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badly_knitted ([personal profile] badly_knitted) wrote in [community profile] fandomweekly2025-03-28 02:27 pm

[#254] Unintentional Victory (Torchwood)


Theme Prompt: #254 – Unexpected Success
Title: Unintentional Victory
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating/Warnings: PG
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 1000
Summary: Jack and Ianto had only wanted to help, but now they seemed to be in over their heads.



“It wasn’t supposed to work!” Ianto said, rubbing the back of his neck, frustration colouring his tone. “It was supposed to be a complete and utter failure, so both sides would finally listen, and do what we suggested in the first place!”

“I know that!” Jack snapped, equally frustrated.

“So now what are we supposed to do? I mean, it was your dumb idea!”

“Dumb? It worked, didn’t it?”

“Exactly! It worked, so now we’re about to achieve a tremendous victory we don’t even want!”

Jack opened his mouth to say something else, then shut it again, sighing and raking one hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up. He slumped into the nearest chair, eyes closed, looking as weary and defeated as Ianto felt. Ianto sat too, sinking into his own whirling thoughts.

He and Jack had helped a lot of people in their travels, mostly individual, families, or small groups. Maybe they’d got above themselves, taking their successes thus far as proof that they could fix anything, that nothing was too big a challenge for two immortals and their TARDIS. But they weren’t the Doctor, they didn’t have knowledge of all time and space, or the wisdom of the Time Lords, and now it looked like they were in over their heads. What on earth, or off earth in this case, had they been thinking?

Maybe they hadn’t been thinking at all, just reacting, wanting to stop a war before it tore an entire planet apart. Too many people on both sides had already died, and over what? One not particularly interesting little island that straddled the equator in the middle of the narrowest channel between the planet’s North and South Continents. The people of this planet were so unimaginative, that was literally what they called their two great nations: North Continent, and South Continent.

To make matters worse, they were all one race of people, a race that had lived in perfect harmony with each other until a little over a hundred and twenty of their planetary years ago, when the shifting of tectonic plates, accompanied by volcanic activity, had destroyed the land bridge that used to connect what had now become two separate continents. All that had been left was the one small island, midway between the two halves of the now divided nation, and both sides had decided it belonged to them.

Not that either side needed it. There wasn’t a lot it could be used for, considering all it consisted of were rocks and a few trees, surrounded by beaches that were more shingle that sand. It wasn’t even any use for people travelling from one continent to the other, not that anyone was doing much of that these days except for the purpose of trying to invade each other’s land.

The planet’s inhabitants had developed air travel almost a thousand years ago, they could easily fly from one continent to the other if they didn’t want to travel by ship, and anyway the island, approximately three miles long and two wide, was the centre point of a stretch of ocean narrower than the Strait of Dover back on earth. At their current level of technology, a ferry could cross between the two landmasses in less than two hours, and had regularly done so before North and South had decided to go to war with each other over the contested island.

Having arrived on the planet and learned of the frankly ridiculous situation, Jack and Ianto, wanting to end the bloodshed, had gathered the governors and their generals from both continents, brought them into the TARDIS, and tried to negotiate a peace treaty between the two sides over coffee and cake. Anything to stop the two factions from bombing one another back to their planetary version of the stone age.

It hadn’t exactly been a roaring success.

In the absence of their leaders, the two sides had decided to ignore the ceasefire, and fired missiles from their respective coasts, all but obliterating two coastal cities, one on each side of the channel.

At that point, Jack had totally lost his temper, shouting at the generals that they needed to make their troops stand down before anyone else died.

“What are you even fighting over? Some tiny scrap of land that’s of no use to anybody! If you can’t come to an agreement either to share it, or to declare it off limits to everyone, why don’t you just blow the damned thing up so no one can have it?”

To be fair to Jack, it hadn’t even been a serious suggestion, just a random outburst borne of frustration over how pig-headed these particular people were being. Unfortunately, as noted before, this race of aliens were not blessed with much in the way of imagination, and had clearly never considered the idea before. Now they embraced it wholeheartedly. With nothing to fight over, perhaps they could go back to being peaceful neighbours, travelling back and forth across the channel at will.

“What a wonderful idea! Let’s do that!” both leaders had decided, their generals nodding along with surprising enthusiasm.

The problem was, destroying an island, even a relatively small one, by blowing it up was likely to cause more problems than it solved, such as earth tremors, tidal waves, possibly a resumption of the seismic activity that had created the situation in the first place. And even if the island was successfully destroyed, that was unlikely to repair the rift that had developed between the two sides. They’d just find another reason to fight each other, and Jack and Ianto would once again be left trying to broker peace between the two halves of an unwillingly separated nation.

“Look,” Jack said eventually. “What’s done is done. Let’s figure out a way to… remove the island without causing more harm, then when we’ve got everyone’s attention, we can sit down with them again and try to come up with a way of creating lasting peace.”


The End
 
peaceful_sands: butterfly (Default)

[personal profile] peaceful_sands 2025-03-28 11:22 pm (UTC)(link)
Politicians! What they needed was to talk to the ‘normal population’, surely they’d have been more reasonable- or at least you’d hope. Not sure even the Doctor could have fixed this one. Well done with the story - it’s a good one.
quicksilverfox3: (Default)

[personal profile] quicksilverfox3 2025-04-02 08:42 am (UTC)(link)
Oh dear, diplomacy is a tricky thing and Jack couldn’t have been expected to be taken up on his “suggestion” of blowing up the island.

[personal profile] yoshishisha 2025-04-03 12:56 am (UTC)(link)
So their plan was too good? Ianto cannot catch a break XD Gotta admit that sounds like the least bad solution in this case