Toshiko Sato (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sadandsingle) wrote2013-10-30 02:21 pm
sadandsingle) wrote2013-10-30 02:21 pm
(no subject)
‘Nice explanation,’ Owen told her. ‘Refreshingly free from the technobollocks you usually give us.’
Toshiko scowled. ‘Don’t parade your ignorance, Owen, just because you don’t understand the language.’
‘I thought you preferred to speak C-minus.’
‘That’s C++,’ she chided. ‘I also know that Java is more than coffee. And that Assembler has nothing to do with IKEA furniture.’
‘All those languages, Tosh, and you still don’t include English.’
--
Toshiko’s attention flitted from monitor to monitor. The display frame on her desk in the Hub held six of them, each illustrating some aspect of her analysis or showing the results of a search she’d initiated.
Gwen stood behind her, quietly watching. Toshiko didn’t like to be studied, Gwen had discovered early on. She said it reminded her too much of her father supervising her homework. All that study didn’t seem to have been wasted, Gwen wanted to tell her. This was Toshiko absolutely in her element, despite Owen’s occasional disparaging remark about her ‘geek chic’. Toshiko was a composer, with data as her music. She coordinated all the elements of her orchestral score, pulling them together until they made sense, so that everyone else heard the symphony and not a cacophony of unrecognisable noise. And, as with an orchestral performance, it was usually only when Toshiko presented the completed piece to them that they were able to recognise it. A masterpiece from the disorderly mass of information.
Toshiko’s work station in the Hub appeared the same, a mass of random junk that seemed to make sense to her alone. ‘Creative chaos’ was how Jack had once described Toshiko’s methodology, in an admiring tone that suggested the others could take a leaf out of her book. Not that he was any different – on the desk in his office, amid the paperwork and old TV sets and bowls of fruit, she’d seen a dish containing fragments of coral, as though he was trying to grow it.
Toshiko’s was the first station you saw when you entered the Hub – a jumble of display screens, scribbled piles of paperwork, and assorted electronic parts. There was even a Rubik’s cube that she could complete within a minute. Owen kept messing it up and dropping it back on her desk when she wasn’t looking. She would infuriate him by somehow completing it each time, even when he’d peeled off and replaced several of the stickers. ‘Teenage bedroom’ was Owen’s alternative description of Toshiko’s desk.
--
‘Owen. I gave up my social evening to get this thing finished tonight, and all I get is abuse from you? Look at the time. I’m going to go home.’
‘Social evening?’ That didn’t sound much like the Toshiko Sato he knew. Dr Sato the programming whizz-kid, first into the office and last to leave every day. This had potential. He grinned at her. ‘You mean… you had a date? What would keep you here if you had a date?’
She stopped staring at him. Looked away. Blushed a little. ‘If you must know, I’ve joined a chess club. We meet on Saturday evenings.’ She was shutting down the computer system. Owen’s leather jerkin, gloves and boots all glittered and faded. Toshiko was wearing her usual black top and trousers again.
Owen watched her leave the R&R area.
Chess, he thought. Right. Ideal for Toshiko. The only pairing where she was ever likely to make the first move.
--
‘Well, who really wants to die, eh? Like that programme about smoking last night on Channel 4, eh Tosh?’
Toshiko didn’t look up from her laptop computer. ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t watch TV.’
‘No TV at night?’ Gwen affected astonishment. ‘God, I don’t know what me and Rhys would do without watching telly.’
‘Talk to each other, maybe,’ suggested Toshiko.
--
And Toshiko, the technical expert who could strip a device she’d never seen before down to wires and bits of metal, then put it back together again just the way it had been, but who didn’t know the first thing about how people worked.
--
But metaphorically filleting alien technology and picking the bones out – that was what Toshiko did best.
Toshiko worried him. Although she was at the heart of the team, she didn’t realise it. She felt that she was remote from the rest, off to one side. Perhaps it was her Japanese heritage showing through, perhaps it was just natural diffidence, but Jack viewed it with some concern. Beneath that reserved exterior, he suspected there was a supernova of emotion, and he didn’t want the resulting explosion to damage the team.
--
Owen worried about the way Toshiko reacted to things sometimes. She internalised a lot. Not like Owen, who let everything out as often as possible. She pondered. Brooded. He didn’t want to say anything that might make her withdraw even more. It wasn’t that he cared, particularly, but she was a key part of the team. Owen didn’t want to be blamed if she went over the edge.
--
Physics was all there was, as far as Toshiko was concerned: everything, in the end, came down to the movements of molecules, of atoms, of elementary particles and, ultimately, quantum energy twisted into multi-dimensional loops and strings.
She and Owen often had this argument, late at night, when there was nobody else around in the Hub. Owen tried to persuade Toshiko that her belief in quantum physics, loop theory and superstrings was itself a faith, given that she couldn’t actually buy them off eBay (and, as far as Owen was concerned, everything he needed in life could be bought online or obtained from a bar). In response, Toshiko logically proved to Owen that biology – the science he had spent his life following – didn’t exist, being partly biochemistry, which was just a branch of chemistry, and partly classification of forms, which was just stamp collecting. And chemistry itself was just a branch of physics because it depended on how atoms and molecules interacted. Owen got really tetchy when she got to that point in the argument, and either put his headphones on and turned the music up loud or just stalked off in a huff. And that left Toshiko feeling like she had lost the argument, because the last thing in the world she wanted was for Owen to stop talking to her, and that was something that physics just couldn’t explain.
--
Toshiko sometimes wondered whether the others truly felt she was part of the team. They valued her technical knowledge – she knew that – but there were times she felt as if she wasn’t part of the decision-making process. Excluded from the action. Marginalised.
Perhaps she just wasn’t outgoing enough. She certainly didn’t join in the banter as much as the others did. She sometimes felt awkward at the informality of the Torchwood team – she was used to working in a more formalised environment. It was her fault that she didn’t integrate with the team. She wished she knew how to do something about it, but she didn’t.
--
Emotions were what differentiated humans from animals, that’s what they said, but Toshiko was finding herself swamped by an animalistic mass of basic drives and fears. For a person who valued logic and order above all things, it was terrifying.
--
‘Philosophy. Not my strong point. Quantum physics and Stephen Hawking, yes. Metaphysics and Plato, not so much.’
Gwen rested her chin in one hand. ‘Rhys once told me that, from the moment we’re born, we’re all on a collision course with death.’
‘If that’s philosophy then I’ll stick with Hawking.’
--
Toshiko went to Owen immediately, putting her arms around him. There was a moment, just a moment, when they looked into each other's eyes and neither of them was entirely sure what the embrace meant.
--
Jack had told her once that UNIT had enquired if they could borrow her to upgrade their systems, but he’d fobbed them off. She knew that Jack Harkness wanted Toshiko Sato’s expertise for himself. And she was more than content with that. She and UNIT weren’t exactly… mates.
--
She and Owen had spent most of the previous night in the Hub, thrashing Jack’s problem through. She enjoyed spending time with Owen on problems. They worked well together, nights in front of computer screens, or alien artefacts, munching on sandwiches – they occasionally used to have hot food until Toshiko one day managed to… Well, now she just referred to it as ‘the toaster incident’. A phrase which always seemed to amuse Owen far more than it ought to.
Of course, there were times when it was difficult. Times when she wanted to just lean across the desk, times she wanted to tell him that she—
Anyway, that was irrelevant. Not conducive to a good working relationship. People at work shouldn’t—
Mind you, there was definitely something between Jack and Ianto. And that was a work situation. And—
But no. No, not Owen. He’d never understand. They’d talked once about how, in their line of work, it’d be really difficult to find someone who could ever really understand them, and Owen had said that girls like that were so rare they were extinct.
Toshiko had wanted to grab him and scream and yell at him and point out ‘I’m right here, you stupid—’
Even if she had, Owen still wouldn’t have got it. He’d have made a joke about it, deflected it with his unique brand of humour. Because God forbid that Dr Owen Harper should ever realise that what he was looking for was right under his bloody nose if only he wasn’t so damn arrogant and convinced he was right, and if he’d just kiss her and hold her and look into her eyes and—
--
Toshiko was displaying more screens of analysis. Gwen’s heart sank a little. Toshiko loved her histograms and her pie charts, but sometimes it was like she was lost in the detail and missing the obvious.
--
He pointed to the stuffed plush toy on her desk. ‘What’s that for?’
Toshiko smiled her secret smile. ‘It’s for when Owen comes to ask me a question for the fifth time each day about how to fix his computer. The sort of thing he should be able to work out for himself. So I insist that he asks this stuffed tiger before he interrupts me.’
He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Does it work?’
Toshiko scratched the tiger affectionately between its velour ears. ‘It has an eighty per cent success rate.’
Jack chuckled, and drew a chair up next to her. ‘Not as good as you,’ he said. ‘This computer of ours, Tosh. Organic, living, intuitive technology light years ahead of anything on Earth. But you got it as soon as you used it. No one understands it like you do, Tosh. What would we do without you?’
--
Toshiko Sato loved equations the way that other people loved poetry.
Those people, the poetry lovers – the people that most others probably thought of as normal – found truth and emotional support in the structure of words, the rhythm and the cadence of their sounds. Toshiko had never fully trusted words. They were so easy to misinterpret, or to be misused. A lot of people could be very clever with words. And they used them to break your heart. Not so many were quite that clever with numbers, few really understood them beyond their significance on a bank statement, and fewer still appreciated their simple, truthful beauty in the way that Toshiko Sato did. Because, at the end of the day, everything came down to numbers, from the physics of an atomic bomb to the shape of an autumn leaf swept away on the wind. Everything came down to mathematics. It was that kind of vision that made Toshiko special. It was also, she knew, what made her a freak.
The fact that she was in love with a dead man who wouldn’t quit walking and talking was par for the course.
She looked up from the figures on her computer screen – calculations on Rift energy fluctuations – and watched Owen bound up the steel staircase to tend his collection of alien plants. He didn’t move badly for a man who had had his heart smashed to a pulp by a .44 calibre bullet just a couple of months earlier. He still had the hole in his chest; like the finger that he had purposefully broken before her one night in a vicious black mood, it would never heal. One morning, he had turned up in the Hub with flowers poking out of the wound and told everyone he thought Torchwood’s subterranean base needed cheering up. Being dead hadn’t killed Owen’s sense of humour. Or perhaps, like her numbers, it was just a way to cope.
Toshiko had been in love with Owen Harper for two years, since he had joined Torchwood. Then he had been a man scarred by the loss of his fiancée to an alien brain parasite who had tried to lose himself in booze and a nightly succession of anonymous club-shags. But a part of her believed that she had come to love him even more since the bullet from that automatic had ripped his chest apart.
--
‘If I was a burglar, I’d look somewhere else,’ Toshiko muttered as she ran her eye over the lock, then placed a gadget from her messenger bag against it.
The back door sprang open.
‘If the Rift ever closes down, I can see a whole new career for you,’ smiled Jack.
Toshiko glanced at Jack. ‘Yes. Well, I have form, don’t I?’
Jack felt his smile shrivel. He had recruited Toshiko into Torchwood from a UNIT cell that hadn’t been big enough to lie down in after she had stolen classified plans for an experimental weapon. She had been coerced into the theft by terrorists who kidnapped her mother, but the price of springing her from the military jail had included severing contact with her family. He had given Toshiko her freedom, but freedom was a relative concept when you worked for Torchwood.
--
Toshiko didn’t want Owen to think a joke was going to get him off the hook just like that.
With barely a word she had gone into the bedroom and grabbed the messenger bag that carried her equipment then told him she was going to take a look around as she went through the front door.
‘I’m getting on with the job,’ she said as the door closed.
It didn’t hit her until she got into the elevator that she was following the ritual of domestic politics she had grown up watching her mother employ on her dad.
Never let a man know you’ve accepted his apology. Let him sweat a little more first.
Her mother had never actually tutored her in the fine art of male-female power games, but it was the sort of thing she would have said. And the young Toshiko had seen her employ the gambit so many times, she had come to understand its mechanics the way a lion cub learns to hunt.
The longer you leave it, the more opportunity he has to buy you something nice.
--
Toshiko wasn’t much good in confined spaces. UNIT had made sure of that when they cooped her up for six months in a cell that had been just 1.2 metres square. She knew without any doubt that if Jack hadn’t shown up when he did and made her that offer to join Torchwood, then one day the UNIT guard that brought her food would have found her dribbling and crazy in the corner.
But that had been a while back now, and she had coped with a hell of a lot more than being shut in a box.
--
Toshiko found the hairbrush and dragged it through her wet hair and thought about Owen standing in her bedroom, wet and all but naked. There hadn’t been many men in her bedroom like that. There hadn’t been many men, full stop. She had never been particularly good at building that kind of relationship. The lovers in her life could be counted on one hand; just a couple of fingers, if one-night stands didn’t count – and she knew that they didn’t. That wasn’t love, it was just lust, no matter how they tried to dress it up. And lust was OK, it was passionate and it took you some place that was all exploding physical sensation, and you could lose yourself there for a while. But Toshiko wanted love. As she’d looked at Owen standing all but naked in her room, she had tried not to look at the hole that had been blown in his chest by Aaron Copley’s gun, but her eyes were drawn to it as inevitably as the droplets of shower water on Owen’s shoulders travelled over his biceps and down his arms. The bullet hole was dark, ringed by livid ragged flesh. And as she looked at it she knew that she might probably love Owen until the day she died, but he could never love her.
She realised that she was crying when she heard the dressing-room door open, and she quickly wiped the tears away. She heard Owen clear his throat, uncharacteristically nervous.
‘How do I look?’ he asked.
Toshiko turned to look at him. ‘You look fine.’
‘Don’t want to let the missus down,’ he shrugged and gave her a smile.
Toshiko felt a crack in her heart deepen a little more.
--
The darkest time in Toshiko Sato’s life had been the months she had spent in the UNIT cell. There had been no real bed, the toilet had been little more than a hole in the ground, and the food had been some tasteless gruel that had been nutritionally designed to do no more than keep her alive. But the worst part was that she had no hope. No one knew she was there and no one there was interested in her account of why she had stolen the plans for the sonic modulator. She had believed that she would die there.
--
He’d admired Tosh – she was the only person in Torchwood who loved the place as much as he did. Something Ianto could only respect. She was quiet, polite, and thoughtful.
Toshiko scowled. ‘Don’t parade your ignorance, Owen, just because you don’t understand the language.’
‘I thought you preferred to speak C-minus.’
‘That’s C++,’ she chided. ‘I also know that Java is more than coffee. And that Assembler has nothing to do with IKEA furniture.’
‘All those languages, Tosh, and you still don’t include English.’
--
Toshiko’s attention flitted from monitor to monitor. The display frame on her desk in the Hub held six of them, each illustrating some aspect of her analysis or showing the results of a search she’d initiated.
Gwen stood behind her, quietly watching. Toshiko didn’t like to be studied, Gwen had discovered early on. She said it reminded her too much of her father supervising her homework. All that study didn’t seem to have been wasted, Gwen wanted to tell her. This was Toshiko absolutely in her element, despite Owen’s occasional disparaging remark about her ‘geek chic’. Toshiko was a composer, with data as her music. She coordinated all the elements of her orchestral score, pulling them together until they made sense, so that everyone else heard the symphony and not a cacophony of unrecognisable noise. And, as with an orchestral performance, it was usually only when Toshiko presented the completed piece to them that they were able to recognise it. A masterpiece from the disorderly mass of information.
Toshiko’s work station in the Hub appeared the same, a mass of random junk that seemed to make sense to her alone. ‘Creative chaos’ was how Jack had once described Toshiko’s methodology, in an admiring tone that suggested the others could take a leaf out of her book. Not that he was any different – on the desk in his office, amid the paperwork and old TV sets and bowls of fruit, she’d seen a dish containing fragments of coral, as though he was trying to grow it.
Toshiko’s was the first station you saw when you entered the Hub – a jumble of display screens, scribbled piles of paperwork, and assorted electronic parts. There was even a Rubik’s cube that she could complete within a minute. Owen kept messing it up and dropping it back on her desk when she wasn’t looking. She would infuriate him by somehow completing it each time, even when he’d peeled off and replaced several of the stickers. ‘Teenage bedroom’ was Owen’s alternative description of Toshiko’s desk.
--
‘Owen. I gave up my social evening to get this thing finished tonight, and all I get is abuse from you? Look at the time. I’m going to go home.’
‘Social evening?’ That didn’t sound much like the Toshiko Sato he knew. Dr Sato the programming whizz-kid, first into the office and last to leave every day. This had potential. He grinned at her. ‘You mean… you had a date? What would keep you here if you had a date?’
She stopped staring at him. Looked away. Blushed a little. ‘If you must know, I’ve joined a chess club. We meet on Saturday evenings.’ She was shutting down the computer system. Owen’s leather jerkin, gloves and boots all glittered and faded. Toshiko was wearing her usual black top and trousers again.
Owen watched her leave the R&R area.
Chess, he thought. Right. Ideal for Toshiko. The only pairing where she was ever likely to make the first move.
--
‘Well, who really wants to die, eh? Like that programme about smoking last night on Channel 4, eh Tosh?’
Toshiko didn’t look up from her laptop computer. ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t watch TV.’
‘No TV at night?’ Gwen affected astonishment. ‘God, I don’t know what me and Rhys would do without watching telly.’
‘Talk to each other, maybe,’ suggested Toshiko.
--
And Toshiko, the technical expert who could strip a device she’d never seen before down to wires and bits of metal, then put it back together again just the way it had been, but who didn’t know the first thing about how people worked.
--
But metaphorically filleting alien technology and picking the bones out – that was what Toshiko did best.
Toshiko worried him. Although she was at the heart of the team, she didn’t realise it. She felt that she was remote from the rest, off to one side. Perhaps it was her Japanese heritage showing through, perhaps it was just natural diffidence, but Jack viewed it with some concern. Beneath that reserved exterior, he suspected there was a supernova of emotion, and he didn’t want the resulting explosion to damage the team.
--
Owen worried about the way Toshiko reacted to things sometimes. She internalised a lot. Not like Owen, who let everything out as often as possible. She pondered. Brooded. He didn’t want to say anything that might make her withdraw even more. It wasn’t that he cared, particularly, but she was a key part of the team. Owen didn’t want to be blamed if she went over the edge.
--
Physics was all there was, as far as Toshiko was concerned: everything, in the end, came down to the movements of molecules, of atoms, of elementary particles and, ultimately, quantum energy twisted into multi-dimensional loops and strings.
She and Owen often had this argument, late at night, when there was nobody else around in the Hub. Owen tried to persuade Toshiko that her belief in quantum physics, loop theory and superstrings was itself a faith, given that she couldn’t actually buy them off eBay (and, as far as Owen was concerned, everything he needed in life could be bought online or obtained from a bar). In response, Toshiko logically proved to Owen that biology – the science he had spent his life following – didn’t exist, being partly biochemistry, which was just a branch of chemistry, and partly classification of forms, which was just stamp collecting. And chemistry itself was just a branch of physics because it depended on how atoms and molecules interacted. Owen got really tetchy when she got to that point in the argument, and either put his headphones on and turned the music up loud or just stalked off in a huff. And that left Toshiko feeling like she had lost the argument, because the last thing in the world she wanted was for Owen to stop talking to her, and that was something that physics just couldn’t explain.
--
Toshiko sometimes wondered whether the others truly felt she was part of the team. They valued her technical knowledge – she knew that – but there were times she felt as if she wasn’t part of the decision-making process. Excluded from the action. Marginalised.
Perhaps she just wasn’t outgoing enough. She certainly didn’t join in the banter as much as the others did. She sometimes felt awkward at the informality of the Torchwood team – she was used to working in a more formalised environment. It was her fault that she didn’t integrate with the team. She wished she knew how to do something about it, but she didn’t.
--
Emotions were what differentiated humans from animals, that’s what they said, but Toshiko was finding herself swamped by an animalistic mass of basic drives and fears. For a person who valued logic and order above all things, it was terrifying.
--
‘Philosophy. Not my strong point. Quantum physics and Stephen Hawking, yes. Metaphysics and Plato, not so much.’
Gwen rested her chin in one hand. ‘Rhys once told me that, from the moment we’re born, we’re all on a collision course with death.’
‘If that’s philosophy then I’ll stick with Hawking.’
--
Toshiko went to Owen immediately, putting her arms around him. There was a moment, just a moment, when they looked into each other's eyes and neither of them was entirely sure what the embrace meant.
--
Jack had told her once that UNIT had enquired if they could borrow her to upgrade their systems, but he’d fobbed them off. She knew that Jack Harkness wanted Toshiko Sato’s expertise for himself. And she was more than content with that. She and UNIT weren’t exactly… mates.
--
She and Owen had spent most of the previous night in the Hub, thrashing Jack’s problem through. She enjoyed spending time with Owen on problems. They worked well together, nights in front of computer screens, or alien artefacts, munching on sandwiches – they occasionally used to have hot food until Toshiko one day managed to… Well, now she just referred to it as ‘the toaster incident’. A phrase which always seemed to amuse Owen far more than it ought to.
Of course, there were times when it was difficult. Times when she wanted to just lean across the desk, times she wanted to tell him that she—
Anyway, that was irrelevant. Not conducive to a good working relationship. People at work shouldn’t—
Mind you, there was definitely something between Jack and Ianto. And that was a work situation. And—
But no. No, not Owen. He’d never understand. They’d talked once about how, in their line of work, it’d be really difficult to find someone who could ever really understand them, and Owen had said that girls like that were so rare they were extinct.
Toshiko had wanted to grab him and scream and yell at him and point out ‘I’m right here, you stupid—’
Even if she had, Owen still wouldn’t have got it. He’d have made a joke about it, deflected it with his unique brand of humour. Because God forbid that Dr Owen Harper should ever realise that what he was looking for was right under his bloody nose if only he wasn’t so damn arrogant and convinced he was right, and if he’d just kiss her and hold her and look into her eyes and—
--
Toshiko was displaying more screens of analysis. Gwen’s heart sank a little. Toshiko loved her histograms and her pie charts, but sometimes it was like she was lost in the detail and missing the obvious.
--
He pointed to the stuffed plush toy on her desk. ‘What’s that for?’
Toshiko smiled her secret smile. ‘It’s for when Owen comes to ask me a question for the fifth time each day about how to fix his computer. The sort of thing he should be able to work out for himself. So I insist that he asks this stuffed tiger before he interrupts me.’
He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Does it work?’
Toshiko scratched the tiger affectionately between its velour ears. ‘It has an eighty per cent success rate.’
Jack chuckled, and drew a chair up next to her. ‘Not as good as you,’ he said. ‘This computer of ours, Tosh. Organic, living, intuitive technology light years ahead of anything on Earth. But you got it as soon as you used it. No one understands it like you do, Tosh. What would we do without you?’
--
Toshiko Sato loved equations the way that other people loved poetry.
Those people, the poetry lovers – the people that most others probably thought of as normal – found truth and emotional support in the structure of words, the rhythm and the cadence of their sounds. Toshiko had never fully trusted words. They were so easy to misinterpret, or to be misused. A lot of people could be very clever with words. And they used them to break your heart. Not so many were quite that clever with numbers, few really understood them beyond their significance on a bank statement, and fewer still appreciated their simple, truthful beauty in the way that Toshiko Sato did. Because, at the end of the day, everything came down to numbers, from the physics of an atomic bomb to the shape of an autumn leaf swept away on the wind. Everything came down to mathematics. It was that kind of vision that made Toshiko special. It was also, she knew, what made her a freak.
The fact that she was in love with a dead man who wouldn’t quit walking and talking was par for the course.
She looked up from the figures on her computer screen – calculations on Rift energy fluctuations – and watched Owen bound up the steel staircase to tend his collection of alien plants. He didn’t move badly for a man who had had his heart smashed to a pulp by a .44 calibre bullet just a couple of months earlier. He still had the hole in his chest; like the finger that he had purposefully broken before her one night in a vicious black mood, it would never heal. One morning, he had turned up in the Hub with flowers poking out of the wound and told everyone he thought Torchwood’s subterranean base needed cheering up. Being dead hadn’t killed Owen’s sense of humour. Or perhaps, like her numbers, it was just a way to cope.
Toshiko had been in love with Owen Harper for two years, since he had joined Torchwood. Then he had been a man scarred by the loss of his fiancée to an alien brain parasite who had tried to lose himself in booze and a nightly succession of anonymous club-shags. But a part of her believed that she had come to love him even more since the bullet from that automatic had ripped his chest apart.
--
‘If I was a burglar, I’d look somewhere else,’ Toshiko muttered as she ran her eye over the lock, then placed a gadget from her messenger bag against it.
The back door sprang open.
‘If the Rift ever closes down, I can see a whole new career for you,’ smiled Jack.
Toshiko glanced at Jack. ‘Yes. Well, I have form, don’t I?’
Jack felt his smile shrivel. He had recruited Toshiko into Torchwood from a UNIT cell that hadn’t been big enough to lie down in after she had stolen classified plans for an experimental weapon. She had been coerced into the theft by terrorists who kidnapped her mother, but the price of springing her from the military jail had included severing contact with her family. He had given Toshiko her freedom, but freedom was a relative concept when you worked for Torchwood.
--
Toshiko didn’t want Owen to think a joke was going to get him off the hook just like that.
With barely a word she had gone into the bedroom and grabbed the messenger bag that carried her equipment then told him she was going to take a look around as she went through the front door.
‘I’m getting on with the job,’ she said as the door closed.
It didn’t hit her until she got into the elevator that she was following the ritual of domestic politics she had grown up watching her mother employ on her dad.
Never let a man know you’ve accepted his apology. Let him sweat a little more first.
Her mother had never actually tutored her in the fine art of male-female power games, but it was the sort of thing she would have said. And the young Toshiko had seen her employ the gambit so many times, she had come to understand its mechanics the way a lion cub learns to hunt.
The longer you leave it, the more opportunity he has to buy you something nice.
--
Toshiko wasn’t much good in confined spaces. UNIT had made sure of that when they cooped her up for six months in a cell that had been just 1.2 metres square. She knew without any doubt that if Jack hadn’t shown up when he did and made her that offer to join Torchwood, then one day the UNIT guard that brought her food would have found her dribbling and crazy in the corner.
But that had been a while back now, and she had coped with a hell of a lot more than being shut in a box.
--
Toshiko found the hairbrush and dragged it through her wet hair and thought about Owen standing in her bedroom, wet and all but naked. There hadn’t been many men in her bedroom like that. There hadn’t been many men, full stop. She had never been particularly good at building that kind of relationship. The lovers in her life could be counted on one hand; just a couple of fingers, if one-night stands didn’t count – and she knew that they didn’t. That wasn’t love, it was just lust, no matter how they tried to dress it up. And lust was OK, it was passionate and it took you some place that was all exploding physical sensation, and you could lose yourself there for a while. But Toshiko wanted love. As she’d looked at Owen standing all but naked in her room, she had tried not to look at the hole that had been blown in his chest by Aaron Copley’s gun, but her eyes were drawn to it as inevitably as the droplets of shower water on Owen’s shoulders travelled over his biceps and down his arms. The bullet hole was dark, ringed by livid ragged flesh. And as she looked at it she knew that she might probably love Owen until the day she died, but he could never love her.
She realised that she was crying when she heard the dressing-room door open, and she quickly wiped the tears away. She heard Owen clear his throat, uncharacteristically nervous.
‘How do I look?’ he asked.
Toshiko turned to look at him. ‘You look fine.’
‘Don’t want to let the missus down,’ he shrugged and gave her a smile.
Toshiko felt a crack in her heart deepen a little more.
--
The darkest time in Toshiko Sato’s life had been the months she had spent in the UNIT cell. There had been no real bed, the toilet had been little more than a hole in the ground, and the food had been some tasteless gruel that had been nutritionally designed to do no more than keep her alive. But the worst part was that she had no hope. No one knew she was there and no one there was interested in her account of why she had stolen the plans for the sonic modulator. She had believed that she would die there.
--
He’d admired Tosh – she was the only person in Torchwood who loved the place as much as he did. Something Ianto could only respect. She was quiet, polite, and thoughtful.