Ficlet: Risks And Rewards
Title: Risks And Rewards
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, mentions Jack.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Nothing specific.
Summary: Torchwood compensates its operatives quite handsomely for the dangers they face.
Word Count: 318
Written For: caz251’s prompt ‘Torchwood, Any Torchwood, Torchwood doesn't pay overtime, it's danger pay they get,’ at
fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.
Torchwood doesn’t pay overtime; what would be the point? It’s not as if they work anything resembling regular hours. Trying to figure out how many extra hours they’d each worked over any given week would be near impossible, and Ianto has better things to do with his limited time off, such as shagging Jack into the middle of next month. Torchwood has its perks to balance out its downsides. For him at least.
Danger pay is a different matter. If Torchwood agents get injured in the course of their work, they’re compensated on a sliding scale. Ianto has a file that details how much each body part and organ is worth in the event of injury or loss. Jack complains that there’s no payout listed for getting your head knocked off, but since Jack is the only person who’s ever likely to suffer such an injury and live to tell about it, Ianto refuses to add one.
There are also bonuses for anyone putting their lives on the line in certain hazardous situations such as halting alien invasions, disarming various kinds of explosives up to and including nuclear bombs, dealing with extreme Rift-induced weather conditions, and preventing the spread of alien plagues or contagions. Most months everyone on the team gets paid for at least one, and often several.
Working for Torchwood can be quite lucrative, as long as you don’t mind constant danger and working very irregular hours that sometimes mean you don’t see your bed, or anyone else’s, for days at a time.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, or coffee, as the case may be. It takes a very particular kind of person to go for days at a time subsisting on catnaps, fast food, and copious amounts of caffeine. But for those who join up, there’s never any going back, because nothing else even comes close to how it feels to save the world.
The End