[fanfic] Life On Mars/Torchwood/Doctor Who: Spacial Genetic Multiplicity
TITLE: Spacial Genetic Multiplicity
AUTHOR: clockwork_sky
FANDOM: Life On Mars, Torchwood, Doctor Who
CHARACTERS: (who appear in any notable capacity at all) Sam Tyler, Jack Harkness, Gene Hunt, Annie Cartwright, Toshiko Sato, Gwen Cooper, Owen Harper, Ianto Jones, the Doctor (Eleven), Amy Pond
PAIRINGS: (mostly gen but the following could be read possibly, depending on your particular shipper goggles) Sam Tyler/Jack Harkness (UST/sympathy is more what came out, I think), Jack/Ianto, Sam/Annie, Sam/Gene, Tosh/Owen, Gwen/Owen
RATING: T (for some innuendo and language)
WORD COUNT: 13695
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This fic much overgrew my original plan. This was meant to be a crack-fic, and I suppose it still is by the definition given on TVTropes, but it suddenly decided to start taking itself a bit more seriously than I'd originally intended. This fic incorporates some canon involving S1 of Torchwood, up to mid-S2 LoM, and S5 of Doctor Who, but it also has general disregard for actually keeping it in tact. This fic was written for silvaa for the 2010 Life On Mars ficathon on lifein1973 and I really hope she still likes it in spite of my liberties. The prompt I chose was: Sam/Captain Jack "it's better than a space hopper" crack. Sorry about its belatedness--university had me with a lot of other big assignments due this week.
DISCLAIMER: Life On Mars belongs to the BBC and to Kudos. Torchwood and Doctor Who both belong to the BBC and their respective copyright holders. This is written for entertainment purposes only.
February 2008
Jack followed along behind the Doctor and Martha Jones, fishing into his pocket for his cellphone. He glanced at it briefly, confirming that he had a strong signal-the Doctor had never zapped his phone, though to be fair he hadn't owned it the last time he'd seen him so it factored among the least of Jack's observance of his double standard. He had dialed up the Hub on the way up the stairs, then Ianto, then Owen, then Toshiko, and finally, with a little sense of dread he tried Gwen. Even if the others weren't answering, he had the feeling that she would, given that she'd been the last to see him when he'd run off after the Doctor, less than a day ago for him, though he hadn't yet worked out how long it'd been for them.
He held the phone up to his ear as he closed the door behind him and again it rang and rang and rang but to no reply.
“Jack, who are you phoning? You can't tell anyone we're here!” the Doctor insisted as he waited on Martha to give him something-a laptop, Jack thought he'd heard him say, but it was hard to be sure as he felt a slight rush of panic, but it seemed there was no use.
“Just some friends of mine, but there's no reply.”
“Here you go. Any good?” Martha asked as she gave the Doctor her computer.
He snapped the phone shut and took the laptop from the Doctor, now more than simply motivated to find out what was going on. He set it down on the nearest flat surface he could find and began typing as he spoke.
“I can show you the Saxon website, he's been around for ages.”
“That's so weird, though, 'cause the day after the election, that's only four days after I met you,” Martha said as she worked it out, standing behind Jack and the Doctor.
“We've been flying all around the universe while he was here all the time.”
“You gonna tell us who he is?”
“He's a Time Lord.”
Jack turned back toward the Doctor, looking up at him briefly. Something about this didn't make sense. Well, none of it did, but there was something else...
“What about the rest of it? I mean, who'd call himself 'the Master'?”
“That's all you need to know,” the Doctor told her before Jack felt him leaning down over him. “Now, show me Harold Saxon...”
After letting the site's admittedly rather flash intro play, Jack began to explain what he knew:
“...former Minister of Defense, first came to prominence when he shot down the Racnoss on Christmas Eve. Nice work, by the way,” he added quickly, again reminded of just how much he wished he could have been there.
“Oh, thanks.”
As Jack turned back to the screen, Martha approached. He had to admire this girl, she seemed sharp and very quick on her feet, not to mention beautiful. He wondered just how long it was he'd been away. She seemed to know who Rose was, but she'd never met her. It could have been as much as a decade, but somehow he doubted it.
“But he goes back years. He's famous, everyone knows his story. Look,” she said as she stepped in and began clicking around the website-nothing he didn't know, but the Doctor wasn't likely to. “Cambridge University, rugby blue, won the athletics thing. Wrote a novel, went into business, marriage, everything, he's got a whole life.”
-
Eventually, the Doctor got on the laptop, studying the website with an increasingly worried expression. Jack got up to make some tea in Martha's kitchen, but he decided he should try to help in any case.
“But he's got the TARDIS. Maybe the Master went back in time and has been living here for decades,” he suggested, because this seemed to mesh with something in his mind which still didn't quite add up, something that was throwing him that he couldn't put his finger on.
“Nope,” the Doctor replied, decisively.
“Why not? Worked for me,” Jack countered as he brought the tea back into the livingroom.
“When he was stealing the TARDIS, the only thing I could do was fuse the coordinates. I locked them permanently. He can only travel between the year one hundred trillion and the last place the TARDIS landed, which is right here, right now.
“Yeah, but, a little leeway?”
“Well...” the Doctor replied, doubtfully and obviously not wanting to talk about things he couldn't explain or didn't know. “...eighteen months? Tops. The most he could've been here is eighteen months. How has he managed all this? The Master always was sort of... hypnotic... but this is on a massive scale.”
“I was gonna vote for him,” Martha chimed in, perched on the arm of her sofa.
“Really?”
“Well, it was before I even met you, and I liked him.”
“Me too,” Jack replied, without hesitation.
“Why do you say that?” the Doctor asked.
Jack didn't have an answer, and it didn't look like Martha had much of one either.
“What was his policy? What did he stand for?” the Doctor prompted further.
“I dunno. He always sounded... good,” Martha said, getting a bit of a far-off look in her eye and tapping her fingers against her other hand. “Like you could... trust him. Just nice. He spoke about... I can't really remember, but it was good... Just the sound of his voice...”
Jack noticed the tapping, watched her as a sense of dread worked its way through him. Something about this just wasn't right. The Doctor would work it out, in the end, and he wasn't going anywhere until that happened.
Still, it seemed like maybe, just maybe, all of this had started somewhere the Doctor wasn't hitting on. Eighteen months seemed much too short-it didn't add up. If this had all been a part of the Master's plan all along, he supposed, it was entirely possible that he'd simply made something up to fill in the gaps. He still had a human brain, and human brains did do that sort of thing. Still, he was sure that he'd not only heard of Harold Saxon, but met him, actually had a reason to trust him. He'd met him.
Twice.
1973
“All right, Sam?”
Sam started and rubbed at his eyes a bit as he looked up from the dim desk lamp and the five file folders he was going through. He smiled a bit as he focused on Annie before shrugging a little.
“What is it now?” she asked gently, reaching out and picking up one of the folders he wasn't looking through presently. “Think you're from the past?”
He glanced up at her with a somewhat wilting expression and she sighed heavily, looking down as she half-perched on the edge of the desk.
“I'm sorry,” she said a bit awkwardly before she looked back up at him with an apologetic expression. “But really, Sam, you can't expect me to--”
“Believe me,” Sam finished for her with a sigh, tidying up a stack of papers and placing it back in its folder before turning his eyes up to hers. “I know. What are you still doing here?” he asked, finding it much easier to simply find a smile and change the subject.
“Where should I be?” she asked, playfully challenging.
“Home.”
“Double-standard bearer? I thought you were the one in favour of women having their place in the world. Things are so much more civilised in Hyde.”
Sam laughed a little and rubbed again at his somewhat red-rimmed, tired eyes.
“You should go home and get some sleep,” Annie told him, reaching out and rubbing the back of his shoulder as she got to her feet.
“Maybe I should, yeah,” Sam mumbled, gathering the file folders and looking at them again, trying to decide whether he wanted to continue working.
“Goodnight, Sam,” Annie sighed, leaning in and pressing a fleeting kiss to the top of his temple before walking to the locker room to get her things.
Sam mirrored her sigh after she'd walked away. At least there were some good things about 1973. The Guv was at least beginning to take his job as something apart from an ego trip. There was decent music. There was Annie. Still, looking down at the mess of papers on his desk, he leaned down and let his forehead rest against one particularly high pile, trying not to let himself fall asleep then and there. What he wouldn't give to see a search engine again.
-
The next morning
“Does someone want to explain to me why I am up at the bloody arse-crack of dawn?” Gene hunt demanded as he turned the Cortina sharply to the left, such that it slid of the country road a bit and skidded over some grass as he brought it to a stop just before crashing into an old iron gate in front of an old house, parking it with hardly a blink.
“It's 11:30, Gene,” Sam sighed. “Mrs. Violet Hudson, age 67, and her granddaughter, Claire, age 12, were here this morning looking through an old family graveyard--”
“Ought to know better than coming here to look through a graveyard. Looks just like something out of Scooby-Doo,” Chris chimed in, only to be spoken over by Sam after a longsuffering sigh.
“Claire's been missing since 9:30 this morning. Her grandmother's terrified, and while we can hope for the best, the closer we get to the 48-hour mark, the less likely it is we're ever going to find that little girl alive,” Sam explained emphatically.
“Forty-eight?” Gene asked, glancing from the driver's seat over at Sam with a withering expression. “Another of your magic Hyde-numbers is it?”
“Statistics,” he replied simply. “Now are we going to go look for this girl, try and find out what happened or not?”
“No, we thought we'd play hide-and-go-seek,” Ray drawled from the back, quite obviously more than a bit hung over still. He stretched a little languidly and Annie leaned forward discretely to keep him from putting his arm across her shoulders.
“Oh, come on,” Gene groaned, taking out a flash and drinking deeply before replacing it. “Let's find where the kid's gone off to before he gets his knickers in a twist.”
Chris and Ray got out of the car without further prompting, though Ray was more than a little slow about it. Annie slid a bit further forward to poke her head between Sam and Gene's seats.
“So what's the plan, then?”
“We ought to spread out and--” Sam started, looking back at her, but he was quickly cut off by Gene, whom he heave a rather impatient look.
“Might be best if you stay here, Flash-Knickers.”
“What?” Annie asked.
“If someone's taken a little girl, I don't want my own big girl's disappearance on my hands, too.”
“Guv, I'm a trained police officer.”
“Doesn't mean you're not a piece of skirt to a nonce who hangs out 'round haunted houses.”
Annie allowed her shoulders to sag a bit, elbows resting down against either seat as she sighed and rolled her eyes a bit, fixing them on Sam's when she had finished, widening them with a sort of questioning expression.
He shrugged and smirked at her in turn, as subtly as he could. Maybe this was the Guv's way of looking out for his team, but he understood her frustration, shared it even, to some degree or another. The 70s-a completely different world.
It took a long moment, much too long, but Gene finally noticed the nonverbal communication passing between Sam and Annie and snorted.
“All right, you two. You got a gun?” he asked Annie.
“No, sir. I've told you at least three times now, I haven't had any proper firearms training.”
Gene simply gave her a gun without another word, which she took delicately and sat back in the seat with it.
“If we do find the girl, I'm gonna need to know where you are. I might be the most charming among us, but if we've got a kid on our hands, you're the one with the nicest tits for it to cry into.”
“Yes, Guv, charming,” Sam replied as Gene made a move to get out of the car.
“Anything to keep me out of the action,” Annie interjected, sliding forward in her seat again once she was sure she wasn't going to hurt anyone with the gun.
Gene wasn't listening anymore, but as Sam followed his lead and began to get out of the car, he turned to Annie, who set the gun down carefully on the dash and seemed to be slipping up over the seats.
“What are you doing?”
“Best do something while I'm here. I'll mind the radio,” she replied as she slid down into his seat, first alongside him before gently pushing him with a smile. “Off you go.”
When he got up and had almost shut the door, he turned back to her and peered down, smiling a little.
“It's a bit cold out. There's a sort of... blanket thing... in the boot...”
Annie raised her eyes to his, much less than amused.
“Police officer.”
Sam laughed nervously and pulled back, hands raised, before following after an annoyed and impatient Gene at a trot.
-
When Sam caught up, he got his radio firmly in one hand and frowned a little, curiously, as he watched Gene pull out another flask from a different pocket and take a particularly long drink from it before replacing it.
“Guv, do you mind not drinking on the job? A little girl's life might be at stake.”
“Aren't you the one always telling me not to assume the worst possible scenario?”
“Yes, but this is a child we're talking about.”
“And I'll be damned if we're not going to find her, but if you'll excuse me, Gladys, if there is any sort of foul-play involved here, you don't want to see what I'd do to the sod who'd lay his hands on a child. Consider my drinking a preliminary precaution.”
Sam sighed and looked over at Gene, meeting his eyes briefly and deciding that there was really nothing he could say or do to correct him because he really did believe that what he was saying was perfectly valid. Sam's head was so out-of-sorts lately that, for a brief moment, he thought that for all he knew it might be. He turned to head toward the house before this turned into an argument and they lost anymore precious time.
“Whatever you say, Guv,” he murmured as he walked away, ascending the muddy dew-slick slope up toward the old, dilapidated house.
“Oh, I love it when you talk dirty to me, Sammy-boy,” Gene replied with a sarcastic smugness that Sam had to force himself to ignore as he found his feet on the old, worn path that led to the door.
Something about this place set his senses on edge, like the crackle of static electricity. He was dimly aware that Gene, as Chris and Ray apparently had, had taken to some quarter of the gardens or the woods that surrounded the estate. The sky was dull and grey-nothing terribly unusual about that, but it was damp, cold, and for once it actually served to give Sam an affective sense of foreboding. He dearly hoped that they wouldn't be returning to the Station to tell Claire's grandmother that she was never coming home.
Pulling himself up over a pile of fallen rocks from what had once been a high archway, he thought he heard something like the grating of rocks over one another come from a bit further to his left than it should have done if it was only him here. He cautiously and steadily drew his gun and looked around behind him before turning quickly back toward the door.
“Guv? Chris? Ray?” he hissed in slow, steady succession. There was no answer from them or from anyone as he clipped his radio onto his belt and steadied the gun with his freed hand, using his shoulder to push the door open slowly. It creaked and inside he felt even more of the strange feeling he'd felt outside on the grounds. Cold, but also a kind of unnatural, crackling static, something like heat that wasn't heat, emanating from the walls, seeming to draw him in towards itself. Maybe this was just instinct, but something still seemed wrong.
He was glad that no one was there to see him nearly taken aback with a start as he heard the distinct and very loud creaking of some floorboards upstairs. He found the staircase and noted that there was a series of three stairs that looked as if the slightest touch might cause them to give way. If she was still here, it seemed quite plausible that Claire might be upstairs. Children did not know to be afraid of falling, much of the time, and her grandmother wouldn't have thought to look upstairs, likely wouldn't have been able to comfortably ascend them even if they hadn't been in such disrepair. Regardless of what it was that made him think it was a good idea, something was drawing him in.
He approached the stairwell and placed one of his feet on the first step, testing it as he took hold of the rickety, once-ornate banister, checking how much it would wobble were he to try and use it. He retreated long enough to retrieve his radio and to try to radio the car.
“Annie?” he asked, only to be met with a very loud hiss of static. He tapped the device, as if it might help it, and tried again. “Annie? Do you read?” He paused to wait for a reply, but again was just met with a rush of static, and he couldn't tell if she was trying to respond but being met with interference or if interference was simply blocking their communication completely. He decided that it was only productive to assume the former and he spoke into the radio again, quickly, before replacing it on his belt: “Annie, I need you to get the Guv, Chris, and Ray to come up to the house. I think I may've found something.”
Then, without further pause to wait for a reply, he took the first two steps from the ground floor and carefully vaulted himself over the caving three steps and made it up to the next floor.
-
Annie had been trying to occupy herself by watching keenly for any sign of movement back toward the car. She'd seen nothing more interesting than occasional gusts of wind as the cloud cover moved about the sky but didn't show any signs of clearing off. She had ultimately pulled her feet up into the seat a bit, regardless of what Gene would think. She wouldn't be cold if he'd actually let her come along and help. There was hardly any point to her being plain-clothes when she was even more limited, at times, that she'd ever been in uniform.
The radio crackled and she glanced down at it as she listened. It just hissed with a wall of static, and so she picked up her end and tried to reply.
“I'm sorry, had some interference, could you say that again, please?”
Another hiss and finally she heard Sam say her name, “Annie...”
“DI Tyler,” she replied, noting how neither calling him Sam all the time nor formality really fit, somewhere in the back of her mind, even as she tried to concentrate. “Go ahead.”
“...need you.... Guv... something...” where most of what she heard in the midst of static, then it cut out completely, a high pitched feedback sounding for a moment and then fading into absolute silence.
“Sam?” she asked, again forgetting about his title. “Sam, do you read me?”
This weather was rather rubbish, and she supposed that it might affect the radios, but something worried her, so she radioed Gene without a second thought.
“Guv, where are you?”
“At home, taking a short nap,” he replied momentarily. “What is it, Cartwright?”
“It's Sam-DI Tyler, he tried to radio me, but there was an awful lot of static, and I'm getting it near clear as crystal from you. He said something about needing us, I think, then it cut out.”
“He's in the house, last I knew.”
“I'm going to go check he's all right,” Annie decided, telling the Guv over the radio and then exiting the car without waiting for further instruction, knowing he would likely tell her to stay where she was, but if she hadn't been bored enough before, now she was worried, a far more insistent motivator.
“Cartwright, stay in the damned--”
Gene realized that the other end of the line had gone completely quiet and he growled and uttered a random series of obscenities under his breath as he turned on his heels and stalked back toward the house.
When he got to it, the door was hanging open and looked as if it might just fall off its hinges. When he passed it and it creaked quite loudly, he helped it on its way in doing just that.
“Cartwright?” he demanded.
Annie had made her way through most of the ground floor and emerged from the door of one of the old bedrooms.
“He's not down here.”
“Didn't I tell you to stay in the car?”
“Guv, he called us, and I got here as fast as I could, and I've already been through this whole floor and he's not here.”
“Maybe he went out into the back garden to frolic for a bit.”
“I don't think so,” Annie sighed and got up onto the staircase and began to ascend it, careful not to put much weight at all on the rotting, caving three stairs.
Gene followed her much less discriminately and his foot did managed to punch a hole in one of the, but he quickly extricated himself, only to hear Annie call from the first room on the left at the top of the stairs, a nervous edge in her voice that he didn't like in the slightest.
“Guv?”
“What?” he asked irritably as he came to the door himself and met her at her shoulder. The room was mostly empty, all the old furniture and paintings and mirrors and other such sundry for some reason pushed back to its perimeter, its contents largely untouched for decades. All except for one police radio, lying in the centre of the floor.
Annie looked back at the Guv, trying to keep the rush of fear and further emotion from showing forth in her eyes. For the first time, she briefly wondered if Sam could have possibly been telling her the truth all this time, about being out of his time. Where else could he have gone without a sound or a trace? Someone who may have been easily able to overpower a little girl surely couldn't take Sam, leaving without a single trace of struggle.
“He's gone.”
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
AUTHOR: clockwork_sky
FANDOM: Life On Mars, Torchwood, Doctor Who
CHARACTERS: (who appear in any notable capacity at all) Sam Tyler, Jack Harkness, Gene Hunt, Annie Cartwright, Toshiko Sato, Gwen Cooper, Owen Harper, Ianto Jones, the Doctor (Eleven), Amy Pond
PAIRINGS: (mostly gen but the following could be read possibly, depending on your particular shipper goggles) Sam Tyler/Jack Harkness (UST/sympathy is more what came out, I think), Jack/Ianto, Sam/Annie, Sam/Gene, Tosh/Owen, Gwen/Owen
RATING: T (for some innuendo and language)
WORD COUNT: 13695
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This fic much overgrew my original plan. This was meant to be a crack-fic, and I suppose it still is by the definition given on TVTropes, but it suddenly decided to start taking itself a bit more seriously than I'd originally intended. This fic incorporates some canon involving S1 of Torchwood, up to mid-S2 LoM, and S5 of Doctor Who, but it also has general disregard for actually keeping it in tact. This fic was written for silvaa for the 2010 Life On Mars ficathon on lifein1973 and I really hope she still likes it in spite of my liberties. The prompt I chose was: Sam/Captain Jack "it's better than a space hopper" crack. Sorry about its belatedness--university had me with a lot of other big assignments due this week.
DISCLAIMER: Life On Mars belongs to the BBC and to Kudos. Torchwood and Doctor Who both belong to the BBC and their respective copyright holders. This is written for entertainment purposes only.
February 2008
Jack followed along behind the Doctor and Martha Jones, fishing into his pocket for his cellphone. He glanced at it briefly, confirming that he had a strong signal-the Doctor had never zapped his phone, though to be fair he hadn't owned it the last time he'd seen him so it factored among the least of Jack's observance of his double standard. He had dialed up the Hub on the way up the stairs, then Ianto, then Owen, then Toshiko, and finally, with a little sense of dread he tried Gwen. Even if the others weren't answering, he had the feeling that she would, given that she'd been the last to see him when he'd run off after the Doctor, less than a day ago for him, though he hadn't yet worked out how long it'd been for them.
He held the phone up to his ear as he closed the door behind him and again it rang and rang and rang but to no reply.
“Jack, who are you phoning? You can't tell anyone we're here!” the Doctor insisted as he waited on Martha to give him something-a laptop, Jack thought he'd heard him say, but it was hard to be sure as he felt a slight rush of panic, but it seemed there was no use.
“Just some friends of mine, but there's no reply.”
“Here you go. Any good?” Martha asked as she gave the Doctor her computer.
He snapped the phone shut and took the laptop from the Doctor, now more than simply motivated to find out what was going on. He set it down on the nearest flat surface he could find and began typing as he spoke.
“I can show you the Saxon website, he's been around for ages.”
“That's so weird, though, 'cause the day after the election, that's only four days after I met you,” Martha said as she worked it out, standing behind Jack and the Doctor.
“We've been flying all around the universe while he was here all the time.”
“You gonna tell us who he is?”
“He's a Time Lord.”
Jack turned back toward the Doctor, looking up at him briefly. Something about this didn't make sense. Well, none of it did, but there was something else...
“What about the rest of it? I mean, who'd call himself 'the Master'?”
“That's all you need to know,” the Doctor told her before Jack felt him leaning down over him. “Now, show me Harold Saxon...”
After letting the site's admittedly rather flash intro play, Jack began to explain what he knew:
“...former Minister of Defense, first came to prominence when he shot down the Racnoss on Christmas Eve. Nice work, by the way,” he added quickly, again reminded of just how much he wished he could have been there.
“Oh, thanks.”
As Jack turned back to the screen, Martha approached. He had to admire this girl, she seemed sharp and very quick on her feet, not to mention beautiful. He wondered just how long it was he'd been away. She seemed to know who Rose was, but she'd never met her. It could have been as much as a decade, but somehow he doubted it.
“But he goes back years. He's famous, everyone knows his story. Look,” she said as she stepped in and began clicking around the website-nothing he didn't know, but the Doctor wasn't likely to. “Cambridge University, rugby blue, won the athletics thing. Wrote a novel, went into business, marriage, everything, he's got a whole life.”
-
Eventually, the Doctor got on the laptop, studying the website with an increasingly worried expression. Jack got up to make some tea in Martha's kitchen, but he decided he should try to help in any case.
“But he's got the TARDIS. Maybe the Master went back in time and has been living here for decades,” he suggested, because this seemed to mesh with something in his mind which still didn't quite add up, something that was throwing him that he couldn't put his finger on.
“Nope,” the Doctor replied, decisively.
“Why not? Worked for me,” Jack countered as he brought the tea back into the livingroom.
“When he was stealing the TARDIS, the only thing I could do was fuse the coordinates. I locked them permanently. He can only travel between the year one hundred trillion and the last place the TARDIS landed, which is right here, right now.
“Yeah, but, a little leeway?”
“Well...” the Doctor replied, doubtfully and obviously not wanting to talk about things he couldn't explain or didn't know. “...eighteen months? Tops. The most he could've been here is eighteen months. How has he managed all this? The Master always was sort of... hypnotic... but this is on a massive scale.”
“I was gonna vote for him,” Martha chimed in, perched on the arm of her sofa.
“Really?”
“Well, it was before I even met you, and I liked him.”
“Me too,” Jack replied, without hesitation.
“Why do you say that?” the Doctor asked.
Jack didn't have an answer, and it didn't look like Martha had much of one either.
“What was his policy? What did he stand for?” the Doctor prompted further.
“I dunno. He always sounded... good,” Martha said, getting a bit of a far-off look in her eye and tapping her fingers against her other hand. “Like you could... trust him. Just nice. He spoke about... I can't really remember, but it was good... Just the sound of his voice...”
Jack noticed the tapping, watched her as a sense of dread worked its way through him. Something about this just wasn't right. The Doctor would work it out, in the end, and he wasn't going anywhere until that happened.
Still, it seemed like maybe, just maybe, all of this had started somewhere the Doctor wasn't hitting on. Eighteen months seemed much too short-it didn't add up. If this had all been a part of the Master's plan all along, he supposed, it was entirely possible that he'd simply made something up to fill in the gaps. He still had a human brain, and human brains did do that sort of thing. Still, he was sure that he'd not only heard of Harold Saxon, but met him, actually had a reason to trust him. He'd met him.
Twice.
1973
“All right, Sam?”
Sam started and rubbed at his eyes a bit as he looked up from the dim desk lamp and the five file folders he was going through. He smiled a bit as he focused on Annie before shrugging a little.
“What is it now?” she asked gently, reaching out and picking up one of the folders he wasn't looking through presently. “Think you're from the past?”
He glanced up at her with a somewhat wilting expression and she sighed heavily, looking down as she half-perched on the edge of the desk.
“I'm sorry,” she said a bit awkwardly before she looked back up at him with an apologetic expression. “But really, Sam, you can't expect me to--”
“Believe me,” Sam finished for her with a sigh, tidying up a stack of papers and placing it back in its folder before turning his eyes up to hers. “I know. What are you still doing here?” he asked, finding it much easier to simply find a smile and change the subject.
“Where should I be?” she asked, playfully challenging.
“Home.”
“Double-standard bearer? I thought you were the one in favour of women having their place in the world. Things are so much more civilised in Hyde.”
Sam laughed a little and rubbed again at his somewhat red-rimmed, tired eyes.
“You should go home and get some sleep,” Annie told him, reaching out and rubbing the back of his shoulder as she got to her feet.
“Maybe I should, yeah,” Sam mumbled, gathering the file folders and looking at them again, trying to decide whether he wanted to continue working.
“Goodnight, Sam,” Annie sighed, leaning in and pressing a fleeting kiss to the top of his temple before walking to the locker room to get her things.
Sam mirrored her sigh after she'd walked away. At least there were some good things about 1973. The Guv was at least beginning to take his job as something apart from an ego trip. There was decent music. There was Annie. Still, looking down at the mess of papers on his desk, he leaned down and let his forehead rest against one particularly high pile, trying not to let himself fall asleep then and there. What he wouldn't give to see a search engine again.
-
The next morning
“Does someone want to explain to me why I am up at the bloody arse-crack of dawn?” Gene hunt demanded as he turned the Cortina sharply to the left, such that it slid of the country road a bit and skidded over some grass as he brought it to a stop just before crashing into an old iron gate in front of an old house, parking it with hardly a blink.
“It's 11:30, Gene,” Sam sighed. “Mrs. Violet Hudson, age 67, and her granddaughter, Claire, age 12, were here this morning looking through an old family graveyard--”
“Ought to know better than coming here to look through a graveyard. Looks just like something out of Scooby-Doo,” Chris chimed in, only to be spoken over by Sam after a longsuffering sigh.
“Claire's been missing since 9:30 this morning. Her grandmother's terrified, and while we can hope for the best, the closer we get to the 48-hour mark, the less likely it is we're ever going to find that little girl alive,” Sam explained emphatically.
“Forty-eight?” Gene asked, glancing from the driver's seat over at Sam with a withering expression. “Another of your magic Hyde-numbers is it?”
“Statistics,” he replied simply. “Now are we going to go look for this girl, try and find out what happened or not?”
“No, we thought we'd play hide-and-go-seek,” Ray drawled from the back, quite obviously more than a bit hung over still. He stretched a little languidly and Annie leaned forward discretely to keep him from putting his arm across her shoulders.
“Oh, come on,” Gene groaned, taking out a flash and drinking deeply before replacing it. “Let's find where the kid's gone off to before he gets his knickers in a twist.”
Chris and Ray got out of the car without further prompting, though Ray was more than a little slow about it. Annie slid a bit further forward to poke her head between Sam and Gene's seats.
“So what's the plan, then?”
“We ought to spread out and--” Sam started, looking back at her, but he was quickly cut off by Gene, whom he heave a rather impatient look.
“Might be best if you stay here, Flash-Knickers.”
“What?” Annie asked.
“If someone's taken a little girl, I don't want my own big girl's disappearance on my hands, too.”
“Guv, I'm a trained police officer.”
“Doesn't mean you're not a piece of skirt to a nonce who hangs out 'round haunted houses.”
Annie allowed her shoulders to sag a bit, elbows resting down against either seat as she sighed and rolled her eyes a bit, fixing them on Sam's when she had finished, widening them with a sort of questioning expression.
He shrugged and smirked at her in turn, as subtly as he could. Maybe this was the Guv's way of looking out for his team, but he understood her frustration, shared it even, to some degree or another. The 70s-a completely different world.
It took a long moment, much too long, but Gene finally noticed the nonverbal communication passing between Sam and Annie and snorted.
“All right, you two. You got a gun?” he asked Annie.
“No, sir. I've told you at least three times now, I haven't had any proper firearms training.”
Gene simply gave her a gun without another word, which she took delicately and sat back in the seat with it.
“If we do find the girl, I'm gonna need to know where you are. I might be the most charming among us, but if we've got a kid on our hands, you're the one with the nicest tits for it to cry into.”
“Yes, Guv, charming,” Sam replied as Gene made a move to get out of the car.
“Anything to keep me out of the action,” Annie interjected, sliding forward in her seat again once she was sure she wasn't going to hurt anyone with the gun.
Gene wasn't listening anymore, but as Sam followed his lead and began to get out of the car, he turned to Annie, who set the gun down carefully on the dash and seemed to be slipping up over the seats.
“What are you doing?”
“Best do something while I'm here. I'll mind the radio,” she replied as she slid down into his seat, first alongside him before gently pushing him with a smile. “Off you go.”
When he got up and had almost shut the door, he turned back to her and peered down, smiling a little.
“It's a bit cold out. There's a sort of... blanket thing... in the boot...”
Annie raised her eyes to his, much less than amused.
“Police officer.”
Sam laughed nervously and pulled back, hands raised, before following after an annoyed and impatient Gene at a trot.
-
When Sam caught up, he got his radio firmly in one hand and frowned a little, curiously, as he watched Gene pull out another flask from a different pocket and take a particularly long drink from it before replacing it.
“Guv, do you mind not drinking on the job? A little girl's life might be at stake.”
“Aren't you the one always telling me not to assume the worst possible scenario?”
“Yes, but this is a child we're talking about.”
“And I'll be damned if we're not going to find her, but if you'll excuse me, Gladys, if there is any sort of foul-play involved here, you don't want to see what I'd do to the sod who'd lay his hands on a child. Consider my drinking a preliminary precaution.”
Sam sighed and looked over at Gene, meeting his eyes briefly and deciding that there was really nothing he could say or do to correct him because he really did believe that what he was saying was perfectly valid. Sam's head was so out-of-sorts lately that, for a brief moment, he thought that for all he knew it might be. He turned to head toward the house before this turned into an argument and they lost anymore precious time.
“Whatever you say, Guv,” he murmured as he walked away, ascending the muddy dew-slick slope up toward the old, dilapidated house.
“Oh, I love it when you talk dirty to me, Sammy-boy,” Gene replied with a sarcastic smugness that Sam had to force himself to ignore as he found his feet on the old, worn path that led to the door.
Something about this place set his senses on edge, like the crackle of static electricity. He was dimly aware that Gene, as Chris and Ray apparently had, had taken to some quarter of the gardens or the woods that surrounded the estate. The sky was dull and grey-nothing terribly unusual about that, but it was damp, cold, and for once it actually served to give Sam an affective sense of foreboding. He dearly hoped that they wouldn't be returning to the Station to tell Claire's grandmother that she was never coming home.
Pulling himself up over a pile of fallen rocks from what had once been a high archway, he thought he heard something like the grating of rocks over one another come from a bit further to his left than it should have done if it was only him here. He cautiously and steadily drew his gun and looked around behind him before turning quickly back toward the door.
“Guv? Chris? Ray?” he hissed in slow, steady succession. There was no answer from them or from anyone as he clipped his radio onto his belt and steadied the gun with his freed hand, using his shoulder to push the door open slowly. It creaked and inside he felt even more of the strange feeling he'd felt outside on the grounds. Cold, but also a kind of unnatural, crackling static, something like heat that wasn't heat, emanating from the walls, seeming to draw him in towards itself. Maybe this was just instinct, but something still seemed wrong.
He was glad that no one was there to see him nearly taken aback with a start as he heard the distinct and very loud creaking of some floorboards upstairs. He found the staircase and noted that there was a series of three stairs that looked as if the slightest touch might cause them to give way. If she was still here, it seemed quite plausible that Claire might be upstairs. Children did not know to be afraid of falling, much of the time, and her grandmother wouldn't have thought to look upstairs, likely wouldn't have been able to comfortably ascend them even if they hadn't been in such disrepair. Regardless of what it was that made him think it was a good idea, something was drawing him in.
He approached the stairwell and placed one of his feet on the first step, testing it as he took hold of the rickety, once-ornate banister, checking how much it would wobble were he to try and use it. He retreated long enough to retrieve his radio and to try to radio the car.
“Annie?” he asked, only to be met with a very loud hiss of static. He tapped the device, as if it might help it, and tried again. “Annie? Do you read?” He paused to wait for a reply, but again was just met with a rush of static, and he couldn't tell if she was trying to respond but being met with interference or if interference was simply blocking their communication completely. He decided that it was only productive to assume the former and he spoke into the radio again, quickly, before replacing it on his belt: “Annie, I need you to get the Guv, Chris, and Ray to come up to the house. I think I may've found something.”
Then, without further pause to wait for a reply, he took the first two steps from the ground floor and carefully vaulted himself over the caving three steps and made it up to the next floor.
-
Annie had been trying to occupy herself by watching keenly for any sign of movement back toward the car. She'd seen nothing more interesting than occasional gusts of wind as the cloud cover moved about the sky but didn't show any signs of clearing off. She had ultimately pulled her feet up into the seat a bit, regardless of what Gene would think. She wouldn't be cold if he'd actually let her come along and help. There was hardly any point to her being plain-clothes when she was even more limited, at times, that she'd ever been in uniform.
The radio crackled and she glanced down at it as she listened. It just hissed with a wall of static, and so she picked up her end and tried to reply.
“I'm sorry, had some interference, could you say that again, please?”
Another hiss and finally she heard Sam say her name, “Annie...”
“DI Tyler,” she replied, noting how neither calling him Sam all the time nor formality really fit, somewhere in the back of her mind, even as she tried to concentrate. “Go ahead.”
“...need you.... Guv... something...” where most of what she heard in the midst of static, then it cut out completely, a high pitched feedback sounding for a moment and then fading into absolute silence.
“Sam?” she asked, again forgetting about his title. “Sam, do you read me?”
This weather was rather rubbish, and she supposed that it might affect the radios, but something worried her, so she radioed Gene without a second thought.
“Guv, where are you?”
“At home, taking a short nap,” he replied momentarily. “What is it, Cartwright?”
“It's Sam-DI Tyler, he tried to radio me, but there was an awful lot of static, and I'm getting it near clear as crystal from you. He said something about needing us, I think, then it cut out.”
“He's in the house, last I knew.”
“I'm going to go check he's all right,” Annie decided, telling the Guv over the radio and then exiting the car without waiting for further instruction, knowing he would likely tell her to stay where she was, but if she hadn't been bored enough before, now she was worried, a far more insistent motivator.
“Cartwright, stay in the damned--”
Gene realized that the other end of the line had gone completely quiet and he growled and uttered a random series of obscenities under his breath as he turned on his heels and stalked back toward the house.
When he got to it, the door was hanging open and looked as if it might just fall off its hinges. When he passed it and it creaked quite loudly, he helped it on its way in doing just that.
“Cartwright?” he demanded.
Annie had made her way through most of the ground floor and emerged from the door of one of the old bedrooms.
“He's not down here.”
“Didn't I tell you to stay in the car?”
“Guv, he called us, and I got here as fast as I could, and I've already been through this whole floor and he's not here.”
“Maybe he went out into the back garden to frolic for a bit.”
“I don't think so,” Annie sighed and got up onto the staircase and began to ascend it, careful not to put much weight at all on the rotting, caving three stairs.
Gene followed her much less discriminately and his foot did managed to punch a hole in one of the, but he quickly extricated himself, only to hear Annie call from the first room on the left at the top of the stairs, a nervous edge in her voice that he didn't like in the slightest.
“Guv?”
“What?” he asked irritably as he came to the door himself and met her at her shoulder. The room was mostly empty, all the old furniture and paintings and mirrors and other such sundry for some reason pushed back to its perimeter, its contents largely untouched for decades. All except for one police radio, lying in the centre of the floor.
Annie looked back at the Guv, trying to keep the rush of fear and further emotion from showing forth in her eyes. For the first time, she briefly wondered if Sam could have possibly been telling her the truth all this time, about being out of his time. Where else could he have gone without a sound or a trace? Someone who may have been easily able to overpower a little girl surely couldn't take Sam, leaving without a single trace of struggle.
“He's gone.”
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five