Title: Dangerous
Summary: Tosh learned something important from Suzie.
Rating: M for violence and sexual descriptions
Word Count: 1015
Other Chapters: No.
Disclaimer: The British Broadcasting Corporation owns Torchwood and all related characters, settings, and trademarks. I do not profit in any way from this material.
Pairings: Toshiko Sato/Suzie Costello (implied); Suzie Costello/Owen Harper (mentioned; fantasized about), Toshiko Sato/Owen Harper (mentioned)
Contains: sex, masturbation,
Warnings: mention of murder
She held them differently now. After Suzie. Before they'd been only objects of wonder and power, like something out of a fairytale. But Suzie used to hold them the same way, and now Tosh could see their darkness where before she couldn't. Had Suzie been corrupted by them, or had she always been corrupt and used the technology for—
No.
As terrifying as the thought of the alien technology they played with the power it offered them corrupting them was, Tosh couldn't believe that Suzie had always had it in her to kill. She liked Suzie.
She'd really, really liked Suzie, in a way that she'd always told herself didn't really mean anything. Owen. Owen was the person that Tosh wanted to be with. When Owen and Suzie had sex and made no secret of it, Tosh was jealous of Suzie. When she'd touched herself that night and thought of them together—Owen's cock deep in Suzie and her bare breasts exposed, sweat glistening on her forehead as she screamed for Owen and he grunted with the pleasure he found in her. God, Tosh went from dry to gushing as soon as she started thinking about it and oh how hard she came—she was probably just imagining herself in Suzie's place. Or something. She'd been tempted—briefly tempted by the image of Suzie on top of her desk, lifting her skirts and gesturing for Owen to—They were her coworkers! Their sex life was none of Tosh's business, and whatever she felt for Owen, these fantasies were ridiculous. Why Suzie? Her visuals of herself with Owen didn't affect her nearly as strongly as her visuals of Owen and Suzie, and she always had such clear visuals of Suzie while she thought about them having sex. Sometimes, she'd catch a sight of Suzie's cleavage or her thighs, and she'd just think—Oh. I'll have to remember that later—Fuck. It meant nothing.
She'd liked Suzie as a coworker. And a boss. And a friend. Suzie had seemed—Suzie had been genuinely nice and pleasant in an organization where most people were distant as a rule. No one in Torchwood knew about Tosh's past as well as Jack did, and he didn't talk to Tosh about it. Tosh knew only the vaguest details about Owen's history. Tosh didn't know much about Suzie's history, but she Suzie had always been more open to talking about her weekend plans, and had even talked Tosh into getting lunch or seeing a film a couple of times. And Suzie had been able to make the glove work. Didn't that require empathy? Tosh had never been able to. Owen and Jack had never been able to. Only Suzie. Surely that meant that there was something within Suzie that felt for other human beings, even those she killed. She could turn it on and off, apparently, but she still had it, when none of the rest of them did. Tosh tried. She wanted to. But... well.. she'd always been such an outsider.
It had been the glove. Suzie would have been if, if they'd just never found that fucking glove. And Tosh understood the appeal. When she'd first seen what the glove was capable of, she'd immediately thought of all the implications for it. The lives they could save. The lost wisdom they could recover. The murderers they could—
Well. Suzie had apparently never considered that a real possibility.
All of the goodbyes people had never gotten to say. And if they could make it work long-term...
But maybe that was the real problem. Tosh didn't believe in God, so she'd always suppressed any thought that Torchwood might be playing his role, but as a scientist, she'd always taken comfort in the idea that nature had certain laws that couldn't be broken. Now she was beginning to consider the possibility that nature had certain laws that shouldn't broken. Maybe the dead were meant to stay dead. How do you touch death that directly without killing something within yourself? That was what made Suzie capable of doing it, and doing it, and doing it, and doing it, and finally doing it to herself. Once she'd pulled that first soul back to life and touched death for the first time, it lost all mystery for her. She lost her terror of it.
Tosh was becoming increasingly certain that there was a line, somewhere in their work. A line that should never be crossed. Tosh didn't know where it was, though. She wanted, and perhaps even desperately needed, to continue their work. They were doing amazing things, and despite all the death they'd seen and even caused, Tosh truly believed that they were doing even more good and would eventually do even greater good. She just needed to... be more careful.
So Tosh sat at her desk and she held their latest catch and she tried to tell herself not to get carried away yet. She didn't know what it did, yet, but it was roughly the size of a human heart and Tosh had the distinct impression that it was glittering, despite it being covered in several centuries of mud and dirt. It pulsed. That was bad. It didn't feel bad, but neither had the glove, and the glove was definitely bad.
Don't get excited.
It wasn't exactly easy to forget Suzie, when Tosh was still struck by memories of her ten times a day at the base, but it was important to remember her for the right reasons. Not the murder, though that was part of it. Not her thighs and her breasts and other things Tosh should never have been thinking about to begin with—She couldn't touch herself to those images anymore anyway. Not now that she knew what Suzie had done and Owen had told he'd spent two hours in the bath trying to scrub her off him. She had to remember Suzie for the lesson Suzie had taught her. That last, important lesson.
Not everything was what it seemed. Sometimes even things that seemed like the best of the lot were actually the darkest and most dangerous.