Moving On - 05/18
Title: Moving On
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairings: Jack/Ianto, references to past Ianto/Lisa
Rating: R
Disclaimer: If I was the one who owned Torchwood, you think I'd admit it now?
Spoilers: Some information and events from s1,2. None for s3.
Summary: Lisa is gone, and Ianto is starting to move on with his life, but it isn't always as easy as it sounds.
Author's Note: Sequel to Guilt and Turning Point.
Thanks to: My sister angelzbabe1989 for stepping in as beta, morbid_sparks for all of her support and idea bouncing through the writing of this, and pinkfairy727 for cheerleading even when she doesn't know what happens.
For previous chapters see Master list for this fic
Chapter Five
It was much later, but still not late, when Tosh made it into the Hub that morning. She had been extensively questioned by the police before they let her go, and she knew there was a good possibility that it wasn’t over yet. Blocking out the cornucopia of intermingling thoughts in the confined atmosphere of the police station had been a nightmare.
Especially when she’d been trying to concentrate. They’d asked too many questions that she just couldn’t answer with the truth - not if she didn’t want to be locked up again, this time in a psychiatric ward somewhere. While she trusted that - if it had come to it - Jack would have managed to get her out, she really didn’t want to face that experience again, no matter how temporarily.
The rest of the team were already there - or at least she assumed they were all there. She couldn’t see Ianto, but as he was more often found down in the archives than anywhere else, that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. And it was past 9am, so she couldn’t imagine him not being in yet.
The pot of hot coffee in the small kitchen area confirmed her assumption.
She bypassed the office area, where Jack, Gwen and Owen were all hard at work - or making a very good impression of it if they weren’t - and headed back down to the worktable she’d been using the last days. She may not be able to make her fingers come up to take the necklace off, but she had enough control that she could stay out of range with her co-workers.
Hearing the thoughts of strangers was bad enough. Hearing those of the team, her friends - her family, almost - would be so much worse. And if that meant she had to avoid coming into anything approaching close contact with any of them until she could figure this out? Then that’s what she would do.
She buried herself in investigation of an item from the new box of archived artefacts that had appeared while she’d been gone, and - to her relief - the team left her to it all morning.
She slipped out of the Hub shortly before lunchtime, picking up sandwiches - for everyone; even avoiding the others she could still be considerate and pick up lunch - and bringing them back to the Hub. She dropped those for the others at the stairs to the office area and took her own back to her worktable.
When Ianto appeared from the archives twenty minutes later, Tosh waved her wrapped sandwich at him to dissuade him from coming over and pointed at the bag of sandwiches on the steps.
Her luck held out until mid-afternoon, the rest of the team staying busy with their own projects and leaving her to work. But she’d known it was terribly optimistic to think it would last.
“Hey, Tosh,” Owen said strolling over. “Scanner’s playing up on me; do you think you could take a look for me?”
Tosh looked up and tried not to let Owen’s thoughts invade her head.
She’s looking nice today… I wonder if she’s done something with her hair. Or maybe it’s a new top…I need to pay more attention…
“Of course,” Tosh said hurriedly. “Just leave it on my desk and I’ll look at it once I’m finished with this.” She gestured at him with the screwdriver she was holding, hoping he would take the hint and go back to what he’d been doing - on the other side of the Hub.
It was almost too tempting to keep him close, and see where that line of thought was about to lead… but Tosh knew that when something sounded too good to be true, it usually was. And Owen thinking nice things about her - things that gave her headstrong heart reason to hope - was definitely on the ‘too good to be true’ list.
She would rather take the moment - however fleeting the thought might have been on Owen’s part - and keep it, hold it close, than risk having it ruined with further words.
Thankfully, Owen got the message and backed off. “Thanks, Tosh. You’re a lifesaver,” he told her, smiling shyly as he left.
Tosh closed her eyes for a second, pressing the moment into her memory, before turning back to her exploration of the inner workings of the artefact on her table.
An hour later, it was all back in one piece again, and although she wasn’t any closer to figuring out what it was supposed to do, she did have a fairly good idea of what pieces were missing that were preventing it doing it.
Scribbling out a tag, she glanced up at the office area. Jack was in his office, but neither Gwen nor Owen were anywhere to be seen. She could just see the edge of Owen’s scanner sitting on her desk, and decided to risk it - Jack’s desk was far enough away from her desk that she should be safe, right?
Just as she was picking the scanner up, she saw Gwen approaching, carrying an armful of folders. She pondered momentarily that she didn’t actually know what Gwen was currently working on before realising with dismay that there was no way she could get back to the worktable without passing close by Gwen.
She nodded, smiling, and tried to sidle past Gwen quickly before she could catch any of the other woman’s thoughts. She wasn’t quite fast enough.
Maybe if I try talking to Jack, see if he’ll tell me what the problem is… I hate seeing Ianto avoid him like this… They’re both so miserable…
“I wouldn’t,” Tosh said to her, before she could think about it and filter her words.
Gwen stopped in her tracks and turned back to look at Tosh, a frown furrowing her forehead. “Wouldn’t what?” she asked, confusion seeping from every pore.
What’s she talking about?
Tosh froze for a second, trying to work out how she should - could - reply to that. One the one hand, she really did want to dissuade Gwen from straight out asking Jack - or Ianto, for that matter - what the problem was; they’d talk to one of them if they wanted to. But on the other, how could she say anything about it when Gwen had only thought her intentions? She couldn’t exactly come out and say that she’d been able to hear people’s thoughts all day.
No matter how much a part of her really wanted to. She couldn’t take the necklace off, and similarly, she couldn’t force the words from her throat to tell anyone what was going on.
“Bother Jack,” she eventually settled on. She glanced behind her for a second and was relieved to see that Jack was actually seemingly engrossed in some form or report or another. “He’s actually making headway on this month’s paperwork,” she added. “Ianto will kill us if you distract him now.”
How did she know I was going to…? Was I that obvious?
Gwen didn’t look totally convinced by Tosh’s argument, but after a second she nodded. “You’re probably right,” she admitted. “Even though he can’t seem to be around Jack long enough to nag him about it himself, Ianto would hate for the paperwork to be late again.”
And I don’t want to cause even more trouble between those two, not when everything seems to be a mess already.
Toshiko sighed an internal sigh of relief when Gwen seemed to have dropped the idea, shifting the folders in her arms and sitting back down at her desk. Tosh picked up the scanner and fled back to the safety of the worktable.
She glanced at her watch as she sat back down. Nearly 4.30pm. With any luck, if the Rift stayed quiet, Jack would start trying to send everyone home in the next hour or so. And knowing Owen and Gwen as well as she did, Tosh suspected that neither of them would need that much persuading.
The problem with the scanner wasn’t serious - if Owen had really thought about it, he would have been more than capable of sorting it out on his own. Tosh wasn’t sure if it was laziness on his part that had prompted him to bring it to her, or some remnant of the last time she’d yelled at him for screwing up a bit of tech she’d been working on.
Focused on her manipulation of the wiring inside the scanner, she didn’t even notice Ianto approaching her until he was almost beside the table.
His thoughts hit her before any sound from his footsteps did.
But what if it did mean something? Is that even worse? And twice. Once could be written off as a lapse in judgement, but twice. How could I do that to her? How could I betray her like that?
“Coffee,” Ianto said brightly, his cheery tone betraying none of the self-flagellation and anxiety his thoughts revealed. “Last round of the day, unless something comes up.” He placed the mug on the side of the table, away from both the edge of the desk and the tech across the middle.
“Thanks,” Tosh said, smiling sympathetically and wishing - now that she’d had a glimpse into Ianto’s personal torment - there was something she could say. Knowing that she couldn’t say anything at all when Ianto hadn’t taken her into his confidence consentingly.
The necklace and the power it granted her with had never seemed so much a curse until this moment.
Ianto drifted away again with his tray of mugs, and it killed her to know for certain now that he was hurting badly - even if she still didn’t truly know the cause.
She lost herself in thought, rejecting scenario after scenario where she could offer Ianto any help. Everything she came up with just seemed far too invasive.
“You know, I just had a very interesting conversation with our friends over at the police station,” Jack’s voice said nearby, startling her back to alertness.
“Oh?” Tosh asked, too surprised to muster a more coherent response.
“Seems you were quite the hero this morning,” Jack continued, sauntering closer.
Tosh glanced around quickly and couldn’t see any of the others; she guessed that Owen and Gwen had probably gone home. Ianto… she wasn’t so sure.
As Jack neared, she braced herself to resist the onslaught of Jack’s thoughts, and was confused when - even when Jack was right next to her - it never appeared.
“Not really,” she demurred. “I was just…”
“In the right place at the right time?” Jack asked, clearly more than a little bit sceptical. “Happened to overhear some creep muttering aloud about the attack he was about to perpetrate?”
Said by someone else like that, the story Tosh had spun for the police sounded even less plausible than it had in her own head that morning.
“Well, I don’t think he was particularly bright,” she ventured, knowing even as she said it that Jack wasn’t going to be convinced, still puzzling as she did as to why she wasn’t fighting off Jack’s thoughts.
She’d conclude that the necklace had somehow stopped working, but it was still exerting its power over her; she still couldn’t take it off.
“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” said Jack, “but there’s stupid, and then there’s ‘would never happen’.”
Jack perched on the edge of the table, looking down at Tosh. “I had this friend once, name was Vincent,” he started, and Tosh wondered where he was going with this. “Normal enough guy, but then one day, he starts acting a bit out of character. I just dismiss it. Next thing I know, he disappears for a few weeks, then comes back and wants to be called Vanessa.”
He looked at her as if he was waiting for her to get the point of the story, but Tosh was no closer to discerning once than she’d been at the start of it.
“Ever since then,” Jack continued a few moments later, “a friend starts acting oddly, I’m paying close attention.”
Ah.
When Tosh looked back at the day in her mind she knew she hadn’t been behaving exactly like herself. She wasn’t a ‘people person’ by any means, but she didn’t usually avoid the rest of the team the way she had been doing all day. She didn’t know what she could say in response to Jack, though.
“What’s going on, Tosh?” Jack said, leaning down slightly. “What’s wrong?”
Tosh tried to force the words through her lips, but couldn’t. “I… It’s… I wish I could tell you, Jack.”
“You can tell me anything, you know that,” Jack said softly.
“No. I… I want to tell you, but I physically can’t.” She looked pleadingly at Jack, begging him to figure it out so she could be free.
“Something’s stopping you,” Jack concluded slowly.
Tosh managed to nod slightly.
She could see the moment when his eyes came to rest on the pendant around her neck; something clicked behind them.
“Oh, I see,” he breathed. “Been a very long time since I’ve seen one of those.”
He pushed away from the table, standing up and circling to stand behind Tosh. “This might be a bit of a shock to the system, so I’ll do this slowly, okay?” he murmured as he crouched down.
Despite the fact that Tosh wanted almost nothing more than to be rid of the amulet, she felt her heart rate increase and the start of a panic attack approaching as Jack’s hands came closer to the back of her neck.
“You’ll be okay,” Jack soothed. “Just breathe, and it’ll be over before you know it.”
Tosh concentrated on slow breaths in and out.
There was a tickle at the back of her neck as Jack reached in and undid the clasp of the pendant. She pushed down the rising panic.
A second later, it felt like a weight had been listed off her chest. The whisper in the back of her mind was gone; she was able to think clearly for herself again.
She closed her eyes for a brief second then swivelled around; Jack stood behind her, dangling the necklace from his fingers. The urge to take it back - put it on again - was there, but resistible.
“Feeling better?” Jack asked, wrapping the chain around his hand and flipping the gem into his palm.
Tosh nodded. “Thank you,” she said, heartfelt. “I… I couldn’t overcome it on my own.”
“Well, the race that designed them aren’t quite wired the same way mentally as humans,” Jack told her, looking at his hand and shaking his head.
She frowned. “Why aren’t you affected?” A thought struck her. “And Ianto. He brought it up to me from the archives and didn’t seem bothered by it at all.”
Jack semi-shrugged. “Some people are more susceptible than others. Me, I’ve had some psychic training to keep things like this out. Ianto’s probably just naturally resistant to its thrall.”
“So that’s why I didn’t hear any of your thoughts?” Tosh asked, curious. “Because you’ve had training to withstand it?”
Jack nodded mutely, and they looked at each other in silence for a few moments. “So what do you want to do with it?”
Tosh felt her eyes widen. “You’re giving me the choice?”
“You’re the only one who’s been directly affected, I think it’s only fair,” Jack said. “Although you should know that your options are limited to locking it up and destroying it.”
The words ‘destroy it’ sprang to her lips, but she hesitated before voicing them. As awful as her day under the power of the pendant had been, it had also proved useful. She had - very probably - saved a young woman’s life.
“Lock it up,” she said shakily. “I… I’m not saying I ever want to see the thing again, but it could be useful.”
“Okay.” Jack tucked it into a pocket. “It’s your choice.”
“Jack…” Tosh paused. “The others… I… I heard things… what do I tell them?”
“You don’t have to tell them at all, if you don’t want to,” Jack replied. “I won’t say anything if you don’t.”
Tosh nodded slowly, thinking about her day, thinking about the things she’d overheard that she never ought to have known.
She knew what she had to do.
Chapter Six
As always, comments and concrit are loved!
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairings: Jack/Ianto, references to past Ianto/Lisa
Rating: R
Disclaimer: If I was the one who owned Torchwood, you think I'd admit it now?
Spoilers: Some information and events from s1,2. None for s3.
Summary: Lisa is gone, and Ianto is starting to move on with his life, but it isn't always as easy as it sounds.
Author's Note: Sequel to Guilt and Turning Point.
Thanks to: My sister angelzbabe1989 for stepping in as beta, morbid_sparks for all of her support and idea bouncing through the writing of this, and pinkfairy727 for cheerleading even when she doesn't know what happens.
For previous chapters see Master list for this fic
Chapter Five
It was much later, but still not late, when Tosh made it into the Hub that morning. She had been extensively questioned by the police before they let her go, and she knew there was a good possibility that it wasn’t over yet. Blocking out the cornucopia of intermingling thoughts in the confined atmosphere of the police station had been a nightmare.
Especially when she’d been trying to concentrate. They’d asked too many questions that she just couldn’t answer with the truth - not if she didn’t want to be locked up again, this time in a psychiatric ward somewhere. While she trusted that - if it had come to it - Jack would have managed to get her out, she really didn’t want to face that experience again, no matter how temporarily.
The rest of the team were already there - or at least she assumed they were all there. She couldn’t see Ianto, but as he was more often found down in the archives than anywhere else, that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. And it was past 9am, so she couldn’t imagine him not being in yet.
The pot of hot coffee in the small kitchen area confirmed her assumption.
She bypassed the office area, where Jack, Gwen and Owen were all hard at work - or making a very good impression of it if they weren’t - and headed back down to the worktable she’d been using the last days. She may not be able to make her fingers come up to take the necklace off, but she had enough control that she could stay out of range with her co-workers.
Hearing the thoughts of strangers was bad enough. Hearing those of the team, her friends - her family, almost - would be so much worse. And if that meant she had to avoid coming into anything approaching close contact with any of them until she could figure this out? Then that’s what she would do.
She buried herself in investigation of an item from the new box of archived artefacts that had appeared while she’d been gone, and - to her relief - the team left her to it all morning.
She slipped out of the Hub shortly before lunchtime, picking up sandwiches - for everyone; even avoiding the others she could still be considerate and pick up lunch - and bringing them back to the Hub. She dropped those for the others at the stairs to the office area and took her own back to her worktable.
When Ianto appeared from the archives twenty minutes later, Tosh waved her wrapped sandwich at him to dissuade him from coming over and pointed at the bag of sandwiches on the steps.
Her luck held out until mid-afternoon, the rest of the team staying busy with their own projects and leaving her to work. But she’d known it was terribly optimistic to think it would last.
“Hey, Tosh,” Owen said strolling over. “Scanner’s playing up on me; do you think you could take a look for me?”
Tosh looked up and tried not to let Owen’s thoughts invade her head.
She’s looking nice today… I wonder if she’s done something with her hair. Or maybe it’s a new top…I need to pay more attention…
“Of course,” Tosh said hurriedly. “Just leave it on my desk and I’ll look at it once I’m finished with this.” She gestured at him with the screwdriver she was holding, hoping he would take the hint and go back to what he’d been doing - on the other side of the Hub.
It was almost too tempting to keep him close, and see where that line of thought was about to lead… but Tosh knew that when something sounded too good to be true, it usually was. And Owen thinking nice things about her - things that gave her headstrong heart reason to hope - was definitely on the ‘too good to be true’ list.
She would rather take the moment - however fleeting the thought might have been on Owen’s part - and keep it, hold it close, than risk having it ruined with further words.
Thankfully, Owen got the message and backed off. “Thanks, Tosh. You’re a lifesaver,” he told her, smiling shyly as he left.
Tosh closed her eyes for a second, pressing the moment into her memory, before turning back to her exploration of the inner workings of the artefact on her table.
An hour later, it was all back in one piece again, and although she wasn’t any closer to figuring out what it was supposed to do, she did have a fairly good idea of what pieces were missing that were preventing it doing it.
Scribbling out a tag, she glanced up at the office area. Jack was in his office, but neither Gwen nor Owen were anywhere to be seen. She could just see the edge of Owen’s scanner sitting on her desk, and decided to risk it - Jack’s desk was far enough away from her desk that she should be safe, right?
Just as she was picking the scanner up, she saw Gwen approaching, carrying an armful of folders. She pondered momentarily that she didn’t actually know what Gwen was currently working on before realising with dismay that there was no way she could get back to the worktable without passing close by Gwen.
She nodded, smiling, and tried to sidle past Gwen quickly before she could catch any of the other woman’s thoughts. She wasn’t quite fast enough.
Maybe if I try talking to Jack, see if he’ll tell me what the problem is… I hate seeing Ianto avoid him like this… They’re both so miserable…
“I wouldn’t,” Tosh said to her, before she could think about it and filter her words.
Gwen stopped in her tracks and turned back to look at Tosh, a frown furrowing her forehead. “Wouldn’t what?” she asked, confusion seeping from every pore.
What’s she talking about?
Tosh froze for a second, trying to work out how she should - could - reply to that. One the one hand, she really did want to dissuade Gwen from straight out asking Jack - or Ianto, for that matter - what the problem was; they’d talk to one of them if they wanted to. But on the other, how could she say anything about it when Gwen had only thought her intentions? She couldn’t exactly come out and say that she’d been able to hear people’s thoughts all day.
No matter how much a part of her really wanted to. She couldn’t take the necklace off, and similarly, she couldn’t force the words from her throat to tell anyone what was going on.
“Bother Jack,” she eventually settled on. She glanced behind her for a second and was relieved to see that Jack was actually seemingly engrossed in some form or report or another. “He’s actually making headway on this month’s paperwork,” she added. “Ianto will kill us if you distract him now.”
How did she know I was going to…? Was I that obvious?
Gwen didn’t look totally convinced by Tosh’s argument, but after a second she nodded. “You’re probably right,” she admitted. “Even though he can’t seem to be around Jack long enough to nag him about it himself, Ianto would hate for the paperwork to be late again.”
And I don’t want to cause even more trouble between those two, not when everything seems to be a mess already.
Toshiko sighed an internal sigh of relief when Gwen seemed to have dropped the idea, shifting the folders in her arms and sitting back down at her desk. Tosh picked up the scanner and fled back to the safety of the worktable.
She glanced at her watch as she sat back down. Nearly 4.30pm. With any luck, if the Rift stayed quiet, Jack would start trying to send everyone home in the next hour or so. And knowing Owen and Gwen as well as she did, Tosh suspected that neither of them would need that much persuading.
The problem with the scanner wasn’t serious - if Owen had really thought about it, he would have been more than capable of sorting it out on his own. Tosh wasn’t sure if it was laziness on his part that had prompted him to bring it to her, or some remnant of the last time she’d yelled at him for screwing up a bit of tech she’d been working on.
Focused on her manipulation of the wiring inside the scanner, she didn’t even notice Ianto approaching her until he was almost beside the table.
His thoughts hit her before any sound from his footsteps did.
But what if it did mean something? Is that even worse? And twice. Once could be written off as a lapse in judgement, but twice. How could I do that to her? How could I betray her like that?
“Coffee,” Ianto said brightly, his cheery tone betraying none of the self-flagellation and anxiety his thoughts revealed. “Last round of the day, unless something comes up.” He placed the mug on the side of the table, away from both the edge of the desk and the tech across the middle.
“Thanks,” Tosh said, smiling sympathetically and wishing - now that she’d had a glimpse into Ianto’s personal torment - there was something she could say. Knowing that she couldn’t say anything at all when Ianto hadn’t taken her into his confidence consentingly.
The necklace and the power it granted her with had never seemed so much a curse until this moment.
Ianto drifted away again with his tray of mugs, and it killed her to know for certain now that he was hurting badly - even if she still didn’t truly know the cause.
She lost herself in thought, rejecting scenario after scenario where she could offer Ianto any help. Everything she came up with just seemed far too invasive.
“You know, I just had a very interesting conversation with our friends over at the police station,” Jack’s voice said nearby, startling her back to alertness.
“Oh?” Tosh asked, too surprised to muster a more coherent response.
“Seems you were quite the hero this morning,” Jack continued, sauntering closer.
Tosh glanced around quickly and couldn’t see any of the others; she guessed that Owen and Gwen had probably gone home. Ianto… she wasn’t so sure.
As Jack neared, she braced herself to resist the onslaught of Jack’s thoughts, and was confused when - even when Jack was right next to her - it never appeared.
“Not really,” she demurred. “I was just…”
“In the right place at the right time?” Jack asked, clearly more than a little bit sceptical. “Happened to overhear some creep muttering aloud about the attack he was about to perpetrate?”
Said by someone else like that, the story Tosh had spun for the police sounded even less plausible than it had in her own head that morning.
“Well, I don’t think he was particularly bright,” she ventured, knowing even as she said it that Jack wasn’t going to be convinced, still puzzling as she did as to why she wasn’t fighting off Jack’s thoughts.
She’d conclude that the necklace had somehow stopped working, but it was still exerting its power over her; she still couldn’t take it off.
“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” said Jack, “but there’s stupid, and then there’s ‘would never happen’.”
Jack perched on the edge of the table, looking down at Tosh. “I had this friend once, name was Vincent,” he started, and Tosh wondered where he was going with this. “Normal enough guy, but then one day, he starts acting a bit out of character. I just dismiss it. Next thing I know, he disappears for a few weeks, then comes back and wants to be called Vanessa.”
He looked at her as if he was waiting for her to get the point of the story, but Tosh was no closer to discerning once than she’d been at the start of it.
“Ever since then,” Jack continued a few moments later, “a friend starts acting oddly, I’m paying close attention.”
Ah.
When Tosh looked back at the day in her mind she knew she hadn’t been behaving exactly like herself. She wasn’t a ‘people person’ by any means, but she didn’t usually avoid the rest of the team the way she had been doing all day. She didn’t know what she could say in response to Jack, though.
“What’s going on, Tosh?” Jack said, leaning down slightly. “What’s wrong?”
Tosh tried to force the words through her lips, but couldn’t. “I… It’s… I wish I could tell you, Jack.”
“You can tell me anything, you know that,” Jack said softly.
“No. I… I want to tell you, but I physically can’t.” She looked pleadingly at Jack, begging him to figure it out so she could be free.
“Something’s stopping you,” Jack concluded slowly.
Tosh managed to nod slightly.
She could see the moment when his eyes came to rest on the pendant around her neck; something clicked behind them.
“Oh, I see,” he breathed. “Been a very long time since I’ve seen one of those.”
He pushed away from the table, standing up and circling to stand behind Tosh. “This might be a bit of a shock to the system, so I’ll do this slowly, okay?” he murmured as he crouched down.
Despite the fact that Tosh wanted almost nothing more than to be rid of the amulet, she felt her heart rate increase and the start of a panic attack approaching as Jack’s hands came closer to the back of her neck.
“You’ll be okay,” Jack soothed. “Just breathe, and it’ll be over before you know it.”
Tosh concentrated on slow breaths in and out.
There was a tickle at the back of her neck as Jack reached in and undid the clasp of the pendant. She pushed down the rising panic.
A second later, it felt like a weight had been listed off her chest. The whisper in the back of her mind was gone; she was able to think clearly for herself again.
She closed her eyes for a brief second then swivelled around; Jack stood behind her, dangling the necklace from his fingers. The urge to take it back - put it on again - was there, but resistible.
“Feeling better?” Jack asked, wrapping the chain around his hand and flipping the gem into his palm.
Tosh nodded. “Thank you,” she said, heartfelt. “I… I couldn’t overcome it on my own.”
“Well, the race that designed them aren’t quite wired the same way mentally as humans,” Jack told her, looking at his hand and shaking his head.
She frowned. “Why aren’t you affected?” A thought struck her. “And Ianto. He brought it up to me from the archives and didn’t seem bothered by it at all.”
Jack semi-shrugged. “Some people are more susceptible than others. Me, I’ve had some psychic training to keep things like this out. Ianto’s probably just naturally resistant to its thrall.”
“So that’s why I didn’t hear any of your thoughts?” Tosh asked, curious. “Because you’ve had training to withstand it?”
Jack nodded mutely, and they looked at each other in silence for a few moments. “So what do you want to do with it?”
Tosh felt her eyes widen. “You’re giving me the choice?”
“You’re the only one who’s been directly affected, I think it’s only fair,” Jack said. “Although you should know that your options are limited to locking it up and destroying it.”
The words ‘destroy it’ sprang to her lips, but she hesitated before voicing them. As awful as her day under the power of the pendant had been, it had also proved useful. She had - very probably - saved a young woman’s life.
“Lock it up,” she said shakily. “I… I’m not saying I ever want to see the thing again, but it could be useful.”
“Okay.” Jack tucked it into a pocket. “It’s your choice.”
“Jack…” Tosh paused. “The others… I… I heard things… what do I tell them?”
“You don’t have to tell them at all, if you don’t want to,” Jack replied. “I won’t say anything if you don’t.”
Tosh nodded slowly, thinking about her day, thinking about the things she’d overheard that she never ought to have known.
She knew what she had to do.
Chapter Six
As always, comments and concrit are loved!