m_findlow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
m_findlow) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomweekly2022-08-14 05:09 pm
m_findlow) wrote in fandomweekly2022-08-14 05:09 pm
Entry tags:
[#147] ENOUGH TO BE DANGEROUS (TORCHWOOD)
Theme Prompt: #147 Trivia
Title: Enough to be dangerous
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating/Warnings: PG. Minor spoilers for audiobook “The Sin Eaters”
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 1,000 words
Summary: Ianto is paying the price for knowing too little about a lot.
‘I’m wet, and it’s cold,’ Ianto complained, setting his shoe beside him and tugging off a sock, squeezing it hard to wring the seawater out of it before reaching down to repeat the motion. He wished he could wring the rest of him the same way, but the wool and polyester blend of his suit would never be the same. Even dry cleaning was probably an exercise in futility. It needed a wet clean more than a dry clean.
He realised he was sitting in the slightly curved dish that formed part of the roof of the SUV, causing water to pool underneath him. He wriggled to the right, budging up closer to Jack as the pair of them continued to perch there, surrounded by grey green waters lapping at the SUV just six inches below them. The rest of the SUV was submerged, having spectacularly failed its first test of its amphibious capabilities.
‘We could paddle back to shore,’ Jack suggested, the seawater still clinging to the tips of his fringe and dripping occasionally onto his face or down his front.
‘And then what? Sun ourselves on the beach whilst we wait for roadside assist?’
Jack rolled his eyes at Ianto's sarcasm. ‘I did warn you it was untested.’
‘And you didn’t think that in all this time it might have been worth doing that in slightly more controlled conditions, just in case of, oh, I don't know, say an emergency?’
‘I hardly think what you were attempting counted as an emergency.’
Ianto pouted. This was what he got for prying too deeply into the hub’s secret documents, finding all of the custom specs that Jack had requested being made to the SUV when it was commissioned, and even more delightedly discovering that there were several Jack had requested to be kept off the final official spec. Not that it had stopped Ianto from finding out about them. It was the kind of thing only Ianto would be interested in - all those tantalising titbits of information the hub's archive had to offer him.
It has seemed like too good an opportunity to waste on a day like today when they were trying to track down the origins of their alien invertebrate. No traces up here on the beach or for a mile in any direction. They were coming in on the tide and so that was where Ianto wanted to lead their investigations. Admittedly, driving off into the ocean in an SUV did sound a bit mad, even if it was supposedly kitted out to do such a thing.
‘I don't suppose you got any readings before we went under,’ Ianto asked.
‘I was a little preoccupied with you trying to drown us.’
Ianto grumbled under his breath, pulling his knees to his chest as the breeze whipped up, sloshing water up and over the edge of the roof. He cast a look back at the beach, trying to gauge where the tide reached its highest point on the sand, and then realised that the tide was slowly coming in and that their precarious spot was going to shortly be overrun, putting the entire SUV under two and a half metres of Bristol Channel water.
Jack leaned back on the roof. ‘On the plus side, no midges. We can at least say that much about the absence of any insects because of our alien presence.’
Jack’s comment turned Ianto’s mind back to the reason they were out here. What was so terrifying about a tiny little alien insect that sent all of its Earth-based cousins running for the hills for at least a mile from here? Of course, they had sliced their way out of a human corpse, leaving it riddled with thousands of tiny cuts, but what did insects have to fear? It was the humans that should be worried.
‘Did you know bees are one of the few species that are part of the mile high club?’
Jack's voice distracted Ianto from his train of thought. ‘What?’
‘Bees. They mate in flight at quite a height. Of course once they do, the male does lose all his important parts and die, but hey, if you’re going to go, that's not a bad way, eh?’
‘Could we perhaps focus on more important matters? It's going to take weeks to fix the SUV, what with everything flooded with saltwater.’
Jack just shrugged him off. ‘I wasn’t the one who got us here in the first place. I assumed you knew that an amphibious modification was unlikely to work. I was being fanciful at the time. Never actually thought it’d work.’
‘Shut up.’
‘This is what you get for thinking you know everything about everything.’
Ianto bristled. ‘I do know everything!’
‘Well, not everything. You didn't know about the bees thing.’
‘I meant I know everything useful!’ Of course he did know a lot of trivial things as well. It was one of the reasons that team Torchwood had been banned from trivia night at their local pub many years ago, much to Owen's displeasure. ‘And if you didn’t think it’d work then you shouldn’t have put it on the specs.’
‘Oh look, Farmer Joe is back,’ Jack said, ignoring Ianto's barb, waving to the scruffy man who’d assumed they were here to investigate where his hive of commercial honey bees had gone. He might have earlier believed they were from the Cardiff University's department of insectology, but they were going to have a hard time explaining to him why they and their car were now stranded six metres out to sea. Ianto begrudgingly supposed that Jack's earlier lie that Ianto was learning to drive would be the explanation for it, but how bad a learner driver do you have to be to drive straight out into the ocean?
‘You need a tow?’ the farmer called out in his thick Welsh accent. ‘I’ll go fetch my tractor.’
‘Thanks!’ Jack called back. ‘Last time I let someone else drive my car!’
Title: Enough to be dangerous
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating/Warnings: PG. Minor spoilers for audiobook “The Sin Eaters”
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 1,000 words
Summary: Ianto is paying the price for knowing too little about a lot.
‘I’m wet, and it’s cold,’ Ianto complained, setting his shoe beside him and tugging off a sock, squeezing it hard to wring the seawater out of it before reaching down to repeat the motion. He wished he could wring the rest of him the same way, but the wool and polyester blend of his suit would never be the same. Even dry cleaning was probably an exercise in futility. It needed a wet clean more than a dry clean.
He realised he was sitting in the slightly curved dish that formed part of the roof of the SUV, causing water to pool underneath him. He wriggled to the right, budging up closer to Jack as the pair of them continued to perch there, surrounded by grey green waters lapping at the SUV just six inches below them. The rest of the SUV was submerged, having spectacularly failed its first test of its amphibious capabilities.
‘We could paddle back to shore,’ Jack suggested, the seawater still clinging to the tips of his fringe and dripping occasionally onto his face or down his front.
‘And then what? Sun ourselves on the beach whilst we wait for roadside assist?’
Jack rolled his eyes at Ianto's sarcasm. ‘I did warn you it was untested.’
‘And you didn’t think that in all this time it might have been worth doing that in slightly more controlled conditions, just in case of, oh, I don't know, say an emergency?’
‘I hardly think what you were attempting counted as an emergency.’
Ianto pouted. This was what he got for prying too deeply into the hub’s secret documents, finding all of the custom specs that Jack had requested being made to the SUV when it was commissioned, and even more delightedly discovering that there were several Jack had requested to be kept off the final official spec. Not that it had stopped Ianto from finding out about them. It was the kind of thing only Ianto would be interested in - all those tantalising titbits of information the hub's archive had to offer him.
It has seemed like too good an opportunity to waste on a day like today when they were trying to track down the origins of their alien invertebrate. No traces up here on the beach or for a mile in any direction. They were coming in on the tide and so that was where Ianto wanted to lead their investigations. Admittedly, driving off into the ocean in an SUV did sound a bit mad, even if it was supposedly kitted out to do such a thing.
‘I don't suppose you got any readings before we went under,’ Ianto asked.
‘I was a little preoccupied with you trying to drown us.’
Ianto grumbled under his breath, pulling his knees to his chest as the breeze whipped up, sloshing water up and over the edge of the roof. He cast a look back at the beach, trying to gauge where the tide reached its highest point on the sand, and then realised that the tide was slowly coming in and that their precarious spot was going to shortly be overrun, putting the entire SUV under two and a half metres of Bristol Channel water.
Jack leaned back on the roof. ‘On the plus side, no midges. We can at least say that much about the absence of any insects because of our alien presence.’
Jack’s comment turned Ianto’s mind back to the reason they were out here. What was so terrifying about a tiny little alien insect that sent all of its Earth-based cousins running for the hills for at least a mile from here? Of course, they had sliced their way out of a human corpse, leaving it riddled with thousands of tiny cuts, but what did insects have to fear? It was the humans that should be worried.
‘Did you know bees are one of the few species that are part of the mile high club?’
Jack's voice distracted Ianto from his train of thought. ‘What?’
‘Bees. They mate in flight at quite a height. Of course once they do, the male does lose all his important parts and die, but hey, if you’re going to go, that's not a bad way, eh?’
‘Could we perhaps focus on more important matters? It's going to take weeks to fix the SUV, what with everything flooded with saltwater.’
Jack just shrugged him off. ‘I wasn’t the one who got us here in the first place. I assumed you knew that an amphibious modification was unlikely to work. I was being fanciful at the time. Never actually thought it’d work.’
‘Shut up.’
‘This is what you get for thinking you know everything about everything.’
Ianto bristled. ‘I do know everything!’
‘Well, not everything. You didn't know about the bees thing.’
‘I meant I know everything useful!’ Of course he did know a lot of trivial things as well. It was one of the reasons that team Torchwood had been banned from trivia night at their local pub many years ago, much to Owen's displeasure. ‘And if you didn’t think it’d work then you shouldn’t have put it on the specs.’
‘Oh look, Farmer Joe is back,’ Jack said, ignoring Ianto's barb, waving to the scruffy man who’d assumed they were here to investigate where his hive of commercial honey bees had gone. He might have earlier believed they were from the Cardiff University's department of insectology, but they were going to have a hard time explaining to him why they and their car were now stranded six metres out to sea. Ianto begrudgingly supposed that Jack's earlier lie that Ianto was learning to drive would be the explanation for it, but how bad a learner driver do you have to be to drive straight out into the ocean?
‘You need a tow?’ the farmer called out in his thick Welsh accent. ‘I’ll go fetch my tractor.’
‘Thanks!’ Jack called back. ‘Last time I let someone else drive my car!’
no subject
no subject