Title: Return Of The Living Socks
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Sock.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 842
Summary: Out on a Rift retrieval in Bute Park, Ianto encounters an alien creature he had hoped never to see again.
Spoilers: Nada.
Warnings: None needed.
Written For: Challenge 503: Sock.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood or any of the characters.






Ianto was experiencing an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. The striped sock inched its way slowly across the ground, creeping towards a beetle that was rooting about in the leaf litter. It looked a bit the worse for wear, the colours faded as if from long exposure to the elements, a sad abandoned sock, like you’d sometimes see in the road or on the pavement, which made Ianto wonder if all those stray socks had once been… alive, like this one.

That was an unsettling thought; maybe they’d been run over and killed while crossing the road. Maybe if they hadn’t fallen victim to accidents, they might have launched a full-scale invasion… Ianto had personal experience of being attacked by a whole flock of sock creatures the previous year, and it had NOT been pleasant. He didn’t want to go through that again, but this sock appeared to be alone.

Scanning the area, both with his eyes and the scanner app on his phone, Ianto couldn’t detect any others, although that didn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any. Perhaps they were spread out, hunting. Then again, the sock creatures the team had encountered last year hunted in a pack, not singly, and were fully capable of bringing down quite large prey. Ianto shuddered; he remembered all too clearly how if felt to be buried under a pile of living socks that were trying to suffocate him. He still couldn’t go to sleep at night if any of his own completely inanimate socks were on the loose. So what if that sounded paranoid? Nobody got to judge him unless they’d experienced what he had.

Still, if this sock creature was alone, subsisting on what small prey it could catch by itself… The sock crept closer to the beetle, pounced, but missed; as the beetle scuttled away, the sock seemed to deflate, going limp, as if too exhausted to continue the hunt. Absurdly, especially knowing how dangerous the things could be, Ianto felt sorry for it.

He looked at the containment unit in his hand, the one he’d brought here from the SUV to collect the Rift’s latest gift, which had turned out to be a very unspectacular dogeared paperback novel that wouldn’t even be written for another seventeen years. Yes, he’d checked the copyright page. So what? It was a book, not a mysterious alien device. Books were harmless, except for very heavy encyclopaedias, which could break your toes if you happened to accidentally drop one on your foot. Another thing Ianto knew from painful experience.

With a resigned sigh, Ianto took the book out of the box, stuffed it in his overcoat pocket, because he intended to read it anyway, then used a fallen twig to scoop the weary, half-starved sock into the plastic container. He was probably too soft-hearted for his own good, but it was a living creature, of sorts, and they’d never had the chance to study the species the last time. After killing the queen, the team had gathered all the remaining sock creatures together, taken them back to the Hub, and consigned them to the furnace. This one…

Well, maybe they’d missed one or two, and this one had somehow managed to survive through spring, summer, autumn, and most of a cold, wet winter. It was a homeless stray animal, but also an alien creature, which made it Torchwood’s responsibility, which in turn made it HIS responsibility, since he was the one who had to take care of the Hub’s residents. What was one more? If the team could learn more about the species, they’d be better prepared to deal with them in future.

The sock lay in the bottom of the containment box, unmoving. It might already be dead, in which case Owen could do a necropsy on it, but just in case it was still alive, Ianto found the beetle it had been stalking, or a similar one, and dropped it in the box as a sock snack. He’d feed the sock something more substantial once he got it back to the Hub. He could keep it in one of the lidded glass tanks they used for smaller species like the spider mouse colony, set up a suitable environment for it. As an afterthought, he tossed a few handfuls of dead leaves into the box too, so the sock would have something to hide under.

Putting the lid on, he picked up the box and headed back to the SUV, musing over his new acquisition. He could be the only person in Cardiff, the only person on earth, to keep a sock as a pet. He wondered how long wild socks lived. This being Torchwood, the sock might well live longer than he would. Outlasted by a sock; there was a certain irony to that thought.

Ianto laughed; every so often he was reminded of just how weird his life was. Weevils, Hoix, alien invasions, living socks… He almost felt sorry for other people. They had no idea how many extraordinary creatures existed in the universe.


The End