Hidden By Aliens

Ghost Machine

It had been a hard week for the Torchwood Three team. Their newbies had mostly settled in- meeting their first alien tends to make heroes or zeroes out of people. Gwen Cooper and Leah Luna-Johnson came out as real heroes. Even if they were heroes in training, they were still good. There was a lot to learn about humanity, about Torchwood, about seeing the good even through the worst shit.

Some days were easier than others.

Some days, you can go home to your partner. You'll watch crap TV, takeaway trays out in front of you and a beer in your hand. You'll smile when you think about your work day. You know you won't ever be able to share it with them, but that they're there at all soothes you.

Some days you're confronted with the past. Of seeing a hand from your long distant species, the first contact you've had with them outside your own future self. You would focus on it every time you walked into work- unable to stop yourself. You feel more cutoff than you have been for years. So close to it, so close to memories of home, yet they're still so far away.

Some days have ghosts.

There's no preparing for when the ghosts come back.

Leah didn't like ghosts.

Not since learning ghosts and Torchwood went hand in metal hand.

(Literally)

==HBA==

When Lawrence later asked her day had gone that night, Leah had no easy answer.

"It started off so simple." She would begin, sitting on a cold rooftop with Italian take out beside her. Lawrence would be sitting beside it- sipping on a blood packet from a blood bank. "Something came up on the scanners- a non-terrestrial thing. They all went to chase it- I was on comm-duty."

"As all tech geniuses are." Lawrence would tease.

Leah wouldn't smile. "They found it. It was a machine. Small, could fit in your hand. Gwen- something changed."

Lawrence did what any normal human would. He asked what the machine could do.

"It uses nanotechnological quantum transducers that can convert emotional energy left over from significant events into visions of those events." Leah would say.

Lawrence did what a normal person would do again: he asked for that in English.

"It showed you ghosts." Leah answered. "One button for the past, one for the future. Gwen found the first half."

That gave Lawrence, a vampire, pause. He was well familiar with the idea of death- of dying. He knew his kind could be killed by UV rays, or losing one's head. He was an older vampire so it would take something big to take him down. He had seen death- felt it in his own body as it decayed then lived on as something new. He had served death. He had seen -felt- life leaving people. Death was not a new concept.

The idea of normal humans seeing it? That gave Lawrence pause. Humans didn't handle the afterlife well. They were afraid. They tried to run from it. To stop it.

Leah knew better. Lawrence could see that. To her kind, death was just another turning of the wheel. Inevitable. Inescapable. But not permanent.

She explained the events after the Torchwood Team found it. Gwen had seen a ghost from the past. A little boy, dressed for World War II, lost in a train station. It turned out to be a man still living, much older now, who still remembered being forgotten when everyone else evacuated.

Harper ended up activating it by accident. He witnessed a girl being raped and murdered. After searching for records, they confirmed the woman had been dead for a long time. The man most suspect- but never charged- still lived. Harper had wanted to bring him to justice. The rest of the team tried their best to give it.