Sparkling Cosmos {A Torchwood Story Two} [COMPLETED]

10. My Doctor

Owen holds up my hand and inspects it after we sit together at lunch. "Your fingernail is infected."
I roll my eyes. "Wow, thanks Captain Obvious. Yeah, I know, and it's not that much of a bother."
He crosses his arms, bringing my arm to his pit. "Well, it is to me. Come on, I think I've got something in the cupboards."

He drags me to the operating room, cruelly tearing me away from my dearly beloved lumchtime coffee. When we walk down the whitewashed steps he lets go of my hand and kneels down to sift through his equipment, leaving me to sigh in annoyance and sit down on the gurney. I swing my legs impatiently.

"It's just some pus, Owen. Not the end of the world. I'm a Time Lord, they probably just heal in double-quick time or whatever."
"I don't want you to get anything in your bloodstream," he replies, a bit indistinctly as he has a syringe without the needle clamped between his teeth. He pours a kind of pink liquid into it and pulls my hand out again.
As he gently cleans my fingernail and tweezers away the remaining bit of hangnail to fill the skin gap with the pink liquid, I raise my eyebrows at him and say cheekily, "And why don't you want anything to happen to me?"

His eyes flicker up to mine, and electricity crackles between them. "Shut up."

I change the subject: "What's the pink shit?"
"Hmm," he begins in reply, taking a sanitary wipe and cleaning off residue. "It's this kind of liquid I found in Suzie's old stuff. She had a stack of writing on it: apparently it can rejuvenate cells. Here, look."
We both peer at my middle finger, and lo and behold, there is no more milk green in the side of my nail. I concentrate on my hand and can feel the liquid bind with my cells to heal them - a weird thing to think about, but then again nothing's really weird to think about now.

We look up to each other again, and the corner of Owen's mouth turns up slightly. "Don't say I never take care of you."
He squeezes my hand slightly and picks up the syringe, leaving me to watch him put everything away.
Strangely, I hear the four-beat pattern that I did a few days ago start up again. I lean to the side to catch Owen tapping a plastic test tube from the cupboard against his hip as he reorganizes the space. So is it still a coincidence, that everyone keeps repeating the pattern of my heartbeats?

Inspiration flashes. I ask Owen to slip his stethoscope on and listen to my hearts, and he asks why.
I roll my eyes. "You don't need to know why I do things, I just do them; chop chop, my doctor."
He raises his eyebrows but nevertheless finds his stethoscope and places the end over the left side of my chest.

My heart thumps along regularly, making beats of two steadily. Now he moves it to my other heart, also beating at the same rate.
I frown. "Now put it in the middle."
He looks up at me from my chest. "What'll that do?"
"Just do it," I urge him, and he shakes his head but moves the stethoscope anyway.

A beat of four, a steady pattern that goes on indefinitely, like what everyone around me has been repeating. Not just the team - I've heard people on Queen Street while I've been shopping and inside Cadwaladers having an ice cream tapping against surfaces in a rhythm I'm not sure they even realise they're doing.

There's no other pattern on this earth like that apart from the heartbeat of a Time Lord.

Does this mean... they're here?

"Evy?" Owen asks, snapping me out of my reverie, and he takes the stethoscope off of my chest. "What is it? Nothing's wrong, by the way."

But I can't help thinking that something is.