Fic: Promise Kept - Sequel to ‘Sunday Spectacular’
Title: Promise Kept - Sequel to ‘ Sunday Spectacular’
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Penny Lewis, Jack, Ianto, Team Torchwood, OCs.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Thanks to a dose of Retcon, after the events in the church, young Penny Lewis forgot all about Torchwood. Until now.
Word Count: 2254
Written For: Amnesty at beattheblackdog, using Challenge 69: Paperwork.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
After the incident with the giant squid in the church, Penny Lewis forgot all about Torchwood and the events of that extraordinary night. For a while at least. She’d taken the pill the doctor man had given her, grown sleepy, and when she’d woken up, she hadn’t remembered a thing. She hadn’t even remembered why she couldn’t remember, but she’d been left with a nagging feeling that something important had happened to her, if she could only figure out what it was.
Her parents had told her everyone at the church had been affected by some sort of gas leak, and she’d pretended to accept their explanation, but deep down she’d been sure that wasn’t right. Something else had happened, something amazing, and then her memories of the amazing thing had been taken away. It made her feel sad and sort of frustrated, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t remember whatever it was she’d been made to forget.
She was young though, and new, exciting things kept happening to her every day, so before long, without even being aware that she’d done it, she’d pushed the whole church mystery to the back of her mind in favour of getting on with the business of growing up. If anyone noticed she was applying herself harder in school than she had before, and eating all her vegetables without making a fuss, they never seemed to connect it with the night the whole congregation of St Paul’s Church had lost a couple of hours; nobody who’d been there remembered it had happened in the first place.
Time passed. Penny moved up to senior school, worked harder than ever, and passed her exams with very good grades indeed, especially in the sciences. At eighteen she was accepted to Cardiff University, and once more threw herself into her studies, but whenever anyone asked her what she wanted to do with her life once she graduated, she was never able to give them an answer, just said she’d figure that out when the time came. She felt as though she was waiting for something to happen, and as the days and weeks and months passed, a peculiar sense of anticipation swelled inside her. Something momentous was coming, she just knew it!
The note arrived on her twentieth birthday, along with a bunch of birthday cards and gifts from friends and relatives; indeed, the envelope the note was in contained a birthday card too, but nobody had signed it. All it said was ‘To Penny. Happy Twentieth Birthday.’ Shrugging, she stood it on a shelf with her other cards.
The note was even less informative, just four words in neat but unfamiliar handwriting. ‘Are you still interested?’ Interested in what? It baffled her, so she set it aside; the mystery could wait until later. Just because it was her birthday that didn’t mean she had nothing to do; there were still lectures to attend, papers to write, and a birthday get-together with her friends to look forward to that evening.
The day flew by in a blur, and so did the evening; she had a great time out on the town with her closest friends, but she perhaps drank a bit more than she should have and woke up the next morning with a bit of a hangover. Stumbling bleary-eyed into the kitchen of her small flat to make herself a badly needed cup of coffee, she caught the envelope she’d left on the kitchen counter with the sleeve of her dressing gown, knocking it to the floor.
With a groan, she stooped to pick it up so she wouldn’t step on it and slip, and that’s when she saw it; the mysterious note had come out of the envelope and flipped over. On the back, which she hadn’t looked at before, was a logo, a stylised letter ‘T’ made up of hexagons, and beneath it one word: Torchwood.
Penny sat down hard on the kitchen floor as memories came flooding back of an evening just over ten years ago, of chaos in the church, two men and a woman, a grouchy doctor, and a giant blue alien squid named… What was it? Gladys? Glynis? No… Gloria; that was it.
As if he was standing right there talking to her, the words of the man who’d introduced himself as Jack filled her head. “You won’t remember us, but I’ll remember you, and when you’re old enough to join Torchwood, I’ll find you.” She hadn’t truly believed him at the time; at not quite ten years old she’d already known that adults often made promises they had no intention of keeping, but Jack had kept his. He must have kept track of her over the years, and now…
Penny’s hangover seemed to evaporate as if it had never existed; Torchwood wanted her, if she was still interested, and of course she was. Who wouldn’t be? Despite having forgotten all about Torchwood until now, she somehow knew she’d been waiting for this moment ever since that night, preparing herself so that when it arrived, she’d be ready.
She still had a few months before she’d graduate from university, but Jack surely must know that if he’d been keeping an eye on her all this time. She grinned; he must have decided to get his offer of employment in early, before she could make other plans or be snapped up by anyone else. Well, the answer to his question was a resounding yes; if Torchwood was hiring then she wanted in. What could be more thrilling than the chance to meet aliens?
There was just one problem; how could she get in touch with Torchwood to tell them? There was no address on the card, not so much as a name or a phone number. She thought hard. Suppose it was a test to prove she was a suitable candidate? Perhaps all she had to do was find her own way to Torchwood.
Pulling herself to her feet, Penny made herself a mug of strong black coffee, then took it back to her bedroom, turned on her laptop, and typed ‘Torchwood’ into her browser. There wasn’t a lot of information available online, and most of what she found was likely wrong, perhaps deliberate misdirection; Torchwood was supposed to be a secret organisation after all. Nevertheless, Cardiff Bay looked to be her best starting point.
Finishing her coffee, Penny showered, did her hair, applied just a touch of makeup, and dressed smartly for her ‘interview’ before heading for Roald Dahl Plas, glad that today was a Saturday, meaning she didn’t have any lectures to attend.
She was leaning on the railing, looking out across the sun-dappled bay and wondering where to go from there, when someone came to lean beside her. “Told you you’d grow if you ate your vegetables,” a smug American accented voice commented.
Turning, Penny came face to face with the man she’d met so briefly a decade ago, his white teeth flashing in a wide smile, vivid blue eyes sparkling. She recognised him immediately; he was even more handsome than she remembered, and yet looking at him, he didn’t seem to have aged a day.
“Jack.”
“Captain Jack Harkness, at your service, Penny Lewis.” His smile widened further. “So, does this mean you’re still interested in joining Torchwood?”
“Yes!” She grinned back. “Of course I am, I’ve been waiting for this day for ten years! Only thing is, I have to graduate first.”
“Yes you do,” Jack agreed. “Not that your degree, or lack of one, would affect Torchwood’s interest in hiring you, but you’ve worked too hard to abandon your studies now, and I would never ask that of you.” He studied her intently for a long moment then nodded as if approving of something he’d seen in her face. “Alright, come with me and I’ll introduce you to the rest of the team; there’ve been some changes in personnel over the last ten years, we’ve added a few new people and lost one. Gwen, who you met at the church, has retired; she’s got three children now, and wanted to spend more time with them. She does a spot of freelance work for us now and then; she and her husband run a haulage firm. Very handy when we need to transport anything big.”
“Like Gloria.”
“Exactly. I hope you’re not claustrophobic because she’d very much like to see you again, but for obvious reasons it’s best she doesn’t return to land; giant alien squid tend to make people panic. You can go visit her in our mini sub though, assuming you can handle small spaces.”
“You have a submarine?”
“Only a little one, but sometimes we need it to retrieve things that have fallen in the bay. Gloria locates them for us, then we go and collect them.”
As they were talking, Captain Harkness had been leading Penny across the Plas towards the water tower, pulling her to stand beside him on one particular paving stone. All of a sudden it began to sink into the ground, and she caught her breath, clutching at his sleeve to keep her balance. He laughed.
“We call it the invisible lift; there’s a perception filter welded to this slab so anyone standing on it can’t be seen. Not our only way of entering and exiting our base, but it comes in handy.”
The slab dropped below ground level and Penny caught her breath again as the lift emerged into a massive underground cavern. She could see people bustling about, some working at computers, and some doing other unfathomable things. Several looked to be in their late thirties or early forties, while the rest looked closer to her own age, early to mid-twenties perhaps.
As the slab settled into its place on the floor of the cavern and Jack led her off it, a man in a suit approached, smiling and holding out his hand. “Good to meet you again, Miss Lewis. Welcome to the Torchwood Hub.”
“Call me Penny. I remember you from the church: Ianto, right? But you look exactly the same as you did that night, both of you do. How is that even possible?”
“For now, let’s just say Jack and I aren’t exactly like other people,” Ianto said, his enigmatic smile piquing her curiosity further. “We have a lot to show you, Penny. Please, come this way; there’s some paperwork you’ll need to fill in before we go any further.”
Feeling a little out of her depth, Penny accompanied Jack and Ianto to an office dominated by a huge antique desk where she sat across from Jack and with Ianto’s assistance, filled in and signed several forms before being handed a copy of the Official Secrets Act to read and sign. She half wondered whether she was dreaming; the whole thing seemed so surreal. Here she was, in Torchwood’s secret base beneath the Plas, and she was never going to be able to tell anyone about it. That was okay though; it was a small price to pay for the adventure she’d be embarking on once she graduated.
With the paperwork squared away, she was introduced to the rest of the team. Computer and technology expert Toshiko Sato. Doctors Owen Harper, the one who’d given her the memory-erasing pill all those years ago, and Martha and Tom Milligan. Weapons and tech expert Mickey Smith. Field agents Andy Davidson, William Maddox, Jon Howell, Gurjit Singh, Petra Snow, and Daniel McKenzie. Junior archivist Jo Thomas, veterinarian Erica Misumi, and general support officer Gary Wells.
Penny was pretty sure she’d get everyone’s names wrong, except for Jack and Ianto, but there was no time to even try committing them all to memory because next there was a whirlwind tour of the Hub’s main areas. Starting with the medical bay, she was shown around cold storage, the night-duty room, the research areas, the decontamination suite, the armoury, the firing range, and the archives, although she only saw a small part of the last on this occasion. Ianto said Torchwood’s archives comprised dozens of rooms spread out over several levels, and there simply wasn’t time to see it all.
Finally, she was shown the pens where stranded alien animals lived, and the cells where dangerous creatures and alien criminals were kept until they could be either handed over to interplanetary law enforcement or returned to where they belonged.
By the time the tour was over, Penny felt almost giddy and welcomed the chance to sit down with the rest of the team in the comfortable break area for lunch and coffee, which almost blew her mind all over again. How she could go back to the substandard coffee she was accustomed to drinking she couldn’t begin to imagine, but she was comforted by the knowledge that she wouldn’t have to endure it for very much longer. Once she was working for Torchwood, she’d get to enjoy Ianto’s heavenly brew every day.
In a few months’ time, this place would become her home from home; these people would be her colleagues, and hopefully in time, her friends. In the space of little more than twenty-four hours her whole world had changed and would never go back to the way it had been before; not that she wanted it to. This was what she’d been waiting for since she was nine and three-quarters; Torchwood was where she belonged. Now, if she could just get through finals, her life could really begin.
The End
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Penny Lewis, Jack, Ianto, Team Torchwood, OCs.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Thanks to a dose of Retcon, after the events in the church, young Penny Lewis forgot all about Torchwood. Until now.
Word Count: 2254
Written For: Amnesty at beattheblackdog, using Challenge 69: Paperwork.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
After the incident with the giant squid in the church, Penny Lewis forgot all about Torchwood and the events of that extraordinary night. For a while at least. She’d taken the pill the doctor man had given her, grown sleepy, and when she’d woken up, she hadn’t remembered a thing. She hadn’t even remembered why she couldn’t remember, but she’d been left with a nagging feeling that something important had happened to her, if she could only figure out what it was.
Her parents had told her everyone at the church had been affected by some sort of gas leak, and she’d pretended to accept their explanation, but deep down she’d been sure that wasn’t right. Something else had happened, something amazing, and then her memories of the amazing thing had been taken away. It made her feel sad and sort of frustrated, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t remember whatever it was she’d been made to forget.
She was young though, and new, exciting things kept happening to her every day, so before long, without even being aware that she’d done it, she’d pushed the whole church mystery to the back of her mind in favour of getting on with the business of growing up. If anyone noticed she was applying herself harder in school than she had before, and eating all her vegetables without making a fuss, they never seemed to connect it with the night the whole congregation of St Paul’s Church had lost a couple of hours; nobody who’d been there remembered it had happened in the first place.
Time passed. Penny moved up to senior school, worked harder than ever, and passed her exams with very good grades indeed, especially in the sciences. At eighteen she was accepted to Cardiff University, and once more threw herself into her studies, but whenever anyone asked her what she wanted to do with her life once she graduated, she was never able to give them an answer, just said she’d figure that out when the time came. She felt as though she was waiting for something to happen, and as the days and weeks and months passed, a peculiar sense of anticipation swelled inside her. Something momentous was coming, she just knew it!
The note arrived on her twentieth birthday, along with a bunch of birthday cards and gifts from friends and relatives; indeed, the envelope the note was in contained a birthday card too, but nobody had signed it. All it said was ‘To Penny. Happy Twentieth Birthday.’ Shrugging, she stood it on a shelf with her other cards.
The note was even less informative, just four words in neat but unfamiliar handwriting. ‘Are you still interested?’ Interested in what? It baffled her, so she set it aside; the mystery could wait until later. Just because it was her birthday that didn’t mean she had nothing to do; there were still lectures to attend, papers to write, and a birthday get-together with her friends to look forward to that evening.
The day flew by in a blur, and so did the evening; she had a great time out on the town with her closest friends, but she perhaps drank a bit more than she should have and woke up the next morning with a bit of a hangover. Stumbling bleary-eyed into the kitchen of her small flat to make herself a badly needed cup of coffee, she caught the envelope she’d left on the kitchen counter with the sleeve of her dressing gown, knocking it to the floor.
With a groan, she stooped to pick it up so she wouldn’t step on it and slip, and that’s when she saw it; the mysterious note had come out of the envelope and flipped over. On the back, which she hadn’t looked at before, was a logo, a stylised letter ‘T’ made up of hexagons, and beneath it one word: Torchwood.
Penny sat down hard on the kitchen floor as memories came flooding back of an evening just over ten years ago, of chaos in the church, two men and a woman, a grouchy doctor, and a giant blue alien squid named… What was it? Gladys? Glynis? No… Gloria; that was it.
As if he was standing right there talking to her, the words of the man who’d introduced himself as Jack filled her head. “You won’t remember us, but I’ll remember you, and when you’re old enough to join Torchwood, I’ll find you.” She hadn’t truly believed him at the time; at not quite ten years old she’d already known that adults often made promises they had no intention of keeping, but Jack had kept his. He must have kept track of her over the years, and now…
Penny’s hangover seemed to evaporate as if it had never existed; Torchwood wanted her, if she was still interested, and of course she was. Who wouldn’t be? Despite having forgotten all about Torchwood until now, she somehow knew she’d been waiting for this moment ever since that night, preparing herself so that when it arrived, she’d be ready.
She still had a few months before she’d graduate from university, but Jack surely must know that if he’d been keeping an eye on her all this time. She grinned; he must have decided to get his offer of employment in early, before she could make other plans or be snapped up by anyone else. Well, the answer to his question was a resounding yes; if Torchwood was hiring then she wanted in. What could be more thrilling than the chance to meet aliens?
There was just one problem; how could she get in touch with Torchwood to tell them? There was no address on the card, not so much as a name or a phone number. She thought hard. Suppose it was a test to prove she was a suitable candidate? Perhaps all she had to do was find her own way to Torchwood.
Pulling herself to her feet, Penny made herself a mug of strong black coffee, then took it back to her bedroom, turned on her laptop, and typed ‘Torchwood’ into her browser. There wasn’t a lot of information available online, and most of what she found was likely wrong, perhaps deliberate misdirection; Torchwood was supposed to be a secret organisation after all. Nevertheless, Cardiff Bay looked to be her best starting point.
Finishing her coffee, Penny showered, did her hair, applied just a touch of makeup, and dressed smartly for her ‘interview’ before heading for Roald Dahl Plas, glad that today was a Saturday, meaning she didn’t have any lectures to attend.
She was leaning on the railing, looking out across the sun-dappled bay and wondering where to go from there, when someone came to lean beside her. “Told you you’d grow if you ate your vegetables,” a smug American accented voice commented.
Turning, Penny came face to face with the man she’d met so briefly a decade ago, his white teeth flashing in a wide smile, vivid blue eyes sparkling. She recognised him immediately; he was even more handsome than she remembered, and yet looking at him, he didn’t seem to have aged a day.
“Jack.”
“Captain Jack Harkness, at your service, Penny Lewis.” His smile widened further. “So, does this mean you’re still interested in joining Torchwood?”
“Yes!” She grinned back. “Of course I am, I’ve been waiting for this day for ten years! Only thing is, I have to graduate first.”
“Yes you do,” Jack agreed. “Not that your degree, or lack of one, would affect Torchwood’s interest in hiring you, but you’ve worked too hard to abandon your studies now, and I would never ask that of you.” He studied her intently for a long moment then nodded as if approving of something he’d seen in her face. “Alright, come with me and I’ll introduce you to the rest of the team; there’ve been some changes in personnel over the last ten years, we’ve added a few new people and lost one. Gwen, who you met at the church, has retired; she’s got three children now, and wanted to spend more time with them. She does a spot of freelance work for us now and then; she and her husband run a haulage firm. Very handy when we need to transport anything big.”
“Like Gloria.”
“Exactly. I hope you’re not claustrophobic because she’d very much like to see you again, but for obvious reasons it’s best she doesn’t return to land; giant alien squid tend to make people panic. You can go visit her in our mini sub though, assuming you can handle small spaces.”
“You have a submarine?”
“Only a little one, but sometimes we need it to retrieve things that have fallen in the bay. Gloria locates them for us, then we go and collect them.”
As they were talking, Captain Harkness had been leading Penny across the Plas towards the water tower, pulling her to stand beside him on one particular paving stone. All of a sudden it began to sink into the ground, and she caught her breath, clutching at his sleeve to keep her balance. He laughed.
“We call it the invisible lift; there’s a perception filter welded to this slab so anyone standing on it can’t be seen. Not our only way of entering and exiting our base, but it comes in handy.”
The slab dropped below ground level and Penny caught her breath again as the lift emerged into a massive underground cavern. She could see people bustling about, some working at computers, and some doing other unfathomable things. Several looked to be in their late thirties or early forties, while the rest looked closer to her own age, early to mid-twenties perhaps.
As the slab settled into its place on the floor of the cavern and Jack led her off it, a man in a suit approached, smiling and holding out his hand. “Good to meet you again, Miss Lewis. Welcome to the Torchwood Hub.”
“Call me Penny. I remember you from the church: Ianto, right? But you look exactly the same as you did that night, both of you do. How is that even possible?”
“For now, let’s just say Jack and I aren’t exactly like other people,” Ianto said, his enigmatic smile piquing her curiosity further. “We have a lot to show you, Penny. Please, come this way; there’s some paperwork you’ll need to fill in before we go any further.”
Feeling a little out of her depth, Penny accompanied Jack and Ianto to an office dominated by a huge antique desk where she sat across from Jack and with Ianto’s assistance, filled in and signed several forms before being handed a copy of the Official Secrets Act to read and sign. She half wondered whether she was dreaming; the whole thing seemed so surreal. Here she was, in Torchwood’s secret base beneath the Plas, and she was never going to be able to tell anyone about it. That was okay though; it was a small price to pay for the adventure she’d be embarking on once she graduated.
With the paperwork squared away, she was introduced to the rest of the team. Computer and technology expert Toshiko Sato. Doctors Owen Harper, the one who’d given her the memory-erasing pill all those years ago, and Martha and Tom Milligan. Weapons and tech expert Mickey Smith. Field agents Andy Davidson, William Maddox, Jon Howell, Gurjit Singh, Petra Snow, and Daniel McKenzie. Junior archivist Jo Thomas, veterinarian Erica Misumi, and general support officer Gary Wells.
Penny was pretty sure she’d get everyone’s names wrong, except for Jack and Ianto, but there was no time to even try committing them all to memory because next there was a whirlwind tour of the Hub’s main areas. Starting with the medical bay, she was shown around cold storage, the night-duty room, the research areas, the decontamination suite, the armoury, the firing range, and the archives, although she only saw a small part of the last on this occasion. Ianto said Torchwood’s archives comprised dozens of rooms spread out over several levels, and there simply wasn’t time to see it all.
Finally, she was shown the pens where stranded alien animals lived, and the cells where dangerous creatures and alien criminals were kept until they could be either handed over to interplanetary law enforcement or returned to where they belonged.
By the time the tour was over, Penny felt almost giddy and welcomed the chance to sit down with the rest of the team in the comfortable break area for lunch and coffee, which almost blew her mind all over again. How she could go back to the substandard coffee she was accustomed to drinking she couldn’t begin to imagine, but she was comforted by the knowledge that she wouldn’t have to endure it for very much longer. Once she was working for Torchwood, she’d get to enjoy Ianto’s heavenly brew every day.
In a few months’ time, this place would become her home from home; these people would be her colleagues, and hopefully in time, her friends. In the space of little more than twenty-four hours her whole world had changed and would never go back to the way it had been before; not that she wanted it to. This was what she’d been waiting for since she was nine and three-quarters; Torchwood was where she belonged. Now, if she could just get through finals, her life could really begin.
The End