Fic: Dead Heroes: "Lost and Found" (2/?)
Title: Dead Heroes: "Lost and Found" (2/?)
Author: Sgt. Mayhem
Category: slash, adventure (Jack/Jack in the long term, obviously)
Rating: R for swearing and gruesomeness
Summary: The Torchwood team has to hunt down a strange killer, and Jack finds something he thought he'd lost.
Spoilers: Torchwood seasons 1 and 2, Doctor Who series 3 episodes "Utopia" through "Last of the Timelords."
Author's Notes: This has become even more ambitious than I once thought. I'm writing what sort of amounts to a fake "season" of Torchwood, with "Lost and Found" being more or less Episode 1. Hope you like it! Please feedback; you guys are great. :)
Many thanks to fuingala, my dedicated and honest friend/beta reader. :D
Part one is here.
Jack had received the urgent call from Owen, who was singularly uninformative and increasingly irritable, in the middle of stripping out of his mud-logged clothes back at the Hub. He had really been looking forward to a hot shower, preferrably with Ianto, before heading to the crash site, but had had to make do with a quick dousing in cold water instead. As he pulled on his greatcoat, hair still damp, he met Gwen coming out of the ladies', on the phone with Rhys.
"Yes, love, we just got back. I'm fine! Everything's fine....no, really.."
Jack grabbed the phone from her.
"Bye, Rhys! Gotta go!" He hung up and tossed it back, jerking his head in a follow-me motion. Gwen caught the phone with an indignant "hey!" and hurried to catch up to him.
"Bloody hell, Jack, don't you ever communicate like a normal human being?"
He grinned widely.
"Define 'normal.' Come on. Plans have changed a bit."
"Where are we going?" Ianto appeared at the door of the Hub, already cleaned up and wearing a fresh suit. Jack raised an eyebrow appreciatively at him, which earned him the barest quirk of eyebrow in response.
"Hospital. Got a call from Tosh and she's got the readings from the crash site there. She says she'll have to bring them back and try to decipher them, though. Meanwhile she's helping out with UNIT's patient and I want to get a look and see what they've got for us in the way of other information. Gwen, you can be my appointed UNIT liason for the day, and get copies of all their reports."
"Can't be too bad now the Terror Alert's off, now can it?" Gwen grabbed her jacket, following him.
"Either that or it's really bad and they've gone into cover-up mode," he grinned at her suddenly apprehensive expression. "Which reminds me, Ianto--I need you here. Need you to go over everything you can get your hands on that came out since this thing appeared...police reports, news shows, anything. UNIT's not exactly known for sharing their discoveries with us, and they're not exactly the man-on-the-street either, so if there's anything they've missed I want to know about it. Odd sightings, dogs going crazy, the usual."
"Yes, sir," Ianto nodded, turning sharply to go do as asked. Jack held the Hub door for Gwen, eyes bright with the excitement of action, and they dashed together to the SUV.
~~~
The wan daylight was fading by the time Sharpe finished typing up his preliminary action report. He had a bugger of a headache from staring at the laptop screen, and all he really wanted was a sofa and a beer or two. However, it was up to him to head off Torchwood's grabby tendencies in regards to mysterious artefacts; both he and Doctor Sato were pretending to each other that there was a possibility that this plane was another piece of Rift junk, but Sharpe knew that they both knew it wasn't true. UNIT suspected Time Lord interference, perhaps a message from the Doctor. God only knew what Torchwood suspected, or what information about the subject they were keeping private. UNIT higher-ups had been ecstatic initially about the acquisition of Martha Jones, who was known to have traveled with both the Doctor and apparently, Torchwood's mysterious leader, Captain Jack Harkness. However, to everyone's disappointment, she'd proven to be a fairly dead end. Traveling companions they might have been, but Jack wasn't telling her any more than he was telling anyone else. This irritated Sharpe to no end; he was always irritated when something seemed as though it should work out perfectly, but, due to the indefinable mysteries of the Universe, it didn't. He liked things concrete and causal. He admitted to himself that the paradoxes of time travel, with which UNIT naturally had to be at least passingly familiar, were bothersome for him to try to comphrehend. He preferred to deal with the tangible: attacks from alien species, mysterious devices which had to be disposed of or hidden away for future use, alert protocols, exterminations. He did not like to ponder, as a habit, the infinite strands of possibility and probability that the existence of the Time Lords introduced. He was a details man; leave the theorizing to the physicists.
However, as he put the finishing touches on his report (not too vague, but unspecific enough to contain the possibility of veiled threat--and a recommendation for indefinite quarantine of the plane and pilot), he kept being struck by the oddest sensation.
Perhaps he was just tired; it had been a long day, but his skin seemed to prickle all over with the mere knowledge that the aircraft was out there...silent, almost threatening. It was true that Sharpe himself had never seen a Spitfire this close in person, and that he had always had a shyly romantic fascination with the era and the aircraft which symbolized it, but he certainly wasn't fanciful, didn't believe that machines had...souls or anything bizarre like that.
So why then, did the image of the wreck keep strangely haunting him: the nose dug into the earth, crumpling the engine cowling, splitting the aluminum skin along the riveted seams and peeling back panels of it, ripping propellor blades from their airscrew, the header tank bleeding oil that ran in dark gushes down the blackened cowling, the fuel and oil lines dribbling out of the ruptures like veins or intestines...it was almost grotesque, like the sight of a horribly mutilated body. Just thinking about it made his typing slow to a stop, his fingers resting inert on the keyboard. His headache was getting worse; perhaps he'd just go have one last look at the Spitfire, in case there was anything Doctor Sato had missed.
The wreck, still illuminated by the field lights, lay hunched and small like an exotic dead beast. Its slender tail lifted at a shallow angle from the ground, whole except for missing half of the rudder. The roundel and sky blue stripe seemed to glow in the lights--oddly bright patches of color in the muted surroundings. The ovoid wings were nearly flush with the ground, but one of them was tilted downward, rumpling the soil. It seemed from the long marks of the aircraft's skidding crash landing that the plane had been pulling to the right--perhaps due to the damaged rudder or a fatally wounded engine. It was truly remarkable that the pilot had managed to land it in any sort of fashion other than catastrophic fireball. This, frankly, also caused Sharpe to be suspicious. The man had been nearly dead when found, slumped forward in the ruined cockpit. Well, he had appeared nearly dead, at any rate. Sharpe himself had been there, had sent two soldiers to clear the craft of any threat, but all they'd found was the apparently human pilot, face masked in blood. He had seemed to be unconscious, but well...
Sharpe arrived at the Spitfire's side.
There were things he had not told the Torchwood officers about the discovery.
He paused. The plane was just a cold monument of twisted, charred metal. Nothing more. Still, he put out a hand to touch it, ran his fingers along the line of rivets holding the canopy to the fuselage, remembering the disturbing moment when the pilot had opened his eyes.
They had been an unnaturally bright greenish color in the blood-darkened face, and they had looked straight at him. Sharpe, alarmed, could only stare back, and when the pilot's lips moved, he had found himself leaning closer to make out the words.
There's drumming. Oh God. So loud. Can you hear it?
Sharpe had just stared, yet it had seemed for a second that he could suddenly hear something, a low pattern, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, like ghost soldiers beating their snares.
Yes...
Shaking his head with a frown, Sharpe tried to dispel the creeping unease which accompanied the memory, and stepped up onto the Spitfire's wing. The cockpit had been checked by UNIT personnel already, but Sharpe thought he'd just have one more look. The access door was jammed; they'd had to use cutters to get the pilot out, and Sharpe eased himself through the gaping hole between the shattered canopy and the glass front panel. The interior was cramped, dark, and cluttered with the debris of the broken instrument panel, and he seated himself with great care, suppressing an involuntary shiver.
His fingertips ran lightly over the charred and wrenched panel. The bulkhead that held it had been smashed back toward the pilot when the plane dove into the ground, and hardly any of the instruments remained recognizable, which certainly didn't help him discern if there were any alien influence in the plane's interior layout. Sharpe eased his feet forward under the firewall that held the instrument bulkhead, his knees bumping the side panels as he did so. Something fell with a tinny clatter from the throttle panel to the floor of the cockpit. Curious, he bent over so that his ear nearly touched the other side of the cockpit frame, stretched his fingers down toward it and picked it up, pausing to turn the smashed piece of instrumentation over in his hands. Charred and dented, it offered him no clues.
There was a jagged creaking noise and Sharpe startled; his foot had accidentally depressed one of the pedals, placed just where any human pilot's foot would be. He looked back over his shoulder, leaning out of the cockpit. The rudder had shifted to the left, slightly. Just a rudder pedal, like any other aircraft would have. Sharpe sighed. He had no idea why Computer 3, as it was called, locked away in sector IVB-2 and known to only select few UNIT personnel, had suddenly begun to transmit its encrypted data when the craft appeared.
Computer 3 was an experimental machine used to detect the particular energy signature of a TARDIS.
He sat there for a long moment, his concentration relaxing into disappointment. Fidgeting with the piece of debris, he stared somewhat morosely out of the scratched and cracked canopy. He would have to order an even more thorough search of the craft in the morning, and just hope that UNIT was able to solve the mystery before Torchwood did. He knew he would catch hell if Harkness' crew came up with the answer first. He lifted himself awkwardly to leave the cockpit. How the hell had those pilots jumped in and out of these things? He jumped lightly down from the wing and picked his way back to the command tent to send his finalized report.
He failed to notice, his mind on finishing his work and going home to bed, the odd patches of grass radiating out from the Spitfire's crash spot. Barely discernable patterns, like whorls or tracks, separated strangely bare patches from lushly verdant new growth, too tall to have formed over one mere day.
~~~
Jack stood against the wall of the surgical recovery room, as far away from the bed and its occupant as he could get, his arms folded tight against his diaphragm. The fluorescent lights washed everything out and made him feel even more tired than he already suddenly was--they flattened the room into a bizzarre cagelike box, paling his skin, the color of his coat, and the unconscious face of the man in the bed into listless copies of their true hues. The man's face was nearly as white as the walls, gaunt, eyes closed in sockets the color of deep bruises. Yet Jack couldn't stop looking at him, couldn't stop daring his mind to be playing tricks on him, and couldn't stop waiting for when he could breathe normally again without the uncomfortable flutter in his pulse.
"Jack--" Tosh said, quietly, from the doorway. The hall lights were slightly more forgiving; she was still a vaguely normal color.
"He's not...supposed to be here."
Tosh sighed. They'd been through this.
"I know. But he is here. What are we going to do?"
Jack was quiet for a moment, eyes fixed on the rise and fall--faint, but steady--of Captain Jack's chest.
"What are the odds, Tosh?" He shook his head, tensely. His thoughts were a mostly incoherent jumble. "We left him...we knew...I knew he was going to die. I let him die."
"Well, he almost did," Toshiko granted, stepping into the room. "Doesn't that keep things alright? I mean, he still disappeared from 1941, presumed dead anyway. And he was shot down. There are bullet holes in the plane. I saw them. He just...came through Time, like Diane and John and Emma..."
Jack winced slightly. "But they came through the Rift, Toshiko. You told me there was no Rift activity, no energy readings, when his plane appeared. So why is he here?"
Tosh sighed then, leaning against the wall beside him.
"Jack, I don't know..."
"What are we going to do with him??" His voice rose slightly; he felt something strangely akin to panic welling up in his chest.
"I don't know." She repeated. "What would you have done for him, if you could have? Back then?"
Jack opened his mouth to reply, but closed it again when no words would come. He could feel Tosh watching him, could almost feel her confusion as she scanned his face for some kind of logic. But Jack Harkness wasn't feeling at all logical at the moment. He had a system for dealing with loss; as an immortal and a former Time Agent, he knew that losses--numerous, constant--were a given. But what did he do when something lost was returned? He should be grateful, he sensed; perhaps in another circumstance, he would be. But this wasn't just any return. Not only was this a man horribly out of his time, but the very man that had given Jack his identity. A man that Jack had kissed goodbye--in apology, in gratitude--more than sixty years ago in linear time.
What could possibly be right about having him here, now?
"Well," Jack shoved away from the wall, suddenly businesslike. "If he regains consciousness, that will certainly help. We need to get some first-hand knowledge about just how he came through...don't know if he'll know much, but it's worth a try--" he started to pace, up and down the far wall. "After that, I don't know...we're still working on a way to send people back through the Rift, but it doesn't seem like we're any closer to that than we were before. Maybe Retcon? We could do something with Retcon. I'll ask Ianto about that, he's pretty creative when it comes to--"
"Jack!"
Toshiko's tone stopped him. She was staring at him incredulously, her dark eyes boring holes into him. Jack took a breath, shakier than he would have liked, and his reply was in a lower tone. "This isn't his time, Tosh. This is all wrong. He won't be happy here...just look what happened to Diane...and John..."
She was angry. "Well you can't send him back because we don't have the means, and you can't just Retcon him and leave him wandering around Cardiff with amnesia, so what are you going to do? Euthanize him?"
His blue eyes looked into her black ones for a brief, horrible moment, in which they both knew that he had thought-- if even for only a second--about just pulling the plug. Tosh sucked in a breath.
"You would never do that."
He didn't reply.
"Do you know why? Because," she came a step closer, looking more directly into him than she had ever done, "when we were there, back in 1941, I saw it...that for a moment, you actually thought about staying!"
Jack's breath felt painfully trapped, lodged in his sternum. He couldn't keep eye contact with her. He couldn't face the certainty in her eyes because if he told her she was right he'd be admitting to something that he was halfway afraid of, something that made his chest ache, and if he told her she was wrong he'd be lying and she'd know it. He clenched both hands into fists, as tight as he could, then let them relax.
"We'll think of something," he murmured. "But one thing is for sure. He's our responsibility, not UNIT's. As soon as we can, we have to get him out of here."
She was still staring at him, but nodded slowly, silently, in agreement. The silence spread around them and the only sound was the quiet beeping of the monitors and the soft whoosh and suck of the respirator.
~~
Something fluttered and warbled through the darkness of the streets. It made an odd sound to itself, as though humming, its form flickering through a series of patterns and visibilities, sensing and tasting this new world. Things moved here; so quick! They did and spoke and the doing and speaking left them, disappearing, forever. Strange!
The thing paused, wrapping up its senses, throwing them out into the night like a net around the two people walking in the park. Of two different kinds--but their existences going only one way: down down into the dark. Slow, but quick. It moved forward in an instant and was upon them. Learning. Feeding.
~~
Ianto didn't know what was taking Jack and the others so long at the hospital, and figured that he wasn't likely to know, since they hadn't bothered to call him at all during the past few hours. He was sick of scrolling through the daily police reports, and he really just wanted to go home, but until he either found something, or Jack returned and relieved him for the day, he was stuck here. Maybe his eyes would just fall out of his head; it certainly felt like a possibility at the moment. They'd all come back and find him, eyeless Ianto, still leaning forward at his computer station, police scanner crackling dully in the background--
Except that it suddenly burst to life and he jumped, nearly falling out of his chair as the voices blared across the emergency channel.
...caller reports two bodies in Bute Park, south end...
Unit 553 is on the way...
...says possible homicide, but under very strange circumstances...
...dispatching Armed Response Vehicle...
Ianto sat up, alert. It could be anything, of course, but the words "very strange circumstances" had come to take on a pointed meaning to the members of Torchwood. Quickly, he grabbed Tosh's keyboard and punched in her code for police vehicles, then entered 5-5-3 into the blank. Instantly, overlaid onto the map of Cardiff and the spikes that denoted Rift activity, he could see a small blue dot indicating Unit 553's progress. An unidentified red dot--most likely the Armed Response Vehicle, raced to join it. Keeping his eyes on the screen, Ianto activated his Bluetooth.
"Jack? Gwen? Someone?"
"It's Gwen...what's up?"
"I think the police might have found something at Bute Park. We might want to get there first."
~~
Tosh had finally left to go get some coffee from the vending machine in the hospital lobby, leaving Jack alone in the room with the Captain and only the two UNIT guards outside the door. Jack stared down at him; his unwitting namesake.
His heart had stopped skidding around inside his chest like an out-of-control car, and now had left him feeling a predominant numbness which, he suspected, was masking a myriad of dizzying, confused emotions. Most recognizable was sorrow, which jabbed him whenever he moved too suddenly, and he didn't understand why. He could recall, with almost perfect clarity, how his heart had broken a little that night at the Ritz, knowing that Captain Harkness was going to die, and that there was nothing that he could do to change it. He remembered how dead he himself had felt, upon his return--leaving that sacrifice buried in the past, unmourned and unremembered; he'd cursed the rules then. He had wanted, irrationally, to be the Captain's hero, and to save him from his fate.
Now it seemed that fate had given him a gift, and yet he felt frozen rather than thankful. So much had changed in the year since he'd left Captain Harkness in 1941, the year that never happened, and yet had left its scars in him forever. Jack realized that he was afraid of trying to explain all of this to Captain Harkness, and afraid of what he would think. He smiled ironically. He wasn't usually one to worry about what others thought of him...and neither, apparently was the other Jack Harkness, if kissing a strange man in the middle of a crowded dance hall in 1941 were any indication. But then, people do strange things when they figure they're about to die. What if the Captain resented him? He wasn't sure he could bear it.
Jack made his way slowly closer to the bed. The Captain's eyes were still closed, but every once in a while they moved quickly beneath the bruised lids. Without the animating force of consciousness, of experience, his face looked so terrifyingly young. Vulnerable. It gave Jack the sudden strong urge to run very far away.
Instead, he seated himself in the bedside chair, shifting around a bit to try and get comfortable on the duct-tape patched naugahyde. Apparently, UNIT didn't have enough influence to get decent chairs for their quarantine areas. He cautiously leaned an elbow on the bed, studying his namesake, waiting for--perhaps dreading--any sign of consciousness. It was eerie, how the respirator breathed for him, forcing oxygen in and out in imitation of the natural cycle, shoving its way into the lungs, spreading ribs that pushed against the taut midline of the Captain's body, tantalizingly half-visible against the thin fabric of the hospital gown. Jack sighed, splaying his fingers out on the bedsheet, centimeters away from the Captain's inert hand, watching the long, slender fingers as they twitched, barely noticably. Gently, slowly, Jack reached his hand forward and pushed his fingers between the Captain's, folding their hands together firmly.
As soon as he could consult Owen about moving Captain Harkness, he was going to get him out from under UNIT's watchful eye and back to the Hub where Torchwood could take proper care of him. He tightened his hold with a painful grimace. Whatever that means.
He had become almost so entranced by the slow breathing, the unconscious silence, that he jumped when Gwen appeared in the doorway, her dark hair looking a bit wind-blown, as though she'd just sprinted up to find him. Her words confirmed that it was probably true.
"Ianto called. There's been a murder or something of the like at Bute Park. Says it's suspicious, and the police are on their way."
Jack stood, abruptly disentangling his hand. "Suspicious how?"
"I dunno...like...the bodies are...mutated or something." Her eyes were wide. "Ianto picked it off of a police scanner, says the caller was panicked about it. Don't know if it's something to do with the plane, but it doesn't sound normal..." she trailed off as she seemed to finally notice the unconscious pilot, her features softening slightly into a wary tenderness. "How is he?" she asked, voice quiet. Jack smiled a bit as he left the room, brushing past her.
"He'll live. Come on."
~~
It was raining again--an unenthusiastic drizzle--when the SUV pulled up behind the police vehicles. Jack declined to park, but simply cut the engine and left the SUV where it was, exiting with the rest of the team and assuming control of the situation by flashing his ID at the wary officers. The bodies lay on a pedestrian path in plain sight, their indistinct forms now sodden with the rainfall, making them almost seem to melt into the ground. Jack took a deep breath and sauntered forward.
"Alright, boys. We've got this covered now."
"I've never seen anything like it--"
Jack laid a hand on the police constable's shoulder. "We have. Like I said. Got it covered."
The man looked dubiously at him, then over his shoulder at Owen, Gwen, and Tosh, sizing them up. He frowned deeply and was about to protest, but apparently thought better of it.
"Don't know who signs your paycheck," he growled almost under his breath, begrudgingly ushering the other police responders towards their vehicles, "bloody well go wherever you want, interfere with everything, don't even have to get permission as far as I see...bloody Torchwood..."
Owen rolled his eyes exaggeratedly. "Yes, well, just because our car's bigger than yours, don't let it get to you too much."
The constable shot him a dirty look as he departed, but Owen ignored it blithely in favor of approaching the bodies and prodding a sleeve with his boot. Then he crouched down to get a closer look, as Jack and the others crowded in. Tosh pulled out the handheld again, scanning for Rift activity. She shook her head.
"Jack, this is weird.." Owen murmured. "Look."
Jack squatted near him, peering at the slumped forms. They both seemed to be human, and adult...at least as far as the body of one and torso and head of the other went. One of them, the male, Jack discovered, was lying on his back, arms slightly akimbo as though he'd been attempting to fend something off. His body was more or less intact, but the head...
"Oh my God!" Gwen gasped.
"How is this possible?" Tosh was frowning in alarm at her handheld, as though it were the filter through which she could make sense of the scene before them.
"Completely dessicated," Owen confirmed, poking a gloved finger into the dry-rotted flesh hanging from the man's head. All that was left was a few scraps of parched skin and a tuft or so of feathery hair, clinging to the age-blackened skull.
"There's something even worse with the woman," Gwen said, her voice pitched low as she tried to avoid getting sick. Jack looked up at her, then down to where she was pointing.
The woman's body was cut nearly in half, it seemed, but cleanly, as though by a laser. In place of the bones of her pelvis and legs, there were a few curiously tiny intestines, neatly coiled, and bones and flesh far too small to belong to an adult woman...
Jack stood, feeling slightly ill himself. He took a deep breath of cool, wet air.
"Okay...you're right. That's weird."
Tosh shook her head in confusion, looking up toward him. "It's as if parts of their bodies were swapped with...I don't know..."
"Murdered children?" Owen asked bluntly, looking at the woman's oddly deformed corpse. Gwen gagged. "Because that's what this looks like." Jack's stomach clenched.
"It regressed her...but only part of her....whatever it was," he gasped out. "And the man..."
"It's like just his head has been aged...incredibly..." Tosh muttered, brushing a wet strand of hair out of her eyes. "But how is that possible?"
"I think the question at this point is less how it's possible and more how we're going to catch and kill whatever's doing it." His heart was beating hard with the heady mixture of excitement and utter panic that he often felt when dealing with the unknowns that the Rift spit out. But this time, there were too many unknowns all at once; there had been no Rift activity, or Tosh's computer would have picked it up. Something had come through with Captain Harkness and his Spitfire, but from where?
"A trail! Over here!" Gwen suddenly called, and they all jerked their heads as one to where she was crouched near the grass. "Some sort of trail, anyway..."
The grass was affected, too, in strange swirling patterns, almost like the track of a snake on sand. Wherever the thing that made it had touched, the ground was bare, hard, the vegetation dead. Jack pulled out his pocket torch and shone it into the rainy dark.
"Gwen, with me. Owen, Tosh...find out all you can about those bodies. Take 'em back to the Hub if you need to, but just be ready to pick us up if we call." He drew his pistol.
Author: Sgt. Mayhem
Category: slash, adventure (Jack/Jack in the long term, obviously)
Rating: R for swearing and gruesomeness
Summary: The Torchwood team has to hunt down a strange killer, and Jack finds something he thought he'd lost.
Spoilers: Torchwood seasons 1 and 2, Doctor Who series 3 episodes "Utopia" through "Last of the Timelords."
Author's Notes: This has become even more ambitious than I once thought. I'm writing what sort of amounts to a fake "season" of Torchwood, with "Lost and Found" being more or less Episode 1. Hope you like it! Please feedback; you guys are great. :)
Many thanks to fuingala, my dedicated and honest friend/beta reader. :D
Part one is here.
Jack had received the urgent call from Owen, who was singularly uninformative and increasingly irritable, in the middle of stripping out of his mud-logged clothes back at the Hub. He had really been looking forward to a hot shower, preferrably with Ianto, before heading to the crash site, but had had to make do with a quick dousing in cold water instead. As he pulled on his greatcoat, hair still damp, he met Gwen coming out of the ladies', on the phone with Rhys.
"Yes, love, we just got back. I'm fine! Everything's fine....no, really.."
Jack grabbed the phone from her.
"Bye, Rhys! Gotta go!" He hung up and tossed it back, jerking his head in a follow-me motion. Gwen caught the phone with an indignant "hey!" and hurried to catch up to him.
"Bloody hell, Jack, don't you ever communicate like a normal human being?"
He grinned widely.
"Define 'normal.' Come on. Plans have changed a bit."
"Where are we going?" Ianto appeared at the door of the Hub, already cleaned up and wearing a fresh suit. Jack raised an eyebrow appreciatively at him, which earned him the barest quirk of eyebrow in response.
"Hospital. Got a call from Tosh and she's got the readings from the crash site there. She says she'll have to bring them back and try to decipher them, though. Meanwhile she's helping out with UNIT's patient and I want to get a look and see what they've got for us in the way of other information. Gwen, you can be my appointed UNIT liason for the day, and get copies of all their reports."
"Can't be too bad now the Terror Alert's off, now can it?" Gwen grabbed her jacket, following him.
"Either that or it's really bad and they've gone into cover-up mode," he grinned at her suddenly apprehensive expression. "Which reminds me, Ianto--I need you here. Need you to go over everything you can get your hands on that came out since this thing appeared...police reports, news shows, anything. UNIT's not exactly known for sharing their discoveries with us, and they're not exactly the man-on-the-street either, so if there's anything they've missed I want to know about it. Odd sightings, dogs going crazy, the usual."
"Yes, sir," Ianto nodded, turning sharply to go do as asked. Jack held the Hub door for Gwen, eyes bright with the excitement of action, and they dashed together to the SUV.
~~~
The wan daylight was fading by the time Sharpe finished typing up his preliminary action report. He had a bugger of a headache from staring at the laptop screen, and all he really wanted was a sofa and a beer or two. However, it was up to him to head off Torchwood's grabby tendencies in regards to mysterious artefacts; both he and Doctor Sato were pretending to each other that there was a possibility that this plane was another piece of Rift junk, but Sharpe knew that they both knew it wasn't true. UNIT suspected Time Lord interference, perhaps a message from the Doctor. God only knew what Torchwood suspected, or what information about the subject they were keeping private. UNIT higher-ups had been ecstatic initially about the acquisition of Martha Jones, who was known to have traveled with both the Doctor and apparently, Torchwood's mysterious leader, Captain Jack Harkness. However, to everyone's disappointment, she'd proven to be a fairly dead end. Traveling companions they might have been, but Jack wasn't telling her any more than he was telling anyone else. This irritated Sharpe to no end; he was always irritated when something seemed as though it should work out perfectly, but, due to the indefinable mysteries of the Universe, it didn't. He liked things concrete and causal. He admitted to himself that the paradoxes of time travel, with which UNIT naturally had to be at least passingly familiar, were bothersome for him to try to comphrehend. He preferred to deal with the tangible: attacks from alien species, mysterious devices which had to be disposed of or hidden away for future use, alert protocols, exterminations. He did not like to ponder, as a habit, the infinite strands of possibility and probability that the existence of the Time Lords introduced. He was a details man; leave the theorizing to the physicists.
However, as he put the finishing touches on his report (not too vague, but unspecific enough to contain the possibility of veiled threat--and a recommendation for indefinite quarantine of the plane and pilot), he kept being struck by the oddest sensation.
Perhaps he was just tired; it had been a long day, but his skin seemed to prickle all over with the mere knowledge that the aircraft was out there...silent, almost threatening. It was true that Sharpe himself had never seen a Spitfire this close in person, and that he had always had a shyly romantic fascination with the era and the aircraft which symbolized it, but he certainly wasn't fanciful, didn't believe that machines had...souls or anything bizarre like that.
So why then, did the image of the wreck keep strangely haunting him: the nose dug into the earth, crumpling the engine cowling, splitting the aluminum skin along the riveted seams and peeling back panels of it, ripping propellor blades from their airscrew, the header tank bleeding oil that ran in dark gushes down the blackened cowling, the fuel and oil lines dribbling out of the ruptures like veins or intestines...it was almost grotesque, like the sight of a horribly mutilated body. Just thinking about it made his typing slow to a stop, his fingers resting inert on the keyboard. His headache was getting worse; perhaps he'd just go have one last look at the Spitfire, in case there was anything Doctor Sato had missed.
The wreck, still illuminated by the field lights, lay hunched and small like an exotic dead beast. Its slender tail lifted at a shallow angle from the ground, whole except for missing half of the rudder. The roundel and sky blue stripe seemed to glow in the lights--oddly bright patches of color in the muted surroundings. The ovoid wings were nearly flush with the ground, but one of them was tilted downward, rumpling the soil. It seemed from the long marks of the aircraft's skidding crash landing that the plane had been pulling to the right--perhaps due to the damaged rudder or a fatally wounded engine. It was truly remarkable that the pilot had managed to land it in any sort of fashion other than catastrophic fireball. This, frankly, also caused Sharpe to be suspicious. The man had been nearly dead when found, slumped forward in the ruined cockpit. Well, he had appeared nearly dead, at any rate. Sharpe himself had been there, had sent two soldiers to clear the craft of any threat, but all they'd found was the apparently human pilot, face masked in blood. He had seemed to be unconscious, but well...
Sharpe arrived at the Spitfire's side.
There were things he had not told the Torchwood officers about the discovery.
He paused. The plane was just a cold monument of twisted, charred metal. Nothing more. Still, he put out a hand to touch it, ran his fingers along the line of rivets holding the canopy to the fuselage, remembering the disturbing moment when the pilot had opened his eyes.
They had been an unnaturally bright greenish color in the blood-darkened face, and they had looked straight at him. Sharpe, alarmed, could only stare back, and when the pilot's lips moved, he had found himself leaning closer to make out the words.
There's drumming. Oh God. So loud. Can you hear it?
Sharpe had just stared, yet it had seemed for a second that he could suddenly hear something, a low pattern, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, like ghost soldiers beating their snares.
Yes...
Shaking his head with a frown, Sharpe tried to dispel the creeping unease which accompanied the memory, and stepped up onto the Spitfire's wing. The cockpit had been checked by UNIT personnel already, but Sharpe thought he'd just have one more look. The access door was jammed; they'd had to use cutters to get the pilot out, and Sharpe eased himself through the gaping hole between the shattered canopy and the glass front panel. The interior was cramped, dark, and cluttered with the debris of the broken instrument panel, and he seated himself with great care, suppressing an involuntary shiver.
His fingertips ran lightly over the charred and wrenched panel. The bulkhead that held it had been smashed back toward the pilot when the plane dove into the ground, and hardly any of the instruments remained recognizable, which certainly didn't help him discern if there were any alien influence in the plane's interior layout. Sharpe eased his feet forward under the firewall that held the instrument bulkhead, his knees bumping the side panels as he did so. Something fell with a tinny clatter from the throttle panel to the floor of the cockpit. Curious, he bent over so that his ear nearly touched the other side of the cockpit frame, stretched his fingers down toward it and picked it up, pausing to turn the smashed piece of instrumentation over in his hands. Charred and dented, it offered him no clues.
There was a jagged creaking noise and Sharpe startled; his foot had accidentally depressed one of the pedals, placed just where any human pilot's foot would be. He looked back over his shoulder, leaning out of the cockpit. The rudder had shifted to the left, slightly. Just a rudder pedal, like any other aircraft would have. Sharpe sighed. He had no idea why Computer 3, as it was called, locked away in sector IVB-2 and known to only select few UNIT personnel, had suddenly begun to transmit its encrypted data when the craft appeared.
Computer 3 was an experimental machine used to detect the particular energy signature of a TARDIS.
He sat there for a long moment, his concentration relaxing into disappointment. Fidgeting with the piece of debris, he stared somewhat morosely out of the scratched and cracked canopy. He would have to order an even more thorough search of the craft in the morning, and just hope that UNIT was able to solve the mystery before Torchwood did. He knew he would catch hell if Harkness' crew came up with the answer first. He lifted himself awkwardly to leave the cockpit. How the hell had those pilots jumped in and out of these things? He jumped lightly down from the wing and picked his way back to the command tent to send his finalized report.
He failed to notice, his mind on finishing his work and going home to bed, the odd patches of grass radiating out from the Spitfire's crash spot. Barely discernable patterns, like whorls or tracks, separated strangely bare patches from lushly verdant new growth, too tall to have formed over one mere day.
~~~
Jack stood against the wall of the surgical recovery room, as far away from the bed and its occupant as he could get, his arms folded tight against his diaphragm. The fluorescent lights washed everything out and made him feel even more tired than he already suddenly was--they flattened the room into a bizzarre cagelike box, paling his skin, the color of his coat, and the unconscious face of the man in the bed into listless copies of their true hues. The man's face was nearly as white as the walls, gaunt, eyes closed in sockets the color of deep bruises. Yet Jack couldn't stop looking at him, couldn't stop daring his mind to be playing tricks on him, and couldn't stop waiting for when he could breathe normally again without the uncomfortable flutter in his pulse.
"Jack--" Tosh said, quietly, from the doorway. The hall lights were slightly more forgiving; she was still a vaguely normal color.
"He's not...supposed to be here."
Tosh sighed. They'd been through this.
"I know. But he is here. What are we going to do?"
Jack was quiet for a moment, eyes fixed on the rise and fall--faint, but steady--of Captain Jack's chest.
"What are the odds, Tosh?" He shook his head, tensely. His thoughts were a mostly incoherent jumble. "We left him...we knew...I knew he was going to die. I let him die."
"Well, he almost did," Toshiko granted, stepping into the room. "Doesn't that keep things alright? I mean, he still disappeared from 1941, presumed dead anyway. And he was shot down. There are bullet holes in the plane. I saw them. He just...came through Time, like Diane and John and Emma..."
Jack winced slightly. "But they came through the Rift, Toshiko. You told me there was no Rift activity, no energy readings, when his plane appeared. So why is he here?"
Tosh sighed then, leaning against the wall beside him.
"Jack, I don't know..."
"What are we going to do with him??" His voice rose slightly; he felt something strangely akin to panic welling up in his chest.
"I don't know." She repeated. "What would you have done for him, if you could have? Back then?"
Jack opened his mouth to reply, but closed it again when no words would come. He could feel Tosh watching him, could almost feel her confusion as she scanned his face for some kind of logic. But Jack Harkness wasn't feeling at all logical at the moment. He had a system for dealing with loss; as an immortal and a former Time Agent, he knew that losses--numerous, constant--were a given. But what did he do when something lost was returned? He should be grateful, he sensed; perhaps in another circumstance, he would be. But this wasn't just any return. Not only was this a man horribly out of his time, but the very man that had given Jack his identity. A man that Jack had kissed goodbye--in apology, in gratitude--more than sixty years ago in linear time.
What could possibly be right about having him here, now?
"Well," Jack shoved away from the wall, suddenly businesslike. "If he regains consciousness, that will certainly help. We need to get some first-hand knowledge about just how he came through...don't know if he'll know much, but it's worth a try--" he started to pace, up and down the far wall. "After that, I don't know...we're still working on a way to send people back through the Rift, but it doesn't seem like we're any closer to that than we were before. Maybe Retcon? We could do something with Retcon. I'll ask Ianto about that, he's pretty creative when it comes to--"
"Jack!"
Toshiko's tone stopped him. She was staring at him incredulously, her dark eyes boring holes into him. Jack took a breath, shakier than he would have liked, and his reply was in a lower tone. "This isn't his time, Tosh. This is all wrong. He won't be happy here...just look what happened to Diane...and John..."
She was angry. "Well you can't send him back because we don't have the means, and you can't just Retcon him and leave him wandering around Cardiff with amnesia, so what are you going to do? Euthanize him?"
His blue eyes looked into her black ones for a brief, horrible moment, in which they both knew that he had thought-- if even for only a second--about just pulling the plug. Tosh sucked in a breath.
"You would never do that."
He didn't reply.
"Do you know why? Because," she came a step closer, looking more directly into him than she had ever done, "when we were there, back in 1941, I saw it...that for a moment, you actually thought about staying!"
Jack's breath felt painfully trapped, lodged in his sternum. He couldn't keep eye contact with her. He couldn't face the certainty in her eyes because if he told her she was right he'd be admitting to something that he was halfway afraid of, something that made his chest ache, and if he told her she was wrong he'd be lying and she'd know it. He clenched both hands into fists, as tight as he could, then let them relax.
"We'll think of something," he murmured. "But one thing is for sure. He's our responsibility, not UNIT's. As soon as we can, we have to get him out of here."
She was still staring at him, but nodded slowly, silently, in agreement. The silence spread around them and the only sound was the quiet beeping of the monitors and the soft whoosh and suck of the respirator.
~~
Something fluttered and warbled through the darkness of the streets. It made an odd sound to itself, as though humming, its form flickering through a series of patterns and visibilities, sensing and tasting this new world. Things moved here; so quick! They did and spoke and the doing and speaking left them, disappearing, forever. Strange!
The thing paused, wrapping up its senses, throwing them out into the night like a net around the two people walking in the park. Of two different kinds--but their existences going only one way: down down into the dark. Slow, but quick. It moved forward in an instant and was upon them. Learning. Feeding.
~~
Ianto didn't know what was taking Jack and the others so long at the hospital, and figured that he wasn't likely to know, since they hadn't bothered to call him at all during the past few hours. He was sick of scrolling through the daily police reports, and he really just wanted to go home, but until he either found something, or Jack returned and relieved him for the day, he was stuck here. Maybe his eyes would just fall out of his head; it certainly felt like a possibility at the moment. They'd all come back and find him, eyeless Ianto, still leaning forward at his computer station, police scanner crackling dully in the background--
Except that it suddenly burst to life and he jumped, nearly falling out of his chair as the voices blared across the emergency channel.
...caller reports two bodies in Bute Park, south end...
Unit 553 is on the way...
...says possible homicide, but under very strange circumstances...
...dispatching Armed Response Vehicle...
Ianto sat up, alert. It could be anything, of course, but the words "very strange circumstances" had come to take on a pointed meaning to the members of Torchwood. Quickly, he grabbed Tosh's keyboard and punched in her code for police vehicles, then entered 5-5-3 into the blank. Instantly, overlaid onto the map of Cardiff and the spikes that denoted Rift activity, he could see a small blue dot indicating Unit 553's progress. An unidentified red dot--most likely the Armed Response Vehicle, raced to join it. Keeping his eyes on the screen, Ianto activated his Bluetooth.
"Jack? Gwen? Someone?"
"It's Gwen...what's up?"
"I think the police might have found something at Bute Park. We might want to get there first."
~~
Tosh had finally left to go get some coffee from the vending machine in the hospital lobby, leaving Jack alone in the room with the Captain and only the two UNIT guards outside the door. Jack stared down at him; his unwitting namesake.
His heart had stopped skidding around inside his chest like an out-of-control car, and now had left him feeling a predominant numbness which, he suspected, was masking a myriad of dizzying, confused emotions. Most recognizable was sorrow, which jabbed him whenever he moved too suddenly, and he didn't understand why. He could recall, with almost perfect clarity, how his heart had broken a little that night at the Ritz, knowing that Captain Harkness was going to die, and that there was nothing that he could do to change it. He remembered how dead he himself had felt, upon his return--leaving that sacrifice buried in the past, unmourned and unremembered; he'd cursed the rules then. He had wanted, irrationally, to be the Captain's hero, and to save him from his fate.
Now it seemed that fate had given him a gift, and yet he felt frozen rather than thankful. So much had changed in the year since he'd left Captain Harkness in 1941, the year that never happened, and yet had left its scars in him forever. Jack realized that he was afraid of trying to explain all of this to Captain Harkness, and afraid of what he would think. He smiled ironically. He wasn't usually one to worry about what others thought of him...and neither, apparently was the other Jack Harkness, if kissing a strange man in the middle of a crowded dance hall in 1941 were any indication. But then, people do strange things when they figure they're about to die. What if the Captain resented him? He wasn't sure he could bear it.
Jack made his way slowly closer to the bed. The Captain's eyes were still closed, but every once in a while they moved quickly beneath the bruised lids. Without the animating force of consciousness, of experience, his face looked so terrifyingly young. Vulnerable. It gave Jack the sudden strong urge to run very far away.
Instead, he seated himself in the bedside chair, shifting around a bit to try and get comfortable on the duct-tape patched naugahyde. Apparently, UNIT didn't have enough influence to get decent chairs for their quarantine areas. He cautiously leaned an elbow on the bed, studying his namesake, waiting for--perhaps dreading--any sign of consciousness. It was eerie, how the respirator breathed for him, forcing oxygen in and out in imitation of the natural cycle, shoving its way into the lungs, spreading ribs that pushed against the taut midline of the Captain's body, tantalizingly half-visible against the thin fabric of the hospital gown. Jack sighed, splaying his fingers out on the bedsheet, centimeters away from the Captain's inert hand, watching the long, slender fingers as they twitched, barely noticably. Gently, slowly, Jack reached his hand forward and pushed his fingers between the Captain's, folding their hands together firmly.
As soon as he could consult Owen about moving Captain Harkness, he was going to get him out from under UNIT's watchful eye and back to the Hub where Torchwood could take proper care of him. He tightened his hold with a painful grimace. Whatever that means.
He had become almost so entranced by the slow breathing, the unconscious silence, that he jumped when Gwen appeared in the doorway, her dark hair looking a bit wind-blown, as though she'd just sprinted up to find him. Her words confirmed that it was probably true.
"Ianto called. There's been a murder or something of the like at Bute Park. Says it's suspicious, and the police are on their way."
Jack stood, abruptly disentangling his hand. "Suspicious how?"
"I dunno...like...the bodies are...mutated or something." Her eyes were wide. "Ianto picked it off of a police scanner, says the caller was panicked about it. Don't know if it's something to do with the plane, but it doesn't sound normal..." she trailed off as she seemed to finally notice the unconscious pilot, her features softening slightly into a wary tenderness. "How is he?" she asked, voice quiet. Jack smiled a bit as he left the room, brushing past her.
"He'll live. Come on."
~~
It was raining again--an unenthusiastic drizzle--when the SUV pulled up behind the police vehicles. Jack declined to park, but simply cut the engine and left the SUV where it was, exiting with the rest of the team and assuming control of the situation by flashing his ID at the wary officers. The bodies lay on a pedestrian path in plain sight, their indistinct forms now sodden with the rainfall, making them almost seem to melt into the ground. Jack took a deep breath and sauntered forward.
"Alright, boys. We've got this covered now."
"I've never seen anything like it--"
Jack laid a hand on the police constable's shoulder. "We have. Like I said. Got it covered."
The man looked dubiously at him, then over his shoulder at Owen, Gwen, and Tosh, sizing them up. He frowned deeply and was about to protest, but apparently thought better of it.
"Don't know who signs your paycheck," he growled almost under his breath, begrudgingly ushering the other police responders towards their vehicles, "bloody well go wherever you want, interfere with everything, don't even have to get permission as far as I see...bloody Torchwood..."
Owen rolled his eyes exaggeratedly. "Yes, well, just because our car's bigger than yours, don't let it get to you too much."
The constable shot him a dirty look as he departed, but Owen ignored it blithely in favor of approaching the bodies and prodding a sleeve with his boot. Then he crouched down to get a closer look, as Jack and the others crowded in. Tosh pulled out the handheld again, scanning for Rift activity. She shook her head.
"Jack, this is weird.." Owen murmured. "Look."
Jack squatted near him, peering at the slumped forms. They both seemed to be human, and adult...at least as far as the body of one and torso and head of the other went. One of them, the male, Jack discovered, was lying on his back, arms slightly akimbo as though he'd been attempting to fend something off. His body was more or less intact, but the head...
"Oh my God!" Gwen gasped.
"How is this possible?" Tosh was frowning in alarm at her handheld, as though it were the filter through which she could make sense of the scene before them.
"Completely dessicated," Owen confirmed, poking a gloved finger into the dry-rotted flesh hanging from the man's head. All that was left was a few scraps of parched skin and a tuft or so of feathery hair, clinging to the age-blackened skull.
"There's something even worse with the woman," Gwen said, her voice pitched low as she tried to avoid getting sick. Jack looked up at her, then down to where she was pointing.
The woman's body was cut nearly in half, it seemed, but cleanly, as though by a laser. In place of the bones of her pelvis and legs, there were a few curiously tiny intestines, neatly coiled, and bones and flesh far too small to belong to an adult woman...
Jack stood, feeling slightly ill himself. He took a deep breath of cool, wet air.
"Okay...you're right. That's weird."
Tosh shook her head in confusion, looking up toward him. "It's as if parts of their bodies were swapped with...I don't know..."
"Murdered children?" Owen asked bluntly, looking at the woman's oddly deformed corpse. Gwen gagged. "Because that's what this looks like." Jack's stomach clenched.
"It regressed her...but only part of her....whatever it was," he gasped out. "And the man..."
"It's like just his head has been aged...incredibly..." Tosh muttered, brushing a wet strand of hair out of her eyes. "But how is that possible?"
"I think the question at this point is less how it's possible and more how we're going to catch and kill whatever's doing it." His heart was beating hard with the heady mixture of excitement and utter panic that he often felt when dealing with the unknowns that the Rift spit out. But this time, there were too many unknowns all at once; there had been no Rift activity, or Tosh's computer would have picked it up. Something had come through with Captain Harkness and his Spitfire, but from where?
"A trail! Over here!" Gwen suddenly called, and they all jerked their heads as one to where she was crouched near the grass. "Some sort of trail, anyway..."
The grass was affected, too, in strange swirling patterns, almost like the track of a snake on sand. Wherever the thing that made it had touched, the ground was bare, hard, the vegetation dead. Jack pulled out his pocket torch and shone it into the rainy dark.
"Gwen, with me. Owen, Tosh...find out all you can about those bodies. Take 'em back to the Hub if you need to, but just be ready to pick us up if we call." He drew his pistol.