Fic: Not Forecast
Title: Not Forecast
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Team.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2283
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Thanks to the Rift, weird weather in Cardiff is not unknown, but this is a bit much.
Written For: Prompt ‘Any, any, snow should not generally be orange in this atmosphere, and yet here we are...,’ at spring_renewal.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
British weather was unpredictable anyway, possibly even more so on the coast, but when you added the influence of a Rift in space and time running right through the Welsh capitol… It was safe to say that Cardiff’s weather was even less predictable than what could be expected anywhere else in the British Isles.
Forget about the legendary rain of toads, which was really nothing more than wet weather drawing frogs and toads from their damp hiding places. Cardiff, on one memorable occasion, experienced a rain of squidlets, and on another, a totally unpredicted fall of pickled gherkins. Cleaning up after that was a nightmare. Rotting gherkins kept turning up in weird places for weeks.
Then there was the memorable night when soap flakes fell from the sky, followed by torrential rain, resulting in towering heaps and rivers of bubbles that turned central Cardiff into something resembling an alien landscape. On the bright side, the streets and sewers had never been cleaner, and the following day it was easy to tell which cars had spent the night parked in garages; they were the only ones in the whole city that still looked dirty.
By now, Ianto had supposed, perhaps somewhat foolishly, that he’d already seen it all, and then some, but clearly he’d been wrong. Here he was, on what should have been a bright, sunny May morning, and it was snowing. Not just regular snow either; this was distinctly different, not to mention disturbing, even for someone accustomed to peculiar sights. He stared at it in… not exactly disbelief, because he’d long since accepted that life with Torchwood was never going to be anything close to normal, but more with a kind of weary resignation, a stoic acceptance of the bizarreness that represented his life.
“I’m no meteorologist, but I know enough to be reasonably certain snow should not generally be orange in this atmosphere.”
Beside him, Jack shrugged. “And yet here we are...”
“Here we are,” Ianto agreed. “And you know Torchwood’s going to get the blame for this. Never mind that we don’t have any control over what comes through the Rift, the Mayor and the city council are going to be up in arms about how we’re ruining Cardiff’s May Day parade, like we’ve done it on purpose.”
“Why would we do that?” Jack sounded baffled.
“How should I know? I’m not responsible for how the Mayor and his people think. He’s still not forgiven us for the fact that he accidentally turned himself into a giant hedgehog that time. We warned him not to touch the device he found, but he did it anyway, and then blamed us because we should have told him what would happen. Like we’d know, without even seeing the device in question.”
“It’s sort of flattering that he thinks we can tell what something is and exactly what it does, all from a brief description.”
“No, Jack, it’s really not. It wasn’t even an accurate description! Anyway, analysing that incident isn’t going to help us with this!” Ianto threw his arms wide, indicating the heavily falling, eye-wateringly bright fluorescent orange snow that must already have been a good two inches deep.
“Is it just localised on the Plas or more widespread?” Jack looked at his lover expectantly, and Ianto rolled his eyes.
“Now you’re doing it!”
“Doing what?”
“Expecting me to know how widespread the snow is, when I can barely see the far side of the Plas! Try asking Tosh, she can check the CCTV cameras around the city. That’s the only way we’re going to find out how far this weather system extends, short of driving around to see for ourselves, which I’d rather not do. Traffic’s most likely in chaos as it is. It’s not like anyone would have been prepared for blizzard conditions today. The snow ploughs have probably already been packed away until winter.”
“What’re you going to do then?”
“What I came up here to do.” Ianto pulled several vials from his pockets. “Collect some snow and take it down to Owen for analysis. He needs to check that it’s not toxic, then see if he can figure out why it’s this colour instead of the usual white. After that, I’ll do a bit of research, see if there’s any record of coloured snow in our databases, or in London’s. Should probably check UNIT’s records too, if they haven’t found Tosh’s backdoor into their systems. Coloured rain is one thing, we’ve seen that before, but that was multicoloured and quite pretty, even if it was a nuisance, while this is just…”
“Orange,” Jack said helpfully.
“Painful to look at,” Ianto finished, squinting through the falling orange flakes, and wishing he was wearing his sunglasses. Not that he got much use from them except on rare holidays abroad, what with the weather in Wales being cloudy and wet more often than hot and sunny.
“Right. You get your snow samples, shouldn’t be difficult. I’ll go down and have a word with Tosh.” Jack pushed his coat sleeve back to get at his vortex manipulator, flipping the cover open.
“No way!” Ianto grabbed his lover’s arm. “You’re not taking the lift down and leaving me stranded up here! I’d have to walk round to the tourist office, through all this snow!”
“It’s not particularly cold,” Jack said. “For snow.”
“That’s not the point. It’ll take me two minutes to get Owen’s samples; you can wait that long, then we can take the lift down together.” Snapping on latex gloves and pulling the stoppers out of his vials, Ianto hurriedly collected samples from several spots on the Plas, just in case it wasn’t all exactly the same, and returned to the paving slab, shaking orange snowflakes out of his hair. “Better hope this stuff is harmless.”
“Maybe you should have brought your umbrella up with you.”
“Thought about it, but it would only have got in the way. I don’t have enough hands to hold an umbrella and fill the vials,” Ianto pointed out.
“I could’ve held it for you.”
“Yes, well, I didn’t know you were up here, did I? Last I heard, you’d gone out on a Rift alert with Gwen. Did you find what came through?” Ianto nudged Jack to one side a bit to make room for himself on the slab.
“Uh…” Jack waved his hand at the falling snow. “Notice anything?”
“Oh, right, that was our weird weather arriving, was it?”
“Looks that way.” Jack tipped his head back, squinting up at the sky as the lift began its slow descent, then started spluttering. Ianto had to grab his arm to steady him.
“Now what?”
Jack spat over the edge of the lift. “Orange snow tastes nasty!”
“You ate some?” Ianto stared at his lover in disbelief. “Why would you do that?”
“It wasn’t intentional! I was trying to see the clouds, or whatever the snow’s coming from, and a flake went in my mouth.” He spat again. “Tastes like something that’s died and gone rotten.”
Ianto took pity on his lover. “Want me to make you a coffee after I deliver Owen’s samples?”
“Yes, please. I need something to take the taste of the snow away.” The disgusted expression on Jack’s face spoke volumes.
“Poor Jack,” Ianto said, unable to keep from smirking. “Maybe that’ll teach you not to take chances with alien snow.”
Jack pouted. “You could at least TRY to sound sympathetic.” Then the lift reached the bottom, and he stalked away towards his office, muttering to himself about toothpaste and mouthwash.
Ianto turned in the opposite direction, towards the medical bay. The sooner Owen analysed the alien snow, the happier everyone would be. He wondered how long it would take the mayor to start blowing up Torchwood’s phones, demanding they do something about the weather.
“Here you go, Owen. Don’t say I never give you anything.” Ianto set the vials of melting snow in the rack Owen had set out for them.
“Orange snow.” Owen snorted. “Just what I always wanted.” Sarcasm came naturally to all Torchwood Three employees; Ianto reflected it was probably a kind of defence mechanism.
“Have fun playing with it. I’m about to make coffee. Want one?”
Owen spared Ianto a brief but unimpressed glance. “Stupid question.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Ianto headed back up the steps, shrugging out of his coat and draping it over the banister of the spiral staircase on his way to the coffee machine.
By the time he’d made the coffee and started delivering it to the team, minus Gwen, who’d gone home with an orange snow induced migraine, Jack was leaning over Tosh’s shoulder, watching her screens as she pulled up CCTV footage from cameras around the city. From what Ianto could see, the falling snow covered most of central Cardiff, from the bay all the way inland to where the River Taff crossed the far end of Bute park, and from Pengam Green Industrial Estate, all the way to Cowbridge Road West, although it wasn’t snowing as heavily that far out, just a few flakes drifting lazily down on the thankfully still air. If it had been a windy day, things might have been a lot worse.
Jack grabbed eagerly for his coffee mug as soon as Ianto’s tray was within reach, and downed half of its contents in a single swallow, making Ianto wince. Jack had to have a cast iron gullet to handle freshly made, industrial strength black coffee. Most people would wait for it to cool down a bit before taking a cautious sip, just to check the temperature, but not Jack. Setting his tray on the edge of Tosh’s workstation, Ianto offered Jack the plate of biscuits. Instead of just taking one, Jack took the whole plate.
“They’re supposed to be for all of us, Jack.”
“Then you should’ve just brought the biscuit tin.” Jack set the plate where he could reach it easily, and Ianto leaned past him to grab a chocolate digestive before his lover could eat them all, taking a bite as he turned his attention to Tosh.
“Jack seemed to think this… snow is what came through when we had that Rift alert earlier.”
Tosh nodded. “It does look that way. According to my programs, something with quite a high density came through, but atmospheric conditions here must be completely different to wherever it came from, because it expanded rapidly on arrival, drifting into the lower atmosphere…” She trailed off, tapping away at her keyboard, bringing up a meteorological map of the area. “It appears to have mixed with some high clouds, causing a chemical reaction of some kind that’s resulted in the snowfall.”
“Any indication of how long that’s going to last?” Jack asked.
Shaking her head, Tosh offered up an apologetic smile. “However long it takes for all of the orange substance to precipitate, I’d imagine, and without knowing its chemical composition, it would be difficult to determine the precise rate. Maybe Owen can make an educated guess once he’s analysed the snow.”
“Owen can’t tell you how long it’s going to keep snowing,” Owen said as he came up from the medical bay and made his way over to Tosh’s workstation, stealing the plate of biscuits away from Jack. “Not at present. What I CAN tell you, is that it’s not toxic as such, just a bit rancid.”
“I could have told you that,” Jack mumbled into his coffee mug, glaring at Owen as the medic ate three biscuits in quick succession.
“He tasted it,” Ianto said, grinning.
“By accident!”
Owen snorted. “Like anyone believes that. Anyway, what we have is what was most likely a compact ball of gas, inhabited by billions of microscopic organisms, sort of like airborne plankton, which expanded rapidly when it hit our atmosphere. Unfortunately for the organisms, but fortunately for us, while they can’t do us any harm, our atmosphere is lethal to them, so now they’re dead and decaying at an accelerated rate, dissolving in the water vapour from the clouds. If the process continues at its current rate, the remains should just soak into the ground or wash away the next time it rains. Shouldn’t even smell much.”
Ianto snatched the plate of biscuits back from Owen and offered it to Tosh. “Is there likely to be any harm to the environment? You know, from what soaks into the ground.”
Owen shook his head. “The organisms do have a high potassium content though.”
“What does that mean?” Jack asked.
“Basically, we’ve just had a load of alien fertiliser dumped on the city,” Owen explained.
Ianto chucked. “We can expect plants across the city to experience a sudden growth spurt. Everyone with a lawn will have to cut it every couple of days to keep it from taking over. Cardiff’s parks are going to be greener than ever.”
Jack visibly relaxed. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Tell that to the people responsible for park maintenance. They’re going to be working non-stop for the next few weeks.”
“Not Torchwood’s problem.” Jack plunked his empty mug on Ianto’s tray, snagged the last two biscuits from the plate, and started towards his office. “Suppose I’d better call the Mayor and let him know what to expect, preferably before he phones me wanting to know what I’m going to do about the snow.”
“Well, just make sure he doesn’t try to stick us with the bill for the park keepers’ overtime,” Ianto said, scooping up his tray of empty mugs and making for the kitchen to wash up. Despite the peculiar weather, routine chores couldn’t be ignored.
Welcome to another typical day at Torchwood.
The End
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Team.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2283
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Thanks to the Rift, weird weather in Cardiff is not unknown, but this is a bit much.
Written For: Prompt ‘Any, any, snow should not generally be orange in this atmosphere, and yet here we are...,’ at spring_renewal.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
British weather was unpredictable anyway, possibly even more so on the coast, but when you added the influence of a Rift in space and time running right through the Welsh capitol… It was safe to say that Cardiff’s weather was even less predictable than what could be expected anywhere else in the British Isles.
Forget about the legendary rain of toads, which was really nothing more than wet weather drawing frogs and toads from their damp hiding places. Cardiff, on one memorable occasion, experienced a rain of squidlets, and on another, a totally unpredicted fall of pickled gherkins. Cleaning up after that was a nightmare. Rotting gherkins kept turning up in weird places for weeks.
Then there was the memorable night when soap flakes fell from the sky, followed by torrential rain, resulting in towering heaps and rivers of bubbles that turned central Cardiff into something resembling an alien landscape. On the bright side, the streets and sewers had never been cleaner, and the following day it was easy to tell which cars had spent the night parked in garages; they were the only ones in the whole city that still looked dirty.
By now, Ianto had supposed, perhaps somewhat foolishly, that he’d already seen it all, and then some, but clearly he’d been wrong. Here he was, on what should have been a bright, sunny May morning, and it was snowing. Not just regular snow either; this was distinctly different, not to mention disturbing, even for someone accustomed to peculiar sights. He stared at it in… not exactly disbelief, because he’d long since accepted that life with Torchwood was never going to be anything close to normal, but more with a kind of weary resignation, a stoic acceptance of the bizarreness that represented his life.
“I’m no meteorologist, but I know enough to be reasonably certain snow should not generally be orange in this atmosphere.”
Beside him, Jack shrugged. “And yet here we are...”
“Here we are,” Ianto agreed. “And you know Torchwood’s going to get the blame for this. Never mind that we don’t have any control over what comes through the Rift, the Mayor and the city council are going to be up in arms about how we’re ruining Cardiff’s May Day parade, like we’ve done it on purpose.”
“Why would we do that?” Jack sounded baffled.
“How should I know? I’m not responsible for how the Mayor and his people think. He’s still not forgiven us for the fact that he accidentally turned himself into a giant hedgehog that time. We warned him not to touch the device he found, but he did it anyway, and then blamed us because we should have told him what would happen. Like we’d know, without even seeing the device in question.”
“It’s sort of flattering that he thinks we can tell what something is and exactly what it does, all from a brief description.”
“No, Jack, it’s really not. It wasn’t even an accurate description! Anyway, analysing that incident isn’t going to help us with this!” Ianto threw his arms wide, indicating the heavily falling, eye-wateringly bright fluorescent orange snow that must already have been a good two inches deep.
“Is it just localised on the Plas or more widespread?” Jack looked at his lover expectantly, and Ianto rolled his eyes.
“Now you’re doing it!”
“Doing what?”
“Expecting me to know how widespread the snow is, when I can barely see the far side of the Plas! Try asking Tosh, she can check the CCTV cameras around the city. That’s the only way we’re going to find out how far this weather system extends, short of driving around to see for ourselves, which I’d rather not do. Traffic’s most likely in chaos as it is. It’s not like anyone would have been prepared for blizzard conditions today. The snow ploughs have probably already been packed away until winter.”
“What’re you going to do then?”
“What I came up here to do.” Ianto pulled several vials from his pockets. “Collect some snow and take it down to Owen for analysis. He needs to check that it’s not toxic, then see if he can figure out why it’s this colour instead of the usual white. After that, I’ll do a bit of research, see if there’s any record of coloured snow in our databases, or in London’s. Should probably check UNIT’s records too, if they haven’t found Tosh’s backdoor into their systems. Coloured rain is one thing, we’ve seen that before, but that was multicoloured and quite pretty, even if it was a nuisance, while this is just…”
“Orange,” Jack said helpfully.
“Painful to look at,” Ianto finished, squinting through the falling orange flakes, and wishing he was wearing his sunglasses. Not that he got much use from them except on rare holidays abroad, what with the weather in Wales being cloudy and wet more often than hot and sunny.
“Right. You get your snow samples, shouldn’t be difficult. I’ll go down and have a word with Tosh.” Jack pushed his coat sleeve back to get at his vortex manipulator, flipping the cover open.
“No way!” Ianto grabbed his lover’s arm. “You’re not taking the lift down and leaving me stranded up here! I’d have to walk round to the tourist office, through all this snow!”
“It’s not particularly cold,” Jack said. “For snow.”
“That’s not the point. It’ll take me two minutes to get Owen’s samples; you can wait that long, then we can take the lift down together.” Snapping on latex gloves and pulling the stoppers out of his vials, Ianto hurriedly collected samples from several spots on the Plas, just in case it wasn’t all exactly the same, and returned to the paving slab, shaking orange snowflakes out of his hair. “Better hope this stuff is harmless.”
“Maybe you should have brought your umbrella up with you.”
“Thought about it, but it would only have got in the way. I don’t have enough hands to hold an umbrella and fill the vials,” Ianto pointed out.
“I could’ve held it for you.”
“Yes, well, I didn’t know you were up here, did I? Last I heard, you’d gone out on a Rift alert with Gwen. Did you find what came through?” Ianto nudged Jack to one side a bit to make room for himself on the slab.
“Uh…” Jack waved his hand at the falling snow. “Notice anything?”
“Oh, right, that was our weird weather arriving, was it?”
“Looks that way.” Jack tipped his head back, squinting up at the sky as the lift began its slow descent, then started spluttering. Ianto had to grab his arm to steady him.
“Now what?”
Jack spat over the edge of the lift. “Orange snow tastes nasty!”
“You ate some?” Ianto stared at his lover in disbelief. “Why would you do that?”
“It wasn’t intentional! I was trying to see the clouds, or whatever the snow’s coming from, and a flake went in my mouth.” He spat again. “Tastes like something that’s died and gone rotten.”
Ianto took pity on his lover. “Want me to make you a coffee after I deliver Owen’s samples?”
“Yes, please. I need something to take the taste of the snow away.” The disgusted expression on Jack’s face spoke volumes.
“Poor Jack,” Ianto said, unable to keep from smirking. “Maybe that’ll teach you not to take chances with alien snow.”
Jack pouted. “You could at least TRY to sound sympathetic.” Then the lift reached the bottom, and he stalked away towards his office, muttering to himself about toothpaste and mouthwash.
Ianto turned in the opposite direction, towards the medical bay. The sooner Owen analysed the alien snow, the happier everyone would be. He wondered how long it would take the mayor to start blowing up Torchwood’s phones, demanding they do something about the weather.
“Here you go, Owen. Don’t say I never give you anything.” Ianto set the vials of melting snow in the rack Owen had set out for them.
“Orange snow.” Owen snorted. “Just what I always wanted.” Sarcasm came naturally to all Torchwood Three employees; Ianto reflected it was probably a kind of defence mechanism.
“Have fun playing with it. I’m about to make coffee. Want one?”
Owen spared Ianto a brief but unimpressed glance. “Stupid question.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Ianto headed back up the steps, shrugging out of his coat and draping it over the banister of the spiral staircase on his way to the coffee machine.
By the time he’d made the coffee and started delivering it to the team, minus Gwen, who’d gone home with an orange snow induced migraine, Jack was leaning over Tosh’s shoulder, watching her screens as she pulled up CCTV footage from cameras around the city. From what Ianto could see, the falling snow covered most of central Cardiff, from the bay all the way inland to where the River Taff crossed the far end of Bute park, and from Pengam Green Industrial Estate, all the way to Cowbridge Road West, although it wasn’t snowing as heavily that far out, just a few flakes drifting lazily down on the thankfully still air. If it had been a windy day, things might have been a lot worse.
Jack grabbed eagerly for his coffee mug as soon as Ianto’s tray was within reach, and downed half of its contents in a single swallow, making Ianto wince. Jack had to have a cast iron gullet to handle freshly made, industrial strength black coffee. Most people would wait for it to cool down a bit before taking a cautious sip, just to check the temperature, but not Jack. Setting his tray on the edge of Tosh’s workstation, Ianto offered Jack the plate of biscuits. Instead of just taking one, Jack took the whole plate.
“They’re supposed to be for all of us, Jack.”
“Then you should’ve just brought the biscuit tin.” Jack set the plate where he could reach it easily, and Ianto leaned past him to grab a chocolate digestive before his lover could eat them all, taking a bite as he turned his attention to Tosh.
“Jack seemed to think this… snow is what came through when we had that Rift alert earlier.”
Tosh nodded. “It does look that way. According to my programs, something with quite a high density came through, but atmospheric conditions here must be completely different to wherever it came from, because it expanded rapidly on arrival, drifting into the lower atmosphere…” She trailed off, tapping away at her keyboard, bringing up a meteorological map of the area. “It appears to have mixed with some high clouds, causing a chemical reaction of some kind that’s resulted in the snowfall.”
“Any indication of how long that’s going to last?” Jack asked.
Shaking her head, Tosh offered up an apologetic smile. “However long it takes for all of the orange substance to precipitate, I’d imagine, and without knowing its chemical composition, it would be difficult to determine the precise rate. Maybe Owen can make an educated guess once he’s analysed the snow.”
“Owen can’t tell you how long it’s going to keep snowing,” Owen said as he came up from the medical bay and made his way over to Tosh’s workstation, stealing the plate of biscuits away from Jack. “Not at present. What I CAN tell you, is that it’s not toxic as such, just a bit rancid.”
“I could have told you that,” Jack mumbled into his coffee mug, glaring at Owen as the medic ate three biscuits in quick succession.
“He tasted it,” Ianto said, grinning.
“By accident!”
Owen snorted. “Like anyone believes that. Anyway, what we have is what was most likely a compact ball of gas, inhabited by billions of microscopic organisms, sort of like airborne plankton, which expanded rapidly when it hit our atmosphere. Unfortunately for the organisms, but fortunately for us, while they can’t do us any harm, our atmosphere is lethal to them, so now they’re dead and decaying at an accelerated rate, dissolving in the water vapour from the clouds. If the process continues at its current rate, the remains should just soak into the ground or wash away the next time it rains. Shouldn’t even smell much.”
Ianto snatched the plate of biscuits back from Owen and offered it to Tosh. “Is there likely to be any harm to the environment? You know, from what soaks into the ground.”
Owen shook his head. “The organisms do have a high potassium content though.”
“What does that mean?” Jack asked.
“Basically, we’ve just had a load of alien fertiliser dumped on the city,” Owen explained.
Ianto chucked. “We can expect plants across the city to experience a sudden growth spurt. Everyone with a lawn will have to cut it every couple of days to keep it from taking over. Cardiff’s parks are going to be greener than ever.”
Jack visibly relaxed. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Tell that to the people responsible for park maintenance. They’re going to be working non-stop for the next few weeks.”
“Not Torchwood’s problem.” Jack plunked his empty mug on Ianto’s tray, snagged the last two biscuits from the plate, and started towards his office. “Suppose I’d better call the Mayor and let him know what to expect, preferably before he phones me wanting to know what I’m going to do about the snow.”
“Well, just make sure he doesn’t try to stick us with the bill for the park keepers’ overtime,” Ianto said, scooping up his tray of empty mugs and making for the kitchen to wash up. Despite the peculiar weather, routine chores couldn’t be ignored.
Welcome to another typical day at Torchwood.
The End