Title: Pulp fiction
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,292 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 490 - Issue
Summary: Ianto thinks he’s finally cracked a secret message lurking in his pile of monthly trash rags.


There were a lot of parts of Ianto's job that weren't strictly his job. Torchwood was a bit like that, thinking up and finding new ways to protect the planet from itself and from the aliens that sometimes ended up here. From scouring eBay and the charity shops, to working through the collections of the deceased estates of the more eccentric Cardiff residents, there were always new and inventive ways of tracking down alien paraphernalia.

It wasn't always the inanimate or the physical, either. Sometimes what needed to be monitored were the thoughts and rumours that swirled around on message boards and in private chat rooms. Most of it was harmless chatter but it didn't hurt to have Torchwood’s computers keeping tabs on the most vocal of these theorists, just in case they needed to pay them a visit and deal with them.

Tangential to that was one of Ianto's other self-imposed duties, which was to collect current issues of all the regular magazines that put aliens and conspiracies at their forefront. It paid to be up to date with what kind of lunatic things were circulating on the fringes. Mostly he found their articles amusing, or so far off from the truth that he almost wanted to laugh out loud. Massive black panthers hiding out in the hills, a shadow government transmitting subliminal messages through the bluetooth in your car, and psychotropics in the local water supplies, forcing images of the devil into people's subconscious and forcing them to vote liberal. Okay, so the psychotropica in the water had some merit to it, but that had only happened twice, and both times it had been very effective to retcon the entire city in one go. Torchwood however had no interest in politics or swaying election results. All politicians were a nightmare to deal with so it really didn't matter to them. Of course, the ones that had integrated the one way system in the centre of town, well, they needed a stern talking to and maybe a few days in a cell next to a weevil.

Ianto naturally didn't have hours to entertain himself with all the ludicrous fantasies that were doing the rounds on a monthly basis. Mostly he fed the magazines through his scanner and let their systems analyse the contents, looking for keywords or patterns or anything that flew just a little too close to one of their actual case files. There was only one magazine each month that he paid particular attention to, and then only to one specific contributor. He hadn't been able to trace the writer's real identity, operating under a pseudonym with a deeply sophisticated electronic audit trail that Ianto couldn't pin to any one country or city.

What bothered him most about this particular writer was not that they ever got any of it right, but that the system was picking up anomalies in the content. Odd little snippets here and there that the mainframe was trying to stitch together. Maybe it was a secret coded message for some extremist group or maybe it was dropping hints that they were part of something much bigger and more complex. Concerns about The Committee rang loudest in the back of his head, but for a group with some much influence on the real world, why would they bother with silly conspiracy magazines and the types of people who read them?

This month though, he'd finally gotten a breakthrough. There was indeed a pattern of a kind in the articles. They were all connected, though the system still couldn't quite pinpoint how and why. It was beyond the weird and wacky and just plain wrong. The writer was someone they should do anything and everything to hunt down. Confident that he finally had enough to report his findings back up the line, he grabbed the current issue, along with a few back issues, flipped open to the relevant pages and marched them up to Jack's office.

‘I've got it,’ he declared without preamble.

Jack raised a curious set of eyebrows at him. ‘What have we got? Please tell me it's something fun we can use after hours. Or even right now. I'm not fussy.’

‘Two years. Two years I've been scouring that trash rags full of conspiracy and nonsense and I've got him. Her. It. Not sure yet, but I've got… them.’

Jack continued to look quizzically at him ‘Them?’

‘There's secret messages hidden in the articles of one particular contributor whose pseudonym I haven’t been able to trace, but they’re there. We have to find this guy, gal, whoever. They know things they simply shouldn't and they've been dropping the clues in their articles. We should get Tosh onto it straight away to try and decode it.’

‘Oh?’ Jack didn't sound nearly as concerned as Ianto would have liked him to be. Sure, it wasn't running into a burning building, all guns blazing to be the hero of the hour kind of stuff, but it was still important work nonetheless.

‘I'm serious. At first I thought I was starting to become “one of them,” he said, putting the quotation fingers around the terminology, ‘seeing the patterns in randomness, but there are just certain things you can't ignore once you start piecing together all the articles.’

‘Uh huh.’

Jack’s lack of interest was starting to irritate him. ‘Jack, I need you to start taking this seriously.’

‘I am completely vested in this,’ Jack assured him. ‘So much so that I'm telling you that there's nothing we need to worry about.’

Ianto was flabbergasted by the response. ‘How can you know that? I haven't even shown you what I've found yet.’

Jack leaned back in his chair, folding his arms and giving Ianto one of those ‘know it all’ kind of looks. ‘Let me guess. It's a magazine called Wacky Tattler and the guy’s name is P. Thane.’

Ianto was about to correct him when he did a double take. ‘What? I mean, yes. But… How could you possibly know that?’

‘Because that's my pseudonym,’ Jack replied. ‘I’ve been penning articles in that magazine for years.’

Ianto was confused, like he'd dropped though into some alternate universe where things no longer made sense. ‘You? But… why?’

Jack gave him a shrug. ‘Just for fun.’

‘Fun?’ Ianto narrowed his eyes at him. ‘You don't have time for fun.’

‘I have time for you.’

‘Even more if you weren’t busying yourself articulating this rubbish,’ he said, flapping the glossy pages at him with a clenched fist.

‘Hey, I am keeping the alien conspiracy theories alive and well, Jack argued. ‘Whilst they're focused on the fiction, that leaves us free to deal with the fact. I’ve been leaving false trails for so long it’s got all those obsessives tied up in knots trying to figure it out when the reality is, there’s nothing to figure out.’

Ianto’s teeth began to grind. Jack had also been tying him up in knots and that was not only annoying but a complete waste of his time. ‘You might have told me.’

‘It wouldn't be a secret pseudonym then.’

Ianto growled under his breath. ‘Well, perhaps when you find some time for facts, you'll find time to finish the umpteen reports you owe me, and not this quackery.’ He threw the magazines down on Jack’s desk in disgust.
‘That quackery has kept you employed,’ Jack reminded him.

‘Analysing it for serious threats to planetary security, not to indulge your fictional fantasies!’

Jack grinned at him. ‘Oh, you have no idea what my fictional fantasies are. That is a whole other file. One which you won't be finding printed in any magazine.’

‘Let's thank decency for that. I’ve had quite enough of your fictional fantasies.’