For
allfireburns, who couldn't ask... but I wrote it anyway.
It shouldn't have happened at all. The very idea of it verged on the ludicrous, and if she'd been able to keep that perspective throughout the whole incident, things might have been different. But idea wasn't reality, and in the aftermath of yet another Rift-related disaster, she was the one who knew where to find Tosh, knew just how little Tosh would want to burden the others...
She was the one who pulled Tosh close, feeling planes and angles where there had once been softer, more yielding curves. She was the one who promised Tosh that they'd fix it... one way or another, they'd fix it, and she'd be back to normal.
She was unprepared for the combination of Toshiko Sato and testosterone, unprepared for the strength of Tosh's desperation and the way simple comfort turned to so much more, every touch leading into another with an urgency she should have anticipated, but didn't.
They were both unprepared for what happened, and because of that...
Well, prepared or not, Suzie had no intention of protesting.
They didn't speak of it, later, and when the Rift flared and twisted again, and Tosh was abruptly as she'd always been, it seemed as though everything had been undone, and Torchwood would go on with business as usual.
...It seemed that way, but it wasn't, and a month later, that was made abundantly clear. She tried to hide it, at first, disappearing into loose clothing or covering up with a welding apron, only admitting the truth in hushed conferences with Juliet, throwing herself into her work until every waking moment was full of some solitary task or another, until the day when Gwen approached her -- of course, it would be Gwen who noticed -- and asked who the father was.
Gwen, dear, sympathetic Gwen tried to respect her silence, discuss options with a certain feminist delicacy that, under any other circumstances, Suzie would've been mildly amused by. Gwen always did have a talent for preaching to the choir. But for all that it was the purest accident, there was a rightness in the whole thing that made Suzie somehow incapable of considering anything but keeping the child.
She always had been drawn to impossible things.
The knowledge filtered through Torchwood one person at a time, prompting more than one heated argument with Jack about the advisability of mixing childrearing and Torchwood, a veritable rain of sarcasm from Owen, concerned looks from Sam, and Ianto's gentle but firm insistence on switching her to decaf, something which she was sure she'd never forgive him for.
Tosh was the last to speak to her, cornering her in the lounge one night as she sipped some vile health shake which both the doctors and Ianto assured her provided vital nutrition.
"It's mine, isn't it? That... It's mine." There was a quiet, pained certainty in Tosh's voice which broke Suzie's heart all over again, but her voice was steady enough when she responded.
"She," she said. "She, and yes." Suzie sipped at her shake, staring at the wall to Toshiko's right.
Tosh was silent for a moment. "You're keeping... her?" Suzie could only nod in response. "Will I... I mean... I am the..." The pause was long, the uncertainty over whether the correct term was father or mother all too obvious.
"I think the term is father," Suzie said, and perhaps her voice was sharper than she meant it to be, but it softened again at her next words. "And... That's up to you, isn't it?"
"I suppose it is." The words were said with the same quiet agreement Suzie had heard from Tosh so many times before, and for once, she couldn't quite decipher the meaning beneath the tone. "Do you... if you know it's a girl, you must have ultrasounds..."
"I've got something better," Suzie said, already going to a certain folder on her laptop. "...Do you want to see?"
Tosh nodded, silent, and Suzie called up the program she'd kludged together -- nowhere near as graceful as anything Tosh could've done, but it worked well enough to call up the images from the TARDIS's medical scanners.
"A completely three-dimensional recording, down to each individual layer of tissue," she said, magnifying the image of a tiny pink form determinedly waving its arms and legs.
Tosh remained silent for a moment, inscrutable, and when she finally spoke, there was more than a bit of awe in her voice.
"She's beautiful..."
"She gets that from you," Suzie murmured.
It was no real surprise when Tosh excused herself then, but what was surprising was the poetry. In a strange reversal of their long-ago courtship, slips of paper started finding their way into Suzie's things. Some were simple computer printouts, some were slips of parchment with kanji rendered in careful, delicate brushwork, translations provided below in Tosh's obsessively neat handwriting.
Poems about mothers and daughters, poems about life and love and family, each one, Suzie knew, researched and analyzed with the same meticulous care Tosh brought to everything else in her life.
They didn't speak, but the poems kept coming, and it was enough.
Nine months after the Rift changed Toshiko Sato in unanticipated ways, eight months and three weeks after the Rift changed her back, Suzie Costello dozed with a pink-wrapped bundle in her arms, and woke to find a familiar figure beside her.
"You never told me," Tosh said, staring intently at her hands, "just what you decided to name her."
Suzie only smiled.
This is the land of poetry and the possible -- and my daughter is named Hope.
-- From Season of Migration to the North by Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ