∞
∞
Chapter Two
The Doctor knew about bad regenerations, more than most - but this was beyond any of those. How the prolonged regenerative period had affected her, he had no idea. Romana hung between states of being while almost a century went by in the world around her little box. She was in a stable condition, though resting far from consciousness - that at least gave him some time.
He’d caught her when she collapsed and, cradling her new slender form in his aching arms, he’d carried her to his room. She lay now, her pale figure swamped in white blankets, seeming to sleep. Her new face wasn’t all that different to the one she’d worn in Paris - she had similar pale skin and fine features; but her cheeks and nose were now scattered with a find dust of freckles and her hair was shorter than his and fiery red. One bright spike curled onto each cheek, framing the ragged edges of her fringe and making her look like a little flame-haired pixie. But the most striking aspect of this new regeneration was how incredibly young she looked - were she human, she couldn’t have been more than sixteen. It was disquieting to say the least, to look at the childish figure before him and try to reconcile it with his memories of Romana.
He wanted nothing more than to sit with her until she woke, but he knew that unless he helped her, there was a very real danger that she never would. His own body was shattered too, and he was still losing blood. In times gone by he would have taken her into the Zero Room - it was a part of the TARDIS removed from certain quantum influences, leaving it as a space that enacted absolutely no pressure on anything inside it, making it a perfect environment for an ailing timelord body to heal itself. One of the Doctor’s usual desperate situations had, however, forced its loss. But Torchwood had been working on creating a similar Zero Environment in their Cardiff base from his appropriated plans - a favour for the Doctor on Jack’s part, more than anything. Their best hope, therefore, was to go to Cardiff and see if they’d finished the project. With a pull of deep regret, the Doctor closed the door on Romana, and headed back to the console room.
*****
When people met Lucy Saxon they generally though she was quite a nice girl; shallow, but quite sweet really. This was mostly because they couldn’t imagine anything but naivety filling out the space in her otherwise evidently empty head. As it happened, they were very wrong. Lucy Saxon was brilliant. Brilliant enough to have ascertained at quite a young age that by disguising her intellect and maintaining the visage of the most pliant of girls, she could manipulate the whole world to her liking without anyone ever seeing her do it. She adopted a self-effacing and subservient manner that led people to trust her, instantly and entirely, because they thought she had no ego. Ego and vanity, however, are not quite the same thing. Ego wants to control the world; vanity wants to be seen to do it. Lucy Saxon did want to take over the world, but was quite happy to let someone else take the credit - and the blame.
How lucky, then, that along came Harry Saxon. A man for whom vanity and ego battle fiercely for equal standing in his grossly enlarged self-image. He was brilliant too, though crippled by his overwhelming vanity, and she could even say she loved him, after a fashion. But more than that, she could control him, and he could control everything else. Like most, he never quite guessed all there was to know about Lucy, and so he told her everything about himself - thinking she would barely understand a word of it. Harry even entrusted her with his most desperate plan, to be enacted if (when, Lucy thought, but let him prolong his denial) the Doctor ruined everything. And so it came to be that at the end of year that never happened, the sweet, subservient Lucy Saxon shot her husband and watched his body burn, then plucked a keepsake from the embers. She was supposed to take the ring immediately to the summer house on the Cote d’Azur, under which was hidden all the equipment needed to take the genetic imprint stored in the ring and use it to restore her husband. But she wasn’t ready to do that quite yet. First of all she had to convince everyone that she was the tragic victim of her husband’s mysterious disappearance - and that she was far too mentally unstable to give a reliable account of what happened the day the American President was assassinated, and why no-one had heard from Harold Saxon since. When question were raised, she simply said ‘I don’t know’ and broke down into big, TV-ready tears, and the residual effects of the Archangel network did the rest. She was an absolute media darling, the new Lady Di, and though the attention was worrying, the control was fabulous. Her every word and action was fed upon by hundreds of tabloid vultures and her every opinion processed and reproduced as a doctrine for the nation. If Lucy wore a green hat, every woman in Britain wore a green hat. But the top of the world is a dangerous place to be, so Lucy Saxon was planning her next move.
*****
It was a rainy night in Cardiff. That was pretty normal, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the Doctor shouldn’t have known it was a rainy night, because he’d dematerialised underground, in the middle of the Torchwood hub - or at least what should have been the middle of the Torchwood hub. But he’d found himself in the middle of a very deep pit, looking up at a scattering of stars with the rain pouring in. He darted back into the TARDIS, shaking water out of his eyes, and checked the readouts. They told him that he was in the centre of the Torchwood Hub, Cardiff, Wales, UK, Earth, 2010 by the Gregorian calendar. He stepped out of the doors again, still definitely in a hole. Then he began to notice things - like the shapes of wrecked structures, glittering with broken glass, the loops of wire hanging frayed from the wall, interlaced with twisted metal beams. It was a ruin, a wreck - but the fallen ruins of the vortex manipulator told him it had once been the hub. He let out a particularly arcane Gallifreyan curse.
A zero environment, if properly constructed, was dissociated enough from the reality around it to survive a blast like this one intact. But anything salvageable had clearly long been salvaged - so it seemed the Doctor would have to find Jack, and then perhaps he could find out what had happened to the hub.
“Well,” he told the rain “that shouldn’t be too hard.”
He was willing to place a pretty big bet that Jack was keeping an eye out for him, so he’d simply sit at the top of this bombsite and wait. It was better to keep the TARDIS stationary anyway, until Romana was safe.
*****
Gwen was technically on maternity leave, but with the new team ringing her up every ten minutes for her expert advice on absolutely everything, this translated in reality to her simply taken off field work. As usual, on Wednesday morning Gwen awoke at 6.05 to the delightful dawn chorus of a screaming infant, and Rhys moaning with his pillow over his head. She lifted the corner of the pillow and peered under it.
“Rhys, pet, would you?”
“I got up at 1am, and 3am. It’s definitely your turn. And he probably wants feeding, which, love, means he’s definitely all yours.”
She mumbled something rude about the possibilities inherent in his man-boobs and rolled out of bed.
Despite it being what passed for summer in Wales, their new flat seemed perennially chilly, and she wrapped her dressing gown tightly around her as she padded into the nursery.
“You have caused me more grief any alien, you know that?”
Another howl confirmed it.
“Give me an army of weevils any day...”
As if in response, the sound of her mobile drifted up from the kitchen. She cringed “Oh, no, I didn’t mean it, honestly I didn’t. Hush, hush, no I’m not going to answer it. No, I’m staying right here you, ok? Ok.”
She resolutely ignored the phone and gathered the screaming bundle up in her arms, where his yells calmed mercifully to an insistent whimper. The ringing stopped eventually, and Gwen sat down to give Dylan his first feed of the day. When he was asleep once more, Gwen opened the blue nursery curtains and let the watery sunlight fill the room. The overnight rain had cleared, but puddles were still scattered along the pavements below and little white trails flew out behind the early morning traffic. It seemed like it was going to be a nice day, but Gwen decided she would much rather spend it in bed. Then her phone rang again. She swore, and then held her breath, waiting for the tirade that followed a woken baby. But Dylan stayed sleeping, and Gwen gave into inevitable and trudged into the kitchen to find her phone.
“Hi Gwen, look, really sorry to disturb you, but I need your advice.”
It was Katia ‘call-me-Kat’ Price, the youngest of the new team at only 19, but terrifyingly intelligent. Apparently, she’d been at some school for geniuses before it was involved in an alien invasion plot, and somehow in the aftermath she ended up with Torchwood. Gwen suppressed a sigh as Kat began to rattle off the details of the latest inexplicable phenomena.
“Something came through the rift last night and I went to pick it up. And it was like, this box - like, an old phone box, kinda. Anyway, it was too big to take back myself, so I called up Mark. He said it was - what was it, Mark?”
There was mumbling from Mark in the background, and Gwen let her eyes fall closed, hoping desperately that Kat would get to the point sometime soon.
“He says it’s a police call box - I dunno, something they used to have in the sixties or something. Anyway, it had doors and we figured we might as well open it and have a look, only we couldn’t. Not with any of our tech, and it only had an ordinary little Yale lock. So that’s like, way odd, right? And just little wooden doors, but we couldn’t break through them. And then I checked the reading from when it arrived, and it didn’t come through the rift.”
Kat paused for effect. Gwen was, in effect, nonplussed.
“It didn’t come through the rift? So, what’s it got to do with us, then?”
“No, you’re not getting it!”
“No, not really.”
“It didn’t come through the rift, but it did come through a disturbance in time and space.”
“...how?”
“No idea.”
“Wait,” a thought was trying to form in Gwen’s mind, but she wasn’t quite awake enough for it “what did you say it looked like - a phone box?”
“A wooden one. And blue.”
“Right, just - wait for me, I’m on my way in.”
“Oh no, it’s not here. We tried to shift it but couldn’t. It’s by the - ” she paused, she’d been about to say ‘bombsite’ but changed her mind “by the Plass. Where the Plass used to be. You know.”
“Yes, okay, I’ll meet you there. Give me ... twenty minutes.”
She hung up, cutting off Kat’s cheery farewell, and let her eyes fall shut again, just for a moment, before starting the sluggish process of getting ready for work.
It ended up taking her a little over thirty minutes to get to the Plass, and she thought that was making damn good time considering five of them had been spent in line at the coffee shop. Katia and Mark were waiting in front of the big black wall that hid the crater behind from view. At forty-three, Mark West was the oldest, though newest, member of the Torchwood team. He’d been a doctor for almost twenty years when he happened upon an alien parasite during a surgery; so Gwen had invited him out to lunch. She’d been just about to spike his drink when he’d started to talk about how glad he was that it was all true, and finally out in the open. Granted, the 456 had terrified him - he had a daughter, kept her home the entire time, hadn’t listened to a word the government said, you couldn’t trust them a jot, he said, not after that thing with the Toclafane was all hushed up and swept under the rug. The American President gets killed and the Prime Minister disappears and no-one knows a damn thing about it? Not bloody likely. But it was all out now, and yes, it was terrifying. But at the same time, it was the most incredible feeling - to know that they weren’t alone, weren’t the only spark of light in the big, black universe. Gwen held the retcon is her hand while he spoke, and when he had finished, she put it back in her pocket. They still needed a medic, after all.
Katia playfully berated her for being late, before setting off around the bombsite to the other side of the Plass, practically skipping. This was clearly a huge buzz for her, but then, most days at Torchwood were. She god a real kick from the new and the strange, from anything she didn’t understand. Well, thought Gwen, she was bound to get a kick out of whatever was coming next. The black wall beside them rolled around a corner and she saw it, the little blue box she’d seen once before - well, a hundred times really. Every time she’d replayed that piece of surveillance from the Plass during Jack’s disappearance: the odd little blue box, Jack running towards it, and them both disappearing together. And here it was; a curiously unimposing thing; if she hadn’t known it could somehow transport itself through space and time, she would have ignored it entirely. As it was, she stepped up to the double doors, and knocked. Well, they were doors - what else was she supposed to do? After a moment she heard footsteps coming, impossibly, from within the box, and yet much further away. Feeling extremely foolish, and a little off-balance, Gwen called out in a voice that very nearly trembled with uncertainty “Doctor?”
The door opened and a man appeared from within wearing a rumpled suit and a rather distracted smile.
“Gwen,” he said, and she very nearly jumped “lovely to see you do come in.”
Katia laughed “Well, of course, an inexplicable disturbance in time and space turns out to be a friend of yours.”
“Well, more of a friend of a friend, really...” Gwen mumbled, not breaking her stare from the scruffy waif of a man who’d dragged Earth back from the Medusa Cascade. He grinned “Nonsense, any friend of Jack’s is a friend of mine.”
“Are you sure that’s wise?”
“Nope.”
He popped the ‘p’, still grinning, still very much only half there, his mind clearly on something quite other.
“Anyway, as I say, do come in, and your friends, the more the merrier!” he said, and Katia’s eyebrows furrowed.
“Four people, in that little box?”
“Five, actually, it’s bigger on the inside.” And he pulled the other door open and stood aside so they could see that there was, in fact, a positively cavernous room inside the phone box. Her feeling of disorientation now settling as a constant presence, Gwen followed him inside. Mark followed close behind, laughing out of pure amazement.
“This job just gets stranger and stranger, doesn’t it?” he said to Gwen, who nodded vaguely looking back towards the door.
“Where’s Katia?”
She was asking Mark, but the doctor answered “She’ll be running in circles around the outside of the TARDIS - that’s this, my ship - she’ll come back in a minute to say something about ‘what the something or other’ and then run outside to do it again. I wouldn’t worry, she’ll get tired of it soon enough.”
Just as he finished speaking, Katia appeared at the door to say “What the hell is this thing? It’s like - like, mental!” then she disappeared again. The Doctor scratched the back of his neck.
“Never quite figured out why they do that. Checking for trapdoors or something...”
Mark was looking around the console, as if searching for something, and said “So, who’s the fifth person? You said there was someone else.”
The Doctor’s façade of a casual demeanour dropped instantly.
“That’s Romana. She’s sleeping, she’s - not very well.”
The slightest pause around ‘sleeping’ and the way the light shuttered completely behind his eyes told Gwen that ‘not very well’ had been a serious understatement.
“She’s the reason I’m here, actually. Gwen, when I last saw Jack he was working on something for me. He was building a Zero Room. Please tell me he’s finished it.”
The desperation in his eyes was painful, and Gwen had to look at the floor to reply “No, not quite.”
The Doctor said something that the TARDIS couldn’t quite translate into English, and the sound fell on Gwen’s ears like shattering glass and she flinched. Katia came clattering down the gangway to join them, but her footsteps fell to a standstill when she caught the dark look on the Doctor’s face.
“Who died?” she asked. She hadn’t had to learn yet that at Torchwood that was never a joke.
“No-one, yet -” said the Doctor, broken out of his momentary lapse in energy “where’s your new base? Co-ordinates, rather than an address if that’s alright, the GPS on this old thing is a bit funny lately.”
“We’re in temporary offices at the moment, the Zero Room is in storage.”
“Right, well, ring Jack, tell him to meet us there.”
Gwen hesitated, her mouth dancing around words that wouldn’t quite articulate. The Doctor stopped fiddling with dials on the console and looked up.
“What?”
“He’s not here.”
“Well, where’d he go?”
She pointed upwards and shrugged. The Doctor rubbed a hand over brows.
“But - I thought he was staying here. He had some reason he wanted to stay here.”
“He did. There was - someone. He died.”
The Doctor’s eyes darted down to the floor and back up to her.
“I’m sorry. Listen, I’ve got to get to that Zero Room. I can finish it - I have to finish it.”
Gwen noticed for the first time that his eyes were horribly bloodshot, and bruises were creeping up his neck. She had been so distracted by the simple fact of him that she hadn’t noticed he was in a terrible state. She took his hand.
“Are you sure you want to be working? I mean, you seem like you need a bit of medical attention yourself, Doctor.”
She covered the irony with a soft smile. He took his hand back rather too quickly and replaced his deliberately disarming grin.
“Oh, don’t worry about me, I’ve been worse, much worse. But Romana, she is a tad worse. But if I can get her into a zero environment she’ll be fine - I think.”
The desperation leaked back into his fading false optimism and she dropped the matter instantly, but glanced back at Mark, who winked, he would keep an eye on the Doctor. Reassured, she told Kat to give him the co-ordinates and headed for the door. Katia called after her “You’re not coming with us?”
“I’ll meet you there, I need to stop by the office” she said, and disappeared before Kat had the chance to ask any more questions.
“So,” said the Doctor “you two are Torchwood - so I’m safe in assuming you’re interested in alien technology?”
“Well, it’s sort of in the job description, isn’t it?” said Mark, and Katia merely giggled, eyeing up the console like a normal teenage girl would eye up shirtless lads at the beach. The Doctor gave them both a wicked grin.
“You’ll love this next bit then.” And he cranked a lever. With its bizarre humming, crashing, groaning whir, the time rotor came to life. A huge shudder ran through the TARDIS and Mark and Katia found themselves both on the floor. The room seemed to spin and fall out of place and then suddenly it was back again. The roar of alien engines faded to a distant, high pitched hum and the vibrations in the floor fell still. When they had caught their breath and picked themselves off the floor, they realised that the Doctor had already slipped out the door. Mark followed him as quickly as his unsteady feet would allow, and Katia too, though a great deal slower, gazing through the grated floor at the mess of wire and lights below as she went.
The Doctor had already found his way through the mess of what was largely discarded alien junk, to the big white box at the centre of the warehouse. It reached just above his head in height and would have just fitted in the TARDIS console room. To call it white was something of a misnomer, it had been white, but one side was completely scorched, and black dust clung in patches to rest, delineating the direction of the blast. On the side that remained to the whitest, there was a door set deep in bolted metal frame. He looked at it uncertainly - it looked tremendously heavy, but, if the zero environment within had any stability it should weigh nothing at all. That was the nature of a zero environment; no gravity, no force, no impact. That’s what made it the perfect place for the body to heal itself. He twisted the lock and pushed gingerly against the door. It didn’t budge. He braced his shoulder against it, ignoring the swollen and bruised skin, and pushed. It crept open, just enough for his thin frame to slip through. Once inside, he leaned back against it, shutting it again - enclosing the separate reality and theoretically stabilising the zero environment. But instead of the lightness and the mysterious scent of roses that he remembered washing over him in his own Zero Room, he found himself swimming in a frayed reality. It was definitely unfinished and, furthermore, damaged by the blast that destroyed the hub. He felt sick, and as he reached for the door he saw his arms elongate before him as the walls of the room expanded. As he moved to pull it open every motion had to be pushed through a thick syrup of the condensing air around him - no, not the air, but the very space it occupied was thickening. The door no longer seemed heavy, only impossibly slow, and when he pulled himself towards it, certain parts of his body seemed to take longer to get there than others. He stood by the slit of the open door, swaying slightly. The stable reality beyond washed over him like a cool breeze and he waited for his senses to rearrange themselves. When he was quite sure of where his feet were, he stepped back through the door and dragged it shut behind, cutting off the tendrils of nausea that clung to his guts.
Kat and Mark were waiting for him outside the room, Mark was frowning deeply and Kat’s eyes were slightly wider than usual. The Doctor looked down to discover that one of the bright red blisters on his stomach had burst and blood was beginning to soak through his jacket.
“Oops,” he looked sheepish “try to avoid doing that again ... right!”
Very suddenly he was all energy again, loosing bolts from around the door with his sonic screwdriver and prattling on as he did so “You know,” he told them over the rattle of falling bolts “this is a screwdriver. And it’s been a screwdriver for several hundred years, but this quite possibly the first time I’ve used it to remove screws.”
He was stopped by Mark’s hand on his arm, pulling back from the door.
“Just hold up for a minute, mate. You’re obviously not in a fit state to be working like this.”
“Oh no, it looks much worse than it is, honestly.”
“Look, I’m a doctor and I can tell you no human being could be losing that much blood and be as absolutely bloody fine as you’re pretending to be.”
“Lucky for me I’m not human, then.”
Mark was momentarily set back, but soon recovered; he was nothing if not persistent.
“Will you at least let me dress the wound?”
“Got your kit with you?”
“Gwen’s bringing it.”
“Can you do it while I work?”
“Now look, I re- ”
“Oh, and don’t even think about trying to take a blood sample.”
Mark grabbed the hand that held the sonic screwdriver and pulled the Doctor towards him.
“Stop, just stop, you’ve got to understand -”
“No, you’ve got to understand,” the Doctor turned, eyes suddenly full of the cold fire that quelled all arguments “if I don’t finish this in time Romana may never wake up. I’ve already lost her once and I can’t do it again. I won’t.”
Mark let go of the Doctor’s hand and held up his own in a gesture of surrender before retreating to sit on a case of kitchen appliances that hadn’t been invented yet. The Doctor removed a panel from the wall of the Zero Room and started pulling out chunks of wiring, seemingly at random. Then he stopped and peered into the impossibly deep darkness behind.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got a dilithium switch for a quantum stabiliser, have you?” he asked over his shoulder. Kat had to consciously disengage from the stunned stillness that had taken her at the Doctor’s angry outburst.
“Not sure, I’ll have to ask Tan...”
Tanydd Llewellyn was Torchwood’s new secretary. Gwen tried very hard not to think of her as Ianto’s replacement, but it was difficult. Like him, she came to them from Torchwood One, a survivor of the Battle of Canary Warf. She had wide hips and a round face that gave her a soft, comfortable look that disguised the diamond-hard personality beneath. When Gwen came through the office door she was on the phone to Kat, scrolling through the archives for something. Their temporary base was an ordinary office in an ordinary office block, in which they hid under the guise of an IT research and development company. The cover wouldn’t last much longer though, some of the people in the offices around them had been retconned so often they were starting to show early signs of Alzheimer’s.
“Aha!” Tanydd told the phone “Found it, section 6, row F. Anything else? Okay, keep me posted.”
No sooner had Gwen shut the door than she was fixed under Tanydd’s sharp eyes.
“So then,” she said, and Gwen had the strongest impression that she was fifteen again, and about to be told off by her teacher for skipping class “who is he?”
“He’s the Doctor.”
“Doctor who?”
“Don’t know that he has another name ... haven’t heard it at any rate.
“It is him, then?”
“Who?”
“The Doctor, the man from Canary Warf. The man Torchwood was founded to defend the Earth against, and spent a century tracking.”
“Umm ... yes. Think so.”
“Well, shouldn’t we arrest him, or something?”
Gwen in the meantime had made her way to her desk and found the little machine she was looking for. She was in the middle of hooking it up to her computer when she looked up in alarm.
“No, no, definitely no arresting of anyone. I think - I think he needs our help. And I think we probably owe it to him.”
Tanydd returned to her computer, clearly beaten and clearly disconcerted by the fact, and Gwen returned to hers. The device on her desk was about the same size as the battered white kettle in their little kitchenette, but its shape was that of a black sphere circled by a silver equator line, out of which sprouted delicate metal wires that curved slightly down with the weight of their bulbous silver ends. A thick spike sat at the very top of the sphere pointing skyward, which terminated in a series of three black discs. The three glass legs that it stood on seemed much too spindly to support its weight, but in fact the whole thing weighed almost nothing. This machine, when fed the right information, should have been able to send a message absolutely anywhere in the universe, that’s what Jack had said. But Jack was a bloody liar, because the information she programmed it with to connect it with Jack’s wriststrap no longer connected with anything at all. For a couple of months it’d been fine, a little red light in the software telling that Jack was three suns away or on some moon; and if she needed him, if everything went to all hell and Torchwood needed Captain Jack, then all she had to do was hit enter and the message would be sent, and Jack would make good on his promise and come back home. But a few months ago, the little red light that was Captain Jack Harkness, somewhere in the universe, had disappeared. And try as she might, Gwen couldn’t get it back again. Now the Doctor had come looking for him, and she knew Jack would want to be here.
She sighed as the screen gave her nothing but white noise and a message telling her to check she’d typed the co-ordinates correctly.
“Yes I bloody have.” She told it, hitting the keyboard slightly harder than was necessary. She left it recalibrating and picked up Mark’s medical bag and her gun. She always carried it with her these days, even down to the shops. Rhys hated having it in the house, but she’d told him, if aliens came to take their baby she wanted a chance to shoot them in the face. He gave up, in the end. She left Tanydd trawling curiously through a few thousand Torchwood One files on the Doctor and headed back out the door.
The Doctor looked positively terrifying. His eyes were bright red and the front of his shirt equally so, there were bloodstain on the panels he’d taken from the wall and little pool of it gradually seeping out of the jacket he’d left lying on the floor. His skin was getting steadily paler and his breaths becoming more laboured, but he seemed capable of keeping going through strength of will alone. Mark hovered just behind him, ready to catch him the moment he fell, and Katia darted into the rows of stored equipment and back, after this, that and the other part. Gwen hesitated slightly in shock when she saw him, and then ran to Mark to pass him his bag. A little stack of gauze in hand, Mark made another attempt at stopping the Doctor, who whirled around and fixed him under red eyes - but said nothing. Mark spoke softly, but firmly.
“Thirty second, just give me thirty seconds, you can count them, if you like.”
The Doctor swayed slightly on the spot, his eyes blinking in and out of focus. Finally, he said “okay.”
“Okay, first, we’ll get your shirt out of the way - okay, now, you hold that there for me a moment - Gwen, give us a hand, could you?”
Gwen took the gauze from the Doctor’s loose grip and pressed it tightly to the wound whilst Mark took bandages and painkillers from his bag.
“You are not injecting me with anything.” The Doctor objected, slightly sluggishly.
“It’s just a painkiller, it’ll help.”
“No it won’t. Different species, remember? Different biochemistry.”
A little reluctantly, Mark put the syringe back in his bag and set about cleaning the wound instead. As he did his eyes ran over the rest of the Doctor’s battered body.
“You’re a mess,” he muttered “you should be in a hospital.”
“Oh no, not a fan of hospitals.”
“That’s hardly the point.”
“Have a listen to my heartbeat.”
“Why?”
“Go on, humour me.”
Gwen’s eyes darted between the Doctor and Mark, trying to see if she could find whatever she felt like she had missed. But Mark was looking as confused as her as he reached for his stethoscope. Gwen watched, no longer noticing the gauze beneath her hands growing damper, as Mark lifted the stethoscope to the Doctor’s chest. His eyes widened with sudden shock, and he moved the head of the stethoscope across the Doctor’s chest, before dropping it back in his bag.
“Still think I should go to hospital?” said the Doctor. Mark nodded, not in affirmative, but in unwilling agreement. The bleeding seemed to have slowed to a gluggy trickle that clung to the opened sore, so Gwen moved away, leaving Mark to finish arranging bandages. Kat sidled up and leaned in to speak in a conspiratorial whisper.
“He’s an alien.”
“Apparently so.”
“That’s not his real body, then.”
“Dunno ... bipedal humanoid forms are common but...”
“What do you know about him? Where does he come from?”
“All I know is what Jack told me. He’s someone from Jack’s past and well, when it came to Jack and talking about his past - oh, he was all secrets and half-told stories..” Gwen realised that she was dangerously close to nostalgia and pulled herself forcefully back into the present.
“Anyway, if you want to know anything about him I’m afraid you’ll have to ask him - or, actually, check the archives, there’s a few files on him.”
“But ignore anything about phantasmagoria,” the Doctor called across to them, and Gwen realised he’d been listening to the entire conversation “that’s just good old Queen Vicky - lovely woman really, but a bit on the conservative side when it comes to interstellar diplomacy. Which I find hypocritical, frankly, considering all the invading she did.”
Gwen wondered mildly if he was joking, before deciding that the answer probably wouldn’t fit in her brain. After another split second fracas, the Doctor returned to his work and Gwen joined Mark who had returned in defeat to his box.
“He is far, far too unwell to be working.”
“Well, you tried.”
“And failed.”
“Can’t win them all, can you?”
“Certainly not,” interjected the Doctor from somewhere inside the wall “not against me, anyway.”
“Hey!” Gwen called back “Talking about you, not to you.”
“And yet I insist on hearing everything you say, I’m rude like that.”
Gwen decided to ignore him.
“Anyway,” she told Mark “I’ve got a husband at home who’s been left holding the baby again, so...”
“Of course, sorry to bring you out, Gwen.”
“Oh no, don’t worry yourself. I wouldn’t have missed this, believe me. I might pop back later, but, keep me informed, eh.”
The husband in question was in fact, not at home. Despite his job being not quite as important as saving the earth from alien invasion, it still required him to turn up - preferably prior to lunchtime. Their emergency babysitter had chosen today to perform a disappearing act so complete Rhys very nearly suspected she’d been swallowed up by the rift. And so it came to be that, not for the first time, the manager of Harwood’s was sat in his office trying to juggle paperwork, a ceaselessly ringing phone, and a ceaselessly crying baby. The first time he’d had to do this had been a novelty, even a little bit fun, with half the staff crowding into his small office to coo and make funny scrunched-up faces. But enjoyment had worn quickly thin, and now he was frankly fed up. Unluckily for Gwen, he was ruminating on just this fact when his mobile rang.
“Rhys, I got your message - oh, I am sorry, pet.”
“You’re always sorry, you’re an incredibly sorry woman these days, you know that?”
“I know, I know, we had a bit of a - a thing this-morning, and, well, you know. My job.”
“And what about my job? I know it’s not action hero, saving the world stuff, but I still have to do it, you know. I’m the manager, people sort of expect me to show up.”
“Well what do you want me to do, Rhys? Bring our baby in with me to Torchwood?”
“Well, why not? He’s not going to come into any harm in the office, is he?”
“Rhys! My last office was blown up!”
“Well maybe you shouldn’t be working there, then!”
“Oh, that’s it, that’s just it, isn’t it? You want me at home, looking after baby and playing housewife?”
“That isn’t bloody it! Gwen, don’t be bloody stupid! I just - I just -”
“What?”
“I worry about you, you know.”
“Oh sweetheart, I know. Look, I’ll call Tan, and tell that if another bloody dalek invasion fleet lands I’m still staying in tonight, okay? And we can have a proper chat and sort something out.”
“...okay. Okay - oh Christ, he needs changing again.”
“Oh, lucky you. Alright love, see you soon.”
“Love you.”
“Bye.”
*****
The Doctor’s frantic work pace came to a very sudden halt. He stepped away from the mess of wires that trailed out of the wall, and just looked at them. Then he took the sonic screwdriver back from where it rested between his teeth, lighting up sections of the dark inside of the wall in blue light, and peering at the tiny little scrolling numbers that floated in the air above his hand. Apparently satisfied, the screwdriver was returned to his pocket. He opened the Zero Room door once more, and it swung lightly into the room.
He turned back to Mark and Katia, smiling broadly once more “Can you smell it?” he said.
“What?” Mark was surprised by the question, but Kat stepped forward to the door and breathed deeply, her face lit up “Rose-petal tea! Ever had rose petal tea?” she asked the Doctor “It doesn’t really taste of anything but it smells great. It smells just like that!”
“Brilliant!” said the Doctor “That means it’s working!”
And he darted off between the rows of shelves and crates again, back to the TARDIS. Mark followed at a run, leaving Kat on her own in the doorway to the now functional Zero Room. She stepped inside, breathing deeply of the richly scented air, wondering what on earth (or otherwise) could be creating the olfactory illusion of roses. But the curiosity of it seemed to matter very little as the pink-grey light of the room seemed to fold lightly around her, filling her with a sense of utter tranquillity. The stress on her feet from running back and forth with heavy equipment simply melted away, and she lifted them off the ground entirely, curling up to hang in the centre of the space, entirely enclosed in the just-warm air. She was so entirely still, that when the door opened again, she felt the movements of Mark and the Doctor sending gentle ripples through the air towards her. Mark gasped in surprise when he saw her hanging in mid-air, but any alarm he may have felt was entirely negated by the zero environment. The Doctor was cradling a young red-headed girl in his arms, whom Katia took to be Romana. The odd thing was that she didn’t look sick at all - she just seemed to be asleep. But the Doctor was looking at her with such desperate concern, she was dying, or close to - it obvious in the way his eyes never left her shut lids, and how tightly and protectively he held her limp body. Even in the utter safety of the Zero Room he seemed loath to let her go; it seemed almost as if a physical force was pushing against him as he drew his arms away from her body, leaving her lying flat, suspended in zero relative gravity. He leaned in to listen to her breathing, and only when they seemed strong enough did he allow himself to fall back into the gently supporting air. Finally, the stress and tension drained away from his body, and he gradually sank into sleep.
Chapter Two
The Doctor knew about bad regenerations, more than most - but this was beyond any of those. How the prolonged regenerative period had affected her, he had no idea. Romana hung between states of being while almost a century went by in the world around her little box. She was in a stable condition, though resting far from consciousness - that at least gave him some time.
He’d caught her when she collapsed and, cradling her new slender form in his aching arms, he’d carried her to his room. She lay now, her pale figure swamped in white blankets, seeming to sleep. Her new face wasn’t all that different to the one she’d worn in Paris - she had similar pale skin and fine features; but her cheeks and nose were now scattered with a find dust of freckles and her hair was shorter than his and fiery red. One bright spike curled onto each cheek, framing the ragged edges of her fringe and making her look like a little flame-haired pixie. But the most striking aspect of this new regeneration was how incredibly young she looked - were she human, she couldn’t have been more than sixteen. It was disquieting to say the least, to look at the childish figure before him and try to reconcile it with his memories of Romana.
He wanted nothing more than to sit with her until she woke, but he knew that unless he helped her, there was a very real danger that she never would. His own body was shattered too, and he was still losing blood. In times gone by he would have taken her into the Zero Room - it was a part of the TARDIS removed from certain quantum influences, leaving it as a space that enacted absolutely no pressure on anything inside it, making it a perfect environment for an ailing timelord body to heal itself. One of the Doctor’s usual desperate situations had, however, forced its loss. But Torchwood had been working on creating a similar Zero Environment in their Cardiff base from his appropriated plans - a favour for the Doctor on Jack’s part, more than anything. Their best hope, therefore, was to go to Cardiff and see if they’d finished the project. With a pull of deep regret, the Doctor closed the door on Romana, and headed back to the console room.
*****
When people met Lucy Saxon they generally though she was quite a nice girl; shallow, but quite sweet really. This was mostly because they couldn’t imagine anything but naivety filling out the space in her otherwise evidently empty head. As it happened, they were very wrong. Lucy Saxon was brilliant. Brilliant enough to have ascertained at quite a young age that by disguising her intellect and maintaining the visage of the most pliant of girls, she could manipulate the whole world to her liking without anyone ever seeing her do it. She adopted a self-effacing and subservient manner that led people to trust her, instantly and entirely, because they thought she had no ego. Ego and vanity, however, are not quite the same thing. Ego wants to control the world; vanity wants to be seen to do it. Lucy Saxon did want to take over the world, but was quite happy to let someone else take the credit - and the blame.
How lucky, then, that along came Harry Saxon. A man for whom vanity and ego battle fiercely for equal standing in his grossly enlarged self-image. He was brilliant too, though crippled by his overwhelming vanity, and she could even say she loved him, after a fashion. But more than that, she could control him, and he could control everything else. Like most, he never quite guessed all there was to know about Lucy, and so he told her everything about himself - thinking she would barely understand a word of it. Harry even entrusted her with his most desperate plan, to be enacted if (when, Lucy thought, but let him prolong his denial) the Doctor ruined everything. And so it came to be that at the end of year that never happened, the sweet, subservient Lucy Saxon shot her husband and watched his body burn, then plucked a keepsake from the embers. She was supposed to take the ring immediately to the summer house on the Cote d’Azur, under which was hidden all the equipment needed to take the genetic imprint stored in the ring and use it to restore her husband. But she wasn’t ready to do that quite yet. First of all she had to convince everyone that she was the tragic victim of her husband’s mysterious disappearance - and that she was far too mentally unstable to give a reliable account of what happened the day the American President was assassinated, and why no-one had heard from Harold Saxon since. When question were raised, she simply said ‘I don’t know’ and broke down into big, TV-ready tears, and the residual effects of the Archangel network did the rest. She was an absolute media darling, the new Lady Di, and though the attention was worrying, the control was fabulous. Her every word and action was fed upon by hundreds of tabloid vultures and her every opinion processed and reproduced as a doctrine for the nation. If Lucy wore a green hat, every woman in Britain wore a green hat. But the top of the world is a dangerous place to be, so Lucy Saxon was planning her next move.
*****
It was a rainy night in Cardiff. That was pretty normal, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the Doctor shouldn’t have known it was a rainy night, because he’d dematerialised underground, in the middle of the Torchwood hub - or at least what should have been the middle of the Torchwood hub. But he’d found himself in the middle of a very deep pit, looking up at a scattering of stars with the rain pouring in. He darted back into the TARDIS, shaking water out of his eyes, and checked the readouts. They told him that he was in the centre of the Torchwood Hub, Cardiff, Wales, UK, Earth, 2010 by the Gregorian calendar. He stepped out of the doors again, still definitely in a hole. Then he began to notice things - like the shapes of wrecked structures, glittering with broken glass, the loops of wire hanging frayed from the wall, interlaced with twisted metal beams. It was a ruin, a wreck - but the fallen ruins of the vortex manipulator told him it had once been the hub. He let out a particularly arcane Gallifreyan curse.
A zero environment, if properly constructed, was dissociated enough from the reality around it to survive a blast like this one intact. But anything salvageable had clearly long been salvaged - so it seemed the Doctor would have to find Jack, and then perhaps he could find out what had happened to the hub.
“Well,” he told the rain “that shouldn’t be too hard.”
He was willing to place a pretty big bet that Jack was keeping an eye out for him, so he’d simply sit at the top of this bombsite and wait. It was better to keep the TARDIS stationary anyway, until Romana was safe.
*****
Gwen was technically on maternity leave, but with the new team ringing her up every ten minutes for her expert advice on absolutely everything, this translated in reality to her simply taken off field work. As usual, on Wednesday morning Gwen awoke at 6.05 to the delightful dawn chorus of a screaming infant, and Rhys moaning with his pillow over his head. She lifted the corner of the pillow and peered under it.
“Rhys, pet, would you?”
“I got up at 1am, and 3am. It’s definitely your turn. And he probably wants feeding, which, love, means he’s definitely all yours.”
She mumbled something rude about the possibilities inherent in his man-boobs and rolled out of bed.
Despite it being what passed for summer in Wales, their new flat seemed perennially chilly, and she wrapped her dressing gown tightly around her as she padded into the nursery.
“You have caused me more grief any alien, you know that?”
Another howl confirmed it.
“Give me an army of weevils any day...”
As if in response, the sound of her mobile drifted up from the kitchen. She cringed “Oh, no, I didn’t mean it, honestly I didn’t. Hush, hush, no I’m not going to answer it. No, I’m staying right here you, ok? Ok.”
She resolutely ignored the phone and gathered the screaming bundle up in her arms, where his yells calmed mercifully to an insistent whimper. The ringing stopped eventually, and Gwen sat down to give Dylan his first feed of the day. When he was asleep once more, Gwen opened the blue nursery curtains and let the watery sunlight fill the room. The overnight rain had cleared, but puddles were still scattered along the pavements below and little white trails flew out behind the early morning traffic. It seemed like it was going to be a nice day, but Gwen decided she would much rather spend it in bed. Then her phone rang again. She swore, and then held her breath, waiting for the tirade that followed a woken baby. But Dylan stayed sleeping, and Gwen gave into inevitable and trudged into the kitchen to find her phone.
“Hi Gwen, look, really sorry to disturb you, but I need your advice.”
It was Katia ‘call-me-Kat’ Price, the youngest of the new team at only 19, but terrifyingly intelligent. Apparently, she’d been at some school for geniuses before it was involved in an alien invasion plot, and somehow in the aftermath she ended up with Torchwood. Gwen suppressed a sigh as Kat began to rattle off the details of the latest inexplicable phenomena.
“Something came through the rift last night and I went to pick it up. And it was like, this box - like, an old phone box, kinda. Anyway, it was too big to take back myself, so I called up Mark. He said it was - what was it, Mark?”
There was mumbling from Mark in the background, and Gwen let her eyes fall closed, hoping desperately that Kat would get to the point sometime soon.
“He says it’s a police call box - I dunno, something they used to have in the sixties or something. Anyway, it had doors and we figured we might as well open it and have a look, only we couldn’t. Not with any of our tech, and it only had an ordinary little Yale lock. So that’s like, way odd, right? And just little wooden doors, but we couldn’t break through them. And then I checked the reading from when it arrived, and it didn’t come through the rift.”
Kat paused for effect. Gwen was, in effect, nonplussed.
“It didn’t come through the rift? So, what’s it got to do with us, then?”
“No, you’re not getting it!”
“No, not really.”
“It didn’t come through the rift, but it did come through a disturbance in time and space.”
“...how?”
“No idea.”
“Wait,” a thought was trying to form in Gwen’s mind, but she wasn’t quite awake enough for it “what did you say it looked like - a phone box?”
“A wooden one. And blue.”
“Right, just - wait for me, I’m on my way in.”
“Oh no, it’s not here. We tried to shift it but couldn’t. It’s by the - ” she paused, she’d been about to say ‘bombsite’ but changed her mind “by the Plass. Where the Plass used to be. You know.”
“Yes, okay, I’ll meet you there. Give me ... twenty minutes.”
She hung up, cutting off Kat’s cheery farewell, and let her eyes fall shut again, just for a moment, before starting the sluggish process of getting ready for work.
It ended up taking her a little over thirty minutes to get to the Plass, and she thought that was making damn good time considering five of them had been spent in line at the coffee shop. Katia and Mark were waiting in front of the big black wall that hid the crater behind from view. At forty-three, Mark West was the oldest, though newest, member of the Torchwood team. He’d been a doctor for almost twenty years when he happened upon an alien parasite during a surgery; so Gwen had invited him out to lunch. She’d been just about to spike his drink when he’d started to talk about how glad he was that it was all true, and finally out in the open. Granted, the 456 had terrified him - he had a daughter, kept her home the entire time, hadn’t listened to a word the government said, you couldn’t trust them a jot, he said, not after that thing with the Toclafane was all hushed up and swept under the rug. The American President gets killed and the Prime Minister disappears and no-one knows a damn thing about it? Not bloody likely. But it was all out now, and yes, it was terrifying. But at the same time, it was the most incredible feeling - to know that they weren’t alone, weren’t the only spark of light in the big, black universe. Gwen held the retcon is her hand while he spoke, and when he had finished, she put it back in her pocket. They still needed a medic, after all.
Katia playfully berated her for being late, before setting off around the bombsite to the other side of the Plass, practically skipping. This was clearly a huge buzz for her, but then, most days at Torchwood were. She god a real kick from the new and the strange, from anything she didn’t understand. Well, thought Gwen, she was bound to get a kick out of whatever was coming next. The black wall beside them rolled around a corner and she saw it, the little blue box she’d seen once before - well, a hundred times really. Every time she’d replayed that piece of surveillance from the Plass during Jack’s disappearance: the odd little blue box, Jack running towards it, and them both disappearing together. And here it was; a curiously unimposing thing; if she hadn’t known it could somehow transport itself through space and time, she would have ignored it entirely. As it was, she stepped up to the double doors, and knocked. Well, they were doors - what else was she supposed to do? After a moment she heard footsteps coming, impossibly, from within the box, and yet much further away. Feeling extremely foolish, and a little off-balance, Gwen called out in a voice that very nearly trembled with uncertainty “Doctor?”
The door opened and a man appeared from within wearing a rumpled suit and a rather distracted smile.
“Gwen,” he said, and she very nearly jumped “lovely to see you do come in.”
Katia laughed “Well, of course, an inexplicable disturbance in time and space turns out to be a friend of yours.”
“Well, more of a friend of a friend, really...” Gwen mumbled, not breaking her stare from the scruffy waif of a man who’d dragged Earth back from the Medusa Cascade. He grinned “Nonsense, any friend of Jack’s is a friend of mine.”
“Are you sure that’s wise?”
“Nope.”
He popped the ‘p’, still grinning, still very much only half there, his mind clearly on something quite other.
“Anyway, as I say, do come in, and your friends, the more the merrier!” he said, and Katia’s eyebrows furrowed.
“Four people, in that little box?”
“Five, actually, it’s bigger on the inside.” And he pulled the other door open and stood aside so they could see that there was, in fact, a positively cavernous room inside the phone box. Her feeling of disorientation now settling as a constant presence, Gwen followed him inside. Mark followed close behind, laughing out of pure amazement.
“This job just gets stranger and stranger, doesn’t it?” he said to Gwen, who nodded vaguely looking back towards the door.
“Where’s Katia?”
She was asking Mark, but the doctor answered “She’ll be running in circles around the outside of the TARDIS - that’s this, my ship - she’ll come back in a minute to say something about ‘what the something or other’ and then run outside to do it again. I wouldn’t worry, she’ll get tired of it soon enough.”
Just as he finished speaking, Katia appeared at the door to say “What the hell is this thing? It’s like - like, mental!” then she disappeared again. The Doctor scratched the back of his neck.
“Never quite figured out why they do that. Checking for trapdoors or something...”
Mark was looking around the console, as if searching for something, and said “So, who’s the fifth person? You said there was someone else.”
The Doctor’s façade of a casual demeanour dropped instantly.
“That’s Romana. She’s sleeping, she’s - not very well.”
The slightest pause around ‘sleeping’ and the way the light shuttered completely behind his eyes told Gwen that ‘not very well’ had been a serious understatement.
“She’s the reason I’m here, actually. Gwen, when I last saw Jack he was working on something for me. He was building a Zero Room. Please tell me he’s finished it.”
The desperation in his eyes was painful, and Gwen had to look at the floor to reply “No, not quite.”
The Doctor said something that the TARDIS couldn’t quite translate into English, and the sound fell on Gwen’s ears like shattering glass and she flinched. Katia came clattering down the gangway to join them, but her footsteps fell to a standstill when she caught the dark look on the Doctor’s face.
“Who died?” she asked. She hadn’t had to learn yet that at Torchwood that was never a joke.
“No-one, yet -” said the Doctor, broken out of his momentary lapse in energy “where’s your new base? Co-ordinates, rather than an address if that’s alright, the GPS on this old thing is a bit funny lately.”
“We’re in temporary offices at the moment, the Zero Room is in storage.”
“Right, well, ring Jack, tell him to meet us there.”
Gwen hesitated, her mouth dancing around words that wouldn’t quite articulate. The Doctor stopped fiddling with dials on the console and looked up.
“What?”
“He’s not here.”
“Well, where’d he go?”
She pointed upwards and shrugged. The Doctor rubbed a hand over brows.
“But - I thought he was staying here. He had some reason he wanted to stay here.”
“He did. There was - someone. He died.”
The Doctor’s eyes darted down to the floor and back up to her.
“I’m sorry. Listen, I’ve got to get to that Zero Room. I can finish it - I have to finish it.”
Gwen noticed for the first time that his eyes were horribly bloodshot, and bruises were creeping up his neck. She had been so distracted by the simple fact of him that she hadn’t noticed he was in a terrible state. She took his hand.
“Are you sure you want to be working? I mean, you seem like you need a bit of medical attention yourself, Doctor.”
She covered the irony with a soft smile. He took his hand back rather too quickly and replaced his deliberately disarming grin.
“Oh, don’t worry about me, I’ve been worse, much worse. But Romana, she is a tad worse. But if I can get her into a zero environment she’ll be fine - I think.”
The desperation leaked back into his fading false optimism and she dropped the matter instantly, but glanced back at Mark, who winked, he would keep an eye on the Doctor. Reassured, she told Kat to give him the co-ordinates and headed for the door. Katia called after her “You’re not coming with us?”
“I’ll meet you there, I need to stop by the office” she said, and disappeared before Kat had the chance to ask any more questions.
“So,” said the Doctor “you two are Torchwood - so I’m safe in assuming you’re interested in alien technology?”
“Well, it’s sort of in the job description, isn’t it?” said Mark, and Katia merely giggled, eyeing up the console like a normal teenage girl would eye up shirtless lads at the beach. The Doctor gave them both a wicked grin.
“You’ll love this next bit then.” And he cranked a lever. With its bizarre humming, crashing, groaning whir, the time rotor came to life. A huge shudder ran through the TARDIS and Mark and Katia found themselves both on the floor. The room seemed to spin and fall out of place and then suddenly it was back again. The roar of alien engines faded to a distant, high pitched hum and the vibrations in the floor fell still. When they had caught their breath and picked themselves off the floor, they realised that the Doctor had already slipped out the door. Mark followed him as quickly as his unsteady feet would allow, and Katia too, though a great deal slower, gazing through the grated floor at the mess of wire and lights below as she went.
The Doctor had already found his way through the mess of what was largely discarded alien junk, to the big white box at the centre of the warehouse. It reached just above his head in height and would have just fitted in the TARDIS console room. To call it white was something of a misnomer, it had been white, but one side was completely scorched, and black dust clung in patches to rest, delineating the direction of the blast. On the side that remained to the whitest, there was a door set deep in bolted metal frame. He looked at it uncertainly - it looked tremendously heavy, but, if the zero environment within had any stability it should weigh nothing at all. That was the nature of a zero environment; no gravity, no force, no impact. That’s what made it the perfect place for the body to heal itself. He twisted the lock and pushed gingerly against the door. It didn’t budge. He braced his shoulder against it, ignoring the swollen and bruised skin, and pushed. It crept open, just enough for his thin frame to slip through. Once inside, he leaned back against it, shutting it again - enclosing the separate reality and theoretically stabilising the zero environment. But instead of the lightness and the mysterious scent of roses that he remembered washing over him in his own Zero Room, he found himself swimming in a frayed reality. It was definitely unfinished and, furthermore, damaged by the blast that destroyed the hub. He felt sick, and as he reached for the door he saw his arms elongate before him as the walls of the room expanded. As he moved to pull it open every motion had to be pushed through a thick syrup of the condensing air around him - no, not the air, but the very space it occupied was thickening. The door no longer seemed heavy, only impossibly slow, and when he pulled himself towards it, certain parts of his body seemed to take longer to get there than others. He stood by the slit of the open door, swaying slightly. The stable reality beyond washed over him like a cool breeze and he waited for his senses to rearrange themselves. When he was quite sure of where his feet were, he stepped back through the door and dragged it shut behind, cutting off the tendrils of nausea that clung to his guts.
Kat and Mark were waiting for him outside the room, Mark was frowning deeply and Kat’s eyes were slightly wider than usual. The Doctor looked down to discover that one of the bright red blisters on his stomach had burst and blood was beginning to soak through his jacket.
“Oops,” he looked sheepish “try to avoid doing that again ... right!”
Very suddenly he was all energy again, loosing bolts from around the door with his sonic screwdriver and prattling on as he did so “You know,” he told them over the rattle of falling bolts “this is a screwdriver. And it’s been a screwdriver for several hundred years, but this quite possibly the first time I’ve used it to remove screws.”
He was stopped by Mark’s hand on his arm, pulling back from the door.
“Just hold up for a minute, mate. You’re obviously not in a fit state to be working like this.”
“Oh no, it looks much worse than it is, honestly.”
“Look, I’m a doctor and I can tell you no human being could be losing that much blood and be as absolutely bloody fine as you’re pretending to be.”
“Lucky for me I’m not human, then.”
Mark was momentarily set back, but soon recovered; he was nothing if not persistent.
“Will you at least let me dress the wound?”
“Got your kit with you?”
“Gwen’s bringing it.”
“Can you do it while I work?”
“Now look, I re- ”
“Oh, and don’t even think about trying to take a blood sample.”
Mark grabbed the hand that held the sonic screwdriver and pulled the Doctor towards him.
“Stop, just stop, you’ve got to understand -”
“No, you’ve got to understand,” the Doctor turned, eyes suddenly full of the cold fire that quelled all arguments “if I don’t finish this in time Romana may never wake up. I’ve already lost her once and I can’t do it again. I won’t.”
Mark let go of the Doctor’s hand and held up his own in a gesture of surrender before retreating to sit on a case of kitchen appliances that hadn’t been invented yet. The Doctor removed a panel from the wall of the Zero Room and started pulling out chunks of wiring, seemingly at random. Then he stopped and peered into the impossibly deep darkness behind.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got a dilithium switch for a quantum stabiliser, have you?” he asked over his shoulder. Kat had to consciously disengage from the stunned stillness that had taken her at the Doctor’s angry outburst.
“Not sure, I’ll have to ask Tan...”
Tanydd Llewellyn was Torchwood’s new secretary. Gwen tried very hard not to think of her as Ianto’s replacement, but it was difficult. Like him, she came to them from Torchwood One, a survivor of the Battle of Canary Warf. She had wide hips and a round face that gave her a soft, comfortable look that disguised the diamond-hard personality beneath. When Gwen came through the office door she was on the phone to Kat, scrolling through the archives for something. Their temporary base was an ordinary office in an ordinary office block, in which they hid under the guise of an IT research and development company. The cover wouldn’t last much longer though, some of the people in the offices around them had been retconned so often they were starting to show early signs of Alzheimer’s.
“Aha!” Tanydd told the phone “Found it, section 6, row F. Anything else? Okay, keep me posted.”
No sooner had Gwen shut the door than she was fixed under Tanydd’s sharp eyes.
“So then,” she said, and Gwen had the strongest impression that she was fifteen again, and about to be told off by her teacher for skipping class “who is he?”
“He’s the Doctor.”
“Doctor who?”
“Don’t know that he has another name ... haven’t heard it at any rate.
“It is him, then?”
“Who?”
“The Doctor, the man from Canary Warf. The man Torchwood was founded to defend the Earth against, and spent a century tracking.”
“Umm ... yes. Think so.”
“Well, shouldn’t we arrest him, or something?”
Gwen in the meantime had made her way to her desk and found the little machine she was looking for. She was in the middle of hooking it up to her computer when she looked up in alarm.
“No, no, definitely no arresting of anyone. I think - I think he needs our help. And I think we probably owe it to him.”
Tanydd returned to her computer, clearly beaten and clearly disconcerted by the fact, and Gwen returned to hers. The device on her desk was about the same size as the battered white kettle in their little kitchenette, but its shape was that of a black sphere circled by a silver equator line, out of which sprouted delicate metal wires that curved slightly down with the weight of their bulbous silver ends. A thick spike sat at the very top of the sphere pointing skyward, which terminated in a series of three black discs. The three glass legs that it stood on seemed much too spindly to support its weight, but in fact the whole thing weighed almost nothing. This machine, when fed the right information, should have been able to send a message absolutely anywhere in the universe, that’s what Jack had said. But Jack was a bloody liar, because the information she programmed it with to connect it with Jack’s wriststrap no longer connected with anything at all. For a couple of months it’d been fine, a little red light in the software telling that Jack was three suns away or on some moon; and if she needed him, if everything went to all hell and Torchwood needed Captain Jack, then all she had to do was hit enter and the message would be sent, and Jack would make good on his promise and come back home. But a few months ago, the little red light that was Captain Jack Harkness, somewhere in the universe, had disappeared. And try as she might, Gwen couldn’t get it back again. Now the Doctor had come looking for him, and she knew Jack would want to be here.
She sighed as the screen gave her nothing but white noise and a message telling her to check she’d typed the co-ordinates correctly.
“Yes I bloody have.” She told it, hitting the keyboard slightly harder than was necessary. She left it recalibrating and picked up Mark’s medical bag and her gun. She always carried it with her these days, even down to the shops. Rhys hated having it in the house, but she’d told him, if aliens came to take their baby she wanted a chance to shoot them in the face. He gave up, in the end. She left Tanydd trawling curiously through a few thousand Torchwood One files on the Doctor and headed back out the door.
The Doctor looked positively terrifying. His eyes were bright red and the front of his shirt equally so, there were bloodstain on the panels he’d taken from the wall and little pool of it gradually seeping out of the jacket he’d left lying on the floor. His skin was getting steadily paler and his breaths becoming more laboured, but he seemed capable of keeping going through strength of will alone. Mark hovered just behind him, ready to catch him the moment he fell, and Katia darted into the rows of stored equipment and back, after this, that and the other part. Gwen hesitated slightly in shock when she saw him, and then ran to Mark to pass him his bag. A little stack of gauze in hand, Mark made another attempt at stopping the Doctor, who whirled around and fixed him under red eyes - but said nothing. Mark spoke softly, but firmly.
“Thirty second, just give me thirty seconds, you can count them, if you like.”
The Doctor swayed slightly on the spot, his eyes blinking in and out of focus. Finally, he said “okay.”
“Okay, first, we’ll get your shirt out of the way - okay, now, you hold that there for me a moment - Gwen, give us a hand, could you?”
Gwen took the gauze from the Doctor’s loose grip and pressed it tightly to the wound whilst Mark took bandages and painkillers from his bag.
“You are not injecting me with anything.” The Doctor objected, slightly sluggishly.
“It’s just a painkiller, it’ll help.”
“No it won’t. Different species, remember? Different biochemistry.”
A little reluctantly, Mark put the syringe back in his bag and set about cleaning the wound instead. As he did his eyes ran over the rest of the Doctor’s battered body.
“You’re a mess,” he muttered “you should be in a hospital.”
“Oh no, not a fan of hospitals.”
“That’s hardly the point.”
“Have a listen to my heartbeat.”
“Why?”
“Go on, humour me.”
Gwen’s eyes darted between the Doctor and Mark, trying to see if she could find whatever she felt like she had missed. But Mark was looking as confused as her as he reached for his stethoscope. Gwen watched, no longer noticing the gauze beneath her hands growing damper, as Mark lifted the stethoscope to the Doctor’s chest. His eyes widened with sudden shock, and he moved the head of the stethoscope across the Doctor’s chest, before dropping it back in his bag.
“Still think I should go to hospital?” said the Doctor. Mark nodded, not in affirmative, but in unwilling agreement. The bleeding seemed to have slowed to a gluggy trickle that clung to the opened sore, so Gwen moved away, leaving Mark to finish arranging bandages. Kat sidled up and leaned in to speak in a conspiratorial whisper.
“He’s an alien.”
“Apparently so.”
“That’s not his real body, then.”
“Dunno ... bipedal humanoid forms are common but...”
“What do you know about him? Where does he come from?”
“All I know is what Jack told me. He’s someone from Jack’s past and well, when it came to Jack and talking about his past - oh, he was all secrets and half-told stories..” Gwen realised that she was dangerously close to nostalgia and pulled herself forcefully back into the present.
“Anyway, if you want to know anything about him I’m afraid you’ll have to ask him - or, actually, check the archives, there’s a few files on him.”
“But ignore anything about phantasmagoria,” the Doctor called across to them, and Gwen realised he’d been listening to the entire conversation “that’s just good old Queen Vicky - lovely woman really, but a bit on the conservative side when it comes to interstellar diplomacy. Which I find hypocritical, frankly, considering all the invading she did.”
Gwen wondered mildly if he was joking, before deciding that the answer probably wouldn’t fit in her brain. After another split second fracas, the Doctor returned to his work and Gwen joined Mark who had returned in defeat to his box.
“He is far, far too unwell to be working.”
“Well, you tried.”
“And failed.”
“Can’t win them all, can you?”
“Certainly not,” interjected the Doctor from somewhere inside the wall “not against me, anyway.”
“Hey!” Gwen called back “Talking about you, not to you.”
“And yet I insist on hearing everything you say, I’m rude like that.”
Gwen decided to ignore him.
“Anyway,” she told Mark “I’ve got a husband at home who’s been left holding the baby again, so...”
“Of course, sorry to bring you out, Gwen.”
“Oh no, don’t worry yourself. I wouldn’t have missed this, believe me. I might pop back later, but, keep me informed, eh.”
The husband in question was in fact, not at home. Despite his job being not quite as important as saving the earth from alien invasion, it still required him to turn up - preferably prior to lunchtime. Their emergency babysitter had chosen today to perform a disappearing act so complete Rhys very nearly suspected she’d been swallowed up by the rift. And so it came to be that, not for the first time, the manager of Harwood’s was sat in his office trying to juggle paperwork, a ceaselessly ringing phone, and a ceaselessly crying baby. The first time he’d had to do this had been a novelty, even a little bit fun, with half the staff crowding into his small office to coo and make funny scrunched-up faces. But enjoyment had worn quickly thin, and now he was frankly fed up. Unluckily for Gwen, he was ruminating on just this fact when his mobile rang.
“Rhys, I got your message - oh, I am sorry, pet.”
“You’re always sorry, you’re an incredibly sorry woman these days, you know that?”
“I know, I know, we had a bit of a - a thing this-morning, and, well, you know. My job.”
“And what about my job? I know it’s not action hero, saving the world stuff, but I still have to do it, you know. I’m the manager, people sort of expect me to show up.”
“Well what do you want me to do, Rhys? Bring our baby in with me to Torchwood?”
“Well, why not? He’s not going to come into any harm in the office, is he?”
“Rhys! My last office was blown up!”
“Well maybe you shouldn’t be working there, then!”
“Oh, that’s it, that’s just it, isn’t it? You want me at home, looking after baby and playing housewife?”
“That isn’t bloody it! Gwen, don’t be bloody stupid! I just - I just -”
“What?”
“I worry about you, you know.”
“Oh sweetheart, I know. Look, I’ll call Tan, and tell that if another bloody dalek invasion fleet lands I’m still staying in tonight, okay? And we can have a proper chat and sort something out.”
“...okay. Okay - oh Christ, he needs changing again.”
“Oh, lucky you. Alright love, see you soon.”
“Love you.”
“Bye.”
*****
The Doctor’s frantic work pace came to a very sudden halt. He stepped away from the mess of wires that trailed out of the wall, and just looked at them. Then he took the sonic screwdriver back from where it rested between his teeth, lighting up sections of the dark inside of the wall in blue light, and peering at the tiny little scrolling numbers that floated in the air above his hand. Apparently satisfied, the screwdriver was returned to his pocket. He opened the Zero Room door once more, and it swung lightly into the room.
He turned back to Mark and Katia, smiling broadly once more “Can you smell it?” he said.
“What?” Mark was surprised by the question, but Kat stepped forward to the door and breathed deeply, her face lit up “Rose-petal tea! Ever had rose petal tea?” she asked the Doctor “It doesn’t really taste of anything but it smells great. It smells just like that!”
“Brilliant!” said the Doctor “That means it’s working!”
And he darted off between the rows of shelves and crates again, back to the TARDIS. Mark followed at a run, leaving Kat on her own in the doorway to the now functional Zero Room. She stepped inside, breathing deeply of the richly scented air, wondering what on earth (or otherwise) could be creating the olfactory illusion of roses. But the curiosity of it seemed to matter very little as the pink-grey light of the room seemed to fold lightly around her, filling her with a sense of utter tranquillity. The stress on her feet from running back and forth with heavy equipment simply melted away, and she lifted them off the ground entirely, curling up to hang in the centre of the space, entirely enclosed in the just-warm air. She was so entirely still, that when the door opened again, she felt the movements of Mark and the Doctor sending gentle ripples through the air towards her. Mark gasped in surprise when he saw her hanging in mid-air, but any alarm he may have felt was entirely negated by the zero environment. The Doctor was cradling a young red-headed girl in his arms, whom Katia took to be Romana. The odd thing was that she didn’t look sick at all - she just seemed to be asleep. But the Doctor was looking at her with such desperate concern, she was dying, or close to - it obvious in the way his eyes never left her shut lids, and how tightly and protectively he held her limp body. Even in the utter safety of the Zero Room he seemed loath to let her go; it seemed almost as if a physical force was pushing against him as he drew his arms away from her body, leaving her lying flat, suspended in zero relative gravity. He leaned in to listen to her breathing, and only when they seemed strong enough did he allow himself to fall back into the gently supporting air. Finally, the stress and tension drained away from his body, and he gradually sank into sleep.