I wish I could say I was sorry for this -but I'm not. As soon as I heard the Master say those lines, this entire scraplet just unfolded in my head, fully formed.
And it's rude not to share, so . . .
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Goose Chase by Emery Board [Reviews - 13]  Author's Notes: | |
Location: The Himalayas
Date: Two minutes to Armageddon.
“This is all Jack’s fault, you know.”
Gwen tried to glare at Owen, but found she didn’t have the energy. Instead, she huddled further into her sleeping bag, trying to pretend that this was all normal, that they were not up some god-forsaken mountain in the middle of Asia looking for an abominable snowman supposedly eating the local villagers.
But Owen persisted. “I mean it!” he insisted. “Jack’s in charge of Torchwood, and what happens?”
“We open the Rift, nearly cause Judgment Day, and you shoot the CO of Torchwood 3 through the head,” Tosh supplied. Tosh had never been very fond of the cold.
“Ha, ha, very funny,” Owen snapped sourly. “But the fact is, the moment Jack leaves, we start getting treated like UNIT’s dogs-bodies.”
“Coffee anyone?” Ianto turned around from his corner of the little tent, proffering a tray of tin mugs. No one seemed quite sure how Ianto had managed to bring what tasted like a professional coffee shop on a trek to the Himalayas, and, as long as he kept producing coffee like this, no one was likely to, either.
“I love you, and I want to have your babies,” Gwen told Ianto as she took a mug from him.
“Get in line,” Tosh shivered. “I’m the senior Torchwood member here.”
Owen scowled. “How come I don’t get any of that love and devotion?” he asked. Although Gwen noticed that he wasn’t offended enough to refuse the coffee.
“Because,” she supplied, “the only hot drink you seem able to make is instant with the consistency of mud.”
“True,” Owen conceded, and burnt his mouth trying to gulp the entire mug of coffee down in one swallow. “Did you notice the thermometer’s frozen solid?”
Tosh risked letting her eyes emerge from the sleeping bag for a look, and saw he was right. “This cold gets into everything.” Including laptops and portable electronics of all types —another reason why Tosh hated sub-zero weather. The only thing that was working was the emergency phone, packed in three layers of Alterian horse-rabbit fur and an electric heater.
“Say what you like,” Owen returned to his previous theme. “Since Jack left, we’ve done no real work. At all.”
He punctuated his last two words with a stare round the tent, which everyone missed —Ianto, because he was packing his tray away, Tosh, because she had buried her head in her sleeping bag and Gwen, because she was staring at Ianto and trying to work out the likelihood of any progeny of theirs carrying the genes for creating perfect coffee.
“I mean it!” Owen spoke louder. “If you ask me, I think this whole thing is a wild goose chase.”
Unseen, the emergency phone’s digital clock blinked as the numbers changed. 8:01 am, Cardiff time.
“And who planned it?” Ianto pointed out, stoking the fire a little higher.
“Oh wait, don’t tell me,” Gwen interrupted. “ ‘Saxon’s trying to get rid of everyone in Torchwood’. This is gonna be one of Owen’s conspiracy theories, isn’t it?”
“How you can have conspiracy theories when you work for a secret organisation?” Tosh wanted to know. “We already know who shot Kennedy, why Krakatoa blew its top —”
“ —the truth about the Loch Ness Monster,” Ianto chimed in. “Why the Americans put the pyramid on their money and a Mason statue in their harbour —”
Gwen giggled. “And my personal favourite —why Torchwood was actually founded.”
Owen tried to stare her down, but found it impossible to be domineering while he resembled a marshmallow.
“The Doctor is real,” he informed them. “I know it.”
Tosh made a dismissive noise. “Please. The Doctor was a product of Queen Victoria’s paranoia after her Scottish protector did a runner with a circus girl. And then UNIT got hold of the myth, and used it as a code-name for their top scientists.”
“Face it, Owen,” Gwen informed him. “You’re just being paranoid. Again.”
Tucked up in Tosh’s rucksack, the phone’s clock marked another minute’s passing. 8:02.
“You just wait,” Owen sat back against his little folding chair and savoured the last of his coffee. “You’ll see I’m right one day. Just wait and see.”
Actually, no one would have been more surprised than Owen to know that the day was coming sooner than anyone would have guessed.
Almost muffled by its protective layers, the emergency phone began to ring.
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