Sparkling Cosmos {A Torchwood Story Two} [COMPLETED]

8. Might've Had Too Much Coffee

I can't focus - something's going on.

I leave my work on my desk and look around until I conclude the distracting noise is from this tapping she's doing on the table. Count of four, in a beat that sounds familiar but I can't quite place it.

Eventually I say, "Can you please stop doing that, Toshiko?"
She immediately stops, but looks across to me like she doesn't know what I'm on about. "Doing what, Lina?"
"That tapping you were doing."
"I was tapping? I didn't realise."

She turns back to her work with a shrug, leaving me confused. I try to shake it off, but with my new brain, nothing ever gets shaken off: it's all stored in my mind, every piece of information ever and every point of knowledge I've yet to understand. It's still so weird being a Time Lord. I need to meet my own people to understand myself more, but how? Jack says he rarely pops up, only if there's worldwide trouble; who knows when that'll next be?

But then another piece of information pops to the foreground of my brain, and I remember the hand. The hand!
I run across the grate floors to Jack's office, where he's currently eating a donut and filing through the admin Tosh has made, but I stop in my tracks.

The four beats echo throughout the Hub; I look around everywhere, and everyone is creating it. Tosh is tapping on the table again, Owen is patting his thighs through his jeans at his desk; Ianto is clinking his nails against the mugs up high, Gwen is tutting it slowly.
And Jack. Jack is fiddling with a ballpoint pen, tapping the end of it against his glass desk to a pattern of four. It sounds like my heartbeat, a quick rhythm of four from my collective two hearts, and I blink in overload. Too much around me. I need to sit down. I need to process.

I must've made a noise, because Jack has looked up and is now at my side looking concerned.
"Is it the Rift?" he asks me, but I shake my head. The Rift causes something different inside me, some kind of pain. This doesn't hurt, it just... exists. And it shouldn't. Believe me, I'm an expert on things that shouldn't exist, and apart from my boss and myself, there's something here that shouldn't be.

"I need to sit down," I say to nobody in particular, and Jack pulls me into his office and lowers me into the chair opposite his. He goes around to his own seat and leans towards me.
"You were coming in here," he says in a low American voice; "what for?"
I force myself to push the pattern to the side, for now. "The hand. I wanna know more about the Doctor, about Gallifrey, about me - I wanna see if I can learn anything from his hand."

His expression clouds over, his lips pouting. "No offense, Evelina, but I don't want anyone touching the hand right now. After Carys threw it onto the ground last week, I don't know - I don't want it to be damaged or anything. It doesn't come out of that container or that solution, am I clear?"
He ends on a dark note, a tone of voice I haven't heard since Canary Wharf, and I blink a few times because I didn't actually realise how much this Doctor meant to him.

I slowly get out of the chair, thank him, and walk back to my desk where I absent-mindedly start tinkering again with this golden box with symbols. Then I leave it. Because the patterns can't be stopped inside or outside my head.

Why is it that nobody notices this sound but me? How come no-one sees how much it's messing me up? Not even Owen.

Maybe I've had too much coffee today.