m_findlow

Title: Dog with a bone
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Gwen, Owen, Ianto
Word Count: 500 words
Rating: PG
Notes: Written for Challenge 56 - Mindless at anythingdrabble
Summary: Gwen has a mystery on her hands that she can't let go.

'Why do you bother with that mindless boring shit?' Owen asked.

'It's not boring,' Gwen replied. 'It's called work. Something people do when the world isn't ending. You might like to try it some time.'

Owen snorted. 'Yeah, whatever.'

Gwen stuck the end of the pencil back in her mouth, finding the spot where her teeth had made a comfortable groove in the wood. A few hours ago, she'd gotten into a rhythm, going through each of the files and records one by one, applying the same process to each one, or as Owen so mildly put it, the mindless part of the task. Now she was left with the resulting questions that she couldn't find answers for.

Ianto had passed on the files to her. 'These have been down here for years. Some project started long ago but never finished. I thought maybe you might like to take a look.'

It was a puzzle to be sure, just as Ianto had promised, enticing enough to draw her in, and infuriating enough now that she couldn't let it go. He'd been right to dig it up, sensing that there was something in it that needed solving. But it required a lot more legwork and trawling through records. She'd been back down to the archives a dozen times or more in her search for related files. Half of it was as yet uncatalogued, just boxes with barcodes, the content ill-defined apart from being the right time period and the same format. Surely it could shed some light, though her lever arch folders of paper were growing larger, rather than smaller. Every clue lead her to three more, and three again, until she had a complex web of facts but with nothing definitive really connecting them.

'There's something still missing,' she insisted on her latest visit downstairs.

Ianto sighed. 'I've been through boxes and boxes of papers until my eyes hurt,' he said. 'I'm not sure what you're looking for.'

Truth be told, she didn't either. Lists of numbers and addresses, names and dates of birth that went on for miles. Why though? What was it all supposed to mean? Were they victims of the rift? Witnesses? A secret society? She had dossiers on many, and dozens more who seemingly never existed. Dates of birth that didn't match to names, names that had never lived at addresses, or couldn't be found on any map, and strings of numbers that didn't connect to anything. 'Did you ask Jack?'

Ianto scoffed. 'When has Jack ever given a straight answer on anything? He didn't know, or pretended he didn't know, whichever he thought would stop us prying.'

'I know it's a lot to ask, but you couldn't help, could you? I know it's not exciting work, but...'

He rolled his eyes but grabbed another box of lists. Hidden somewhere in this data was an answer. It might be a seemingly mindless task, poring through it all, but they'd solve the mystery one way or another.