Fffc Bingo Card - Preserving history

[m_findlow]

Title: Preserving history 
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Tosh
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,000 words
Content notes: none 
Author notes: Written for Bingo Card Prompt 19 - Paper at fffc
Summary: The archives will be the death of Ianto at this rate. 

Ianto wanted to scream in frustration at his morning's efforts. This stupid archive and all its stupid files would be the absolute death of him! He should just go right back upstairs and tell Jack that he'd had enough and that if he wanted his archives sorted, he could get someone else to do it, because he was fed up. 

He'd always known that at some point he was going to have to tackle the enormous wall of filing cabinets that ran the entire length of one side of Vault Two. The vault was a hundred and fifty feet long and the filing cabinets were a standard three drawer model, stood side by side like rows of dutiful soldiers, biding their time until they were called upon to serve. 

And serve they had. Every last one of them was crammed full of files and notes, the collective history of Torchwood locked away in their metal drawers. Every mission report, every personnel file, every scrap of research that had ever been conducted on anything that had crossed their desks, be it alien artifact, visitor from another world, mysterious corpse or conspiracy theory, was tucked inside. Ianto suspected that no one truly knew the extent of what was down here. There could be hundreds of cases files that had never been properly resolved that perhaps now, with the aid of new information, could be laid to rest. There could be dozens more that might have some critical connection, or warn of a threat yet to come. Even Jack, with all his years drifting in and out of Torchwood's hallowed halls, couldn't be expected to know or remember everything. A lot had happened in the time he hadn't been here, or off on some mission far away, out of that hair and minds of the previous leaders, to whom Jack was more hindrance than help. 

At least they appeared to be in some kind of chronological order, Ianto had discovered. Personnel files were in a separate section all their own, sorted alphabetically rather than chronologically. Ianto had made the mistake of spending whole days digesting their contents. He was desperate to know everything about the people who'd worked here for the last century and a half. By the time he'd finished working through them all, he sort of wished he hadn't. He knew very well now that he was destined to die young. Almost all of them did, and plenty of them in horrible, brutal ways. 

Only one personnel file was missing, and presumably that was for two reasons. First was that the Torchwood operative in question was still alive, and secondly, because Jack had it stored away somewhere that no one would ever find it. The average file was a quarter inch thick - more for those that had been leaders - but Ianto was under no illusion that Jack's file would be anything less than several inches of mouth-wateringly private details. 

It wasn't however the personnel files that troubled Ianto. It was the mission reports and the research files. Even though they'd been stored in the dark, kept in tidy manila files and pressed flat and neat into filing cabinets, there was one thing they couldn't be protected from and that was age. 

His job was to protect their files at all costs, and he planned on doing that by making sure that every last one of them was digitised and backed up on at least two external servers. That meant each file needed to be painstakingly scanned and indexed. Whilst he had a huge flatbed scanner and state of the art optical character recognition software, capable of rendering a near perfect image of every page, plus a searchable and indexed copy of the text, it was the scanning process that was proving most vexing. 

Even with gloves and the gentlest movements possible, some of the oldest files stored simply crumbled at the slightest movement or breath of air. Lifting a single page from a file and onto the scanner could take minutes of inexorably slow movement with gloved hands and archivists tools, only to fall apart at the last moment, or have the light from the scanner break down what little cellulose was left holding them together. At this rate he'd end up destroying more than he saved. 

He stomped all the way back up to that main hub, intending on fixing himself a double shot espresso to settle his fragile temper. He nearly collided into Tosh, not watching where he was going. 

‘Are you okay?’ she asked, seeing the look of frustration on his face. 

He spilled all his headaches to her, grateful for someone who'd listen without judging. Tosh often did the same to him when something she was working or wasn't going to plan. 

‘I think I might have a solution to your problem,’ she said. 

‘Really?’ He couldn't imagine there being one. 

Tosh looked furtive as she leaned closer. ‘There's this device that can scan an entire book just by pressing it to the outside cover. Only, it's in the secure archives.’ 

‘Why?’ That didn't sound very dangerous. 

‘It can also read locks, combinations, security codes. You can use it to break into almost anything. That's why Jack locked it away. He said it's banned by the Shadow Proclamation and that we should have turned it in to be destroyed.’ 

Well, that made more sense. They didn't need Judoon storming the hub and arresting Jack. Still, he hadn't turned it over, which was curious in itself. Why would Jack take the risk? Unless of course he thought that one day they might need it. 

‘Thanks for the intel, Tosh. Let me work on Jack.’ If anyone could convince him that it would be okay to use it just for this purpose, then Ianto could. Who knew, maybe something in those files was what would save the world one day, and that had to be reason enough for Jack to have kept it. After all, it was just paper.