Fic: Frozen (Jack Harkness | PG)
Title: Frozen
Author: aibhinn
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through 2x03, "To the Last Man"
Summary: Only the dead can work outside time.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Not making any money. Please not to sue me.
Author's Note: Written for the final week of writerinadrawer, round one. Prompt: Someone's crawling out of a drawer! Additional required element: an alcoholic drink. Thanks to everyone who voted throughout the entire round!
"Six…seven…eight…nine…ten…"
While Connor counted, his eyes covered, Joanne gleefully ran to find a place to hide. She ducked behind a car first, decided that was far too easy, and looked around to find a better spot. A skip sat outside the loading dock of a nearby building, and she made for that instead, slipping behind it to crouch in the tight space between the bin and the wall.
Her foot hit something, and she looked down. Lying beside a half-full beer bottle was an odd-looking object: rectangular, black, and metallic, just visible in the light that filtered into the space. A small green light flashed rhythmically on its top. Interested, she bent down to pick it up.
"…thirty-eight…thirty-nine…forty…."
She angled it so it caught the light better and turned it over in her hands, trying to work out what it was. With a soft whirr, the top lifted of its own accord. Startled, Joanne nearly dropped it. Underneath the top were three buttons. Just that: three buttons, no labels, nothing telling her what they were for.
Joanne cocked her head to one side, thinking. Mum and Dad had told her not to talk to strange people, but they'd never said she mustn't push strange buttons. Besides, how could she work out what this thing was if she didn't?
Slowly, she extended a finger and pressed the right-hand button.
The world disappeared in a flash of orange light.
***
Jack hauled himself up out of his quarters and into the rest of the Hub. "Ianto!" he called. "Did you see that orange-"
He stopped in his tracks, horrified, then rushed towards the unconscious figure slumped at the desk and crouched beside him. "Ianto!" he called again, more urgently, touching his shoulder and shaking gently.
There was no reaction.
Fear pooled in his gut, sending ice-cold tendrils through his body. "C'mon, Ianto, c'mon. Wake up." He shook the Welshman gently, then more strongly. No reaction. Trembling, he pressed two fingers against Ianto's carotid artery, before hauling him into a sitting position to rest his ear against Ianto's chest.
Nothing. No breath sounds, no pulse, no heartbeat.
Ianto was dead.
Jack pulled slowly back, looking up at the calm, slack face of his lover. Ianto's skin was oddly still pink, as though blood continued to flow through his veins, and his eyes were closed. Jack drew in a shaking breath, closing his own eyes as the grief broke over him like a wave. "Ianto," he murmured softly.
Then he gathered himself and pushed to his feet, hand to the comm in his ear. "Owen," he called. The medic didn't answer, and Jack repeated, more forcefully, "Owen! Gwen!"
Nothing. That was odd. Maybe they're somewhere the comms don't work, he thought. Owen and Gwen had gone out to investigate an object that had fallen through the Rift; perhaps the alien object was interfering with transmission.
Or maybe that orange light had been an indicator of something very, very bad.
Praying he was wrong, he pulled out his phone and dialled Tosh's mobile. It rang four times and went to her message. He hung up and tried her home number. Same result. He tried Rhys and Gwen's flat, then the pizza place, then in desperation, dialed 999.
No answer on any of them.
He closed his phone, clenching his fist around it until his knuckles turned white. Either the phone service and the comms had gone down…or the city was dead.
He had to get up to the surface to find out.
He took a deep breath and started for the invisible lift, only to be stopped by an odd sound from deep in the Hub.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
He frowned, turning on the spot to try to locate the source of the sound.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Down towards the basement. He drew his sidearm and took off at a run. He didn't know what was down there, but by God he was going to find out.
***
It was in the morgue.
The thumping had grown steadier, and he approached with caution, gun at the ready. It wasn't coming from Suzie's drawer, thank God; he'd been half-afraid it had been her again with some other freakish plan to come back from the dead. The sound seemed to be coming from a drawer off to the left of Suzie's and a row lower. Jack drew closer, pressed his back to the silent drawers beside that one, and yelled, "Who are you?"
The thumping stopped, and a woman's voice called, "Can you hear me?"
"Yes!" Jack's hold tightened on his pistol. "Who are you?"
"Harriet Derbyshire, Torchwood officer 423, born 19 October 1893, died 26 November 1919." There was a rustling noise, and she said, rather plaintively, "Can you let me out of here?"
Jack's jaw set. "Why should I?"
"Because," she said, "only the dead can operate outside time."
Jack narrowed his eyes, contemplating. "All right," he said after a moment. "I'm opening the drawer, but I'm armed and I can guarantee I'm faster than you." Carefully-and hoping against hope that he wasn't making the biggest mistake of his life-he shifted to stand in front of the drawer and unlocked it, hauling it open.
The body bag was already open, and a young blonde woman lay there, looking up at him. Her face was oval, her skin pale, her features delicate. Big, sky-blue eyes blinked up at him, facing down his pistol with no fear.
"I'm hardly a threat to you, Captain Harkness," she said.
"Funny, but I'm having a hard time believing that right now." He walked backward until he was once again against the other drawers, making it easier for the two of them to see each other. He lowered his gun, but didn't holster it. Her eyes flickered down, noting that his finger was still on the trigger, then looked back up at him. "All right," he said. "Tell me what you know."
She sat up slowly, pulling her knees up and tugging the short gown down over them modestly. "Time's frozen," she said. "The entire Earth, stopped between one heartbeat and the next. We have to get it started again."
"A bit of detail would be helpful here," Jack said sharply, eyes narrowing. "How did it stop? And how do we fix it? And what's happened to my people?"
She sighed, wrapping her arms around her knees. "Do you think I could find some clothes first?"
"No." Jack's tone was flat, implacable. "Right now I'm trying to decide whether I should shove you back in your drawer, or let myself believe you. You'd better do what you can to persuade me."
She looked away, sighed again, and met his gaze one more time. "All right," she said. "A temporal manipulator came through the Rift today. A child found it and, being curious, pressed a button. Time stopped where it was, like stopping a film projector while the lamp is still burning. It affects every living thing on Earth, and it will remain that way until the manipulator's found and turned off."
Jack's eyebrow rose. "Well, that explains why I'm still walking and talking," he allowed. "But it doesn't explain why you've come back from the dead."
Harriet cocked her head to one side, and he saw a glimmer of humour in her eyes. "I don't suppose 'you're not meant to know' is an explanation you'd accept."
"No," Jack repeated, again flatly. "I don't believe any of that shit, that there are things we're not 'meant' to know."
"Unfortunately, that doesn't stop its being true." Jack just glared at her, and she rubbed her forehead wearily. "I only know so much," she said in a tone that was undoubtedly meant to sound reasonable. "I'll tell you everything I can, but there will be holes. I can't help that."
"You'd better hope those holes are small enough I can overlook them, then."
"Oh, for God's sake," she snapped, rolling her eyes. "You can stop trying to intimidate me now. I'm Torchwood too, or I was, and I know all the tricks. Besides which, I'm on your side."
"So convince me of that," Jack said.
She released yet another sigh, then said, "All right. All right. Here's what I know. This time-freezing thing isn't meant to happen. Normally we just leave things like that alone, because your friend the Doctor takes care of most of them-"
"We?" Jack interrupted. "Who's we?"
"That's a hole that will have to remain unplugged," she said firmly. "But the point is, the Doctor can't fix this one, because if he arrives here, he'll be just as frozen as everything else, and so will his ship; she's alive as well. That leaves only you. You're not dead, but you're not precisely alive in the proper meaning of the word, either. Something alive can be killed, and you can't, not permanently. So you're outside the sphere of influence of time."
"I'm wrong," Jack said quietly, remembering the Doctor's words.
Harriet shot him a sharp look. "Hardly, but that's not the point. The point is that you can help us put things right, but you can't do it alone. So I was sent."
"Sent by who?"
"I don't know!" she said, frustrated. "I don't know who, and I don't know how. All I know is why: only the dead can move about outside of time, so it's up to me to make this right."
Jack's eyes narrowed. This wasn't adding up. "If I'm outside the sphere of influence of time," he said, "why can't I do it alone?"
"Just as only someone alive can set the temporal manipulator, only someone dead can turn it off." She gave him a look of exasperation. "Do you have to know the hows and whys of everything? This is Torchwood. Mysteries are part of the job description."
He hated to admit it, but she was right. And this did make sense in an illogical, Torchwood-ish sort of way. "Does that mean Ianto's not actually dead?" he asked hopefully.
"Yes," she said. "He's just frozen in time. He'll be fine once the temporal manipulator's been deactivated."
"But if he was frozen in time, why was he slumped-"
"Captain," she interrupted, "I'd just love to answer every question you've ever had in your life, but I'm sitting here mostly naked and freezing while the rest of the world is waiting for their next heartbeat. Do you suppose we could get on with it?"
Jack blinked. "Right," he said. He holstered his gun and held out a hand to her. "I think Gwen's got an extra set of clothing here; you two look like you're roughly the same size."
***
Driving through Cardiff was problematic when there were literally thousands of vehicles on the road, frozen in time. Jack moved at a crawl, weaving his way between cars and lorries and occasionally driving in the shoulder or even on the median when the cars were too thick to get through. Harriet was silent except when giving directions; apparently she could 'feel' where the temporal manipulator was (whatever that meant; Jack decided not to ask).
It was an eerie feeling, being the only moving, living creatures in sight. They passed pedestrians in mid-stride, birds suspended in the air, even a football game with a player's foot pulled back, ready to deliver a mighty kick to send the ball flying. "Creepy," Jack commented as he curved to go around a dark grey Mini driven by a young blonde woman.
Harriet glanced out of the corner of her eye at him. "You've not seen creepy, Captain Harkness," she said. "Not on Earth, at any rate."
"Oh, I've seen some pretty creepy things in my time," Jack said, turning down a side street; the way ahead was blocked by a half-dozen pedestrians in the zebra crossing. "I've been left behind in a building where I was the only person still alive, thousands of miles from civilisation; I've been stalked by aliens; I've died and come back to life more times than I can count; I've watched my team nearly taken by cannibals. I don't think there's a lot of people who can out-creep me."
"Oh, I think you'll be surprised," she said in an odd sort of tone. Jack shot a look at her. Her eyes were open, but her gaze was entirely inward. "Some day, when you do reach the end of your days, you'll see more than you ever imagined." Before he could respond, her head came up and she leant forward. "Just up there," she said, pointing. "Forty or fifty yards ahead, not much more. It'll be on the right."
Jack weaved his way through the spotty traffic on the road, going slowly, as she peered over the dashboard like a cat scenting prey. "There!" She pointed towards a skip on the right. "In that, or behind it. I'm sure of it."
Jack pulled into the alleyway and parked-when time started up again, he didn't want the suddenly re-animated traffic to hit it. He and Harriet got out, and he felt his heart skip a beat. Just there, crossing the street, were Owen and Gwen. She had her hands in her jacket pockets, her big eyes fastened on the skip; Owen had his hand to his ear, as though he were about to speak into the comm.
Harriet came up beside Jack and touched his arm. "They'll be fine in a moment," she said. "Come on, let's get this done."
It took him a moment to get moving again; by the time he caught up with her, she was looking into the shadows behind the skip. "Here it is," she said, and reached. Jack looked over her shoulder: a small girl, about eight or nine, was behind there, holding a black, rectangular object in her hands. The top on it had opened, and her finger was on the rightmost of the three buttons. Harriet pried it free of the girl's grasp and lifted it out into the light. It glinted in the sunlight, and Jack felt a twinge of discomfort verging on fear. This thing was wrong, it was outright wrong. It shouldn't be here; it shouldn't even exist. Is this how the Doctor feels whenever I'm around? Jack wondered.
Harriet was studying the buttons. "They're not labelled," she said, mostly to herself. "We know it's not the right-hand one… so that leaves two others."
"Don't you know which one it is?" Jack asked. He wiped his hands on his trousers unconsciously. The thing made his skin crawl; he was glad he didn't have to touch it.
"Not exactly."
"What happens if you choose the wrong one?"
Harriet looked at him obliquely. "You'll never know it if I do," she said. Her gaze returned to the temporal manipulator, and she let out a breath in a huff. "All right. Wish me luck, Jack."
"Wait."
She stopped, frowning, and looked at him. He swallowed. "What happens to you once you've deactivated this?"
She smiled softly. "Everything will be put back the way it was meant to be," she said. "I'm meant to be dead. I'm afraid you'll have to take me back to the Hub, though. Tell Gwen thank-you for the loan of the clothes."
"But-" he began.
The world exploded in a flash of blue.
***
"Jack? Jack!"
Jack blinked. The world swam into focus, and he realised he was looking up into a familiar face. "Owen," he grunted. Gwen was on the other side of him, looking concerned.
"That's right. You know where you are?"
Jack made to sit up, but Owen pushed him down again. "Not just yet. Where are you?"
"Newport Road. I came here with-" Jack twisted, looking behind him. Harriet's body lay there, sprawled gracelessly on the pavement. She'd half-fallen on the temporal manipulator, which glinted blackly beneath her body. "With her."
"She's dead," Owen said with an odd gentleness. "What were you doing? You just appeared out of nowhere. Scared that little kid out of her wits."
Jack closed his eyes and let himself sink back down to the ground. "It's a long story. The short version is, she saved the world. I just drove her here." His mouth quirked in a half-smile. "There were a lot of heroes during World War I. Not all of them fought on the front lines."
"Let's get back to the Hub," Owen said, clearly not understanding in the least, but focussed on the essentials.
"Harriet, too," Jack said as Owen and Gwen helped him to his feet. "And the thing she's got with her. She needs to be put back into her drawer."
"You'd better tell us the whole story at some point, Jack," Gwen said as she helped him into the SUV. Owen had Harriet's body, and placed it respectfully in the back along with the temporal manipulator. "It's got to be good."
"I'll explain later," Jack promised. He reached up to his comm. "Ianto?"
There was a pause, then Ianto said, "Yes?" His voice was oddly husky.
"You all right?"
"I'm fine, Jack. Where are you?"
"You sure you're all right?" Jack pressed.
There was a pause, then Ianto said, in slightly embarrassed tones, "I'm afraid I, er, drifted off. It won't happen again, sir."
A weight lifted off Jack's heart, and he laughed in relief. "See that you don't," he said, because he knew it was expected. "We're on our way back to the Hub. See you in a few." Ignoring Gwen's confusion, he pulled the door closed, started the ignition, and headed off towards the Hub to return a heroine to her final resting place.
Author: aibhinn
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through 2x03, "To the Last Man"
Summary: Only the dead can work outside time.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Not making any money. Please not to sue me.
Author's Note: Written for the final week of writerinadrawer, round one. Prompt: Someone's crawling out of a drawer! Additional required element: an alcoholic drink. Thanks to everyone who voted throughout the entire round!
"Six…seven…eight…nine…ten…"
While Connor counted, his eyes covered, Joanne gleefully ran to find a place to hide. She ducked behind a car first, decided that was far too easy, and looked around to find a better spot. A skip sat outside the loading dock of a nearby building, and she made for that instead, slipping behind it to crouch in the tight space between the bin and the wall.
Her foot hit something, and she looked down. Lying beside a half-full beer bottle was an odd-looking object: rectangular, black, and metallic, just visible in the light that filtered into the space. A small green light flashed rhythmically on its top. Interested, she bent down to pick it up.
"…thirty-eight…thirty-nine…forty…."
She angled it so it caught the light better and turned it over in her hands, trying to work out what it was. With a soft whirr, the top lifted of its own accord. Startled, Joanne nearly dropped it. Underneath the top were three buttons. Just that: three buttons, no labels, nothing telling her what they were for.
Joanne cocked her head to one side, thinking. Mum and Dad had told her not to talk to strange people, but they'd never said she mustn't push strange buttons. Besides, how could she work out what this thing was if she didn't?
Slowly, she extended a finger and pressed the right-hand button.
The world disappeared in a flash of orange light.
***
Jack hauled himself up out of his quarters and into the rest of the Hub. "Ianto!" he called. "Did you see that orange-"
He stopped in his tracks, horrified, then rushed towards the unconscious figure slumped at the desk and crouched beside him. "Ianto!" he called again, more urgently, touching his shoulder and shaking gently.
There was no reaction.
Fear pooled in his gut, sending ice-cold tendrils through his body. "C'mon, Ianto, c'mon. Wake up." He shook the Welshman gently, then more strongly. No reaction. Trembling, he pressed two fingers against Ianto's carotid artery, before hauling him into a sitting position to rest his ear against Ianto's chest.
Nothing. No breath sounds, no pulse, no heartbeat.
Ianto was dead.
Jack pulled slowly back, looking up at the calm, slack face of his lover. Ianto's skin was oddly still pink, as though blood continued to flow through his veins, and his eyes were closed. Jack drew in a shaking breath, closing his own eyes as the grief broke over him like a wave. "Ianto," he murmured softly.
Then he gathered himself and pushed to his feet, hand to the comm in his ear. "Owen," he called. The medic didn't answer, and Jack repeated, more forcefully, "Owen! Gwen!"
Nothing. That was odd. Maybe they're somewhere the comms don't work, he thought. Owen and Gwen had gone out to investigate an object that had fallen through the Rift; perhaps the alien object was interfering with transmission.
Or maybe that orange light had been an indicator of something very, very bad.
Praying he was wrong, he pulled out his phone and dialled Tosh's mobile. It rang four times and went to her message. He hung up and tried her home number. Same result. He tried Rhys and Gwen's flat, then the pizza place, then in desperation, dialed 999.
No answer on any of them.
He closed his phone, clenching his fist around it until his knuckles turned white. Either the phone service and the comms had gone down…or the city was dead.
He had to get up to the surface to find out.
He took a deep breath and started for the invisible lift, only to be stopped by an odd sound from deep in the Hub.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
He frowned, turning on the spot to try to locate the source of the sound.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Down towards the basement. He drew his sidearm and took off at a run. He didn't know what was down there, but by God he was going to find out.
***
It was in the morgue.
The thumping had grown steadier, and he approached with caution, gun at the ready. It wasn't coming from Suzie's drawer, thank God; he'd been half-afraid it had been her again with some other freakish plan to come back from the dead. The sound seemed to be coming from a drawer off to the left of Suzie's and a row lower. Jack drew closer, pressed his back to the silent drawers beside that one, and yelled, "Who are you?"
The thumping stopped, and a woman's voice called, "Can you hear me?"
"Yes!" Jack's hold tightened on his pistol. "Who are you?"
"Harriet Derbyshire, Torchwood officer 423, born 19 October 1893, died 26 November 1919." There was a rustling noise, and she said, rather plaintively, "Can you let me out of here?"
Jack's jaw set. "Why should I?"
"Because," she said, "only the dead can operate outside time."
Jack narrowed his eyes, contemplating. "All right," he said after a moment. "I'm opening the drawer, but I'm armed and I can guarantee I'm faster than you." Carefully-and hoping against hope that he wasn't making the biggest mistake of his life-he shifted to stand in front of the drawer and unlocked it, hauling it open.
The body bag was already open, and a young blonde woman lay there, looking up at him. Her face was oval, her skin pale, her features delicate. Big, sky-blue eyes blinked up at him, facing down his pistol with no fear.
"I'm hardly a threat to you, Captain Harkness," she said.
"Funny, but I'm having a hard time believing that right now." He walked backward until he was once again against the other drawers, making it easier for the two of them to see each other. He lowered his gun, but didn't holster it. Her eyes flickered down, noting that his finger was still on the trigger, then looked back up at him. "All right," he said. "Tell me what you know."
She sat up slowly, pulling her knees up and tugging the short gown down over them modestly. "Time's frozen," she said. "The entire Earth, stopped between one heartbeat and the next. We have to get it started again."
"A bit of detail would be helpful here," Jack said sharply, eyes narrowing. "How did it stop? And how do we fix it? And what's happened to my people?"
She sighed, wrapping her arms around her knees. "Do you think I could find some clothes first?"
"No." Jack's tone was flat, implacable. "Right now I'm trying to decide whether I should shove you back in your drawer, or let myself believe you. You'd better do what you can to persuade me."
She looked away, sighed again, and met his gaze one more time. "All right," she said. "A temporal manipulator came through the Rift today. A child found it and, being curious, pressed a button. Time stopped where it was, like stopping a film projector while the lamp is still burning. It affects every living thing on Earth, and it will remain that way until the manipulator's found and turned off."
Jack's eyebrow rose. "Well, that explains why I'm still walking and talking," he allowed. "But it doesn't explain why you've come back from the dead."
Harriet cocked her head to one side, and he saw a glimmer of humour in her eyes. "I don't suppose 'you're not meant to know' is an explanation you'd accept."
"No," Jack repeated, again flatly. "I don't believe any of that shit, that there are things we're not 'meant' to know."
"Unfortunately, that doesn't stop its being true." Jack just glared at her, and she rubbed her forehead wearily. "I only know so much," she said in a tone that was undoubtedly meant to sound reasonable. "I'll tell you everything I can, but there will be holes. I can't help that."
"You'd better hope those holes are small enough I can overlook them, then."
"Oh, for God's sake," she snapped, rolling her eyes. "You can stop trying to intimidate me now. I'm Torchwood too, or I was, and I know all the tricks. Besides which, I'm on your side."
"So convince me of that," Jack said.
She released yet another sigh, then said, "All right. All right. Here's what I know. This time-freezing thing isn't meant to happen. Normally we just leave things like that alone, because your friend the Doctor takes care of most of them-"
"We?" Jack interrupted. "Who's we?"
"That's a hole that will have to remain unplugged," she said firmly. "But the point is, the Doctor can't fix this one, because if he arrives here, he'll be just as frozen as everything else, and so will his ship; she's alive as well. That leaves only you. You're not dead, but you're not precisely alive in the proper meaning of the word, either. Something alive can be killed, and you can't, not permanently. So you're outside the sphere of influence of time."
"I'm wrong," Jack said quietly, remembering the Doctor's words.
Harriet shot him a sharp look. "Hardly, but that's not the point. The point is that you can help us put things right, but you can't do it alone. So I was sent."
"Sent by who?"
"I don't know!" she said, frustrated. "I don't know who, and I don't know how. All I know is why: only the dead can move about outside of time, so it's up to me to make this right."
Jack's eyes narrowed. This wasn't adding up. "If I'm outside the sphere of influence of time," he said, "why can't I do it alone?"
"Just as only someone alive can set the temporal manipulator, only someone dead can turn it off." She gave him a look of exasperation. "Do you have to know the hows and whys of everything? This is Torchwood. Mysteries are part of the job description."
He hated to admit it, but she was right. And this did make sense in an illogical, Torchwood-ish sort of way. "Does that mean Ianto's not actually dead?" he asked hopefully.
"Yes," she said. "He's just frozen in time. He'll be fine once the temporal manipulator's been deactivated."
"But if he was frozen in time, why was he slumped-"
"Captain," she interrupted, "I'd just love to answer every question you've ever had in your life, but I'm sitting here mostly naked and freezing while the rest of the world is waiting for their next heartbeat. Do you suppose we could get on with it?"
Jack blinked. "Right," he said. He holstered his gun and held out a hand to her. "I think Gwen's got an extra set of clothing here; you two look like you're roughly the same size."
***
Driving through Cardiff was problematic when there were literally thousands of vehicles on the road, frozen in time. Jack moved at a crawl, weaving his way between cars and lorries and occasionally driving in the shoulder or even on the median when the cars were too thick to get through. Harriet was silent except when giving directions; apparently she could 'feel' where the temporal manipulator was (whatever that meant; Jack decided not to ask).
It was an eerie feeling, being the only moving, living creatures in sight. They passed pedestrians in mid-stride, birds suspended in the air, even a football game with a player's foot pulled back, ready to deliver a mighty kick to send the ball flying. "Creepy," Jack commented as he curved to go around a dark grey Mini driven by a young blonde woman.
Harriet glanced out of the corner of her eye at him. "You've not seen creepy, Captain Harkness," she said. "Not on Earth, at any rate."
"Oh, I've seen some pretty creepy things in my time," Jack said, turning down a side street; the way ahead was blocked by a half-dozen pedestrians in the zebra crossing. "I've been left behind in a building where I was the only person still alive, thousands of miles from civilisation; I've been stalked by aliens; I've died and come back to life more times than I can count; I've watched my team nearly taken by cannibals. I don't think there's a lot of people who can out-creep me."
"Oh, I think you'll be surprised," she said in an odd sort of tone. Jack shot a look at her. Her eyes were open, but her gaze was entirely inward. "Some day, when you do reach the end of your days, you'll see more than you ever imagined." Before he could respond, her head came up and she leant forward. "Just up there," she said, pointing. "Forty or fifty yards ahead, not much more. It'll be on the right."
Jack weaved his way through the spotty traffic on the road, going slowly, as she peered over the dashboard like a cat scenting prey. "There!" She pointed towards a skip on the right. "In that, or behind it. I'm sure of it."
Jack pulled into the alleyway and parked-when time started up again, he didn't want the suddenly re-animated traffic to hit it. He and Harriet got out, and he felt his heart skip a beat. Just there, crossing the street, were Owen and Gwen. She had her hands in her jacket pockets, her big eyes fastened on the skip; Owen had his hand to his ear, as though he were about to speak into the comm.
Harriet came up beside Jack and touched his arm. "They'll be fine in a moment," she said. "Come on, let's get this done."
It took him a moment to get moving again; by the time he caught up with her, she was looking into the shadows behind the skip. "Here it is," she said, and reached. Jack looked over her shoulder: a small girl, about eight or nine, was behind there, holding a black, rectangular object in her hands. The top on it had opened, and her finger was on the rightmost of the three buttons. Harriet pried it free of the girl's grasp and lifted it out into the light. It glinted in the sunlight, and Jack felt a twinge of discomfort verging on fear. This thing was wrong, it was outright wrong. It shouldn't be here; it shouldn't even exist. Is this how the Doctor feels whenever I'm around? Jack wondered.
Harriet was studying the buttons. "They're not labelled," she said, mostly to herself. "We know it's not the right-hand one… so that leaves two others."
"Don't you know which one it is?" Jack asked. He wiped his hands on his trousers unconsciously. The thing made his skin crawl; he was glad he didn't have to touch it.
"Not exactly."
"What happens if you choose the wrong one?"
Harriet looked at him obliquely. "You'll never know it if I do," she said. Her gaze returned to the temporal manipulator, and she let out a breath in a huff. "All right. Wish me luck, Jack."
"Wait."
She stopped, frowning, and looked at him. He swallowed. "What happens to you once you've deactivated this?"
She smiled softly. "Everything will be put back the way it was meant to be," she said. "I'm meant to be dead. I'm afraid you'll have to take me back to the Hub, though. Tell Gwen thank-you for the loan of the clothes."
"But-" he began.
The world exploded in a flash of blue.
***
"Jack? Jack!"
Jack blinked. The world swam into focus, and he realised he was looking up into a familiar face. "Owen," he grunted. Gwen was on the other side of him, looking concerned.
"That's right. You know where you are?"
Jack made to sit up, but Owen pushed him down again. "Not just yet. Where are you?"
"Newport Road. I came here with-" Jack twisted, looking behind him. Harriet's body lay there, sprawled gracelessly on the pavement. She'd half-fallen on the temporal manipulator, which glinted blackly beneath her body. "With her."
"She's dead," Owen said with an odd gentleness. "What were you doing? You just appeared out of nowhere. Scared that little kid out of her wits."
Jack closed his eyes and let himself sink back down to the ground. "It's a long story. The short version is, she saved the world. I just drove her here." His mouth quirked in a half-smile. "There were a lot of heroes during World War I. Not all of them fought on the front lines."
"Let's get back to the Hub," Owen said, clearly not understanding in the least, but focussed on the essentials.
"Harriet, too," Jack said as Owen and Gwen helped him to his feet. "And the thing she's got with her. She needs to be put back into her drawer."
"You'd better tell us the whole story at some point, Jack," Gwen said as she helped him into the SUV. Owen had Harriet's body, and placed it respectfully in the back along with the temporal manipulator. "It's got to be good."
"I'll explain later," Jack promised. He reached up to his comm. "Ianto?"
There was a pause, then Ianto said, "Yes?" His voice was oddly husky.
"You all right?"
"I'm fine, Jack. Where are you?"
"You sure you're all right?" Jack pressed.
There was a pause, then Ianto said, in slightly embarrassed tones, "I'm afraid I, er, drifted off. It won't happen again, sir."
A weight lifted off Jack's heart, and he laughed in relief. "See that you don't," he said, because he knew it was expected. "We're on our way back to the Hub. See you in a few." Ignoring Gwen's confusion, he pulled the door closed, started the ignition, and headed off towards the Hub to return a heroine to her final resting place.