Author:
badly_knittedCharacters: Ianto, Jack, Tosh, Team, Aliens.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Dear Diary… Ianto writes about a typical Wednesday at Torchwood.
Word Count: 950
Written For: Prompt # 035 – Dear Diary at fandomweekly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.
May 24th.
Dear Diary…
Why do I always start these entries with that? I should probably just write Dear Jack, since I know you’ll keep searching until you find my diary and then you’ll read it from cover to cover. Honestly, sometimes I wonder why I even bother trying to hide it from you. It never does any good. Anyway, that’s beside the point right now. I should have half an hour or so to record the day’s events before you decide you’ve done enough brooding for the time being and come down from your rooftop of choice. It’s been a pretty normal day for Torchwood, which is to say, weird, with a side order of mind-numbing terror. Nothing like a bit of mind-numbing terror to get the adrenaline pumping though. Damn, I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Okay, let’s start this again.
Dear Diary, or Jack, as the case might be.
So, that happened. By ‘that’, I mean world-ending catastrophe. Except it didn’t. End, that is. That’s Torchwood for you. We eat world-ending catastrophe for breakfast, possibly literally in this case. I think I might have swallowed some, but I’m not going to worry about that right now. Owen ran tests on the stuff, and according to him it’s inert, not very nutritious, and basically harmless, which is reassuring to know. Tasted bloody awful though.
As world-ending catastrophes go, it wasn’t the worst we’ve ever faced; didn’t even make my top ten. Nevertheless, if we hadn’t prevented it, things could have got a bit nasty.
Why do aliens always decide to invade earth on a Wednesday? Is there a flashing neon sign somewhere out there in space saying ‘Come and try your hand at invading Planet Earth, open Wednesdays’? Wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve seen so much weirdness since joining Torchwood, and heard so many stories from Jack about the strange and bizarre things that exist in the wider universe, that I’m honestly not sure anything would surprise me anymore.
Whatever the reason, they came, the latest invasion force, a bunch of thick-skulled brutes who threatened to reduce the planet to its component molecules if the people of earth didn’t surrender. Well, okay, roughly translated their actual words were more along the lines of “We want your planet and if you don’t give it to us, we’ll blast it to pieces so nobody can have it.” As a rule, invasion forces tend to be somewhat lacking in imagination.
Did I mention they weren’t particularly bright either? Armed to the teeth, which they had a lot of; big, sharp-looking, dirty yellow teeth in too-wide mouths, but about as smart as your average… I was going to say dog, but on the whole, dogs are a lot smarter. These guys actually flew down in their landing shuttle to give us their ultimatum in person. Jack said we’d fight to the death, so they killed him, dropped him right where he was standing by the open boot of the SUV. That’s where most of the mind-numbing terror came in; no matter how many times it happens, I’m always terrified he won’t wake up again. The effects of alien weapons are hard to predict; at least this one just seemed to light him up like a Christmas tree before he dropped.
What beggars belief is that our ‘invaders’ then gave us two hours to make up our minds about whether we wanted to surrender or be destroyed. Unbelievable! Two hours! In most of these situations, that’s more than enough time for Torchwood to come up with a plan. We’ve had a lot of practice, after all; we get ‘invaded’ at least once a month. Aliens never seem to learn though; maybe that’s because they rarely survive long enough to pass on what they know to anyone else. Who knows, maybe if they did, there’d be fewer invasion attempts.
But the icing on the cake was when, just to prove how ‘superior’ they were to the weak, helpless earthlings, they turned their backs on us to walk back into their shuttle. They didn’t even try to take our weapons, no doubt convinced we couldn’t possibly have anything powerful enough to harm them.
Wrong! Jack revived in plenty of time, and he really does love playing with the Big Gun. It had quite a remarkable effect on our would-be overlords; they sort of exploded, bits flying everywhere. Unfortunately for me, the wind changed direction at precisely the wrong moment and I got a face- and mouthful of pulverised alien. I can still taste it, even after three extra-strong coffees. Think I’ll suggest to Jack we go for a curry tonight, hopefully a really hot, spicy curry should obliterate the last traces.
Anyway, after that, finishing the job was a piece of cake. Tosh set the shuttle’s systems to overload, Jack programmed it to return to the parent ship on autopilot, and we all got to watch a spectacular and really quite pretty firework display when shuttle and ship went boom together. Whatever fragments were left burned up in the atmosphere before reaching the ground. Problem solved, world saved, just another typically Torchwood Wednesday really.
Right, so that was my day. Not too bad really. Any day that ends with the team alive and mostly unhurt, and the world still in one piece, is a good day.
Thursday tomorrow, and nobody ever invades on a Thursday unless it’s Christmas. Might be able to get caught up with the filing if I’m lucky. The last few days have been a bit busy so there’s quite a backlog.
It’s almost eight; better hide this journal again before Jack gets back, so until tomorrow, this is Ianto Jones, signing out.
The End