'What do you mean the others stopped?'
The alien didn't look up from the boy, but rolled its head this way and that as if bathing in the sound.
'It called me.' The words were rough, no tone or resonance, barked out as if the sound was a crime against the creature's nature. 'So far away. The nothing brought me to the sound. It was beautiful.'
Jack moved slowly to the far side of the room, crouching down where he could see both the boy and the alien. The singing child had lifted his head, his eyes on the grotesque fractured and grey visage in front of him.
'Are you from the Silent Planet?'
The beams of red sharpened and lessened, the edges softening. 'My world has no name. There are no names. No sound. No sight. There is only yourself. For ever.'
Jack frowned. 'So why come here?' He edged an inch closer to the boy and Gwen could see the portable device in his hand. 'We must be your worst nightmare.'
The creature sighed, its mouth losing shape. 'I am...' It paused. 'I am wrong.'
'Why did you kill those people?'
There was a long moment where all Gwen could hear was the boy's singing. It was 'Pie Jesu'. It was a song she must have heard a hundred times before, but it had never moved her until now. If her heart hadn't been about to explode from tension, she thought, it might have broken with the sheer emotional quality of his voice.
'The sound. I want the sound.' The creature shook its head, and Gwen felt the air tremble with the weight of the movement. 'But the parts didn't work.' For the first time, the alien turned its attention away from the boy and towards Jack. 'When I took them and made them part of me, they wouldn't work. I couldn't make the sound. Only the words.'
For the first time, Gwen felt a wave of the awful loneliness Ianto had talked about sensing. The sheer despair and hollowness of being entirely alone.
'It's not the parts that make the sound.' Jack eased forward and was within reach of the boy. 'It's the person. Alive. We're not machines.'
The alien's hand hovered, and for a second it moved just the tiniest bit away from the boy's neck, the contact broken. Jack crouched ready to move, and Gwen prepared to take the boy from him and run.
'Look!' In the doorway, Ceri gasped out the word and pointed.
On the floor, Ryan had reached up, his small hand touching the alien's face.
Cutler cursed from the doorway, and Gwen shared his exasperation. The moment was gone. The alien was focused back on the boy again, its own hand once again touching his throat.
Ceri let out a small laugh. 'He's never done that. He's never touched anyone. He's never even shown any indication that he knows anyone else exists!' Clapping her hands together, she held them to her face with joy, as if there were no dead woman on the carpet and no alien seated in the middle of the room. Gwen stared at her and then looked over to Jack. He watched the boy and the alien for a long time and then slid the prison device back into the hidden pocket of his jacket before backing away.
'Jack?' Gwen frowned. What the hell was he doing?
Jack stood up. 'He's never done anything like this before?'
The nurse shook her head. 'Never. He just sings. Has done since he could speak. It keeps the world out.'
'What are you thinking, Jack?' Gwen tapped her foot. They needed to save the boy before this thing disappeared on them again.
He didn't look at Gwen, fascinated instead by the boy's hands on the alien's face. 'I'm thinking that these two are made for each other.'
'What?'
'It makes perfect sense. It will make them happier.'
'I'm out in the cold here, Harkness,' Cutler said from the doorway. 'Although this is Torchwood, so I don't know why I should expect any different.'
Jack looked from the alien to the boy and back again.
'Jack?' Gwen growled. It was one thing Cutler being out of the loop, but she was one of the team. And it didn't help that she had Ianto in her ear pushing to know what was going on.
'They need to become one. Look at them.' Jack's face carried a weight of seriousness that Gwen had only seen rarely, and always when he was struggling with a decision that went against all he believed about the sanctity of humanity. Gwen felt her own frustration ebbing away. Looking to the door, she saw Ceri was nodding.
'Yes.' She smiled. 'Yes.'
'What are we doing, Jack?' Gwen's eyes darted between the humans and the alien.
For the first time, Jack looked up at her and smiled gently. 'Don't you get it, Gwen? Here, this boy is different because he doesn't want the world. He wants the isolation; to be completely alone. He doesn't understand the concept of society, of company, of communication...' Jack didn't bother keeping his voice low, instead becoming more animated as he explained. 'Everything that is part of our world he hides from behind his singing.' He turned to Ceri. 'Have I got that about right?'
The nurse nodded, tears still making tracks and carrying her mascara down her cheeks.
'And I should imagine that on the Silent Planet our visitor here is their equivalent of autistic. He wants to connect with someone or something. That's why he followed the music.' He looked up at Cutler. 'And that's why he killed the best singers. For the power of emotion in their performance. To be able to share emotion.' He shook his head slightly.
'The terrible isolated loneliness Ianto felt...' Gwen felt understanding prickle on her skin. 'That was the alien's emotion. How it's lived all its life.'
Jack nodded. 'Awful, isn't it? Imagine no light, no sound, nothing but the essence of your being. No memories to cherish. No sense of love. To be reviled by any of your kind you tried to connect with. Totally alone.'
Gwen tilted her head. 'So what are you saying we do? Let him go? Send him back?'
'No. We need to make existence easier for both of them.'
'How?' Gwen frowned. She wasn't getting it.
'The boy needs isolation, and the alien needs something to make the isolation easier.'
'Just speak bloody English, Jack.'
'Instead of absorbing the vocal cords, it needs to absorb the whole child.'
Gwen felt stunned. 'You can't be serious. How can we let it do that?'
The dark and frustrating eyebrow rose. 'How can we not?'
'Because...' Gwen stepped forward. 'Because he's just a little boy. We need to get him away from that thing and send it back.'
Jack shook his head. 'Don't think of his life in your terms. This is hell for him. And if we send this creature back, then we're condemning it. Can you really live with that?'
'He's right.' Ceri whispered softly. 'It's what Ryan needs. His mother's dead. We haven't seen his father since he came in here. He has no one.' She paused. 'And he hates the world.'
'This is crazy.' Cutler shook his head. 'But it makes a crazy kind of sense.'
Gwen looked at the perfect child, his blond hair stained with his mother's blood, his tiny hands paying the fractured creature more attention than he'd ever given the woman that bore him. She saw the want in those hands, greedily drinking in the creature's dark years of emptiness as his young voice continued to steadily create the aching music so out of place next to the cooling, damaged body.
'It's pulling me back.' The creature gargled the words. 'You have nothing more to fear from me.'
'Tell me.' Jack crouched between them. 'Can you absorb the whole? Can you make the boy part of you? Without killing him?'
The creature nodded.
Jack looked over to Gwen. 'Agreed?'
'Agreed.' And she was. Cutler mumbled his yes, and Gwen didn't have to look at the nurse to know what she thought.
Jack smiled. 'Then do it.' Standing up, he joined Gwen against the wall.
The alien opened the cavern of its mouth and tilted its head backwards, stretching out its thick neck. The fractures in the smooth skull grew wider and Gwen stared, both fascinated and horrified, as its solid form began to disintegrate. Where Ryan's fingers touched its cheek, the chubby childish digits dissolved as they became one with the dark
cloud that had only seconds before been a solid form, his particles lighter than the mass of the alien until the two sets danced into one thick cloud. Gwen was sure she saw a light smile tickle his face just before it unravelled.
The dark shadow hovered above them for a perfectly still moment, and then it slid out of the window and was gone, disappearing into the sky, and the Rift, and the universe beyond.
The last strains of 'Pie Jesu' hung in the air like the memory of a taste just out of reach; the ghost of all the music that Ryan had used to hide from the world behind. And then eventually they were left in silence.
The clock on the wall ticked loudly, insisting that the world move relentlessly onward, and finally Jack smiled. 'Now there goes a big step forward in interplanetary relationships.' He winked at Gwen. 'I mean, let's face it. You can't get closer than those two are now.'
'Harkness?' Cutler leaned against the doorframe. Folding his arms across his chest, he nodded towards the nurse. Ceri wandered into the small room, looking out of the smashed window, her face a mask of awe despite the rain falling into her open eyes. 'I think she could use a stiff drink.'
'Oh, trust me, we can do better than that.'
'In the meantime,' said Cutler, pulling his mobile out of his pocket, 'I'll call my team to clean this up. Unless you have any objections?'
'Go ahead. We don't need her for anything.'
Gwen looked down at the glazed, resigned expression on the dead woman's face and wondered what she'd make of this outcome. She hoped she'd be happy for her child. She sighed. Not that it mattered. When you were dead, you were dead. This woman's worries were over.
Turning away, Gwen left the room and its horrific contents behind. It seemed there had been so much death lately. Suddenly she felt the urge to run back to the flat and curl up with Rhys and eat a Chinese takeaway on the sofa and pretend that everything in the world was all right. And, just for a few hours, it would be. Rhys had that effect on her. He might not be the most exciting man on the planet – which Gwen knew for a fact, since she worked for the man that must surely claim that title – but Rhys was the most dependable and he loved her, and at the end of the day what more could she want than that?
Jack squeezed her arm. 'You OK?'
'Yeah.' Clearing the dark cloud from her face, she smiled. 'Yeah. Just glad it's over.'
Leaving Havannah Court Autism Centre behind, for the first time in days Gwen was happy to feel the heavy drops of rain running through her hair.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Jack took a long swallow of his bottled water as the man scraped the bar stool next to his out and sat down.
'I thought you'd stood me up.'
Cutler grinned. He was still in his suit this time; the hour earlier and the mood lighter. 'Are you crazy? Wherever I go, there are phones ringing for me.'
Jack laughed. 'But this time I'm thinking they're all being a little nicer when you answer.'
'Maybe.' Cutler nodded at the barman. 'JD and coke and whatever that piss-water is he's drinking.'
Pushing a ten pound note across the bar, Jack forced Cutler's own cash out of the way. 'I'm getting these.' He looked over at the detective. 'Let's call it a farewell drink.' He paused. 'I take it you are leaving Cardiff? And not to go to the Orkney Islands?'
'You guess right.' Stuffing his money back in his pocket, Cutler leaned forward on the bar. 'I've been called back to London. Seems the stink around me is fading.'
'Congratulations.'
They clinked bottle to glass and the note rang clear around the half-empty bar. 'Thanks. Although congratulations aren't necessary, are they? None of this has anything to do with me.'
Jack watched him thoughtfully. 'But you solved the case and brought an end to the terror of the Cardiff Slasher.'
Cutler laughed. 'Oh yeah. Of course I did.'
'It's in the papers. It must be true. Maria Bruno's husband cracked under the pressure of their debts and her constant put-downs and threats of divorce and murdered his wife, cutting out the organs that were most important to her. But not before he'd practised on a few others first, scouring the streets of Cardiff dressed in a thick black cape, seeking out his victims and monstrously killing them. But his taste for blood had grown too great and, even after the ruthless execution of his own wife, Martin Meloy just couldn't stop.'
Jack widened his eyes, exaggerating the impact of his words; his voice full of Victorian carnival melodrama. 'And then, feeling Detective Inspector Cutler's carefully slung net closing in around him, and with his final murder attempt foiled, he took the coward's route and ended his own life, leaving only the pitiful note, "I'm sorry. It was all my fault."'
He raised an eyebrow and then his bottled water, saluting the policeman.
'If that's what the papers say, then it must be true.' Cutler rolled his glass around in his hands. 'I'm glad you find it funny.'
Jack sighed. 'Sometimes you have to look at the lighter side. If you don't, the darkness will drive you mad. Take that on board from one who knows.'
'Poor bastard Meloy.'
'No.' Jack shook his head. 'He's dead. This doesn't hurt him.'
Cutler didn't look so convinced. 'You know what is funny?' he said, eventually.
'Go on.'
Jack watched the crinkles and lines of the other man's face. There were plenty running their way across his forehead and down his cheeks that had no place there for a few years yet. None of them looked like laughter lines.
'Well, think about it. I stuck the knife in my career by pretending I'd planted evidence, and now I've resurrected my career by actually planting evidence to set up a dead man. There's trace DNA of Meloy's been found at every crime scene or on each body just in case anyone tries to prove him innocent.' He shook his head. 'And Torchwood forced my hand in both cases.' Running his fingers through the mess of sandy hair that topped his head, he met Jack's gaze. 'So you can congratulate me as much as you like, but we both know it's all bollocks. There's no real truth or justice here. It's all a mockery. Just like last time.'
Jack shook his head. 'You're wrong. You don't think what happened with Ryan Scott and the alien was justice? And do you really think the world is ready for the truth about the Rift and everything else that's out there?' Cutler didn't answer. 'Of course you don't. If you did, you wouldn't have stayed quiet all these years. It's just not as easy as black and white and right and wrong, although sometimes my job would be a lot easier to live with if it were. Truth is all perception. The truth can change.'
'The real truth of things is always there, Jack. Underneath. You know it. You just make choices and hope they're the best ones.' Cutler smiled. 'And I respect you for that. But I'm not sure it's a code I can live by.'
They drank in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. It was Jack that cracked the moment.
'I can make it true, though.'
He looked sideways at the policeman.
'I can make it as if none of the truth happened and what the papers say is real.' He paused.
'We have something. It kind of soothes the memory. Wipes the crap away. And trust me, it's normally for the best.'
'So is that how you deal with inconvenient people like me down here?' Cutler shook his head. 'That won't make it any truer. It will just make it true to me. And that's a completely different thing. I'll keep my brain untampered with, if you don't mind. Bitter and twisted is the way I like to be.'
'I thought that's what you'd say, but it would be rude not to offer.'
'And I thank you for your offer.' Cutler pushed back the stool. 'Just need to take a trip to the little boys' room and then I'm going to buy you a goodbye drink. A proper one. With alcohol in it and everything.' He paused. 'You'd have been a good man to have on the force, Harkness.'
Jack grinned. 'I'll get them in, sir.'
'You do that.'
Twenty minutes later, Gwen stood in the doorway of the bar, her slim figured haloed by light and with her hands on her hips. It was only when she walked in that Jack saw
the slight frown pulling two lines down between her eyebrows. He wondered if he'd still know her when those lines settled there. Everything was uncertain. Everything could change. How long did Gwen have? Would her breath of life be any longer than Tosh's or Owen's or all the others he'd seen die in the name of Torchwood? The inside of his mouth stung bitterly.
Gwen looked at the policeman slumped over the bar, his blond head resting in his hands. A snuffled snore squeezed out from between his face and the smooth surface.
'I take it that's not been brought on by drink?'
Jack shook his head. 'No.'
'Didn't think so.'
Ianto joined them, his own neat suit the antonym of Cutler's, whose shirt hung out at the back. 'Retcon?'
'Yep.' Jack stood up. 'I slipped it in his drink when he went to the bathroom.'
'How come?' Gwen's disappointment was clear, but Jack didn't want to hear it. He knew she'd liked Cutler. He also knew that seeing Cutler out cold on the bar was a little like having a premonition of her own future. If Torchwood didn't kill her one way, then there was always the possibility it would take her another. There were no guarantees for anyone. And Retcon was a kind of death.
'He's been in the Hub. Worked with us closely.' The muscle in Jack's jaw twitched painfully. Sometimes he hated the things he had to do in his job. 'If he was staying in Cardiff then maybe he'd have been useful, but they were transferring him back to London. He'd be too far away to monitor. He could cause problems.'
He'd chosen his words carefully, and fully expected Gwen to fly into a rage at him over describing Cutler in terms of 'usefulness'. She didn't, though. Instead, he looked up to find her watching him thoughtfully with her dark, beautiful eyes. In the smooth neon light, she looked very young, and Jack once again wondered at these people that would follow him into situations that might bring about their own deaths but never his. What did he do to deserve their loyalty?
'Probably the right thing,' she said at last.
'Where shall we take him?' Ianto peeled the body into a seated position, trying to secure one arm over his neck.
Jack pulled a set of keys from the sleeping detective's inside pocket. 'Back to his place.' He stuffed a small piece of paper into Ianto's free hand. 'The address is there. It's one of those new apartments down in the Bay.'
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