Crossing the Rift: Affairs of Cardiff and the Kawoosh - Chapter 4
Title: Crossing the Rift: Affairs of Cardiff and the Kawoosh
Author: sinisterx18
Rating: PG-13
Crack!Pairings: Capt. Jack H./Daniel Jackson, Col. Jack O./Ianto Jones, Teal'c/OC, Owen Harper/Anise
Final Pairings: Capt. Jack H./Ianto Jones, Col. Jack O./Samantha Carter
Warnings: Spoilers for TW season 1 and SG-1 through season 4. Also massive amounts of crack.
Summary: Simultaneous accidents bring Torchwood and SG-1 together, but their attempts to fix the problem brings them together in ways they never expected.
AN: This one's a little shorter, but would have been to long if I had included the next section (which is probably one of the best, just by the way). Such is life. If you missed Chapter 1, you can read it here.
After what felt like hours, everyone relevant to this story gathered in the infirmary, while Frasier read off her clipboard. This felt like hours because it actually did take several hours. Consequently, Owen was annoyed, both Jacks were grumbling under their respective breaths, and Daniel was significantly more sober.
"Well?" General Hammond asked. Not having been forced to go through the battery of tests the others had to deal with, he was less annoyed than they were, but equally impatient, 'cause he's like that.
"They're clean with the exception of slightly raised blood-alcohol levels," Frasier reported. "SG-1's DNA matches their... own. And Torchwood is all entirely human. I found a few unusual traces in Captain Harkness' system, but I don't believe it should be contagious, or can't be explained by years of space travel."
"No Goa'uld?" Hammond asked, relieved.
Janet shook her head. "No. Not a symbiote among them."
"Good." Hammond started towards the two teams, adding over his shoulder, "Nice work, Doctor."
"So, General, am I me?" Colonel O'Neill quipped as General Hammond made his approach. "And when can we get out of here? I hear there's cake in the mess."
Hammond decided to ignore the Colonel's second question. "Colonel, I'm happy to say that you and your team have been cleared. Yours too..." Hammond trailed off trying to remember a name or the proper form of address for the man who seemed to lead the group of people who had appeared with SG-1.
"Captain, Captain Jack Harkness." Captain Jack Harkness introduced himself.
"Well, Captain," Captain of what? That uniform is 1940's... And RAF... Hammond puzzled over the strange man for a fraction of a second, and then continued. "You and your team are not hosts to hostile aliens, nor do you seem to pose any medical threat to the base. SG-1 seems to think you're friendlies, but I'm sure you'll understand that until I'm certain of that the five of you will have escorts and are confined to the base."
The general was not prepared for the decidedly undisciplined response he got from three fifths of the Torchwood team. His command style was certainly on the more lax side of things, but for Captain Harkness to pout, the oddly amphibious one to mutter, "Bloody military," and the woman with the gap between her teeth to go off on a tirade about not having a change of clothes was unsettling to say the least.
"Airman," Hammond once again addressed the room. There was always someone who answered to "Airman" within earshot of him at all times. "Please escort the new arrivals to quarters, get them settled and keep them out of restricted areas of the base."
"But sir, the entire base is restricted." Ah, the joys of working under NORAD.
"I see your point, Airman." Somedays Hammond missed running a normal base. "Alright, restrict them to quarters, the mess, and recreation areas unless otherwise requested by Doctor Frasier, members of SG-1 or myself. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir!" And off the anonymous airman went, Torchwood in tow.
"SG-1, please follow me to the briefing room. We need to have a talk about where you were during the five hours you were MIA."
"Five hours?" Daniel asked, apparently intent on starting the briefing as they walked. "We weren't gone for five hours."
"Oh no?" General Hammond asked. He half turned around to look at the rest of the team, who were all nodding in agreement with Daniel's statement. "How long would you say that you were gone?"
They glanced at each other.
"Maybe..." Jack paused, counting on his fingers "20 hours?"
The others nodded. "That sounds about right, sir," Sam agreed, either to Hammond or O'Neill, the general wasn't sure.
"So you're telling me that there's a time lapse between the two universes?" he asked her. "Or... wherever you were?"
Sam nodded tentatively. "It's hard to say," she admitted. "But we think that the device we found on P3X-075 somehow connected our universe with Torchwood's. They have an almost identical device, which Ianto Jones apparently accidentally activated just before our arrival."
Ignoring the alliteration, Hammond frowned in concentration. They had reached the door to the briefing room during this deceptively short conversation, and the general opened it while still pondering the Major's explanation.
"Major, do you mean to say that Dr. Jackson and Mr. Jones activated the separate devices at the exact same moment?" he asked.
No one asked how he knew that it had been Daniel to pick up the strange alien device and push the button on it.
"No, sir," Jack O'Neill replied innocently. "Apparently, Ianto activated the device on his end about two years after Daniel got to ours."
"But sirs!" Sam seemed to get very excited as a wonderful new insight occurred to her. "As I hope you've all figured out by now, time is relative. However, if Newton's idea of time as objective does hold some truth outside our fairly limited scale of observation..." She trailed off, lost in thought.
"Major Carter, you have discontinued sharing your revelation," Teal'c pointed out after a beat or two.
"Oh! Right... In some grand massive scale they could have been pushed at the same moment if perceived from one of the higher dimensions. I can't prove it at the moment, and the odds would be astronomical, but the implications!"
"Couldn't they just have started counting two years earlier?" Daniel didn't want to rain on Sam's parade, but rewriting the laws that govern time seemed a little extreme.
"Space-monkey has a point, Major." Jack loved to watch her when she got all techno-babble-y about something, but... "Sometimes the simplest answer works just as well."
"They could also work on the principle of transporting the first user to the device pushed second, no matter how far apart temporally that second device was activated," Sam conceded. "Occam's razor takes all the fun out of things," she muttered under her breath. Everyone chose to ignore her; most of them didn't know what Occam's razor was anyway.
After finally getting their post-mission check-ups done (SG-1 had caused quite the line to form), SG-6 came in to join the briefing. Lieutenant Ryan held his universe's button; he was being careful not to push it now that someone had finally explained that it caused nine people to jump universes.
"You took it off!?!?" exclaimed a very distraught Daniel Jackson. "The damage, the context that may have been lost..." He trailed off in horror.
"Relax, Doctor Jackson," Lieutenant Fischer tried to talk the man down. "We took hi-res images, and caused as little damage as we could. But we had to get it back here, it was the only thing within three klicks that wasn't a rock or a tree." Everyone in the room shuddered slightly at the mention of trees. Every planet just had so many of them.
"You made the right call, SG-6," Sam assured them. Turning to Daniel she said, "This is really more my field than yours. There wasn't any writing near the button, but Tosh and I were making considerable progress with the one on their end."
"Excuse me," Lieutenant Brooks interrupted, "But what exactly happened to you guys? You were there, then you weren't, and then you were here."
SG-1 quickly filled SG-6, and General Hammond in on everything that had happened. They did, however, glaze over the part where 3/4 of them got hammered in a Welsh pub because they were bored.
Teal'c poured himself a cup of coffee. SG-6 and General Hammond jumped slightly, his stoic silence had almost overcome his imposing form.
Finishing the story, Sam added, "But to be frank, sir, I have no idea why we returned to this universe when and where we did."
Speaking up, Lieutenant Ryan sheepishly admitted, "I think that may have been my fault, ma'am. The device was in my pack. The rest of my gear may have pressed it when I set my pack down to get out my GDO right as Colonel Barnes dialed Earth."
O'Neill sighed. "Don't you know a button when you see it? And what shouldn't you do with unknown buttons?" Directing is gaze at Daniel, he continued, "Push them. If you don't know what it does, for cryin' out loud, don't push it!"
Meanwhile, the Torchwood team was settling in to their new (hopefully temporary) quarters. Naturally, they had all inexplicably gathered in their Jack's room.
Toshiko was reading something that no one else understood, tapping her finger on the desk as she jotted down theories about their spontaneous universe-jumping. Nearby, Owen was playing with a yo-yo that he had stolen from the other Jack while he was drunk.
Gwen was standing by the door, looking out the small window at the bustling corridors filled with life. They were, of course, completely deserted, but a girl could dream.
And Ianto was sitting on his Jack's bed, something that Harkness found incredibly, unavoidably sexy.
As for himself, the Captain was looking at his team over the cover of the book he had long since given up on reading. As grateful as he was to Daniel for loaning them some literature to keep them entertained, the man had incredibly boring taste.
"What do you think they're talking about up there?" Owen asked, tossing the yo-yo towards the ceiling to indicate the briefing room. Not that any of the Torchwood team actually knew where the briefing room was, but the doctor had decided that it was in the general "up" direction, and no one cared to argue with him.
"Dunno," Gwen answered. "Probably trying to decide what to do with us until we can go back." She paused suddenly and glanced over at Tosh. "We can go back, can't we?" she asked worriedly.
"Well," Tosh answered slowly, glancing up from her reading, "SG-1 got back to their universe, so there seems to be no reason we can't. The trick will be returning without dragging them with us, as they did."
"Do we know why SG-1, and consequently us, ended up here?" Ianto didn't think the odds of getting back were very good if they didn't know why they'd left.
"No," she admitted. "But Sam and I were making a lot of progress. I'm sure we'll figure it out."
Jack, as anyone named Jack is apparently wont to do, was getting bored. "Hey!" he suggested excitedly, "Whadda ya' say we bust out?"
Gwen and Ianto were visibly appalled at Jack's poor annunciation (even if it was only for comedic reasons) and the idea of trying to "bust out" when under armed guards in a highly secure military installation that also happened to be their only hope of getting home.
"I meant we should get something to eat..." Jack uncharacteristically muttered. His team was no fun sometimes.
"Sounds brilliant - I'm starved." Owen followed up on his agreement by banging on the door and yelling "Oi! You out there! Any chance we could go to the canteen?"
"Canteen?" One of the airmen stationed outside whispered to the other in confusion at the decidedly British term.
"He means commissary." Ianto shouted through the door. "I believe it's on level 22." Catching the looks his team was shooting him, Ianto defended himself by saying, "What? I know everything."
Jack sighed. That archivist of his was good. It was a wonder the man had only almost destroyed the world once. The twenty-five-year-old could be running the world if he set his spookily brilliant mind to it.
Which, disturbingly enough, he might one day.
However, they wouldn't have time for that, as suddenly and without warning, their room disappeared, and they found themselves back in the base.
From somewhere behind them, they heard O'Neill sigh loudly. "Aw, crap," he complained.
Chapter 5
Author: sinisterx18
Rating: PG-13
Crack!Pairings: Capt. Jack H./Daniel Jackson, Col. Jack O./Ianto Jones, Teal'c/OC, Owen Harper/Anise
Final Pairings: Capt. Jack H./Ianto Jones, Col. Jack O./Samantha Carter
Warnings: Spoilers for TW season 1 and SG-1 through season 4. Also massive amounts of crack.
Summary: Simultaneous accidents bring Torchwood and SG-1 together, but their attempts to fix the problem brings them together in ways they never expected.
AN: This one's a little shorter, but would have been to long if I had included the next section (which is probably one of the best, just by the way). Such is life. If you missed Chapter 1, you can read it here.
After what felt like hours, everyone relevant to this story gathered in the infirmary, while Frasier read off her clipboard. This felt like hours because it actually did take several hours. Consequently, Owen was annoyed, both Jacks were grumbling under their respective breaths, and Daniel was significantly more sober.
"Well?" General Hammond asked. Not having been forced to go through the battery of tests the others had to deal with, he was less annoyed than they were, but equally impatient, 'cause he's like that.
"They're clean with the exception of slightly raised blood-alcohol levels," Frasier reported. "SG-1's DNA matches their... own. And Torchwood is all entirely human. I found a few unusual traces in Captain Harkness' system, but I don't believe it should be contagious, or can't be explained by years of space travel."
"No Goa'uld?" Hammond asked, relieved.
Janet shook her head. "No. Not a symbiote among them."
"Good." Hammond started towards the two teams, adding over his shoulder, "Nice work, Doctor."
"So, General, am I me?" Colonel O'Neill quipped as General Hammond made his approach. "And when can we get out of here? I hear there's cake in the mess."
Hammond decided to ignore the Colonel's second question. "Colonel, I'm happy to say that you and your team have been cleared. Yours too..." Hammond trailed off trying to remember a name or the proper form of address for the man who seemed to lead the group of people who had appeared with SG-1.
"Captain, Captain Jack Harkness." Captain Jack Harkness introduced himself.
"Well, Captain," Captain of what? That uniform is 1940's... And RAF... Hammond puzzled over the strange man for a fraction of a second, and then continued. "You and your team are not hosts to hostile aliens, nor do you seem to pose any medical threat to the base. SG-1 seems to think you're friendlies, but I'm sure you'll understand that until I'm certain of that the five of you will have escorts and are confined to the base."
The general was not prepared for the decidedly undisciplined response he got from three fifths of the Torchwood team. His command style was certainly on the more lax side of things, but for Captain Harkness to pout, the oddly amphibious one to mutter, "Bloody military," and the woman with the gap between her teeth to go off on a tirade about not having a change of clothes was unsettling to say the least.
"Airman," Hammond once again addressed the room. There was always someone who answered to "Airman" within earshot of him at all times. "Please escort the new arrivals to quarters, get them settled and keep them out of restricted areas of the base."
"But sir, the entire base is restricted." Ah, the joys of working under NORAD.
"I see your point, Airman." Somedays Hammond missed running a normal base. "Alright, restrict them to quarters, the mess, and recreation areas unless otherwise requested by Doctor Frasier, members of SG-1 or myself. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir!" And off the anonymous airman went, Torchwood in tow.
"SG-1, please follow me to the briefing room. We need to have a talk about where you were during the five hours you were MIA."
"Five hours?" Daniel asked, apparently intent on starting the briefing as they walked. "We weren't gone for five hours."
"Oh no?" General Hammond asked. He half turned around to look at the rest of the team, who were all nodding in agreement with Daniel's statement. "How long would you say that you were gone?"
They glanced at each other.
"Maybe..." Jack paused, counting on his fingers "20 hours?"
The others nodded. "That sounds about right, sir," Sam agreed, either to Hammond or O'Neill, the general wasn't sure.
"So you're telling me that there's a time lapse between the two universes?" he asked her. "Or... wherever you were?"
Sam nodded tentatively. "It's hard to say," she admitted. "But we think that the device we found on P3X-075 somehow connected our universe with Torchwood's. They have an almost identical device, which Ianto Jones apparently accidentally activated just before our arrival."
Ignoring the alliteration, Hammond frowned in concentration. They had reached the door to the briefing room during this deceptively short conversation, and the general opened it while still pondering the Major's explanation.
"Major, do you mean to say that Dr. Jackson and Mr. Jones activated the separate devices at the exact same moment?" he asked.
No one asked how he knew that it had been Daniel to pick up the strange alien device and push the button on it.
"No, sir," Jack O'Neill replied innocently. "Apparently, Ianto activated the device on his end about two years after Daniel got to ours."
"But sirs!" Sam seemed to get very excited as a wonderful new insight occurred to her. "As I hope you've all figured out by now, time is relative. However, if Newton's idea of time as objective does hold some truth outside our fairly limited scale of observation..." She trailed off, lost in thought.
"Major Carter, you have discontinued sharing your revelation," Teal'c pointed out after a beat or two.
"Oh! Right... In some grand massive scale they could have been pushed at the same moment if perceived from one of the higher dimensions. I can't prove it at the moment, and the odds would be astronomical, but the implications!"
"Couldn't they just have started counting two years earlier?" Daniel didn't want to rain on Sam's parade, but rewriting the laws that govern time seemed a little extreme.
"Space-monkey has a point, Major." Jack loved to watch her when she got all techno-babble-y about something, but... "Sometimes the simplest answer works just as well."
"They could also work on the principle of transporting the first user to the device pushed second, no matter how far apart temporally that second device was activated," Sam conceded. "Occam's razor takes all the fun out of things," she muttered under her breath. Everyone chose to ignore her; most of them didn't know what Occam's razor was anyway.
After finally getting their post-mission check-ups done (SG-1 had caused quite the line to form), SG-6 came in to join the briefing. Lieutenant Ryan held his universe's button; he was being careful not to push it now that someone had finally explained that it caused nine people to jump universes.
"You took it off!?!?" exclaimed a very distraught Daniel Jackson. "The damage, the context that may have been lost..." He trailed off in horror.
"Relax, Doctor Jackson," Lieutenant Fischer tried to talk the man down. "We took hi-res images, and caused as little damage as we could. But we had to get it back here, it was the only thing within three klicks that wasn't a rock or a tree." Everyone in the room shuddered slightly at the mention of trees. Every planet just had so many of them.
"You made the right call, SG-6," Sam assured them. Turning to Daniel she said, "This is really more my field than yours. There wasn't any writing near the button, but Tosh and I were making considerable progress with the one on their end."
"Excuse me," Lieutenant Brooks interrupted, "But what exactly happened to you guys? You were there, then you weren't, and then you were here."
SG-1 quickly filled SG-6, and General Hammond in on everything that had happened. They did, however, glaze over the part where 3/4 of them got hammered in a Welsh pub because they were bored.
Teal'c poured himself a cup of coffee. SG-6 and General Hammond jumped slightly, his stoic silence had almost overcome his imposing form.
Finishing the story, Sam added, "But to be frank, sir, I have no idea why we returned to this universe when and where we did."
Speaking up, Lieutenant Ryan sheepishly admitted, "I think that may have been my fault, ma'am. The device was in my pack. The rest of my gear may have pressed it when I set my pack down to get out my GDO right as Colonel Barnes dialed Earth."
O'Neill sighed. "Don't you know a button when you see it? And what shouldn't you do with unknown buttons?" Directing is gaze at Daniel, he continued, "Push them. If you don't know what it does, for cryin' out loud, don't push it!"
Meanwhile, the Torchwood team was settling in to their new (hopefully temporary) quarters. Naturally, they had all inexplicably gathered in their Jack's room.
Toshiko was reading something that no one else understood, tapping her finger on the desk as she jotted down theories about their spontaneous universe-jumping. Nearby, Owen was playing with a yo-yo that he had stolen from the other Jack while he was drunk.
Gwen was standing by the door, looking out the small window at the bustling corridors filled with life. They were, of course, completely deserted, but a girl could dream.
And Ianto was sitting on his Jack's bed, something that Harkness found incredibly, unavoidably sexy.
As for himself, the Captain was looking at his team over the cover of the book he had long since given up on reading. As grateful as he was to Daniel for loaning them some literature to keep them entertained, the man had incredibly boring taste.
"What do you think they're talking about up there?" Owen asked, tossing the yo-yo towards the ceiling to indicate the briefing room. Not that any of the Torchwood team actually knew where the briefing room was, but the doctor had decided that it was in the general "up" direction, and no one cared to argue with him.
"Dunno," Gwen answered. "Probably trying to decide what to do with us until we can go back." She paused suddenly and glanced over at Tosh. "We can go back, can't we?" she asked worriedly.
"Well," Tosh answered slowly, glancing up from her reading, "SG-1 got back to their universe, so there seems to be no reason we can't. The trick will be returning without dragging them with us, as they did."
"Do we know why SG-1, and consequently us, ended up here?" Ianto didn't think the odds of getting back were very good if they didn't know why they'd left.
"No," she admitted. "But Sam and I were making a lot of progress. I'm sure we'll figure it out."
Jack, as anyone named Jack is apparently wont to do, was getting bored. "Hey!" he suggested excitedly, "Whadda ya' say we bust out?"
Gwen and Ianto were visibly appalled at Jack's poor annunciation (even if it was only for comedic reasons) and the idea of trying to "bust out" when under armed guards in a highly secure military installation that also happened to be their only hope of getting home.
"I meant we should get something to eat..." Jack uncharacteristically muttered. His team was no fun sometimes.
"Sounds brilliant - I'm starved." Owen followed up on his agreement by banging on the door and yelling "Oi! You out there! Any chance we could go to the canteen?"
"Canteen?" One of the airmen stationed outside whispered to the other in confusion at the decidedly British term.
"He means commissary." Ianto shouted through the door. "I believe it's on level 22." Catching the looks his team was shooting him, Ianto defended himself by saying, "What? I know everything."
Jack sighed. That archivist of his was good. It was a wonder the man had only almost destroyed the world once. The twenty-five-year-old could be running the world if he set his spookily brilliant mind to it.
Which, disturbingly enough, he might one day.
However, they wouldn't have time for that, as suddenly and without warning, their room disappeared, and they found themselves back in the base.
From somewhere behind them, they heard O'Neill sigh loudly. "Aw, crap," he complained.
Chapter 5