hortus conclusus

Torchwood meta

2020-02-22T15:54:38Z

A decade ago, as Torchwood ‘Miracle Day’ started airing, I wrote out this slab of blurb about why Children of Earth / Miracle Day didn’t feel like kosher ‘Torchwood’ to me. Here’s a C&P from the original post below the line

...I’ve been thinking about Torchwood.

Four eps broadcast so far. I can’t give you an impartial sense of how well they’re doing, my perception is that the media critics are mostly still endorsing it as must-see TV, though there are some naysayers and some complaints about slow pace or lack of story-build. On fandom’s side, mostly I think those who were predisposed to hate it are hating it, those who wanted to love it are loving it, both sides are certainly vocalising their POVs quite widely. Overall, the fandom buzz seems to be far down on what CoE and even S2 were getting back in their day, though equally I think the non-fandom general audience buzz through Twitter looks far bigger and definitely more pro than anti.

There also seems to be very very little being generated so far from the new season by way of fannish creativity, or even meta that goes much deeper than straightforward ep reviews. The new characters aren’t inspiring reams of fic, there aren’t many new icons to be seen. That’s a definite change and one that can, for example, be compared to the fandom response to the last radioplay at the start of this month, after which it fair rained response fic and meta that was less about the actual content and more to do with the impact on individual fans’ feelings and mindsets.

No surprise that I’m in the predisposed-to-hate camp. I watched the first ep straight through, dl’d the second then ended up half-watching it on BBC1. The third ep I downloaded for the shag/s (which even AfterElton had to admit “didn’t please most of you as much as the titillating media foreplay that preceded it” – amazing that anyone is STILL guzzling RTD’s snake oil, honestly). I skimmed to that intercut scene - a bloodless unsexy rip-off of the far superior twinned snog montage of Cyberwoman – and did something else while the rest of the ep was on, which meant half-listening and not actually paying enough attention to grok what was happening. I do know it ended with Jack getting beaten up a lot, and me finding out I was just clean out of fucks to give.

I know those of us in the yah-boo camp have all posted various reasons why we’re not being seduced by this new series, and a lot of them point out the lack of the tangible things we liked about Torchwood in the first place – location, set, Myfanwy, SUV, characters, alien spooky-do, MotW story format, a certain darkly British sense of humour that meant the show could manage absurd high camp one minute, and thought-provoking moral dilemmas or emotional gut-punches the next, without losing grip on either.

At some point in the last week, what I really find repellent about the new series finally crystallised for me, enough so that I didn’t even bother to pull down last Friday’s US ep for mockery purposes.

Now I suspect some of the Miracle Day pompom wavers are putting on a bit of enforced gaiety, and others are so devoted to Barrowman they’d watch him paddle in silage for an hour and still come away perfectly contented. Nonetheless, there are undoubtedly quite a lot of people, fans and wider audience, who are watching and loving the new season of Torchwood. Viewing figures are holding around a tolerable +/- 1m for STARZ, and dropping by about 250k/week on the Beeb, but that’s still four or five million happy campers. What the show is doing now is working for them as satisfying entertainment, and I’m not belittling that in any way. This post is simply about me putting my finger, finally, on why I think it’s unsatisfying as entertainment, and it’s something that surprises me, given it’s something RTD has delivered over and over in previous series he’s conceived and scripted.

For me, the baseline is this: Torchwood Miracle Day is built on a fatally flawed narrative structure and premise, so it fails to engage interest in either the plot or the characters.

Look at Harry Potter. (I know, Ron’s much more fun to look at, but bear with me.) Part of its amazing success springs from J K Rowling either lucidly or intuitively choosing a core concept and narrative structure that pulls in the reader almost irresistibly. The core concept is the journey of a disenfranchised prince towards his pre-destined throne, through a fantastic enchanted kingdom that actually exists at a quantum level, right here in the same place as our own world. The narrative structure is a sequence of individual and effectively discrete stories, all of which fit together in a larger arc - but each being set in the same locations and replicating some of the basic parameters allows space and scope for the characters to change and grow within each story, building that growth layer by layer within a stable backdrop which doesn't need to take up valuable narrative focus.

The magical mysterious world just on the edge of our perception is a myth-staple in practically every culture I know, it has a timeless appeal. Rowling then ensured we as readers would find our way easily into that kingdom alongside Harry, by creating a basic stage set, if you like, and a small cast of characters we would get to know quickly. The main set is Hogwarts, which starts as an impenetrable safe eyrie, with its very specific tangibles: dorms, the Great Hall, the Quidditch field, the classrooms, where the narrative action can take place again and again. And while the POV almost never shifts from Harry, the main cast are fleshed out clearly through his eyes. So we have super-smart but vulnerable Hermione, average but loyal and determined Ron – the three of them brought together, not by Destiny, but pure chance: three in many ways quite ordinary characters, randomly forced by circumstance into uniting and fighting an ever more dangerous battle. Around them, most of the other characters are there from the start: aloof, powerful, mysterious but benign Dumbledore, malevolent Snape, sneering and haughty Draco, bumbling Neville, loveable Hagrid and so on.

Harry Potter’s core ‘pitch’ might not have been a stunning novelty, but that didn’t matter. It’s a universally popular trope, and it was presented through a narrow POV of Harry and the small central cast, within a series of settings that were established quickly and clearly at the start, so that the individual adventures that progressed Harry along his journey could at the same time add little brushstrokes bit by bit to everyone, so we could start to see the impact of Ron’s wobbly self-esteem or Hermione’s vulnerability or Neville’s unexpected courage – all emerging without getting in the way of the plot.

It’s a hell of a good way to tell a story, or many stories, and build the engagement and loyalty of your audience as you do so. You don’t have to have the most innovative story-concept ever, when you’ve got a solid framework and characters who matter to your audience. So hey, at the end of every book Harry defeats the Big Bad: are we surprised? No. Does that matter? Not at all, because we’re there for the whole journey, not merely the punchline.

Now I think the first two seasons of Torchwood followed a near-identical template, and that is why the show grew such a passionately loyal fanbase. What would that original pitch of Torchwood have looked like? “Secret underground team of dysfunctional charmers fight to save the world from mystery menaces!”, maybe? Not in any way a radical concept, there are probably two dozen shows on air in the last five years that could fit into that spec.

But look at the way Torchwood told its story. We had that central set of the impregnable base, the Hub hidden from mere mortals, with its very specific tangibles: invisible lift, the Captain’s office, the Autopsy Bay, that hobo-chic main room with the blinging tech and untilitarian metal floors and gangways. Hogwart’s Express re-sprayed as the SUV. And we had core characters who were introduced to us one by one, with care, in a sequence of individual stories linked by being set within that fixed context, so that we got to know each of them in depth and then carried on learning through them.

Everything Changes is almost fully Gwen’s POV, she’s Harry and Jack is, idk, Hagridore with lashings of pheromones and a very close shave. That first ep spent its first half getting us grounded with nobody but Gwen, and all the Torchwood team are then seen as her fragmented impressions, but none of them too distracting to take our attention away from getting to know her.

Day One does the same thing, except the POV shifts a couple of times between Gwen and Jack, who stays enigmatic but also starts to show his key traits – flirty, frivolous, heartless, dashing, inexplicably passionate about a hand in a jar… Ghost Machine flicks between Gwen and Owen. We already know Owen at that point as the sarcastic, predatory cynic, striking but not terribly likeable – now we start to get some real depth to him, seeing his complicated reactions to a rape and murder victim he shouldn’t really feel responsible for. Cyberwoman springs on us all the almighty surprise of Ianto, but that one hour takes us from barely registering him, to telling a tiny, complete, awful doomed tragedy where he is hero and victim and fool and broken completely, ending with his first shaking steps out of the wreckage.

And look at how that episode also builds on the core concept of Torchwood and what we’ve seen to date. With the Cyberwoman we have the first real alien threat capable of destroying the whole world, a huge step up from the limited impact of Risen Mittens and orgasm gas and memory-toys. But then half the story is also about Ianto and Jack and the unexplained train-wreck of Something going on between them. On the side, Gwen and Owen – the two characters we know most about at this stage – start to reveal their mutual, if fraught, sexual attraction. Poor Toshiko, who isn’t going to be getting her time in the spotlight for another two eps, is discreetly disengaged from the rest of the team for a large part of Cyberwoman, because trying to flesh her out at this point, when there’s too little of her for us to go on, and too much going on in the rest of the story, would be distracting.

After Cyberwoman it’s another Gwen-and-Jack-centric ep, then a whole-team one where for the first time we really do get some sustained interaction between our five leads – by now, we know most of them well enough for that scattering of permutations and connections and reactions to be interesting to us. It’s even safe to take the action completely out of the core set at this stage, for a few hours. After that, Toshiko is the one in focus – again, in a way that is built to maximise our understanding and our empathy. To keep our attention on her, the location shifts back to Cardiff and specifically the Hub for much of the time in Greeks Bearing Gifts.

For the rest of the first season, with the exception of Random Shoes (an ep which, un-coincidentally, most fans dislike or just ignore), every story is told through our team’s assorted POVs. Susie’s return is really not so much about her Machiavellian genius, it’s about Gwen struggling instinctively to connect to her, the discomfort of Owen and Toshiko and in contrast, Jack’s steady, chilly but absolutely essential ruthlessness. Look at Out of Time – the three guest roles are strongly written and delivered, but it’s really all about Owen, Gwen and Jack encountering people who are their spiritual twins, and dealing with having to let each of them go in different ways.

For all that people jeer at Torchwood for cracky plots or supposed character inconsistencies, I think there always was a focus on the characters and their respective developments and interactions, that made everything else about the whole show watchable and compelling. Torchwood was *about* Torchwood - that team, in that magical otherworld right here within our own. It wasn’t ever really about the aliens or the threats or the bombs. Those things were the ideas, the punchlines for each week. But the whole thing was about the characters and how they lived, day to day, what changed them, what strengthened them.

For me, that was why the second season was especially strong. Again, the POV from start to finish is team, team and more team. John Hart has no significance except for his interactions with them. Rhys starts to become a POV character at exactly the same time and rate as he’s drawn into the Torchwood secret circle. Adam feels unsettling and odd right from the start, because the story metas itself – we, like the team, have no idea who this character is or how he got there, even though we’re apparently supposed to know him, like Jack when we look at him we don’t feel anything – no pride, no warmth.

Now, Children of Earth changed the core concept of Torchwood completely. This wasn’t a story about that team in that place, it was a story about a global threat and how the world deals with it, with Torchwood mostly dragged in the slipstream. Of course, it didn’t start like that, though: it started feeling like the established pattern of story-telling for Torchwood, from the POVs of the characters we know, in their safe place, dealing with the kind of anomaly they habitually deal with. As a narrative over the week, CoE was able to engage existing fans because it started from that familiar point. By the end of the week, with so much of that familiar, essential concept literally destroyed, it’s no wonder that the fandom was left reeling. Think of how Harry Potter would have been to read, if Deathly Hallows had kicked off with the obliteration of Hogwarts, Ron killed off before the final battle, and that battle itself taking place in Birmingham, say – some place where we’d never been before in the Potterverse.

The key new POV characters in CoE were Lois and Frobisher, and they were only a tiny part of the initial narrative. And Lois remained essentially a blank character, no more than the human tool that allowed our Torchwood team to Trojan-horse their way into where the London action was happening. With hindsight, nothing about Lois either makes sense or engages our interest: why she was so willing to compromise her job from day one, why she trusted total strangers who were being treated by the whole of Government around her as de facto terrorist menaces. What happened to her after Day Five? Does anyone actually care at all?

I’ve done it again, I know. Five million words to try to explain what is probably a flaw that can be expressed in seven: Miracle Day isn’t about Torchwood any longer. Torchwood used to be that whole collective concept, location and characters and a narrative focus which was about how they dealt with Stuff, not about the Stuff itself. Miracle Day is about The Miracle. It’s all about that one concept pitch – “what if everyone in the world stops dying?”. And that’s what’s being narrated, each week is a new chapter with new locations, new characters, new distraction: worldbuilding rather than character-building. Ten hours of plot about what has happened, how people in general are dealing with it, how the Establishment is dealing with it. The punchline won’t be “Torchwood solves it and saves the day”, any more than that was the punchline for CoE, where it was “bloody hell, people in power are shitty and inhumane! (p.s. – aliens are no better than us, really)”

So already, unless you find that one core concept thoroughly engrossing, MD doesn’t have much of a compulsive narrative pull. I’ll bet you five shiny groats the ‘miracle’ will have been undone by the end of the series, bongloads of people will suddenly die as Nature had intended, and the world will go on largely unchanged, leaving us all with the shocking message that – once again – People in Power Are Venal Selfish Fuckers, be that government, corporations, religion or whatever. So, not even the kind of punchline of an episode like Small Worlds, where we genuinely didn’t know Jack would sacrifice the life of one child without a struggle, to buy the safety of the rest of us.

But the real killer for me is that this concept is being narrated in such a piss-poor amateur, unengaging way. I’m serious. RTD creates characters and they pop to life onscreen in a handful of lines, usually, it’s his best gift. Look at Rose and Martha and the way we see them for the first time, in two stories which are entirely about them and their POV of this freak man-type alien who crashes into their lives. Now when Donna first turned up in The Runaway Bride, the POV initially was the Doctor’s, and there was a fair bit of negative reaction to her brash antagonism. When they meet again, in Partners In Crime, Donna gets the lion’s share of the POV, we see the story through her and we see her for what she is, in all her brilliant, slapdash, nosy, compassionate beauty.

Whose POV dominates Miracle Day? I honestly can’t tell you, because nothing seems to be happening through any of these characters, old or new: it’s all just happening to them, or around them, and they’re bobbing along in it all like so many little rubber duckies, just reacting in ways that don’t tell us enough about them for us to start caring about them. We should at the very least have some idea of how this is all happening from Gwen’s POV, and Jack’s – but I can’t see that myself. Jack seems to have closed off into new depths of enigmatic obscurity. He’s back to protect Gwen, is he? From where? Why doesn’t he do just that, then – get her out of this danger, and deal with the miracle by himself.

Like CoE, we’re getting hints that Jack knows more than he’s letting anyone know, including his whole bloody audience. Now, when did he ever do that in the first two years of Torchwood? He might have been reticent about his immortality, but Gwen witnessed it, so we knew about it. He didn’t discuss the dark old days squandered with John Hart, but he took care to let them know what they needed to know – that Hart wasn’t to be trusted. CoE pulled that bad crime novel trick of having one of our POV characters fail to tell us vital information he clearly knew all along. When the secret of Jack’s complicity is revealed, it breaks our engagement with him as a POV character – not because he’s done something reprehensible, but because he’s no longer a reliable narrator for us. And I’ll bet the same thing will be happening around Ep 7 or so on MD.

Too many duckies in MD too. Jack and Gwen, Rex and Esther, Vera and Danes and Jilly. Too many new characters introduced too soon, with not enough unobstructed focus on any of them to start building them into people we are introduced to properly. I’d said in another post that the characterisation is weak, and it is, for me: none of these new characters make any coherent sense. Look at how we saw Toshiko being built up – smart, smart, shy, smart, tough and competent under threat, crush on Owen (hm, romantic yearnings + dodgy judge of character?) - so then her faux pas with Mary makes perfect sense, that she longs to be loved and recognised and valued, as much as she’s curious about what makes the people around her tick. How does Esther read at this stage? Smart, smart – no wait, dumb, naïve, dumb, (the phones? The sister?), crush on Rex which… oh well, doesn’t really mean anything actually. Is there going to be a Mary for Esther? I’ll bet you five more groats there won’t, because knowing more about what makes Esther tick is not relevant to delivering the core concept of MD.

I don’t know, maybe it's hindsight talking, but a few eps into the first season and I could have written you drabbles about all the main characters. Hell, four eps in and I’d written my first Torchwood fanfic, that bugger just shot fully-formed straight out of my head, I could extrapolate a Ianto who would think Jack had brought him back to his flat to kill him and fake his suicide, as well as the Ianto who advises Jack on how best to do it so as not to cause too much of a mess.. For love nor money, I could not write you a word about any of these new characters – frankly I think Jack would stump me at this point – and Gwen is just this sort of swiss army girl now, like the old Gwen (ooh, domestic bliss is lovely BUT I CRAVE EXCITEMENT AND DANGER!!!) but with a billion new super-smarts and ninja fighting skills and Ianto’s dry wit and a BABY who…. hasn’t changed her in one single discernable way whatsoever. Thus making her quite unique amongst every baby-making friend and family member I’ve ever known.

Alright, time for me to shut up. Miracle Day is failed story-telling, for me: the core concept is one-note, everything in the script is only about the ramifications of that one note on a world full of strangers. None of the lead characters are being developed with anything like the necessary craft of care to make me start to find them engaging or intriguing as individuals, so I don’t give a shit how they relate to each other or what this miracle means for them. To top that off, of course, the last six eps for Torchwood before MD taught me something the previous 25 never had – that engaging with any “Torchwood” character is a waste of time anyway, because they’ll be dead soon so why bother?

And all of that put together seems to me to be a really atrocious way of making a drama that is supposed to be entertaining and engrossing. Torchwood used to tell stories about Torchwood, a tangible thing I knew and understood and empathised with and liked. Torchwood Miracle Day is telling a story about Miracle Day, a flashy ~edgy idea, and it’s telling it in a way that leaves me skidding across its glassy, greasy surface and shooting right off the other side. It’s crass bad storytelling, and I am actually a bit boggled that people actually enjoy this kind of drama, yes. But honestly more boggled that this is the best that RTD can manage at this time in his career, even with two years of development time, a bigger better budget, creative free rein and a team of experienced scriptwriters at his beck and call.

Well, he’s 47 like me. Maybe his creative mojo has just fizzled out at last?

I’m 56 now ofc and haven’t changed my view on this in the slightest, and RTD is probably every bit as stubborn and convinced of his own rightness in every creative decision he’s made. Even ‘Years and Years’ #hahahagsaahagshhaaaha!

study me then, you who shall lovers be

2011-03-09T22:44:13Z

Is this a Torchwood post that I see before me? And a canon one too, rather than one of my increasingly fruitbat dreams? Indeed it is, who'd have, etc...

A long long time ago - seriously, getting on for a year, long enough ago that I'm not even sure if anyone knew then whether they'd be novel or audiobook - the two new Torchwood *things* showed up for pre-order on the Book Depository and I ordered them both. I honestly can't remember why I did that now. Maybe a completist thing? I have all the novels and audioboks and assorted tut, all ready to be neatly packed into a mouse-proof box for the attic, I guess. Maybe it was a nostalgic nod to the dead, as they seemed set to be the last bits of pre-CoE canon we'd ever be getting. Who knows, it's even possible I was still harbouring some tiny shreds of deluded hope that the new series wouldn't be the anything-but-Torchwood hodgepodge it seems to be shaping up into.

Anyway, I did pre-order them, and then I forgot, and so getting a Book Dep. despatch email last week was a bit of a surprise. I toyed with the idea of just not listening and selling them all still nicely shrink-wrapped on eBay, but in the end I opened them and listened anyway: see 'completist' above. So here's a summary of what I thought about both under a cut or two, organised in unspoilery and slightly more spoilery slices, together with what I'm planning to do with them both.

The two audiobooks are Department X, and Ghost Train, both written by James Goss and read by Kai Owen. Department X has Jack, Gwen and Ianto investigating Odd Stuff happening at a once-glamorous Cardiff department store, now faded and unfashionable. Ghost Train is something of a Rhys adventure, as he tries to solve a Harwoods-related mystery that - natch - turns out to cross wires with Torchwood business. It isn't clear which order they should be in. and doesn't really matter. Ghost Train was the last one published, but it also includes one reference to one strand of Department X which makes me think it's actually meant to be the earlier story.

So, what were they like?

You're not going to get an objective impression from me about anything Torchwood anymore, if you ever did. The thing is, I didn't listen to these in any spirit of hating or wanting to troll: where I am now, thinking about Torchwood just tends to make me feel sad and defeated, but just as with the very occasional fanfic I'll still click on, there's always that nostalgic desire for just one more story that takes me back to the point in time when everything was still to play for. And I actually enjoyed James Goss's TW novels quite a lot - after Joe Lidster, Goss came closest (for me) to capturing the feeling of random alien mayhem, but shot through with an affectionate tolerance for / love of the characters themselves - unlike TW novelists like Trevor Baxendale or Peter Anghelides, say, who seemed to mostly be shoehorning the characters into their own pet horror scenarios. (Or Sarah Pinborough, whose Gwen-fetish might have been cute if it didn't come wrapped in a thick greasy topcoat of rancid homophobia.) But Almost Perfect and Risk Assessment were imaginative and creepy, and had a convincing Gwen and Ianto in particular, as well as portraying Jack and Ianto's flirtatious, uncertain relationship quite persuasively.

So I went in about as neutral-positive as I could be these days.

And neither of them is a stinker, neither of them is a bad story. They're just - meagre, curiously flat. Torchwood Lo-Cal. There's precious little drama or tension in either, no matter how much the background music keeps trying to drum it up. Of course, with any TW canon set before Children of Earth, building any convincing sense of danger or menace is an almost impossible ask - still, there's none of the genuinely horrible nuance that some audiobooks or radio plays have managed, like Lidster's In The Shadows, with that mad moral-crusader cabbie and his matchbox of eternal damnation. My attention wandered while listening to both, which might explain why Department X in particular made absolutely bugger-all sense to me by the end.

There's no mention at all of Owen or Toshiko or the times before Exit Wounds at all, really. There's also not a whisper of something I badly wanted; namely, the presaging hints threaded through the pre-CoE radio plays. That probably wouldn't have been Goss's strongest card either, since his TW style has generally been one of relentless quirky cheerful flippancy, even when the world is crashing in flames. He's not especially empathetic - nor are most of the TW novelists, to be fair - but with the foreknowledge of CoE impossible to un-know, that unwavering perky indifference to no matter what suffering and dying is happening felt unsatisfying to me. A better writer - or maybe one who cared more - would have found some way to at least subtly acknowledge what has been lost and we all know is about to be lost around the corner: to be poignant. There's one sense in which I think Goss may have been aiming at something like that, but it's spoilery so I'll put it in further down.

As for Kai Owen as narrator... well, again, he's not terrible or anything. He's just not all that good at it. About as competent an audio reader as John Barrowman, I guess? When he's immersed in the story he doesn't do too badly, which means that Ghost Train is mostly the better narration (since it's entirely Rhys 1st-person POV). But there are also way too many times when his reading is either lumpy or just plain wrong. Department X starts with a large volume of dialogue, and Owen just can't seem to manage to deliver the "he said... she said"s without trampling them clumsily onto the heels of each previous sentence. There are some strange tonal choices throughout: one character says something "while winking at Jack" but the delivery of the actual line is a kind of hysterical yelp, that kind of thing.

And the accents! Look, we've only got Jack, Gwen, Rhys and Ianto now in the main cast - 75% Welsh, 25% Kai Owen's own bloody character on the show. So, his Jack is a game try but pretty awful, his Ianto is oddly flat and dull, his Gwen is squeaky and strange - but even his Rhys doesn't sound like Rhys half the time! Now that's quite a nifty trick to pull off. The thing about audiobooks is that they suit some actors better than others, but for the most part of course, the better the actor, the better the delivery. Now, for all the reservations I have about what a mean-spirited arse Gareth David-Lloyd is personally capable of being at his worst, I have always liked his acting. I think he has a genuine talent for instinctively understanding the core of the character, and then conveying that to an audience. As far as audio narratives go, he's a dream - he has that deliciously enjoyable accent, and he's a fluent, relaxed reader, with the natural mimic's gift for catching both the accent of another person's voice, and their cadences, the lyricism of their speaking patterns. Because of that, his reading of Brian Minchin's The Sin Eaters was head and shoulders above the rest of the cast's audiobooks: the story was so-so but damn, he really sounded like Jack and Gwen and Rhys when he was reading! Kai Owen delivers the words like a competent actor, but at some level he simply doesn't have an ear for the nuances that make Ianto sound like Ianto, say, or maybe he hears it but can't deliver it.

All of which means that these two audiobooks are essentially, irredeemably inert. And also depressing, which I'll explain in the next bit. I've listened once: I have no interest in listening again. More on that later!

Here is the next bit! Not a complete synopsis, but plenty of spoilers.

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There are a number of spoilery reasons these two stories didn't move me and certainly didn't give me any cathartic warm fuzzies, which was probably what I wanted when I pre-ordered.

Maybe the biggest thing of all is the tone. Both stories are set in dully unappealing environments, with these strangely downbeat, dull themes. Ghost Train involves boring bits of the Cardiff rail network - old trains, dusty old stations - being borrowed or cloned by aliens who turn out to be nerdy, stereotypical traffic controllers, obsessed with lifeless systemic efficiency. Department X is all about a once-grand, proud department store, the star of Cardiff, now hopelessly out-of date, commercially obsolete and superseded by what's clearly the St David's shopping mall. It's a horrible but perfectly plausible version of Howells ten years from now, on its last legs, shabby and unloved, with only a few loyal old biddies as the last straggling customers. As it turns out, the shop is freezing them in the basement and eating them, which only shows they really should have followed their fickle neighbours to John Lewis after all.

I don't know about you but I've known so many shops like this fictional G R Owen, and they are depressing and soul-sucking beyond question, from the unfashionable discounted stock to the pitiful last few customers hoping for a tired 'bargain', to the staff, all eking out their days while waiting for the inevitable redundancy and closure. There is nothing about this scenario that is in any way amusing or jolly, and after the umpteenth gloomy description of the sad old manager hopelessly watching the place he'd loyally served for his whole working life crumbling wretchedly around him, I honestly couldn't have felt more miserable. And then wait until you meet Gareth... Ghost Train was marginally less chronically gloomy, but then again it's basically a story about intergalactic trainspotters and traffic wardens. It's as if Goss searched for the two most dismal, depressing themes he could imagine, then laid on the hopeless sense of defeat and obsolescence with a generous trowel. Maybe he was trying to make his own point about the eventual fate of the Torchwood we used to know? Maybe. I don't know, but he certainly depressed the shit out of me even more than before, which as far as all things Torchwood goes is pretty impressive.

Another thing I really disliked about these two stories is how they're set in Cardiff, but have very little textual connection with the pre-CoE Torchwood and all its silly, cracky, random gizmos and pterodactyls and Weevils and cryo-crypts and all the rest. Ghost Train mostly takes place following Rhys from home to Harwoods and on various round-Cardiff chases, including a stopover at Ianto's flat for a couple of weeks. (If you're hoping for fun, illuminating details of Ianto's domestic world in canon, hope on: we find out that it's neat, boring and clean, with a big telly and a nice sofa and a Rio Ferdinand calendar - a detail I didn't believe in the slightest, partly because Ianto is obsessively careful about not flashing his orientation in any way, not to mention that if he really wanted a 'fit men' calendar, surely but surely he'd have the rugby-loving good taste to choose the Dieux du Stade, come on!)

The thing is, Rhys makes one five-second visit to the Hub, and - that's it. He sees the SUV tooling around the town, but in general it's as if all the Torchwoody-ness of the show has already been tidied away: no strange gadgets, no fun bits and bobs of alien tech. Department X is worse in that it's set entirely in this big decrepit shop, with Gwen and Ianto undercover. The Hub i- sorry, was - the heart of the show in many ways, and these two stories feel as if the heart's already been crushed out of them. In a similar way, the aliens of both stories are both omnipotent in a supernatural, handwavey, disengaged way - and utterly banal. Both stories use the idea of super-powerful aliens in some way disguising themselves as not just humans, but the most boring of humans in the most mundane of settings, doing dull everyday things. It smacks of aspiring to the zany oxymoronic contrasts of Douglas Adams' sci-fi universe, without the talent to make that genuinely amusing.

And Team Torchwood itself is strangely subdued. There are scarcely any scenes where the three of them interact together, and most of the action in both stories is Jack, Gwen or Ianto doing something solo, or Jack and Gwen together while Ianto is stuck with Rhys, or with one of the OCs. Not that he's missing anything. Goss in his earlier TW novels had a real sense of the kind of playfully bitchy bantering the team has always tended to enjoy, even in the teeth of crisis, but that's almost all gone here. As it was in CoE, indeed. Jack still bounces around doing flamboyant stuff without telling either of his partners what's happening: Gwen still chatters away to OCs or to Rhys, Ianto still says very little, though there's now no trace whatsoever of his dryly snarky spirit. I don't know if any of this is deliberate on Goss's part, but he's writing the way I suspect I'd be writing now if I tried to go back to Torchwood, as if all the lustre and vibrancy has gone out of the narrative. It's really hard to escape the feeling that the spirit has already left the building.

Jack and Ianto? Well, Jack isn't the snide, chilly, condescending heteronormative fuckwad he became in CoE, so that's nice. At one point, Goss has Ianto thinking about Jack as "his best friend" which made me pull a face I don't have the right emoticon to describe (not least because, for all his fussy undertones, I seriously don't think Ianto's ever been such a big wet girl's blouse, 'best fwiend' my arse.) Elsewhere, though, they're flirty and canoodling mildly in Menswear, and during Rhys's (covert) two-week stay at Ianto's flat, either Ianto stays with Jack or Jack spends the night with Ianto, much to Rhys's embarrassed discomfort: the walls are apparently very thin... So, they're lovers, we know they are (no watershed-esque narrative pixellating for the kiddies) and there's absolutely no feeling of any UST whatsoever between Gwen and Jack - she only has eyes for Rhys, and Jack is friendly but businesslike with her. Ianto and Gwen also clearly function very much as equal deputies to Jack's lead. And when Ianto goes missing in Department X, Jack is very furiously focused on recovering him: in Ghost Train, the only advice he gives Rhys at the most critical tits-up point is "tell Ianto", trusting implicitly that Ianto will have the level-headed intelligence to figure everything out and do what's needed to save the day.

And yet... there's no real feeling of affection either, between Jack and Ianto or any of them. I was looking out for it with Jack and Ianto of course, but even with Gwen and Rhys, even though they have the odd moments of cozy domestic harmony - and Rhys babbles on and on and bloody on about how gorgeous Gwen is, how bee-oo-tii-ful, how she's got a great arse blahblah - there's also the point in Ghost Train where he sees her die in a giant explosion... and then he carries on. Occasionally remembering to mention how he's all shocked and stunned because OMG, Gwen's dead! - but really, you'd be hard-pressed to feel as if he actually thinks for a moment that she really is lost, or that he's all that cut up about it. Again, that might be Kai Owen's banal delivery, but it might also be that James Goss just isn't trying to sell it very convincingly at all.

Where's the love, Team Torchio? Oh, they're looking out for each other, worried about their safety, anxious when they're threatened, but there's a strange absence of any intimacy, any tenderness. I think of Jack in Exit Wounds, in The Stolen Earth, how he clung to them both, how he was unabashedly demonstrative. The times when Gwen clung to Rhys like he was her lifeline. And sure, desperate times maybe, but now they're all just a bit too busy rushing about solving supernatural crimes to be genuinely affectionate. There's even a reference in Ghost Train to how Ianto scrupulously avoids revealing his feelings the incessant times he has to witness Jack dying, how he's developed this special, carefully neutral manly hug, to provide a touch of discreet but stoic reassurance for Jack while not alarming him with anything too emotional. And while I'll admit that feels all too painfully in-character, the truth is I have a sad, soppy weak love of emotional warmth between characters I care for, to us being given just the occasional crumb of compassion and tenderness. God knows, we never got many of those before CoE as it was, and just the slightest touch of that in either of these stories would have been like a sweet sorrowful glimmer in the darkness. But there's no glimmer here, and that means there never will be ever anymore.

So as I say, I have no reason to listen to either of these again, and I don't feel any urge to keep them either.

But I also don't want to sell them. So here's my cunning plan. Do you want them? You can have them! Let me know - leave a comment here, then PM an address to me, and I'll post them to you. First come first served - with only one catch. If someone else also wants them, after I've sent them to you and you've listened, please mail them on to the next person. And if there are three of you, the second recipient mails them on to the third, and so on. Like an impromptu library conga - so if you want them, you just have to be willing to pass them on and either pay the postage onward, or negotiate something adult and fair with the next recipient.

That's all! I appreciate, with a sales pitch like that, none of you may want to listen to these at all, and in any event I expect the Fight Clubs will come up with the goods eventually anyway. But I don't personally want to upload these, I just want to send them on to someone who will send them on in turn. They're probably worth listening to, if only to see if you agree with me or think I'm being cruel and unfair.

In conclusion: see icon. oh Torchwood...

undone

2010-06-07T18:58:04Z

Do you want to see the definition of a selfish, irrational reaction? Yes? Then check out mine, to this press release.

Peeps, I got teary. Just a bit, mind, but they weren't tears of joy.

You see, I finally got to some kind of place in my head where I was reconciled - with no forward canon beyond CoE, I had my own fix-it sorted and settled and I liked it, it made me feel at peace with Torchwood and what I'd loved about it. As I've said, not a story I'd ever write, but something that worked for me, a good closure.

And this? This will obliterate even that. I'm too much of a canon whore and I simply can't handwave what happens in the TV shows (books, films) I love. Sydney Carton dies on the guillotine. Jerott is exiled back to Malta for the rest of his (short, martial, loveless) life. Data sacrifices himself for his Captain. Buddy shoots his face off in the back of the car. Darius Jedburgh - the original one, the fantastic Joe Don Baker, not last year's travesty - stands up, arms wide like the wings of Death, and brings them together over his head in a plutonium halo. There are angels that will stand by me...

New Torchwood. Doesn't matter that I won't watch it, it will still happen, and my particular imagining of the unwritten future will be a lost text in a palimpsest, over-written by the victors in the legitimate final version.

Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it all. Here's the plan. I'm going to forget it all and turn myself into a, a - Royal Pains fangirl, that's about all I'm fit for. Cheese and soap-bubbles, cardboard het-shippery. Nice and simple, and no-one will ever die.

Torchwood not-fic pimping

2010-06-01T21:21:31Z

The Torchwood-related things I feel like pimping these days could be counted on the fingers of my armpit. Not that I don't think anyone's doing anything worth your time anymore: I'm sure they are, I'm just very picky about what really appeals to me these days, beyond a vague nod-and-move-on reaction.

I am reading some fic, which I hadn't really expected to. I've read at least one fix-it that didn't make me want to jump off the roof, there have been a few assorted pre-CoE or post-CoE fics I've quite liked, including some of the Jack-goes-looking-for-an-AU-replacement. (Especially now the WIP I'm currently reading has moved on from Jack having it off with an AU PC Andy and on to good old hardcore shagging with that hot-button favourite, AU Rentboy!Ianto. It seems that my anti-hot-button is fic where PC Andy is having any form of sexybiz with anyone - what can I say? He reminds me of an utterly creepy guy at college ::shudder:: I think it's the hair. And the lame, snivelling personality.)

So, here's that rare thing - a Torchwood-related post I do want to wave at any of you who still feel that stubborn fondness for the dratted (almost certainly dead) show and its dratted (assorted dead and not so dead) characters. It's a pair of picspam posts, by thepyromanical1, which lovingly chronicle, annotate and illustrate a key motif and real highlight of Torchwood: namely, Ianto's sideburns. Season One is here and Season Two is here. No Season Three because, amongst all the other fatal failings and botches of CoE, maybe the worst crime of all is that some tasteless twat decided to get rid of the Jones sideburns - look at it! Shorn like a spring lamb! Compare that to the S1 and S2 evidence, and you can understand how, like Samson, thw whole show went to shit in the space of one week last year. They truly were The Sideburns That Held The TorchWorld Together.

Alright, it's not Descartes, just a harmless picspam. But it made me happy, the S2 one especially so. thepyromanical1 has a good eye for the cute screengrabs, and the commentary is quietly dryly amusing but above all, it's affectionate - for Ianto, for the whole team, for Torchwood. Affectionate and teasing without being superior or sneery, that's what I like. If you like any of that too, go check 'em out.

Last but not least, I know GDL has been 52 shades of pillock in the last few years (and that is a charitable assessment), but the one thing you can't argue - in S2 especially - he is one hot, handsome coc oen. siiiiiiigh

fic: SJA / TW crossover, "The Other" (5/5)

2009-10-14T03:31:36Z

Part 4

Part 5

"Chula technology," Jack Harkness said with a sigh, leaning back on the sofa. "It's my Achilles heel. Should've had that section of the archive walled up years ago. Still, I guess this is the second time it's had me meet people worth meeting. Maybe it's not all bad."

"Your friend thinks the amnesia can be reversed?" Sarah Jane asked. They were sitting in her living room, Jack in his shirtsleeves after half an hour on the phone, relaxed and charmingly talkative now, as if the coldly brutal antagonist of a few hours ago had been a mirage. Outside, Luke, Clyde, Maria and Ianto were probably getting up to even more trouble in the ridiculous Torchwood SUV that Jack had happily unlocked for them to investigate. ("Systems are all deadlocked," he'd assured her, "and Ianto will make sure they don't press anything they shouldn't."

"Ian - Ianto - doesn't even remember what any of the buttons do!"

"Yeah, but his love for that car borders on the adulterous. You know, I ripped off the aerial once – total emergency – and he blanked me for a fortnight. I didn't even get coffee, let alone – well, you get the picture!")

The phone call had been to a Doctor Jones – in the derided UNIT, of all places. In spite of his earlier contempt, whatever he'd heard from her seemed to have put the Captain's mind at rest.

"Yeah, Martha wants to see him herself, of course, but she's pretty sure it's another Chula evac protocol, she's dealt with their hardware before. Probably something designed for search and rescue in battle - finds the wounded, teleports them out of danger and back to the triage ship to be treated."

"Except there is no Chula spaceship here on Earth."

"You got it! Whatever we had in the archive, according to the records it's been sitting there dormant for sixty years or more. A whole lot of Chula equipment found its way to Earth during both World Wars – trying to do what it was designed for, I guess. Pity most people here don't know how to use any of it."

"So," Sarah Jane said thoughtfully, "this Chula medical thing in your archives woke up, found a 'casualty' to rescue, beamed Ianto away, and then didn't have any evacuation point to send him to."

"It makes sense. The moment my bullet caught him, he was a medical priority for it – get the injured soldier out of immediate danger first and worry about what to do with him later."

"So it looked around for something that might be a Chula base - "

" - noticed a great big cloud of baryon radiation stuck to some buildings miles away but on the same landmass –"

"And rematerialised him in the Bubble Shock factory!"

"And I went looking for an object, something that might have acted as a homing beacon." Jack shook his head. "But all it did was home in something that looked like home. Like when you're lost at night and you go looking for a light, because anything light means civilisation."

"Well, a homing beacon was a logical guess." She paused. "But the amnesia, what's that - some sort of post-traumatic shock?"

"Martha doesn't think so. More likely to be the Chula equivalent of Retcon, or a medical coma, even. Put a temporary block on the patient's memories while their body recovers – it keeps them from getting stressed or agitated from their injuries, or the shock of the teleport. Don't worry, she'll figure out how to get him back."

"And if she doesn't?"

Ianto had materialised silently in the doorway. Sarah Jane jumped, but Jack didn't blink, uncoiling himself from the sofa and rising to clasp him by the shoulders.

"Don't worry! Martha's always come through for us before, right? You're going to be fine! Now –" he looked past Ianto to where Luke, Maria and Clyde were hovering in the hallway. "Assuming you and your new friends have left the SUV in one piece, we should be heading back to Cardiff – damn it, I need to call Gwen first, she'll be going insane! Ianto, could you fix me a coffee before we hit the road?"

There was something dryly amused in the quirk of Ianto's lips. "I think I can manage that." He glanced at Sarah Jane. "I'm guessing everyone else would prefer tea?"

"You have him well-trained," Sarah Jane said, not sure whether to be entertained or annoyed by Jack blithely standing in her house giving orders.

Jack laughed. "Don't be fooled. He's the one who has me whipped into shape. I was a happy slob before Ianto came to Torchwood. Now it's all clean shirts, clean sheets, regular mealtimes and all my case reports have to be written up and filed within 48 hours. You have no idea how cranky he gets over an untidy desk."

"So he's like, what, your butler?" Clyde asked.

Jack was dialling his mobile. "He's my everything," he said simply, and then he was booming into the phone. "Gwen! He's here, it's OK, I've found him, he's fine... Yeah, Ealing, would you believe? Yeah, she did. No, I wouldn't – listen, why don't you speak to him yourself?" He strode off towards the kitchen. "Well, one slight problem, he might not exactly know who you are – hey, it wasn't me! Look, just ask him yourself..."

The living room seemed both quieter and bigger without Jack Harkness in the middle of it, waving his arms about as he talked. Luke sat down next to Sarah Jane. "You OK?"

She sighed: it had been a busy Monday. "Yes, I'm fine. Jack is – well, he's not exactly a saint, but I don't think he's quite the demon I'd let my imagination conjure up. If I hadn't been so willing to believe all the bad things I'd heard about him..."

"You'd have called him yourself, and Ian would've gone home yesterday instead of today," Maria said. "So it all worked out fine in the end."

"I suppose." Though that didn't erase the image of Jack Harkness standing in her hallway, pointing a gun at her and the children, driven by anger born out of utter desperation, because she'd chosen to let her prejudices dictate her judgement... Would he have shot her, if Luke hadn't intervened? He's my everything. The answer was almost certainly yes: the thought made her shiver. In the end, even love didn't seem to make Torchwood any less of a liability.

What would Ian revert to, when he remembered who Ianto Jones was? Was he more like Jack Harkness, all surface charm over a coolly ruthless heart? That quirky sense of humour, his eagerness to please, his instinct to protect her and Luke from a possible danger – even if that danger was himself. Was that the 'real' Ianto?

Luke's gaze was fixed on his pile of scrapbooks, stacked neatly on the table. She wasn't sure if ruffling his hair would be uncool. "What do you think?" she asked him.

Luke looked thoughtful. "In the SUV, it was funny – he knew where everything was. Sat in the driver's seat straight away, adjusted the mirror, made all the systems light up –"

"Wait a minute – Jack said he'd deactivated it all!"

The three children shared a guilty look.

"Um, Ian must have - reactivated it?" Luke said vaguely.

"Mate, he hotwired it!" Clyde chipped in. "Actually, that was pretty cool."

"But Luke's right," Maria said. "He knew exactly what he was doing. He showed us the scanner, there was a computer... they've got a really good sound system!"

"He belonged," Luke said, quiet but firm. "Like with – with Jack: he doesn't remember, but he knows him. He was happy, in the car. He knows he's going home now." He sighed, then sat up straight. "I like him, I only ever wanted him to be happy."

"I know you did! And he will be, because of you." She gave in to the impulse then and hugged him quickly. Her brilliant, wonderful son, whose heart was even bigger than his amazing brain.

Luckily for his dignity, she'd managed to let go before Jack and Ianto came back, Ianto carrying a tray and serving tea and coffee with a quaintly formal air, in spite of the t-shirt and bare feet. Jack sat on the sofa next to her armchair and followed his every move as he handed round the china.

He leaned closer, conspiratorially. "God, you have no idea how much I've missed that!"

"I have a feeling you're not talking about a nice cup of tea, Captain."

He laughed, saluting her with his cup. "That too. Everything. Stupid conversations, the things he says, the clothes he wears, the way he wears them. Him and Gwen ganging up on me... It's funny how you have to lose some things, before you finally understand how much they matter to you."

Ianto was talking to Luke and Clyde – about the SUV, by the sound of it. Next to them, Maria looked like she was nodding off. Sarah Jane gestured at Ianto. "I'm sure your Doctor Jones is every bit as good as you say. But what will you do if she can't get his memories back?"

"Oh, if she's really at a loss, I guess I'll have to ask that other Doctor I know." He leaned back with a slow lazy grin, watching her.

Was he...? No, he couldn't, not Jack Harkness, of all people. Could he?

"You? You know – the Doctor?"

"Want to know about the first time I got caught out by Chula technology? It was... a lifetime ago, and I did something dumb and got myself in trouble – a lot of other people, too. I messed up, big time. And then this guy turned up, out of the blue, and he saved me. A guy who lived in a spaceship that looked like a blue police box, and a girl called Rose, and I got to travel with them, for a while. That was when I stopped being a waste of space and started to try to be what he thought I could be. Better, you know. A better man."

"Yes, he does that to you, doesn't he." She was smiling so hard it made her cheeks ache. "And you know Rose, too! I met her last year, when I met him again. Oh, he'd changed, of course – skinny suit, all teeth and hair, a bit mad. Was that your Doctor?"

"Yeah, but not the first time. My first time, he was leather jacket, big ears, cute accent. You?"

"I don't know that one! Well, the first time I met him, he was elegant, very distinguished, with white hair, maybe a little bit vain but so lovely! And the one after that was a complete contrast – mind you, he was all teeth and hair and a bit mad too, come to think of it. And Alistair says his first Doctor was nothing much like either of them!"

"Always the same guy really, though. We come and go, and he's always out there, dipping in and out of our lives..."

"He always changes us, though, doesn't he? For the better, I think." She glanced over to where Luke was propped up casually against Clyde, yawning, as Ianto quietly started to clear away the tea things. She knew how he felt: it really had been an exhausting day, one way or another. She shook her head at Jack. "Honestly, though – Jack Harkness, you read my files, so you knew I knew the Doctor – why on earth didn't you just tell me that you'd travelled with him too?"

Jack winked, putting a finger to his lips as he nodded across at Ianto. "I guess I got used to not mentioning the Doctor to other people. Especially around him! He gets kind of moody whenever I do, and knowing my luck that'd be the one thing he does remember from before! Crazy, though. If I hadn't met the Doctor, I'd never have met Ianto. And I certainly wouldn't have deserved – hey, hey, come here, you. Ears burning yet?"

Sarah Jane stretched. Really, the armchair was far too comfortable. Jack had pulled Ianto down onto the sofa next to him, and now they were talking, their voices soft, wrapped up in each other once again and oblivious to everything around them. She knew it was bad manners, but she couldn't help leaning her head to one side to eavesdrop.

"...why it activated in the first place?" Ianto was saying. "Even before you shot me, it was trying to reel me in. Or was that just the dream?"

"No, that happened. And I don't know why it stopped being dormant. Could have been one of those bits of Rift junk that got washed up in the Bay. Like a charger or a remote control. Maybe we just put something new in the Archive that tripped its wake-up button?"

"So we switched it on by accident, and it just grabbed the next person who walked past it?"

"Oh, I didn't say that." Jack had one of Ianto's hands in his own, tracing slow circles on the palm with his thumb. "No, it was you that it wanted."

"Why?"

"Because of Owen, and Toshiko, and how you aren't coping."

Ianto's face creased with an unhappy frown at the two names. "I don't – I know them... Something wrong. What happened?"

"We lost them. I'm sorry. A month ago. Nothing any of us could do, and it's been... Hard. Gwen cries all the time, and that's okay. We take care of her, and then she goes home to Rhys, and he helps her. And I cry too, mostly at night, and you hold onto me and that helps me.

"And you, Ianto. Want me to tell you what you don't remember yet? About how you look after both of us, keep the Hub running, deal with it all. You make sure we eat and drink, you've started to go through Tosh's notes, trying to do her job too. You're strong and you're stubborn and you absolutely will not crack, not in front of us. So when you think I'm not looking, you take things down to the Archive to file them away, and that's where you let go. Down there in the dark, so as not to let us see how badly it's hurting you too. That's why the Chula machine latched on to you."

"Ohh..." Sarah Jane hadn't meant to make a sound. Jack looked up from Ianto's stricken face, smiling sadly at her and nodding.

"Chula tech. It's what it's programmed to seek out. A living creature in pain. It doesn't care if that's a laser burn or a bomb blast, or - grief. It just wanted to take him away and get him healed."

It made her heart ache to look at Ianto now. She closed her eyes. "So young, Jack, he's too young..."

Jack's voice was a warm whisper. "I know. But I promise you, Sarah Jane Smith, I'll take care of him. I will heal him, and I will keep him safe, trust me."

"See that you do, Captain," Sarah Jane mumbled. "Or I'll be...

And then she was asleep.

***

Ianto blinks, stares at Sarah Jane dozing serenely in her armchair, then across to where the three kids are sleeping in a comfortable heap on the other sofa.

"So, that would be Retcon?" he says politely.

Jack studies him. He doesn't look worried or concerned, just thoughtful.

"Yes, I Retconned them all, in the tea."

"And we both had coffee." Ianto frowns. "Will it harm them?"

"No, absolutely not. I give you my word. They'll all wake up in a couple of hours, and the last few days will be a blur, and they won't remember you or me. That's all."

"Not if Sarah Jane notices your unloaded pistol in her bread-bin. Or my shoes, wherever they hid them."

"Which is why you and I need to go room by room and clear up anything that shows we were ever here. You okay with that?" Ianto considers, nods. "Then let's get started."

Ianto may not remember who he is but he's good at this, of course: it's the kind of thing Jack had him doing from the first week he joined Torchwood Three. Clean-up, cover-up, his own near-eidetic brand of meticulous attention to detail that has him stripping the spare bed, tearing pages out of notebooks, bundling his old clothes into a carrier bag to take away, and fitting a bell back onto the bicycle in the side alley.

The shoes prove elusive, until Jack scans for more residual baryon and they track the last fuzzy blip to the bottom of Luke's wardrobe.

Back in the living room, he watches Ianto thinking and processing, carefully retracing every move over the last few days. The urge to stop him right there – to walk up and touch him, kiss him, feel him up, even – is intense, but Jack hangs back so as not to distract him. To be fair, all that should probably wait until he can remember who he is, anyway. It's kind of unscrupulous to take advantage of a dream-memory.

"Phones," Ianto says suddenly, pointing. "Luke, Maria, Clyde – they took photos of me, when they thought I was asleep."

"Cute," Jack smirks. "Did they mess your hair up too?" Ianto stares at him, bemused.

The phones turn out to be password-locked. Jack shrugs, fiddles with his wrist-strap, and swipes each phone past it. "Memory wipe," he explains. "But not very selective, unfortunately. Let's hope they're all as diligent about backing up their sim cards as you are with mine!"

"Isn't that going to be a bit of a giveaway?" Ianto asks. "Everyone wakes up, the weekend's a blank and so are all the phones?"

Jack waves at the ceiling.

"Did you get a look in the attic while you were here? Guess what the amazing Sarah Jane Smith has up there – a great big computer that didn't come from PC World. Or anywhere else on this world, for that matter. Or this timezone. Trust me, these kids are already used to a generous dose of wacky in their lives. One blurry-edged weekend is going to be nothing to them!"

"I do - trust you, that is. Just making sure everything ties up."

Jack has to kiss him then. It's probably wrong and bad, but it's been a terrible ten days and Ianto's yielding mouth is every bit as sweet and hot as he remembers.

"I shouldn't do that to you – not while you can't really remember me. Sorry."

"And yet," - Ianto runs the tip of his tongue over shiny lips, eyebrow quirked – "putting up remarkably little resistance here. You do smell nice."

"Nice? Is that the best thing you can say about my alluring pheromones?"

"Sorry. Thought it was a new fabric conditioner."

He's eyeing Jack up with that sly, sly poker-face. "I'd spank you if we didn't have an unconscious audience of minors. Are you going to ask me why?"

"Why the Retcon?" Ianto shrugs. "You'll tell me if you want me to know."

"Now that is exactly why I have to kiss you again." God, Jack loves Gwen to bits but she is utterly, completely incapable of sitting in silence and letting him unwind his thoughts at his own pace. She questions everything, and it's one of her great strengths, of course, but it also drives him mad at times: this last week more than ever before.

Ianto is a quiet presence, a safe haven, thoughtful and un-shockable. He breaks slowly away from the kiss and moves around the room, straightening a last few things, checking each of the oblivious children, shifting the cushion behind Clyde to support his head better, pushing a lick of hair out of Luke's eye and resting Maria's dangling hand gently in her lap.

He stops in front of Sarah Jane, a sleeping queen in a stripy jumper, curled up catlike in her armchair. Ianto leans in, takes her hand and kisses her cheek, slowly, then glances back at Jack. "Do you think she'd mind?"

"A kiss from you? I think she'd be fine. Now see, if I tried that I'd probably have gotten a slap, Retcon or not. D'you think I'm losing my touch?"

"She protected me," Ianto says softly. "They all did. They didn't know anything about me, or what I might be, but they all wanted to help. I don't know what would have happened if Luke hadn't found me. I was -" He looks down, fidgeting. "- I was too scared. Just couldn't think..."

"It's okay." Jack puts his arm around Ianto's shoulders, draws him close. "Shock. And they did find you. They took care of you, until I could come and get you. And what did I do when I did get here? Lied to her, mocked her, forced my way into her house and pulled a gun on her in front of her son and their friends."

"It isn't exactly how you'd want to be remembered," Ianto says wryly.

"You're damned right. This way, they don't remember anything bad, about either of us. Then give it a month or two, and you and I'll find an excuse and come calling – only this time, Torchwood won't be the scary bad guys with the guns. We'll be there to offer them our help, for the next time they have a problem with the Bane or the Slitheen, whatever it is. I want her to trust me, to like me. And I want her to think that you have the best boyfriend in the galaxy!"

"Do I? I mean, is that what – you, me...?"

"Yep."

"We're..."

"Yes we are. What, you think I just roam around randomly kissing anyone if they're hot enough?"

"Strangely enough..." Ianto says equably. "Let's hope I turn out to be the tolerant sort, when I can actually remember who I am."

"And the sooner we get back to Torchwood, the sooner you'll know. Ready to go?"

Ianto nods. In the doorway, Jack takes a last look. There's afternoon sun spilling across the sleeping figures in the living-room. It's a perfect family tableau, supremely peaceful, impeccably domestic. Safe. All the things Jack's enjoyed in the past, other lives he's lived in and passed through and out-lived.

All the things Ianto doesn't get to have: being in Torchwood, being with him. Maybe the unselfish thing would be to Retcon him too and leave him tucked away here in this safe nest.

When he turns, Ianto is right behind him, waiting. Gorgeous as ever, even in the atypical jeans and t-shirt, and smiling at Jack with a slightly puzzled look as Jack walks over and envelops him in a fierce hug. He's Ianto, warm and solid and alive, arms tight around Jack's back, wriggling closer, his lips brushing Jack's neck with a contented little sigh.

And selfishness wins, as it always does.

"Come on, "Jack says, "Time to take you home."

fic: SJA / TW crossover, "The Other" (4/5)

2009-10-14T03:08:02Z

Part 3

Part 4

Rosalie's was the same as always, shabby and cosy and cluttered, with half the tables taken up by women in twos and threes with shopping bags piled around their ankles. The cafe's only waitress, the grey-haired and slightly quivery Emma, was filling teapots at the counter, working at her usual unhurried pace.

There were, as usual, no men to be seen, and not many children – not many young women either, for that matter. Rosalie's was a bit too old-fashioned for the cool twenty-somethings of West London. They'd only got round to installing a coffee machine in the last year, and Emma still handled it as if she was waiting for it to jump up and bite her. But the tea was good and the cakes and sandwiches were always fresh, and nobody made a fuss if Sarah Jane wanted to sit in the corner for a couple of hours with a slice of apricot tart and a notebook, marshalling her thoughts with no interruptions.

Breakfast that morning hadn't been the trial she'd been dreading all night, after all. She'd kept it simple, just stating calmly that she'd spoken to Harkness and that they were meeting later that morning. Ian had nodded his thanks, looking thoughtful and saying nothing. Luke had only sighed, not glancing up from his bowl of Sugar Puffs. Too quiet, really. She should have guessed: when the phone call came and she'd dashed out of the house, Luke had been standing by the car.

"Luke, please – not now! I need to get to Rosalie's as quickly as I can."

Luke had shaken his head. "I'm not trying to stop you. I think I should come with you, though. In case this Captain Harkness tries – in case you need help, you know."

His urge to protect her made Sarah Jane's heart swell. "Oh, bless you! But there's nothing to worry about, I promise. Harkness may be a bit strange, but he won't do anything to harm me. Besides, I need you to stay here and help Ian, if he's still determined to mend my gazebo today. You can show him where everything is – and make sure he doesn't try to overdo it and fall off the stepladder!"

The cafe door opened and she glanced up, but it was just one frowning woman laden with Marks & Spencer bags, making a beeline for the big centre table. Sarah Jane checked her watch again. She'd only been there ten minutes - it had felt important to get here before Harkness, to be settled and calmly waiting when he arrived. But now she was fretting: what if he'd changed his mind? What if he'd found something at the factory, or had somehow guessed she knew something about Ian?

What if Harkness himself didn't know anything about Ian, though? Not that this seemed likely - why else would Torchwood's infamously self-important Captain have come on a three-hour drive all the way to London, if he wasn't involved in some way in that fire, and Ian being shot and abandoned in the Bubble Shock factory in the first place?

The cafe doorbell tinkled again. Ah, no mistaking this new arrival! Even if she hadn't seen the UNIT file photos of the infamous Captain Jack, it would have been impossible to miss the ripple of excitement running around Rosalie's, as the tall figure looked around the cafe, grinning and waving as he spotted her.

It wasn't just that, in person, Harkness really was devastatingly handsome, the broad shoulders and vivid blue eyes and artfully messy dark hair, that Hollywood-wattage smile. And it wasn't the eccentric clothes, the old-fashioned military greatcoat and braces that should have looked ridiculous, but on him were strangely dashing.

The man had presence. Sarah Jane watched, reluctantly impressed, as he sauntered towards her, weaving between the cluttered tables, flashing his bright grin at the suddenly flustered ladies to left and right who were rushing to pull shopping-laden chairs out of his way. In the background, Emma the waitress was staring wistfully after him as she smoothed her pinafore out in a most atypically flirtatious manner.

"Sarah Jane Smith!" He loomed over her, hand outstretched. "Wondered if I'd recognise you – not a problem but I'm telling you, UNIT needs to get better pictures for your personnel records, because – " he had the nerve to lean back, still holding her hand, and sweep his eyes from her face to her boots and all the way back up. Slowly. "- can I just say, Wow! If I'd known what I was missing, I'd have tried twice as hard to recruit you last time."

The shameless, handsome bastard. His hand enveloping hers was warm and strong. For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss it, but instead he shook it again, oddly formal, before letting go. Stupidly, Sarah Jane felt a twinge of disappointment.

Emma was at their table before Harkness had even managed to pull his chair out. "What can I get you, Sir?"

"Black coffee and – hey, is that walnut cake?" Harkness reached over without a pause, breaking a corner off Sarah Jane's slice and popping it into his mouth. "Ohh yes! Definitely having some of that. Did you bake it yourself?" Emma shook her head wordlessly, giggling. "Pity – you look like a woman who really knows how to whip her buttercream into shape!"

Emma looked like a woman old enough to be his grandmother. Was Harkness flirting with her, too? Sarah Jane took a deep breath as the pink-cheeked waitress hurried off, beaming. "So, Captain, did – "

"- Jack, remember! Unless you want me to call you Miss Smith, and where's the fun in that?"

"So, Jack - did you find what you were looking for at the Bubble Shock factory?"

"No..." Suddenly, he wasn't smiling. "I guess it was kind of a long shot. There's nothing there, just a few cleared-out warehouses, some trashed processing equipment and a giant fuzz of baryon-9 radiation clinging to everything."

"What were you looking for?"

He gave a dry laugh. "You want to know the funny thing? Truth is, I have no idea!"

"Really? That must make it rather hard to find."

"Tell me about it!" – and then Emma was back in what had to be a world record time for her, carrying a full tray. Harkness took a long gulp of his coffee and beamed, making Emma giggle. "Everything in the world goes better with coffee, right?" When she was safely out of earshot, he leaned towards Sarah Jane. "Though possibly not this coffee! Do you think she got confused and poured me a cup of gravy instead?"

Sarah Jane smiled. "They only installed that fancy espresso machine a few months ago. I think Emma is still trying to get to grips with it."

"Yeah, I know how that feels!" Harkness sighed sympathetically. He drank again, grimacing. "Unpredictable machines... This thing I'm looking for, all I do know is that it'll be tech of some kind – alien tech. Chula, Olembride, could even be Bane for all I know. Something that runs on baryon compression – a marker buoy, scanner, homing beacon, that kind of thing."

"Don't you have any idea at all? I mean, how big will this machine be? Is it dangerous?"

"No idea," Harkness shrugged apologetically, spreading his hands. "Big as a car, size of your fist. Probably not dangerous, unless someone tries to interfere with it. We didn't even – " He broke off, gulping at the coffee again but so lost in thought this time, he didn't flinch. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. "You know how it is with bananas? You have a bunch of bananas, it sits there by itself, no harm to anyone. Stick it in the fruit-bowl along with all the other fruit, and before you can blink, every apple's gone rotten and the peaches have ripened into mush, and someone's standing in the kitchen moaning that everyone knows bananas give off ethylene, when all you were trying to do was tidy the place up for once!"

It was almost like being back with the Doctor again: sitting in this quiet little cafe in Ealing, surrounded by people whose idea of a exotic adventure was watching Michael Palin riding alpacas over the Andes, with a larger-than-life man across the table, waving his hands and chatting casually about aliens and galactic technology, as if they were discussing a new toaster or the latest mobile phone.

Harkness straightened up. "Well, whatever it is, it's still out there, which means I have to keep looking. Which means we need to get down to business! Okay, so let's talk about you - all those rebuffs, and finally I get you chasing after me! I have to tell you, I was starting to get worried I was losing my touch... So what is it that I can help you with but the almighty UNIT can't?"

"You're not a fan of UNIT?"

He shrugged. "They have some good people there now. The uniforms are kind of cute. And I know you worked for them a while back, or you had some kind of liaison assignment with them, so I won't run your pals down. Let's just say UNIT and I don't always share the same view of who our friends and our enemies are, hmm?"

Of course. Harkness had clearly roamed around in who knew how many supposedly restricted UNIT files – he had to know about the Doctor's time with them! No wonder the head of Torchwood was bristling about UNIT. Did he perhaps even know that she and the Doctor had worked together – travelled together?

It was an unnerving thought. Sarah Jane sipped her cold tea, collecting herself.

"Well, I suppose UNIT does have a long history, just like yours – I mean Torchwood's, of course. There were bound to have been times when you didn't see things from the same perspective."

"You think so? Look around you. This is one lonely little planet, and the human race all still taking baby steps into the future. And it's a big bad universe out there, full of aliens who get that certain look in their eye whenever they notice us down here, like lambs in the meadow. You'd think UNIT might be more willing to put aside some of their precious military mindset when it's a question of a fellow human's well-being!"

"Maybe they'd be more willing to co-operate, if Torchwood wasn't so fond of ignoring everyone else's interests when they don't suit you!"

He raised his eyebrows. "Touchy. And yet, it's me you want to talk to now. Something UNIT's rule-book doesn't cover, I guess?"

"You're right, I'm sorry." Only sorry that he'd got under her skin, but a little fake contrition in front of Harkness wouldn't do any harm. Sarah Jane glanced away, feigning embarrassment. "And yes, UNIT can't help me with this. Jack, I need to ask you about – Retcon."

He laughed, but looked puzzled as he did. "Retcon, really? That's disappointing – from the way you were dancing around it, I was sure you were about to ask me out on a date! You know, last time I tried to lure you into my team, one of the things you told me was that you didn't want to work with the kind of organisation that would wipe people's minds to protect its secrecy. Right?"

"You're quite right. And I still – use of Retcon isn't a concept I feel at all happy about. It's just that, well, circumstances have changed, for me. I have Luke now – I need to protect him, and his friends. And, the thing is... I do tend to find myself in certain – situations, you might say."

"Like fighting a Bane invasion single-handed?" He gave her a little bow. "Still think you did a hell of a job there!"

"Yes, exactly like that! The Bane, and – well, it's like you said. You and I both know that this planet attracts a lot of, shall we say, visitors? Some of them are perfectly friendly, and some of them, less so."

"And some of them just happen to find their way straight to Number 13 Bannerman Road." He leaned back, smiling lazily. "Been wondering about that. Artificial weather patterns a few months ago, temporal hiccups rippling all the way over the Severn... What exactly are you hiding in your basement, Sarah Jane? Don't tell me there's a new Rift under Acton!"

He was joking with her, she hoped. Certainly he looked relaxed, the big smile easy and warm, hands clasped loosely in his lap. But the grin didn't quite reach his blue eyes, calculating and old as he studied her.

"I know!" she said, smiling back. "I don't think there's a Rift around here, though the number of times Luke loses his Oyster card, I'm starting to wonder. I mean, some of it is just my job. An investigative reporter does tend to, you know, investigate strange incidents. But maybe I picked something up while I was working for UNIT? Like your baryon radiation, perhaps. They told me that stuff lasts for years. Perhaps I'm some kind of alien magnet!"

"Yeah, maybe you are. If I was an alien, I'd certainly come calling!" The words were playful but the look he gave her was a long hard stare, and Sarah Jane knew he knew more than he was saying. There was a magnet, and it had nothing to do with her own penchant for investigating the paranormal. That residue of artron energy, from her time in the TARDIS, drew alien travellers to her as often as she sought them out.

But UNIT didn't have equipment that could scan for artron emissions. Did Torchwood? She took a breath, ploughing on. "So – your Retcon. I really do need to start thinking about taking a few precautions, maybe. I wanted to find out more about it."

"Such as?"

"Well – is it safe?"

Harkness shrugged. "Depends what you mean by safe. It's not toxic, we have no recorded incidence of allergic reactions. Short-term side-effects include headaches, dry mouth, sometimes mild nausea – pretty much like your average hangover after a good Friday night out on the town. Oh, and amnesia, of course. Long-term side-effects: amnesia. That's all."

"Do you use it a lot?"

"Depends what you mean by that. Not so much this last month, I guess – the Rift's been quiet since..."

He fell silent. "Since the bombings?" she said gently, and Harkness nodded.

"Since the bombings, yeah. I think the whole city's still in shock, or maybe that's just us, projecting. Sometimes it feels like the Rift is in shock too. We've had nothing happening recently, just a few bits of space junk washed up in the Bay. Quiet days, for a change. Plenty of time to tidy up the Archives."

He was looking at his half-drunk coffee, no longer smiling. After all the things she'd read and heard about Jack Harkness, seeing him like this was disconcerting. The flamboyant Captain Jack was supposed to care only for himself. Mourning for others? Maybe she'd missed things about Jack Harkness that the files and the saucy gossip didn't cover.

"No need for Retcon recently, then?" she asked, her voice casual.

Harkness shook his head thoughtfully. "Last time must have been four, five weeks ago now - before the attack. We didn't use Retcon at all in the clean-up - it would have meant dosing half the city. Though everyone swallowed the terrorist line anyway. Made it a little easier for us, I guess. People can't deal with the idea of aliens in their city, but humans killing other humans, that's just your everyday nightmare. They're used to coping with that."

But that couldn't be right. Whatever had happened to Ian couldn't have been much more than a week ago. The bullet wound on his arm had barely started to heal when she'd cleaned it up. So far, at least, she'd assumed Harkness had been telling her the truth. Suddenly, Sarah Jane was unsure again. Maybe even the look of loss in his eyes was just an act.

"I must admit, I'm surprised you didn't dose them anyway, if Retcon's so completely harmless."

He stared hard at her. "I don't care what crap UNIT's been telling you - we don't use it unless we have to. Listen, Retcon is simply a drug that does what it needs to, same as anything in your bathroom cabinet. You have a headache, you take a painkiller. You have nightmares because you saw a Weevil mauling some guy in an alleyway in Butetown, I give you Retcon and the nightmares go away."

"So you get to choose – what people can cope with and what they can't?"

"Yes I do, because I know what I'm dealing with, all the monsters and all the threats. I take responsibility for protecting people - like you right now, thinking about how best to protect the people around you. Which might mean using Retcon on your neighbours, maybe even your son and his schoolfriends, right?"

"Thinking about it, yes! But I'm a long way off making my mind up. I'd love to be as certain as you that everything I do is inherently right, but I know I'm not that perfect, Jack, even if you are. And I'm talking about children here – Do you even use Retcon on children?"

"Yep." He smiled mirthlessly. "Though sometimes I have to guess the dose. Kids these days, the way they act, you can't tell how old they are just by looking, have you noticed that?"

"You guess the dose? Is that a joke?" He stared at her, unmoving. "But what happens when you get it wrong?"

"I don't get it wrong."

"Who decides that? I mean, what about if you're, oh, trying to get someone to forget last night and you get a little carried away – do they forget the whole of yesterday? A week? A month? Their own identity? What's the limit?"

"The limit is what I decide. Retcon is a tool, a weapon in the war, and I'm prepared to use it any way I have to. Are you?"

"I – I don't know. But I don't think of my life as a daily battle. Maybe you need weapons because you always go looking for a fight?"

There wasn't a flicker of doubt about Harkness. He laughed harshly, leaning back in his chair. "And maybe you're hiding from what you know it's like out there. Let me tell you about this time a few months ago. We ran into a little gang of petty criminals – nothing to do with Torchwood, except it turned out they'd had the luck to find a creature that had come through the Rift. Now that alien was helpless, sentient, harmless, completely innocent - but for them it was just a thing they could abuse for profit. When we finally discovered what they were up to, they'd had it chained up and tortured for months, in agony you can't imagine. Too badly injured for us to save. What would you have done with those guys, Sarah Jane Smith?"

"Handed them over to the police," she replied promptly, even though she knew it was the answer he was hoping for.

"No point. We'd disposed of the corpse, and no alien meant no evidence. Not that I think the Merthyr constabulary are quite ready to figure out which charges to bring for kidnap and torture of a non-human lifeform."

"Well... UNIT, then."

"Five years ago, UNIT was still operating a policy of life internment without trial for the worst breaches of national security. Did you know that? It's supposed to have stopped now, of course, but sometimes I'm just not sure what UNIT gets up to, even with the few people I can rely on there. Alien contact, hostile engagement, threats to the state – three small-time wasters from the valleys? Those men would have been buried alive in the Category One bunker under Salisbury Plain. Is that your idea of justice?"

Sarah Jane shook her head. "No it isn't. But I have a feeling I'm not going to like yours any more than that."

"I Retconned them all, a massive dose. I wiped years out of their memories, at least five, maybe as much as ten - anything longer than six months isn't that much of an exact science with chemical amnesia. Yeah, I can see what you think - but I did those bastards a favour! No custodial sentence, no pain, no trauma. Hell, maybe this time around they won't grow up to be the kind of people who think mutilating a living creature to line their own pockets is a neat idea."

"Torchwood – my God, you never change!" She shook her head, appalled at herself as much as at the casually ruthless Harkness. How could she have ever been so stupid as to think anyone from Torchwood could be anything but a threat and a liability?

"We do what it takes, and I don't think you're ready for that yet." Harkness sounded amused. He reached for her forgotten cake, pulling off another piece. "I take it you won't be asking me for your own supply of Retcon, then?"

"No – no thank you. I'm clearly not ready to start following your lead, Captain." More than that, there was no way on Earth now that she'd even consider putting Ian into the hands of this man. Whatever had happened to him, they'd have to find another way to go forward, and a way that protected him from any more exposure to Torchwood and its brutal vigilante justice.

No wonder they thought of the Doctor as their Number One enemy! She couldn't imagine anyone less like her Doctor than the cold-hearted, arrogant man across the table, chewing her cake as he watched her, eyebrows quirked. "I'm sorry to have wasted your time today."

"No problem," Harkness grinned wolfishly at her. "It was good to put a real face to that seductive voice of yours at last. Make sure you get UNIT to update your personnel photo before the next time I try to recruit you!"

"Oh, I think we both know that would be a waste of even more of Torchwood's valuable time." She stood up, matching Harkness's wide, insincere smile as she held out her hand. "It was – very interesting meeting you, Captain. And I hope you find what you're looking for. Preferably without having to Retcon your way through too many people in the process."

"Until the next time, Sarah Jane!" He stood too, shaking her hand just as warmly as before. As she left, she glanced back: Harkness was sitting down again, legs stretched out, studying Rosalie's snack menu. So much for having no time to spare! She was starting to wonder if the man had said a single honest thing to her from the moment they'd met.

***

On the short drive back home, Sarah Jane seethed as the weight of her disappointment hit home. In spite of the things she'd heard and read about Torchwood, she'd never actually met anyone who worked for them. And Jack Harkness might be infamous throughout UNIT, but the scandalised asides and whispers had, more often than not, been tinged with envy and even a little respect at times.

It had been obvious - from the old files, and now the casually scattered references in his conversation - that, like her, the Captain had travelled a long way beyond this planet. She'd imagined meeting someone she could really talk to, someone she could make a connection with. After all, some sections of UNIT weren't the Doctor's biggest fans, either – not back when she'd first met him, and certainly not this latest incarnation, who'd managed to rub more than a few generals the wrong way when he'd breezed in and repelled the Sontaran invasion earlier that year.

She'd thought that meeting Harkness in person would be different. Maybe even that he'd be like the Doctor in some way – eccentric but compassionate, big-headed but good-hearted. Not the charming and utterly ruthless, utterly indifferent bastard sitting back in Rosalie's cafe, stealing the cake off her plate and smiling at her the whole time with that big, calculating, false grin.

Perhaps the most frustrating part was that she really had believed he would be able to help. Ian's desperation to find out who he was - to make sure he wasn't a threat to any of them - was painfully sincere. Enough to have let Sarah Jane think it was worth at least arranging to meet Harkness, and maybe to take the gamble of telling him about Ian.

Well, that had turned out to be naive of her, at best! Ridiculous, really. She shook her head at herself with a sigh. Harkness had agreed to meet her... Who could say why? Probably because he was bored, at best – more likely he'd enjoyed the idea of trying to rattle or shock her, with his lurid tales of Retconning helpless people back to adolescence. Perhaps it was his twisted idea of punishment for daring to turn down his recruitment offer two years ago? "Very courageous, Captain!" she said aloud, and the sound of her own voice, all wounded dignity and slighted pride, made her laugh as she turned into Bannerman Road.

By the time she'd parked the car, her bad temper had lifted. Well, so she couldn't look to Torchwood for help. Luke, bless him, had been right all along. Whatever Ian was afraid of about himself, he couldn't possibly be put into the hands of someone like Harkness. She'd have to find another way to help him...

Harry! Oh of course, why hadn't she thought of him before? She could call him that afternoon, see what he could come up with. Harry Sullivan might not swagger around in period military clothes like a man who seemed to think he was the star of a Hollywood war drama, but she knew which of the two men was the real hero.

She found Maria and Clyde in the living room, sorting diligently through a fresh pile of newspapers. "Still no sign of any missing millionaires!" Clyde said cheerfully as she peered in.

"No, but I'm sure the Ealing Herald will be grateful for the extra boost in circulation this week. Where's Luke?"

"In the garden with Ian," Maria said. "They're mending your gazebo. We did offer to help – but I think Luke still wants to keep Ian all to himself!" She grinned, patting Clyde's knee. "Clyde is taking his rejection like a man."

"Yeah, right – because poncing round the garden like Alan Titchmarsh was always top of my career wishlist!"

"At least Ian wasn't the one screaming and running away when one little spider in the shed landed on him!"

"Hang on, did you see the size of that thing? That wasn't a normal spider – not one from this planet, at any rate. Unless it's just come back from a nice holiday at Sellafield..."

She left them to it, suppressing a small shudder at the fleeting memory of Metebelis Three as she headed out through the kitchen. Clyde wasn't the only one who wasn't all that fond of monstrous great big spiders.

The garden was flooded in sunshine, brightening the young green leaves on all the shrubs and trees. At the far end, Ian was standing barefoot on top of her rickety stepladder, bracing the broken corner of her beloved gazebo. Below him, Luke was gazing up as he steadied the ladder.

Only three days ago, Ian had been a dishevelled wreck of a man hidden in a dirty cupboard, shaking with fear and fever. Out here silhouetted against the sunny sky, he was balanced effortlessly, the solid muscles of his shoulders and back flexing as he shifted his grip on the corner joint, dropping a tube of glue down to Luke. Even in jeans and t-shirt, there was something self-contained about him now, a physical confidence she hadn't seen before.

Luke seemed mesmerised: was he getting a bit of a crush on his new friend? The thought made Sarah Jane smile as she walked across to join them.

Ian noticed her before Luke, and smiled. Too late, she realised he'd mistaken her own grin for good news. She shook her head quickly, mouthing sorry as she spread her hands wide, and the pleased look on Ian's face vanished in a blink, replaced by a bland mask. He gave her the tiniest of nods before focusing his attention back on the gazebo, but his shoulders had sagged.

From ground level, Luke had completely missed the momentary exchange. His own expression as she joined them was undisguised worry. "Did you find anything out? Did he know?"

"Nothing, no. Sorry." The sorry was for Ian's benefit: Luke looked as if he'd been given an unexpected present. He rarely tried to hide his feelings, which was good in a way since he was generally hopeless at it. "Look, Captain Harkness was a waste of time but I've had another idea – someone I think we really can trust to help us figure this out. He's an old friend, sort of a super-diplomat now, has contacts in all sorts of organisations – and I absolutely know we can trust him. So why don't you both come in? We can have some tea and I'll tell you all about him."

"Sounds like a good idea," Ian said. He didn't look down. "You go in, I'll join you in five minutes. I've just put the epoxy in, it needs to cure off a bit before I can let go."

"I'd better stay, then," Luke said, "to keep the ladder steady."

Ian shook his head. "It's okay Luke, thank you. I'm not going to move at all. I'll be down in a few minutes."

Ian wanted to be alone, she understood that. It was clear that he'd built up his hopes that her meeting with Harkness would provide the answers he needed, every bit as much as Luke had been hoping it wouldn't. "Right! We'll get lunch ready," she said brightly, nudging Luke. "Come and give me a hand with that?"

Thankfully, he didn't argue. Back in the kitchen, Sarah Jane busied herself with peeling and slicing. Luke stood by the sink, staring out at the solitary figure at the end of the garden, posed almost sculpturally on the stepladder. "He really does need to find out, Luke," she said quietly, and Luke nodded.

"I know. I just didn't want it to be Torchwood that had the answers. I didn't like the sound of that man. What was he like in person?"

"Oh, every bit as arrogant as everything I'd ever heard about him, and then some!" She laughed at the thought of Harkness, sprawled in the corner of the cafe, ogling her and Emma and the cakes all at once, brimming with self-satisfaction. "I'll tell you all about it when Ian comes in – I expect Maria and Clyde will want to hear, too. Do you know, he actually thought we were meeting because I wanted to go and work for him?"

As she reached for the saucepan, Sarah Jane noticed Ian's shoes, lined up neatly next to the utility room door where she'd caught him yesterday. Now he wasn't fogged down with illness, she had a feeling he might simply decide it would be better to remove himself from the house sooner rather than later. Not that she wanted to trap him against his will, but even if he was physically better now, it would be absurd for him to head off into the unknown while he didn't even know his own name.

If the shoes were out of sight, then at least they wouldn't put any silly ideas into his head. She pointed. "Luke, could you do me a favour and pop those up in Ian's room for me? Just stuff them under the bed or something, so he doesn't trip over them."

"Good idea!" Luke hared off so quickly, she wondered if he'd had the same sneaky thought as her. She hoped not! He was far too young to start getting cynical yet. Even if his naiveté was something of a liability...

The doorbell rang. From the living room, Clyde yelled, "I'll get it!"

"Thank you!" The kettle boiled, and as the sound of the churning water died back, she could hear voices from the hallway. Then Maria was at the kitchen door, looking anxious.

"Sarah Jane, I think you'd better come out here!"

In the hall, Clyde was standing near the front door, fists clenched.

Facing him in the open doorway, one foot over the threshold, was Captain Jack Harkness.

Sarah Jane crossed quickly to join Clyde, resting a hand on his shoulder. Close behind her, Maria half-whispered, "Is that him?", and she nodded without looking away.

The same man, yet here inside her own home there was no trace of the casually smiling charmer of an hour ago. Harkness loomed in front of her, the dark greatcoat seeming to block the hallway completely. He stared, tight-jawed and coldly angry.

At her side, Clyde was bristling. "I didn't let him in, he just barged through the door! I told him he couldn't do that!"

She needed to stay calm, they all did. She nodded. "It's alright. Captain Harkness, this is - unexpected. What do you want?"

He ignored the question, nodding at Clyde instead. "This your son?"

"No, he's a friend, Clyde. And this is Maria. Now, you said you were a busy man. Was there something you forgot to ask me?"

"You could say that. Guess I should have asked you why you've been lying to me right from the start!"

"What?" The abrupt accusation took her completely by surprise. "I have no idea what you're talking about!"

Harkness reached into his overcoat pocket, pulling out a flattish black box that looked like an old-fashioned mobile phone. Blue lights flickered along the top. "Any idea what this is?"

"One of those online lie detectors?" Clyde scoffed. "They don't really work, you know. You've been ripped off, mate."

"Not with this one." The smile Harkness flashed briefly at Clyde was ice-cold. "It's a scanner, calibrated to detect a range of non-Earth-sourced background radiation, like Kappa-Teha or artron, say. Today, I set it to detect baryon-9..." He pointed the box at Sarah Jane: the array of blue lights danced wildly as the box emitted a torrent of tell-tale beeps. "So, want to tell me again how you haven't been to the Bubble Shock site?"

Damn. Sarah Jane stared at the blinking lights. Was he telling the truth? Maybe the scanner was picking up the artron residue from her time in the TARDIS! Not that she wanted to suggest that to Harkness either. Something else, another excuse...

"Wait a minute – you were there yourself this morning, just before we met. You shook my hand in the cafe. That thing's probably just picking up traces from the site that you transferred to me!"

"Nice try. Unfortunately for you, I've been using another handy bit of Torchwood tech this last week – looks like a loofah, scrubs off radiation. It would be kind of stupid to start cross-contaminating places I was checking out, after all. I cleaned myself up before I came to meet you. Which is why I couldn't understand why this thing lit up like Christmas when I picked it up after our little coffee-chat. Just on my right hand, where I'd touched you. And on your chair, and your cup and your plate. And since you were so certain you hadn't been anywhere near that factory site –"

"Well, not recently!" Sarah Jane managed a little laugh, to underscore to Harkness how absurd this all was. She hoped he couldn't see how hard she was gripping Clyde's shoulder. "Sorry, I didn't realise how paranoid you were. Obviously, I've been there once – a year ago, when the Bane were there. Baryon radiation can be quite persistent, for those of us who don't have Torchwood's super decontamination technology to clean us up."

"Oh, it's persistent – eighteen months half-life, at least." Harkness smiled agreeably at her, then the smile vanished. "Which doesn't explain this –"

He swung the scanner towards Clyde. This time, the stuttering lights and warning beeps were even more frantic than before.

"Or this – " At Maria this time, who crossed her arms defiantly as the scanner lit up. Harkness glanced past her, to where Luke was standing silently on the bottom stair, glaring at him. "And I'm guessing your son – this is your son, right? – will make it a full house of liars."

"No-one's lying to you!" Maria said angrily. "We went there yesterday – me, Clyde and Luke. We'd heard about the fire – we just wanted to see what it looked like. Sunday afternoon, we were bored, you know." She glanced at Sarah Jane, pretending to look contrite. "Um, I suppose we should have told you, only Luke thought you'd be worried it was dangerous, sorry!"

"You three kids went there?" Harkness asked quietly, and something about the low menace in his voice made Sarah Jane shiver. Whatever Maria had been hoping to do, she had a feeling it hadn't helped.

"Yeah, we went there," Clyde said. "Poked about, nothing to see, came back here. Big deal."

"Just yesterday?"

"Yesterday afternoon, like Maria told you!" Luke said indignantly. "And that's why we've all got your baryon radiation all over us. So now you know, you can go back to Torchwood!"

Luke... no! Sarah Jane could see the ripple of calculation as Harkness stared at her son. He moved closer, and it took all her strength not to flinch as he pointed the scanner at Luke, nodding as the beeping warning went into overdrive.

"Your mother tell you about Torchwood?" Luke nodded miserably. "What did she say?"

"That you're arrogant. You hurt innocent people, and you can't be trusted."

Harkness grinned. It wasn't reassuring. "Sounds about right. Though on the can't be trusted part, I'm starting to think you could teach me a few things. By the way, did you know that baryon radiation has no saturation limit on living tissue? Want to guess what that means, Luke? It means you're caked in it, layer after layer. So let me ask you again – When did you go to the Bubble Shock site? How many times have you been there? What did you do there?"

Luke crossed his arms, echoing Maria's defiance. "We already told you. We went there yesterday, we looked around, we came home. That's all!"

Harkness took another step closer, scowling.

"You're lying! Tell me what you did – you did something, I know it! You took something, activated it - disturbed something there. It has to be you – what the hell did you do? What did you take? Tell me!"

"That's enough!" Sarah Jane snapped. Yelling at her son like that – who did the man think he was? "We've told you what happened, and I don't care if you think we're all lying, you have no right to come into my..."

Her voice died. Where Harkness had been holding the scanner a moment before, now there was a black pistol in his fist.

"This is what I think." In the sudden silence of the hallway, his voice was quietly furious. "That I don't have time for your games. Start talking now!"

"What, or you'll shoot us all? An unarmed woman and three kids?" Clyde was trying to sound dismissive, but his voice was higher than normal.

Harkness didn't even look at him. "No need to shoot you all. But if one of you doesn't start talking right now, I will shoot her."

He cocked the gun and pointed it straight at Sarah Jane's face.

For a second, she closed her eyes, hearing Maria cry out and feeling Clyde jerk in shock. A moment later, Luke had barged past her, pushing himself between her and the gun.

"Luke, no!" She tugged desperately at his arm, but he was already half a head taller than her: in the next instant, Maria and Clyde were either side of him, shielding her, and there was nothing she could do to stop them.

"Leave her alone! She didn't do anything - it was me!" Luke was six inches from the end of the gun, face to face with Harkness. She could feel him shaking. "I went and I found him there last week, and he's safe now. But he's no threat to you! Whatever you did to him, he doesn't remember any of it. Your drug wiped out all his memories, so you can just go! Go back to Torchwood and leave us all in peace!"

The effect on Harkness was extraordinary. Before her eyes, Sarah Jane saw the anger drain from his face, replaced by open-mouthed shock. The hand holding the gun fell loosely to his side as he stared at Luke.

She waited, fists clenched. The only sound in the hallway was the wall-clock's noisy ticking.

Then Harkness sucked in a long, shuddering breath and whispered, "He's here?"

Luke closed his mouth and glared, refusing to give anything else away. But Harkness wasn't threatening them anymore. He looked past Luke, seeking out Sarah Jane, and the aching pain in his eyes was something she recognised, could not ignore.

"Yes, he's here," she said.

"Mum, no!" Luke exclaimed, horrified.

She squeezed his shoulder with a little laugh as the tension ebbed out of her. "It's OK – oh, Luke, I have been such an idiot! Look at him. Can't you see?"

Luke shook his head, frowning. Maria and Clyde were still flanking him, facing the enemy. She smiled, trying to reassure everyone. "Captain – Jack – do you have a photograph of him, perhaps? In case we're still... at cross purposes."

"Yeah, yeah, of course, wait a minute – " He shook his head, as if dazed, patting the pockets of his greatcoat. "On my mobile -" He dug out a phone and tapped away: something brought a twitch to his lips, quickly smothered. "Maybe not that one! OK, here you go..."

He held out the phone. The image on the screen was unmistakeably Ian, peacefully sleeping, his hair fanned in ridiculous spikes against the pillow.

"World's worst bedhead," Harkness said fondly. "Well, that's what he thinks. Actually, I wait until he's asleep then mess it up deliberately."

Maria stifled a giggle as she looked at the photo. "Why do you do that?"

"Because he won't let me do it when he's awake, of course." Harkness smiled at the image again for a moment before putting the phone away. "Look, I'm sorry – the gun, yelling at you. I just need to know he's OK, please! Is he OK?"

"He'd been shot when I found him," Luke said coldly, and Harkness flinched.

"Yeah, his arm – was it bad?"

"It's fine now, it's -" Sarah Jane began, but Clyde cut across her.

"How did you know about that?"

"Because I shot him." Luke stiffened and Clyde muttered, "I knew it!", but Harkness carried on talking as if they weren't there. "He was in the Archives, something got activated... By the time we found him, it had these – metal tendrils all over him, reeling him in. He told us to keep back out of reach, shoot it off, and I tried." He grimaced. "Bullet bounced straight off. Clipped his arm and he yelled and that was it, the whole thing just vanished, with him. It took him."

He had all their attention now, not that he seemed to have noticed. As he talked, he'd pulled the pistol back out of his pocket almost absent-mindedly. Sarah Jane tensed, but he gave her a quick smile as he emptied the bullets from the chamber. He dropped them back into his pocket and handed the unloaded gun to her with a brief nod of acknowledgement.

"You keep this for now. I shouldn't have threatened you, it's just when you lose... I've been searching – every hour, every day. Just me and Gwen, we didn't have anyone else, no real idea where to start. There was an empty storage box in the Chula section, and baryon radiation everywhere. No other clues, I didn't even know -" He broke off, frowning. "How long's he been here? Why didn't he call me?"

"Amnesia, I told you," Luke said. His shoulder under Sarah Jane's hand was still tense. "You Retconned him."

"God, no!" Harkness looked horrified. "Why would I do that to him?"

"Because you're Torchwood, and I told Luke that's what you do." Sarah Jane moved past Luke. "Ian dreamed about your logo, and I put it together with his amnesia, and the bullet-wound, and made - a stupid, stupid mistake. I'm sorry, I didn't realise, just didn't think."

"Didn't think what?" Clyde asked.

"Didn't think someone as nice as Ian could be Torchwood too," Maria said slowly. Luke stared at her, shocked. She glanced at Sarah Jane, then back at Harkness. "That's right, isn't it? Ian is yours - he works for Torchwood, for you?"

He nodded, with a puzzled smile. "Yeah, he's mine. You called him Ian?"

"He looks a bit like my uncle Ian, and he needed a name. He couldn't remember his own."

"I'm sure he liked that one. Does he remember me?"

Sarah Jane held out her hand. "We don't know. But why don't you come with us and find out?"

She took Luke's hand as she led the way through to the kitchen, for reassurance, not because he needed leading: there was no way he was going to let Harkness out of his sight.

Luke, and maybe Clyde, still had their doubts. But Sarah Jane knew Maria was right, and knew how wrong she herself had been, when she watched Jack Harkness staring through the kitchen window at the figure at the end of the garden, still balanced perfectly on her stepladder.

After a long silence, Harkness let out a shuddering sigh and relaxed visibly, though his hands were still gripping the edge of the sink, white-fingered. Sarah Jane reached over, resting her own hand lightly on his.

"Why didn't you tell me? In the cafe, you said you were looking for a thing, an artefact. Why didn't you say you were looking for him?"

He made a good stab at a casual shrug and grin, but his eyes were glittering. "Hay, back atcha. All that talk about Retcon, why not just tell me you'd found a guy who couldn't remember anything but Torchwood?"

It was her turn to smile, embarrassed. "That's fair enough. It's your reputation, you and Torchwood. You're not exactly known as user-friendly. Fear of the unknown, yes? It's so easy to let that steer you, especially when you're trying to protect someone else."

"Exactly!" He clutched at her hand. "You know what that's like. I couldn't take a chance on trusting anyone. I was feeling my way in the dark, couldn't risk doing anything wrong. I had to find him – couldn't lose him, not so soon after Tosh and Owen... not him, not him!"

She did know. That police car driving Luke away as the Slitheen's last trick pulled her world apart. Months ago now, but the memory of her frantic despair was still sharp and terrifying. Would she have done what Jack Harkness had done? Stormed into a stranger's house, threatened their children with a gun...?

She couldn't be certain that she would never do such a thing, to protect them: Maria or Clyde, or Luke... Who surprised her again: when she looked round, he was standing by the back door. He opened it, gave Sarah Jane a resigned smile, then nodded at Harkness.

"He's this way. Follow me."

No-one spoke as they all headed out into the garden and across the lawn, but something must have alerted Ian. As they drew near to the gazebo he turned, and Sarah Jane caught the exact moment when he spotted the tall figure of Jack Harkness in his distinctive coat.

They were a couple of yards away. Sarah Jane paused, signalling the others to stay with her as Harkness moved slowly towards the stepladder. Ian climbed half-way down then jumped off, landing lightly on the grass. His eyes hadn't left Harkness, but there was no fear at all in his face. He looked curious, puzzled.

Harkness stayed still, hands loose at his sides, as Ian came closer.

"Hey..." It was a hesitant whisper, no trace of his usual loud confidence.

Ian studied him, hands on hips. Eventually he said, "I know you."

"You remember me!"

A shake of the head. "No. But I dreamed about you."

"Hope it wasn't a nightmare!"

"Hmm," Ian said thoughtfully. "Not to begin with. We were watching... A film, maybe? We had beer. Then you kissed me."

Harkness gave a short bark of laughter. "I'll bet I did! Good kiss, or great kiss?"

Ian rolled his eyes with a sigh. At her side, Maria was grinning open-mouthed as she nudged Clyde.

"So we kissed, and...?" He tailed off: Ian was frowning. "What? You think you ought to censor the rest?"

"It's not that. You know how dreams are, it all jumps around. I'd lost something, I was searching in the dark, underground..." He shut his eyes and frowned, lower lip caught between his teeth. "Something grabbed me. Metal, metal fingers. I was yelling and you were there, you had a gun, you said... Stay still, don't move, I'll get it off you –"

His eyes flew open. "You said, stay right there, wait... Ianto, wait!"

Harkness nodded. There were tears on his cheeks, but he was smiling as Ian ran a hand through his hair.

"That's my – that's me. I'm Ianto."

"Yes. Ianto Jones, my Ianto." He reached out, brushing his fingers gently over the bandage on Ian's forearm, but Ian was still scowling in distress, fists tight. "What is it?"

"I can't – why can't I remember? Just fragments... Like you! I know you, I really know you, I know you matter but I can't remember you!"

"You will, it's OK, we'll figure it out, I promise. You trust me?" Ian nodded, and Harkness slid a hand around his waist, pulling him in close. "Then show me. Your dream. Show me how I kissed you."

No hesitation. Ian took Jack's face in his hands, leaned in, and kissed him on the mouth.

And kissed.

And kissed.

And Sarah Jane watched, mesmerised, one hand over her own mouth to hide her unthinking smile as she watched Jack wrap Ian - Ianto, she thought, Ianto - in the tightest of hugs, lifting him an inch or two off the ground, never breaking that passionate kiss.

She'd thought she had understood the man's desperation – to find a lost colleague, a friend even. Not quite. Jack Harkness had surprised her again.

Beside her, Maria breathed, "Oh, wow, that's brilliant!" and turned to grin at her, delighted.

"Well, this is all very lovey-dovey," Clyde announced cheerfully. If Harkness and Ianto heard him at all, they didn't react. "But I did happen to notice earlier that old Captain Torchwood came calling in a big shiny black SUV that looked like it escaped from a James Bond film. Flashing blue lights and secret-service glass - and it's parked right in your driveway, Luke. Want to see if he forgot to lock the door when he came storming in to rescue his boyfriend?"

For a moment Luke hesitated, watching the embrace. Then he smiled at Clyde.

"Yeah, let's check it out before he notices. Maybe we can even pick the lock?"

"Luke!"

"It's a joke, Mum!" He tutted at her and rolled his eyes, just like Ian had, before hurrying back into the house with Clyde.

"Come on, we should give them a bit of space too, I think!" she said, steering a reluctant Maria back towards the kitchen. Before closing the door, she stole a last look back. In the middle of her lawn the two men were clinging to each other, Jack's hand stroking Ianto's cheek tenderly, a thumb brushing his lip, before Ianto buried his face against Jack's neck. like the rest of the world had melted clean away.

***

Part 5

fic: SJA / TW crossover, "The Other" (3/5)

2009-10-14T02:52:50Z

Part 2

Part 3

"T is for Torchwood. This is the Torchwood logo, and Ian drew it on the bathroom mirror this morning."

She'd dug up a UNIT file and printed out the linked hexagonal T-symbol she'd recognised with a feeling of dread, and then had to wait, fretting for the rest of the morning, until they'd all had lunch and Clyde had come back.

In spite of his quick recovery, Ian still had little energy for anything more strenuous than reading the papers or playing video games with Luke. Now he was in the living room, safely asleep again under the Sunday Times, but Sarah Jane still found herself whispering across the kitchen table as she placed the printed page in the middle.

Maria looked thoughtful. Clyde shook his head, shrugging, but Luke nodded.

"The Torchwood Institute. Founded in 1879 by Queen Victoria, to defend the British Empire against the threat of infiltration and attack by alien forces."

Sarah Jane looked at him sharply. "How do you know about Torchwood?" she asked, just as Clyde was saying, "Aliens? Queen Victoria? You've got to be having a laugh, right?"

Luke looked guilty. "Sorry. I asked Mr Smith to tell me everything he knew about verified alien activity on Earth. I didn't think that was wrong. Torchwood came up a lot."

"I'm sure it did," she said grimly. "Don't worry, I understand that you're curious. It's just - Torchwood. And yes, Clyde, Queen Victoria encountered aliens. A race of haemovores – alien werewolves - trying to assassinate her. She was lucky that the Doctor was there to save her."

"Your friend the Doctor?" Maria asked. Sarah Jane nodded. "So he told her to set up this – Torchwood Institute - to protect herself?"

"No, that's the stupid part. He saved her, and she decided that he was the biggest alien threat of them all! Victoria created Torchwood, gave them total power to do what they liked, with one rule - the name right at the top of Torchwood's list of threats to the Empire was to be the Doctor himself!" She shook her head, annoyed. "And they've been like that ever since – arrogant, violent, quite hopeless... Remember when we first met, Maria? I told you there were people out there whose idea of protecting the Earth was to go in with guns blazing. Well, that's Torchwood. Shoot first, and never apologise afterwards. They think they have all the answers, and that's what makes them more dangerous than anything."

Luke was frowning. "But they don't exist anymore. Mr Smith said there was a battle, just before I – came here. Torchwood was destroyed."

"Their headquarters, yes. The battle at Canary Wharf." She closed her eyes, remembering and suddenly regretting her angry outburst. UNIT had helped with the clean-up: she'd seen some of the reports. "It was a terrible massacre – whatever Torchwood had done, the people there never deserved it. Hundreds were killed, almost everyone who worked there. The people in charge of Torchwood had become so sure, so certain they had all the answers, and they were so wrong. A catastrophe..."

"Canary Wharf?" Clyde chipped in "Hey, I remember that – the big tower that got bombed. They said on the news that was terrorists, wasn't it?"

Cybermen and Daleks, and memories she never wanted anyone else to have to bear. "Terrorists – yes, in a way I suppose they were. Just terrorists from another planet, another dimension even. Not human, and totally without any mercy."

"But if Torchwood was destroyed," Luke persisted, "How can it have anything to do with Ian?"

"Oh well, you see, not all of Torchwood was in London. They had a couple of regional offices, if you like – one in Glasgow and one in Cardiff. And one that's sort of... gone walkabout."

"Cardiff in Wales?" Maria exclaimed. "But Ian's Welsh! You can hear his accent, now he's starting to speak again. You – you think he's one of them? From this Torchwood?"

"Oh no, no," Sarah Jane shook her head, thinking about the way Ian spoke, realising Maria was right. "But I think maybe he's met them. Look, the man who runs what's left of Torchwood invented a drug called Retcon. They use it all the time - to hide what they're doing, or to make sure people who've had alien encounters won't remember what happened to them. And Retcon is an amnesia drug! It wipes memories completely. The last day of your life, or the last week, month. However much of your past they want to obliterate."

Across the table, three pairs of eyes widened.

"Exactly! It's one of the things I've always hated about Torchwood. They think they have a right to decide what other people can know, and that's just wrong. People need to know the truth, not be left walking around with holes in their memories. Retcon is a horrible weapon, and Torchwood uses it just because it makes things easier for them. No matter what harm it might be doing to the people they've drugged!"

"Ian's been given Retcon!" Luke breathed.

"I think so, yes. It would explain why he's lost so much of his memory. Who knows what dosage he might have been given?"

"Whoa, hang on," Clive interrupted. "If Torchwood uses this Retcon drug to wipe out memories, how come he can still remember their logo?"

"I don't know," Sarah Jane admitted. "But Retcon isn't foolproof. Some people react differently to it – a few of them aren't affected by it at all. Sometimes, memories that don't get completely lost. UNIT medics seem to think it could even be reversed by accident, if the victim sees something that reminds them strongly enough of whatever they were supposed to forget."

"Anyway, he can't be from Torchwood," Luke insisted. "The way you describe them – that's not Ian at all."

"Why don't we just ask him?" Clyde suggested.

"Maybe we'll have to." She sighed, hesitating. "Right now, I'm not sure that's a good idea. I know I said people shouldn't be kept in the dark, but... Look, someone shot at that man, wiped his memory and brought him here, to a ruined building hundreds of miles from Wales. If that was Torchwood, then the last thing they'll want is him remembering why. If he remembers what happened to him, tries to go back, I don't know what they might do. Take away every memory he's ever had, wipe his mind completely, even - Retcon can do that. They might do something worse."

"Then he's safer here. If he stays here, he'll be fine. He can get a job, we can help him find somewhere to live. And Torchwood won't be able to hurt him anymore." Luke was nodding as he spoke, no doubt at all in his mind. But Maria looked less convinced.

"Okay, none of us wants anything more to happen to him. We want him to be safe. But he's not happy like this – not remembering, not knowing who he is. And even if we're trying to protect him, he might start to remember by himself anyway, you said."

"But people don't always react well to the truth," Luke argued. "Remember when you finally told your Dad about all the stuff that was happening here? He freaked out - wanted to move house and make sure you never saw us again!"

Clyde was nodding. "And if this Torchwood lot are so dangerous, maybe it's just better for everyone if they never find him again – or us, for that matter. But what if they track him down to here anyway?"

"I don't know. Look, I'm not saying they're murderers, it's just – " Sarah Jane broke off, trying to find the right words. "It's Torchwood - something about that place always gets to me! Too many guns, not nearly enough compassion. I don't know what to do, I really don't."

"So, is he safe staying here like he is now, with no idea of who he is?"

"Not just him – us too! Are we safe hiding him here?"

"But it's not just what's safest, it's about what's right! If we think we might know anything about what's happened to him, don't we have to tell him?"

Sarah Jane closed her eyes, listening to the three of them quietly but passionately chewing it over. They made a good team, she thought: none of them afraid to speak up, all of them ready to listen to each other. More than anything, she knew they'd all want to find some way to ultimately agree with each other. It was lucky they –

There was a quiet cough behind her.

"Excuse me," Ian was standing in the kitchen doorway. "Sorry to interrupt. Wondered if I could make myself some coffee? I can't stay asleep all the time."

His voice was getting stronger now: no mistaking the Welsh lilt that Maria had picked up. "Of course – you're not interrupting. I've got filter coffee somewhere if you want something a bit better than instant..."

She tailed off. Ian was staring at the sheet of paper in the middle of the table. Too late to whip it out of sight. Oh, how stupid!

Keeping her voice carefully calm, Sarah Jane said, "Do you recognise that?"

"Yes," Ian said. He paused. "It's the symbol I drew on the bathroom mirror this morning. Thought I'd cleaned up in there, sorry."

"Do you know what it is?"

He shook his head, frowning. "No idea. I was dreaming last night – can't remember much, just a jumble of random, um, stuff. But I was standing in front of a window at some point, and that shape was on it. Thought it might jog my memory if I drew it in the steam, like the way I'd dreamed it."

"Did it?" Maria asked.

"No, not really. It's all too vague, like a feeling of things – stone walls, a man yelling. Smell of metal..." He sighed, but Sarah Jane smiled brightly at him.

"Cheer up! This is good – you are starting to remember at last! I don't remember seeing this sign in the Bubble Shock warehouse, which might mean it's something you've seen from before that - before whatever happened to you, yes?"

Ian nodded, looking thoughtful. "Yes, I suppose... Do you know what it is?"

Under the table, Sarah Jane crossed her fingers. "I'm not sure. But I think I know a man who might be able to help figure it out."

She caught the look of distress on Luke's face, Maria biting her lip, Clyde suddenly very still. Ian, though, let out a sigh of relief. "Thank God! Who is he? When can you speak to him?"

So happy at the possibility of finally finding out who he was. Sarah Jane sighed. "The thing is, this man, he's, well, he's – a bit odd. I've never met him, but we've talked a couple of times." Probably best not to mention – to Ian or any of the kids – that the maverick Captain Harkness had tried to recruit her to join Torchwood, a few years ago. "Rather unconventional, you might say, and not always reliable. Before I approach him, I want to be sure we really don't have any other options. Just in case he knows the people who did this to you in the first place."

Ian looked disappointed for a moment, then nodded. "Good thinking, yeah. Best play it safe. I just – " He waved a hand at himself. " – this is all very... must be inconvenient for you. Having to look after some stranger coming out of nowhere, I mean."

"Not at all!" She caught Luke's eye and smiled reassuringly. "Not nearly as unusual as you might think. Look, it doesn't matter how long this takes, you're welcome to stay with us as long as you need to. Now, let's see if I can remember where I put my cafetière –"

"It's in the pantry! Come with me!" Luke almost bounced out of his chair, smiling again. Clyde waited until they were both out of the room, before pointing at the sheet of paper and saying softly, "I take it this unreliable guy you mentioned works for that lot, then?"

"He's the boss."

"The boss? The one you said invented this Retcon drug?" Maria looked agitated, but she was also whispering. Sarah Jane nodded.

"I know. Look, maybe Ian's memory is coming back by itself anyway. Let's leave it another day or two, see what happens. I'm not in any rush to pick up the phone to that man, don't worry!"

***

After lunch, it fell back into being a pretty average Sunday afternoon. Ian fussed quietly with the cafetière, finally producing a brew that Maria and Luke both sampled reluctantly ("Gah!" Maria exclaimed, horrified. "I'll stick with the Nescafe") but which Sarah Jane had to admit tasted far better than she'd usually managed to make herself. Ian started on a long, detailed explanation to Luke of the science of perfect coffee, but it made him go hoarse again, so he sat at the table and wrote everything down, his handwriting faster and also noticeably loopier after the second cup.

Coffee Manifesto, he wrote at the top of the page, underlining it and adding a small doodled crown. Luke leaned over his shoulder, pointing. "What's the crown for?"

I'm the King of Coffee, Ian scrawled, and Clyde laughed.

"Ahh, got it, mate! You're not a millionaire – you're one of those barista guys in Starbucks!"

Ian smiled, inclining his head as he scribbled. Mystery solved! Congratulations, Clint.

The living room had, of course, been tidied thoroughly while they'd been debating in the kitchen. There was something faintly unreal about the sight of her sofa with all the cushions plumped and smoothed and neatly arranged at each corner.

Luke wanted Clyde and Maria to challenge Ian on the Wii game they'd been playing that morning. Sarah Jane left them all to it, taking her laptop out into the garden to see if she could finish her corporate manslaughter article at last. It was quite a warm day for early May, and the garden was starting to sprout everywhere. It took willpower not to start wandering around, poking at the vine growing over the dilapidated gazebo to see if pruning it back might stop the whole thing falling over, or starting the mammoth task of weeding the flowerbeds. She liked gardening, but since Luke had arrived, it had to be said that she'd let things slide.

Still, work was work. Most of the article was already written, and she was finally making good progress – enough to feel briefly irritated when the kitchen door opened and the kids trooped out into the garden.

"We had to put the Wii away," Luke said. "Maria thinks we were making Ian go mopey again."

"That's not what I said!" Maria exclaimed. "He's an adult, Luke. Maybe he doesn't want to sit around all day playing Metroid Prime III with a bunch of kids."

"Only because we both kept beating the pants off him," Clyde said cheerfully. "Anyway, he probably just needed another nap. Right, we can't hang around here. You're not the only one with work to do, Sarah Jane!"

"Oh – don't tell me you're starting your half-term projects already?"

"No, we're going to bike over to the Bubble Shock plant, have a dig around. Investigate! See if there's anything there, like that Torchwood sign thing, maybe. Or some other clues."

She wanted to tell them not to go, but there didn't seem much point – not that Clyde and Maria were obliged to take any notice of her anyway. And the truth was, if they were in the habit of following leads, satisfying their curiosity no matter how risky, well, she only had to look in the nearest mirror to see whose example they were following.

All she could do was wave them off, with firm instructions not to hang around, to watch where they were walking and to get out immediately if they saw anyone else or found anything suspicious. "Especially that logo!"

It had only been a short interruption, but her concentration had ebbed away. Now, her thoughts kept straying back to the Bubble Shock factory, remembering that first sight of Ian crouched in a dark cupboard, fearful and lost. And that only made her think of the first time she'd seen Luke, of course, hiding in the Ladies with Maria. There was something eerily similar in the way they'd both stared at her, so helplessly confused...

Not really the same at all. Ian had a past, even if he'd been forcibly relieved of it, but at least there was a chance he could recover his memories. For Luke, there had been nothing before that unique, terrifying moment of coming into full human consciousness. She'd tried before to imagine what it must have been like for him, the shock and fear. Enough to drive anyone mad! Not her son, though: even then, right from the start, he'd trusted her to help him. And all he'd wanted to do was the right thing. Is that good or bad?, he'd asked her, again and again about every new thing he encountered: names, books, a cup of tea. Always trusting that she would know the right answer.

Sometimes, it felt like an impossible burden. And sometimes it made her feel that she finally understood the Doctor, in ways that wouldn't have been possible before. She'd always trusted that he would have the right answers, that he'd keep her safe, never once thinking about the weight of responsibility pressing down on him. Maybe that was why he never travelled with any one companion for too long. Was Rose Tyler still there with him?

Sarah Jane shook her head. This wasn't getting the writing done! Maybe one more small cup of Ian's lethally strong coffee, to help her focus? She'd have to hang on to that list of instructions he'd scrawled out, for the next time Alistair came to stay - another man who loved coffee that took the lining off your throat on the way down.

The house was quiet. In the kitchen, as she squeezed one last cup out of the cafetière, the utility room door opened and Ian came out, his shoes in his hand. He jumped at the sight of her, then smiled brightly. "My, uh, feet were getting a bit cold. Thought I'd see if these were OK."

The shoes had been cleaned and polished back to a flawless lustre. Sarah Jane nodded. "You've done a good job with those! Sorry, I totally forgot about socks. Shoes won't be very comfortable around the house, though – I'll give Luke a call, see if he can pop over to the shops on his way back. Marks & Spencer might still be open."

Ian hesitated, then said smoothly, "If you tell me where the shops are, I could walk there myself. Could do with stretching my legs, you know. Bit of fresh air."

He was glib, but she knew he wasn't thinking about a quick trip to the shops and back. There was an odd tension in him, the way he glanced at her and then back at the shoes, not looking up again.

He was planning to run away, she was certain of it, though she couldn't say why. She kept her voice light. "You know, two days ago you fainted dead away right here in this kitchen, young man. Let's not go wild just yet. Why don't you come with me and have a stroll around the garden first, see how you feel? It's nice out there."

He didn't argue, just put the shoes down and followed her meekly out, barefoot. They walked around the lawn, as Sarah Jane pointed out the plant that wasn't really an Earth-sourced hellebore, taking up a bit too much of the side wall now, and the rockery that was crying out for a good weeding, before ending up back by the gazebo. She gestured at the laptop.

"I've just got to finish the last bit of this article, then I can get it sent off. Do you mind if I...?" He nodded and sat down next to her, eyes closed and face turned to catch the gentle May sunshine as she tapped out the final revisions. He looked as if he might have dozed off, but when she shut the lid of the laptop he spoke without opening his eyes.

"Luke said you're a journalist. Funny working hours come with the job, I suppose."

"I think that's more to do with me putting everything off until the last possible minute of every deadline, though that's a great journalist's tradition too, of course."

He nodded, then sat up, pointing up at the gazebo behind them. "The frame there, that corner's come right out of its joint. Working loose at the top, too. Might not be all that safe, you know."

"I know," Sarah Jane sighed. "I keep meaning to do something about that. I have this terrible stepladder, though – I'm always scared it's going to collapse under me."

"I could do it," Ian offered. "If you have tools – it'd just need a hammer and a bit of epoxy to go in the socket."

She frowned. "I'm not sure that's a good idea, not yet. What if you get dizzy again and fall over, or –"

"Your son, the others, you let them go back to that place where you found me -" She started to speak but this time he ploughed on, determined in spite of his still-faltering voice. "I heard them talking in the kitchen, and they're just kids. How do you know they won't be in danger there? You can't let them do that and, and – sit here worrying about someone you don't know falling off a stepladder!"

She couldn't exactly explain to him that the children had taken on unimaginable dangers, alien warriors and monsters, and beaten them every time. "I trust them. They may be 'just kids' but they're pretty smart, you know? Anyway, it's not as if I could tell Maria and Clyde what to do."

"You could. They look up to you, all of them. They're your responsibility." He hesitated, the anxiety clear on his face. "I can't stay here. I shouldn't be here. You don't know anything about me, how can you be sure that they're safe with me? I could be a mon- anything. Dangerous."

"Yes, I suppose that's possible. But come on, be sensible for a minute, think of the odds. Sixty million people in this country, and how many of them are really evil? It's a tiny fraction, Ian, and you're not one of them. The evil people are the ones who did this to you, stole your memories, shot you, left you to... Well, they weren't trying to help you. And I love my son, and Maria and Clyde too. Believe me, I wouldn't let you stay here with us if I thought for one minute you were any kind of a threat to them or me."

He frowned, slumping back on the garden bench, shoulders drooping.

"Can't help thinking about that too. If there's someone out there looking for me. Like - people, family worrying. Not knowing what's happened. Or maybe no-one's even noticed I'm gone." He gave a small, rusty laugh. "Don't really know which would be worse."

"Oh, someone's missing you, I'm sure of it." She thought of the Slitheen and their horrible plan to get hold of Luke, the moment when they'd stolen her child away. She'd never have imagined that she could feel so alone. "God forbid, but if Luke was ever lost, I'd have to hope someone out there would keep him safe, look after him until I could find him and bring him home. And that's exactly why you need to stay right here with us, d'you see?"

He nodded, sighing. "I understand. And you're very kind. I just – have to do something, you know? Can't just sit around all day waiting for my memory to come back."

She stood up, picking up the laptop. "Well, I tell you what. Let's go in and get your dressing changed, and if it's still doing well, I promise to show you where the key to the toolshed is – you can take your chances with my death-trap stepladder tomorrow, if you're still feeling like you need a job to do!"

***

Luke came back alone: Maria and Clyde had gone home. "We didn't find anything," he announced to Sarah Jane, sounding not in the least bit unhappy about that. Behind him in the living room, Ian sat down heavily on the couch, not looking at either of them.

Maybe he was just tired. She'd been right to tell him to take it slow. Luke seemed to be the only one of them with any energy left. After tea, he brought down his science project books to show Ian, who nodded politely as Luke turned the pages, pointing out press cuttings of reports from the Phoenix expedition or the countdown to activating the Hadron Collider in Geneva. Occasionally, Ian would ask a question in that frail and charmingly-accented voice, but to Sarah Jane's eye he seemed distracted or lost in thought. Luke carried on regardless, thrilled to be sharing his hobby with someone who was apparently quite at home with a detailed discussion of quark-gluon plasma.

Sarah Jane emailed the finished article off to her editor and checked for new mail. Ah, poor Colonel Wells must have been working on a Sunday, too. He'd sent her the UNIT report on the Bubble Shock fire. It was disappointing, though: short, and with nothing exceptional. A small but intense fire, under control within half an hour from the first alert (UNIT had a couple of sensors installed at the factory, as a standard precaution on all sites with a record of alien activity). The Fire Service had suggested an electrical fault - after all, the whole ruined factory was classed as unsafe, and there were still flammable materials there that hadn't been consumed in the explosion that had destroyed the Bane.

It was only when she'd finished reading the report that she noticed the message at the end of the Colonel's email.

I thought you should know this is the second request I've had this weekend for that report. Torchwood want to see it, something to do with logging baryon spikes? No other explanation - you know what they're like. I wanted to check with you before sending it to Captain Harkness. Should I delay replying? Anything I need to know?"

"Oh," she said aloud. Torchwood. Harkness. It couldn't be a coincidence. She started typing her reply to Colonel Wells, feeling rattled. Nothing to worry about but thank you for asking. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't any possibility the Bane were coming back! Please let Captain Harkness have the report. Who knows what Torchwood are up to this time!

When she glanced up, Ian was watching her, eyes narrowed. "What is it?"

"It's an email from a friend. I – I'm pretty sure now that the man I told you about today does know something about what happened to you. It looks like I'll have to get in touch with him."

Ian's "Good!" came at the same time as Luke's loud "No!" He shook his head to underline the point. "You said he was unreliable. Why do we have to tell him anything?"

"Because I need to know, Luke." Ian said quietly.

"Why? You're safe here. Why can't you just leave things as they are?" His face fell. "Don't you like it here? Is it me?"

Ian shook his head. He wasn't smiling. "No of course not. When you found me, you just wanted to help me. You've all been – Luke, listen to me. I look at you and all I can think is, where is my family, my friends? Are they missing me? Are they safe? I have to find out."

"What if there's no-one waiting for you?" Luke said bluntly.

"Luke!"

He ignored her: all his attention was on Ian. "Why aren't they looking for you, then? There might not be anyone – look!" He jumped to his feet, pointing at her and the room around them. "Before Mum found me, I didn't have a life, I didn't have anything. All this is me, and I'm happy! Can't you just be happy here with us?"

"No," Ian whispered, shaking his head, but he didn't look away. It was Luke who turned abruptly and left, hurrying up the stairs. The bathroom door slammed shut and after a moment, she heard the sound of the shower running.

Ian was picking up Luke's scrapbooks, folding loose pages carefully back into place as he stacked them together. Sarah Jane helped him.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Did you know that I adopted Luke? About a year ago now."

He nodded. "He told me yesterday. He's very proud: it makes sense, why he's being - He wants to help, I understand that. It's good that he feels so safe with you..." His voice had faded down to a whisper again, but she didn't think it was the laryngitis this time.

When he looked up again, he was frowning. "Sarah Jane, there's something you need to see." He glanced towards the stairs: the shower was still running overhead. He switched the Wii console back on, selecting a cartridge from Luke's shelf of games. She didn't know which one, they all looked much the same to her.

"Watch," Ian said urgently as the game started up. It was some kind of urban battlezone that reminded her for one brief, nasty moment of the Kudlak and their Combat 3000 arena.

In front of the TV, Ian was standing still, the console's remote controller held loosely at his side. He turned the sound down almost completely, and as the first little figure scuttled across the screen, there was a sudden change: feet apart, the hand of his bandaged arm clasping the other's wrist, Ian was upright, still, utterly focused.

Shooting.

She could hear the muffled gunfire, see the little animated figures flying about the screen, tiny distant screams and yells as he aimed and fired over and over, hand rock-steady. She hardly needed to see the score tally whizzing up at the bottom of the screen.

The screen cleared, flashing up cheery congratulations for a new high score, and Ian moved quickly, shutting the game down and turning the machine off. Sarah Jane was on her feet, staring at him.

He was breathing a little faster, but his expression was calm. "D'you see?"

She took a breath, let it out slowly. "I take it that wasn't the beginner level?"

"I cranked it up as high as it could go." He placed the remote gently down next to the console. "We were playing this afternoon, Clyde got this game out. It was the first shoot-em-up we'd played. Mario Olympics and Guitar Hero before that. The moment it was my turn, I realised - Don't worry, I made sure they didn't see what I could do. How well I could..."

"So, so you've been spending a bit too much time on arcade games," Sarah Jane said faintly, trying to smile.

"It's no game. I know how to shoot, I mean, shoot really well. Can't explain it, but I know what I'm doing. How to stand, how to think..."

Guns, she hated guns so much. Sarah Jane took a breath, trying to stay calm. "Alright, alright. You're – you can hit a target. But that doesn't mean anything by itself! You could be a sportsman – shooting is an Olympic sport, you know. Or, oh, a policeman, in the military, something like that?"

"Yes, I could be." He stared her down, his face set. "Or I could be something worse. I don't think a trained marksman with no memory is the kind of person who should be under the same roof as you, or your son, or his friends. Right?"

He was still calm, oddly determined as he held her gaze. Sarah Jane hesitated. "Look, I'm certain you're not a threat –"

"But you can't be certain. That man you mentioned, the one who might know what happened to me. Is he any kind of threat to you? Could he harm you, or Luke or the others?"

She wrestled with the idea of how to explain Captain Jack Harkness. The wild rumours, the UNIT files she'd read and the handful of stilted, innuendo-laden conversations she'd had with him. "Not to me, no, I don't think so. He's a sort of law unto himself, more than anything. I suppose that makes him dangerous in a way... But it's you I'm worried about. If he finds you through me, I can't be sure what he'd do – except to look after his own interests, not yours or anyone else's. If I talk to him, Ian, I can't promise you'll still be safe."

"Then don't do it for my sake. Do it to protect Luke. Maria. Clyde. Yourself. Please."

He kept his eyes on her, pleading silently, until she nodded. It felt like a betrayal. "Alright, I'll call him. Tomorrow, though. I promise, but it can wait until tomorrow."

Ian nodded solemnly, and went back to tidying Luke's scrapbooks away.

In bed that night, she reached out to turn off the bedside lamp, but her own thoughts refused to be so easily dimmed. Luke hadn't come back downstairs after his shower, and she'd left him in peace – partly because she didn't want to crowd him, and at the end of the day he really was a teenager, one who could be as touchy and insecure as any of his peers. Mostly, though, the truth was that she didn't want to face him and have to tell him the truth. I'm going to call Captain Harkness. I have to, Luke. It's for the best.

Not for Ian, she was sure of it. Torchwood, who existed to hunt down the Doctor as if he was the enemy of humankind! Torchwood in London had destroyed the Sycorax ship, even as it was fleeing from Earth. She hadn't paid them much attention before that Christmas: after that, she'd worked her way through the UNIT archives, charting the rise of the Institute from Queen Victoria to their gleaming glass tower dominating the skyline at Canary Wharf.

A secret organisation with enough boundless arrogance to hide in plain sight and defy anyone to try to act against it. She'd seen reports of failed exposés by journalists going back over decades, every story quashed by interventions from the Government of the day, the secret services... In recent years, one UNIT archivist had noted acidly, there was a statistically significant incidence of people investigating Torchwood who suffered mental breakdowns or sought psychiatric help for memory loss or clinical paranoia.

Almost as bad was the fact that Torchwood couldn't even protect its own. Years ago, she'd heard UNIT personnel jokingly refer to Torchwood as the James Dean Gang. Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. In the darkness she sighed. There had been something only recently... a terrorist attack on Cardiff last month, or what the media had called terrorists. UNIT had classed it as an alien incursion, through the space-time Rift there, with two Torchwood operatives killed in the bombings, along with nine other fatalities that night. And hadn't Torchwood Cardiff only been a handful of people anyway?

Another terrible thought struck her - Oh God, could Ian have been involved in that attack? But that had happened weeks ago, a month at least. He wasn't an alien, Mr Smith had been certain. And even if he was tied up in it all, somehow, then what was Torchwood doing - meting out its own brand of justice? Oh, that was all too likely, though. Torchwood had always been happy playing judge, jury and executioner, she thought furiously, even before Canary Wharf. Harkness was no different to Yvonne Hartman and all her ruthless predecessors. Given what Torchwood thought of the Doctor, nothing they did could be all that surprising. It was –

The phone rang, shocking her out of her thoughts. Her alarm clock read 00.54 in its soft blue glow. She fumbled for the phone by the bed – who on earth would call at that time of night? Maria? Clyde? UNIT? No, they'd have rung her mobile. Wrong number, most likely.

"Hello?" she said cautiously, and a man's voice boomed, "Sarah Jane Smith, it's been a while!"

Her shock this time was so great, she nearly dropped the receiver. That accent – American, loud, confident – it couldn't be! How could he have possibly...? No, too great a coincidence, it had to be her mistake. "Who - who is this?"

"Don't tell me you've forgotten me already? Now that hurts. Captain Jack Harkness, ma'am. We need to talk."

It was him. How? "Captain... Harkness," she said weakly, playing for time to let her brain catch up "This is a – I hope this is something urgent, do you have any idea how late it is?"

"Yeah, sorry about that." There wasn't even a hint of contrition in his voice. "Working all hours, we're kind of short-staffed here at the moment."

She felt a surge of remorse. "Of course – I'm so sorry for your loss, you must be finding it hard -"

"What do you mean?" Harkness snapped, his voice suddenly harsh.

"The attack in Cardiff last month – I read the UNIT reports. Your people, they..." There had been personnel photographs. She couldn't remember the names, but the faces had stayed with her. The woman pretty and slight, with a shy smile. A pale, sharp-faced man favouring the camera with a cocky smirk. Both so ridiculously young. "I meant, you must miss them. I can't imagine -"

"Yes we do, and no you can't. Okay listen, I need to check something with you. That factory in Ealing, where you took the Bane incursion out last year – nice piece of work, by the way – UNIT reported a fire there a week ago. You know anything about that?"

She weighed up the risk of being caught out lying any more than she had to. "Yes, my son mentioned it – some of the other children at his school were talking about it. I asked Colonel Wells to send me -"

"- You have a son?" Harkness cut across her. "Don't remember that on your file."

It was tempting to tell him to mind his own business. Sarah Jane gritted her teeth: she needed to keep him as friendly as she could manage. "Yes, Luke – I adopted him. He's wonderful, I had no idea - "

"Huh, must be something in the air," Harkness was interrupting again. "Everyone's settling down – marriages, engagements, parenthood. You're all going to make me nostalgic if you keep this up. So why did you ask UNIT to send you the report?"

The sudden jump back on-topic threw her for a moment. "Oh, you know – well, maybe you don't, unless you've encountered the Bane yourself. They nearly took over the planet last year. Perhaps I'm just a little paranoid now. I wanted to be sure they weren't back here and up to something else."

"Yeah, I've met 'em. If you're feeling jittery, go get yourself a pressure jet and a couple of litres of sodium chlorate – they won't bother you after that, I guarantee. Did you go check out the fire?"

"No, the UNIT report said it was just an electrical fault." This was crazy, she needed to get a grip on the conversation. "Captain Harkness, not that I don't enjoy a good interrogation by phone in the middle of the night, but what exactly is Torchwood's interest in all this? Is there something I should be worrying about?"

He laughed. "Hey, call me Jack. And I'm sorry, I'm not exactly having a good week right now. What do you know about Bane technology?"

It was her turn to laugh. "Not much. I'm just a journalist."

"Yeah, right. I've seen your files, ma'am – including the ones your old buddy Lethbridge-Stewart didn't want me to hack. I'll have to tell you all about Toshiko Sato one day – she wasn't UNIT's greatest fan, my Toshiko. Okay, the Bane use a form of harnessed sub-particle cascade based on baryon fission, and I'm trying to track down recent surges in baryon radiation. Like your fire down there. I guess UNIT didn't do as good a job on the alien tech clear-up as Torchwood would've."

"Well apparently not," she replied, more tartly than she'd meant to. Snooping around in her restricted files, indeed! Sarah Jane shook herself. "So, will you be coming here to check the site for yourself?"

"Probably not any time soon. Like you say, it looks like the baryon spike wasn't significant, just a residual contamination footprint kicked up by the fire. I've got a few more leads to go through for now. Just thought it was worth a call to you – and it gives me an excuse to keep in touch, you know."

Check up on me, you mean! Pulling her mouth into a reluctant smile in the darkness, Sarah Jane said, "That's a pity, Jack! You know, I'd been meaning to give you a call myself. Something I've been wanting your advice on, it's a little complicated, actually, but if we could meet, maybe –"

"Yep, another time, I guess -" Harkness broke off abruptly: someone else was speaking in the background. A woman's voice. With a quick stab of insult piled on insult, Sarah Jane realised that Harkness had been talking to her on a speakerphone! She gripped her own phone hard as the voices debated something too softly for her to hear, then the Captain was back at full blast. "Okay, change of plan. I'm going to drive down to London tomorrow, that way I can check the site out for myself, cross it off the list for certain, then I can swing by Bannerman Road and see if I can help with whatever your thing is. I can't stay long, though."

He even knew where she – wait, come to the house? Oh God, no - far too risky! She screwed up her face, thinking desperately. "That's very kind of you! But why don't I make things easier? There's a nice little cafe just off Ealing Broadway, Rosalie's – it's ten minutes from the Bubble Shock site. If we meet there, you'll still be close to the M4. Saves you getting stuck in more London traffic than you have to. And I can buy you lunch if you have time."

"Sarah Jane Smith, are you flirting with me?" The playful tone was back, and she laughed in spite of herself.

"Not at all! I'd appreciate your help, and I don't want to add to your bad week, that's all."

"I'm sure meeting you will make the whole trip worthwhile." God, he was slick. "Okay, it's a deal. I'll give you a call when I'm at the factory. See you tomorrow." And with that he hung up, leaving Sarah Jane still clutching the receiver tightly, feeling rushed and now hopelessly awake. With a sigh, she put it back on the cradle and fussed with her pillows. What on earth was she going to say to Luke?

***

Part 4

fic: SJA / TW crossover, "The Other" (2/5)

2009-10-14T02:36:35Z

Part 1

Part 2

Sarah Jane woke up to sunlight slicing through a small gap in the curtains, and Maria sitting quietly on the floor, smiling at her. On the other side of the room, the sound of rusty breathing from the sofa told her that her unplanned houseguest was still asleep.

"Morning!" Maria whispered.

"Oooh... what time is it?" Sarah Jane stretched, feeling everything creak disagreeably.

"Eightish. Luke and Clyde are getting breakfast. Why don't you go to bed for a few hours? Get some real sleep - we can keep an eye on Ian."

"Are you sure?" Sarah Jane said, though the thought of a cup of tea and a nap in her own bed was terribly tempting.

"Yeah, we'll be fine. And look - I've borrowed a couple of things from Dad, for when Ian wakes up." She rummaged in a carrier bag, pulling out sweatpants and a t-shirt. "They're sort of the same size, so I think these should fit him OK. They'll do for now, at any rate."

"What did you tell your father?" Sarah Jane said, alarmed.

Maria rolled her eyes. "Nothing! Ian's supposed to be hiding, right? Dad's gone to the gym. He won't notice."

"Really?"

"Oh yeah!" Maria laughed. "We're talking about the man who couldn't find a single pair of his own pants the day after we moved! Mind you, I think Mum might have hidden them deliberately when we were packing, just to see how he'd cope."

"Well, thank you. Good thinking - I'm sure Ian will be grateful, when he wakes up. It's probably best to let him sleep for now. And I'll be back down before lunchtime, but call me if there's anything you need before then, right?"

She went by the kitchen to wish the boys a half-awake, "Good morning!"

Clyde waved a disgustingly lurid cereal box at her. "You have Coooookie Crisp! I think I need to come round here for breakfast more often!"

"How's Ian?" Luke asked.

"Still asleep. I expect that's the best thing for him right now. And I'm going to do the same thing, in my own bed. Will you all be OK for a few hours?"

"Yes," Luke replied, and Clyde grimaced and nodded, mouth full of cereal.

A decent nap turned out to be just what she needed. When Sarah Jane cane back downstairs a few hours later, she found that Ian hadn't woken up at all, and that the children had been quietly busy all morning. There was a fresh jug of Ribena and a box of Strepsils next to the painkillers on the coffee table, and Maria was tapping away on the laptop, while Luke and Clyde worked their way through a big pile of local and national newspapers strewn all over the carpet.

"Missing Persons ads," Luke stage-whispered. "But none of them sound like Ian."

"No mystery millionaires either," Clyde added, looking disappointed. "Though I'm still looking."

Maria showed her a list of addresses and telephone numbers.

"These are all the local charity shelters, Salvation Army, anything like that. I thought we could start calling round this afternoon."

Sarah Jane beamed at them all. "This is really impressive!" she began, but her voice must have been louder than the children's, as the duvet on the sofa shifted, and Ian peered blearily out at her, blinking.

He looked confused. "Morning!" she said, smiling reassuringly. "Well, lunchtime, really. You've had a good long sleep - how are you feeling?"

Ian opened his mouth - his lips moved, but no sound came out.

Behind her, Clyde let out a hoot of laughter. "Oh my God, how funny is that!"

"That's funny?" Luke said uncertainly.

"No it isn't!" Maria snapped. "Stop laughing, Clyde, you're scaring him."

Ian did actually look quite shocked. Sarah Jane grabbed a notepad and pen from her desk drawer, handing them to him. "Don't worry! You sounded rather hoarse last night, it's probably laryngitis. I had it last winter - oh, it's completely annoying, I know, but you'll get your voice back in a day or two, I promise. In the meantime, use these..."

She trailed off: Ian was still staring at her. "You do remember me, don't you?"

He nodded, taking the pad and pen and writing before holding it up.

Sarah Jane, Luke, Maria, Clive

"That's 'Clyde'," she whispered, grinning at Clyde's squawk of outrage over her shoulder. Ian was scribbling again, in loose but clear handwriting. He turned the page to show her.

no memory and no voice
I'm vanishing

"No, you're not, really!" She leaned in, made the blue eyes meet hers. "Look, this time yesterday you'd been hiding in a damp cupboard for a week. At least you're indoors now, nice and warm. And you're not alone - that has to be better, right?"

Ian nodded slowly, taking the notepad again.

sorry
thank you

can I use your bathroom?

"Of course! And don't worry about anything. You're probably the most undemanding guest I've ever had. You should see what Alistair's like in the mornings when he stays here." She handed him Maria's carrier bag. "There are some clean clothes in there - we think they'll fit you. The bathroom's upstairs, second door on the left. Will you be alright?"

He nodded again, with a quick, shy smile, before wrapping the duvet modestly around himself and shuffling off. Sarah Jane stripped the sofa, handing the sheets to Luke.

"Laundry basket for those, please. Ian can sleep in the spare bedroom tonight, I think. Now, we need to work out how to use your list, Maria. Will it be better to phone around, or to visit each of the shelters?"

"Phone would be quicker," Luke said.

"But most people tell you more when they're face-to-face," Clyde countered. "You can connect with them - read their body language and all that."

"And - " Maria held up her mobile phone. "We all took pictures of Ian when he was asleep. That way, we can show people what he looks like, see if anyone recognises him!"

Sarah Jane shook her head. "Hang on - we need to be careful about this. If Ian's right that someone is after him, we can't just dash about letting everyone know that he's here with us. Whoever did this to him may well be thinking the same way as us - checking places where missing persons get reported. I don't think we should show anyone those photos, not for now, at least."

The kids looked crestfallen. "I thought it was such a good idea," Maria said glumly.

"It was! Don't get rid of those, we may need them later. For now though, I think you're right, Clyde. Face-to-face is probably the best way to go about this."

"Well..." Maria rustled the newspaper in her hand. "You are a proper journalist, with a proper NUJ card you can show them, so I suppose it wouldn't be odd for you to go asking around the shelters."

"You could say you were... doing a piece on homeless people, missing people, then ask them about who's been recently reported missing?" Luke suggested.

"Yes, that would be plausible. But what happens to Ian while I'm out?"

Clyde sighed. "Weren't you the one saying he's not a problem? Look, it'll be fine. We'll stay here and keep an eye on him, and that way we can also carry on checking through the papers and the internet for you."

"Alright..." She wondered what Chrissy Jackson would have to say about mad 'Mary-Jane' leaving three children alone in the house with a grown man they knew absolutely nothing about. Even if Ian seemed to be more apprehensive about all of them than they were about him.

In the end, she knew, it came down to trusting your instincts. The Doctor had always been ready to give pretty much anyone the benefit of the doubt, which might have something to do with the amazing amount of danger he was always getting himself into, of course. Then again, she'd never seen him turn his back on anyone in trouble, and she didn't doubt for a moment that Ian needed their help.

More than that, there was something about this man that reminded her of Luke, even though he was clearly not another Archetype. Not a child, but lost like Luke had been, and confused, with no-one else looking out for him. She couldn't say why, but her instincts told her that he wasn't any kind of a threat.

She'd been doing so well, in her years of self-imposed exile after the Doctor - or so she'd always believed. A career, a big house, a solitude she'd called independence, and maybe all of those things had been right, in their time. But meeting the Doctor again had thrown all her carefully-structured certainties on their head, just as he had the first time they'd met, showing her the things she was missing.

She watched Luke with an armful of sheets, laughing at a picture Clyde was pointing out to him in one of the newspapers, and Maria sitting on the sofa next to her, studying the laptop and making quick notes on the pad balanced on her knee. Did the Doctor even have a clue, how easily and completely he changed the lives of the people he met? Probably not.

"I fancy cheese on toast," she said brightly. "Anyone else?"

She heard footsteps on the stairs while they were all eating in the kitchen, but Ian didn't join them. Back in the living room, it turned out that he'd drunk all the Ribena and promptly fallen asleep again, sitting upright on the sofa with his hands clasped neatly in his lap and his head lolling against the back.

In daylight, with damp hair and a clean face, and Alan Jackson's old Chelsea football shirt hanging a bit loose, he looked younger than Sarah Jane had originally guessed, though the scraggly stubble made it hard to tell. Early thirties, maybe. Still, young or old, he was going to wake up with a stiff neck if he stayed like that. She yanked his feet up, and he slid sideways and curled over without waking, even when Luke carefully pushed a pillow back under his head.

"Right, I'm off," Sarah Jane said. "If he wakes up again, see if you can get him to eat something, yes? And I'll be as quick as I can, but you call me right away if you're worried about anything."

"Why would we be worried?" Luke looked completely puzzled, and she sighed. He was far worse than the Doctor when it came to blithely trusting anyone.

Before she could reply, Clyde chipped in. "She means, in case he wakes up and suddenly turns out to be a raving nutcase. Come on, Sarah Jane, have some faith! You don't think he's going to be any worse than the Slitheen, do you? And we're the team who sorted them out!"

"The Graske, the Gorgon," Maria added proudly.

"And the Bane," Luke said. "But Ian's just an ordinary man, like Mr Smith said. So there's nothing to worry about."

Sarah Jane opened her mouth, trying to think of what a good, responsible mother was supposed to say at this point, about ordinary human beings sometimes being just as bad as any of the more monstrous species that found their way to Earth. Though the responsible mothers probably didn't have an attic full of alien technology and the experience of travelling across half the Universe, of course.

"You’re right, I’ll stop worrying – but promise you'll call me right away if you need to. See you later!"

***

Her circuit of the local shelters took longer than she'd thought, and proved to be frustrating. The places themselves were shabby but warm and friendly, and the volunteers who showed her around were all helpful, but there was no sign of anyone resembling Ian in any of the 'missing persons' registers or files that she saw.

Before heading back, she stopped off to buy a few t-shirts and a pair of jeans, guessing at the size - despite what Maria had said, she didn't fancy the idea of Alan knocking at her door and being greeted by a strange man wearing his clothes. In Boots, she grabbed disposable razors, a comb and toothbrush, Solpadol and Lemsip, and checked her phone for the umpteenth time while she waited at the till. No calls. Well, silence was a good sign, she told herself firmly, and tried not to run too many lights on the way home

When she opened the door, Sarah Jane caught the tail-end of a burst of laughter from the living room, and Clyde yelling, "Oh no mate - Transformers was for little kids! You can't like that!"

The living room was a mess, with newspapers and crockery all over the place, and Ian in the middle of the couch, sitting up in an untidy cocoon of duvet and blankets. He smiled and gave her a weak little wave as Luke came over to show her the notepad.

"Maria had this great idea! We've been making lists of things and getting Ian to write down what he likes and hates. To see what he remembers."

"Like Twenty Questions," Maria elaborated. Ian reached for the pad, wrote quickly and handed it back to Sarah Jane with a wry smile.

"20,000 Questions", it said: then did you find anything out about me?

He looked hopefully at her, but his face fell when she shook her head.

"I'm sorry. Nothing yet - but don't worry. We've hardly started looking yet, I'm sure we'll get this all figured out."

She went into the kitchen and hunted around in the cupboard for pasta, as Maria joined her, filling a saucepan with water and putting it on the hob without needing to be asked, practical as ever.

"So, come on - what's he like?" Sarah Jane said quietly. She knew how smart all of the children were - Luke's IQ, of course, was off the scale - but it was Maria's quiet intuition that she trusted to pick up odd things that the boys would have missed.

"Hmmm," Maria was clearing space on the table. "He's nice, actually. Funny, too - I mean, it's hard to tell when he can't speak, but I'm sure some of his answers were just to try and wind Clyde up, and then you look at him and he looks really innocent, like he hasn't a clue, but then he just does this thing with his eyebrows..."

"Funny and nice, that's good. Anything else?"

"He's sad," Maria said, after a pause. "I think he's still scared, but he didn't want us to see that. A car backfired outside and he really jumped. And he doesn't like not remembering, but it's weird, all the different bits... He remembers all the James Bond films, but not what his house looks like. Or where he went on holiday, or if he's got a girlfriend."

The children's questions must have been bewilderingly random to the poor man, Sarah Jane thought, though the idea of getting him to make lists was a good one. She'd have to look at the answers herself, later, see what sense she could make of him from them. "But you don't think he's lying, about his memory?" she asked.

Maria shook her head firmly. "No way. He got really upset, when he couldn't remember some things. Luke asked him about his job, and that made him all... I got him to come in here and have a cup of coffee, to take his mind off it. And so the boys wouldn't see him, you know."

"That was very kind of you."

"Maybe not," Maria said, grinning as she pointed to a note on the shopping list board. In what she recognised as Ian’s quick handwriting, Sarah Jane read, sorry, this coffee is terrible is there any more Ribena?

They ate together in the chaos of the living room, with the TV on. "Harry Hill's TV Burp," Luke had said proudly, handing her the notepad. "It's on his favourites list." And there it was, listed between Antiques Roadshow and Top Gear. Ian definitely had eclectic tastes. Sarah Jane sat back, watching Maria and Clyde laughing, Ian smiling in between mouthfuls, and Luke's attention flitting between the TV screen and his friends' reactions. He still seemed to find some of the nuances of humour almost impossible to grasp.

Maria left afterwards, looking torn. "I need to get back. Dad's joking that I don't love him anymore. I shouldn't leave him on his own so much, I know."

"You can tell him he's welcome to come over here, any time," Sarah Jane said, and she meant it: Alan was a lovely man. Maria grinned, then nodded over at Ian, on to his third bowl of pasta. "Hmm, maybe I should wait to tell him that after, you know..."

"After we get this all sorted, yes, good idea." They were both speaking quietly, but she saw Ian's quick glance over at them both, then away.

"Come on," she said to Clyde. "I'll give you a lift home – no arguments!" she added, seeing Clyde's mouth open in protest. "Your mother won't want you standing around waiting for the bus at this time of night.

In the car, Clyde was unusually quiet for most of the short trip. At the end of his road, he looked up and sighed. "I didn't think it still mattered to him, you know? Luke, being – different. I thought he was happy, happy with us."

"Oh, I think he is happy. He loves school, and has good friends. I'm sure he knows that."

"And he's got you!" Clyde added firmly, then sighed. "Thing is, he was so sure Ian was another Archetype. Last night, when we were talking. He kept wondering if Mr Smith might have made some mistake. He'd spent all week thinking there was someone else just like him, kept going on about it..."

She smiled gently. "You're an only child too, right?"

Clyde shrugged. "No telling what my old man got up to after he walked out on us. Me and Mum have got each other, though, and we're fine. We don't need anyone else."

"I was an orphan," Sarah Jane said. "My Aunt brought me up - don't get me wrong, she loved me, and I was never exactly unhappy. Except, I used to wonder, all the time, what my parents had been like. What it would be like to have a proper family, you know, brothers and sisters too. I had friends, but sometimes I just felt so alone, I suppose. So I can understand why Luke wanted that, wanted Ian to be like a brother, maybe."

Clyde nodded, looking thoughtful, then he grinned and gave her arm a little mock-punch.

"Well, you've both got me and Maria now, so you'll just have to get used to never being alone again. I'll be back round tomorrow morning – and hey, if you're in trouble at all tonight, you've got to call me straight away, right?"

"Yes, I promise!" He made her smile all the way back home: she'd never have had Clyde's self-assurance at that age. Aunt Lavinia had been eccentric, but she'd always believed that children needed to know their place. Treating adults as if they were equals would have been scandalous – well, no way was Luke going to grow up thinking like that, meek and submissive to any one, no matter who they were, or how old. Clyde's breezy but absolute respect for his mother, or the way Maria and Alan Jackson trusted and supported each other – those were the best examples her son could have.

Back home, Luke was still watching the TV, one of those endless talent show competitions that he seemed to be fascinated by. There was no sign of Ian, but the living room itself had been transformed. Everything was neat and straight, newspapers folded into a precise pile, cushions plumped up, the duvet rolled up, dirty plates and cups nowhere to be seen.

"Thanks, Luke!" She leaned over and ruffled his hair. When it came to clearing up after himself, Luke was usually a completely typical teenager. She gestured at the immaculate room. "That was lovely of you!"

"Oh, that was Ian," Luke said, not looking around. "I helped him, but he did most of it himself. He's pretty good at tidying up – he wouldn't let me help him in the kitchen."

"Oh, no!" She hurried through. Her strange visitor was at the sink, scouring the pasta saucepan. Luckily, he hadn't had time to tackle the rest of the mess. "You really don't have to do this!"

He glanced at her, shrugging apologetically, but carried on with the saucepan until she tugged on the sleeve of his t-shirt.

"I'm serious. You're our guest, and you're still unwell. You need to be resting, not going around cleaning up after everyone else!"

He frowned, opening his mouth then shutting it with an impatient sigh. Drying his hands, he rubbed some space on the shopping list board with a tissue.

there's nothing else I can do to thank you

"You don't need to!" But he shook his head, raising the marker pen again.

I need something to do or and he stared at her, hands spread wide. Sarah Jane reached for his free hand, ignoring the small flinch when she touched him.

"Or you'll disappear? I understand, I do - you want to remember. Not knowing who you are must be so frustrating, but the best thing you can do right now is concentrate on getting better. Rest, sleep, eat, don't worry about anything else. Will you do that?"

He bowed his head, nodding slightly without looking up.

"Good. Okay, first we need to change that dressing on your arm, make sure it's still healing. And after that, I picked up a bakewell tart this afternoon - could you manage a slice?" Ah, at least that got her a slight smile.

He was writing again - yes please – ♥ bakewell tart!

"Me too. And – " she reached for the first aid box, giving his hand one last shake. "I won't make you drink any coffee with it, don't worry."

She could see the blush rising, even under his scruffy almost-beard. He grabbed the tissue and scrubbed hastily at the incriminating message on the whiteboard, frowning again.

They were all tired: Ian looked bleary as he ate the dessert, and Luke was stifling yawns – he and Clyde would have been up half the night talking, no doubt. Before Ian dozed off again, Sarah Jane made another mug of Lemsip, and showed him to the spare bedroom.

"Sorry," she said with a grimace. "It's a bit drab, I know." What used to be her guest bedroom was now Luke's room. This had been a not-quite office, filled with clutter over the years. The bed took up most of the space now, and it all needed redecorating, but Ian promptly sat down with a happy sigh, pointing at the pillows and giving her a thumbs-up.

She handed him the things she'd bought that afternoon, and a new notepad and pen – "In case anything crosses your mind in the night." He nodded. "And you know where everything is – kitchen, bathroom. Sleep in as long as you want."

Behind her, Luke appeared, holding out his hand. It was the bell from his bicycle. He handed it to Ian. "In case you need anything and you can't get up. It's really loud!"

Indeed it was – she'd bought him the noisiest one in the shop. If that started ringing in the middle of the night, Sarah Jane thought, she'd probably have a heart attack. Still, it was a nice thought, and Ian seemed to agree. He mouthed thank you, then tapped his temple, pointing at Luke. smart idea.

Luke, bless him, looked pleased to bits.

Downstairs, she finished half-heartedly clearing up the kitchen – the last 24 hours were catching up with her, too – and took a glass of wine and Ian's first notepad to her armchair, to study the lists he'd made. The children's questions had ranged wildly. What football team did he support (he didn't: he watched rugby). Favourite music, films, TV, food... From the answers, Ian appeared to have a sweet tooth and a fondness for crime dramas, silly comedies, and films old and new – there were a dozen black-and-white classics on his list, complete with what had to be Clyde's additions of "Huh?" and "???"

Some of the annotations were definitely Ian's own. On the "Food" list, Marmite was firmly underlined, with a little smiley winking next to it. You can stay, young man, Sarah Jane nodded to herself. "Science" was on the Favourites side, complete with little doodles of graphs and Heath Robinson-esque nonsense machines. "Astronomy" came next, then "Maths", with another Clyde amendment – "no wonder you and Luke get on!" and a response in Ian's hand: a long jumble of symbols and numbers, an equation she didn't recognise at all, though Luke clearly did, judging by the hurried "YES!" scribbled next to it.

He's funny, Maria had said, and Sarah Jane was starting to get a sense of that, though most of the answers were simply too random to tell her anything she could strictly call useful about the man – where he came from, what might have happened to him. Yawning herself, Sarah Jane finished her wine and headed for bed.

She forgot to set her alarm, and overslept the next morning. Before Luke, sleeping in on a Sunday wouldn't have mattered at all, but now she felt the need to be a bit more responsible, set a good example. She dragged her dressing gown on and stumbled to the bathroom, but the door was locked – Luke had beaten her to it.

Never mind. She headed for the stairs, thinking about putting the kettle on, when she heard the door open behind her. When she turned, it wasn't Luke coming out of the bathroom, but a tall, clean-shaven young man in jeans and a white t-shirt, dark hair combed neatly back. As he smiled politely at her, eyebrows raised, she realised with a slight shock that it was Ian.

"Oh my goodness, you look – um!" she said, feeling absurdly wrong-footed. Without the beard, scrubbed clean and in new clothes, it dawned on her that she'd have to revise his age down by yet another decade: he couldn't have been more than in his mid-twenties. Definitely handsome too, oh dear! "I mean, you look as if you had a good sleep. How are you feeling?"

"Much better, thank you." Ian's voice was back – still a faint whisper, but without the painful, choking rasp he'd had on that first evening. "And thank you for all these –" he gestured down at his torso. "Good fit. Don't know how to -"

"You're welcome," Sarah Jane cut in, smiling. "But listen, you need to go slowly with the voice. Stick to writing things down for now, if you can. You don't want to lose it as soon as you've started to get it back!"

He bowed his head, almost formal, with a smile. Nice manners, for someone who couldn't be that much older than Luke and Clyde, and wasn't that a disconcerting thought? "Now, what would you like for breakfast? How about some toast... I have Marmite!"

The grin she got for that was positively radiant. Sarah Jane laughed. "Do you feel up to helping yourself? I think I need a bath – I won't be long. Luke will show you where everything is."

She wasn't surprised, by now, to see that the bathroom had been left immaculately clean and neat, down to Alan's old clothes folded in a sharp-edged pile on top of the laundry basket. She pondered as the bath filled. Was Ian a hotelier, maybe? Or just someone with a bit of a tidying fetish? Well, David Beckham was supposed to love nothing more than hoovering the carpets of his luxury homes in nice neat lines. Maybe Clyde's dreams of an undercover millionaire weren't totally ruled out yet.

She soaked in the bath for a long time, enjoying the hot scented water and the peace and quiet of a Sunday morning, letting her mind wander. Ian had still been a little unsteady as he'd headed downstairs, though he was obviously recovering fast from the effects of his time in the Bubble Shock cupboard. He was breathing much less painfully now, at least. She didn't like to think what would have happened to him if Luke hadn't given in to his curiosity.

He looked so different without the beard! It was more than that, though: he'd been sick and groggy before, only half-there. Now, even in that short meeting on the landing, he was obviously more awake and aware. Younger than she'd guessed, taller than she'd realised, long pale feet... Oh God, she'd forgotten to buy him any underwear at all! Maybe it would be okay to ask Maria to swipe a pair of Alan's old socks, at least, when she smuggled his other clothes back home? After all, everybody expected socks to go missing completely at random. She had an idea that the Doctor probably knew exactly which alternate dimension all the missing socks vanished into. She'd have to ask him, if they ever met again. After their reunion last year, that no longer seemed as unlikely as it used to. Or maybe it just wasn't quite as important as it had been, before Luke?

By the time she got out of the bath, her fingers and toes were pink and wrinkled, and the room was full of steam. She opened the window an inch, towelling her hair in front of the mirror. As the steam cleared, she noticed faint marks in the condensation on the mirror, like fingerprints, a neat double line of dots, more dots below making the outline of a letter...

She'd seen that pattern before. Sarah Jane put her hand over her mouth, stared at the fingermarked shape that was fading before her eyes as cold air filled the bathroom. But it wasn't the breeze that was making goosepimples spring up all over her arms.

She dried herself quickly, hurrying back to her bedroom to dress, with a towel wrapped around her head – time for the hairdryer later. Downstairs, Luke and Ian were sitting together in the living room, playing one of Luke's Wii games, with two discarded bowls of cereal on the floor next to them.

Maria was in the kitchen, making a pot of tea. She waved both hands excitedly at Sarah Jane as she came in.

"Wow, have you seen Ian this morning? He's a bit hot! Didn't you think..." She was whispering, a little breathlessly, as she grinned. Sarah Jane sat down, helping herself to tea. Two sugars this morning, definitely. Maria stared, the smile fading. "What is it? What's wrong?"

"Oh, Maria," Sarah Jane sighed, staring at the teacup. "It's Ian - I think I know what happened to him now."

***

Part 3

fic: SJA / TW crossover, "The Other" (1/5)

2009-10-14T02:25:16Z

Fandom: Sarah Jane Adventures / Torchwood
Rating: G (slightly more snogging than the average SJA: slightly less nudity and handjobs than the average Torchwood. It all balances out)
Words: 68 million. Alright, 32,000 - but it felt like 68m
Warnings: none
Pairings: ummm
Spoilers: Set between Seasons 1 and 2 of SJA, after Season 2 of Torchwood, and before the Doctor Who Season 4 finale. (Probably the second week in June, then?) Random spoilers for all three series up to those respective points, including references to Sarah Jane's Classic adventures.
a/n: This fic has only been part-beta'd: my thanks to several of you but especially lonelybrit for the constant encouragement along the way. Any dim mistakes, gawping plot holes etc, are all down to me. Please let me know if you spot a howler, and I'll knock it on the head with my mighty fist of incompetence.

Summary: " It started innocently enough... " This is simply the story of a very quiet weekend in the Whoniverse. No gore, no vomitty monsters, quite a lot of tea being consumed.

Part 1

It started innocently enough, with Luke coming home after school on a Friday and asking her if he could use his pocket money to go and buy chips.

"Of course you can! That's your money, Luke. You don't have to ask me what you can spend it on." Sarah Jane studied him. He'd requested second helpings a few times that week, and toast as well as his usual cereal for breakfast. Growth spurt, she thought, though he looked as skinny as ever. "Dinner won't be ready for a bit, but if you're feeling hungry now, you can always have a sandwich if you'd like?"

And Luke smiled at her, as guileless as ever. "Oh, the chips aren't for me. They're for the other."

A tiny alarm bell rang in the back of her head. "The 'other'? The other what?"

"The other one like me," Luke said, helping himself to a banana. "The other Archetype."

"""

A week ago, Mr Smith had woken her to inform her that there had been a small fire in the ruins of the Bubble Shock factory, triggered by a brief energy surge. And no, he couldn't say where the energy was from or why it had spiked, because the residual Baryon-9 radiation all over the site (a by-product of Bane power generators, he'd informed her, ponderously) meant that he usually blanked that location out of his standard monitoring sweeps.

For a computer, he'd managed to inject just the right note of bored irritation into that last response. As if he had time to keep an eye on every last corner of their own backyard! Had she forgotten he already had a whole galaxy to oversee?

UNIT had removed all traces of Bane technology from the ruined factory. They hadn't been able to do anything about the radiation, though their technicians had assured her that Baryon-9 was as persistent as limescale, and a hundred per cent less harmful. Still, an unexplained energy surge might have meant they'd missed something. Sarah Jane had sighed, and woken herself up enough to call up the ever-patient Colonel Wells at UNIT's Guildford base, who promised to send a team to check it out and let her know if there were any problems.

She'd turned over and fallen asleep. Colonel Wells had called her back on Saturday, to assure her that the fire was out and the UNIT team had checked around, but found no sign of anything unusual.

"Sergeant Miller thinks it was probably just loose wiring," he'd said reassuringly. Sarah Jane thought that Sergeant Miller wasn't a patch on any of his predecessors that she'd known, but UNIT were generally very courteous to her - Alistair's influence, perhaps? - and the fire was out, and the deadline for the Herald's article on corporate manslaughter was getting uncomfortably close. She'd thanked the Colonel and forgotten about it.

She wouldn't have mentioned it to Luke, even if she'd remembered. He'd mostly stopped asking those questions - how he'd come into existence, what she thought the Bane Mother might have done with him when she'd finished using him to refine the Bubble Shock - but only, she suspected, because she didn't have anything new to tell him. The curiosity was still there, ticking quietly away. In many ways, Luke really was exactly like every other child dealing with the transition towards adulthood, asking himself the big questions about who he was and what he was meant to be.

"So, what made you decide to go back there?" she asked Luke. They were driving back to the Bubble Shock factory, with a large portion of cod and chips (wrapped) and a bottle of Coke on the back seat.

"Jenny Ellison. She's in our class, and her dad's a fireman. At break on Monday she'd been talking about this fire he'd been called out to last Friday, how there were soldiers there too, from UNIT - she didn't know what UNIT was, but I did. I went by there after school on Monday, to... you know. Check it out."

The Clyde-ism made her smile. For Luke, UNIT equalled extra-terrestrial mysteries. No wonder he'd been curious. "Why didn't you tell me? We could have gone over together."

Luke shrugged apologetically. "It was on my way back from school, sort of. And I didn't want to disturb you if there was nothing to see."

"Spoken like a born reporter!" she said cheerfully, nudging his shoulder. 'On his way back' would have meant a two-mile detour between school and Bannerman Road. Of course, she'd prefer him not to go haring off to poke around in dangerous old ruins, but it was already something she had to struggle against: the urge to over-protect, to keep him close and safe from the world. And Luke had so much to learn. If she did that too much, he'd end up unable to set a foot outside the front door.

She was beginning to understand how it must have been - must still be - for the Doctor. Travelling with companions who might be bright or capable but who would always be oh, so hopelessly inexperienced and ignorant compared to him. If the Doctor hadn't let her spread her wings, take risks, then who knew how small and dull her life might have turned out?

"It's a good thing I found him when I did," Luke said. "He hadn't had anything to eat for ages. I had a Mars Bar in my bag, and an apple. And I saved my packed lunch for him on Tuesday, and Wednesday and Thursday. But I think he's still very hungry."

That explained the recent 'growth spurt' eating, at least. "You said he was hiding," Sarah Jane said as they reached the factory site. "How did you know to look for him?"

"I didn't," Luke frowned. "I was looking around and I just had this weird feeling, like my neck was tickling. Maybe it's because he's another Archetype? There's a cupboard at the end of one of the corridors. He was in there. He didn't want them to find him."

"Five days, though." They had to park the car on the side of the road and climb in under a loose bit of the mesh fence running all around the site. "Why didn't you tell me you'd found someone here?"

Luke turned to her, eyes earnest. "Mum, he's really scared. Someone hurt him, he doesn't want them to find him again. I remember what that was like, when I woke up the first time, and I met Maria and you. I was scared, just like him. I wanted to make sure he knew that he's safe with me." He brightened. "I think he'll be okay with you now, though. I knew I could trust you, right from the start."

"Well, you were right about that." She matched his smile, switching on the torch she'd tucked into her pocket as they reached a side door. "But I'm still not sure how you know he's another Archetype. Why would the Bane have made two of you?"

"I don't know," he replied. "But you'll see, when you talk to him. He's just like me, Mum - he knows lots of things, but he doesn't know any of the things he needs to. Like what his name is, or where he comes from. We need to go left, here... and then just along over there. Follow me!"

The floor was covered in puddles everywhere. The factory was a wrecked shell, now, with half the roof missing, and it had rained a lot in the last week. Some of the water might be from where the fire had been put out, Sarah Jane thought. She could smell traces of smoke and burnt rubber, and guessed they had to be close to where it had started.

They were heading towards what looked like a storage cupboard at the end of a long, dark corridor. Luke pressed a finger to his lips, then leaned forward and called out, "Hello! It's me, Luke."

No reply. Luke whispered over his shoulder, "Secret signal," and knocked gently on the cupboard door, the quick-slow-quick of Morse Code. S.O.S. After a moment, the door opened a few inches.

Luke waved at the crack. "How are you?" he asked. There was a whispered reply that Sarah Jane couldn't make out. Luke nodded, leaning down and pulling the door wider. "I know, but don't worry. I've brought you some chips, here." He offered the wrapped parcel, then gestured Sarah Jane to come closer.

"And I've brought my mum," Luke added brightly as she crouched down next to him.

Frantic scrabbling sounds came from inside the cupboard. It was far too dark to see anything. Luke held up his hands, pleading.

"No! It's okay, don't be scared, she won't hurt you! She's really nice, I told you about her, remember? She helped me, she'll help you too."

No response. Sarah Jane could hear harsh breathing in the darkness. Down by the cupboard door, she turned the torch slowly, to illuminate herself and Luke together.

"Luke's right. I found him here too, where the Bane used to be. I promise you I won't hurt you. I'm going to shine the light in now, so that you can see me better and I can see you too. I won't point it into your face."

Luke certainly believed he'd found another Archetype, though common sense told her that this was hardly likely. Even so, in her mind's eye she'd been expecting to find someone who at least looked like another Luke, a pale perfect boy in a white smock and slippers.

As she swept the beam slowly across the wet concrete floor, it caught on something shiny-dark against the matt blackness of the cupboard. A man's shoe, lying discarded on its side... No, not discarded. The torch made out a sock, the cuff of a trouser leg, and up and up, until she reached the face of – not a child, but a grown man, grimy and scruffily bearded. His eyes were slate-blue and bloodshot under a dark matted fringe, and he squinted miserably at her in the torchlight.

She sucked in a breath, said, "Ohh..." but remembered not to add the Luke! onto the end of it. Her son was already acutely tuned in to that sound of censure in other people's voices, the tell-tale hint that he'd got something wrong again. Every day was a social minefield for him, and he was always trying his hardest to blend in, to pass for ordinary.

Instead, Sarah Jane smiled briefly at the dishevelled man in the cupboard, huddled on what looked like a nest of dirty bubble-wrap, before she straightened up. Luke stood with her, watching expectantly. She'd been anticipating something like this from him, he was far too tender-hearted. She'd guessed it would be a lost puppy, though, or fledgling birds next spring. Not some stray down-and out taking refuge in the deserted factory where he'd been 'born'.

Luke was the distillation of thousands of random humans, though. So maybe his inherent sweet nature was a good thing for all of them, on the whole, all those random humans adding up to compassion rather than selfishness. Even if it did cause a few problems from time to time.

She put her hand on his shoulder. "Luke, listen. I don't think the man in there is like you - another Archetype, I mean. I think he's just, well, an ordinary adult. Someone who's living rough, um... homeless, you know?"

Luke looked confused. "But that's what I was. I didn't have a home, until you found me and let me live with you. Can you adopt him too?"

"Oh gosh... I don't really think so, no. We can probably find a shelter for him. Somewhere that's set up to look after people like him, who need help."

"But you have to talk to him!" Luke insisted. "I told you - he's like I was, he doesn't know who he is. Would a shelter be able to give him a name, like you did for me?"

She hated the thought of disappointing him. Of course, if you were the only one of your kind, the idea that you might have found another like you had to matter hugely. "The thing is, I'm pretty sure he already has a name. He might not have told you because he's in trouble with the police, or because - well, some people forget things because they're unwell, or because they've had too much to drink. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he assured her. "But please just talk to him, Mum."

"Alright, I will." No harm in talking... She crouched down again, breathing in as she did. She couldn't smell alcohol, though it was hard to tell: the air in the cupboard was close and smelled of damp cloth and sweat, smoke and metal. She shone the torch in again. Luke's 'Archetype' was huddled as far away from the door as he could get, knees against his chest, his breath whistling in and out of congested lungs. As she studied him he coughed, a nasty hacking sound, and put one arm up to cover his eyes.

"Light hurts," he mumbled, His voice was a cracked whisper, almost impossible to make out.

"Oh, yes, sorry." She pointed the torch down, trying to catch an angle that would give both of them some illumination. "You sound like you've got a bit of a bad cough. It's very cold in here, wet too. Why don't you come out of there, come with us? I'm pretty sure there's a Samaritans shelter near here. I've got a car, we can drive you there. They'll have food and medicine, and -"

He shook his head, wriggling even further back into the corner. "No! I can't, they'll find me."

"Who will find you?"

"Them. Whoever did this - Not mad, 's all wrong." His voice was terribly hoarse. Sarah Jane leaned forward, struggling to hear him.

"Alright, look - What's your name?"

He glanced at Luke, nervously, then back at her, shaking his head. "Can't remember. Told him that."

"Yes, you did. I just wondered if it had come back to you. How did you get here?"

"I don't remember!" His voice was nearly gone but she could hear the fear and desperation, even in that faltering rasp. Now that her eyes were getting used to the gloom, Sarah Jane could see that he was sweating.

"I'm sorry. I'm just trying to understand. Can you remember anything?"

He frowned, scratching at the grimy stubble on his chin, then shook his head again. "Fell out of the sky. Couldn't get my breath, everything hurt. Then more noise... I hid in here, thought they were coming for me."

"When did that happen? How long have you been here?"

He shrugged. "Don't know. Slept a bit."

"And that's definitely all you can remember?"

He was silent for a while, staring at the floor. When he spoke again, she had to lean forward to catch the faltering whisper.

"I bought five Danish again. Stupid, keep forgetting, they get upset and I need to, to be more..."

If he was a tramp, he was the oddest one she'd ever met. "But you can't remember who 'they' are?" she asked, as softly as she could, and the man shook his head and put his hands over his face.

She sighed. Looked at Luke, who was crouched down next to her, his expression anxious and eager all at once. Looked back at the stranger crouched in front of her. Under a week's worth of dirt, she could see that his fingernails had been neatly manicured. He was in shirtsleeves and a waistcoat whose dark pinstripes matched the rumpled material of his trousers. His hair was an unwashed mess but still short, trimmed close against the nape of his neck.

He was no more a down-and-out than he was another Archetype. He was a puzzle, and a problem, and even as she hated the inevitability of it, Sarah Jane heard herself saying, "Look, you really can't stay here. You'll have to come home with us."

The man looked up quickly, shaking his head. "No. It isn't safe."

"It's not safe for you to stay here. What if they come back, the people you were hiding from?" He'd probably just been scared by the UNIT recon team, but she didn't know for sure. Maybe someone really had been chasing him? He was right that something strange must have happened to him, at any rate. "Besides, this whole building's not safe - it's a wreck. I can't have Luke clambering about in here every day to bring you food!"

"Tell him he can't come here anymore."

"So I say to my son that we're just going to get up and leave you here, to starve to death, if you don't freeze to death first, or die of pneumonia?" She smiled at Luke, who was looking alarmed. "I don't think Luke would be very happy with me if I did that. In fact, he'd probably just ignore me and come straight back to look after you anyway. Is that what you want?"

"If you told me I couldn't come back, I wouldn't do it!" Luke protested. "But I wouldn't be happy either. It wouldn't be a good thing to leave him here."

"No, it wouldn't," Sarah Jane agreed. She held out a hand to the stranger. "What about just for tonight, hmm? I've got a spare bedroom, it's nice and warm. You could, oh, have a wash, get some decent rest. We'll pick up more chips on the way back - I think these ones will be cold by now. And I promise you, you'll be perfectly safe. It's just Luke and me, no-one else will know you're with us. I promise."

She didn't know if it was her reassurances, or the lure of food and a bed, or that he was too ill to put up much of a struggle, but after a while the man sighed, coughing, took her hand in a weak, clammy grip, and let himself be drawn out of the cupboard and led away with them.

***

They drove back to the chip shop, and Luke hurried back in for three more cod and chips while his strange new friend slouched down as low as he could get in the passenger seat. He didn't speak, just coughed feebly and stared at the door handle, as if he was thinking of making a run for it. Frankly, Sarah Jane doubted if he'd be able to make it as far as the end of the street.

When they got back, he mouthed "Bathroom?" and she gestured towards the downstairs loo, then pointed behind her. "And the kitchen's through here – come and find us when you're ready." After he'd shut the door, she hesitated for a moment, wondering whether to lock the front door... No. If he really wanted to get away from them, there wasn't much either she or Luke could do about it. Even so, she felt oddly relieved when he appeared in the kitchen a few minutes later, as she was pouring mugs of tea.

Indoors, in decent light, he looked a bit less grizzled than she'd first thought, and tall, and very unsteady on his feet. His hands were scrubbed clean now, in stark white contrast to the rest of him. "Come on in, please, sit down. You look like you need to rest."

He mumbled something that was just too hoarse for her to make out. "Pardon?"

"He was asking if he could have a bath," Luke translated quickly. His hearing was exceptionally good, of course, though it might also have had something to do with him being used to his new friend's weak croak of a voice by now.

She smiled. "Of course you can, but something to eat first, yes?"

He nodded, sitting down meekly next to her. As she slavered ketchup on her plate, Sarah Jane was thinking ahead. What could he wear? Nothing she and Luke had could possibly fit him, but his own clothes were damp and filthy. The vivid lilac shirt might have been smart once, but now looked as if it had been mauled by a wild animal, with one sleeve torn from wrist to elbow and bloodstains down the side. There was a twist of stripy cloth tied around his forearm, like a crude bandage.

Luke bolted his food down – well, fish and chips was one of his favourites – but she was worried to see that the stranger was barely eating. After only a few chips he'd given up, sitting hunched at the table with his left hand cradled awkwardly in his lap. When he sipped the tea Luke had poured, it brought on a long coughing fit that sounded far from good. As it subsided, Sarah Jane said casually, "What happened to your arm?"

He glanced down at the striped material. "Um... caught it on something, I think. Stopped bleeding after I tied it up."

"Does it hurt?"

He shrugged, coughing again, but didn't speak.

Travelling with the Doctor for those few enchanted years had taught her so much - most of it completely useless back on Earth, of course. But Harry Sullivan had taken her through some basic first aid on a few quiet afternoons, probably to take his own mind off the fact that he was hurtling through time and space in a spaceship that looked like a tiny wooden police box, with a great big laughing madman at the helm.

She touched the makeshift bandage lightly. "Do you mind if I take a look?"

He held out his arm, not looking up from the plate of congealing chips. She untied the knotted ends and unwound the fabric. It turned out to be a tie, wrapped around a long, ragged tear in his forearm. Not too deep, but still bloody and raw. And she'd spent enough time with UNIT to be reasonably sure it was a bullet wound.

"Do me a favour, please, Luke? I need the first aid box in the bathroom. Could you - ?" He was out of his chair before she'd finished. Sarah Jane filled a bowl with hot water and a dash of Dettol, then studied the bloodstained tie in her hand. The purple stripes were decorated with a pattern of tiny crossed hockey sticks. "Is this yours?"

He glanced quickly up. "Mmm. Blood'll come out if I soak it in cold water. Did last time."

She glanced at the label: Prada. A tramp with a Prada tie. "It's very nice," Sarah Jane said casually. "Were you going somewhere special?"

He looked confused. "Just work things," he mumbled, gesturing vaguely at his ruined shirt.

Luke was back with the first aid box. Sarah Jane rolled the remains of the lilac shirtsleeve up out of the way and got to work. The man flinched a few times as she cleaned the wound and sprayed antiseptic all over it, but he seemed on the point of falling asleep where he sat, his head nodding slowly as she finished pinning the bandage end in place.

"You must work somewhere quite smart, then?" No reaction. "An office, maybe?"

"Maybe. I - I'm not -." Another wave of coughing put an end to that sentence.

"You know, I really don't think you're very well at all," Sarah Jane said softly. "I should call a doctor. That injury, too. It looks clean enough now, but you probably need antibiotics. What do you think?"

"No, please!" He was half-out of his chair, the fear forcing his voice almost to breaking point. "No-one else! I just need to rest..."

"Okay, don't worry." He was so nervy, and there was so little she could do to help him like this. She rummaged in the first aid box – yes, there was an unopened box of Lemsip in there. It seemed a bit inadequate, given how pale and ill he looked, but it had to be better than nothing. "Here, drink one of these at least, yes? I'll just get some blankets, and you can have a nap on the sofa. It's very comfortable."

It had to be better than a wet concrete cupboard floor, at any rate. She left Luke making up a mug of Lemsip while watching their unexpected guest with undisguised fascination, and went upstairs to fetch a sheet and spare duvet.

When she came back, Luke greeted her at the kitchen door, finger pressed to his lips. Behind him, the man was sprawled across the table, face pillowed on his good forearm and breathing in a phlegmy rasp.

"He must be very tired," Luke whispered. "That looks uncomfortable. At least I got him to drink the Lemsip. Should we wake him?"

"Let's make a bed up for him first. We'll have to wake him then, though. I don't think you and I are going to manage to carry him from here to the living room, do you?"

They'd just finished laying out a bed of sorts on the sofa - actually, Sarah Jane thought, it looked rather cosy - when the doorbell rang. A moment later Maria and Clyde appeared at the window, grinning and waving.

Luke hurried off to answer the door before she could say anything to him. From the hallway, she could hear Maria saying, "Hey, are you okay? We were getting worried about you!" and Clyde adding, "Yeah, you shot off so fast this afternoon, you didn't even pick up your science assignment for half-term. We thought you must've caught that vomiting bug or something! You been puking?"

"No, I'm fine." So far in his short life, Luke had never as much as sneezed. She'd worried that his unique biology might have made him susceptible to every virus going the rounds at school, but in fact he seemed to be exceptionally resilient. "I had to take care of the other. I forgot about the assignment, oh, that's not good."

"Don't worry, I've got yours here," Maria said, swinging a carrier bag. "The other what? If it's aliens, you'd better not be keeping it all to yourself!" She walked into the living room, waving at Sarah Jane, then stopped short when she saw the sofa. "Oh, hi! Are you having a sleepover?"

Sarah Jane opened her mouth, but before she could speak Clyde pushed past Maria and hurried into the room.

"Listen, quick - someone's got into the house! There's a dosser crashed out in your kitchen!"

"What's a dosser?" Luke asked.

Clyde groaned. "You know, a vagrant, a street guy - listen mate, we'll do the Slang Twenty Questions later, alright? How'd he get in? Did you leave the back door open? Anyways," he turned to Sarah Jane, "We can shut this door and call the cops from in here, right?"

"There's no need for the police," Sarah Jane sighed, trying to think of something even slightly plausible. "That's a - friend. He's just dropped in to see me this evening."

"A friend? Well if you don't mind me saying, your friend needs a bath. He's minging. And his clothes are filthy. And why is he sleeping on your kitchen table?"

Maria stared disbelievingly at Clyde, then hurried out of the room. Resigned, Sarah Jane followed her, with Luke and Clyde close behind. Clyde caught at Maria's arm as she stood in the kitchen doorway.

"Don't get too close! Some of them can get nasty if you wake 'em up too quickly. He might lash out!"

"No he won't, he's alright," Luke said defensively.

"What, so he's your friend too?"

"I found him," Luke smiled proudly: Sarah Jane leaned her head against the door jamb. "In the Bubble Shock factory, where I was - made. He's another like me, or he might be. I think he is, but Mum's not sure. He's not feeling very well, though, so we brought him home tonight."

Maria grimaced. "Jenny Ellison. You went all quiet at school when she started talking about her dad and that fire. Well, even quieter than usual. I should have guessed you'd be curious. I'm sorry."

"Awww, Luke!" Clyde looked exasperated and fond all at once. He put his arm around Luke's shoulder. "Look, just because you found some strange guy sleeping rough in that place, doesn't mean that he comes from there. Not like you did. You're one of a kind, see? That's why we like you! Only one Luke Smith."

"Actually, there are over 145,000 entries for Luke Smith on Google," Luke replied, but he gave Clyde a small smile in response.

"Probably all your fansites. Anyway, thing is, you can't just let a total stranger into your house like this. Not with just the two of you in here. What if he's a nutter, or on the run?"

"I appreciate the chivalry, Clyde," Sarah Jane said, "But I've lived on my own for - a few years, you know, and I've seen things a lot scarier than this poor man. I really don't think he's any kind of threat at all. He's the one who's scared of us, as it happens."

"But he's right." The whispery voice came from behind her: their strange guest had woken up, pushing himself unsteadily away from the table. "You can't be sure - I don't even know who I am! What happens to you if they find me here? I need to go."

"See!" Clyde said triumphantly. Behind him, the man stood up fast, took a few stumbling steps and promptly keeled over.

Luke gave a yelp and rushed over, glaring at Clyde. "What did you do that for? He's not well!"

"I didn't know he'd faint!" But Clyde looked contrite. "Shall I call 999?"

"No, no," Sarah Jane said briskly. If Luke’s new friend woke up in a hospital bed in his current state, he'd probably end up jumping out of the window. "Just help me to get him into the living room."

Between the four of them, they managed to carry the man through to the makeshift bed on the sofa. While Sarah Jane dug a thermometer out of the first aid box, the children fussed quietly around him, putting cushions under his head and unlacing his shoes as he lay limp and still, breathing wheezily.

The thermometer read 101. Not good. When she looked up, Maria was holding out one of the man's shoes.

"Look at this! Only, don't look too closely, because I don't think he's had these off for a week and his feet smell worse than Dad's!"

The shoe was muddy and scuffed, but clearly good quality. She glanced at the inside sole. "Church's," Sarah Jane said, holding the shoe up to show Clyde and Luke. "These are £300 shoes he's wearing."

"So? He's a mugger with good taste," Clyde shrugged, ignoring Luke's cross glare.

"And a good eye - good enough to mug someone with exactly the same shoe size as him?" Sarah Jane shook her head. "His tie is Prada. And that shirt isn't High Street, the cotton's far too fine.

Clyde reached out to feel the sleeve cautiously. "Okay, so he's got expensive clothes. Hey, just a minute... maybe he's one of those rich guys who pretends to be poor? You know, like on the telly. We look after him now, he gives us fifty thousand pounds for being Good Samaritans, you know! Nice!"

"Maybe. Though he's taking the disguise a bit far, if he's making himself this unwell to pull it off."

Luke touched her arm. "I think he's waking up, Mum."

On the sofa, their new guest was staring wildly at Maria and Clyde as he pushed himself upright. He tried to speak, but all that came out was an unintelligible wheeze.

Time to take charge, Sarah Jane thought. She pushed the man gently but firmly back against the cushions.

"It's alright, listen to me. Everything is fine and everything is going to be fine, but you have to do as I say. You're not well, you need help and you're just going to have to stay here and let us help you. Do you understand?"

Thankfully, he didn't argue but sank obediently back, breathing with some difficulty. He looked distressed, his forehead slick with sweat, but she gave him a reassuring smile. "Good! Now, this is Maria and Clyde, they're our friends, you can trust them too. And I think we need a name for you. Just for now, until you remember your real one. Do you want to choose?"

He looked as confused as Luke had, months ago now in this same room, faced with the same question. After a while he coughed, shrugging as he shook his head

"What about Ian?" Maria said. "You look a bit like my uncle Ian - my Dad's brother. He's nice, lives over in Pimlico. He and Dad go to Chelsea matches when they're playing at home."

He blinked, and for a moment she thought he was about to cry. Instead he shrugged, nodding again, then closed his eyes and turned his face away to the back of the couch.

"Alright, Ian it is. Now, you just rest here for now..." Sarah Jane gestured everyone else out of the room, turning the main lights off. In the hallway, they all stood close, as Luke told Maria and Clyde about finding 'Ian' in the factory.

"So - we don't know anything about this guy, right? Who he is, how he got there, if he's telling the truth about not remembering anything –"

"He is – he doesn't!" Luke interrupted Clyde defensively, and Clyde held up his hands.

"Whoa Nelly! I'm just telling it how it is. You can't always go around taking everybody at face value, you know!"

"Yeah, but isn't everyone supposed to be innocent until proven guilty?" Maria pointed out.

"Look, you're both right." Behind Clyde, Sarah Jane could see Luke frowning unhappily. "We don't know, but for now I think we can give him the benefit of the doubt – at any rate, I don't think he's a threat to any of us, the state he's in now. Let's just see how he is tomorrow, after he's had the chance to rest. I'll ask Mr Smith to run some more checks, see if he can tell us anything about him."

"Yes – Mr Smith can tell us if he's another Archetype!" Luke exclaimed, clearly delighted. Behind him, Maria and Clyde were conferring quietly.

"OK, sorry about this but I have to get back," Maria said. "Dad's doing stir-fry tonight. But I'll come round first thing tomorrow!" She smiled at Luke. "I want to see if your Ian has remembered anything by then!"

As she left, Clyde was talking on his mobile. "Yeah... No... Yeah Mum, I will. Bye!" He tucked the phone away with a grin. "That's sorted! I've told her Luke was having a half-term sleepover tonight. You got a t-shirt I can borrow, mate?" At Sarah Jane's raised eyebrows he added hastily, "It's okay if I stay over, yeah? Only there's no way I'm leaving you two on your own here tonight with some total stranger. Even if he is Mr Eccentric Millionaire."

She had to smile. "That's very kind of you. Of course you can stay. But is your Mum going to be OK by herself?"

Clyde grinned. "It's Friday night - that's girls' night out. There's a new bar that's just opened on Station Road - Casino Royale. If I'm not at home, she doesn't have to worry about what time she gets back. Do her good to be young free and single for one night!"

She'd met Carla Langer for the first time a few weeks ago, and liked her immediately. Maybe it was what they had in common, each of them alone with a teenage son to care for. Part of it was just the quiet pleasure of seeing Clyde's covert but stubborn, protective love for his mother, and the way she could see echoes of the same unwavering affection in him for Luke.

"Right, I'm going to have a word with Mr Smith. I'll leave you two to see if you can get that ridiculous air-bed blown up again?"

Up in the loft, Mr Smith came to life with his usual absurd theatrical flourish, and ran a quick scan as she requested, with only the faintest trace of a huff in his artificial voice. The alien computer never liked being interrupted at night: perhaps it was when he played whatever the AI equivalent of Solitaire was, or caught up on old TV shows?

"Your guest is a human male. Apart from high levels of Baryon-9 contamination, a small firearms wound, mild dehydration and an unpleasant upper respiratory infection, he is normal and in reasonably good health."

"Not like Luke, then? An Archetype, I mean."

"As I said, he is a normal human male. Had there been anything remarkable about him, I would have remarked on it the first time."

It was a good thing she knew that computers couldn't really harrumph impatiently, Sarah Jane thought. "Sorry, of course you would. I just wondered because Luke found him at the Bubble-Shock factory. Would the Baryon-9 have come from there? He'd been there for several days."

"That would seem likely. You and Luke are also showing low and moderate levels of contamination."

Such a horrible word. "Is it harmful?"

"Baryon-9 does not occur naturally on this planet," Mr Smith intoned. "I cannot give you empirical information on the potential effects of protracted exposure for human subjects. However, Baryon-9 is highly unlikely to be have any permanent effect on human health."

"Alright, that's good - I think." She turned, then hesitated: it was an unpleasant suspicion, but still. "One last thing, please. Are there any recent reports of prisoners absconding, or patients going missing from any local mental institutions?"

It could only have been nanoseconds, but the tiny silence seemed to drag on uncomfortably. "I can find no records of any such occurrence in the last month, from any relevant establishments within a fifty mile radius. Shall I widen the parameters?"

She let out a sigh of relief. "No, thank you." Ian's fancy shoes had been wet and grubby, but under the dirt they'd looked brand new. Impossible to see how he could have walked more than a few miles in them, or been living rough for more than a couple of weeks.

Well, at least one mystery was solved. She found Luke in the kitchen, making up a jug of hot Ribena - he seemed to live on the sticky stuff.

"For Ian – he probably needs to drink more fluids, right?"

"Good idea," she said brightly. "There's some Solpadol in the first aid box, too. We'll get him to take a couple, if he hasn't fallen asleep again!"

"What did Mr Smith say?" Luke asked eagerly. "Did you ask him about Ian being another Archetype?"

"I did, and he definitely isn't. He's just an ordinary man. It was a coincidence that you found him, where you found him... I'm sorry, Luke."

"Oh." She watched as he sorted through the first aid box, taking care to put the boxes of plasters and tubes of antiseptic back in a neat order after he'd found the paracetamol. It was strange that she'd never felt the absence of children in her life until she had a son of her own. Now, she just wanted the world to be forbidden to disappoint him.

"You know, I was thinking about the Bubble-Shock factory – about Ian being there, and the fire, and you finding him. What do you think would have happened if you hadn't gone there last Monday, to check it out?"

"Happened to Ian?" Luke said. "I don't know. I suppose... someone else would have found him?"

"Ah, but who? And when? Maybe whoever did this to him, but they weren't exactly trying to help him in the first place. And no-one else would go to that place now - it could have been weeks, Luke. Months. And I don't think he'd have come out of that cupboard by himself, even if he was starving."

Luke looked thoughtful as he topped up the Ribena jug with cold water. Eventually, he said quietly, "You think he might have - died in there?"

"Yes, I really think he might have. So, he may not be an Archetype, but he's very lucky indeed that you are. Now, I'll take this through and make sure Ian's settled down for the night – and you'd better make sure Clyde hasn't managed to get himself trapped inside the duvet cover again. He nearly knocked himself out last time, remember!"

Luke nodded, giving her a quick hug as he went past. "Thanks. Goodnight, Mum."

"And could the two of you try not to stay up all night texting Maria, please!"

In the living room, Ian was asleep, breathing noisily. She left the Ribena and Solpadol on the small table next to him, then dimmed most of the lights and settled down in her favourite armchair with a couple of books, a notebook and her laptop, and tried to concentrate on finishing the corporate manslaughter article. The deadline was the end of that week.

Inevitably, though, it proved impossible to force her concentration to stick with the article. With a sigh, she gave up and started to check missing persons websites online. But all she knew about Ian was what he looked like, and an approximate time-frame. It was impossible to usefully narrow the search. She'd have to start checking local hospitals and shelters tomorrow. The children would be glad to help her, she knew, though they needed to find a way of doing it discreetly, in case Ian was right about being pursued.

She sent a short, non-committal email to Colonel Wells, asking only if he could send her the full UNIT report on the Bubble Shock fire last week, and dozed off to the sound of a total stranger sleeping fitfully ten feet away.

***

Part 2