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AN: Just to clarify, for "Torchwood" this takes place shortly before the beginning of "Reset", while Owen's doing the autopsy- at around the same time as Martha showed up in the original episode, actually-; had to relocate the 'when' of those events a bit, but I wanted to explore the consequences of the Doctor and Martha's involvement in this particular crisis (Besides, the dating was confusing enough as it was; I was never entirely certain how long was it meant to have been since the Year That Never Was by the time Martha showed up at Torchwood, beyond the fact that it was long enough for her to finish her courses...)
AN 2: Bonus points to anyone who catches the partial quote from the classical series I included here
Old Faces, New Hopes
Even after he'd received the phone call, Jack was still somewhat stunned about how he was meant to react to this latest twist.
The Doctor was coming here?
After all the crap he'd gone through with Torchwood One when he'd run into them- just because he'd apologised to Jack at their last meeting didn't mean Jack was kidding himself into thinking that he'd completely forgiven Torchwood for what they'd done to him; trusting one person wasn't the same as trusting the group they belonged to-, Jack hadn't been expecting the Doctor to call the Hub directly unless he had to, even after giving the Time Lord his contact details...
So what had happened to change his mind?
More importantly, how was he going to explain this to the rest of his team, given that they were already dealing with enough problems in the form of that 'Meredith Roberts' woman who almost certainly hadn't been killed of a Weevil attack...?
"Jack?" Gwen's voice said from the door of his office, breaking his train of thought and prompting him to look up at her. "Are you all right?"
"Mmm?" Jack said, looking up at Gwen with a reassuring smile. "Yeah, I'm fine; just got a call that we've got a guest on their way."
"A... 'guest'?" Gwen repeated, her confusion evidently increasing as she stared at him. "Who-?"
Further questioning was cut off as the sound of the TARDIS materialising on the main floor of the Hub, prompting Jack to hurry out of his office just in time to see the Police Box he'd spent so long searching for since originally joining Torchwood materialising in the middle of his headquarters, followed by the door opening to reveal the Doctor and Martha standing there with an old woman in the Doctor's arms.
"Ah, Jack, good to see you," the Doctor said, looking up at him with a brief nod before he continued. "I need to borrow a stasis unit for the next few days; what's available?"
"I... what?" Doctor Owen Harper said, looking up sharply from the autopsy he'd been about to conduct at this latest proclamation; Jack vaguely registered Tosh looking at the Doctor in clear uncertainty about how to react to his presence, but otherwise Owen seemed to be dominating the current meeting. "Look, I don't know who you are, and I don't care how you know Jack, but you can't just come waltzing-"
"I'm the Doctor," the Doctor said, turning to stare at Owen with the kind of intensity Jack hadn't seen the Doctor display since his previous body had vowed to rescue Rose from the Dalek Emperor's ship. "Trust me on this, Doctor Owen Harper; when I put my mind to it, there is very little I can't do... and what I want right now is use of your facilities for the next few days while I figure out how to save my friend, is that understood?"
Despite himself, Owen swallowed; he wasn't used to getting stared at with the kind of intensity that was currently being directed at him.
"Uh... right," he said, nodding in awkward confirmation.
"Good," the Doctor said, his glare fading into his usual slightly cheery smile as he glanced over at Jack, he and Gwen having come down to the main floor during the Doctor's brief chat with Owen. "Now then, Captain, if you could show me to your stasis chambers; Leela needs to get on ice as soon as possible."
"Right this way," Jack said, nodding at the Doctor as he turned around and began to walk towards the Hub's cryogenic storage area, the Doctor promptly following him with the old woman.
"So..." Jack said after they were out of earshot from the rest of the Torchwood staff, leaving Martha to answer any questions his team might have, "who's she?"
"An old companion of mine," the Doctor replied as they entered the cryo-chamber, Jack automatically walking over to open the nearest empty chamber he could find, allowing the Doctor to place the woman inside it. For a moment, he simply stood over the woman in silence, a contemplative expression on his face, until he leaned over and planted a brief kiss on her forehead, pulling back to look at her with an almost paternal affection.
"I'll help you, savage," he said simply. "I promise."
With that he shut the cryo-'shelf' and turned to face Jack, resolute once more. "Now then, could you show me to that 'Rift manipulator' thing you mentioned?"
"Hold on; that's the Doctor?" Gwen asked, looking incredulously at Martha. "As in, Jack's Doctor?"
"The one he was looking for, yeah," Martha replied, nodding back at Gwen while ignoring the brief sense of déjà-vu; she might have 're-met' most of the Doctor's past companions during the early Christmas celebrations they'd attended after that whole Titanic mess- they still kept in touch when they could; the age gap between her and most of them made it a bit odd at times when they'd had a few nights out together, particularly since none of them looked like each other enough to be related, but travel with the Doctor tended to reinforce the idea that age wasn't that important-, but meeting the Torchwood team outside of the Himalayas when they didn't remember the aid they'd given her during that year was still slightly unnerving. "And before you ask, if you don't know the answers already I'm not going to give them to you; that's something Jack should tell you himself."
"Cut a man off before he can get started, why don't you...?" Owen muttered, rolling his eyes as he turned back to the body behind them. "Honestly, first interesting bit of work in months, and-"
"Interesting in what way?" Martha asked, turning to look at the body lying on the table in the lowered area behind where the TARDIS had landed that looked like the facility's equivalent of an operating table. The body appeared generally unmarked, but Martha was willing to bet there was something strange about it.
"You mean, aside from the fact that it was found in the presence of a member of a rather ruthless alien race and doesn't appear to have actually been so much as scratched?" Owen answered, his tone making it clear he regarded her as a mere intruder into his domain. "Not much, really; I was just starting the autopsy when you-"
"Don't forget to check the bloodstream," Martha said, walking over to pull on a pair of operating gloves as she studied the body herself, noting a couple of interesting holes. "There's a couple of puncture marks here that look like they've been caused by a hypodermic needle..."
"Needles?" the Doctor's voice suddenly said, prompting Martha and Owen to spin around in surprise to see the Doctor standing above them, his glasses now on his face as he quizzically studied the body before them. "He was injected with something?"
"I was just about to take a closer look at that, actually," Martha replied, briefly pausing as something occurred to her before she looked back at the Time Lord. "Doctor, I know we came here for Leela, but..."
"The body's caught your interest, mmm?" the Doctor said, smiling slightly at Martha with a warm grin before his expression became more serious as he studied the still form on the autopsy table. "Trust me; from what I've heard from here, I wouldn't mind taking a closer look at this particular situation myself- when I'm not working on the Rift manipulator, of course-"
"What?" Toshiko said, turning around and walking away from her monitors to look sharply at the Time Lord incredulously. "You can't; that's-"
"Don't worry, I'm not going to do anything to activate the Manipulator- and I might actually need your help when it comes to that bit; Jack tells me you're the one who did most of the calculations to make that thing-; I just need to refine it to channel a bit of Rift energy to make sure it does what I want it to," the Doctor explained, walking around to stand in front of Toshiko with a reassuring look on his face. "Trust me, I appreciate your concern, but I know what I'm doing; so long as everyone involved is careful, this should work out well..."
For a moment Tosh and the Doctor simply stood in silence, the Asian woman looking reflectively at the man before her as though trying to determine what he was planning to do just from his features, before she finally sighed and nodded.
"Well..." she said at last, shrugging slightly as she looked at the Doctor, "if Doctor Shaw's reports about you were even half true, you probably know what you're doing."
"You read Liz's reports about me?" the Doctor said, suddenly smiling at Tosh with a renewed warmth. "You worked for UNIT?"
"Until they had me locked up after I was forced to steal plans for a sonic modulator to save my mother," Toshiko replied, her tone cold as she stared at the Doctor.
"Ah," the Doctor said, swallowing slightly uncomfortably at this latest news. "If it helps, I haven't really had much contact with UNIT in the last decade or so; I wouldn't have really known anyone involved in that particular state of affairs..."
Before the Doctor could say any more, Tosh simply reached over and patted him lightly on the arm, a reassuring, slightly teasing smile on her face.
"It's fine," she said simply. "Come on; let's get to work."
"And while you're at it, maybe you could see about giving us a tour of this place when we're done?" Martha called over, shrugging on a white lab coat as she turned her attention to the body on the table before her.
"After everything else you've both done for the planet?" Jack said, smiling as he looked between his old friends. "Trust me; there's nothing you could ask for that you wouldn't get- except Ianto, of course; I prefer him where he is."
"It's the coffee," Ianto said, shrugging slightly as the Doctor and Martha glanced over at him where he currently stood near the main door of the Hub, before he turned around and departed the room.
"Coffee?" the Doctor repeated, looking at Jack with a sceptical smile.
"He does make really good coffee," Gwen put in, although the teasing grin on her face made it clear that she knew what the Doctor was really asking.
"Ah," the Doctor said, nodding briefly in understanding before he shrugged and turned back to Tosh, evidently concluding that it was a conversation for another time. "So, getting back on topic, where's this Manipulator of yours?"
A couple of hours later, Martha found the Doctor and Tosh sitting in the Torchwood conference room, going over a wide variety of papers scrawled with all kinds of equations that reminded Martha of some of the physics papers she'd found in the TARDIS library while browsing through it on a few occasions (She'd initially been surprised at the amount of papers present in that area that had been published by a 'Dr. E. Shaw' given that the other names in the collection were people she could at least vaguely remember hearing about, but the later discovery that Elizabeth Shaw had been the Doctor's assistant during his original employment by UNIT had answered that question).
"Going well?" she asked, smiling slightly at her boyfriend- she wished she could come up with a better term for her relationship with the Doctor, but 'boyfriend', for all that it was slightly juvenile, did the job well enough- as he glanced up at her, an enthusiastic grin on his face.
"Brilliantly, thanks," he said, nodding in approval at the young Japanese woman. "Tosh here really knows her stuff; actually, turns out we met in my last body."
"Really?" Martha said, raising her eyebrows as she looked back at Tosh in surprise. "How'd that happen?"
"Oh, Owen was hung over on his first day and I had to cover an alien dissection in his place; the Doctor showed up to take a closer look at the body dressed in leather and with bigger ears and less hair," Tosh replied, a brief smile on her face that both of the other people in the room would bet was caused by the thought of Martha's fellow doctor- although a glance at the Doctor when describing his previous suggested that there was an element of amusement at comparing him to his other self involved as well- before she looked curiously at the other woman. "Talking of Owen, what did the dissection turn up?"
"Not much, unfortunately," Martha said, shrugging as she sat down beside the Doctor. "There were high traces of ammonium hydroxide in his system, but we can't determine much more than that; something seems to have wiped most of his medical records from the NHS."
"Really?" the Doctor said, his curiosity sparked as he looked at Martha. "That's an... odd way to kill, when you think about it."
"And the data crash seemed a bit odd, too; I'm not exactly a computer expert, but it seemed a bit too... specific to be an accident; a whole bunch of files seem to have lost the same bits of information in all kinds of databases," Martha said, looking over at Tosh again. "Actually, Owen suggested we should have you take a look at that later; the data loss looks a bit too exact to be an accident."
"I'll keep that in mind," Tosh replied.
"Thanks," Martha replied, before she turned back to look at the Doctor with a shrug. "Still, the dissection aside, they've really got some interesting stuff in here; Owen showed me some of the alien tech they've salvaged over the years."
"Oh, he showed you that 'singularity scalpel' he's been talking about?" Tosh asked.
"Singularity scalpel?" the Doctor repeated.
"It's this thing Owen discovered recently; it apparently concentrates energy on a fixed point of matter without damaging anything in between," Tosh explained. "He's been working on getting it working, but so far he apparently hasn't had much luck; the last time he tried to destroy a piece of paper in a cup he ended up vaporising something on the next desk over."
"Ah," the Doctor said, before he glanced over Martha's shoulder and noticed something. "Where's everyone else?"
"They left," Martha said. "The computer reported something about another hypodermic attack where the victim survived; Jack thought it would be better to catch up with what she had to say as soon as possible."
"Really?" Tosh said, looking up at Martha, a suddenly hurt expression on her face. "But..."
"He just thought that it would be better to let you focus on the situation here, given that you weren't actually needed out there; it's nothing personal," Martha said, looking reassuringly over at the other woman.
"Oh," Tosh said, simply nodding in response before she turned to the Doctor with a curious smile. "So... how do you know Jack?"
"Mmm?" the Doctor said, looking at Tosh in surprise. "Jack never mentioned that?"
"Apart from once telling Gwen that he was waiting for 'the right sort of Doctor', not really," Tosh replied, shaking her head before she looked between the other two people in the conference room with an eager curiosity. "So, how did you meet him?"
"Ran into him when he tried to con me into buying what he thought was a Chula medical ship back in the Second World War that turned out to not be quite as harmless as he thought it was," the Doctor replied, a slight smile on his face at the memory. "Jack helped me stop a bomb that was going to destroy the ship, and I ended up taking him along with me when his own spaceship was about to explode; he stuck around with me until we... went our separate ways after an incident with an alien invasion, and I didn't see him again until we ran into him here."
Tosh blinked.
"Jack... was conning you?" she asked.
"It was a long time ago by anyone's standards; even before we parted company, he'd come a long way from who he'd been before," the Doctor said, waving a hand reassuringly at Tosh before he turned back to the papers before them. "Anyway, getting back to the matter at hand, based on what you've got here, you've definitely got a good grasp of how to control the Rift; what's needed for this to work is the ability to refine that control by channelling Rift energy into a specific point..."
"Hold on; you need the Rift manipulator to channel the Rift's energy?" Martha asked, looking uncertainly at the Doctor. "I thought you said the TARDIS could use Rift energy for fuel; why don't you just use that if that's what you need?"
"The TARDIS absorbs Rift energy like a dam contains water, really; it absorbs the energy in quantities that are too large for me to use for what I've got in mind," the Doctor explained, tapping a couple of equations thoughtfully with his sonic screwdriver as he studied them. "On the other hand, the Rift Manipulator might be more basic than the TARDIS, but it's also capable of absorbing and channelling Rift energy to a finer degree; by establishing a containment buffer and temporarily reversing the polarity of the rift flow, we should be able to direct that rift energy to restore Leela's cells to their original 'default' age and then restore her traditional aging pattern."
Martha could only blink in astonishment at what the Doctor had just told her; the fact that Tosh appeared equally stunned was only a partial consolation at this point.
He was going to... rejuvenate Leela?
For a moment Martha wasn't sure how to respond to that; the fact that Leela had grown that old on Gallifrey probably had something to do with whatever he was planning, but the idea that he had a means of doing that to anyone...
Martha wasn't sure whether she should be terrified at the idea of that kind of power in anyone's hands or awed at the dedication he'd have to possess to be willing to use that power in this manner for a friend he probably hadn't seen in years-
The sound of the Hub doors opening diverted Martha's thoughts away from that issue and back to the more immediate matter of the case at hand.
Right now, they had a strange death to deal with; her thoughts about the lengths that the Doctor was willing to go to in order to help old friends could wait until later.