Fic: On Being God 1/2 (Torchwood)
Title: On Being God (1/2)
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.b-jewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: BBC's. !mine.
Summary: You're either insane, or you're a God. When it comes to Torchwood, who can tell?
Notes: Written prior to Reset, but contains no spoilers. I started this in April 2007. That's a rate of a little over 1000 words per month. I totally fail. Also: LJ post limits suck.
It was anyone's guess what caused what Owen Harper would later disparagingly refer to as 'Toshiko's Little Episode'. Tosh, herself, would later muse on what had first sparked the insane frenzy in her brain. Maybe she'd finally had one cup of coffee too many. Maybe the stress and the strain of working for an underground alien-hunting organisation had finally gotten to her and she'd suffered some kind of psychotic break. Or maybe it had something to do with that globule of alien energy that had escaped its holding cage sometime on Thursday lunchtime.
Really, when it came to daily life as an employee of the Torchwood Institute, you couldn't be sure about anything.
**
“Really, I feel fine.” Toshiko Sato certainly looked alright, it had to be said. She looked a little uncomfortable, but then anyone who'd been thrown ten feet across the Hub to smack into a brick wall would look the same, if only because of the sure-to-be growing bruises.
She was surrounded by her Torchwood colleagues. Gwen was looking agitated, nervous, Owen was setting down the portable instrument that was a bit like a hand-held MRI, and Jack Harkness was standing off to the side, arms folded and expression unreadable.
“After giving Miss Sato a thorough physical examination,” Owen infused his words with a leer, which Tosh responded to with a roll of the eyes, “I can conclude she's fine. Nothing but bumps and bruises. No sign of a concussion or any adverse physical effects.”
Jack frowned. “So the energy didn't do anything to her?”
Owen shook his head. “Mild zap. Nothing worse than sticking your fingers in a light socket for half a second.”
“Don't people get killed sticking their fingers in light sockets?” Gwen asked.
Owen ignored her. "She's fine," he repeated, stressing the words. "Any protestations to otherwise will be entirely to avoid work, I'm sure."
Tosh rolled her eyes. "I think you're getting my work ethic confused with your lack of one."
Owen's mouth twitched into a half grin. "Ethics are for wusses and committees," he said.
Tosh sat up, shivering from the cold metal of the infirmary's laughable excuse for an examination table, and swung her legs over the side. "Right. Well, as he said, I'm fine, so I'd like to get back to things?"
Jack frowned, just a little bit, and brandished a finger at her, waving it warningly. "I want you taking it easy. No overstraining yourself, understand? You're not going anywhere near the field for the next forty-eight hours."
Toshiko sighed and shook her head. "I work with computers, Jack," she said, exasperated, "It's really not that stressful."
"Let me be the judge of that," Jack said, and shooed them all back to work.
**
Life turned to darkness and sorrow
darkness spreading outwards reaching to the edges of the void
outwards sending a seed of hope for tomorrow
**
"You are having a laugh." Gwen looked between Jack and Owen rapidly, her eyes narrowing as neither of their faces shifted into a grin. "You are," she insisted.
"What about this do you find hard to believe?" Jack seemed amused at that thought, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms.
Toshiko smiled at her co-worker's expression of disbelief and tore off the top sheet of her notepad as she finished filling it with scribblings, setting it aside to start another. She wasn't sure when the weekly 'what are we doing and how much is it costing us?' meeting had dissolved into what could be politely termed as 'winding Gwen up' but since she hadn't finished her last report on the alien iPod-type thing yet, she wasn't unhappy that the meeting had gotten off-track.
"The Greys, as in the little grey men with big heads and big eyes that American rednecks are always going on about, are actually real? But they've never actually abducted anyone?" Gwen narrowed her eyes. "You're honestly telling me those aliens are real?"
Owen leaned forward, lacing his fingers and attempting to speak in an earnest 'professorial' manner which was slightly offset by the twinkle in his eye and the grin that kept trying to pull at his lips. "When the Reticulii came to Earth to conduct their genetic profiling, turns out their amnesia medication interacted badly with Human physiology. Hence why people who hadn't spent more than five minutes on board their ship had full on hallucinations."
"Torchwood," Jack continued, picking up the narrative, "Contacted them, and asked them to nicely refrain from doing that until they'd worked out the bugs with the drugs and, by the way, would you like a hand with that in exchange for the manufacturing process."
"And that is how we got Retcon," Owen said, grinning and spreading his hands.
"You are having me on," Gwen insisted, though she looked dubious.
"Which is the part you find hard to believe?" Tosh asked, glancing up from her notes. Her fingers were cramping.
Gwen pursed her lips and sighed. "None of it. All of it? I swear to God I can't tell any more."
Jack laughed. "Took you that long to figure out why Torchwood has about thirty five percent of its workforce routinely cracking up."
Gwen blinked. "Wait, what?"
"So!" Jack leaned forward, placing his hands, palm down on the table, changing the subject and ignoring Gwen's suddenly worried expression. "Lights spotted flying around a mile down the coast. Ideas?"
"Swamp gas," Owen said, promptly, lacing his fingers together and putting it forward with an overly earnest expression.
"Five miles out to sea?"
Owen smiled. "Stranger things have happened."
Jack shook his head. "Remind me not to come to you for the next cover story we have to make up."
Owen rolled his eyes, leaning back and waving a hand. "Probably just a load of pissheads making stupid prank calls."
"Much as I hate to let Owen think he's ever right," Gwen said, giving Owen a broad grin when he gave her a mock-serious glare, "It was kicking-out at the local pub, and the police operator who took the call did think they sounded drunk."
Tosh ripped the top sheet of the notepad off and carefully set it aside, shaking out her hand to try and stave off cramp from gripping the biro too tightly. “I suppose,” she said, thoughtfully. “I can run a search. See if anything out of the ordinary turns up.” She glanced down at the pad, started writing again in neat, cramped handwriting. “I mean, out of the ordinary for us.”
“Finally, a sensible suggestion,” Jack said, clearly amused. “Go, children, to work.” He made shooing motions with his hands, and with the exchange of long suffering glances of exasperation, they all went back to their relative stations.
**
Tosh dropped onto her seat in front of her computers with a gusty sigh, stretching out the kinks that had developed in her shoulders from sitting in the conference room so long. She chewed her lip, and moved her hands across the keyboard, reallocating memory and space, shoving her active projects into the background and bringing up a new, clean screen, all ready for her search parameters.
She looked at the blankness, and frowned. Then she looked down at all the notes she'd been writing in the meeting, and shrugged to herself. She started typing, quickly filling the screen and making it scroll, and when she reached the end of the stuff she'd already written, it was somehow natural to just keep going.
She delved into her work, revelling in the purity of numbers and how much sense they made. She heard Ianto grumbling about the amount of paperwork involved in keeping a secret organisation afloat as he went into Jack's office to talk financing, and shared a giggle with Gwen about how it might all just be a cover for other activities, although Owen interjected that he could hear them from his station and unless they were really kinky and “quarterly fiscal summaries pertaining to property output” was one hell of a euphemism, they probably really were just dealing with the finances.
They all laughed, especially when they heard Ianto's voice rise on the phrase “wanton feduciary irresponsibility”, and Tosh made them all some bad coffee, though she wound up drawing a spatial arcs in some spilled milk while she waited for the water to boil. Things settled down after that, Ianto emerging from Jack's office, taking the mug she offered on his way back to the office with a mumbled thanks, a cluster of forms clutched in his hands as he muttered to himself about Owen, eBay, and the expense accounts.
The morning progressed slowly. Owen worked quietly to himself in the autopsy bay, while Gwen took care of busy work, taking time to briefly call the police to get the latest on the rumours and gossip that might lead to more work for Torchwood. Tosh, for her part, knew she had stuff to be getting on with, but every time she tried, she kept getting drawn back to her new little project, though, if anyone had asked her what she was doing, she wasn't sure she could have told them. It felt vaguely important though, almost like-
"Tosh?" It was Ianto, standing next to her desk with Gwen, who was shrugging into her jacket. "Coming to lunch?"
"Hmm?" She corrected a mistake in the figures on screen without even thinking about it, and paused, glancing up and blinking against the dimness of her surroundings. "Sorry, what was that?"
"Lunch," Ianto looked amused, "Are you coming?"
Tosh glanced at her watch and realised, with a start, what time it was. She'd barely been aware of the passage of time, and completely unaware of how hungry she was. "Oh, ah, no, I'm alright. I'll grab something from the shop later."
She turned back towards her screen, and barely heard Ianto's, "Ok then," he said, sounding amused. "We'll leave you and the computer alone with each other then."
Gwen laughed, amused, and patted Tosh on the back in farewell as the pair made their way to the exit, quietly swapping suggestions about where to go get lunch.
“Tosh?” Jack was leaning out of his office doorway as she turned at his call, fighting down a surge of irritation at the interruption. “Finished that sweep yet?”
She hadn't even started it. She felt her cheeks growing warm and turned her head slightly, hoping that her hair falling forward with the motion would hide the embarrassed flush. “Uh... not yet,” she said, fingers twitched a centimeter or so above the keyboard.
“Oh,” Jack looked a little surprised at her, but gave her a mock-stern look and a smile. “No slacking off, Miss Sato, or you'll overtake Owen as the top shirker of the Torchwood Institute.”
“Oi!” Owen's voice drifted up from the autopsy bay. Tosh would be less surprised at him hearing if she hadn't known of the weird acoustics of the Hub.
Jack grinned and winked at her, and though she found it difficult to summon the energy, she managed a wan return of the smile. “The sweep, Tosh?”
“Get right on it,” she said, nodding her head.
As Jack ducked back into his office, Tosh returned her attention to the computers, and called up the search protocols, and stopped. She quickly glanced at the list of things to check: satellite imagery, local scans, CCTV, database cross-checks, witness statements... it would take hours.
She bit her lip, and glanced back at her other screens, where reams and reams of numbers and symbols were displayed, quietly mocking her with their incomplete nature.
'Later,' she thought, 'I'll get to it later. I'll just finish a couple more lines of this equation.'
Pushing away the search screens with a broad swipe of her fingers on the screen, she brought her equations back to the fore, and, taking a deep breath, allowing the familiar feeling of calm, the one she always felt when dealing with the simplicity of maths, to overtake her, she started typing again.
**
At first, she thought the ringing was the lingering remnants of her dreams, but, as Tosh opened her eyes, staring fuzzily at the ceiling, she realised that it was coming from her bedside table. She closed her eyes against the sun making it through the closed curtains of her bed and reached out blindly for her mobile, pressing the call button and holding it to her ear.
"Hello?" her voice was croaky, and her throat felt dehydrated. She swallowed awkwardly, trying to impart some moisture to her mouth.
"Good morning, Sleeping Beauty." Lyrical Welsh phrasing. Gentle amusement. Gwen. "Did I wake you?"
"What... what time is it?" Tosh brought her phone away from her ear for a moment to squint at the time displayed on the screen. Fuck. She heard Gwen repeating the time as she replaced the phone at her ear.
She wasn't sure what time she'd arrived home last night. It had been late, she'd known that. She'd succumbed to the urge to eat, finally realising that she was starving, when Owen had been on his way out the door and suggested they grab a sandwich on the way home. She hadn't even been planning to leave the Hub, entranced by the way that the full picture of her latest idea was emerging bit by tiny bit on her screens. She couldn't help but feel she was dealing with something monumental, but she'd been so very hungry, almost shaking, and the suggestion of a sandwich had been too much to resist. So she'd gone to the late-night café with Owen, and made him laugh by drinking two overly sugary and creamy cups of coffee, as well as demolishing three sandwiches and two muffins. He'd made jokes alternately about skipping lunch and eating for two, and she hadn't even had the energy to be annoyed at him.
At that point, her home had been closer than the Hub, and how tired she was had been making itself known. She'd stuffed the napkin onto which she'd been doodling graphs into her pocket, and bought another sandwich to take home with her.
She'd stumbled in the door, eaten the sandwich and... and then...
"Owen's been making comments about you painting the town red for the last half hour," Gwen continued, "And Jack's on the verge of coming around to yours to make sure you weren't killed in your sleep. I managed to persuade them to let me call you first."
Tosh groaned, "I'll be right in," she said, "Give me twenty minutes." And she hung up the phone, struggling to a sitting position in bed.
The sound of sliding paper persuaded her to open her eyes against the bright light, and she couldn't help but freeze, a little startled, as she looked around her bedroom. She wasn't exactly certain, but she'd thought that last night, when she went to sleep, her room hadn't had every surface covered in pieces of A4, all with neatly written equations decorating them. The pages were on her bed, on the floor, and there was ink on her hand and a pen lost in the bedsheets that she found when trying to sit up and it jabbed her in the thigh.
She swiped a hand across her eyes, sweeping away the grit she felt there, and found, for a moment, that she just couldn't quite comprehend the bizarrity of what she saw. She got dressed quickly, and then, after a long moment of staring at the paper-covered vista that had been her bedroom, she quickly swept all the sheets into a pile and stuffed them into her laptop bag. She'd worry about it later.
**
“I had Ianto take care of running that sweep.”
Tosh looked up at her boss guilty as she hung her coat on the stand, and pushed her laptop bag under her desk. She ran a hand through her hair that she'd not had time to wash or brush, and tried not to grimace at the slightly greasy feel of it. She'd not managed to give even a cursory nod to makeup, and the brushing of her teeth had been only a small token gesture towards dental hygiene. In short, she absolutely felt like she didn't want to stand there under Jack Harkness' critical gaze.
“I'm sorry,” she said, feeling a guilty stab low in her stomach, “I got distracted.”
“With what?” he asked sharply.
She supposed he had a right to be concerned. Employees shirking or neglecting their duties was one of those things you had to watch out for, lest alien influence be involved somehow. Tosh had long since stopped wondering at the fact that such thoughts even occurred to her.
“I...” She debated internally as to how much exactly she should tell him. She was fairly certain that she was nearly finished with her equation, like she could see the outline of the statue as it was painstakingly carved out of marble, but she didn't know how to say it. How could she put something so wordless into phrases and sentences? When she thought of the numbers, she could taste colours and hear shapes, and it all made sense. “I've been working on some theories,” she said, finally, opting for a partial truth. “It's just this idea that's been niggling at me. I'm working through it.”
“What idea?” Jack pressed, still looking rather suspicious as he leaned against her desk in a deceptively casual manner.
“The Rift as a Universal constant.” The words leapt from her lips before she'd even concocted the thoughts to frame her explanation. She frowned, but somehow, it seemed true, so she shrugged mentally, and continued. For one, Jack's attention had suddenly sharpened. “It's a theory about how the Rift was formed by a tearing of the fabric of the time-space continuum and how it was sort of... stapled... to the underlying domain, forcing through a constant stream of high-energy particulate matter, which is why it never seems to exhaust itself, so to speak, and why it's generally one-way.” She realised she was babbling, her words running together, and took a deep breath. “Does that... make sense?”
She didn't tell him about her nocturnal scrawlings, or about how all she wanted to do was push him away from her desk and to get back to work.
Jack looked away from her for a second, staring off into space. She waited, nervously, for his response.
Finally, he turned his head back towards her, and gave her a small, distant smile. “You know,” he said, conversationally, “I'd love to see that research, once you're through with it.”
“Of course,” she said, quickly, nodding.
Jack stood up, nodding. “Fine. You get on with your research, but I wouldn't ask Ianto for any favours. He's probably still mad that you made him run that sweep.”
“You made him run that sweep,” Tosh corrected, smiling.
Jack wagged a finger at her. “Yes, but it's all your fault, really.” And with that, he sauntered away, presumably to bother one of the others.
Tosh breathed a sigh of relief, dropping heavily onto her stool. She looked at her desk, to see there was a steaming mug of tea, with a biscuit sitting next to it. She smiled to herself. Clearly Ianto wasn't that mad at her, even if he had only provided a rich tea instead of a chocolate hobnob. Nibbling at the biscuit, she brought her workstation online, and looked at the reams of numbers and code.
Hmm, she thought, as she stared at the blank gaps in the script. The Rift as an untapped well of energy, directly from the Universal source. That would make an awful lot of sense right about... there...
**
She suffered through the day's distractions. She allowed herself to be forced into the morning meeting, though if anyone noticed her twitchy distraction, and the way she kept glancing down at her computer, they were tactful enough not to mention. She continued undisturbed until lunch, when Ianto came around, saying he was going out to the shops and did anyone want anything, and she surprised him by ordering half a dozen sandwiches and enough lucazade to float a small dinghy. He didn't argue though, and she spent the afternoon munching the sandwiches and working, and when a call came in about a suspected weevil sighting, she was completely relieved when Jack made Owen go out with him to retrieve the creature, leaving her to carry on.
The passage of time seemed to lose meaning for her, though she knew she had to have been sitting there for hours, given the way her back was aching, her wrists twinging, and the fact that when she blinked, her eyes felt hot and slightly painful from the intense staring she'd been doing all day.
She nearly leapt out of her skin when she felt two hands land on her shoulders. But she didn't look away from her screen; she couldn't. She felt like she was tenuously grasping at a thin thread of an idea, and if she looked away, that thread might be lost forever.
"I hope you're not planning to stay late." Jack's American accent assaulted her ears. She didn't usually find it so grating, but for some reason, the distraction got to her on an almost physical level of irritation.
"I just need to finish this up," she said, fingers still dancing across the keyboard. She wasn't even aware, really, of what she was doing, but what was taking shape in front of her seemed so right that she didn't feel the need to stop and check.
His fingers dug into her shoulder muscles, massaging, and Tosh belatedly realised how tense they were. She didn't appreciate the diversion, however, and fought the urge to shrug him off. Jack really was the very definition of incorrigible.
“The others are all gone,” he told her, “You should go home too. Maybe get some sleep.”
“I'm fine,” she said, fighting to keep the irritation out of her voice.
"A person can work too hard," he told her. "The computer will still be here in the morning."
"It won't take me long," she insisted, and felt as well as heard him sigh.
"Alright," he said, and his hands fell away. "I'm going out for a bit. Ianto's still around, though, if you need anything."
"You don't tell him to go home?" she asked, a little tartly, feeling her lips twitch into a smile in spite of herself.
"Of course I do," she heard, "But he listens to me as much as you do." A brief touch of his fingertips against her back, and then he withdrew. She didn't relax until she heard the door rolling shut behind him, letting her get back to her numbers, and the worlds she could see taking shape before her eyes.
She was barely aware when Ianto came, hours later, to say that that he was heading out himself, muttering a goodnight to him and carrying on. Nothing mattered except the ideas forming under her fingertips. Nothing at all.
**
Ianto never slept for very long, and he'd not had cause to try for a full nights sleep since one terrible day in London, and so he'd become rather accustomed to arriving at the Hub for the day in the pre-dawn hours, when there was no one up and about except him and the pterodactyl. Occasionally, Jack was awake and lurking around the Hub somewhere, but on those days he was content to let Ianto get on with the business of sorting out the Hub for the day in peace.
Of course, there were nights when Ianto didn't leave the Hub at all, which were another matter entirely.
Today, however, Jack was nowhere to be found, but it wasn't until he stepped into the main Hub area, thumbing through overnight reports from listening satellites, comms intercepts, UNIT and other organisations, that he realised that it wasn't just him and the pterodactyl that were up that morning.
"Tosh?" he asked.
Toshiko was sitting almost exactly as he'd last seen her, at her desk, bolt upright, fingers dancing across the keyboard, eyes firmly fixed on her monitor. The only difference was that scattered around her desk were the remnants of the takeaway that the team had ordered a couple of days earlier. It looked like she'd eaten her way through the entire contents of the fridge.
He stepped up to her, picking his way over a discarded orange juice carton and picking it up between thumb and forefinger in disgust. "Have you been here all night?" he asked.
She didn't answer. If anything, she seemed to become a little agitated. She shifted on her chair, and he could hear her muttering to herself in a combination of English and Japanese. He dropped the carton into the nearest bin, and stepped close to her. "Tosh?"
She didn't answer, so he reached out and gently touched her shoulder. "Tosh?"
That seemed to break the spell. She abruptly jerked back from his touch, almost falling off her chair. She scrambled away from her desk, hands raised and fingers clenching and unclenching. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, and she didn't seem to be seeing him.
"Not big enough," she murmured. She looked like she was sweating. "Need a bigger space. Need to see it all laid out."
"Um..." Ianto was briefly at a loss as to how to deal with his friend and colleague, and was on the verge of suggesting a calm sit down on the sofa when she suddenly dove for her desk, scrabbling through the drawers until she made a small sound of triumph and ran for the door, something small clutched in her hand.
"Tosh!" Shoving his PDA in his pocket, he ran out after her.
**
The late twentieth and early twenty first centuries were characterised by chaos, Jack had been taught, with a sort of vague disapproval for the wanton excess and destruction that had characterised this key moment in Humanity's history.
He wasn't sure when, but Jack Harkness had learned to love that chaos. He found himself out, many nights, standing atop buildings with security that didn't stand up to Torchwood lock-picks, drinking in that beautiful chaos, and reminding himself exactly why they all did what they did.
Once upon a time, that hadn't been his reason for climbing buildings, and staring out across the city, but times changed, and even Jack did, even if he changed far more slowly than the rest of Humanity.
He was so distracted by the view that he almost didn't hear it when his phone started ringing. He took it out and opened it up without even glancing at the display. There weren't exactly a lot of people with his phone number in their possession. He didn't say anything, just waited for the other person to speak.
Long used to (and occasionally exasperated with) Jack's phone habits, Ianto was quick to speak. “Sir,” he ventured, sounding concerned. “I really think you better get off whichever building you've climbed on top of tonight and back to the Plass.”
Jack frowned, turning in the direction of the bay, though he was nowhere near a good enough vantage point to see anything useful. “What's going on?” Ianto didn't sound as if the end of the world was nigh, or as if he were in mortal danger, so he figured he had time to ask.
“It's about Tosh,” Ianto said, after a long pause. “She's acting a little strangely.”
Jack pursed his lips. “Strange how?”
**
So maybe Ianto had been right to call him. His subordinate barely afforded him a glance as Jack strode towards the fountain, easily able to see why Ianto had sounded so bewildered and uncertain on the phone.
Ianto shoved his hands deep into his pockets, shivering slightly in the chill of the night air. “I've rerouted CCTV, so we just have to hope that there aren't many people planning on wandering through at 5am.”
Jack nodded, not really paying attention. He was focused on Toshiko, and the way she was on her hands and knees on the paving stones, a thick piece of chalk, the sort of they used for marking up concrete, in her hands. She was muttering to herself, and using the chalk to draw out elaborate equations that now covered several square meters. With her free hand, she was keeping a woollen blanket clutched around her neck, but she didn't seem to be aware of it. Jack guessed that Ianto had forced it upon her when she hadn't come back to the Hub.
“I've been trying to follow what she's writing,” Ianto was saying, shaking his head. “But it's all way beyond me. I recognise a few bits and pieces from some Rift equations, but the rest...”
Jack wasn't much better off than Ianto. Toshiko could have been drawing cartoons of bunny rabbits for all that it was comprehensible. That grouping to his left looked a little like gravitational warp theory, while the graph Tosh was currently drawing looked like it might have been describing the ulterior curvature of nth-plane physics, but other than that, he didn't understand it. And with her twenty first century understanding of maths, Toshiko definitely shouldn't have been able to understand it either.
She looked almost feverish. She was sweating in spite of the chill of the night air, and she didn't even seem to be focusing on what she was doing. Feeling something painful grip at his heart, a fear for her, he stepped closer.
"Tosh? Toshiko?"
She didn't answer, so Jack grabbed her hands, forcing them away from the pavement. She showed no sign of the tightness of his grip, still staring at the numbers and symbols on the ground.
"Toshiko Sato," he said, putting as much force of command into his voice as he could manage.
He felt Ianto step closer, saw the hand he rested on her shoulder. "Yamete kudasai," he said, pleadingly.
Whether it was the language or her name or the physical contact, Jack couldn't know, but Tosh blinked, as if coming out of a trance, and looked at him, squinting against the orange of the street lights.
Toshiko dropped the chalk, and her fingers felt so cold they must have gone numb in the night air. “Jack?” She whispered, her voice shaky, “How did I get out here?”
Second Part
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.b-jewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: BBC's. !mine.
Summary: You're either insane, or you're a God. When it comes to Torchwood, who can tell?
Notes: Written prior to Reset, but contains no spoilers. I started this in April 2007. That's a rate of a little over 1000 words per month. I totally fail. Also: LJ post limits suck.
It was anyone's guess what caused what Owen Harper would later disparagingly refer to as 'Toshiko's Little Episode'. Tosh, herself, would later muse on what had first sparked the insane frenzy in her brain. Maybe she'd finally had one cup of coffee too many. Maybe the stress and the strain of working for an underground alien-hunting organisation had finally gotten to her and she'd suffered some kind of psychotic break. Or maybe it had something to do with that globule of alien energy that had escaped its holding cage sometime on Thursday lunchtime.
Really, when it came to daily life as an employee of the Torchwood Institute, you couldn't be sure about anything.
**
“Really, I feel fine.” Toshiko Sato certainly looked alright, it had to be said. She looked a little uncomfortable, but then anyone who'd been thrown ten feet across the Hub to smack into a brick wall would look the same, if only because of the sure-to-be growing bruises.
She was surrounded by her Torchwood colleagues. Gwen was looking agitated, nervous, Owen was setting down the portable instrument that was a bit like a hand-held MRI, and Jack Harkness was standing off to the side, arms folded and expression unreadable.
“After giving Miss Sato a thorough physical examination,” Owen infused his words with a leer, which Tosh responded to with a roll of the eyes, “I can conclude she's fine. Nothing but bumps and bruises. No sign of a concussion or any adverse physical effects.”
Jack frowned. “So the energy didn't do anything to her?”
Owen shook his head. “Mild zap. Nothing worse than sticking your fingers in a light socket for half a second.”
“Don't people get killed sticking their fingers in light sockets?” Gwen asked.
Owen ignored her. "She's fine," he repeated, stressing the words. "Any protestations to otherwise will be entirely to avoid work, I'm sure."
Tosh rolled her eyes. "I think you're getting my work ethic confused with your lack of one."
Owen's mouth twitched into a half grin. "Ethics are for wusses and committees," he said.
Tosh sat up, shivering from the cold metal of the infirmary's laughable excuse for an examination table, and swung her legs over the side. "Right. Well, as he said, I'm fine, so I'd like to get back to things?"
Jack frowned, just a little bit, and brandished a finger at her, waving it warningly. "I want you taking it easy. No overstraining yourself, understand? You're not going anywhere near the field for the next forty-eight hours."
Toshiko sighed and shook her head. "I work with computers, Jack," she said, exasperated, "It's really not that stressful."
"Let me be the judge of that," Jack said, and shooed them all back to work.
**
Life turned to darkness and sorrow
darkness spreading outwards reaching to the edges of the void
outwards sending a seed of hope for tomorrow
**
"You are having a laugh." Gwen looked between Jack and Owen rapidly, her eyes narrowing as neither of their faces shifted into a grin. "You are," she insisted.
"What about this do you find hard to believe?" Jack seemed amused at that thought, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms.
Toshiko smiled at her co-worker's expression of disbelief and tore off the top sheet of her notepad as she finished filling it with scribblings, setting it aside to start another. She wasn't sure when the weekly 'what are we doing and how much is it costing us?' meeting had dissolved into what could be politely termed as 'winding Gwen up' but since she hadn't finished her last report on the alien iPod-type thing yet, she wasn't unhappy that the meeting had gotten off-track.
"The Greys, as in the little grey men with big heads and big eyes that American rednecks are always going on about, are actually real? But they've never actually abducted anyone?" Gwen narrowed her eyes. "You're honestly telling me those aliens are real?"
Owen leaned forward, lacing his fingers and attempting to speak in an earnest 'professorial' manner which was slightly offset by the twinkle in his eye and the grin that kept trying to pull at his lips. "When the Reticulii came to Earth to conduct their genetic profiling, turns out their amnesia medication interacted badly with Human physiology. Hence why people who hadn't spent more than five minutes on board their ship had full on hallucinations."
"Torchwood," Jack continued, picking up the narrative, "Contacted them, and asked them to nicely refrain from doing that until they'd worked out the bugs with the drugs and, by the way, would you like a hand with that in exchange for the manufacturing process."
"And that is how we got Retcon," Owen said, grinning and spreading his hands.
"You are having me on," Gwen insisted, though she looked dubious.
"Which is the part you find hard to believe?" Tosh asked, glancing up from her notes. Her fingers were cramping.
Gwen pursed her lips and sighed. "None of it. All of it? I swear to God I can't tell any more."
Jack laughed. "Took you that long to figure out why Torchwood has about thirty five percent of its workforce routinely cracking up."
Gwen blinked. "Wait, what?"
"So!" Jack leaned forward, placing his hands, palm down on the table, changing the subject and ignoring Gwen's suddenly worried expression. "Lights spotted flying around a mile down the coast. Ideas?"
"Swamp gas," Owen said, promptly, lacing his fingers together and putting it forward with an overly earnest expression.
"Five miles out to sea?"
Owen smiled. "Stranger things have happened."
Jack shook his head. "Remind me not to come to you for the next cover story we have to make up."
Owen rolled his eyes, leaning back and waving a hand. "Probably just a load of pissheads making stupid prank calls."
"Much as I hate to let Owen think he's ever right," Gwen said, giving Owen a broad grin when he gave her a mock-serious glare, "It was kicking-out at the local pub, and the police operator who took the call did think they sounded drunk."
Tosh ripped the top sheet of the notepad off and carefully set it aside, shaking out her hand to try and stave off cramp from gripping the biro too tightly. “I suppose,” she said, thoughtfully. “I can run a search. See if anything out of the ordinary turns up.” She glanced down at the pad, started writing again in neat, cramped handwriting. “I mean, out of the ordinary for us.”
“Finally, a sensible suggestion,” Jack said, clearly amused. “Go, children, to work.” He made shooing motions with his hands, and with the exchange of long suffering glances of exasperation, they all went back to their relative stations.
**
Tosh dropped onto her seat in front of her computers with a gusty sigh, stretching out the kinks that had developed in her shoulders from sitting in the conference room so long. She chewed her lip, and moved her hands across the keyboard, reallocating memory and space, shoving her active projects into the background and bringing up a new, clean screen, all ready for her search parameters.
She looked at the blankness, and frowned. Then she looked down at all the notes she'd been writing in the meeting, and shrugged to herself. She started typing, quickly filling the screen and making it scroll, and when she reached the end of the stuff she'd already written, it was somehow natural to just keep going.
She delved into her work, revelling in the purity of numbers and how much sense they made. She heard Ianto grumbling about the amount of paperwork involved in keeping a secret organisation afloat as he went into Jack's office to talk financing, and shared a giggle with Gwen about how it might all just be a cover for other activities, although Owen interjected that he could hear them from his station and unless they were really kinky and “quarterly fiscal summaries pertaining to property output” was one hell of a euphemism, they probably really were just dealing with the finances.
They all laughed, especially when they heard Ianto's voice rise on the phrase “wanton feduciary irresponsibility”, and Tosh made them all some bad coffee, though she wound up drawing a spatial arcs in some spilled milk while she waited for the water to boil. Things settled down after that, Ianto emerging from Jack's office, taking the mug she offered on his way back to the office with a mumbled thanks, a cluster of forms clutched in his hands as he muttered to himself about Owen, eBay, and the expense accounts.
The morning progressed slowly. Owen worked quietly to himself in the autopsy bay, while Gwen took care of busy work, taking time to briefly call the police to get the latest on the rumours and gossip that might lead to more work for Torchwood. Tosh, for her part, knew she had stuff to be getting on with, but every time she tried, she kept getting drawn back to her new little project, though, if anyone had asked her what she was doing, she wasn't sure she could have told them. It felt vaguely important though, almost like-
"Tosh?" It was Ianto, standing next to her desk with Gwen, who was shrugging into her jacket. "Coming to lunch?"
"Hmm?" She corrected a mistake in the figures on screen without even thinking about it, and paused, glancing up and blinking against the dimness of her surroundings. "Sorry, what was that?"
"Lunch," Ianto looked amused, "Are you coming?"
Tosh glanced at her watch and realised, with a start, what time it was. She'd barely been aware of the passage of time, and completely unaware of how hungry she was. "Oh, ah, no, I'm alright. I'll grab something from the shop later."
She turned back towards her screen, and barely heard Ianto's, "Ok then," he said, sounding amused. "We'll leave you and the computer alone with each other then."
Gwen laughed, amused, and patted Tosh on the back in farewell as the pair made their way to the exit, quietly swapping suggestions about where to go get lunch.
“Tosh?” Jack was leaning out of his office doorway as she turned at his call, fighting down a surge of irritation at the interruption. “Finished that sweep yet?”
She hadn't even started it. She felt her cheeks growing warm and turned her head slightly, hoping that her hair falling forward with the motion would hide the embarrassed flush. “Uh... not yet,” she said, fingers twitched a centimeter or so above the keyboard.
“Oh,” Jack looked a little surprised at her, but gave her a mock-stern look and a smile. “No slacking off, Miss Sato, or you'll overtake Owen as the top shirker of the Torchwood Institute.”
“Oi!” Owen's voice drifted up from the autopsy bay. Tosh would be less surprised at him hearing if she hadn't known of the weird acoustics of the Hub.
Jack grinned and winked at her, and though she found it difficult to summon the energy, she managed a wan return of the smile. “The sweep, Tosh?”
“Get right on it,” she said, nodding her head.
As Jack ducked back into his office, Tosh returned her attention to the computers, and called up the search protocols, and stopped. She quickly glanced at the list of things to check: satellite imagery, local scans, CCTV, database cross-checks, witness statements... it would take hours.
She bit her lip, and glanced back at her other screens, where reams and reams of numbers and symbols were displayed, quietly mocking her with their incomplete nature.
'Later,' she thought, 'I'll get to it later. I'll just finish a couple more lines of this equation.'
Pushing away the search screens with a broad swipe of her fingers on the screen, she brought her equations back to the fore, and, taking a deep breath, allowing the familiar feeling of calm, the one she always felt when dealing with the simplicity of maths, to overtake her, she started typing again.
**
At first, she thought the ringing was the lingering remnants of her dreams, but, as Tosh opened her eyes, staring fuzzily at the ceiling, she realised that it was coming from her bedside table. She closed her eyes against the sun making it through the closed curtains of her bed and reached out blindly for her mobile, pressing the call button and holding it to her ear.
"Hello?" her voice was croaky, and her throat felt dehydrated. She swallowed awkwardly, trying to impart some moisture to her mouth.
"Good morning, Sleeping Beauty." Lyrical Welsh phrasing. Gentle amusement. Gwen. "Did I wake you?"
"What... what time is it?" Tosh brought her phone away from her ear for a moment to squint at the time displayed on the screen. Fuck. She heard Gwen repeating the time as she replaced the phone at her ear.
She wasn't sure what time she'd arrived home last night. It had been late, she'd known that. She'd succumbed to the urge to eat, finally realising that she was starving, when Owen had been on his way out the door and suggested they grab a sandwich on the way home. She hadn't even been planning to leave the Hub, entranced by the way that the full picture of her latest idea was emerging bit by tiny bit on her screens. She couldn't help but feel she was dealing with something monumental, but she'd been so very hungry, almost shaking, and the suggestion of a sandwich had been too much to resist. So she'd gone to the late-night café with Owen, and made him laugh by drinking two overly sugary and creamy cups of coffee, as well as demolishing three sandwiches and two muffins. He'd made jokes alternately about skipping lunch and eating for two, and she hadn't even had the energy to be annoyed at him.
At that point, her home had been closer than the Hub, and how tired she was had been making itself known. She'd stuffed the napkin onto which she'd been doodling graphs into her pocket, and bought another sandwich to take home with her.
She'd stumbled in the door, eaten the sandwich and... and then...
"Owen's been making comments about you painting the town red for the last half hour," Gwen continued, "And Jack's on the verge of coming around to yours to make sure you weren't killed in your sleep. I managed to persuade them to let me call you first."
Tosh groaned, "I'll be right in," she said, "Give me twenty minutes." And she hung up the phone, struggling to a sitting position in bed.
The sound of sliding paper persuaded her to open her eyes against the bright light, and she couldn't help but freeze, a little startled, as she looked around her bedroom. She wasn't exactly certain, but she'd thought that last night, when she went to sleep, her room hadn't had every surface covered in pieces of A4, all with neatly written equations decorating them. The pages were on her bed, on the floor, and there was ink on her hand and a pen lost in the bedsheets that she found when trying to sit up and it jabbed her in the thigh.
She swiped a hand across her eyes, sweeping away the grit she felt there, and found, for a moment, that she just couldn't quite comprehend the bizarrity of what she saw. She got dressed quickly, and then, after a long moment of staring at the paper-covered vista that had been her bedroom, she quickly swept all the sheets into a pile and stuffed them into her laptop bag. She'd worry about it later.
**
“I had Ianto take care of running that sweep.”
Tosh looked up at her boss guilty as she hung her coat on the stand, and pushed her laptop bag under her desk. She ran a hand through her hair that she'd not had time to wash or brush, and tried not to grimace at the slightly greasy feel of it. She'd not managed to give even a cursory nod to makeup, and the brushing of her teeth had been only a small token gesture towards dental hygiene. In short, she absolutely felt like she didn't want to stand there under Jack Harkness' critical gaze.
“I'm sorry,” she said, feeling a guilty stab low in her stomach, “I got distracted.”
“With what?” he asked sharply.
She supposed he had a right to be concerned. Employees shirking or neglecting their duties was one of those things you had to watch out for, lest alien influence be involved somehow. Tosh had long since stopped wondering at the fact that such thoughts even occurred to her.
“I...” She debated internally as to how much exactly she should tell him. She was fairly certain that she was nearly finished with her equation, like she could see the outline of the statue as it was painstakingly carved out of marble, but she didn't know how to say it. How could she put something so wordless into phrases and sentences? When she thought of the numbers, she could taste colours and hear shapes, and it all made sense. “I've been working on some theories,” she said, finally, opting for a partial truth. “It's just this idea that's been niggling at me. I'm working through it.”
“What idea?” Jack pressed, still looking rather suspicious as he leaned against her desk in a deceptively casual manner.
“The Rift as a Universal constant.” The words leapt from her lips before she'd even concocted the thoughts to frame her explanation. She frowned, but somehow, it seemed true, so she shrugged mentally, and continued. For one, Jack's attention had suddenly sharpened. “It's a theory about how the Rift was formed by a tearing of the fabric of the time-space continuum and how it was sort of... stapled... to the underlying domain, forcing through a constant stream of high-energy particulate matter, which is why it never seems to exhaust itself, so to speak, and why it's generally one-way.” She realised she was babbling, her words running together, and took a deep breath. “Does that... make sense?”
She didn't tell him about her nocturnal scrawlings, or about how all she wanted to do was push him away from her desk and to get back to work.
Jack looked away from her for a second, staring off into space. She waited, nervously, for his response.
Finally, he turned his head back towards her, and gave her a small, distant smile. “You know,” he said, conversationally, “I'd love to see that research, once you're through with it.”
“Of course,” she said, quickly, nodding.
Jack stood up, nodding. “Fine. You get on with your research, but I wouldn't ask Ianto for any favours. He's probably still mad that you made him run that sweep.”
“You made him run that sweep,” Tosh corrected, smiling.
Jack wagged a finger at her. “Yes, but it's all your fault, really.” And with that, he sauntered away, presumably to bother one of the others.
Tosh breathed a sigh of relief, dropping heavily onto her stool. She looked at her desk, to see there was a steaming mug of tea, with a biscuit sitting next to it. She smiled to herself. Clearly Ianto wasn't that mad at her, even if he had only provided a rich tea instead of a chocolate hobnob. Nibbling at the biscuit, she brought her workstation online, and looked at the reams of numbers and code.
Hmm, she thought, as she stared at the blank gaps in the script. The Rift as an untapped well of energy, directly from the Universal source. That would make an awful lot of sense right about... there...
**
She suffered through the day's distractions. She allowed herself to be forced into the morning meeting, though if anyone noticed her twitchy distraction, and the way she kept glancing down at her computer, they were tactful enough not to mention. She continued undisturbed until lunch, when Ianto came around, saying he was going out to the shops and did anyone want anything, and she surprised him by ordering half a dozen sandwiches and enough lucazade to float a small dinghy. He didn't argue though, and she spent the afternoon munching the sandwiches and working, and when a call came in about a suspected weevil sighting, she was completely relieved when Jack made Owen go out with him to retrieve the creature, leaving her to carry on.
The passage of time seemed to lose meaning for her, though she knew she had to have been sitting there for hours, given the way her back was aching, her wrists twinging, and the fact that when she blinked, her eyes felt hot and slightly painful from the intense staring she'd been doing all day.
She nearly leapt out of her skin when she felt two hands land on her shoulders. But she didn't look away from her screen; she couldn't. She felt like she was tenuously grasping at a thin thread of an idea, and if she looked away, that thread might be lost forever.
"I hope you're not planning to stay late." Jack's American accent assaulted her ears. She didn't usually find it so grating, but for some reason, the distraction got to her on an almost physical level of irritation.
"I just need to finish this up," she said, fingers still dancing across the keyboard. She wasn't even aware, really, of what she was doing, but what was taking shape in front of her seemed so right that she didn't feel the need to stop and check.
His fingers dug into her shoulder muscles, massaging, and Tosh belatedly realised how tense they were. She didn't appreciate the diversion, however, and fought the urge to shrug him off. Jack really was the very definition of incorrigible.
“The others are all gone,” he told her, “You should go home too. Maybe get some sleep.”
“I'm fine,” she said, fighting to keep the irritation out of her voice.
"A person can work too hard," he told her. "The computer will still be here in the morning."
"It won't take me long," she insisted, and felt as well as heard him sigh.
"Alright," he said, and his hands fell away. "I'm going out for a bit. Ianto's still around, though, if you need anything."
"You don't tell him to go home?" she asked, a little tartly, feeling her lips twitch into a smile in spite of herself.
"Of course I do," she heard, "But he listens to me as much as you do." A brief touch of his fingertips against her back, and then he withdrew. She didn't relax until she heard the door rolling shut behind him, letting her get back to her numbers, and the worlds she could see taking shape before her eyes.
She was barely aware when Ianto came, hours later, to say that that he was heading out himself, muttering a goodnight to him and carrying on. Nothing mattered except the ideas forming under her fingertips. Nothing at all.
**
Ianto never slept for very long, and he'd not had cause to try for a full nights sleep since one terrible day in London, and so he'd become rather accustomed to arriving at the Hub for the day in the pre-dawn hours, when there was no one up and about except him and the pterodactyl. Occasionally, Jack was awake and lurking around the Hub somewhere, but on those days he was content to let Ianto get on with the business of sorting out the Hub for the day in peace.
Of course, there were nights when Ianto didn't leave the Hub at all, which were another matter entirely.
Today, however, Jack was nowhere to be found, but it wasn't until he stepped into the main Hub area, thumbing through overnight reports from listening satellites, comms intercepts, UNIT and other organisations, that he realised that it wasn't just him and the pterodactyl that were up that morning.
"Tosh?" he asked.
Toshiko was sitting almost exactly as he'd last seen her, at her desk, bolt upright, fingers dancing across the keyboard, eyes firmly fixed on her monitor. The only difference was that scattered around her desk were the remnants of the takeaway that the team had ordered a couple of days earlier. It looked like she'd eaten her way through the entire contents of the fridge.
He stepped up to her, picking his way over a discarded orange juice carton and picking it up between thumb and forefinger in disgust. "Have you been here all night?" he asked.
She didn't answer. If anything, she seemed to become a little agitated. She shifted on her chair, and he could hear her muttering to herself in a combination of English and Japanese. He dropped the carton into the nearest bin, and stepped close to her. "Tosh?"
She didn't answer, so he reached out and gently touched her shoulder. "Tosh?"
That seemed to break the spell. She abruptly jerked back from his touch, almost falling off her chair. She scrambled away from her desk, hands raised and fingers clenching and unclenching. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, and she didn't seem to be seeing him.
"Not big enough," she murmured. She looked like she was sweating. "Need a bigger space. Need to see it all laid out."
"Um..." Ianto was briefly at a loss as to how to deal with his friend and colleague, and was on the verge of suggesting a calm sit down on the sofa when she suddenly dove for her desk, scrabbling through the drawers until she made a small sound of triumph and ran for the door, something small clutched in her hand.
"Tosh!" Shoving his PDA in his pocket, he ran out after her.
**
The late twentieth and early twenty first centuries were characterised by chaos, Jack had been taught, with a sort of vague disapproval for the wanton excess and destruction that had characterised this key moment in Humanity's history.
He wasn't sure when, but Jack Harkness had learned to love that chaos. He found himself out, many nights, standing atop buildings with security that didn't stand up to Torchwood lock-picks, drinking in that beautiful chaos, and reminding himself exactly why they all did what they did.
Once upon a time, that hadn't been his reason for climbing buildings, and staring out across the city, but times changed, and even Jack did, even if he changed far more slowly than the rest of Humanity.
He was so distracted by the view that he almost didn't hear it when his phone started ringing. He took it out and opened it up without even glancing at the display. There weren't exactly a lot of people with his phone number in their possession. He didn't say anything, just waited for the other person to speak.
Long used to (and occasionally exasperated with) Jack's phone habits, Ianto was quick to speak. “Sir,” he ventured, sounding concerned. “I really think you better get off whichever building you've climbed on top of tonight and back to the Plass.”
Jack frowned, turning in the direction of the bay, though he was nowhere near a good enough vantage point to see anything useful. “What's going on?” Ianto didn't sound as if the end of the world was nigh, or as if he were in mortal danger, so he figured he had time to ask.
“It's about Tosh,” Ianto said, after a long pause. “She's acting a little strangely.”
Jack pursed his lips. “Strange how?”
**
So maybe Ianto had been right to call him. His subordinate barely afforded him a glance as Jack strode towards the fountain, easily able to see why Ianto had sounded so bewildered and uncertain on the phone.
Ianto shoved his hands deep into his pockets, shivering slightly in the chill of the night air. “I've rerouted CCTV, so we just have to hope that there aren't many people planning on wandering through at 5am.”
Jack nodded, not really paying attention. He was focused on Toshiko, and the way she was on her hands and knees on the paving stones, a thick piece of chalk, the sort of they used for marking up concrete, in her hands. She was muttering to herself, and using the chalk to draw out elaborate equations that now covered several square meters. With her free hand, she was keeping a woollen blanket clutched around her neck, but she didn't seem to be aware of it. Jack guessed that Ianto had forced it upon her when she hadn't come back to the Hub.
“I've been trying to follow what she's writing,” Ianto was saying, shaking his head. “But it's all way beyond me. I recognise a few bits and pieces from some Rift equations, but the rest...”
Jack wasn't much better off than Ianto. Toshiko could have been drawing cartoons of bunny rabbits for all that it was comprehensible. That grouping to his left looked a little like gravitational warp theory, while the graph Tosh was currently drawing looked like it might have been describing the ulterior curvature of nth-plane physics, but other than that, he didn't understand it. And with her twenty first century understanding of maths, Toshiko definitely shouldn't have been able to understand it either.
She looked almost feverish. She was sweating in spite of the chill of the night air, and she didn't even seem to be focusing on what she was doing. Feeling something painful grip at his heart, a fear for her, he stepped closer.
"Tosh? Toshiko?"
She didn't answer, so Jack grabbed her hands, forcing them away from the pavement. She showed no sign of the tightness of his grip, still staring at the numbers and symbols on the ground.
"Toshiko Sato," he said, putting as much force of command into his voice as he could manage.
He felt Ianto step closer, saw the hand he rested on her shoulder. "Yamete kudasai," he said, pleadingly.
Whether it was the language or her name or the physical contact, Jack couldn't know, but Tosh blinked, as if coming out of a trance, and looked at him, squinting against the orange of the street lights.
Toshiko dropped the chalk, and her fingers felt so cold they must have gone numb in the night air. “Jack?” She whispered, her voice shaky, “How did I get out here?”
Second Part