This is just a little piece I had stuck in the corner of my brain. Each team member gets two mistakes in the list, which starts at small, funny mistakes and then (rather abruptly) jumps to more serious, personal ones. I hope you enjoy!
Disclaimer: I got nothing.
Becoming a member of Torchwood meant (in theory, at least) leaving all error behind. In top-secret organizations, government-affiliated or otherwise, there simply wasn't room for mistakes which, when augmented by extraterrestrials and their technology, tended to spin out of control faster than the brain could register.
Of course, the fact that all members of Torchwood were only human meant that error was bound to become involved to some degree or anther. Even when the huge mistakes (the Cyberwoman in the basement, tearing open the Rift…the life-threatening ones) were set aside, the little ones built up and amplified and meant something. Over time, the list of Torchwood's biggest little mistakes emerged.
10.) Ianto chose to purchase decaf coffee for the team. He'd thought that it would be healthier. The reliance on caffeine in the Hub was certainly a sight to behold, and he was becoming slightly worried as to how their performance would be altered if they weren't weaned off it. Unfortunately, the physical and emotional backlash from Owen (and to a lesser degree, from Gwen and Jack) was enough to change his mind within two hours of serving the first cup. From that day on, it was regular coffee.
9.) Tosh decided to eat breakfast out one morning. She hadn't realized that sitting down to breakfast at a restaurant was something to be done either with a significant other or with family. She had neither, at least not in Cardiff. They were the loneliest scrambled eggs she'd ever stared down at. After that morning, Tosh revised her definition of "breakfast out" to mean "eating a slice of toast at her workstation in the morning."
8.) Owen's unlucky choice to glance through the CCTV footage of the night before. He'd accidentally hit a button with his elbow while trying to catch a falling paperweight. To his horror, he learned more in the next 12 seconds about Jack and Ianto's relationship than he'd ever cared to. He would never ear the word "eraser" without wanting to scream and/or vomit ever again.
7.) Jack left his RAF coat over at Ianto's for the weekend. It hadn't been his fault—he'd just forgotten it. The pair of them had needed to rush out the next morning to stop a pair of Weevils from attacking a daycare, anyway. But when he'd gotten it back, it had smelled like Ianto. After putting it on, he hadn't been able to concentrate all day.
6.) The one day Gwen chose pumps over trainers. It was only one day, and it had been a fairly quiet week. Of course, she realized in retrospect that she ought to have taken that as a warning sign, but she'd bought the shoes only the other day and she'd been dying to give them a go. It had to be on the day of the full-speed foot chase through the sewers. She'd sprained her ankle, broken the heel off one of the shoes, and hadn't been able to walk for two weeks.
5.) Tosh kept the picture of Tommy in her wallet. She liked to remember the people who meant something to her, especially the people who meant something to her in that way. So she'd made a copy of the photo of Tommy in the Torchwood file and slipped it into her wallet. Toshiko hadn't thought anything of the action—she didn't know anyone who would be made curious or become wildly jealous because of the picture of the man from 1918 lurking in her purse. But then, one late night at the Hub, a week or so after she and Owen had reached their post-mortem (for him, anyway) "understanding," she'd dropped her purse and the picture had fluttered out. Unflappable, steel Owen had stared at it for about a minute without moving, a look of pain and twisted bewilderment on his face. Move on? She'd never been particularly good at that.
4.) Ianto had never moved Jack's things back to the Hub. The two of them had never officially moved in together before Jack had disappeared without warning. They hadn't even begun to talk about taking that step. Nevertheless, possessions of Jack's began appearing at Ianto's flat out of sheer convenience—his razor, and extra change of clothes, his copy of "Air Force One" on DVD (Ianto had always teased him that he had an action-hero complex). But even with the American gone, Ianto couldn't bring himself to shove the man out of his life altogether. Every time he returned to his flat, he was reminded of what he'd lost. Every time he returned to his flat, he remembered how he wasn't good enough to make the Captain stay. Every time he returned to his flat, he lost a little…bit…more…hope.
3.) Gwen never told Rhys about Owen. It had never come up in conversation (but then again, when does the subject of illicit affairs ever come up in pleasant exchange?), and she just couldn't make herself put another load on their already strained relationship. Telling Rhys would mean the end of their relationship—she had no delusions on that subject. Gwen knew that putting it off wasn't necessarily doing any good, but she couldn't see the benefit of telling him. And so, in the marriage of no lies, the biggest lie of all festered.
2.) Jack never told Ianto how he felt. It had scared him, waking up from that long death. He'd wanted to see the young Welshman so badly, and that kind of powerful emotion scared the living crap out of him. He'd run to the end of the universe, the end of the world, the end of time, but what he'd seen had only reminded him that he'd messed up. Big time. Keeping his mouth shut, laughing it off, making a meaningless, raunchy comment—all tactics had a time and a place. Dealing with Ianto was never that time, nor that place, but he'd used them anyway.
He'd messed up. It had been come-clean time, and he'd missed it.
1.) Owen didn't make Tosh tell him was was wrong. He couldn't lie—as he sat trapped in the nuclear power plant in the last few moments of his second life, he was perfectly aware that something was wrong with Toshiko. Owen was a doctor, for God's sake! He knew the sound of suffering when he heard it, and it was reading loud and clear in her voice in those last few moments of semi-life, but he just…didn't…ask. Selfish until the end, he'd thought as he sat, doing his best to calm her—one dying man to another. See you on the other side. How about that game of pool?
The Torchwood team made mistakes, both large and small. The big ones nearly destroyed the world—but the little ones reminded them that they were human.
I hope you liked it. I always like those "Ten times…" fics, and I wanted to write one myself. If you did like it, why not check out some of my other fics? I'm not exactly running short on them.
Review, please!