Nic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
trillianastra) wrote2009-07-10 08:32 pm
trillianastra) wrote2009-07-10 08:32 pm
Fic: The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life [Torchwood]
Title: The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life
Fandom: Torchwood
Prompt: Table 1: First (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
occhallenge)
Rating: mild PG-13
Word count: 2044
Characters: Jack Harkness, my OC Faith, quick mention of Alex Hopkins.
Summary: An American teenage girl on holiday has an alien (and Torchwood) encounter on the streets of Cardiff, and from then her life takes a course she wasn’t expecting.
Disclaimer: All belongs to the Beeb and RTD, folks.
Notes: This is basically one big flashback. The italics sections are present-day, and set post-Children of Earth, but there are no spoilers.
“So, spill the beans… how did you meet Jack, then?” Gwen asks the young American woman sitting opposite. Faith grins and takes a sip of her drink.
“Well, it was a complete coincidence, or rather quite a few coincidences. It was here, actually, in Cardiff...”
Faith Edwards was seventeen, and bored. She’d hoped to spend her summer vacation working on her writing, so that she could get the internship with a big newspaper that she was hoping to get. Her parents, however, had decided that it had been far too long since they had seen Aunt Ruth and Uncle David, and so the whole family – Faith, her sister Kylie (ten, and unbearably irritating), and her brother Danny (thirteen, rather less irritating) – had been packed up and dragged off to Wales for a month.
Faith had complained bitterly in the weeks leading up to the vacation, trying to persuade her parents that she could stay home on her own while they went away, but it didn’t work. She had consoled herself by taking her writing journal, saying that it could be good practice for when she was an international journalist jetting all over the world.
The first week passed in deathly dullness. There were the obligatory hugs and welcomes from her aunt and uncle, then her mother and aunt spent what felt like six hours discussing how big their respective children had gotten since they last saw each other, while her dad and uncle had retreated to the pub for a quiet drink. Then there’d been a few days of sightseeing, which consisted of trailing around after her parents as they looked at different tourist spots around Cardiff. Faith kept herself occupied by carefully observing the passers-by around her and trying to guess what their lives were like. It was while she was people-watching when she spotted the man in the coat.
The first time he was getting into a big black SUV, with a serious expression. The SUV sped away shortly afterwards, leaving Faith wondering who he was. The second time she saw the man in the coat, he ran past the café where she was sitting with a coffee. She wasn’t actually drinking the coffee, because these Welsh people really couldn’t make a decent cup, but it gave her a good excuse to sit there. She got a good look at his face that time, and thought that he looked like an old movie star, from one of the movies that her mom watched – Clark Gable or Cary Grant, someone like that. Discreetly, she tried to see what he was running after, but whatever it was, it had gone. Disappointed, she opened her journal to a fresh page and wrote down what she’d seen. Because she didn’t know his name, she wrote Clark at the top. Until she found out who he was, she’d call him that.
She didn’t see him again until the next week. She’d managed to convince her parents that she wouldn’t get mugged or kidnapped if she explored by herself, which meant she had time to wander around the less tourist-oriented parts of Cardiff and look for interesting things. She was walking down an apparently ordinary street when she saw a big black SUV with tinted windows drive past and park further down the road. The car seemed familiar, and she realised that it was the one she’d seen ‘Clark’ getting into the previous week. Curious, she walked closer, trying to look like she was just out for a walk. She noticed ‘Clark’ and some other people – an older guy with grey hair and a woman – get out and walk to one of the houses. They stopped outside the door, and seemed to check something on a PDA before the older guy knocked on the door and they all went inside. Faith took advantage of the situation to hurry over to the SUV. She tried the doors, but they were locked, and she sighed in frustration, stepping back and leaning against the low wall between the house’s front garden and the street. Then she noticed something written along the side of the SUV… TORCHWOOD. That got written down in her journal as well, with a big question mark next to it.
Then she heard the scream. A… well, it looked mostly like a person, though she had the strangest feeling that it wasn’t. But it was moving too fast for her to tell one way or the other. It was moving fast, and she knew somehow that it shouldn’t be allowed to get away, so she did the only thing she could and grabbed an empty milk bottle from where it sat on the sidewalk and threw it at the not-exactly-person.
The bottle smashed against the side of what looked like the not-person’s head, and bits of broken glass scattered everywhere as it collapsed. Now that it was lying still, Faith could see that it really wasn’t human… its face was too long, like someone had stretched it out somehow, and its skin has a distinct bluish tint. She crouched down to look at the whatever-it-was in more detail, and was still studying it when she heard a voice behind her.
“Well, that’s not what I expected to see…” The American accent made her curious, and she twisted around to see ‘Clark’ looking down at her. Faith stood up, staring at him. Without thinking, she blurted out, “Clark?”
“Do I know you?” He studied her face. “No, don’t think so. And I wouldn’t have called myself Clark, either…”
“Oh. Oh, no, that’s just, uh… I’ve seen you before. Last week. I thought you looked like a movie star, and I didn’t know your name… so I called you that in my head.”
“Ah, I see. In that case, it’s time we were properly introduced. Jack Harkness, good to meet you. And I’m guessing you’re not from around here…”
“If you mean my accent, I’m guessing you aren’t, either. Faith, by the way, Faith Edwards.”
“Well, Faith Edwards… want to explain why this guy’s out cold?”
She blanched. “Oh. Uh… I threw a milk bottle at him.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “And… why?”
“Just a feeling. It seemed like he was running from something.”
“Well, thank you, I suppose. Impressive reflexes, by the way… how old are you?”
“Thanks… wait, excuse me? I’m seventeen, why do you care?”
“Relax, you’re too young.”
“For what, exactly?”
“Can’t tell you. Classified, I’m afraid.” He looked unhappy about saying that, and went to the SUV, opening the door.
“Is it Torchwood?”
Jack turned around, surprised. “Where did you hear that name?”
“I didn’t, idiot, it’s written on the side of your SUV.”
“Oh. Yeah. I did tell Alex that was a bad idea…”
“So what is it, then? What’s up with that guy?” she gestured at the unconscious not-person on the sidewalk.
Jack looked at her, as if weighing something up. “I need to talk to my boss… wait here, OK? Keep an eye on him for me.”
“Uh… okay…”
Jack strode back inside the house, and Faith heard raised voices and what was definitely an argument coming from inside. But she felt weird eavesdropping, and looked away, concentrating on the unconscious might-not-be-a-man at her feet, and wondering who he/it was. She was left sitting there for a few minutes until Jack emerged, looking a little awkward. “Okay, my boss wants me to send you on your way with a stiff caution to stay out of our business in future. But, my boss can be a real stuffed shirt at times, and when he does I try not to pay too much attention.”
That was worrying. “Uh, shouldn’t you listen to your boss?”
He shrugged. “Mostly I do. Anyway, to calm him down I said I’d get you home and make sure you weren’t going to talk to anyone about us. Which gives me the rest of the afternoon to tell you what you’ve walked into.”
“Seriously?” Faith grinned.
“Of course. You’ve obviously got a talent. It might be useful one day.”
“I… guess.”
“So where are we heading?”
“I’m staying with my aunt and uncle, they live on Gower Street. I’m not expected back for” she looked at her watch, “three hours or so.”
“Plenty of time. C’mon, we’ll walk. They’ll need the car, anyway.”
Jack set off walking down the street, hands in his pockets. Faith hurried after him, falling easily into step next to him. He waited until they’d turned the corner before he explained to her that the not-exactly-a-man she’d managed to knock out was an alien, but one who’d slipped through a rift in time rather than arriving in a spaceship. He told her that Torchwood was a secret organisation that studied and, when necessary, captured aliens found on Earth, and stopped anyone from finding out that aliens existed at all.
When he paused, Faith looked up at him. “Er… Mr Harkness…”
He laughed. “Jack. Call me Jack.”
“Okay… Jack, why did you say I was too young, before? You said it was classified.”
“It is. But you know about us now… the way you dealt with that G’rthrax, and to be honest that feeling you had, the one that told you something was up? Those aren’t exactly common traits. I thought that maybe when you’re older, you’d be a good target for recruitment.”
“You mean… catch aliens for a living?”
“Why, do you like the idea?”
“I… I don’t know. It never really came up at career day. I didn’t know aliens existed until today.”
“Well, you wouldn’t get recruited for a few years anyway, the minimum age is twenty-one. But… there is something…”
“What?”
“Where do you live, Faith?”
“New Jersey, why?”
“We don’t have many contacts in America. Most of what we know, we get from news broadcasts and the government, and… well, it’s not ideal. But Alex thinks we should just be focusing on Cardiff, and the big bosses in London agree, so I can’t do much about it. What we really need, though, are people on the ground, keeping their eyes open for anything of a potentially alien nature.”
Faith smiled as she realised what he was asking. “And you want me to do that? To… gather intelligence or whatever it’s called?”
“Well, I’m not going to force you. And it would be strictly unofficial, because the bosses don’t approve, and unpaid, but if you want to…” He looked questioningly at her.
“I… well, not much interesting stuff ever happens in our town, but I can totally do that.”
“You wouldn’t be able to tell anyone.”
“I don’t think I want to tell anyone, really.”
“Then we have a deal. Anything you find – and you need to realise that there probably won’t be that much – you report to me. I’ll give you a private email address and my personal phone number, so you can contact me.”
“And, well, that’s how it happened. I got bored and stumbled across a Torchwood case in progress. It’s not that special, really.” Faith drank more of her beer and shrugged.
“But you were a kid… only seventeen and you knocked out an alien, without knowing what was going on, and working purely on reflex.” Gwen sounded impressed. “No wonder Jack likes you.” She looked around quickly, then leant closer. “So, did you and him ever... you know…”
Faith almost choked on her mouthful of beer. When she’d swallowed it, she answered, “Uh, no. Never mind that for the first five years after I met him I was in the States and we only kept in touch through email… I just don’t think about him that way.”
“Really? You must be the only one on the planet who does, then...”
“I’ve heard a few stories. And I guess I care about him… but not like that. He’s a friend, and a really good friend, considering. But just a friend.”
Sitting in the bar with Gwen, talking about life and Torchwood and everything in between, Faith decided that she was going to like this job, despite the fact that she couldn’t tell anyone what she was doing in Cardiff at all.
Fandom: Torchwood
Prompt: Table 1: First (
occhallenge)Rating: mild PG-13
Word count: 2044
Characters: Jack Harkness, my OC Faith, quick mention of Alex Hopkins.
Summary: An American teenage girl on holiday has an alien (and Torchwood) encounter on the streets of Cardiff, and from then her life takes a course she wasn’t expecting.
Disclaimer: All belongs to the Beeb and RTD, folks.
Notes: This is basically one big flashback. The italics sections are present-day, and set post-Children of Earth, but there are no spoilers.
“So, spill the beans… how did you meet Jack, then?” Gwen asks the young American woman sitting opposite. Faith grins and takes a sip of her drink.
“Well, it was a complete coincidence, or rather quite a few coincidences. It was here, actually, in Cardiff...”
Faith Edwards was seventeen, and bored. She’d hoped to spend her summer vacation working on her writing, so that she could get the internship with a big newspaper that she was hoping to get. Her parents, however, had decided that it had been far too long since they had seen Aunt Ruth and Uncle David, and so the whole family – Faith, her sister Kylie (ten, and unbearably irritating), and her brother Danny (thirteen, rather less irritating) – had been packed up and dragged off to Wales for a month.
Faith had complained bitterly in the weeks leading up to the vacation, trying to persuade her parents that she could stay home on her own while they went away, but it didn’t work. She had consoled herself by taking her writing journal, saying that it could be good practice for when she was an international journalist jetting all over the world.
The first week passed in deathly dullness. There were the obligatory hugs and welcomes from her aunt and uncle, then her mother and aunt spent what felt like six hours discussing how big their respective children had gotten since they last saw each other, while her dad and uncle had retreated to the pub for a quiet drink. Then there’d been a few days of sightseeing, which consisted of trailing around after her parents as they looked at different tourist spots around Cardiff. Faith kept herself occupied by carefully observing the passers-by around her and trying to guess what their lives were like. It was while she was people-watching when she spotted the man in the coat.
The first time he was getting into a big black SUV, with a serious expression. The SUV sped away shortly afterwards, leaving Faith wondering who he was. The second time she saw the man in the coat, he ran past the café where she was sitting with a coffee. She wasn’t actually drinking the coffee, because these Welsh people really couldn’t make a decent cup, but it gave her a good excuse to sit there. She got a good look at his face that time, and thought that he looked like an old movie star, from one of the movies that her mom watched – Clark Gable or Cary Grant, someone like that. Discreetly, she tried to see what he was running after, but whatever it was, it had gone. Disappointed, she opened her journal to a fresh page and wrote down what she’d seen. Because she didn’t know his name, she wrote Clark at the top. Until she found out who he was, she’d call him that.
She didn’t see him again until the next week. She’d managed to convince her parents that she wouldn’t get mugged or kidnapped if she explored by herself, which meant she had time to wander around the less tourist-oriented parts of Cardiff and look for interesting things. She was walking down an apparently ordinary street when she saw a big black SUV with tinted windows drive past and park further down the road. The car seemed familiar, and she realised that it was the one she’d seen ‘Clark’ getting into the previous week. Curious, she walked closer, trying to look like she was just out for a walk. She noticed ‘Clark’ and some other people – an older guy with grey hair and a woman – get out and walk to one of the houses. They stopped outside the door, and seemed to check something on a PDA before the older guy knocked on the door and they all went inside. Faith took advantage of the situation to hurry over to the SUV. She tried the doors, but they were locked, and she sighed in frustration, stepping back and leaning against the low wall between the house’s front garden and the street. Then she noticed something written along the side of the SUV… TORCHWOOD. That got written down in her journal as well, with a big question mark next to it.
Then she heard the scream. A… well, it looked mostly like a person, though she had the strangest feeling that it wasn’t. But it was moving too fast for her to tell one way or the other. It was moving fast, and she knew somehow that it shouldn’t be allowed to get away, so she did the only thing she could and grabbed an empty milk bottle from where it sat on the sidewalk and threw it at the not-exactly-person.
The bottle smashed against the side of what looked like the not-person’s head, and bits of broken glass scattered everywhere as it collapsed. Now that it was lying still, Faith could see that it really wasn’t human… its face was too long, like someone had stretched it out somehow, and its skin has a distinct bluish tint. She crouched down to look at the whatever-it-was in more detail, and was still studying it when she heard a voice behind her.
“Well, that’s not what I expected to see…” The American accent made her curious, and she twisted around to see ‘Clark’ looking down at her. Faith stood up, staring at him. Without thinking, she blurted out, “Clark?”
“Do I know you?” He studied her face. “No, don’t think so. And I wouldn’t have called myself Clark, either…”
“Oh. Oh, no, that’s just, uh… I’ve seen you before. Last week. I thought you looked like a movie star, and I didn’t know your name… so I called you that in my head.”
“Ah, I see. In that case, it’s time we were properly introduced. Jack Harkness, good to meet you. And I’m guessing you’re not from around here…”
“If you mean my accent, I’m guessing you aren’t, either. Faith, by the way, Faith Edwards.”
“Well, Faith Edwards… want to explain why this guy’s out cold?”
She blanched. “Oh. Uh… I threw a milk bottle at him.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “And… why?”
“Just a feeling. It seemed like he was running from something.”
“Well, thank you, I suppose. Impressive reflexes, by the way… how old are you?”
“Thanks… wait, excuse me? I’m seventeen, why do you care?”
“Relax, you’re too young.”
“For what, exactly?”
“Can’t tell you. Classified, I’m afraid.” He looked unhappy about saying that, and went to the SUV, opening the door.
“Is it Torchwood?”
Jack turned around, surprised. “Where did you hear that name?”
“I didn’t, idiot, it’s written on the side of your SUV.”
“Oh. Yeah. I did tell Alex that was a bad idea…”
“So what is it, then? What’s up with that guy?” she gestured at the unconscious not-person on the sidewalk.
Jack looked at her, as if weighing something up. “I need to talk to my boss… wait here, OK? Keep an eye on him for me.”
“Uh… okay…”
Jack strode back inside the house, and Faith heard raised voices and what was definitely an argument coming from inside. But she felt weird eavesdropping, and looked away, concentrating on the unconscious might-not-be-a-man at her feet, and wondering who he/it was. She was left sitting there for a few minutes until Jack emerged, looking a little awkward. “Okay, my boss wants me to send you on your way with a stiff caution to stay out of our business in future. But, my boss can be a real stuffed shirt at times, and when he does I try not to pay too much attention.”
That was worrying. “Uh, shouldn’t you listen to your boss?”
He shrugged. “Mostly I do. Anyway, to calm him down I said I’d get you home and make sure you weren’t going to talk to anyone about us. Which gives me the rest of the afternoon to tell you what you’ve walked into.”
“Seriously?” Faith grinned.
“Of course. You’ve obviously got a talent. It might be useful one day.”
“I… guess.”
“So where are we heading?”
“I’m staying with my aunt and uncle, they live on Gower Street. I’m not expected back for” she looked at her watch, “three hours or so.”
“Plenty of time. C’mon, we’ll walk. They’ll need the car, anyway.”
Jack set off walking down the street, hands in his pockets. Faith hurried after him, falling easily into step next to him. He waited until they’d turned the corner before he explained to her that the not-exactly-a-man she’d managed to knock out was an alien, but one who’d slipped through a rift in time rather than arriving in a spaceship. He told her that Torchwood was a secret organisation that studied and, when necessary, captured aliens found on Earth, and stopped anyone from finding out that aliens existed at all.
When he paused, Faith looked up at him. “Er… Mr Harkness…”
He laughed. “Jack. Call me Jack.”
“Okay… Jack, why did you say I was too young, before? You said it was classified.”
“It is. But you know about us now… the way you dealt with that G’rthrax, and to be honest that feeling you had, the one that told you something was up? Those aren’t exactly common traits. I thought that maybe when you’re older, you’d be a good target for recruitment.”
“You mean… catch aliens for a living?”
“Why, do you like the idea?”
“I… I don’t know. It never really came up at career day. I didn’t know aliens existed until today.”
“Well, you wouldn’t get recruited for a few years anyway, the minimum age is twenty-one. But… there is something…”
“What?”
“Where do you live, Faith?”
“New Jersey, why?”
“We don’t have many contacts in America. Most of what we know, we get from news broadcasts and the government, and… well, it’s not ideal. But Alex thinks we should just be focusing on Cardiff, and the big bosses in London agree, so I can’t do much about it. What we really need, though, are people on the ground, keeping their eyes open for anything of a potentially alien nature.”
Faith smiled as she realised what he was asking. “And you want me to do that? To… gather intelligence or whatever it’s called?”
“Well, I’m not going to force you. And it would be strictly unofficial, because the bosses don’t approve, and unpaid, but if you want to…” He looked questioningly at her.
“I… well, not much interesting stuff ever happens in our town, but I can totally do that.”
“You wouldn’t be able to tell anyone.”
“I don’t think I want to tell anyone, really.”
“Then we have a deal. Anything you find – and you need to realise that there probably won’t be that much – you report to me. I’ll give you a private email address and my personal phone number, so you can contact me.”
“And, well, that’s how it happened. I got bored and stumbled across a Torchwood case in progress. It’s not that special, really.” Faith drank more of her beer and shrugged.
“But you were a kid… only seventeen and you knocked out an alien, without knowing what was going on, and working purely on reflex.” Gwen sounded impressed. “No wonder Jack likes you.” She looked around quickly, then leant closer. “So, did you and him ever... you know…”
Faith almost choked on her mouthful of beer. When she’d swallowed it, she answered, “Uh, no. Never mind that for the first five years after I met him I was in the States and we only kept in touch through email… I just don’t think about him that way.”
“Really? You must be the only one on the planet who does, then...”
“I’ve heard a few stories. And I guess I care about him… but not like that. He’s a friend, and a really good friend, considering. But just a friend.”
Sitting in the bar with Gwen, talking about life and Torchwood and everything in between, Faith decided that she was going to like this job, despite the fact that she couldn’t tell anyone what she was doing in Cardiff at all.