Risk Assessment (with a dash of COE thrown in?)
Awhile back I read the TW novel "Risk Assessment" and I was a bit more than... stunned by the ending. It desperately begs for fic continuation. Warning: major spoilers for the novel here so I'm going to put it under a cut to be safe, in case anyone has a thing about avoiding novel spoilers...
I mean, huh?? The novel ends with the Hub being in total shut down, the risk assessor having supposedly closed them down for good and having total authority (and means) to do so. And Jack, Ianto, and Gwen retconned. Now I'm assuming Agnes only wiped their memories of her and George's questionable actions during the events of the novel... (The team was inside the Hub at the time and doubtful it could induce amnesia as extensive as it would have to be to wipe Jack's mind anyway).
I guess we're to assume that Jack found some way to bring the Hub back up, but the three of them would've woken up with no idea what the heck had happened. What happened next? If Agnes was empowered by the Queen herself with the authority to shut down Torchwood and Jack had no memory of the evidence against Agnes, how could he fight it? How did things play out? What the heck was Cardiff going to do without a TW to watch the Rift? U.N.I.T taking over? And what would Jack do now? The others? I've always gotten the feeling they wanted Jack kept close (via Torchwood's control/hold on him). He knows too much, he might just become public enemy #2 after The Doctor if they no longer could keep an eye on him via TW. Would he (with Ianto?) leave the planet? So many questions begging to be answered...
And my little grasping-at-straws mind wonders if this could even tie into COE somehow, as some sort of fix-it, AU. I'd love this novel to actually be canon, because it could throw a major monkey wrench into S3. What if it takes place right before COE? If Torchwood had been shut down by Agnes already, then the government wouldn't have had to bother blowing it up (and many things would have happened differently). Maybe, after everything that happened (losing Tosh & Owen, etc.) Jack decided to wash his hands of TW for awhile and try to have a more normal life (with Ianto of course). Gwen and Rhys could do the same, with the baby on the way. Or they form a new secret organization that's totally Jack's and operating in an anti-government, illegal underground manner. And then the 456 come... (or flip that around, the underground org. is formed by Jack after the COE stuff). Or alternately, maybe the whole COE debacle was just a retcon-induced hallucination/dream. I like that one, too. ;)
It's vague, so many possible directions to go with it. The only thing I can say for sure about this plot bunny is that I'm a big Janto shipper and I don't read anything COE-related where Ianto dies for good.