Torchwood: Fanfic: For the record

[m_findlow]

Title: For the record
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,838 words
Conten ntes: none
Author notes: Written for badly_knitted's prompt "any, any, buried under a pile of work, literally" at fic_promptly
Summary: Everyone underestimates just how much work is involved in maintaining the Torchwood archives, and the lengths its archivist is prepared to go to

Ianto had made it his life's ambition to resolve the chaos that was the Torchwood archives. To have called it an archive before he'd started there was something of a gross misnomer. It was more of a rubbish tip crossed with a garage sale. Most things had at least been tagged in some form, and some had been boxed, sometimes even in such a way that might have indicated a grouping of similar items or some other semblance of a sorting system. Ianto could occasionally make sense of the thought process behind the original archiver's intention, but oftentimes the logic left him baffled.

He'd started with the more recent archive vaults, knowing that at the very least those items should be better documented. Even that left much to be desired. Clever and ambitious as he was, there was no point in making the task any more challenging than was strictly necessary. Slowly and methodically, he'd managed to properly catalogue the items so that each had a unique identification number and a minimum level of detail regarding name, description, including several photographs, origin by location and time, if known, date and location the item was found, and references for any related case files that accompanied it. It was also given a designated threat level, graded from one for inert or non-dangerous objects, all the way through to twelve for highly dangerous, requiring archival in the secure archives.

There was an entire three vaults dedicated just to Earth based objects that had fallen through the rift. Those items at least were easily dealt with, and could be sorted with minimum fuss. One day they might even be able to be rid of many of them, but as it was, most items were still soaked in residual rift energy and couldn't be risked being disposed of until they could be deemed one hundred percent safe.

The boxes and boxes of old mission reports and research papers weren't too difficult to sort out either. Most of the more recent stuff was already computerised, but some of it now only existed on magnetic storage tapes and had to be reloaded onto redundancy servers to ensure the records were preserved in the event of catastrophe in the hub. Paper files were a little trickier. Optical character recognition software helped import most of it into their existing server systems and scans of the original reports were included in case of problems with translation, or to incorporate images or diagrams that the report writer had included, which were quite common in a lot of the earliest files when photography had been less widespread and more expensive. It also accounted for times when the agent simply didn't have time for photos, usually when they were pursuing some creature, or being pursued. There wasn't exactly time to turn around and ask it to say cheese if it was seconds from tearing your throat out.

In addition to this, Tosh and Ianto had spent several weeks developing a program that would crawl through the text of each report and file, creating a sizeable bank of meta data that could be attached to each file and separately indexed, which would make it much easier to search and cross reference files so that the next time someone found "a weird purple cone shell that barks like a dog", chances were good that they could search for anything that turned up the words shell, cone, purple, dog or bark.

He could spend hours uninterrupted in the archives, and usually only had visits from the team when they needed an artefact or report, or coffee. Even though he'd made the new archiving system easy to follow for even the most uninitiated agent, mostly they just preferred to tell him what it was they were after and have him retrieve it for them. Sometimes they didn't even come down anymore, just buzzing him over his comms or the phone he'd installed in the tiny office space he'd created for himself as a central location for working. He didn't mind though, the peace and quiet made for a nice change from the chaos that often occupied the main area of the hub, and it helped his concentration.

He was two years into the task now and had finally reached a point he'd been dreading. The oldest of the archive vaults.

Since it's inception in 1869, all of the very oldest artefacts had been stored in the vaults that were now designated 26 through 32. They were poorly lit, even by Torchwood standards, causing Ianto to permanently carry a camping sized floodlight with him whenever he headed down there. These vaults also had a particular smell of mustiness, dust and mothballs, that couldn't be displaced, and reminded him of Sunday services spent at church when he was a boy, and afternoons at his aunt's house where the only concession to the out of bounds status of every other room in the house, was her homemade jam scrolls.

The shelves in the oldest vaults were packed tightly with ancient wooden crates and old style shipping cartons, whilst other shelves were simply stacked with objects of all kinds, heavily caked in dust or covered with thick canvas sheeting, and most other items were shoved into cardboard boxes or leather-bound trunks. Several artefacts had lost their tags over the years, the string attaching them having given up long ago to mildew and rot. Paper reports and journals were so faded and fragile they looked as if they'd disintegrate at the slightest touch, and Ianto was forced to use gloves and dimmed lighting to access their pages, sometimes having to manually type in their contents, so delicate were the originals that they might not survive the scanning process. After that they were carefully filed into vault 33 which had a hermetically sealed section which Jack had specially commissioned at his request. Now that they'd been electronically preserved, the originals would hopefully never be needed, but if they were, at least they were doing all the could to prevent further degradation.

The crates in the ancient vault were piled high and haphazardly on rickety old wooden shelving. It would be easy to believe that the only thing holding them together still was the dust itself. From what he could tell, these particular crates were only meant to house reports and photographic archives, but the stamping on the side of the crates was faded in some places and smudged in others. Plus he had to contend with the system of his predecessors, or lack of system as was usually the case.

He knew he should have retrieved the step ladder to reach the highest crates, but it was located several vaults away and it was getting late. He really just wanted to be able to collect the series of crates and put them on the trolley so they could be dealt with elsewhere. The last and highest shelf was just out of reach of his finger tips. It's boxes should have been reasonably lightweight like the rest had been. Opting for efficiency over efficacy, he placed a foot on the lowest shelf and hauled himself up, gaining the extra three feet he needed to properly get access. With one hand gripping tightly to the upper shelf and the other reaching for the first crate, he felt quite pleased with himself.

Then it happened. The shelving which held the bulk of his weight at the bottom had decided that after 130 years, it had run its race. It cracked and split underneath his foot, the sudden pressure decidedly more than it could cope with. As his foot came out from under him, his other hand frantically grabbed for the top shelf to stop him from falling. Only it too decided it was going to have other ideas. Once the lower shelf bent and snapped in two, the vertical pressure from the side beams added to the top shelf and now that his full weight was hanging from it, it too cracked, but not before creaking in that loud foreboding way that warned Ianto that things were about to go terribly wrong.

As he fell backwards to the floor, the boxes that had been resting on the top shelf followed, and the whole structure came toppling down on him. The impact against the floor winded him, but there wasn't time to react to it before the boxes from the shelf came tumbling down, followed quickly by the rickety remains of the shelving. In a way he was fortunate that the boxes landed on him first, blunting the impact of the rotted shelving that could easily have shattered body and bone. Miraculously he had also avoided hitting his head on his way to the ground, so he was alert enough to know that he was now stuck under a pile of immovable debris. Had it just been the boxes, he would have been fine, thought they did appear to be heavier than first anticipated, although that could simply be because they were crushing his torso, rather than being securely bundled in his arms. Newton's third law had a lot to answer for.

He struggled for a moment before realising there was no way he was getting out of this on his own. If only he could reach up to his ear and activate his comms unit, luckily still in place, for he didn't work in the archives without it anymore. Not in the event that the team might urgently need him, and there was no time to send a search party looking for him. More likely, he thought, he would have to send a search party after them, because they'd get lost down here in about five minutes flat. Then they'd all be in trouble. Ianto trapped under a mass of archiving, and teammates lost forever to the maze that was the archives. Jack would be lucky to have anyone left to make tea by the end of it.

Eventually he managed to free his hand, but not before part of the shelving decided to take a chunk out of the side of it as revenge for defying it. He gratefully tapped his earpiece, ignoring the bleeding gash, switching it on and praying someone was still there listening. As luck would have it only Jack would still be there, late as it was, and embarrassed as he was, he was glad that he at least wouldn't have to spend the rest of the night stuck down here. If the archives didn't kill him, sheer boredom and annoyance at his own stupidity might.

With a considerable amount of effort, Jack managed to locate Ianto and prise away enough of the heavy wood to free him from his predicament. There were times when he was glad to see Jack, and there were times when he was really glad to see Jack. This was definitely the latter.

'I know you like to get stuck into your work,' Jack joked, 'but I think you've taken it way too literally.'

Comments

[jo02]

Sigh, the job's gonna kill him one way or another.

[m-findlow.livejournal.com]

Ianto will be making sure that all those rickety old shelves are replaced with nice new ones that don't try to murder unsuspecting Torchwood agents.

[bk_forever]

Poor Ianto, what a predicament! Thank goodness Jack wasn't on a rooftop somewhere. I wonder how long it would've taken him to send out a search party if he hadn't got the SOS.