Fic: Serving Life
Title: Serving Life
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Tosh, OCs
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Fragments.
Summary: Tosh is facing life in a UNIT prison.
Word Count: 601
Written For: juliet316’s prompt ‘Torchwood, Tosh, serving time’ at
fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.
A/N: This one's pretty dark and grim. Sorry.
Tosh knew what she was doing was wrong, but what choice did she have? They had her mother, said they would kill her if Tosh didn’t do exactly as they ordered. She would have done anything they wanted after that; her family meant everything to her.
So she’d stolen the plans, built the device, delivered it to the place they’d specified… and was captured. She had no illusions, knew she would be punished for her crime, but that was okay because she’d done what she had to. Her mother was alive and safe, that was all that mattered. Tosh hardly even cared what the soldiers would do to her; jail was always going to be preferable to knowing she had a chance to save her mother and not even trying.
Still she’d at least expected some kind of trial, a chance to tell her side of the story.
There was no trial, no phone call, no nothing, only this. They hadn’t said a word to her, just shoved her into a room and handed her a set of hideous orange overalls, then stood staring at her, arms folded across their chests. She’d stripped to her underwear, reached for the overalls, but one of the soldiers had stopped her. Apparently she wasn’t to be permitted even her bra and panties. Feeling humiliated, she’d removed her underwear and pulled the coarse fabric of the overalls over her naked body, pathetically grateful for the concealment they provided.
Once dressed, she’d been frogmarched from the room, her bare feet scrambling to move fast enough to keep up with the tall soldiers’ long strides, toes scraping painfully on the cold concrete. They’d hauled her along corridor after corridor until she’d lost all sense of direction before finally shoving her through the door into this cell, where she fell to the rough cement floor, exhausted.
She remained where she’d fallen for several minutes, head bowed, trying to catch her breath. It came as a shock when she finally took in her surroundings. The cell couldn’t have been more than five feet by eight, and it was devoid of any kind of furnishings. There wasn’t even a blanket. In the centre of the ceiling was a single bright light bulb in a metal cage, the harsh glare it gave off painful to her eyes. High in the end wall was a single small window, covered with a grill, too high for her to reach even standing on tiptoes and stretching as high as she could. The floor and walls were rough, unfinished cement and there was a drainage hole in one corner. Tosh shivered; surely they wouldn’t leave her there for long?
But they did. It seemed this bare, unfurnished cell was to be her home from now on. The light remained on twenty-four hours a day. Twice a day she was given water and slop to eat, and for thirty minutes each morning she was shackled with a dozen or so other prisoners and marched barefoot around a barren indoor courtyard. They weren’t permitted to talk or even to look at each other; they had to keep their eyes on the floor and punishment was swift if they disobeyed in any way. The soldiers only spoke to issue orders. Tosh understood and it chilled her to the bone; they weren’t considered people anymore, they were just things, and things had no rights.
She knew then that she would never leave this place alive. The only comfort she had was in knowing she’d saved her mother. Despite the outcome, that was the one thing she would never regret.
The End