"Rose River" AU
'River Run'
Chapter One
- Prologue -

A/N: Hello again! Glad you lot are still around. This first bit wont make any sense at all, unless you've been keeping up with all the different Pete's World glimpses in the previous stories. As always, comments feed the muses and keep me going. This one will more than likely be ridiculous with the amount of chapters going on, but as a Christmas Special, this would most likely be a two parter with two hours each. Like I said... ridiculous.

Allons-y!

The room was a small, stark white brick face, which annoyingly smelled of fresh paint. There was a single door to the place and no windows or mirrors of any sort. In the middle stood a table with two chairs. One of them was filled by a skinny, salt and peppered haired bloke, who looked insanely bored and needed a shave. His green leather coat was over the chair he was sitting in. Tie undone and dangling, he had his blue sleeves rolled to the elbow - even though they'd dropped the temp down to fifty Fahrenheit again. He snapped one of his braces, just to hear anything except his own breathing.

Glancing at his upturned wrist for the umpteenth time, he looked sideways with his eyes up to the camera in the corner and glared into the lens of it. "Dammit, Peter Alan Tyler, I do have to eat you know. Get the hell in here and ask your bloody questions already. I'm starving!"

That was a lie, of course, but an expected one since they'd left him in here to stew or rot for at least five hours. He could go for a satsuma though, or a coffee. Coffee was good. Tea's better, but... Yeah, a coffee would be nice. His foot started tapping again, doing his best to ignore his pissed off bladder, then smirked at the irony of that thought.

The door abruptly opened a few minutes later, and Pete came into the room in full business mode. Plopping a thick folder on the table, he sat across from the man. Pausing to stare at him for a moment, he opened the folder and started reading.

"Daniel Alexander Davenport, born the 18th of March, 1962, and raised in Dartmouth's Home for Boys. Upstanding marks throughout your scholastics, and even earned a Fellmark grant for University in the fields of Chemistry and Physics."

The pause for breath that Pete took was filled with a muttering, "Like you don't know this already, Ginger. We went to the same bloody schools, for heaven's sake."

Looking up from the folder, Pete wasn't impressed. "Valedictorian in no less than four fields of study, you were hand-picked by my predecessor's predecessor on more than one occasion, up to and including your appointment as his replacement as Director of Torchwood One, which you refused in lieu of the position at Torchwood Three in Cardiff."

"And?" he prodded, still bored and rubbing a tired eye.

Slamming the folder shut on the table, Pete was completely pissed off. "How the hell did you do it Danny? We can't find any sort of breach in my household firewall! Was it a leech virus? I trusted you for God's sake!"

Rolling his eyes, Daniel leaned back in the chair. "Didn't have to, old bean," he said quietly. "I already knew what you were talking about."

"You keep saying that, but that simply doesn't make any sense at all!" Pete shouted. "Everything is coded so that no other computer receiver would even register it!" he bellowed.

Pointing to the camera in the corner with his upturned left hand, Daniel still looked relaxed. "Turn that off and I'll tell you how," he grinned.

Blinking, Pete stood up and pulled the wire out of the camera. Even though it wasn't designed for it, he was so angry that he yanked the wires completely out of the socket with a bit of a sparking protest.

While he was distracted, Daniel nonchalantly reached back and fingered something in his jacket pocket, nullifying the other listening devices in the room. Once Pete turned around again, he removed his watch, set it gently on the table, and took in Pete's expression of outright shock with a wry grin.

Ten minutes later, Pete came out of the room as white as a sheet. Leaning against the door, he mumbled a 'dear god', then looked to his left and told the guard to let him go.

Pulled out of school early, Tony was completely confused. No amount of asking would prompt a why out of his father, so he sat in the limo and counted the dirigibles floating in the air.

After they got home, things became more confusing when his father told the staff to go home for the day. All he got out of his mother was a worried shrug. A half hour after the staff left, there was a knock at the door and he was asked to go to his room.

Of course, he didn't do any such thing. Taking a page out of his big sister's book, Tony lay on his stomach at the top of the stair to watch what was going on, investigating. His frown went deeper when he saw Uncle Danny at the door.

Grinning at the sight of his eccentric non related Uncle, he shook his head at that unsightly garish tie of his. After they moved into the main sitting room, he had to shuffle down the stair in order to peek out from under the ceiling. It was a neat trick, since he was still on his stomach and half inverted.

Nothing prepared him for what he saw next. If it wasn't for his mother's shriek of surprise, they would've heard his own loud gasp when Uncle Danny took off his watch. Eyes gaping, it looked like years literally melted off of him. If that wasn't surprising, the sight of his mother hugging him like he was going to disappear certainly was.

Having seen enough, he got up and stomped down the stairs. "What the bloody hell is going on?" he shouted. "Uncle Danny? What'd you do to yourself?"