m_findlow

Title: Acceptable casualties
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Jack, Ianto
Word Count: 500 words
Rating: PG.
Notes: Written for Challenge 154 - Artificial at anythingdrabble
Summary: Jack isn't about to let a Cardiff landmark stand in the way of defeating a vicious alien threat.

Ianto set his hands on his hips and huffed loudly. 'Well, now you've gone and done it, haven't you?' he said, directing his ire at Jack rather than spending a single minute more staring at the blackened and broken remains of what had once been a Cardiff Bay landmark.

Where once Captain Scott had stood, struggling to pull hismelf through the snow and the ice, dragging himself ever onwards to the South Pole even as his comrades lay buried up to their faces in snow, their terrible fates already sealed ahead of his own, now there was nothing at all resembling the modern monument.

'Don't use the plasma cannon!' Ianto had said, as they pursued a rather nasty looking insect creature around the edge of the bay. 'Not even on the low setting,' he'd added as an afterthought, preempting Jack's reply as he ran at full pelt to keep up. They'd already taken out half of the Severn Bridge with it last year thanks to Jack's mishandling of yet another supposedly simple operation. He did not want Jack pointing that thing anywhere near the Norwegian Church or anywhere else that was likely to leave an enormous crater.

'Bullets aren't going to stop it, Ianto!' Jack had yelled back, having tucked the cannon under his arm as they raided the armory the minute the rift alert came through, seeing for themselves the creature on the CCTV cameras around the Plass. A whole room full of deadly weapons but Jack always went for the biggest and most destructive.

Ianto had to admit, as soon as the insect thing wound itself around the monument, using it for added height and a fine place for it to make a stand against them, he knew what Jack would do almost before he'd even done it. He'd charged that plasma cannon to full and let it rip, wiping out everything in its path, alien and monument included. Thank God at least he hadn't damaged the church.

'The alien's dead, isn't it?' Jack replied, giving a shrug as if there'd been absolutely nothing wrong about his choices.

'And you've destroyed a significant Cardiff landmark. Again,' he added, underscoring the point.

Jack rolled his eyes theatrically. 'It wasn't like it was a marble statue carved by Michelangelo during the Renaissance.'

'And yet the council will still be pissed.'

'So, we replace it. We take all of the CCTV images from around the area, reconstruct a 3-dimensional outline of it, crank up that big old alien 3D printer and voilá. One replacement Captain Scott Memorial before morning and no one any the wiser.'

'It was made from thousands of individual mosaic tiles. You can't just print up some artifical plastic replica. Not to mention it would blow away in the first gust of wind.'

'I mentioned the 3D printer was alien, right? You want a big heavy statue covered in pretty little mosaic tiles, you've got it.'

Ianto frowned. 'Just so long as you're the one lugging it here.'