Fic: Unique
Title: Unique
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Nosy, Jack, Owen, OC.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: There’s a newcomer in the Hub, and it looks a bit different from what Ianto and the others have come to expect.
Word Count: 1833
Written For: Challenge 202: Curly at beattheblackdog.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
“It’s… curly,” Ianto said, sounding a bit disconcerted, which was fair considering the sheer unexpectedness of the whole situation.
“Hum,” Nosy agreed, slurping some water from its dish. It gave the impression of being supremely unconcerned, but Ianto wasn’t buying it for a second.
“Um, why?”
“Humm?”
“I mean, not that it isn’t nice, because it is. It’s very cute. It’s just… a bit unusual, isn’t it? Fluffs are generally… well, fluffy. I didn’t know curls were an option.”
“hummmm.”
Ianto thought he detected something faintly sheepish in Nosy’s barely audible reply as the Fluff made a vague attempt at straightening some of its latest offspring’s fur, to no avail; it immediately sprang back into the same tight curls.
“Ianto?” Jack’s voice bellowed from somewhere out in the Hub. “Where are you? Have you seen Nosy? It’s disappeared.”
“We’re in the kitchen,” Ianto replied distractedly. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the newcomer.
“Hey there. Everything okay? Whoa!” Jack stopped in his tracks as he caught sight of the new Flufflet. “Well that’s… different.” He crouched down to study the small creature with its soft, curly, peach and brown fur.
The Flufflet looked up at him with big, curious brown eyes and hummed a squeaky little hum.
Jack grinned up at Ianto. “It’s even curlier than you are!”
“I’m only a little bit curly.” Ianto glared down at his husband, then looked at the Flufflet and its parent again. Nosy was still doing a pretty good job of appearing untroubled, and yet Ianto couldn’t quite shake the feeling that it too was a bit puzzled by the curliness of its youngster’s fur, and not quite sure how it had happened.
The cog door alarms abruptly blared out, announcing the arrival of one of the team, and the Flufflet squeaked in alarm, trying to hide beneath its parent.
Nosy was having none of that, dragging the youngling back out again by its tail and humming calmly, letting its little one know that the alarms were perfectly normal, nothing to be afraid of; it was one of the first lessons every Flufflet had to learn, along with what not to touch, what was good to eat, and who all these very tall and funny shaped creatures were.
Owen slouched wearily into the kitchen, yawning. “Please tell me there’s coffee,” he groaned. “The idiots next door were throwing a New Year’s Eve party last night; between the yelling, loud music, and fireworks going off until the early hours, we barely got any sleep. I told Tosh to ‘ave a lie-in.” He rubbed his eyes then blinked at the sight before him. “And now I’m hallucinating from lack of sleep.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re not seeing things. It’s real.” Strolling over to the machine Ianto poured Owen a coffee and, because he was feeling generous and wanted to start the year off on the right foot, brought it over to the medic who accepted it without a word and took a swig, nearly burning his mouth.
“Fuck!”
“Yes, Owen, it’s hot; I just made it. And mind your language, there’s an impressionable youngster present.”
“Right. Sorry.” Owen walked slowly around the Flufflet, studying it from all angles. “Why’s it all curly?”
“How should I know? Ask Nosy, although I’m not sure it knows either.”
“At least this one’s easy enough to name.” Jack was petting the soft curls, gently twining them around his fingers.
“Curly, right. Do we even know who this one’s for?” Ianto looked at his lover, then at the team medic. “Is someone expecting, and you neglected to tell me?”
“I’m not,” Jack assured his lover. The twins were only eleven months old; it was far too soon to even consider adding to their family. Privately, Jack was already vowing Never Again.
“Tosh isn’t either,” Owen added. “I’m a doctor; I’d know if my wife was pregnant.”
Ianto cocked an eyebrow. “One of the others then?”
“My money’s on Mickey,” Jack said with a grin, looking up from where he was still playing with the new Flufflet.
Rolling his eyes, Ianto gave his husband a shove, knocking him on his arse.
“Hey!” Jack pouted. “No fair!”
“You asked for it.”
“Yeah,” Owen agreed. “Just because you can get yourself knocked up doesn’t mean every other bloke on the team can. You’re just weird.”
“I’m not weird, I’m more evolved,” Jack corrected, standing up and dusting off the seat of his pants.
“Whatever. You finished with your frizzy friend there? Think I’d best take it down to the med bay and give it the once over, see if I can figure out why it looks like it’s been given a home perm.”
At Owen’s words, Nosy grabbed its Flufflet by the scruff of its neck and slithered towards the steps leading to the medic’s domain, dragging its offspring along; Fluffs were surprisingly hardwearing, which was fortunate, but Ianto still winced as the youngster got bumped down every single stair.
Owen drained the rest of his coffee and followed, leaving the empty mug on the kitchen counter. “I’ll ‘ave a refill if there’s any more going,” he called over his shoulder. “It’ll take more than one to keep me awake after last night.”
Sighing, Ianto refilled Owen’s mug and followed Jack down the steps. By the time he got there Owen already had Curly on the examination table, a cloth spread out over the cold metal so the Flufflet wouldn’t slide off the slippery surface and onto the floor.
“Right, let’s ‘ave a look at you.” Owen picked up one of his scanners and ran it over his ‘patient’ from end to end. “Looks normal enough, everything’s there that that should be there, no added extras if you don’t count the curls.” Setting that scanner aside he picked up another one, running that over Curly too. The Flufflet fidgeted. “Hold still! I can’t get accurate readings with you squirming about.”
Nosy reared up on the other side of the table and hummed its offspring into submission. Curly froze in place with an apologetic squeak, stiff as a poker.
“Thanks.” Putting the second scanner down. Owen picked up a sharp pair of scissors.
“What’re you gonna do with those?” Jack demanded, moving closer as if to protect the defenceless baby Fluff.
“Relax, Jack, I’m just going to clip off a tiny bit of fur for testing.”
“Not from anywhere visible you’re not! It doesn’t need a bald patch!”
“Fine.” Owen lifted the end of the Flufflet’s tail and carefully snipped a small curl from underneath. “There. Happy?”
“I guess so,” Jack huffed grudgingly.
“Good. Nothing showed up on the scans, so I’ll analyse this and see if it sheds any light on the mystery.”
“That’s it? You’re done?”
“For now. If nothing shows up, I might take a blood sample later.” Like humans and most alien species, Fluffs had a circulatory system although their blood was distinctly different from that which flowed through human veins.
“Good.” Jack plucked the Flufflet off the table and carried it back up to the main Hub, Nosy slithering along behind him.
“You’re sure Jack’s not got one in the oven?” Owen asked dubiously.
“He says not. Why?”
“Well, anyone would think he was the new parent instead of Nosy, fussing over the baby.”
“He’s like that with the twins’ Flufflets too.” Rhiannon was looking after the terrible twosome and their big sister for the day, along with Squiggle and Spot, so that Ianto could help Jack with the team’s annual performance reviews, which were due to be sent to Buckingham Palace in less than a week. With everything that had been going on lately Jack had completely forgotten about them until Ianto had reminded him the night before. “Anyway, you’re just as bad with Dizzy.”
“That’s different; Dizzy’s the family Fluff. This new one… Nosy’s never produced a Flufflet without a recipient in mind.” Owen was busy with the curl of fur he was analysing, running a bunch of tests on it. “Hello, that’s interesting.”
“What is?” Ianto went to look over Owen’s shoulder as information began to appear on his computer screen. Alien technology could analyse samples far faster than anything humans had so far invented.
“The caffeine levels are through the roof; the concentration is almost thirty times higher than normal.”
“That sounds bad; is it?”
Owen shrugged. “The scans all indicated a healthy young Flufflet; the extra caffeine doesn’t seem to be doing it any harm.”
“Where did it all come from though? I know Nosy likes its coffee, but it doesn’t drink any more than the rest of us, certainly not enough to account for those levels. Nothing like this has ever happened, not even that time Nosy ate all the coffee beans you spilled.”
“You’re never letting me forget that, are you?” Owen scowled at his friend.
“The sight of a high-speed over-caffeinated fully-grown Fluff zooming around the Hub is indelibly engraved on my memory.”
“Yeah, mine too,” Owen admitted. “It was unforgettable.”
“Doesn’t explain this though.”
“No it doesn’t.” Owen was frowning as a horrible thought gradually came to him. “This is probably a stupid question, but what happened to the contraband we confiscated from those alien drug dealers last week? You know, the stash of pills.”
A matching frown graced Ianto’s brow. “Why’re you asking me? I thought you destroyed them after you ran your tests.”
“Actually I didn’t; I was going to, but I couldn’t find them. Figured you must’ve taken care of them while I was patching Andy up.”
Ianto shook his head. “I would’ve asked you first, made sure you were done with them.”
The two men stared at each other in dawning horror.
“There were almost a thousand of them, ninety percent caffeine and a few other substances, hallucinogens, hypnotics, sedatives, some stuff I couldn’t even begin to identify; a single dose would’ve most likely been lethal to most humans!”
“And Nosy might’ve eaten the lot!” Ianto went pale.
“But it’s seemed fine, hasn’t even been hyperactive or anything!”
“Maybe it just shunted all the excess caffeine into growing a Flufflet.”
“In record time if it started growing this one after eating the pills.” Normally Flufflets took several weeks to grow. “Makes a weird kind of sense when I think about it.”
“Suppose that might explain the curly fluff too. Sort of,” Ianto said.
“Could do. I’d better give Nosy a thorough medical though, just to be sure it’s okay.” Owen grabbed his scanners and started for the steps, Ianto right on his heels, mind in a whirl.
No wonder Nosy seemed a bit bemused by the new arrival; it probably didn’t even remember what had triggered it to start a new Flufflet growing. Well, as long as both parent and offspring were healthy nothing else mattered. Ianto was sure one of the team would be happy to foster Curly, assuming he could prise it out of Jack’s clutches. Everyone wanted their own Fluff. Honestly, who wouldn’t?
The End
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Nosy, Jack, Owen, OC.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: There’s a newcomer in the Hub, and it looks a bit different from what Ianto and the others have come to expect.
Word Count: 1833
Written For: Challenge 202: Curly at beattheblackdog.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
“It’s… curly,” Ianto said, sounding a bit disconcerted, which was fair considering the sheer unexpectedness of the whole situation.
“Hum,” Nosy agreed, slurping some water from its dish. It gave the impression of being supremely unconcerned, but Ianto wasn’t buying it for a second.
“Um, why?”
“Humm?”
“I mean, not that it isn’t nice, because it is. It’s very cute. It’s just… a bit unusual, isn’t it? Fluffs are generally… well, fluffy. I didn’t know curls were an option.”
“hummmm.”
Ianto thought he detected something faintly sheepish in Nosy’s barely audible reply as the Fluff made a vague attempt at straightening some of its latest offspring’s fur, to no avail; it immediately sprang back into the same tight curls.
“Ianto?” Jack’s voice bellowed from somewhere out in the Hub. “Where are you? Have you seen Nosy? It’s disappeared.”
“We’re in the kitchen,” Ianto replied distractedly. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the newcomer.
“Hey there. Everything okay? Whoa!” Jack stopped in his tracks as he caught sight of the new Flufflet. “Well that’s… different.” He crouched down to study the small creature with its soft, curly, peach and brown fur.
The Flufflet looked up at him with big, curious brown eyes and hummed a squeaky little hum.
Jack grinned up at Ianto. “It’s even curlier than you are!”
“I’m only a little bit curly.” Ianto glared down at his husband, then looked at the Flufflet and its parent again. Nosy was still doing a pretty good job of appearing untroubled, and yet Ianto couldn’t quite shake the feeling that it too was a bit puzzled by the curliness of its youngster’s fur, and not quite sure how it had happened.
The cog door alarms abruptly blared out, announcing the arrival of one of the team, and the Flufflet squeaked in alarm, trying to hide beneath its parent.
Nosy was having none of that, dragging the youngling back out again by its tail and humming calmly, letting its little one know that the alarms were perfectly normal, nothing to be afraid of; it was one of the first lessons every Flufflet had to learn, along with what not to touch, what was good to eat, and who all these very tall and funny shaped creatures were.
Owen slouched wearily into the kitchen, yawning. “Please tell me there’s coffee,” he groaned. “The idiots next door were throwing a New Year’s Eve party last night; between the yelling, loud music, and fireworks going off until the early hours, we barely got any sleep. I told Tosh to ‘ave a lie-in.” He rubbed his eyes then blinked at the sight before him. “And now I’m hallucinating from lack of sleep.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re not seeing things. It’s real.” Strolling over to the machine Ianto poured Owen a coffee and, because he was feeling generous and wanted to start the year off on the right foot, brought it over to the medic who accepted it without a word and took a swig, nearly burning his mouth.
“Fuck!”
“Yes, Owen, it’s hot; I just made it. And mind your language, there’s an impressionable youngster present.”
“Right. Sorry.” Owen walked slowly around the Flufflet, studying it from all angles. “Why’s it all curly?”
“How should I know? Ask Nosy, although I’m not sure it knows either.”
“At least this one’s easy enough to name.” Jack was petting the soft curls, gently twining them around his fingers.
“Curly, right. Do we even know who this one’s for?” Ianto looked at his lover, then at the team medic. “Is someone expecting, and you neglected to tell me?”
“I’m not,” Jack assured his lover. The twins were only eleven months old; it was far too soon to even consider adding to their family. Privately, Jack was already vowing Never Again.
“Tosh isn’t either,” Owen added. “I’m a doctor; I’d know if my wife was pregnant.”
Ianto cocked an eyebrow. “One of the others then?”
“My money’s on Mickey,” Jack said with a grin, looking up from where he was still playing with the new Flufflet.
Rolling his eyes, Ianto gave his husband a shove, knocking him on his arse.
“Hey!” Jack pouted. “No fair!”
“You asked for it.”
“Yeah,” Owen agreed. “Just because you can get yourself knocked up doesn’t mean every other bloke on the team can. You’re just weird.”
“I’m not weird, I’m more evolved,” Jack corrected, standing up and dusting off the seat of his pants.
“Whatever. You finished with your frizzy friend there? Think I’d best take it down to the med bay and give it the once over, see if I can figure out why it looks like it’s been given a home perm.”
At Owen’s words, Nosy grabbed its Flufflet by the scruff of its neck and slithered towards the steps leading to the medic’s domain, dragging its offspring along; Fluffs were surprisingly hardwearing, which was fortunate, but Ianto still winced as the youngster got bumped down every single stair.
Owen drained the rest of his coffee and followed, leaving the empty mug on the kitchen counter. “I’ll ‘ave a refill if there’s any more going,” he called over his shoulder. “It’ll take more than one to keep me awake after last night.”
Sighing, Ianto refilled Owen’s mug and followed Jack down the steps. By the time he got there Owen already had Curly on the examination table, a cloth spread out over the cold metal so the Flufflet wouldn’t slide off the slippery surface and onto the floor.
“Right, let’s ‘ave a look at you.” Owen picked up one of his scanners and ran it over his ‘patient’ from end to end. “Looks normal enough, everything’s there that that should be there, no added extras if you don’t count the curls.” Setting that scanner aside he picked up another one, running that over Curly too. The Flufflet fidgeted. “Hold still! I can’t get accurate readings with you squirming about.”
Nosy reared up on the other side of the table and hummed its offspring into submission. Curly froze in place with an apologetic squeak, stiff as a poker.
“Thanks.” Putting the second scanner down. Owen picked up a sharp pair of scissors.
“What’re you gonna do with those?” Jack demanded, moving closer as if to protect the defenceless baby Fluff.
“Relax, Jack, I’m just going to clip off a tiny bit of fur for testing.”
“Not from anywhere visible you’re not! It doesn’t need a bald patch!”
“Fine.” Owen lifted the end of the Flufflet’s tail and carefully snipped a small curl from underneath. “There. Happy?”
“I guess so,” Jack huffed grudgingly.
“Good. Nothing showed up on the scans, so I’ll analyse this and see if it sheds any light on the mystery.”
“That’s it? You’re done?”
“For now. If nothing shows up, I might take a blood sample later.” Like humans and most alien species, Fluffs had a circulatory system although their blood was distinctly different from that which flowed through human veins.
“Good.” Jack plucked the Flufflet off the table and carried it back up to the main Hub, Nosy slithering along behind him.
“You’re sure Jack’s not got one in the oven?” Owen asked dubiously.
“He says not. Why?”
“Well, anyone would think he was the new parent instead of Nosy, fussing over the baby.”
“He’s like that with the twins’ Flufflets too.” Rhiannon was looking after the terrible twosome and their big sister for the day, along with Squiggle and Spot, so that Ianto could help Jack with the team’s annual performance reviews, which were due to be sent to Buckingham Palace in less than a week. With everything that had been going on lately Jack had completely forgotten about them until Ianto had reminded him the night before. “Anyway, you’re just as bad with Dizzy.”
“That’s different; Dizzy’s the family Fluff. This new one… Nosy’s never produced a Flufflet without a recipient in mind.” Owen was busy with the curl of fur he was analysing, running a bunch of tests on it. “Hello, that’s interesting.”
“What is?” Ianto went to look over Owen’s shoulder as information began to appear on his computer screen. Alien technology could analyse samples far faster than anything humans had so far invented.
“The caffeine levels are through the roof; the concentration is almost thirty times higher than normal.”
“That sounds bad; is it?”
Owen shrugged. “The scans all indicated a healthy young Flufflet; the extra caffeine doesn’t seem to be doing it any harm.”
“Where did it all come from though? I know Nosy likes its coffee, but it doesn’t drink any more than the rest of us, certainly not enough to account for those levels. Nothing like this has ever happened, not even that time Nosy ate all the coffee beans you spilled.”
“You’re never letting me forget that, are you?” Owen scowled at his friend.
“The sight of a high-speed over-caffeinated fully-grown Fluff zooming around the Hub is indelibly engraved on my memory.”
“Yeah, mine too,” Owen admitted. “It was unforgettable.”
“Doesn’t explain this though.”
“No it doesn’t.” Owen was frowning as a horrible thought gradually came to him. “This is probably a stupid question, but what happened to the contraband we confiscated from those alien drug dealers last week? You know, the stash of pills.”
A matching frown graced Ianto’s brow. “Why’re you asking me? I thought you destroyed them after you ran your tests.”
“Actually I didn’t; I was going to, but I couldn’t find them. Figured you must’ve taken care of them while I was patching Andy up.”
Ianto shook his head. “I would’ve asked you first, made sure you were done with them.”
The two men stared at each other in dawning horror.
“There were almost a thousand of them, ninety percent caffeine and a few other substances, hallucinogens, hypnotics, sedatives, some stuff I couldn’t even begin to identify; a single dose would’ve most likely been lethal to most humans!”
“And Nosy might’ve eaten the lot!” Ianto went pale.
“But it’s seemed fine, hasn’t even been hyperactive or anything!”
“Maybe it just shunted all the excess caffeine into growing a Flufflet.”
“In record time if it started growing this one after eating the pills.” Normally Flufflets took several weeks to grow. “Makes a weird kind of sense when I think about it.”
“Suppose that might explain the curly fluff too. Sort of,” Ianto said.
“Could do. I’d better give Nosy a thorough medical though, just to be sure it’s okay.” Owen grabbed his scanners and started for the steps, Ianto right on his heels, mind in a whirl.
No wonder Nosy seemed a bit bemused by the new arrival; it probably didn’t even remember what had triggered it to start a new Flufflet growing. Well, as long as both parent and offspring were healthy nothing else mattered. Ianto was sure one of the team would be happy to foster Curly, assuming he could prise it out of Jack’s clutches. Everyone wanted their own Fluff. Honestly, who wouldn’t?
The End