FIC: Seven Conversations About Love (Toshiko, Jack; PG)
Title: Seven Conversations About Love
Author: golden_d
Rating: PG overall; some strong language
Characters: Toshiko, Jack; Team Torchwood and canon pairings in the background.
Word Count: 3575
Summary: Seven conversations about love (and robots, aliens, syphilis, and maraschino cherries).
Author’s Notes: Incredible thanks to 51stcenturyfox and blue_fjords, betas extraordinaire! Written for tw_unpaired, using the prompt “Jack has a conversation with one or more members of the team about sexuality and gender in the 51st century as opposed to the 21st.” The song “I Fall in Love Too Easily” is by Sammy Cahn (lyrics) and Jule Styne (music); see Frank Sinatra performing it here.
ETA: chestnut_filly has done a great podfic - go listen and love!
--
“You know, I had sex with a robot once,” Jack says to her, shortly after Ianto goes on suspension. “Well, an android. It’s an important distinction.”
Toshiko makes a noise of surprise and something very like disgust. “Don’t joke. It isn’t kind.”
“Who’s joking? Robots are automatons, the things that shine your shoes and make the coffee. Androids are people made of metal.”
Yes; she’s seen that episode of Star Trek. “And cybermen?” Tosh asks, because she knows what this is really about.
Jack almost snarls. “They’re parasites. They take people and destroy them, destroy their families and their lives. Cybermen are robots whose only purpose is murder and conquest.”
“Not worthy of love?” she asks.
“It would be like loving nuclear missiles. You could do it if you tried hard enough, but it wouldn’t be worth it in the end.”
“Then Ianto must have a lot of love,” says Toshiko, “to love that woman the way he did.”
--
The day after Mary-after the pendant is destroyed, Tosh calls out sick. She doesn’t want to deal with Gwen and Owen, knowing what they’re doing, and she feels the need to scrub down every inch of her flat to rid it of cigarette smoke and the lasting scent of perfume.
Around noon, her doorbell rings, and, not caring who it is, she answers it still in her cleaning clothes: rubber gloves, sweatpants, and a ratty t-shirt. It’s Jack, and she’s startled and angry and pleased all at once. “What do you want?”
He holds up a roll of paper towels and a takeaway bag that smells like samosas. “Thought I might help you clean. I brought lunch.” His posture is the same as always, full of bravado and arrogance, but his smile quirks in a way that is oddly hesitant. She thinks that Jack is trying to apologise even though he doesn’t know how.
When she lets him in, he takes off his shoes inside the door without being asked as she washes her hands and gets out some plates. He’s lounging against the table trying to look debonair; he would have succeeded, but his right sock has a hole in the toe. Tosh debates pointing it out to him, but instead stifles a smile and sets the table for lunch.
She eats in silence while Jack, mercifully, regales her with non-stop tales of past adventures: the aliens who invented duct tape; the terrestrial outpost of an extraterrestrial gambling ring; the dragon living under Cardiff Castle. Afterwards he helps her clean just like he promised he would, and they finish sterilising her flat in half the time it would have taken her alone.
The sun has almost set by the time they are done, and she is glad; when she looks at the sun, all she sees is Mary, golden and treacherous and dead.
Jack puts his shoes back on, hesitating by the door. “Toshiko,” he says, and she nods permission for him to continue. “If Mary had been a man-if ‘Martin’ had given you the pendant instead-would you still have cleaned? Or wouldn’t it have mattered?”
“Of course it would have mattered,” she replies sharply. “Man or woman, it would’ve hurt just as much.”
“Owen thinks you skipped work because you’re ashamed of having dated a woman.”
“Owen can go to hell!”
And Jack laughs, but she doesn’t miss the look of relief as slips across his face. “My Toshiko,” he says fondly. “Get some rest. Don’t dwell on it. Come back when you’re ready.”
--
She tries not to dwell on it, but she still has to see Owen and Gwen every day. Neither one of them has any gift for subtlety, but they try to be subtle anyway. It’s excruciating.
To get away from them, she volunteers to go on a coffee run one afternoon. Ianto’s coffee maker is out of commission due to the sentient alien mold that has taken up residence in it, and no one has been able to think of a way to remove the mold without provoking an intergalactic incident. Jack comes with her, “Just in case she needs help carrying anything.” He says it with a wink, because he’s seen her balance a laptop, a gun, and a brimming mug of coffee without dropping, spilling, or shooting anything-but he remembers how they first met, and how much she’s grown, and he likes to make sure she’s taken care of.
“Do you think her boyfriend knows?” Tosh asks him as they walk along the Plass. “What’s his name. Rhys.”
“They’re not exactly discreet,” says Jack, who’s not exactly the picture of discretion himself. “But if he knows, he’s not saying anything. Maybe he doesn’t care.”
“Doesn’t care,” she repeats, looking at him with raised eyebrows. “Jack, after three years in Cardiff, the only people I’ve met who wouldn’t care either worked for Torchwood or weren’t Welsh. Things are a little different here.”
“Tell me about it,” Jack drawls. “The trouble I have-me! have trouble!-getting people to agree to a threesome. Almost always worth it, though.”
They let the subject drop for a few minutes while Toshiko orders their coffees and Jack flirts with the barista, but she has no illusions that the conversation is over. As they walk out, Jack says: “It’s a funny thing, monogamy. Makes people feel bad about loving more than one person at a time.”
“Most of us are lucky to even have a chance with one person at a time. We can’t all have your charm.”
“Even if it’s one-sided,” he insists. “I don’t like the idea of having a claim on somebody just because we’re sleeping together. Love is love, sex is sex. People get them mixed together too much.”
“And you think that’s okay,” Tosh says. “That it’s okay for Gwen to be sleeping with Owen because she doesn’t love him, but she does love Rhys.”
“I think it would be okay even if she loved both of them,” Jack says, but he breaks off when he sees the look on her face.
“You might do,” Tosh tells him, after a moment. “But Rhys doesn’t. And no matter what you believe about-about monogamy or open relationships, don’t you think that sleeping with someone else, and knowing that your partner would be hurt by it-don’t you think that’s wrong?”
But then they reach the Hub, and they both put on cheery smiles as they hand out coffee. There’s no time to finish the conversation, but Tosh thinks she hears Jack mutter something about Backwards, so backwards, and she refuses to talk to him for the rest of the day.
--
Toshiko doesn’t quite know when Jack and Ianto start their affair (she doesn’t know what else to call it, not knowing if it’s based on love or affection or lust or guilt or any number of things); they keep it under wraps, but one day she looks at the two of them and simply knows. Owen and Gwen, she’s sure, have no idea. But Tosh has known Jack long enough to know what he looks like when he’s been well-shagged, and he’s had a bit of an extra swagger lately.
It could be anyone he’s shagging, of course-except that Ianto has a bitemark on his neck just high enough so that his collar can’t hide it. It makes perfect sense.
Except that Jack killed Ianto’s girlfriend not too long ago, and Tosh may be good at puzzles, but she suspects that this one might be best left alone.
--
Sometime after Jack and Ianto start, Gwen and Owen stop, and Owen and Diane begin and end, and Tosh doesn’t know what order things happened in and doesn't especially care. Sometimes she’s glad she doesn’t have a love life: It gets in the way of saving the world.
--
And sometimes, saving the world gets in the way of having any life at all.
“Did Jack Harkness really die in a training accident?” Tosh asks. She and Jack have been drinking and toasting and avoiding the subject for a few hours, and now that he is drunk (and so is she), she finally asks him. Not: Who are you really? or How many times have you been to the 1940s? or Have you told Ianto about Captain Jack, and are you going to? She files those questions away to ask him later; for now, she asks the one she thinks he will answer.
“In a sense.”
“Yes or no, Jack,” she chides.
“Yes,” he says. “He died while training other pilots. No, it wasn’t an accident.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t, for sure,” he says, “but when you’re impersonating a man, you make it a point to find out how he dies. It was either suicide or murder, and I never got the chance to ask him which it was.”
It’s mean and sarcastic and underlain with guilt. Tosh says nothing. Jack will talk to fill the silence.
“Do you know,” he says, “that the last recorded human-on-human hate crime isn’t until the 43rd Century? Hundreds of years after the space exploration boom. During the boom, even if people were over their prejudices about what humans did with other humans, they still weren’t over their prejudices about what humans did with aliens. Fucking an alien would be like fucking a goat. And then around the 38th century, it’s suddenly this great big trend: aliens are more desirable than any human. Blame the tentacles, or maybe the feathers. Birthrates go way down for about two hundred years, and there’s a couple of outposts out there that had to be repopulated from the outside. There’s backlash, right? Some places outlawed alien-human copulation, don’t even think about marrying. It was this real dark age. And things fell back to the ‘natural order,’ but the hate and the killing stuck around. It takes awhile for things to change, out in space.” He looks at his glass, drains what little scotch remains in it, and puts it back on his desk with a thunk.
“It takes awhile for things to change anywhere. But when things changed, man, it was night and day. After the 43rd century, no more human-on-human hate crime, and it might not sound like much, since alien killings are still going on, but when half the alien worlds are at war with humans at any given time, it’s-it’s not good, but it’s explainable. Times like that, it’s hard to tell who your enemy is.”
Toshiko takes the bottle of scotch and pours him another drink. “Goodnight, Jack,” she says quietly, and kisses him on the forehead.
If he drinks enough, he’ll think that she has, too. That anything he said won’t be remembered, or that she’ll dismiss it as drunken ramblings.
Tosh doesn’t forget anything, but he doesn’t need to know that.
--
They save the world, and Jack dies; then Jack lives, and Jack leaves. When he returns, he flirts with John and flirts with Ianto and explains absolutely nothing.
Ianto tells her that Jack asked him on a date. Tosh beams at him, wishes him luck, and later on slips a pack of condoms inside his coat pocket. After a summer that has taken its toll on all of them in different ways, she is glad to see Ianto happy. More importantly, however, she wants to see Ianto safe from any alien- or future-STIs that Jack might be immune to (or unaware of) but Ianto most certainly is not.
It makes her wonder how many unsuspecting humans Jack has accidentally infected, and decides to ask him. Purely in the pursuit of science, of course. Tosh brings Jack a report on an alien anaesthetic she and Owen have been studying, tells him the salient points (since she doubts he’ll read it in the detail it deserves), and adds, “By the way, you’re not carrying any sexually-transmitted infections, are you?”
Jack sputters around a mouthful of coffee. “No! Who told you that? Did John tell you that, because he’s a filthy liar, which you should know, and if anyone’s carrying diseases it’s him!”
“I was only wondering,” she said. “After all, in your...vast lifetime, you haven’t been exactly celibate. Not here on Earth, not on other planets, not in this time, not in the past, not in the future. I’m only looking out for Ianto’s safety.”
“Ianto can take care of himself,” Jack says, looking her in the eye. “And if there were anything he needed to be worried about, I’d tell him. I may be an ass sometimes, but I’m a considerate sexual partner.” He pauses. “Although I did die from syphilis once, that was a nasty death. But when I-when I woke up again, I wasn’t sick anymore. Illnesses, diseases, they don’t last for me after death. I never carry anything for long.”
“People aren’t always honest about these things,” Toshiko says by way of explanation, and they both know that she means, You haven’t been very honest with us about yourself. “I thought it was important to ask. Ianto-”
“Since when are you so concerned about Ianto, Tosh?”
“Since you ran away and left us!” Tosh doesn’t shout, Tosh despises shouting, but if Tosh ever shouted she would have been shouting now. “Before-before, you took care of us all, but we all had our own individual orbits. Then you went away and we had to look after each other. Congratulations, Jack: You left and we finally became a team.”
“Toshiko,” he says quietly, reaching for her hand, but she steps back out of reach.
“You saved me, and I trusted you. But you were lying to us the whole time.”
“Ask me anything,” Jack tells her, spreading his arms wide. “Anything. I promise I’ll tell you the truth.”
He expects her to ask Why did you leave? or Why did you lie? or How did you become immortal? But instead, after a few moments’ thought, she asks, “Do they ever find a cure for HIV? Do they ever figure out how to stop it?”
It’s not even around by his time, so he knows the answer must be yes, but he has to reach far back into his memory of academy history class to get the answer. “In the 27th Century,” he says. “A team of researchers develop a vaccine. Goldberg, McKay, Reddy, and Rivera.”
“It takes seven hundred years?” Tosh asks, and the look on her face is heartbreaking. “How many people die before they cure it?”
“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I don’t know more than that. The vaccine was developed two thousand years before I was born.”
He sees her wrap her mind around this figure, sees in her eyes that she has so many more questions. “Don’t hurt Ianto,” she says, and it wasn’t what he was expecting, but his Tosh has always been so full of surprises.
“I won’t,” he promises. “That’s one thing in the future that hasn’t changed, you know. People are still protective of the ones they love.”
“Probably because people are still getting hurt,” she says sharply. She isn’t wrong (Tosh so rarely is), but it’s not the point he was trying to make.
“Tosh,” he says, as she turns to go. “You can always ask me anything. I promise.”
She nods, gives him a small smile, and leaves. She’ll never ask him about the Year That Wasn’t, because she doesn’t know it was, but if she asked, he’d tell her about how he saw her smile again once, defiantly, before she died (before she was killed), and how that smile kept him fighting. But she’ll never ask, and Jack thinks there may be some things it’s better she never knows.
--
If you asked Tosh if she’d loved Tommy, she’d answer that she didn’t know. Certainly she was attracted to him, liked him, cared about him. Was that love? It had all happened so quickly.
“It’s easy to love someone when you know you only have a day,” she says to Jack, late at night, when she is exhausted and too tired to care what she’s saying. She doesn’t want to be alone, so Jack sits up with her, watching horrible shows on her telly, and now she leans her head on his shoulder. “You can give them everything, because there’s no After to worry about. I think-I think it’s harder to love someone when you’ll have to see them again. Do you think?”
He strokes her hair. “I don’t know if I should be giving relationship advice,” he says with a wry smile.
“I don’t want advice,” she says crossly. “It’s an intellectual discussion.”
“Sometimes the long game is more rewarding,” Jack tells her. “But it’s got more risks. You know the short game isn’t going to last, so you don’t need to hold back.”
“So you agree,” Tosh says, sleepy and triumphant.
Jack laughs, and croons to her softly: “I fall in love too easily-I fall in love too fast. I fall in love too terribly hard for love to ever last... And still I fall in love too easily, I fall in love too fast.”
“Is there such a thing as falling in love too fast?” she asks.
“He thought so. But when I come from, that’s how it is. Love fast, love hard. Too much is temporary to settle down with someone.”
“Sounds like Torchwood,” Tosh says, and Jack laughs his agreement. “Gwen’s settling down, though.”
“Gwen is a very stubborn woman,” says Jack, and that makes Tosh laugh in turn. “She needs stability to balance out the Torchwood whirlwind or else she’ll get lost.”
They are silent for awhile before Tosh asks quietly: “Do people in your time ever settle down? Do people in Torchwood-other than Gwen?”
“When they’re older,” he answers. “Sometimes when you find someone or someones who’ll travel with you, if you’re of a traveling lifestyle. In Torchwood...” He thinks of Gerald and Harriet, of himself and Lucia, of the countless friends and lovers who died before they had the chance. “Sometimes,” he says, and it’s all he can say without taking away hope, but she seems to understand, and takes his hand.
“Torchwood becomes husband and wife,” she says, and he can’t tell if she’s sleepy or sad. “Torchwood becomes your family.”
“But what a family it is,” says Jack, and he hums quietly to her until she falls asleep.
--
And then Owen dies. Jack only means to bring him back for a minute, and Tosh confesses her love, and then Owen somehow doesn’t die again, and things get monumentally awkward. “A textbook reaction to grief,” says Owen.
“All I want to do is help,” says Tosh, who fixes things, who solves problems, who built a functioning sonic modulator out of faulty plans. One self-destructive zombie shouldn’t be giving her this much trouble. She takes a vengeful bite of the banana split she and Jack are sharing. “Is that so wrong? If he thinks I’m delusional, then at least I can be his friend. Why is he being so stupid?”
Jack licks chocolate syrup off a maraschino cherry, raises an eyebrow at her. She’ll figure it out, she always does. He only knows himself because he’s been in Owen’s position, having died and lived again too many times to count. He remembers how he was after the first time.
“Of course,” Tosh says, because she is brilliant and Jack loves to see her mind at work. “Anger. Talk about textbook reactions, honestly.” She stabs the ice cream with her spoon. “Fine. Fine. He’ll come around eventually, it’s not like he’ll run out of time. And in the meantime, I am going to enjoy myself. Enjoy ice cream, and pizza, and beer, and...”
“And keep loving him,” Jack finishes for her. “Until he realises what he’s missing.”
“Or even if he doesn’t,” Tosh says. “It wouldn’t be any different from how things have ever been.”
They have a brief battle over the last maraschino cherry, but she lets Jack have it, since he enjoys them so much more. In thanks, he tells her, “In any time-in this time, or in the future-one of the best and bravest things you can do is keep loving someone through any circumstances. Love’s more work than people think.”
“I know,” says Tosh, but she smiles at the affirmation, smiles again as Jack lets her steal the last spoonful of ice cream. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
Author: golden_d
Rating: PG overall; some strong language
Characters: Toshiko, Jack; Team Torchwood and canon pairings in the background.
Word Count: 3575
Summary: Seven conversations about love (and robots, aliens, syphilis, and maraschino cherries).
Author’s Notes: Incredible thanks to 51stcenturyfox and blue_fjords, betas extraordinaire! Written for tw_unpaired, using the prompt “Jack has a conversation with one or more members of the team about sexuality and gender in the 51st century as opposed to the 21st.” The song “I Fall in Love Too Easily” is by Sammy Cahn (lyrics) and Jule Styne (music); see Frank Sinatra performing it here.
ETA: chestnut_filly has done a great podfic - go listen and love!
--
“You know, I had sex with a robot once,” Jack says to her, shortly after Ianto goes on suspension. “Well, an android. It’s an important distinction.”
Toshiko makes a noise of surprise and something very like disgust. “Don’t joke. It isn’t kind.”
“Who’s joking? Robots are automatons, the things that shine your shoes and make the coffee. Androids are people made of metal.”
Yes; she’s seen that episode of Star Trek. “And cybermen?” Tosh asks, because she knows what this is really about.
Jack almost snarls. “They’re parasites. They take people and destroy them, destroy their families and their lives. Cybermen are robots whose only purpose is murder and conquest.”
“Not worthy of love?” she asks.
“It would be like loving nuclear missiles. You could do it if you tried hard enough, but it wouldn’t be worth it in the end.”
“Then Ianto must have a lot of love,” says Toshiko, “to love that woman the way he did.”
--
The day after Mary-after the pendant is destroyed, Tosh calls out sick. She doesn’t want to deal with Gwen and Owen, knowing what they’re doing, and she feels the need to scrub down every inch of her flat to rid it of cigarette smoke and the lasting scent of perfume.
Around noon, her doorbell rings, and, not caring who it is, she answers it still in her cleaning clothes: rubber gloves, sweatpants, and a ratty t-shirt. It’s Jack, and she’s startled and angry and pleased all at once. “What do you want?”
He holds up a roll of paper towels and a takeaway bag that smells like samosas. “Thought I might help you clean. I brought lunch.” His posture is the same as always, full of bravado and arrogance, but his smile quirks in a way that is oddly hesitant. She thinks that Jack is trying to apologise even though he doesn’t know how.
When she lets him in, he takes off his shoes inside the door without being asked as she washes her hands and gets out some plates. He’s lounging against the table trying to look debonair; he would have succeeded, but his right sock has a hole in the toe. Tosh debates pointing it out to him, but instead stifles a smile and sets the table for lunch.
She eats in silence while Jack, mercifully, regales her with non-stop tales of past adventures: the aliens who invented duct tape; the terrestrial outpost of an extraterrestrial gambling ring; the dragon living under Cardiff Castle. Afterwards he helps her clean just like he promised he would, and they finish sterilising her flat in half the time it would have taken her alone.
The sun has almost set by the time they are done, and she is glad; when she looks at the sun, all she sees is Mary, golden and treacherous and dead.
Jack puts his shoes back on, hesitating by the door. “Toshiko,” he says, and she nods permission for him to continue. “If Mary had been a man-if ‘Martin’ had given you the pendant instead-would you still have cleaned? Or wouldn’t it have mattered?”
“Of course it would have mattered,” she replies sharply. “Man or woman, it would’ve hurt just as much.”
“Owen thinks you skipped work because you’re ashamed of having dated a woman.”
“Owen can go to hell!”
And Jack laughs, but she doesn’t miss the look of relief as slips across his face. “My Toshiko,” he says fondly. “Get some rest. Don’t dwell on it. Come back when you’re ready.”
--
She tries not to dwell on it, but she still has to see Owen and Gwen every day. Neither one of them has any gift for subtlety, but they try to be subtle anyway. It’s excruciating.
To get away from them, she volunteers to go on a coffee run one afternoon. Ianto’s coffee maker is out of commission due to the sentient alien mold that has taken up residence in it, and no one has been able to think of a way to remove the mold without provoking an intergalactic incident. Jack comes with her, “Just in case she needs help carrying anything.” He says it with a wink, because he’s seen her balance a laptop, a gun, and a brimming mug of coffee without dropping, spilling, or shooting anything-but he remembers how they first met, and how much she’s grown, and he likes to make sure she’s taken care of.
“Do you think her boyfriend knows?” Tosh asks him as they walk along the Plass. “What’s his name. Rhys.”
“They’re not exactly discreet,” says Jack, who’s not exactly the picture of discretion himself. “But if he knows, he’s not saying anything. Maybe he doesn’t care.”
“Doesn’t care,” she repeats, looking at him with raised eyebrows. “Jack, after three years in Cardiff, the only people I’ve met who wouldn’t care either worked for Torchwood or weren’t Welsh. Things are a little different here.”
“Tell me about it,” Jack drawls. “The trouble I have-me! have trouble!-getting people to agree to a threesome. Almost always worth it, though.”
They let the subject drop for a few minutes while Toshiko orders their coffees and Jack flirts with the barista, but she has no illusions that the conversation is over. As they walk out, Jack says: “It’s a funny thing, monogamy. Makes people feel bad about loving more than one person at a time.”
“Most of us are lucky to even have a chance with one person at a time. We can’t all have your charm.”
“Even if it’s one-sided,” he insists. “I don’t like the idea of having a claim on somebody just because we’re sleeping together. Love is love, sex is sex. People get them mixed together too much.”
“And you think that’s okay,” Tosh says. “That it’s okay for Gwen to be sleeping with Owen because she doesn’t love him, but she does love Rhys.”
“I think it would be okay even if she loved both of them,” Jack says, but he breaks off when he sees the look on her face.
“You might do,” Tosh tells him, after a moment. “But Rhys doesn’t. And no matter what you believe about-about monogamy or open relationships, don’t you think that sleeping with someone else, and knowing that your partner would be hurt by it-don’t you think that’s wrong?”
But then they reach the Hub, and they both put on cheery smiles as they hand out coffee. There’s no time to finish the conversation, but Tosh thinks she hears Jack mutter something about Backwards, so backwards, and she refuses to talk to him for the rest of the day.
--
Toshiko doesn’t quite know when Jack and Ianto start their affair (she doesn’t know what else to call it, not knowing if it’s based on love or affection or lust or guilt or any number of things); they keep it under wraps, but one day she looks at the two of them and simply knows. Owen and Gwen, she’s sure, have no idea. But Tosh has known Jack long enough to know what he looks like when he’s been well-shagged, and he’s had a bit of an extra swagger lately.
It could be anyone he’s shagging, of course-except that Ianto has a bitemark on his neck just high enough so that his collar can’t hide it. It makes perfect sense.
Except that Jack killed Ianto’s girlfriend not too long ago, and Tosh may be good at puzzles, but she suspects that this one might be best left alone.
--
Sometime after Jack and Ianto start, Gwen and Owen stop, and Owen and Diane begin and end, and Tosh doesn’t know what order things happened in and doesn't especially care. Sometimes she’s glad she doesn’t have a love life: It gets in the way of saving the world.
--
And sometimes, saving the world gets in the way of having any life at all.
“Did Jack Harkness really die in a training accident?” Tosh asks. She and Jack have been drinking and toasting and avoiding the subject for a few hours, and now that he is drunk (and so is she), she finally asks him. Not: Who are you really? or How many times have you been to the 1940s? or Have you told Ianto about Captain Jack, and are you going to? She files those questions away to ask him later; for now, she asks the one she thinks he will answer.
“In a sense.”
“Yes or no, Jack,” she chides.
“Yes,” he says. “He died while training other pilots. No, it wasn’t an accident.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t, for sure,” he says, “but when you’re impersonating a man, you make it a point to find out how he dies. It was either suicide or murder, and I never got the chance to ask him which it was.”
It’s mean and sarcastic and underlain with guilt. Tosh says nothing. Jack will talk to fill the silence.
“Do you know,” he says, “that the last recorded human-on-human hate crime isn’t until the 43rd Century? Hundreds of years after the space exploration boom. During the boom, even if people were over their prejudices about what humans did with other humans, they still weren’t over their prejudices about what humans did with aliens. Fucking an alien would be like fucking a goat. And then around the 38th century, it’s suddenly this great big trend: aliens are more desirable than any human. Blame the tentacles, or maybe the feathers. Birthrates go way down for about two hundred years, and there’s a couple of outposts out there that had to be repopulated from the outside. There’s backlash, right? Some places outlawed alien-human copulation, don’t even think about marrying. It was this real dark age. And things fell back to the ‘natural order,’ but the hate and the killing stuck around. It takes awhile for things to change, out in space.” He looks at his glass, drains what little scotch remains in it, and puts it back on his desk with a thunk.
“It takes awhile for things to change anywhere. But when things changed, man, it was night and day. After the 43rd century, no more human-on-human hate crime, and it might not sound like much, since alien killings are still going on, but when half the alien worlds are at war with humans at any given time, it’s-it’s not good, but it’s explainable. Times like that, it’s hard to tell who your enemy is.”
Toshiko takes the bottle of scotch and pours him another drink. “Goodnight, Jack,” she says quietly, and kisses him on the forehead.
If he drinks enough, he’ll think that she has, too. That anything he said won’t be remembered, or that she’ll dismiss it as drunken ramblings.
Tosh doesn’t forget anything, but he doesn’t need to know that.
--
They save the world, and Jack dies; then Jack lives, and Jack leaves. When he returns, he flirts with John and flirts with Ianto and explains absolutely nothing.
Ianto tells her that Jack asked him on a date. Tosh beams at him, wishes him luck, and later on slips a pack of condoms inside his coat pocket. After a summer that has taken its toll on all of them in different ways, she is glad to see Ianto happy. More importantly, however, she wants to see Ianto safe from any alien- or future-STIs that Jack might be immune to (or unaware of) but Ianto most certainly is not.
It makes her wonder how many unsuspecting humans Jack has accidentally infected, and decides to ask him. Purely in the pursuit of science, of course. Tosh brings Jack a report on an alien anaesthetic she and Owen have been studying, tells him the salient points (since she doubts he’ll read it in the detail it deserves), and adds, “By the way, you’re not carrying any sexually-transmitted infections, are you?”
Jack sputters around a mouthful of coffee. “No! Who told you that? Did John tell you that, because he’s a filthy liar, which you should know, and if anyone’s carrying diseases it’s him!”
“I was only wondering,” she said. “After all, in your...vast lifetime, you haven’t been exactly celibate. Not here on Earth, not on other planets, not in this time, not in the past, not in the future. I’m only looking out for Ianto’s safety.”
“Ianto can take care of himself,” Jack says, looking her in the eye. “And if there were anything he needed to be worried about, I’d tell him. I may be an ass sometimes, but I’m a considerate sexual partner.” He pauses. “Although I did die from syphilis once, that was a nasty death. But when I-when I woke up again, I wasn’t sick anymore. Illnesses, diseases, they don’t last for me after death. I never carry anything for long.”
“People aren’t always honest about these things,” Toshiko says by way of explanation, and they both know that she means, You haven’t been very honest with us about yourself. “I thought it was important to ask. Ianto-”
“Since when are you so concerned about Ianto, Tosh?”
“Since you ran away and left us!” Tosh doesn’t shout, Tosh despises shouting, but if Tosh ever shouted she would have been shouting now. “Before-before, you took care of us all, but we all had our own individual orbits. Then you went away and we had to look after each other. Congratulations, Jack: You left and we finally became a team.”
“Toshiko,” he says quietly, reaching for her hand, but she steps back out of reach.
“You saved me, and I trusted you. But you were lying to us the whole time.”
“Ask me anything,” Jack tells her, spreading his arms wide. “Anything. I promise I’ll tell you the truth.”
He expects her to ask Why did you leave? or Why did you lie? or How did you become immortal? But instead, after a few moments’ thought, she asks, “Do they ever find a cure for HIV? Do they ever figure out how to stop it?”
It’s not even around by his time, so he knows the answer must be yes, but he has to reach far back into his memory of academy history class to get the answer. “In the 27th Century,” he says. “A team of researchers develop a vaccine. Goldberg, McKay, Reddy, and Rivera.”
“It takes seven hundred years?” Tosh asks, and the look on her face is heartbreaking. “How many people die before they cure it?”
“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I don’t know more than that. The vaccine was developed two thousand years before I was born.”
He sees her wrap her mind around this figure, sees in her eyes that she has so many more questions. “Don’t hurt Ianto,” she says, and it wasn’t what he was expecting, but his Tosh has always been so full of surprises.
“I won’t,” he promises. “That’s one thing in the future that hasn’t changed, you know. People are still protective of the ones they love.”
“Probably because people are still getting hurt,” she says sharply. She isn’t wrong (Tosh so rarely is), but it’s not the point he was trying to make.
“Tosh,” he says, as she turns to go. “You can always ask me anything. I promise.”
She nods, gives him a small smile, and leaves. She’ll never ask him about the Year That Wasn’t, because she doesn’t know it was, but if she asked, he’d tell her about how he saw her smile again once, defiantly, before she died (before she was killed), and how that smile kept him fighting. But she’ll never ask, and Jack thinks there may be some things it’s better she never knows.
--
If you asked Tosh if she’d loved Tommy, she’d answer that she didn’t know. Certainly she was attracted to him, liked him, cared about him. Was that love? It had all happened so quickly.
“It’s easy to love someone when you know you only have a day,” she says to Jack, late at night, when she is exhausted and too tired to care what she’s saying. She doesn’t want to be alone, so Jack sits up with her, watching horrible shows on her telly, and now she leans her head on his shoulder. “You can give them everything, because there’s no After to worry about. I think-I think it’s harder to love someone when you’ll have to see them again. Do you think?”
He strokes her hair. “I don’t know if I should be giving relationship advice,” he says with a wry smile.
“I don’t want advice,” she says crossly. “It’s an intellectual discussion.”
“Sometimes the long game is more rewarding,” Jack tells her. “But it’s got more risks. You know the short game isn’t going to last, so you don’t need to hold back.”
“So you agree,” Tosh says, sleepy and triumphant.
Jack laughs, and croons to her softly: “I fall in love too easily-I fall in love too fast. I fall in love too terribly hard for love to ever last... And still I fall in love too easily, I fall in love too fast.”
“Is there such a thing as falling in love too fast?” she asks.
“He thought so. But when I come from, that’s how it is. Love fast, love hard. Too much is temporary to settle down with someone.”
“Sounds like Torchwood,” Tosh says, and Jack laughs his agreement. “Gwen’s settling down, though.”
“Gwen is a very stubborn woman,” says Jack, and that makes Tosh laugh in turn. “She needs stability to balance out the Torchwood whirlwind or else she’ll get lost.”
They are silent for awhile before Tosh asks quietly: “Do people in your time ever settle down? Do people in Torchwood-other than Gwen?”
“When they’re older,” he answers. “Sometimes when you find someone or someones who’ll travel with you, if you’re of a traveling lifestyle. In Torchwood...” He thinks of Gerald and Harriet, of himself and Lucia, of the countless friends and lovers who died before they had the chance. “Sometimes,” he says, and it’s all he can say without taking away hope, but she seems to understand, and takes his hand.
“Torchwood becomes husband and wife,” she says, and he can’t tell if she’s sleepy or sad. “Torchwood becomes your family.”
“But what a family it is,” says Jack, and he hums quietly to her until she falls asleep.
--
And then Owen dies. Jack only means to bring him back for a minute, and Tosh confesses her love, and then Owen somehow doesn’t die again, and things get monumentally awkward. “A textbook reaction to grief,” says Owen.
“All I want to do is help,” says Tosh, who fixes things, who solves problems, who built a functioning sonic modulator out of faulty plans. One self-destructive zombie shouldn’t be giving her this much trouble. She takes a vengeful bite of the banana split she and Jack are sharing. “Is that so wrong? If he thinks I’m delusional, then at least I can be his friend. Why is he being so stupid?”
Jack licks chocolate syrup off a maraschino cherry, raises an eyebrow at her. She’ll figure it out, she always does. He only knows himself because he’s been in Owen’s position, having died and lived again too many times to count. He remembers how he was after the first time.
“Of course,” Tosh says, because she is brilliant and Jack loves to see her mind at work. “Anger. Talk about textbook reactions, honestly.” She stabs the ice cream with her spoon. “Fine. Fine. He’ll come around eventually, it’s not like he’ll run out of time. And in the meantime, I am going to enjoy myself. Enjoy ice cream, and pizza, and beer, and...”
“And keep loving him,” Jack finishes for her. “Until he realises what he’s missing.”
“Or even if he doesn’t,” Tosh says. “It wouldn’t be any different from how things have ever been.”
They have a brief battle over the last maraschino cherry, but she lets Jack have it, since he enjoys them so much more. In thanks, he tells her, “In any time-in this time, or in the future-one of the best and bravest things you can do is keep loving someone through any circumstances. Love’s more work than people think.”
“I know,” says Tosh, but she smiles at the affirmation, smiles again as Jack lets her steal the last spoonful of ice cream. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”