“God, I love these things.”
Owen couldn’t help but huff from his safe distance on the other side of his lab, organizing his tools to finally get Ianto off his ass as his begrudging partner leaned over a weevil. He glanced at the pair of rift creatures, the weevil chained and swaying slightly from sedative as it stared up at her. “The cannibal likes the cannibal monster, what a surprise.” He muttered.
She didn’t bother to look at him. “It’s not cannibalism if it’s different species.”
“Because that’s so much better.” He scoffed. “And leave it alone would you? You’re going to piss it off and make it burn through the sedatives and I don’t want to have to go get another one.”
That makes her frown at him. “I’m doing a physical examination. If we can’t do this test more than once we need to make sure he’s actually a representation of the general population and not secretly deformed or sick. Besides,” Her smile slides back into place like it was never gone, and that’s more unsettling than any weevil snarl, “they’re fascinating.”
“What could possibly be fascinating about a shit-eating freak that crawled out of the sewers?”
“Look at it Owen.” Her voice dropped to an insistent hiss. “It’s an alien.”
He didn’t bother, staring at her incredulously instead. “You do know I’ve been here a good deal longer than you have, right? I bloody well know it’s an alien.”
Liz sighed, the disappointment in it grating him despite his best efforts. “I can’t believe you’re a doctor and you think like this.” Her hand, pale and delicate enough against the weevil’s orangey skin to make Owen tense, ready to jump for his field kit, brushed the side of its face. It rumbled lightly as she turned its face toward him. “Look at its eyes, Owen.”
“What the fuck about them.” He’s seen them, too often. He doesn’t need to look now. He does anyway.
“They look like ours.” It’s practically a whisper, a secret shared in the quiet of the lab, and he can’t cut her off now because she’s right. They do. Her own pair burn into the side of his face from across the room, fever bright. “They’re from across the universe. With different food and different gravity and a different starting point of their evolution. But their eyes are the same as ours. Isn’t that incredible? Isn’t it fascinating?”
He’s holding a scalpel too tight, fingers white around the steel. “Whatever.” He manages to force out, bodily turning away from the pair of them. Liz hums, amused.
“Do you have one of those little mirror things? I want to check its teeth.”
Owen ignores her this time, re-nudging each tool into alignment as she starts clattering through the drawers around her. He doesn’t look at the weevil now sitting alone, doesn’t think about the organization of its skeletal system filed away in the torchwood database. It eats shit for god’s sake it can’t be- it isn’t—
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