TEAM BUILDING (R) BY IAMSHADOW
Title: Team Building
Author: iamshadow
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairings: Jack/Suzie, Suzie/Owen, Jack/Ianto
Rating: R
Word Count: 4,457
Summary: Jack isn't looking for a team. Jack doesn't need a team. But Jack doesn't count on his team finding him.
Warnings: Prequel era. Pathos, language, sex, violence, mentioned minor character deaths (canon). Spoilers for S2 Ep11(Adrift) and S2 Ep12(Fragments).
A/N: Five interconnected ficlets about the building of Torchwood Three under Jack's command. Interesting and fun to write, so I hope they're as fun to read.
Jack
Jack still has blood under his nails from scrubbing the floors when he finds the papers on Alex's desk. Alex left Jack meticulous notes, master passwords, keys, secrets, and four cooling corpses in sticky puddles of crimson, and Jack doesn't know quite what to do with his new-found freedom and responsibility.
At eight o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day, when most of Britain's population are nursing their first hangovers of the millennium, Jack opens a bottle of his late boss's best Scotch and drinks the whole thing. Alex would have bitched about the blasphemy. He always believed in savouring the good stuff, not guzzling it. Jack has never been a man who holds back. That's why the bottle is empty by eight thirty-two. It's his first binge in thirty years, and though he knows it won't kill him, the lurching of his stomach when he wakes from a fitful doze twelve hours later feels like a kind of penance. It's not nearly enough, but it's better than numbness.
Alex had set an email by timer to forward itself to all the relevant persons at the stroke of midnight, as Jack discovers when he logs on to check for any reports of Rift activity. After reading first one or two, he ignores the rest of the avalanche of replies.
It doesn't take long before the phone starts ringing. It doesn't stop for two days. He deflects Yvonne Hartman's personal assistant enough times that the Director herself deigns to contact him. Hartman tries to flirt him into subservience, but compared to him she's a clumsy amateur, and with the Hub still echoing from the gunshots, he's not really in the mood to play around. Afterwards, he can't really remember what he said, only that Hartman hung up on him after levelling some vague and impotent threats. He doesn't care. After one hundred years, he's his own man again, and he doesn't really feel like slipping back into Torchwood's collar willingly. Mercenary, assassin, cannon fodder, test subject; he's been them all for Queen and Country. Underneath Hartman's pretty words, she's just promising more of the same, and Jack's tired of being kept under duress. He's staying, but on his own terms.
Jack takes the information Alex left him and uses it to make the Hub his, completely. He moves his belongings from the cell-like room in the sub-levels that's been his for fifty years to a disused bunker directly below his new office. It's cold, Spartan and damp, just like the old room, so, all in all, he feels right at home. It's not like he really spends much time in it, anyway.
In between hunting down Weevils, salvaging cloning devices and D'ranian tasers from jumble sales and fucking his pain away with convenient strangers, Jack meticulously combs the Archives. There's nothing he can do about London, who no doubt have reams of their own files, but Cardiff is his, and no one is here to stop him. His first instinct is to burn the lot, to erase every trace of himself, but he soon rejects it. The mission files are valuable records, and he'd be putting too many at risk by destroying them. It's the work of long months to edit his name from them, but he soon finds a certain satisfaction in it. However, the medical and scientific records from three seperate eras labelled 'Subject: Harkness, J' he destroys with no hesitation and a good measure of unnecessary aggression, along with a stack of others for Jane or John Does returned by the Rift. Then he goes to see Dora.
"Nimble and quick, shining like the sun, the son, the child of flowers," Dora greets him.
"Now, now. You're making me blush," Jack responds, pasting on his best smile. She smiles back, and it's radiant and kindly. Were it not for the scales on her arms and the webbed fingers, she could be anyone's grandmother.
"Still she weaves by night and day?" Dora asks, sounding just as hopeful as she always does. Jack just shakes his head, and opens the cell door to pass her a cup of tea.
In the two years that she's been in the vaults, Dora has often hinted in her own, roundabout way that she'd like to knit to pass the time. Alex had never permitted it. Too risky, he'd said, giving a prisoner knitting needles, despite the fact that Dora had never shown herself to be anything other than harmless.
Changes have to be made. Those files he destroyed and Dora's plight only harden Jack's resolve to make things better, if he can't make them right. He's already put things in motion, but it'll be months, yet, before the island is ready. In the end, it's too late for Dora, but not for those that follow after her. It'll never be enough to balance out past wrongs, to salve his conscience for things he couldn't prevent, but it's something.
Jack can't die and doesn't need to sleep, and for the best part of two years, he isn't just the boss, he is Torchwood Three. Vigilante, alien hunter, scavenger, defender of Cardiff, and guardian of the Rift. One man trying to undo over a hundred years of wrongs, single-handed.
Jack isn't looking for a team. Jack doesn't need a team.
But Jack doesn't count on his team finding him.
Suzie
A particularly nasty rash of murders sweeps Cardiff in the Spring of 2002. The papers are full of it, and gruesome conspiracy theories about the identity and motives of the rather unimaginatively dubbed 'Cardiff Ripper' are the latest hot topic in workplaces and cafes all over the city. The police do their job as best they can. They do autopsies. They take swabs and dust for fingerprints. They try to find any connections between the victims. And when all those avenues turn out to be dead ends, the top brass get in some hot-shot profiler from London, who swans about like she owns the place. Cardiff PD is a turbulent mess of bickering and bitching when someone from 'higher up' walks in one Friday afternoon to take the case off their hands.
"We have the suspect in custody," the operative tells the sweating senior officer, and the relief on the man's face is immediately evident.
"Thank Christ for that," he says, swabbing his face with a handkerchief. "Usually I'd be pissed off at you blokes for stepping in, but this case has been a PR nightmare from start to finish. Drink?"
The operative demurs. "No, thank you." He waits patiently while the policeman downs a finger of whiskey, then continues in the same, easy tone. "We'll need to take custody of all your files and evidence, of course."
The whole force are glad to be rid of the mess, and it's barely half an hour before it's all neatly packed into cardboard evidence boxes, waiting to be stacked in the SUV. When all's said and done, Jack muses, Torchwood isn't that different to the con game. It's all about selling lies with just enough truth mixed in to make it palatable.
"And that's everything?" he asks.
"Everything except what Costello's got. She clocked out at noon." The officer doesn't sound too disappointed that the profiler had given herself an early mark. A bit of sweet talking, and Jack manages to get himself the officer's phone number and Costello's room number at the rather swish local hotel she's booked into.
***
"James Harper," he announces with a charming smile, flashing his identification.
Costello's eyes flick to the card in his hand, then back to his face. "You'd better come in," she says after a brief pause.
Jack takes a broad stride past her into the room. "Now, the lovely boys and girls in blue say you have some files..." Jack trails off when he hears an all too familiar metallic click behind him. He raises his hands and turns, ever so slowly on the spot. "...for me."
He's staring down the barrel of a very nice, rather high powered semi-automatic pistol, and from Costello's stance and grip, she almost certainly knows how to use it.
"Are you armed?" she asks, her voice tight, but not trembling.
Jack leaves his hands in the air. "Yes."
"Where is it? Don't move," she adds quickly, even though Jack hadn't so much as twitched. "Just tell me."
"Handgun. Holster on my right hip," Jack says, giving an infinitesimal nod to the appropriate side.
Rather than moving closer, Costello simply says, "Take it out and kick it over to me. No sudden moves, and keep your hands where I can see them."
Jack is at a distinct disadvantage, but he knows that he could probably still take her if he wanted to. However, he's already died twice this week, and he's not really that eager to make it three times. He pulls out the Webley and lays it down on the floor, before nudging it over towards her with the toe of his boot.
"Now talk. Who are you?"
"James Harper. Cardiff PD should have phoned and told you I was coming."
Costello looks unimpressed. "Nice try. You're not as good a liar as you'd like to think you are."
"Check my ID again if you're not convinced," Jack says, reaching down slowly for his pocket.
"Hands up," Costello reminds him, before sneering, "That ID that you showed me was just a blank piece of paper. Who sent you?"
Jack feels a jolt. "You didn't see anything on it?"
"Why would I? It was blank. Now, I'm losing my patience. Who sent you?" The first tremor has entered Costello's voice, and Jack is suddenly aware of how very frightened the woman in front of him is. The likelihood of him ending up perforated and bleeding out onto the plush, cream carpet has just significantly increased. Jack hates trying to get blood out of cream carpet. Especially when it's his own.
"I'm not here to harm you. I'm only here for the case files. That's all," he says, projecting his most earnest, most soothing demeanour. When Costello doesn't lower the gun, he continues. After all, he can always Retcon her if he needs to. "The Ripper case. I'm tidying up the loose ends, cleaning up. It should never have got as public as it did, but the bastard was sneaky and quick. Got away from me a dozen times, right when I thought I had him cornered."
The gun's still up, but he knows he has her, from the bright spark of interest deep in her eyes. "What are you, some kind of spook?"
Jack shakes his head, but continues, "Something like that."
"What's an American doing hunting down murderers in Cardiff? Was he foreign, too?"
"He was, but Cardiff's my home turf. I'm a citizen. Have been for a long time now."
"What'll happen to him?"
Jack shrugs. "Detainment for now, but probably execution. He's too dangerous to be released." He cocks his head a little and gives her a quizzical look. "Does that bother you?"
"Not really. Nothing in the profile I came up with makes me comfortable with someone like him roaming the streets. Sit." She casually gestures with the gun for Jack to take a seat in one of the plush armchairs behind him. She lowers the gun and walks across the room to her desk to pick up the papers there, though Jack notices that she never fully turns her back to him, always keeping him in her peripheral vision. The Webley stays on the floor.
"Who did you think I was? Who's after you?" he asks.
Costello snorts before turning to face him, holding the pile of papers out for him to take. He does so gingerly, no sudden moves. She's still holding the gun, after all. "No idea. It's a dangerous job. You could have been anyone holding a grudge, or anyone hired by someone holding a grudge. You still could be."
"What could make you trust me, I wonder?" Jack muses aloud, not looking at the files in his hand.
"Well, you could start by giving me your name," she replies.
"Captain Jack Harkness," he offers.
"That's your real name, then?" Costello asks, with a disbelieving twist to her mouth.
"Near enough. I've been using it for a while, now," Jack says frankly. "And you are?"
"Suzie Costello," she replies.
She's holding the weapon in a looser grip, now, down by her thigh, and Jack decides it's time to take a gamble. "So, are you going to put down the gun, now, Suzie Costello?" he asks with a smile.
"Not yet," she replies coolly, with a smile of her own. "Tell me something true."
Jack knows he's being tested, and realises that he's been testing Suzie Costello himself since she pulled a gun on him. "What if I told you that the killer wasn't human?" he asks, and waits for her reaction.
Suzie doesn't even blink. "Prove it," she says, calmly.
***
Suzie takes the Hub, the Rift and the Weevils in her stride remarkably well. Within a few weeks she's romping about the Mainframe as though she designed it herself, and she's as good a shot as Jack predicted. The Armoury is obviously as appealling to her as a toy shop to a child, and Jack finds himself showing off just a little bit, explaining the features of the various pieces of earth and alien weaponry. They spend hours together in the firing range, getting high and giddy together on the adrenalin and the smell of cordite. She has an infectious glee for the power of destruction that makes him oddly nostalgic for John and his conman days. It's been so long since he had someone who can be just as enthusiastic as himself over a weapon, not just as a tool, but as a thing of beauty in and of itself.
He sleeps with her two weeks after she joins Torchwood. She approaches him with a gleam in her eye that's immediately recognisable, and he can't think of any reason why not to go along with it. It's been a while since he had sex, and she doesn't seem like the type to expect commitment.
It's not until she's riding him, her hair unbound and tangled, that he realises that she's not seeing him at all. She's looking right through him and fucking him hard, as though sex is just another weapon, like pointing the gun at his head in the hotel room. He's simply the last in what's probably a long line of men with power over her that she's slept with. He's been a casual shag hundreds of times, been called by other men's names more times than he can count, but he doesn't remember ever feeling so invisible before.
She doesn't stay the night, and she never mentions it again, but she does seem calmer and more at home at the Hub in the weeks that follow. Jack tries not to think about how much their encounter unsettled him, how used he felt afterwards.
No more sleeping with the staff, Jack decides. Far too complicated now that I'm the boss.
Tosh
The slow weeks are the worst. Like being back in the trenches, there are the long hours of tedium, followed by an explosion of incredibly dangerous activity. The Rift is only quiet when it is building up to something big.
"Get me a coffee?" Jack wheedles from his office.
"Get it yourself," Suzie replies, without looking up from her monitor.
"I'm busy."
"Busy doing what?" Suzie asks, disbelievingly.
"Er... paperwork. And things. I pay you. You're closer," Jack argues.
"Let me play with that vaporiser thing again."
"Not on your life!"
"Then no."
Jack wanders out down the stairs, and spreads his arms wide. "Where's the respect?" he asks the heavens dramatically.
"I think it got left somewhere in the gutter with your dignity and your morals," Suzie quips, still tapping away at her keyboard.
"Hey, I resent that," Jack retorts, pointing a finger at her. "I have plenty of morals."
Suzie just snickers, and Jack feels the urge to pout.
"What are you so busy with, anyway?" he asks, knowing he's lost the argument and will be making the coffee this time.
"Hacking into UNIT," Suzie replies, sounding mildly bored.
"Again?"
"They haven't even upgraded their security since last time. Takes all the fun right out of it," Suzie complains.
Jack makes a sympathetic noise and walks over to stand behind her shoulder.
"Care for a round of 'guess my crime'?" Suzie asks. The screen is a mosaic of half a dozen mug shots.
"Loser makes the coffee?" Jack asks hopefully.
"Winner gets to drive the SUV this week," Suzie counters. Suzie loves the SUV, and gets bitchy when she's relegated to passenger too often.
"Deal. Hit me."
Suzie hovers her mouse over the hard face of a man who has 'military turncoat' written all over him.
Jack scoffs. "You could at least try to make it difficult."
Suzie rolls her eyes. "Fine, then. Her."
It's the only woman on the screen. She's young, petite, Asian, and she looks shy and frightened; nothing like the rough company surrounding her. Were it not for the shoulders of her red overalls, he'd think her picture was there by mistake. He has no idea, so he takes a wild stab in the dark, clothed in the form of a joke.
"Assassin. Lures powerful men into bed and suffocates them with her thighs."
"You've got nothing," Suzie mocks. "I've seen that film, too, you know."
"Oh, and you're so clever?" Jack retorts. "What do you think?"
"Cyber-terrorism," Suzie replies without hesitation. "She's the utter cliché of a techno-geek. She was lured over to the dark side."
"You know, that's stereotyping," Jack reprimands her without venom.
"You're just bitter because you know you've lost. And stereotypes don't come from nowhere."
With a click, Prisoner Sato's information comes up on the screen.
"We were both wrong," Jack attempts.
"I was still closer," Suzie says, smugly. "Don't try to wriggle out of it."
Jack would respond with a witty rejoinder, but he's suddenly caught up in reading the details. If UNIT's report is correct, Prisoner Sato built a working Sonic Modulator five centuries too early, using stolen, faulty MOD plans, basic electronics, a soldering iron and a laptop. And she's not even thirty years old. Prisoner Sato is a treasure, and Jack covets her, covets what he could use her for. He has shelves full of faulty or unidentified tech that he just doesn't have the time to fiddle with properly. The Hub would just be a slightly bigger cage than the UNIT prison, but Jack can envision the possibilities if she agrees.
Suzie obviously senses something has happened, because Jack catches her watching him with a quizzical expression on her face. "Forward that link through to my station, would you?" he asks, feigning a casual tone, even though he knows she won't be fooled.
He makes her a coffee, just the way she likes it, then spends the rest of the afternoon tracking down all available information on Toshiko Sato. The next morning, he makes a phone call.
Suzie gets to drive the SUV for the next two weeks, and shows no surprise whatsoever when Jack guides a thin and jumpy Toshiko down into the Hub not long afterwards.
"Welcome to the madhouse," she says in greeting.
Tosh gives her a shaky smile in return.
Owen
"It's a lobster," Suzie says dully. She is cold, wet, and looks distinctly unimpressed.
"This is not a lobster," Jack says firmly, gingerly dropping the wriggling crustacean into a containment box.
"Looks like one," she counters.
"Jack's right," Tosh speaks up quietly, studying her handheld scanner. "It's covered in Rift energy."
"Rift lobsters," Suzie says, unconvinced.
"They are not lobsters," Jack snaps. He's cold and wet, too, and he's certain that odeur des poissons is currently winning out over his superior pheromones. "They're alien, and though they might not look like much, they can host a very nasty parasite which is fatal to humans. Speaking of which, why aren't you wearing your masks?"
Tosh jumps guiltily and dons her mask. Suzie rolls her eyes and does the same.
"These things stink, you know," she complains, muffled by rubber and air filter. "Why aren't you wearing one?"
"I'm immune," Jack replies tersely. He's really not in the mood to try and explain 51st century vaccinations in a way that doesn't involve giving up a whole lot of secrets he'd much rather keep. "And, by all means, leave yours off if you want parasites from another galaxy chewing on your brain. Either way, get some of those gloves on and come help me. Tosh, go and check out the captain's log. See if you can find out how many of these things we're dealing with."
"I'm on it," Tosh says, and disappears upwards.
They work more or less in silence, until Tosh returns twenty minutes later.
"We've got a problem," she says worriedly. "This is only half the catch."
"Where's the rest?" Jack asks.
"London. The truck left about two hours before we arrived," she says.
"No way to stop it," Suzie concludes. "It'll be there by now."
"We worry about that later," Jack decides.
***
The Rift lobsters end up delivered to half a dozen fashionable restaurants and hotels. While Torchwood are able to take possession of most of them without incident (a story about contamination has the establishments tripping over themselves to get rid of the things), it's far too late for at least a dozen customers, and several staff who were responsible for preparation.
"Are they all going to get sick?" Tosh asks, looking at the list of names in horror.
Jack shrugs. "There's no way to tell."
Jack watches Tosh's face as the scale of it sinks in. "But... you said you were immune, and we've still got several specimens. Maybe we could develop a serum-"
There's wild hope in her eyes, and Jack hates to quash it. "There's a vaccine," he admits gently, "but there's no cure. If any of these people are infected, there's nothing we can do for them. This is a clean-up operation. When they die, we retrieve the bodies and destroy the parasites. That's it."
"Then what do we do?" Tosh sounds crushed.
Jack puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently. "We wait. We monitor those most likely to have been infected. We'll know within a few months. There'll be symptoms by then."
In the end, there are three victims. One of them is Katie Russell.
***
"New boy coming in. When he arrives, make him feel at home," Jack announces cheerily, striding through the Hub one morning.
"When's he going to be here?" Suzie asks, looking up from a rather frightening set of barbed daggers.
"End of the week. He's relocating; had to find a flat," Jack explains, hanging up his coat.
"Where from?"
"London. He's a medic. No more sewing up our own Weevil gashes," Jack says with glee. "Don't say I never get you anything."
Suzie follows Jack into his office and stands in front of his desk, hands on hips. "This is that bloke, isn't it? The fiancée of that girl with the parasite? I thought you Retconned him."
Jack takes a random piece of paperwork down from the top of the teetering stack and pretends to scan it. "I didn't."
"So, you just let him think he was crazy for a couple of months?" Suzie challenges.
If Jack wasn't already feeling a pang of conscience, maybe he'd find Suzie's sudden humanity fascinating. "I thought he'd be useful."
"That's fucking cold, Jack. Even for you."
He doesn't reply and doesn't look up, and eventually, she leaves him alone.
***
Owen comes to Cardiff, and to Torchwood Three, spoiling for a fight. He's screaming his fury at the world and fate in the only way he knows how; by brawling and fucking and drinking himself into oblivion. Jack has been there himself, more than once, and he knows that while Owen needs to act out, he also needs a distraction, something to give him a purpose. He feeds Owen the more interesting cases, spars with him hand to hand, and trains him to be a pretty damn good marksman. Once he starts coming in hung over only on alternate mornings, Jack pushes him up to field operative.
Jack notices now and then that Owen smells of Suzie's perfume, and it isn't hard to put two and two together. He knows it isn't about love - with Suzie, it never is - but he really does wonder, out of the two of them, who hates themselves more.
Ianto
Without meaning to, Jack has built himself a team.
Torchwood Three works like a well oiled, if slightly temperamental, machine. He has his group of clever, broken, dysfunctional children, and he doesn't need anybody else. He doesn't need a butler. He doesn't need a teaboy. He definitely doesn't need a pteranodon, or a very pretty boy who looks equally good in a suit or tight jeans and appears to be not averse to sexual experimentation (even if he is currently playing a little hard-to-get).
However, Jack has a rather flexible interpretation of the difference between need and want.
Ianto sets another cup of his amazing coffee down on the edge of Jack's desk and clears his throat politely. "If you don't mind me asking, sir - when did Torchwood Three last have a full time archivist? Or even a part time archivist?"
Jack thinks back. He thinks hard. "Ah... mid-nineties, maybe? Why?"
Ianto grimaces. It's quite adorable. There's dust on his tie, his cuffs, and the knees of his trousers, and there's a cobweb in is hair. "It... explains a lot, sir."
"Need a hand down there?" Jack asks, his voice deep, his smile suggestive. "I've done some filing in my time."
Ianto appears to consider it. "No one since the mid-nineties, sir?"
Jack blinks. "That's right."
"And who, might I ask, has filed the most reports since then?"
"That would probably be me."
Ianto's smile is tight and tolerant, and Jack briefly wonders if his next cup of coffee will be safe to drink. "Will you be needing anything else, sir?"
"Not right now, thanks," he answers. If Jack wasn't convinced that Ianto was deeply annoyed at him, he'd call him back and offer to dust off his arse for him, but he suspects that really would lead to poison in his coffee.
Jack hasn't broken his rule about not fucking the staff, yet, but he's certainly looking for loopholes.
Author: iamshadow
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairings: Jack/Suzie, Suzie/Owen, Jack/Ianto
Rating: R
Word Count: 4,457
Summary: Jack isn't looking for a team. Jack doesn't need a team. But Jack doesn't count on his team finding him.
Warnings: Prequel era. Pathos, language, sex, violence, mentioned minor character deaths (canon). Spoilers for S2 Ep11(Adrift) and S2 Ep12(Fragments).
A/N: Five interconnected ficlets about the building of Torchwood Three under Jack's command. Interesting and fun to write, so I hope they're as fun to read.
Jack
Jack still has blood under his nails from scrubbing the floors when he finds the papers on Alex's desk. Alex left Jack meticulous notes, master passwords, keys, secrets, and four cooling corpses in sticky puddles of crimson, and Jack doesn't know quite what to do with his new-found freedom and responsibility.
At eight o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day, when most of Britain's population are nursing their first hangovers of the millennium, Jack opens a bottle of his late boss's best Scotch and drinks the whole thing. Alex would have bitched about the blasphemy. He always believed in savouring the good stuff, not guzzling it. Jack has never been a man who holds back. That's why the bottle is empty by eight thirty-two. It's his first binge in thirty years, and though he knows it won't kill him, the lurching of his stomach when he wakes from a fitful doze twelve hours later feels like a kind of penance. It's not nearly enough, but it's better than numbness.
Alex had set an email by timer to forward itself to all the relevant persons at the stroke of midnight, as Jack discovers when he logs on to check for any reports of Rift activity. After reading first one or two, he ignores the rest of the avalanche of replies.
It doesn't take long before the phone starts ringing. It doesn't stop for two days. He deflects Yvonne Hartman's personal assistant enough times that the Director herself deigns to contact him. Hartman tries to flirt him into subservience, but compared to him she's a clumsy amateur, and with the Hub still echoing from the gunshots, he's not really in the mood to play around. Afterwards, he can't really remember what he said, only that Hartman hung up on him after levelling some vague and impotent threats. He doesn't care. After one hundred years, he's his own man again, and he doesn't really feel like slipping back into Torchwood's collar willingly. Mercenary, assassin, cannon fodder, test subject; he's been them all for Queen and Country. Underneath Hartman's pretty words, she's just promising more of the same, and Jack's tired of being kept under duress. He's staying, but on his own terms.
Jack takes the information Alex left him and uses it to make the Hub his, completely. He moves his belongings from the cell-like room in the sub-levels that's been his for fifty years to a disused bunker directly below his new office. It's cold, Spartan and damp, just like the old room, so, all in all, he feels right at home. It's not like he really spends much time in it, anyway.
In between hunting down Weevils, salvaging cloning devices and D'ranian tasers from jumble sales and fucking his pain away with convenient strangers, Jack meticulously combs the Archives. There's nothing he can do about London, who no doubt have reams of their own files, but Cardiff is his, and no one is here to stop him. His first instinct is to burn the lot, to erase every trace of himself, but he soon rejects it. The mission files are valuable records, and he'd be putting too many at risk by destroying them. It's the work of long months to edit his name from them, but he soon finds a certain satisfaction in it. However, the medical and scientific records from three seperate eras labelled 'Subject: Harkness, J' he destroys with no hesitation and a good measure of unnecessary aggression, along with a stack of others for Jane or John Does returned by the Rift. Then he goes to see Dora.
"Nimble and quick, shining like the sun, the son, the child of flowers," Dora greets him.
"Now, now. You're making me blush," Jack responds, pasting on his best smile. She smiles back, and it's radiant and kindly. Were it not for the scales on her arms and the webbed fingers, she could be anyone's grandmother.
"Still she weaves by night and day?" Dora asks, sounding just as hopeful as she always does. Jack just shakes his head, and opens the cell door to pass her a cup of tea.
In the two years that she's been in the vaults, Dora has often hinted in her own, roundabout way that she'd like to knit to pass the time. Alex had never permitted it. Too risky, he'd said, giving a prisoner knitting needles, despite the fact that Dora had never shown herself to be anything other than harmless.
Changes have to be made. Those files he destroyed and Dora's plight only harden Jack's resolve to make things better, if he can't make them right. He's already put things in motion, but it'll be months, yet, before the island is ready. In the end, it's too late for Dora, but not for those that follow after her. It'll never be enough to balance out past wrongs, to salve his conscience for things he couldn't prevent, but it's something.
Jack can't die and doesn't need to sleep, and for the best part of two years, he isn't just the boss, he is Torchwood Three. Vigilante, alien hunter, scavenger, defender of Cardiff, and guardian of the Rift. One man trying to undo over a hundred years of wrongs, single-handed.
Jack isn't looking for a team. Jack doesn't need a team.
But Jack doesn't count on his team finding him.
Suzie
A particularly nasty rash of murders sweeps Cardiff in the Spring of 2002. The papers are full of it, and gruesome conspiracy theories about the identity and motives of the rather unimaginatively dubbed 'Cardiff Ripper' are the latest hot topic in workplaces and cafes all over the city. The police do their job as best they can. They do autopsies. They take swabs and dust for fingerprints. They try to find any connections between the victims. And when all those avenues turn out to be dead ends, the top brass get in some hot-shot profiler from London, who swans about like she owns the place. Cardiff PD is a turbulent mess of bickering and bitching when someone from 'higher up' walks in one Friday afternoon to take the case off their hands.
"We have the suspect in custody," the operative tells the sweating senior officer, and the relief on the man's face is immediately evident.
"Thank Christ for that," he says, swabbing his face with a handkerchief. "Usually I'd be pissed off at you blokes for stepping in, but this case has been a PR nightmare from start to finish. Drink?"
The operative demurs. "No, thank you." He waits patiently while the policeman downs a finger of whiskey, then continues in the same, easy tone. "We'll need to take custody of all your files and evidence, of course."
The whole force are glad to be rid of the mess, and it's barely half an hour before it's all neatly packed into cardboard evidence boxes, waiting to be stacked in the SUV. When all's said and done, Jack muses, Torchwood isn't that different to the con game. It's all about selling lies with just enough truth mixed in to make it palatable.
"And that's everything?" he asks.
"Everything except what Costello's got. She clocked out at noon." The officer doesn't sound too disappointed that the profiler had given herself an early mark. A bit of sweet talking, and Jack manages to get himself the officer's phone number and Costello's room number at the rather swish local hotel she's booked into.
***
"James Harper," he announces with a charming smile, flashing his identification.
Costello's eyes flick to the card in his hand, then back to his face. "You'd better come in," she says after a brief pause.
Jack takes a broad stride past her into the room. "Now, the lovely boys and girls in blue say you have some files..." Jack trails off when he hears an all too familiar metallic click behind him. He raises his hands and turns, ever so slowly on the spot. "...for me."
He's staring down the barrel of a very nice, rather high powered semi-automatic pistol, and from Costello's stance and grip, she almost certainly knows how to use it.
"Are you armed?" she asks, her voice tight, but not trembling.
Jack leaves his hands in the air. "Yes."
"Where is it? Don't move," she adds quickly, even though Jack hadn't so much as twitched. "Just tell me."
"Handgun. Holster on my right hip," Jack says, giving an infinitesimal nod to the appropriate side.
Rather than moving closer, Costello simply says, "Take it out and kick it over to me. No sudden moves, and keep your hands where I can see them."
Jack is at a distinct disadvantage, but he knows that he could probably still take her if he wanted to. However, he's already died twice this week, and he's not really that eager to make it three times. He pulls out the Webley and lays it down on the floor, before nudging it over towards her with the toe of his boot.
"Now talk. Who are you?"
"James Harper. Cardiff PD should have phoned and told you I was coming."
Costello looks unimpressed. "Nice try. You're not as good a liar as you'd like to think you are."
"Check my ID again if you're not convinced," Jack says, reaching down slowly for his pocket.
"Hands up," Costello reminds him, before sneering, "That ID that you showed me was just a blank piece of paper. Who sent you?"
Jack feels a jolt. "You didn't see anything on it?"
"Why would I? It was blank. Now, I'm losing my patience. Who sent you?" The first tremor has entered Costello's voice, and Jack is suddenly aware of how very frightened the woman in front of him is. The likelihood of him ending up perforated and bleeding out onto the plush, cream carpet has just significantly increased. Jack hates trying to get blood out of cream carpet. Especially when it's his own.
"I'm not here to harm you. I'm only here for the case files. That's all," he says, projecting his most earnest, most soothing demeanour. When Costello doesn't lower the gun, he continues. After all, he can always Retcon her if he needs to. "The Ripper case. I'm tidying up the loose ends, cleaning up. It should never have got as public as it did, but the bastard was sneaky and quick. Got away from me a dozen times, right when I thought I had him cornered."
The gun's still up, but he knows he has her, from the bright spark of interest deep in her eyes. "What are you, some kind of spook?"
Jack shakes his head, but continues, "Something like that."
"What's an American doing hunting down murderers in Cardiff? Was he foreign, too?"
"He was, but Cardiff's my home turf. I'm a citizen. Have been for a long time now."
"What'll happen to him?"
Jack shrugs. "Detainment for now, but probably execution. He's too dangerous to be released." He cocks his head a little and gives her a quizzical look. "Does that bother you?"
"Not really. Nothing in the profile I came up with makes me comfortable with someone like him roaming the streets. Sit." She casually gestures with the gun for Jack to take a seat in one of the plush armchairs behind him. She lowers the gun and walks across the room to her desk to pick up the papers there, though Jack notices that she never fully turns her back to him, always keeping him in her peripheral vision. The Webley stays on the floor.
"Who did you think I was? Who's after you?" he asks.
Costello snorts before turning to face him, holding the pile of papers out for him to take. He does so gingerly, no sudden moves. She's still holding the gun, after all. "No idea. It's a dangerous job. You could have been anyone holding a grudge, or anyone hired by someone holding a grudge. You still could be."
"What could make you trust me, I wonder?" Jack muses aloud, not looking at the files in his hand.
"Well, you could start by giving me your name," she replies.
"Captain Jack Harkness," he offers.
"That's your real name, then?" Costello asks, with a disbelieving twist to her mouth.
"Near enough. I've been using it for a while, now," Jack says frankly. "And you are?"
"Suzie Costello," she replies.
She's holding the weapon in a looser grip, now, down by her thigh, and Jack decides it's time to take a gamble. "So, are you going to put down the gun, now, Suzie Costello?" he asks with a smile.
"Not yet," she replies coolly, with a smile of her own. "Tell me something true."
Jack knows he's being tested, and realises that he's been testing Suzie Costello himself since she pulled a gun on him. "What if I told you that the killer wasn't human?" he asks, and waits for her reaction.
Suzie doesn't even blink. "Prove it," she says, calmly.
***
Suzie takes the Hub, the Rift and the Weevils in her stride remarkably well. Within a few weeks she's romping about the Mainframe as though she designed it herself, and she's as good a shot as Jack predicted. The Armoury is obviously as appealling to her as a toy shop to a child, and Jack finds himself showing off just a little bit, explaining the features of the various pieces of earth and alien weaponry. They spend hours together in the firing range, getting high and giddy together on the adrenalin and the smell of cordite. She has an infectious glee for the power of destruction that makes him oddly nostalgic for John and his conman days. It's been so long since he had someone who can be just as enthusiastic as himself over a weapon, not just as a tool, but as a thing of beauty in and of itself.
He sleeps with her two weeks after she joins Torchwood. She approaches him with a gleam in her eye that's immediately recognisable, and he can't think of any reason why not to go along with it. It's been a while since he had sex, and she doesn't seem like the type to expect commitment.
It's not until she's riding him, her hair unbound and tangled, that he realises that she's not seeing him at all. She's looking right through him and fucking him hard, as though sex is just another weapon, like pointing the gun at his head in the hotel room. He's simply the last in what's probably a long line of men with power over her that she's slept with. He's been a casual shag hundreds of times, been called by other men's names more times than he can count, but he doesn't remember ever feeling so invisible before.
She doesn't stay the night, and she never mentions it again, but she does seem calmer and more at home at the Hub in the weeks that follow. Jack tries not to think about how much their encounter unsettled him, how used he felt afterwards.
No more sleeping with the staff, Jack decides. Far too complicated now that I'm the boss.
Tosh
The slow weeks are the worst. Like being back in the trenches, there are the long hours of tedium, followed by an explosion of incredibly dangerous activity. The Rift is only quiet when it is building up to something big.
"Get me a coffee?" Jack wheedles from his office.
"Get it yourself," Suzie replies, without looking up from her monitor.
"I'm busy."
"Busy doing what?" Suzie asks, disbelievingly.
"Er... paperwork. And things. I pay you. You're closer," Jack argues.
"Let me play with that vaporiser thing again."
"Not on your life!"
"Then no."
Jack wanders out down the stairs, and spreads his arms wide. "Where's the respect?" he asks the heavens dramatically.
"I think it got left somewhere in the gutter with your dignity and your morals," Suzie quips, still tapping away at her keyboard.
"Hey, I resent that," Jack retorts, pointing a finger at her. "I have plenty of morals."
Suzie just snickers, and Jack feels the urge to pout.
"What are you so busy with, anyway?" he asks, knowing he's lost the argument and will be making the coffee this time.
"Hacking into UNIT," Suzie replies, sounding mildly bored.
"Again?"
"They haven't even upgraded their security since last time. Takes all the fun right out of it," Suzie complains.
Jack makes a sympathetic noise and walks over to stand behind her shoulder.
"Care for a round of 'guess my crime'?" Suzie asks. The screen is a mosaic of half a dozen mug shots.
"Loser makes the coffee?" Jack asks hopefully.
"Winner gets to drive the SUV this week," Suzie counters. Suzie loves the SUV, and gets bitchy when she's relegated to passenger too often.
"Deal. Hit me."
Suzie hovers her mouse over the hard face of a man who has 'military turncoat' written all over him.
Jack scoffs. "You could at least try to make it difficult."
Suzie rolls her eyes. "Fine, then. Her."
It's the only woman on the screen. She's young, petite, Asian, and she looks shy and frightened; nothing like the rough company surrounding her. Were it not for the shoulders of her red overalls, he'd think her picture was there by mistake. He has no idea, so he takes a wild stab in the dark, clothed in the form of a joke.
"Assassin. Lures powerful men into bed and suffocates them with her thighs."
"You've got nothing," Suzie mocks. "I've seen that film, too, you know."
"Oh, and you're so clever?" Jack retorts. "What do you think?"
"Cyber-terrorism," Suzie replies without hesitation. "She's the utter cliché of a techno-geek. She was lured over to the dark side."
"You know, that's stereotyping," Jack reprimands her without venom.
"You're just bitter because you know you've lost. And stereotypes don't come from nowhere."
With a click, Prisoner Sato's information comes up on the screen.
"We were both wrong," Jack attempts.
"I was still closer," Suzie says, smugly. "Don't try to wriggle out of it."
Jack would respond with a witty rejoinder, but he's suddenly caught up in reading the details. If UNIT's report is correct, Prisoner Sato built a working Sonic Modulator five centuries too early, using stolen, faulty MOD plans, basic electronics, a soldering iron and a laptop. And she's not even thirty years old. Prisoner Sato is a treasure, and Jack covets her, covets what he could use her for. He has shelves full of faulty or unidentified tech that he just doesn't have the time to fiddle with properly. The Hub would just be a slightly bigger cage than the UNIT prison, but Jack can envision the possibilities if she agrees.
Suzie obviously senses something has happened, because Jack catches her watching him with a quizzical expression on her face. "Forward that link through to my station, would you?" he asks, feigning a casual tone, even though he knows she won't be fooled.
He makes her a coffee, just the way she likes it, then spends the rest of the afternoon tracking down all available information on Toshiko Sato. The next morning, he makes a phone call.
Suzie gets to drive the SUV for the next two weeks, and shows no surprise whatsoever when Jack guides a thin and jumpy Toshiko down into the Hub not long afterwards.
"Welcome to the madhouse," she says in greeting.
Tosh gives her a shaky smile in return.
Owen
"It's a lobster," Suzie says dully. She is cold, wet, and looks distinctly unimpressed.
"This is not a lobster," Jack says firmly, gingerly dropping the wriggling crustacean into a containment box.
"Looks like one," she counters.
"Jack's right," Tosh speaks up quietly, studying her handheld scanner. "It's covered in Rift energy."
"Rift lobsters," Suzie says, unconvinced.
"They are not lobsters," Jack snaps. He's cold and wet, too, and he's certain that odeur des poissons is currently winning out over his superior pheromones. "They're alien, and though they might not look like much, they can host a very nasty parasite which is fatal to humans. Speaking of which, why aren't you wearing your masks?"
Tosh jumps guiltily and dons her mask. Suzie rolls her eyes and does the same.
"These things stink, you know," she complains, muffled by rubber and air filter. "Why aren't you wearing one?"
"I'm immune," Jack replies tersely. He's really not in the mood to try and explain 51st century vaccinations in a way that doesn't involve giving up a whole lot of secrets he'd much rather keep. "And, by all means, leave yours off if you want parasites from another galaxy chewing on your brain. Either way, get some of those gloves on and come help me. Tosh, go and check out the captain's log. See if you can find out how many of these things we're dealing with."
"I'm on it," Tosh says, and disappears upwards.
They work more or less in silence, until Tosh returns twenty minutes later.
"We've got a problem," she says worriedly. "This is only half the catch."
"Where's the rest?" Jack asks.
"London. The truck left about two hours before we arrived," she says.
"No way to stop it," Suzie concludes. "It'll be there by now."
"We worry about that later," Jack decides.
***
The Rift lobsters end up delivered to half a dozen fashionable restaurants and hotels. While Torchwood are able to take possession of most of them without incident (a story about contamination has the establishments tripping over themselves to get rid of the things), it's far too late for at least a dozen customers, and several staff who were responsible for preparation.
"Are they all going to get sick?" Tosh asks, looking at the list of names in horror.
Jack shrugs. "There's no way to tell."
Jack watches Tosh's face as the scale of it sinks in. "But... you said you were immune, and we've still got several specimens. Maybe we could develop a serum-"
There's wild hope in her eyes, and Jack hates to quash it. "There's a vaccine," he admits gently, "but there's no cure. If any of these people are infected, there's nothing we can do for them. This is a clean-up operation. When they die, we retrieve the bodies and destroy the parasites. That's it."
"Then what do we do?" Tosh sounds crushed.
Jack puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently. "We wait. We monitor those most likely to have been infected. We'll know within a few months. There'll be symptoms by then."
In the end, there are three victims. One of them is Katie Russell.
***
"New boy coming in. When he arrives, make him feel at home," Jack announces cheerily, striding through the Hub one morning.
"When's he going to be here?" Suzie asks, looking up from a rather frightening set of barbed daggers.
"End of the week. He's relocating; had to find a flat," Jack explains, hanging up his coat.
"Where from?"
"London. He's a medic. No more sewing up our own Weevil gashes," Jack says with glee. "Don't say I never get you anything."
Suzie follows Jack into his office and stands in front of his desk, hands on hips. "This is that bloke, isn't it? The fiancée of that girl with the parasite? I thought you Retconned him."
Jack takes a random piece of paperwork down from the top of the teetering stack and pretends to scan it. "I didn't."
"So, you just let him think he was crazy for a couple of months?" Suzie challenges.
If Jack wasn't already feeling a pang of conscience, maybe he'd find Suzie's sudden humanity fascinating. "I thought he'd be useful."
"That's fucking cold, Jack. Even for you."
He doesn't reply and doesn't look up, and eventually, she leaves him alone.
***
Owen comes to Cardiff, and to Torchwood Three, spoiling for a fight. He's screaming his fury at the world and fate in the only way he knows how; by brawling and fucking and drinking himself into oblivion. Jack has been there himself, more than once, and he knows that while Owen needs to act out, he also needs a distraction, something to give him a purpose. He feeds Owen the more interesting cases, spars with him hand to hand, and trains him to be a pretty damn good marksman. Once he starts coming in hung over only on alternate mornings, Jack pushes him up to field operative.
Jack notices now and then that Owen smells of Suzie's perfume, and it isn't hard to put two and two together. He knows it isn't about love - with Suzie, it never is - but he really does wonder, out of the two of them, who hates themselves more.
Ianto
Without meaning to, Jack has built himself a team.
Torchwood Three works like a well oiled, if slightly temperamental, machine. He has his group of clever, broken, dysfunctional children, and he doesn't need anybody else. He doesn't need a butler. He doesn't need a teaboy. He definitely doesn't need a pteranodon, or a very pretty boy who looks equally good in a suit or tight jeans and appears to be not averse to sexual experimentation (even if he is currently playing a little hard-to-get).
However, Jack has a rather flexible interpretation of the difference between need and want.
Ianto sets another cup of his amazing coffee down on the edge of Jack's desk and clears his throat politely. "If you don't mind me asking, sir - when did Torchwood Three last have a full time archivist? Or even a part time archivist?"
Jack thinks back. He thinks hard. "Ah... mid-nineties, maybe? Why?"
Ianto grimaces. It's quite adorable. There's dust on his tie, his cuffs, and the knees of his trousers, and there's a cobweb in is hair. "It... explains a lot, sir."
"Need a hand down there?" Jack asks, his voice deep, his smile suggestive. "I've done some filing in my time."
Ianto appears to consider it. "No one since the mid-nineties, sir?"
Jack blinks. "That's right."
"And who, might I ask, has filed the most reports since then?"
"That would probably be me."
Ianto's smile is tight and tolerant, and Jack briefly wonders if his next cup of coffee will be safe to drink. "Will you be needing anything else, sir?"
"Not right now, thanks," he answers. If Jack wasn't convinced that Ianto was deeply annoyed at him, he'd call him back and offer to dust off his arse for him, but he suspects that really would lead to poison in his coffee.
Jack hasn't broken his rule about not fucking the staff, yet, but he's certainly looking for loopholes.