[section=Disclaimers & Notes]Disclaimers: Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Doctor, Rose Tyler, Jack Harkness, and all other recognizable characters are copyright to the BBC and are borrowed with great love.
Word Count: 3,238
Note: The title comes from the Epica album Consign to Oblivion. Yes, I still suck at titles. This is the first of my fan novels for Torchwood. It is set to bridge the gap between Series 1 and Series 2. Whether or not it will be Series 2 compliant is left to be seen, but it does take into account information released in “The Sound of Drums” of Doctor Who.
Summary: Set immediately following End of Days but prior to the beginning of Series Two, Torchwood Three’s leader is gone. What will happen in the meantime?[endsection]

Realistically, Gwen knew she’d left the Hub since Jack had left, but that was just to go collect the creature that was now occupying the cell Rhys had been in a few days ago. Well, and to make certain Rhys had been brought back to life once Abaddon had been defeated and Jack had been safely delivered back to the Hub. Well, relatively safely; he’d been dead when she got back and had stayed dead for days, only to wake up and be kidnapped. Awfully convenient timing, that was, in her opinion. Not that she could blame that Doctor bloke for not wanting to kidnap a corpse.

But more than that, what if Abaddon and Jack’s subsequent eventual reawakening was what had brought the Doctor calling?

There was no two ways about it. Toshiko and Owen could make her leave the Hub, but they couldn’t make her go home. The apartment she shared with Rhys seemed like another world right now, something completely separate from her Torchwood life. And that’s what needed her right now. Going home to sooth Rhys’s hurt feelings wouldn’t help them find Jack, and more than ever, they needed Jack. Cardiff needed Jack. No more than that; the world needed Jack.

She’d take Tosh’s suggestions to go to a hotel, but she wasn’t going far. There were hotels close by, after all, and she could be back as soon as she needed to tomorrow. She was also taking all the information they had on this Doctor person with her. Maybe she could come up with some sort of profile that might help. Just because no-one had successfully been able to track him down before now didn’t mean anything, other than Torchwood hadn’t been trying too hard before.

She knew Tosh was working on a program to physically track the Doctor’s transport, this TARDIS thing. Well, building computer programs was hardly her speciality, but she could always try to flesh out a personality profile on him, figure out what his next move would be. She was hardly an expert on psychology, but she hadn’t done half bad profiling for cases before. And the one time she’d been really, truly wrong about a person’s characteristics, they’d all been taken in – and wouldn’t she just love to get her hands on Bilis. Wouldn’t they all?

She suspected Toshiko was only letting her leave with the files to make certain she actually did leave. That the Asian woman followed her upstairs and that Owen was waiting in the tourist centre just cinched it for her. Ianto had left easily enough, to her mild surprise, but then the poor man had been through the wringer. She felt like she’d been through the wringer herself as it happened. Bilis killing Rhys, Jack dying and resurrecting and dying and eventually resurrecting and being taken, and the days of waiting by Jack’s side and research… It was no wonder she felt like she’d been going on all cylinders for a month with no chance for a break; it had been a rough week.

They were all tired, she could see that, maybe more than anyone else, but all three of them, they were always so ready to just give up on Jack. Not believing he’d wake up and calling breaks in looking for him, they might as well have just admitted defeat to the Doctor. She’d helped kill Jack once; she wasn’t going to give up on him again. She wasn’t going to stop till he was back with them, no matter what it took.

They were going to be stretched thin, though, trying to find Jack and run Torchwood Three. She was sure Toshiko was coming up with some sort of plan to deal with the duties they were going to have to divvy out amongst them. Hopefully that should allow them time to look for Jack “on the clock” as it were. She had no qualms about staying late and sleeping on the couch someone had so conveniently set up in the office to get the work done and put in the time to find their boss, as long as Ianto showed up the next morning with coffee, but the rest of them seriously needed to spend some more time sleeping. Ianto seemed like he was fading out, Toshiko had dark circles under her eyes that rivalled the one time she’d played in her mum’s eyeliner when she was small, and Owen definitely wasn’t allowing himself time to heal properly; it had been less than a week since he’d been shot for God’s sake. Even doctors needed longer to heal up after that. The only person she knew who’d be over being shot this quickly was, well, Jack, him being the man who stood right back up with a great bloody hole in the middle of his forehead one of the first times she’d met him.

She spread the papers she’d collected from the Hub before she left across the hotel bed and studied them in each turn. There were at least a few dozen pictures of the Doctor, several of them showing a different man each time. So, given that the files listed him as alien of unknown species (and since she couldn’t read someone’s horrible handwriting on the side of that note), she was going to assume (a) the title was familial or (b) the Doctor could change his face. Given that he was alien, she was leaning more towards Option B. So, a chameleon… It made sense, of a sort, but who knew what the Doctor really looked like then?

He seemed to have a limited number of facial and body type options, and as far as the files noted, he was limited to a Caucasian male appearance. Not very helpful for limiting the field. The faces she had seen were all males, approximately mid-thirties and increasing in age to sixties and covering the range between. So almost definitely no-one younger than thirty or older than, say, sixty-five. That narrowed it a bit more.

She eyed the pictures a bit more closely. Was that an opera coat? And she’d thought she worked with some odd ones back when she was still with the police. Apparently, she could add an occasional penchant for odd clothing to the list, even though the short-haired one with the big nose and ears wasn’t too odd, compared to the rest anyway. It wasn’t all the versions of the Doctor, but enough to count as she figured it, especially the bloke with the scarf that just kept on going. That counted as odd as far as she was concerned.

Most of the information she had before was painstakingly gathered by both Torchwood and U.N.I.T. As far as she could tell, there were two totally different takes on the Doctor presented before her. U.N.I.T. seemed to have benefited a great deal over the years from the Doctor’s assistance and knowledge, and so they were the source of almost any positive comments in the files. These were apparently the files that Jack had access to that the remainder of Torchwood did not and detailed multiple instances the Doctor had saved or assisted in saving the Earth, whether from outside invasion or home-grown terrors. They were also the second driest reads she’d ever had to sit through, which said something after years of police reports.

U.N.I.T. didn’t completely whitewash the Doctor and had thoughtfully included some shortcomings with each version they had chronicled, but those files didn’t even display a third the venom towards some of the other aliens they had chronicled (and there had been quite a few mentioned; she’d spent several hours going over the files carefully one at the time) as the Torchwood files did for the Doctor. If she didn’t know better, she’d think that these weren’t even the same alien, that there was another Doctor that Torchwood had met compared to U.N.I.T. It seemed like maybe the higher-ups at Torchwood had met a different alien named “the Doctor” than the higher-ups at U.N.I.T. had, in other words.

Personally, she didn’t buy the theory that there might be more than one Doctor out there in the universe. Oh sure, there might be billions of aliens out there who were doctors among their own people, just like there were thousands of doctors of various kinds here on Earth, but she was placing bets that there was only one the Doctor. The universe narrowed too much otherwise, and if there was one thing she’d looked learned in Torchwood (besides don’t shag aliens, don’t accept gifts that may or may not be alien artefacts from strange people who may or may not be aliens themselves, don’t shag aliens, don’t open the Rift, and oh yeah, don’t shag aliens), it was that the universe was unimaginably huge.

It would be like Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation was usually the best. Never presume there were two criminals carrying out crimes when one criminal could just as easily have done all the crimes and the evidence supported that conclusion. The evidence, thanks to the addition of the U.N.I.T. files, supported the idea that there was indeed only one Doctor interested in any way with the Earth. It also supported the theory that the Doctor could change his face and body, not at will but at times when a human would have died, again going by U.N.I.T.’s files. (And she was curious how Jack had managed to get hold of them: they were all marked top secret and higher. She knew they had some dealings with U.N.I.T., and Ianto had once told her that the two organizations occasionally worked in tandem, if not cooperatively, in the past, before much of U.N.I.T.’s higher-ups had been killed at Downing Street and the majority of Torchwood was lost at the Battle of Canary Wharf. In her time with Torchwood, though, she had seen some information sharing going on but rarely anything this highly classified.)

So in her opinion, there was only one Doctor, capable of changing his face and body at times when he should have died, when a human would have. He was at least four hundred Earth years old, having met both Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria – and made enemies of both of them. Interestingly, apparently he’d been wearing the same face both times, the face recorded at Canary Wharf and during the attempted invasion by the Sycorax at Christmas a few years ago. Yet that was not the face he’d been wearing when Toshiko met him not that long before Canary Wharf at Albion Hospital in London, when the officers of U.N.I.T. were murdered. All the evidence seemed to point towards the Doctor being stuck with the face and body he got after each near death, so there was no way for him to change back and forth as far as she could see. However, that was one of the few options she had for the changing back and forth this time line indicated…

But she was looking at it from a human point of view and normal Earth (non-Torchwood, non-U.N.I.T.) technology. Maybe she needed to be looking at it from a more alien view. After all, she never figured on an alien ship looking like a giant rock or being small enough to be an arm’s length long and still fit two aliens larger than the one she and Owen had captured tonight. Earth was sadly behind in technology, comparing it to things she’d seen since joining Torchwood.

But what could alien tech do? The file mentioned a TARDIS as the Doctor’s primary means of transportation, but how it travelled wasn’t touched up, not even in the U.N.I.T. files on him. According to what little Torchwood had gotten at Canary Wharf before everything went pear-shaped, it materialised inside the building and out stepped the Doctor, the same Doctor Queen Elizabeth had met, the same Doctor Queen Victoria had met, knighted, and banished. He looked to be the youngest, but being no real expert in aliens (other than the simple rule of you don’t shag them), she couldn’t be certain. So, alien tech that no-one really understood, plus a humanoid alien that had been reported by two impeachable sources, added up to what exactly?

It sounded utterly daft and like something out of a bad science fiction film, but all she could add it up to was time travel. And frankly, if Jack and Tosh hadn’t been pulled to 1941 recently, it probably would have never come to her mind in a million years. If they hadn’t been snatched back through time by Bilis Manger, she would have probably left time travel in the realm of the impossible. And of course, that was to say nothing of how Bilis appeared and disappeared as it were: “stepping across eras” was how she thought he’d put it in the clock shop, before everything had really gone to shit, before they’d realised the true extent of his duplicity, before he’d killed Rhys (because who else could it have been?), before he tricked them into releasing Abaddon.

If Bilis could walk through time as easily as walking from one room to the next – she definitely remembered him saying that – then why couldn’t the Doctor also travel in time? It made the most sense, and it was the simplest explanation. Occam’s Razor worked here as well, and it wasn’t like she couldn’t compare her thoughts against Toshiko’s tomorrow morning. Whatever the Asian woman was coming up with, it was probably more scientifically accurate. Figuring out people and how they would react was more Gwen’s forte than the actual aliens themselves. And who knew? Maybe time travel wasn’t possible. She remembered something from some film Rhys had rented by accident (but they’d watched anyway) about something with paradoxes or something like that; maybe that was a tick in the column against time travel being plausible. The scientific bits of it were well and truly above her head. Yes, in the morning, she’d run the time travel idea by Tosh and get her opinion on if it was even possible, much less likely. For all she knew, Tosh had already thought of, considered, and discarded the idea as simply too improbable.

This whole thing might just be her spinning her wheels at this point. It wasn’t like Torchwood hadn’t been working on this Doctor issue for over a hundred years. She certainly wasn’t going to solve it in a single night, not when better, more scientific minds than hers had failed for this long. She wasn’t going to solve a century old problem overnight, not even for Jack, but that certainly wasn’t going to stop her from trying. There was no way she was giving up this easily.

She pulled the notepad provided by the hotel into her lap and balanced the pen she’d found in the bedside table drawer between her fingers as she tried to work out which of her theories was correct enough or plausible enough to jot down, biting down on the capped end in thought. Well, the time travel theory first, if only so Toshiko could reject it quickly and get it out of the way. Or better still, just get it all out so it could picked through. Owen would probably have a field day with it and probably order her up a psych evaluation once this was all over, but that was then and this was now – and now they needed a theory. (What they needed was Jack, but in the meanwhile, a theory on how to find Jack would have to suffice, and that was the best she could do for now. She wasn’t giving up after all.) So with a heavy sigh, she uncapped the pen and began to write:

“Name: The Doctor (real name unknown)
Known alias: Doctor James McCrimmon (? spelling)
Known associates:”

She paused in her writing to check back through the files and consult both the Torchwood One notes and what was recorded by the surviving members of Queen Victoria’s guard and the Queen herself to make certain she had the name right before she continued:

“Rose Tyler (from Powell Estates?, London accent, seen in both Torchwood One in 2006 and Scotland in 1879), unknown companions (two meetings with Queen Elizabeth I, unnamed persons from various timezones), UNIT members, UNIT officers
Known allies: UNIT, various companions (human or humanoid)
Known enemies: Torchwood (? – still in charter, but hasn’t been mentioned since I started and read initial files)
Known age: At least 400 human years (? possibly older)
Known actions: Several years with UNIT as advisor, Sycorax, werewolf, Albion Hospital, Downing Street bombing?, Canary Wharf
Known transport: TARDIS (dematerialise, whirring grinding noise – yes Owen back-firing auto – move from Powell Estate to Torchwood One – travels in space – maybe time? – help me out with this one Tosh)

“Initial thoughts: Maybe this Doctor can do like Bilis Manger and travel through time. If so, then this makes him doubly dangerous. Queen Victoria said he finds dangerous situations entirely too fun and enjoyable, making him dangerous, an adrenaline junkie, and therefore unpredictable. He also can be anywhere and now anywhen. We also have to add in to that equation that he was present at the attack of the Sycorax and the Racnoss (? spelling on both), both of which had a huge possibility of loss of human life, and the danger goes up. When we add in the Battle of Canary Wharf and the loss of human life, both civilian and Torchwood staff members alike, and the worldwide alien battle that resulted, it’s no wonder the Doctor was written into our charter as one of the most dangerous aliens out there. If he doesn’t cause it, (Tosh, your experience seems to indicate he’s fairly peaceable if not provoked) then trouble follows him here to Earth. Which came first: the Doctor or the trouble?

“It may not be a valid theory, but given that Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, and Torchwood One all apparently met the same version of the Doctor, based on descriptions, sketches, and CCTV, I submit that he is likely extremely long-lived. Since Tosh met a different Doctor between those times and UNIT worked with several different Doctors between those times, my guess is he can travel in time. Maybe that is one of the TARDIS’s functions, along with the dematerialising here and there across the Earth.

“The Doctor was present at the destruction of Torchwood One. We get a recording of his TARDIS when Captain Jack Harkness, our leader, vanishes. We are left with the inescapable conclusion that the Doctor wants Torchwood out of the way. Taking into effect the time travel theory above, perhaps he just learned Torchwood was created to protect the world from him when he landed at Torchwood One – but he is cleaning us up now.

“Of course all of this is theory. We’ve proven time and again that aliens don’t always react in human-like ways, so all the theories above could be utter rubbish. And don’t you dare say a word, Owen. We need theories, and I’ve yet to hear a decent one from you.”

She stuck the cap back on her pen and tucked the notepad under her pillow as she laid down on it. No sense taking any chance with this information vanishing. They might need it after all.

[section=Footer Notes]08 July 2007

You guys are just worlds of fantastic! Okay, so I’m only at one treat (ice cream from the beta for every 500 hits), but still… a treat!

I’m caught back up answering reviews for now – and thank you so much to everyone who has left one! You have no idea how much each one means to me. Thank you!

I’m making no promises on when the next chapter should be out. Every two days seems to be about my speed, but maybe that’ll change sooner or later. Faster would be nice, but I’m not giving up quality for it.

See you in Chapter Five!

Apollymi[endsection]

[section=Disclaimers & Notes]Disclaimers: Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Doctor, Rose Tyler, Jack Harkness, and all other recognizable characters are copyright to the BBC and are borrowed with great love.
Word Count: 3,343
Note: The title comes from the Epica album Consign to Oblivion. Yes, I still suck at titles. This is the first of my fan novels for Torchwood. It is set to bridge the gap between Series 1 and Series 2. Whether or not it will be Series 2 compliant is left to be seen, but it does take into account information released in “The Sound of Drums” of Doctor Who.
Summary: Set immediately following End of Days but prior to the beginning of Series Two, Torchwood Three’s leader is gone. What will happen in the meantime?[endsection]

The door to the holding cell closed with barely more than a hiss. Like all the ones on this floor, it had gotten some frequent use after the Rift had been opened the first time. When it had been opened the second time, anything that had slipped through time disappeared again. From then until now, the only thing that had been in a cage here again had been a couple of Weevils. Hopefully this wasn’t a sign of things to come, that they were once again starting to use more of the cages.

At least Ianto had met them at the door with another Taser. Lucky break, that was, especially with their new… friend starting to wake up again. And starting to of course meant the damn thing was trying to claw through the cage in the back of the SUV. They were definitely going to have replace the entire back seat, at least the rear portion of it facing the cage. And replacing the cage might not be a bad idea either. Amazing; it held up so well against Weevils. Hell, two Weevils could go in it without too much damage to the SUV, but in less than twenty minutes, this thing had nearly ripped the back to pieces.

“Never thought I’d start appreciating Weevils,” he muttered to himself. And he was resolutely ignoring how the Weevil in the cage just across from where he stood, the one Jack had named Janet, if he remembered right, was eyeing him. He’d been doing his best to avoid coming down here too often since that night in the cage and then Bilis and Abaddon, or at least trying not to stop near any of the Weevil-occupied cells. He still wasn’t too sure what to think of Janet cowering before him or the way the creatures went silent and tried to make themselves small around him. It had been hard to hide, especially after the Rift had been opened the first time, and the Weevils started going mad, coming up out of the sewers and attacking the good, ignorant people of Cardiff in greater numbers than ever before on top of every other bit of hell that had broken loose, which in turn meant more Weevils for them to bring in. Ianto had equated the reaction once he’d seen it to the law of the jungle, weaker beasts cowering submissively before a greater predator. They had to be daft if they thought he was a better predator than the Weevils themselves, no matter how mighty he had felt baring his teeth and hissing at the creature.

Well, their new guest was definitely on a level above that, given the damage it had done to their equipment and those two poor bastards unlucky enough to get in its way. A pissed off gigantic iguana with extra long claws, extra big teeth, and an extra bad attitude, that was what this thing was. And, strangely he could almost get why Jack insisted on naming everything down here: it made it so much easier to keep up with which one was which. So… Charlie. Yeah, the thing looked like a Charlie. At least it wasn’t Sandra or Kate or whatever it was Jack called that thing they fished out of the Bay that one time, back before Gwen got recruited. Suzie had hated the smell of that… thing, Sandra-or-Kate, which he recalled being far from pleasant but not quite bottom of a rubbish bin awful. Maybe more like those dirty socks you found hidden under your bed that may or may not have belonged to the person who lived in your flat before you; yeah, from what he remembered of Sandra-or-Kate and its particular odour, that was about the best analogy.

“Owen?” And that would be Tosh’s voice, echoing in the holding room. She stood in the doorway, dressed a thousand times more casually than he ever seen her at work, jeans and a simple blouse. No make-up, of course, but the opposite there was much more of a rarity. Why was he noticing all this now, he had to wonder. But he also immediately figured it’s another of those Jack being missing things. Suddenly their team of five had been reduced to a team of four, when they’d lost the one who inexplicably knew the most about the aliens they were up against. Well, most of the time anyway; Abaddon had been a bit beyond Jack, and if it hadn’t been bloody terrifying, it might have proven enjoyable to see the Captain as much in the dark as the rest of them.

“What?” And snarling off his words wasn’t hard, not with Charlie and Janet around. Charlie and Janet: they sounded like the Odd Couple like that. It meant they fit in perfectly around here. It meant everyone and everything was odd. About par for the course, if anyone asked him.

“I’m sending Ianto and Gwen home for the evening. We’ve all been here entirely too long. We’re not going to do any good if we’re falling asleep on our feet.” She was clearly building herself up for the argument to end all arguments, and quite right too. “If our new friend here is secure, why don’t you go on home as well? I’ll close down the Hub for the evening.”

He glanced over his shoulder to where their new friend was slowly climbing to its feet. Charlie didn’t really look too bad for a creature that had been Tasered twice in one night. Obviously electricity had an effect, but not a permanent one. The last jolt Ianto had given it had been less than half an hour ago; that seemed to be about the amount of time it needed to shrug off the effects and get back up again. “The Tasers do a lot more good than guns,” he had to admit. “Shooting it only made it angry, after all. Where do you suppose he fell through from?”

Tosh had slowly crossed the room to stand next to him before the cage. “I don’t know.” She jumped, catching her breath in a gasp as it leapt, snarling, towards them. Admirably, she recovered quickly. “I do know, though, that identifying its species can wait till tomorrow. You need to go home as well, Owen. We all do.”

“There’s still so much to do,” he paused, tossing her a reassessing glance. “Besides, are you trying to send us home like bad kids, Mum?”

And there went a faint flush across her cheeks, and she glanced down to find something on the floor near her feet very interesting, somehow managing to completely ignore Charlie’s scrambling, trying to claw his way through the clear wall. He wouldn’t be able to, of course – or at least that was the running theory – but it was a bit odd that Toshiko was actually able to completely ignore it.

There was new resolve in her eyes when she looked up again, though. “Jack’s gone.”

“I thought that was completely obvious by this point.”

“No, Jack is gone. We don’t know when he’ll be back, how he’ll come back, or even if he’ll come back at all.”

He held a purely mental shudder in. “He’ll be back. The bastard made it through Abaddon, the pug-faced so-called destroyer of worlds. He’ll make it through the Doctor. I reckon that alien bastard probably isn’t figuring on Jack being nigh on immortal.”

“It’s hardly common knowledge. The point is, until we manage to find and rescue him or Jack escapes, he’s gone. We’re short one person, unless you really want to call Glasgow or the Prime Minister and beg for a replacement branch leader and hope it’s someone we can stand.”

“Someone we won’t have to shoot, you mean?” he drawled. No way was he going to let his distaste at the idea of calling in help be seen. Sure, Harold Saxon was a great guy and all that, but all the same, he didn’t want to see who the man might send out to replace Jack, much less if the guy would do something like order them to stop searching for Jack. He had a bit of trust for Saxon, but not for other government officials; always looking out for their own asses, they were. “No thanks, I think we can manage on our own till Jack’s back.”

And she was nodding, a small, almost (no, scratch that almost) shy smile on her face. Obviously he said what she was leading up to. “I couldn’t agree more. We can manage as a team of four for a little while, just till we get Jack back.”

“Then what are you still wittering on about?”

“We can make it as four, but only if all four of us pulls his fair share and a bit more. We each have to do our own job. And then there’s Jack’s as well.”

Seriously, what was she leading up to? Sometimes he really had no idea what Tosh was talking about, especially when she decided to beat around the bush like this. “I’ve been-”

“No, Owen,” she interrupted boldly then looked surprised at herself for the intrusion. He couldn’t help agreeing. It wasn’t very like her to do something like that. “We’re going to have to split Jack’s jobs and duties among us. One person can’t do all their own tasks and Jack’s.”

And the penny dropped. “That’s what you’ve been building up to?”

“What did you think I meant?” Thankfully, she didn’t give him time enough to answer that before pushing on. “You did a good job leading in the field today. I’ll handle the Hub-side of things and deal with U.N.I.T.; I’ve had some experience with B ambera before now. I think we should delegate relations with the Prime Minister and the regular military over to Ianto and have Gwen step up relations with the police in general; we’ll need all the extra resources we can get if we’re going to get out of this fix quickly.”

“And the police are supposed to be another great resource?” He didn’t even bother pretending to keep the scorn out of his voice. The closest the Cardiff police had come to helping in any productive way had been either tossing Gwen over their direction or putting Roman soldiers in holding cells till they arrived. It was a bit better than the helpless flailing the hospital had done with the bubonic plague, after all, though not by much as far as he was concerned. “Think they can manage to pick the alien out of the line-up?”

“Owen…”

“You’re absolutely right, might be a bit much for them. Think we can, I don’t know, get them flashcards or something? Match the aliens? Should bring it about down to their level.”

She was smiling for real at last as he began to wind down. It hadn’t taken nearly as long as he thought it might. “Thank you. I needed that.”

“What you need is to go home and get some sleep. You look like you’re dead on your feet.”

“So do you.” She sighed, sparing Charlie a long stare before speaking again. “I need to make sure Ianto and Gwen are leaving before I can do anything.”

“Good luck getting her to go home,” he muttered sullenly. And if Gwen asked, she was absolutely not sleeping on his couch. He made a point of not involving himself with an ex after the dumping was done. It would be a whole other thing if they’d broken it off a bit more amicably, but as it stood, he’d just as soon let her sleep on the door step. Well, no, maybe on the kitchen table. But that was it.

“I’ll get her a hotel room if nothing else, but she can’t stay here another night.”

He couldn’t resist a little barb. “I don’t think she’s that kind of girl, Tosh. You would have to catch her on a bad day or buy her a drink first.” He paused, reconsidering his words. “Actually, you either have to catch her on a bad day or get her drunk – or lock yourself in a room with her and a bunch of alien sex pheromones.”

“I think I’ll have to take a pass on that. It’s much more like your sort of thing to do. I would just like to know she’s spending the night somewhere besides here – and perhaps taking a real shower. I don’t think she’s done that since Abaddon.”

“Which is just a nice way of saying she smells about as bad as Charlie here,” he tossed back, giving said alien a nod, which just seemed to make him even more angry. Yes, the glass should hold, but all the same, he almost wondered if they should give him another shock and move him to a level all of his own. A private suite, as it might be, rather than risk him getting out and killing the Weevils they had imprisoned.

“You named it Charlie?” She needn’t sound so incredulous. The way she sounded, she was at most a few seconds from laughing hysterically at him. “Charlie?” And it was slipped out, the first giggle. “Why Charlie?” She cast a glance over her shoulder to Janet and burst out into more laughter.

“After the stinky, ugly kid who used to live next door to me, not that it makes any difference.”

Another twitter of amusement escaped her. “So do you think… Charlie here will be all right till morning?” And she was entirely too amused by the whole thing. On the other hand, though, how long had it been since this place had heard any laughter? Any just plain relaxed laughter, not nervous or hysterical? Well, that was something even Jack hadn’t managed lately. “The Weevils don’t seem to like him much.”

Well, that was true. Janet had flattened herself against the back wall of her cell when they brought Charlie in and scarcely moved since then. Abruptly he couldn’t help but remember what Ianto had said about law of the jungle and recognising a better predator. Weevils were really less predators than scavengers, but they were definitely adept at killing their own meals if needs be. Charlie, on the other hand, was either a true predator or a sadist; it hadn’t eaten the two men it had killed, but that might have been because it was on the run. With teeth and claws like that, it definitely was a carnivore. That, or wherever it was from had some vicious plant life, perhaps truly carnivorous plant life. That was a plant he never hoped to meet if he had anything to say about it and if the theory was correct; then again, he could kill cacti. Jack said he had a gift for killing plants – a “brown thumb” was how he’d put it – so he should be fine against carnivorous plants. Unless of course they were after revenge for all the plants he’d killed over the years; at that point, he’d be in a lot of trouble.

In fact, it’d probably be a lot like going through Jack’s back catalogue of dates: a long, long list that would take a long, long time to go through. And that just brought up entire new worlds of questions: just how many guys could Jack have slept with? Sod what Toshiko said about him going for anything gorgeous; the man had to be gay. He was shagging Ianto, after all, so gay and desperate, as far as Owen was concerned. But how long could Jack’s back catalogue be? He paused in consideration: it depended on just how old Jack was, a fact none of them had discovered yet. There was no record of a Captain Jack Harkness in the United Kingdom since 1941, and from Tosh’s story, while he’d seemed to fit in in the Forties, that didn’t fit some of the very few other clues they had.

At least Gwen hadn’t gotten it into her head yet to put out a missing poster for him. There wasn’t enough information they knew to even begin to fill it out. Hell, they wouldn’t even know what to put down for his name. “Captain Jack Harkness” wasn’t even his name, according to the info Toshiko had pulled in from her trip with him to 1941. They had his height, photograph, and physical description – but not any of the important things the amateurs in the police would need: name, age, or even where he was originally from. America, perhaps, based on his accent, but even that was a guess. Ianto had suggested C.I.A. or Black Ops once, and it made a degree of sense; if he’d been C.I.A. or even maybe in a special section of U.N.I.T., they may have erased his identity.

And he must have been exhausted for his mind to be wandering like it was. What was it Tosh had asked? “He should be fine till morning. I’ll need to take a closer look at him and find out what I can about his species. If he’s an example of what we’re going to be getting from now on, we need a better idea of what to expect.” He sighed tired. “Jack picked a hell of a time to swan off.”

“Owen? Do you really think the Doctor took him?”

He shrugged one shoulder, the one that didn’t have a great bloody bullet hole through it. If Ianto had been aiming for his shoulder, he supposed he had to be glad he hadn’t been aiming anywhere more vital. “You’re the one who’s met the Doctor, not me. What do you think?”

She shifted on her feet, eyes locking on the floor. “The Doctor I met sounded like he was from the North. It wasn’t the same Doctor as Canary Wharf.” She paused, apparently thinking over what she was going to say before she said it. “If it was the Doctor I met… If he thought we did something wrong, he’d probably come here and tell us off for it. The Doctor from Canary Wharf, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I mean, all those people…”

“He’ll get a shock if he tries anything on Jack.” His smile was feral at best as a dark thought occurred to him. “He’ll get an even bigger surprise the first time Jack sits right back up.”

She laughed shortly, finally turning back towards him. “Owen? Can we agree to share Jack’s responsibilities for the duration of however long he’s gone?”

Another shrug. “I don’t see why not. I hate paperwork, though, so that part’s yours.”

She laughed before spinning towards the door. “All right, then I’m sending them out of here. Start closing up the Hub for the evening and go home as well, Owen.”

“After I make certain Charlie’s secured. Last thing we want is him to get loose and wreaking havoc.”

She nodded. “Oh yes. The pterodactyl might not approve. You are going home, though, right?”

“Of course. Why would I want to sleep here? I mean, the couch isn’t that great, and have you seen Jack’s little bunker under his office? I might not mind close quarters, but I’d prefer to share them with someone.”

“I don’t think Jack stayed – stays down there very often. He and Ianto seem to go to Ianto’s flat on Mermaid Quay. Before that, though… I don’t think he slept down there often.” She smiled and shrugged. “Jack may well be the reason we have a couch.”

He had to laugh at that as well. “Yeah, can you picture Yvonne Hartman letting anyone crash in her perfectly clean and sterile Canary Wharf building? She’d have probably died of an embolism before you got ten minutes into your nap, then come back from the dead, and disinfect after you.”

“Well, you’d have never survived there. But we knew that a long time ago. Now, go home, Owen. I’ll be waiting upstairs till you’re gone.”

That remained to be seen. He fully anticipated Gwen putting up a fight against leaving now. Now that he could stand to see.

[section=Footer Notes]06 July 2007

Finished my daily word count! With… 4 minutes left to spare… Okay, not my best.

You know, for the record: Owen is not my favourite character. In fact, my favourites list goes something like this: Jack first, Gwen and Tosh tied for second, Owen in third, and then Ianto. (I’m not rating Suzie, evil genius that she is.)

Thank you to everyone who’s left a review so far; you guys are just fantastic! I’m doing a fairly good job answering all the comments fairly quickly, but I know I’m at least one behind. I’m going to work on that tomorrow. Err… later today; it’s now after midnight getting this posted, so I’m going to bed while I’m still coherent.

Apollymi

07 July 2007 – P.S. from Apollymi
My beta-reader and I have made a bet. For every 500 hits you guys give me on this, I get ice cream. Today is my first treat! Keep them coming: I love ice cream :-D[endsection]

[section=Disclaimers & Notes]Disclaimers: Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Doctor, Rose Tyler, Jack Harkness, and all other recognizable characters are copyright to the BBC and are borrowed with great love.
Word Count: 3,096
Note: The title comes from the Epica album Consign to Oblivion. Yes, I still suck at titles. This is the first of my fan novels for Torchwood. It is set to bridge the gap between Series 1 and Series 2. Whether or not it will be Series 2 compliant is left to be seen, but it does take into account information released in “The Sound of Drums” of Doctor Who.
Summary: Set immediately following End of Days but prior to the beginning of Series Two, Torchwood Three’s leader is gone. What will happen in the meantime?[endsection]

It was perfectly obvious to Toshiko what was happening around here. There were entire planets of denial circulating around, each one more oppressive than the one before, and for all that he might be trying to hide it, Owen might be the worst of the lot of them, with Gwen running a close second. At least Ianto was fairly honest in his utter misery – and wasn’t that fun to sit around the Hub with – and she was keeping herself busy with their newest alien guest, as well trying to write a program to track the Doctor’s TARDIS from the limited information they had on it.

The Torchwood One files had been no help in the matter whatsoever in the matter. Any information they may have had from trying to study it before everything went pear shaped was lost when the Cybermen and the other aliens (Jack had called them Daleks, and she was quite willing to go with that) started taking over. And it wasn’t just the information the alien technology, including the TARDIS, that had been lost; the technology itself had been lost. Most estimates that had been done since the Battle of Canary Wharf, as it was now being called, about ninty-three per cent of the alien technology in Torchwood One’s holdings had been lost or damaged beyond repair. To make matters all the worse, all of Torchwood Four’s info and tech had been there in storage since that entire team’s disappearance.

In the end, though, it meant she was flying a bit blind when it came to this program. She just didn’t have enough information and was having to extrapolate nearly as much she knew with any degree of certainty. She couldn’t exactly trace it just by the noise; otherwise, she’d end up tracking every backfiring Volvo, as Owen had put it, around the world. Chasing that many false leads would spread them too thin, which would leave them in no position to help Jack, should they eventually actually find the TARDIS that way. She’d briefly considered calling in Torchwood Two to help them find their missing leader, but no, if Owen’s theory was correct and the Doctor was after Torchwood, then they’d need a unit in reserve. Still, she could set up a back-up program, so that if they didn’t log into the Hub’s interface, either mobilely or from one of the computers here, an alert would be sent to Edinburgh. She’d have to make sure it didn’t send prematurely (perhaps she could set it for nine hours without a single log in) and that it sent all the information they’d collected so far, however much or little it was by that point.

She was well aware that she had something of a reputation in Torchwood, not for her intellectualism as she’d prefer, but for being the only living person in Torchwood to have met the Doctor. To this day, she was still amazed at how many people had called her from the other branches for information about him in the days and weeks after the aliens faking aliens incident. When all she could say was he was a brooding Northern-sounding man who made her feel stupid, the phone calls had begun to peter off. To her that was the amazing point: it wasn’t often that she felt stupid. She could count them all on one hand, after all, and all but one of them had occurred since she’d joined Torchwood. The other had been she had been very young and was something she generally preferred not to think about on most days.

Right now, she wished she knew as much about the man as people had thought she did. Any information more than she had would be wonderful at the moment. Most of the files U.N.I.T. sent Jack had been on a different Doctor, an elderly chap with odd taste in clothing, though there had been files on other people called “the Doctor”. Perhaps it was a title that was passed on, perhaps father to son. How many Doctors could there have been since Queen Victoria founded Torchwood? How many Doctors had there been since the missives retrieved from Queen Elizabeth I’s personal documents? Just how many Doctors had there been?

But if it was a title passed from father to son, then how quickly did these aliens age? The Northern Doctor she’d met hadn’t seemed old enough to have a son the age of the Doctor caught on Torchwood One’s CCTV. Different maturity rates, perhaps, from humans? She almost hoped that was the answer. The only other option she could immediately come up with, the one that kept drifting back into the forefront of her mind like a portent of doom, was that all these Doctors were the same person, that there was just one Doctor, an alien capable of changing his face; in other words, a chameleon masquerading among humans. But that would mean he was either as immortal as Jack was or extremely, extremely long-lived. And she couldn’t see the Northern Doctor she’d met at Albion Hospital being willing to let so many people die, not when he hadn’t wanted the fake alien killed, not when he’d shown such sympathy for it. It had to be the former theory. There had to be more than one Doctor.

Any other idea was just too monstrous, even for Torchwood’s number one enemy. Besides, the father-to-son theory explained why the current Doctor matched descriptions of the Doctor Queen Victoria had met. As for the descriptions of the woman who’d been with him, that London girl named Rose Tyler, matching the Victorian descriptions of the “timorous beastie” and the “wee naked child” with the Doctor then… Well, maybe there was a familial preference for blondes. Of course, Rose Tyler was on the list of the dead from Canary Wharf, the list which had arrived mere days before Ianto. When it had arrived, Jack had locked himself in his office for hours and had quietly drunk himself into a stupor. She supposed they’d all mourned Torchwood One in their own ways, since Owen had spent three days away from the Hub and come back looking like something she’d throw back in the rubbish bin.

Owen… She supposed he was blaming himself for this and that was why he was acting like he needed to be both himself and Jack for the rest of them. He was bound to stretch himself too thin, trying to both be their medic and a temporary leader, especially since they’d yet to follow procedure and call in Jack’s disappearance to the proper people, namely the branch head of Torchwood Two, Bambera over at U.N.I.T., and the Prime Minister. Yes, Mister Saxon seemed like a great guy, and she’d even voted for him herself, but she didn’t fancy telling him they’d managed to lose their branch leader.

Maybe if Owen wanted to play at being their temporary leader, he could make the calls. Better him than her, after all, she figured. And if he wanted someone to yell at him and punish him for whatever role he thought he’d played in Jack’s vanishing, then she was sure Bambera was up to the task. No nonsense, that was how Bambera had struck her the one time she’d gone with Jack to meet the woman after the incident at Albion. There hadn’t been a lot of U.N.I.T. officers left after that, as she recalled, and they had yet to assign a new Torchwood liaison, so they’d gotten to go straight to the top. As she also recalled it, Bambera had made a veiled reference to preferring Jack over Yvonne. She wouldn’t be happy to know they let Jack get taken.

And if Owen was trying to be Jack for them, then Gwen was throwing herself further into work than even she was. At least she went home at night. She didn’t think Gwen had been home since checking to make sure Rhys had been restored. She’d lost count how many times Rhys had called her personal mobile since then, till Gwen’s phone’s battery had died. It had been silent since then, two days ago, the day before Jack woke up and was taken, so she had to assume Gwen had yet to recharge the battery. If they bothered to cut on the police chatter, there would probably be a missing persons report being broadcast on her.

Now there was a halfway decent idea: if nothing else, she could set up an alert for all the versions of the Doctor she knew about (just in case) and Jack, both on the police bands and in the media (also just in case, better safe than sorry and all that). It wouldn’t take any time at all to do that, and then she could get back to her research. Hastily she pulled up another window in her far right monitor and working on the new program.

“Idea?”

She started, having almost forgotten about Ianto also being in the Hub in her preoccupation. “I’m setting up a second program, to monitor the police and media for the Doctor and Jack.”

“Do you think they’ll show up on the news?”

She shrugged. “It’s a long shot, but it’s worth a try. I’m having trouble setting up the program to track the Doctor, so this will have to do till it’s finished.”

“How long do you estimate on it?”

Poor Ianto, she thought to herself as she kept inputting information into the second program. There was absolutely no doubt what Bilis, if that was indeed the man’s name, had shown him, they’d killed Jack, Jack had woken up, Jack had died again, come back, and been kidnapped all within a few scarce days of each other. The relationship between Jack and Ianto had been cause for more than a few late-night drink discussions between the other members of the team. The most they’d ever decided was that it was the most confusing thing they’d ever dealt with, which was saying a lot given where they worked and what they dealt with on a day-to-day basis, and it would be best for them to drop the subject before it became too much for the ale to deal with.

“I’m not really sure, Ianto. A few hours, if I can find something to trace the TARDIS. A few days, if I happen upon some lucky breakthrough. A few weeks, if I have to keep making it up as I go.” She half-glanced over her shoulder at him, trying not to see the pervasive sadness in his eyes or the exhaustion in the slump of his shoulders, but they were so hard to ignore.

“Of course.”

“It really is hard to say at this point. None of us are giving up on finding him though,” she rushed to reassure him. “We’re going to get Jack back, I know it.”

“Do you think Owen’s right? That the Doctor took him?”

“It’s the best theory we have to run with right now. If he’s wrong, then we’ll come up with a new one. I promise you, Ianto: we’re going to find Jack.”

She really shouldn’t be making promises like that, not when she had no idea if she’d be able to keep it. But it felt right. It felt like something they’d be able to accomplish somehow. They would get Jack back, and hopefully they would accomplish it before U.N.I.T. or Torchwood Two or even the Prime Minister found out. After all, they’d dealt with fairies (that one hadn’t gone well), cannibals (well, Jack had shot the cannibals before the rest of them could become dinner), falling back in time (okay, Owen had had to open the Rift to save them, and things had gone distinctly south thanks to that rescue), a Cyberwoman in their basement (the less said about that the better), and Abaddon (again, that one had gone horribly, horribly wrong, and if she had been in Jack’s position, she wasn’t sure she could have forgiven them for what they’d done). Maybe their track record wasn’t stellar, but they usually got some sort of resolution on the cases they took on, even if it wasn’t always a pleasant or pleasing one.

No, they would get Jack back if it was the last thing they did. Jack wouldn’t give up on them; they couldn’t give up on him. The closest Jack had come to giving up on any of them had been in 1941 – and after they met the other Captain Jack Harkness. She couldn’t even imagine how that must have felt for him, but she knew raw pain when she saw it and that was the look that had been in his eyes when they began to realise how trapped they were, when they left to come back to their own time, when they toasted to the other Captain Jack in his office. That impenetrable sadness had been so devastating to hear when he promised to take care of her that she’d wanted to cry and ask who would take care of him, especially watching him break slowly at not being able to save the other Captain Jack.

And yet she’d let herself be complicit the very next day in shooting him. She may not have pulled the trigger herself, but she certainly hadn’t stopped Owen. She’d frozen, at first unable to believe the things Jack was saying to them, then unable to believe Gwen had punched him like that. But then Owen had had Jack’s gun, and everything had happened so quickly. She’d frozen; that was the only way to put it. She would have no more been able to do anything then than if she’d been asked to fly. And she’d still gone along with their hastily made plan to open the Rift after seeing Jack’s body on the floor; there was no stopping then. Even Ianto had carried through, despite his shock at Owen’s actions. They were all equally guilty. Owen may have pulled the trigger, perhaps thinking at the time that death wouldn’t be permanent on Jack either, just as it wouldn’t be for Rhys, but they’d all had a part to play in the act. They were all guilty.

If her calculations and Jack’s predictions were true, and the Rift was going to become a lot more active, then she wouldn’t blame Jack in the least if he didn’t forgive them this time, didn’t trust them again. The Rift opening might have even been the impetus for the Doctor’s visit; it might be their fault Jack was kidnapped. No, she wouldn’t blame him in the least if he never trusted them again. Owen’s betrayal was bad enough, actually killing him as he had, but the other three of them had betrayed him in much worse ways that couldn’t be atoned for: Ianto and he had a relationship of some sort, so he had broken a lover’s confidence; Gwen, he had trusted with the secret of his immortality, long before any of the rest of them had known (and only then they’d found out because Gwen had told them), so she’d broken a confidante’s trust; and she was the only one who knew that Jack Harkness wasn’t even his real name, that he’d been in 1941 before, that he’d been a conman, sometime in his past, so she’d betrayed a friend’s trust, because that was what he’d called her, talking to Mary.

Somehow she didn’t think it was a word he tossed around lightly. And she was none too sure he’d still use it. She’d liked it. She’d never had too many friends before, and she liked the idea of Jack being hers.

“Owen and Gwen are coming back with our new guest.” Damn, she’d almost forgotten he was there again. How embarrassing. “I’ll go get a cell ready and meet them upstairs.”

She nodded absently. “Take an extra Taser. I’m not sure how long it will have been knocked out. It might be waking up soon.” It had been fairly large. The electrical current may have diffused itself by now, or its neural synapses might still be firing. As an alien they were having a first encounter with, it was hard to say. They may have even accidentally killed it, but Owen probably would have said something if they had. If he was in doctor mode, that was, and not in a pretending to be Jack state of mind.

No, she shouldn’t fault Owen for trying to find a way to make things right for them till Jack was back. They all were in their own way, after all, but Owen needed to be doing something that benefited himself as well, not just the rest of them. It just wasn’t like the Owen they all knew to be selfless; he was supposed to be sarcastic and a bit crude and completely irascible. He was also supposed to be second-in-command, not the leader. He was supposed to be Owen, in other words, not Jack. Yes, they needed Jack right now, but they also needed Owen.

Right now, they couldn’t afford to be even one person short, much less two. They needed a medic especially now, while they were all running themselves ragged. Till Jack was back, they’d just all have to equally share the burden of leadership. She’d made certain they all went home tonight, even Gwen, or at least slept some place that wasn’t at their desk, on the couch, in the conference room, or in Jack’s office; if they wouldn’t got home, she’d just rent them all hotel rooms. She might even demand Gwen call Rhys and let him know she was still alive, if she wouldn’t go home and reconcile things with him.

With a few last keystrokes, she set the secondary program to begin, with expanded search perimeters: it wouldn’t just search Cardiff’s media and police wavelengths – it would search throughout the United Kingdom. When she had the time to work on it further, once the main program was completed, she’d reset it to search throughout the world. It’d be a nice back-up to the Doctor-TARDIS search, a sort of fail-safe measure. It was a good idea. Jack would be proud of her.

After all, if they did things her way, when Jack got back, whether he freed himself or they found him, there would still be a team left to come back to, not a group of bedraggled has-beens in their place. Her way, there would still be a Torchwood Three left for Jack to come home to.

[section=Footer Notes]04 July 2007

Wow. Err, I actually meant to change narrators part of the way through there, but once Tosh got started, I didn’t want to stop her. She’s fun like that.

Well, I’m caught back up on my word count. In fact, I’m a little over (a very little, like 33 words), but I’m going try to build that gap as time goes.

Thank you to everyone for the reviews so far, as well as the well wishes. I slept about thirteen or so hours, being that I had today off, and generally lounged about writing like a fiend to make up my deficit from yesterday. Of course, that required turning on various episodes from time to time to make certain I had things right.

Hopefully more tomorrow, work permitting, but probably not this long. Thanks for sticking around, everyone. Talk at you guys more after Chapter Three.

Apollymi

[endsection]

[section=Disclaimers & Notes]Disclaimers: Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Doctor, Rose Tyler, Jack Harkness, and all other recognizable characters are copyright to the BBC and are borrowed with great love.
Word Count: 1,971
Note: The title comes from the Epica album Consign to Oblivion. Yes, I still suck at titles. This is the first of my fan novels for Torchwood. It is set to bridge the gap between Series 1 and Series 2. Whether or not it will be Series 2 compliant is left to be seen, but it does take into account information released in “The Sound of Drums” of Doctor Who.
Summary: Set immediately following End of Days but prior to the beginning of Series Two, Torchwood Three’s leader is gone. What will happen in the meantime?[endsection]

“Well, what would Jack do?!”

He wasn’t too sure what Jack Harkness would do in a situation like they found they were currently finding themselves in, but Owen was fairly certain it wouldn’t involve shrieking like a banshee in his ear. If it did, well, he wouldn’t put a lot of things past Jack, and that included shrieking like a banshee but only if it’d be for their own good. He hoped, anyway.

Jack may have said he was forgave him, after all, but he wasn’t sure he entirely believed him. Not when he wasn’t completely ready to forgive himself. Since Jack’s disappearance (Had it only been yesterday? It felt like both ages and mere hours ago.), he thrown himself into their work. He had Toshiko and Ianto back at the Hub trying to find out what they could about the Doctor, and he and Gwen had left on what seemed to be another normal Weevil spotting. How wrong he had been.

Apparently Jack had told Gwen just before his disappearance, because it was just too hard to think of a bloke like Jack being kidnapped, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the Rift would be getting more and more active. Either he was right and they were therefore getting new aliens they’d never seen before, or he was still right and they were getting evolved Weevils. Neither was a pleasant concept, especially not with Jack gone; the man sometimes seemed to have something more of a clue of what was going on than the rest of them, not that he was always willing to share what that clue might be, of course, but the fall-back had at least been there.

He’d love to get his hands on whoever had Jack. Never mind that if they had Jack and had managed to keep him this long, apparent immortality and all, they could probably hand him his own arse in a neat little pile. Never mind that; he wanted to get his hands around their throats, assuming they h ad them, and squeeze.

Toshiko and Ianto were dead certain it was the Doctor they were dealing with. To some extent that alarmed him: the Doctor showed up at Torchwood One, and hours later, over four hundred people were known to be dead – and half again as many as that still reported to be missing. Hell, it had been easier in the end to count the survivors (twenty-seven, out of eight hundred twenty-three) than the dead in the end, to say nothing of the civilians. That had been one of the days he’d hated being in Torchwood, cataloguing pieces of co-workers as best he could. No-one really knew what had happened with Torchwood Four, but if the Doctor was involved there, then what did that say about Jack’s odds?

It was Jack, though. Whatever whoever had him was planning on, they were going to get a surprise, especially if anything… fatal happened to him. Owen almost wanted to be a fly on the wall when Jack sat right back up. Unless this Doctor got interested in finding out what made Jack sit right back up…

He needed to stop thinking up situations like that. Especially when they weren’t one hundred per cent certain that it was the Doctor who had taken him. Tosh and Ianto were so certain, though, that the sound Gwen had heard was the Doctor’s TARDIS. If it had been just the tea boy, even with the recording from Torchwood One, he might have room to doubt, but Tosh was equally as positive – and she’d heard the TARDIS in person, a couple years ago when Jack sent her to Albion Hospital in London on what was supposed to be an alien fished out a spaceship in the Thames.

Jack and Yvonne had been in heavy competition around that time, as he recalled it, and since Yvonne had sent them the widow of some nutter named Clive (Steve? Dave? He couldn’t recall now) to deal with, Jack had sent Toshiko in to be the government’s “resident alien expert”, before Yvonne could even begin to mobilize her own people. Which in turn meant Tosh was the only surviving member of Torchwood, any branch of Torchwood, to have met the Doctor.

And he needed to quit worrying about Jack when his ass being on the line wasn’t the immediate problem. No, the immediate problem was about a meter – but more likely a little more – taller than Gwen, smelled like a Weevil fresh out of the sewer, and looked twice as bad, with claws that were roughly triple the length. Maybe if the Weevil’s mother had had a more than passing relationship with Abaddon, maybe then this thing could be related to Janet, the Weevil living in the basement of Torchwood’s Hub. And where had Jack come up with a name like Janet for a Weevil anyway? Mentally he added that to the ever-growing list of questions he was going to ask the other man if – no, when they got him back. At the rate the list was growing and if he remembered them all, he’d be demanding answers from Jack till he was eighty. Not that he was likely to get many of them answered, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was that he needed to start ducking faster.

---

Owen wasn’t moving nearly as quickly as he should be, as he normally would be in the field, she thought in dismay. That had to mean he was still recovering from the gunshot wound Ianto gave him nearly a week ago. He probably shouldn’t be out here yet, but…

They’d all gone out in the field with injuries before, of course. It was a necessary part of their job with Torchwood. A necessary evil, Jack had called it, not that he went out injured frequently. No, it was more common for Jack to die on a job than get hurt. Maybe that should have been a clue.

Owen ducked, rolling in a tuck that would make stunt co-ordinators weep, though whether from envy or derision she couldn’t be absolutely certain, and coming back up with his gun aimed at the creature, firing three times in quick succession. At least one of them connected, striking high on its torso. Unfortunately, that just seemed to make it more angry, as if it wasn’t enough already.

“Tosh! Tell me this thing has a weakness and you’ve found it!” she yelled into her earpiece as she tried to manoeuvre around Owen to get a clear shot herself. Maybe if she could just hit its head, no matter how freakishly small a target it was compared to the rest of the thing’s body. Not while Owen’s so close though. Not if lead bullets don’t work. Insanity was doing the same thing and expecting different results, after all.

Right now they could really use Jack. Someone to cover for them, take the up close position till Tosh came up with a solution of some sort… and all the other things Jack did for them that they hadn’t even begun to realise till he was gone. God, she hoped he was in better shape than they were, hope he was having better luck with whatever he was doing than they were against this thing.

How many times had he told her, after all, that he was waiting on the right kind of doctor. Two that immediately came to mind: standing above the city of Cardiff after everything with Suzie, the first time everything happened with Suzie, the one where Jack died, not where she almost did; and just before he was taken, like the words had summoned his kidnapper. Could it possibly be that Jack’s doctor was the Doctor?

She hadn’t exactly read the files on the Doctor since her second day on the job. For one thing, there were just so many and they were all so thick that they reminded her in a way of textbooks. Actually they did remind her of textbooks: each one was more dry that the one before. Whoever wrote the reports had apparently been trying to bore his audience to death. What she did recall was that every couple of files, the images of the Doctor would change into a completely new man, which made no sense, because she recalled a few of the dates overlapping. Granted, not all the notes were made by Torchwood employees: some of the files had been sent over directly to Jack by U.N.I.T. Ianto had admitted to her privately once that, even though he’d been at Torchwood One when the Doctor arrived that fateful day, he hadn’t known nearly as much about the man (Alien? What she could recall of the files wasn’t very specific.) they were supposed to be fighting as he did after seeing Jack’s great amassed pile of files.

Maybe she should go back over those files. Hell, maybe they all should. There might be some sort of clue in there on how to get Jack back, if he wanted to come back. And maybe she should tell the others that Jack had been waiting on a doctor. But it wasn’t her secret to tell, not really. But on the other hand, it might help them find him. She could almost place bets that even as Toshiko was rushing to find a solution to this problem, as well as research the latest information on the Doctor and his relationship to the other Torchwoods, the other woman was also working on a program to track their missing leader back down so that they could bring him home.

“Gwen? Do you have your Taser with you?” Tosh’s voice asked in her ear.

She fumbled at her belt, but it was still clipped there. She’d started back carrying it after the Weevil Fight Club Owen had infiltrated. Not all the monsters were aliens after all; they should all know by now that sometimes humans were the biggest threats. And sometimes a bit of electricity was the best way to deal with a human. “Yes, I do.”

“Do you see the small patch of skin under its neck that’s lighter than the rest?” She almost nodded her agreement, still sometimes forgetting that Tosh couldn’t see her. Though if Tosh could see the lighter bit of scaly skin that she herself could barely detect, then maybe Tosh could see her nod. “It appears that the scales are thinner there. If it’s like cold-blooded animals here, the electricity may at least slow it down.”

Well, Owen shooting it wasn’t doing any good. “Owen!”

Obviously he heard Tosh as well because he was already moving back over towards her when she fired, praying to any deity that might be listening that her aim would be good. It was such a small target.

For an indeterminably long moment, she held her breath as the electric prongs flew through the air – then released it again in a loud triumphant whoop as it struck nearly exactly where she’d been aiming for but still in the paler patch of scales. The creature jerked and twitched its way to lie prone on the filthy concrete floor, and they shared an exhausted glance before slowly bending to collect the newest addition to Torchwood’s basement’s collection of aliens.

As they loaded it in the back of the SUV, she faintly heard Owen muttering, “Jack picked a fine time to disappear.”

She couldn’t really disagree that they could really use a fifth person right now, but… “Someone took him. Jack wouldn’t leave us like this if he had a choice.”

“I wish I had your faith.” He looked surprised to have said that much and immediately got back to securing their unwilling passenger.

And she couldn’t say why she had faith in Jack.

[section=Footer Notes]03 July 2007

I wish I had something witty to say here, but here’s a chapter and it’s probably loopy because I’m sick. Yep, seem to be picking up a July case of the flu. Kinda brilliant, huh? More soon.

Apollymi

[endsection]

[section=Disclaimers & Notes]Disclaimers: Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Doctor, Rose Tyler, Jack Harkness, and all other recognizable characters are copyright to the BBC and are borrowed with great love.
Word Count: 1,811
Note: The title comes from the Epica album Consign to Oblivion. Yes, I still suck at titles. This is the first of my fan novels for Torchwood. It is set to bridge the gap between Series 1 and Series 2. Whether or not it will be Series 2 compliant is left to be seen, but it does take into account information released in “The Sound of Drums” of Doctor Who.
Summary: Set immediately following End of Days but prior to the beginning of Series Two, Torchwood Three’s leader is gone. What will happen in the meantime?[endsection]

The wind was slow to die down in the Hub. Papers, still in the process of being put back into a semblance of order after the Rift opening a few days before, flew from their carefully constructed piles and mixed together once more on the floor. One of the few remaining pages on the Rift Manipulator itself went into the pool at the base of the water tower, but that wouldn’t be noticed for hours yet. For the most part, everything else had been anchored before the strange roaring wind began, either on one of the four desks stationed around the large room, in the recessed office a dark-haired woman had only recently vacated, or pinioned under a fallen piece of the structure which had yet to be repaired.

The noise faded much more quickly. If one were to ask the woman staring at the empty room before, her three companions behind her, she would have described it as a grinding wheeze – and perhaps compared it to a backfiring car on its last legs. That was the noise that had pulled her from her boss’s office, that and he was never so quiet. The last time he had been that quiet was only a few hours ago, and that was something none of them wanted to happen again. All their nerves were rubbed raw, and strange noises in a place they had once considered the safest in Cardiff did little to soothe them. No one had asked her about the noise yet though.

“I thought we tidied up in here,” Owen stated, glancing around in confusion. It was something echoed in the expressions Ianto and Toshiko wore as well, and though she was doing all she could to keep the same look from overcoming her face as well, Gwen Cooper was certain she was failing spectacularly. “What’s the matter?”

And suddenly finding the right words to say were a lot more difficult than she thought they’d be, especially since she herself had no idea just what had gone on only a few scarce seconds before. Jack had been here, complaining about how long the coffees were taking. She heard his heavy boots descending the stairs. The noise had stopped for a second, she heard him take a few steps, then… nothing. Nothing but that noise, then the wind, and then no Jack. The lift was still in place, and he couldn’t have gone out the main door, not and the others somehow miss him. Even Owen wasn’t that unobservant, she thought dryly.

“He was just here.” Even she was glancing around the mess that remained of the Hub, as if it would give her the answer they all were seeking. And in a way, it did. Something else was missing, something besides their leader. The hand in the bubbling jar, the one that was so important to Jack, was also gone from its post, the first time it had vanished since Carys took it all those months ago. And that cinched it. Jack was gone. That strange hand was gone. The current leader of Torchwood and what was probably a piece of an alien, for all that it looked so human, were missing, and that could only mean someone took them, someone who wanted Torchwood’s information – and maybe something about that hand. But the hand wasn’t what was important now. “Something’s taken him. Jack’s gone.”

---

Gwen was taking this all too calmly, Toshiko Sato thought to herself, setting down her coffee on an empty piece of desk where a stack of papers had stood only a few minutes ago. If this were any other job in the world, she’d be sitting the Welshwoman down and have Owen check her over. It had been a rough few days, and she wasn’t too sure how long it had been since Gwen had had any sleep. Lack of sleep could do strange things to a person, after all, cause hallucinations and the like, to say nothing of the stress they’d all been under lately.

But this wasn’t any other job; this was Torchwood. And even if all of this sounded like a stress-induced hallucination to her, well, she was hardly an expert, and it couldn’t be discounted. Not immediately anyway.

It was so quiet in the Hub. It immediately reminded her of those three days Jack had been dead. Gwen had never left the morgue, not that she’d ever seen anyway; Ianto had straightened Jack’s office over and over again, crying into the man’s greatcoat, as if the routine would wake him up once more; and Owen thrown himself into putting the Hub back into its original state of repair, trying to ease his mistakes by fixing what he could. And she had repaired the equipment, only half her mind on her work; the other half was on the larger than life man who lead Torchwood, and snippets of conversations they had shared, on a bench outside the Millennium Centre after Mary and in his office after 1941. The office had been a tomb, silent except the sounds of cleaning, muted though they had been, and the occasional ring of Gwen’s mobile till its battery ran out. Every time anyone had checked the number, it had been Rhys.

It was that quiet again now, and she realised with a start that they were all waiting on Jack to just appear out of nowhere, to bounce back from whatever had him, as he had done when Owen shot him, as he had eventually done after Abaddon. They could all pretend they weren’t waiting on him fall from the sky or even jump out from behind a desk and yell “Surprise”. In a way, she wouldn’t put it past Jack. One just never knew what to expect with him; sometimes she thought he might have even jumped out his own mother’s birthday cake. It wouldn’t surprise her, but lately little surprised her.

“Are you sure someone’s taken him?” Owen was asking Gwen, circling past both her and Ianto to look at the other woman more closely. Good. If there were any signs of shock, the doctor would notice and get seen about. He was definitely cataloguing her responsiveness, as far as Tosh could tell, but again, she was hardly the expert here. He was, though. “Maybe he just left.”

“How? The lift is still down, and he couldn’t have gone out the main way without you seeing him.” She frowned hard, as in deep thought on something she could not quite place. “And there was that noise. Such a strange noise, not like anything I’ve ever heard before.”

“What did it sound like, Gwen?” she found herself asking, moving up to cluster close to the two of them. And she could tell herself it wasn’t so they wouldn’t vanish as well.

Well, Torchwood staff members did have a habit of disappearing. There was all of Torchwood Four still missing to this day, and no-one had ever found all the bodies from Torchwood One. Why Jack, though? Of all of them, why did it have to be Jack? They needed him. If someone was going to take one of them, why couldn’t it be her instead?

Gwen’s eyes closed, as she clearly tried to remember exactly how it sounded. “Something like a grinding… or a wheezing. Maybe both.” She opened her eyes, glancing around at the mess on the floor. Behind them, Tosh could faintly seeing Ianto doing something at Owen’s desk, just out of the corner of her eye. “The wind started at the same time. And it was all right when Jack vanished. It’s all connected, somehow.”

“A grinding or a wheezing?” Owen repeated. He was doing his best to keep a professional expression on his face, at least while he was still checking Gwen over, but disbelief was written in his eyes and all over his tone. “What? Someone drove a backfiring Volvo in the Hub through an entrance no-one knows about, kidnapped Jack, and left before any of us could notice?” It was strangely nice to know even the past week’s events couldn’t dull Owen’s acetic tongue. Some things, at least, didn’t change.

“I didn’t say that!” Gwen hissed in return. The Welshwoman’s eyes were flashing, but she was keeping her voice down. They all were, even Owen. It was just like, too much like, when Jack had been dead. “And I don’t see you coming up with any kind of a real theory!” Abruptly, Toshiko was reminded of that wild punch Gwen had unexpectedly thrown at Jack and stepped to the side, so that she was closer to the woman than Owen. Just in case violence ensued, she told herself, she didn’t want to be on the accidental receiving end of Gwen’s temper. “So why don’t you just-”

Whatever insult she was going to level on Owen was lost as a sound Toshiko could best describe only as a grinding wheeze, much as Gwen herself had, filled the still air of the Hub. The reaction was instantaneous: Owen cursed and reached for a gun that wasn’t there, Gwen jumped and pulled a gun Toshiko hadn’t known she had on her, and she froze.

Just as abruptly as the strange sound began, it ceased, leaving the room once more in a strained silence.

“Was that what you heard?” Ianto’s voice spoke up, and as one, they turned to where he stood, still beside Owen’s desk. A file was open on the desktop, and from here, all she could see was a random assortment of letters and the words ‘Torchwood One’. “Gwen?”

She breathed a silent sigh of relief as the gun disappeared once more to wherever it had come from as Gwen and Owen both rushed over to the desk. “That was it!” she exclaimed. “What is it?”

Only Toshiko caught the darkening in the Welshman’s eyes. Whatever it was, Ianto didn’t like it. This wouldn’t be good.

“That was recorded at Torchwood One, hours before it went under,” he finally said, his voice dull. “Someone managed to load it on the Torchwood Archive mainframe before everything went-” He trailed off, as if searching for the appropriate phrase.

“Tits up?” Owen offered.

Ianto shrugged. “Exactly. It’s the sound of the TARDIS, when it… arrived in Torchwood One.”

Perhaps this sinking feeling was what people meant when they said their hearts sank. “The TARDIS? Like the Doctor’s TARDIS?” she repeated in shock.

“The Doctor took Jack?” came from Gwen.

A loud bang made her jump, made them all start, and turn their attention to Owen. One of his fists had just come down on the edge of the desk hard, hard enough for her to wonder if they’d need to cast it later. “Why not?” he growled. “The Doctor was there when Torchwood One was destroyed. We may be his next targets.”

[section=Footer Notes]01 July 2007

Oh, Owen, you are a silly, silly one. The Doctor isn’t gunning for Torchwood. Granted, it may feel like that to you right now, but that’s just you. However, looking at it from Torchwood’s point of view, I can see how they’d think that.

For another thing, I’m hoping there will be a post a day on this, or at least every other or so day. I can’t compete in NaNoWriMo due to work (working in a university means that November is one of the busiest months of the year), so I’m doing my 50,000 words this month. Almost 2000 down, a little over 48,000 still to go.

See everyone at the end of Chapter One! Ciao!

Apollymi[endsection]

[section=Disclaimers & Notes]Series: Torchwood
Pairing: Gwen + Jack
Rating: PG
Word Count: 334
Note: Title comes from the song that was playing when I finished: “Wander” by Kamelot, from the album, Epica. I suck at titles.
Disclaimers: I own nothing but the idea.[endsection]

Falling for someone like Jack Harkness was doomed to failure from the beginning. She’d known that going into this though, of course. There were a thousand and more barriers separating him from her — and Torchwood and his apparent immortality were just two of the most obvious ones. Rhys, Owen, Ianto, and “The Right Kind of DOCTOR” (That’s how it sounded to her every time he said, caps and everything) made up four more very good reasons for her to her eyes glued on her work and not let them follow the Captain around the Hub.

It wasn’t like there was anyone else down here to shift the blame of her distraction to either: Ianto was minding the front upstairs, Owen was still home recuperating from being a damn idiot and locking himself in a cage with a Weevil, and Tosh… was probably fussing over Owen.

The Weevil had been fed, a fun enough experience on its own; thankfully, it was still licking its wounds as well and had stayed on the far end of its cell; and Jack was feeding Myfanwy. Feeding said pterodactyl tended to consume all of one’s attention, lest you lose a limb or, at the very least, a hand, and she wasn’t too sure even Jack could regrow one. Maybe that was why he was so possessive of the one in the jar? It was his spare? Nope, that didn’t make any more sense than any other possibility she’d come up with so far. Scratch that idea then.

(It had to belong to whoever it was that had Jack’s heart. That was the running bet. A hundred quid from each of them went to Tosh if that was right, and it would be awful if a half-drunken suggestion was the correct guess.)

No, falling for someone like Jack Harkness would never end well for someone like her. But Jack-watching… That was a hobby she could indulge in, from time to time.

And lie to herself in the meantime.

[section=Footer Notes]18 May 2007

And another little venture into the Whoniverse. And I havne’t the foggiest why I keep latching on to Gwen as a narrator, but she does make a great Jack-observer, doesn’t she?[endsection]

[section=Disclaimers & Notes]Disclaimer: Doctor Who and Torchwood belong to the BBC. I’m just borrowing.
Word Count: 200[endsection]

Who is Captain Jack Harkness?

Who is Jack? A leader, a fighter, a lover? A man with more secrets than is healthy? What do we really know about Jack?

Who is the Captain? A man who knows more about the alien tech we deal with every day than anyone else at Torchwood — with no explanation as to why he knows any of this, at least as far as gets to us. ‘Captain Jack Harkness’ isn’t even his real name, as far as we know, from what Tosh found out in 1941, when she met the ‘real’ Captain Jack Harkness. There, Jack introduced himself as ‘Captain James Harper’; is that his real name or another alias?

What do we know about Jack? From the sex alien incident, we know that hand is more important to him than anything else. Thinking back, there are things he’s said that made it seem he wasn’t from this world, time, something. We know he can’t die: that we can account for, he’s been shot on two separate occasions… and then there was Abaddon.

Why do you keep doing this, Gwen?

Because, if we can find out who he is, maybe we can find him.

[section=Footer Notes]03 May 2007

Yes, it was one of the plot kitties that had been in my head for a bit. No, I was planning on it being longer than 200 words. No, I was planning on pairings in it, but the word limit prevented that.

Yes, I’m mental.[endsection]