The Planet Earth, as is well known throughout the galaxy — at least, at a certain age — is not a particularly large planet. Some would define it as "medium-large", some would be more kind to use "respectable size, definitely!" while others might point out they've seen bigger and, well, more impressive, because while size is definitely not everything, it still counts for something. However, all of those commenting on its size would agree it's definitely not small. Therefore, when thinking about the size of the planet, one might find the possibility of not one but two alien-related organisations being both based in the rather average and unimportant city of Cardiff to be somewhat unlikely. Especially, as it turns out, in the early 21st century, when the inhabitants of this respectably sized planet have only recently and slowly been given proof of their existence.
And yet, here is Captain Jack Harkness of the Torchwood Institute, standing together with Doctor Owen Harper as the two are trying to save the life of Doctor Martha Jones — inside the Pharm, a medical facility exploiting extra terrestrial life forms on Earth. Needless to say, they are all within the vicinity of Cardiff.
Three of the Captain's other operatives are exploring the compound itself — or, rather, the place where the aliens are being kept. In Captain Jack's righteous anger, he's about to order all of the captive creatures killed — a killing of mercy, preventing the poor things any more suffering. He really does believe he's doing them a favour, because he knows he would never be able to bring them back home, and would probably also be unable to undo the damage already done to their bodies.
And, under certain circumstances, he gives that order, the compound is brought down, weevils, mayflies and other creatures die, and so do Doctors Copley and Harper, one a renegade medical manager, another a mortal Torchwood operative who was in the wrong place — in front of a gun — and in the wrong time — directly after that gun was fired.
However, under these particular circumstances, things don't exactly go according to plan. Doctor Jones is being rescued. Doctor Harper carries her out of the lab, as Doctor Copley already left. And Toshiko Sato, technical genius and Torchwood employee, tells the good Captain of the creatures in the storage. A weevil, used for extracting pesticide. In the next tank, a big bug, out of which a drug is being synthesised, with unfortunate results. And a man in a brown suit who would have had beige trainers had his captors not taken them away, inside a third tank. He looks completely human, Toshiko reports, he even just opened a weary brown eye and looked directly at her, intelligence radiating from him like the sun in a summer day. In Morocco. But the caretaker insists. It only looks human, she says.
And when Doctor Harper peeks into the next room and asks what the hell a Police Public Call Box is, Captain Jack Harkness runs faster than he ever did in his life, long as it may be.
X
"Uh — Jack? He's got two heartbeats."
"He" referred to the Doctor, of course, but Owen didn't know that detail yet. Jack never got around to telling him. He just burst into the compound, fire in his eyes — and in his gun — and broke the tank containing the man, disconnecting the assorted wires attached to him from the surrounding machinery. The man — alien — thing — whatever — coughed several times, looked at Jack, tried to smile — and lost consciousness. By that time, Martha was already awake and aware, calling for the man and trying to wake him up, while Jack was shouting at Tosh "Shut this place down! Right now, do it!" and the seven of them left the warehouse in a hurry.
It didn't take long for Jack to find Copley, and as soon as he did, his gun was aimed at the scientist's head. "Tell me why I shouldn't shoot you!" he shouted. "Give me one good reason not to kill you, right now."
It wasn't Copley who answered, but Martha. "Jack, if they did something to him, we're going to need Copley to tell us what it was. And besides," she hesitated, but continued nonetheless, "besides, you know he wouldn't want that."
Jack just nodded, and Owen found himself in the SUV, trying to wake their new patient up while, at the same time, making sure Martha was going to be alright — her heart was racing, her temperature was still a couple of degrees too high, and had he had any chance of taking her blood pressure, he knew he wouldn't like it, either — and hoping Jack's reckless driving wouldn't get the four of them killed — especially considering fifty percent of the present company had just barely escaped death by Copley.
Well, if they all died here today — all but Jack, he corrected himself mentally — at least Gwen, Tosh and Ianto would live on to tell the tale. If they manage to follow Jack's instructions and bring the blue box and the sadistic son of a bitch back to the Hub.
But no, despite Jack's best attempts, they made it to the hub in one piece. Martha was already better, able to walk properly and even help Owen and Jack bring the alien into the hub. Which meant they could all fully concentrate on the problem of the alien in Torchwood. The alien Torchwood was trying to help. Inside their hub. What a day for irony.
Owen still insisted on taking Martha's blood pressure — he was right, he didn't like it — and ordered her to stay on the sofa, wait for Ianto to come back and ask him for a good cup of tea, and mainly, not go anywhere or do anything exciting.
"But the Doctor - !" she protested.
"Martha, you're no good to him dead. Besides, I get he's all important to the two of you, but in my priorities, you come first. Now I won't be able to treat him properly 'til I know you're okay, so stay here and relax." He could see the gratitude in her eyes — and yes, something more when he told her his priorities — but she obviously was still nervous.
"Just let me know what's going on with him, okay?"
"Promise," he smiled at her and rushed back downstairs, towards his new patient.
"Take his vitals," he could hear Jack shouting from his office. "Blood works, too, even though I don't think they're going to make a lot of sense — I'm just calling up old medical records on him."
So Owen took his blood, took the vitals, and when the blood pressure made no sense and the machines he hooked his new patient up to claimed his heart was either not pounding at all or pounding at a rate that should have left a hole in his ribcage by now — and Owen wasn't quite sure which option would be better — he took to listen to his patient's chest in the old fashioned way.
That was, of course, when he learned a thing or two about alien anatomy he was unaware of before.
"That's because he's got two hearts," Jack was walking down the stairs now, carefully carrying some printouts from his computer. "Have you got those readings? We should compare them to these — now I don't know how reliable exactly they are, as they were taken right after he regenerated apparently, and by all accounts it wasn't the most smooth regeneration, but that's all we have to work on — unless you know something about Time Lord physiology," he called out upstairs.
"Sorry, Jack," came the answer from Martha, sounding as frustrated as Jack was.
"So he is an alien," Owen surmised after taking a look at the papers Jack gave him. "We saved him," he fixed his gaze at Jack, refusing for a moment to have another look at the papers and figure out just how different his own readings were and what could have caused this, "but not the rest of the aliens. Why?"
"They were too far gone," Jack said quietly.
As a result, Owen pushed his own papers towards his boss. "And he isn't?"
Any unbiased observer would have had to admit Owen had a point, at the very least. The blood pressure didn't make any sense in either reading, but in completely different ways. The hearts were beating way too fast, even if the original readings already seemed too fast. The skin, which must have been too cold for comfort when the figures were written down in the old report, was now radiating heat, too hot, way too hot, even for a human. And they both knew that in a couple of minutes, when Torchwood's alien technology would finish analysing the blood sample it was given, the results will have shown so many foreign elements even a junkie volunteering for human tests in order to get his high from anything would seem clean in comparison.
That's usually the case with labrats, anyway. Or other fluffy rodents. Or monkeys — or anything else that's been used for experimentation by pharmaceutical companies in the early twenty first century. Aliens are no exception.
"We need to give him a chance," Jack said curtly.
"I wouldn't even know where to start," Owen said, and it wasn't a question, or a possibility, or even a request. Just a plain, simple fact. Set in stone.
"Do your best anyway," Jack said, and checked on Martha briefly before rushing outside, looking for the rest of his team, expected to bring with them security tapes, experiment documentation, a scientist without a conscience, and a blue box. Their late arrival was completely and utterly the result of that blue box, he knew, but there's no way he would have left it there.
In his little working place, Owen sighed and pulled the paper out of the alien machine. "And what have we got here?... Let's see how truly wasted you are, alien boy."
His patient didn't wake up.
X
Five minutes later, Gwen and Ianto were escorting their new prisoner down to the vaults, carrying a bag full of documents and tapes, while Tosh was outside, giving directions to the lorry driver.
"Yes, yes, just stop here — we'll handle the box from there, thank you," she rolled her eyes at her boss and gave the driver his tip.
"Jack, I don't know how we'll handle it from here. How is this box going to fit into the Hub? We can't leave it here!"
"Leave that to me, go back inside," he just told her and entered the box. Tosh might have mumbled a thing or two about her insane boss, but was glad the headache of trying to figure out a way to move that thing was no longer hers. Following her two teammates, she entered the Hub through the front door.
"Martha!" she called when she saw the medic up and about, standing in the autopsy room above the alien together with Owen. "How are you — "
"I'm fine, really, I am," Martha said, smiling a weary smile. "Owen did good — for once."
It was a measure of how occupied Owen was with his latest patient that he didn't even bother to comment, just muttered something under his breath as he tried injecting a different drug into that patient's systems.
He wasn't occupied enough to miss the sound of ancient engines appearing out of nowhere inside the Hub, nor the wind that started up from nothing inside the closed space. Or to notice there was now a blue box in the middle of his super-secret day-job base, where a second ago there was no sign of it.
"What the hell?" it wasn't Owen, but Gwen, who came back from the vaults with Ianto by now — and was answered both by Martha exclaiming "oh, it's working!" and by Jack, stepping out of the box.
"But?... How?..."
"You can fly this thing?" Martha seemed to be unbothered by the idea of boxes showing up out of nowhere.
"Just a bit. Not enough to risk travelling the universe on my own — but you know, sometimes I think he doesn't know enough, either! — but enough to move it a couple of feet."
"It's his spaceship, isn't it?" Ianto caught up. "The blue box. But that would mean — " he turned to look at Owen's patient.
Jack remembered he never actually told them who their new guest is.
Gwen's eyes grew wide — "that's the Doctor? Over there? But — "
"Ianto, would you accompany me to the vaults?" Jack cut the conversation before this could turn into an all-Torchwood argument — the way they tend to. "Gwen, Tosh, if you could go over these reports and try to figure out what they gave him and how to undo it, Martha and Owen, I'm assuming you know how to treat your patient."
And he was gone, Ianto following close behind.
"This isn't going to end well," Tosh remarked as the two of them were gone, but still sat down next to her computer to go through everything. Down in the autopsy room, Owen was questioning Martha about everything she could possibly remember concerning the Doctor's physiology. They were both unhappy the answer was 'not much'.
And "not much" was apparently all they could do. Knowing his boss's capability of ruthlessness, Ianto was more than surprised to see just how self restrained he was during those hours he questioned Copley, as they carefully reconstructed what exactly was done to the Doctor — and even more surprised at how, at the end of it, Jack just walked out and locked the door behind him, not hurting a hair on Copley's head. By the time they got back, Gwen and Tosh had also had a fairly good idea of what they were facing, and Owen and Martha did their best to adjust whatever drugs they were giving the Doctor to the new information.
But as his body temperature went down, his hearts started beating a bit slower, and the rest of his vitals slowly returned to those on record from the old UNIT files, it became obvious that if their new alien friend was going to wake up, he would do so on his own. Days went by as the world refused to stand still and aliens didn't quite realise Torchwood were busy with other things and kept on coming in through the rift and in spaceships and - well, in whatever weird ways they had of finding Earth, really. And most of the time the team would go out, leaving one of the medics or Ianto in the Hub, to just keep an eye on things and their patient, who kept on sleeping in Jack's room undisturbed. Yes, at least it was definitely sleep now, rather than unconscious coma — "see that twitch? He's dreaming, I'm sure of it." — but such an unnatural sleep was not a lot of comfort, especially as none of the alien experts knew when he would wake up. Most of them didn't mind — well, not that much, anyway. But they were unable to ignore how preoccupied their boss was these days, how he would go back into that little room whenever he could spare a minute, and how little sleep he himself got in the meantime.
It could only have been a relief then when, a week later, they were all sitting and trying to figure out what exactly was the device they salvaged from Henry Parker's house when a thin, tall figure, clad in Ianto's old pyjamas, shot through the Hub, entered the blue box they all got used to seeing there by now — if not entering it, which was strictly forbidden by Jack — and slammed the door behind it. It was another half minute before those engines were heard again, and the box was gone.