lt_indigo

Fandom:	Torchwood
Title:	Helping Hand
	In which Jack searches for an unusual kind of assistance.
Author:	lt_indigo
Pairing(s):	none
Warning(s):	none
Disclamer:	Never mine.
Word count:	323

Jack returned to the ruins of Torchwood Tower late in the night, long after Suzie, Owen and Tosh had slipped into the sleep of the exhausted. It was still there: it had to still be there. There was no way Yvonne Hartman wouldn’t have taken care of it, because she knew exactly what it was she had. But would she have left it rotting in the archives were just anyone could find it?

Jack smiled to himself and made his way to her office. He searched with a fine-toothed comb, and finally found what he was looking for: a secret compartment in the floor, of all places. And inside, hidden away safely in its bubbling containment unit, the hand. Not just any old hand, of course; his hand. His DNA, that could be used cobbled together with some alien tech to make a detector so Jack could not only find him (because that was easy: Jack had found him many times over the last century and a half), but find the right version of him. It wasn’t difficult to work out that at some point, he would come and refuel at the Rift – it was the reason Jack stayed with Torchwood – and now Jack could be sure that it was the right version. Harriet Jones had confirmed that this hand was from a brand new regeneration, and Rose had still been with him when the hand had been severed, back on Christmas Day, so Jack could be certain that this was a Doctor that came after their time together, chronologically speaking. That was important for time travellers, to meet in the right order. Things became… complicated… if you met out of sync with each other.

Now Jack could build his Doctor detector, and he could get out of Cardiff and he could get some answers and get back to his old life, in the TARDIS with the Doctor and Rose, where he belonged.