I don't own Doctor Who, or Loki's TVA although I'm taking inspiration from the Council of Eight from the Eighth Doctor BBC novel 'Sometime Never.'
Please let me know what you think.
The T.V.A
Captain Jack checked the Vortex Manipulator on his wrist as soon as he appeared in 1912. There was a lot of interference in the local area of the Time Vortex, and according to the scan on the Manipulator - it was a more advanced model than the one he had started out with, but one of the advantages of reliving the centuries between the 20th century all the way to the 51st was he had the time and the patience to find other methods of time travel, although he had settled once more on a trusty Vortex Manipulator, although he'd needed to wait for a while until the Agency had shut down as John had told him about when they'd met shortly after the Year that Never Was - it was getting stronger.
That meant one thing, but what surprised him the most was how whoever was coming to this point in time was using a Time Corridor. Jack was just surprised someone was using a Time Corridor, of all things, but that was sometimes the way of the universe.
But at the same time, he wondered why anyone would come here.
Jack thought about this time period; a lot happened at this moment in history, especially since World War 1 was around the corner. So that meant a lot could happen around about now. He checked the date again, and he frowned at what he saw.
15th April 1912.
Jack frowned harder as he remembered that horrible cruise on the Titanic. He had spent a month trying to get his hands on a ticket to cross the Atlantic in the hopes the Doctor would be on the Titanic, a version he knew about and one that coincided with him. The Doctor had been unaware, but Jack had learnt enough about the Time Lord to know how he popped in and out of disasters as he owned them, but during his time with the Doctor and Rose, Jack had been with him and he got a decent enough scan lot the man to detect him easily; the Vortex Manipulator might have burnt out as he'd left the Gamestation, but it had been a relief the computer matrix had survived the trip back through time, but it was sensitive enough for him to tell which one of the Doctor's Time Lord lives he was dealing with.
Okay, he had some terrible memories of his time on the Titanic, but he didn't understand why he was on the coast of Newfoundland and why a Time Corridor was opening here. Had something happened in this part of the world on the very day of the sinking-?
Suddenly Jack went still while the Vortex Manipulator detected the opening of the Corridor. A figure appeared out of nowhere. The moment Jack took in the figure with their orange armour carrying a case, and he didn't need his Manipulator to see he was looking at an android.
"Hi there," Jack stepped forward - he'd had his own fair share of androids, they varied between being indistinguishable between humans and aliens and just simply programmed walking computers - in the hope of getting answers. "Where are you from? I take it you are not from around these parts."
The android spotted him. "You are Captain Jack Harkness."
"You know who I am?" Jack had learnt the hard way ever since that mess with Angelo and the deal made by the patriarchs of the Three Families behind the Miracle disaster which came after it to keep a low profile, although his entry into Torchwood had been something he truly regretted since it had not only been unpleasant, especially when those two bitches electrocuted him but because of his big fat mouth which had attracted Torchwood's attention because Queen Victoria declared the Time Lord an enemy of the British Empire.
Since then Jack had learnt to try to keep a lower profile. It was that or be considered a freak and repeatedly killed hundreds of times, but it was hard; he came from a temporal culture where you drank, took drugs, and blabbed. But Jack was more experienced and he had lived for thousands of years now.
He had learnt his lesson, the last thing he wanted was for that fucking Miracle mess to happen once more.
"Yes. Orders have just been received…. Captain Jack Harkness is to come with me to the Time Station," the android interrupted his thoughts and his trip down memory lane.
"The Time Station? What's that?"
"Captain Jack Harkness is to come with me to the Time Station." Okay, so it was looking more and more likely the androids were built and programmed simply, but he couldn't be sure about that after only a few minutes. "Mission parameters re-engaged."
"What? What do you mean by that?" Jack knew androids and robots sent out to conduct missions would stick with them until they were programmed with a new set of programs, but he didn't know enough about the android in front of him to know what it was doing but he was becoming increasingly certain this android was what he had been looking for.
The android opened the case and pulled out a cylinder, and opened it up. A brightly coloured butterfly flew out of the tube and flew into the atmosphere.
The android placed the cylinder back into its case and turned to Jack. "You will come with me now. Initialising temporal holding ring," the android lifted its 'hands' and Jack stiffened as he was suddenly surrounded by three interlocking rings of light, and he felt his inner sense of time freezing up...
X
The android studied the temporal prison imprisoning the body of Captain Jack Harkness. It wasn't doing it out of any kind of concern for the former Time Agent. It was merely obeying its programming which was standard for all androids sent out into the field by the Temporal Variance Authority.
As it analysed the body and determined the readings indicated Jack was still alive which was a given considering his fixed nature in space and time, the android sent a special narrow-band transmission through the Time Vortex.
In return, it received the parameters for its next mission.
The android watched without any kind of worry or impatience as Captain Jack's temporal prison containing the immortal Time Agent disappeared slowly as it was scooped out of the current time zone by a Time Scoop.
A moment later it disappeared itself as the Time Corridor which would open a portal from 1912 to somewhere else.
X
Jack fell forward, realising dimly the Temporal Prison which had immobilised him in a similar way to the chronon rings which had immobilised the TARDIS during the mess in the Medusa Cascade had been shut off. He made an 'oomph' as he fell forward onto a spongy like mass which was a cross between a sofa and a football pitch sized mattress.
Although he could guess thanks to the local gravity and the atmosphere, Jack lifted his head. He was in a large meeting room made from stone, and the darkness broken by the few occasional wall scones and the drapes gave the place a Gothic like feel. However, rather than be cold and menacing, there was something rather homely about it.
But more than that, there was something familiar about it, but Jack couldn't entirely place it. Along one side of the room was a large number of clocks and watches all ticking away, intermingled with plants from various worlds. The thing he had landed on was right in front of a large table with a number of chairs ranging from armchairs to rocking chairs and stools from different periods of Earth's history. All around the room were other pieces collected from the rest of the universe from different moments of history. Again, Jack felt there was something familiar about them, but a familiar voice said, "JACK!"
Jack turned around and gaped in shock as he saw a tall man wearing a leather jacket. "Doctor?" He gaped as he took in the Doctor whom he had first travelled with.
The Doctor - the Ninth Doctor - nodded with a grin, although that same solemn shadow Jack remembered only too well from his original travels with the Time Lord before that mess on the Gamestation completely changed his life for better and for worse because of Rose's actions. "Yeah, it's me," the Ninth Doctor replied.
"Where exactly are we now?" Jack had originally planned on asking how the Doctor could be here before he remembered the Doctor was an experienced time traveller, and he could hop through time and even jump across his timeline, but he held that back.
"We're currently on the Gamestation," the Ninth Doctor replied plainly.
"What, but how?" Jack said confused, remembering his meeting with the second Doctor he had known, but it wasn't until that conversation underneath the Utopians' rocket while he and the Tenth Doctor had been working to get the rocket off of Utopia that the fall extent of his immortality and the way the Doctor had abandoned him and felt prejudiced towards him came out (he would not think about the sudden revelation of the Master's survival; that led to a string of memories he truly didn't want to dwell upon, and that came after the whole mess with Angelo and the Three Families and the mess with the Miracle).
So why was the Ninth Doctor standing right in front of him without the same distaste as the Tenth Doctor, or was it simply a difference of personas? The Tenth Doctor had been rather arrogant, self-righteous and Jack, despite liking that incarnation, had been horrified by how the Doctor had kicked Harriet Jones out of office simply because she was right about him.
Jack knew the Ninth Doctor would have been angry, or slightly disappointed in Harriet's decision, but Jack had the feeling that Doctor would have backed down a little bit. He would have listened to her explanation and even supported it a little bit. He was that noble. Was the Ninth Doctor just standing there accepting of him because he was hiding his distaste under a mask? It was possible.
"He's simply been taken out of time," another familiar voice spoke from behind, causing Jack to swing around (a part of him wondered if getting on through the centuries, constantly living and dying had made him complacent enough to ignore the finer details of his Time Agent and military training) in shock, only to see the female incarnation of the Doctor he had met only recently. "Hiya, Jack!" The Thirteenth Doctor grinned happily.
"Doctor?" Jack looked between the two iterations of the same Time Lord - admittedly he had not really done too much other than stand in the background when he'd been with this incarnation and Yaz, Ryan, and Graham during that confrontation with the Daleks. "Two of you?"
"Three, actually," another Doctor walked into the room, this Doctor was one whom Jack had never really met. This Doctor was a tall, thin man with floppy brown hair and a rectangular face wearing a tweed jacket with a bow tie. "Hello, Jack."
"Hi," Jack would normally grin at the prospect of having one of his fantasies fulfilled by this kind of thing, but right now after everything he had seen today, and the surprising temporal anomalies right in front of him with three Doctors in front of him and his remembered temporal theory lessons at the Time Agency which had warned him such anomalies were best avoided at all costs, he couldn't muster the means to even try to flirt. "How are you all together? What's going on? Why am I here? And how can you be here," he turned to the Ninth Doctor, gazing at the leather-clad Doctor questioningly, "when you're on the Gamestation?"
"Whoa! Calm down, Jack," the bow tie-wearing Doctor held up a placating hand. "Really, it's okay. Let's just talk about this."
The Doctor walked over to the table and they sat down. With nothing better to do, Jack followed and sat down. "What's going on? Hold on, is that one of the androids who I saw release that butterfly in 1912?" He added in shock when the tall figure of an android walked into the meeting room carrying a tray of tea in a teapot, some milk, sugar, etc.
"Yeah, it is," the Thirteenth Doctor replied, an uncertain look on her face as if she wasn't sure how to approach this topic.
Jack gaped at the Doctors. "The androids are working for you!" He deduced. "But why?"
The former Time Agent could not believe nor understand what would make the Doctor send androids of all things to certain moments in time; he knew theoretically how easy it was to shape history, but he hadn't expected the Doctor to do it.
The bow tie-wearing Doctor sighed. "The androids are working for us, Jack. And we're interacting together thanks to a Blinovitch Limitation effect Limiter. It creates a temporal bubble around different versions of the same people and prevents any kind of effects of the paradox kicking in."
"Okay, that makes sense, but why are you using androids and sending them through time?" Jack asked, privately wondering where the TARDIS was in all of this.
The Ninth Doctor folded his arms and sighed. "D'you remember the stories of the Time Lords, Jack? How they watched history and only stepped in whenever someone meddled in it?"
Jack and the other Doctors knew the double questions were rhetorical. When Jack had first stepped into the TARDIS it had taken him a while to work out who and what he was travelling with. He had originally believed, like so many others, the Time Lords and the Time War was nothing more than a universal myth, a bunch of fairy tales told by the more advanced and elder races in the cosmos.
Unlike Rose, who hadn't seemed to have cared either way about learning more about the Time Lords, Jack had asked the Ninth Doctor questions although he had needed to be careful since the Doctor took that kind of conversation very personally.
"Yeah," Jack replied, wondering where this was going.
The Ninth Doctor sighed. "Jack, do you remember when I told you how the timelines completely changed after a battle with Faction Paradox before the timelines replaced them with the Daleks, and I spent 100 years on Earth?"
"Yeah, I do," Jack remembered the mind-numbing headache he had gotten during that night; he had encountered all kinds of weirdness when it came to time travel, but what the Doctor had described after Jack and he had met one night and talked. The pair of them had quickly bonded, and when the Doctor had calmed down when it came to the touchier subjects, Jack had learnt a great deal. "You told me that in an alternate timeline, the TARDIS took in a biodata infection from you after Faction Paradox infected an alternate version of your third self with a virus which would twist you into one of them and the TARDIS was transformed into a weird bone-shaped flower floating in time and space before you destroyed Gallifrey. But you negated the timeline when the TARDIS fired off a huge blast of energy, and when you restored your memories the timelines changed and shifted to replace the Faction with the Daleks since the Faction no longer existed, and the new Time War was even worse."
"That's right; the Time War with the Daleks was even worse because I was brought in much earlier when Compassion was hunted by both sides of the conflict. Rassilon was revived when the Time Lords found they were out of their depth, but many of the previous events remained consistent. But the time I was alone remained the same," the bow tie-wearing Doctor said, "but it's the aftermath of the Time War we're talking about. After the Time Lords vanished because we," here the Doctor waved a hand to his other selves, "saved Gallifrey, although we weren't clear about it because the timelines were out of sync at the time-."
"Speak for yourself," the Ninth Doctor interrupted, "as the version of us who came up with the idea of freezing Gallifrey in the first place, you and your successors wouldn't have a problem with remembering Gallifrey still existed."
"So what happened?" Jack interrupted.
"After we were sure Gallifrey was lost in both timelines, we travelled the universe although we still had lost our memories at the time," the Thirteenth Doctor looked down for a second, remembering the chaotic mess caused by the 'destruction' of Gallifrey, to say nothing of the way she and her other selves had made use of the energy blast created by the TARDIS to travel back in time and make use of a stasis cube which the Zygons had somehow gotten hold of; creating a time corridor for their other selves had been a very difficult thing to do, especially with how badly time was affected by the whole mess with the Edifice, but since they were latching onto the temporal energy of their own TARDIS had been simple enough while relying on a single second of time to push the planet and the Time Lords into a parallel pocket universe.
"I told you after Gallifrey was 'destroyed' in the blast, the TARDIS was badly damaged and needed time to recharge. After the TARDIS was restored after being reduced to the size of a snuffbox afterwards and I went back to travelling the universe, albeit without remembering too many details of the past until later, I was travelling in a universe where time travel was more widespread," the Ninth Doctor said.
"Two groups tried to step into the vacuum left by Gallifrey's loss, Jack; the Onihr, a rhino-like race similar to the Judoon who really thought highly of themselves, who wanted to achieve time travel, but the one group that came close was an organisation called the Council of Eight; their creation is very complicated, but essentially the Council were a race of crystalline beings who wanted to become the new Lords of Time," the bow tie-wearing Doctor explained, "We stopped them, but when we regenerated following the Time War, we saw events which shouldn't have happened; the conspiracy of the Game station aka Satellite 5, the Reapers, the Silence, the Master and the Year-That-Never-Was. And yes, I do blame my predecessor for making the mistakes of getting rid of Harriet Jones and giving the Master a chance to rise to power."
Jack started at the Ninth Doctor, seeing him bow his head. It was clearly upsetting for the man to hear how his successor had gotten rid of a historically important woman simply because she was right. He had always been angry and surprised himself by how the Tenth Doctor had meddled in history and allowed the Golden Age to fall apart.
But what made it worse was the Tenth Doctor had been responsible for the events in the first place; he had been bleeding regeneration energy out and attracted the Sycorax to Earth, and he had given the Master the means to take a foothold and take over Earth. For a whole year in a negated timeline, the human race was enslaved, and in the aftermath, the Doctor had swaggered off without a care in the world.
Jack might respect the Doctor, but that didn't mean he didn't have to like everything they did.
Jack focused on the purpose of what the Doctor's were doing and try to find out what the implications behind what the androids were up to. "You mean you decided to copy this Council of Eight?" He asked.
"No," the Thirteenth Doctor shook her head, "absolutely not; the Council were power-mad and they were trying to expel every single creature out of the Time Vortex. What we're trying to do with the androids is crystallise moments of history."
"You see Jack when the Time Lords were around they kept watch over history and they were content to let everything happen; now they're… out of the picture, every moment of history is vulnerable to time meddling. The First World War, for instance, is one of the biggest hotspots. We've been making sure time meddlers haven't tried to change history while keeping other moments as they're meant to be. We're taking a different step to the Time Lords and different to the Council of Eight, but we're making certain history runs its natural course despite crystallising moments."
"Not long ago, we were forced to time loop a time machine which was being used to nip back in time all over the place, and the people using it were breaking the first law of time; they were meeting themselves, but we couldn't do anything without rewriting history, so we locked the fractured timeline within a time loop and we destroyed the time machine," the Ninth Doctor said.
"So you're doing what the Time Lords essentially did before the Time War? You're doing what you did before you set this up? How did you do it, anyway?" Jack asked, still in two minds about what the Doctors were doing. He could understand why they were doing it, but he wasn't sure he liked the thought of them using androids to ensure history played out the way they needed to. "Why use androids?"
The bow-tie wearing Doctor decided to focus on the question about the androids and get it out of the way. "Believe me, Jack; we don't want to use androids for this type of work, but it was the only way. We wanted to keep this to ourselves, and for the most part, we do. We travel to the moments of history with the TARDIS as we always do, but sometimes we need helpers to deal with the small stuff while we deal with the major events that need Time Lord expertise," the bow tie-wearing Doctor said solemnly.
The former Time Agent mulled that over in his mind, and he could see the sense there. With the various incarnations of the Doctor out there, with a few still here, wherever here was, they could take care of things the way they always had while sparing the androids for other work. "You didn't answer my other questions," he went on, deciding to wait until he had the full picture before he passed on his own judgement. He knew he couldn't stop the Doctors from this since he knew that despite everything he had seen them do in the past, they were taking their business of saving the universe to a new level.
And the Doctors were right. He had been a Time Agent. He had stopped so many people from changing history or threatening history in some way here and there. But he wasn't sure if he liked this method of using androids to purposefully induce the butterfly effect even if it was effective.
"Which questions?"
"You know full well. How did you set this place up? Where is this?"
The Ninth Doctor sighed. "The Council of Eight we told you about. They formed a crystalline Time Station within the Vortex. We did something similar, by cloning our own TARDIS. And we mapped it into the vortex, so we could better detect changes in the timeline."
Jack almost couldn't believe it; he knew how powerful the TARDIS was, but to use it like this… "How long did it take?"
"A long time," the bow-tie wearing Doctor admitted. "That's the joy of being a time traveller, Jack; you know we can step out of time, pop along to a different place and time, and return within seconds of when you left before."
"We're going to be doing this for the rest of time, Jack. We've even called ourselves the TVA."
"Temporal Variances Authority. It's out of Marvel comics," the Thirteenth Doctor added helpfully.
Jack shook his head in amazement. "Okay, so you named this after a plot in Marvel comics. You cloned your own TARDIS. You send agents back through time to different moments to crystallise history. And you yourselves are taken out of time to work here."
"Pretty much."
"Why am I here?" Jack asked.
"We caught wind you'd learnt about what we were doing. D'you wanna join up?"
Jack looked between every single one of the Doctor's at the table, thinking the offer through. While he wasn't sure about all of the Doctor's methods, he had to admit it was tempting to do some real good with his old friend - friends - again. But at the same time, he still wasn't sure about the methods.
"I dunno, Doctor - Doctors - it's tempting, but I dunno about everything you're doing. And the way you kidnapped me...?" Jack shook his head as he remembered how the Time Lords did that.
"It's the androids, right?" The bow-tie wearing Doctor said sheepishly. "We know it's extreme, Jack, but while we can take care of some things, and we can in a way be everywhere at once, we do want to travel around as we normally do and have fun. The only way we can do that is if we have helpers."
"And as for kidnapping you, we wanted to make it quick; Jack, you and we aren't the only time travellers out there, and we're sure the Daleks out there know about the TVA's operations," the blonde-haired female Doctor added.
"What?" Jack whispered in horror while the Ninth Doctor grumbled under his breath at the mention of the Daleks.
"Yeah. That's another reason we use androids because they're heavily armed and defended; we are only brought into the TVA full-time at points in time where we're about to regenerate. We can't let our timelines be rewritten," the bow-tie wearing Doctor explained.
Jack could understand that point of view, and he wished he'd been given it by the Doctors before now. "What would I do?"
"We could travel together and see the universe, but at times we'd be here, in this TARDIS and keeping time safe."
Jack considered the idea silently. He knew the Doctors well enough to know they wouldn't force him into doing something against his nature. Ever since the shit with the 456 with the loss of Ianto on top of the loss of Tosh and Owen, with Miracle Day which ended with Esther's death, Jack had been working alone. But he had missed out on working with others, and it would be good to put his knowledge and experience as a time traveller to good use.
And besides, while the TVA sounded like the Time Agency, he knew it was anything but.
That sweetened the deal.
"Okay, I'm in."