Disclaimer: Not mine, just borrowed for fun.

Warning: This is a *long* chapter. And also, most likely, the last of this fic.

...Of a Lifetime!

"I can't believe this!" shouted Sherlock, throwing his arms up in exasperation.

"No, no, wait. Wait just a minute, just… a… little… moment… yes! Look! My timey-wimey-piratey detector is working. He was here, well done you, and he went into the hedge!"

"...Doctor, that makes no sense," sighed John patiently.

But the Doctor was frowning at the innocent-looking plantrow. "Into the hedge..." he murmured thoughtfully. "Now why does this look familiar?"

"Doctor..."

"Really familiar. But why? It definitely reminds me of something… but what?"

"Doctor, would you listen!..."

The Time Lord went rigid.

"...Doctor?"

John was ignored; the Doctor was listening, yes, very intently in fact: to something else entirely.

A moment later, his eyes widened and he grabbed John and Sherlock by their shoulders. "Hide!" he hissed wildly, dragging them back and into the shadows.

"Wha…?"

"Shh!"

He pushed them behind some wastebins just in time, before two odd people rounded the corner, following a weird-looking hand-held contraption made of coloured cables, that beeped and tweeted apparently at random.

One was a pretty young woman with shoulder-length brown hair, wearing a short, beige coat and brown, knee-length boots; the other was a tall man with wide pale eyes bulging alarmingly above big teeth and a dark head of curly hair. He was fiddling with the million-or-so cables that seemed to make up his device, frowning thoughtfully.

"My old spatio-temporal gaps locator!" muttered the Doctor almost silently. "Oh. Oh! That's it! Cratenudbups. Originally from the three habitable systems of Futewhe. Now I remember! A scattered growth – very dangerous. Sarah-Jane and I had quite the task in shutting down all the subspatial tunnels they're inadvertently creating..."

"That… that's you?" asked John incredulously.

He watched the rather bohémien man in the alley avidly, taking in the trench coat, unbottoned waistcoat and scruffy, slanted hat.

"Which you?" he asked in fascination.

"You're wearing question marks on the collar of your shirt," commented Sherlock in a disapproving whisper.

"Hmm. I rather tended to do that, yes. More in later years, even." The Doctor behind the wastebins paused contemplatively for a moment. "Can't remember why."

"Doctor, are you sure it is working?" asked the woman worriedly from where the two had stopped in front of the hedgerow.

"Of course it works," replied her companion loudly. "It's cutting edge technology! And depending on what this plantrow turns out to be, it might well become cutting hedge, too..."

The pretty woman groaned. "I can't believe you just said that."

"Whyever not?"

"What happened to your scarf?" John whispered as the two bantered, nudging the pinstripes-wearing Doctor with his shoulder.

"We're supposed to investigate an utterly abnormal and mysterious presence of subspatial tunnels – which you noticed, I might add – and you make puns about it!" protested the woman emphatically just a few feet away.

The Doctor, peering at her from his hiding spot, nudged John back without looking at him: "Scarf? What scarf? I don't wear scarves. Death traps, one and all," he proclaimed in a haughty murmur.

"Paronomasia is an excellent workout for the brain," declared the hat-wearing Doctor loftily. "Now stand back, Sarah-Jane, wouldn't want this to grow out of hand… it's best to nip this one in the bud, so let's not beat around the bush."

Sherlock groaned. The woman groaned as well. "Doctor, can't you take anything seriously?" she asked with fond exasperation.

"I'd make another one, but I'm trying to cut back," replied the Doctor with a toothy grin.

Sarah-Jane groaned again.

Half of John was thoroughly enjoying the banter, but the other half frowned. "I liked that scarf," he whispered to the Doctor by his side. "It had character."

The displeased reply came in a hiss: "I told you, I don't-"

"There we go!" exclaimed the curly-haired Doctor enthusiastically from where he'd crouched close to the herdgerow, catching their attention again. "I say! We appear to have found ourselves some Cratenudbups!"

The Doctor with spiky hair was still muttering something about 'bets' and 'horrid' and 'Sarah-Jane's stupid picture', but John was distracted by his best friend.

"Cratenudbups. Cratenudbups," repeated Sherlock in a reflexive murmur. "Hmm..." John spared him a glance and wondered if his friend was visiting his mind palace. He had that kind of lost-away look the doctor had learned to recognize.

The hat-wearing Doctor was now pointing something metallic and whirring (which John suspected was a sonic screwdriver) at the restless leaves, moving it slowly along a random pattern, all the while babbling to an interested Sarah-Jane about the alien hedge's 'intrinsic susceptibility to chemiluminescence' or some such.

Whatever he was doing, it was alighting traces of residual energy that almost looked like... a mouth. John grimaced, unnerved; Sherlock narrowed his eyes in interest. "Excitation of an analyte in the visible spectrum by a sonic stimulus. Quite ingenius," he muttered – because of course he was following what the other Doctor was doing. John almost rolled his eyes. Bloody genius.

"Thank you, I thought so too," murmured the Doctor in pinstripes absently. "Oh, yeah. Definitely Cratenudbups," he whispered decidedly, moving some trash slightly to better peer at his younger self. "I hope I thought of moving them to some park or gardens. The best way to deal with them is to encourage them to grow into a hedge maze after all. They like that, keep each other entertained – plus, you get a nice garden maze to show off to all your friends. Win-win solution," he explained to the two Londoners in a sage whisper.

"Wait. Hope? You don't remember what you did?" murmured Sherlock in a very unimpressed tone.

The curly-haired Doctor got up and stepped away from the hedge. "The best way to deal with them," he proclaimed to Sarah-Jane with a winsome smile, "is to encourage them to grow into a hedge maze."

"I just said that!" pouted the Doctor in hiding.

"Yes, yes, you did," agreed John, stifling a laugh.

"Hedge maze?" was asking Sarah-Jane interestedly. "Do you mean, like the one at Hampton Court?"

"Oh, yes! It lets them keep each other entertained, you understand. Plus, it's pretty to look at, and occasionally fun."

"I see."

"Do you?" asked the Doctor with the hat in a tone of slight surprise.

"No."

John stifled a small laugh. The Doctor by his side was beaming fondly. "Good old Sarah-Jane," he murmured.

"Cratenudbups. I know nothing of them," interrupted Sherlock in a very irritated hiss. "Why do I know nothing of them? There was no mention of them in the website! Why weren't they covered?"

"Website? What website?" asked the spiky-haired Doctor distractedly.

"Oh, yeah!" exclaimed John quietly. "That reminds me: what the heck happened to the show?"

"What?"

"Because I seriously liked it!" muttered John a bit despondently.

The Doctor frowned in confusion, but was barely sparing any attention to his current companions. His younger self and Sarah-Jane were readying themselves to leave, the Time Lord having managed a few stopgap measures that his hidden counterpart was slowly remembering as they happened (something that always gave him a headache, but alas. Hazards of timetravel and all that.)

The Doctor in the alley had worked swiftly and efficiently, and though only the Doctor behind the wastebins truly understood what he'd been doing, even John could see that the energy outline of the mouth was reducing and the restless branches were stilling, until they were effectively frozen.

"Good. That'll keep things simple until the other me can get the Tardis here to move the Cratenudbups away," muttered the older Doctor.

"That'll keep things nice and simple until I can come back and collect the Cratenudbups with the Tardis," the Doctor assured Sarah-Jane with a toothy grin, shooing her away from the hedgerow.

"The more things change..." murmured John, inordinately amused.

"It is really very inconvenient that that website disappeared," complained Sherlock with some annoyance. "Even though it appears that it was woefully incomplete. But then, most archives are."

"What?" The Time Lord's focus was yanked back to a conversation he abruptly realized he should probably have paid attention to. "What do you mean, a website disappeared? Which website? And what show?" he yelped quietly, suddenly concerned.

They could hear Sarah-Jane's worried voice inquiring about the logistics of moving the plantrow and the younger Doctor insisting that she "stop dawdling, I must close these spatial tunnels at once or by morning we might all be dead!"

The pinstripes-wearing Doctor just stared at the consulting detective. "What are you talking about?"

Some 150 miles to the west of that alley, Jack Sparrow was observing the frantic, lights-filled world around him pensively.

Being eaten by the hedgerow had been unpleasant, all swirling rushing lights and nausea-inducing spinning; but it wasn't the first unpleasant task he'd faced in his long life and it wouldn't be the last, and he had learned to shrug this kind of things off as soon as he could wipe his hat clean of spit and gore.

He studied instead the twilight scene before him.

He was obviously in a city: there were far too many edifices around to be anything else. He could see the sea in the gaps between buildings, though, pink and purple in a perfect reflection of the starless sky above, and it made him feel better.

Judging by the weather and the light, and what he could see of the horseless carriages and clothes going about, he guessed he hadn't moved too far away from the London he was in earlier, though he couldn't be sure, of course.

He'd landed in a harbour, too, he realized quickly, relaxing further. There weren't many boats, and no ships at all in the docks, but he could tell: it might look nothing like a harbour, but as strange as the ropes and machineries he could spot were, not to mention the lack of barrels, sacks and wooden crates, there was nevertheless that general sense of a wharf at the end of a busy workday, that any sailor could recognize. After all, no matter what odd contraptions might be used to load and unload instead of cubersome, tiring manwork, cargo was still cargo; and there were the expected pallets, and huge metal boxes what no man coulda moved, but perhaps the machineries were ta help wi' that. Mayhap, he reflected while studying what he could see, break-bulk shipping wasn't as hard in the future as he was used to – a pleasant thought indeed.

He felt even better when he realized, just watching the darkening area for a while and spotting a couple instances of violence, not to mention neatly avoiding an attempted theft from his person, that future slums were still slums. It was quite easy to hide, and easy to judge the few others what were hiding too. He felt quite at home.

Now. Hadn't he been promised rum? He eyed his compass balefully.

The sudden disappearance of the unnerving sensation at his back surprised him for all of a moment. He'd barely registered the prickling feeling, since he knew it came from the hedgerow what had spat him out, but now that it was gone, it was suddenly noticeable.

He left his hiding spot and turned to study the plantrow with a frown. The leaves were still; the swirling greyish nothingness had vanished. The passage was closed.

Oh, well.

Another quick glance at his (most of the time) trusty compass assured him that rum was on this side of it, and so was Jack himself, therefore everything was well.

With a cheerful spring in his swaying gait, he set off to find it.

Meanwhile, in London, the Doctor was leading Sarah-Jane away rapidly and also, of course, hiding behind smelly wastebins and discussing time mechanics and paradoxes and other matters of astronomical import in hurried whispers.

"What website are you talking about?"

"The Tardis Data Core, it... vanished. Gone without a trace. As if it never existed. Just like the show," continued to explain John, slowly slipping out from behind the wastebins, while keeping a wary eye out for returning Time Lords, or pirates, or aliens of whatever kind.

"John! Which show?"

The blogger turned to the Doctor, who was stumbling out into the alley as well: "Remember that TV show I told you about? That was all about… well, you?"

"Aaah, yes!... About that..." started the Doctor looking smug and sheepish all at once.

"It doesn't exist anymore!" blurted out John. "Nobody remembers a thing about it! I asked… I checked the internet, libraries, even old second-hand shops... nothing! I was at the pub and made a joke on it and nobody got it, nobody could remember watching it at all, or even hearing it mentioned!..."

The Doctor smiled blithely and interrupted his tirade: "Yes, well, I went and... corrected that little mistake."

Sherlock emerged as well, adjusting the collar of his coat and somehow looking perfectly put together. "Correct?" he demanded sharply. "As in…?"

"We-elll! I really had no other choice. A TV show about my life? Do you have an idea how dangerous that would be? Very, very dangerous, let me tell you. What if I'd seen an episode and found out something about my own future? What if someone else had reacted like you? What if it all turned into a bubbling temporal paradox? And reapers were drawn out in force by a disruption of the balance of time? You don't want winged dragon-like beings with red eyes, mouths on their chests, claws that could break through stone and scythes for tails to swoop down on you and excise the paradox, believe you me!"

All through his rant, the Doctor was running his sonic screwdriver up and down the frozen hedgerow, trying not to disrupt his younger self's work while still figuring out where his wayward, rum-loving companion might have disappeared to. He rather feared the question was more literal than he would like, too.

"Far, far too dangerous!" he babbled on, hardly knowing what he was saying. "Now, I like dangerous as much as the next bloke, nothing like some good honest adrenaline to make a day worth living..."

His younger self's actions had destroyed most of the temporal traces around the Cratenudbups, but the Doctor could still tell that a timetraveller other than him or Sarah-Jane had been there not long before. And his temporal signature vanished into the Cratenudbups. Had the foolish pirate been caught into the spatio-temporal tunnel, perchance?

"...but there are some things that are simply best left alone. Jymmying the timelines is one of those things!" he concluded, stifling the urge to curse. With the tunnel shut down by his younger self, finding where Sparrow had ended up would be nigh impossible!

John frowned, trying to sort out what the Doctor was really saying amidst all the words he was firing out. "So you... what? Prevented the show from being filmed? How?"

The Doctor whirled about, focusing back onto the blond blogger: "Exactly! I had a chat with my future companion and convinced him that there are better ways to employ his time. Apparently some idiot on a plane had told him to write it all down and sell it as a sci-fi script to make some money. And he'd done just that, in the hope of funding his own personal research into time-travel. Only he decided that he didn't want to wait and used one little piece of technology that he'd kept as a souvenir! Which unfortunately turned out to be a time vortex, of all things. I still can't believe I'll let him keep it – except that, well, I won't have a choice, will I? Since I've seen I will." He sniffed. "Oh, luckily he didn't have much charge to it – no compatible chargers before the 42nd century, you see – but it was enough for one trip there and back again, so he went, sold the idea to that Newman bloke, set up a bank account which accruited interest until now and... well. I was able to convince Newman that the show would never take flight and to invest in Star Trek instead – much safer. Also, I like Star Trek," he added thoughfully. "I still can't believe I invited along such an idiot! My next incarnation must be a rather untrustworthy bloke."

"..."

"Wow."

The Time Lord glared tiredly: "No. No, really. No."

"Right. Sorry." John tried to pretend contrition.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Anyway, now it's all fixed. The world is being rewritten around the absence of that show and I've created a new circuit for the Tardis to prevent any of my companions from writing down our shared adventures."

"You did what?" asked Sherlock, aghast.

"Much safer for everyone involved. And also for everyone not involved, come to it," rambled on the Doctor. "As for him, I sent him UNIT's way – they'll keep him occupied. Last thing I need is someone inventing the Time Agency too early..."

"So that's why I can't write anything down?" interjected John, trying to keep the accusation from his tone. "Whenever I try to type something about you, the document erases itself in seconds."

"I know."

"...So I won't be able to blog about this?"

"Sorry."

John glared.

"It's nothing personal. Really, I love your blog! Never miss an update!"

"Well, it is very inconvenient," was Sherlock's petulant comment.

"Inconv-?" The Doctor stared at the consulting detective, incredulous.

"You don't even read my blog, Sherlock!" complained John good-naturedly.

Sherlock waved his hand impatiently: "Of course I do – in any case, I was talking about the website, which, as you might have noticed were you not so self-centred, was our only reference source on alien species."

John goggled: "I'm self-centred?"

"Of course, it matters little. After our joint adventure, Doctor, I watched every episode, listened to every audio file, read every tale about you I could find – and there were a lot at first. Now they're all gone – all of them – but they're also stored safely in a wing of my mind palace."

"Don't tell me anything!" shouted the Doctor.

Sherlock gave him a considering look: "The dangers of tangling timelines," he nodded. "I read up on that, too."

And he swirled away.

"Read up… why, the nerve! Didn't I just explain all that? What does he need to read about it for?" pouted the Doctor.

John ignored both with practiced ease. "But I remember, too," he said instead. "Doctor, I remember everything...!"

"Ah, yes... well... that's... that's kind of, ah, my fault. Sort of. Residual memory born of the synergy between the Tardis' temporal grace state and the rewrenching of un-tuned event strings into a stabilized timeline," he rattled off, as if John could understand what the heck he was saying. "But you did say you find the 21st century enjoyable?" he asked with very wide, very brown puppy-eyes.

"Ah," deadpanned John. "That."

Before the army doctor turned blogger could decide if he should revisit his earlier anger at the upturning of his perception of himself and his life, Sherlock's phone rang.

When the detective ignored it, John's started ringing instead.

"Hello?… Lestr-! What? The same? Right. Where… Balham? Really? Yeah, yeah, of course- we're just… err… Look, we'll be there, ok?"

He snapped it shut and opened his mouth. Sherlock beat him to the punch: "There's been another one," he stated, frowning.

"Balham, though," commented John, sounding slighlty perturbed. "That's strange."

"What's strange with Balham?" asked the Doctor curiously. "Wait, wait, I've got a better question. Another what?"

"Another mysterious death. Possibly a murder," explained Sherlock succinctly. He rewove his blue scarf around his neck and started towards the nearest chance at a cab.

"Possibly?" The Doctor's eyebrows rose. "And- Balham?" he asked, turning to John. "Balham isn't strange."

The blond man thought for a moment, then replied: "You know Clapham?"

"Of course I know Clapham!" blustered the Doctor. "I knew Clapham before it was Clapham! I took tea with Elizabeth Cook in Clapham!"

"Yes, well, nowadays, as my esteemed colleagues would say, it's Nappy Valley. Assuming you are an an investment banker or similarly paid. Or married to one. And Balham is just one stop on the tube from Clapham. Basically the same, only the cheaper version. It's not that it's strange, per se, it's just… not where I would expect a gruesome murder."

"Assumptions are ridiculous, John," came Sherlock's haughty voice from a bit further. "The great majority of murderers aren't epically clever villains with great plans, but harassed clerks who just couldn't take their boss' bullying anymore and battered wives that simply snapped and took a baseball bat to their worthless husbands."

"Right, right..."

"And yes, Doctor. Possibly. There is no solid evidence that they are, indeed, murders. The wounds so far have been consistent with animal attacks rather than human hands. Still, it is quite possible that a human is using an animal for his own murderous purposes."

"They? So far?" The Doctor sounded positively bewildered.

Sherlock sighed like a long-suffering parent. (Which John always found unfair, given how much of a child he was).

"It's a cold case," explained John hurriedly. "Cases, rather. The first we heard of happened almost four months ago, then nothing, so we thought it was a one-off, right? But then a very similar one happened, and another… we weren't sure what to think..."

Sherlock sniffed: "Speak for youself. I have several viable hypotheses."

He materialized a cab in his usual inexplicable way and soon they were on their way; John went on explaining: "Then it happened again, just a few days later; but even Sherlock couldn't piece things together."

He ignored Sherlock's grumbling, and so did the Doctor, who was frowning in thought.

"And once more, there was nothing after the attack… until now..." concluded John.

"Several disappearances are connected to the potential murders as well," interjected Sherlock darkly. "Not that anyone believes me."

"Whyever not?" asked the Doctor, sounding offended on his behalf.

"Homeless, vagrants, vagabonds, they go missing all the time, don't they?" said Sherlock with slighly bitter rhetoric.

"Thankfully the mauled bodies convinced Lestrade to investigate all avenues – and he knows Sherlock enough not to discount his advice," said John.

The crime scene wasn't much different from the dozens of others John had seen since meeting Sherlock. Policemen milling about, barricade tape helding back gawkers, forensic scientists busy collecting, tagging, logging and packaging as much evidence as they could in the shortest possible time.

A number of flashes went off as pictures were taken to document everything of potential interest; evidence markers dotted the place – John knew enough to realize just how far the victim was spread and winced – and Sherlock was quickly working his way through examining the scene, heedless of the grumblings and insults that rained on him from all sides – the only difference being that this time he had a tall, thin alien dogging his steps.

Donovan was keeping track of all the comings and goings, directing people with an efficiency that belied her too-often lacking professionalism (as usual); she seemed a bit thrown by the Doctor's presence, though ("Freak! Who the hell is this?!"), and put off by his open enthusiasm for Sherlock's methods ("Someone tell me what is going on!"). Not to mention the way he touched everything ( "Hold on, you're contaminating a crime scene!") , and once even licked some evidence ("Tell me why I shouldn't arrest you all!").

And Lestrade was marching up to them in long, stalking steps.

He opened his mouth (probably to berate them) but Sherlock didn't give him the time to say a word. "Whatever did this had very sharp fangs. Biped, though. Not much shorter than an average human. Heavier, but not overly so. Definitely faster than even an athlete. Exactly like the previous times."

John's usual "Amazing!" was, to Sherlock's surprise, echoed by the Doctor's "Fantastic!"

Lestrade did a double take.

"Who the hell are you?" he asked loudly. "What do you think you're doing? Wait. Stop! You can't go in there- What are you even- you- Sherlock! Who the hell is this!? I can't just let anyone onto a crime scene..."

Lestrade was, as usual, overruled by the whirlwind that was his sort-of friend. Strangely, John, too, pretended to ignore the irregularity, not even muttering an embarrassed apology for his partner (most unusual) and that left Lestrade somewhat reeling.

(Truth was, John didn't have any idea how to justify the Doctor, so he figured pretending to ignore the problem was his best bet.)

"Oh. Oh, no. Oh, this is bad." The Doctor crouched over some gory remains, sniffing them. "Oh, this is very, very bad."

"Doctor?" asked John carefully, leaning over him.

Sherlock was eagerly focused: "You know what did this!" he exclaimed rather than asking.

Lestrade's feeble protests were ignored.

"Ever heard of the sewer crocodiles in New York City? 1930s or thereof?" asked the Time Lord, looking up at the three men.

"Yeah?" asked John, breathless.

"Not crocodiles," said the Doctor succinctly.

"What? Are you serious?" Lestrade yelped, staring, while Donovan muttered something highly uncomplimentary in the background.

"That was just an urban legend!" protested Sherlock, crouching by the Doctor with a gleam in his eyes that John knew all too well.

"Legends always hold a nugget of truth."

"You're saying that there are alien crocodiles in our sewers?" asked John, trying not to sound too skeptical.

"Not crocodiles," repeated the Doctor impatiently.

"Aliens, Christ. You've brought us a wierdo." Donovan snorted. "Shouldn't be surprised I guess."

"Is he for real?" Lestrade asked the universe at large.

"Well, whatever they are, they're attacking my Network." Sherlock sounded totally put upon.

He straightened up and Lestrade grabbed his arm quite firmly. "Sherlock," he said with forced calm. "Who. Is. This. Weirdo?"

The Doctor got up too and went on as if he was oblivious to the incredulity and irritation surrounding him, staring thoughtfully at the blood and gore. "The problem is that they aren't an inherently violent race, mostly they only attack if threatened directly."

"These seem to have gone rogue," John deadpanned.

"Indeed," agreed Sherlock thoughtfully, ignoring how Lestrade was tightening the grip on his arm to the point of pain. "The position of the body and the pattern of traces indicate the victim was attacked from behind and taken down efficiently. Nothing suggests a cornered beast lashing out in a panic. This is the behaviour of a hunter." He raised his gaze to the Doctor briefly: "Your pirate will have to wait."

"Pirate? What pirate?!" Lestrade's voice was past frustration.

The Doctor winced and turned to the detective earnestly: "Look, I'm really very sorry. I didn't mean to take him this far into the future, really."

"No, I don't mean- I... what?!"

"But he doesn't seem to have done too much damage anyway. So… all's well?"

Lestrade gaped.

Said pirate was, at that very moment, savouring his long-sought treasure – a bottle of very fine rum, very fine indeed – in a dreadfully dull warehouse, some 200km to the west of the investigating trio.

Completely unaware that he was about to utterly throw a certain small team of alien hunters (converging on him at the very moment) for a loop, despite their being far too used to the odd, weird, alien, anomalous, bizarre, uncanny and generally strange.

Captain Jack Harkness was having a bad day.

A day full of rain and mud and too-primitive-technology and too-much-running and too-many-problems. Not all too unusual an occurrence, in this life he'd made for himself while waiting for, as he might say if anyone asked, "the right kind of Doctor"; but still unpleasant.

There was mud on his fantastic coat and a string of terse directions in his ear, courtesy of a rather stressed technical expert by the name of Toshiko Sato. And he was chasing a Weevil in the streets of Cardiff. Again. Curse the stars, it was the fifth this week! What had gotten into them?

Tosh's voice in his earpiece directed him through the very familiar maze of alleys, relying on her software to keep track of their prey.

Unknowing that the very Time Lord he so desperately wished to catch up with was only about one hour away, as a short-haul aircraft flies, he took a turn at a dead run, caught a glimpse of their target and yelled at his team to "hurry the bloody hell up!"

As if in response, the pounding of the rain picked up.

Suddenly, Tosh gave a cry of surprise. "It's gone! I can't find it anywhere on the map!"

Frantic clicking could be heard in the background, as she tried to compensate for a possible malfunction, though knowing their luck, it was nothing as simple as that.

Harkness cursed out loud. Could this week get any worse? Nobody answer that, please.

He looked around to organize his team, only to find that Gwen Cooper had lagged behind and was on the phone, her longish brown hair plastered to her face by the unrelenting rain.

Ready to curse again, he was stopped by the look on her face when she snapped the cell phone closed and started yelling: "They found another stash!"

Just. Bloody. Great.

They'd been finding these 'stashes' for the past month or so, or rather, the local law enforcement had been finding them. Torchwood never seemed to know about these caches in time to get there first – and they could not figure out why.

Mostly it was weapons; some art pieces, a lot of technology components but not much of immediate use, now and then luxury foodstuff.

All of it undoubtedly alien.

And at least two kinds of precious metals non-native to Earth, in tidy piles of ingots, as if the rest wasn't bad enough. One of which was highly toxic to humans upon skin contact.

When he caught the cursed morons that were smuggling besserium (and a host of other things) onto his planet…

(And Earth was his. He'd been defending it for over a century. It counted.)

The only saving grace was that there was nothing sentient being smuggled. Nevertheless, the team had been working their arses off to stop this – having to retcon the police so often was a bit much even for Torchwood standards – yet weren't able to catch whoever was responsible. Harkness was starting to suspect they had a way to block Torchwood's monitoring systems, because it just wasn't realistic that the bloody Cardiff cops, who didn't even know what they were looking for, could find these assholes more easily than his highly trained team!

He was at the point where he was starting to consider not retconning the police anymore, letting them have a go at cracking the case in its entirety, since they were obviously in a better position to do so. The paperwork would be a nightmare, but… Sadly, he knew that the local law enforcement wasn't equipped to cope with such definitely not local smugglers. Whoever they were, they had access to transmat technology at the very least!

In any case, if there was a chance to get the bastards at last, chasing a weevil had to slip down the priority list. Especially chasing a weevil that was nowhere on their radar.

"No trace of the weevil in a fifty miles radius. At all," confirmed Tosh in his earpiece, grim and bewildered. "I just don't understand!"

Harkness sighed, closing his eyes for a long moment. Then he clapped his hands: "Alright, kids! Change of plans..."

Halfway to the indicated warehouse, they got a grim update: there were smugglers at the site still – cops were hysterical, which probably meant they were visibly alien – the intercepted ramblings about red skin were also indicative – and things had escalated to a shooting – two policemen were dead and several more had been injured.

"We're going to have to dose the water supply again, aren't we?" asked Owen in a resigned tone.

Gwen looked at him oddly: "Didn't you say the water company got really pissed off the last time we did that?"

Tosh's voice interrupted their banter with an underlying urgengy: "Jack, the police radio reports I've hacked say it's the red warehouse to your left," she said unnecessarily – they could see quite clearly the ambulances, police cars and dozens of people swarming the site; what a nightmare – but then went on to add: "but I'm picking up a lifesign in the pale yellow one with the barbed wire. Human, but with some weird radiation readings."

"I see it, Tosh. We'll check that out first."

Guns out, they burst into the warehouse that might (had they been lucky) have held their targets and stumbed to a stop in shock.

There was a pirate sitting on an overturned crate in a corner.

An actual, honest-to-God pirate. Complete with flintlock pistol, ornate pistol belts, a ragbag of sea-weathered garb (Harkness noted the coat with fleeting admiration), and a faded-black tricorne hat.

In Cardiff.

"Holy shit," Doctor Owen Harper summed up effectively.

"Ah! Company!" the unexpected man said grandly, getting himself to his feet unsteadily and swaying gently, like a weather wane in the wind.

Jack Harkness was quite the good judge of anachronisms – the Time Agency was big on that kind of thing – and he was fairly sure the man was the real deal. Spat out by the rift, most likely; though he seemed to be taking it a lot better than the average unfortunate.

"Who are you?" demanded Gwen sternly, her gun steady in her usual one-handed grip. She got a vague smile in reply.

His sense of smell being quite sophisticated, Harkness had little trouble guessing the probable reason for the man's unsteadiness. The rum smelled like good quality, though, he'd give the pirate that much.

The out-of-time man swayed lightly, peering at the glowering woman: "My tremenduous intuitive sense of the female creature informs me that you strongly dislike me – do I owe you money, by chance?"

Unwittingly amused, Harkness admitted to himself that the misplaced pirate certainly had style. Out loud, he reiterated the question: "Who are you?"

"Me? I'm Captain Jack Sparrow!"

From behind Harkness, Owen groaned audibly. "Great. Just what we needed. Two Captain Jacks!"

"Twice the fun!" commented Harkness promptly. His team glared at him, but really, did they expect him to let such an opening pass him by?

The pirate was sliding away from him with a frozen look: "I'm deeply flattered, lad, but my one and only love is the sea."

Harkness pouted.

Owen moved forward, familiar annoyance on his thin, pointed face; sheating his gun, he asked rudely: "What the hell are you doing here?"

Sparrow graced them all with a glinting smile: "Enjoying the illicit fruits of a time-honoured and enterprising profession," he proclaimed grandly.

Oh, yeah. Harkness grinned. The man had style.

"Smuggling." Sparrow explained to the doctor's uncomprehending look, and showed off his prized bottle.

"Time-honoured?!" burst out Gwen, indignant – all her former policewoman's sensibilities offended by the pirate's claim. "Profession!?"

"Why, love. Smuggling is good!" he protested. "It takes enterprise, stealth, original thinking. All good traits!"

"It's illegal!" she yelled, her Welsh accent stretching the vowels with her ire.

Sparrow's courteous smile conveyed very effectively that he didn't give a damn. Harkness stifled a laugh.

Gwen's features hardened. "Are you behind all this, then?" she demanded harshly. "Did you kill those people?"

Sparrow's eyebrows rose in shock, but then he smirked: "I doubt it. I prefer not to use brute force if possible. All that blood and… stuff. Not my style. Trickery is smarter and works better."

"You're just a coward," accused Owen with a snort, but he looked amused.

"Damn right I am," replied the pirate proudly. "I ain't no foolish hero what throws his life away for some grand, meaningless ideal. Me, I'll take intelligent cowardice over foolhardy bravery any day."

He shot Gwen a mocking look at this and she bristled; she firmed her jaw, gun still ostentatiously trained on the man, and Harkness moved to calm her dow - the last thing he needed was her shooting the poor sod centuries after he'd been born - putting his own gun away without qualms. He briefly wondered why he felt so at ease with their unexpected guest, but he'd come to trust his instincts and they were telling him the man was all right. At any rate, he was fairly sure this pirate had nothing to do with the smugglers they were after.

Captain Sparrow took a swig from his hard-earned bottle and then, rolling his eyes at Gwen's scowl, he condescendingly assured: "They were already dead when I arrived."

"What?"

"The men what got shot out there." Sparrow gestured with his bottle. "They were down for the count, an' people what look like soldiers were yellin', and short red people wi' spikes all over were yellin' and shootin', and then they got hit by pink lighnin', what must not have been much fun I don't think, an' poof! Gone. Same for the two what was here. Pink lightning and whoosh! Not at all like how I arrived," he finished reflexively.

Captain Harkness' mind worked hastily to make sense of the somewhat confused, but unexpectedly thorough explanation. Sounded like Zocci to him, having a showdown with the cops, and a transmat beam – he'd been right about that – but what did the man mean by…?

"...Arrived," he repeated out loud, and gestured for him to elaborate: "Arrived how?" He had his suspicions about the pirate's presence, but best to be sure.

Sparrow made a vague hand-motion. "The world spun ghostly and colorless!" he raved, stumbling forward with remarkable grace, as if he was treading the boards of an Elizabethan stage. "White. Silver. Black. Grey..." he lowered his voice to a mysterious whisper. " 'Twas all..." he moved his hands in a meaningful way that told them absolutely nothing. "And then…" he gestured again leaning back, wide-eyed, and nodded seriously.

The odd thing was, Harkness reflected in bafflement, that they were all hanging on his every word. Gesture. Whatever.

"Unpleasant," concluded the pirate with an air of finality, and returned his attention to the rum.

Harkness frowned. Grey? The Rift wasn't grey. Rift energy tended to have a bluish tinge to it, but mostly, it was just eye-watering light, at the very edge of the visible spectrum. The only thing that would be perceived as swirling and ghost-like greyness was...

"A spatio-temporal tunnel!" he exclaimed with surprise. Studying the man more closely, he spied a few things that raised alarm bells – those gold bands looked definitely Pastafarians, for one; and was that glowing piece of bark Alumian? Perhaps he'd misjudged the situation-

He moved casually closer to the pirate until he could swiftly snatch the bottle away ("Hey! That's me rum!") and sniffed at the bottle.

"Syntharum," he commented, surprised and not at once. "Not bad. Not as good as hypervodka, of course, but not bad at all. Also, not to be invented for quite a few centuries."

"And not on this here planet, yes, I know," said Sparrow, still pouting.

Harkness narrowed his eyes. "You do look like someone from Sevenseas," he commented thoughtfully, with fake nonchalance. "The hat and all."

"Very important things, hats," assured Sparrow and grabbed the bottle back.

Well, that changed things.

"He's an alien?" asked Gwen incredulously.

"Everybody's an alien somewhere, love," retorted the pirate before Harkness could say anything.

Owen snorted.

"Okay, well." Harkness clapped his hands to try and regain some control of the situation. "We can help you make your way back. Hopefully. Maybe. Or else convince someone to cast you in a movie so you'll be set here. But in the meanwhile, we'll have to lock you up. Just to ensure you're not a threat, you understand," he told the Sevenseaser.

"I ain't no threat!" protested Sparrow. "Honestly. I am peculiarly disinclined to harm those what are not peculiarly inclined to harm me, savvy?"

"Excellent philosophy. Stick with it and we'll be fine."

Meanwhile in London, Sherlock had somehow shaken off a very bewildered Lestrade and rattled off to the Doctor all the observations he'd compiled on the previous crime scenes, giving the descriptions of the marks of a creature's passage in the alleys and the bloody and torn pieces of human bodies with the same clinical detachment with which they were received.

The two were now throwing theories back and forth, heads bent together, talking over each other at high speed; John rather suspected some of the wilder things they were saying were more to keep the stimulating discussion going than actual hypotheses.

He kept an ear on their spirited discussion (filing away the useful tidbits, like the fact that the creatures were definitely faster – and likely stronger – than a man, that they typically lived in dark, damp conditions, that group behaviour and territorial aggression had been observed, that loud noises scared them; all things that would come in handy should they have to fight them) and an eye out for anything potentially threatening (be it murderous aliens or annoying police investigators; someone had to be on the lookout while the geniuses got lost in their minds, after all).

While he waited, he reflected on the evident changes in the Doctor's behaviour, as well as looks. This new version no longer moved with his predecessor's combination of blunt strength and boneless grace that was both arresting and disconcerting; rather, he darted hither and yon, rambled on conversationally (regardless of having an audience or not) and tended to stuff his hands in his pockets more than to cross his arms before his chest.

He was still as manic and brilliant as ever, though.

"That's it! Oh, oh! That explains it!" he yelled at last, leaning away from Sherlock just to have a chance to point his finger at the consulting detective. "Well done you! Low-level telepathic field! That's what I was missing!"

He rocked on the balls of his feet, looking genuinely pleased. "They don't have a language as we intend it, see, in fact, a lot of species categorize them as being of low-level intelligence, but it's just because they think on a different wavelength! They communicate through the group, not mind-to-mind, but rather mind-to-a-collective-mind, sort of. Isn't it brilliant? But the spatio-temporal tunnels, they play havoc on a telepathic mind! I should know, whenever I accidentally end up in one, I get out with a splitting headache, my magnetic perception all over the place and a craving for strawberries. I don't even like strawberries," he rambled on plaintively. "I don't imagine they do, either. I think we can safely assume their aggressive behaviour is a consequence of a very unpleasant trip!"

"So… they're killing people because they have a headache?" summed up John with a slight frown.

"One hell of a headache," agreed the Doctor. "We-elll… there is the slight possibility that they might see it as killing food because they have a headache, of course. But!"

"You believe that they are being brought here by the Cratenudbups, then?" interjected Sherlock.

"Not on purpose!" said the Doctor quickly, waving his hands in the air. "It's just that I can detect absolutely nothing else that could have brought them here. No space-time rifts running through the city, no holes in the continuum, no energy sources from any kind of non-terrestrial technology in any close range..."

"Therefore, the only reasonable explanation is that they've been coming through the spatio-temporal tunnels created by the Cratenudbups," concluded Sherlock, nodding along. His eyes narrowed: "The pirate in the hedge," he murmured (and John made a mental note to use that as a title before he remembered he would not be able to blog about any of this). "Could the disappearances be the same thing in reverse?"

"Why, certainly! The tunnels go both ways – and come to think of it, you're right. My pirate clearly did just that. Which is a problem in and of itself." The Time Lord frowned, losing his excitement.

"Why?" asked John practically. "Can't you go and get him wherever he's ended up?"

"No, I can't. Why? Because I don't know where he's ended up!" said the Doctor. He ran a hand through his hair, obviously frustrated.

"Surely you can find him?" asked John incredulously.

"If I could, I would have already," snapped the Time Lord.

"But why…?"

"Because I shut the tunnel down!" He ran a hand through his hair again. "The younger me, that is. Completely understandable, of course, how was I to know I would need it open? Also annoying."

He paced and ranted: "All I know is that he can't have gone further than 200 miles in any direction, those Cratenudbups were too young to manage more than that. That's about 120 thousand square miles I should comb with my timey-wimey-piratey detector, land and sea – it'll take ages! He could be anywhere from Nottingham to- to Dieppe!"

Sherlock sighed deeply, quite put upon. "We might have to ask Mycroft," he said with obvious distaste.

The Doctor curled his lips. "I don't like your brother," he protested. "Stuck on that ridiculous idea that I'm an enemy of the state. Why, I have no idea. It's not like I've ever done anything to warrant such hostility…"

Sherlock goggled. "You know my brother? What am I saying, you're an alien freelance defender of the British Empire. Of course you know my brother."

"Of the Earth," corrected the Doctor with a frown.

"In Mycroft's head, that's the same."

The Torchwood team was having marginally more success with tracking their quarries.

"If they're Zocci, that'd explain the technology level," Harkness related hurriedly to a frowning Gwen and an absent but intent Tosh, "and how they're getting their hands on all this stuff. A lot of them come from planets that are big in the recreational business – pleasure cruises and the like. Ideal for smuggling. But how are they escaping our notice?"

"I can't track them," came Tosh's voice. "I can't even see them. Even knowing where and approximately when they've been, I can barely detect any trace of their passage. It's like their presence on Earth is cloaked in some way that is specifically targeted to our detectors. All I notice is Rift activity, everything they do is hidden beneath a blanket of data on temporal fluctuations and standard energy readings."

"Maybe it's something they're putting around the crates? A shield or- or a concealing wavelength or... something?" tried Gwen, who didn't have much of a clue when it came to technology, but generally grasped the workings of a criminal mind better than any of them.

"Like a beacon that generates a white noise?" asked Tosh, sounding intrigued. "I suppose it's possible. If it produced a continuum of frequencies evenly distributed over the Rift's usual range... It wouldn't have to be bigger than a microchip, either… probably stuck to the goods somewhere."

"Good idea. Let's have a look at the loot," nodded Harkness.

"… and then she sailed away in the dinghy," was saying Sparrow from the upturned crate he'd reclaimed as his seat, moving his hand theatrically to underline his words.

Harkness did a double take when he saw that Owen was sitting next to him, chin propped on one hand, absolutely riveted by the tale. "Must have been one hell of a kiss," the doctor commented with feeling. Sparrow smiled smugly.

"If we could get back to work," hissed Gwen pointedly, marching up to Owen with a glare. The doctor jumped up, looking guilty, then hunched his shoulders and started glaring back.

Harkness ignored them all and went to sort through the crates. Ammo, ammo, small sculptures nestled in silk, more ammo… chocolate bars, huh, that was new…

In the background, Gwen and Owen were bickering ("Don't these people know how to pack?" - "Careful there! Leave that alone, what are you even doing?" - "Aargh! Goddammit!" - "God, Owen, don't try to activate alien tech, it's like the first thing you learn in this job!" - "Well, excuse me if I don't know what this is at a glance!..." - "You have a scanner, don't you? Maybe you could, I don't know, use it?" - "What for? There's nothing here!" - "Gimmie that!" - "Get your own!").

Harkness pretended he couldn't hear them. Another crate of chocolate… berillium batteries? Those were only produced for a brief period in the Post-Garren Age!…

"I've seen this before," declared Sparrow unexpectedly. "In a Spanish convent."

He was frowning in contemplation over a statue that he'd lifted out of a silk wrapping. It was a Santiago Matamoros, some sixteen inches high, mostly wooden; Saint James was riding a muscular horse, wrapped in a cloak that fanned out behind him, with a sword raised high above his head, while frightened looking Moors lay sprawled under him. From what little Harkness knew of the matter, it looked fairly standard.

"What were you doing in a Spanish convent, anyway?" grumbled Owen, who was feeling irritable because of the stinging pain in the hand he was traying to wrap (having carelessly burned himself on an anchoring rod for cyborg implants, if Harkness was any judge).

The pirate shrugged: "Mistook it for a brothel. Honest mistake!"

Gwen looked up incredulously from the bunch of munitions strings for some sort of energy rifle that she was trying without much success to disentangle.

Harkness pushed himself away from a crate of gears and nodded thoughtfully: "That actually happened to me as well, once. Well, not in Spain – on Hyacinth III, but still. Perfectly understandable mistake."

Sparrow nodded earnestly.

Owen facepalmed.

Harkness grinned and made his way to the statue that Sparrow had put down again. "You say you saw something like this once?"

Sparrow looked at him gravely: "No, mate, I didna see somethin' like this, I saw this. See this here marks?" He pointed to the unmistakable signs of something having been wrenched away from Saint James' cloak and smiled brightly. "I did that!" His face fell: "An' then I got caught." He looked at nothing, thoughts far away. "Had to impersonate a parson to get out of that one. He he."

Gwen wondered idly: "How did an alien artefact end up in a Spanish convent?"

"I don't think it's alien," Harkness said thoughtfully. He felt on the brink of making sense of things.

"Whatever it is, it's been in the Rift," commented Owen, holding a frantically beeping scanner to the thing. "Sensor's going haywire."

Clarity exploded in Harkness' mind: "That's it!" Since no-one else appeared to understand, he went on impatiently: "Don't you see? They're not importing anything from off-planet, they're harvesting the Rift! That's why we can't pinpoint them, we do pick them up, but we think it's just Rift stuff – because it is! They're… basically, they're doing what we're doing, only they do it for a profit. They sift through the flotsam and jetsam the Rift spits out, scavenge whatever they can, probably pick up what others leave behind too, if they can find ways of selling it..."

"One man's trash is another man's treasure," commented Sparrow, grasping what he was saying before anyone else. "Clever."

Gwen was thinking along different lines, however: "That means we can predict when and where they might strike next!" She grinned sharply. "Guys? I've got a plan."

"I've got a plan," declared the Doctor at the exact same time, but in London.

"I've got a bad feeling about this," muttered John (but nobody got the reference, as usual).

His bad feeling had become outright worried and then full ominous by the time they reached Barts, and a certain dark-haired and usually soft-spoken pathologist.

"You want what?!" screeched Dr. Molly Hooper, aghast.

John had never seen the kind woman so appalled, and considering the alarming regularity with which Sherlock convinced her to 'support' the weirdest experiments, that was saying something.

"No. NO. Absolutely not!"

She paced her lab, wringing her hands. "I can't believe you. Go to a butcher's if you need meat! These people gifted their bodies to science, Sherlock. They wanted to be useful after their death! They wanted to help medical students learn to help other people, not- not…! They gave themselves to medicine. Medicine, Sherlock! Not some insane conspiracy theorist's absurd plan!"

"Hey!" protested the Doctor, from where he was being ignored while curiously examining something he had no business with in Molly's microscope.

"It's disrespectful!" she cried, crossing her arms half-defiantly, half-defensively.

"Molly, be reasonable. They're dead. They can't care," retorted Sherlock condescendingly.

She gasped and glared fire from her eyes.

John coughed. "Bit not good," he muttered.

The consulting detective frowned, but thankfully shut up.

"I suppose we could use ourselves," mused the Doctor, who was now fiddling with a mortuary refrigeration unit, the buzz of his sonic screwdriver lost in the noise of the ventilators.

"What are you doing?" asked John, alarmed, but he was overwhelmed by Sherlock's louder: "You want to use ourselves as bait?"

He sounded half-disbelieving, half-intrigued and John's alarmed focus shifted rapidly: "Sherlock. NO."

But the Doctor was on a roll: "It could work, maybe even better, really. If we lay very still… perhaps mask our odour – oh! Oh! We could use make-up!" he exclaimed, growing enthused with the idea. "Dress ourselves up as splatstick zombies, I learned all about that on the set of Braindead, you know-"

"Doctor!" tried to interrupt John, frowning fiercely.

"-I was looking for a Kahler hiding among the extras and do you know how difficult it is to find someone with a green mark on his face among people dressed up as zombies?"

"DOCTOR!" yelled John.

"...What?" the Time Lord asked, derailed.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," said John with admirable levelness, "but isn't your idea very likely to end up with us being hunted by a bunch of enraged, sharp-toothed aliens?"

"We-eelll… I think we could call it a pack, under the circumstances, the do have a social structure after all..."

"…" John opened his mouth. He closed it. He closed his eyes, too, praying for patience. He nodded to himself. He opened his eyes and ostentatiously checked his gun.

And Molly crumbled.

"Alright! Alright! You can have the corpses! Oh God I'm going to Hell I just know it, this is all your fault, Sherlock! Don't you dare get yourself killed, I'll never forgive you! How do I always let you talk me into these things? Oh God please just don't get killed..."

"Molly!" snapped Sherlock reproachfully. "Stop being hysterical. It's utterly tedious!"

She stopped. She straightened. She glared.

And even Sherlock took a nervous step back, unsettled.

"Get. Lost," she bit out.

"What do you mean, we lost him?" demanded Gwen, looking around herself incredulously, as if the pirate might just be hiding behind a cupboard or napping on the couch. "How did we lose him?"

"Err..."

There had been a lot to do, that was the thing. Ideas to discuss, plans and backup plans to make, details to sort out, tasks to assign, technology to find back at HQ, Tosh to meet up with, Rift monitors to check, things to organise…

And so, all in all, it had been a good hour before the Torchwood team realized that Captain Jack Sparrow wasn't with them anymore.

At which point they groaned.

"How could you lose him?" accused Gwen.

"Me? Why didn't you keep track of him?" immediately retorted Owen.

"I thought he was with you!"

"Don't you dare blame me!..."

Hakrness tuned out the bickering duo and turned to their technical expert. "Can you find him?"

"When was the last time you saw him?" asked Tosh sensibly, already searching the internet.

He closed his eyes and tried to pinpoint when, exactly, the man had slipped away. One moment he was actively encouraging their planning session, then he was quiet, but still curiously listening to them, then not paying too much attention anymore, but still smiling politely when they glanced his way… and now he wasn't there.

How had they not noticed he wasn't in the SUV with them? Only he'd been so quiet, and they'd been so busy and... Damn it all. He'd played them. And they'd let him! Harkness felt like banging his head on the wall. Bloody hell, he'd known the man was a Sevenseaser, trickery was in their blood, he should have expected something like this!

"Found him!" exclaimed Tosh, the constant clicking of her keys stopping to mark her success. She turned her laptop so he could see what she'd called up: Pirate_in_Cardiff! already had 1827 views on Youtube and almost half as many likes.

Harkness cursed out loud.

"It's not that bad," the pretty Asian woman smiled, scrolling the comments. "The most popular theory is that he's advertising for a new movie… followed by advertising for a fundraising tennis tournament."

"A what?"

"He's outside the Cardiff Central Youth Club," she explained gesturing to the CCTV video she'd called up. The grainy image on the small screen was, indeed, a pirate in a deserted parking lot. As for the location, he'd take her word for it.

"What the hell is he doing there?" asked Owen, unbelieving.

"Who cares? Let's just go get him," said Harkness curtly.

"Do we really need to do this?" asked John, eyeing the manhole going down to the sewers with distaste.

It's not like he was squeamish, God no (he'd never have survived medical school, let alone living with Sherlock, if he was) but dear Lord the place smelled.

They were somewhere in Hackney, round the corner from a house that had to have been painted by someone under the influence of some very good drugs. The Doctor and Sherlock both assured him this was the best place to access creatures presumably living in the Northern Outfall Sewer. He hadn't bothered asking them how they knew that, or even how they'd determined where the carivores' lair was.

At least the Doctor had produced opaque nylon cloth to hide what they were doing and orange cones and neon yellow, hi-visibility vests (which only John had bothered putting on, of course) so that they may pass for road workers. Hopefully.

"We must gather them all up, John, I don't want to risk a repeat of the New York alligators mess," said the Doctor, tongue between his teeth as he balanced all the components of whatever contrivance he was building around the site they'd chosen.

"I just want to be completely sure that this," he indicated Sherlock and the the body parts that Molly had let him take and he was now artfully arranging, "is truly necessary." He frowned, something in the sprawled limbs tickling his memory. "Sherlock, are you trying to recreate that messy cold case with the murdered builders you saw in those pictures last week?" he asked incredulously.

The consulting detective looked guilty for the briefest of instants, before choosing to ignore the blogger. Lestrade had refused to let him recreate the crime scene just for a chance to solve the case – this was too good an opportunity to pass up!

John sighed resignedly and bent to help him move the last body into position.

All the while, the Doctor kept darting hither and yon, doing six things at once and grinning wildly at the unspoken comments John was oh-so-visibly swallowing down.

"We don't even know if they're still here. They could have gone through those tunnels again, couldn't they?" the blogger protested half-heartedly.

"Balance of probability, John," chastised Sherlock. "If they've been negatively effected on the way here, they'll stay clear of any similar openings; any return trip would only be by chance."

"Exactly! Balance of probability says that there are several hungry, omnivorous creatures living in the sewage system of a very populous city," proclaimed the Doctor briskly. "What happens when they come up looking for food?"

John glanced around. A group of children with sports bags were running to catch the bus, yelling merrily. At the bus stop, young men with hoodies were bent over their smartphones, and closer to their worksite, a woman in a waitress uniform was smoking and watching a few teens toss a ball back and forth and against a wall. An old lady was dragging a rickety trolley full of groceries down the sidewalk. Two mums had stopped for a chat, angling their respective prams so that they weren't in the way.

"Point taken," he swallowed; but he was still uneasy. "Wouldn't it be better to do it at night, though?" When they frowned at him, he insisted: "I'm just not comfortable with the idea of calling up a bunch – oh, excuse me, a pack – of potentially murderous aliens into a crowded street."

"It's hardly crowded, John."

"Not murderous! There is no criminal intent behind their actions. Besides there's nothing to worry about, it's the trip in the spatio-temporal tunnel that's made them aggressive, now that nothing's messing with their low-level telepathic field, they should be back to mild-mannered self-defence-only types..."

"Should, huh?" muttered John. Sherlock was too busy studying the well-disposed bodies with intent to pay him any mind.

The Doctor bounced around the place, checking that everything was just so, turning his devices on and setting up a blower fan. "There! Done! As soon as they enter this area, they'll get terribly drowsy and I'll be able to round them up and return them to their planet of origin. Easy peasy!" He stopped with a hand on the on button of the fan: "Ready?"

And suddenly even John was grinning. Because they were doing this regardless of his misgivings and what the hell, he might as well enjoy it! If there was one thing that the three of them unequivocally had in common, it was the wild, goofy delight that they took in carrying out some crazed, brillian plan!

"Right, yes. Let's get the hell out of here!" he said, grabbing Sherlock by an arm to pull him to safety.

The fan started buzzing, wafting the smell of the meat, and the Doctor jumped back and hurried after the two friends, already babbling about something…

A football streaked past them out of nowhere ("Sorry!" yelled the laughing teens from down the street. "Throw it here, will ya?") but the wide-eyed Time Lord could only hold out a hand helplessly ("NO!") while it, with unerring precision, hit the closest tottering contrived projector, making it stagger out of alignment and stutter to a stop-

"Oh, no!… Run!"

The Torchwood team kept an eye on Sparrow through the CCTV feed, watching him stride up and down the parking lot and the nearby grassy space in huge steps, holding a little box up or to the side at random.

Fortunately, by the time the black SUV skidded to a stop by the Youth Centre, the pirate was still there, now propped against a sickly tree trunk, intently studying his hand-held box – a compass, Harkness realized, dismissing it almost at once.

"How's holding up that tree going, Sparrow?" he called out jovially, masking his irritation. It was their own damn fault they'd lost him, after all.

The pirate appeared to give his mocking question some serious consideration, looking up at the leaves above his head, then around himself, then up again.

"Still standin', so I'd say 'twas a job well done," he replied with a little smirk. He pushed himself up and disappeared the compass into some pocket or other.

"Good, good. Now you can come and hold up the bars of one of our cells," said Harkness, still too-jovial. "And no, that's not an invitation you can turn down. God knows what you could do if we let you wander around unsupervised..."

"You wound me, Cap'n," protested Sparrow, deftly avoiding every attempt to grasp him. "To think I would bring trouble to this here town. City!" he corrected himself quickly.

Harkness swiftly cut off his strategic retreat and pinned him with a mild glare.

"It won't be for long," promised Tosh, holding out her hand in a soothing motion. "We're about to catch those smugglers, then we'll be able to help you. And look at the bright side! Once we close up the case, you can help us celebrate!" she said encouragingly.

She motioned to the SUV hopefully. An annoyed Owen held the door open. Gwen drew her gun with a snort.

"Oh, a party! I love a good party," the pirate said brightly, dancing out of their reach once more.

"Me too," said Harkness blandly, stepping to the side to cut Sparrow's way again. For some reason, his team groaned loudly at this – which was patently unfair. What had he even said?

"First, we catch the bad guys. Then we party," said Gwen sternly and raised the gun, freezing Sparrow in mid-step as he made to slip away.

"And you are coming with us, one way or another," added Harkness throwing an arm around the pirate's shoulders (and wrinkling his nose). He turned to march his captive to the SUV. "No more wandering!" he scolded.

"You seem ta need a lesson or five on having fun, Cap'n. Might I suggest a visit to Singapore?"

"Oh, would I ever!"

"RUN!"

The Doctor was yelling at the top of his lungs, waving his long arms about frantically at the few foolish people that weren't diving for cover inside the nearest building, while still holding up his sonic screwdriver like a beacon, to ensure the pack followed them.

Sherlock was barking out directions, taking the three of them and their pursuers towards the safety of the Tardis at high speed, along the route with less probability of people and most probability of obstacles to throw behind them in the aliens' path.

Said aliens – several rabid humanoids with sharp fangs and flattened noses – were hot on their heels.

A couple of shots from John's gun had slowed the creatures down the tiniest bit, but they seemed awfully determined to chase them. And very, very angry. If John hadn't needed all his breath to keep ahead of them, he'd have shouted I told you so at the Doctor – repeatedly!

Tearing through a private backyard and then slamming a gate behind them bought them the chance to distance them a little – enough that they could reach their goal (and John wanted to yell when the Doctor got a key out, didn't he have a better way to open the door, something faster, damnit, phenomenal technology and he still relied on bloody keys!).

They all burst into the Tardis at last, adrenaline running high, and the Doctor flew to the controls, typing instructions to his ship at breakneck speed. "Don't close the door!" he warned.

The two Londoners almost collapsed in a heap just inside, breathless and giddy, while the Tardis shuffled her rooms disposition a bit and a wide path formed through her control room, a big door opening obligingly at the end of it.

"Drowsy, you said! Sleepy!" John complained loudly, too hyped up to just catch his breath quietly. He pointed a finger at the aliens outside repeatedly: "That isn't sleepy, Doctor!"

"Sorry! I'm so sorry! The ball disalligned the projector – the combination of wavelengths turned into a highly disruptive one, meant to boost reaction times and get the adrenaline pumping instead of being calming!"

"Next time, we're using chemical agents!" snapped Sherlock, straightening up and retying his scarf.

The growling creatures reached the Tardis.

"Right. Go! Run straight through!" shouted the Doctor pointing authoritatively to the newly formed door, and John and Sherlock obeyed because what else could they do?

In they went, through a bare room with a hint of grass smell in the air that had been on the other side of the ship just before, out an opening on the wall in front of them that closed seamlessly after them, down a brief straight corridor and through another door- into the console room.

They stumbled to a stop in shock, right in time to watch the pack of aliens run in after them (Sherlock made a pained sound when he actually spotted the back of his own coat flapping out of sight) and straight into the grass-smelling room. Quick as lightning, the Doctor slammed the door shut after them and locked it with his sonic screwdriver.

"And done!" the Time Lord cheered.

Sherlock was pale, eyes closed, muttering something irate that had to do with 'ridiculous ships' and 'impossible geometries' and the 'underrated need for rational coherence in reality'. John pushed him gently onto the Captain's seat.

The Time Lord moved to the controls, working quickly. "All set. Safely contained and ready for delivery!All's well what ends better, isn't it? Let me just reverse the polarity of the neutron flow and we'll go retrieve the bodies..."

"Neutron-" Shrugging off the shock, Sherlock glared, appalled: "That has no scientific meaning whatsoever!"

The Doctor paused briefly. "I know, but people don't usually call me on it."

Sparrow never made it all the way to the Torchwood SUV, because a bushy hedge bordering the opposite side of the parking lot suddenly developed a mouth.

"Oh, that's where it is!" he exclaimed happily and before Harkness could figure out how, the pirate had freed himself of his grip and was running uncoordinatedly towards the swirling, stormy nothingness swelling within and oozing out of the hedge.

"What? Wait!" They took off after him, but he had a good headstart and was shockingly fast.

"How is he doing that? The way he moves his arms – he looks like he's slacklining in mid-air, how can he possibly be that fast?" protested Owen – none of them was a slouch when it came to speed, but Sparrow was still faster, damnit!

They slammed to a stop just out of reach of the greyish stuff (long experience teaching them to stay far from unknown substances), yelling demands and threats that were ignored, and could only watch the pirate running straight up to the odd energy mouth and plunging into it with a perfect dive.

"That's him gone, then," sighed Gwen.

Harkness ran a weary hand over his face. He was worried about what mess the man might create wherever the tunnel led him to, but… he had to prioritize. A pirate from Sevenseas could take care of himself, surely?

"Right, well. Let's put up a perimeter around this place and go catch those bastards first, we'll worry about the pirate in the hedge later."

And with that, the Torchwood team threw a last backward glance to where Captain Sparrow had just been and turned their attention with synchronized efficiency to finally, finally corral the Zocci smugglers they'd been after for so long.

Miles to the east of that parking lot, Jack Sparrow landed with a painful twist onto a London pavement what seemed ta be filled with torn up bodies and got up quickly, dizzy from the unpleasant trip, staggering drunkenly for a moment as he tried to get his bearing.

That was made difficult by the forked coral struts fazing in and out of perception all around him, with blaring trumpets heralding the reshaping of reality into that magnificent ship of the Doctor's.

"There you are!" cried three voices at once.

"Am I?" asked Sparrow, sounding doubtful.

"So you are the pirate," stated Sherlock, studying him closely. "You've led an… interesting life. Most of it on the sea – obvious; salt-encrusted clothes, kohl eyeliner against the glare of sun and wind, odd balance… You scan your surrounding constantly, you don't appear to, but you're aware of everyone's and everything's position at all times – you're used to being in danger, even when among comrades. You likely have a reputation for untrustworthiness, then."

Sparrow's eyebrows rose, but Sherlock barely took a breath before continuing rapidly: "The way you move indicates you rely on agility and quick wit rather than brute force, likely because of your average height and build, but the callouses on your hands say clearly that you're a skilled swordsman. The slurred speech and your blasé attitude towards confusion speak of semi-perpetual drunkenness, but you're less effected by being intoxicated than you let people believe. Keeping everybody off-balance gives you an advantage."

He ignored the slight narrowing of the pirate's eyes and declared approvingly: "You're clever. Very clever. Fiercely independent – you care nothing about other people's opinion of you and you'll do whatever you need to be able to do whatever you want. Clearly you have a unique sense of style – most likely each piece of attire you wear has a tale to it and I would venture to say you haven't paid for any of it."

Sparrow smirked, but didn't interrupt.

"The trinkets in your hair and clothes mark your history of daring ventures, but the rings, ah, the rings. This one," Sherlock tapped the gold and onyx flower ring on the man's left hand, "is clearly a trophy, stolen or conned I'd wager, while this one," he held up Sparrow's right hand, on the index finger of which glinted an antique ring with a green stone set between a skull on each side, "is more likely an heirloom – the stone is obviously not of value but you are more careful with it than the others nonetheless: sentiment. And these you haven't had long."

He turned the hand to better see the two thin gold bands the pirate wore on the same finger, both with weirdly woven knots reminescent of a plate of spaghetti.

He dropped that hand and grabbed the other, raising it and pushing the sleeves back, exposing a gold and amethyst Greco-Roman ring and a piece of lace wrapped around the wrist. "This ring is a different matter; given the pattern of wear you've rubbed into it – you worry it often, obvious – it is both significant and representative of an unresolved situation; a promise? Not a bethrotal, you don't have any significant female in your life at this time – a business arrangement that fell through then, or that has yet to bear fruit. Now, the lace? That is from a romance. Former lover, and you obviously miss her – she left you, or you wouldn't have kept this. Dead? Just moved on?" he wondered, but did not give the pirate a chance to answer.

"You've been to the Far East, clearly," he went on instead, fleetingly touching the silver and jade oriental dragon ring on Sparrow's left thumb. "More than once," he added, eyeing the Chinese luck coin tied to a bone with some copper wire that peeked out of his hat. "Enough to pick up some of the beliefs and superstitions. Oh, and you you have some familiarity with vodoo practices."

He flicked the blackened chicken paw dangling from Sparrow's belt before pushing the other sleeve up, baring the forearm.

"The tattooes are quite obvious – P for pirate, branded by the East India Trading Company – clearly you were caught at least once, but escaped the gallows somehow; the sparrow flying across a setting sun is just as well-known: sailors used this to sygnify that the bearer has sailed all of the Seven Seas – so you're a well-travelled and experienced seaman."

Sparrow snatched his arm back and adjusted his coat sleeve fastidiously.

"That 'X' scar on your right cheek tells me you've run afoul of someone with a grudge but to whom you were useless if dead. A scar like that is deliberate, they were giving you a message," he elaborated and asked absently: "Did you owe them money? That you never rub it shows me you don't think much of it, either you already dealt with the messenger or you simply don't care."

That earned him another slight smirk, but Sherlock barely acknowledged it.

"Given the times you lived in and chosen lifestyle, it is unlikely that you received any formal education, but the way you track the written word in the monitors around us betrays that you are far from illiterate. You more or less raised yourself then, and developed a taste for reading out of the same curiosity that gave you a taste for piracy," he concluded. "Then there's your hat."

He paused to draw breath, looking smug.

"Important things, hats," said Sparrow blandly.

"To you, certainly. It's a key element in your look, possibly in your identity," Sherlock rattled off quickly. "It's battered and faded, but obviously well-loved. Practical as well as decorative. Very simple, no trimmings or emblems – freedom and independence, again – but it's not cheap wool felt either, no, this is expensive – you don't think of yourself as a mere sailor – but the sea is your life nonetheless – this is good protection from the weather, you could probably wear it in a storm without ruining it. Chances are you tried on a lot of hats before finding the 'perfect' one and now that you have it, you'll guard it jealously. It's not just a hat, it's a symbol of all you have achieved, of the role you've chosen for yourself." He finished dramatically: "That hat is who you are, Jack Sparrow."

There was a moment of breathless silence, while the world waited for the pirate's reaction to Sherlock having deduced the hell out of him.

"Captain," he commented eventually, unfazed.

"Excuse me?"

"It's Captain Jack Sparrow." He leaned unsteadily into Sherlock's personal space, black eyes staring into verdigris ones. "And don't you forget it."

Sherlock wrinkled his nose at the rather pungent smell of sea and rum and lack of hygiene, but he refused to react further than that. "Always something," he muttered, displeased.

John let out a breath, quietly amazed.

Sparrow rocked fluidly back and turned to the Doctor: "Now, my dear fellow," he said charmingly. "Where might I find some rum?"

"You've got quite enough rum, I'd say!" protested the Time Lord.

Sparrow regarded him blankly. "…Enough rum?" he asked with profound skepticism – evidently doubting his understanding of the Doctor's language.

John darted his eyes from one to the other, trying not to laugh. "How about some tea instead?" he proposed brightly.

The pirate transferred his blank stare to him.

"Tea! Yes! Excellent choice, John Watson! Good cup of tea! Super-heated infusion of free-radicals and tannins, that's just what we need!" babbled on the Doctor, overly-cheerful.

Sherlock collapsed back on the Captain's seat, looking disgusted with life. "Tea's boring," he muttered.

But he didn't refuse the steaming cup John handed him (unlike Sparrow, who regarded the tea with wariness of all things) and so the blond settled comfortably against the Tardis' coral struts.

"Out of curiosity… what possessed you to throw yourself into the maws of a hedge?" he asked urbanely.

Sparrow, who was fiddling with some of the Tardis' levers, replied briefly: "I was following directions."

He dangled his compass by its string for a moment before turning to squint at the curio cabinet that the Tardis had refilled for him, studying its new content to see if anything might be easily removed. His face lit up when he spied a familiar looking green trinket.

"Directions from a broken compass?" asked Sherlock scornfully.

Sparrow swivelled and made an outraged sound when he spied his compass in the hands of the detective, who was studying it intently, shaking it to see if he could affect the incessant spinning.

"Sherlock," said John reproachfully.

"And that reminds me! I shall have my psychic paper back, thank you!" interjected the Doctor loudly.

"I suppose this could be a side-effect of this ship's capabilities, but as we are currently not moving, the most logical conclusion is that this compass is useless."

Sparrow snatched it back. "My compass is unique," he said testily.

"Unique here having the meaning of broken?" inquired Sherlock sarcastically.

Sparrow sniffed: "Oh, my compass works fine. It's you what don't understand how it works!"

That was guaranteed to seize Sherlock's attention and keep it, thought John. There'd be no rest until the detective figured the broken compass out.

"More tea?" he offered to the Doctor, resignedly.

"Is that my yo-yo?" asked the Time Lord however, frowning at the pirate.

Sparrow froze, green yo-yo falling from his grasp to dangle from its string, the merry little tune dwindling sadly because he wasn't playing with the toy properly.

"No," he lied blatantly.

The Doctor scowled, but the pirate hurried to distract him: "Well, now! I think that we've all arrived at a very special place. Spiritually, ecumenically, grammatically," he declared grandly, clapping his hands after slipping the yo-yo discreetly out of sight.

"That last one's important," nodded the Doctor in mock seriousness, marching up to the man with a hand outstretched.

"Indeed," sniffed Sherlock.

John rolled his eyes.

"Now if you could give my yo-yo back..."

Sparrow smiled winningly: "I believe it's time that I return to the Caribbean – and my bonny ship." He deftly avoided the Doctor's grasp.

"That's a good idea," said John mildly. "After all, you owe us, Doctor."

"What?"

Effectively distracted, the Time Lord turned to the British doctor. "What!"

"You owe us big," insisted John, fighting a grin. "You owe us... a trip!"

The Doctor started to protest, realized what John was saying and changed his complaint to a pleased question: "I thought you didn't want to come?"

"We don't!" said Sherlock at once. "...We don't, do we?" he asked John more quietly, trying to pretend he wasn't worried about his friend's answer – because of course John wanted to go, he'd seen as much the last time, why hadn't he expected this, stupid, stupid, but he'd thought they were past this… "You said you didn't want to leave London!" he blurted out, and refused to wince at how blatantly alarmed he sounded – feelings, urgh – but it was always like this with John and maybe, just maybe, his brother was right about this caring business…

"I said you would never leave London," corrected John and oh, this hurt – Sherlock tried to hide it, but he felt slightly ill – he knew, he knew John would leave one day, why hadn't he protected himself better-

"...but I've thought of something in the meanwhile," continued John easily, as if he wasn't forcing Sherlock to scramble to raise walls he was no longer accustomed to, not from this quarter- "We don't actually need to leave London, do we?"

Sherlock blinked as his friend's actual words registred. Us. We. As in… Sherlock-and-John travelling, not just John leaving. Travelling in this almost nightmarish irrational not-space that he could barely stand.

The consulting detective kept quiet, mind spinning, uncharachteristically insecure.

John had a huge grin: "I was thinking… we could visit a dry cleaner's shop on St John's Wood High Street, in April of 1949."

A heartbit, then Sherlock's eyes glowed with interest. "You mean... John, you can't possibly mean...!"

The Doctor was baffled: "Why would we do that?"

"Emily Armstrong," explained Sherlock, breathless with sudden excitement. "She had her skull shattered by 22 blows from a claw hammer. There were some suspects, but no leads ever truly panned out. It's one of the unsolved murders I've studied… If I could examine the crime scene…!" Suddenly the idea of travelling in this headache-inducing timeship wasn't too bad anymore.

The Doctor's face lit up. "Oh! Brilliant! You want to go to 1949, then? I can certainly manage that!" He started running around the Tardis console, dialling coordinates and pushing buttons and levers.

"Or else November, 1536," offered John, shifting to grasp the Tardis' coral trunks securely.

"Robert Pakington!" Sherlock guessed at once, moving to hold onto something as well. "Even better! The first handgun murder in London ever. Merchant and Member of Parliament, later cast as martyr, but to this day still an unsolved case!"

"Not for long!" exclaimed the Doctor happily. "We'll be then in a jiffy. I haven't been in 1536 in a while, actually. This might be interesting indeed!"

The Tardis' dematerialization sounds rose and fell all around them excitingly.

"Of course, first we've got to bring him back," the Doctor said, carelessly pointing at Jack Sparrow while he kept busying himself with the controls.

The pirate was lounging on a branch of the coral-like interior, in a position that ought to be impossible in terms of balance but managed to appear incredibly comfortable. He smile sardonically from under his lowered hat, the light of the Tardis' core catching on his golden tooth.

"You can do that later!" scowled Sherlock, pouting like a child who got told he had to wait for dessert. "I don't want to spend more time in this ridiculous ship than necessary!"

The Tardis promptly buckled, sending him to collide against a wall. He cursed, while a three-parts chorus protested his careless remark.

"Don't insult her!"

"This here is a magnificent ship!"

"My Tardis is not ridiculous!"

Sherlock got up, scowling for all he was worth.

"Oh, come on!" cajoled John after a moment. "Didn't you want to be a pirate when you were a child?"

Sherlock looked at him, startled. How did John even know these things?

Sparrow jumped to his feet in a quick, deft movement, as usual managing to appear graceful through a combination of clumsy motions. And moved towards Sherlock, invading his personal space with a cocky grin: "You wanna be a pirate, lad? I c'n make you a pirate!"

Sherlock gazed slowly from Sparrow's confident, sexy smirk, to the Doctor's eager, self-assured grin, to John's warm, excited smile.

Sniffing haughtily, he raised his chin, wrapped his scarf more securely around his neck: "Alright, then," he said, and popped Sparrow's hat off his head, deftly moving it to his own, ignoring the yelped, indignant: "Me hat!"

He smirked: "The game is on!