Fandom: Torchwood

Characters: Jack, Gwen, Ianto

Author: m_findlow

Rating: PG

Length: 2,535 words

Content notes: none

Author notes: Written for Challenge 354 - Letter

Summary: Gwen has an odd note left on her desk.


When Gwen entered the hub for the morning the last thing she was expecting on her desk was a crumpled note. Sometimes she was left with files, or even the odd artifact, but she knew that last night when she'd left work, her desk had been clean. That in itself felt like a small victory since she could ever seem to get it cleared of unfinished work and unresolved case files. See could never understand how Ianto's desk was always pristine, with nothing on the leather blotter except for maybe a stray pen abandoned in haste. She was partly jealous and partly proud that hers at least looked like she did work, even if she knew they shared equally in workloads.

She picked it up and quickly digested the brief contents. It simply addressed her by name and then, below the short salutation, said 13 November. That was it. Just "Gwen, 13 November." Not her birthday, or an anniversary or any particular significance to the date at all. She turned it over in her hand, wondering if the rest of the message was written on the back, but it was blank. Apart from a T logo at the top centre of the brown and ageing piece of paper, there was nothing else. Just those three words written in ink. She leaned over her desk and flipped her desk calendar forward to the date, two weeks away but there was nothing noted on there either. If it was meant to be significant, it was terribly cryptic.

'Morning,' Ianto chirped, appearing to her left with two mugs of coffee, passing her one as was their usual custom. 'Another day, another chance for it to all end suddenly and violently without warning,' he added. It was the kind of bleak irony only Ianto could deliver and still make it seem normal, and a little bit funny.

Gwen held up the odd letter. 'Does this look familiar to you?'

Ianto frowned at the piece of paper as she held it up to his gaze. 'Is it supposed to?'

'No. Well, maybe. I just thought perhaps you'd left this here.'

Ianto sipped from his mug without breaking eye contact. 'Nope. I know your desk. If I do have to leave a message it's on a post-it stuck to the middle of your screen. With added tape so you can't miss it.'

Gwen inclined her head suspiciously at him. 'Not one of your messages trying to tell me some secret without actually telling me outright?'

Ianto flushed at the question. She never did find out if Jack had given him a bollocking for spilling the beans about Flat Holm Island. 'That was a one off.' Well, that answered that question.

'Jack then?'

'Gwen. 13 November,' he said, rereading the sparse few words. 'A bit vague, don't you think? And yes, it's not Jack's handwriting. Not even on a bad day.'

Gwen knew that for herself. Ianto had neat penmanship and Jack's cursive script hadn't changed in a hundred years. He wrote like an old fashioned Victorian. Gwen thought it was beautiful to have writing like that. It looked painstaking and effortless all at the same time.

'Okay. What about the letterhead?' Gwen asked, trying to consider the mystery from a different angle. 'Is it something from our archives?'

Ianto didn't even bother to give it a secondary glance. It must have been that photographic memory of his. 'It's a monogrammed letter T,' he replied. 'We're not the only organisation to use that letter. And besides, we've only ever had two logos: the old one with the T in a hexagon and the one we use now.'

Gwen wasn't quite prepared to let that go without further interrogation. 'You've never seen this on any archive document?'

'No.'

'But it's old.' The paper was slightly fragile, stained and crumpled like it had survived the decades. She knew that if she held it up to her nose it would smell musty.

'I could check the CCTV for you, if you like. See if a secret admirer dropped it off for you?'

She gave him a sympathetic smile at the offer. 'No thanks, Ianto. I can check myself if I need to. I know you've got plenty on.'

He grinned ironically. 'Don't I know it. This job isn't getting any easier.'

It didn't take Gwen long to run out of ways to analyse the paper. There really wasn't much she could study. It was ordinary paper, ordinary ink. A scan of the logo at the top run through their extensive database came back with nothing. No where on the entire planet, now or at any point in the past had anyone ever used a corporate logo in the shape and size of the one she was looking at right now. The CCTV was just as fruitless. There simply wasn't enough definition on the feeds from within the hub to tell if and when a single piece of paper had appeared on her desk. There certainly hadn't been anyone wandering past it to specifically drop it off. Apart from Ianto gathering up yesterday's dirty mugs, no one else had been near it.

'You're probably overthinking this, Ianto told her later as she was still staring at the paper on her desk instead of helping him break down a translation for a bunch of data stick files Jack had given them. 'It could have innocently fallen out of a file, or maybe it's not even for you.'

'What do you mean? Of course it's for me. It's got my name on it.'

'Well, Gwen is a pretty common name.'

'Just like Ianto?' she teased.

He smirked. 'It is here in Wales. Did you ask Jack about it?'

'Do you think I'd get a sensible answer if I did?'

'Probably not, but you could try.'



Jack flipped the page from front to back and back again, giving it an unenthusiastic look. 'As secret admirer love letters go, it's not much,' he said.

'But what do you think it means?' Gwen asked, pressing him for anything at all. 'I checked my calendar last year and the three years before that. I checked the cases we were working on that day, but there's nothing.'

Jack shrugged, letting the paper flutter onto his desk before pushing it away. 'I can't help you. Sorry. Love to, but that's about as much of nothing to work with as you can get.' He must have caught the creasing of her forehead. 'Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it. Strange stuff turns up here all the time. Flotsam and keys and from being right on top of the rift.'

'And you just ignore it?'

'Sometimes. Most times.' He leaned forward, expression turning more serious. 'Don't you think if the world were ending there'd be a bit more information?'

'I suppose.' She didn't like conceding defeat, but if Jack wasn't worried, then she probably shouldn't be either.

Jack was about to dismiss her as he stood from his desk, making to leave himself, even if she weren't. He paused, hands shoved in his pockets. 'You didn't happen to find any other letters like this lying around by any chance?'

'Nope. Just this one.'

Jack nodded thoughtfully. 'Good. Because I got a note on my desk earlier that said "hothouse 6pm". I hoped it meant what I thought it did.'

Gwen resisted rolling her eyes at him. 'Did it happen to be in Ianto's handwriting?'

Jack grinned from ear to ear. 'Oh, yeah. I'm hoping there'll be a second one later that says "bring handcuffs".'

Gwen left feeling perplexed. It just wasn't in her nature to let something like this go unresolved. She toyed with it and carefully folded it before slipping it into her jacket pocket. Perhaps she'd come up with some fresh ideas about it after tea.

'Uh, sorry to ruin your evening,' Ianto said, poking his head in through the door, 'but we've just got word of an explosion in Splott. Well, an implosion, actually, judging by the CCTV, but it's taken out two ambulant parking spaces in front of the local Asda and is billowing green and purple smoke.'

After that, Gwen's note became completely forgotten.



'Where'd it crash?' Jack asked, speeding through the busy morning peak hour, changing lanes and sometimes driving on the wrong side of the road, just to get there quicker. Gwen grabbed the door handle in a vice like grip as they swerved.

If Ianto was annoyed with Jack's defensive driving, he didn't say so, too busy extrapolating a location for them from the data coming in over police chatter and low orbit satellites.

'Top of Castle Street, I think. Near the university.'

'Urgh, great.'

'That's not the worst part. Seems it's leaking fuel and has some interesting hallucinogenic properties. I just heard a police officer break out into an operatic rendition of "99 Luftballons" halfway through making his report.'

'Ah, that'd be the proton-organic phyto fuel cells breaking down,' Jack observed. 'Gwen, grab us a few of those hazmat masks. Pink elephants will be the least of our worries, but it'll dissipate in a few hours. Gonna make the locals a little bit loopy.'

She pulled down the back seat and tugged them from the compartment located behind it, tossing two through the gap and leaving her own in her lap, ready to don as soon as they arrived.

Meanwhile, Ianto popped the glove box, pulling out several silver blister packs. 'Hope we've got enough,' he said, counting out the retcon pills. 'Otherwise it's going to be another expensive tab at the university pub.'

'And I hate university happy hour,' Jack added, swinging the SUV around the corner and coming face to face with the crashed alien vessel. He hit the brakes and had his mask on and was out of the car before either of the other two could so much as unclip their seat belts.

Ianto reached back and held out a blister pack for her. 'Here you go,' he said, before tugging on his own mask and entering the fray.

Gwen got out of the car, mask on and pulled down the zip in her jacket pocket and slid the pills inside, feeling something else already wedged in the small leather pocket. She tugged it out to give her more space and discovered the letter she'd put in there two weeks ago.

'Gwen! C'mon!' Jack was keen for her to knuckle down and get on with the task at hand, corralling crazed citizens and looking for survivors from the crash, but all she could think about was the letter. 13 November. Today. It just had to mean something. I had been in her pocket all this time and today, on the day written on the piece of paper she'd just happened to slip her hand inside and rediscovered it. Being here and doing nothing about it was making her nervous and fidgety, despite the chaos she should have been throwing herself headlong into.

She called out loudly over the muffling from her mask. 'I'll be back in a bit!' she said, turning back to the SUV.

'Gwen!' Jack called back to her. 'Gwen!' he repeated more angrily.

She jumped in the SUV, tugged off her mask and hit the accelerator. It wasn't until she was a few hundred yards down the road that she realised she had no idea where she was going. She had a date but no location. What did that mean? Was she meant to be at the hub? At home? Perhaps she wasn't meant to be anywhere at all. Perhaps whatever or whoever it was would simply find her.

She worked up her options, thinking that home had to be her best bet. She spent all her time at the hub, so why would anyone try and send her a message there? The only other thing that mattered to her in the world was Rhys, and he should be at work right now, or out on the road somewhere. Her instincts told her home was a likely place to be, if she was meant to be somewhere.



When she shoved open the apartment door with far more force that was strictly necessary, she found the place empty. That was just how it should have been, of course. Rhys really was at work, not skiving off or pulling a sickie. Rhys got man flu but he never skipped work even if he could have gotten away with it.

She pottered around, waiting for something to happen, keeping one eye on her phone unless an alert pinged at the hub, but there was nothing. She even called Rhys who assured her he was busy working away and not scoffing his third orange cream with the cup of tea Ruth had brought him in order to butter him up for a payrise. Frustrated at her impulsiveness, she gave the apartments one last long long and then pulled the door shut behind her. She'd completely overreacted to a stupid piece of paper with a date that could have meant anything. Annoyed with herself, she drove back to the university to try and make amends with the teammates she'd abandoned.



The scene was only marginally less chaotic when Gwen finally returned. Jack looked annoyed, which was to say he would be even more annoyed once he got stuck into her.

'Nice little cigarette break?' he said, forcing a large broom across the broken remains of a large window, picking up pieces of glass along with a good potion of something pale blue that was probably crystallised fuel.

'Sorry.' She at least had the guts to look and sound genuinely contrite. 'I just…' she tugged the letter back from her pocket. 'It's today. I just figured maybe it was someone trying to tell me something.'

Jack suddenly looked less mad. 'Well, maybe they were,' he finally said after staring hard at the letter with a strange expression on his face. 'Just after you left, things got really out of hand and a lorry swerved up Castle Street, smacking into the windows here. I saw it just quick enough to grab Ianto and pull him out of harm's way, but if you'd been here with I'm, well… I don't think there'd have been enough time to get you both clear.' He grimaced. 'The driver didn't make it.'

Gwen finally noticed the huge vehicle half sticking out of the administration office, just to the left of the crashed ship. 'Are you saying someone knew this was going to happen? That it was a warning?'

Jack shrugged. 'Or a way to get you out of the way. I guess we didn't consider it might have been from the future.'

Gwen looked at the piece of paper in her hand again. It was old, but what if it was old in the sense that it had traveled back in time? 'But who? It's none of our handwriting, and who else would know exactly what happened just now, on this day some time way off in the future?'

Jack shook his head. 'That I can't answer, Gwen Cooper, but I'd say that someone somewhere out there must be looking out for you.'