Fic: Guardian Angel
Title: Guardian Angel
Rating: G
Character: Tosh
Words: ~300
Spoilers: TW 1.04 Cyberwoman
Summary: Tosh knows what it's like to be invisible
Author's Note: It's different in tone and content than the pieces I'm currently working on. But unlike the rest of them it's done (ah-hah! that's what vignettes are for!), so it gets to be the first chick pushed out of the nest.
She writes the program one afternoon during the first week of his suspension. It doesn't take long, these things never do when inspiration comes upon her exactly like the breath of the gods. Code flies from her fingertips, thoughts into keywords, ideas reified into objects. This one monitors selected internal and external CCTV inputs, running at all times, unsleeping, observant, so it is obviously cArgus. That one is meant to learn about him so it can recognize him from cArgus's datastream. With a puckish smile she names that one cJeeves, and she pulls up old internal CCTV footage so it can learn his silent tread, his upright posture. Returning to the Greek theme, cArachne weaves his daily wanderings into data, while cMnemnosyne slots each thread neatly into a table on Mainframe. And here is cGuardian, the controller that pulls it together, that tells Argus and Jeeves about each other, that lets Arachne observe Jeeves and tell Mnemnosyne what to store, and that will, on request, show him to her. The project and the executable she names GrdnAngl.exe, a disemvowelled digital Guardian Angel.
She usually prefers a more unified (and less whimsical) naming convention, but who is she to argue with inspiration?
She knows that Jack is doing something similar ("the old fashioned way... with my eyes" her internal Ianto-model supplies). She loves Jack. He saved her in almost every way a human being can be saved. But he's easily distracted; more charitably, he's the Captain, and Torchwood isn't an easy command. So this is her way of lending him a helping hand.
She does this because it's logical to do so. He hid a monster in the basement, and they didn't know, because none of them bothered to look.
But... she also does this because she knows what it's like to be invisible.