Disclaimer: I don't own what you recognise; the drill should be familiar to you by now
Feedback: I'd appreciate it; I'm trying to do something a bit different here
AN: To confirm in advance, for the moment events for Oswald Danes and the other as-yet-unseen characters are unfolding just as they did in canon; you'll know when things start to change.
AN 2: Minor detail to be addressed here; certain novels- "The Devil Goblins from Neptune" and "The King of Terror" in particular- revealed that the CIA had an anti-alien division run by a man known only as 'Control', who it was suggested had some ties to Gallifrey's Celestial Intervention Agency considering such clues as him never aging between his meetings with the Brigadier in 1970 and 1999. However, since the novels also mentioned that he appeared to be dying of old age by 2003 ("Time Zero"), likely due to the destruction of Gallifrey, I'm going to assume that he's out of the picture by the time these events occurred; the Doctor's only thinking about Control because he doesn't know the man's current status for certain, but there are no plans to include him.
The Age of Paradox 2.5: Miracle Day
"They can't do this!" Gwen said indignantly as the group were led out of the cars at the airport, the TARDIS crew and the former Torchwood staff in handcuffs. "I'm a British citizen on British soil!"
"Me too!" Amy put in.
"You've probably been a bit busy watching aliens," Rhys shook his head. "Fact is that Americans have been getting away with this sort of stuff for years."
"Hey, hey, hey, what's that supposed to be, a criticism?" Agent Matheson put in as he walked up to the group, a smug grin on his face that Gwen wished she could punch off. "What are you gonna do, write to your MP? And you two-" he added, as he removed Jack's vortex manipulator and the Doctor's sonic screwdriver from the respective time-travellers, "I'll take these."
"Those are harmless," the Doctor looked grimly at the CIA agent.
"Then you won't mind me having them."
The Doctor simply glared silently back at Rex as the man walked off with the two objects in his pocket, already judging the extent to which he should dislike this man as the agent began to talk with an unfamiliar Asian-American woman waiting by the plane. He had no obvious reason to regard Rex as an outright enemy, as Rex at least seemed to want to find an explanation for the strange loss of death, but he also had no reason to like the idea of being basically press-ganged like this…
"How's that cut on your arm?" Gwen looked over at Jack.
"I'll survive," Jack said. "I'm mortal, not dying."
"Well, no more than everyone else is at the moment, anyway," the Doctor smiled, before his expression became more solemn. "Which raises the question of whether what's happened to you has a deeper meaning or is just a very unlucky coincidence."
"Why would it be a coincidence?" Gwen asked.
"Why not?" Rhys observed, awkwardly shrugging his shoulders. "We basically just all got switched, right? Nothing to do with Jack if the wires got crossed. Everything mortal becomes immortal, so everything immortal becomes mortal."
"That's… something to consider, certainly," the Doctor nodded, even as he privately doubted that assessment; Jack's immortality went beyond the fact that he healed from everything thrown at him…
"OK, let's go," Rex said as he walked back up to the group from where he had been talking with someone by the plane. "Get 'em on the plane; take the husband back to Wales."
"What?" Amy and Natalie looked at Rhys in surprise as a couple of policemen grabbed him, prompting yells of protest from Gwen in particular.
"What the hell?" the dark-haired Welsh woman finally focused her yells on Agent Matheson. "Where are you taking him?"
"I'm arresting Torchwood," Rex responded. "Is he Torchwood? No; he's a spouse. World War Two's allegedly in charge, you're the second, these guys are claiming bow-tie's the science guy, redhead's his assistant and the woman's the security, but we don't need him and we don't need the baby. Now you go; get out of here."
"Give me my daugh-!" Gwen yelled as another agent took the baby girl out of the car, before Natalie grabbed her arm.
"Don't make this any bigger than it is," she said, looking urgently at her new associate before shooting a glare at Rex. "I'm sure Agent Matheson here is just appreciating this little power trip, but he's not going to actually hurt Rhys."
Rex simply stared at Natalie and Gwen in silence, but the satisfied grin on his face at least suggested that Natalie had made the correct assessment of him.
"I'll look after her," Rhys said, taking the baby girl in his arms as the rest of the group were led onto the plane. Gwen called out a few final words of support for Rhys and condemnation of Agent Matheson's actions before she set foot on the plane itself.
"What about K9?" the Doctor asked, looking over at his immediate guard as he was led to a seat. "And the TARDIS?"
"Tardis?" the agent repeated with a raised eyebrow.
"The blue box."
"Right…" Agent Matheson nodded in response, before he gave the Doctor a nonchalant smile. "Well, you'll be pleased to know that the box is with your dog in the hold with the rest of the luggage; you'll get all your equipment back at the other end."
"Good," the Doctor nodded, even as his mind raced to consider the best way of approaching things once the plane had landed. Whatever his thoughts on Agent Matheson's motives, he didn't have any reason to think that Control was involved with this, but he still couldn't afford to give anyone at the CIA access to the TARDIS interior, even if he needed the TARDIS if he was going to trace whatever had done this to the human race…
"Uh… Doctor?" Amy said as the CIA agents moved away from the group, keeping her voice low as she leaned over to look awkwardly at the Time Lord. "Sorry if this sounds a bit… I mean, if the human race suddenly can't die any more… does that apply to me?"
"Huh?" Gwen looked at Amy in surprise. "Why wouldn't it… you weren't here when the Miracle happened, right?"
"Only got here a few minutes before we met you," Amy nodded tentatively as she kept glancing at the agents up front who were still watching the group cautiously, even if they seemed prepared to dismiss the current talk as unimportant. "I mean, the Doctor and Natalie aren't human, so they're probably not affected by it, and K9's definitely immune, but… would this thing have done anything to me if I missed the moment it all got set off?"
"Good… question," the Doctor nodded thoughtfully. "I mean, it all depends on whether we're dealing with something that had to be triggered at one moment or whether it's caused a continuous effect that affected you once you returned to this time period…"
"If it helps, it looks like it affected me when I wasn't on Earth, but I was still in the same time period-"
"You weren't on Earth?" the Doctor looked sharply at Jack. "What happened?"
"…Things went wrong," Jack said, his tone becoming grimmer as he stared out of the window. "I had to get away for a while."
Nodding in tentative understanding, the Doctor fell into silence himself, exchanging glances with his companion and his daughter even as he kept his fingers crossed, hoping that he hadn't brought up a particularly difficult topic for his old friend.
Until he could get the TARDIS back, he had to work out what was going on with nothing but his own insight, which meant that his biggest question was working out what about this situation could affect Jack specifically. Jack's immortality went beyond the former Time Agent being biologically incapable of dying, and there shouldn't be anything technological that could affect his status as a Fact, but Jack had clearly lost his accelerated healing factor at what was likely the same time as the rest of humanity had lost the ability to die…
"So who are you?"
"Mmm?" the Doctor looked politely up at Agent Matheson as the man took up position sitting against the chair at the end of the Doctor's current row. "I told you, I'm Torchwood's scientific advisor-"
"Who doesn't appear on any of the records my assistant managed to dig up on that organisation, and I can't even trace a damn record for you or your alleged 'security expert'," Rex observed. "And as for your stupid dog-"
"His name is K9."
"Yeah, where the hell did you actually get something like that?"
"If you're still asking that question, you're not ready to hear the answer," the Doctor replied as he settled back into his chair. "I'll let you know when you are."
"Right…" Rex shook his head in exasperation before he turned around and walked into the plane lavatory, evidently giving up on the conversation as unimportant in the current situation, holding a small container in his hands that the Doctor suspected contained some kind of pain medication. Judging by the way Rex was holding a hand over his chest, he guessed that the agent had suffered some kind of injury recently, most likely Miracle-related, that was still causing him some kind of pain, but the Doctor doubted it was anything too serious with the current immortality taken into account.
Which raises the question of how this affects humanity's ability to heal, the Doctor suddenly reflected. Based on what he'd heard so far, the human race hadn't acquired Jack's accelerated healing ability, but even if certain injuries like that suicide bomber Jack had told him about would probably remain permanent, did that mean that comparatively lesser injuries like Agent Matheson's apparent chest wound would eventually get better now that the man wasn't going to die of it?
"…no way of knowing Rex was gonna pull that stunt," Jack was saying to Gwen as the Doctor's attention returned to the current situation.
"But you know the way it works, Jack," Gwen said. "Every time anyone ever gets close to you, nobody has a normal life again."
"He gets that from the Doctor," Amy put in with a tentative smile that made it clear she wasn't sure if what she was about to say would be appreciated. "I met him once when I was seven and things weren't normal even before he came back for me seven years later."
"He came back for you?" Jack looked curiously at her.
"Best day of my life," Amy smiled with a tentative shrug. "I mean, we had to stop the planet being destroyed when the Atraxi came looking for an escaped prisoner and were willing to incinerate us to stop it, but what matters is that we did it, right?"
"Well, OK, so it worked for you and him, but with me and Jack it just… it really pisses me off," Gwen cut in, shooting a brief apologetic look at Amy before turning back to Jack. "What took you so long? I have to nearly explode before you turn up?"
"Did you miss me?" Jack smiled.
"Yes," Gwen conceded automatically, before she looked away with a more solemn expression, Jack sitting beside her in silence until she spoke again. "I… I started to think it'd be like some kind of fairy tale; I'd be an old woman and you'd just turn up out of the blue and visit my granddaughter. I'd be ancient and you'd be exactly the same."
Listening to the story, Amy suddenly wondered if that was going to be her fate some day. She might be committed to staying with the Doctor for the foreseeable future, but she had to recognise that she'd probably have to leave him some day, if only because she was too old to keep up the pace of their lives. After she left, would she keep glimpsing that blue box everywhere she looked? Would she hear that wheezing sound in every backfired car engine? Every unidentified noise?
What happens when you move on from life with the Doctor?
"Where did you go, Jack?" Gwen asked.
"A long way away," Jack replied solemnly.
"And did it help?"
"Hey, lovebirds," Agent Matheson cut in, squatting in the middle of the aisle as he held up Jack's vortex manipulator, "let me ask you a question; what the hell is this thing? All it does is go beep."
"So give it back to me," Jack said.
"And maybe return my… tool?" the Doctor cut in.
"Yeah, I'm sure you'd like that," Rex said, looking dismissively at the Doctor before his attention returned to Jack. "What does it do? Measure how mortal you are?"
"Still don't believe me?" Jack responded.
"Please," Rex chuckled.
"The world's suddenly lost the ability to die, and Jack's crazy because he thinks he can die?" Natalie pointed out.
"Look, talking of the whole problem here, do you actually have a plan for what you're going to do to us when we land?" Amy asked.
"You'll be interrogated."
"You stupid, tiny, bloody little man," Gwen cut in with a bitter glare. "For starters, we don't know anything. And even if we did, why didn't you just ask?"
"Oh, hey, listen, I'm sorry, maybe I didn't explain it earlier," Rex said. "Doctor Smith over there raises a few possibilities, but he's too new to have anything to do with this shit if he's not even on your team records, and the rest of you guys don't exactly strike me as the sharpest tools in the shed. What you are is connected, and someone's made a link between that old Institute of yours and the Miracle, and now they want to kill you for it. So we work out what the connection is, and then we start to solve it."
"And obviously the best way to do that is to take us all the way to America and interrogate us about something we can't know anything definite about rather than leave us in Wales where we'd have access to any of our remaining records and might be able to give you more detailed insight?" the Doctor asked. He might be inclined to think of Agent Matheson as an ally against whatever had caused this mess, but he wasn't a fan of the man's 'this plan works because it's my plan' attitude so far.
"My thoughts exactly," Jack nodded at the Doctor before he turned back to Rex. "And on the topic of what we might or might not know, has anyone done any investigation on morphic fields?"
"On what?" Rex asked.
"The Sheldrake theory," Jack explained nonchalantly. "The passing of connective information through the process of morphic resonance."
"I'm sure it is-" Rex began.
"Is this anything like that theory that if a bunch of monkeys learn something then another bunch of monkeys somewhere else will start doing it?" Amy asked, shrugging slightly as the agent looked sceptically at her. "I read it in a comic book."
"Basically," Jack nodded at her in approval before he looked back at Rex. "The principle might seem like science fiction, but it works because every species is connected through a morphic field."
"You expect me to buy this?" Rex asked with an awkward chuckle.
"We're asking you to consider it," Natalie put in.
"And consider how this affected everyone at the same time," Jack continued. "We have records of the last recorded death taking place at basically the same time on a global scale, and then death stops for everyone, everywhere."
"And that," the Doctor nodded, "is a morphic event on a scale I haven't seen before."
"Oh, and your sodium's low."
"What?" Rex looked at Jack in confusion.
"That bleeping," Jack noted. "It's found low sodium levels in your blood."
"You need salt," Amy grinned.
Rex simply shook his head as he walked away, leaving the mixed Torchwood/TARDIS team to take in the surrounding captors once again. Amy noticed one woman with her head bent over in a manner that suggested she was sending a message, but without knowing more about this team, she couldn't be sure if that was something she should be worried about or just be annoyed that people were still keeping things secret from them.
The Doctor warned me that sometimes local authorities wouldn't like what we were trying to do, but this is going a bit beyond people just panicking in the face of the unknown…