Fic: Christmas Joy
Title: Christmas Joy
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack, Ianto, Owen, Team.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2508
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Jack loves Christmas, but this year his Christmas joy has suffered an unexpected setback.
Written For: Challenge 464: Joy at fan_flashworks. Also for Weekend Challenge Christmas Song Lyrics at 1_million_words.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Christmas was rapidly approaching, the most wonderful time of the year; at least it was according to Jack. Christmas hadn’t existed where he’d grown up on the Boeshane Peninsula. They’d had a winter solstice celebration, but that had been a very different thing. There’d been decorations and food, but the decorations had been made from shells, driftwood, and dried seedpods, and the feast had been to use up anything that couldn’t easily be preserved. There’d been no singing or exchanging of gifts; really, it had been more like the American tradition of Thanksgiving.
After becoming stranded on earth, Jack had grown to love Christmas, with all its quaint traditions. There was so much about the festive season that appealed to him: all the evergreen decorations of holly and ivy, the tree, decorated with candles and shiny, spun glass baubles, and more recently, with the tinsel and fairy lights that had become so popular over the last half century or so. The jolly fat man in his red suit, the laughter, the joy, the music…
Jack delighted in belting out Christmas Carols at the top of his voice as he put up ever more gaudy and overdone decorations, shedding tinsel and glitter everywhere. He adored buying his team extravagant, and often highly inappropriate, gifts, and receiving gifts himself, and of course he relished stuffing himself with turkey and all the trimmings. He did his best to get at least two Christmas dinners each year, even booking a table at a local restaurant for Christmas Eve. That worked out reasonably well most years, since Christmas in Cardiff tended to be quiet, any significant action usually taking place in London.
Most of all, of course, Jack being the man he was, he loved the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe, and he made it his goal each year to catch every member of his team for a kiss at least once a week throughout December. Some of them enjoyed the experience more than others, but from Jack’s point of view, seeing the expression of disgust on Owen’s face every time was all part of the fun. Besides, if Owen really objected to Jack kissing him, he’d do more than simply pull faces, so he probably didn’t hate it as much as he pretended to.
Jack had done most of his Christmas shopping over the course of the year, making sure he had gifts for everyone, and a few extras just in case, well in advance of the big day, having long ago learned what a nightmare it was trying to do it all at the last minute. He’d managed to get everything wrapped by the end of November, because he had to find something to do when he was awake at night and Ianto was busy sleeping. Then, as soon as December had arrived, he’d dug out all the boxes of Christmas decorations and ventured out to buy a couple of trees, a big one for the Hub and a smaller one to go in the tourist office.
Ianto preferred to decorate that one himself because, as he’d explained to Jack, he needed one place he could work without getting eyestrain and a headache. Besides, he claimed that Jack’s style of decorations would scare the tourists away and earn him demerits with the Welsh Tourist Board, and that might cost him his annual certificate of excellence. That little piece of paper, awarded each year without fail, meant a lot to him, and the last thing Jack wanted to do was upset his lover, especially not during the festive season. Christmas was a time for joy, not regret and disappointment.
Naturally, decorating the main Hub was a responsibility Jack kept for himself, although he generally enlisted the rest of the team to help whenever they had a spare moment. There was so much more to do than merely decorate the eight-foot-tall tree. There was tinsel to be wound around railings, fairy lights to be hung from the catwalks, paperchains to be put up in Jack’s office and the boardroom, along with a couple of smaller but quite realistic artificial trees…
All gifts would be put under the tree in the boardroom, where Myfanwy couldn’t get at them. Pteranodons, it turned out, were even more curious than cats. Not that Jack could blame her. He was just as eager to find out what was in the gifts his team put there, especially the ones with his name on them. Ianto had been forced to ban Jack from touching anything once it was beneath the tree, under the threat of having his gifts confiscated.
“Where’s the fun if you already know what you’ve been given before you open it? Everyone else will get a surprise when they open their gifts; you’ll be the only one who doesn’t.”
When Ianto put it like that, Jack could see his point. It was maddening having to wait to find out, but the anticipation was part of the fun, and that would be spoiled if he already knew.
Singing along to Carols and Christmas songs alike, suffused with the joy of the season, Jack hung the last sprig of mistletoe, smiling in satisfaction. There was almost nowhere in the main Hub that anyone could walk without passing under a sprig, maximising Jack’s chances of catching them. All he needed to do now was wait for the team to arrive the next morning.
He paced restlessly, checking his watch every few minutes, frustrated at the way time always seemed to pass more slowly when waiting for a much-anticipated event. He couldn’t settle to do the paperwork that was waiting on his desk, and even browsing ebay or watching CCTV from around the city was failing to hold his attention. Eventually, just as he’d almost decided to go and pass the time brooding on a rooftop, the Rift monitor blared out an alert, and Jack gave a sigh of relief. At least retrieving whatever had come through would give him something to do. Anything was better than prowling the Hub, twiddling his thumbs.
The retrieval itself only took a short while, poking around a deserted school playing field out towards Trowbridge, but first he had to get there, and then, after he’d found what he was looking for, he had to drive back to the Hub, so he was gone for perhaps an hour and a half, maybe a little longer. He parked in the underground garage and plucked from the passenger seat the small containment box holding the device he’d found, carrying it through to leave on Tosh’s desk so she could take a look at it in the morning. She always enjoyed having something new to investigate.
While he was gone, the Hub’s lighting had slipped into sleep mode, but as he stepped through the door from the garage, motion detectors registered his presence, and the lights gradually began to brighten. Even so, it wasn’t until his boot slid slightly on the rough concrete floor that he noticed something was amiss. He looked down and saw he’d trodden on a small sprig, crushing the white berries attached to it. They’d been what had made him slip.
“Huh. Must not have secured that bit very well,” he muttered to himself as he continued towards Toshiko’s workstation. Then, as the lights continued to grow brighter, his eyes widened, and he looked on in horror. The sprigs of mistletoe that he’d hung so carefully now lay scattered across the floor, the workstations, the catwalks… “What? NO! My mistletoe!”
Worse, the fresh little green and white sprigs had an unhealthy greyish colouring, and even as he looked on in disbelief, the nearest one seemed to shrivel, turning brown and slimy. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the glorious Christmas tree in its tub was withering, the needles falling, baubles dropping from its sagging branches to shatter on the floor. Christmas, the season of joy and goodwill to all, was turning into a nightmare before his very eyes!
Dimly he heard himself whimper; he couldn’t believe this was happening! Dumping the containment box on the floor, Jack ran to the tree, slipping and skidding on decaying mistletoe, and just managed to catch a bauble as it tumbled towards the ground. Setting it carefully aside, he started removing the other baubles as fast as he could, before they could fall and break as well. He was still desperately trying to salvage as much as he could from the ruins of his tree when the cog door alarms sounded, and Ianto came in, his cheery ‘Good morning’ dying on his lips.
“Jack? What happened?”
“I don’t know!” Jack wailed, grabbing for another bauble. “I had everything looking perfect, then I went out on a retrieval, and when I got back, everything was dying!”
Ianto hurried over to join Jack in stripping the remaining decorations from the tree, pulling a face at the sliminess of the falling needles. “It’s not something to do with what the Rift dropped off, is it?”
“No.” Jack was certain of that much. “It’s just an ordinary data storage device, broken, and missing its power source. Unless it was carrying some sort of microbe that my VM’s scanner can’t detect, which is highly unlikely, there’s no way it’s responsible for this!”
“Microbe?” Ianto frowned at the rotting pine needles. “You mean like a fungus?”
“I already told you; the device is clean! I found it under a bush out near Trowbridge, a perfectly healthy bush with no trace of fungus!”
“Yes, I know, but wasn’t Owen studying an alien fungus yesterday?”
Jack froze. “He swore he destroyed it! If he’s responsible for this, I’m going to… to…”
“Make him clean up the mess he’s caused?” Ianto suggested.
“Yes! And pay for a new tree, new decorations, everything! The whole Hub will have to be fumigated!” Jack fumbled for his phone, but Ianto already had his out and was calling Torchwood’s medic.
“What?” a slightly tinny voice came through the speaker.
Jack grabbed for the phone, snatching it from Ianto’s hand. “Get your bony arse to the Hub right now, Harper!”
“Why? What’s up?”
“That fungus you were mucking about with yesterday got loose. It’s killed the Christmas tree, and all of my mistletoe, and we need to keep it from spreading. If it gets out of the Hub…”
Owen cut him off. “I’m on my way! Keep everywhere shut down tight, and whatever you do, don’t open the door to the hothouse. The specimens in there are irreplaceable!”
“What about my tree?”
“I’ll get you a new one!”
“Damn right you will! But not until you’ve cleaned up the mess here.” Jack hung up and Ianto grabbed his phone back, calling Gwen and Tosh to tell them to stay away. Until the contagion could be dealt with, they’d be needed on the outside to deal with any Rift alerts, Weevil issues, and such. He and Jack, and Owen once he arrived, wouldn’t be able to leave the Hub; the risk of them carrying fungal spores with them was too great.
Owen arrived in less than fifteen minutes, and the look on his face when he saw the mess might have been amusing, if the circumstances hadn’t been so dire.
“Fuck! I had no idea it would do this! It was only supposed to be a prank!”
Jack had already been angry, but now he looked ready to commit murder. “A prank? You did this on purpose?”
“I thought it would kill your stupid mistletoe, save us all from gettin’ snogged half to death!”
Ianto grabbed for Jack, restraining him. “Whoa! You can kill him AFTER he fixes this.”
“I should open the hothouse and let the fungus kill all his precious plants!” Jack snarled.
“We need some of those plants, Jack,” Ianto soothed his understandably irate lover.
Muttering threats, Jack subsided, glaring at Owen. “Fix this! Now!”
Owen didn’t argue, just nodded and got to work.
Fumigating the Hub, and themselves, took hours. The antifungal gas filled the main Hub, getting into every crack and crevice that might harbour spores, while the three men took refuge in the decontamination chamber, where the various alien chemicals thoroughly cleaned them, along with all their clothing.
“What I want to know is why the contamination alarms didn’t go off when the fungus started spreading,” Ianto said, a resigned expression on his face as he stripped out of his suit and hung it up, hoping the chemical solution it was drenched in wouldn’t damage it.
“I turned them off,” Owen admitted sheepishly.
“You what? Of all the irresponsible…”
Once again, Ianto was forced to restrain Jack. “We’ll reset everything when the fumigation’s complete, then we can make sure nothing was missed, deal with any residual contamination.”
“I should fire him!”
“You could, but where would we get another medic with knowledge of alien anatomy and diseases? We don’t want to be stuck training somebody new if we can avoid it. Besides, this is supposed to be the season of goodwill to all men. Dock his pay, make him clean up the mess and replace what his prank destroyed, and let this be a learning experience for him.”
Jack huffed but subsided, scowling at Owen. “I want a ten-foot tree to replace the one you killed. And you’re replacing the mistletoe too.”
“Fine, whatever.”
Once the fumigation was completed, the contamination alarms turned back on, and a few remaining traces of fungus had been dealt with, Owen was set to work cleaning up the dead remains of the fungus and its victims, small dry, crusty patches that littered the floor and the catwalks, and a larger patch around what was left of the tree. While he was doing that, Ianto scanned each of the surviving baubles in turn, to make certain they wouldn’t contaminate the new tree. Jack went out to buy a bigger, better tree and new decorations, since none of the tinsel that had been on the first tree could be salvaged. It was too crusty, and quite a few baubles and strings of lights also had to be disposed of.
Nevertheless, by evening the Hub was looking suitably festive once more, and Jack was slowly regaining his Christmas cheer, helped along by a few snogs from Ianto underneath the new mistletoe.
Tosh, when she was finally allowed inside, set about making the contamination alarms even more sensitive, and added safeguards so that they couldn’t be turned off without Jack’s authorisation. Or Ianto’s, since everyone knew that amounted to the same thing.
The joy of Christmas might have been derailed for a bit, but Jack was determined that his enjoyment of the festive season was not going to be spoiled, especially by an alien fungus! Christmas only happened once a year, and he intended to make the most of every moment, starting with catching all his team under the mistletoe. Yes, even Owen, because Jack was generous that way. Owen was going to share in the Christmas joy whether he wanted to or not!
The End
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack, Ianto, Owen, Team.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2508
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Jack loves Christmas, but this year his Christmas joy has suffered an unexpected setback.
Written For: Challenge 464: Joy at fan_flashworks. Also for Weekend Challenge Christmas Song Lyrics at 1_million_words.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Christmas was rapidly approaching, the most wonderful time of the year; at least it was according to Jack. Christmas hadn’t existed where he’d grown up on the Boeshane Peninsula. They’d had a winter solstice celebration, but that had been a very different thing. There’d been decorations and food, but the decorations had been made from shells, driftwood, and dried seedpods, and the feast had been to use up anything that couldn’t easily be preserved. There’d been no singing or exchanging of gifts; really, it had been more like the American tradition of Thanksgiving.
After becoming stranded on earth, Jack had grown to love Christmas, with all its quaint traditions. There was so much about the festive season that appealed to him: all the evergreen decorations of holly and ivy, the tree, decorated with candles and shiny, spun glass baubles, and more recently, with the tinsel and fairy lights that had become so popular over the last half century or so. The jolly fat man in his red suit, the laughter, the joy, the music…
Jack delighted in belting out Christmas Carols at the top of his voice as he put up ever more gaudy and overdone decorations, shedding tinsel and glitter everywhere. He adored buying his team extravagant, and often highly inappropriate, gifts, and receiving gifts himself, and of course he relished stuffing himself with turkey and all the trimmings. He did his best to get at least two Christmas dinners each year, even booking a table at a local restaurant for Christmas Eve. That worked out reasonably well most years, since Christmas in Cardiff tended to be quiet, any significant action usually taking place in London.
Most of all, of course, Jack being the man he was, he loved the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe, and he made it his goal each year to catch every member of his team for a kiss at least once a week throughout December. Some of them enjoyed the experience more than others, but from Jack’s point of view, seeing the expression of disgust on Owen’s face every time was all part of the fun. Besides, if Owen really objected to Jack kissing him, he’d do more than simply pull faces, so he probably didn’t hate it as much as he pretended to.
Jack had done most of his Christmas shopping over the course of the year, making sure he had gifts for everyone, and a few extras just in case, well in advance of the big day, having long ago learned what a nightmare it was trying to do it all at the last minute. He’d managed to get everything wrapped by the end of November, because he had to find something to do when he was awake at night and Ianto was busy sleeping. Then, as soon as December had arrived, he’d dug out all the boxes of Christmas decorations and ventured out to buy a couple of trees, a big one for the Hub and a smaller one to go in the tourist office.
Ianto preferred to decorate that one himself because, as he’d explained to Jack, he needed one place he could work without getting eyestrain and a headache. Besides, he claimed that Jack’s style of decorations would scare the tourists away and earn him demerits with the Welsh Tourist Board, and that might cost him his annual certificate of excellence. That little piece of paper, awarded each year without fail, meant a lot to him, and the last thing Jack wanted to do was upset his lover, especially not during the festive season. Christmas was a time for joy, not regret and disappointment.
Naturally, decorating the main Hub was a responsibility Jack kept for himself, although he generally enlisted the rest of the team to help whenever they had a spare moment. There was so much more to do than merely decorate the eight-foot-tall tree. There was tinsel to be wound around railings, fairy lights to be hung from the catwalks, paperchains to be put up in Jack’s office and the boardroom, along with a couple of smaller but quite realistic artificial trees…
All gifts would be put under the tree in the boardroom, where Myfanwy couldn’t get at them. Pteranodons, it turned out, were even more curious than cats. Not that Jack could blame her. He was just as eager to find out what was in the gifts his team put there, especially the ones with his name on them. Ianto had been forced to ban Jack from touching anything once it was beneath the tree, under the threat of having his gifts confiscated.
“Where’s the fun if you already know what you’ve been given before you open it? Everyone else will get a surprise when they open their gifts; you’ll be the only one who doesn’t.”
When Ianto put it like that, Jack could see his point. It was maddening having to wait to find out, but the anticipation was part of the fun, and that would be spoiled if he already knew.
Singing along to Carols and Christmas songs alike, suffused with the joy of the season, Jack hung the last sprig of mistletoe, smiling in satisfaction. There was almost nowhere in the main Hub that anyone could walk without passing under a sprig, maximising Jack’s chances of catching them. All he needed to do now was wait for the team to arrive the next morning.
He paced restlessly, checking his watch every few minutes, frustrated at the way time always seemed to pass more slowly when waiting for a much-anticipated event. He couldn’t settle to do the paperwork that was waiting on his desk, and even browsing ebay or watching CCTV from around the city was failing to hold his attention. Eventually, just as he’d almost decided to go and pass the time brooding on a rooftop, the Rift monitor blared out an alert, and Jack gave a sigh of relief. At least retrieving whatever had come through would give him something to do. Anything was better than prowling the Hub, twiddling his thumbs.
The retrieval itself only took a short while, poking around a deserted school playing field out towards Trowbridge, but first he had to get there, and then, after he’d found what he was looking for, he had to drive back to the Hub, so he was gone for perhaps an hour and a half, maybe a little longer. He parked in the underground garage and plucked from the passenger seat the small containment box holding the device he’d found, carrying it through to leave on Tosh’s desk so she could take a look at it in the morning. She always enjoyed having something new to investigate.
While he was gone, the Hub’s lighting had slipped into sleep mode, but as he stepped through the door from the garage, motion detectors registered his presence, and the lights gradually began to brighten. Even so, it wasn’t until his boot slid slightly on the rough concrete floor that he noticed something was amiss. He looked down and saw he’d trodden on a small sprig, crushing the white berries attached to it. They’d been what had made him slip.
“Huh. Must not have secured that bit very well,” he muttered to himself as he continued towards Toshiko’s workstation. Then, as the lights continued to grow brighter, his eyes widened, and he looked on in horror. The sprigs of mistletoe that he’d hung so carefully now lay scattered across the floor, the workstations, the catwalks… “What? NO! My mistletoe!”
Worse, the fresh little green and white sprigs had an unhealthy greyish colouring, and even as he looked on in disbelief, the nearest one seemed to shrivel, turning brown and slimy. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the glorious Christmas tree in its tub was withering, the needles falling, baubles dropping from its sagging branches to shatter on the floor. Christmas, the season of joy and goodwill to all, was turning into a nightmare before his very eyes!
Dimly he heard himself whimper; he couldn’t believe this was happening! Dumping the containment box on the floor, Jack ran to the tree, slipping and skidding on decaying mistletoe, and just managed to catch a bauble as it tumbled towards the ground. Setting it carefully aside, he started removing the other baubles as fast as he could, before they could fall and break as well. He was still desperately trying to salvage as much as he could from the ruins of his tree when the cog door alarms sounded, and Ianto came in, his cheery ‘Good morning’ dying on his lips.
“Jack? What happened?”
“I don’t know!” Jack wailed, grabbing for another bauble. “I had everything looking perfect, then I went out on a retrieval, and when I got back, everything was dying!”
Ianto hurried over to join Jack in stripping the remaining decorations from the tree, pulling a face at the sliminess of the falling needles. “It’s not something to do with what the Rift dropped off, is it?”
“No.” Jack was certain of that much. “It’s just an ordinary data storage device, broken, and missing its power source. Unless it was carrying some sort of microbe that my VM’s scanner can’t detect, which is highly unlikely, there’s no way it’s responsible for this!”
“Microbe?” Ianto frowned at the rotting pine needles. “You mean like a fungus?”
“I already told you; the device is clean! I found it under a bush out near Trowbridge, a perfectly healthy bush with no trace of fungus!”
“Yes, I know, but wasn’t Owen studying an alien fungus yesterday?”
Jack froze. “He swore he destroyed it! If he’s responsible for this, I’m going to… to…”
“Make him clean up the mess he’s caused?” Ianto suggested.
“Yes! And pay for a new tree, new decorations, everything! The whole Hub will have to be fumigated!” Jack fumbled for his phone, but Ianto already had his out and was calling Torchwood’s medic.
“What?” a slightly tinny voice came through the speaker.
Jack grabbed for the phone, snatching it from Ianto’s hand. “Get your bony arse to the Hub right now, Harper!”
“Why? What’s up?”
“That fungus you were mucking about with yesterday got loose. It’s killed the Christmas tree, and all of my mistletoe, and we need to keep it from spreading. If it gets out of the Hub…”
Owen cut him off. “I’m on my way! Keep everywhere shut down tight, and whatever you do, don’t open the door to the hothouse. The specimens in there are irreplaceable!”
“What about my tree?”
“I’ll get you a new one!”
“Damn right you will! But not until you’ve cleaned up the mess here.” Jack hung up and Ianto grabbed his phone back, calling Gwen and Tosh to tell them to stay away. Until the contagion could be dealt with, they’d be needed on the outside to deal with any Rift alerts, Weevil issues, and such. He and Jack, and Owen once he arrived, wouldn’t be able to leave the Hub; the risk of them carrying fungal spores with them was too great.
Owen arrived in less than fifteen minutes, and the look on his face when he saw the mess might have been amusing, if the circumstances hadn’t been so dire.
“Fuck! I had no idea it would do this! It was only supposed to be a prank!”
Jack had already been angry, but now he looked ready to commit murder. “A prank? You did this on purpose?”
“I thought it would kill your stupid mistletoe, save us all from gettin’ snogged half to death!”
Ianto grabbed for Jack, restraining him. “Whoa! You can kill him AFTER he fixes this.”
“I should open the hothouse and let the fungus kill all his precious plants!” Jack snarled.
“We need some of those plants, Jack,” Ianto soothed his understandably irate lover.
Muttering threats, Jack subsided, glaring at Owen. “Fix this! Now!”
Owen didn’t argue, just nodded and got to work.
Fumigating the Hub, and themselves, took hours. The antifungal gas filled the main Hub, getting into every crack and crevice that might harbour spores, while the three men took refuge in the decontamination chamber, where the various alien chemicals thoroughly cleaned them, along with all their clothing.
“What I want to know is why the contamination alarms didn’t go off when the fungus started spreading,” Ianto said, a resigned expression on his face as he stripped out of his suit and hung it up, hoping the chemical solution it was drenched in wouldn’t damage it.
“I turned them off,” Owen admitted sheepishly.
“You what? Of all the irresponsible…”
Once again, Ianto was forced to restrain Jack. “We’ll reset everything when the fumigation’s complete, then we can make sure nothing was missed, deal with any residual contamination.”
“I should fire him!”
“You could, but where would we get another medic with knowledge of alien anatomy and diseases? We don’t want to be stuck training somebody new if we can avoid it. Besides, this is supposed to be the season of goodwill to all men. Dock his pay, make him clean up the mess and replace what his prank destroyed, and let this be a learning experience for him.”
Jack huffed but subsided, scowling at Owen. “I want a ten-foot tree to replace the one you killed. And you’re replacing the mistletoe too.”
“Fine, whatever.”
Once the fumigation was completed, the contamination alarms turned back on, and a few remaining traces of fungus had been dealt with, Owen was set to work cleaning up the dead remains of the fungus and its victims, small dry, crusty patches that littered the floor and the catwalks, and a larger patch around what was left of the tree. While he was doing that, Ianto scanned each of the surviving baubles in turn, to make certain they wouldn’t contaminate the new tree. Jack went out to buy a bigger, better tree and new decorations, since none of the tinsel that had been on the first tree could be salvaged. It was too crusty, and quite a few baubles and strings of lights also had to be disposed of.
Nevertheless, by evening the Hub was looking suitably festive once more, and Jack was slowly regaining his Christmas cheer, helped along by a few snogs from Ianto underneath the new mistletoe.
Tosh, when she was finally allowed inside, set about making the contamination alarms even more sensitive, and added safeguards so that they couldn’t be turned off without Jack’s authorisation. Or Ianto’s, since everyone knew that amounted to the same thing.
The joy of Christmas might have been derailed for a bit, but Jack was determined that his enjoyment of the festive season was not going to be spoiled, especially by an alien fungus! Christmas only happened once a year, and he intended to make the most of every moment, starting with catching all his team under the mistletoe. Yes, even Owen, because Jack was generous that way. Owen was going to share in the Christmas joy whether he wanted to or not!
The End