Ficpost, Twenty Things about Tosh
Mar. 4th, 2009 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mari4212Fandom: Torchwood
Timeline: Set late in season one, but uses season two's backstory extensively.
Characters/Ships: Everyone gets a mention, but the focus is on Tosh. Canon ships mentioned.
Wordcount: approximately 6,000
Disclaimer: The recognizable characters and settings belong to those running Doctor Who/Torchwood. Lavender is mine, as there had to be someone working as a team medic between the time Jack took over and the time he hired Owen. Brownie points if you recognize the children's novel I grabbed her name from.
Summary: These are the things that form her life.
Author's Notes: First, a big thank you to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vaudy, who put a lot of work into whipping this story into shape. Second, I have several references within this story to books and songs. I tried to go for relatively unobscure works, but if you don't catch a reference, poke me for clarification. (And with the music, I'll just point you to youtube, where all the songs are up in good versions).
1.
Her favorite color was purple. It had been ever since she was five and her grandmother had shown her how the purple crocuses and hyacinths bloomed earliest in their favorite park. Every year in the early spring, Tosh found herself wandering through whatever park was closest on her free days, waiting to see the first buds blossom. They were that little bit of hope for the future to be better than today.
She missed them for the first time when she was in UNIT custody. They held her in the cell for most of the spring, and when she counted the days and realized that she’d been there past the latest date for the flowers to bloom, that was when she finally gave up hope.
The next year, she had a window box in her flat planted with bulbs in the previous fall. When the shoots finally bloomed, it was the first time she’d felt completely safe since everything started. That night she pulled out a bottle of wine over dinner and toasted to Torchwood.
2.
Before Torchwood, before the disaster with the sonic weapon and UNIT, before Jack rescued her, her favorite poem had been “Sympathy”, by Paul Laurence Dunbar. There was a point, when she was in her cell and had been convinced that she’d never get out, where she found herself repeating the verses constantly under her breath. Ever since then, she couldn’t stand any poetry, especially that poem. It meant too much and not enough.
But sometimes she’d wake from nightmares and the stanzas would be flowing from her lips, ‘Oh, I know why the caged bird beats his wing/ till its blood is red on the cruel bars/ for he must fly back to his perch and cling/ when he fain would be on the bough aswing/ and a pain still throbs in the old, old scars/ and they pulse again with a keener sting/ I know why he beats his wing!’ Those were the nights when she wouldn’t let herself fall back to sleep, when she’d turn on the telly as loud as her flat’s soundproofing would allow, and she’d watch those stupid infomercials that said that her life would be perfect if she’d only get this vacuum, that brand of cleaner. They were stupid and annoying, but at least they were human voices, at least they were sound and light and as far away from poetry whispered in a dank cell as she could get.
3.
She wasn’t exactly shy, really. It’s just that in a room that had Jack and Suzie arguing at the top of their lungs about everything under the sun and beyond, anyone looked quiet in contrast. Even when Susie and Lavender grabbed her away during her first year to chat, their conversations tended to center on what the other two liked and were interested in, and she still found herself remaining quiet in the midst of noise. It only got louder when Lavender had her breakdown, got Retconned out, and Jack replaced her with Owen. Even when Owen didn’t say anything, he seemed to be shouting. It was easier to not try to speak up with all that noise around, easier not to try to force herself into the picture. When Ianto came, he was the first in a long time that didn’t seem to think that he constantly had to make noise to be all right. She hadn’t talked to him, really, because he had never seemed to want to chat with her. She was just relieved to not have someone else shouting at her all the time.
By the time Gwen showed up, it had just become part of how they all were, that the others made the noise all around her while she stayed quiet. It was a bit startling when Gwen started stealing her away at lunch breaks, “to have a bit of girl-talk,” as she put it. Gwen was good at drawing her out when they were on their own, good at making their talks as much about Tosh as they were about Gwen. It was a change, but a good one, she thought.
4.
Jack relaxed his rules about her communications with her mother three months into their agreement. She’d settled into a routine of placing her weekly postcard on his desk in the morning for him to approve and ship off, and he’d stare at her every time with an unreadable expression on his face. She’d been so terrified, at first, that he was debating cutting off even that narrow line of communication, the last contact she had with her old world.
Then one day, early in the morning before anyone else arrived, he came past her desk and dropped the latest card on top of her keyboard. She’d stared down at it, fighting with all her might to keep from bursting into tears right then, while he pulled his cell out and started dialing. She’d jerked her head up as the phone began to ring, horror-struck at the thought that he was sending her back to UNIT confinement. She’d gasped, her mind chasing itself in circles trying to figure out how to convince him to let her stay, when the other side of the connection picked up and he’d handed the phone to her.
Her mother’s voice on the other end stopped all thought, and she could only stare up at him in gratitude as her voice worked on automatic, greeting her mother and listening to the commonplace conversation she’d given up on hearing again. Jack just nodded at her and headed back into his office.
He didn’t say anything a half-hour later, when she returned his phone. He just grinned, the smile he only gave when everything was right with his world for a moment, and shooed her off to get back to work on the database.
5.
She fell in love with Owen for the first time five months after he came to work at Torchwood. The good and bad thing about being back in regular communication with her family was that it was so regular. She had three aunts who all live in Japan with her mother, and each of them had felt perfectly justified in calling her up at work to ask her about when she was going to stop being silly about things and settle down with a nice man.
Her eldest aunt had been the worst, with all her references to Christmas cakes being past their sell-by date, and Tosh had hung up the phone with tears of rage running down her cheeks. Jack and Suzie had been out after a possible alien artifact being sold at a pawn shop in Splott, and she’d looked up from the phone base to see Owen staring at her with the strangest look in his eyes, like he was trying to choose his words carefully.
He’d finally just grabbed her by the hand and taken her out to the local teashop. A cup and a half of tea and something ridiculously sticky and chocolate-coated to eat later, and he started joking and pulling off long, rambling rants about the weather in Cardiff and Jack’s obsession with playing 1940s dance hall music during the middle of alien autopsies. She was laughing so hard, a minute into his monologue, that she couldn’t finish her tea, she was so afraid that she’d choke on it.
After a half-hour or so, he calmed down and just talked with her. It was the first time anyone at Torchwood aside from Jack had even seemed to notice her as a person, and it meant the world to her that he’d let her rant about her family and her bitter aunts and how worried she always was about her mother. He was wonderful.
The next day, he was back to being an obnoxious little jerk about everything, but after that point, the two of them had places where they could connect and just be friends with each other. And she loved him for it.
6.
Sometimes she thought that she was a walking cliché. Really, she was a quiet Japanese woman who was good at maths and computers, but who never dated or had anyone notice her for anything other than her job skills. And she was hopelessly in love with a co-worker who barely noticed that she’s even female. If she’d been a character on the telly, she’d have been the first one of her group of friends at Uni to complain about how obnoxious the stereotypes were.
The third weekend in a row that she’d ended up alone in her flat with a glass of wine thinking about clichés and stereotypes, she went out and had her hip tattooed, just as a reminder that she wasn’t just the geek in the corner of a bad daytime soap. And of course, two weeks later a weevil had gotten the drop on her and sliced the side of her leg, a long deep gash that had absolutely required Owen to stitch it up for her.
He’d stopped his rant about not moving fast enough or just flat out ducking out of the way for a minute after getting her slacks off to stare at her hip before he’d dragged his attention back to his work, and she’d bitten her lip. It’d been clearly visible, the butterfly above the numbers 24601, and she’d had a brief moment of relief that Owen had never liked French literature or musicals enough to get the reference.
Afterwards, he’d teased her for weeks about being a rebel, but she hadn’t minded that much. She still liked the reminder that she was more than what the clichés said she could be.
7.
After Mary, Jack gave her a few days off. To clear her head, he said, and to let the others get past her mind reading.
She went home and burned the sheets that had been on the bed. She couldn’t look at them without remembering Mary. Without remembering how she’d let herself invade her friends’ privacy, how she’d compromised the Hub’s security for a lie. Without remembering that the first person she’d let into her life like that since she’d come to work at Torchwood had used her.
After the sheets were burned, she went on a cleaning binge throughout the apartment. Mary had only been there for two days, but she’d left her mark throughout. The stale smell of her cheap cigarettes had gotten into everything, and it lingered as Tosh scrubbed and vacuumed and washed everything that Mary had ever touched, had ever even looked at more than once.
Finally, three days later, with the scent of bleach so strong in the air that it finally chased away the last of the cigarette stench, Tosh let herself collapse on the couch and sob for everything that she’d thought she’d had, for everything that she’d lost with one impetuous infatuation.
8.
She envied Gwen. Gwen was so strong, so stubborn, she clung to things that everyone else had long since given up on and she had proved that it was not impossible to work for Torchwood and find love, that you didn’t have to give up on your humanity in order to protect humankind. Gwen didn’t cut her losses, had never stopped paying attention to ordinary people. Gwen refused to make the logical, big-picture, hard decisions, refused to sacrifice the few for the many. Gwen never let herself believe that life wasn’t fair.
Tosh is simultaneously amazed and infuriated by Gwen, and late at night, she wonders what it says about herself that it took Gwen coming to make her question those decisions again.
9.
Everything that happened with Suzie at the end tainted so much of Tosh’s memories of her that it was hard to remember that she’d once truly liked her. That there had once been a point where Suzie had been the one member of the team with whom Tosh always felt comfortable.
That Suzie had helped her to adapt. Had, in Tosh’s third week at Torchwood, when she was still twitching and jumping at shadows and any sudden moves around her, taken her out to eat at a decent restaurant and filled her in on all the gossip about everyone in Torchwood Three, and everything Suzie knew about what went on at Torchwoods One and Two. Had, for the year following, until Tosh had her feet firmly planted, continued to take her out on ‘girls’ nights’ with Lavender. They’d get together and chat, and grill each other on what they all had figured out about Jack, or ignore him completely in favor of discussing trashy sitcoms or stupid internet memes. Anything that wasn’t related to Torchwood or the rift.
It hurt to reconcile that Suzie, the one who had gone out of her way to make her feel accepted and safe at Torchwood, with the Suzie who murdered so many people in cold blood, with the Suzie who launched such an elaborate revenge plot against Torchwood and her father.
10.
When she worked late in the Hub, and she thought that the others had gone, Tosh liked to play music to help her think. She’d hook up her iPod into the Hub’s speakers and turn up the volume loud enough to drown out the other noises of the Hub at night, Myfanwy in the rafters, the water from the fountain splashing, Janet in the cells. Sounds that she could easily ignore during the day when the others were around, but which were not as easy to tune out when she was alone.
Her favorites to play were all musicals, ones where she knew the surrounding story enough to understand the emotions of the song, ones where she could ignore parts of the song and yet still understand it all once she started paying attention again. She’d find herself singing along almost unconsciously when certain songs hit, like “Defying Gravity” or “A Little Death,” songs that resonated with her on so may levels.
She had been halfway through a tricky bit of coding, and had been half-heartedly singing along with the female line on “Waltz for Eva and Che” when a rich tenor voice joined in as Che’s part began again. She’d jumped half out of her chair, shrieking, and grabbing at the empty space at her waist where her gun sat when she was out on a mission before she’d even processed whose voice it had been.
After a quick breath, and a stern reminder to her heart to slow down and stop trying to leap out of her chest, she turned and glared at Jack, who’d raised his hands and backed up a step, but who hadn’t stopped grinning at her, expecting her to join in with the joke.
She’d glared at him for a minute more before she smiled back. It had actually been rather funny, and she’d have laughed herself if he’d pulled something like it on one of the others. Then, instead of scolding her for staying on late, he’d pulled up another chair to her station and started quizzing her on her program. After she’d caught him up, he relaxed into his chair and watched her work, acting as another set of eyes to catch if she transposed anything while she coded. When the next duet came up, something from Miss Saigon, they automatically sang it together.
Nights like that first one became a pattern, a few times a month where she’d stay late and he’d come sit with her, and they’d sing and work together. It was comforting to have that time alone with him, time when the world wasn’t in immediate danger, and when the others weren’t also there to need attention or to look over and see what she was doing. Those nights were when she made the transition from respecting him and being loyal to him because of Torchwood and their agreement, to considering him a friend as well as her boss.
11.
She’d met the Doctor, once. When the Slitheen attacked, Jack had needed someone to cooperate with UNIT and find out what was going on. Torchwood One had been on the outs with UNIT at that point, and Jack had been ordered to send in someone to do the autopsy.
Or at least, that’s what he said had happened. Tosh was never completely sure of what exactly had gone on that day, given that Jack had ordered her to get Owen onto a train to London an hour before the alien ship even registered on their scans, let alone hit Big Ben. Jack had been so demanding, so convinced about the urgency that when she’d seen how hung-over Owen had been, she knew there wouldn’t be enough time to let him sober up enough and had gone ahead in his place.
Issues of timing aside, Jack had been right to send one of them, she knew as soon as she saw the Doctor. Meeting him drove all thought of trying to fake her way through an autopsy out of her head, even before the pig revived and ran into a hail of bullets. Someone from Torchwood One wouldn’t have hesitated to go after the Doctor instead of cooperating with him and that would have been disastrous.
But meeting him, just for that brief time before he headed out and saved the day, she could see why it was that Jack had spent so much time arguing with Yvonne about the Torchwood policy on the Doctor. Why he’d trained her to ignore what Torchwood One said and to just do whatever the Doctor asked. She’d seen the Doctor’s brilliance, and his compassion and grief for an innocent life caught up in someone else’s plots. He was awe-inspiring.
12.
After the cannibals, she took Ianto out to eat at a local vegetarian restaurant. Neither one of them could stand the thought of eating meat, not after almost being on the menu themselves.
And more, she was feeling a bit guilty. He’d been right, when he’d said that they never noticed him. She’d been just as likely to ignore him as the others were, and it felt worse for it to be her doing so, because she knew what it was like to be ignored and left on the outside looking in. She’d been the outsider all her life. How could she do that to someone else?
She was a bit awkward with him, as the meal started. It was hard to know how to start the conversation, really. It wasn’t as if they could discuss work, between it being so classified and the fact that what they’d just been through was too horrible to bear thinking about yet. Discussing anything about their personal lives was out as well; Gwen’s stupid game at the beginning of the mission had proved that. After all, she was sitting there pathetically mooning after Owen, and he was still grieving for Lisa. Striking those two topics from the conversation made it a bit awkward, they neither one of them knew enough about the other’s life or interests to jump into any other discussion easily.
In the end, it was Ianto who got the conversation going, asking her if she’d read any interesting books lately. It only took a few minutes before they hit on a few authors they both enjoyed, and they spent the next hour talking about everything from Victor Hugo’s treatment of Valjean and Javert to Pratchett’s concept of time and alternate history in the Discworld novels.
For a while, she thought that would be the end of it, that they’d had the one dinner to put each other back on level ground and that they’d both be fine after. Then came Mary, and after Tosh was over the sheer horror of it all, she remembered what she’d seen in Ianto’s thoughts. And it struck her that if she was reeling from Jack killing Mary, how much more Ianto must be dealing with, having loved Lisa for far longer. So she invited him out for another dinner, and over time it morphed into a regular thing, getting together every few weeks, or after a particularly hard incident, and helping one another through it all.
In some ways, she thought he might be her best friend.
13.
She actually was fascinated by the aliens they encountered. Not just their technology or their anatomy, but by their cultures as well, by how all of the aspects of humanity, good or bad, were reflected in the aliens they met. She loved learning about all of it, loved how this job let her do and see things she’d never dreamed of before.
And yet it was a bit isolating, being the only one who seemed to be curious about the worlds and societies outside their own. Owen and Gwen didn’t really care that much, as long as the aliens and their technology weren’t actively hurting anyone, Ianto was more focused on pragmatics versus philosophy, and Jack just acted like he’d seen all of it before. And really, with him, she couldn’t know if he hadn’t seen it all. It seemed as likely as not, given all his stories. She didn’t have anyone else who seemed like they grasped the sheer wonder of what their work meant, anyone who stared in awe at all the fantastic things they saw.
On one of their late nights together in the Hub, she mentioned it all to Jack, how much she loved their work and how much she wished she could see more, learn about everything. He went quiet then, staring off into the distance, and when she asked him what he was thinking of, he only mentioned that he wished he could introduce her to a couple of friends he’d once had, who had thought similarly.
He’d walked away shortly afterwards, and when she’d glanced over to see what he’d been looking at, all she saw was the hand he kept safe.
14.
After her first year at Torchwood, after Lavender left, Tosh sat down with the employee database and spent a quiet morning calculating out the odds of her living long enough to fulfill the next four years of her contract with Jack. The records were incomplete, and some of them didn’t include much information about the time or cause of death, but it didn’t take long for her to reach several conclusions.
The first was that, statistically, she would be dead before her 32nd birthday. Torchwood Three was a field operation, primarily, and even the more support/research team members spent a great deal of time out on missions. The average span of time a team member survived doing field missions was three years. If she spent more time than most at the Hub, doing technological support, she was likely to gain a bit more time, but even work at the Hub had its dangers.
The second conclusion was that if she didn’t die, straight off, she was likely to go mad. She could find twenty-three confirmed cases of severe mental breakdown at Torchwood Cardiff in a forty-year period, and that was with several employee files only half-recorded. Lavender was just the latest of that bunch. All of the ones who hadn’t killed themselves or someone else had been ret-conned off and sent to some form of mental hospital, though the details were a bit vague as to which one, particularly.
And the third was that there was something extraordinary about Jack. His name was listed far too often in records and cases, for far too long a period for him to be the age he looked.
When lunch hit, she closed up the employee files and deleted her calculations. She didn’t need to explain to either Jack or Suzie how dangerous this job was, nor did she need to keep around the mathematical proof for herself. And when she left work that day, she set up an appointment with a lawyer about a will. She knew Torchwood got her possessions, but she could make sure that her family received any money she had saved before her death. The next free weekend, she shipped home a few family heirlooms that she wouldn’t want stored away in a Torchwood vault for forever. She told her mother, when she asked, that there had been a series of thefts in the neighborhood, and that she wanted the family possessions in safekeeping.
From a certain point of view, that almost approached the truth.
15.
She hadn’t known what to think when she realized that Owen and Gwen were having an affair. She’d been able to ignore it for the most part, when it was Owen and Suzie having it off. Suzie had always been discreet about anything personal, and the two of them had never flung their relationship in anyone’s face.
Gwen, on the other hand, was rather the opposite of subtle when it came to things like emotions and relationships. In only a few months of knowing her, Tosh knew more than she’d ever thought anyone could about all of Gwen’s family and friends. She knew Rhys’s five favorite foods, his opinions on various sports teams, and everything about his work and the dispatcher that Gwen thought had a crush on Rhys. Tosh had had friends at Uni she hadn’t known as much about, and she’d never even met Rhys to learn all of this from him.
So it made sense, of course, that when Gwen started sleeping with Owen, she made an absolute hash of keeping it secret. And Owen had the subtlety and tact of a brick to the face, so when Gwen dropped hints or slipped when she interacted with him, he made no efforts to hide or cover it up either. Tosh had known about the two of them before she ever tried on the pendant, just from watching them over the course of a morning alternately stare at or ostentatiously ignore one another.
Besides, Owen was on to his classic behavior pattern with her when it came to women. If he was free, or he didn’t care about whatever girl he was doing this time around, he tended to be relaxed and fun around her, his jokes and his sarcastic comments aimed less at wounding her, more at actually making her relax and laugh with him. He’d grab lunch with her and tease her about going out on the pull with him. If they had time alone, they’d even just sit and talk; they’d remember how to be friends with each other, instead of just being co-workers.
But if he started getting serious to any extent about a girl, he’d clam up tight, as if he could only stand to let one person inside his barriers at any one point. He’d shove her away and his jibes would sink home towards her, as if he was proving to himself that he only cared about the other girl.
The week she noticed the two of them like that, he went above and beyond his normal levels of nastiness, especially when Gwen was anywhere near earshot.
But she hadn’t known what she should feel about them, about what they were doing. Her immediate response had been an overwhelming rush of hurt and anger, so intense that she’d done her level best to avoid interacting with anyone for the rest of the day, afraid that all her feelings would explode over the first person to talk to her.
She’d spent the next week afterwards trying her hardest to talk herself down out of her misery, reminding herself that it was none of her business, that the two of them were adults and had made their choices. And if she felt jealous and bitter about Gwen’s desire to have two men dancing attendance on her, she had work even more to remember why she herself liked Gwen so much, that Gwen genuinely did care about everyone and everything. She had to remind herself that it wasn’t that surprising that Owen was just as caught up in the charisma that Gwen exuded when you talked to her one on one. She had to remind herself how mind-blowing Torchwood was, when you first joined, and how alienating it could be to know so much that you couldn’t tell anyone. It made sense for Gwen to cling to one of her teammates to make it all make sense again. Tosh wasn’t Rhys, had never even met him, so she couldn’t even pretend that her anger was on his behalf, that she was upset that Gwen was cheating on her boyfriend. She’d have been just as miserable if Gwen had been single when it all started.
Tosh could make them make sense, but she couldn’t make it stop hurting when she saw them and saw what she’d never had from Owen.
16.
Mary hadn’t been her first female lover. She’d found other women beautiful for as long as she’d noticed men being handsome. And she’d dated Alyssa for two years before they both decided to split it off, the longest romance she’d had with anyone.
She supposed that had made some parts of it easier to deal with, long-term. It meant that she’d had at least some experience with women, that Mary’s betrayal hadn’t permanently tainted her understanding of what it was like to be in love with another woman. She could still look at a woman walking past in the street and see loveliness and grace.
But Mary did make it far harder to trust anyone to be who he or she said they were. Mary had made it even harder for Tosh to trust herself, her own judgement. She’d been proven horribly wrong when it mattered most.
17.
She was a tremendous workaholic, as any of her team would tell her at the drop of a hat, but even she liked to take a day or two off here and there. Her job was amazing, truly mind-blowing, but she knew as well as anyone that if she had tried to live at work all the time, she’d fall to pieces eventually.
So she tried to take at least a few days off a month that weren’t a direct result of getting herself beaten or sliced open, and do something with them that didn’t make her immediately think about Torchwood or aliens. She’d go to this one street that had a row of artsy shops and just wander through them all, looking at all sorts of hand-made trinkets and knick-knacks, some absolutely awful, some surprisingly good. More than one Christmas present for a member of her extended family had come out of her visits to some of those shops.
Other days, she’d head out to one of the museums in town, and again, she’d spend the day meandering through the exhibits, sometimes learning something new, but more often, just allowing her mind to lie fallow and enjoy the atmosphere, the peace that came with being in a quieter space devoted to knowledge. Oftentimes, part of an exhibit would remind her of a member of her team, even when she was trying to avoid all thoughts of Torchwood. Going to Techniquest, for example, she’d smile at the exhibits of applied science laid out for the children to play with, and she’s see a girl with Suzie’s determined expression bent over a display, trying to force it to work the way she wanted it to. She’d wander through the Impressionist collection at the National Museum and Gallery, and the colors and scenes seemed like they’d fit Gwen’s tastes.
When she caught herself thinking along those lines even on her days off, she didn’t even bother sighing or getting exasperated with herself. Torchwood had a way of making every part of your life be about it, despite all efforts to the contrary.
18.
She’d been starved for human contact in the UNIT prison, losing her sense of where her body ended from the lack of others touching her, brushing past her in the street, constantly reminding her that she was more than just her mind being carried from place to place. For those dark weeks, when she would let herself hope for rescue, release, she’d pray for someone to touch her, to remind her that she existed, and she’d promise herself that she’d reach out and make that contact.
Only, after Jack made the deal and escorted her out of the prison, he’d leaned over and brushed a hand against her shoulder. And she had shuddered, flinching away from him and tucking her head down to avoid his eyes. He’d paused for a moment, then deliberately shifted his body language away from her. For the rest of the evening, and months following, he made no movements near her personal space that he didn’t telegraph beforehand, an effort at reassurance. Later, when she knew him better and had watched him interact with the rest of the team, she was even more startled at his graceful avoidance of her triggers. Jack was very physically oriented, very tactile, and it seemed to her that all of his real communication was done through touch and posture, the way he held his body and the way he moved near you. For him to have recognized her discomfort before she had even realized it, and to have made so much of an effort to back off and come towards her on a level she could handle astounded her.
It took her years to settle back into her own skin in the way she had before her imprisonment. And always, Jack seemed to recognize her new stage of comfort before she herself did, and he inserted himself into the new space she had created for contact the moment she was ready for it, never overstepping the new boundary. Sometimes she had to wonder if she’d have ever gotten all of her acceptance of touch back if it hadn’t been for his reinforcement, his support.
19.
She bonded with Tommy her first year at Torchwood, when Jack asked her to be the one to escort him around the day they pulled him out of stasis. He was sweet and undemanding, more interested in finding out what had changed over the last year than about why she was now working at Torchwood. He was chivalrous and gentle around her, and they ended up spending a good part of the afternoon talking about everything under the sun. By the end of the day, when the time came for him to go back into cryo-stasis, they were ending each other’s sentences.
The next year, she volunteered to be on “Tommy Duty”, instead of letting it fall to Owen as the new junior member of the team. She tried to explain it to Jack as being in Tommy’s best interest, as Owen was rather volatile still, and not exactly interested in watching over anyone who wasn’t injured.
She was rather sure that Jack didn’t believe her justification any more than she herself did, but he went along with it anyway, and Tommy became her responsibility. There was something distinctly pleasant about being the center of his attention once a year, about building a friendship with someone who knew about Torchwood, but didn’t live it out day after day with her. Her annual date with him became a touchstone for her, a source of comfort and strength when everything else about her life at the Hub was insane.
And it didn’t hurt that he was rather nice to look at, and he at least seemed like he thought she was attractive as well. There’s something to be said for aesthetic appreciation.
20.
It seemed like she had always divided her life into a series of befores and afters. Her teenage years were split between her childhood in Japan and her return to England, a gulf in culture and expectations and language that was impossible to explain to anyone who had not also made a similar transition. College too had served as a barrier, moving away from her mother and finding a new home in her studies and her friendships, learning to understand the language of technology the same way she knew English and Japanese, an intuitive grasp below her conscious mind.
Then, of course, there was the greatest shift, a breaking apart of her life that resembled a bottomless chasm more than a wall. UNIT’s prison and her work at Torchwood functioned as a paradigm shift, a prism changing how she viewed every aspect of her life. UNIT broke her into a thousand different pieces, jagged shards held together by a bit of skin and the knowledge that she’d done the only thing she could have for her mother’s sake. And Torchwood gave her back her life, gave her the glue to start putting herself to rights, and told her that there was redemption and a way to make up for her impossible choice. Her team became her new family, pushing and pulling her into healing, one at a time. Jack with his understanding and compassion, Suzie with her acceptance, Owen making her laugh and showing her it was possible to fall in love, Gwen’s warmth, Ianto’s quiet fellowship. Torchwood made her whole again, her team made her like herself better than she ever had before.
In this last great change, she finally found a home to belong to.
Timeline: Set late in season one, but uses season two's backstory extensively.
Characters/Ships: Everyone gets a mention, but the focus is on Tosh. Canon ships mentioned.
Wordcount: approximately 6,000
Disclaimer: The recognizable characters and settings belong to those running Doctor Who/Torchwood. Lavender is mine, as there had to be someone working as a team medic between the time Jack took over and the time he hired Owen. Brownie points if you recognize the children's novel I grabbed her name from.
Summary: These are the things that form her life.
Author's Notes: First, a big thank you to
vaudy, who put a lot of work into whipping this story into shape. Second, I have several references within this story to books and songs. I tried to go for relatively unobscure works, but if you don't catch a reference, poke me for clarification. (And with the music, I'll just point you to youtube, where all the songs are up in good versions).1.
Her favorite color was purple. It had been ever since she was five and her grandmother had shown her how the purple crocuses and hyacinths bloomed earliest in their favorite park. Every year in the early spring, Tosh found herself wandering through whatever park was closest on her free days, waiting to see the first buds blossom. They were that little bit of hope for the future to be better than today.
She missed them for the first time when she was in UNIT custody. They held her in the cell for most of the spring, and when she counted the days and realized that she’d been there past the latest date for the flowers to bloom, that was when she finally gave up hope.
The next year, she had a window box in her flat planted with bulbs in the previous fall. When the shoots finally bloomed, it was the first time she’d felt completely safe since everything started. That night she pulled out a bottle of wine over dinner and toasted to Torchwood.
2.
Before Torchwood, before the disaster with the sonic weapon and UNIT, before Jack rescued her, her favorite poem had been “Sympathy”, by Paul Laurence Dunbar. There was a point, when she was in her cell and had been convinced that she’d never get out, where she found herself repeating the verses constantly under her breath. Ever since then, she couldn’t stand any poetry, especially that poem. It meant too much and not enough.
But sometimes she’d wake from nightmares and the stanzas would be flowing from her lips, ‘Oh, I know why the caged bird beats his wing/ till its blood is red on the cruel bars/ for he must fly back to his perch and cling/ when he fain would be on the bough aswing/ and a pain still throbs in the old, old scars/ and they pulse again with a keener sting/ I know why he beats his wing!’ Those were the nights when she wouldn’t let herself fall back to sleep, when she’d turn on the telly as loud as her flat’s soundproofing would allow, and she’d watch those stupid infomercials that said that her life would be perfect if she’d only get this vacuum, that brand of cleaner. They were stupid and annoying, but at least they were human voices, at least they were sound and light and as far away from poetry whispered in a dank cell as she could get.
3.
She wasn’t exactly shy, really. It’s just that in a room that had Jack and Suzie arguing at the top of their lungs about everything under the sun and beyond, anyone looked quiet in contrast. Even when Susie and Lavender grabbed her away during her first year to chat, their conversations tended to center on what the other two liked and were interested in, and she still found herself remaining quiet in the midst of noise. It only got louder when Lavender had her breakdown, got Retconned out, and Jack replaced her with Owen. Even when Owen didn’t say anything, he seemed to be shouting. It was easier to not try to speak up with all that noise around, easier not to try to force herself into the picture. When Ianto came, he was the first in a long time that didn’t seem to think that he constantly had to make noise to be all right. She hadn’t talked to him, really, because he had never seemed to want to chat with her. She was just relieved to not have someone else shouting at her all the time.
By the time Gwen showed up, it had just become part of how they all were, that the others made the noise all around her while she stayed quiet. It was a bit startling when Gwen started stealing her away at lunch breaks, “to have a bit of girl-talk,” as she put it. Gwen was good at drawing her out when they were on their own, good at making their talks as much about Tosh as they were about Gwen. It was a change, but a good one, she thought.
4.
Jack relaxed his rules about her communications with her mother three months into their agreement. She’d settled into a routine of placing her weekly postcard on his desk in the morning for him to approve and ship off, and he’d stare at her every time with an unreadable expression on his face. She’d been so terrified, at first, that he was debating cutting off even that narrow line of communication, the last contact she had with her old world.
Then one day, early in the morning before anyone else arrived, he came past her desk and dropped the latest card on top of her keyboard. She’d stared down at it, fighting with all her might to keep from bursting into tears right then, while he pulled his cell out and started dialing. She’d jerked her head up as the phone began to ring, horror-struck at the thought that he was sending her back to UNIT confinement. She’d gasped, her mind chasing itself in circles trying to figure out how to convince him to let her stay, when the other side of the connection picked up and he’d handed the phone to her.
Her mother’s voice on the other end stopped all thought, and she could only stare up at him in gratitude as her voice worked on automatic, greeting her mother and listening to the commonplace conversation she’d given up on hearing again. Jack just nodded at her and headed back into his office.
He didn’t say anything a half-hour later, when she returned his phone. He just grinned, the smile he only gave when everything was right with his world for a moment, and shooed her off to get back to work on the database.
5.
She fell in love with Owen for the first time five months after he came to work at Torchwood. The good and bad thing about being back in regular communication with her family was that it was so regular. She had three aunts who all live in Japan with her mother, and each of them had felt perfectly justified in calling her up at work to ask her about when she was going to stop being silly about things and settle down with a nice man.
Her eldest aunt had been the worst, with all her references to Christmas cakes being past their sell-by date, and Tosh had hung up the phone with tears of rage running down her cheeks. Jack and Suzie had been out after a possible alien artifact being sold at a pawn shop in Splott, and she’d looked up from the phone base to see Owen staring at her with the strangest look in his eyes, like he was trying to choose his words carefully.
He’d finally just grabbed her by the hand and taken her out to the local teashop. A cup and a half of tea and something ridiculously sticky and chocolate-coated to eat later, and he started joking and pulling off long, rambling rants about the weather in Cardiff and Jack’s obsession with playing 1940s dance hall music during the middle of alien autopsies. She was laughing so hard, a minute into his monologue, that she couldn’t finish her tea, she was so afraid that she’d choke on it.
After a half-hour or so, he calmed down and just talked with her. It was the first time anyone at Torchwood aside from Jack had even seemed to notice her as a person, and it meant the world to her that he’d let her rant about her family and her bitter aunts and how worried she always was about her mother. He was wonderful.
The next day, he was back to being an obnoxious little jerk about everything, but after that point, the two of them had places where they could connect and just be friends with each other. And she loved him for it.
6.
Sometimes she thought that she was a walking cliché. Really, she was a quiet Japanese woman who was good at maths and computers, but who never dated or had anyone notice her for anything other than her job skills. And she was hopelessly in love with a co-worker who barely noticed that she’s even female. If she’d been a character on the telly, she’d have been the first one of her group of friends at Uni to complain about how obnoxious the stereotypes were.
The third weekend in a row that she’d ended up alone in her flat with a glass of wine thinking about clichés and stereotypes, she went out and had her hip tattooed, just as a reminder that she wasn’t just the geek in the corner of a bad daytime soap. And of course, two weeks later a weevil had gotten the drop on her and sliced the side of her leg, a long deep gash that had absolutely required Owen to stitch it up for her.
He’d stopped his rant about not moving fast enough or just flat out ducking out of the way for a minute after getting her slacks off to stare at her hip before he’d dragged his attention back to his work, and she’d bitten her lip. It’d been clearly visible, the butterfly above the numbers 24601, and she’d had a brief moment of relief that Owen had never liked French literature or musicals enough to get the reference.
Afterwards, he’d teased her for weeks about being a rebel, but she hadn’t minded that much. She still liked the reminder that she was more than what the clichés said she could be.
7.
After Mary, Jack gave her a few days off. To clear her head, he said, and to let the others get past her mind reading.
She went home and burned the sheets that had been on the bed. She couldn’t look at them without remembering Mary. Without remembering how she’d let herself invade her friends’ privacy, how she’d compromised the Hub’s security for a lie. Without remembering that the first person she’d let into her life like that since she’d come to work at Torchwood had used her.
After the sheets were burned, she went on a cleaning binge throughout the apartment. Mary had only been there for two days, but she’d left her mark throughout. The stale smell of her cheap cigarettes had gotten into everything, and it lingered as Tosh scrubbed and vacuumed and washed everything that Mary had ever touched, had ever even looked at more than once.
Finally, three days later, with the scent of bleach so strong in the air that it finally chased away the last of the cigarette stench, Tosh let herself collapse on the couch and sob for everything that she’d thought she’d had, for everything that she’d lost with one impetuous infatuation.
8.
She envied Gwen. Gwen was so strong, so stubborn, she clung to things that everyone else had long since given up on and she had proved that it was not impossible to work for Torchwood and find love, that you didn’t have to give up on your humanity in order to protect humankind. Gwen didn’t cut her losses, had never stopped paying attention to ordinary people. Gwen refused to make the logical, big-picture, hard decisions, refused to sacrifice the few for the many. Gwen never let herself believe that life wasn’t fair.
Tosh is simultaneously amazed and infuriated by Gwen, and late at night, she wonders what it says about herself that it took Gwen coming to make her question those decisions again.
9.
Everything that happened with Suzie at the end tainted so much of Tosh’s memories of her that it was hard to remember that she’d once truly liked her. That there had once been a point where Suzie had been the one member of the team with whom Tosh always felt comfortable.
That Suzie had helped her to adapt. Had, in Tosh’s third week at Torchwood, when she was still twitching and jumping at shadows and any sudden moves around her, taken her out to eat at a decent restaurant and filled her in on all the gossip about everyone in Torchwood Three, and everything Suzie knew about what went on at Torchwoods One and Two. Had, for the year following, until Tosh had her feet firmly planted, continued to take her out on ‘girls’ nights’ with Lavender. They’d get together and chat, and grill each other on what they all had figured out about Jack, or ignore him completely in favor of discussing trashy sitcoms or stupid internet memes. Anything that wasn’t related to Torchwood or the rift.
It hurt to reconcile that Suzie, the one who had gone out of her way to make her feel accepted and safe at Torchwood, with the Suzie who murdered so many people in cold blood, with the Suzie who launched such an elaborate revenge plot against Torchwood and her father.
10.
When she worked late in the Hub, and she thought that the others had gone, Tosh liked to play music to help her think. She’d hook up her iPod into the Hub’s speakers and turn up the volume loud enough to drown out the other noises of the Hub at night, Myfanwy in the rafters, the water from the fountain splashing, Janet in the cells. Sounds that she could easily ignore during the day when the others were around, but which were not as easy to tune out when she was alone.
Her favorites to play were all musicals, ones where she knew the surrounding story enough to understand the emotions of the song, ones where she could ignore parts of the song and yet still understand it all once she started paying attention again. She’d find herself singing along almost unconsciously when certain songs hit, like “Defying Gravity” or “A Little Death,” songs that resonated with her on so may levels.
She had been halfway through a tricky bit of coding, and had been half-heartedly singing along with the female line on “Waltz for Eva and Che” when a rich tenor voice joined in as Che’s part began again. She’d jumped half out of her chair, shrieking, and grabbing at the empty space at her waist where her gun sat when she was out on a mission before she’d even processed whose voice it had been.
After a quick breath, and a stern reminder to her heart to slow down and stop trying to leap out of her chest, she turned and glared at Jack, who’d raised his hands and backed up a step, but who hadn’t stopped grinning at her, expecting her to join in with the joke.
She’d glared at him for a minute more before she smiled back. It had actually been rather funny, and she’d have laughed herself if he’d pulled something like it on one of the others. Then, instead of scolding her for staying on late, he’d pulled up another chair to her station and started quizzing her on her program. After she’d caught him up, he relaxed into his chair and watched her work, acting as another set of eyes to catch if she transposed anything while she coded. When the next duet came up, something from Miss Saigon, they automatically sang it together.
Nights like that first one became a pattern, a few times a month where she’d stay late and he’d come sit with her, and they’d sing and work together. It was comforting to have that time alone with him, time when the world wasn’t in immediate danger, and when the others weren’t also there to need attention or to look over and see what she was doing. Those nights were when she made the transition from respecting him and being loyal to him because of Torchwood and their agreement, to considering him a friend as well as her boss.
11.
She’d met the Doctor, once. When the Slitheen attacked, Jack had needed someone to cooperate with UNIT and find out what was going on. Torchwood One had been on the outs with UNIT at that point, and Jack had been ordered to send in someone to do the autopsy.
Or at least, that’s what he said had happened. Tosh was never completely sure of what exactly had gone on that day, given that Jack had ordered her to get Owen onto a train to London an hour before the alien ship even registered on their scans, let alone hit Big Ben. Jack had been so demanding, so convinced about the urgency that when she’d seen how hung-over Owen had been, she knew there wouldn’t be enough time to let him sober up enough and had gone ahead in his place.
Issues of timing aside, Jack had been right to send one of them, she knew as soon as she saw the Doctor. Meeting him drove all thought of trying to fake her way through an autopsy out of her head, even before the pig revived and ran into a hail of bullets. Someone from Torchwood One wouldn’t have hesitated to go after the Doctor instead of cooperating with him and that would have been disastrous.
But meeting him, just for that brief time before he headed out and saved the day, she could see why it was that Jack had spent so much time arguing with Yvonne about the Torchwood policy on the Doctor. Why he’d trained her to ignore what Torchwood One said and to just do whatever the Doctor asked. She’d seen the Doctor’s brilliance, and his compassion and grief for an innocent life caught up in someone else’s plots. He was awe-inspiring.
12.
After the cannibals, she took Ianto out to eat at a local vegetarian restaurant. Neither one of them could stand the thought of eating meat, not after almost being on the menu themselves.
And more, she was feeling a bit guilty. He’d been right, when he’d said that they never noticed him. She’d been just as likely to ignore him as the others were, and it felt worse for it to be her doing so, because she knew what it was like to be ignored and left on the outside looking in. She’d been the outsider all her life. How could she do that to someone else?
She was a bit awkward with him, as the meal started. It was hard to know how to start the conversation, really. It wasn’t as if they could discuss work, between it being so classified and the fact that what they’d just been through was too horrible to bear thinking about yet. Discussing anything about their personal lives was out as well; Gwen’s stupid game at the beginning of the mission had proved that. After all, she was sitting there pathetically mooning after Owen, and he was still grieving for Lisa. Striking those two topics from the conversation made it a bit awkward, they neither one of them knew enough about the other’s life or interests to jump into any other discussion easily.
In the end, it was Ianto who got the conversation going, asking her if she’d read any interesting books lately. It only took a few minutes before they hit on a few authors they both enjoyed, and they spent the next hour talking about everything from Victor Hugo’s treatment of Valjean and Javert to Pratchett’s concept of time and alternate history in the Discworld novels.
For a while, she thought that would be the end of it, that they’d had the one dinner to put each other back on level ground and that they’d both be fine after. Then came Mary, and after Tosh was over the sheer horror of it all, she remembered what she’d seen in Ianto’s thoughts. And it struck her that if she was reeling from Jack killing Mary, how much more Ianto must be dealing with, having loved Lisa for far longer. So she invited him out for another dinner, and over time it morphed into a regular thing, getting together every few weeks, or after a particularly hard incident, and helping one another through it all.
In some ways, she thought he might be her best friend.
13.
She actually was fascinated by the aliens they encountered. Not just their technology or their anatomy, but by their cultures as well, by how all of the aspects of humanity, good or bad, were reflected in the aliens they met. She loved learning about all of it, loved how this job let her do and see things she’d never dreamed of before.
And yet it was a bit isolating, being the only one who seemed to be curious about the worlds and societies outside their own. Owen and Gwen didn’t really care that much, as long as the aliens and their technology weren’t actively hurting anyone, Ianto was more focused on pragmatics versus philosophy, and Jack just acted like he’d seen all of it before. And really, with him, she couldn’t know if he hadn’t seen it all. It seemed as likely as not, given all his stories. She didn’t have anyone else who seemed like they grasped the sheer wonder of what their work meant, anyone who stared in awe at all the fantastic things they saw.
On one of their late nights together in the Hub, she mentioned it all to Jack, how much she loved their work and how much she wished she could see more, learn about everything. He went quiet then, staring off into the distance, and when she asked him what he was thinking of, he only mentioned that he wished he could introduce her to a couple of friends he’d once had, who had thought similarly.
He’d walked away shortly afterwards, and when she’d glanced over to see what he’d been looking at, all she saw was the hand he kept safe.
14.
After her first year at Torchwood, after Lavender left, Tosh sat down with the employee database and spent a quiet morning calculating out the odds of her living long enough to fulfill the next four years of her contract with Jack. The records were incomplete, and some of them didn’t include much information about the time or cause of death, but it didn’t take long for her to reach several conclusions.
The first was that, statistically, she would be dead before her 32nd birthday. Torchwood Three was a field operation, primarily, and even the more support/research team members spent a great deal of time out on missions. The average span of time a team member survived doing field missions was three years. If she spent more time than most at the Hub, doing technological support, she was likely to gain a bit more time, but even work at the Hub had its dangers.
The second conclusion was that if she didn’t die, straight off, she was likely to go mad. She could find twenty-three confirmed cases of severe mental breakdown at Torchwood Cardiff in a forty-year period, and that was with several employee files only half-recorded. Lavender was just the latest of that bunch. All of the ones who hadn’t killed themselves or someone else had been ret-conned off and sent to some form of mental hospital, though the details were a bit vague as to which one, particularly.
And the third was that there was something extraordinary about Jack. His name was listed far too often in records and cases, for far too long a period for him to be the age he looked.
When lunch hit, she closed up the employee files and deleted her calculations. She didn’t need to explain to either Jack or Suzie how dangerous this job was, nor did she need to keep around the mathematical proof for herself. And when she left work that day, she set up an appointment with a lawyer about a will. She knew Torchwood got her possessions, but she could make sure that her family received any money she had saved before her death. The next free weekend, she shipped home a few family heirlooms that she wouldn’t want stored away in a Torchwood vault for forever. She told her mother, when she asked, that there had been a series of thefts in the neighborhood, and that she wanted the family possessions in safekeeping.
From a certain point of view, that almost approached the truth.
15.
She hadn’t known what to think when she realized that Owen and Gwen were having an affair. She’d been able to ignore it for the most part, when it was Owen and Suzie having it off. Suzie had always been discreet about anything personal, and the two of them had never flung their relationship in anyone’s face.
Gwen, on the other hand, was rather the opposite of subtle when it came to things like emotions and relationships. In only a few months of knowing her, Tosh knew more than she’d ever thought anyone could about all of Gwen’s family and friends. She knew Rhys’s five favorite foods, his opinions on various sports teams, and everything about his work and the dispatcher that Gwen thought had a crush on Rhys. Tosh had had friends at Uni she hadn’t known as much about, and she’d never even met Rhys to learn all of this from him.
So it made sense, of course, that when Gwen started sleeping with Owen, she made an absolute hash of keeping it secret. And Owen had the subtlety and tact of a brick to the face, so when Gwen dropped hints or slipped when she interacted with him, he made no efforts to hide or cover it up either. Tosh had known about the two of them before she ever tried on the pendant, just from watching them over the course of a morning alternately stare at or ostentatiously ignore one another.
Besides, Owen was on to his classic behavior pattern with her when it came to women. If he was free, or he didn’t care about whatever girl he was doing this time around, he tended to be relaxed and fun around her, his jokes and his sarcastic comments aimed less at wounding her, more at actually making her relax and laugh with him. He’d grab lunch with her and tease her about going out on the pull with him. If they had time alone, they’d even just sit and talk; they’d remember how to be friends with each other, instead of just being co-workers.
But if he started getting serious to any extent about a girl, he’d clam up tight, as if he could only stand to let one person inside his barriers at any one point. He’d shove her away and his jibes would sink home towards her, as if he was proving to himself that he only cared about the other girl.
The week she noticed the two of them like that, he went above and beyond his normal levels of nastiness, especially when Gwen was anywhere near earshot.
But she hadn’t known what she should feel about them, about what they were doing. Her immediate response had been an overwhelming rush of hurt and anger, so intense that she’d done her level best to avoid interacting with anyone for the rest of the day, afraid that all her feelings would explode over the first person to talk to her.
She’d spent the next week afterwards trying her hardest to talk herself down out of her misery, reminding herself that it was none of her business, that the two of them were adults and had made their choices. And if she felt jealous and bitter about Gwen’s desire to have two men dancing attendance on her, she had work even more to remember why she herself liked Gwen so much, that Gwen genuinely did care about everyone and everything. She had to remind herself that it wasn’t that surprising that Owen was just as caught up in the charisma that Gwen exuded when you talked to her one on one. She had to remind herself how mind-blowing Torchwood was, when you first joined, and how alienating it could be to know so much that you couldn’t tell anyone. It made sense for Gwen to cling to one of her teammates to make it all make sense again. Tosh wasn’t Rhys, had never even met him, so she couldn’t even pretend that her anger was on his behalf, that she was upset that Gwen was cheating on her boyfriend. She’d have been just as miserable if Gwen had been single when it all started.
Tosh could make them make sense, but she couldn’t make it stop hurting when she saw them and saw what she’d never had from Owen.
16.
Mary hadn’t been her first female lover. She’d found other women beautiful for as long as she’d noticed men being handsome. And she’d dated Alyssa for two years before they both decided to split it off, the longest romance she’d had with anyone.
She supposed that had made some parts of it easier to deal with, long-term. It meant that she’d had at least some experience with women, that Mary’s betrayal hadn’t permanently tainted her understanding of what it was like to be in love with another woman. She could still look at a woman walking past in the street and see loveliness and grace.
But Mary did make it far harder to trust anyone to be who he or she said they were. Mary had made it even harder for Tosh to trust herself, her own judgement. She’d been proven horribly wrong when it mattered most.
17.
She was a tremendous workaholic, as any of her team would tell her at the drop of a hat, but even she liked to take a day or two off here and there. Her job was amazing, truly mind-blowing, but she knew as well as anyone that if she had tried to live at work all the time, she’d fall to pieces eventually.
So she tried to take at least a few days off a month that weren’t a direct result of getting herself beaten or sliced open, and do something with them that didn’t make her immediately think about Torchwood or aliens. She’d go to this one street that had a row of artsy shops and just wander through them all, looking at all sorts of hand-made trinkets and knick-knacks, some absolutely awful, some surprisingly good. More than one Christmas present for a member of her extended family had come out of her visits to some of those shops.
Other days, she’d head out to one of the museums in town, and again, she’d spend the day meandering through the exhibits, sometimes learning something new, but more often, just allowing her mind to lie fallow and enjoy the atmosphere, the peace that came with being in a quieter space devoted to knowledge. Oftentimes, part of an exhibit would remind her of a member of her team, even when she was trying to avoid all thoughts of Torchwood. Going to Techniquest, for example, she’d smile at the exhibits of applied science laid out for the children to play with, and she’s see a girl with Suzie’s determined expression bent over a display, trying to force it to work the way she wanted it to. She’d wander through the Impressionist collection at the National Museum and Gallery, and the colors and scenes seemed like they’d fit Gwen’s tastes.
When she caught herself thinking along those lines even on her days off, she didn’t even bother sighing or getting exasperated with herself. Torchwood had a way of making every part of your life be about it, despite all efforts to the contrary.
18.
She’d been starved for human contact in the UNIT prison, losing her sense of where her body ended from the lack of others touching her, brushing past her in the street, constantly reminding her that she was more than just her mind being carried from place to place. For those dark weeks, when she would let herself hope for rescue, release, she’d pray for someone to touch her, to remind her that she existed, and she’d promise herself that she’d reach out and make that contact.
Only, after Jack made the deal and escorted her out of the prison, he’d leaned over and brushed a hand against her shoulder. And she had shuddered, flinching away from him and tucking her head down to avoid his eyes. He’d paused for a moment, then deliberately shifted his body language away from her. For the rest of the evening, and months following, he made no movements near her personal space that he didn’t telegraph beforehand, an effort at reassurance. Later, when she knew him better and had watched him interact with the rest of the team, she was even more startled at his graceful avoidance of her triggers. Jack was very physically oriented, very tactile, and it seemed to her that all of his real communication was done through touch and posture, the way he held his body and the way he moved near you. For him to have recognized her discomfort before she had even realized it, and to have made so much of an effort to back off and come towards her on a level she could handle astounded her.
It took her years to settle back into her own skin in the way she had before her imprisonment. And always, Jack seemed to recognize her new stage of comfort before she herself did, and he inserted himself into the new space she had created for contact the moment she was ready for it, never overstepping the new boundary. Sometimes she had to wonder if she’d have ever gotten all of her acceptance of touch back if it hadn’t been for his reinforcement, his support.
19.
She bonded with Tommy her first year at Torchwood, when Jack asked her to be the one to escort him around the day they pulled him out of stasis. He was sweet and undemanding, more interested in finding out what had changed over the last year than about why she was now working at Torchwood. He was chivalrous and gentle around her, and they ended up spending a good part of the afternoon talking about everything under the sun. By the end of the day, when the time came for him to go back into cryo-stasis, they were ending each other’s sentences.
The next year, she volunteered to be on “Tommy Duty”, instead of letting it fall to Owen as the new junior member of the team. She tried to explain it to Jack as being in Tommy’s best interest, as Owen was rather volatile still, and not exactly interested in watching over anyone who wasn’t injured.
She was rather sure that Jack didn’t believe her justification any more than she herself did, but he went along with it anyway, and Tommy became her responsibility. There was something distinctly pleasant about being the center of his attention once a year, about building a friendship with someone who knew about Torchwood, but didn’t live it out day after day with her. Her annual date with him became a touchstone for her, a source of comfort and strength when everything else about her life at the Hub was insane.
And it didn’t hurt that he was rather nice to look at, and he at least seemed like he thought she was attractive as well. There’s something to be said for aesthetic appreciation.
20.
It seemed like she had always divided her life into a series of befores and afters. Her teenage years were split between her childhood in Japan and her return to England, a gulf in culture and expectations and language that was impossible to explain to anyone who had not also made a similar transition. College too had served as a barrier, moving away from her mother and finding a new home in her studies and her friendships, learning to understand the language of technology the same way she knew English and Japanese, an intuitive grasp below her conscious mind.
Then, of course, there was the greatest shift, a breaking apart of her life that resembled a bottomless chasm more than a wall. UNIT’s prison and her work at Torchwood functioned as a paradigm shift, a prism changing how she viewed every aspect of her life. UNIT broke her into a thousand different pieces, jagged shards held together by a bit of skin and the knowledge that she’d done the only thing she could have for her mother’s sake. And Torchwood gave her back her life, gave her the glue to start putting herself to rights, and told her that there was redemption and a way to make up for her impossible choice. Her team became her new family, pushing and pulling her into healing, one at a time. Jack with his understanding and compassion, Suzie with her acceptance, Owen making her laugh and showing her it was possible to fall in love, Gwen’s warmth, Ianto’s quiet fellowship. Torchwood made her whole again, her team made her like herself better than she ever had before.
In this last great change, she finally found a home to belong to.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 04:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 05:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 05:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 06:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 06:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 01:33 pm (UTC)But I am glad you enjoyed the fic.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 07:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 01:02 pm (UTC)Her eldest aunt had been the worst, with all her references to Christmas cakes being past their sell-by date...
That is so, so likely. Wow, this is so true to Tosh.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 01:37 pm (UTC)That is so, so likely. Wow, this is so true to Tosh.
I haven't studied that much of Japanese culture, but that nugget stuck in my brain, and it definitely fit for Tosh. Her family seems relatively traditional on other aspects.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-06 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-06 12:34 am (UTC)I am glad you liked the story.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-06 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 11:46 pm (UTC)(and if I guess "Matilda" would I be right?)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-06 12:24 am (UTC)(and if I guess "Matilda" would I be right?)
Bingo!