Fandom: Torchwood

Characters: Tosh, Ianto, Jack

Author: m_findlow

Rating: PG

Length: 1,968 words

Content notes: none

Author notes: Written for Challenge 337 - Wonder

Summary: Tosh needs a friend to convince her that what they're doing is for the greater good.

'Ianto?' Tosh called out.

'Here,' he replied, pulling back the bead curtain he was hidden behind. Just sorting out the latest bundles of brochures, he added, waving a thick bundle of glossy three-folds.

Tosh squeezed behind the desk in the pokey little office, watching him remove the rubber bands from another stack. He pulled the old ones from a plastic holder facing outwards on the desk and binned them, before slotting the new bundle in their place. 'Are you really putting out brochures? I thought they were just for show.'

Ianto gave her a pained look. 'You don't win the Welsh Tourism Board's best tourist office award two years running by having outdated brochures.'
'Only two years? I thought you'd been here three?'

'Yes, well, there was last year we missed out. It was that information bureau up by the castle won it last year. Not our fault. We didn't do anything wrong. It was just that it was all shiny and new and floor the ceiling glass and coffee out of a machine that tastes like dirty dishwater and staffed by people who really had no idea what to do and see in the city, but they had their nice new shiny brochure stands and their lovely free coffee, and oh, is that one of those fancy touchless hand dryers in the loos? Well, you get points for that. Not to mention the…' he drifted off, watching Tosh's expression, knowing he'd lost her somewhere along the way but not entirely sure when she'd started tuning out to his many indignities about the bribery and scandal involved in the Tourism Board's questionable voting system. 'But,' he said, changing subject, 'I'm guessing you didn't come up here to see what discount coupons we had.'

She gave him a practised but half-hearted smile. 'Sit?' she asked, patting the scuffed leather bench that took up the whole length of one side of the narrow little space behind the beaded curtain. 'I brought beers,' she added, holding up two bright green bottles by their necks in her slender hand.

'Now you're talking.' He took them from her and proceeded to snap the top of the first using the little bottle opener from his keychain before passing it to her and opening the second. He settled on the bench beside her and they clinked bottles. 'So, this is cosy and a little clandestine.'

'What? Can't I just want to sit with my best friend and share a beer?'

'Sure. But I'm not stupid. That's not something we normally do.' Tosh normally didn't drink beer for a start. She was a white wine girl at heart. 'What's on your mind?'

'Nothing... Everything.' She paused as if trying to figure out where to begin. 'Sometimes I just wonder why I'm doing this job, that's all.'

Ianto halted his bottle inches from his lips. 'What's brought this on?'

'No one thing. Not really. Just… you know there was that thing with the space whale, and Tommy Brockless, and that time we retconned ourselves…'

'Don't forget the alien sleeper cell,' he reminded her. Mass orgy proposals from Owen weren't going to be easily erased, even with retcon.

'That, too. How could I forget?' She turned slightly to face him. 'I never did ask you how that all went with you and Jack undercover. I know better than to believe anything Owen says, or Jack for that matter.'

Ianto did take a pull in his beer this time. 'Best you don't ask.'

'You were out there for weeks. Something must have happened in all that time.'

'It really wasn't as exciting as you think. Mostly it was counting off the hours of my life I was never going to get back, mixed in with a smattering of over the top spousal overtures, sex-obsessed neighbours and a whole lot of domestic dreariness and home cooked meals. To be honest I thought we were stuck undercover with a swingers mob more than we were a deadly alien sleeper cell.'

Tosh choked on a mouthful of beer. 'Swingers?'

'Never underestimate the depravity of the middle classes. They're so bad they make Jack look like a kindergarten teacher. I though we were going to have to start having sex loud enough that all the neighbours could hear it just to maintain our cover! Couldn't have us looking like the neighbourhood prudes. We'd never fit in.'

Tosh nearly gagged on yet another mouthful of beer.' I've never heard you talk about it like that. You and Jack, I mean.'

'Not really much of a secret, really. Didn't seem much point avoiding it. Jack certainly has no qualms sharing the intimate details.'

'What about Jack? What does he think about all these things? The sleepers and the end of that world stuff.'

Ianto gave her a knowing look. 'Oh, is that what this is about? You trying to get the dirt on Jack.'

'No. I just wondered… he's seen a lot more of this kind of stuff than we have. All the sacrifices and hard choices and awfulness. How does he stay so…'

'Blase?' Ianto offered.

'I was going to say rational.'

Ianto snorted. Jack could be totally irrational when it suited. 'I don't think he spends too much time dwelling on it. Not like us. It's probably eat him alive if he did. All those terrible things and all those people he must have seen die. People he let die, or the ones he couldn't save.'

Tosh gently shook her head, staring down at the floor between her knees. 'I'd go mad if I didn't have someone to talk to about it all.'

'And Owen is such a conversationalist,' Ianto teased.

'No. I mean you. You get it. What it's like. How it makes you feel, seeing all the stuff we see. Does Jack ever talk to you about it?'

'Not really. But then I probably don't really talk to him about this stuff either.'

'So, what do you do when it all gets too much?'

He smirked. 'Come find a friend and ask them if they'd like to sit and have a beer?'

Tosh chuckled. 'I don't think you've ever done that.'

'Oh? Must just be really well adjusted then.'

She sucked on the lip of her beer bottle. 'Liar. Doesn't it all just get to you sometimes? I mean, take the space whale for example. We did those awful things to it. Us. The human race. Maybe we don't deserve to think we're better than everyone else. We treated it like it was just a thing without thoughts or feelings.'

That was what Dale and his goons had done, certainly. Jack had been really torn up about the whole thing, but he'd been a flurry of emotions that day - jealous of Gwen, annoyed with Rhys, furious with Ianto for nearly getting himself killed. 'What they did was wrong, but I don't think there's anything else we could have done to make the situation better.'

'Jack was going to rescue it and send it back through the rift,' Tosh said.

'Yeah right. When have we ever succeeded in sending anything back through the rift? We could have ended up sending it somewhere worse. Not that Jack would ever let us touch the rift machine. It just sounds nice to be able to say you'll do all these brave and noble things for the greater good. What we actually end up doing is something totally different and awful instead. We trade one life for another and tell ourselves that's okay because we didn't have any other options.' He sighed. 'Maybe you're right. Maybe we don't deserve to be saved or forgiven.'

'What? Where's that come from? I thought you were meant to be making me feel better?'

He stared down at the half empty bottle, worrying at the edge of the label with a fingernail. 'That sleeper cell we were hunting down at Serenity Plaza?'

'You destroyed them.'

'Not just them. Not just the dozen people whose bodies they'd taken over. They'd downloaded their genetic code into thousands of people all over the planet by the time we were able to figure out a way to stop it. We killed them all. Just one little button push and we snuffed out their entire race and all the humans they stole for hosts.'

'There was no other option. That's what Jack said.'

He couldn't help but think Jack wasn't always right. 'I still wonder though… if Jack hadn't been there, could I have done it? It was easy enough to pass the buck when he was there to do it, but what if it were up to me? Would the world have been taken over by alien sleepers because I couldn't live with myself for killing them?'

'We're all just soldiers fighting a never-ending war,' Tosh mused.

'Just like Tommy.'

She nodded. 'Just like Tommy.'

Ianto decided their conversation was getting too grim to handle. He'd need more than a beer if they kept going, and probably enough until he reached a point where nothing hurt anymore. 'I never did ask you. What happened that night you took him back to yours. Did you...?'

Tosh blushed and then shoved him. 'Just because you like to kiss and tell.'

'Ah, so you did sleep with him. Hello, Mrs Robinson. And, for the record, I never kiss and tell.'

Tosh ignored the thinly veiled jibe about the age gap between her and Tommy. 'Yes, I slept with him. And it was lovely. You wouldn't know he was from 1918. I guess it's true that we didn't invent sex. It always just seems weird thinking about people in the olden days doing it.'

'Probably got pointers from Jack,' Ianto mused.

Tosh threw him a warning glance. 'So long as that's all he got from Jack.'

Ianto ignored it. 'Well, if you've only got one day before you go back in the deep freeze for another year…'

She shoved him again. 'God, listen to us. World not worth saving one second and then shag like there's no tomorrow the next.'

Ianto couldn't help but smile. 'It's the booze talking.'

'I hope so. I really do love this job. I can't imagine doing anything else, even if it's a bit tough to look yourself in the mirror some days.'

'Me too. What would we be doing if we weren't here, do you think?'

'Boring office jobs, Tosh suggested. Doctoring timesheets and hanging out for five o'clock to go to the pub.'

'We'd be like sharks. Stop moving and we'd die.'

'Yeah,' Tosh agreed.

'Hey!' Jack called out, pulling back the beaded curtain to discover his two teammates. 'I've been looking all over wondering where you two got to. Thought maybe you'd gone home.'

Tosh leaned back, tipping back the remainder of her beer before he told them that something had inevitably come up and needed them back in action. 'In this job? No chance.'

'So, what were you doing?' He glanced at them huddled close with their nearly empty beer bottles. This looks kinda cosy. Am I interrupting something? Or maybe you're open for someone else to join in?'

'Just discussing the existential futility of attempting to preserve the human race,' Ianto replied.
Jack pulled a face. 'Urgh. Boring. I liked it better when I thought you were talking about me.'

'Honestly, when are we ever not talking about you?'

Jack grabbed at his chest as if he were wounded by the comments. 'You make me sound so shallow and egocentric. I'll have to know that before I joined Torchwood I was described by most people as a quiet achiever.'

Tosh's empty bottle skittled across the floor as she used both hands to stop herself laughing. Ianto found the admission too completely preposterous to laugh. 'Well, wonders never cease.'