Anythingdrabble Challenge 42 - Artistic license

[m_findlow]

Title: Artistic license
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Jack, Ianto
Word Count: 500 words
Rating: PG
Notes: Written for Challenge 42 - Chromatic at anythingdrabble
Summary: The latest visitors from the rift have given one of the city's monuments a facelift.

Ianto nervously tapped the steering wheel as they waited at the lights. 'Are you sure we've got nothing to worry about?'

'Ianto, relax. It'll be fine. I've double and triple-checked the rift signature. It's just a cloud of harmless little spores. Hardly worth even going out there to check but,'

'But?' There was an accusation in that one little word, implying Jack wasn't giving him the full picture.

'It's part of the job. Now, are we going or not, because that light has been green for about twenty seconds.'

Ianto growled under his breath and pressed the accelerator. It had less to do with the potential futility of the rift alert as it did the location. Any rift alert that cropped up near the castle made him nervous. He couldn't bear the idea of having eight hundred years of Welsh history under threat. Destroy some crummy estate block or a public eyesore that had blighted the city for forty years, but don't you dare think about coming here and touching the castle, he thought.

He took a deep breath as he made the turn off North Road. It's just spores.

'They're not the kind that like to eat things, are they?' he suddenly asked.

'Spores don't eat stuff. That's bacteria.'

'Right. Of course. Getting my invertebrates mixed up.' It wasn't nearly as reassuring as he'd hoped.

The car swung around the bend in the road, entering the car park. Ianto hit the brakes hard. 'Oh, my God,' he said, as the castle came into view. What should have been grey stone rising up from the lush green hill was now a multicoloured mess, like a whole mob of teenagers on smack had come along with their cans of spray paint.

'What have you done to it?'

'Me?' Jack cried.

'They're just spores, you said. Totally harmless, you said. Iesu Mawr!'

'Okay, so it's a little more chromatic than usual,' Jack said, trying to calm Ianto down before he lost it completely. 'They're just reacting to the organic material they've landed on, that's all.'

'And what exactly is that supposed to mean?' Ianto said, gripping the wheel with both hands lest he have an urge to strangle something.

'It means, the only technicolor thing are the spores themselves. Your precious monument is perfectly fine.'

'Let's hope you're more sure about that than your previous statement.'

'Hey, look I didn't bring them here,' Jack said, getting annoyed.

'Sorry,' Ianto said, realising he was venting at the wrong person. Bloody rift. 'So, what do we do? I don't really want to have to explain this to the council and the National Trust.'

'We're gonna need some really big vacuum cleaners,' Jack said. 'We can suck them straight off the surface and release them somewhere out in the countryside. Clearly they're not used to man-made structures.'

Ianto sighed. 'I feel like my whole life is just one big clean-up job.'

'But, on the plus side, the grass around the castle will never be greener.'

Comments

[bk_forever]

Poor Ianto, he's really protective of Cardiff castle. Hopefully the spores will be easy enough to deal with once they have the right equipment.

[m-findlow.livejournal.com]

They clearly need a different food source that doesn't interfere with their systems quite so much. The castle will be back to its historical best in no time.