lt_indigo

lt_indigo

It happened every few years: a piece of red ribbon would be found tied to the fence outside the Torchwood Museum at Mermaid Quay, Cardiff. There seemed to be no pattern to the years it happened – sometimes there would be a few years in a row and sometimes it might be a decade or more – but when it was found, it was always on the morning of August twentieth.

The ribbons had changed over the years, starting out as satin or silk, and had gone through various alien fabrics, but seemed to have settled on the virtually indestructible Ataxian silk about a hundred years ago.

They were a bit of a local legend around Cardiff, and after the first few, they were left alone. Of course, they rotted away eventually, one by one, but it never deterred the mysterious ribbon donor.

Sometimes someone would claim to have seen a good-looking, broad-shouldered man of around six feet in height, with light brown hair. But those rumours had been going around for centuries, and that description could fit a lot of people. However hard they tried, the staff at the museum could never get a good image of the perpetrator on any recording device.

The significance of the date had never been lost on the staff at the museum – it was the day after Ianto Jones’ birthday – but they had never been able to explain it beyond that. No-one seemed to mark the birthdays of Gwen Cooper, Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato, Rex Matheson or Esther Drummond the same way (and, of course, there was no record of Captain Jack Harkness’ date of birth). Some of the romantics spun the wild theory that maybe Captain Jack had been immortal after all, and it was him, marking his husband’s birthday, but the realists pointed out that it was ridiculous to think that anyone could have lived the thousands of years since Torchwood had been founded. It was simply impossible.

The ribbons remained a mystery. And they kept on appearing.