Torchhouse (part 1) [ Torchwood/House MD ]
Title: Torchhouse (part 1) (Torchwood/House MD)
Word count: 2,239
Characters: Cameron, Captain Jack, Chase, Cuddy, Foreman, Gwen, House, Ianto, Owen, Tosh, Wilson. Nathan (OC).
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Spoilers: Nothing specific. It’s set outside the canon timeline for “House” and somewhere between episodes 4 and 9 of “Torchwood”.
Disclaimer: As with all fanfiction, this is not-for-profit, just for fun, and all the assorted other words that really mean nothing but look like an attempt.
Author’s note: For
Summary: It starts with a routine investigation by Torchwood and ends up as House’s patient of the week.
September, 2008
Cardiff, Wales, UK
Owen Harper touched his ear and opened the communications link to The Hub. “Lost ‘im in the airport, Jack. I’m sorry,” he panted. He came so close to catching him. His fingers had brushed the back of the boy’s shirt but failed to find purchase as the boy twisted sideways and disappeared.
Literally disappeared. One second there and the next second gone, with not even the popping sound to indicate air rushing in to fill the space where he had been.
“Say that last part again?” Tosh looked up at the screen even though it was only showing the swirling blue screensaver.
“I said there wasn’t even that popping sound you get when something teleports.” He drew another breath and tried to calm himself down. Christ, he wanted a beer. Maybe he could just pop into the Echo…
Jack’s voice put an end to that. “You lost him at the airport, Owen?”
“That’s what I said, yeah. He just vanished.”
Tosh looked over her shoulder at Jack. “Owen said he disappeared. It wasn’t a teleportation. There wasn’t the usual signs of it.”
“No blips, either.” Ianto added. “Teleportation always shows a distinct wave pattern. There was nothing like that anywhere near Owen’s location.”
“So whatever he’s got gives him the power of invisibility. Probably some sort of a cloaking device. Owen, come on back home. Tosh, you keep trying to figure out the signature of the thing. See if we can narrow down the race that built it. That ought to give us an idea of how it operates. It’s got to be small. Something for a ship would be huge. Impossible to carry or at least conceal.” He noticed Gwen’s confused stare and gestured a cube. “A ship’s cloaking device is bigger than a breadbox. Who came up with that as a unit of measure, anyhow? Ianto!”
“Wasn’t me, sir. I’ve always wondered how one would describe a breadbox.” He mimed his own cube. “Hey, this breadbox is the size of a breadbox.”
Jack bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. “Research, Ianto. Find me everything about everything that renders the holder invisible. Invisibility cloaks, rings, charms, potions… anything we’ve got. Gwen, you take the surveillance footage and see if you can get a good shot of our invisible friend. Find out who he is, where he’s from, and why he was running to the airport. Hopefully he hasn’t left Cardiff.”
November, 2008
Torchwood 3
Cardiff, Wales, UKSomething flashed in the corner of Tosh’s main monitor. She glanced over from the secondary monitor where her code was displayed and moved the mouse to the blinking icon. A database alert. She double-clicked and quickly scanned the text. “Jack? Jack!”He looked up from the stack of government reports he was supposed to be reading. “What is it?”“Remember the disappearing guy? He’s turned up.”
Jack was away from his desk and standing behind Tosh in the blink of an eye. “Where?”
Tosh tapped a few keys and pulled up the information. “He’s in hospital. Irregular heartbeat, hallucinations, fever, systemic failure…”
“Which hospital?” Owen joined the two and read through the medical information. “Princeton-Plainsboro? Where the hell’s that?”
“Princeton, New Jersey.”
“America.” Owen grumbled.
Across the room, Ianto turned his headset on and tapped away at his keyboard. He transferred funds from the Torchwood petty cash account to their US bank.
“Ianto. Two tickets to New Jersey. Owen and me.” Jack turned to Tosh. “I want you, Ianto, and Gwen to stay here. Keep an eye on things. The last thing we need is something coming through the rift while no one’s here. I’ll also need you to fake up some records for Owen and our disappearing friend. We’re going to need access to him, so make him Owen’s patient. Put together a medical history for him. Ianto, monitor his current treatment. Make sure they don’t do anything that might lead them to discover the artifact. Gwen, pull the records for for the invisible man and the artifact. I need that on my desk before we leave. Ianto! When are we leaving?”
“four-thirty, sir. That’ll get you there about noon. I’ve flagged your passports and tickets to get you through security and customs without question in case you need to pack anything that might raise suspicions.”
“Good man,” Jack patted Ianto on the shoulder as he passed his desk. Unseen by the other members of Torchwood, Jack’s thumb caressed the nape of Ianto’s neck. Ianto didn’t even crack a smile. Good man, thought Jack. “Go home and pack what you need, Owen. We don’t have a lot of time to waste.”
“It’s like time travel,” Owen said.Jack snapped back into full wakefulness. “What?”Taken aback, Owen leaned away from Jack and repeated himself. “We left at suppertime. We’ll be getting there at lunchtime. It’s like time travel.”Jack regained his composure. “Oh. Yeah. You’re right.”
“When’s the last time you were in the States?”
“A long, long time.” Jack avoided eye contact and fiddled with the buttons on the seat, paging the flight attendant. Ianto had booked them in first class, ensuring maximum comfort and privacy.
The stewardess appeared and smiled warmly. “Gentlemen?”
“I’d like a water, please. Cold, but no ice.”
“Beer, please?”
“Right away, sirs.” She disappeared as silently as she’d arrived.
Jack flipped open the cover of his notebook. They all had PDAs, but he still preferred the paper-and-pen method of note taking. It was more reliable and not likely to fail at a critical moment.
“Nathan Blake. Aged twenty-four. Resident of Rhode Island and a student at Princeton University in New Jersey. He was in Cardiff as part of a graduate program in history. He disappeared, no pun intended, after a visit to Llandaff Cathedral. That’s most likely where he picked up the cloaking device. We picked up his signal when he got back into the city centre. You gave chase and lost him at the airport, where he was probably trying to get home. The cloaking device is most likely Vrubos in origin.”
The two men fell silent as the flight attendant returned with their drinks, then resumed after she had gone.
“Do we have any idea where it is in him?”
“One of his hands. It’s a tiny device. Looks like a sliver of metal, but a scan for metal won’t find it because it’s not terrestrial. He probably thought he just stuck himself and probably activated it accidentally the first time when he touched it. You know how you said he disappeared like that?” Jack snapped his fingers. “It might have actually been that. The snap could trigger the cloaking mechanism.
“The Vruboi are humanoid, which is why the device works for Nathan. Unfortunately humans are not mentally wired for invisibility. The hallucinations and irregular heartbeat are because his mind’s stressing out. The fever and systemic breakdown is his body trying to push out the device. Could also be an allergic reaction to the device. It could be toxic to non-Vruboi.”
Owen consulted his own notes. “Tosh has set me up as his attending physician in Cardiff, and you as the head of his graduate program. I was apparently treating him for headaches and tachycardia before he disappeared. I’ve had no contact with him since he left Wales, and had no idea he was in hospital until a request for his medical records was sent.” He skimmed a few more paragraphs. “A doctor Gregory House has taken him on as a patient. That means he’s been to other doctors who’ve given up trying to diagnose him. This is going to be interesting.”
Princeton, New Jersey, USAForeman read the patient’s history to the diagnostics team. “The patient has been experiencing hallucinations, tachycardia, fever… he’s showing all the signs of having a systemic infection, but hasn’t responded to any antibiotics. His regular doctor even began the standard treatments for early stage Lupus, but he’s shown no improvement.”“That’s because it’s never Lupus. I thought we finally all agreed on that,” House drummed his cane on the floor between his feet and frowned.“He’s frowning,” Cameron remarked.
“He’s interested,” Chase replied.
House ignored them. “What’s the rest of his story?”
Cameron took up the file and flipped back a few pages. “Graduate student in European history. He was in Wales at the start of the semester. His parents say he came home after a few weeks. He says he was in a relationship with another student, then found out she was married and came home because he was afraid of her husband.”
Foreman interrupted before House could ask his usual questions. “The kid is clean. No drug use and no STDs. No poisoning. We even checked for the more unusual heavy metals. He’s scheduled for an MRI later this afternoon, but he’s had that and a CT scan already. We’re doing it again in case they missed something the first time, or there was something too small to see and it’s gotten bigger.”
House glared. “I hate it when you guys do that.” He waved his hand dismissively and slid his chair back. “Go forth and diagnosticize, my children. Come back when you’ve got something more interesting than a hypochondriac paranoid graduate student.”
Lunchtime
Princeton, New Jersey, USAHouse took a bite of his Reuben and turned the pages of Monster Truck Monthly. Stupid Wilson was with a stupid patient so he was forced to eat lunch alone, at his desk.He leaned over and looked out of his office at the conference table. Chase was sitting there, eating his own lunch and flipping through a magazine. House put his magazine aside and checked his email.
YOUR CREDIT CARD IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE! membership@livenudegirls.com
RUSSIAN GIRLS HOT 4 U qwerty@hotrussianbabes.ru
KEEP IT UP FOR HOURS joblo@v1agrav1agrav1agra.net
Please stop surfing porn at work netadmin@ppth.edu
!Patient History: Blake, Nathan K. lisa.cuddy@ppth.edu
The cursor hovered briefly over “Russian girls”, then dipped to the email from Cuddy. Sometimes the mystery was more important than the pornography. Not that he’d ever admit that out loud.
To: greg.house@ppth.edu
From: lisa.cuddy@ppth.edu
Subject: !Patient History: Blake, Nathan K.
Date: November 11, 2008, 11:30 AMHouse,Blake’s doctor and graduate director are arriving from Cardiff this afternoon. PLEASE don’t start an international incident! Allow them access to the patient and keep them in the loop as far as treatments. Please. Please?!
Cuddy
Files attached: 001-214-44blakenathank.pdf
House clicked back to his inbox and selected the membership email.
He was filling in his information when Cameron knocked on the doorframe. “House? Nathan’s doctor is here.”
“I thought I was Nathan’s doctor?”
“His other one. The one from his graduate program? Cuddy said she emailed you about this.”
“She did. I don’t care. He’s my patient and whatever country doctor he was seeing before me can just go sit in the waiting room with his parents. Where’s Cardiff, anyhow?”
“It’s in Wales.”
House looked up at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. The man standing next to Cameron was tall, good looking, and dressed in a pseudo-retro military style. Cameron looked smitten. House scowled.
“You don’t sound Welsh.”
“I’m not. I’m American. Jack Harkness, head of the Cardiff university history graduate program. This is Doctor Owen Harper, Nathan’s physician.”
House’s eyes narrowed. Doctor Harper’s eyes narrowed. House crossed his arms. Doctor Harper crossed his. Cameron rolled her eyes. “They could be at this for hours,” she said as she lightly touched Jack’s arm. “Can I get you a coffee, mister Harkness?”
“Jack, please. And I’d love some.” He followed her to the coffee maker, leaving Owen and Doctor House to glower.
“So you’re his doctor,” Owen said.
“Better me than you, considering you couldn’t even keep track of him. You apparently didn’t even know he was back in the US.”
Owen shrugged “Students. Who can keep up with them? It’s not like I was tethered to him. I’d like to see him, if you don’t mind.”
“I mind.”
“House!” Cameron shouted from the other room. “Be nice!”
House let out a weary sigh and shrugged. “Women.”
Owen nodded. “She one of those ’sunshine and puppies’ and ‘remember he’s a person not a problem’ types?”
“I see you’ve met Cameron,” House stood and picked up his cane.
“Someone like her, yeah.” To Owen’s credit, he didn’t acknowledge House’s cane. He just took a step back to allow the other doctor to pass him, then followed him out of his office and into the hallway.
They stopped just outside the patient’s door. “So what’s so important about our boy that you and Captain America had to fly all the way across the Atlantic?”Owen gave a non-committal shrug. “We’re a small group. Dedicated to the security and comfort of our students. One of them goes missing and ends up in hospital, we like to check up on them. Make sure they’re alright. Find out if they’re coming back to Cardiff.”House’s cane shot out and blocked Owen before he could cross into Nathan’s room. “It took you over a month to realise he wasn’t there.”"Well, we’re not that small. There are other students. It’s independent study, so we can’t keep an eye on everyone.”
“I don’t know when I’ve ever heard such utter bullshit in my life.” House lowered his cane. “Go in. But don’t touch him. Don’t touch any of the equipment. Don’t do anything to my patient.
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