Special Unit 3 - Part 2 of 9
Aug. 10th, 2009 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wiseheartTitle: SPECIAL UNIT 3
Author: Soledad
Fandom: Torchwood/Special Unit 2 x-over, with a guest appearance of the Tenth Doctor.
Category: Heavy-duty Gwen bashing and a great deal of silliness.
Rating: G, suitable for all, with the exception of die-hard Gwackers.
Genre: Crackfic, with gender bending, body swap, whatever – the whole nine miles.
Series: none
Timeframe: indefinite. Perhaps “Sleepers”, from Series 2 for Torchwood, but not necessarily.
Summary: Once again, Gwen fumbles around with something she was told not to touch. The consequences are…unusual.
Disclaimer: the usual: don’t own, don’t sue! Everything belongs to RTD and BBC - and UPN, respectively.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
PART TWO: RUDE AWAKENINGS
Author’s notes:
You are free to guess what has happened to our heroes – although it will all be revealed in the next part. *g*
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Jack Harkness came to in his office with a heartfelt groan. Every single bone in his body hurt; and he had the feeling that even his bruises had bruised. That answered one question, though: he most definitely had not died in this particular case… whatever it might have been. Had he died, he’d be weak and disoriented for a few minutes, but he wouldn’t hurt after that. And he was hurting like hell, right now – although he couldn’t for the immortal life of his, explain why. He had absolutely no memory of what had happened to him.
Deciding that if anyone, Ianto would be able to give him an answer – after all, didn’t he always know everything that happened in the Hub, a hundred times better than Jack himself, who lived there? – Jack touched his headset to activate it… and froze in shock. He couldn’t feel the contact on his fingertips. Hell, he couldn’t feel anything with his hand!
Thinking that it might have gone numb by some sort of nerve damage, he carefully extended the hand… and froze again. The first thing he could see was the sleeve of a drab, dark suit jacket – which was ridiculous. He’d never worn a suit in his unnaturally long life. Uniforms, yes, black leather, for sure, but never a suit. That was Ianto’s idea of proper clothing – and Ianto did look good in them. Good enough to eat, in fact.
Sternly ordering his lewd thoughts into the back of his mind for later use, Jack gave his strangely nerveless hand a good, hard look… and got the third shock within five minutes. The appendage he was staring at was definitely an artificial one. A prosthetic hand, made by some unfamiliar technology.
It was also clearly black. What the hell had happened to him?
He held up his other hand, the real one. It was also dark-skinned, as dark as or even darker than Detective Swanson’s. Had he made a trip into the far future and been given transplants for some unknown reason?
Well, he decided, let’s deal with first things first. Using his other hand, he activated his headset.
“Ianto? Come to my office, we’re having a problem.”
Hearing his own voice, he froze again. It sounded deep and harsh… completely unfamiliar to him.
What the hell had happened here?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Jack’s call reached Ianto in the depth of the Archives, where he was about to put the alien artefacts previously collected into storage. He felt strangely disoriented and had absolutely no memory of what might have happened to him… and why he was lying on the cold concrete floor.
Not to mention the debilitating pain that was practically saturating every cell in his body. He hadn’t hurt so badly since his encounter with the cannibals in the Brecon Beacons, about a year earlier. But he hadn’t even left the Hub, had he? The artefacts were still in the box where he’d put them… how long ago exactly?
He reached into his pocket for the stopwatch to check the time – and his hand touched well-worn denim instead of the usual coarse wool of his suit trousers. And the stopwatch was gone.
What the hell…?
Or had he accidentally put it into one of his suit jacket pockets? Still a little dizzy, he patted down his jacket – and froze with shock as he realized that he wasn’t wearing a jacket at all. Or a vest. Or one of his trademark dress shirts and ties, either.
Instead, he was wearing a tank top, made of some way too clingy and elastic fabric. A tank top that was short enough to reveal his navel.
Plus, he seemed to have grown a pair of breasts since coming down to the Archives. How on Earth...?
He patted down his chest again, praying that he’d been hallucinating a moment earlier, but there could be no doubt: he had breasts now. Small, perky ones as usually slim, flat-chested women had them, but definitely breasts. Pushed up by a cleverly-made bra and boldly displayed through the generous cleavage of his tank top, at that.
He sat there for a moment, trying to recover from his shock. This was impossible. Gender-bending only happened in really cheesy sci-fi shows, never in reality. Not even in Torchwood reality, which, admittedly, was a rather unusual one, what with Jack’s perpetual deaths and resurrections, and the Doctor regenerating in a whole new shape (and personality) every time he got killed.
But even the Doctor came back as a male entity every time; and as for Jack, he just remained the same. Gender-swap was not part of their repertoire.
Speaking of Jack… he was still calling for him through the headset. Ianto looked around for the thing. It was lying on the floor, not so far away from him; he’d most likely lost it when collapsing. He reached out for it, only to find that his arm was not long enough anymore to get it. Apparently, the breasts didn’t represent the only changes in his body structure.
He stared down at his hands. They were still shapely and long-fingered, but definitely female hands – and God forgave him, he was wearing nail polish now! A further look down himself revealed that he now possessed endless (and rather well-formed) legs, and that the denim he’d felt before was an extremely short rock, displaying said legs in the most complimenting manner.
His feet, too, were smaller and more narrow, and every hope that this new, female version of him would at least have the common sense to wear sensitive shoes fled when he saw the knee-high boots with their high heels. How was he supposed to climb the spiral staircases of the Hub in those without breaking his neck? Really, the higher powers could have shown at least some small mercies!
Although Jack probably would appreciate the sight, he though sourly.
That reminded him that he still hadn’t answered Jack’s call. Getting the headset, he put it on and activated it.
“Sorry, sir, I was out like a light for some time,” he began; then he stopped, shocked again by the feminine pitch of his voice. It was a low, husky voice for a woman, but definitely a feminine one. He should have suspected it would change, too, really, after the breasts and hands and endless legs and all that, but… well, how could a man seriously think about such things, without freaking out completely?
“Ianto?” Jack was shouting at him through the headset frantically. “Ianto, is that you? What happened to your voice? Are you all right?”
If he thought about it, Jack didn’t sound exactly like himself, either. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one affected by… well, whatever it was that happened.
Deepening his voice as much as he could without sounding like a vamp from some cheap porn movie, he interrupted Jack’s frantic questions.
“Sir… Jack, I don’t think we should discuss this per interlink. I’ll come up to your office as soon as I’ve checked with Tosh. Perhaps the CCTV footage can tell us what’s happened here.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Falling asleep on her own desk had been a stupid thing to do, Tosh decided, while trying to work the worst kinks out of her neck and back. Even though she’d done so involuntarily. A quick glance at the computer screen reassured her that she hadn’t accidentally deleted the programme she’d been working on for so long. That was a relief – starting everything again from square one, for the third time, would have been a killer. It was bad enough that Gwen and Owen had ruined his entire work during one of their stupid little mating dances.
Suppressing her old pain about their affair – and their behaviour towards her, especially Owen’s, who actually counted – she glanced at the screen one more time to see how long she’s slept. She was surprised to see that it had only been twenty-three minutes. She felt as if she’d spent days crunched over her desk in a most uncomfortable position. In fact, she felt as if she’d spent said days on one of those medieval torture benches where they’d stretched the unfortunate suspects to force a confession out of them, whether they were guilty or not. How could she have ruined her back so completely in a mere twenty-three minutes? She was not so old yet, for God’s sake!
Thinking of it, her back wasn’t the only thing that hurt. She hurt everywhere, as if someone had beaten her up – which was ridiculous, wasn’t it? It couldn’t have happened in those twenty-three minutes, within which she didn’t even leave the Hub, could it? Unless there had been some freaky dimensional shift or whatnot, and she’d fought a war in a parallel dimension. Or took part in mud-wrestling. With Torchwood, one could never really know.
“This job is driving me crazy,” she told the universe in general – and froze in shock, hearing the geeky male voice coming from her mouth. What the hell…?
She jumped to her feet – and promptly hit her head in one of the vertical concrete beams that ran directly above her workstation. But how? She’d been working here for years and never bumped against that dratted thing. It was weird – unless she’d grown at least a foot in the last twenty-three minutes.
Being the research girl that she was, she decided to seek affirmation, no matter what she might find. Everything was better than not knowing. With uncertain steps, trying to get in synch with the obviously changed proportions of her body, she went to the washroom – the only place within Torchwood with a proper, full-body mirror.
The image said mirror showed her was that of a lanky, dark-eyed Caucasian man, with a rather unattractive horse-face and short-cropped dark hair, wearing a white lab coat over grey trousers and a fairly tasteless T-shirt. He also had feet of the size of rowing boats.
Tosh collapsed on the floor, breaking down in tears. This was not fair! This was so not fair! As if being ignored by everyone wouldn’t have been bad enough, she was now an ugly male geek, too!
She didn’t know how long she sat there, sobbing, when she heard the clicking of high heels beyond her. Looking up, she saw a tall, gorgeous blonde woman, wearing knee-high boots, an extremely short denim skirt and a tank top that left nothing to imagination. A long coat in leopard-look completed the image of an aspiring movie star.
“T-tosh?” the woman asked uncertainly, and there was something achingly familiar in her husky voice.
“Ianto?” she asked tentatively, and the woman nodded in defeat.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
~ game over ~ game over ~ game over ~ game over ~
The sign blinked on Owen’s computer screen tirelessly. It was perhaps that stubborn flashing that woke him from his sleep… coma… unconsciousness… whatever. A bleary look at the screen told him that he’d lost the endgame, which was annoying enough, after such an excellent series of wins, but didn’t explain why he was feeling like shit.
Like after an entire night spent in seedy bars, actually, including indecent amounts of booze and getting beaten up by at least three jealous boyfriends whose girls he’d seduced. Which he hadn’t, not this time. He’d been hanging around in the Hub, bored to death, playing computer games against the boredom. Hadn’t he?
He shook his head in confusion – and was shocked by the long, honey blonde tresses flying around his face. Had someone glued a blonde wig onto his head while he’d been out? He wouldn’t put such a silly, infantile joke beyond Gwen – it was definitely her crappy idea of fun.
Owen conveniently forgot the fact how often he’d been part of Gwen’s juvenile pranks, in order to get into her pants easier. Not that it would ever have been such a complicated task. She was always ready (and willing), just like the bloody boy scouts. Or girl scouts. Whatever.
In any case, the stupid wig needed to be gone. He’d give Gwen a piece of his mind later. Privately. By pizza and beer, perhaps. In his own place.
Groaning with pain, Owen rose from his workstation – and fell promptly onto his arse. In that undignified position his knees came into view, and while they were clad in blue denim, as expected, something seemed… odd about them. They were a lot less knobbly than usual, and the jeans, too, were different. Fitted, of a much softer fabric than his usual gear… almost feminine. The legs within those jeans seamed longer and ended in narrow feet, which were put in nice little leather shoes with three-inch heels.
Which explained the falling onto his arse part, but not the rest of it. After all, he’d never in his life worn shoes with three-inch-heels. Ever. He wasn’t a fag. Okay, he sometimes did get close and personal with a guy, just for the change of scenery, but he wasn’t one of those neutered blokes who’d dress up like women, was he?
That reminded him of the stupid wig, and without any further attempt to get up, he began to tear at it with both hands, trying to get it off. To his unpleasant surprise, it hurt like a bitch – what sort of industrial strength glue had Gwen used? The stupid cow, couldn’t she even get her idiotic practical jokes right?
After several extremely painful moments of frantic tugging and tearing, the only result was a terribly burning scalp. The long blonde hair stayed firmly attached to where it had been, save from the handful that he’d managed to tear out… and boy, had that hurt!
Actually, it had hurt a lot more than it ought to be when one was trying to remove a glued-on wig. Granted, he’d never had a wig glued on before, but this… this had felt as if he’d indeed torn out his hair for real. What if…
Nah, he refused that idea at once. Snipped it in the bud. Such things didn’t happen, not even at Torchwood. People didn’t grow long blonde hair in twenty minutes or so. Nope, it was just not possible. All he needed to do was to get to the CCTV monitoring station and check out what had happened tin the Hub while he was out. Yep, that’s what he’d do.
He clambered onto his feet, mindful of the stupid shoes Gwen must have managed to put on him somehow and meandered over to said station. The screen was blank; all he could see on it was his mirror image.
Or, to be more accurate, the image of a gently beautiful blonde woman, whose smooth forehead was creased into his customary frown.
Seeing that image, Dr. Owen Harper passed out a second time.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Andy Davidson woke up in the tourist information office with the mother of all headaches… although his head wasn’t the only thing that hurt. He felt like on that day, more than a year and a half ago, when he and Gwen had been sent to break up a bar brawl. Gwen, of course, had screwed up, as usual, getting herself knocked out in the first minute, and Andy had suddenly found himself between the two hostile groups, both equally pissed off at the police for interfering.
He’d been sent on a week of sick leave afterwards, for his bruises to heal. And when he’d come back to work, Gwen had already been gone, without a word. Had joined Torchwood. Had been shown off her secret agent stuff ever since, all posh, as if she’d been his boss now.
No, Andy didn’t miss Gwen at all. He was all too happy to have a new, reliable partner who didn’t get him in trouble twice a week done to sheer stupidity and by constantly disobeying orders. But he’d promised Rhys, who was a decent bloke, to keep an eye on his wife-to-be – and God knew did she need surveillance! – and now there he was, in the bleak little tourist shop where he’d seen Gwen go in many times… but never come out.
Apparently, the shop was abandoned, so Andy switched into cop mode and started looking around for any clues for the whereabouts of the owners. And that was when he realised what had been bothered him ever since he’d come to.
He’d fallen asleep… passed out… whatever, in the tourist office. Where he woke up was a dry cleaner service – plus, his uniform was gone, too. What had those Torchwood types done with him? Kidnapped him? Shut him away amidst of a lot of recently cleaned coats? But how had they managed to do that, and, before all else, why?
He gave the room a thorough investigation but didn’t find anything suspect. By all means and purposes, it was a dry cleaner’s… albeit a very small one. The only thing that puzzled him was a button, hidden below the counter. It didn’t look like a police alarm button, so what could it be?
Deciding that nothing dared nothing gained, Andy pressed the button.
In that instant, the front door of the shop fell shut, and simultaneously, part of the wall on the right opened up, revealing a hidden corridor behind. A secret door! Now that was more like it. Quickly, Andy jumped to the previously unseen door and slipped through before it could close, too.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The blearing of the alarms lured Tosh and Ianto, both moving rather awkwardly in their new, unfamiliar bodies, out of the washroom. Moving around wasn’t an easy thing, even though Ianto solved part of the problem by pulling off the life-threatening boots and going barefoot. He’d fetch his extra shoes, the ones he kept in his locker for emergency cases, later.
“You’re ungrateful, really,” Tosh said, hating the sound of her new, geeky voice as she spoke. “Were I still a woman, I’d kill for a pair of boots like these; they’re gorgeous and must have cost a fortune.”
“You still are a woman,” Ianto replied, his low, husky voice disturbingly sexy, even in his own ears. “You’re just stuck in a male body, that’s all.”
“And what an ugly one it is!” Tosh complained. “How comes that the changes turned you into a femme fatale, while I get to be the nerd with no life again? An ugly, male nerd at that? It’s not fair!”
“Let’s hope it’s only temporarily,” Ianto said. “I’ll happily give you the boots as a gift if I can get back my suits… and the proper body parts again.”
“Well, you’re a lucky dog in that you look gorgeous, both as a man and as a woman,” a deep, unfamiliar voice said from the direction of Jack’s office.
Looking up, they spotted a large, middle-aged, portly black man, with his grey hair cropped so short he almost seemed bald. He had a thick moustache, too, and an apparently prosthetic hand. He was wearing a dark grey suit – not a particularly elegant one, but a suit nonetheless, which was impossible. Jack would never…
“Jack?” Ianto asked tentatively, and the stranger nodded.
“In the flesh… although not in my own flesh, it seems. Do you have any idea what’s happened here?”
“Nope, Tosh and I were just about to check the CCTV when the alarm sounded.”
“So this is Tosh?” the not-quite-Jack shook his head in disbelief. “She isn’t even Japanese anymore!”
“Neither are you still white… nor even close to handsome,” Ianto pointed out mercilessly. Jack nodded.
“Touché. At least I’m still a man. Although,” he added, giving Ianto’s new body a thorough once-over that would have been declared indecent in a dozen or so countries, “I do like the legs. And the tits. And your arse looks particularly gorgeous in that skin-tight mini skirt.”
“Careful, sir,” Ianto warned, “that’s harassment.
Even Tosh laughed at that overused phrase, the oldest insider joke of Torchwood. Everyone knew that Ianto didn’t mind being “harassed” by his boss the least. On the contrary.
“So,” Jack then said. “I’m here, you’re here, and Tosh is here. Where are the others? And who might want to visit us at this highly inconvenient time?”
“That would be PC Andy,” Ianto replied. “He was looking for Gwen in the tourist office when… well, when whatever this is happened.”
But when the cog door rolled aside, it wasn’t the lanky, uniformed, straw-headed figure of Andy that appeared. The man who’d come was about his age, but a head shorter, darkly handsome and wearing casual clothes. His brown hair was gelled up, and he had a five-hour shadow that made his face even more attractive.
“Why hello!” Jack whistled. “Not all the changes were for the worse, I see.”
Ianto shook his head in exasperation. “You’re hopeless, Jack. Can you control your libido until we find out what’s going on?”
“You’re no fun at all,” Jack pouted, which looked rather… strange on his new face, but let himself be shepherded into the main Hub area without further protests.
Part 03: So, What the Hell Happened to Us?
Author: Soledad
Fandom: Torchwood/Special Unit 2 x-over, with a guest appearance of the Tenth Doctor.
Category: Heavy-duty Gwen bashing and a great deal of silliness.
Rating: G, suitable for all, with the exception of die-hard Gwackers.
Genre: Crackfic, with gender bending, body swap, whatever – the whole nine miles.
Series: none
Timeframe: indefinite. Perhaps “Sleepers”, from Series 2 for Torchwood, but not necessarily.
Summary: Once again, Gwen fumbles around with something she was told not to touch. The consequences are…unusual.
Disclaimer: the usual: don’t own, don’t sue! Everything belongs to RTD and BBC - and UPN, respectively.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
PART TWO: RUDE AWAKENINGS
Author’s notes:
You are free to guess what has happened to our heroes – although it will all be revealed in the next part. *g*
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Jack Harkness came to in his office with a heartfelt groan. Every single bone in his body hurt; and he had the feeling that even his bruises had bruised. That answered one question, though: he most definitely had not died in this particular case… whatever it might have been. Had he died, he’d be weak and disoriented for a few minutes, but he wouldn’t hurt after that. And he was hurting like hell, right now – although he couldn’t for the immortal life of his, explain why. He had absolutely no memory of what had happened to him.
Deciding that if anyone, Ianto would be able to give him an answer – after all, didn’t he always know everything that happened in the Hub, a hundred times better than Jack himself, who lived there? – Jack touched his headset to activate it… and froze in shock. He couldn’t feel the contact on his fingertips. Hell, he couldn’t feel anything with his hand!
Thinking that it might have gone numb by some sort of nerve damage, he carefully extended the hand… and froze again. The first thing he could see was the sleeve of a drab, dark suit jacket – which was ridiculous. He’d never worn a suit in his unnaturally long life. Uniforms, yes, black leather, for sure, but never a suit. That was Ianto’s idea of proper clothing – and Ianto did look good in them. Good enough to eat, in fact.
Sternly ordering his lewd thoughts into the back of his mind for later use, Jack gave his strangely nerveless hand a good, hard look… and got the third shock within five minutes. The appendage he was staring at was definitely an artificial one. A prosthetic hand, made by some unfamiliar technology.
It was also clearly black. What the hell had happened to him?
He held up his other hand, the real one. It was also dark-skinned, as dark as or even darker than Detective Swanson’s. Had he made a trip into the far future and been given transplants for some unknown reason?
Well, he decided, let’s deal with first things first. Using his other hand, he activated his headset.
“Ianto? Come to my office, we’re having a problem.”
Hearing his own voice, he froze again. It sounded deep and harsh… completely unfamiliar to him.
What the hell had happened here?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Jack’s call reached Ianto in the depth of the Archives, where he was about to put the alien artefacts previously collected into storage. He felt strangely disoriented and had absolutely no memory of what might have happened to him… and why he was lying on the cold concrete floor.
Not to mention the debilitating pain that was practically saturating every cell in his body. He hadn’t hurt so badly since his encounter with the cannibals in the Brecon Beacons, about a year earlier. But he hadn’t even left the Hub, had he? The artefacts were still in the box where he’d put them… how long ago exactly?
He reached into his pocket for the stopwatch to check the time – and his hand touched well-worn denim instead of the usual coarse wool of his suit trousers. And the stopwatch was gone.
What the hell…?
Or had he accidentally put it into one of his suit jacket pockets? Still a little dizzy, he patted down his jacket – and froze with shock as he realized that he wasn’t wearing a jacket at all. Or a vest. Or one of his trademark dress shirts and ties, either.
Instead, he was wearing a tank top, made of some way too clingy and elastic fabric. A tank top that was short enough to reveal his navel.
Plus, he seemed to have grown a pair of breasts since coming down to the Archives. How on Earth...?
He patted down his chest again, praying that he’d been hallucinating a moment earlier, but there could be no doubt: he had breasts now. Small, perky ones as usually slim, flat-chested women had them, but definitely breasts. Pushed up by a cleverly-made bra and boldly displayed through the generous cleavage of his tank top, at that.
He sat there for a moment, trying to recover from his shock. This was impossible. Gender-bending only happened in really cheesy sci-fi shows, never in reality. Not even in Torchwood reality, which, admittedly, was a rather unusual one, what with Jack’s perpetual deaths and resurrections, and the Doctor regenerating in a whole new shape (and personality) every time he got killed.
But even the Doctor came back as a male entity every time; and as for Jack, he just remained the same. Gender-swap was not part of their repertoire.
Speaking of Jack… he was still calling for him through the headset. Ianto looked around for the thing. It was lying on the floor, not so far away from him; he’d most likely lost it when collapsing. He reached out for it, only to find that his arm was not long enough anymore to get it. Apparently, the breasts didn’t represent the only changes in his body structure.
He stared down at his hands. They were still shapely and long-fingered, but definitely female hands – and God forgave him, he was wearing nail polish now! A further look down himself revealed that he now possessed endless (and rather well-formed) legs, and that the denim he’d felt before was an extremely short rock, displaying said legs in the most complimenting manner.
His feet, too, were smaller and more narrow, and every hope that this new, female version of him would at least have the common sense to wear sensitive shoes fled when he saw the knee-high boots with their high heels. How was he supposed to climb the spiral staircases of the Hub in those without breaking his neck? Really, the higher powers could have shown at least some small mercies!
Although Jack probably would appreciate the sight, he though sourly.
That reminded him that he still hadn’t answered Jack’s call. Getting the headset, he put it on and activated it.
“Sorry, sir, I was out like a light for some time,” he began; then he stopped, shocked again by the feminine pitch of his voice. It was a low, husky voice for a woman, but definitely a feminine one. He should have suspected it would change, too, really, after the breasts and hands and endless legs and all that, but… well, how could a man seriously think about such things, without freaking out completely?
“Ianto?” Jack was shouting at him through the headset frantically. “Ianto, is that you? What happened to your voice? Are you all right?”
If he thought about it, Jack didn’t sound exactly like himself, either. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one affected by… well, whatever it was that happened.
Deepening his voice as much as he could without sounding like a vamp from some cheap porn movie, he interrupted Jack’s frantic questions.
“Sir… Jack, I don’t think we should discuss this per interlink. I’ll come up to your office as soon as I’ve checked with Tosh. Perhaps the CCTV footage can tell us what’s happened here.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Falling asleep on her own desk had been a stupid thing to do, Tosh decided, while trying to work the worst kinks out of her neck and back. Even though she’d done so involuntarily. A quick glance at the computer screen reassured her that she hadn’t accidentally deleted the programme she’d been working on for so long. That was a relief – starting everything again from square one, for the third time, would have been a killer. It was bad enough that Gwen and Owen had ruined his entire work during one of their stupid little mating dances.
Suppressing her old pain about their affair – and their behaviour towards her, especially Owen’s, who actually counted – she glanced at the screen one more time to see how long she’s slept. She was surprised to see that it had only been twenty-three minutes. She felt as if she’d spent days crunched over her desk in a most uncomfortable position. In fact, she felt as if she’d spent said days on one of those medieval torture benches where they’d stretched the unfortunate suspects to force a confession out of them, whether they were guilty or not. How could she have ruined her back so completely in a mere twenty-three minutes? She was not so old yet, for God’s sake!
Thinking of it, her back wasn’t the only thing that hurt. She hurt everywhere, as if someone had beaten her up – which was ridiculous, wasn’t it? It couldn’t have happened in those twenty-three minutes, within which she didn’t even leave the Hub, could it? Unless there had been some freaky dimensional shift or whatnot, and she’d fought a war in a parallel dimension. Or took part in mud-wrestling. With Torchwood, one could never really know.
“This job is driving me crazy,” she told the universe in general – and froze in shock, hearing the geeky male voice coming from her mouth. What the hell…?
She jumped to her feet – and promptly hit her head in one of the vertical concrete beams that ran directly above her workstation. But how? She’d been working here for years and never bumped against that dratted thing. It was weird – unless she’d grown at least a foot in the last twenty-three minutes.
Being the research girl that she was, she decided to seek affirmation, no matter what she might find. Everything was better than not knowing. With uncertain steps, trying to get in synch with the obviously changed proportions of her body, she went to the washroom – the only place within Torchwood with a proper, full-body mirror.
The image said mirror showed her was that of a lanky, dark-eyed Caucasian man, with a rather unattractive horse-face and short-cropped dark hair, wearing a white lab coat over grey trousers and a fairly tasteless T-shirt. He also had feet of the size of rowing boats.
Tosh collapsed on the floor, breaking down in tears. This was not fair! This was so not fair! As if being ignored by everyone wouldn’t have been bad enough, she was now an ugly male geek, too!
She didn’t know how long she sat there, sobbing, when she heard the clicking of high heels beyond her. Looking up, she saw a tall, gorgeous blonde woman, wearing knee-high boots, an extremely short denim skirt and a tank top that left nothing to imagination. A long coat in leopard-look completed the image of an aspiring movie star.
“T-tosh?” the woman asked uncertainly, and there was something achingly familiar in her husky voice.
“Ianto?” she asked tentatively, and the woman nodded in defeat.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
~ game over ~ game over ~ game over ~ game over ~
The sign blinked on Owen’s computer screen tirelessly. It was perhaps that stubborn flashing that woke him from his sleep… coma… unconsciousness… whatever. A bleary look at the screen told him that he’d lost the endgame, which was annoying enough, after such an excellent series of wins, but didn’t explain why he was feeling like shit.
Like after an entire night spent in seedy bars, actually, including indecent amounts of booze and getting beaten up by at least three jealous boyfriends whose girls he’d seduced. Which he hadn’t, not this time. He’d been hanging around in the Hub, bored to death, playing computer games against the boredom. Hadn’t he?
He shook his head in confusion – and was shocked by the long, honey blonde tresses flying around his face. Had someone glued a blonde wig onto his head while he’d been out? He wouldn’t put such a silly, infantile joke beyond Gwen – it was definitely her crappy idea of fun.
Owen conveniently forgot the fact how often he’d been part of Gwen’s juvenile pranks, in order to get into her pants easier. Not that it would ever have been such a complicated task. She was always ready (and willing), just like the bloody boy scouts. Or girl scouts. Whatever.
In any case, the stupid wig needed to be gone. He’d give Gwen a piece of his mind later. Privately. By pizza and beer, perhaps. In his own place.
Groaning with pain, Owen rose from his workstation – and fell promptly onto his arse. In that undignified position his knees came into view, and while they were clad in blue denim, as expected, something seemed… odd about them. They were a lot less knobbly than usual, and the jeans, too, were different. Fitted, of a much softer fabric than his usual gear… almost feminine. The legs within those jeans seamed longer and ended in narrow feet, which were put in nice little leather shoes with three-inch heels.
Which explained the falling onto his arse part, but not the rest of it. After all, he’d never in his life worn shoes with three-inch-heels. Ever. He wasn’t a fag. Okay, he sometimes did get close and personal with a guy, just for the change of scenery, but he wasn’t one of those neutered blokes who’d dress up like women, was he?
That reminded him of the stupid wig, and without any further attempt to get up, he began to tear at it with both hands, trying to get it off. To his unpleasant surprise, it hurt like a bitch – what sort of industrial strength glue had Gwen used? The stupid cow, couldn’t she even get her idiotic practical jokes right?
After several extremely painful moments of frantic tugging and tearing, the only result was a terribly burning scalp. The long blonde hair stayed firmly attached to where it had been, save from the handful that he’d managed to tear out… and boy, had that hurt!
Actually, it had hurt a lot more than it ought to be when one was trying to remove a glued-on wig. Granted, he’d never had a wig glued on before, but this… this had felt as if he’d indeed torn out his hair for real. What if…
Nah, he refused that idea at once. Snipped it in the bud. Such things didn’t happen, not even at Torchwood. People didn’t grow long blonde hair in twenty minutes or so. Nope, it was just not possible. All he needed to do was to get to the CCTV monitoring station and check out what had happened tin the Hub while he was out. Yep, that’s what he’d do.
He clambered onto his feet, mindful of the stupid shoes Gwen must have managed to put on him somehow and meandered over to said station. The screen was blank; all he could see on it was his mirror image.
Or, to be more accurate, the image of a gently beautiful blonde woman, whose smooth forehead was creased into his customary frown.
Seeing that image, Dr. Owen Harper passed out a second time.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Andy Davidson woke up in the tourist information office with the mother of all headaches… although his head wasn’t the only thing that hurt. He felt like on that day, more than a year and a half ago, when he and Gwen had been sent to break up a bar brawl. Gwen, of course, had screwed up, as usual, getting herself knocked out in the first minute, and Andy had suddenly found himself between the two hostile groups, both equally pissed off at the police for interfering.
He’d been sent on a week of sick leave afterwards, for his bruises to heal. And when he’d come back to work, Gwen had already been gone, without a word. Had joined Torchwood. Had been shown off her secret agent stuff ever since, all posh, as if she’d been his boss now.
No, Andy didn’t miss Gwen at all. He was all too happy to have a new, reliable partner who didn’t get him in trouble twice a week done to sheer stupidity and by constantly disobeying orders. But he’d promised Rhys, who was a decent bloke, to keep an eye on his wife-to-be – and God knew did she need surveillance! – and now there he was, in the bleak little tourist shop where he’d seen Gwen go in many times… but never come out.
Apparently, the shop was abandoned, so Andy switched into cop mode and started looking around for any clues for the whereabouts of the owners. And that was when he realised what had been bothered him ever since he’d come to.
He’d fallen asleep… passed out… whatever, in the tourist office. Where he woke up was a dry cleaner service – plus, his uniform was gone, too. What had those Torchwood types done with him? Kidnapped him? Shut him away amidst of a lot of recently cleaned coats? But how had they managed to do that, and, before all else, why?
He gave the room a thorough investigation but didn’t find anything suspect. By all means and purposes, it was a dry cleaner’s… albeit a very small one. The only thing that puzzled him was a button, hidden below the counter. It didn’t look like a police alarm button, so what could it be?
Deciding that nothing dared nothing gained, Andy pressed the button.
In that instant, the front door of the shop fell shut, and simultaneously, part of the wall on the right opened up, revealing a hidden corridor behind. A secret door! Now that was more like it. Quickly, Andy jumped to the previously unseen door and slipped through before it could close, too.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The blearing of the alarms lured Tosh and Ianto, both moving rather awkwardly in their new, unfamiliar bodies, out of the washroom. Moving around wasn’t an easy thing, even though Ianto solved part of the problem by pulling off the life-threatening boots and going barefoot. He’d fetch his extra shoes, the ones he kept in his locker for emergency cases, later.
“You’re ungrateful, really,” Tosh said, hating the sound of her new, geeky voice as she spoke. “Were I still a woman, I’d kill for a pair of boots like these; they’re gorgeous and must have cost a fortune.”
“You still are a woman,” Ianto replied, his low, husky voice disturbingly sexy, even in his own ears. “You’re just stuck in a male body, that’s all.”
“And what an ugly one it is!” Tosh complained. “How comes that the changes turned you into a femme fatale, while I get to be the nerd with no life again? An ugly, male nerd at that? It’s not fair!”
“Let’s hope it’s only temporarily,” Ianto said. “I’ll happily give you the boots as a gift if I can get back my suits… and the proper body parts again.”
“Well, you’re a lucky dog in that you look gorgeous, both as a man and as a woman,” a deep, unfamiliar voice said from the direction of Jack’s office.
Looking up, they spotted a large, middle-aged, portly black man, with his grey hair cropped so short he almost seemed bald. He had a thick moustache, too, and an apparently prosthetic hand. He was wearing a dark grey suit – not a particularly elegant one, but a suit nonetheless, which was impossible. Jack would never…
“Jack?” Ianto asked tentatively, and the stranger nodded.
“In the flesh… although not in my own flesh, it seems. Do you have any idea what’s happened here?”
“Nope, Tosh and I were just about to check the CCTV when the alarm sounded.”
“So this is Tosh?” the not-quite-Jack shook his head in disbelief. “She isn’t even Japanese anymore!”
“Neither are you still white… nor even close to handsome,” Ianto pointed out mercilessly. Jack nodded.
“Touché. At least I’m still a man. Although,” he added, giving Ianto’s new body a thorough once-over that would have been declared indecent in a dozen or so countries, “I do like the legs. And the tits. And your arse looks particularly gorgeous in that skin-tight mini skirt.”
“Careful, sir,” Ianto warned, “that’s harassment.
Even Tosh laughed at that overused phrase, the oldest insider joke of Torchwood. Everyone knew that Ianto didn’t mind being “harassed” by his boss the least. On the contrary.
“So,” Jack then said. “I’m here, you’re here, and Tosh is here. Where are the others? And who might want to visit us at this highly inconvenient time?”
“That would be PC Andy,” Ianto replied. “He was looking for Gwen in the tourist office when… well, when whatever this is happened.”
But when the cog door rolled aside, it wasn’t the lanky, uniformed, straw-headed figure of Andy that appeared. The man who’d come was about his age, but a head shorter, darkly handsome and wearing casual clothes. His brown hair was gelled up, and he had a five-hour shadow that made his face even more attractive.
“Why hello!” Jack whistled. “Not all the changes were for the worse, I see.”
Ianto shook his head in exasperation. “You’re hopeless, Jack. Can you control your libido until we find out what’s going on?”
“You’re no fun at all,” Jack pouted, which looked rather… strange on his new face, but let himself be shepherded into the main Hub area without further protests.
Part 03: So, What the Hell Happened to Us?
