Torchwood: Fanfic: Priceless artifacts

[m_findlow]

Title: Priceless artifacts
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 834 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for juliet316's prompt "Any, any, collecting the strangest things" at fic_promptly
Summary: Jack desk has become a universal museum

Jack's desk is about the most eclectic combination of oddities that have appeared to ever have been assembled in one place, so Ianto thinks. Apart from the usual paper towers and pens, discarded coffee mugs and sweet wrappers, the rest of it is thoroughly perplexing.

He was fairly certain that they weren't oddities, in the sense that Jack would have known precisely what each of the objects was, but to the untrained eye, it was nothing more than a curiosity.

There was a small metal ball which sang when you hovered your hand over it, and he claimed it helped him when he was stuck for a word. Ianto had suggested he try a thesaurus.

There was his small wooden box that contained the tiny white retcon pills, compartmentalised into four sections for varying strengths, and a small notebook and pencil wedged down one side, to mark off each pill taken.

There was something that looked like a one handed, one eyed binocular, which seemed an odd thing to call it, since you could only look through one long viewfinder, and what you saw was not necessarily a depiction of the actual vista in front of you. It should have been called an omniocular.

Some of it was just odd earth paraphernalia. A Newton's cradle, a pair of cardboard 3D glasses, an old fashioned hourglass, encased in wood, and a fat rubber stamp used for marking cases as closed.

There's a large conical metal object, like an upside down funnel, that apparently registers levels of some kind of sub-neutronic radiation. There's a race of microscopic creatures called beenvagles that can strip flesh from you in less than fifteen seconds, he says, but they can only exist in environments where that particular kind of radiation is high. It's an early warning system, he explains, though they've stopped listening after the "stripping flesh in fifteen seconds" part, looking around cautiously as if expecting to be attacked at any moment.

Some things tend to come and go, sitting there for weeks or months, and then suddenly falling out of fashion one day, replaced by something new and bizarre the next. Where the old objects go or why is never known, nor what reason the new item has for being there, other than being just as mysterious and unexplainable as the man who sits behind the desk.

There's always a decent smattering of glass objects there too. From his ornate sweets jar, to the long tall tubes, wide round bowls and other empty vessels that adorn the surface from time to time. The jars with nothing in them are probably not as empty as they appear, so no one risks pulling off the lid in case something inside should escape. They'll have a job on their hands trying to find it if it does. Jack it seems, has a penchant for fine cut crystal. The decanter of scotch and matching glasses are intricate in detail, and worth a small fortune, yet their finest hour is when the team are at their lowest, drowning their sorrows in elegant style.

The computer and phone are only recent additions. Despite everything, Jack still prefers to do things on paper, always with a large assortment of yellowing pages and well weathered case files from decades ago, littered about, not to mention several large tomes from a vast library of odd books, the titles on which appear often to have little relevance to anything they're investigating. Perhaps it's just light reading for in between cases, in which case, the chosen subject matter is thoroughly confounding.

And yet despite the fact that many of the objects that take up residence on his desk are from the far flung future, or at least the other side of the known universe, it doesn't make it seem modern and high tech. If anything, it only adds to the dated look of the place, as if everything Jack owns is trapped in a time bubble circa 1940. Ianto doesn't mind though. The look just seems to suit Jack, like a well fitted glove.

Then there was the strangest thing of all. It was a piece of odd looking yellow coral, sort of flat but spiked and ridged, and mounted up off the surface of the desk. Jack had explained most of the things on his desk in fine detail, but the coral remained something of a mystery. And it was the one thing that always remained, never replaced. All he would say is that one day it would be important. Ianto assumed it was something to do with everything changing and arming themselves against the future, whatever that might mean. If he'd known that it would one day, with enough rift energy and love, grow into a TARDIS that would take both he and Jack travelling all across the universe and throughout time, he might not have been so nonchalant as he drifted past Jack's desk, giving it a light going over with his feather duster.

Comments

[bk_forever]

And that's no doubt why the TARDIS loves Ianto so much, because he regularly dusted it, without ever knowing just how important it would be, simply because it was something Jack obviously loved!