Fic: Five children that weren't...and one that was (DW/TW, PG-13, starring everyone)
Title: Five children that weren't...and one that was
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Characters: Cast of thousands (but strangely, no Doctor)
Warnings: Uhm. Sad? Spoilers for everything to now, both shows.
Summary: Sometimes, for whatever reason, it just doesn't work out. And then there's at one time it does.
Written for Day four of the 14valentines thing, whose theme was Reproductive Rights and Motherhood. It should have been up last night, but I fell asleep on the floor in my kid's room. Another fic later today/tonight.
1. Not for lack of trying.
His hands slide up over her shoulders. The fingers are long, and they round over and dip just under her clavicles, as if he could squeeze and pick her up, shake her out like a rug. Her arms round in front of her, fingers cupping her opposite elbows. John rests his temple against the side of her head and they watch Tony chase the dog about in the yard.
"It's not the end of the world," he says softly, more softly than the other Doctor ever did. Rose rather appreciates the tone, despite the candor. "You know, we know a bit about that, right?" He pauses and his mouth presses against the back of Rose's head.
Out in the yard, her mum tackles dad and they roll about in the leaves, rakes forgotten.
"It feels like the end of something," she tells the window before turning away. Tony is at that androgynous age in which his belly laughs could be any child, any child in the world. In the universe.
"Do you want to keep trying?" he asks, his hands dropping from her shoulders.
Rose shrugs. It's been three years. Three years of trying and testing and sex, so much sex that she doesn't even look at him in the mornings when she rolls over and grasps him under the sheets. It's one more thing to do three times a day, much like brushing teeth or drinking tea or having a meal. Everything is fine, the doctors say, everything is right where it should be, and they should try in vitro, but deep down, Rose wonders.
"This was always a possibility," he says from the window, hands in pockets, those long fingers hidden deep in the cloth. He has long shed the suit in favor of denims and t shirts, and she can't say that she hadn't welcomed the change, welcomed the sheer difference of it.
"But you're part human," she murmurs, sitting down on the edge of the bed and pressing her lips to her folded hands.
He shoves his hands in his pockets and leans against the window frame. The afternoon light is murky and dark, and she can't see his face. "I guess not the right part, then," he answers. It sounds so very blank, so very uncharacteristically careful. Very unlike the Doctor, really.
Because he isn't.
2. They make ointments for that, you know.
Jack ate another handful of breath mints. He could still taste the syrup they'd made him drink at the clinic. He stared at the rings around Delius Four as he followed the flight path out of the system. God, he would have made a terrible mother.
"Nappies," he groaned.
"What was that?" John asked from the co-pilot's chair. He smirked and took a swig from something out of the flask he'd picked up onworld. "What did you do while I was getting the payout?"
Jack shook his head. "Sometimes it's better not saying."
3. Incompatible software.
Donna Noble's health records, compiled in a folder almost an inch thick, were extremely depressing, Ianto decided.
"It's the Time Lord part of her," Martha says quietly from behind him. A mug of tea appears at his side. Ianto accepts it with a nod, wishing not for the first time that he is back in Cardiff, just for a few minutes or so. He could always ring Jack, but he isn't about to call the head of Torchwood Three from his office just to hear the sound of his voice.
"I thought that was just her mind," he replies distractedly. The last batch of records had been thirty pages long. He punches holes in the top and unfolds the prongs in the file to add them on. His secretary normally does this, but this is his special project, his and Martha's. His co-conspirator sits at the chair across from his desk. His desk, as big as the Torchwood Three conference table, it seems some days. And the paperwork. Good lord, Jack had always complained about it, ignored it, left critical bits of it for Ianto to do, and now Ianto can see why. And that had just been Cardiff. This was London.
"Well, apparently, it wasn't just her mind. There were all kinds of genetic issues with the metacrisis, and since we don't have the other Doctor..." Martha crosses her legs and blows on her tea. She doesn't call him Rose's Doctor, so Ianto adds it in his head.
Ianto takes off his reading glasses and rubs a temple. "And the Doctor," he asks, "Our Doctor, I mean."
"Oh, he's right full of guesses," Martha snaps. "Actually, no. He's full of answers, and they're all correct. Everything we supposed about it is true."
Ianto flips the cover closed. "And the records-"
"All the paper files have been intercepted and replaced. The computer records are being changed as we speak." Martha sighed. "It's becoming more and more difficult to falsify her blood tests. I suppose it's a blessing that nothing definitive shows up on MRIs and PET scans."
"Quite," Ianto agrees. He sets his tea down and moves one pile of paper to the other side of his desk; it doesn't do anything-it just makes him feel better.
Ianto lays one hand on Donna's file, closes his eyes, and his memory flashes its contents through his synapses with undue speed: marriage one, miscarriage one, two, three, fetal death one, divorce one, marriage two, miscarriage four, fetal death two, this one vaginally delivered still in the eighth month. The top photo is a CCTV screenshot that Ianto took himself the week before: Donna's red and puffy face, poorly hidden behind dark glasses. Her huddled form as she leaves her solicitor's office after signing off on the second divorce papers. He keeps the photo on top to remind himself of what he is capable, and what he can never fix, no matter how much power Torchwood gives him.
He had pulled strings, moved things about, used a bit of banned hypnotic suggestion tech to get her a better settlement-just to get her back on her feet, really. Her last husband hasn't been the image of fidelity and gentleness, and while Ianto wishes that he could pick a man for Donna who would appreciate her for what she truly is, he has a feeling that that man is in a Police Box somewhere in the sky.
When he had told Jack what he'd done and expected to be admonished about banned alien technology and its usage, Jack had shrugged. She saved the world, and it cost her something we can never repay. Maybe a handsome alimony is just. Then Jack had kissed his hand and stared off down the Thames, sipping his take-away coffee. Not fair, but just.
Ianto watches Martha turn her own wedding band on her finger, and he wonders if she ever wanted children. She could still have them, really, but she'd never said anything.
"Don't you ever wish -even though I know we can't-don't you wish we could tell her?" Martha rolls her eyes up from the floor and locks gazes with him.
Ianto picks up the file, weighty with paper, with truth, the only written truth about Donna Noble in existence. Hidden truth in an open sea of carefully-crafted lies. Martha's question itches his fingers.
"Every day," he says, finally.
And then he places the file in his secure desk drawer and turns the lock on it, it, and any child Donna might never have.
4. Oh, if only.
In another universe, Tosh turns to the left just before the bullet hits her, and she falls like she's been hit. In another universe, Gray makes his impassioned speech about death as she feigns the throes of a mortal wound like she has seen Jack do for real.
In another universe, she waits until Gray has left to scramble up apply pressure to her wound and walk Owen through the protocols, remembering to tell him to disable the automatic door seals until he can re-enable them once he is safely out of the zone.
In another universe, Tosh stands outside the clinic three months after Gray is locked in the cryo cell. She is clutching her purse and has to sit down on the bench by the kerb because she's not entirely sure that she understands what she's just done, even though she was completely aware of what it was at the time. But there it is in big bold letters on her paper copy of the medical report: RESULTS: 50 mIU/ml hCG (POSITIVE).
In another universe, Tosh leaves the bench in front of the in vitro clinic and staggers into the Hub, sitting in Jack's office and telling him that yes, she did it, and yes it worked, and that yes, she is in fact going to have a child. In another universe, Tosh assures him that no, it's not Owen's (how impossible), or Ianto's or Jack's; even though he is fully aware that they have never slept together, this physical impossibility doesn't seem to phase him. She assures him that the donor is an anonymous Mensa candidate with brown hair and blue eyes (she has always been taken with blue eyes) and that to the best of her knowledge, he is definitely from this planet.
In another universe, Jack sighs and relegates her to desk duty for the duration, which is a relief, because she had been sure that she was going to lose her job.
In another universe, Ianto makes her chamomile tea and Gwen finds her the most hideous booties in Cardiff. Owen grumbles that the Hub is going to become a fucking nursery, but he's the first one there after the birth, bringing flowers that he must have scrounged from the ground outside the hospital, and telling her that her kid looks like it was genetically bred to perform differential equations.
In another universe, Tosh sits drowsily in the sun on her sofa, breastfeeding her son and playing with his tiny hands. In another universe, she names him Tommy and decorates his room with trains and footballs and the periodic table of elements, because it's never too early for that.
But it's not another universe, Tosh thinks as she holds her bleeding gut and waits for Owen to answer her over the comm. It's this one.
It is a comfort, however cold, to think that if parallel universes do exist, as Jack insists that they do, that somewhere out there, she will one day be sitting in the sun in her living room, holding her child in her arms.
5. It would kill him.
"You get the file?" he asks Suzie, his eyes not leaving Owen's terminal. The doctor listlessly taps a few keys.
Suzie settles in the chair across from him, folds one leg underneath her, and then the other over that. It is the compacted perch that she has taken on in the past few months. Jack doesn't think anything of it until much later.
"Yes," she says softly. "The computer files were wiped when Torchwood One autolocked down at Canary Wharf, but the paper files were abundant." She picks at a hangnail. "It took some time to get through them. I could have used Ianto."
Jack opens the file and lays it flat on the conference table, pulling out photos he'd just as soon never see again and a stack of neatly typed paper print outs. "Ianto is not allowed back at Torchwood One," he says, eyes meeting Suzie, and she doesn't say anything, because she knows that this is a rule that he is enforcing, and not the official policy that he pretends it is.
A close up of Katie's hand calls to him, because of the big rock on her finger. Owen is probably still making payments on that thing.
"Does Archie have any of this?" he says, his eyes reading the toxicology report: the symbiote's hormonal secretions had been off the chart in her bloodstream. Owen had been lucky that her skull hadn't split like an egg in the middle of the night. Jack closes his eyes and digs the heels of his hands into the sockets.
Suzie sighs. "No. I was in and out before Archie got there." She smiles. "That was some distraction, Captain."
Jack smiles wanly at her and is about to say something flirtatious when Ianto walks in the conference room with a tray of coffee. He is new and fresh and still nervous when the two of them are in the room alone and cease speaking upon his entrance. Jack doesn't blame him. Part of him suspects that their brave little recruit is hiding secrets, but as long as those secrets aren't about to kill them all in the next three days, Jack is content to let them lie where they are.
Ianto stiffens when he sees the photos, or maybe the singed manila folder with the Torchwood logo on it. Jack places an arm over the worst of the photos and flips the folder closed, eyes coming in contact with Ianto's.
"Thank you," he says with emphasis, and Suzie echoes him in a much nicer tone, and then Ianto pivots on his heel as surreptitiously as one can in wingtips and leaves them alone.
Suzie's hands fold about the coffee cup and her shoulders hunch inward. "You should see the Anatomic Diagnoses," she says to him softly, looking out the window as Myfanwy glides down to the floor. Jack knows what the cause of death was, but he opens the file again and reads down the list: Head and neck: cranial fracture. Rupture of the frontal, parietal and occipital lobes. Et cetera. He scans down the list of other catalogued injuries until he gets to Torso, and then his eyes rest on the thing that Suzie wanted him to see. He blinks once and wonders if he's just tired.
"You're not just tired," Suzie says, as if she has heard his thoughts. "Two months along."
Jack sighs. "Probably didn't even know." He gathers the photos and stacks them neatly. Raps them once on the table, producing a sharp clacking sound.
Suzie sips from her cup and grimaces. "She had to have known," she says. "She would have been late. They would have done blood tests before the surgery."
Jack picks up his own cup and drinks the whole thing, even though it is scalding hot. He wants it to burn. He wants it to burn a lot. He doesn't have to answer Suzie because he knows that she already knows that Kate probably didn't remember that she was late, not enough to take a test, and that the hormones the parasite had been secreting into her system would have done more than mask the low levels of hormone that early pregnancy gave off.
"So," he says finally, "this is the only copy in the universe."
Suzie sets her cup down and folds her hands on the table. "The only copy."
Jack replaces the photos into the folder, fishes in his pocket and kicks the metal bin over towards him. Suzie dispassionately watches him thumb the lighter open and bring it to life, holding it to the bottom corner. The file catches quickly, and he dumps it into the bin, watching the flames lick the edges.
"Don't ever say anything," he says to her, and they both glance out quickly to where Owen is cursing at the monitor and smacking his keyboard against the desktop. His voice rises up to them, angry and flustered, barely-contained rage simmering underneath something else.
Jack wonders if he already knows.
6. Who needs men?
Jenny sneaks into the cloning bay and presses a few buttons on the machine. This section of Messaline has been closed for years, and even though she has never been here, she knows where everything is. That pesky programming. It's been twenty years, but she can't seem to shake it, and so here she is, in the middle of the Messaline night, dusting off the glass doors of the cloning machine before smiling at its green glow when it cycles up.
"Brilliant," she says to herself, then sets about pulling her hair into a tail and slamming switches in the manner that she remembers from her training.
It's not that she doesn't want to have a kid the old fashioned way, it's more that she doesn't want to have to deal with all the things that come with having a small creature utterly dependent on her for life. It's hard to run from danger when you have a two year old strapped to your chest, and if her dad taught her anything in the short time they had, it's that, if you're doing it right, you spend a great deal of time running from danger.
Jenny finds herself running constantly.
She sowed her wild oats, and now Jenny thinks that it might be wizard to have a kid, an older kid to help her descale the epsilon coupling on the graviator because her back doesn't like it when she bends too much like that for hours on end. It's not that she's looking for cheap labor, but that's the handiest excuse she can think of at the moment, while she pulls levers and hopes for the best.
Wild lever-pulling is one of her favorite things. She wonders if she got that from her own dad. She wonders what her kid will get from her. Get from her, like she's participating in a strange gift exchange in which she doesn't remember shopping for anything. She's a bit giddy with excitement.
Her hearts are beating wildly and she's grinning from ear to ear when the doors open and the mist clears, and her daughter steps out of the machine, fully clothed.
She isn't sure exactly how the cloning generator works (though she suspects that her dad could tell her. It's one of the many things she'd like to ask him about.), but she does know that what comes out is sort of like a copy, and sort of like its own creation. Case in point: Jenny herself, obviously. And so while she'd made a daughter, she didn't expect her to look just like Jenny.
Still, where'd the ginger hair come from?
"Wooooah," the girl says, looking at Jenny. "Are we still at war? With the Hath?"
Jenny shakes her head and shuts down the cloning equipment. "Nah. That's long done."
Her daughter shakes her ponytail. "Why do I know how to do a field dressing?" she asks.
Jenny grins. "Remember that bit-it's handy." She shuts the cloning generator down carefully. Never know when it might come in useful again.
The girl squints at Jenny, and for a second she wonders what she's done. Taking care of another person is something that she'd decided was fair, but it occurs to her what she was like when she had first stepped out of that mist and had seen the world for the first time. Cor, she hadn't known anything.
Well, learning it was half the fun, anyway.
"Come on then," she says to her daughter, who is still looking about and making noises. She says something about it being dirty, and Jenny laughs. She's right. This isn't a very appealing place to be born. They'd have to fix that. Maybe a quick trip to Midnight. They could eat at the antigravity restaurant. The one with the bibs.
When they reach the ship, it occurs to her that she hasn't introduced herself. She stops in front of her daughter and holds out her hand, but no, that seems too formal, so instead she grabs her shoulders and brings her in for an awkward hug, the kind that makes an A out of their bodies.
"So," she says, I'm your mum." Jenny points to herself. " People call me Jenny."
"Can I call you Jenny?"
Jenny shrugs. "Sure. And this-" she points to the docking bay door that they're nearing. "Is the door to the ship. I call her Claire."
Her daughter squints. "Why Claire?" And before Jenny answers, she shrugs her shoulders. "Oh, I get it, why not?"
Jenny is sure that they'll get along. "Now, I don't have a name ready for you," Jenny says, opening the doors to the ship with a pre-programmed snap of her fingers. "So, uhm, I knew a lady called Donna once. She was ginger too. And funny."
Donna snaps her fingers, and Jenny knows that in no time she'll be able to control the ship with ease. "I like it. Runs off the tongue-Donnadonnadonnadonna-"
Jenny shakes her head and whistles behind her for Donna to catch up. "You're a little wired up, aren't you?"
Donna follows her into the ship and laughs. "For some reason I want to beat the ever loving hell out of something."
Jenny smirks. "Yeah, that's the generator programming. It'll pass in a few days." She settles in the pilot's seat. "In the meantime, please don't destroy anything critical, okay?"
Donna flips her ponytail and it smacks her in the face; her nose crinkles, just like Jenny's does when something is funny. "Okay, mum."
Oh that's right. She's the mum.
She glances about the cockpit. "Well, you can sit there," she says gesturing to the co-pilot's seat. You know how to fly this?"
Donna pulls her hair out of the ponytail and runs her fingers on her scalp as she plonks down in the seat. It looks better that way. The little differences are just as sharp as the similarities. "I was born knowing how to fly this." Then she wiggles her fingers and taps a few buttons, listening to the engine. "Is that....is that a Malvoran Cadmium three?" she asks? When Jenny nods, she snaps her fingers. Already her snapping has improved. "Brilliant."
Jenny smiles. "You want to take her out of orbit?" she asks, and is gratified when Donna surges forward in the seat and settles her fingers on the console gingerly.
"So, where are we going, mum?" Donna asks, pulling levers and depressing the flight stick. Jenny watches her with some measure of pride; after all, it is her DNA that created the girl sitting on the seat. It's not a maternal feeling, per se, but it is something more than the affection one feels for a stranger. Interesting. Was this what the Doctor had felt for her?
She reaches over and corrects the tilt of the flight stick minutely, and the ship steadies as it zooms out of orbit. "We're going to find your grandpa."
END
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Characters: Cast of thousands (but strangely, no Doctor)
Warnings: Uhm. Sad? Spoilers for everything to now, both shows.
Summary: Sometimes, for whatever reason, it just doesn't work out. And then there's at one time it does.
Written for Day four of the 14valentines thing, whose theme was Reproductive Rights and Motherhood. It should have been up last night, but I fell asleep on the floor in my kid's room. Another fic later today/tonight.
1. Not for lack of trying.
His hands slide up over her shoulders. The fingers are long, and they round over and dip just under her clavicles, as if he could squeeze and pick her up, shake her out like a rug. Her arms round in front of her, fingers cupping her opposite elbows. John rests his temple against the side of her head and they watch Tony chase the dog about in the yard.
"It's not the end of the world," he says softly, more softly than the other Doctor ever did. Rose rather appreciates the tone, despite the candor. "You know, we know a bit about that, right?" He pauses and his mouth presses against the back of Rose's head.
Out in the yard, her mum tackles dad and they roll about in the leaves, rakes forgotten.
"It feels like the end of something," she tells the window before turning away. Tony is at that androgynous age in which his belly laughs could be any child, any child in the world. In the universe.
"Do you want to keep trying?" he asks, his hands dropping from her shoulders.
Rose shrugs. It's been three years. Three years of trying and testing and sex, so much sex that she doesn't even look at him in the mornings when she rolls over and grasps him under the sheets. It's one more thing to do three times a day, much like brushing teeth or drinking tea or having a meal. Everything is fine, the doctors say, everything is right where it should be, and they should try in vitro, but deep down, Rose wonders.
"This was always a possibility," he says from the window, hands in pockets, those long fingers hidden deep in the cloth. He has long shed the suit in favor of denims and t shirts, and she can't say that she hadn't welcomed the change, welcomed the sheer difference of it.
"But you're part human," she murmurs, sitting down on the edge of the bed and pressing her lips to her folded hands.
He shoves his hands in his pockets and leans against the window frame. The afternoon light is murky and dark, and she can't see his face. "I guess not the right part, then," he answers. It sounds so very blank, so very uncharacteristically careful. Very unlike the Doctor, really.
Because he isn't.
2. They make ointments for that, you know.
Jack ate another handful of breath mints. He could still taste the syrup they'd made him drink at the clinic. He stared at the rings around Delius Four as he followed the flight path out of the system. God, he would have made a terrible mother.
"Nappies," he groaned.
"What was that?" John asked from the co-pilot's chair. He smirked and took a swig from something out of the flask he'd picked up onworld. "What did you do while I was getting the payout?"
Jack shook his head. "Sometimes it's better not saying."
3. Incompatible software.
Donna Noble's health records, compiled in a folder almost an inch thick, were extremely depressing, Ianto decided.
"It's the Time Lord part of her," Martha says quietly from behind him. A mug of tea appears at his side. Ianto accepts it with a nod, wishing not for the first time that he is back in Cardiff, just for a few minutes or so. He could always ring Jack, but he isn't about to call the head of Torchwood Three from his office just to hear the sound of his voice.
"I thought that was just her mind," he replies distractedly. The last batch of records had been thirty pages long. He punches holes in the top and unfolds the prongs in the file to add them on. His secretary normally does this, but this is his special project, his and Martha's. His co-conspirator sits at the chair across from his desk. His desk, as big as the Torchwood Three conference table, it seems some days. And the paperwork. Good lord, Jack had always complained about it, ignored it, left critical bits of it for Ianto to do, and now Ianto can see why. And that had just been Cardiff. This was London.
"Well, apparently, it wasn't just her mind. There were all kinds of genetic issues with the metacrisis, and since we don't have the other Doctor..." Martha crosses her legs and blows on her tea. She doesn't call him Rose's Doctor, so Ianto adds it in his head.
Ianto takes off his reading glasses and rubs a temple. "And the Doctor," he asks, "Our Doctor, I mean."
"Oh, he's right full of guesses," Martha snaps. "Actually, no. He's full of answers, and they're all correct. Everything we supposed about it is true."
Ianto flips the cover closed. "And the records-"
"All the paper files have been intercepted and replaced. The computer records are being changed as we speak." Martha sighed. "It's becoming more and more difficult to falsify her blood tests. I suppose it's a blessing that nothing definitive shows up on MRIs and PET scans."
"Quite," Ianto agrees. He sets his tea down and moves one pile of paper to the other side of his desk; it doesn't do anything-it just makes him feel better.
Ianto lays one hand on Donna's file, closes his eyes, and his memory flashes its contents through his synapses with undue speed: marriage one, miscarriage one, two, three, fetal death one, divorce one, marriage two, miscarriage four, fetal death two, this one vaginally delivered still in the eighth month. The top photo is a CCTV screenshot that Ianto took himself the week before: Donna's red and puffy face, poorly hidden behind dark glasses. Her huddled form as she leaves her solicitor's office after signing off on the second divorce papers. He keeps the photo on top to remind himself of what he is capable, and what he can never fix, no matter how much power Torchwood gives him.
He had pulled strings, moved things about, used a bit of banned hypnotic suggestion tech to get her a better settlement-just to get her back on her feet, really. Her last husband hasn't been the image of fidelity and gentleness, and while Ianto wishes that he could pick a man for Donna who would appreciate her for what she truly is, he has a feeling that that man is in a Police Box somewhere in the sky.
When he had told Jack what he'd done and expected to be admonished about banned alien technology and its usage, Jack had shrugged. She saved the world, and it cost her something we can never repay. Maybe a handsome alimony is just. Then Jack had kissed his hand and stared off down the Thames, sipping his take-away coffee. Not fair, but just.
Ianto watches Martha turn her own wedding band on her finger, and he wonders if she ever wanted children. She could still have them, really, but she'd never said anything.
"Don't you ever wish -even though I know we can't-don't you wish we could tell her?" Martha rolls her eyes up from the floor and locks gazes with him.
Ianto picks up the file, weighty with paper, with truth, the only written truth about Donna Noble in existence. Hidden truth in an open sea of carefully-crafted lies. Martha's question itches his fingers.
"Every day," he says, finally.
And then he places the file in his secure desk drawer and turns the lock on it, it, and any child Donna might never have.
4. Oh, if only.
In another universe, Tosh turns to the left just before the bullet hits her, and she falls like she's been hit. In another universe, Gray makes his impassioned speech about death as she feigns the throes of a mortal wound like she has seen Jack do for real.
In another universe, she waits until Gray has left to scramble up apply pressure to her wound and walk Owen through the protocols, remembering to tell him to disable the automatic door seals until he can re-enable them once he is safely out of the zone.
In another universe, Tosh stands outside the clinic three months after Gray is locked in the cryo cell. She is clutching her purse and has to sit down on the bench by the kerb because she's not entirely sure that she understands what she's just done, even though she was completely aware of what it was at the time. But there it is in big bold letters on her paper copy of the medical report: RESULTS: 50 mIU/ml hCG (POSITIVE).
In another universe, Tosh leaves the bench in front of the in vitro clinic and staggers into the Hub, sitting in Jack's office and telling him that yes, she did it, and yes it worked, and that yes, she is in fact going to have a child. In another universe, Tosh assures him that no, it's not Owen's (how impossible), or Ianto's or Jack's; even though he is fully aware that they have never slept together, this physical impossibility doesn't seem to phase him. She assures him that the donor is an anonymous Mensa candidate with brown hair and blue eyes (she has always been taken with blue eyes) and that to the best of her knowledge, he is definitely from this planet.
In another universe, Jack sighs and relegates her to desk duty for the duration, which is a relief, because she had been sure that she was going to lose her job.
In another universe, Ianto makes her chamomile tea and Gwen finds her the most hideous booties in Cardiff. Owen grumbles that the Hub is going to become a fucking nursery, but he's the first one there after the birth, bringing flowers that he must have scrounged from the ground outside the hospital, and telling her that her kid looks like it was genetically bred to perform differential equations.
In another universe, Tosh sits drowsily in the sun on her sofa, breastfeeding her son and playing with his tiny hands. In another universe, she names him Tommy and decorates his room with trains and footballs and the periodic table of elements, because it's never too early for that.
But it's not another universe, Tosh thinks as she holds her bleeding gut and waits for Owen to answer her over the comm. It's this one.
It is a comfort, however cold, to think that if parallel universes do exist, as Jack insists that they do, that somewhere out there, she will one day be sitting in the sun in her living room, holding her child in her arms.
5. It would kill him.
"You get the file?" he asks Suzie, his eyes not leaving Owen's terminal. The doctor listlessly taps a few keys.
Suzie settles in the chair across from him, folds one leg underneath her, and then the other over that. It is the compacted perch that she has taken on in the past few months. Jack doesn't think anything of it until much later.
"Yes," she says softly. "The computer files were wiped when Torchwood One autolocked down at Canary Wharf, but the paper files were abundant." She picks at a hangnail. "It took some time to get through them. I could have used Ianto."
Jack opens the file and lays it flat on the conference table, pulling out photos he'd just as soon never see again and a stack of neatly typed paper print outs. "Ianto is not allowed back at Torchwood One," he says, eyes meeting Suzie, and she doesn't say anything, because she knows that this is a rule that he is enforcing, and not the official policy that he pretends it is.
A close up of Katie's hand calls to him, because of the big rock on her finger. Owen is probably still making payments on that thing.
"Does Archie have any of this?" he says, his eyes reading the toxicology report: the symbiote's hormonal secretions had been off the chart in her bloodstream. Owen had been lucky that her skull hadn't split like an egg in the middle of the night. Jack closes his eyes and digs the heels of his hands into the sockets.
Suzie sighs. "No. I was in and out before Archie got there." She smiles. "That was some distraction, Captain."
Jack smiles wanly at her and is about to say something flirtatious when Ianto walks in the conference room with a tray of coffee. He is new and fresh and still nervous when the two of them are in the room alone and cease speaking upon his entrance. Jack doesn't blame him. Part of him suspects that their brave little recruit is hiding secrets, but as long as those secrets aren't about to kill them all in the next three days, Jack is content to let them lie where they are.
Ianto stiffens when he sees the photos, or maybe the singed manila folder with the Torchwood logo on it. Jack places an arm over the worst of the photos and flips the folder closed, eyes coming in contact with Ianto's.
"Thank you," he says with emphasis, and Suzie echoes him in a much nicer tone, and then Ianto pivots on his heel as surreptitiously as one can in wingtips and leaves them alone.
Suzie's hands fold about the coffee cup and her shoulders hunch inward. "You should see the Anatomic Diagnoses," she says to him softly, looking out the window as Myfanwy glides down to the floor. Jack knows what the cause of death was, but he opens the file again and reads down the list: Head and neck: cranial fracture. Rupture of the frontal, parietal and occipital lobes. Et cetera. He scans down the list of other catalogued injuries until he gets to Torso, and then his eyes rest on the thing that Suzie wanted him to see. He blinks once and wonders if he's just tired.
"You're not just tired," Suzie says, as if she has heard his thoughts. "Two months along."
Jack sighs. "Probably didn't even know." He gathers the photos and stacks them neatly. Raps them once on the table, producing a sharp clacking sound.
Suzie sips from her cup and grimaces. "She had to have known," she says. "She would have been late. They would have done blood tests before the surgery."
Jack picks up his own cup and drinks the whole thing, even though it is scalding hot. He wants it to burn. He wants it to burn a lot. He doesn't have to answer Suzie because he knows that she already knows that Kate probably didn't remember that she was late, not enough to take a test, and that the hormones the parasite had been secreting into her system would have done more than mask the low levels of hormone that early pregnancy gave off.
"So," he says finally, "this is the only copy in the universe."
Suzie sets her cup down and folds her hands on the table. "The only copy."
Jack replaces the photos into the folder, fishes in his pocket and kicks the metal bin over towards him. Suzie dispassionately watches him thumb the lighter open and bring it to life, holding it to the bottom corner. The file catches quickly, and he dumps it into the bin, watching the flames lick the edges.
"Don't ever say anything," he says to her, and they both glance out quickly to where Owen is cursing at the monitor and smacking his keyboard against the desktop. His voice rises up to them, angry and flustered, barely-contained rage simmering underneath something else.
Jack wonders if he already knows.
6. Who needs men?
Jenny sneaks into the cloning bay and presses a few buttons on the machine. This section of Messaline has been closed for years, and even though she has never been here, she knows where everything is. That pesky programming. It's been twenty years, but she can't seem to shake it, and so here she is, in the middle of the Messaline night, dusting off the glass doors of the cloning machine before smiling at its green glow when it cycles up.
"Brilliant," she says to herself, then sets about pulling her hair into a tail and slamming switches in the manner that she remembers from her training.
It's not that she doesn't want to have a kid the old fashioned way, it's more that she doesn't want to have to deal with all the things that come with having a small creature utterly dependent on her for life. It's hard to run from danger when you have a two year old strapped to your chest, and if her dad taught her anything in the short time they had, it's that, if you're doing it right, you spend a great deal of time running from danger.
Jenny finds herself running constantly.
She sowed her wild oats, and now Jenny thinks that it might be wizard to have a kid, an older kid to help her descale the epsilon coupling on the graviator because her back doesn't like it when she bends too much like that for hours on end. It's not that she's looking for cheap labor, but that's the handiest excuse she can think of at the moment, while she pulls levers and hopes for the best.
Wild lever-pulling is one of her favorite things. She wonders if she got that from her own dad. She wonders what her kid will get from her. Get from her, like she's participating in a strange gift exchange in which she doesn't remember shopping for anything. She's a bit giddy with excitement.
Her hearts are beating wildly and she's grinning from ear to ear when the doors open and the mist clears, and her daughter steps out of the machine, fully clothed.
She isn't sure exactly how the cloning generator works (though she suspects that her dad could tell her. It's one of the many things she'd like to ask him about.), but she does know that what comes out is sort of like a copy, and sort of like its own creation. Case in point: Jenny herself, obviously. And so while she'd made a daughter, she didn't expect her to look just like Jenny.
Still, where'd the ginger hair come from?
"Wooooah," the girl says, looking at Jenny. "Are we still at war? With the Hath?"
Jenny shakes her head and shuts down the cloning equipment. "Nah. That's long done."
Her daughter shakes her ponytail. "Why do I know how to do a field dressing?" she asks.
Jenny grins. "Remember that bit-it's handy." She shuts the cloning generator down carefully. Never know when it might come in useful again.
The girl squints at Jenny, and for a second she wonders what she's done. Taking care of another person is something that she'd decided was fair, but it occurs to her what she was like when she had first stepped out of that mist and had seen the world for the first time. Cor, she hadn't known anything.
Well, learning it was half the fun, anyway.
"Come on then," she says to her daughter, who is still looking about and making noises. She says something about it being dirty, and Jenny laughs. She's right. This isn't a very appealing place to be born. They'd have to fix that. Maybe a quick trip to Midnight. They could eat at the antigravity restaurant. The one with the bibs.
When they reach the ship, it occurs to her that she hasn't introduced herself. She stops in front of her daughter and holds out her hand, but no, that seems too formal, so instead she grabs her shoulders and brings her in for an awkward hug, the kind that makes an A out of their bodies.
"So," she says, I'm your mum." Jenny points to herself. " People call me Jenny."
"Can I call you Jenny?"
Jenny shrugs. "Sure. And this-" she points to the docking bay door that they're nearing. "Is the door to the ship. I call her Claire."
Her daughter squints. "Why Claire?" And before Jenny answers, she shrugs her shoulders. "Oh, I get it, why not?"
Jenny is sure that they'll get along. "Now, I don't have a name ready for you," Jenny says, opening the doors to the ship with a pre-programmed snap of her fingers. "So, uhm, I knew a lady called Donna once. She was ginger too. And funny."
Donna snaps her fingers, and Jenny knows that in no time she'll be able to control the ship with ease. "I like it. Runs off the tongue-Donnadonnadonnadonna-"
Jenny shakes her head and whistles behind her for Donna to catch up. "You're a little wired up, aren't you?"
Donna follows her into the ship and laughs. "For some reason I want to beat the ever loving hell out of something."
Jenny smirks. "Yeah, that's the generator programming. It'll pass in a few days." She settles in the pilot's seat. "In the meantime, please don't destroy anything critical, okay?"
Donna flips her ponytail and it smacks her in the face; her nose crinkles, just like Jenny's does when something is funny. "Okay, mum."
Oh that's right. She's the mum.
She glances about the cockpit. "Well, you can sit there," she says gesturing to the co-pilot's seat. You know how to fly this?"
Donna pulls her hair out of the ponytail and runs her fingers on her scalp as she plonks down in the seat. It looks better that way. The little differences are just as sharp as the similarities. "I was born knowing how to fly this." Then she wiggles her fingers and taps a few buttons, listening to the engine. "Is that....is that a Malvoran Cadmium three?" she asks? When Jenny nods, she snaps her fingers. Already her snapping has improved. "Brilliant."
Jenny smiles. "You want to take her out of orbit?" she asks, and is gratified when Donna surges forward in the seat and settles her fingers on the console gingerly.
"So, where are we going, mum?" Donna asks, pulling levers and depressing the flight stick. Jenny watches her with some measure of pride; after all, it is her DNA that created the girl sitting on the seat. It's not a maternal feeling, per se, but it is something more than the affection one feels for a stranger. Interesting. Was this what the Doctor had felt for her?
She reaches over and corrects the tilt of the flight stick minutely, and the ship steadies as it zooms out of orbit. "We're going to find your grandpa."
END