m_findlow

Title: Inquisitive
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Tosh, Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 673 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for m_findlow's prompt "any, any, asking the question" at fic_promptly
Summary: Curiosity is not always a curse

Tosh had only been working with Jack for six months but in that time she must have asked him more questions than she had ever asked in her entire life put together.

What was the rift? How did it come to be here? How did stuff come through it? Where was it coming from? So many questions, and so few answers.

When they weren't out in the field, she was busily working away at building a more complex and integrated computer system at the hub, to centralise their data, and in the process, to start answering some of the questions she had about the world that had suddenly opened up before her. The world she hadn't even known existed before Torchwood.

And Jack was incredibly patient with her, answering whatever he could. Even if it seemed complicated in its explanation, Tosh was able to follow quite a bit of it, and that still managed to impress Jack. It became readily apparent that few of the people he'd worked with were able to grasp to such complex ideas with the ease that Tosh did.

He was generous with his time, teaching her, mentoring her and protecting her. It was like they just clicked. She'd finally found a place where her natural talents could thrive and grow, and Jack had found someone to talk to and to share stories with, for it seemed to her he must have been terribly lonely working on his own. She'd been told about the team that was there before, and how their leader had murdered them all on New Years Eve, a victim himself of alien technology, but that was nearly three years ago. Jack had been on his own since. And Tosh had been far from a social butterfly in her own life.

But now they had each other, and Tosh had decided that as bosses went, Jack was one of the best. Her incarceration in that awful UNIT facility was already becoming a distant memory.

So it didn’t faze her when they were sat in the SUV, monitoring the entrance to a known weevil lair, to ask Jack yet another question.

'Jack, if weevils are so vicious, why do they wear clothes? Where do they get them?'

'I don’t know,' he admitted. Perhaps they’re enslaved on their home world, made to wear them to serve their masters. Maybe that's why they don't take too kindly to us getting in their way, and that's why they like to keep to the sewers.'

'That sounds horrible. The slavery part, I mean. Who would do such a thing?'

'Not all the universe is pretty Tosh, and not all races of beings are treated as equals.'

'You’d think we’d have learned some tolerance, having to share the universe.'

Jack remained silent. He couldn’t think of a good response given everything he’d seen. He knew she had a point, and yet reality didn't seem to reflect morality. It was one of the things that he'd learned from his travels with The Doctor, and from his years with the Time Agency, and something he'd been determined to change when he took over Torchwood.

'Jack?'

'Yeah?' he answered slowly.

'How do they keep them clean?'

'How does who keep what clean?'

'The weevils, their clothes,' she responded

'Oh,' the question caught him off guard. He’d never given it any thought. He suddenly knew he’d made the right decision taking Tosh on board. She wasn't just a technical genius, she was kind and loyal and caring. He needed more people like her to keep him grounded, to remind him what they were doing and why it was important. He needed to start thinking about recruiting others, he and Tosh couldn’t do this job on their own.

'Maybe they do laundry? Nobody at Torchwood has ever studied them properly to know much about them. I suspect they’re a far more complicated species than we ever give them credit for.'

'Let's just hope they don't think about using the same laundromat as us.'

'Now that would be awkward!'