hotaru no hikari (the light of fireflies)
FESTIVE TITLE BITCHES YO: hotaru no hikari (the light of fireflies)
RECIPIENT WHO HAD BETTER BE GRATEFUL BECAUSE I SPENT TIME THAT I COULD HAVE BEEN DRINKING WRITING THIS SHIT: xtricks (are NOT for kids!)
SUMMARY: (NOUN) A COMPREHENSIVE AND USUALLY BRIEF ABSTRACT, RECAPITULATION, OR COMPENDIUM OF PREVIOUSLY STATED FACTS OR STATEMENTS
BETA: POSSIBLY NOT FOXY. I WAS DRUNK. IT WAS DARK.
RATING: NAUGHTY (BY NATURE)
WARNING: IMMA REALLY CRAP WRITER AND YOU'RE ALL MUCH BETTER THAN ME
SPOILERS: JESUS PEOPLE IT'S JUST ABOUT THE TORCHWOOD TEAM DRINKING EGGNOG
DISCLAIMER: THEY'RE NOT MINE. EXCEPT WHEN THEY ARE. IN MAH PANTS.
He begins it to make her happy, something she wants (and maybe he wants it too), a burst of glitter to infuse the Hub, to dazzle her perspective, to cheer her in the manner one might hang a prism in a sunny room. Toshiko is tired and frightened and stressed-no slow descent into the underworld that is Torchwood for her-it had been a plummeting fall that had landed her in front of her complex workstation, a technological genius in place of an Alice, an invisible lift in place of a rabbit hole.
And so he begins it to keep her happy, something she needs (and maybe he needs it too), a brush on the back of a hand, an extra sweet wrapped in a paper serviette, a pilfered candy necklace from the corner shop. These things evolve when he becomes bolder, when he becomes more charmed by her, and he's content to be her happy magpie, bringing her trinkets, gifts: alien tech, recovered sunglasses, one time a Fendi bag, as if he is auditioning for a life role that he cannot play. It never seems to bother her, the way he touches her back, rests his chin on her shoulder, the way he opens his arms to pull her in, the way she waltzes him across the dance floor of the catwalk Hub.
It's a thing, he decides, a goof thing that they can use to feel better, about the darkness, about the rain and the bare walls they confront every day, walls that have no family pictures, walls that stretch on in bare white or cream, walls that should be painted with finger smears and smiling images of loved ones.
Which is why he doesn't feel bad then, the first night he turns her over on her desk and licks her cunt until she screams so loud they must have heard it on the Plass.
***
She begins it, to make him happy, to make her happy, to end the silence she marinates in all her days at the Hub, maybe to keep herself from being lonely. Jack, she had learnt about three hours into her employment at Torchwood, hadn't the faintest concern about the perimeters of her confinement. He signed the papers and stuffed them in a drawer and babbled about flats and cars and was her passport up to date? She might need it.
She takes his candies, his baubles. She hands him papers with illustrations that have nothing to do with aliens. He takes them to his office and writes a fairy tale for her, Once upon a time there was a very very naughty princess who liked to leave her knickers in suggestive places…. There's never any doubt in her mind that Jack is lonely, that Jack understands her, that Jack doesn't care about convention, but rather reinvention. Jack knows that there are patterns in the woodwork, in the molecules that make up her come, his spit, her fingers, his cock, their sweat. Jack gets it, more than he ever bothers to say.
Three months later, to the very day of the first time her heeled feet had settled on the metal grating right in front of her workstation, Tosh uses a cloth serviette to tie Jack's hands together. Then she diagrams every atom of her affection with her tongue.
***
Jack likes the way she sucks a lolly. He'd given them to her, and yeah, it hadn't been innocent, but she'd taken them as that, or maybe not, or maybe they just like the agreement. He doesn't even have a name for these things. She picks the brightest ones, turns her tongue blue and then covers her mouth as she interviews witnesses at a crime scene. Suzie has a few choice comments for it all, but Suzie is always secretly pleased by everything, by Jack and Toshiko when they kick her out, by Toshiko's shiny black heels and Jack's little leather collar, peeking out of the top of his button down. Suzie thinks that power play and toys and safewords and all that is nonsense.
Jack couldn't agree more, well, most of the time. Safewords, not really into them. He doesn't explain to Toshiko why she doesn't need one, and she doesn't ask. She just goes for it, and he loses track of how many times he can come in one night.
Things get heavy. He would never say that he loves her, and she'd be horrified. He likes to think that even if he could put a ring on her finger he wouldn't, and maybe that's true, but he never asks. Work is difficult. UNIT is full of dickheads. She's in desperate need of someone who can get her belly fat, if she never needed anyone (He wants to see her back arched, pregnant, legs spread on his bed, but that's one of those daydreams, like when he had been a kid and wanted a house made of candy.).
No wonder he thinks of her when he passes the Cadbury's displays.
***
It's nineteen hundred hours and Suzie is stuck in the Hub by herself. They keep meaning to hire a medic, a new one, but Jack plays the "eeny meenie miney moe" game, he says, and it takes a long long time. In the meantime, the bodies pile up, and they run on three.
Jack has bought her a present, he says, and they lay on the bed with the cards and flip through them in a matching game.
"I have them all memorised," he says, turning the corner of one on her nipple.
She raises an eyebrow. "Really."
He flips the card in two fingers and frowns. "Eye no naka noka ee-ru tai kai-o shi-ra zu," he tells her.
The clock in the foyer whistles the time. She takes the card and examines it critically. "That was possibly worse than your Welsh impression."
Jack laughs into her belly, then picks up another card. "But I know what it means! 'A well frog doesn't remember the ocean.'" When she snorts and smells the card he shrugs and dips his tongue into her navel. "I didn't say I understood it."
"It would help if you'd got it right," she whispers, fingers flipping through the deck for the matching cards. "Here--makeru waka chi. 'A loser sometimes gains'."
Jack sits up then, pulling the deck from her hands and laying out the cards on her front, down her thighs, across her belly, up over her chest. "In the spirit of things, I thought we might play the game the way it is meant to be played."
"If you want to match the sayings together with these pictures, you're going to be here all night," she teases.
Jack sets the already-matched cards on her breasts, and cocks his head. "I think, and stop me if I'm wrong, that in traditional iroha karuta, the collector gets to keep the cards he matches. Such as these two-" he pulls the cards from her breasts, feather light with the glossy surface on her skin, his lower lip between his teeth. "Oh look, there's a picture underneath," he says, waggling his eyebrows.
Oh ha. "You better hope you remember all your Japanese," she jokes. "It would be a shame if you couldn't see the whole thing."
Jack picks up a card from her thigh and the one over her navel. "Even those wearing rags can have brocade for a heart." She nods and he leans over her to kiss the bare skin of her thigh.
Tosh is impressed with his academic tenacity. Then again, his cock has incentive.
Later, they ignore the rain spattering down from the windowsill above her bed and lounge, legs tangled together, and he asks her about the pictures one by one. She explains A lump above the eye, and You can't exchange your stomach with your back. He traces the symbols with a finger and then retraces them on her neck and back.
She tells him about Osaka: heat and moistness he understands, fast cars and bridges over water and markets full of shouting people. Children playing drums in the park. A box full of sweets. A puppet play done with masks.
There are things in Osaka that she cannot tell him about, because if she starts to mention it, if she opens her mouth, the words will tumble out and curl on her chest as they lie there in bed, will weight her down and crush her. She cannot tell him of the festival when she danced as the Water Maiden. Or the times when she fell through the paper walls. She cannot tell him of the sound of the waterspout knocking in the garden in the middle of the night, of the summer rain. Of the fat happy koi in the pond outside, or how many times she fell in. The sound of crickets. Fireflies over the grass. These are all things that she thinks of in their foreignness she says, omitting the list.
"You can't get them here, so I think of them as Japanese," she says.
Jack runs a finger over the roll of her shoulder. "Mmm. Like tatami and decent teriyaki?"
She hits his chest, and it's miniscule. Jack flips back on her bed and stares at the ceiling. "Something about sand and heat," he says. "If I can't go home for it, I don't want a substitute. You know?"
Tosh looks at her hardwood floors, cold and made to be walked on with shoes.
In the morning, Jack leaves the deck on the table, cards facing up: There is a powerful man beneath.
***
Jack hires Owen, and he notices the moment Toshiko lays eyes on him that something will be shifting, which is a shame because Owen has too many reasons for never wanting to look at another woman again, not look at her and actually see her. Someday, Owen will find another girl that sets his heart on fire, but that girl isn't Toshiko, not now (If there is a window of love, Jack doesn't know how to open it, and his has long been nailed shut.).
Owen's prior grief does not keep him from sniffing around Suzie's crotch, Jack notes with disappointment and a slight bit of relief.
Toshiko might have turned her head to the left, but the rest of her remains forward, he realises when she comes to his office and places the sea salts on his desk, says "The ocean," and leaves, her black heels blocky and thick, and he finds out later that when he'd imagined what that muleheel would feel like on his chest, right over his heart, grinding the salt into his raw skin, he's imagined perfectly.
Salt and sand mix on his chest, gritty and feeling like something he can't quite prise from memory. Toshiko snaps it into focus when she bends down, in half, naked but for those heels, and runs her fingers across his forehead. "You smell like the dunes."
He comes for her then.
They are in the bathtub, the old shite Victorian one that Jack only keeps around because he'd fucked every member of Torchwood's original team in it ("It's my biggest sex trophy," he tells her, and she thinks he's charming.).
"So I have another game," she whispers from behind him, her legs wrapped around his waist. Her hand rubs the raw skin on his chest with a soft cloth and he cannot escape a nostalgic feeling, but not clever shallow nostalgia, like looking back and saying "Ah, Big Band music, that was where it was at. God I miss those USO shows." More like looking back and seeing nothing, a frosted window over a part of one's life that was so long ago that it's cordoned. Seeing images and smells, remembering sounds that could belong anywhere but for some reason in the mystery context take on layers of meaning that are trapped behind a translucent barrier.
Like shadow puppets out of focus.
"Show me your game," he says, and when she blindfolds him, he expects to be given the most expert of blowjobs ("Under!water!loving!" she always calls it with a sashay of her hips, like she's dancing to Blip-Hop.) and instead something comes under his nose. All he smells is oranges and when she brushes his lips with it, it's cold. It edges his mouth, one drop of juice hits his tender skin and that hurts in the good way. Toshiko sings something from an old pop song, something about twenty-three positions in a one night stand, and he understands when she puts the flesh of the orange to his lips for him to taste, that this is just the beginning, and she's a leisurely cat, and he has her all night.
So much for Owen.
Oranges are followed by mint, followed by jasmine, followed by leather, followed by all manner of things, twenty-three of them, maybe, he loses count. Each one is followed by a lick, a grab, the olfactory version of her Japanese card game. He'd given her a children's toy; she gives him a psych evaluation.
By the end, he's out of his skin, really, and she's in front of him, riding him, maybe that's twenty-three. Maybe that's the place he cannot go, when his hands skitter across her breasts, down to her nest of pubic hair, when he finds her clit and fucks her, pretends that she's Toshiko when she is Toshiko, maybe Toshiko to the left and he is Jack to the right.
Maybe, since she's blindfolded him, she won't mind that he imagines his ring on her finger.
***
"I never thought I'd see the day the wild Harkness was tamed," Suzie said around a brush, her hair, the back of her head and her common sense, surely. "It's like a nature special. Or a circus act."
Tosh is busy reapplying lipstick that had been removed through wear and tear. Wear. And. Tear. "You still haven't seen it," she replies, because they don't talk about this, and if they did, Tosh would feel more than happy to bring up the fact that the prior week, Owen had fucked Susie with a frozen lolly on Tosh's desk after hours and left the mess all over her paperwork.
She sometimes thinks he does this to send her messages: the discards of mindless and meaningless sex= I'm an empty shell without you; come save me from myself; I think of you when I think of strawberries, you lovely bitch.
Tosh has an active imaginary life. In it, Jack gives her away at the altar, even though her father is still alive. When she dreams this in her sleep and not at her workdesk, he fucks her down the aisle. What does that mean?
Suzie steals her lipstick and paints her mouth with it, because she's a victim of wear and tear, too. Aren't they all? Even Owen, posh little club boy, is getting ragged around the edges, as if Torchwood is a woodburner singeing away at them for artistic effect.
"Well, when was the last time you heard him talk about some hot piece of arse? Some little bint with a tight pussy?" Suzie is filtering her words through Babel-Jack, because he never says it like that.
Tosh shrugs. "I don't listen," she replies, tossing her recovered lipstick, her brush, her extra tampons in her purse.
Suzie grins. "Nope. You never do."
Tosh thinks about it all day at her desk. She makes some calls. She makes a paper airplane out of some of the information she gleans and sails it to Owen's desk, and when he reads it his face twitches and he glances at Suzie. Suspicion is always the colour orange in Tosh's head.
She makes a few more calls, then she decorates a piece of paper with a red heart and a phone number. No, the heart is too much. She starts again: a name, a number, scrolling letters, like pornocursive. A 'T' that all but says 'deep throat', a five that promises multiple orgasms, a seven that sings the praises of a tight arsehole. Then she adds a small illustration because that's what people really mean when they say pornographic.
Jack is waiting for her at his desk, because they are clockwork. She's the gear and he's the little man that pops out on the hour and does a circuit. Or maybe he's a lever and she's the clapper inside the bell. It's hard to make these things up on the spot.
"Today is a special day," she says, and his mouth quirks, because Jack doesn't forget anything, not where the extra pencils are or how many times she's said the word like in a three hour stretch (sometimes they play games when they're bored in the car).
"Thursday is always special," Jack jokes, and she sees her collar around his neck, something he doesn't always wear, but he will, just so that she can see it, even though it's as inert as a helium-filled balloon three days after the party.
She ignores his push forward on the desk, instead turning the nozzle on the helium tank, just a little. Just enough to change her voice, right? "We don't celebrate our anniversary," she says, "but if we did…." A shrug, the kind that you give to the pasty boy when he asks what kind, because they're all the same, right? "Happy Christmas," she says, though it is May. "I've a gift."
Jack cocks his head and wrangles the paper that she steers through the maze of his paperwork-logged desk with two fingers. "Oh darling," he says, smiling. "You shouldn't have."
The paper is opened, held between two fingers like a spine-cracked novel. Jack's eyebrows have a life of their own, and they are always amused. Or puzzled. Or just above her-well.
"Who is Thomas?"
Tosh crosses her arms and sits on the desk. "I got you an appointment."
"Why Toshiko," he drawls, and she's about to be treated to his Sheriff Jack impression. "You done got me a boywhore."
"Manwhore, actually," she replies unthinkingly. "I didn't want to go too young."
Jack laughs into the paper and then hits himself in the forehead with it. "If this were an anniversary," he says, "I'd ask you if you plan to join me."
Tosh sits back then on the desk, resting against a stack of paperwork and thinks about it, but she pulls a paper from her bra, because all men like to watch women fondle their breasts, and Jack has never been an exception. "I have an appointment of my own."
Jack's lower lip juts out. "Aww," he says, pulling the paper from her fingers and flipping it open. "Sweet Lucille." He leans forward. "What does she do to earn the Sweet part?"
Tosh plucks the paper from his fingers and replaces it where it belongs, and Jack looks disappointed for a split second. "I'm not quite sure, but I think it has something to do with honey and the Deep South." Her nails click on the green glass lamp shade. "I'd keep you abreast of the situation, but you're to be occupied elsewhere." She glances at the clock. "In thirty minutes, in fact."
Jack sits back, fingers steepled. "What brought on this extremely liberated and somewhat illegal offering?"
"A little bird told me he's talented," she says. "Something about a gag reflex and depilation." She shrugs. "I don't get your sexy man-on-man ways."
Jack snorts. "Bring Lucille," he says, "Sweet Lucille. Does she taste like mint juleps?" he asks when Tosh shakes her head and jumps off the desk, saunters to the door. Might as well give the man a show.
"Ladies don't kiss and tell," she says, and her Southern accent is as bad as Jack's Japanese.
Jack throws his hands up, but he's already standing and casting about for his keys, she can tell by the way his eyes sweep the desk. There they are, under a buff folder marked 'FOR YOUR EYES ONLY'. Tosh enjoys his two-step to the lift.
Lucille is her stylist. She does know all about the deep, deep South.
***
"I think," Toshiko says, as they lie on the sofa, spent and tired and covered in the dust that comes from the cushions that have all but disintegrated inside the coverings. "I think that we need to think about this."
Jack shrugs. "Okay."
Toshiko threads the filament through her fingers, making a Jacob's ladder from the alien thread they'd picked up, and Jack watches, wishes they were fucking, but now it's just fuck fuck fucking, because her heart is somewhere else, and he's in love with a pair of Welsh eyes.
Well, not love. His cock is in love. The rest of him, assuredly, will be soon to follow, like the back end of a hammer pulling the nails from the window. Right. That always works out for the best.
Toshiko's face in profile is a woodcut, and he's always liked those, reusable art, in a way. Toshiko would tell him it's sustainable, much like herself, capable of moving on and making more and being in general a beautiful thing that continues to replicate its own goodness through touch. Through existing.
She hasn't said that they need to talk about this, so he eats her out on the sofa, right under the CCTV, and saves the footage, which she will later make into a music video with Donna Summer's 'Last Dance' in her spare time. He will tell her a story and she will illustrate it, and he will hide the stapled pages in a tin box.
The Welsh boy will try to break his heart, and then an alien from another universe will actually succeed in breaking hers. She will be the hero, and then she will cry, and then he will tell her that the universe is a vast place and that there are many fish in the sea, right here on earth.
He will nudge Owen just a little, but Owen will have his own heart broken by someone else.
And so he ends it instead, as they lie there on the sofa again, this last time, and she sighs into his shoulder and says something about moving on, and he closes his eyes and visualises the Putting Away of Toshiko Sato.
He folds her in a box in his mind, just some of the memory of her, a big spacious box that he can easily lift the lid to should he feel like it (and he will, no matter how good the next lover, how sweet the future love, no two things ever taste the same), the softness of her skin, the breathiness of her voice in the morning, the quirk of her eyebrow when he begs her to release him. These things need to be packed, preserved like a wedding dress, and admired through the plastic box window.
He gives her his face full of regret, and for a split second, they both pretend that they have Mary's necklace on. Tosh thinks of Jack racing in a ship with her through the stars. Jack thinks of the same thing, but he's wearing their kid in a sling around his chest.
Tosh laughs then, falling back to the cushions. "God, I need a boyfriend."
Me too, Jack thinks, me too.
***
Three weeks after Jack has returned, and she's not surprised that he's never mentioned their previous relationship. It had been water under the bridge shortly after Ianto came to work for them, and that has been almost a year. Jack moves differently these days, and she should know, since she'd been fucking him for years.
That's petty, and Jack is never petty.
She clanks the alien tech she's working on and looks at Gwen making mooneyes at the office. She wonders if Jack would be having a similar discussion in the dead of night with a spent and sweaty Ianto on the sofa if Gwen had been available. Petty. And not true.
Jack's shadow dances on the wall of his office, out of focus. She rubs her eyes and heads to the loo, so she can stare at herself in the mirror and wonder where she is. Her lipstick is as perfect as it had been when she put it on after lunch, a symbol she would think was sad if she hadn't switched to a brand that all but dyes the lips. Still, shame that she hasn't even had the chance to test its durability.
Perhaps she needs a boywhore (manwhore).
She asks Owen out again, because she figures that she has no shame left (she never did really, not with Owen, because he's never seen her, something she suspects Jack has always known and tried to let her down gently so many times she could make a collage of those conversations in her head), and is rebuffed when he thinks she's offered to wash his car. One of these days, she'll get Ianto to accidentally schedule them together for something, and she'll just rip his pants off with her teeth.
She is thinking about that on her way out the door, so she doesn't bother to say goodnight to anyone. That’s the way it is sometimes. Her trip up the steps into the tourist office takes her past Ianto, though, who pets her arm and says something sweet and comforting, because he always ends their private conversations with a spoken "onee-san" and a silent We've both had Jack's cock everywhere.
She thinks that sometimes she wants to take Ianto away from Jack, but she'd never do that, and there's the lingering suspicion that she'd be kissing her little brother. He's younger than the boywhore.
The jar sits on the bonnet of her car when she approaches and she's about to go back and get a tech scanner from the Hub. "Accept no substitutes," Jack says from behind her and she jumps. When she turns, he is standing there in the summer twilight, shirtsleeves rolled, braces down, hands in pockets. "What d'you think?"
She picks up the jar and peers inside at the dozen or so glowing creatures within. "How did you get them?"
Jack shrugs and winks. "How did I get you? I know a guy who knows a guy." He watches her sit on the bonnet and smiles, pulling hair back from her face. "Hey."
It's not like she loves him. Not like she loves Owen, or Ianto or Gwen, or any of them, but mostly Owen. It's a rare thing. She is reminded of the time Jack had told her that just because he couldn't go home, and he knew that he shouldn't go home, didn't mean that he didn't want to. Tosh gets that.
The fireflies plink off the walls of the jar harmlessly. They crawl the glass sides, onto the underside of the lid, with its holes poked for air. Do fireflies need to breathe?
"They'll die in the jar," she says, her hands wrapped around the glass.
Jack sits down next to her and the car rocks with their combined weight. "Well then, open it."
Fireflies in Wales. Now she's seen everything. Tosh's fingers fumble on the lid because he'd screwed it on too tight, and finally he has to help her. She holds the jar out in front of her, and half of the fireflies crawl up to the lip and spread their wings, taking off and glowing in the carpark before going their separate ways. Or their same ways. Who knows the ways of fireflies?
She thinks that it's sad that they are here in the city, where there's no forest for them to play in, and then she thinks that they were brought here for her, and she's rather like a Roman watching things die for sport. Jack snorts when she says it aloud, saying something about humanity and all times and all deaths.
A firefly hovers in front of Jack's face and he reaches out in the darkness, swipes it in his massive paw and opens his hand in front of her face. A little yellow glow in his palm beats out in Morse code and then the wings flip up and it alights. "Hah."
She catches another one and lets it crawl along her palm, up the meat of her thumb, until it too leaves.
Jack takes the jar and turns it upside down, tapping the bottom with the flat of his hand. "Sometimes you have to force them to leave," he offers. The last of the bugs is stubborn and clings to the jar.
Tosh takes the jar back. "I like that one. I'll name him Jack." She swipes the firefly up on her finger, removes it, and waits for ten seconds until the thing decides to take off.
"You were gentle with Jack," Jack tells her. "I was afraid you were going to peel the glowy thing off and stick it on your ring finger."
Tosh sets the jar aside then and leans, into his arms, reaches into his trouser pocket for the sweet she knows he's placed there for her, and sighs into his dress shirt. "You know me better."
Jack's voice is an audible rainbow. "Yup. I do, Toshiko. I do."
END
RECIPIENT WHO HAD BETTER BE GRATEFUL BECAUSE I SPENT TIME THAT I COULD HAVE BEEN DRINKING WRITING THIS SHIT: xtricks (are NOT for kids!)
SUMMARY: (NOUN) A COMPREHENSIVE AND USUALLY BRIEF ABSTRACT, RECAPITULATION, OR COMPENDIUM OF PREVIOUSLY STATED FACTS OR STATEMENTS
BETA: POSSIBLY NOT FOXY. I WAS DRUNK. IT WAS DARK.
RATING: NAUGHTY (BY NATURE)
WARNING: IMMA REALLY CRAP WRITER AND YOU'RE ALL MUCH BETTER THAN ME
SPOILERS: JESUS PEOPLE IT'S JUST ABOUT THE TORCHWOOD TEAM DRINKING EGGNOG
DISCLAIMER: THEY'RE NOT MINE. EXCEPT WHEN THEY ARE. IN MAH PANTS.
He begins it to make her happy, something she wants (and maybe he wants it too), a burst of glitter to infuse the Hub, to dazzle her perspective, to cheer her in the manner one might hang a prism in a sunny room. Toshiko is tired and frightened and stressed-no slow descent into the underworld that is Torchwood for her-it had been a plummeting fall that had landed her in front of her complex workstation, a technological genius in place of an Alice, an invisible lift in place of a rabbit hole.
And so he begins it to keep her happy, something she needs (and maybe he needs it too), a brush on the back of a hand, an extra sweet wrapped in a paper serviette, a pilfered candy necklace from the corner shop. These things evolve when he becomes bolder, when he becomes more charmed by her, and he's content to be her happy magpie, bringing her trinkets, gifts: alien tech, recovered sunglasses, one time a Fendi bag, as if he is auditioning for a life role that he cannot play. It never seems to bother her, the way he touches her back, rests his chin on her shoulder, the way he opens his arms to pull her in, the way she waltzes him across the dance floor of the catwalk Hub.
It's a thing, he decides, a goof thing that they can use to feel better, about the darkness, about the rain and the bare walls they confront every day, walls that have no family pictures, walls that stretch on in bare white or cream, walls that should be painted with finger smears and smiling images of loved ones.
Which is why he doesn't feel bad then, the first night he turns her over on her desk and licks her cunt until she screams so loud they must have heard it on the Plass.
***
She begins it, to make him happy, to make her happy, to end the silence she marinates in all her days at the Hub, maybe to keep herself from being lonely. Jack, she had learnt about three hours into her employment at Torchwood, hadn't the faintest concern about the perimeters of her confinement. He signed the papers and stuffed them in a drawer and babbled about flats and cars and was her passport up to date? She might need it.
She takes his candies, his baubles. She hands him papers with illustrations that have nothing to do with aliens. He takes them to his office and writes a fairy tale for her, Once upon a time there was a very very naughty princess who liked to leave her knickers in suggestive places…. There's never any doubt in her mind that Jack is lonely, that Jack understands her, that Jack doesn't care about convention, but rather reinvention. Jack knows that there are patterns in the woodwork, in the molecules that make up her come, his spit, her fingers, his cock, their sweat. Jack gets it, more than he ever bothers to say.
Three months later, to the very day of the first time her heeled feet had settled on the metal grating right in front of her workstation, Tosh uses a cloth serviette to tie Jack's hands together. Then she diagrams every atom of her affection with her tongue.
***
Jack likes the way she sucks a lolly. He'd given them to her, and yeah, it hadn't been innocent, but she'd taken them as that, or maybe not, or maybe they just like the agreement. He doesn't even have a name for these things. She picks the brightest ones, turns her tongue blue and then covers her mouth as she interviews witnesses at a crime scene. Suzie has a few choice comments for it all, but Suzie is always secretly pleased by everything, by Jack and Toshiko when they kick her out, by Toshiko's shiny black heels and Jack's little leather collar, peeking out of the top of his button down. Suzie thinks that power play and toys and safewords and all that is nonsense.
Jack couldn't agree more, well, most of the time. Safewords, not really into them. He doesn't explain to Toshiko why she doesn't need one, and she doesn't ask. She just goes for it, and he loses track of how many times he can come in one night.
Things get heavy. He would never say that he loves her, and she'd be horrified. He likes to think that even if he could put a ring on her finger he wouldn't, and maybe that's true, but he never asks. Work is difficult. UNIT is full of dickheads. She's in desperate need of someone who can get her belly fat, if she never needed anyone (He wants to see her back arched, pregnant, legs spread on his bed, but that's one of those daydreams, like when he had been a kid and wanted a house made of candy.).
No wonder he thinks of her when he passes the Cadbury's displays.
***
It's nineteen hundred hours and Suzie is stuck in the Hub by herself. They keep meaning to hire a medic, a new one, but Jack plays the "eeny meenie miney moe" game, he says, and it takes a long long time. In the meantime, the bodies pile up, and they run on three.
Jack has bought her a present, he says, and they lay on the bed with the cards and flip through them in a matching game.
"I have them all memorised," he says, turning the corner of one on her nipple.
She raises an eyebrow. "Really."
He flips the card in two fingers and frowns. "Eye no naka noka ee-ru tai kai-o shi-ra zu," he tells her.
The clock in the foyer whistles the time. She takes the card and examines it critically. "That was possibly worse than your Welsh impression."
Jack laughs into her belly, then picks up another card. "But I know what it means! 'A well frog doesn't remember the ocean.'" When she snorts and smells the card he shrugs and dips his tongue into her navel. "I didn't say I understood it."
"It would help if you'd got it right," she whispers, fingers flipping through the deck for the matching cards. "Here--makeru waka chi. 'A loser sometimes gains'."
Jack sits up then, pulling the deck from her hands and laying out the cards on her front, down her thighs, across her belly, up over her chest. "In the spirit of things, I thought we might play the game the way it is meant to be played."
"If you want to match the sayings together with these pictures, you're going to be here all night," she teases.
Jack sets the already-matched cards on her breasts, and cocks his head. "I think, and stop me if I'm wrong, that in traditional iroha karuta, the collector gets to keep the cards he matches. Such as these two-" he pulls the cards from her breasts, feather light with the glossy surface on her skin, his lower lip between his teeth. "Oh look, there's a picture underneath," he says, waggling his eyebrows.
Oh ha. "You better hope you remember all your Japanese," she jokes. "It would be a shame if you couldn't see the whole thing."
Jack picks up a card from her thigh and the one over her navel. "Even those wearing rags can have brocade for a heart." She nods and he leans over her to kiss the bare skin of her thigh.
Tosh is impressed with his academic tenacity. Then again, his cock has incentive.
Later, they ignore the rain spattering down from the windowsill above her bed and lounge, legs tangled together, and he asks her about the pictures one by one. She explains A lump above the eye, and You can't exchange your stomach with your back. He traces the symbols with a finger and then retraces them on her neck and back.
She tells him about Osaka: heat and moistness he understands, fast cars and bridges over water and markets full of shouting people. Children playing drums in the park. A box full of sweets. A puppet play done with masks.
There are things in Osaka that she cannot tell him about, because if she starts to mention it, if she opens her mouth, the words will tumble out and curl on her chest as they lie there in bed, will weight her down and crush her. She cannot tell him of the festival when she danced as the Water Maiden. Or the times when she fell through the paper walls. She cannot tell him of the sound of the waterspout knocking in the garden in the middle of the night, of the summer rain. Of the fat happy koi in the pond outside, or how many times she fell in. The sound of crickets. Fireflies over the grass. These are all things that she thinks of in their foreignness she says, omitting the list.
"You can't get them here, so I think of them as Japanese," she says.
Jack runs a finger over the roll of her shoulder. "Mmm. Like tatami and decent teriyaki?"
She hits his chest, and it's miniscule. Jack flips back on her bed and stares at the ceiling. "Something about sand and heat," he says. "If I can't go home for it, I don't want a substitute. You know?"
Tosh looks at her hardwood floors, cold and made to be walked on with shoes.
In the morning, Jack leaves the deck on the table, cards facing up: There is a powerful man beneath.
***
Jack hires Owen, and he notices the moment Toshiko lays eyes on him that something will be shifting, which is a shame because Owen has too many reasons for never wanting to look at another woman again, not look at her and actually see her. Someday, Owen will find another girl that sets his heart on fire, but that girl isn't Toshiko, not now (If there is a window of love, Jack doesn't know how to open it, and his has long been nailed shut.).
Owen's prior grief does not keep him from sniffing around Suzie's crotch, Jack notes with disappointment and a slight bit of relief.
Toshiko might have turned her head to the left, but the rest of her remains forward, he realises when she comes to his office and places the sea salts on his desk, says "The ocean," and leaves, her black heels blocky and thick, and he finds out later that when he'd imagined what that muleheel would feel like on his chest, right over his heart, grinding the salt into his raw skin, he's imagined perfectly.
Salt and sand mix on his chest, gritty and feeling like something he can't quite prise from memory. Toshiko snaps it into focus when she bends down, in half, naked but for those heels, and runs her fingers across his forehead. "You smell like the dunes."
He comes for her then.
They are in the bathtub, the old shite Victorian one that Jack only keeps around because he'd fucked every member of Torchwood's original team in it ("It's my biggest sex trophy," he tells her, and she thinks he's charming.).
"So I have another game," she whispers from behind him, her legs wrapped around his waist. Her hand rubs the raw skin on his chest with a soft cloth and he cannot escape a nostalgic feeling, but not clever shallow nostalgia, like looking back and saying "Ah, Big Band music, that was where it was at. God I miss those USO shows." More like looking back and seeing nothing, a frosted window over a part of one's life that was so long ago that it's cordoned. Seeing images and smells, remembering sounds that could belong anywhere but for some reason in the mystery context take on layers of meaning that are trapped behind a translucent barrier.
Like shadow puppets out of focus.
"Show me your game," he says, and when she blindfolds him, he expects to be given the most expert of blowjobs ("Under!water!loving!" she always calls it with a sashay of her hips, like she's dancing to Blip-Hop.) and instead something comes under his nose. All he smells is oranges and when she brushes his lips with it, it's cold. It edges his mouth, one drop of juice hits his tender skin and that hurts in the good way. Toshiko sings something from an old pop song, something about twenty-three positions in a one night stand, and he understands when she puts the flesh of the orange to his lips for him to taste, that this is just the beginning, and she's a leisurely cat, and he has her all night.
So much for Owen.
Oranges are followed by mint, followed by jasmine, followed by leather, followed by all manner of things, twenty-three of them, maybe, he loses count. Each one is followed by a lick, a grab, the olfactory version of her Japanese card game. He'd given her a children's toy; she gives him a psych evaluation.
By the end, he's out of his skin, really, and she's in front of him, riding him, maybe that's twenty-three. Maybe that's the place he cannot go, when his hands skitter across her breasts, down to her nest of pubic hair, when he finds her clit and fucks her, pretends that she's Toshiko when she is Toshiko, maybe Toshiko to the left and he is Jack to the right.
Maybe, since she's blindfolded him, she won't mind that he imagines his ring on her finger.
***
"I never thought I'd see the day the wild Harkness was tamed," Suzie said around a brush, her hair, the back of her head and her common sense, surely. "It's like a nature special. Or a circus act."
Tosh is busy reapplying lipstick that had been removed through wear and tear. Wear. And. Tear. "You still haven't seen it," she replies, because they don't talk about this, and if they did, Tosh would feel more than happy to bring up the fact that the prior week, Owen had fucked Susie with a frozen lolly on Tosh's desk after hours and left the mess all over her paperwork.
She sometimes thinks he does this to send her messages: the discards of mindless and meaningless sex= I'm an empty shell without you; come save me from myself; I think of you when I think of strawberries, you lovely bitch.
Tosh has an active imaginary life. In it, Jack gives her away at the altar, even though her father is still alive. When she dreams this in her sleep and not at her workdesk, he fucks her down the aisle. What does that mean?
Suzie steals her lipstick and paints her mouth with it, because she's a victim of wear and tear, too. Aren't they all? Even Owen, posh little club boy, is getting ragged around the edges, as if Torchwood is a woodburner singeing away at them for artistic effect.
"Well, when was the last time you heard him talk about some hot piece of arse? Some little bint with a tight pussy?" Suzie is filtering her words through Babel-Jack, because he never says it like that.
Tosh shrugs. "I don't listen," she replies, tossing her recovered lipstick, her brush, her extra tampons in her purse.
Suzie grins. "Nope. You never do."
Tosh thinks about it all day at her desk. She makes some calls. She makes a paper airplane out of some of the information she gleans and sails it to Owen's desk, and when he reads it his face twitches and he glances at Suzie. Suspicion is always the colour orange in Tosh's head.
She makes a few more calls, then she decorates a piece of paper with a red heart and a phone number. No, the heart is too much. She starts again: a name, a number, scrolling letters, like pornocursive. A 'T' that all but says 'deep throat', a five that promises multiple orgasms, a seven that sings the praises of a tight arsehole. Then she adds a small illustration because that's what people really mean when they say pornographic.
Jack is waiting for her at his desk, because they are clockwork. She's the gear and he's the little man that pops out on the hour and does a circuit. Or maybe he's a lever and she's the clapper inside the bell. It's hard to make these things up on the spot.
"Today is a special day," she says, and his mouth quirks, because Jack doesn't forget anything, not where the extra pencils are or how many times she's said the word like in a three hour stretch (sometimes they play games when they're bored in the car).
"Thursday is always special," Jack jokes, and she sees her collar around his neck, something he doesn't always wear, but he will, just so that she can see it, even though it's as inert as a helium-filled balloon three days after the party.
She ignores his push forward on the desk, instead turning the nozzle on the helium tank, just a little. Just enough to change her voice, right? "We don't celebrate our anniversary," she says, "but if we did…." A shrug, the kind that you give to the pasty boy when he asks what kind, because they're all the same, right? "Happy Christmas," she says, though it is May. "I've a gift."
Jack cocks his head and wrangles the paper that she steers through the maze of his paperwork-logged desk with two fingers. "Oh darling," he says, smiling. "You shouldn't have."
The paper is opened, held between two fingers like a spine-cracked novel. Jack's eyebrows have a life of their own, and they are always amused. Or puzzled. Or just above her-well.
"Who is Thomas?"
Tosh crosses her arms and sits on the desk. "I got you an appointment."
"Why Toshiko," he drawls, and she's about to be treated to his Sheriff Jack impression. "You done got me a boywhore."
"Manwhore, actually," she replies unthinkingly. "I didn't want to go too young."
Jack laughs into the paper and then hits himself in the forehead with it. "If this were an anniversary," he says, "I'd ask you if you plan to join me."
Tosh sits back then on the desk, resting against a stack of paperwork and thinks about it, but she pulls a paper from her bra, because all men like to watch women fondle their breasts, and Jack has never been an exception. "I have an appointment of my own."
Jack's lower lip juts out. "Aww," he says, pulling the paper from her fingers and flipping it open. "Sweet Lucille." He leans forward. "What does she do to earn the Sweet part?"
Tosh plucks the paper from his fingers and replaces it where it belongs, and Jack looks disappointed for a split second. "I'm not quite sure, but I think it has something to do with honey and the Deep South." Her nails click on the green glass lamp shade. "I'd keep you abreast of the situation, but you're to be occupied elsewhere." She glances at the clock. "In thirty minutes, in fact."
Jack sits back, fingers steepled. "What brought on this extremely liberated and somewhat illegal offering?"
"A little bird told me he's talented," she says. "Something about a gag reflex and depilation." She shrugs. "I don't get your sexy man-on-man ways."
Jack snorts. "Bring Lucille," he says, "Sweet Lucille. Does she taste like mint juleps?" he asks when Tosh shakes her head and jumps off the desk, saunters to the door. Might as well give the man a show.
"Ladies don't kiss and tell," she says, and her Southern accent is as bad as Jack's Japanese.
Jack throws his hands up, but he's already standing and casting about for his keys, she can tell by the way his eyes sweep the desk. There they are, under a buff folder marked 'FOR YOUR EYES ONLY'. Tosh enjoys his two-step to the lift.
Lucille is her stylist. She does know all about the deep, deep South.
***
"I think," Toshiko says, as they lie on the sofa, spent and tired and covered in the dust that comes from the cushions that have all but disintegrated inside the coverings. "I think that we need to think about this."
Jack shrugs. "Okay."
Toshiko threads the filament through her fingers, making a Jacob's ladder from the alien thread they'd picked up, and Jack watches, wishes they were fucking, but now it's just fuck fuck fucking, because her heart is somewhere else, and he's in love with a pair of Welsh eyes.
Well, not love. His cock is in love. The rest of him, assuredly, will be soon to follow, like the back end of a hammer pulling the nails from the window. Right. That always works out for the best.
Toshiko's face in profile is a woodcut, and he's always liked those, reusable art, in a way. Toshiko would tell him it's sustainable, much like herself, capable of moving on and making more and being in general a beautiful thing that continues to replicate its own goodness through touch. Through existing.
She hasn't said that they need to talk about this, so he eats her out on the sofa, right under the CCTV, and saves the footage, which she will later make into a music video with Donna Summer's 'Last Dance' in her spare time. He will tell her a story and she will illustrate it, and he will hide the stapled pages in a tin box.
The Welsh boy will try to break his heart, and then an alien from another universe will actually succeed in breaking hers. She will be the hero, and then she will cry, and then he will tell her that the universe is a vast place and that there are many fish in the sea, right here on earth.
He will nudge Owen just a little, but Owen will have his own heart broken by someone else.
And so he ends it instead, as they lie there on the sofa again, this last time, and she sighs into his shoulder and says something about moving on, and he closes his eyes and visualises the Putting Away of Toshiko Sato.
He folds her in a box in his mind, just some of the memory of her, a big spacious box that he can easily lift the lid to should he feel like it (and he will, no matter how good the next lover, how sweet the future love, no two things ever taste the same), the softness of her skin, the breathiness of her voice in the morning, the quirk of her eyebrow when he begs her to release him. These things need to be packed, preserved like a wedding dress, and admired through the plastic box window.
He gives her his face full of regret, and for a split second, they both pretend that they have Mary's necklace on. Tosh thinks of Jack racing in a ship with her through the stars. Jack thinks of the same thing, but he's wearing their kid in a sling around his chest.
Tosh laughs then, falling back to the cushions. "God, I need a boyfriend."
Me too, Jack thinks, me too.
***
Three weeks after Jack has returned, and she's not surprised that he's never mentioned their previous relationship. It had been water under the bridge shortly after Ianto came to work for them, and that has been almost a year. Jack moves differently these days, and she should know, since she'd been fucking him for years.
That's petty, and Jack is never petty.
She clanks the alien tech she's working on and looks at Gwen making mooneyes at the office. She wonders if Jack would be having a similar discussion in the dead of night with a spent and sweaty Ianto on the sofa if Gwen had been available. Petty. And not true.
Jack's shadow dances on the wall of his office, out of focus. She rubs her eyes and heads to the loo, so she can stare at herself in the mirror and wonder where she is. Her lipstick is as perfect as it had been when she put it on after lunch, a symbol she would think was sad if she hadn't switched to a brand that all but dyes the lips. Still, shame that she hasn't even had the chance to test its durability.
Perhaps she needs a boywhore (manwhore).
She asks Owen out again, because she figures that she has no shame left (she never did really, not with Owen, because he's never seen her, something she suspects Jack has always known and tried to let her down gently so many times she could make a collage of those conversations in her head), and is rebuffed when he thinks she's offered to wash his car. One of these days, she'll get Ianto to accidentally schedule them together for something, and she'll just rip his pants off with her teeth.
She is thinking about that on her way out the door, so she doesn't bother to say goodnight to anyone. That’s the way it is sometimes. Her trip up the steps into the tourist office takes her past Ianto, though, who pets her arm and says something sweet and comforting, because he always ends their private conversations with a spoken "onee-san" and a silent We've both had Jack's cock everywhere.
She thinks that sometimes she wants to take Ianto away from Jack, but she'd never do that, and there's the lingering suspicion that she'd be kissing her little brother. He's younger than the boywhore.
The jar sits on the bonnet of her car when she approaches and she's about to go back and get a tech scanner from the Hub. "Accept no substitutes," Jack says from behind her and she jumps. When she turns, he is standing there in the summer twilight, shirtsleeves rolled, braces down, hands in pockets. "What d'you think?"
She picks up the jar and peers inside at the dozen or so glowing creatures within. "How did you get them?"
Jack shrugs and winks. "How did I get you? I know a guy who knows a guy." He watches her sit on the bonnet and smiles, pulling hair back from her face. "Hey."
It's not like she loves him. Not like she loves Owen, or Ianto or Gwen, or any of them, but mostly Owen. It's a rare thing. She is reminded of the time Jack had told her that just because he couldn't go home, and he knew that he shouldn't go home, didn't mean that he didn't want to. Tosh gets that.
The fireflies plink off the walls of the jar harmlessly. They crawl the glass sides, onto the underside of the lid, with its holes poked for air. Do fireflies need to breathe?
"They'll die in the jar," she says, her hands wrapped around the glass.
Jack sits down next to her and the car rocks with their combined weight. "Well then, open it."
Fireflies in Wales. Now she's seen everything. Tosh's fingers fumble on the lid because he'd screwed it on too tight, and finally he has to help her. She holds the jar out in front of her, and half of the fireflies crawl up to the lip and spread their wings, taking off and glowing in the carpark before going their separate ways. Or their same ways. Who knows the ways of fireflies?
She thinks that it's sad that they are here in the city, where there's no forest for them to play in, and then she thinks that they were brought here for her, and she's rather like a Roman watching things die for sport. Jack snorts when she says it aloud, saying something about humanity and all times and all deaths.
A firefly hovers in front of Jack's face and he reaches out in the darkness, swipes it in his massive paw and opens his hand in front of her face. A little yellow glow in his palm beats out in Morse code and then the wings flip up and it alights. "Hah."
She catches another one and lets it crawl along her palm, up the meat of her thumb, until it too leaves.
Jack takes the jar and turns it upside down, tapping the bottom with the flat of his hand. "Sometimes you have to force them to leave," he offers. The last of the bugs is stubborn and clings to the jar.
Tosh takes the jar back. "I like that one. I'll name him Jack." She swipes the firefly up on her finger, removes it, and waits for ten seconds until the thing decides to take off.
"You were gentle with Jack," Jack tells her. "I was afraid you were going to peel the glowy thing off and stick it on your ring finger."
Tosh sets the jar aside then and leans, into his arms, reaches into his trouser pocket for the sweet she knows he's placed there for her, and sighs into his dress shirt. "You know me better."
Jack's voice is an audible rainbow. "Yup. I do, Toshiko. I do."
END