Disoriented Cosmos {A Torchwood Story} [COMPLETED]

19. What's Up With That Rift?

The room thunks for a fourth time this hour, and again like every other time, my head throbs painfully along with it.

Tosh watches me as I wince in time with the sound of a mechanic ball dropping. "Something is up with the way your head aches only when whatever inside the room is going off."

"You think?" I reply, rubbing my forehead to make it go away. It's an annoying headache that spans my whole head, but only for that specific period of time when the room sounds off - whenever it's not happening, I feel no pain whatsoever. You can't take ibuprofen for a headache that only lasts for ten seconds every twenty minutes or so.

I look to Jack's office and see him picking up sheafs of paper that keep falling from the desk at every rumble. Wanting this sound and my headache to stop permanently, I stride to his room and ask him, "Do you have any idea what this sound is? Or at least where it's coming from?"

He smacks his cheeks whilst thinking, something I've never seen any modern person do in my life. "I've made Suzie and Owen check all the equipment and cells and whatnot we have currently here, and she's reported nothing back from them, so-"

"So you don't know?"
"So the only other explanation is the Rift," Jack interrupts, and I turn my head to the large cylinder in the centre of the Hub that manages the unexplainable tear in time and space that is the Rift.

When we all joined Torchwood, we were told enough about the Rift to know not to mess with it: just over a hundred years ago, a split in time and space was opened in the centre of Cardiff by an alien event; since then it's been active in terms of letting creatures from other worlds and various flotsam and jetsam slip in and out of it, with not much information or many solutions on how to reverse them. I don't think even Jack fully understands it, despite all the otherworldly knowledge he has.
And now it's making funny noises that are causing my head to ache. Is something happening to it? And why am I involved somehow?

In one flash decision, I'm off to the autopsy room to grab a crowbar type instrument off Owen and running to the Rift Manipulator anipulator to prise it open.

"Eve, use the bloody door!" Tosh shouts despairingly and runs over to unlatch it, an expression that a mother would use for a child on her face. Like a kid myself, I grin sheepishly before turning to the inside of the Manipulator. It's the first time anyone but Jack has seen the Rift fully, beforehand only seeing the mechanics and outside casting, and now it looks manic. There are particles flying everywhere, bumping into each other and every so often stopping just short of where I'm peering in like I'm one of them and they recognise me.

Well, I recognise them!

I gasp slowly, my eyes shining. "Huon particles!"
"But what are Huon particles?" Toshiko asks next to me, and in my wonder I barely hear Jack behind me add, "And how do you know about them?"

"Huon particles are particles of energy that have been around since the Dark Times of the universe. They're a part of everything that's existed since then: time machines, Dark Engineering; they even speculate that they might have been a part of creating parallel worlds, seeing as each are so similar to each other. That's because this Huon energy, as particles they attract and are attracted to each other, which might be why parallel worlds look the same - the Huon particles attracted each other built in different worlds and copied."

Everyone is silent as I finish my explanation and gaze into the heart of the Rift.
Only Jack speaks after me: "How do you know all this, Evelina? Nobody on Earth knows about Huon particles apart from me and Torchwood One in London."

Actually, how do I know about Huon energy? It feels like as soon as I saw it inside the Rift, I just... knew. But I've never seen anything like this before - that I can attest to.

"Evelina?" Jack asks again, and I tear my gaze away from the tower and to my boss. The expression on his face is not a pretty one - it's almost the same expression I have when I'm trying to figure out what exactly he is.

In this moment, me and Captain Jack Harkness don't know what he or I are.