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fandomweekly2024-11-17 10:33 am
m_findlow) wrote in fandomweekly2024-11-17 10:33 am
Entry tags:
[#240] CROSSROADS (TORCHWOOD)
Theme Prompt: #240 - Future
Title: Crossroads
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating/Warnings:PG
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 1,000 words
Summary: Ianto is trapped in the mystery of his own continued existence.
Ianto allowed himself a brief grin of smugness as the lock on the door came free. Everything else around here might have been high tech, but the door to the roof of the apartment block was still good old fashioned lock and key, and whilst out of practice, there wasn’t a lock mechanism in Cardiff that Ianto couldn’t pick with the right tools and enough perseverance. Or maybe it was just that nobody ever came up here and so couldn’t care less whether it was secure or not.
He closed the door behind him and breathed a sigh of relief. Alone at last, or at least that's how it felt. He had no doubt that he was being monitored every time he came and went from the apartment building and that they were scrutinising what he was streaming on his television at night. They were probably able to tell every time he moved from room to room, automatically setting on lights and logging what time his kettle boiled. They didn’t trust him, he was sure, and maybe they didn’t trust anybody, but they trusted him least of all. Perhaps in their shoes, he might feel the same.
Up here it was eerily silent. He’d stood on many a rooftop and was used to the sound of cars going by down below him. He could still see the snaking headlights but these cars with their hydrogen fuel cells made no sound unless the night was wet, and even then it was only the swish of tyres on the wet road. There were no horns honked from angry Welshmen who'd been cut in front of, because there was no cutting in front. The driverless cars simply went about their business in polite cooperation. Most people didn't even seem to own a car as far as he could tell. You just picked one up from wherever you happened to be and got in. They were as ubiquitous as the e-scooters that had littered the streets back in his own time.
In his own time. That was the thought that was hardest to grapple with. How could six hundred years have simply gone by? He’d been in stasis, brought back only now, not because there was a cure for the illness he’d had – that had existed for four centuries – but because he’d been forgotten until now and someone had stumbled on his body and brought it back. Beyond being ill, he couldn't remember much at all about what had happened, much less why he would have agreed to be put into suspended animation until a cure could be found. That wasn’t in his nature. If his time was up, then he was okay with it. He’d always known he’d die young. All he could think was that Jack had somehow convinced him.
Jack. the name stuck in his throat, trying to choke him as he swallowed it back down. Jack was gone and, according to Torchwood’s records, had been for hundreds of years. Why? Why go to the trouble of trying to preserve Ianto? Maybe Jack had moved on, or just forgotten that Ianto had ever existed. Ianto has tried to find out more about it, but every time he made a request for files on Jack and Gwen, Owen and Toshiko, he was denied on account of that being “classified”. How could knowing anything about the people he’d worked with right up until his last moments in the twenty-first century be classified?
That was Torchwood, of course, he knew, and Torchwood now was nothing like what it had been. It scared him a little, just how powerful an organisation it had become. Their sole purpose now was not the defence of the planet, but rather its offensive capabilities and how it might further its reach across the universe. Where once he might have wandered down to the edge of the bay and stood watching the water lap at the sea wall to calm his mind, now it was an impenetrable militarised zone. Everything for two miles, radiating out from the place where the water tower had once stood, marking the centre of the hub and the rift machine itself, was fortified and patrolled. His own security pass barely got him through the front door, let alone anywhere else within the base.
Part of his mind screamed at him, telling him to get away from it as far as possible. This was not his Torchwood, that he’d loved working for, and eventually had been in charge of. Strangely no one seemed to know that. His files were silent on his promotion to the head of the organisation, which was troubling. Had Jack deleted those files to keep him safe? He was certain that if they’d realised he’d been anyone of importance, he wouldn't have been allowed to keep his job, relegated back to a lowly clerk. Someone had thought it important enough that Ianto’s true history be protected.
He dropped his head into his hands and his whole body shuddered. He didn’t want to be here, in this place where he didn’t know anyone and where Cardiff had become a cold, Orwellian city. Yet there was something holding him here. Jack was out there somewhere, in the vast unending universe. He couldn’t die and so that one thought – the idea that there was still one person in this world who knew him, and who he loved more than life itself – sustained something inside him. Torchwood had answers to questions he had, from how it had come to be a war machine railing against the universe to what had happened to his friends and co-workers, and how he’d ended up in this here and now, hundreds of years into a future he didn’t belong. Jack wouldn't have abandoned them to this fate without good reason, and as he stared up at the stars overhead wondering what that reason was, he could almost feel Jack’s presence out there amongst them, willing him to find the answers.
Title: Crossroads
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating/Warnings:PG
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 1,000 words
Summary: Ianto is trapped in the mystery of his own continued existence.
Ianto allowed himself a brief grin of smugness as the lock on the door came free. Everything else around here might have been high tech, but the door to the roof of the apartment block was still good old fashioned lock and key, and whilst out of practice, there wasn’t a lock mechanism in Cardiff that Ianto couldn’t pick with the right tools and enough perseverance. Or maybe it was just that nobody ever came up here and so couldn’t care less whether it was secure or not.
He closed the door behind him and breathed a sigh of relief. Alone at last, or at least that's how it felt. He had no doubt that he was being monitored every time he came and went from the apartment building and that they were scrutinising what he was streaming on his television at night. They were probably able to tell every time he moved from room to room, automatically setting on lights and logging what time his kettle boiled. They didn’t trust him, he was sure, and maybe they didn’t trust anybody, but they trusted him least of all. Perhaps in their shoes, he might feel the same.
Up here it was eerily silent. He’d stood on many a rooftop and was used to the sound of cars going by down below him. He could still see the snaking headlights but these cars with their hydrogen fuel cells made no sound unless the night was wet, and even then it was only the swish of tyres on the wet road. There were no horns honked from angry Welshmen who'd been cut in front of, because there was no cutting in front. The driverless cars simply went about their business in polite cooperation. Most people didn't even seem to own a car as far as he could tell. You just picked one up from wherever you happened to be and got in. They were as ubiquitous as the e-scooters that had littered the streets back in his own time.
In his own time. That was the thought that was hardest to grapple with. How could six hundred years have simply gone by? He’d been in stasis, brought back only now, not because there was a cure for the illness he’d had – that had existed for four centuries – but because he’d been forgotten until now and someone had stumbled on his body and brought it back. Beyond being ill, he couldn't remember much at all about what had happened, much less why he would have agreed to be put into suspended animation until a cure could be found. That wasn’t in his nature. If his time was up, then he was okay with it. He’d always known he’d die young. All he could think was that Jack had somehow convinced him.
Jack. the name stuck in his throat, trying to choke him as he swallowed it back down. Jack was gone and, according to Torchwood’s records, had been for hundreds of years. Why? Why go to the trouble of trying to preserve Ianto? Maybe Jack had moved on, or just forgotten that Ianto had ever existed. Ianto has tried to find out more about it, but every time he made a request for files on Jack and Gwen, Owen and Toshiko, he was denied on account of that being “classified”. How could knowing anything about the people he’d worked with right up until his last moments in the twenty-first century be classified?
That was Torchwood, of course, he knew, and Torchwood now was nothing like what it had been. It scared him a little, just how powerful an organisation it had become. Their sole purpose now was not the defence of the planet, but rather its offensive capabilities and how it might further its reach across the universe. Where once he might have wandered down to the edge of the bay and stood watching the water lap at the sea wall to calm his mind, now it was an impenetrable militarised zone. Everything for two miles, radiating out from the place where the water tower had once stood, marking the centre of the hub and the rift machine itself, was fortified and patrolled. His own security pass barely got him through the front door, let alone anywhere else within the base.
Part of his mind screamed at him, telling him to get away from it as far as possible. This was not his Torchwood, that he’d loved working for, and eventually had been in charge of. Strangely no one seemed to know that. His files were silent on his promotion to the head of the organisation, which was troubling. Had Jack deleted those files to keep him safe? He was certain that if they’d realised he’d been anyone of importance, he wouldn't have been allowed to keep his job, relegated back to a lowly clerk. Someone had thought it important enough that Ianto’s true history be protected.
He dropped his head into his hands and his whole body shuddered. He didn’t want to be here, in this place where he didn’t know anyone and where Cardiff had become a cold, Orwellian city. Yet there was something holding him here. Jack was out there somewhere, in the vast unending universe. He couldn’t die and so that one thought – the idea that there was still one person in this world who knew him, and who he loved more than life itself – sustained something inside him. Torchwood had answers to questions he had, from how it had come to be a war machine railing against the universe to what had happened to his friends and co-workers, and how he’d ended up in this here and now, hundreds of years into a future he didn’t belong. Jack wouldn't have abandoned them to this fate without good reason, and as he stared up at the stars overhead wondering what that reason was, he could almost feel Jack’s presence out there amongst them, willing him to find the answers.