Title: When it rains, it pours
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Gwen
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,322 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 500 - Flood
Summary: In the hub, the team are preparing for bad weather..


As Jack entered the hub, he grabbed the tips of his coat lapels, giving them both a sharp tug. Rainwater spattered in every which direction as it flew from his collar and shoulders, leaving wet makes on everything it touched. ‘Man, it’s wild out there,’ he remarked, looking around the hub for his two teammates and friends.

Gwen barely looked up from her computer. The ends of her hair were still damp from her own morning commute and now the rest of her hair was dry but sticking out from her head in tousled waves. She didn't offer him any sympathy. Being damp and miserable was apparently the order of the day.

The click of polished shoes announced Ianto behind him. Jack caught his expression just in time to notice the way he was trying hard not to comment on the water splashed all over the floor. ‘Still raining, I see,’ he said instead. Unlike them, he was perfectly dry, if a little bit red-cheeked and flushed.

‘Get that coffee on, pronto,’ Jack said. ‘After being out in that, I’ve earned it.’

Ianto arched an eyebrow at him. ‘I've been sandbagging the tourist office for the last two hours and you want me to make you a coffee?’

‘Hey, I was out in that rain whilst you were tucked up nice and dry in here, don’t forget,’ Jack replied. ‘A coffee is the least I'm owed.’

Ianto grumbled something under his breath but he headed towards the kitchen anyway, heeding Jack's command for more caffeine. He didn't really want to deny Jack coffee – everybody knew how that would end. It was just the principle of the matter.

Jack made his way across the hub towards his office taking off his coat giving it another tug just before the threshold, leaving more spattered raindrops littering the concrete floor before finally hanging it on the rack just inside where it would hopefully drip dry as it had done a thousand times before. It really was terrible out there, he thought. He lived here for decades and he was familiar with the whims of Cardiff's weather, but the rain today was epic, and it only seemed to be just getting going, working its way up to a full crescendo of torrential rain wind, possibly hail. A once in a decade storm, he thought as he plonked himself in the well worn battered leather chair behind his desk propping up a boot on the edge of it and leaning back for a moment waiting for his coffee to arrive.

Ianto finally returned with a tray of coffees – and even a plate of biscuits, which was surprising. Jack took a glance through the window out over the hub. He turned back to Ianto just as the mug of steaming hot coffee was being laid gently on the desk. ‘What are they saying on the forecast?’

‘Oh, the usual,’ Ianto replied. ‘Lots of rain, some wind, general bleakness… Just another lovely day in Cardiff, really,’ Ianto said with his trademark dry humour. Welshmen loved to complain about the weather because at least it was a topic of consistency, on which very few people could argue. It was the sort of thing you discussed when you were trying to avoid religion and politics. Weather in Wales was anything but contentious.

‘Have you shut off the valves in the rift pool?’ Jack asked, picking up his coffee and taking a grateful sip of burning hot liquid, coating his throat with scalding hot goodness all the way down until it found the pit of his stomach, warming it from the inside out.

‘Of course,’ Ianto replied. ‘Can't be too careful on days like these,’ he replied.

It was bad enough that a heavy rain could cover the Plass in a few inches of water, which inevitably always managed to find its way down through the cracks in the roof, shimmying down the long silvery water tower and into the rift pool below, filling it more than it was designed to cope with. What they didn't need was it coming back up the other way from the bay. If the weather was as wild as they said it was going to be, then storm surges and high tidal waves were highly likely.

Whilst the barrage might protect them from the worst of it, the winds would whip up the still waters of the bay regardless, crashing them over the quay, finding every nook and cranny in the century old Torchwood facility and working their way inside. Too many times they'd watch that tourist office floor covered in three inches of salty, smelly water, much to Ianto’s disgust and horror. Thus the sandbagging this morning. He was sick of having to mop up the place every time waves crashed over and seeped under the door. Maybe they ought to think about making the tourist office entrance more waterproof, Jack thought. Some sort of proper airtight seal around the doors edges, that would serve not only to keep the rain water out but also keep in anything deadly that shouldn't reach the general public.

‘For the record, sir,’ Ianto added, ‘I’ve fetched the scuba gear from downstairs and left it up in the boardroom should we need it.’

Jack simply nodded. Once up a time he would have laughed off the suggestion of needing scuba equipment, and mocked Ianto’s sense of panic-merchantry, but the last time it had rained this hard, the storm surges out in the bay had managed to push all the way up the pipes that usually fed water out into the bay. Without much warning they’d been in three feet of seawater, covering the floor of the hub all the way to the walls and still rising. The valves had been open that day, allowing a free flow of water, albeit in the wrong direction. It might not have been so much of a problem having a minor flooding event inside the hub, except that the surge had pushed other things back up the pipes along with the inordinate level of seawater. Jack discovered this the hard way, being pulled under by a shark and mauled as he’d sloshed through the water, trying to close off the covers of the rift machine and to reach the valves that would put a stop to the rising water levels. That altercation had put him off his fish and chips for months.

‘I’ve also readied the harpoon guns,’ Ianto added, as if he were reading Jack’s thoughts in real time. ‘Just in case we need to fend off anything.’ He paled slightly, as if remembering the fact that Jack did not always make for a pretty corpse.

‘Good work, Ianto.’ They’d been caught out once before, and Jack had no desire for a repeat. The hub was a big place with a lot of levels, but the bay was a lot bigger, filled with enough seawater to fill the hub fifty times over.

‘Fortunately this time we don’t have the supermoon adding to the gravitational pull of the water into the hub,’ he commented.

Ah yes, how could Jack forget. It wasn’t bad enough to have bad weather, they had to have a poor alignment of interstellar objects exerting their gravitational force on the planet at the same time. ‘I’m sure we’ll have nothing to worry about,’ Jack replied, setting his half drunk coffee back on the desk. ‘Once in a century storm that day, right?’

‘That’s what they were calling this on the news this morning,’ Ianto replied with a frown.

‘Prepared as we can be,’ Jack told him. ‘Now, time for some real work.’

Ianto nodded and left and Jack watched him go before pulling open the bottom drawer of his desk and checking that the chain mail reinforced gumboots were still in there. Just in case, he told himself. Let a shark try and take a bite out of those babies.