Ruey's Tale (a CS/Torchwood crossover COMPLETE)
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#1: Ruey's Tale (a CS/Torchwood crossover COMPLETE) Author: Sarah_KLocation: St Albans PostPosted: Tue Mar 06, 2007 11:01 pm
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Seeing as the Squeen is posting her Torchwood Crossover here I thought I'd let you have a look at my effort too. The prompt was:

The team investigates the disappearance of Professor Richardson (father of Ruey, one of the pupils) during his attempted space flight and discovers aliens are involved.

I didn't quite manage the team but here's Ruey's Tale and I hope you enjoy it whether you know Torchwood or not.



If you’ll sit here a while and listen I’ll tell you a story. Now don’t look at me like that, as if I’m crazy, perhaps I can’t always remember the names of all the nurses and visitors in and out of here without knocking but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten him.

Forgotten who? Why Jack of course. Captain Jack Harkness, or so he was calling himself the last time I met him.

Yes he had more than one name. If you keep interrupting me I’ll never finish and your mother will be back in no time to drag you away. No imagination that one, not like you, not like your grandmother or your great grandmother. Heaven knows where she got such a dull mind from, it must have been your grandfather I suppose but I never did know why Con chose him. I suppose because she couldn’t choose Roger.

Now look what you’ve done! I’m starting in the middle and it’s muddled enough as it is. Come sit by my chair and I’ll tell you a story of aliens and space travel and time travel and a man who never dies.

You may well smile now but you won’t when I finish.

Once upon a time…

All good stories start once upon a time you know so there’s no need to sigh at me like that. Alright, I’ll ‘cut to the chase’ though where you picked up such a slangy phrase I can’t imagine.

My father was always interested in the stars you see. I don’t know why, some people just seem to be fascinated with that world up there just outside our reach. Mother told me once that he used to take her out when they were courting and show her the constellations and promise her he’d bring them back as a necklace for her to wear. It always seemed an odd thing to promise but by the time I was old enough to know my father he wasn’t such a romantic person.

My brothers and I… Roddy and Roger, don’t interrupt I’d have told you eventually… used to ignore Dad’s mania as much as we could. Sometimes strange men would appear and he’d disappear off and we wouldn’t see him for days and when we were little we didn’t really mind but then mother died.

Oh we were quite young still. Roddy always said he could barely remember her though Roger and I never forgot. Dad got worse and worse without her and he’d vanish off for weeks at a time and really we got used to looking after ourselves and tried not to rely on Dad for anything practical.

That was when I met him for the first time. Dad had some of his cronies round and they all seemed very excited about something and completely oblivious to the world outside so when the doorbell rang I opened it.

Perhaps you don’t know what it’s like seeing someone that glamorous turn up at your front door. He looked like he’d stepped right out of the movie screen, from one of those pictures Roger and Roddy always refused to watch with me. Today all your magazines and papers and televisions are filled with beautiful people but I’d never seen anyone quite like him and being a pretty average teenaged girl and he rather took my breath away.

He introduced himself as Dr Alex Markhouse, here to see the man of the house, and he winked at me and I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks. He was quite unlike any of Dad’s other friends. He talked to me which none of the others had ever tried, all the way up the stairs to Dad’s attic, though I couldn’t tell you a word of what he’d said.

I suppose it was just a crush, a terribly normal thing to happen to anyone really, but to me it felt magical. Roger hated him on sight. He said there was something not quite right, something untrustworthy about him but I think he was jealous of his looks and his easy manner though perhaps in the end it was Roger who was right.

I’m getting ahead of myself again. Are you comfortable sitting like that?

Well I didn’t see him leave and no amount of questioning would get Dad to tell me anything about him except that he was something to do with rockets and a very clever man. A little over a week after that Dad announced we were upping sticks and moving to Austria.

You know the next bit well I dare say, possibly you even remember Joey telling you. You don’t? I suppose you were very little when she died. I think you’d have loved her though. She told the most amazing stories and gave the most amazing hugs. Yes, just like granny Con did.

Well I’m sure you do remember but I’ll tell it in brief if you want.

Dad disappeared soon after we arrived leaving Roger, Roddy and I to our own devices and we went along alright till Roger hurt his leg badly and we came into contact with the Maynards. They took us in like the waifs and strays we were and looking back I’m amazed at it. To adopt three strange children when they already had so many and Joey hadn’t been well… They were amazing people your great grandparents.

Eventually news came that Dad had taken the final step with his obsession and been fired into the sky in a rocket and I cried my heart out in Joey’s arms and then did my best to put it out of my mind. We never really talked about it much. I don’t think Roddy minded really. He told me once that he thought Dad must have died happy and that was all he could ask for. I thought at the time Roger must have taken it harder but he was really very cross with Dad for a while so I talked about it with Len and Con and Margot and after a bit with some of the girls at school but slowly I began to forget.

It seems an odd thing to forget doesn’t it but then I had so many other things going on and really I believed he must have died when we didn’t hear from him at all. It was only years later, when I was just leaving school, that I had to think of it again.

Roger sent me a letter, it’s in amongst my papers somewhere perhaps you could look for it if you had time one day. He had come across one of Dad’s old friends and had asked a few pointed questions and… Well to be honest Roger was never the world’s best correspondent and he was so worked up that it all seemed very strange.

Apparently this friend had dropped out of the venture at the last minute when he’d discovered that Dr Alex Markhouse had died years before we’d met him. Dad had ignored the warning and gone on with trying to purchase the rocket Dr Markhouse was apparently selling. Well Roger, hearing this story became convinced that Markhouse must be a con artist and determined to track him down and find out if he’d been responsible for Dad’s death.

No. I’m not tired dear. I’ll try not to go off in a dream like that but it’s all such a long time ago and so hard to remember how Roger was.

He was such a tall young man, full of energy like a coiled spring, and he was going to be an engineer. He became quite obsessed and tracked down all the information he could and then. Well you have to understand that manias seemed to run in our family. He turned up on my doorstep at college incredibly excited about some discovery he’d made. He sounded so much like Dad it was alarming. He kept saying that it looked like Markhouse was a fraud after all and he’d been right but that the rocket was real. He was babbling about aliens and space travel and I’m afraid I didn’t want to hear it.

You see I’d become so normal by then. I wanted a calm life. I was training to be a PE teacher and had my friends around me and we all thought Con and Roger were going to make a match and here was Roger sounding just like Dad had and I couldn’t cope with it at all. I threw him out and I’ll never forgive myself for that.

Thank you darling. I don’t know what I’ve done with my handkerchief at all. Matron would be quite cross with me.

I never saw him again of course. Nobody did. Jack spent quite a time searching for him and I don’t think ever really gave up hope but Con was desolate and Roddy went to New Zealand to escape and I just tried to plough on with my course but my heart wasn’t really in it.

That was when I met him for the second time.

It was the day of the moon landing. 1969 and the whole world seemed to stop still in front of those tiny television screens we had then. Have you seen the footage? I suppose you watch it in history now. Well it was years before I saw it. All that build up, people talking about flying off into space and landing on the moon and it was all so full of hope and sometimes they’d mention the crazy pioneers who’d died trying to each the stars before and I didn’t want to hear it at all.

I went to a café, a tiny café in Cardiff. I’d been visiting a friend and they’d all crowded into someone’s living room to watch and they thought I was a little crazy but perhaps my friend had explained because they didn’t push me. So there I was, alone, in this tiny café and the door opened and he was standing there.

I think I must have gasped out loud for he turned and looked at me with this piercing gaze and then flashed a smile. A million dollar smile I suppose you’d call it. I don’t think he remembered who I was at first but he came and sat with me and ordered tea and cake and asked what a pretty girl like me was doing out here on my own when history was being made.

What are you giggling at young lady? Well yes I suppose it was a little corny but it didn’t sound like it coming from his mouth. Oh be quiet or I’ll stop right now.

Ready to listen? Well alright then. Not that this next bit is much fun. I’m afraid; to my utter shame afterwards I burst into tears. I was never one for tears really but it was such a shock seeing him after Roger had looked so hard and on that day of all days and it all came pouring out about Dad and the rocket and his death and how Roger had disappeared and how he’d been looking for him.

What did he do? Well what would you do if a girl had a sobbing fit into a pot of tea because you asked her a simple question? No I don’t know either. He held my hand and listened and stroked it and made soothing noises right up until I said Roger had been looking for him and then he froze. He looked so confused, and so afraid, that I was suddenly unsure of myself and I asked him if he was Dr Alex Markhouse and he looked at me and said that he had been once which seemed such an odd thing to say.

We sat like that for a while. He looked so little and broken, it was very strange, as if I’d reminded him of some awful truth and I thought perhaps Roger was right and I pulled my hand away as if I’d been stung but he was faster and he wouldn’t let go. I don’t think I’ve ever been that scared before or since. Suddenly all the fear after Dad left, and when Roger left, all of it came back and I thought I was going to die but he just looked at me and…

He looked sad. No that wasn’t it. He looked like he had all the weight of the world on his shoulders and he just stared at me as if he wanted to say something and he couldn’t get the words out and so I asked him straight out, if he’d killed my Dad and Roger and he just shook his head and I thought for a moment he might cry.

He told me he had no idea what had happened to Roger but that if he’d worked out all he said he had then he sounded smart enough to look after himself and I believed him though I had refused to believe anyone else who’d tried to comfort me. I asked him if he’d killed my Dad again and he said perhaps Alex Markhouse had which mad me so cross.

Your Great Aunt Margot used to blame her devil whenever she did something wrong and it just sounded so childish blaming my father’s death on a name he might have been known as once as if he wouldn’t take it on himself and I told him either he did or he didn’t and he told me nothing was ever that simple.

You think that sounds glib? I can tell from that look on your face that you don’t believe him but I did. Oh not at first, I was still too afraid for that, but after a little while I realised I trusted him without ever quite knowing why.

He told me about another world you see. His world was full of wonders and miracles beyond anything I’d ever known. He spoke as if a man really could bring the stars back in a necklace; told me how he’d seen this planet thousands of years into the future and how he’d met beings I could never imagine. It sounds fantastic doesn’t it but he was such a good storyteller, Joey would have loved him I though that even then whilst I was sitting there scared and wondering if he had the same mania that my father did and that Roger had caught.

Then it changed. He was telling me about the way television would come to shape our future, something that seemed very possible on that day with the streets so empty, and then suddenly he was very quiet. He wasn’t looking at me anymore but he told me of a girl he’d known who’d travelled and seen the end of this universe and I could tell he must have loved her very dearly. Then he spoke of wars, of losing friends, he spoke of Daleks, which was a word none of us knew back then though I’ve heard it again in these last years.

I hadn’t believed in the wonders, not completely, how could you? But I believed in the horrors. He spoke just as some of our teachers spoke when they told us of World War Two and you couldn’t imagine he’d made it up and all the time he was holding my hand and staring into space as if he could see this world that I couldn’t and suddenly it was too much.

“And you sent my father into this?” Such a stupid question really but it brought his attention back to me and he looked as if I’d stabbed him. For a moment he was silent and then he said perhaps again and I pulled away and this time he let me.

He told me the ship he’d sold to my father was real and that it would fly and then men with Dad knew how to fly it but he also told me it was stolen. He told me he had been a conman just as Roger suspected. I was so angry with him, I think I must have shouted asking him why he’d sent my father away in a stolen ship and where he might have gone but it was clear he had no answers for me.

He didn’t apologise. I’ll always remember that. He told me that my father could be safe and well exploring the heavens just as easily as he could be… He trailed off there. He said he’d paid the price for his actions and that he would go on paying it until the earth stopped turning and I told him not to be so melodramatic and he just laughed.

Much later I remembered that he hadn’t aged at all, he still looked very much like that young dashing man I met at the door, thirty or so at most. Right then I couldn’t think of anything except the image of some angry being chasing after Dad trying to get back it’s stolen ship.

He promised me he’d look for Roger and then he left.

Yes just like that. You think you’d have followed him do you? Or called the police I suppose. Well perhaps you would have done you’re much wiser now than I was even at very nearly twenty but I didn’t. I suppose I was under his spell somewhat but I just sat there until the owner came to top up my tea.

Who did I tell? Who could I have told? Joey and Jack wouldn’t have believed anything so unlikely, very few of my friends would, and I couldn’t tell Con who was still struggling to cope with the loss of Roger. I tried to tell Annie, that was the university friend I was staying with, but she seemed to think it was all just emotion from the moon landing and laughed it off.

I tucked it all away in my head though and I never quite forgot it or him after that. I used to imagine I saw him on street corners; once or twice I was convinced I saw my Dad too.

No I never thought I saw Roger. I don’t know why.

Are you still comfortable, there’s not much more to go, I know it’s a long story. What comes next?

The third time I saw him was so many years later. I was an old woman then.

Well it’s nice of you to say that but I’m certainly an old woman now and even then, it would have been about 7 years ago just before Con died, I was starting to go grey. Oh I was still active then and they didn’t try to hide my shoes like that awful woman does. Call herself Matron does she well she’s not a patch on Matey.

Yes I’ll calm down. She does hide them though I’m sure of it.

He didn’t look a day older and it didn’t surprise me at all. I think over those years I’d come to believe his story more and more. It comforted me to imagine Dad amongst the stars even with all those horrors out there. When he walked through the door it seemed so normal.

I was sitting in a café, the one next to St Josephs in town you know it, just waiting for my bus and he came and sat down next to me and ordered himself a tea just like before. He said, I found him in the end, and I just looked at him blankly. That seemed to unnerve him a little and he introduced himself, I’m Captain Jack Harkness, he said, Don’t you remember me?

Who was once called Alex Markhouse I replied and started laughing which seemed to unnerve him more and he looked around as if to find help so I tried to pull myself together.

He told me then that he’d never stopped searching for Roger, and I thought of two such different Jacks carrying out that task, though he was sorry to tell me it had been too late.

He was dead you see, you don’t like using euphemisms do you? I suppose they can cause confusion but I knew exactly what I meant and I gripped my mug of tea tightly urging him on with my eyes.

He told me Roger had found out a lot of the truth that Alex, Jack, whoever he was, had told me that long ago afternoon in ’69 but that in the process he’d alerted a lot of people to his presence. Not aliens, he reassured me seeing the fear in my eyes, but people who studied aliens and their place on earth. He thought they’d found Roger before he ever came to me and that they’d drugged him to make him forget, yes it does sound like the Men in Black I know but perhaps all stories have a little truth in them.

Apparently Roger, for some reason he didn’t know exactly, had managed to break the influence of the drug and had remembered bits and pieces which is when he’d come to see me sounding so crazy and manic and I’d thrown him out again.

Yes I’m alright. Don’t fuss.

They’d found him again, these people. He wouldn’t tell me their name; he said he didn’t want them to find me. Roger had been able to remember nearly everything and this time when they found him they spoke to him and discovering he was an engineer they offered him a job. They told him he might be able to discover the truth and that he could help his country in the mean time.

He’d been alive all those years, all though those horrible years we thought him dead and when Con had cried for him and when Roddy had left and never written and… he’d been alive and safe. He’d just been living under another name.

Paul Boston.

I see from that look you recognise the name. Your mother thinks he must have been an old boyfriend of mine I suppose. Without any evidence to oppose her I can imagine why she might but he was my brother, that’s why I helped them bring his body here and buried him at St Josephs.

Jack told me he’d died as a hero, protecting other men in his team from a blast caused by a piece of technology they didn’t understand. He’d seen the picture in a report and realised it looked just like my father and he’d managed to piece it all back together. He’d somehow managed to gain custody of the body, though from the shifty look he had I suspect that was his conman side returning, and he wanted to know if I would like to pick his grave site.

There wasn’t much else. You’d think after all those years I’d have thought of hundreds of questions to ask him but he’d done what he had promised and found Roger for me and we spoke of the practical details and he told me he had some photographs I could keep.

Yes I still have them. There in my treasure box and maybe I’ll let you see them someday but I’m afraid I’m tired now.

Oh you haven’t worn me out darling it’s just remembering it all again. He left me sitting in that café again just as he had in Cardiff and I knew then that I’d probably never see him again, never find out what had happened to my father, never find out what had happened to Jack to put him in what seemed like such a purgatory. He reminded me of the myth of the Wandering Jew, look it up when you get home, cursed to walk the earth forever for his deed in the past. I hoped whoever had cursed him would come back for him one day.

If you don’t mind I think I should like to sleep for a little now. I’ve never told anyone it all before and I don’t suppose I shall again. I told Con he was safe just before she died and she smiled as if she’d always known but I couldn’t tell anyone else.

Your mother will be here soon. I think it would be best if you kept this story to yourself.

You’d like to write it down? Well if you want to, you really are just like my Con you know, a worthy namesake.

Thank you for listening to an old woman’s ramblings. Perhaps he’ll come and find you one day and you’ll believe me. Oh I know you don’t now but one day you might and that’s enough for me.

#2:  Author: ElbeeLocation: Surrey PostPosted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 9:52 am
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Sarah, that was brilliant! I especially liked the style of Ruey explaining it to a much younger generation, who might be a bit sceptical about the state of her mind! It's exactly what could have happened to the Professor Laughing

You've caught Jack spot on - is he a rogue or a good guy, we're just never sure Wink

#3:  Author: Ruth BLocation: Oxford, UK PostPosted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 11:11 am
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That was great! Thanks Sarah.

#4:  Author: white_hartLocation: Oxford PostPosted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 9:14 pm
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I really enjoyed this - thanks!

#5:  Author: dorianLocation: Dublin PostPosted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 10:06 pm
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I'm not at all familiar with "Torchwood", but it doesn't matter - this is just lovely. Really well-written and...well, wonderful.

Thank you.

#6:  Author: bethanyLocation: Liverpool (mostly) PostPosted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 11:58 am
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I really enjoyed watching Torchwood, and have been hoping for ages that someone would write a crossover drabble, and now there are two, yay!

Thanks Sarah, I really enjoyed reading this - so believable.

#7:  Author: Fiona McLocation: Bendigo, Australia PostPosted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 10:22 pm
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I don't know Torchwood at all, but this kept me absolutely spellbound. And it seemed so believable to. Thanks



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