Another little requested scene for 'Stuck'. People wanted to see more of Lord Hugo. The icon I'm using was made by vail_kagami, who wins. This is somewhere just after Forget Me Not.



Lord Hugo the Third Shall Save Us

“I’m just saying there has to be a better place to store him!” Jack shouted at the Doctor as Ianto painstakingly tried to dry out some highly classified paperwork on the radiator. Lord Hugo the Third, their small pet alien manatee, had gnawed through his paddling pool again. It wouldn’t have been a major problem, except the shallow flood of water across the lower levels had short-circuited some of the electrics, which had switched on the sprinklers and soaked everyone. Even the Doctor’s wet look couldn’t calm Jack’s fury.

“There is nowhere else we can put him!” the Doctor yelled back. “And it’s hardly his fault if your systems overreact to a manatee-related accident!”

Then the electrics went completely dead, plunging the Hub into darkness. The Doctor threw his arms up with exasperation. “And now we’ve lost power! All because a household pet got into the wiring! Brilliant tech here Jack…brilliant.”

Jack held up a hand to halt the Doctor’s sarcasm. “Wait. The systems aren’t all connected in that way, for security purposes we run things on separate…” He trailed off, feeling a sense of unease. “Tosh? Is everything okay down there?”

The Japanese woman came running into the office, knocking some of the damp papers off of the radiator. She looked particularly anxious. “Jack, something’s shutting us down! Some sort of computer virus, but it can’t be a virus because if it was I could stop it and…” She shrugged helplessly, “…I can’t stop this. I’m locked out of everything.”

The Doctor pushed past her and ran down to the computer terminals. The rest of the team made to follow, but something caught Jack’s eye. “Wait.” He put his arms out so that his team didn’t run down the steps past him.

“What is it?” Toshiko asked. The rest all tried to peek over her shoulder to see what he had seen.

Jack narrowed his eyes, squinted into the darkness of the lower levels. “Doc,” he said in a low voice to the Time Lord tapping at the keyboard. “Doctor, get up here. Now.”

“Hang on, I think I’m almost in…” the Doctor muttered as he waved his sonic about and tapped at keys.

“Doctor,” Jack hissed, his eyes picking out small shapes in the gloom, “Get up here now!”

“Seems to have been a temporary lockdown,” the Doctor said thoughtfully. “But why would anyone instigate a temporary power outage? Why not do it permanently?”

Jack took a step down hesitantly. It didn’t do much to decrease the distance between him and the Doctor. “Maybe they just wanted to close us down long enough to get into the Hub, now get here. Please.” He tried not to raise his voice, he didn’t want to alert whatever was moving about in the dark. He pulled his gun slowly. Prepared for action.

The Doctor seemed to realise Jack’s meaning, as well as noticing that everyone else was a level higher than him. Staying off the ground. He glanced around the Hub and Jack wondered if those Time Lord eyes saw more than he could. The Doctor looked uneasy. “Right then, moving from the lower level…On my way…”

He took one step in their direction before the lights came back on, almost blinding everyone. With the sudden flare, their enemy was clear. Gwen shrieked.

All around the floor were large beetles. Very large, fluorescent green, beetles.

“Oh that’s disgusting,” Owen muttered from behind Jack as the beetles roamed around the ground level. “That is really foul.”

Jack was more worried about the Doctor. When the lights came back on the beetles had gone for the Time Lord in their midst, but the Doctor had jumped up onto the desk chair quickly to avoid the vicious little pincers. But he was surrounded. Not in any immediate danger, since the critters clearly couldn’t climb, but still surrounded and looking rather perturbed.

“What are they?” Ianto asked.

“Alien vermin,” the Doctor said from his perch by the desk. The bugs all ran at the chair when he spoke, but they couldn’t reach him. “Believe me, I don’t like to use the word vermin very often, but these things are barely sentient, constantly hungry and highly venomous.”

“If they’re barely sentient, how did they travel here?” Toshiko asked curiously.

Jack knew the answer to that one. “They didn’t. They were dumped on us. Some clever civilisation honed in on the Rift, shut down the defences on the other side and threw these bastards over like intergalactic garbage.”

“Now what?” asked Gwen. Clearly they couldn’t stand upstairs all day. The Doctor wouldn’t stay on that chair forever, either.

“Jack for god’s sake put the gun away. The chances of you hitting the soft underside of these little things is slim to none, no matter how much of a sharp-shooter you think you are.” The Doctor opened his mouth as if to continue, when his chair lurched violently, almost tipping him into a swarm of hungry beetles.

Everyone was watching, but Owen was the first to notice. “They’re eating the chair!”

“Doc, get on the desk!” Jack yelled.

“I can’t stand on a bloody computer!” the Doctor yelled back as the chair began to shrink beneath him.

Jack’s muscles tensed. He was going to have to run down there and grab the Doctor and carry him back over to the stairs. He would surely die in the process, but better him than the Doctor. He took a deep breath to prepare himself for heroics.

Then a slithering, slurping noise heralded Lord Hugo the Third’s arrival round the corner of the desk. The beetles immediately swarmed the little manatee and the Doctor’s anguished cry was enough to break Jack’s heart. How could the foolish man have become so attached to a space whale in two weeks?

“HUGO! NO!” The Doctor seemed poised to jump off the chair.

“DON’T YOU DARE GO IN FOR HIM, DOC! DON’T YOU DARE!” Jack pointed at the Doctor authoritatively. “You are not risking your life for a manatee!”

He would swear to gods that he didn’t believe in, that the Doctor’s lower lip wibbled. “But it’s not just a manatee! It’s Lord Hugo!” Oh god, the Time Lord’s eyes were getting teary. “He only came by because he was looking for me!” The Doctor knelt down low on the unsteady chair and reached out, but he couldn’t reach the manatee. Even if he could, the beetles were everywhere. Hugo wasn’t even visible anymore. “Hugo! HUGO!”

“Sir?” Ianto drew Jack’s attention from the tragedy. “If we could find chains or ropes up here, we might be able to extend them down over the balcony. He could climb up.”

“Good thinking, Ianto. All of you, get looking!” He would stay to keep a distant eye on the Doctor. The Time Lord had sat back sullenly on the chair and Jack knew the Doctor felt the loss like a kid losing their first pet.

“I should just stick to robot dogs…” muttered the Time Lord, sniffling slightly. “Even then they get exploded because of me.”

“Aww, Doc, don’t do this. You know that…hey. Is it just me, or are there less beetles?”

The Doctor glanced up at him, then down at the swarming alien vermin. The pile did seem slightly…

A beetle fell from the top of the swarm to the floor, revealing a bit of Lord Hugo, who moaned happily in his space-whale way before slurping up the fallen beetle. The Doctor stared for a moment before beaming the happiest smile Jack had seen in quite some time. “HUGO! You’re alive! And…eating venomous beetles.”

The manatee-like creature slithered slowly along, having difficulties with mobility on dry floor. With slow and methodical progress, it picked up each beetle in its big mouth and slurped them down until there were none left. Then the alien pet looked up at its alien owner and said…

“RAOWWWWOOO.”

The Doctor laughed, almost giggled, as he jumped down off of the seat and scooped his little friend up into his arms. “He saved me, Jack! Did you see that? He saved me!”

Jack waved away Ianto and his ropes and descended the stairs. The Doctor was truly coddling Hugo now.

“…and we’re going to get you a massive pool! And all the venomous space vermin you can eat! And you’re not even queasy, are you, you clever little manatee! Your digestive system laughs in the face of venom!” Jack went to put an arm around the Doctor, but the Time Lord twisted away. “And you wanted to store him elsewhere!”

“He can stay, okay?” Jack said with a tired smile. “Even if he only ate those bugs out of hunger.”

The Doctor scowled at him, clearly convinced that Hugo had acted out of love. “I’m going to repair and refill his pool. Look after him, I mean it!”

Jack nodded and took the slimy creature into his arms as the Doctor rushed off to set up Hugo’s inflatable home.

Then, with a quick glance to ensure his team weren’t watching, he pressed a quick kiss to the creature’s head.

“Thanks for saving him, Hugo.”