TW/W13: Tales from Warehouse Twelve [T]
Fandom:
Torchwood / Warehouse 13
Title:
Tales from Warehouse Twelve
Chapter 1:
In which Wolcott joins the Warehouse and discovers that there is more to the world than he imagined.
Author:
lt_indigo
Pairing(s):
Spoilers :D
Warning(s):
Some adult ideas dealing with sexuality more than anything else, and some potentially dodgy Welsh. I'm not fluent, by any stretch of the imagination.
Disclamer:
Oh, I wish
Word count:
2,208
Author's note:
Okay, so I couldn't reisist this once I'd given in to the urge to write about Wolcott. I hate myself, because I already have two WIPs that I REALLY want to finish.
Fair warning - I am not intending on updating this regularly, for reasons cited above. Things will be added as they come to me, and not necessarily in chronological order. Sorry, guys. (Then again, writing Jack AND Helena is great fun - she's worse than Tosh!)
For the Torchwood fans, as before, you do not need a vast amount of knowledge of Warehouse 13 as this is a prequel. All you need to know is that the setting is Victorian, and that Wolcott (who appeared on screen for all of about five minutes in a single episode) was played by our very own GDL.
For the W13 fans, equally you don't need a vast amount of knowledge of Torchwood because, again, this is a prequel to the show, and we're looking at this from a Warehouse perspective so any info you will need as things go on will be spoon-fed.
For anyone who hasn't followed "Underhanded Tactics", the 'footnotes' can be accessed by hovering your cursor over the number. Here, it is just the translations - I'm not intending on carrying on the style I'm trying out there.
Right, so Warehouse 13 has a somewhat conflicted continuity. For the sake of argument, I am taking the dates given in Season 2 for H.G.'s timeline, meaning that Christina Wells was born in 1891, ignoring her statement in "3...2...1..." that Christinia had been 'gone' for two years prior to 1893.
I am also using the name of 'David Wolcott', as stated by Myka in "Lost and Found", rather than 'William Wollcott', which is cited on the W13 wiki, but doesn't seem to have any canonical basis.
Previous part ("Warehouses and Back Catalogues") | Next part (coming soon)
David Wolcott had learned at a young age that he was different from other people. At the age of seven, he had been scolded by his teachers for hugging a girl at school because she was sad. The girl in question had not shared with anyone the fact that her father had just died, and no-one else had realised because she was hiding it so well. By the age of eight, he was widely heralded as the school hero, because he was always the one who ended up with the Welsh Not. His friends thought he was a hero but, if he was honest with himself, the physical pain caused by the smacking he received was nothing compared to the pain and fear he felt when others were struck.
He was lucky in a way: his parents had been just about rich enough for him to continue schooling after compulsory attendance ended at the age of ten. He was a bright boy, and his parents were keen for him to have the means with which to escape from Newport and make a name for himself. This happened at the age of sixteen when he inadvertently brought himself to the attention of Warehouse agents by being able to identify a classmate who was under the murderous control of the sword of Rhys Gethin, the Welsh General who had freed Newport from English control in 1402.
David had bidden goodbye to Newport with barely a backward glance. His English father was glad that his only child was going off to London to an important government job, and his mother had passed a few months beforehand. That his father was no longer having to foot the bill for his education was an added bonus, David told himself.
Seeing Warehouse Twelve made David realise he had made the right choice in leaving his home, and in the few months he was allowed to acquaint himself with the correct procedures, his colleagues, and the Warehouse itself, David learned that the Welsh were still seen as savages by many English people, and he therefore learned to suppress his natural accent and completely surrounded himself with English day and night, often falling asleep as he was pouring over some piece of paperwork or another, in order to ensure that any stray exclamations were in English rather than his mother’s native, troublesome, Welsh.
Once he was deemed suitably educated for field work, and he had passed the accuracy tests with Nicolas Tesla’s electrical weapon, he was partnered with the famous H.G. Wells. Wolcott quickly got over his shock that she was a woman when she saved his life, and he picked up a lot of additional information about her by listening to both the gossip at the Warehouse and her emotions. Her affection for people was deep, but often fickle. She had no qualms about offering herself to a man in exchange for information. Indeed, she had no qualms about offering herself to a woman in exchange for information. Miss Wells seemed to keep a string of lovers, both male and female. He wondered which of the men, if any, was the father of Christina, the beautiful three-year-old child he had once met at her home.
He had been in the field as a fully-fledged agent for around a year when they met Jack Harkness for the first time. The Warehouse files had mentioned Torchwood, but had been somewhat lacking in detail. Wolcott had asked around, but no-one had been particularly forthcoming about what exactly Torchwood was. The general feeling was that they were intruders, trying to do for the crown what the Warehouse did for the good of humanity in general. The Regents had long believed that any royal or governmental control over the Warehouses would be disastrous, and there was Torchwood, standing for Queen and Empire, trying to do the same job.
Jack Harkness was charming, and genuinely interested in both him and Miss Wells. That very fact had him more interested than, as he knew he should have been, disgusted. His own interest in Harkness left him confused and, after Harkness had shown them that the artefact they were hunting was, in fact, extra-terrestrial in origin, and therefore did not fall under the purview of the Warehouse, Helena took him to her home, settled him in the drawing room and poured them both large glasses of brandy.
“Woolly,” she said soothingly, sitting directly opposite him and taking his hand in earnest, “you have known me for long enough to know that attraction to an individual can transcend gender.”
He nodded, almost absently. He had wondered for a while: he was eighteen years old, an age where he should have been seeking a wife, but no woman had struck his fancy. No woman beyond Miss Wells herself, that was, and she was soiled goods; hardly an appropriate young lady to start courting. Only she seemed equal to him; the few other women at the Warehouse were record keepers, and were vacuous creatures simply waiting to be married. Women in general, and particularly those of noble breeding, bored him because their heads were filled with nothing but romance and sewing. Miss Wells was more than the equal of any man: intelligent, sharp-witted, and able to both visualise and create the most extraordinary machines. She was a true genius, and it was a tragedy indeed that she was forced to utilise her rather dim-witted brother Charles in order to be taken seriously in society and get her books published. He had wondered if Miss Wells was a man trapped in a woman’s body, and that was the reason she sometimes took a woman to her bed.
Jack Harkness was making him realise that might not be the case, because he certainly wasn’t a woman trapped in a man’s body, but he felt an attraction to the man like nothing he had experienced before. He wanted Harkness, wanted to be with him, beside him. He wanted to kiss him. That was quite a frightening revelation.
Miss Wells seemed to follow his thoughts, even without his gift. “No-one has been hanged for sodomy in almost sixty years,” she assured him. “Homosexuality no longer incurs the death penalty. Indeed, there are places in London itself where the police tend to turn a blind eye to men doing what they like with other men.”
Wolcott wasn’t so naïve that he didn’t know of Molly houses, but he had never even entertained the barest glimmer of a thought of setting foot in one. Yet, less than three hours later, he found himself at the threshold, daring himself to enter.
“Well, hello there, cutie-pie,” a man said from his left. Wolcott spun, and blushed as he saw the largest man he had ever seen beside him, smiling at him in a predatory manner. The man was interested in him in the same way that Jack Harkness had been, and for the first time, Wolcott found himself on the receiving end of the same look he had seen used on some of the girls back in Newport. It wasn’t as friendly as Jack’s appreciative glances, and it made Wolcott feel a little uncomfortable. He wasn’t a fool: he had studied biology, and he knew how humans reproduced. He had plenty of theoretical knowledge about the sexual act between man and wife, but absolutely no idea about how it worked in practice, or how it worked between people of the same gender.
“You look nervous. First time?”
Wolcott nodded quickly at this blond bear of a man.
“Well, that’s okay,” the man assured him. “We don’t bite, you know. Not unless you want us to, anyway.” The man winked at him, and Wolcott found himself blushing.
The man nudged him gently out of the way and opened the door to the establishment, which purported to be a tea room. He then turned back and held out his hand. “Why don’t you come on in, gorgeous, and see if this is your scene?”
.oOo.
Wolcott had made himself stay for an hour, taking tea and being pawed by several men, all of whom seemed to take pleasure in his youthful features and unusual height for such a submissive man. He felt like a brood mare being assessed.
It was the moment in which a hand strayed to his groin that he fled. He had never felt more out of his depth than at the Molly house, surrounded by men who either wanted him or those (generally wearing dresses and corsets) who were jealous of the attention he was receiving.
He determined from this experience that he wasn’t of the homosexual persuasion after all, and whatever he had felt for Captain Harkness had been fleeting and a result of his youth and the thrill of the chase.
.oOo.
A month passed, and he and Miss Wells found themselves in Cardiff, chasing a shield that had once belonged to King Arthur, and had the ability to make people suggestible to the point they would follow any instruction, no matter how destructive it was. Four men had already died in various unusual ways, the last having simply walked directly into the Taff. The currents had carried him away into the sea, and they stood little chance of recovering his body.
The residents of the Cardiff docklands area already hated the English, so he was the one interviewing people, enjoying being able to converse in his native Welsh while Miss Wells observed their surroundings for clues as to the whereabouts of the miscreant. As they got closer and closer to Penarth, he started hearing people mention an American who had been insistently poking his nose where it didn’t belong. Sure enough, as they found themselves pursuing the youngster, Gareth Pryce, through the streets of Penarth itself, Captain Jack Harkness was suddenly running with them, grinning like a madman.
Miss Wells fell behind as they neared the coast, and it seemed like the two of them had Pryce cornered when he ran along the half-built pier. They slowed as Pryce, a boy of no more than fifteen, stopped suddenly and turned to face them, holding the small shield out as if to protect himself.
“You!” he shouted, pointing at Jack. “You do not belong here. This land is ours.”
Oh, wonderful. A Welsh nationalist. Just what they needed with a brash American beside him.
“Mr Pryce, nid oes rhaid i chi brifo pobl1.”
Harkness’ attention seemed to shift to him, surprise and attraction radiating from him.
“Nid ydynt yn perthyn yma!2” Pryce cried. The youngster was angry, but under that anger, Wolcott could sense distress and grief. “Dylai Cymru fod ar gyfer y Gymraeg.3”
“Pwy wnaethoch chi golli?4” Wolcott asked him, taking a step towards him slowly.
Pryce looked stricken. “Fy nhad a fy mrodyr,5” he admitted. “Maent yn eu lladd yn y pyllau6. Mae’r fforman Saesneg eu gaeth7.”
Suddenly this boy’s plight made a lot more sense to him. Wolcott had been lucky - his father had been a foreman at the steelworks, and between him and his seamstress mother had managed to make enough money to keep Wolcott out of the both the factory and the coal mines. Many of his childhood friends had not been so fortunate, and were now labouring as their fathers and grandfathers had before them. All of Pryce’s victims so far had either been English, or in the second instance, a Welsh foreman: the boy was seeking a justice they both knew would never happen through the courts.
“What’s going on?” Harkness demanded, turning Pryce’s attention back to him.
“Walk,” the boy said, and Harkness did so, moving slowly towards the open end of the pier. His expression was blank, but Walcott could feel both fear and resignation from him, a bizarre combination of emotion.
“I don’t have time for this,” Wolcott grumbled. He pulled his Tesla while Pryce’s attention was still on Harkness, and stunned the boy. He grabbed the shield quickly and shouted: “Stop!”
Harkness did so, then turned on his heel and strode back to Wolcott. He grabbed Wolcott and kissed him firmly, his entire body radiating excitement and lust. Much to his surprise, Wolcott found himself responding enthusiastically, if clumsily.
Dimly, on the periphery of his attention, he heard Miss Wells arrive finally. She chuckled and said: “You could have waited for me, boys.”
Harkness pulled away, amused, leaving Wolcott feeling like his world was ending. His head was spinning, and nothing else seemed to matter other than Harkness.
“I’m sure you can join in, Helena,” Harkness said with a grin. “There’s plenty of me to go around.”
Miss Wells was crouched by the discarded shield, wrapping it in a neutraliser-infused cloth to ensure that any further effects were ended. Once finished with her task, she looked up at them, her face alight with anticipation.
“As I recall, Jack, there’s almost as much of you as you think there is.”
Harkness pretended to be insulted, before grabbing Miss Wells’ hand and pulling her into their embrace.
“I trust you have lodgings somewhere nearby?” she said, looking up at the two of them.
Harkness grinned. “We should be able to find a Hackney. It’s not far.”
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