A/N: Boy, this is a long time between updates, yeah? Not too awfully long, I hope. One look at my profile will show that I write most Ranma 1/2 stuff, so that'll explain that. Hope everyone enjoys this chapter!
Toshiko inhaled deeply, pasting a vaguely pleasant expression on her face, and stepped squarely on the lift. With a mechanical jerk, it began to descend and she glanced at her watch. She had only been gone for thirty minutes. More than likely, everyone was still out to lunch.
Sitting at her workstation, Toshiko glared at the negative spike alert on her screen. Not that any one of them would know or notice well enough to recognize the expression. Gwen and Owen constantly cast hungry looks at each other in what they probably considered to be a surreptitious manner. Jack and Ianto participated in a dance between themselves that somehow only involved their eyes.
It all made her want to scream.
Grabbing her coat and purse, she sent a quick message to Jack's computer. Protocol ordered that if you went out in the field alone, you had to wear one of the communication earpieces. Today was the first day Toshiko dared to ignore the rules.
'Code Amber. Gone to site. Tosh.' Code Amber was a negative spike, in honor of the American Amber Alert for missing children. She would take readings on the site, hoping to glean some new information to find out if there was a pattern from the places the Rift took people.
As she exited through the tourist office, she wondered how long it would take Jack to notice that she was gone.
In fact, Jack noticed Toshiko's absence as soon as he returned to the Hub. He idly wondered if she was having fun on her little lunch date. It was good to see her moving on after Mary but he thought she might be pushing herself a little much. She was a very introverted girl and he always felt her pain keenly.
"Where's Tosh?" Jack was halfway up to his office when he turned to smile at Ianto.
"I guess she's still out to lunch."
Ianto shook his head worriedly. His eyes had caught a couple of things that didn't go together. Tosh's computer was active, as if she had been there only a few minutes before, but all the com pieces were hanging on the wall. It would be unlike Toshiko took go anywhere significant without her earpiece, unlike her to ignore such a singular rule.
Meanwhile, Jack had continued to his office after giving the Welshman a wry smile that he didn't notice. It passed through his head that Ianto worried too much and that kind of stress wasn't healthy when he realized his computer was blinking rhythmically in a pattern he had convinced Toshiko to plug into his computer. It meant that he had received an intersystem message.
Without a second thought, he maneuvered around his desk and leaned over his keyboard, moving the mouse around to select the message. His eyes widening slowly, he read it several times to be sure before running out of his office quickly. Ianto was never one to miss something and he rarely seemed worried for their Asian employee, for she tended to follow protocol to the letter.
"Ianto!"
"Yes, sir?" The prim Welshman was a military salute away from clicking his heels together in some kind of alert gesture. However, now was not the time to think of him trussed up in uniform.
"Tosh has gone to a site. Is the weather still turning bad?"
Ianto nodded slowly and sighed heavily. Jack waited, knowing that the other man's professionalism would force him to say what was on his mind soon enough. "All the com units are here."
Over the course of an eternally slow second, Jack could feel his face growing slack and pale. Cardiff was due for a heavy downpour any minute and this was the time that Tosh had chosen to become rebellious, even if it was something as slight as forgetting a com unit. Pulling out his phone, he punched out a quick text message to his subordinate, informing her of the bad weather and urging her to return as soon as possible.
His heart dropped when his phone beeped dully not two seconds after he sent the message. Sliding his thumb across the screen, he barely managed to keep from either gasping in horror or crunching his phone in an angry fist. The message informed him that the receiver's device was turned off.
"Ianto, her phone's off too."
With a stiff nod, he turned to one of the workstations and immediately brought up the CCTV connection. He did some dragging and clicking for a few moments and then sat back, waiting tensely. It was long moments before the computer finally beeping, sharp shrill alarms that were designed to catch one's attention if Ianto and Jack weren't already on edge as they waited.
"She's not far. It looks like she's in South Cardiff at the bay, opposite the highway from the yacht club," Ianto told him, something in his voice making it wobble slightly. It was a definite left turn from his normal British butler professionalism. "The storm's already starting to hit there."
Glad that he'd yet to remove his coat, Jack moved toward the lift. He kept trying to remind himself that Tosh was a big girl, a big girl that was in for punishment for ignoring so much protocol in one day, but he couldn't help worrying. "Keep Gwen and Owen in line until I get back."
Ianto snorted at the very idea and looked up at his boss. "Jack?" It still surprised the immortal man exactly how much the Welshman could convey with a single word.
"If you're not here, they won't get any work done. And I don't even want to think what they would do in the autopsy bay if no one's here." He grinned cockily, trying to infuse the expression with as much confidence as he could muster. "Don't worry, Ianto. Everything will be fine."
Turning away, Jack mounted the lift and used his wrist device to command it to the surface. He could keep the worry from his face but that didn't mean it wasn't running rampant in his mind. Idly, he wondered what exactly had gone wrong at her lunch date to cause this type of erratic and irresponsible behavior.
Tosh shivered as the first drops of rain fell, cursing herself for the spontaneous decision to get away from the Hub. It hadn't been the first time the urge had struck her and it wouldn't be the last. She held up her phone, scowling at the black screen, and tapped it insistently with her index finger. It made no sign of returning to life, so she deposited it back into her jacket pocket. The damned thing had been glitching for days and she had been sure it would last at least another week before she had to requisition another but it looked like the proximity to recent Rift activity was the last straw for this particular piece of technology.
Squinting her eyes in irritation, she looked up at the gray sky, her sour expression deepening. From the look of the clouds, the rain would be quite heavy soon. She cast a yearning look at the SUV parked just off the edge of the road a few meters away and sighed, squaring her shoulders. She came out here to do her job, the lack of a com and her dead phone notwithstanding, and that was exactly what she would do.
Hefting the medium-sized backpack that Owen often referred to as Tosh's Techie Bag (mostly with heavy amounts of snark), Toshiko lifted a small device from the side pocket and rested the bag on her back. This device was something like a magnet for Rift activity. She had spent four years studying the Rift and it had taken the better part of six months to create this device. As she adjusted a dial on the side with a minute movement, she was reminded of the time Owen's brutish hands had nearly caused it to implode and her to have a conniption that reduced her to a puddle of technical jargon.
How that man could be an artist with a scalpel but an utter mess with absolutely everything else was beyond her.
The device beeped twice and her lips curved into a smile. "This must be the place," she murmured to herself as she turned the device off and slid it back into the bag. She set down the bag gently and pulled out a large brick of a machine as well as a notepad and a pen. She looked to the sky again, her brown eyes straining to see the reach of the Rift itself, before settling down to scan the area.
The screen of the machine filled with lines of code that her mind translated automatically, her hand jotting pertinent notes on the paper in front of her. Though the information that she saw in front of her was no doubt interesting, it was almost useless. The more she looked at the findings and reflected on the various negative spike sites she'd been to over the years, the more she realized she would need decades of data to truly unlock this mystery, decades that the Torchwood lifestyle was unlikely to give her. It was all well and good that Jack had a facility for them after they returned but that wouldn't stop the Rift from taking them.
Why did the Rift take this person and not that one? From one location and not from another half a mile away? As far as she could tell, she was the one person to make the most sense of the Rift in the one hundred years since its presence had been discovered but she was always finding new things, new complications for which contingency plans had to be updated and changed or altogether scrapped at times.
When she felt the sharp edges of the machine bite into the skin of her hands, Tosh realized she had been tightening her fingers, painfully so, and forced herself to relax. Watching the code finish through the sheen of water that now covered the screen, she turned off the device and stowed it back in the bag. Her notes were smudged and nearly illegible with the efforts of the rain but she could always go back over it later, she decided, and slid the notepad into the bag as well. The sound of the zipper closing sounded loud in her ears and then there was nothing, nothing but the sound of rain and lapping waves and her own thoughts.
She rubbed her upper arms idly, an old habit from her time in the UNIT cell that usually signified heavy anxiety. Gazing out toward the water, her eyes unseeing, she thought back to that which was really bothering her – her conversation with Rhys barely thirty minutes ago. In a way, she knew that he was telling the truth about wanting to be her friend and she would never be able to convey to someone how much she wanted that. A friend – clear-cut and simple – but it had always been the one thing she could never have. Even before the terrorists and her time with UNIT, she had been quiet and withdrawn, careful not to intrude on anyone too completely. (Her time with UNIT had only made this particular trait so much worse, on more levels than she cared to think about.)
However, now there would always be the thought that Rhys would be around her as an extra tie to Gwen. After all, she had likely been more up-front and truthful in that short conversation than the Welshwoman had been in the past two months. Toshiko wasn't afraid of Torchwood or Jack anymore, hadn't been since the first six months of her employment. As it was, she was nothing outside of her work. She could wither away to death and no one would be the wiser.
All she wanted… all she'd ever wanted was someone that truly cared about her.
"Tosh!"
Turning with a small level of surprise, she saw Jack standing next to her SUV. Blinking hard, she realized there was another vehicle there, one identical to the one she'd arrived in. She furrowed her brow slightly, feeling somehow muddled and weak. Shouldn't she have noticed Jack's SUV immediately? Now that she wasn't deep in thought, she realized she felt very cold and wet and there was something like cloth coming between her and the rest of her immediate thoughts.
Shaking her head to clear the cobwebs, she swept an arm down to grab her bag and stepped forward at the same time. Something somewhere in the electrical impulses got crossed because suddenly the ground was coming at her faster than she liked. She tried to order her arms out to cushion the fall but that didn't work either. As a result, she felt the sharp pain of her forehead coming in contact with a less-than-rounded rock rather keenly.
What a perfect ending to this day, she thought as she finally felt the weakness deep in her bones that had been trying to claim her attention through her thoughts and memories.
"Toshiko!" Jack cried out in alarm. And that was the last thing she heard before the black claimed her.
"Why are you in charge?" Ianto quirked an eyebrow at Owen's tone but didn't think anything of it. A glance in Gwen's direction told him that she was actually mad, though. Interesting… Did she actually fancy herself to be above those that had been a part of Torchwood for years, even if his time with Torchwood Three was somewhat less than that of Owen and Tosh?
"Because I was here when Jack went out on a call and he remarked on his concern of what the two of you might do in the autopsy bay if left unattended," he told them in an unremarkable tone. It was like fresh rain over the wound of his intense worry for Toshiko when Owen's eyes widened comically and Gwen spluttered and blushed hard.
"Where's Tosh?" Owen asked idly. "Not back from her lunch date yet?"
Ianto frowned. Jack had told him about the Asian woman's lunch plans with an unknown male but he honestly didn't think the doctor paid enough attention to her to realize she'd gone out for lunch, which was somewhat unusual for her. Before he could ask him, however, Gwen looked at Owen in confusion. "What lunch date?"
The snarky doctor grinned at her. "Oh, didn't you notice? Tosh went out for lunch even though she usually works through and has Tea Boy fetch her something." Ianto admitted silently that that was true; he had no problem fetching things for Toshiko – she didn't induce the feelings of awkward lust that Jack caused or subdued animosity that both Owen and Gwen tended to spark in him.
Gwen seemed kind of taken aback, though. "Really? I've… Well, I guess I've never noticed."
Ianto's eyebrow quirked again. This was the woman that broke Retcon because she remembered a murder weapon in Suzie's pile of tools? How exceedingly pathetic. He remained quiet when Owen's attention turned back to him, obviously expected him to answer the original question, the one about Toshiko's whereabouts. Just because he knew didn't mean he had to say; more specifically, because he had endured twenty minutes of perfect silence between the time Jack left and the arrival of his coworkers, it merely meant his boss should be returning with Toshiko quite soon.
"Do you really think she's still out?" Gwen asked then. "It doesn't seem like Tosh to take a long lunch or to be late… ever." Ianto barely kept his eyes from narrowing at the former constable. Aside from her early attempts at easing her way with the quiet woman, what did Gwen believe she actually knew about Toshiko Sato?
At the very moment, before his anger could begin to consume his worry, the mechanical sound of the lift alerted him to Jack's return. Feeling the worry fill up his gut again, he sighed heavily and craned his neck in order to watch the descent.
"Something's wrong," Owen said suddenly with conviction. "Ianto, what happened?"
Jack was within sight now and Ianto's eyes widened minimally when he saw that he was carrying Toshiko in his arms. His brow furrowed and he tilted his head, the silent question for Jack alone. The immortal man inclined his head once, though the frown that pulled at his face only worried the Welshman further.
"Toshiko went to site alone, without a com unit and her phone turned off," Ianto told him finally. "Because the weather was turning bad, Jack went out to get her." He glanced at the man in question again. "I'm not sure about anything else."
Owen rushed over to Jack, transferring the woman easily into his arms, and then transported her to the autopsy bay, which was now for all intents and purposes a medical bay. He hurriedly went through the process of checking her pulse and breathing before drawing blood, his movements professional and steady but something in his eyes almost… unnerved.
"I checked her phone," Jack said to Ianto softly. "It won't turn on. I think she's been due for a replacement for a while." Ianto nodded, explaining something that would have been just a bit more off than the tiny rebellion of not taking a com unit to site. "She was just staring out into the bay when I got there." He sounded very worried but then again, he got like that any time one of them was injured or sick. His immortality had made him achingly aware of the fragility of human life.
"Then what?" Ianto murmured, his eyes keeping a close eye on Owen's ministrations. When she woke, Toshiko would go to him, blushing and hoping to heaven that nothing untoward had occurred.
"She looked at me and… fainted. Maybe she caught a chill?" Jack looked at Ianto, searching his face, and the Welshman nodded, thinking that was the most likely culprit. "Whatever happened at lunch today, it couldn't have been good to make her do something like this."
"It isn't her fault that the weather turned bad and she caught something," Ianto reminded his boss gently.
Jack harrumphed softly. "Well, she's not going to be happy about Owen examining her," he remarked, trying and failing to throw a jaunty tone into his voice.
Quirking an eyebrow, he looked over at Jack. "Why not?"
The immortal leaned forward, laying his arms over the railing and resting his chin on his forearms. "He hasn't seen her scars."
Ianto said nothing in return but knowing that the worry had returned full force to fill his eyes. What scars? he thought helplessly.
