Title: Hell
Summary: Tosh is dealing with a loss and is hoping Suzie can tell her something that will help. It doesn't work out that way. Set during They Keep Killing Suzie.
Rating: T for discussions of violence and death
Word Count: 1288
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: gen; Toshiko Sato/Owen Harper (implied); Suzie Costello/Gwen Cooper (teasing)
Contains: Discussions of death and violence.
Warnings: Mentions of minor character death.

"Tell me it's not so bad, being dead."

Suzie scoffed and rolled her eyes. "Now you'll talk to me."

"This is important to me!" Tosh said, and then she glanced around quickly to make sure that Jack or Ianto wasn't hiding in some dark corner. They were good at hiding in this place and popping up when Tosh least wanted them to, and Tosh suspected that Jack would be hovering over everyone more than usual with Suzie's zombie hanging out at the base. Tosh took a deep breath. "There's no Hell, right?" Tosh was not religious, and if she were she wasn't sure she'd be Christian. Her parents weren't religious. She had a grandmother in Osaka who was a practising Shinto and a grandfather in London who actually went to church. Her parents didn't talk about religion. Tosh didn't think they were atheists, but they weren't religious. Tosh had read Dante's Inferno in school and absorbed religious messages via cultural osmosis in both of the countries where she'd spent her childhood, but questions of about the afterlife had never particularly interested her. Even working for Torchwood... Well, Tosh had always done her best to put the resurrection glove and all the horrifying questions it raised out of her mind.

Then the accident had happened.

"It's all Hell, Tosh," Suzie said.

Tosh's stomach turned and she quickly comforted herself by reminding herself that Suzie wasn't exactly trustworthy. Tosh still didn't want to look at her. She was a dead traitor and while Tosh had enough of a guilty conscience to feel like she wasn't allowed to be bothered by the 'traitor' part, though she was anyway, she felt well within her rights to be bothered by the 'dead' part. The scarf wasn't really helping. It was slightly prettier to look at than the bullet wounds, but Suzie didn't normally wear scarves so the fact that she was wearing one now was as clear a reminder as anything that something was wrong.

"Why? Scared?"

"No," Tosh said quickly, and she thought she meant it. Circumstances had long ago forced her to come to terms with the fact that there were things worse than death. She'd gone from a UNIT prison cell to an underground sewer with zombies and flesh-eating aliens and she'd never regretted the change. There were scarier things than dying and there were plenty of things out there that were worth dying for.

Tosh was concerned, and not about Suzie.

Tosh glanced up and their eyes met for half of a second before Tosh looked away again, but that was apparently all Suzie needed to decide that she believed her. "Alright," she said. "Who died? I know it wasn't me."

Tosh took a deep breath. She hadn't even told the team. (It was funny how quickly 'the team' had started including Gwen and stopped including Suzie in Tosh's mind.) She hadn't lied to Jack, exactly, but there were oceans of ambiguity in 'I need next Friday off for a family function,' and it was relatively unlikely that Jack had inferred 'I need next Friday off to go to my mother's funeral,' from it. He had access to her files. He could have looked it up if he suspected and cared enough to bother, but he probably didn't. He'd raised an eyebrow but given her the requested day off without asking any questions, and he hadn't said a word to her about it since.

"Come on, Tosh. Did anyone but me ask? Did anyone but me notice?"

Tosh glared at her.

Suzie smirked. "Not even sweet little Gwen Cooper, huh?"

"You tried to kill her. Why do you have a grudge?"

Suzie shifted around in her wheelchair and kept smirking at Tosh. Tosh looked away again. "I know it was a parent or a grandparent," Suzie said. "It obviously wasn't Owen and you don't have any friends."

"Nobody in Torchwood has friends," Tosh said.

"Nope," Suzie said. "All we have is each other." She didn't even try to hide how manipulative she was being. It was all right there in her tone and Tosh shivered and her stomach flipped but she couldn't deny it.

"It was my mother," she said, and she almost felt as if she should thank Suzie for being the only one to ask, if not the only one to notice, but a more rational part of her mind categorically refused to thank murderers.

"I'm sorry," Suzie said, and she actually sounded like she meant it. "Was it sudden?"

"Car crash," Tosh said, not looking up. "On her way back from a mammogram." She smiled darkly. "Doesn't get much more sudden than that."

"Oh, sweetie, I really am sorry," Suzie said, and Tosh would have believed it several months ago. "Sometimes it's easier that way, though. You know, my dad's health has been declining for years—"

"You killed people!" Tosh said. "Am I actually supposed to believe you feel sorry about my dead mother? What about the people you killed? Did any of them have children? Do you feel sorry for them? Do you even know?!"

"Stop it," Suzie snapped. "That glove didn't work unless you empathized with the victims. Of course I thought about their children and their families and their jobs. A Hell of a lot more than you did, apparently. You needed Gwen bloody Cooper to use that glove on me."

Tosh swallowed hard. "How'd you do it? How could you think about all of those things and do it?"

"They were going to die anyway, Tosh. But the glove..." she took a deep breath. "If I could just get it to really, properly work... It's power no human being has ever had before and it's amazing. Tell me you don't want it. Tell me you wouldn't try that glove on your mother if you could—"

"Stop it!" Tosh said.

"Don't suppose it matters," Suzie said with a sigh. "You have to be Gwen Cooper to make it work right. Was this her first try? Tell me this wasn't her first try."

"You know," Tosh said over her, "The general consensus right now is not that she did it right."

"Well," Suzie said, "Jack would know a lot about the right way to come back from the dead, wouldn't he?"

Tosh looked her over carefully. "What are you talking about?"

"I shot him dead, Tosh."

"No."

"I did. And you know he never seems to get hurt. We've seen him walk away from some incredible things." Her voice got softer. "I think he already knows something that he's hiding from us." ."

Tosh shook her head. "You put a bullet through your head. Are we even sure your memories are trustworthy?"

"My memory is fine, Tosh. You brought me back for them, remember? Ask Gwen if you don't believe me. She saw it. You trust her, don't you?"

"Stop it with Gwen! You went on a killing spree and committed suicide! It's not like you're an innocent victim and she just waltzed in here and stole your job!"

Suzie smirked. "She's cute too, isn't she?"

Tosh stood up. "I just wanted to know what it was like! That was all!"

"It is cold, dark Hell, Toshiko," Suzie said to the back of Tosh's head. Tosh froze for a second. "It is terrifying and I don't want to go back."

Tosh shook herself out and let herself out of the room, which wasn't a cell because Suzie was a former team mate and they were much too nice to put her in a cell.

"Sorry about your mum!" were the last words Tosh heard before she slammed the door shut. Her hands were shaking as she locked it.

She really couldn't trust Suzie, anyway.