Title: Wild weather

Fandom: Torchwood

Characters: Jack, Tosh, Ianto, OC

Author: m_findlow

Rating: PG

Length: 3,944 words

Content notes: none

Author notes: Written for Challenge 264 - Shelter

Summary: Wild weather has often been Jack's undoing.


'Over there!' Jack yelled over the din of the pounding rain.

Tosh raised her hand to her forehead trying to stop the rain from running into her eyes and she attempted to peer through its opaque screen. 'What? A bus shelter?' she asked, assuming that was what he was referring to.

'Any port in a storm, as they say,' Jack replied, jogging towards it, his boots sloshing through the puddles that were already forming deep pools on the ground.

She shrugged, conceding he had a point, and running after him to catch up with his long loping strides.

'Phew!' Jack said, running a hand through his hair and then shaking his head like a dog, dispelling as much water from it as he could. 'I know it's Cardiff and they forecast a bit of rain, but they weren't kidding!'

Tosh gripped her ponytail and squeezed it, astonished at just how much water came out of it. Luckily she was wearing her leather jacket which had stopped most of the rain, though she couldn't say the same about her jeans, which were saturated from ankle to thigh, unable to protect her from the almost sideways falling rain that was getting heavier and heavier. Tosh watched as the torrents of water sloughed down the road. It had gone from several inches to at least a foot in as many minutes. She pulled her feet up onto the cold metal bench, whilst Jack did the same, avoiding them from dangling into the rising floodwaters.

'We'll be okay, right?' she asked.

'Of course,' Jack said, looking nonplussed. 'It's just a little rain.'

'Maybe we should have just braved it and made for the SUV,' she suggested.

Jack chuckled. 'By now we'd have only been halfway there and already up to our knees in water.' He groaned out a sigh. 'I'd call Ianto to come and pick us up but there's no way I want him driving in these conditions. Especially not without the SUV.'

'I don't even think the SUV would manage,' Tosh replied. 'Ianto will be mightily annoyed at having to clean out the water.'

Jack grinned. 'Lucky for us the SUV is amphibious, then. That ought to spare him the worst of it.'

Tosh turned and started at him in surprise. 'It is?'

Jack shrugged. 'Well, I mean it's never actually been tested, but sure. Kind of a pity we're stuck here. A few water wings could be really handy right about now. Might've been our big chance to try it out.'

Tosh leaned her head back against the glass, hearing a roll of thunder boom overhead. 'This is going to be one big storm,' she commented. 'I've never seen it rain this hard. It just started so suddenly.'

'Nothing like the storm of sixty-eight,' Jack said. 'Now that was one for the record books. It's always the little assignments that catch you unawares.'

'Have you always got a story for every occasion?' Tosh asked, unable to keep the smirk from her face.

'What can I say, Tosh? Life is never boring.'

'Well, it doesn't look like were going anywhere anytime soon. If you're up for sharing, I've got nowhere else to be.'

Jack smiled. He loved a captive audience. 'Well, it all began on a dark, stormy night...'



Jack clenched his teeth again as he stared down the Torchwood leader. 'I'll handle it,' he repeated. He didn't wait for any further argument to be furnished, simply brushing past and heading for the door.

It's just a stupid weevil, he kept telling himself as he drove through the rainy night. Nothing he couldn't handle. Nothing he hadn't handled a million times before. The city was riddled with them and there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason why the rift chose to frequently dump them here. Where did they come from? What was their world like? How must it have felt to be ripped away from everything you knew and forced to survive on a completely alien world. The last question at least he had an answer for. He was as much a refugee here as them. It might have been decades since he'd first gotten stuck here, but that strange sense of not belonging was always there. He remember the Earth word for it: alienation. How apropos.

'What a stinking night,' he said to himself, flicking the windscreen wipers onto their highest setting. Being underground was probably a lot dryer than being up here, he decided. Get the damn weevil, knock it out drag its sorry arse back to the hub for them to deal with and then he was going home to hole up himself. The small, two storey terrace in a rather run down part of the city would be better than hanging around at the hub. He'd swap his tatty vinyl sofa and orange linoleum floors for any more disapproving comments. He really didn't need Torchwood as much as he seemed to let on. It was just that any job other than this was completely boring and he needed something to fill in his days. Nineteen sixty eight. Still a long way to go until the turn of the century and the Doctor's eventual return.

He parked the car up on the kerb, forcing the wheels illegally onto the pavement to keep the driver's side up and out of the water that was pooling on the road. Never mind that he was also parked in the wrong direction. One day this would be a one way street anyway, so he was only doing what would be considered acceptable about forty years from now. Stupid one way system.

He stepped out into the rain, flinching as the first wave of cold drops assailed him, pulling his coat collar up high to stop them from running down his neck. 'You asked for this,' he grumbled at himself, jogging along the sodden pavement.

Trying to find the manhole cover in the driving rain was no easy task, nor was managing to get his finger in the small gap clotted with mud and dirt, tying to lift it away from the road. As predicted, the water sluicing down the abandoned road drove itself toward the path of least resistance, down the manhole and straight into the sewers below. It was his destination too, waiting for the worse of the storm water to empty into the tunnels beneath the city streets, before clambering down the cold slippery ladder, submerging himself in that same wet darkness.

His boots came down in a slosh, finding a solid foot of water already filling the sewer. He tried to step to the side, keeping to the higher curved section of the Victorian age tunnels. The smell of decay and other things he didn't care to dwell on hung thick in the damp air.

'Alright, time to find you and get out of here,' he declared, flicking on the heavy metal torch in his hand, determined to find the weevil and be done with it quickly. His task was only to locate it, sedate it for capture and return it to Torchwood. After that, its particulars would be noted, attempting to distinguish it from other weevils already logged into their databases. Things like scars, missing fingers, facial features were the norm to visually separate one weevil from another. There had been an argument for decades as to why they should bother at all. Some of Torchwood’s less illustrious leaders would have preferred to put bullets in them and be rid of them permanently. On behalf of all things alien, Jack took personal offense. They didn't want to be here, and so long as they were left alone, they tended not to cause too much trouble for locals. Jack had advocated for years to let them be, and to monitor their nests. They liked the sewers, and so long as they could be contained to one section of the city's network, they were happy to coexist.

This weevil he was tracking down was of course a newcomer, as they so often were. A weevil dumped here by the rift would be disoriented, sometimes unpredictable in its behaviour, and thus a risk to the general public. Established weevils that went rogue were the exception rather than the rule. They were communal creatures as far as he could tell, and so chances were that this one, once relocated to where the rest of them cohabited, would find itself far less of a threat, happy to eke out an existence with the rest of its refugee family.

That was the argument he'd been having when he'd stormed out of the the hub in a huff of indignation. It was always the same thing over and over again. Where Jack wanted to preserve life, Torchwood wanted to cut it up and study it, or worse, kill it just for the hell of it. He'd hoped that their current leader, Herbert Smithson, would be different, but old Herb, as Jack liked to call him, was a stickler for protocol. When Torchwood One gave him orders, he followed them to the letter, without question.



'You don't have to do what they tell you,' Jack said.

Herb set his tired hands on his hips, feeling every bit his fifty two years. 'They're our commanding office, Jack. Of course we do.'

'They've had enough weevils to cut open,' Jack argued. 'If they haven't figured out how they tick by now, they're never going to. I'll handle it.'

'It's a rogue weevil, and one less for us to have to keep tabs on.' Herb attempted his best stern look at Jack. 'If you can't bring it back, I'll get someone else from the team to go out and capture it.'

Jack's face was set in grim determination. 'I'll handle it.'



He stomped through the rushing water, beginning to seethe once more over it. Getting angry over it wasn't going to change anything.

He stopped at a cross tunnel, straining his ears over the sound of the water, searching and listening for the telltale signs of weevil activity. The noise made it hard to tell apart movement of living creatures from all the other sounds reverberating around him. Instead he picked a path and headed left. He knew these sewers like the back of his hand. He'd been down here often enough that even if he'd been spun around three times blindfolded, he'd have been able to find his way out, or know which manhole would put him on St Mary Street or Lloyd George Avenue.

He slipped on the slimy surface and went down on one knee, cursing the bruise that would be blossoming across his kneecap, nevermind the fetid water than now soaked through his trousers. 'Where are you?' he muttered, trotting through the slowly rising waters. Just when he thought he must have been on completely the wrong trail, there was a familiar mewl coming from further down the tunnel and beyond the next junction. It echoed back to him with surety. Jack extracted a can of weevil spray from his pocket, readying it for use. The handclamps were clipped to his belt within easy reach. Sometimes weevils went quietly, but other times it was a real battle with some of the bigger males - one he hadn't always come out of on top. Judging by the sounds this one was making though, it was female.

He paused just at the corner of the T-junction, peering carefully around to get the lay of the land before diving head first into a potential melee. The sight caught him by surprise. At the end of the short tunnel - one he knew from past experience that was almost permanently locked off by heavy metal grating - was the weevil. There was a rusted and twisted hole in the metal grating that had been like that for years. Maybe it had been damaged in the Blitz, or maybe vandals had broken through it. The tunnels beyond it were out of service, that much he did know. The weevil had clearly decided it was a good place to hide out, trying to crawl through the narrow gap, but had gotten itself caught in the broken metal.

Jack approached cautiously. The weevil mewled again and he noticed the long bloody gash on its arm where it had obviously tried to dislodge itself. 'Oh boy,' Jack sighed.

The weevil looked despairingly at him and growled. It wasn't in anger or in fear. It seemed to be from sheer exhaustion. Who knew how long it had been half lying in that freezing cold water, and the water was continuing to rise a inch at a time as more and more rainwater made its way into gutters, filling the system with the overflow before attempting to expel it into the bay.

Jack took a tentative step forward. 'It's okay. I'm not gonna hurt you.' The weevil gave a half-hearted growl which Jack took to mean acquiescence but no sooner than he'd gotten close it, the weevil lashed out in anger, forcing Jack to stumble backwards.

'Oh, I really hate to have to do this,' Jack said, clutching his weevil spray and holding it out, giving the weevil a dose. It didn't knock the weevil out completely, too jumped up on adrenaline from its battle with the gate, but it was more than enough to turn it limp and compliant.

'Right, now let's try and get you out of there.' Jack's fingers fumbled around the sharp edges of the gate, trying to figure out just how the weevil was stuck. It had obviously tried to keep going, forcing itself through the gap, only getting even more tangled. He thought maybe he could spot the area where a mangled bit of rusting metal had twisted itself up in the weevil's boilersuit, when a sudden torrent of water came rushing at them. Without thinking, Jack grabbed hold of the gate, trying not to get swept away by the gushing water. One of the overflow pipes must have opened up, releasing the excess into this part of the system. Where before he was only in about two feet of water, now it was more like four. All but the weevil's head and shoulders were now submerged under the water and it let out a mournful sound.

'Not giving up on you yet,' Jack promised, waters up to his own chest, his greatcoat weighing impossibly heavily as it soaked in the water. It was so dark he could hardly see a thing, his torch gone with the last assault of water. He shoved his hands back under the water, toward the gate, fumbling by touch alone to try and find the spot he'd had before. Using the weevil's body as a guide, he ran his hands down it, probing gently for the gap and the metal snare. As his hands worked lower, his body dropped with it, kneeling and forcing him to struggle to keep his head above the waterline.

Another rush of water filled the sewer tunnel and Jack was forced to let go again, rising up with the water to avoid being submerged. It washed over his head and he flailed against the current, breaking the surface and shaking the water from his eyes. The weevil struggled feebly, pulling itself up, its head just high enough to let it breathe. It growled unhappily and with no small amount of genuine fear.

'Oh, this is so not my day,' Jack declared. 'Between me and you,' he said, conversing with his only companion, 'I'm going to be giving that handsome weatherman on Channel Four a stern talking to. Some heavy rains, he said. Pack your brolley, he said.' The waters were surging around them now, upset that both the gate, Jack and the weevil were blocking its efforts to get through.

'You're gonna owe me a drink the pub after this,' Jack said, knowing what he had to do. He gulped in a deep breath and pulled himself under the water, scrabbling around with his eyes shut, his hands numb from cold as they found the spot once more. He fiddled with the fabric caught in the metal, finally managing to untangle it, and then bursting back up for air. 'Got it!' he heaved. He grabbed the weevil by its suit and began trying to tug it back out from where it had wedged itself in the gap. Now would have been the time when he wished he hadn't had to sedate it. He slapped its face, trying to wake it back up. 'You gotta help me help you now,' he said.

The weevil seemed to sense the change, feeling its freedom of movement vastly improved. With a bit of jiggling, the pair of them managed to get it free. Without the weevil blocking the hole the current swept out more strongly and Jack had to hang on tight to the criss-crossing bars. He spat out a mouthful of the foul water. 'I never really asked if you guys know how to swim.' From the way the weevil was struggling to keep its head up above water, he guessed the answer was no.

With the water rushing by, forcing him to tread water as best he could to stay above it, he knew they needed to get out quickly. Above ground the rains must have been coming down hard and fast, desperate to find any path, and most of those being down gutters and drains that lined every street and sidewalk across the city.

Jack grabbed the weevil's collar, bunching it up tight in his fist. 'You and me are busting outta here, girlfriend.'

His other hand let go of the metal grating and the torrent of water began carrying them both. He needed to find a manhole up to the street, but in the dark and turgid waters that was proving harder than it seemed. For once he had no idea where he was, getting turned around a dozen times by the water, dumping over his head, or getting dragged down by his non-aquatic companion. The weevil was going to drag him under if they didn't get out of here soon. It was only by chance that he spotted the ladder against the wall. The water foamed around the slight resistance it caused to the general flow. Flinging out a desperate arm, he wrapped it through one of the gaps, elbow jarring at the force of stopping his momentum. The weevil almost slipped from his grip as it continued past him. He held tight as best he could, trying to pull it back towards him against the flow. Once it saw that he was holding onto something, it too reached for the metal ladder, clinging to it as hard as a barnacle to a pier.

Jack wasted no time in clambering up the rungs, though his arms and legs trembled from the effort and the bone deep cold. He knew the weevil would be right on his six. They knew all about getting in and out of Cardiff's sewer system.

He reached the top, coming face to face with the three inches of metal manhole cover that separated them from salvation. With all his remaining strength, he pushed it up and and away. They were almost home free.

The deluge of water that hit him square in the face caught him totally off guard. The road above them was completely flooded, and the water that hadn't had anywhere to go suddenly found a new avenue for escape. It barreled straight into him and the shock of the assault kicked Jack backwards, his grip on the ladder disappearing in an instant. He felt himself fall back into the icy waters, thrown around like a stray sock in a tumble dryer, unable to tell up from down. Try as he might to break the surface, the black water swept him further and further along, never letting go its grip on him as it tossed him about. His lungs burned whilst the rest of his body froze. Not long afterwards, he traded one kind of blackness for another, and his fight against the storm water ceased.



'Oh my God!' Tosh exclaimed. 'How did you survive?'

Jack shook his head. 'I don't know.' He knew he hadn't, but he couldn't tell Tosh that. She knew he didn't age - a side effect of some alien technology a long time ago, he'd he'd explained - but she didn't know the true story, of how he could never die, or at least, how he couldn't stay dead, just like back in 1968. He'd woken up somewhere out in the middle of the tidal flats, half buried in the mud and stinking of every kind of foulness there was. Somehow he'd been ejected out the other end of the sewerage system, dumped out into the bay, and then the tide had washed his body back up on the shores. There was no way of telling if he'd been there hours or days.

'What about the weevil?' Tosh asked. 'Do you know if it survived?'

He shook his head again. He didn't know that either, and that was the truth. Maybe it drowned like he had, and been washed out to sea. Or maybe it had managed to keep hold of the ladder despite the downpour and eventually climbed out to safety. There were too many weevils in the city to be certain he hadn't crossed paths with it later. He was pretty sure it would have recognised him if he had. They were far from unintelligent.

'I hope it did,' Jack replied. 'It seems cruel to think that all it wanted was a place to shelter, and that the one place it should have been safe had ended up being the most dangerous. At least I know for sure it never ended up in the hands of Torchwood One, as just another experiment.'

'I never thought of it like that,' Tosh confessed. 'About the weevils, I mean. It seems impossible to feel sorry for them most days when they're trying to rip your throat out.'

'We've managed to coexist for this long,' Jack said. 'I don't see why we can't continue to do so. Nights like this I really hope they've found a safe place to ride out the worst of the storm. Looks like she's gonna be a real screamer.'

Tosh shivered from the damp starting to soak through her jacket when a set of headlights approaching nearly blinded her. Right in front of the bus stop, a dark black car pulled up.

'Buses are cancelled, didn't they tell you?' Ianto's friendly face was a sight for sore eyes.

'Boy, are we glad to see you!' Tosh cried.

'Well, we couldn't really leave you two out here. They're saying we're going to get twelve inches of rain in the next two hours. When you didn't come back, we ran a trace on your phones. You're were a mile from the SUV.'

'It's dangerous weather to be out driving,' Jack said, scowling slightly as he climbed into the car, squeezing into the backseat with Tosh taking the front passenger seat. 'Only a crazy person would attempt to come after us.'

'Not nearly as crazy as thinking you'd be okay here all night,' he replied. 'You'll need to sit on the roof of the bus shelter to avoid being swept away at this rate.'

'Well, thank you,' Tosh said, ending the argument. 'Jack thanks you as well.'

'Thank you,' Jack muttered.

'You can thank me by paying for my car to get detailed, sir. You've brought half of the weather in with you.'