Part 2
Author – Antimorph
Rating – 15 but not for sex. Sorry guys...
Summary – Dr Who/LoM X-over. Gene has questions that Jack can't answer, the Doctor has answers to the questions Sam just won't ask, and Rose has a sneaking suspicion (and a crush on Chris).
Part 2 – Eavesdropping is Bad Manners
Author's note – This is very slightly AU, just to make it work. Jack was rescued after the Xmas Invasion, and Sam never made that joke.
Thanks for interest, encouragement and comments! Normally I don't do requests, but today I think I might make an exception... But no naughty stuff (unless it's also funny).
P.S. Check out my List of LoM Crossover Ideas.
And now. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.
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Sam actually managed to make it out of the interview cupboard without laughing and the urge died away when he caught Gene's expression. He looked away then, feeling guilty and said out loud:
"Should we try the other one again?"
"He's takin' the piss Tyler. Taking. The. Piss. This is a murder case and that, that-" Gene groped for a suitable descriptor.
"Poofter?" Sam interjected helpfully.
"-bastard is makin' it into a fuckin' joke. He thinks it's funny."
Sam shrugged. "I don't think he was involved in the murder though."
Hunt's eyes narrowed as he turned to face his D.I..
"What, you think he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time? We seem to get a lot of them with you around, Sammy-boy."
Sam opened his mouth to object and then shut it again. That was a whole other can of worms he didn't want to get into, and he was happy enough if they could go on ignoring it.
"What we need," Hunt continued thoughtfully, " is a way to get them to talk." Sam rolled his eyes.
"What, really?" and received another Hunt-bestowed glare.
"Don't try and be smart with me. We need a way to get them to talk without putting 'em on the defensive. Any ideas?"
Sam stared thoughtfully at the door to the interview/lost property cupboard for so long that the Guv decided he'd gone into another daydream.
"I said-"
"Actually, yeah." Gene looked enquiring.
"Come on, out with it then."
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It took them just forty minutes to set it all up, plus another ten for Chris to find a blank tape. They put the suspects back in the cells and sat back to wait.
"How long d'you think it'll be?" Chris asked, putting his feet up on his desk and then hurriedly taking them down again when the Guv gave his boots a pointed stare.
"How long's the tape?" Sam asked thoughtfully. There was a confused pause.
"Er, I dunno. I didn't measure it, sorry." Chris looked worried and apologetic, and Sam put his hands over his eyes.
"You wazzock. He means, how long will the tape last." Ray flicked some of his fag ash onto the carpet towards Sam's desk, hoping to annoy him.
"Oh, er, sorry. 'Bout fifty minutes?"
"Well." Gene leant back in his chair. "Looks like you've got time to finish that paperwork after all, Tyler."
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45 minutes later... Sam was gratified to see the two men looked sheepish when he removed the tape machine from the box on the door of their cell. The Doctor caught his eye and shrugged almost apologetically, but when Hunt stepped through the door the other one, Jack, looked determinedly up at the ceiling. Having separated the two again, Sam and Gene went on to the office and set the tape machine up to play. Which it did, after some fiddling with volumes and a lot of swearing from Hunt about bloody technology. The machine hissed with static, and for a moment Sam wondered if it had picked anything up at all. Then:
The Doctor glared at Jack, but as his regenerated form was quite short with a sort of school-boy charm to it, it didn't come across as menacingly as he'd hoped.
"This," he said, waving his hand-cuffs accusingly at Jack, "is all your fault."
"My fault? How the hell is this my fault?" Jack struggled with the handcuffs before deciding that he didn't want out of them badly enough to dislocate his thumbs.
"Shopping? Your idea. Running away? Your idea. Therefore, it must be your fault." The Doctor leaned back on the bench and put his feet up.
"Your the one who gave them a dodgy fake name. I heard the skinny one calling you Howard." Jack added, amused. The Doctor shrugged.
"That's not as bad as what I heard the one with the tache calling you." Jack shrugged.
"What does poofter mean, anyway?" He caught the smirk on the Doctor's face and sighed. "Oh, that." There was silence for a while which Jack used to pick at his cuffs again.
"So." Jack began when he could stand it no more. "What's the plan?" The Doctor leaned back some more as if the hard cold bench was the most comfortable place in the world.
"Stay here and wait." he answered smugly. Jack groaned.
"Some plan. Does Plan B involve getting these cuffs off?" The Doctor gave him look of mock surprise.
"But I thought you liked handcuffs."
"They have their place, I'll admit." Jack tried to scrape them off on the bench and failed. "On other people."
The Doctor frowned thoughtfully to himself , ignoring Jack, who began to get irritated.
"Listen, how about I get us out of here?"
The Doctor looked up at that.
"Oh yes? How do you plan to do that?"
Jack smirked.
"Well-"
"No." the Doctor cut him off suddenly.
"What? You don't even know what I was going to say!" Jack complained, much to the Doctor's amusement.
"Seducing the guards?" he suggested.
"Okay," Jack admitted "You did know what I was going to say. But why not? You think I can't?"
"I think they'll beat seven kinds of shit out of you if you try." the Doctor replied with his eyes shut.
"Huh. You think so, do you?" Jack smiled in a superior sort of way. "For your information, I think the senior officer's got a bit of a thing for me. It wouldn't be the first time." he added.
The room went silent. Sam caught a glimpse of Gene's expression of furious concentration and ducked his head, not trusting himself to keep a straight face. He had come to the decision not so long ago that Gene Hunt worked on a knife edge, carefully balancing 1970's policing with his own vicious temper., The look he had now suggested that someone had just tipped the scales.
"The senior officer." the Doctor said flatly. "The violent one with the drink problem."
Jack frowned at him. "What makes you say that?"
"I have a nose for these things." the Doctor tapped it knowingly. "He smells of cheap whiskey. Teacher's, I think. Disgusting rot-gut, anyway."
Gene looked up at that, too quick for Sam to avoid it, and mouthed 'Do I?' Sam shrugged and pointed at the tape machine as the voices went on.
"And the violence?" Jack sounded, and looked, as if the Doctor had personally insulted him. The Doctor shrugged. "Well, anyway." Jack continued "He likes me, so-"
"What makes you think that?"
"In the interview, he was-"
"Oh, in the interview. Oh right, how romantic. In the interview." The Doctor sounded supremely unconvinced.
"Wait a minute, just what are you trying to say?"
The Doctor sighed. "He's a policeman, right? A copper."
"Cop. Right."
"He's a copper first, understand? No matter what else he is, I don't know, but he really is a copper. The genuine vintage 1973 real McCoy."
"And?"
"And the whole purpose of an interview is to make you confess to the crime. People who aren't guilty don't confess, right? SO if he can put you off guard..."
"Oh God." Jack put his head in his hands. "What is this, the dark ages?"
The Doctor laughed to himself.
"No, it's the brown ages. It's the seventies, what do you expect?"
"I don't know." Jack admitted. "But this isn't it. Crap."
"No harm done." The Doctor dismissed it airily. "We should be fine, provided you didn't give him a reason to keep us here."
There was a telling silence.
"Jack," the Doctor said warningly, "What did you tell him?"
"Well. He kind of kept asking me what we were doing in the alley, if we didn't seeing the dead guy?" Jack swallowed nervously at the Doctor's expression. "I might have told them we were having sex."
"In an alley."
"Sort of."
"In public. Oh, that's just great. There's at least three laws against that that I know of, and I'll just bet they'll be able to find more. Fantastic. You, Jack Harkness, are an idiot." The Doctor lay back on the stone slab in defeat.
Jack twiddled his thumbs for a minute.
"I'm sorry-" he tried
"I'm thinking." The Doctor snapped back. "With my brain. You should try it some time."
There was silence. Then;
"Well, what am I supposed to do whilst you're coming up with the master plan?"
"Amuse yourself, why don't you." The Doctor sounded more amused than really annoyed, so Jack decided to push his luck.
"How? My hands are tied." he grinned at the Doctor's exasperated expression.
"I don't know! Play I-spy, sing a song, do whatever you like! Just stop bothering me."
Jack nodded and began to sing under his breath. The Doctor ignored him. Frowning in concentration, Jack raised the volume a little.
"-carrot and coriander chilli chowder! Croutons! Croutons! Crunchy friends of the liquid broth! I like gazpacho oh! I-"
The Doctor opened his eyes and sat up suddenly.
"Got it!" Jack gave him a startled look.
"Got what?"
"Someone told me something important and I think I just remembered what it is!" Jack made a 'well go on' gesture. "D.I. Tyler!"
Listening to the tape, Sam jumped when he heard the Doctor person shout his name. He looked round the office briefly, just in case this was on of those things only he could hear, and caught the Guv's eye, who shrugged. Probably it was. He was pretty sure that none else had heard the 'Soup Song', and 100 certain that no one would recognise it if they had.
Jack frowned, puzzled. "Who's D.I. Tyler?"
"The skinny one. The one who looks like he doesn't get enough sleep." The Doctor got up and began pacing the floor.
"What about him?" Jack sat up, his interest piqued.
"Not sure." The Doctor frowned. "There's something about him."
"If you say so." Jack shrugged.
"He seems out of place. You know who he reminds me of?" he said suddenly, snapping his fingers.
"No?" Jack looked, and sounded bewildered, and the Doctor shrugged apologetically.
"Did Rose ever tell you about the time we went to see her dad?" Jack shook his head. "Well, anyway. This Tyler, he reminds of him. I don't know. It's probably nothing." He shrugged, stopped pacing and sat down again.
"He reminds me of you." Jack said thoughtfully, winning a deliberately neutral expression from the Doctor. "When we first met." Jack elaborated. "I knew there was something odd about you. And Rose. You just looked-"
"Out of place?"
"Out of time. Just wrong, you know? And you sounded wrong. That Tyler, he sticks out a mile. I mean, I don't know much about the Seventies-"
"You're not missing much." The Doctor interjected
"-maybe I'm wrong. But I don't think so." Jack shrugged and stretched out. Then straightened up suddenly. "Do you think Rose is okay?"
"She'll be fine."The Doctor didn't sound 100 convinced. "Rose." he repeated thoughtfully.
"Thinking again?"
"Remember last time we took Rose to see her mum? She was on the phone to some aunt, or somebody-"
"Sister in law." corrected Jack.
"She said Rose's cousin had been in some sort of accident, didn't she?" The Doctor looked questioningly at Jack, who shrugged.
"I think it was a car accident, but what-"
"I'm sure he was called Sam." The Doctor grinned. "Sam Tyler."
Sam sat up straight and reached forwards to the tape machine in one sudden movement. The Guv slapped his hand away from the rewind button, and as Sam stared at him, unnerved, slightly panicked and uncertain he saw his own disbelief reflected in Hunt's eyes. Clearly, he wasn't the only one hearing this. The Guv put a finger to his lips as the tape continued.
"I remember that, didn't she say he was in a coma?" Jack sounded excited, now it looked like they were getting somewhere. Of course where they were getting was another matter entirely. The Doctor grinned again.
"Want to know the weirdest bit?" Jack nodded impatiently "He was a policeman. In Manchester."
"Same age?" asked Jack. The Doctor nodded.
"I think so. Rose said she'd never seen him. It just seems too much of a coincidence. I don't like coincidences."
Jack shook his head. "No. Got any ideas?"
"On what?"
Jack groaned in frustration. "On this whole thing! Come on, you don't think he's really a time traveller, do you?"
The room had gone silent, everybody frozen in position unable to believe what they'd just heard. Sam stared fixedly at the tape machine, hoping that somehow something would begin to make sense.
The Doctor shrugged. "Why not? The question is, who brought him here, and why?"
"And where from." Jack added helpfully.
"If that was him, if he is Rose's cousin then he was in a coma when we left there's no reason not to assume that he was taken from there."
"What, 2006 again?"
There was a crash as Ray accidentally knocked his cup off the desk and failed to retrieve it in time, but Sam didn't hear it. The words that passed between this mysterious 'Doctor' and Jack were spinning round and round in his head. He hadn't imagined it, he wasn't going mad. If he wasn't in a coma, this meant that he might actually get some clue as to what the hell was going on. And if he was, maybe he was about to wake up. He stood quickly and was restrained, none too gently, by Gene's heavy hand on his shoulder. He hadn't even seen him stand up.
"I'm not about to try and stop you, Tyler, I'm not a bloody idiot." Sam nodded at him shortly as Hunt let him go. "But I want to hear what he says."
"Good." Sam snapped, just a little of the stress showing. "Because he's going to talk."
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Short and sweet, this one. Stay tuned for the next instalment, in which we find out what the heck happened to Rose all this time, and Annie has to baby-sit. Apologies for the delay and all that, but Rose is a bit of a pain to write.