Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Chapter 01 – Abandoned

Washington, 2002, after a successful joint operation between the CIA and the Home Office

“The place is clean, sir,” CIA agent Todd Neilson came back to report his boss. “MI5 is currently taking care of the bodies and collecting all the evidence. We’ve been promised copies and photos of everything they might find, but they insist on keeping the original documents and the items.”

Deputy Director C. Eccles Stone shrugged. He was a tall, lean man with short-cropped dark hair, a long nose and somewhat large ears, which earned him a few amused looks from time to time – until somebody looked into his eyes that were pale and cold like blue ice.

“Let them have what they want, as long as we get the copies,” he said. “The action took place in their territory; it’s only fair to humor them a little. This was the largest, most successful offensive against the Toclafane since they first emerged five years ago; worth to endure some British poshness.”

“Some of them still don’t seem to have realized that we’re not their colonies anymore,” Neilson commented dryly. “That old Navy officer behaved as if he could keelhaul us when we disobeyed his orders. And that Holmes woman was even worse.”

“Be careful, Neilson,” the Deputy Director warned him. “That Holmes woman, as you call her, has been ennobled by the Queen for her service as a combat pilot and has the rank of an Air Commodore… plus wide-spread contacts and some very old money. There are families in England you won’t read about in the tabloids but they are quietly powerful in the background and pissing them off would be a really bad idea. We might need to work with the British Secret Service – and with UNIT – in the future yet.”

“Understood, sir,” Agent Neilson paused. “What about Harkness, sir?”

Deputy Director Stone raised a surprised eyebrow. “What about him? Has he been found?”

Neilson nodded. “Yes, sir, in one of the cells.”

“And he’s still breathing?” the Deputy Director seemed decidedly unhappy about that fact.

“Sort of,” Nielson grimaced at the unpleasant memory. “They really did a number on him. Anyone else would have already died – twice – but that bastard is notoriously hard to kill.”

“Like a cockroach,” Stone muttered.

Neilson, very wisely, pretended not to have heard him. “Should I organize transport for him?” he asked instead.

“No,” Stone said slowly, after a lengthy pause. “Even if he survives, he won’t be of much use for us in his current state.”

“But he might speak,” Neilson reminded him. “He knows too much.”

Stone shrugged philosophically. “Don’t we all? Have him placed with the other bodies. By the time MI5 gets to examine them, he’ll be safely dead without medical treatment – and we’ll be spared the effort of eliminating him.”

Agent Neilson nodded in agreement. The former USAF pilot had been useful, but also a major pain in the ass, and his tendency to fuck everything that wasn’t up a tree by the count of three constantly got on everyone’s nerves.

Unfortunately, his usefulness had outweighed the liability created by his promiscuous nature… until now.

“An elegant solution, sir,” he said with a mean little smile.

And with that, the fate of Captain Jack Harkness was sealed – or would have been, had MI5 not taken over the cleaning up of the scene.

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Chapter 02 – Saved By the Bell

London, 2002, after a successful joint operation between the CIA and the Home Office

Luckily for Captain Jack Harkness, the clean-up team was led by Senior Agent Camille Johnson, otherwise known as “that cold bitch”, and Camille Johnson was famous for being mercilessly thorough. Even more fortunate for the abandoned CIA-agent was the fact that the MI5 Deputy Director supervising said clean-up was no lesser person than Commodore Harry Sullivan, a retired Navy officer and battlefield trauma surgeon. Not the youngest man anymore, granted, but one who still had a sharp eye and a steady hand – not to mention a great deal of experience.

He was also a man who’d been drilled never to leave a wounded comrade behind. Therefore when Agent Johnson called him over from the secret headquarters of the eco-terrorists, where the UNIT technicians were taking the computers of the Toclafane apart – in an attempt to find any useful data about further cells of the organisation – and reported him that one of the supposed corpses still seemed to have a pulse, Harry Sullivan grabbed his emergency kit and hurried over.

“Do we know who he is?” he asked, looking down at the bleeding and badly bruised man who was still lying among the dead terrorists.

The man was perhaps in his early to mid-thirties, handsome in that typical, sun-tanned American way that required regular hours spent on the sun-banks and in fitness studios, and with more blinding white teeth than any honest bloke was entitled to have. Still, he didn’t look like the stereotypical gorillas the CIA liked to send abroad to intimidate the locals, and Commodore Sullivan’s experienced eyes recognised some of the apparent laugh lines around his eyes and mouth as well-concealed surgical scars.

He didn’t think that the reason for those would have been mere cosmetic surgery. This man had changed his face at least once. Either because of some extensive damage or for other, more sinister reasons.

Right now, he seemed in a rather sorry shape, though. His dark brown hair was matted with sweat and blood, his blue shirt soaked with it, too… what little of the shirt was still there, that is, because it was torn and even scorched in several places. A black silk scarf was looped around his neck and pulled tightly enough that it would cut off his already laborious breathing.

“We didn’t find any ID on him, sir,” Agent Johnson replied. “He’s apparently been captured and tortured in the basement for information for several days, seeing his condition. I reckon the Toclafane tried to kill him when we made our move, hence the blow to the chest.”

“If he’s one of the CIA agents, he’d have an ID chip,” Private Jenkins, one of the UNIT soldiers, suggested, but Johnson shook her head.

“A CIA agent would have used his cyanide capsule to prevent breaking under torture and giving information. That’s their standard procedure.”

Jenkins shrugged. “Perhaps he didn’t have the time. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to die as long as he still hoped to escape.”

“He will die, though, if the two of you keep blathering instead of helping me,” Sullivan said sharply because the ragged breathing of the unknown man became more laboured by the second; his hands were desperately scrabbling at the dirty floor beneath him. His striking blue eyes were wide with panic as he was straining to pull in air, his wide chest heaving insufficiently. His eyes locked onto Sullivan’s, the relief and fear in them heart-breaking as he struggled to wet his lips.

“No,” Sullivan cut him off in a commanding tone. “Don’t try to speak, my dear chap. Jenkins, help me. We need to move him, so I can get a better look. Sorry, lad, this will be rather unpleasant,” he added apologetically while fisting his hands in the collar of the man’s shirt and dragging him away from the dead bodies, towards the door, so he had room to work.

“Ambulance will be here in fifteen minutes,” Johnson reported.

“Too late,” with Jenkins’ help, Sullivan laid the injured man on the ground in front of the house, so that the ambulance would have immediate access to him, while the man struggled to regain the rough, desperate breathing pattern he’d achieved before being moved. He clearly wasn’t one to give up easily.

Sullivan’s expression was eerily focused, almost blank as he quickly but carefully removed the fine silk scarf that had been pulled too tightly around the man’s neck (with the obvious attempt to suffocating him unless he’d give satisfying answers). That eased the pressure on his throat a little before he would open the area to assessment and pushed the ugly yellow jacket back to expose the horrendously damaged chest.

“Johnson,” the commodore threw a pair of trauma shears at her, his tone command-clipped, authoritative and without the need to actually raise his voice. She automatically reacted to the commanding tone by straightening herself and focusing on the task at hand. Sullivan waved to the injured man’s right side. “I need full view of his chest. Cut the front of the shirt first so I can get in there, then the shirt and jacket sleeves after. Understood?”

“Yes, sir” Johnson replied crisply, donned the gloves with tight, economic movements, then dropped to her knees on the victim's side and began cutting. She was ex-military and an MI5 agent. This was old hat for her.

“Jenkins, take off your jacket and put it under his head. Keep him quiet and get me a heart rate,” Sullivan pushed the blue shirt aside as Johnson finished the centre and moved to the sleeves. Then he fished a torch from his pocket and thrust it at the young soldier. "And hold this so I can see," he added, his eyes never turning away from the exposed chest, cataloguing observations as he carefully pressed along with his hands, looking for broken ribs..

“Yes, sir,” Jenkins folded his military issue jacket and placed it under the injured man’s head like a pillow, then he dropped to his knees on his left side, laying two fingers on his carotid.

“Just keep breathing, mate,” he said, looking down into the panicked eyes in what he hoped was an encouraging manner. “The commodore will get you sorted in no time.”

“Jenkins, the heart rate!” the commodore snapped; Jenkins shut up and began to count.

Johnson, in the meantime, finished with the right sleeve and went to the other side of the victim to do the left one.

“One hundred and thirty,” Jenkins reported a minute later. As a trained field medic himself, he knew that remaining calm and getting out of the doctor’s way was the best thing he could do at the moment, but knowing it and doing it were two very different cups of tea. He was thankful for Agent Johnson’s unshakable presence.

Sullivan acknowledged his report with a brisk nod. His hands kept mapping the badly bruised chest, ignoring the shallow knife wounds and burn marks for the time being. He held both palms flat, measuring the breaths and chest movement on each side. His eyes moved from the man’s face to his throat and chest with the rapid, clinical precision of one who was used to deal with trauma patients under the most unconventional circumstances and was not easily shocked anymore.

Finally, he removed his hands and pursed his lips thoughtfully.

“Johnson, switch places with Jenkins,” he ordered. “I’ll need his help and he’s been trained to assist in such cases. And put your phone to record; the ambulance will need the details.”

Johnson and Jenkins hurriedly switched places. The commodore rummaged through the contents of his emergency kit for the things he needed to deflate the affected chest while recording the facts of his patient’s condition worth the help of Johnson’s phone.

“Patient is male, Caucasian, in his mid-thirties, suffered severe thoracic trauma, was presumably tortured. He shows symptoms of dyspnoea, tachycardia and tachypnoea. Jugular venous pressure is raised. The left chest is hyper-expanded and barely moving with respirations. There’s visible tracheal deviation to the right. Hypoxation is rapidly progressing, with impending cardiopulmonary arrest.”

He finally found what he was looking for and tossed the small packet at Jenkins.

“Give me a betadine scrub here, right between the nipple and the clavicle,” he motioned with a gloved finger along on the left side of the injured man’s chest.

Jenkins acknowledged with a crisp “Yes, sir!”, tore open the pocket and leaned over the patient to begin swabbing the area with the small, pre-wrapped antiseptic pad. He’d never assisted to this particular procedure before, but his field training kicked in as it was supposed to. He knew, at least I theory, why it was necessary. Severe chest trauma was a dangerous thing, a common cause of significant disability and mortality. Death followed quickly a tension pneumothorax without tube thoracostomy.

The commodore now fished a long 14 gauge catheter from his kit, changed his gloves and prepared to do the emergency needle decompression, while the patient was rapidly losing consciousness, his fingers searching for the centre of the left clavicle.

“Steady. Steady, old chap,” he spoke kindly to the injured man who was struggling to stay awake. “You’re not in the red zone yet. Your left lung’s collapsed, and the mediastinal shift to the right is compromising the rate of blood flow back to your heart. Every time you breathe in, more air gets into the pleural space where it has no business to be and from where it can’t escape. You must keep breathing, though,” he added in a warning tone. “Worry you not; it will get easier in a moment.”

He handed the catheter to Jenkins and ordered him to peel open the packaging so he could grab it. The private did so with some reasonable skill.

“Marvellous,” the commodore murmured. “Your first needle decompression?”

Jenkins nodded, and the commodore gave him an appraising look.

“Well done, son. Now, I’ll have to do a needle aspiration at the second intercostal space, mid-clavicular line. Do I have to worry about you fainting in the middle of the procedure? I say, it’s a somewhat disturbing sight.”

Jenkins shook his head. “No, sir, I can do this.”

“Terrific training,” the commodore slid two fingers over the betadine to the mark between his patient’s second and third ribs, his index finger on the third rib while he reached out with his free hand for the catheter. He gripped the top of it as Jenkins expertly peeled the rest of the package away.

“Now, you see, I’ll insert this catheter into the pleural space to allow the excess air to escape…”

With a steady hand, the commodore pushed the needle straight down into the nameless man’s chest, right above the third rib. There was a sudden hiss of air coming from the puncture point, not unlike air being let out of a tire, and the patient’s bright blue eyes, that had fallen shut on their own volition, snapped back open in relief. Some of the tension left his handsome face, and while his breathing was still rough, it seemed to be easing a bit.

“The catheter must be advanced and maintained until further treatment,” Sullivan continued in his pedantic lecture hall tone – he’d held hundreds of training seminars for blossoming field medics during his career – and eased the catheter down until the hub was flush with the patient’s chest wall. Then he removed the needle, wrapped it into the empty packaging with one hand and dropped both into the sharps disposal bag, all the while holding the catheter in place with the thumb and forefinger of his other hand.

Johnson couldn’t help but be impressed with this level of multitasking.

“Say, old chap, can you hold it for me while I anchor it?” the commodore asked Jenkins, who paled a little but nodded nevertheless, refusing to lose his nerves. He was a trained medic, for God’s sake, he could do this! He moved closer to mimic Sullivan’s grip.

“Marvellous, thanks,” Sullivan took some tape from his emergency kit, tore strips of it and taped the catheter to place. “Give me a heart rate,” he then said to Johnson, raising his voice above the wailing of the sirens down the street.

Johnson started to count, ignoring the noise around them.

“One hundred and ten,” she then reported, frowning. “Still a bit high, isn't it?”

“Oh, well, I say it’s still pretty impressive after massive thoracic trauma and emergency needle aspiration,” the commodore replied. “We released the trapped air but couldn’t re-inflate the lung under the conditions we had here. He’ll need a proper chest tube for that,” he smiled down at the patient. “It’s all right, old chap. Don’t worry. I’ll have you in hospital in no time. Honestly, I’m surprised that you haven’t arrested right off. It must have been a massive blow, seeing the injury that it caused.”

The patient’s eyes opened for a moment again. “Cosh… XXL-size…” he whispered almost soundlessly before passing out for good.

“And quite a few other things, I say, by the general condition of him,” the commodore said, snapping off his soiled rubber gloves and putting them into the biohazard bag. “I wonder who he is and why he was left behind… and by whom.

“A quick DNA-test will take care of that,” Johnson said, securing a blood sample while the paramedics lifted the patient onto a gurney and wheeled him into the ambulance car. “Mr Holmes will see to it.”

“I’m positive he will,” Commodore Sullivan had no doubts about that. He knew his godson better than anyone.

“Where shall I send him sir?” Johnson asked. “Whoever wanted to see him dead, that alone might be reason enough to keep him alive, but it won’t be easy. They might make more… direct attempts to finish him, should they find out that he’d come through.”

Sullivan nodded. “I say, you’re right, old girl. I better call my godson about the use of the Infirmary; he’ll be quite safe there.”

Johnson was relieved that the problem had been taken off her hands. For that, she was even willing to forgive the commodore for that annoyingly silly nickname – this time.

And so Sullivan called his godson, the enigmatic Mycroft Holmes, the actual mastermind behind this successful joint action between UNIT, the Secret Service and the CIA, and within ten minutes the nameless man was taken to a place called the Infirmary. A place where wounded agents of the British Secret Service were usually treated. It was small but more secure than any other metal facility in the UK.

He would be safe here until his identity was affirmed.

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Chapter 03 – Confirmed Identity

London, 2002, after a successful joint operation between the CIA and the Home Office

“So, he actually was part of the CIA-team?” Commodore Sullivan stared at his godson with an unhappy frown. “And they just left him behind to die? Didn’t even check if he was dead already or still breathing?”

Mycroft Holmes, impeccably elegant in his pin-striped three-piece suit and more powerful than any mere mortal at the age of thirty-four should be while looking like some minor bureaucrat, shrugged indifferently.

“According to my sources, he has been a thorn in the Deputy Director’s side for quite some time. But given that he worked for the CIA on a freelance basis, they couldn’t exactly fire him. And he’s apparently too wary and too skilled to orchestrate a… and accident for him, as they usually do with people who have become uncomfortable.”

“So they used our joint project to kill two birds with the same stone?” the commodore asked grimly. Mycroft Holmes nodded.

“Yes, obviously. They sent him in half a year ago, under a false name and with a false identity, to infiltrate the Toclafane. Needless to say that they deliberately forgot to inform us about that fact. Well, to his credit, Harkness managed to get in and could keep his cover until two weeks ago. We still don’t know how he was found out, but somehow the Toclafane learned that he was a plant and wanted to find out who’d planted him. When our people stormed their hiding place, they tried to kill him – and his bosses apparently thought that getting rid of him was more important than all the intel he might still have.”

“Oh; I say that wasn’t gallant,” the commodore frowned. “But why would they do that? He must be a first class boffin. No-one has ever managed to infiltrate the Toclafane and gather intel on them for six months.”

“It seems that such results still won’t make up for what Deputy Director Stone sees as an unsavoury character,” Mycroft Holmes replied dryly.

Commodore Sullivan shook his head in bewilderment. “Crickey, what has the chap done to deserve such dismay? Is he a serial killer? A double agent? A professional con man?”

Mycroft Homes shrugged again. “None of those as far as we know. According to his file he was a pilot by the US Air Force and served in the Middle East, among other places. He got an honourable discharge in the rank of a captain after he’d been shot down and couldn’t continue flying, due to his injuries. Soon thereafter he started freelancing for the CIA, as civilian life didn’t seem to suit him.”

“So he’s a war hero and they still tried to get him killed by the Toclafane?” Harry Sullivan asked in bewilderment. “What on Earth was his fault that his own mates wanted him dead so badly?”

“His fault, if you can call it that, seems to have been a strong libido and a tendency to promiscuous behaviour,” Mycroft Homes pulled a vaguely disgusted face. “A behaviour that was neither gender-specific nor restricted to a particular age.”

“What? He molested children?” the commodore was beginning to regret having saved the man’s life.

“On the contrary,” Mycroft Holmes replied with a thin smile. “He appears to have a certain… fondness for mature ladies.”

“Rich ones?” That wouldn’t have been a rare thing, although not a very gallant one, either.

“Oh, no,” Mycroft Holmes said. “My sources say that the only criterion that counts for him is whether they are gorgeous enough,” again, he smiled thinly. “I believe he would get on fabulously with my Aunt Diane.”

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Chapter 04 – Recruited

London, 2002, after a successful joint operation between the CIA and the Home Office

When Jack Harkness was brought out of the medically induced coma two weeks later, he still found himself in considerable pain. Also, he was hooked up to more tubes and machines than he’d ever seen, save for sensationalist hospital series on the telly and could barely move… not that he’d felt like trying anyway.. His throat was horribly sore – small wonder, considering that he’d been choked to the verge of suffocation at least a dozen times – and he was dying from thirst.

“Here, try some ice chips,” a deep female voice said. “And don’t attempt to speak. Your windpipe is as badly bruised as the rest of you, and your vocal cords are still healing.

He felt something cold and metallic – presumably a spoon – nudge his parched lips. He opened his mouth obediently, and in the next moment he could feel the blessed coolness soothing his dry mouth and aching throat.

Opening his eyes, he saw a woman of indefinite age sitting at his bedside. She could have been anything between thirty-five and sixty, and she definitely wasn’t a nurse, seeing that she was wearing an elegant, pin-striped trouser suit with a silk blouse, and there was something in her bearing that practically screamed ‘military’.

There was also a faint residue of cigarette smoke clinging to her, and Jack tried his best not to cough. That would have been painful in his current state of health… or rather the lack of it.

She gave him some more ice chips and smiled. She had a beautiful, slightly mischievous smile like that of a young girl; one that didn’t match either her posh accent or the expressive elegance of her clothing.

“Better?” she asked, and Jack nodded weakly. That seemed to satisfy her, because she smiled at him again. “Welcome back among the living, Captain Harkness. I’m Air Commodore Diane Holmes. Well, I was until recently. Now I’m just a retired old lady, meddling with the affairs of MI5 on my nephew’s behalf, since I seem to have too much spare time and too little to do with it.”

“Your… nephew?” Jack croaked, despite her previous warning not to speak. He needed to know where he was and why he was here.

“Mycroft Holmes,” she explained readily enough while feeding him some more ice chips. “You might have heard of him, although I doubt that your security clearance would have been high enough for that.”

Jack grinned weakly. His security clearance had been practically nonexistent when it came to the people pulling the strings behind the really big anti-terrorist actions, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t get more info than he was entitled to if he put his mind to it. So yes, he had heard of Mycroft Holmes, the Deputy Director’s mysterious contact in nearly all of his dealing with the British Secret Service… but that had been basically it.

There was a file on Mr Holmes in Stone’s safe, of course. A meagre and rather unremarkable file that read like the uneventful career of a minor bureaucrat working directly for and with the British Government. The truth about him was in the double row of codes on the bottom half of the last page; codes representing the various terrorist threats Mr Holmes had helped to neutralise.

Somehow it didn’t seem surprising that the guy would have an aunt who was a retired Air Commodore and clearly enjoyed to meddle with dangerous things in her spare tame.

Then he belatedly realised that the lady had been speaking of his career as a freelance CIA agent in past tense. As something that was well and truly over.

Again, not really surprising. That motherf*cker Stone had left him behind to die, after all.

“What… happens now?” he croaked. It wasn’t the most elaborate question but the lady pilot understood his meaning.

“With you?” she asked back. “Well, that’s your choice, of course. First of all you’ll need to heal. We’ll see into that. Fortunately, you seem to have the constitution of an ox. Doctor Harper says you’ll make a full recovery, though it may take some time. After that? You can return to the States, although that may not be the safest thing for you to do.”

No, it wasn’t, and Jack knew it. Stone would find another way to get rid of him – permanently, this time. He weakly shook his head… and regretted it promptly when a fresh wave of nausea hit him. If one could speak of nausea and fresh in the same context.

“Or you can stay here, since you do have dual citizenship,” the lady continued after he’d finished vomiting. “My team can always use someone of your skills; and freelancers get paid, too. My nephew can deal with the paperwork easily,” she rang the nurse to take the pan away, and then she rose. “Get better, Captain, and don’t worry. This is one of the safest places in England. No-one can get to you without permission. And while you’re recovering, think about my offer. You won’t regret accepting it.”

~The End – for now~