Fic: Borrowed Robes - Part Three (Torchwood/Various, PG-13)
Title: Borrowed Robes - Part Three (Chapters Eight to Ten)
Author: Prochytes
Fandom: [in this part] Torchwood/Aubrey-Maturin/The Authority/Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Harry Potter
Rating: PG-13. Somewhat cracky, with a certain amount of violence and innuendo.
Pairing: [in this part] None (apart from Captain Harkness's temporal shenanigans)
Disclaimer: Torchwood belongs to the Beeb; the Aubrey-Maturin sequence belongs to the estate of the late Patrick O'Brian; the Wildstorm Universe belongs to DC Comics; Harry Potter belongs to JKR, and Buffy belongs to Mutant Enemy. None is I.
Summary: Torchwood Three and their unexpected allies face a battle in the Hub, and a problem even The Authority could not handle. If they fail, there could be multiversal consequences. No pressure, then.
Word Count: 2955.
A/N: This is a crossover, focussing on Torchwood, but with guest stars from five other fandoms. This part contains spoilers for Torchwood down to "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang". The fic would not have been possible without the beta-ing and advice of arachnekallisti.
8. Divers Alarums
In which bonds of amity are forged in the crucible of panic.
Tosh hurried back into the heart of the Hub, Stephen in tow. It was at once apparent that Torchwood protocol was still being observed. The obligatory blame-storming session was already in full swing.
“… my arse, tea-boy. What sort of steroids have you been putting in their feed?”
“Tosh, Dr. Maturin,” Jack moved to greet the two arrivals, “hi. We’d welcome your thoughts on how a dozen Weevils all got strong enough to smash our cell walls at once. Against the advice of my doctor,” he glanced back at the middle of the room, where Owen and Ianto were eye-balling each other, “I don’t think it’s because they’ve been eating their Scooby Snacks.”
“This is… bizarre.” Tosh settled into a chair to catch her breath. “Weevils aren’t anywhere near powerful enough to break the plexi-glass.”
“That’s changed.” Jack indicated a monitor. “Slowly but surely, they’re punching their way through our blast doors. Right now, they all hit like a Androgum who’s just found you sleeping with his sister.”
Tosh looked enquiring.
“Long story.” Jack rubbed his jaw reminiscently. “Let’s just say she was worth it…”
“I still say it has to be the food,” Owen paced across the room. “If Tosh can tear herself away from the Imminent Victorian for a sec, we can…”
A high-pitched klaxon sounded. Ianto gave vent to something Welsh and profane. Owen frowned. “What the hell was that?”
“The Mum’s Birthday alarm.” Ianto was scanning another screen.
“The what?”
“After our run-in with Bilis, I realized that we’re sometimes up against things that can get in the Hub without using the doors. And out.”
Ianto stared at Jack, who returned his gaze with a bright smile. Ianto lowered his head again, and resumed: “Anyway, I reconfigured the security systems to detect anything that tried to pull the same sort of stunt. The Mum’s Birthday alarm. For things that always creep up on you unawares.”
“Bloody hell, Ianto, you and your poxy names for things. It’s got an infernal screech to it, and all.”
“Well, I considered using the Mexican Hat Dance, Owen, but we would all have mistaken it for your ring-tone.” Ianto looked up. “We’re reading eight…”
“Eight?”
“… eight intruders. They’ve appeared down below.”
“With the Weevils? Someone should have packed an A to Z.” Owen smirked. “Nothing like having one problem sort out anoth…”
A muffled boom shook the room. Owen winced. “Me and my big mouth.”
Jack joined Ianto at his station. “What just happened?”
“We lost our blast doors. It wasn’t the Weevils. The intruders must have forced them open.”
“I see.” Jack drew his gun. “Lady and gentlemen, we will shortly have company. Dress to impress. Dr. Maturin, please step into the Autopsy Room.”
The first wave took the familiar shape of four Weevils. What slathered after them into the main Hub, however, was something new. Slightly bigger than the Weevils, it looked like a crocodile half-way through swallowing a live hyena. There was a moment of silence, as five sets of feral eyes focussed on a single point.
“What are they staring at?” whispered Ianto as he looked back at the object of their gaze. Who swallowed nervously, and cleared her throat.
“Um… I think that would be me…” said Tosh.
Jack took aim. “Open fire.”
Whatever had enhanced the strength of the Weevils had also done wonders for their resilience. It swiftly became clear that several clear shots were needed to down one. The Torchwood team found themselves being forced back across the room, the three men doing their best to block their assailants’ path to Toshiko.
Tosh herself found her perceptions tearing into discrete drops of panic. The thing at the back jumping on Owen, the two of them going down together beside a work-station. Ianto accounting for a Weevil as it charged him, only to be slammed against the wall by its body. A claw smashing against her wrist, knocking the gun out of her hand. Herself defenceless, a Weevil flanking her on either side, as Jack rose from despatching one of their comrades. Jack raising his own gun against her assailants, but not even he could down both of them before…
Three shots rang out. The unknown creature’s head exploded. Both of the remaining Weevils dropped.
Jack scratched his head, and looked up at the two figures silhouetted against the doorway to the Autopsy Room.
“Sleeping Beauty picked the right moment to wake up, I see. Nice work splatting hyena-head, ma’ am. Where did you two get those guns?”
Angie shrugged. “I made them. Just now. Normally I would have gone for an automatic, or a rocket launcher, but I’m not quite myself yet, and I wouldn’t want to smear you guys across the scenery.”
“See?” said Tosh excitedly. “I told you she makes things!”
“Roll over, Blue sodding Peter,” came the somewhat muffled voice of Owen. “And speaking of rolling over, could someone get the cold meats counter here off of me?”
“That was good shooting,” said Jack, as he hefted the carcass away from his medic, “but I’m curious, Doctor Maturin. There were two Weevils on Tosh. How did you know which one I’d be gunning for?”
“It seemed a reasonable supposition, Captain Harkness, that you would target the larger, as presenting the greater threat.” Stephen advanced into the main Hub, and helped Ianto to his feet. “I therefore followed the sound doctrine enunciated by a naval gentleman of my acquaintance, and chose the lesser of two Weevils.”
9. Flotsam and Jetsam
In which strangers on a plane compare notes.
“Will this hold them back?” grunted Ianto. He, Jack, and Owen were hauling the largest available filing cabinets across the entrances to the main Hub. Owen shrugged.
“Wouldn’t have thought so. If they can get past the blast doors, this little lot should be a walk-over. Might slow them down, though.”
“Things still don’t add up. If they want…” Ianto darted a look behind him, and lowered his voice, “if they want Tosh, and they can teleport, why don’t they just appear in here and grab her?”
“Teleportation is dicey,” Jack lowered one of the cabinets into place. “You have to be very sure that the terrain you’re going into hasn’t changed from what you expect. Otherwise, you pop back into occupied space, maybe fuse with something like this…” he patted the box, “and, suddenly, ‘buns of steel’ isn’t a metaphor.”
“So what’s their play, sir?”
“Best guess? The first wave was speculative: seeing what we’ve got. The next one won’t be as easy.”
“Oh well,” Owen slammed another cabinet home, and grinned, “I never was one for the nursery slopes, anyway.”
Across the room, Tosh and Stephen, whose physical exiguity excused them both from furniture detail, were listening to Angie. “… so, my people are basically our Earth’s peace-keepers, operating out of the Carrier.”
“Which is?” prompted Tosh.
“A sentient ship, fifty miles wide and thirty-five deep, powered by a caged baby universe, cruising the inter-dimensional Bleed.” Tosh whimpered quietly, making Angie look up at her, “are you ok?”
“No worries,” said Owen, trying not to drop a stand on his foot. “I think that you just gave Tosh her first orgasm of the year.”
Tosh glared at Owen, and resumed: “But if your… Authority is so powerful, what went wrong? Why did you crash-land on Cardiff? On our Cardiff?”
“The Terrene Horde.”
“The what?”
“The Terrene Horde. A bio-engineered army, brewed by the Murder Colonels in the Birthing Vats of Zissel’ Teng. Since before World War Two, the Horde had been squirreled away in cryo. Then, a couple of days ago, something woke them up.
“The Colonels designed the Horde to be an army of super-soldiers. Strong, fast, tough… your basic economy-class meta-mook. Thousands of utterly subservient goons, all linked by a docile hive-mind.
“They should have been another day at the office for my guys. But something was wrong. The Horde were orders of magnitude more powerful than they should have been, and their hive-mind had somehow gotten smart. And focussed.”
“On what?”
“On me. You would have thought that they would be more preoccupied with, e.g., the guy who could kill them by looking at them, or the girl who was ripping off their heads with her feet…”
“That’s what I love about this job,” said Owen, sotto voce, “the characters you meet.”
“… but no dice. They stopped at nothing to get to me, and we were being overwhelmed. I tried to open a door back to the Carrier, so that the others could regroup, but it didn’t work. Something - something powerful - was blocking access to the Bleed.
“Things were getting worse and worse. In the end, the Doctor…”
“What did you say?” Jack twisted away from the makeshift barricade to stare at Angie.
“The Doctor - our shaman - cast a spell that was supposed to shunt me somewhere safe.”
“A spell?” Tosh’s nose wrinkled. Jack turned back to his work.
“Does the idea of magic upset you, Tosh?” Owen smirked. “Next you’ll be telling me you don’t believe in fairies.”
“Anyway, the Doctor did manage to transport me, but I didn’t wind up anywhere safe. I found myself in mid-air, plummeting towards this Earth’s take on Cardiff. And on my own, I can’t get back.”
“That is absolutely fascinating,” Tosh breathed. She looked at Stephen, who had been following the account with equal attention. “I think that we have the explanation for what happened to you, Stephen.”
“How so, my dear?”
“Dr. Maturin,” Tosh turned back to Angie, “is from an alternate Earth too, one with somewhat unusual characteristics. I think that his native spacetime abuts what we call the Rift. In our universe, the Rift’s proximity causes involuntary time-travel. Where Stephen comes from, though, it seems to produce generalized temporal dilation instead, like a scar pulling at the healthy skin around it. His Earth has only reached the early Nineteenth Century, for example. And there are other… oddities.”
“As I have said before, Toshiko, I believe that that you state your case with undue vehemence.”
“I don’t think that she does, Stephen,” said Jack. “From what you’ve said, your Earth crams way more into its years than they should be able to take. Your 1812 wasn’t an overture. It was the Ring cycle.”
“Anyway,” Tosh resumed, “it was still puzzling us what brought Stephen here. One minute he was happily bird-watching not far from his Llantrisant…”
“Reports of the Bearded Tern, unattested hitherto in that vicinity…”
“… the next, he was whisked to the middle of our Cardiff. Bit of a culture shock, as you can imagine, but Dr. Maturin is a very adaptable man. That FAQ which Gwen put together for our accidental tourists didn’t hurt, either.”
“Girl had to be good for something besides pouting and lilting. Ouch.”
“I’m sorry, Owen; was that your toe?”
“But the thing is this: even if the Rift does exert an influence on Stephen’s Earth, there’s no evidence that it’s ever created a bridge from there to ours before. Our manifestation of the Rift only accesses distant points of this spacetime. It doesn’t open up alternate realities.
“I think - and this is just a hypothesis, you understand - that when Angie was shunted out of her home dimension, the Rift, for want of a better word, ‘caught’ her. But that catch sent ripples through the Rift itself. Because the Rift tangles up time as well as space, some of the fall-out happened before the event that prompted it…”
“… and so Dr. Maturin’s appearance four weeks back was actually the prequel to Miss Spica’s tonight. Brilliant.” Jack smiled.
“Brilliant or not, we’re still in the shit.” Owen kicked a shelf into place. “We’ve got two trans-dimensional castaways we can’t send home. Oh yeah, and the local mega-vermin are all pumped up with a taste for techie. Not to mention their teleporting mates downstairs and whatever the hell that other thing was.”
“I suspect, Dr. Harper, that our woes are yet more substantial than you suppose.”
“Do what?”
“The concinnity between Miss Spica’s account of herself and our present plight is most suggestive.” Stephen inspected his gun with a critical eye. “If I understand your narrative aright, Miss Spica…”
“Call me Angie, please. Anyone I’ve already handed hardware can take intimacy as read.”
“… Angie, your problems began when creatures that share a collective will evinced unusual prowess and strength of purpose?”
“Yeah.”
“And this purpose was the destruction of yourself, disregarding your colleagues?”
“I can see where this is heading, Stephen,” Angie frowned, “and I don’t like the destination one bit.”
“Agreed.” Tosh had turned pale. “The same pattern - replicating itself across realities. What if…”
The rest of Tosh’s question petered out at the sight of the barricades melting.
10. Unexpected Patrons
In which little salvation is found from wood or steel.
As the manufacture of furniture fondue went, one could not help but admire the tempo. It was neither so slow as to leave any doubt about what was happening, nor so fast as to prevent a good view of the Daliesque distortions it entailed. The handles of the filing cabinets curved into sleepy, drunken grins as they collapsed.
Owen, who was standing nearest, had expected the figures disclosed by the viscous barricade to be more Weevils, or further rejects from The Garden of Earthly Delights. He was therefore disconcerted to see seven men in what looked like long dresses. Transvestites, in Owen’s experience, were not life-threatening (unless you counted that unfortunate misunderstanding in Pontypridd, which had been down to vodka and poor pub lighting). Then it struck him that they were probably cultists, which were an entirely different kettle of fish. His finger tightened on the trigger.
The weirdo in the lead waved the piece of wood he was holding, and barked a word. Owen’s gun flew from his deadened hand. The weirdo grinned. “You muggles and your guns,” he said.
“This from a man holding a dildo.” Owen’s forehead connected with the cultist’s nose. He went down, blood spurting. The next in line flourished his own stick, and whispered something that hurled Owen half-way across the room. He crawled over to join the others behind a desk.
“OK, guys; you’ve got my permission to waste these losers with extreme prejudice.”
“Wish we could,” said Ianto. “Whatever he did took out our guns too.”
“Bollocks. Can the human Argos catalogue whip us up some new ones sharpish?”
“Working on it,” hissed Angie. “I’m tired, and hurt, and slow right now. I can’t even manifest my own armour.”
The seven men advanced into the room. The one in the lead, still clutching his nose, focussed on Stephen with a look of recognition which was becoming all too familiar. He smiled; pointed his stick at the world-lost doctor; and said something which to Owen’s incredulous ears sounded a hell of a lot like “Abracadabra”.
The air shivered for a moment. Nothing else happened. The man with the broken nose looked puzzled.
Hi guys. Nice little Killing Curse there, by the way. Your average over-the-counterspell would have had serious trouble bouncing it. Good thing my mo-jo’s prescription.
“Show yourself, witch.” The man in the lead brandished his stick.
“And now an invisible American chick is wittering in our heads. Do you have any sodding clue what’s going on here, Harkness?” asked Owen.
Jack shrugged. “None at all. Sit tight until something explodes.”
My. What a big wand the gentleman has. Don’t really dig wands much myself. Thank you, Dr. Freud. The trouble with wands is this: every last sprig of ’em remembers what it was like to be a tree. And it’s not that hard to jog their memories.
The men in robes gasped with pain. Blood blossomed from their hands as the sticks they were holding grew thorns.
They’re all yours.
“Too bloody right they are.” Owen started to rise, until he felt the pressure of Tosh’s grip on his arm.
“I don’t think she was talking to you, Owen.”
In the middle of the room, air and darkness were shrugged off of slender shoulders, to reveal a girl in her late teens with messy brown hair. There was a stick in her right hand. It showed no sign of born-again verdure.
Stephen, Angie, and the home contingent retained enough presence of mind to duck as the girl raised the stick. Her voice put Latin through a mangle and pushed out sheets of silk, which swiftly cocooned the disarmed men. They toppled over, feebly twitching.
Jack whistled. “Now, there’s a girl who knows her way around a wand.” He rose, slowly and carefully. “Hi, miss. We come in peace. Well, I come in peace and these guys hide behind desks, but I think you’ll agree that they’re doing a pretty pacific job. Where’s your telepathic friend?”
“Here.” Beside a nearby chair, a small, red-haired woman blew out the candle in her hand. This act somehow made sense of the fact that they had been aware she was there all along, much as one might suddenly find one knew all the lyrics to a song heard in childhood but decades forgotten. Owen’s brow creased as he tried to cope with the mnemonic vertigo.
“I was numbing you to my presence,” the red-head explained. “Undetectability on a shoestring. We can’t all have borrowed cloaks of invisibility. Time’s short, so I’ll keep things simple. This is Hermione…”
“Hello.”
“… and I’m Willow. We’re witches from two different alternate Earths, and we brought munchies. I’d say more, but I’m going to be busy passing out.”
The red-head swayed, and crumpled to the floor.