Torchwood: Fanfic: Hope springs eternal

[m_findlow]

Title: Hope springs eternal
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Tosh
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 848 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for juliet316's prompt "Any, any, sunshine after the rain" at fic_promptly
Summary: Tosh isn't sure how she's meant to carry on.

Tosh leant over the railing watching the stormy grey waters of the bay as the rain pelted down on her head. She just needed to be alone for a little while so she could mourn in private.

Hard to think that just yesterday she'd been stood here in the sunshine, letting Tommy spin her around like some girl he'd met at a dance. It was silly but she'd loved it. She was too old for him and too far removed from his timeline to know that anything between them could ever work out. Perhaps she'd known that a year ago, or the year before that, or the year before that. Each time they'd woken him up, he was just the same as always, and yet she was sure he must have noticed the change in her. The way she wasn't nearly as innocent as she'd been a year ago, or the way that she'd become colder and less responsive to how brutal life could be.

Even as she remembered their afternoon in the pub, she watched the despair on his face as he watched footage of soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. She didn't think about war in the same way he did. To her, it was all technology these days. Soldiers were still a part of it, but much less so than half a century ago. There were no news stories of thousands of men being killed every day for seemingly no reason. One side believed in a God that went by a different name to the other side. It wasn't war so much as it was ignorant hatred. They bombed cities and villages full of innocent people, and even thought that was worse than soldiers who'd chosen to die fighting, she never reacted to it. It was just one of those inescapable facets of living in the twenty-first century. War and terrorism had become part of the global psyche.

Yet here was a man, more a boy still, really, that saw it for what it was. He'd faced the horrors of war first hand, and yet he was till so sweet and innocent. He was so much better than her, and more than she deserved. When he kissed her though, she felt like she was a different person; better, kinder. He made her feel worthy where a thousand guys would have walked right past her and never blinked a eye. And she adored him. It was silly, dating a guy you could only see once a year, yet she treasured those moments. She didn't have to try and impress him, to be clever or trendy or pretty. He liked her just the way she was.

It wasn't fair, she thought. Jack had always said they couldn't wake him up for more than a day. He was meant for something in the future and no one knew just how far into the future that was. Even waking him for a day, they had to preserve him as best they could, not altering his timeline in case it should affect the future. Even so, Jack saw the way that Tosh looked at him, and he her, and so he let them spend what little time they had together. She appreciated it more than she could say, and when she'd said he could stay the night with her, Jack hadn't stopped her then either. It was different then. Now they knew Tommy's fate and still she chose to turn a blind eye to it. It was cruel to know that they'd kept him alive and whole all this time, only to be sending him to his death. Worse still was that once the time loop closed itself, he wouldn't remember any of what had happened to him. He wouldn't remember that there was a future, bright with patches of grey, and that his actions would preserve that future, ensuring that the girl he'd fallen head over heels in love with would survive. Instead he'd be sent back to war, unable to cope with the death and the horror, finally dying at the hands not of the enemy, but of his own men, executed for being human enough to fear. They should all be afraid. No man should have to die for that. He was so much braver than all of them, because he knew what would come and he still chose to do it. She wanted to tear up the records that said he died a coward and a craven. They had no idea what he'd willingly sacrificed for them.

Then rain mixed with the salty teaes on her faced for a long time before finally both abated. Overhead the clouds broke and parted, and the tiniest glimmers of sunshine forced their way back down to earth, glittering off the waters surface. All of this was here because of him, just like Owen had said. She was here. No one else would ever know the sacrifice he made. He'd be just one of millions who died in the war, but to her, he'd be the one that saved them all.

Comments

[bk_forever]

So poignant! Tommy's story was both a triumph and a tragedy, he was an unsung hero and he deserved so much more for saving the world than to be executed as a coward.

[m-findlow.livejournal.com]

It really is awful the way his life ends. He's just another casualty of war, albeit a different one to the one he thought he was fighting.