Title: Hero Worship
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Mica Davies; Jack/Ianto (mentioned)
Warnings: Spoilers for COE, mentions character death
Summary: Mica cannot remember much about her Uncle Ianto but she knows she wants to be like him when she grows up.
Disclaimer: I don't own Torchwood, nor any of the characters here.
A/N: My first Torchwood fic and my first fic written in four months. So it's a bit... *shrugs*. Not beta-ed; feel free to point out any mistakes. Um... Mica is in her mid-teens.
Mica doesn't remember much from those five days. She supposes it is because she was only five when they happened. She does wake up some nights though, with a start, from dreams of rough hands pulling her away and her Mam screaming.
She doesn't ask her Mam about those days, because it only makes her cry and Mica finds that disturbing, watching Rhiannon Davies, who fears and falters at nothing, cry. But she gets the feeling that the tears are less of grief and more of guilt.
Tad just tells her to "shut up about it, you'll upset yer Mam". David… David is… she's not quite sure, but she'll figure him out someday.
Mica remembers the woman though, Gwyn, Gwen, whatever her name was. She was at the funeral too, lurking in the background, tears running down her face, probably wanting to come closer but afraid of Mam. Mam always did have a very mean backhand.
And Uncle Ianto… Uncle Ianto was and still is a mystery. She hardly remembers him, accept that he gave her and David money whenever he visited. And that once when he came, not his last visit, he'd cried like a baby. She'd found it funny at the time, but feels bad about it now.
Oh, and he was gay. That is hard to forget, because while she doesn't remember any kind of conversation he'd had with her Mam, she knew he'd come out just before he died and Tad had won some money in a bet that he'd spent on ice-cream for them later "in Ianto's memory" when things had gotten a little better.
And she also has a photograph of his boyfriend.
The man in the photo is handsome, like a movie star. And no, she's not attracted to him, just making a clinical observation. Mam says she's like her Uncle in some aspects and while she used to feel annoyed by that comparison, she now takes it as a compliment.
Uncle Ianto did die saving the world.
This objectivity of hers also doesn't make it seem pervy, sick, incestuous or wrong in any kind of way for having a photograph of her dead uncle's boyfriend. She's just interested in her family genealogy. And maybe there's a little bit of belated hero worship here too.
She's not quite sure when this fascination with her died-saving-the-world uncle began. But Susan did show her something once, something that hadn't looked, but had felt otherworldly. She'd managed to get her friend to throw it into Cardiff Bay, and feeling had gone away. Maybe she should have given it to Torchwood, but she's not quite sure how to find them. And going to her uncle's grave to babble to thin air about alien artefacts that gave her the shivers had been one of the most embarrassing things she's done, even though she'd felt a lot better afterwards.
Nobody talks about it, but Mica knows that Uncle Ianto died saving the world from aliens.
It's hard to imagine her staid, suited uncle running around with a gun blasting aliens to dust. Or maybe not really. No, not at all actually. It's cool. Very cool. Like Men in Black, like James Bond with aliens. Yeah.
Okay, maybe with Uncle Ianto, a little weird.
It's easy to imagine that with his boyfriend though. The man in the picture has the dashing look of the action hero who saves the world, the day, and always gets the girl in the end. Or in this case, the guy.
Jack, Office, Hub. 2007 is written across the back of the photograph in a scrawl. Jack. Mica's never seen him. She's even Googled him, but the only Jack Harkness she finds is on a list of pilots from World War II. Maybe Ianto's Jack is dead. Maybe he left the country, made a new life for himself elsewhere. Maybe he killed himself. (She finds that romantic, in a twisted Romeo and Juliet kind of way, and sometimes feels bad about that. That would also make Jack Juliet, which is just weird.)
Nobody knows about the photo, which is a good thing, because it would be a little hard to explain, wouldn't it? She found it in her uncle's wallet, which had been given to her Mam in a box with all personal effects that had been found on him when he died. That Gwyn woman had come to take the box shortly before the funeral, citing Torchwood policy in a very half-hearted, reluctant manner and Mam had socked her in the face, despite Gwyn being pregnant and all that. There had been a stopwatch in the box too, she remembers playing with it when Mam had first shown her its contents. The next time she'd opened it two years ago, when she'd found the photo, the stopwatch had gone.
In the picture Jack is staring at point beyond the camera and whoever took the photo. There is a soft smile on his face, and his eyes look sad, wistful. The romantic in her believes that he was looking at Ianto when it was taken. (The romantic in her also prefers to think of her uncle as just "Ianto" in such moments. Adding the family relation there makes her feel… like an incestuous pervy stalker or something, no matter how objective she is about these things.)
She also has a photo of Ianto hidden in the same book she hides Jack's photo in but she doesn't quite like it because it's not one of the uncle she knows. The Uncle Ianto she knows and admires wears a suit and doesn't talk much and once cried noisily in the kitchen over cups of tea. The one in the photo is dressed for clubbing and looks a little drunk. But it's the only photo she managed to find of him in which he isn't scowling and she's sure that her Jack photo would prefer the company of a slightly drunk Ianto photo to that of a sulking Ianto photo.
(No, she's not mad. Maybe just sentimental. Curious. Hero-worshipping. And just a little enamoured by this secret-romance thing she sometimes think they had going.)
It's probably unhealthy, this slight… curiosity she has for her uncle, his boyfriend and his work. But ever since those five days in during which her uncle died, she's noticed things. That the man she passed on the street had purple eyes and no ears and short horns under his long hair. There are creatures in shiny boiler suits that sometimes appear in Cardiff and are captured by Torchwood. Lots of "terrorism" seems to happen in Cardiff. She'd been to the Millennium Centre once, and seen a blue police box (of all things!) materialise on the plass before vanishing seconds later.
Something has changed, she knows, and she's not sure this twenty-first century world is ready. Her friends don't remember those five days; dismiss it as a government plot, terrorism, any kind of strange, deviant human activity. Not aliens. But she sees it's so obvious now, when she goes through old reports and files on the internet. Hospitals vanishing. Spaceships appearing in the sky over London. The Titanic almost crashing into Buckingham Palace. Mass hallucinations at Canary Wharf that somehow killed her uncle's colleagues and girlfriend.
And her uncle was a Man in Black, a James Bond fighting alien baddies instead of psychotic human ones. He wore a suit, carried a gun, kicked alien arse and died in the line of duty.
She thinks that's cool, awesome. (She is also still very young, inexperienced and naïve.)
She will find Torchwood and one day she will save the world, just like her Uncle Ianto.
Thank you for reading. Comments and criticism will be much appreciated.