TORCHWOOD USA: Damaged Goods, a torchwood fanfic

We've all heard that Russell Davies may be bringing Torchwood to FOX in the USA. This is my take at a possible way to bring it over while keeping it connected to its UK roots.

TORCHWOOD USA:

Damaged Goods

By R. A. Stott

"What the hell am I doing here!?" shouted Captain Jack Harkness from the center of what looked like a transporter pad from that odd American science fiction series.

"Making like the Statue of Liberty, I would presume," a cranky looking old man joked from across the room. Harkness looked confused at him until he realized that his right arm was stretched over his head.

Then it struck him – a solid racking thud to his chest and groin. He crumpled to the ground.

"Oh dear," the old man said as he waddled over to the platform. "It wasn't supposed to kill him."

"Records show that he has been dragged through the time and space vortex before," a disembodied voice said. "He recovered from that experience as well."

The old man bent over the prone body and poked it with a cane he was carrying. Each time he did, a small clock in its handle called out Coo-Coo!

"Well, he still is only human, after all," he muttered.

"A human who lives out of time, Professor," the voice said in a reminding way. "Besides, he is still our property."

The old man looked up and shook his head. "Property… what a ridiculous notion! How can he be your property, when he will easily outlive this pitiful organization?"

There was a brief moment of silence. "Very well," the voice stated. "He is our property for the time being, while this organization exists."

"That's the spirit, Archie!" the old man cheerfully replied. "Live with that knowledge that entropy will eventually take you back to Scotland, where you belong! Now where are those skutters? I'm certainly not going to be able to pick him up!"

"Professor, why do you always insist on this argument?" the voice of Archie asked. "May I remind you, once again, that you are our commanding officer."

"Am I?" he befuddled. "Well, yes, and I will remind you as well that he is a living sentient being. We do NOT own him, nor shall we follow any of the doctrine that our former home office supported, is that clear?"

"Understood."

"Fine!" The Professor stamped his cane on the floor with a clack. "Now brew me up a nice pot of tea. And get those skutters in here to move this body off my transmat. I'm expecting someone!"

There was another brief moment of silence as the old man shuffled towards a door in the back of the room.

"Who would that be Professor?" Archie asked.

"Captain Jack Harkness, of course," the Professor answered. "And don't forget the scones!"

It was different this time. Normally, when he would revive, it would all just come back – as if someone had simply turned on a switch. This time, it came with pictures.

The Calion Bay at dusk - He had just closed up the shop on the wharf for the day. The twin suns descending over the vast stretch of water made it scarlet. Up on the top of the dock sat Alonso and his crap-assed 2-seat speeder waiting to take them back home. He raised his arm to wave to him.

It was then that he felt that his right shoulder was nearly torn off. Something had grabbed his wrist, and suddenly Calion Bay, the planet the bay sat on, Triptanpaliophosis 8, let alone, the entire star system ripped away as the near familiar view of the vortex surrounded him. The manipulator that he always wore on his arm was shrieking as it yanked him along involuntarily. In his blurred vision, he noted to himself that he had never seen it illuminated like it was before. He would have to check this, when he recovered.

If he recovered…

No, he would recover…

But, what if he landed on some K-type planet? With its highly acidic atmosphere, he would then die and be reborn every five or so minutes.

That would be nasty. Not again…

No – no – no… that could not be the case here. This was not a simple situation of a fault in the vortex manipulator. If anything, it was only working as a field generator, if the readings he was seeing were correct. Something else had snagged him, and was dragging him away. There was a sound – a familiar sound – a little higher pitched than usual, and maybe just slightly faster than normal… A sound like…

A huge gasp of air catapulted him upright.

"Oh, I see! The bio-filter was set for a time-lord! You're not a time-lord, are you son? No wonder you were killed!"

Jack groggily looked at the old man who was standing right beside him. He, himself, was lying on a table.

"Care for a cheese sandwich?" the Professor asked. "Actually no… you really need this packet of peanuts instead. The salt you know… you've probably lost some salt in the transference."

"Where…" Jack started like a deflated balloon.

"Third sub-basement, University of Pennsylvania School of Bio Science," came an answer from a dark corner of the room. "Also known as Torchwood 6."

The cobwebs started to fade, now replaced by rage. "Pennsylvania? TORCHWOOD!? What, you mean I'm back on EARTH!?"

"Yes, depressing, isn't it?" the old man mumbled as he stuffed the packet of peanuts into Jack's hand and sat down to nibble on his sandwich.

"What am I doing back on Earth?" the captain demanded as he tossed the peanuts aside and jumped off the table, which he found, was not a very good idea. This resuscitation was not the same this time around. His knees wobbled and he had to grab the nearest chair to steady himself. It was then he realized that he was down to his boxers as well.

"Where are my clothes?" he yelled. "It's FREEZING in here!"

A towel whopped him in the face. Jack yanked it off to glare at the person in the corner.

A short black-haired woman stepped forwards. "You might want to shower first, Captain," she told him. "You're still a mess from work."

"Yes – yes," the Professor noted. "You should always know where your towel is!"

An hour later, Jack found himself on the streets of Philadelphia following the old man and the woman as they lead him to an old brick building. He was full of questions, and was biting at the bit to ask them. But he was also interested in what was going on around him. He had left this planet only a year or two before. Some things seemed out of place, even though this was America. And then there were this pair he was following. The old man seemed to have an air about him that he felt uneasily comfortable with. And as for the girl, there just seemed something familiar about her that was nagging him.

"Okay, when is this?" he finally blurted as the door was shut behind them. "If this is Earth, it certainly isn't the one I left a while ago."

The woman gestured to a chair. "Have a seat and we will discuss it," she told him.

Jack looked at the chair. It was a deep, heavily padded and plush reading chair. He looked about the room. It was all dark wood paneling with deep recessed bookshelves piled in volumes and papers. A desk seemed buried beyond capacity with more books and strewn newspapers. As he sat down he was handed a cup and saucer.

"I'll just ring for some tea," the old man stated. "What do you like with yours?"

"Mine?" Jack asked, now getting as befuddled as the old man.

"With your tea, lad," the codger yipped. "I have cream, sugar… I even have some honey! Would you like some honey?"

This was not getting them anywhere. "Cream and sugar is fine," Jack quickly agreed in an attempt to get the questions moving. "Please, just tell me, what is going on here? Why am I here?"

"Is the old fool driving you nuts?" he heard and looked over his shoulder at a doorway in the center of the far wall of clutter. "He does that to me every day, but he does at times makes sense."

"Archie?" Jack asked the man standing there. "What are you doing here? You told me you were closing down Torchwood 2 years ago to go fishing!"

"Yea, and I bagged me a trout!" he said with a snarl towards the Professor.

"Don't be sassy with me, you bad excuse for a burned out hard drive!" the old man snapped back. "Now you do your duty and brew us up some tea, or I'll dock you a memory chip or two!"

Jack sat for a moment as he watched Archie turn and grumble to himself and enter the far room.

"Wait a minute… why are you treating him like a robot?" he asked the old man.

The Professor waved a hand at the doorway. "Well he is one or at least an android… humanoid type… Didn't you know?"

Jack looked stupefied at the doorway. "No," was all he could say.

"What is it with you Torchwood types anyway?" the Professor griped. "You never seemed to talk with one another. You were always keeping secrets between one another. Now how is that any way to run an organization?"

"We haven't run it that way in a while, Professor," the young woman said as she sat across from Jack. The way she said that made him look over at her.

"Your voice, your accent," he said to her. "You remind me of Gwen."

The woman smiled but continued to scowl at him. "That's not surprising. Gwen Cooper Williams is my mother," she stated. "It was she who insisted that you would be the only person able to rectify our current situation."

Jack looked about the room looking to see if there was a camera recording this. "Wait – wait – wait! You're telling me that you're Gwen's child? When I left here, she was just about to have you!"

"Actually that was my brother, Edward," the girl pointed out. "My name is Marcy… Marcy Williams. Mother had me a year after him."

Jack stood up. "Okay, stop. I need reference. What the hell date is this?"

"Well, let's see," the old man said as he pulled out a large pocket watch and began to fiddle with it. "It has been 22 years, 6 months, 12 days, 18 hours and a few fiddly little minutes since you last stood on this planet. Jumping off using that sub-ether thumb of yours must have been spectacular. There's nothing like hitching a lift when the moment arrives. I seem to remember doing something like that myself in my day."

"You were a wanted criminal in your day, Professor," Archie butted in as he brought a tray of tea and scones in and placed it on the cluttered table that sat between the chairs. When he looked up, he found Jack giving him a profoundly perplexed expression.

"A story for a later moment, I agree," he stated. "Marcy, if you could get to the heart of the matter for the Captain, please?"

She shuffled some papers beside her and picked up what looked like a TV remote control. But when she punched a button, a holographic image of the Earth popped up over the teapot on the table. The Professor scrambled about for a moment, as its spout was causing Antarctica to distort.

"Cardiff," she said. The holographic globe spun to show Jack the United Kingdom. A red dot appeared where the sea met the land in the southwest. "As you know, 23 years ago, the government of the United Kingdom did a very foolish thing."

"How could I forget, since I was the epicenter of the event," Jack snapped.

"Shameful," the Professor muttered as he sat down with his cup. "They only recently completed the repairs to the National Assembly. As for the opera house, well, they just could not stop it from teetering over. It would seem the magnetic pull of the Rift was just too strong and SHLOOP! In it went!"

"The Rift is still open?" Jack asked. "The explosion didn't seal it?"

"Oh my, no," the Professor chuckled. "The Tetrinite Bomb they used in you would hardly snuff something like the Rift."

"But it did do this," Marcy noted as she clicked the remote at the image. The red dot drew a line into the globe image, and then tossed other lines out in many other directions. When they reached the surface of the globe, a new red spot would appear.

"It shattered it" Jack stated in worry.

"Splintered it, actually," Marcy corrected. "It shoved the terminal host of the Rift nearly to the core of the planet, hence the greater magnetic pull it gave the Cardiff site initially. But now, we have space/time fractures all over the globe. Three here alone in the United States."

"We attempted to establish a Torchwood presence over each one," Archie commented from the doorway. "Number 6 here in Philadelphia, 8 out in Seattle, where that Rift-point emerged, and our central command base in the heart of the wheat belt, Wichita, Kansas. We can't put the base on that actual exit point, as the United States Air Force wouldn't allow it."

"With all the open fields and farmlands, wouldn't you know it would pop up under the end of the main runway at McConnell Air Force Base?" the Professor laughed to himself.

Jack was starting to seethe. "Okay, let's forget that I seem to be here 23 years after I left and that there seems to be issues with the Rift… WHY AM I HERE!? I didn't ASK for you to bring me back here! I DID NOT WANT to come back here! As a matter of fact, I was QUITE HAPPY where I WAS!"

"You were happy scraping off barnacles from the hulls of Tripanopi fishing scows that worked the moons?" Archie asked while placing some scones down next to the teapot.

"Not scraping, relocating," Jack corrected him. "Some of those barnacles were sentient! It made for some interesting paperwork."

Archie snorted. "Squatter's rights for barnacles! After 20 some odd years, don't you think you could be doing better for yourself?"

Jack glared at them. "What do you mean 20 some odd years? It has only been 2, maybe 2 and a half years for me since I left this rock!"

There was a chirp beside him, and Jack noticed that all eyes were now on the Professor.

His cup shook as he fumbled with it. He quickly put it down on some books and pulled what looked like a slide rule from his pocket. "Oh dear… this would have never happened if the Eye of Harmony was still accessible… carry the two… oh dear oh dear." He looked up at Jack then returned to his tool. "Mass equivalent to the weight ratio… temporal drift compensation… Brownian Motion… where's my tea?" He took a slug from his cup.

"Oh, my dear boy… my dear lad, I'm so sorry," he nearly sobbed to him. "The recall signal strayed back too far. It was supposed to get you now, not back then. Oh these Type 25s just aren't that reliable when they're anchored!"

"Recall signal?" Jack forced himself to calmly ask in an attempt to settle the old man. "What recall signal? You mean on this thing?" He raised his wrist to show him his vortex manipulator but only showed him his wrist. A tap on his back side made him see that Marcy was holding it up for him to take.

"The Professor used your recall circuit to bring you here," she told him as he snatched it from her.

"How?" he asked as he quickly fiddled with the strap to get it on. "This doesn't have a recall circuit that I know of."

"It is a vortex manipulator," the Professor stated in a more serious voice. "To travel the vortex, you need a dimensional stabilizer; otherwise the vortex would crush you. And if you have a dimensional stabilizer, you'll have a drift compensator which is where you will always find a recall circuit which in most circles is also known as a universal gyroscope. It is needed as a location source to the galactic center so that you have a reference point to base your travels through space and time through. But, since you have a universal gyroscope inside your manipulator, all you need is one of these to use it as a recall circuit." He then gestured around himself.

Jack looked about. "I need a what… a library?"

"A messy one at that," Archie sniped.

The Professor shook his finger at them. "You two could use a good book or two right now – right up the side of your ears!"

He returned to Jack. "Besides, this is my study… not a library." He sat back in his chair and folded his hands across his belly. "But this is much more… very much more. And you, Captain Jack Harkness, should know what it is. You've been in one before. In my student's as a matter of fact."

Jack looked around again. There did seem to be a familiar throbbing emanating from below his feet.

"The bio-filter was set for a time-lord!"

The words he had heard when he woke up finally struck home.

"Time-Lord!" he whispered. "This is a TARDIS?"

"A TT Capsule, yes," the Professor admitted with a bit of disappointment in his tone. "A beat up old Type 25 that was being ready to be parted out by the scrappers in the Skiffer's Yard down by the loading docks near the Citadel back on Gallifrey… such a waste… but then again, no one ever said that a Time-Lord could see past the end of their noses, let alone the future. You see, that was why we chose the Type 25 in the first place for our escape. Unlike the newer models, the 25s were so lean and stripped of all those fiddly little bits of nonsense like extra rooms and pools and chameleon circuits that they were hard to find even for the Chancellery Security System. You see, they were designed to 'fit in' to nooks, holes, caves, vacant rooms, what have you. Do you know what you get when you look at a Type 25 when it's not inside a hole-in-the-wall somewhere?"

Jack sat flabbergasted. "No?" he could only ask.

"A box," the Professor pointed out. "A simple 8 by 8 by 8 box with a slide out door on one side. Whoopee! She's not much to look at on the outside, but she's got it where it counts on the inside!"

"But… Professor," Jack interrupted him, "a friend of mine said that there were no more Time-Lords. That you had all died in a great war and that he was the only one."

The Professor chuckled a bit. "I would say that my student got that wrong, didn't he? Or did he? Technically, I'm retired – no longer a Time-Lord you know… That's why when the recall signal was sent out for all Time-Lords to return to Gallifrey, I did not go."

"You mean you made them not to recall you," Archie sniped in. "The same way you made them forget that you had stolen this infernal machine we're in, and that you had in fact escaped from their very own prison that they had put you in!"

Jack looked at the little old man then back at Archie. "Him? A criminal?"

Archie snorted. "Did you not read the UNIT Code 9 report on these people? Time-Lords have capabilities that other life forms don't, including telepathy and in some cases, mind control. The good Professor here was a teacher of such. When one of his prize pupils started using his teachings for evil, the Council of the Time-Lords attempted to imprison him."

"For teaching?" Jack asked. "Was what you were teaching illegal?"

"They MADE it illegal," the Professor pouted. "You see, I have the knowledge of mind projection… I can project my mind into others, save you…" His last remark was driven at Archie in spite. "I found it a great time saver, being a teacher…"

"Oh, I can see that," Jack sarcastically cracked. "Come into class – BING! – class dismissed!"

"Exactly!" the Professor excitedly agreed. "My students had the greatest amount of free study time of any other professor at the Academy!" He sat back as he realized that he was being too exuberant. "But they said I was a 'mind controlling criminal', when all I had done was taught… him. Anyway, our mutual friend helped me escape from my prison."

"But wouldn't that mean he would be listed as a criminal as well?" Jack asked.

The Professor seemed a bit distraught at the thought. "Only if the Time-Lords knew he had helped me. He was such a sweet boy, I just could not subject him to being hunted for my escape. So when we returned to the Citadel, I dropped in on the Panopticon and entered the Time-Lord Matrix…"

"Matrix?" Jack asked.

"A psychic data center," Archie explained. "A repository linked to all the Time-Lords as a knowledge bank."

Jack nodded. "And you know that because?..."

Archie gestured to the Professor. "He told me," he flatly said.

"I used it to project my mind to all the Time-Lords," the Professor meekly continued. "I made them forget that I ever exsited. All traces of me were removed."

"All?" Jack pondered.

"He even made them forget about the prison," Archie quipped. "And a few of the books in here were the only written reference to him as well. After a quick inventory after he joined us, those volumes were locked away for safety."

"You mean you confiscated them!" the Professor barked.

"On your orders, sir," Archie added.

"Oh, yes," the Professor agreed under his breath. "Well, I came here… my student seemed to like the Earth, and suggested that I set up in Cambridge. But when it looked like Harold Saxson would become Prime Minister, I picked up and skedaddled."

"You moved your TARDIS?" Jack asked. "And he didn't notice?"

"Oh, my no," the Professor laughed. "The old girl can't move like that anymore. Models this old require the Eye of Harmony to be able to move. And since that went the way of Galifrey, I was forced to use this."

He held up a flash drive.

Jack stared at it. "You moved your TARDIS with that?"

The Professor examined it. "Newfangled human gizmo! They're getting more and more like us Time-Lords, finding ways to squeeze things into little places you know."

"You fit a TARDIS onto a flash drive?" Jack asked a bit astonished.

The Professor seemed a bit befuddled. "It is one of the newer 16TB ones… or did I make it 16TBs? One way or the other, I came over to Boston and joined MIT. But soon after, Mr. Archibald came to me asking for my assistence setting up a Torchwood branch here in the United States."

"That was why you closed down Glasgow branch?" Jack asked Archie.

"I had other reason, but that was one of them," he replied.

"And the other reasons?" Jack pushed.

Archie just shrugged. "I'm not at liberty to say… at least not right now."

Jack sat back in his chair. "So, let me get this straight… We have a Time-Lord that no one knows about, we have his TARDIS that doesn't work, we have a Torchwood agent who is actually an android – you do intend on telling me how and why you came into being?"

"No," Archie answered.

"And you," Jack continued, "the daughter of one of my most trusted friends. What an interesting little band we have here. But it still doesn't answer my question. WHAT AM I DOING HERE!?"

"We needed you, Jack," Marcy said while looking at her lap. It unnerved him a bit at how much she looked like her mother just then.

"What for? What, have you got an infestation of Weevils because of all these Rift openings?" he snarled.

"Actually no," she hissed back making Jack almost squirm in his seat. "The backlash through the Rift of your explosion seems to have stopped any further incursions."

"A Rift probe I sent through the vortex shows that the explosion grew expodentially in strength as it tracked back through the feed," the Professor interjected. "When it errupted on two of its outward event horizons it incinerated the surface of one planet while vaporizing the other. Terrible…"

"We think the Weevils homeworld was one of them, since they seemed to have had the easiest access to the Rift," Archie noted.

"Then why?" Jack was tired of repeating himself. He found a small rectanglular box being handed to him by Marcy.

"If you remember, the Hub had many levels," she told him. "Some of which we have only just been able to get to now that the Rift energy has disapated to allow our operatives to enter and examine them. Surprisingly, the Vault area escaped serious damage, but it was near enough to the Rift at its maximum distortion that it caused some to deactivate their purpetual stasis locks."

"That was found near the remains of C S number 5," Archie added. Jack looked at him with near shock.

"Number 5…" he whispered. "That was in the upper section… next to the medical center."

"With ancillery access to the lower cryo-vault," Marcy finished for him. "The transfer of the casket had been completed by the time of the explosion."

Jack stared at the box. Seeing that it was hinged in the middle, he split it open to find a small screen and some controls of a video playback unit. Scribbled around the buttons was the message "TO JACK WITH LOVE."

"Has anyone played this thing yet?" he asked.

Marcy cleared her throat. "Mother did… she imediately asked that we find you after she did."

"Then I guess it won't explode in my face then," he half joked as he gingerly reached for the play button.

The screen flickered on. The view seemed to jump about a bit as the user put the recorder down to steady it.

"God, this place is a wreck," the voice of the person recording the message said. A form in the dark squatted down and looked out at Jack.

He drew slowly on a breath. "Gray?" he asked.

"I'm sure that whoever finds this unit will play it… You're a damn fool!" Jack's brother laughed from the player. "I could have easily planted a bomb or something else in this. But honestly, I found it in the rubble down here. I take it that something happened to your precious headquarters? And since I know that even collapsing this place on you wouldn't kill you, I'm sure you're out there somewhere."

The image jumped and shifted as Gray picked up the recorder. "Let me tell you something, brother dear… Remember our last conversation? You forgave me, right? YOU FORGAVE ME for MY INDISCRETIONS! Well, let me tell you, dear brother, I do NOT forgive YOU! And I NEVER WILL! So, wherever you are, whenever you are, I will hunt you down. I will hunt down those you love, I will hunt this WORLD you stranded me on!"

The image stopped as Gray slapped the unit shut.

"Such a troubled lad…" the Professor said as he sipped his tea.

oOo