Ficlet: Shades Of Grey
Title: Shades Of Grey
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto Jones
Rating: G
Spoilers: Fragments, Cyberwoman
Summary: Torchwood Three is very different from Torchwood One
Word Count: 257
Written For: juliet316’s prompt ‘Torchwood, author's choice, Torchwood didn't deal in black and white, merely in shades of gray.’ at
fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.
At Torchwood One, everything had been black and white. Humans were good, aliens were bad and to be destroyed or experimented on. Aliens had no rights because they weren’t people. It was simple, straightforward, and Ianto hated it. All of humanity’s xenophobia, prejudices and discrimination were packed into the tower and he had no choice but to toe the party line, even though he didn’t agree with it.
Torchwood Three is the other way around. Nothing is black and white; it’s all shades of grey. Aliens are good, bad, or indifferent and that can change from one minute to the next. The things that come through the Rift are usually unknown, often unknowable and so they get consigned to the jumbled archives, just more examples of Torchwood’s monumental lack of knowledge. Even the other team members are neither good nor bad, hovering somewhere in between. The same, surprisingly, can be said for Captain Harkness himself. He’s not what Ianto was expecting. He suspects he’s not what Harkness expected him to be either.
But that’s okay, because for once Ianto fits; he’s just not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. Because he’s concealing something from them, something that like everything here, is neither one thing nor the other. Half human, half cyberman, how much is still Lisa he really can’t guess. The only thing he knows for sure these days is that whether he’s right or wrong, he has no choice but to try to save her, regardless of what it might cost them all.
The End