Title: The Guardian
Author: Xenutia
Rating: PG (for mild language throughout, but no f-bombs, mostly English slang)
Word Count: 17,000 +
Spoilers: 'Reset', 'Dead Man Walking', 'A Day in the Death'. Very minor spoiler for 'Utopia', 'The Sound of Drums', and 'The Last of the Time Lords', too, but you probably won't notice that one.
Characters: (in order of how much they get to do) Tosh, Gwen, Owen, small appearance by Jack. There are hints of Tosh/Owen within canon, but nothing more, as it’s primarily a plot fic rather than a shipper fic.
Notes: This isn’t a traditional Christmas themed-story, but it does touch on theology and hopefully some basic themes that will be in people’s minds at this time of year, even if you’re not Christian or even a monotheist.  And it’s very much a feel-good fic.


December 13th, 8:31pm

They ordered drinks – at least, the girls did – and Gwen filled Owen in on all they had discovered and all they suspected. Tosh worked.

She was suprised, pleasantly so, to find that she remembered a fair amount of the sequencer, and how it was all supposed to work. It was an inexact science, but it should be enough to find Carrig.

“I’m done,” she announced at last, snapping a last cover into place over a tangle of wires. “We might get a few red herrings, if there are any animals out there large enough to register the same as a teenaged boy – a wolf, say – but it’s unlikely.”

“Yeah, but all the respectable wolves are in bed by now,” Owen said. “Of course we won’t find a bloody wolf, where do you think we are, Nevada?”

Tosh turned back to her thermal sequencer and tried not to let him see her blink, angrily. “I was just using that as an example,” she said, but to her her voice sounded strained, squeaky. She was so unsure this would even work . . . she was covering herself, she realised, already preparing herself for failure. Preparing them for her failure. The fact that Owen seemed to be willing, even eager, to believe that it would fail, hurt more than she thought it would. It wouldn’t seem half so bad from Gwen, but the other woman seemed more confident of its success than Tosh herself did.

“You’re a legend with this stuff, Tosh, I can’t get the VCR to record the right channel half the time,” she said, with a warm smile, and a hand placed reassuringly on Tosh’s shoulder.

She guessed they would see soon enough.


December 13th, 9:42pm

They found no wolves, but after over an hour of seaching over the hills, they had located a number of heat signatures which the sequencer identified as cats, birds, an arrogant, silver-brushed dog-fox, and one very startled badger. The million tiny specks of red-heat that denoted insect life looked like clouds of burning fireflies on the little monitor that Tosh watched as they walked, and she was memorised enough by their skating and flitting across the night that she walked half in a trance, her head downturned to the screen, following the glowing coals that represented Gwen, and listening with one ear to both her and Owen’s footsteps, trusting that if she walked where they did she wouldn’t bump into anything, or fall down anything.

It was hilly country – not just the softly rolling slopes of Wales, their emerald paled to grey in the darkness, but pitted and run through with narrow fissures fit to catch an unwary ankle, twist it, break it – and falling was a distinct possibility if they took a mis-step. A part of her had already decided, without ever voicing it, that this was what had happened to Carrig; he may well have been a victim of the countryside, visability dulled by the sudden skirmish of snow this morning into a narrow white world where the dangers lay concealed under a blanket of fine white powder. She suspected that Gwen’s thoughts lay elsewhere, that Marcus Llwellyn and the hidden hood featured prominently in her theories. What Owen thought was inscrutable, and most would think it was because he didn’t care – but what most didn’t understand was that he was a doctor, not a detective, and his focus would always be what happened now, rather than what had happened then.

As it approached ten Tosh had detected a very faint, very far-off signature that was neither a human, nor an animal, nor anything the sequencer had a profile for. It registered as twenty degrees centigrade below zero at its core, blazing white in the black of the sequencer’s monitor like an ice comet in a night sky. In size, and shape, it was comparable to the flares that made up Gwen’s and her own presence . . . but there the similarity ended. Owen, of course, didn’t register at all – his body temperature was exactly that of the air around him, and the sequencer consequently dismissed him as background noise.

She showed the sequencer readings to Gwen, while Owen crashed through the fringe of brush and bushes that curled down the white hill-side like a helter-skelter, looking for any sign that Carrig might have come this way. He was making as much noise as possible, because their presence, and their purpose, in Glaudinas wasn’t a secret – but the more noise they made in the search, the more chance there was that Carrig would hear them and reply.

If he was still capable of replying.

“Gwen, check this out,” she said. Gwen came up to her shoulder in a vague aura of heat and fading perfume, and Tosh reflected, for a moment, how much that cloud of warmth was a part of a person’s presence, how much it insinuated itself into the consciousness as proving their existence, their closeness, their everything. Pheromones, sweat, the softer odours of food or coffee that made up a person. The psychic blankness that Owen carried with him was almost worse, somehow, than the fact his chest no longer rose and fell.

“What’s that? What the hell could be that cold, it looks like a frozen turkey,” Gwen commented.

“It’s Llwellyn,” Tosh said, softly. “There’s our proof. He’s not human.”

“We needed proof?” Gwen was trying to lighten the mood, but providing comic relief had never really been her role in the group, and Owen was out of earshot, still thrashing through the bushes as if he was a hunter stirring his quarry into flight. Despite her attempt at flippancy, Tosh could tell that the sight of that white, starry spot in the scope unsettled her deeply.

“Owen, we’re looking for a teenaged boy, not a lost collie,” Gwen called. Her words iced up on the air in thin white streams like the lyrics on a Disney Sing-Along video, almost seeming to spell out her words on the midnight blue of the sky. She had gone to drag him back from his enthusiastic search methods before Tosh could reply, but that was okay. As much as she loved him, these days it was becoming more and more difficult to be near him without realising what she had lost, without ever really having it to lose.

It was a quarter past ten before Tosh called them over to her side again. Over the next rise, behind a stand of trees that might have been oak, but which Tosh would be hesitant to actually name as such, a larger smudge of orange had come into view. Its colour was dimmer than hers or Gwen’s, or even the animals they had seen – his outline glowed dull, orange, like the last hot embers in the heart of a banked fire, slowly dwindling into slumber for the night.

“He’s suffering from hypothermia,” Owen said, over her shoulder. “Look. His body temperature’s registering as 35 degrees. Should be over 36.”

“That doesn’t sound like much,” Gwen said, pointing to the reading over Tosh’s other shoulder. “Can one degree make that much difference?”

“It’s only the first stage, but he’ll get worse pretty quickly from here on out. He’ll need hospital treatment an hour from now.” Owen raised his head and looked out over the rise, squinting as if his undead eyes could see more in the dark than their living ones. They couldn’t, of course – he was just posing again. “Right,” he said at last, decisively. “You two, go back to town, call for an emergency extraction to the hospital. Might even be a helicopter job in this weather. I’m going to go find Carrig.”

Tosh was willing to just do as he said, trusting that in this instance he knew what he was talking about, but Gwen asked: “Why you? I know you’re a doctor, but . . .”

“Because, you charmingly slow valley girl, I’m the one that’s not going to bloody catch hypothermia with him.”

Tosh nodded acquiescence, cutting off any further protest from Gwen. Amazingly, though, Gwen had made no move to reply in the negative. She had already turned to face back down the hillside, towards the sparkling scatter of lights that cast their fine white web over the village below. Touches of coloured lights, of blue and red and green, traced the main road and house fronts, making a Christmas Tree of the City of Lights.

“Come on, then. Tosh?”

“Coming.”

She hesitated just a moment longer, letting Gwen make her start down the hill without her.

“You be careful,” she said, with sudden seriousness. Owen opened his mouth to protest, she could see on his face that that was what he meant to do, and raised her gloved hand to cut him off. “I know you can’t freeze to death, Owen, but you could still fall. It’s treacherous up here. If you break something . . .”

“It stays broken. I know, I know.”

She scanned his pale, oddly still face, the face that would never need shaving again, watching for some sign that he was simply humouring her. But he only looked back, deadly serious, mirroring her watchfulness as if he was waiting for her leave first.

With a nod, and knowing he was all but busting to be off over that hill, she did just that.


December 13th, 10:26pm

Owen took the rise at a lope, wanting to run and forcing himself not to. He’d be well and truly buggered if he broke his leg out here. Wheelchair city. It was not only the uneven terrain and the thick carpet of snow and dead leaves underfoot that he had to be careful of; a sharp wind was heading in from over the black horizon, and as he watched, what he thought was a swirl of raised snow kicked up by the breeze became a powdery fall of new snow, although he had only his eyes to tell him as much. He couldn’t feel the temperature dropping, couldn’t feel the snowflakes touching his face and hands. 

Owen dismissed the thought, and jogged on down the far side of the slope. If it was going to snow in earnest again, then it was even more imperative that he find the missing kid and stop him from turning into a ice cube.

“Carrig?” he called, crunching to a halt at the bottom – not so much level ground as a cleft between the foot of this smaller hill and the next, blacker, even, than the star-lit darkness of the slopes and hill-tops. “Carrig, you out there?”

There was no reply . . . but up ahead, amidst the vista of white, and white, and white, he could make out a patch of darkness in the ground. Not something on it – something cutting through it.

A hole.

“Carrig, mate, you down there?” he called again, approaching at a forced walk. Although the hole itself was barely three feet across, there was no way of telling if more hid under the snow, and Tosh’s warning still rang in his head like its own dwindling bell. If you break something . . .

“Y . . . yeah?” came a faint, snuffling noise from the direction of the hole.

He was at the edge now, and casting Tosh’s loaned flashlight down into the blackness at his feet. The sides were stone, curved and even and manmade, and across the top, protruding from the snow, were several splintered ends of rotted wooden planks. A well. The cover must have been covered in snow, and whereas a hiker wouldn’t ordinarily walk on a wooden well-cover simply by dint of superstition, in the snow Carrig hadn’t seen it . . . had stepped on it . . . and gone plummeting down through the sodden boards to the well-shaft below.

“Carrig? Carrig, I’m a doctor. I came with a search party looking for you.” No need to mention alien hunting or investigating mysterious self-ringing bells, he thought. Don’t wanna scare the poor bugger anymore than he already is. “My friends have gone to get help, okay?”

Of all the responses he might have expected from a frightened, lost kid trapped down a well in the middle of a snowstorm, Owen hadn’t for a moment considered what actually came back.

“How do I know you’re a doctor?”

For a moment Owen’s first instinct was to snap back: Does it really matter right now?, but he was able to prevent it from escaping his mouth just in time. He settled for a still snarky, but slightly less confrontational: “Nope, you got me, I’m really an encyclopedia salesman. Can I interest you with a free calendar?”

Nothing from within the depths of the well.

Then, his young, pale voice stuttering like a tune from a broken whistle: “How do I know you’re not a paedophile?”

“A paedophile doctor, or a paedophile encyclopedia salesman?”

Again, nothing. It hadn’t sounded, to Owen’s educated ear, as if it had particularly hurt him to talk; there were the early signs of exposure clear in his voice, the shaking Carrig hadn’t quite been able to control or prevent, but nothing to suggest that he was yet into the second stages where breathing would become difficult. Better yet, it didn’t sound as if the boy had broken any ribs on the way down. So it seemed he was just being silent for his own, admittedly unfathomable, reasons.

“Look, I’m coming down, Carrig. Are you hurt?”

Sullenly: “My leg.”

Owen had expected as much from what probably amounted to a fall of twelve feet or so, possibly more. In fact, if that was all the injury Carrig had sustained, then he was a very lucky kid. Owen had had visions of punctured lungs or head injuries when he first laid eyes on that gaping well-shaft, and so a busted femur or popped knee was definitely worthy of relief.

“Hang on, then. I’m coming down.” If I can without breaking every bone in my undead body, he thought, morosely.


December 13th, 10:32pm

The sides, he saw at once, were not quite sheer, despite it being a man-made structure; at some time in its artificial existence one side of the well’s shored-up wall had fallen in, both narrowing the shaft and creating a kind of step of debris and rubble. If he was careful, he could make the short leap to the heap of stones, and the shorter jump to the well’s floor, without causing himself any damage. It would be too high to climb out again, a thought Owen didn’t exactly relish – but that was where the girls came in. His problem was taking care of Carrig, even if the kid was a little sod. Getting the two of them out was Gwen and Tosh’s problem.

Shining his torch carefully onto the highest point of the rubble, Owen counted to 3, and stepped off the well’s edge onto it. For a moment as his foot impacted on the stones he thought the topmost one would give way and send him crashing down to the bottom in a flurry of broken, unknittable bones and unhealable wounds. But it wobbled, slanted . . . and finally steadied.

If he could have let out a sigh of relief, he would have. He made the shorter jump to the ground before his makeshift step could change its mind again, and collapse under him.

His torch was the only light at the foot of the well, the shaft too deep for the moonlight to reach. The beam fell at once on a grimed and streak-cheeked white face, pale eyes the no-colour of clouded glass in the harsh light. He was bundled up in a dark-coloured anorak, one leg stuck stiffly out in front of him.

“You’re stuck with me now,” Owen said, and squatted down to one side of Carrig’s straightened leg. “No way back up.”

“Well, you’re a mug, then,” said the boy sullenly.

You got that right, Owen thought, not very charitably. I am a mug.

“Listen, I don’t know what your problem is, mate, and if you ask me you could be a bit more grateful that I’m basically saving your arse, but have it your way.  What I’d ideally like to do is take a look at that leg – but it’s your decision, right? I mean, if I’m a doctor, then technically you’re my patient right now, and you’ve got the right to refuse treatment if you want.”

Carrig was eyeing him suspiciously, a little heat and dark creeping into his pale eyes like a shadow over the moon.

“Let me take a look at you,” the boy said.

Owen turned the torch on himself, holding it a little below his chin so he wouldn’t blind himself.

Carrig grunted. “You don’t look like a paedophile,” he said, grudgingly.

“Oh, well, I’ll certainly sleep better at night knowing I have your seal of approval,” Owen returned. “Does that mean I can take a look at your leg now?”

Carrig shrugged, although all it really produced was a faint rustling of his anorak; the rest was lost to the dark.

Owen directed the torch to the boy’s leg, looking for any obviously wrong angles or signs of blood. Neither were apparent, but that in itself didn’t mean much – the worst injuries were often buried so deeply inside that it was impossible to see, from an outward examination, what was wrong. It was why so many terrible cases of paralysis or even death had been caused by well-meaning bystanders moving an accident victim before they had been properly checked by medical personnel.

Which was where he came in.

“Right, Carrig, I’m going to have to cut some of these jeans away, okay? And maybe unlace your trainer a bit.” The only answer that Carrig now gave was chattering teeth, and he appeared to have shrunk in on himself again, somehow, making his body into a tiny, compressed thing under his anorak. The uninjured leg was pulled up to his chest, so that the knee was tucked inside the coat as well. God, was it really that cold? Owen had no way to tell without a thermometer, but Carrig’s face was an icy, bloodless oval in the dark, and his lips were slack with shivering. He had probably been in the first stages of hypothermia for hours, granted a temporary reprieve by the break in the snow throughout most of the day – but it was falling more heavily now. Stray snowflakes reached them even in the depths of the well shaft, casting ghostly little fairie-lights in the beam of the torch. An hour, tops, before the kid passed through stage 2 and right on into fatal territory.

Owen clamped the barrel of the torch in his teeth, and removed his travelling medical kit from his pocket. It was only a small case, about the size of a glasses case, and didn’t hold much; just a scalpel, syringe, thermometer, and a few tiny vials of basic field medicines, mostly painkillers and coagulants. He selected the scalpel, closed the case, replaced it, and set about carefully cutting along the seam of the jeans where it met Carrig’s ankle. There was no evidence of blood, either in the fabric or underneath, and that was good. Whatever damage there was to the leg, Carrig hadn’t been losing blood all this time. As much as he hated to admit it, had he been bleeding as well as freezing, the kid wouldn’t have survived this long, and they would have found a corpse at the bottom of this well – the kind that didn’t walk about and practice medicine.

He peeled away the jeans and the cuff of Carrig’s sports sock, and gently unlaced the Nike trainer so that it would slip partly off the swollen foot. It was badly swolllen, almost twice the size it should have been in comparison with the rest of his leg, and a bloated, purple-black colour where it disappeared into his shoe.

“Can you feel all your arms and legs okay, Carrig?” Without thinking, and without even realising that he had passed that demarcation line, Owen had dropped his voice to his bedside tone; softer, more rhythmic than usual, trying to be soothing. When he heard it he realised that it meant he had distanced himself, partly, from the patient. It had ceased to be Carrig, ceased even to be a boy; it was a problem to solve, a puzzle to piece together. Later on, when the immediate danger was past, he could step back again, cross back over that line where patients became people again – but for now, it was automatic, and he went with it more for his own protection than any sense of professionalism.

“Y . . . yeah.”

“Wiggle your left hand for me.”

Carrig slowly withdrew it from his coat and Owen saw, with some relief, that at least the boy had worn gloves when he went out with his dog this morning. At least there would be less chance of frostbite. The fingers waggled, quickly, before the hand vanished back into the coat.

“What about the right?”

The process was repeated, this time with his right hand. Then his right foot. Finally, with all three complete, Owen nodded, satisfied. “Good. Looks like your spine’s just dandy, Carrig, nothing to worry about there.”

“What about my leg?”

“You, my son, have gotten very lucky,” Owen returned, replacing the scalpel back in the case. “It’s a very nasty sprain, and they can hurt almost as bad as a break sometimes, but it won’t be nearly so slow healing up.” But of course what he didn’t say was that the leg had never been the real danger at all. As long as the snow continued to fall and Carrig remained down here in this lightless, squalid hole where the sun never reached even in high summer and the walls oozed water like blood from a cut vein, the real danger was very much clear, and every bit as present.


December 13th, 10:51pm

The church was as gloomy in the hour before midnight as it had been in the husky twilight, when they had used Gwen’s alien skeleton key to sneak inside. They used it again now. The hard white shade that was Marcus Llewellyn emanated from inside this church, where, it seemed, everything repeatedly came back to. The bells – the hood – Llwellyn – that incessant, alien hum that had set their teeth rattling in their heads, and the blue glow that burrowed down behind their eyes and into their brain. If anyone was going to have answers, it was him.

“You sure you gave the ambulance men the exact location?” Gwen fussed, as she applied the key once more to the church’s robust old door.

“Gwen, I gave them co-ordinates. They’ll find them. And they don’t need us to get Carrig to a hospital and fill them in, they have Owen for that. We’re Torchwood, our place is here.”

Bracing themselves in case the door should swing open once more on that roaring cacophony that had almost driven them insane last time, Gwen gave the door a push. There was only the silence and darkness of a regular church at night. The cold, as before, was unnatural, and it felt to Tosh like opening a freezer compartment in the supermarket and standing in front of it.

Wrapping their coats tight about them, they slipped quietly inside.

They turned automatically to the left, to the vestry; that was clearly Marcus Llwellyn’s lair, the place where he spent most of his time. As it had earlier, but had somehow failed to make the impact it should have, the marked lack of modern accroutrements stood out starkly against their battery-powered torches, and the thermal sequencer she still held unregarded in one hand. Even if her photo-fitting software hadn’t proclaimed Llwellyn over eight hundred years old, the dusty medieval austerity of the vestry would have raised her suspicions anyway. It didn’t always follow – Jack had been living on modern-day Earth since the eighteen hundreds, but he certainly embraced all that was modern with a relish that she suspected had been borne of, instead of being in spite of, his time in a less-industrialised world. Marcus Llwellyn’s time on Earth appeared to have had the opposite effect on him, or else he kept up the appearance of hermitage to deflect suspicion, and kept his more scientific paraphenalia hidden safely away.

She was about to turn and remark on as much to Gwen, who had been as unusually silent as her; but as she turned, she saw why Gwen had fallen silent, and anything she might have said died on her lips. Out between the pews, as if he had approached them from the direction of the bell-tower, stood the tiny, imperturbable figure of the priest. His small, malformed hands, so large of knuckle and slender of wrist, were clasped old-lady-like in front of him, as if he might at any moment take a bow. His partly bald head and fluffy fringe of snow-shite hair shone unnaturally in the dark. The whites of his eyes burned – no, that wasn’t the right word. They shone, as if a star had been set in each freakishly large orb, a tiny point of light captured in blue diamond.

“I wondered how long it would take you ladies to come seek me out,” he said, with a pleasant, slightly high voice – the proper elderly Welsh gent, without a hint of sarcasm despite his words. “In fact, I had thought it might be sooner.”


December 13th, 10:52pm

Owen remained crouched beside Carrig’s injured leg a moment longer, but already he knew that there was little he could do with the limited supplies he had, and that keeping Carrig warm must be his first priority.

“Here,” he said, and stripped off his jacket. Carrig gave him wild eyes over the lip of his bunched anorak, the whites wet and staring, his teeth chattering like castonets below the collar.

“You’ll freeze,” the boy said, disbelievingly.

Owen glanced down at his sweatshirt, considered for a brief, almost a fleeting, moment, and then removed that, too, pulling it over his head and letting it puddle in his lap. He was left with only the short-sleeved t-shirt he had worn underneath the whole, but there was no way he could lose that – not only would Carrig not believe he could survive without even that, but it would display the bullet-hole that bored through his heart. Explaining that would be even tougher.

“Nah, not me,” he said, with a smile that felt as if it had been put there by someone else – pasted onto his face, maybe, like a sticker on a kid’s exercise book. “I don’t feel the cold. Trust me on that.”

It’s obvious you don’t trust me on anything else, he thought, with only a twinge of bitterness. Lots of people feared doctors, or distrusted them; there were so many charlatans and quacks in practice that he found he could hardly blame the boy for his suspicion. He had learned, long ago, that it wasn’t personal. The bereaved relative that thought you should have done better, done more, even though there was nothing in man’s power to save their loved one; the child that sat in terror of getting a shot, despite all admonitions that it was good for him; the woman that had just discovered she was pregnant when it was perhaps the worst situation she could imagine for herself. None of it was personal.

Carrig’s unearned bile wasn’t personal. He was just scared.

Owen very gently eased the boy’s arms from the anorak, and although Carrig initially fought him and growled that he could do it himself, so get the **** away from him, it soon became apparent that he couldn’t. The kid’s arms were moving slugglishly, halting with every inch, as if the bones were twisted with arthritis and every movement hurt. Damn it, that meant he was well into stage 2 hypothermia. Owen peered closely at the boy’s snow-touched face, saw the shivering of his lips and the blue tinge of veins under translucent skin. The slight unfocus in the cloudy eyes.

Bollocks to this, he wasn’t going to make it. Not if Owen didn’t do something fast, something soon.

The anorak discarded for the moment, Owen helped Carrig’s stiff, unbending arms into the sweatshirt, thankful the boy wasn’t one of those fourteen-year-olds that could rival their fathers in size, and then replaced the anorak, and finally wrapped his larger jacket around the whole. Carrig’s legs remained largely uncovered apart from his jeans, socks, and one trainer, and frostbite was a distinct danger; but it was his core temperature that was vital. With his torso bundled in those two extra layers, he had a chance to regain those lost degrees; he had a chance to survive.

Owen softly reached out and brushed the boy’s sodden fringe aside, feeling his icy forehead with the back of his hand. Carrig tried to shrug away, distrustful even now, and muttered: “Geddoff. Perv.”

With a smile, Owen let him pull his head away, and sat back. “Course I bloody am, but I don’t run to boys, thanks, so knock it off,” he replied.

Carrig might have smiled, had the muscles in his mouth and the wildly stuttering jaw not betrayed him. The bundle of clothes shook like a tree under earth-moving equipment.

“So . . . my friends said they found a hood that exact colour in the church,” Owen said, cheerfully. “I notice there’s no hood on that coat of yours. What were you doing in the church, Carrig?”

For a moment a spot of bright panic settled in each of his no-colour eyes and an alertness that had been noticeably absent came back, a startled, caught look like an animal trapped by the hunter’s torch beam.

“It’s all right, mate, I won’t tell anyone. It’s just you’re so hung up on this paedophile business . . .” Owen let the thought hang, baiting a hook for the kid. He didn’t believe for a minute that the old boy (well, old alien) at the church was into little boys or that Carrig’s snark had been anything but fear of his situation, but if anything would make him admit the truth of it, and better yet, take his mind off the sluggishness creeping inexorably over his body, then this would.

“No! No, it’s not like that.” Panic, and then embarrassment, as if realising he shouldn’t have spoken so forcefully.

“No? What’s it like, then?”

“Father Llwellyn, he’s just . . . cool. Like, he talks about stuff. Stuff my parents won’t tell me about. Like, how there’s other planets with life on ‘em, and how there is this kind of God, right, or like, a mega-intelligent being out there, and he’s not just in charge of Earth, see, but all of them.”

Owen nodded. He didn’t know if he believed in this intelligent being; once, he would have laughed at the idea, scoffed, said that any being that could let Katie die in such a pointless, such an undignified, way, could go screw himself . . . but lately, since he died . . . since he saw the darkness behind the veil that was life . . . well, he wondered. He wondered if something hadn’t wanted him alive – if this was living – for a reason. Something beyond Durok, beyond the makers of the glove. Something BIG.

“So you go to chat about theology?”

Carrig nodded. “I don’t know the word. Just about, like, the universe and stuff. He’s not like other priests. They’re all hellfire and damnantion and don’t use condoms, cause they’re evil.”

Owen was surprised into a laugh. A snarky little sod he might be, but he was finding himself liking Carrig Dreug more and more.

Well, you mustn’t, Owen. Get it? This kid is dying, and you might have to sit here and watch it if help doesn’t come soon. Maybe you can save him, but maybe you can’t. Maybe you’ve done enough and maybe you haven’t. And if it comes down to sharing body heat with him or letting him die, let’s face it, you’re screwed.

Out loud, he said: “Can you touch your little finger to your thumb for me, mate?”

The boy’s right hand snaked out from between the layers of clothing – the layers that were shuddering a little less now, but that could be both a good sign and a bad one – and the hand contracted, trying to bring the little finger to the thumb and vice versa.

The two digits stopped short of each other by about an inch.

Good God, but stage 3 was setting in. The shivering had stopped.

Carrig was dying.


December 13th, 11:11pm

Carrig spoke less and less over the following twenty minutes. Owen sat, his back to the wall, and watched the boy as his shivering gradually thinned into the occasional shudder, and his eyes glazed into a fixed and faraway look, studying something that wasn’t there. His breathing was heaving, stentorious.

The two extra layers of clothing hadn’t been enough, not for the advanced stage of exposure that Carrig was suffering. He needed body heat, that core warmth poured into him.

And Owen couldn’t give him that.

If he had had some alcohol, a thermos of something warm, hell, even a dog for the boy to cuddle, he could fix what was wrong within half an hour, and Carrig would come through okay without even frostbite to his name. He would feel sluggish for some hours, and would probably fear to set foot outside his door in snow again, but it would be nothing in the scheme of things. Not if he got to live.

It was ten past eleven when Owen saw the glint of light on the curving wall above Carrig’s bowed head, a gleam that looked like water. Without disturbing the kid huddled below it, Owen stood, silently, and pressed his hand to the shining surface. Although he could feel neither the texture or the cold, the solidity of it told him it wasn’t water at all, but ice. Carrig was sitting with his back to an ice wall.

“Right, mate, change of plan,” he said, with a brusqueness he didn’t feel. It was probably too late, he knew it, and Carrig, if he wasn’t too far gone into stupor, probably knew it too . . . but it was still something he could change, dammit, something he could do, that might make a difference.

Taking hold of Carrig’s shoulders, Owen urged him down on to the ground, where the ice had not yet formed so thickly, and arranged his good leg so that it covered the front of him as best it could. He had turned Carrig’s inert, blueing face to the wall, not touching it, his back exposed to the open centre of the shaft where random swirls of snow still fell, tumbling down long feet of blackness to find them below. Then, oblivious to the ice under him, the snow alighting on his back, unable to feel the cold behind him or the dwindling heat of the boy in front of him, Owen lie down behind Carrig, covering as much of the boy’s body as he could with his own (and his slender figure had never irked him more than it did now), and wrapped his bare arms around the boy’s chest. He couldn’t give Carrig his body heat, but he could do this. He could shield him from the falling snow and the ice that had veined its way into the walls like iron ore through rock, by making himself into a kind of shelter. He could start a new career as a tarpaulin when this was over. Owen Harper, the all-weather wind shield.

He had thought Carrig was too far into third-stage delirium to know what was happening, but as he settled down close to the boy, mourning and thanking his own immunity to the cold alternately and sometimes both at the same time, Carrig’s soft Welsh voice said:

“Perv.”

Owen smiled. And prayed.


December 13th, 11:18pm

Gwen was nearest the vestry door, and stepped outside into the rows of pews first. Tosh followed, and stepped to one side to face the old man with Gwen. He only stood there, smiling, benign.

“If that’s true, why didn’t you talk to us earlier?” Gwen asked, casting her torch down at his feet – enough to illuminate him, to make it apparent if he was armed in any way, but not threatening or confrontational, as a torch-beam full in the face might have been.

“I couldn’t speak then.”

“Why not? There was no-one around but us—” Gwen began, but Tosh interrupted, softly.

“You mean you actually couldn’t speak?” she asked. The priest nodded. “Rendered silent. Mute. Dumb. Whatever you choose to call it.”

“But you’re not now?” Gwen demanded. She appeared to be having difficulty grasping the concept.

He turned his eyes from Tosh to Gwen without contempt, although it would be easy to imagine she saw it there; every movement he made was unconsciously imperious tonight, his chin held slightly aloft, his gaze appearing to look down on them despite his diminutive stature. “Correct.”

“But it was you who sent us the e-mail?” Tosh pursued, cautiously.

He nodded.

“Why? I mean, a missing boy is important, and we appreciate you trusting us with it, but it could have been handled by the police. Why call in Torchwood?”

“I was hoping you could help me with something. Carrig’s disappearance merely gave me the excuse I needed. And, I thought, if I had aided you in some humane way, you might be more inclined to ask questions first and withhold the shooting until later.” The two tiny stars in his eyes twinkled, like flecks of mica in a road. He was, very gently, making fun of them.

“So . . . you rang the bells, then?” asked Gwen.

Again Marcus nodded.

“How did you know Carrig was in danger? He’d only been missing a couple of hours when you contacted us.”

“I suppose by now that you know what I am?” It was still faintly mocking, like an indulgent uncle watching a beloved nephew or niece make a fool of themselves in an amusing but ultimately cute way.

“Actually . . . we really only know what you aren’t,” Tosh admitted. “Which doesn’t narrow it down much.”

He dipped his head, once, in a kind of half-bow. It was not a nod, although he seemed to give those often; it was an old-fashioned, courtly gesture, and it once again placed him as something out of his time – or perhaps, also, out of his place.

“A wise woman. So many humans seem to think in terms of ‘aliens’, as if they are all one kind. You acknowledge the vastness of existence.”

“We’ve kind of met a few,” Tosh replied.

“My kind are . . . prognosticators. Not intentionally, you understand; we would rather the future left us alone to enjoy the present, more often than not. But when something is about to occur which, with proper precautions, could be avoided . . . we are sometimes granted visions. Always twelve hours into the future, and always, as soon as we have seen, we are struck dumb and unable to pass on what we see.”

“Sounds like a bit of a design flaw to me,” Gwen said, and for moment Tosh wondered if perhaps she was joking – but her eyes were deadly serious, her mouth drawn down tight and hard against mirth and the cold.

“That’s not for me to say,” Marcus returned, serenely. “Or you. Who is to say what the creator was thinking when he made the common housefly? Or the flea? They appear to serve no purpose to us, but remove them from the planet, and we may well find the place a wasteland within a year.”

“You really are a priest, then?” Tosh interjected. “It’s not just an act?”

“You could say that, although I don't subscribe to any one religion on Earth, even though I am a priest of one denomination, that I understand we have a common denominator. My people and many of yours share the belief that there is one great Knowledge, one power beyond us or our understanding, which is responsible for much in the universe.”

“To get back to the point,” Gwen said, rather tersely. “I mean, I understand that what you’re saying is important, Mr Llwellyn, but Carrig and our colleague are still out there, and we’d like to join in the rescue as soon as possible. When you say you were rendered mute for those twelve hours, why couldn’t you just write a message for somebody? Warn them what it was you saw?”

Llwellyn shook his abnormally large, balding head sadly. “You saw what the result of my trying to write during that time is like,” he said. “It is like having a severe case of dyslexia. I managed to write that e-mail only after much effort, and even then, I’m not entirely sure it made much sense. It was the best I could do.”

“It was enough to get us here. Thank you,” Gwen replied.

The old priest’s haggard face broke into a smile, then: teeth like tombstones in the vague lightlessness, dentures that were too large for his small mouth and too small for his large head. But Tosh thought it was a kind smile. It was unfathomable, now, why they had ever thought him creepy, or suspected him of spiriting Carrig away.

“But . . . why can you talk to us now? I assume you have to remain mute until the twelve hours is up?” Tosh asked.

“That’s correct. I remain speechless until it is over.”

“But it’s not time yet,” Tosh protested. “You rang the bells at 12:15, right? That means you shouldn’t be able to talk to us until 12:15 tonight. But it’s only 11:30, at most.”

“I should explain,” the old man said. “When I say ‘until it is over’ . . . well, there are two ways a situation like this can be said to be ‘over’. I remain without speech either until the disaster has taken place, or until something has been altered in such a way that it will avert that disaster.”

“You . . . you mean, Carrig was meant to die at 12:15?” Gwen said.

Marcus nodded. He did that a lot – even when his power of speech was available to him, it seemed he chose to be sparing with his words. It suited his slightly regal bearing, his shrunken form, and this silent, brooding tomb of a church, so dark and blue and resonant.

“But now he won’t? Something changed?”

“Owen,” Tosh murmured.

“Is that right? Has Owen done something to save Carrig?” Gwen was looking eagerly at Llwellyn, silently urging him to confirm what she clearly hoped was true – and that was just like Gwen, Tosh thought, with an inward pause of both envy and fondness. Gwen would see only the lost boy, the fate that might have awaited him without their intervention, and would pursue it doggedly. While Tosh longed to question Marcus Llwellyn about all he knew of the universe, where he came from, what scientific secrets he might be able to share with them, Gwen was very firmly standing with both feet on planet Earth, and her mind and heart on a missing teenager.

“I don’t know. I only know that it must have been changed, or I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”

Tosh watched, breath bated, as Gwen very deliberately stepped forward, closing the distance down the long aisle until she stood chest-to-nose with Llwellyn. His enormous eyes and hers, alike in every way but the colour and that dimaond-chip shine that wasn’t quite human in his, met for a long, still moment. Then she said, very softly but somehow clear as its own bell in the immense blue hush: “If you really have helped to save a boy’s life today, Mr Llwellyn, and you certainly earned any help it’s within Torchwood’s power to give you. But I can’t promise that until we know the whole story. Where you’re from, what it is you want from us.”

Managing to look down on her even as he craned his scrawny neck to meet her eyes, Llwellyn said: “All right.”

And told the following story.


December 14th, 12:03pm

“It was over eight hundred and twenty years ago, and there was nothing on this stretch of land but hills and caves, and sheep. I and a handful of others were on a scientific expedition, studying some of the unique mineral formations in this part of Wales, when our ship crashed. I was the only survivor. It was my good fortune that, apart from my stature, I looked remarkably like the indigenous people – and remember that humans were generally shorter, then. I discovered I could pass for a midget.
   
“I made my way on foot to Brecon Abbey, and the Abbot there, thinking I was a lost traveller, allowed me to stay in the Abbey for a time. It was during my stay that I had my first vision while on Earth.

“I saw in my vision that a coal from the fire in the refectory was going to fall loose from the grate, and burn down the Abbey within hours. I couldn’t speak to tell anyone, and I hadn’t yet learnt to write in Welsh, which was spoken here at the time, or Latin, so I decided to sit all night and day in the refectory and wait for it to happen. I was able to put out the first flames as soon as the coal fell.

“The Abbot didn’t believe that I had been merely sitting in the refectory for warmth – and of course when there was a second incident, he became convinced that I was ‘gifted’ or touched in some way. He called me his ‘Guardian Angel’. It amuses me how humans’ perceptions have changed over the centuries – any inexplicable event was then put down to angels, demons, witches. Today it is always aliens, psychic manifestations, E.S.P. In the end, they all come down to the same thing. Magic is only science we haven’t yet discovered the secrets to.

“He was so grateful and so convinced that I was a sign of divine approval that he built this church for me, and instated me as priest. The sounds and lights you saw earlier – yes, I know you were here – are something he arranged especially for me. The town grew up around it, as most towns and villages did in medieval Britainnia, and those early sightings of our ship in the hills, so many years before, eventually gave the village its name: The City of Lights.
.
“Over the years I have been visited with many visions, and rang the bells to warn the townspeople that something is coming. But it is an inexact science, you understand. The bells would make people more cautious, more likely to avoid the kind of reckless behaviour that causes many accidents, and so some, thankfully, have been averted. A woman planning to walk home alone at night would hear the bells and decide to take the bus home; a drunk planning to drive home would instead decide to walk.

“I explained my prolonged periods of silence by falling back on my roots at the Abbey – the Benedictine Monks there often take a vow of silence, and I claimed to be following the example of my brothers on those days I wasn’t needed for services. The few times I was struck dumb on a Sunday, I had to plead laryngitis or some such nonsense. Because you see, I never get ill.

“We also do not eat and drink organic materials as you humans do. We have a particular mineral – a crystal, if you will - that absorbs and assimilates nutrients from the atmosphere that we need to survive, and secretes them in through our skin on contact. They are self-sustaining, in theory, everlasting. To prevent it being discovered or lost, the Abbot had the crystal ground into the mortar of the church. When I’m alone I use these walls to feed.

“You see, I’m stranded here. All the equipment I might have used to contact my home for retrieval was destroyed in the original crash. I was hoping that Torchwood, with its vast collection of alien artifacts and its knowledge, might be able to help me find a way to contact them, or even to get me home.”


December 14th, 12:06pm

He must have gone into a kind of waking trance – not dozed, never dozed, he couldn’t anymore – but now Owen found himself waking from that half-conscious state he had slipped into. There was a thumping sound directly overhead, shaking the foundations of the well as if it caused all the hillside round about to tremble.

A helicopter.

Light flared down the well-shaft and into his eyes, and he blinked, instinctively rolling away from Carrig and into the light. Somewhere above them he heard a horn sound, a rude, blaring roar in the echoing hills.

Beside him, Carrig’s breathing had steadied, levelled out into sleep. When he touched a hand to the boy’s head, he was cold, but the deathly iciness had gone, faded back into a chill that would thaw.

He’d done it.


December 14th, 12:16pm

“I believe him, Jack. Carrig’s safe thanks to him. They took him to the hospital a few minutes ago. Owen’s with him.”

Gwen stood off to one side, close enough that Tosh could hear her side of the conversation, far enough away that the wordless murmur of Jack’s reponses was lost to the night. They and Marcus Llwellyn were standing outside the church on the slushy path under the streetlight, where they had watched the emergency services helicopter pass by moments ago.

Gwen was nodding, listening earnestly as Jack spoke. Tosh turned to Llwellyn, who stood with his quiet, benevolent smile beside her. She was usually the short one, except when Martha had come to visit, but next to this tiny little priest she felt a giantess, stamping through the show after Jack and her stolen harp.

“You said that the Abbot called you his ‘Guardian Angel’,” she said. “And that people back then called a thing spirits that they would call aliens today.”

He only looked at her, expectantly. Tosh sighed. She had been hoping he would catch the drift of her question without her having to come out and say it, but if he understood what it was she wanted so badly to ask, then he was feigning ignorance. Making her say it aloud.

“Which is it?” she said, at last. “Are all angels aliens, or are all aliens angels?”

“My dear girl,” he replied. “Those are just labels. Words to understood what can’t be understood. Ezekial saw angels that match exactly what so many UFO sightings have reported. Elisha was spirited away to heaven. Aliens? Angels? Maybe both. Maybe neither.”

Gwen snapped her phone closed, and stomped across the slush to where they stood, companionable and silent. Perhaps his tendency for the quiet was catching.

"I've told our boss your story, father," she said, with a broad, beaming smile that lit the snow almost more brightly than the streetlight did. "He said he'd love to help. And what's more, he says he knows just the thing to do."

She paused for a beat, as if she could hardly believe her own news, how good it was, and that exuberance was bursting from her like wadding from an over-stuffed teddy-bear. "Jack says, if you would like to take the offer, that he has a friend that might be able to give you a lift."