something completely different
I think it's safe to say that the following piece is in my style.
I was commenting upon sam_storyteller's amazing Torchwood fic, and the topic of Ianto's diary came up in a nearby thread. Sam mentioned that he liked the idea of Jack keeping Ianto's diary around in that tin of photos and letters. As I read this, inspiration struck.
I thought it would be something short, not quite hitting the one thousand words mark. Oh, how wrong I was.
Also. I'd like to apologise in advance. I know I'm throwing all sorts of Fanfiction Common Courtesy out of the figurative window. But I don't think I was ever in control of this particular fic.
Title: Posterity
Fandom: Torchwood
Wordcount: 4,177
Summary: Jack has a long memory. (Thanks to sam_storyteller for the inspiration and 42footprints for spawning the original idea.)
Reports of Weevil activity come in one afternoon, with Jack nowhere to be found and thus probably in the mausoleum. As countless teams before them have learned to do, the current staff of Torchwood Cardiff draw straws to determine who will go fetch him. The lot falls to Anna Boddington, resident linguist and fairly new on the job. Mug of chai in hand, flipping off the rest of the team with the other, she descends the stairs to their Captain's hideout and comes perilously close to tripping on the last step.
"We've got a runner, Cap'n," she begins, but breaks off when she realises that he did not notice her entrance and is completely engrossed in his own thoughts yet. He is leaning against one of the drawers, and staring at the names upon it and the two following as if the meaning of life were written there.
Unused to such a distracted Jack and a little unnerved, but determined to do her job, she approaches. "Cap'n?" she says again.
He snaps back to attention, smiles at her. "Been taking lessons from Dmitri?" he jokes, referring to the team's silent supercomputer programmer. Up close, his face is a study of thin lines like roads on a map; laugh lines, he calls them, and chuckles as if at some sort of joke. Anna knows that he is unusually old for Torchwood, though she does not know his exact age. He looks more like her father than the daring captain of a mostly-secret agency protecting the Earth from alien threats. She thinks how strange it is that such a man could still be working at such a tiring, thankless job.
"Does Torchwood offer a retirement plan?" she asks before she thinks about the implications of her words. "Not that I'm saying you're old, or anything, Cap'n. Just... curious."
Jack grins now, but there's a sort of sadness in it. "This is the one job you can't really leave," he tells her. "I of all people should know that."
"You've been part of Torchwood for a long time, haven't you?" she asks after a moment. "Longer than anyone else here."
"I've been working here for a long time, yes," he says, and laughs a bit to himself. "A very long time."
There isn't much Anna can think of to say to that, other than the obvious question of how long. But as she knows from the rest of the team that asking such questions of their esteemed leader is a futile endeavor, she does not ask it. "Raff got a call about a Weevil," she says instead.
"Persistent, aren't they?" Jack responds. "Just when you think you've got them contained, there's always another one." He flashes Anna one last grin, and then walks up the stairs, presumably to inquire further about the Weevil.
Anna almost follows, but curiousity leads her to inspect the names on the drawers that the Captain was leaning on. 'Costello, Suzie' means nothing to her, though she recognises 'Sato, Toshiko' as the name behind the original translation programs. 'Jones, Ianto' rings a bell as well, though she can't place it. She wonders if she should know these things. She wonders if anyone above knows anything, or if they're all doomed to wondering who exactly this masked man is.
She doesn't wonder if it's her business; she knows it isn't. But that's sort of the point.
--
She asks Dmitri first, and he actually takes a break from his work to roll his eyes at her. "No one understands the Captain," he says.
"But the people," Anna presses.
"I failed history," Dmitri replies shortly. "Not that Torchwood ever makes it."
"Ask Jay," suggests Tina the medic, waving her foot vaguely toward the stairs down from where it rests on her cluttered desk. "I bet even twentieth-century Torchwood had to stash the loot somewhere."
That takes some doing, as Jay is never easy to find. More often not he can be found in the archives, doing what he does best, but the archives are a big and scary place. Once Raff got lost, looking for some old artefact or another, and the team spent the afternoon trying to give him directions back. Usually everyone keeps a good distance, these days. Jay is the only one who really knows his way around the archives, which he claims is because he goes to real libraries with real printed books. Anna's theory says that he is the only member of the team with a sense of direction; the rest of the team agrees, for the most part.
But luck is with her, for she discovers Jay toward the front of the archives, engrossed in some report or another from another time. He jumps rather spectacularly when Anna taps him on the shoulder. "Do you make any noise when you walk?" he demands, turning to face her. "You should wear something jingly or something. Seriously, one of these days someone's gonna stun you out of sheer instinct."
"You should pay more attention to the world around you," Anna retorts. "Hey, do you know of a Suzie Costello?"
Jay makes a face of perpetual suffering. "First she scares me half to death, and then she interrogates me about my personal life. I don't get paid enough for this. Does it matter? I was in the middle of something important!"
Tina warned her about Jay's whining on her first day, and since then Anna has witnessed many of his 'prissy fits'. As ever, she has to wonder if Jack hired him simply for the entertainment value. "Not a living Suzie Costello," she clarifies, laughing. "I mean, is there a mention of her in the archives?"
"Rings a bell," Jay says, and pulls out the archival PDA, typing in a few characters and then pressing the 'Send' button rather violently. "Here we go: Torchwood Cardiff, early twenty-first century. Archived the... gauntlet later dubbed 'Rizzen Mitten' by the archivist back then. This is old material, this is." He scrolled down, managing to keep the screen at just the wrong angle for Anna to read it over his shoulder. "Well, damn. Mentioned in the second edit of the archival notes. Apparently she was brought back to life with it. Assuming you didn't know that, what's so special about her?"
"Just... idle curiosity," Anna replies. "I went to get the Captain out of the mausoleum and he was looking at three drawers in particular. Hers was one."
Jay raises one dark eyebrow at her. "That's snooping," he admonishes her. "So who were the other two?"
"Well, there was Toshiko Sato," Anna tells him. "I know that name from a bunch of our software, but have you got anything else on them?"
A few more keystrokes and Jay nods. "Also twenty-first century. She - Sato's a woman, apparently - was probably the tech. Listed under a lot of repair work and translations. Oh, and she was apparently involved with a cryogenically-frozen soldier from World War One." He whistles. "Didn't know they even had cryogenics back then."
"Probably wasn't their own technology," Anna puts in.
"No shit," Jay replies companionably. "And the third?"
Anna has to think back for a moment. "Ianto Jones," she says at length. "That's I-A-N-T-O, by the way."
"I see it enough," Jay scoffs, rolling his eyes. "Twenty-first century again. Did most of the archiving for that era. Kept a Cyberman in the basement. He's all over the place here. So's his coffee, apparently." He roots around the filing cabinet still open from his previous activities and pulls out a rather aged packet of paper. True to Jay's word, coffee stains can be seen in rings on both the first and last pages. "Owen Harper's report on Abbadon. It's all over the inside, too. I don't suppose you ran into Owen Harper with the others, did you?"
Shaking her head, Anna takes the report and glances over it. "Someone was at this with black ink," she observes, pointing to a space that seems to have once contained a name. "But no, I didn't see an Owen Harper. I take it he was on the twenty-first century team, too?"
"Beginning of the twenty-first century. Teams change pretty quickly, you know." Jay laughs grimly, and Anna remembers Jack saying that leaving Torchwood isn't really done. Is that what he meant? she wonders. "Costello, Sato, Harper, and Jones were the original twenty-ones. Costello wasn't around for long, though, according to these records." He presses another button on the PDA and the screen goes blank. "Have I answered your questions, then? Or do you need to waste more of my time?"
Anna snorts. "Don't tell me you were actually busy," she retorts. "But get back to slacking off. Tina'll have something else for you before too long."
--
Dmitri is engrossed in whatever programs he's running when Anna returns to the main Hub, but Tina mockingly salutes her with an empty mug. "How is the Diva?" she inquires, jerking her head back toward the archives. Tina has nicknames for everyone, though no one will tell Anna hers.
"Dusty," Anna replies easily. "Does he ever actually leave the place for more than ten minutes at a time? Excluding field work, of course."
"I've heard he has a flat over by the shuttle launchpad," the medic says. "But you know how the rumour mill is." She pushes a stray strand of dark hair from her face and grimaces. "I give up," she announces. "I am going home and shearing this whole bloody mess off."
Anna snorts; Tina has said as much at least once a week for as long as Anna has known her, and yet the hair remains as long as ever. Just like Jay's complaining and Dmitri's grumpy silence, Tina's war with her own hair is a part of Torchwood. Despite what the official statement might be, Torchwood is not just a group of qualified experts united by a common cause. Torchwood is a family. A dysfunctional family, perhaps, but people cannot help but bond over the little things if they are out saving each other's arses on a fairly regular basis. Tina may refer to Jay as 'The Diva', and Jay and Raff may snark at each other if let loose in the same room together - certainly Dmitri does his best to ignore them all - and certainly Jack sometimes calls them all by the wrong names, but Anna knows they all really love each other, deep down.
And Anna has decided that she wants to know if she is in danger of being referred to as 'Suzie' any time soon.
It's just a hunch, of course, but Anna did her research when she joined up. She knows what little there is to know about the enigmatic Doctor, and part of that knowledge is that Jack at one point was quite good friends with him. She also has noticed that there is no record of Jack's joining Torchwood - he just simply appears after a while, without any fuss. He could easily have been a Torchwood agent back in the earlier days - perhaps Suzie Costello's replacement, even - and simply have been transported by the Rift or the Doctor to the Torchwood of now. It would explain his fixation with the mausoleum. It would explain the mishaps with names, too (although they must have gone through personnel like Weevils back then).
When Tina turns back to her computer, Anna seizes the moment and takes the stairs up to Jack's office. It's unlocked, as usual; Jack likes to act like he has nothing to hide.
On the desk is the usual assortment of randomised clutter; today, Anna notices that the odds and ends all represent different eras of history. There's a rather antique PersonaSphere, rather scratched up; a collection of various plants, preserved in glass; a gas mask that must have come from the oxygen conversion years of the twenty-ninth century. On top of an entirely obsolete coin bank rests some sort of early watch, metallic and possessing a button on the top. Next to it is the crushed remains of what must once have been a very pretty pendant. Anna wonders where Jack found all of these things. Perhaps he's simply trying to learn about the periods of Torchwood history he missed.
In the center of his desk, however, is a slightly rusty tin box, lid only partially closed over the top. Jackpot, Anna thinks, and then winces at her own pun as she lifts the lid off altogether. Inside the box are photographs, actually printed out. Very twenty-first century, Anna thinks triumphantly, and sifts through a few.
But the top few photographs are much more recent than that; Anna recognises these as snapshots from the night Raff demanded they throw a universal birthday party, since no one ever remembered to celebrate separately. She hadn't even noticed Jack taking pictures - unless, of course, he simply printed CCTV screenshots. Underneath these is a group shot of three people Anna does not recognise and a much younger Tina. One of the strangers has a bionic arm, with which he is ruffling the young Tina's short hair.
Below that is a series of sketches; the man with the bionic arm is featured in one, and Jack in another, and then four more unknown faces. Anna does not go through the whole pile, as it looks as if Jack has a picture of every Torchwood team to exist, but pushes the pile aside to look in the bottom.
She finds a journal, paper aged yellow. Carefully opening the cover, she reads:
Property of Ianto Jones, c/o Torchwood. No, Owen, I am not writing about my 'secret longings'. Stop poking about my desk.
A cough from the doorway cuts her off before she can read further; Jack stands there, one eyebrow raised. Anna carefully closes the journal and replaces it in the tin box, stepping away from the desk. "Sorry, Cap'n," she says, because there isn't much else she really can say.
"You know, I've noticed things about the people I hire for this job," Jack comments lightly. "All sorts of people, of course, but there's always someone who just can't leave well enough alone."
"What happens to them?" Anna asks warily.
"Oh, all sorts of things," Jack replies. "A lot of the time it involves very near brushes with death. Or unleashing the apocalypse upon hapless Cardiff." He chuckles, as if remembering a joke.
Being one of those people who cannot leave well enough alone, and apparently not about to be relieved of duty, Anna can't help but ask, "So what happened to the man who wrote that?" She points to the journal in the tin box. "How did you end up with his diary?"
She will swear later that she catches a glimpse of something in Jack's expression then, a sort of familiar grief, but the next moment it has vanished. "Let's hear your theory first," he says, smiling indulgently.
"I think you're from a different time," Anna tells him in a rush. "I think it was the twenty-first century, because you're always down in that part of the mausoleum, and you've got that journal. And then I think the Rift caught you, or maybe you went traveling with the Doctor, and somehow you ended up here, and just... picked up where you left off." She crosses her arms, wondering if it's too much to hope that she will receive a yes-or-no answer.
Jack laughs again. "Did you look through all the photographs?" he asks. Anna shakes her head, and he gestures toward the box. "Hardly a thorough investigation," he adds. "I expected better from you."
Picking up a few photos, she gingerly examines them. Another group shot. A couple. Jack. Another group shot. Candid shots of Torchwood from another time at work. Jack again, looking vaguely younger. Wreckage, and a picnic in it. Jack and three women who could've been sisters, posing with guns and laughing. A beribboned Weevil.
Anna looks up and levels a glare at the captain. "You said you had been here for a long time," she says. "But that's impossible."
"Never stopped me," replies Jack.
"You've been here since the twenty-first century?" Anna demands incredulously.
Jack shakes his head. "I've been in charge since the twenty-first century," he corrects her. "I've been at Torchwood Cardiff since almost the beginning."
"Then Suzie Costello, Toshiko Sato, Ianto Jones…"
"Owen Harper," Jack finished. "And Gwen Cooper, a bit later. My first team."
Anna nods, suddenly feeling very small in the face of history and the realisation that these people must also have been family to Jack - that all of Torchwood Cardiff had been Jack's and that he must have felt every death like a shot to the gut.
And these first, what was their legacy? A computer program. Entries in the archives. Centuries-old coffee stains. Photographs.
"Do you have," she begins, and then swallows. "A picture?" she finishes.
Jack smiles again, wistfully. "Under the journal," he says.
The photo looks well-loved, dog-eared and creased and rather faded. In it are five people. Closest to the camera are two women, who are smiling directly toward whoever took the picture. The shorter of the two looks somewhat sheepish, shy. Behind them, sprawled on a park bench and not looking at all thrilled with the prospect of photography, a wide-mouthed man crosses his arms and eyes the first two. A little ways away stands Jack and another man, deep in conversation and apparently oblivious to the documentation.
"So that's Suzie and Toshiko..." Anna begins.
"Gwen and Toshiko," Jack corrects her. "The sullen one is Owen." His own mouth twists, expression caught someplace between affectionate amusement and sadness.
"So that leaves Ianto," Anna continues, holding the photo closer to her face for a closer look. Another photo detaches itself from the first; a closer shot of Jack and Ianto Jones. The latter has spotted the camera and is in the process of rolling his eyes, though amicably. Jack - younger than ever before - is laughing.
Anna's Jack smiles fondly down at this second photo. "These were taken by Gwen's husband," he recalls. "Along with many others. He gave them all to me since we wouldn't let him scrapbook."
Imagining Jack and the Torchwood of the photograph sitting around the Hub, scrapbooking, is definitely the Wrong Thing To Do. Anna very nearly dissolves into inconsolable giggles, and only the knowledge that she'll never learn anything else if she does this keeps her from such a fate. She chokes instead, coughing steadily for about thirty seconds, holding the two photos out of harm's way.
Jack slaps her companionably on the back once she's caught her breath again. "Well, I think that's enough of a history lesson for one day," he says, in that friendly tone of voice that nevertheless brooks no argument. "I'd appreciate it if you asked before searching my effects, next time."
Nodding, Anna takes the hint and heads for the door. But she pauses once she's reached it, looking back at the tin box. "How do you do it?" she asks. "I mean, just keep going on like that. Haven't you ever wanted to go somewhere else - live somewhere new?"
"I've had practice," Jack replies.
"I suppose so," Anna says, because it's a little painful to consider what he means by that. She doesn't ask the other question that dances on the tip of her tongue, but instead walks back to her abandoned desk, lost in thought.
--
The next day, she brings a camera with her to work, and very discretely snaps pictures of the team at work. Raff catches her in the act toward the end of the day and makes funny faces every time he sees it, but this notwithstanding she ends up with a reasonable collection of Torchwood documentation.
Feeling rather self-conscious, she prints out a few of the best after transferring the rest to her hard drive. It takes her twenty minutes to find suitable paper and a printer without alerting Jack to her actions (though it's possible he already knows, of course), and then another five to get the printer working again. She almost asks Raff to help sort out the twenty-fifth century wiring, but eventually manages without his expertise. Certainly he knows more about the second millennium than anyone on the team besides Jack, but he also can't keep a secret.
At the end of the day she leaves a small stack of paper on Jack's desk, with a note: on a Rift-lazy day, we ought to do something with these.
She hopes he finds scrapbooking as funny an image as she did.
-- coda --
Torchwood has changed over the years, but a few bits and pieces linger from its earliest days. Jack, for instance, is still hanging about his office, leading the team. The holding cells have expanded, and grown in both security and diversity to accommodate all sorts of specific needs, but they still hold a multitude of Weevils. The bodies of former team members still lie frozen in the mausoleum in chronological order.
Jack spends a great deal of time there, as years pass and it begins to fill. Over the years, various teams learn in various ways that when he retreats to the mausoleum he is thinking Deep Thoughts, and will not necessarily respond well to being disturbed. He doesn't spend his time mourning those gone, though he easily could; but he finds the silence here familiar, unchanging. Even the hum of machinery seems to fade after a while. He remembers long ago waking up inside a body bag waiting to be slid inside. He never really had a chance to appreciate the horror of what might have happened if he'd been slid inside before waking up. After all that followed, it seemed laughable. In fact, he chuckles about it to himself every time he enters: someone, as a joke, marked an empty drawer as belonging to 'Harkness, Jack'.
But he does not laugh long or often, in the mausoleum.
Sometimes he contemplates the other names, written in varying styles as according to the time period. The oldest are handwritten in faded ink. Then, a succession of varying fonts from varying typewriters, until the notable switch in 1978. Jack remembers very well the day a thirty-second century printer materialised on the Hub floor. It had been quite a capable printer until its untimely demise in 2107, but until the advent of the 1990s and the worldwide quest to Build a Better Computer, it had printed only in one font. After the printer's reprogramming, official documents and archival material used the standard institutional fonts, but no one had ever switched out the fonts in the mausoleum. Jack doesn't find it a difficult task to identify the eras in the mausoleum; he just remembers the people stored there.
He finds himself drifting back to the twenty-first century's section more often than not, perhaps from a morbid sense of loyalty. Of course, he has loved all of the people he has employed, but his team, his first team of people he selected himself and trained and guided - they hold a special place in his heart.
The whole team is not there. Owen Harper's body was never recovered from the nuclear power plant, for instance, though by rights he ought to have rested between 'Costello, Suzie' and 'Sato, Toshiko'. 'Cooper, Gwen' is also absent. The day she died, her husband of eleven years had turned up at the Hub and, after a brief conversation with Jack, left with a promise that Gwen Cooper would be buried in a proper cemetery. But then again, Gwen was always the exception to the rule where the outside world was concerned.
There is an incongruence beside 'Sato, Toshiko': the tech hired to replace her had suffered an especially untimely death, even by Torchwood standards. But 'Eriksen, David' did not turn up for another drawer, at the request of the final member of the twenty-first century team. 'Jones, Ianto' marked the end of the Team, though Ianto Jones had outlived David Eriksen by over thirty years.
Ianto had actually orchestrated this himself. Jack had descended into the mausoleum to find that most of the cataloguing had been finished, and that there was a gap between Tosh and David. "Archival mishap?" he'd asked, trying to to make light of a rather depressing day.
But Ianto had shaken his head. "I'm just saving a place," he'd replied gravely. He didn't say for whom the place was intended, for there was only one obvious candidate.
Jack hadn't liked hearing Ianto plan for his own death, and said as much. But he never mandated that the chronological inaccuracy be corrected. In a way, it was comforting. He also finds he can take slight comfort in the fact that the empty drawer with his name on it rests only one tier above. Though he doubts he will ever fill it... it feels nice to know he has a place waiting, just in case.
I was commenting upon sam_storyteller's amazing Torchwood fic, and the topic of Ianto's diary came up in a nearby thread. Sam mentioned that he liked the idea of Jack keeping Ianto's diary around in that tin of photos and letters. As I read this, inspiration struck.
I thought it would be something short, not quite hitting the one thousand words mark. Oh, how wrong I was.
Also. I'd like to apologise in advance. I know I'm throwing all sorts of Fanfiction Common Courtesy out of the figurative window. But I don't think I was ever in control of this particular fic.
Title: Posterity
Fandom: Torchwood
Wordcount: 4,177
Summary: Jack has a long memory. (Thanks to sam_storyteller for the inspiration and 42footprints for spawning the original idea.)
Reports of Weevil activity come in one afternoon, with Jack nowhere to be found and thus probably in the mausoleum. As countless teams before them have learned to do, the current staff of Torchwood Cardiff draw straws to determine who will go fetch him. The lot falls to Anna Boddington, resident linguist and fairly new on the job. Mug of chai in hand, flipping off the rest of the team with the other, she descends the stairs to their Captain's hideout and comes perilously close to tripping on the last step.
"We've got a runner, Cap'n," she begins, but breaks off when she realises that he did not notice her entrance and is completely engrossed in his own thoughts yet. He is leaning against one of the drawers, and staring at the names upon it and the two following as if the meaning of life were written there.
Unused to such a distracted Jack and a little unnerved, but determined to do her job, she approaches. "Cap'n?" she says again.
He snaps back to attention, smiles at her. "Been taking lessons from Dmitri?" he jokes, referring to the team's silent supercomputer programmer. Up close, his face is a study of thin lines like roads on a map; laugh lines, he calls them, and chuckles as if at some sort of joke. Anna knows that he is unusually old for Torchwood, though she does not know his exact age. He looks more like her father than the daring captain of a mostly-secret agency protecting the Earth from alien threats. She thinks how strange it is that such a man could still be working at such a tiring, thankless job.
"Does Torchwood offer a retirement plan?" she asks before she thinks about the implications of her words. "Not that I'm saying you're old, or anything, Cap'n. Just... curious."
Jack grins now, but there's a sort of sadness in it. "This is the one job you can't really leave," he tells her. "I of all people should know that."
"You've been part of Torchwood for a long time, haven't you?" she asks after a moment. "Longer than anyone else here."
"I've been working here for a long time, yes," he says, and laughs a bit to himself. "A very long time."
There isn't much Anna can think of to say to that, other than the obvious question of how long. But as she knows from the rest of the team that asking such questions of their esteemed leader is a futile endeavor, she does not ask it. "Raff got a call about a Weevil," she says instead.
"Persistent, aren't they?" Jack responds. "Just when you think you've got them contained, there's always another one." He flashes Anna one last grin, and then walks up the stairs, presumably to inquire further about the Weevil.
Anna almost follows, but curiousity leads her to inspect the names on the drawers that the Captain was leaning on. 'Costello, Suzie' means nothing to her, though she recognises 'Sato, Toshiko' as the name behind the original translation programs. 'Jones, Ianto' rings a bell as well, though she can't place it. She wonders if she should know these things. She wonders if anyone above knows anything, or if they're all doomed to wondering who exactly this masked man is.
She doesn't wonder if it's her business; she knows it isn't. But that's sort of the point.
--
She asks Dmitri first, and he actually takes a break from his work to roll his eyes at her. "No one understands the Captain," he says.
"But the people," Anna presses.
"I failed history," Dmitri replies shortly. "Not that Torchwood ever makes it."
"Ask Jay," suggests Tina the medic, waving her foot vaguely toward the stairs down from where it rests on her cluttered desk. "I bet even twentieth-century Torchwood had to stash the loot somewhere."
That takes some doing, as Jay is never easy to find. More often not he can be found in the archives, doing what he does best, but the archives are a big and scary place. Once Raff got lost, looking for some old artefact or another, and the team spent the afternoon trying to give him directions back. Usually everyone keeps a good distance, these days. Jay is the only one who really knows his way around the archives, which he claims is because he goes to real libraries with real printed books. Anna's theory says that he is the only member of the team with a sense of direction; the rest of the team agrees, for the most part.
But luck is with her, for she discovers Jay toward the front of the archives, engrossed in some report or another from another time. He jumps rather spectacularly when Anna taps him on the shoulder. "Do you make any noise when you walk?" he demands, turning to face her. "You should wear something jingly or something. Seriously, one of these days someone's gonna stun you out of sheer instinct."
"You should pay more attention to the world around you," Anna retorts. "Hey, do you know of a Suzie Costello?"
Jay makes a face of perpetual suffering. "First she scares me half to death, and then she interrogates me about my personal life. I don't get paid enough for this. Does it matter? I was in the middle of something important!"
Tina warned her about Jay's whining on her first day, and since then Anna has witnessed many of his 'prissy fits'. As ever, she has to wonder if Jack hired him simply for the entertainment value. "Not a living Suzie Costello," she clarifies, laughing. "I mean, is there a mention of her in the archives?"
"Rings a bell," Jay says, and pulls out the archival PDA, typing in a few characters and then pressing the 'Send' button rather violently. "Here we go: Torchwood Cardiff, early twenty-first century. Archived the... gauntlet later dubbed 'Rizzen Mitten' by the archivist back then. This is old material, this is." He scrolled down, managing to keep the screen at just the wrong angle for Anna to read it over his shoulder. "Well, damn. Mentioned in the second edit of the archival notes. Apparently she was brought back to life with it. Assuming you didn't know that, what's so special about her?"
"Just... idle curiosity," Anna replies. "I went to get the Captain out of the mausoleum and he was looking at three drawers in particular. Hers was one."
Jay raises one dark eyebrow at her. "That's snooping," he admonishes her. "So who were the other two?"
"Well, there was Toshiko Sato," Anna tells him. "I know that name from a bunch of our software, but have you got anything else on them?"
A few more keystrokes and Jay nods. "Also twenty-first century. She - Sato's a woman, apparently - was probably the tech. Listed under a lot of repair work and translations. Oh, and she was apparently involved with a cryogenically-frozen soldier from World War One." He whistles. "Didn't know they even had cryogenics back then."
"Probably wasn't their own technology," Anna puts in.
"No shit," Jay replies companionably. "And the third?"
Anna has to think back for a moment. "Ianto Jones," she says at length. "That's I-A-N-T-O, by the way."
"I see it enough," Jay scoffs, rolling his eyes. "Twenty-first century again. Did most of the archiving for that era. Kept a Cyberman in the basement. He's all over the place here. So's his coffee, apparently." He roots around the filing cabinet still open from his previous activities and pulls out a rather aged packet of paper. True to Jay's word, coffee stains can be seen in rings on both the first and last pages. "Owen Harper's report on Abbadon. It's all over the inside, too. I don't suppose you ran into Owen Harper with the others, did you?"
Shaking her head, Anna takes the report and glances over it. "Someone was at this with black ink," she observes, pointing to a space that seems to have once contained a name. "But no, I didn't see an Owen Harper. I take it he was on the twenty-first century team, too?"
"Beginning of the twenty-first century. Teams change pretty quickly, you know." Jay laughs grimly, and Anna remembers Jack saying that leaving Torchwood isn't really done. Is that what he meant? she wonders. "Costello, Sato, Harper, and Jones were the original twenty-ones. Costello wasn't around for long, though, according to these records." He presses another button on the PDA and the screen goes blank. "Have I answered your questions, then? Or do you need to waste more of my time?"
Anna snorts. "Don't tell me you were actually busy," she retorts. "But get back to slacking off. Tina'll have something else for you before too long."
--
Dmitri is engrossed in whatever programs he's running when Anna returns to the main Hub, but Tina mockingly salutes her with an empty mug. "How is the Diva?" she inquires, jerking her head back toward the archives. Tina has nicknames for everyone, though no one will tell Anna hers.
"Dusty," Anna replies easily. "Does he ever actually leave the place for more than ten minutes at a time? Excluding field work, of course."
"I've heard he has a flat over by the shuttle launchpad," the medic says. "But you know how the rumour mill is." She pushes a stray strand of dark hair from her face and grimaces. "I give up," she announces. "I am going home and shearing this whole bloody mess off."
Anna snorts; Tina has said as much at least once a week for as long as Anna has known her, and yet the hair remains as long as ever. Just like Jay's complaining and Dmitri's grumpy silence, Tina's war with her own hair is a part of Torchwood. Despite what the official statement might be, Torchwood is not just a group of qualified experts united by a common cause. Torchwood is a family. A dysfunctional family, perhaps, but people cannot help but bond over the little things if they are out saving each other's arses on a fairly regular basis. Tina may refer to Jay as 'The Diva', and Jay and Raff may snark at each other if let loose in the same room together - certainly Dmitri does his best to ignore them all - and certainly Jack sometimes calls them all by the wrong names, but Anna knows they all really love each other, deep down.
And Anna has decided that she wants to know if she is in danger of being referred to as 'Suzie' any time soon.
It's just a hunch, of course, but Anna did her research when she joined up. She knows what little there is to know about the enigmatic Doctor, and part of that knowledge is that Jack at one point was quite good friends with him. She also has noticed that there is no record of Jack's joining Torchwood - he just simply appears after a while, without any fuss. He could easily have been a Torchwood agent back in the earlier days - perhaps Suzie Costello's replacement, even - and simply have been transported by the Rift or the Doctor to the Torchwood of now. It would explain his fixation with the mausoleum. It would explain the mishaps with names, too (although they must have gone through personnel like Weevils back then).
When Tina turns back to her computer, Anna seizes the moment and takes the stairs up to Jack's office. It's unlocked, as usual; Jack likes to act like he has nothing to hide.
On the desk is the usual assortment of randomised clutter; today, Anna notices that the odds and ends all represent different eras of history. There's a rather antique PersonaSphere, rather scratched up; a collection of various plants, preserved in glass; a gas mask that must have come from the oxygen conversion years of the twenty-ninth century. On top of an entirely obsolete coin bank rests some sort of early watch, metallic and possessing a button on the top. Next to it is the crushed remains of what must once have been a very pretty pendant. Anna wonders where Jack found all of these things. Perhaps he's simply trying to learn about the periods of Torchwood history he missed.
In the center of his desk, however, is a slightly rusty tin box, lid only partially closed over the top. Jackpot, Anna thinks, and then winces at her own pun as she lifts the lid off altogether. Inside the box are photographs, actually printed out. Very twenty-first century, Anna thinks triumphantly, and sifts through a few.
But the top few photographs are much more recent than that; Anna recognises these as snapshots from the night Raff demanded they throw a universal birthday party, since no one ever remembered to celebrate separately. She hadn't even noticed Jack taking pictures - unless, of course, he simply printed CCTV screenshots. Underneath these is a group shot of three people Anna does not recognise and a much younger Tina. One of the strangers has a bionic arm, with which he is ruffling the young Tina's short hair.
Below that is a series of sketches; the man with the bionic arm is featured in one, and Jack in another, and then four more unknown faces. Anna does not go through the whole pile, as it looks as if Jack has a picture of every Torchwood team to exist, but pushes the pile aside to look in the bottom.
She finds a journal, paper aged yellow. Carefully opening the cover, she reads:
Property of Ianto Jones, c/o Torchwood. No, Owen, I am not writing about my 'secret longings'. Stop poking about my desk.
A cough from the doorway cuts her off before she can read further; Jack stands there, one eyebrow raised. Anna carefully closes the journal and replaces it in the tin box, stepping away from the desk. "Sorry, Cap'n," she says, because there isn't much else she really can say.
"You know, I've noticed things about the people I hire for this job," Jack comments lightly. "All sorts of people, of course, but there's always someone who just can't leave well enough alone."
"What happens to them?" Anna asks warily.
"Oh, all sorts of things," Jack replies. "A lot of the time it involves very near brushes with death. Or unleashing the apocalypse upon hapless Cardiff." He chuckles, as if remembering a joke.
Being one of those people who cannot leave well enough alone, and apparently not about to be relieved of duty, Anna can't help but ask, "So what happened to the man who wrote that?" She points to the journal in the tin box. "How did you end up with his diary?"
She will swear later that she catches a glimpse of something in Jack's expression then, a sort of familiar grief, but the next moment it has vanished. "Let's hear your theory first," he says, smiling indulgently.
"I think you're from a different time," Anna tells him in a rush. "I think it was the twenty-first century, because you're always down in that part of the mausoleum, and you've got that journal. And then I think the Rift caught you, or maybe you went traveling with the Doctor, and somehow you ended up here, and just... picked up where you left off." She crosses her arms, wondering if it's too much to hope that she will receive a yes-or-no answer.
Jack laughs again. "Did you look through all the photographs?" he asks. Anna shakes her head, and he gestures toward the box. "Hardly a thorough investigation," he adds. "I expected better from you."
Picking up a few photos, she gingerly examines them. Another group shot. A couple. Jack. Another group shot. Candid shots of Torchwood from another time at work. Jack again, looking vaguely younger. Wreckage, and a picnic in it. Jack and three women who could've been sisters, posing with guns and laughing. A beribboned Weevil.
Anna looks up and levels a glare at the captain. "You said you had been here for a long time," she says. "But that's impossible."
"Never stopped me," replies Jack.
"You've been here since the twenty-first century?" Anna demands incredulously.
Jack shakes his head. "I've been in charge since the twenty-first century," he corrects her. "I've been at Torchwood Cardiff since almost the beginning."
"Then Suzie Costello, Toshiko Sato, Ianto Jones…"
"Owen Harper," Jack finished. "And Gwen Cooper, a bit later. My first team."
Anna nods, suddenly feeling very small in the face of history and the realisation that these people must also have been family to Jack - that all of Torchwood Cardiff had been Jack's and that he must have felt every death like a shot to the gut.
And these first, what was their legacy? A computer program. Entries in the archives. Centuries-old coffee stains. Photographs.
"Do you have," she begins, and then swallows. "A picture?" she finishes.
Jack smiles again, wistfully. "Under the journal," he says.
The photo looks well-loved, dog-eared and creased and rather faded. In it are five people. Closest to the camera are two women, who are smiling directly toward whoever took the picture. The shorter of the two looks somewhat sheepish, shy. Behind them, sprawled on a park bench and not looking at all thrilled with the prospect of photography, a wide-mouthed man crosses his arms and eyes the first two. A little ways away stands Jack and another man, deep in conversation and apparently oblivious to the documentation.
"So that's Suzie and Toshiko..." Anna begins.
"Gwen and Toshiko," Jack corrects her. "The sullen one is Owen." His own mouth twists, expression caught someplace between affectionate amusement and sadness.
"So that leaves Ianto," Anna continues, holding the photo closer to her face for a closer look. Another photo detaches itself from the first; a closer shot of Jack and Ianto Jones. The latter has spotted the camera and is in the process of rolling his eyes, though amicably. Jack - younger than ever before - is laughing.
Anna's Jack smiles fondly down at this second photo. "These were taken by Gwen's husband," he recalls. "Along with many others. He gave them all to me since we wouldn't let him scrapbook."
Imagining Jack and the Torchwood of the photograph sitting around the Hub, scrapbooking, is definitely the Wrong Thing To Do. Anna very nearly dissolves into inconsolable giggles, and only the knowledge that she'll never learn anything else if she does this keeps her from such a fate. She chokes instead, coughing steadily for about thirty seconds, holding the two photos out of harm's way.
Jack slaps her companionably on the back once she's caught her breath again. "Well, I think that's enough of a history lesson for one day," he says, in that friendly tone of voice that nevertheless brooks no argument. "I'd appreciate it if you asked before searching my effects, next time."
Nodding, Anna takes the hint and heads for the door. But she pauses once she's reached it, looking back at the tin box. "How do you do it?" she asks. "I mean, just keep going on like that. Haven't you ever wanted to go somewhere else - live somewhere new?"
"I've had practice," Jack replies.
"I suppose so," Anna says, because it's a little painful to consider what he means by that. She doesn't ask the other question that dances on the tip of her tongue, but instead walks back to her abandoned desk, lost in thought.
--
The next day, she brings a camera with her to work, and very discretely snaps pictures of the team at work. Raff catches her in the act toward the end of the day and makes funny faces every time he sees it, but this notwithstanding she ends up with a reasonable collection of Torchwood documentation.
Feeling rather self-conscious, she prints out a few of the best after transferring the rest to her hard drive. It takes her twenty minutes to find suitable paper and a printer without alerting Jack to her actions (though it's possible he already knows, of course), and then another five to get the printer working again. She almost asks Raff to help sort out the twenty-fifth century wiring, but eventually manages without his expertise. Certainly he knows more about the second millennium than anyone on the team besides Jack, but he also can't keep a secret.
At the end of the day she leaves a small stack of paper on Jack's desk, with a note: on a Rift-lazy day, we ought to do something with these.
She hopes he finds scrapbooking as funny an image as she did.
-- coda --
Torchwood has changed over the years, but a few bits and pieces linger from its earliest days. Jack, for instance, is still hanging about his office, leading the team. The holding cells have expanded, and grown in both security and diversity to accommodate all sorts of specific needs, but they still hold a multitude of Weevils. The bodies of former team members still lie frozen in the mausoleum in chronological order.
Jack spends a great deal of time there, as years pass and it begins to fill. Over the years, various teams learn in various ways that when he retreats to the mausoleum he is thinking Deep Thoughts, and will not necessarily respond well to being disturbed. He doesn't spend his time mourning those gone, though he easily could; but he finds the silence here familiar, unchanging. Even the hum of machinery seems to fade after a while. He remembers long ago waking up inside a body bag waiting to be slid inside. He never really had a chance to appreciate the horror of what might have happened if he'd been slid inside before waking up. After all that followed, it seemed laughable. In fact, he chuckles about it to himself every time he enters: someone, as a joke, marked an empty drawer as belonging to 'Harkness, Jack'.
But he does not laugh long or often, in the mausoleum.
Sometimes he contemplates the other names, written in varying styles as according to the time period. The oldest are handwritten in faded ink. Then, a succession of varying fonts from varying typewriters, until the notable switch in 1978. Jack remembers very well the day a thirty-second century printer materialised on the Hub floor. It had been quite a capable printer until its untimely demise in 2107, but until the advent of the 1990s and the worldwide quest to Build a Better Computer, it had printed only in one font. After the printer's reprogramming, official documents and archival material used the standard institutional fonts, but no one had ever switched out the fonts in the mausoleum. Jack doesn't find it a difficult task to identify the eras in the mausoleum; he just remembers the people stored there.
He finds himself drifting back to the twenty-first century's section more often than not, perhaps from a morbid sense of loyalty. Of course, he has loved all of the people he has employed, but his team, his first team of people he selected himself and trained and guided - they hold a special place in his heart.
The whole team is not there. Owen Harper's body was never recovered from the nuclear power plant, for instance, though by rights he ought to have rested between 'Costello, Suzie' and 'Sato, Toshiko'. 'Cooper, Gwen' is also absent. The day she died, her husband of eleven years had turned up at the Hub and, after a brief conversation with Jack, left with a promise that Gwen Cooper would be buried in a proper cemetery. But then again, Gwen was always the exception to the rule where the outside world was concerned.
There is an incongruence beside 'Sato, Toshiko': the tech hired to replace her had suffered an especially untimely death, even by Torchwood standards. But 'Eriksen, David' did not turn up for another drawer, at the request of the final member of the twenty-first century team. 'Jones, Ianto' marked the end of the Team, though Ianto Jones had outlived David Eriksen by over thirty years.
Ianto had actually orchestrated this himself. Jack had descended into the mausoleum to find that most of the cataloguing had been finished, and that there was a gap between Tosh and David. "Archival mishap?" he'd asked, trying to to make light of a rather depressing day.
But Ianto had shaken his head. "I'm just saving a place," he'd replied gravely. He didn't say for whom the place was intended, for there was only one obvious candidate.
Jack hadn't liked hearing Ianto plan for his own death, and said as much. But he never mandated that the chronological inaccuracy be corrected. In a way, it was comforting. He also finds he can take slight comfort in the fact that the empty drawer with his name on it rests only one tier above. Though he doubts he will ever fill it... it feels nice to know he has a place waiting, just in case.