Fic: Lifeline
Title: Lifeline
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Lisa, Team.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1369
Spoilers: Cyberwoman.
Summary: Sorting out the archives started out as a chore but soon became so much more.
Written For: Weekend Challenge Prompt: 5 Alphabetical Words at 1_million_words, using fable, faced, facet, facts, faded’.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Sorting out Torchwood Three’s archives had seemed a daunting prospect when Ianto had first seen the mess they were in; they were a far cry from the clean orderliness he’d been accustomed to at Torchwood Tower. But the task had given him a valid reason for being down in the lower levels for hours on end, so he hadn’t hesitated to take off his jacket, roll up his shirtsleeves, and get stuck in. It hadn’t taken him long to realise everywhere was in even worse shape than he’d originally thought. The labels on the few items that still had them were faded almost into illegibility, and he was faced with trying to decipher them in an effort to identify artefacts that had, in theory at least, already been identified. Clearly, it was not going to be a quick or an easy job.
He'd started in what had seemed the most logical manner by rewriting the labels that were still attached to various items. Then he’d rewritten all the labels which had come adrift from the objects they belonged to, the ones that were still more or less readable anyway, in the hopes of eventually matching them with unlabelled items. Then the fun had really began.
Most of the labels carried some kind of physical description of the artefact in question, so it was a case of taking each redone label and searching around where he’d found the original until he located something that seemed to fit. Occasionally, he’d find several similar objects, any or all of which might be the right one, and since guessing didn’t seem like a wise move, he’d gather them up, together with the label, and take them upstairs to see if Captain Harkness could shed some light on the matter.
Jack seemed to enjoy these interludes, helping Ianto puzzle out a selection of the archives’ many mysteries, but Ianto privately suspected he knew less than he pretended to. Torchwood Three’s leader would regale him with rambling tales that Ianto considered to be mostly fable, and therefore worryingly short on anything resembling provable facts. Not that the tales themselves weren’t entertaining, because they were, they just weren’t always particularly helpful. They were, however, a pleasant distraction.
Talking to Jack about a peculiar device, or a curious object, took Ianto’s mind off Lisa, hooked up to the cobbled together life-support machinery hidden away in a damp little room in one of the Hub’s lowest habitable levels. He began to look forward to those occasions when he could sit in Jack’s office, drinking coffee, and listening to his new boss waxing lyrical over some interesting facet of the latest mysterious object they were trying to identify.
What had started out as a sort of alibi to account for his frequent absences from the main Hub soon became Ianto’s lifeline, the one thing that was keeping him mostly sane while he tried to juggle his work responsibilities with tending to Lisa’s needs, all while getting too little sleep. The archives were a source of endless fascination, not only the shelves and boxes crammed with the accumulated flotsam and jetsam of over a century of Rift activity, but also the filing cabinets stuffed to overflowing with personnel files, field reports, and information on several hundred alien races, some of it verified fact and some little more than speculation. He could have happily lost himself for days on end reading, sorting, researching, cross-referencing… it was such a challenging and absorbing task. Sadly, there simply weren’t enough hours in the day for him to spend as much time at it as he might have liked.
After Lisa was discovered, and the cyber-consciousness that had taken over her body had been destroyed, Ianto found himself lost, rudderless, adrift. He was barred from the Hub, put on a four-week suspension, and suddenly he didn’t know what to do with himself. He did his best to catch up on sleep, when the nightmares allowed him to, but when he was awake… What could he do to fill in the long hours of wakefulness? Watching TV just added to the tedium, yet there was only so much wallowing in grief and guilt that a human body and mind could handle without demanding a diversion of some description.
He reorganised his cramped little apartment, cleaned everything to within an inch of its life in an effort to keep his mind and body occupied, threw out a bunch of stuff that he no longer needed, or that held too many bad memories, but what he really wanted was to lose himself in Torchwood’s archives. Over the past few months, they’d begun to feel like the closest thing he had to a home, and away from them he felt bereft, with no clear purpose to his existence, and no reason to drag himself out of bed every morning. He knew he was sinking into depression but had no idea how to prevent it.
Then, almost before he knew it, his suspension was over. He was allowed to return to work, and he willingly faced the resentment and suspicion directed at him by some of his colleagues, because his job at least gave him a renewed sense of purpose, a reason to keep going day after day. He endured two weeks of puttering around the main Hub, cleaning, caring for the residents, making coffee, ordering food for the team, and maintaining the SUV before Jack finally gave him permission to return to the archives.
The moment he stepped into the cool, dimly lit, cavernous warren of rooms and passageways, it felt like coming home. He’d missed the musty scent of dust and old paper, the soothing hum of the air circulation systems, the familiar banks of filing cabinets, the strange and literally unearthly objects jumbled together on endless rows of shelves, waiting to be identified and assigned a permanent place. They were old friends, and far better company than Owen, with his pointed barbs and insults, Gwen with her cloying sympathy and distrust, Jack with his piercing scrutiny. Only Tosh, with her gentle kindness and unforced empathy, somehow avoided setting his nerves on edge.
But in the archives, by himself, he could drop his guard, no longer feeling the need to keep looking over his shoulder, knowing that someone would be watching him. Down here, he could relax, focus completely on his task, and not think about anything else.
Gradually, as the weeks passed, the air of tension and suspicion that had made the main Hub such an uncomfortable place for Ianto faded away and things got back to something approaching normal. No one came right out and said they’d forgiven him, except for Jack during a long talk a month after he’d resumed his duties, but he knew they had, each in their own way. Even Owen. He resumed bringing unidentified artefacts to Jack’s office for the two of them to ponder over, started going to Tosh with unknown devices, in an effort to determine what they did and whether or not they should be considered dangerous.
Tosh also helped him set up a much-improved computer database, so that all of the old reports could be scanned in and cross-referenced, making searches for information much more productive.
As for the many items that fell through the Rift, Ianto developed a cataloguing system that meant they could easily be located if they were needed. He doubted he would live long enough to complete the job of wresting organisation from the total chaos he’d faced the first time he’d entered the archives and seen how poorly maintained they were, but he had no doubt that his efforts would make life much easier for whoever filled the position of archivist after he was gone.
Back when he’d first persuaded Jack to give him a job, working amid the jumble of alien artefacts and old paperwork had been his lifeline, the one thing he had some degree of control over amid the chaos his life had become following the Canary Wharf massacre. But now it would be his legacy, something he could be proud of, a gift to pass on to future generations of Torchwood Three employees. There was satisfaction in that.
The End
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Lisa, Team.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1369
Spoilers: Cyberwoman.
Summary: Sorting out the archives started out as a chore but soon became so much more.
Written For: Weekend Challenge Prompt: 5 Alphabetical Words at 1_million_words, using fable, faced, facet, facts, faded’.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Sorting out Torchwood Three’s archives had seemed a daunting prospect when Ianto had first seen the mess they were in; they were a far cry from the clean orderliness he’d been accustomed to at Torchwood Tower. But the task had given him a valid reason for being down in the lower levels for hours on end, so he hadn’t hesitated to take off his jacket, roll up his shirtsleeves, and get stuck in. It hadn’t taken him long to realise everywhere was in even worse shape than he’d originally thought. The labels on the few items that still had them were faded almost into illegibility, and he was faced with trying to decipher them in an effort to identify artefacts that had, in theory at least, already been identified. Clearly, it was not going to be a quick or an easy job.
He'd started in what had seemed the most logical manner by rewriting the labels that were still attached to various items. Then he’d rewritten all the labels which had come adrift from the objects they belonged to, the ones that were still more or less readable anyway, in the hopes of eventually matching them with unlabelled items. Then the fun had really began.
Most of the labels carried some kind of physical description of the artefact in question, so it was a case of taking each redone label and searching around where he’d found the original until he located something that seemed to fit. Occasionally, he’d find several similar objects, any or all of which might be the right one, and since guessing didn’t seem like a wise move, he’d gather them up, together with the label, and take them upstairs to see if Captain Harkness could shed some light on the matter.
Jack seemed to enjoy these interludes, helping Ianto puzzle out a selection of the archives’ many mysteries, but Ianto privately suspected he knew less than he pretended to. Torchwood Three’s leader would regale him with rambling tales that Ianto considered to be mostly fable, and therefore worryingly short on anything resembling provable facts. Not that the tales themselves weren’t entertaining, because they were, they just weren’t always particularly helpful. They were, however, a pleasant distraction.
Talking to Jack about a peculiar device, or a curious object, took Ianto’s mind off Lisa, hooked up to the cobbled together life-support machinery hidden away in a damp little room in one of the Hub’s lowest habitable levels. He began to look forward to those occasions when he could sit in Jack’s office, drinking coffee, and listening to his new boss waxing lyrical over some interesting facet of the latest mysterious object they were trying to identify.
What had started out as a sort of alibi to account for his frequent absences from the main Hub soon became Ianto’s lifeline, the one thing that was keeping him mostly sane while he tried to juggle his work responsibilities with tending to Lisa’s needs, all while getting too little sleep. The archives were a source of endless fascination, not only the shelves and boxes crammed with the accumulated flotsam and jetsam of over a century of Rift activity, but also the filing cabinets stuffed to overflowing with personnel files, field reports, and information on several hundred alien races, some of it verified fact and some little more than speculation. He could have happily lost himself for days on end reading, sorting, researching, cross-referencing… it was such a challenging and absorbing task. Sadly, there simply weren’t enough hours in the day for him to spend as much time at it as he might have liked.
After Lisa was discovered, and the cyber-consciousness that had taken over her body had been destroyed, Ianto found himself lost, rudderless, adrift. He was barred from the Hub, put on a four-week suspension, and suddenly he didn’t know what to do with himself. He did his best to catch up on sleep, when the nightmares allowed him to, but when he was awake… What could he do to fill in the long hours of wakefulness? Watching TV just added to the tedium, yet there was only so much wallowing in grief and guilt that a human body and mind could handle without demanding a diversion of some description.
He reorganised his cramped little apartment, cleaned everything to within an inch of its life in an effort to keep his mind and body occupied, threw out a bunch of stuff that he no longer needed, or that held too many bad memories, but what he really wanted was to lose himself in Torchwood’s archives. Over the past few months, they’d begun to feel like the closest thing he had to a home, and away from them he felt bereft, with no clear purpose to his existence, and no reason to drag himself out of bed every morning. He knew he was sinking into depression but had no idea how to prevent it.
Then, almost before he knew it, his suspension was over. He was allowed to return to work, and he willingly faced the resentment and suspicion directed at him by some of his colleagues, because his job at least gave him a renewed sense of purpose, a reason to keep going day after day. He endured two weeks of puttering around the main Hub, cleaning, caring for the residents, making coffee, ordering food for the team, and maintaining the SUV before Jack finally gave him permission to return to the archives.
The moment he stepped into the cool, dimly lit, cavernous warren of rooms and passageways, it felt like coming home. He’d missed the musty scent of dust and old paper, the soothing hum of the air circulation systems, the familiar banks of filing cabinets, the strange and literally unearthly objects jumbled together on endless rows of shelves, waiting to be identified and assigned a permanent place. They were old friends, and far better company than Owen, with his pointed barbs and insults, Gwen with her cloying sympathy and distrust, Jack with his piercing scrutiny. Only Tosh, with her gentle kindness and unforced empathy, somehow avoided setting his nerves on edge.
But in the archives, by himself, he could drop his guard, no longer feeling the need to keep looking over his shoulder, knowing that someone would be watching him. Down here, he could relax, focus completely on his task, and not think about anything else.
Gradually, as the weeks passed, the air of tension and suspicion that had made the main Hub such an uncomfortable place for Ianto faded away and things got back to something approaching normal. No one came right out and said they’d forgiven him, except for Jack during a long talk a month after he’d resumed his duties, but he knew they had, each in their own way. Even Owen. He resumed bringing unidentified artefacts to Jack’s office for the two of them to ponder over, started going to Tosh with unknown devices, in an effort to determine what they did and whether or not they should be considered dangerous.
Tosh also helped him set up a much-improved computer database, so that all of the old reports could be scanned in and cross-referenced, making searches for information much more productive.
As for the many items that fell through the Rift, Ianto developed a cataloguing system that meant they could easily be located if they were needed. He doubted he would live long enough to complete the job of wresting organisation from the total chaos he’d faced the first time he’d entered the archives and seen how poorly maintained they were, but he had no doubt that his efforts would make life much easier for whoever filled the position of archivist after he was gone.
Back when he’d first persuaded Jack to give him a job, working amid the jumble of alien artefacts and old paperwork had been his lifeline, the one thing he had some degree of control over amid the chaos his life had become following the Canary Wharf massacre. But now it would be his legacy, something he could be proud of, a gift to pass on to future generations of Torchwood Three employees. There was satisfaction in that.
The End