Title: Fishy business
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 584 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 497 - Fish
Summary: Jack has a track record for being wary of all things Torchwood One.


Captains Log: 18 June 2006

Got accosted by that kid again this morning. He was standing out by the old office entrance waiting for me. With a mug of coffee for crying out loud. Who does that?

Of course I've done my research on him since last night. He's Torchwood One. I thought we'd accounted for all the survivors – how few of them there were – but this guy seems to have slipped through the cracks. Had to take him off the “presumed dead” list. Mr Jones, Ianto Jones is very much alive and well.

He knew the entrance to our base and that's a cause for concern. No one from London had that information. I know because Yvonne would have attempted a takeover a dozen times over if she did. Normally I like the jealous type, but that woman… There’s literally nothing she wouldn't have done to get her claws on the stuff we’ve got here. I’ve had to deal with her little eyes and spies more than once.

Anyway, she's not my problem anymore, but this guy is. One minute he's turning up to fight off weevils (point of clarification: I had it completely under control, it's just that I find sexy young men a bit of a distraction) and now he's hanging out at my front door delivering coffee. Not even drugged coffee, but pretty damn good coffee, like that’s a selling point!

Clearly I was too subtle last night. Not enough “thanks, but no thanks.” He's hell bent on getting a job here. Gods only know why. After everything they went through in London, any sane person would run a hundred miles and never look back. Makes me think there's something fishy going on. I started getting crazy ideas that maybe Yvonne wasn't dead after all, and that there was some kind of ploy by a surviving splinter group to retake Torchwood Three and set themselves back up and running again. That kind of thing keeps me awake at night, and for the record, I am not the kind of guy who likes having to look over my shoulder. Nobody should want a job here that badly that they'd take to stalking me (although I confess I've been stalked before and once considered the allure of setting up my own cult. I reckon I've got the level of charm to pull it off.).

This kid Jones though is no one. Just someone from administration according to his files. Smart, though probably not too smart. No smart person gets done for shoplifting as a teenager. Not sure he even really knows what it is we do. Okay, so he knew what a weevil was, and had no qualms getting a little rough with one, but what we do here isn't anything like Torchwood One. It's dangerous and chaotic. Most days I love it, but then again, I'm not most guys. Danger doesn't stick to me.

I've got Tosh putting together a facial recognition program for our local CCTV security. Call me paranoid but I wanna know if he's spotted lurking anywhere within a mile of the hub. Torchwood One folk are, on the whole, not to be trusted. If I see his face again (which is a bit of a shame as it wasn’t a bad face, and the arse was pretty good too), he’ll get told – explicitly this time – that there is no job here for him and never will be. It never hurts to be too careful about these things.