Fffc Bingo Card - Left in charge

[m_findlow]

Title: Left in charge 
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,000 words
Content notes: none 
Author notes: Written for Bingo Card Prompt 22 - Tower at fffc
Summary: Jack is faced with his worst task ever. 

It was a drab, foggy morning. Jack wished he was still wrapped up in bed instead of stuck in a mile long traffic jam thanks to an upended lorry. He shoved his hands under his legs to try and keep them warm, wishing for the hundredth time that he'd made a different decision. Torchwood Tower should have been razed to the ground. It would have saved him a lot of trouble. 

His phone pinged as an email arrived. Another invoice from the contractors he'd engaged as part of the cleanup. The bills were mounting up so he used the time to pay them all. Let it not be said that Torchwood was a bad customer. For what he was asking them to do he should have been paying them triple. 

He rubbed a hand over his face. The commute was beginning to wear him down. Three hours to London before the peak hour rush in the morning, three hours back at the end of the day, long after the rest of the city had clocked off and gone home. He could have split duties with Suzie and Owen, but he didn't. He wanted to see to it personally that the job was done and done right. UNIT could post a few soldiers around the perimeter to guard it night and day, informing locals that the building was off limits, due to poor construction resulting in structural weaknesses. They didn't have to worry about homeless squatters. What had once been the old unloved docklands end of the city was now new and upmarket. 

It had taken weeks to deal with the worst of it, clearing out the bodies. All that remained of the daleks and the cybermen were a few broken pieces, those that had not survived the initial battle or been sucked back into the void. All of it had been carefully collected and destroyed as soon as possible. The rest was dealing with the fallout of Torchwood itself.

The building was full of storage rooms and laboratories, packed with alien tech and hybrid prototypes. It was staggering just how much of it fell into the weaponised category. Hadn't that always been the remit of the old Torchwood, he reminded himself. Everything would be boxed up, packed up, and sent back to Cardiff. He'd worry later about whether it should be destroyed or locked away permanently. 

He cast a glance at the back seat and the four boxes lying there. This was the worst part of the job, he thought. The contract cleaners he'd hired were there to wash away the last of the evidence, the blood and the grisly horror. It was their specialty, cleaning up crime scenes, but it didn't make him feel any less guilty for needing them at all. Whatever happened to the building next, Jack wanted it to be as plain and inconspicuous as possible. They were here to do their job, erasing the terrible things that had gone on. Still, he thanked them for it every single day at the end of their shift, offering them a beer as thanks, along with a dose of retcon. It was becoming part of his daily habit, apologising for the state of the place - feeding them the story of the mass shooting that had occurred there - thanking them and drugging them. Today he'd do it all over again - apologise, lie, thank and erase. That was his job now, undoing all of the mistakes his predecessors had made, wracked with a unique kind of guilt that stemmed from not having done more to stop it before Torchwood consumed itself. 

He had his own task to do when he got there, completing the erasure of Torchwood. The cleaning crew had a special formula of acid wash that could strip paint. He used it to remove every last Torchwood logo from every window and door. He must have scrubbed two thousand of those letters from existence. They were literally everywhere he turned, constantly reminding him where he was. No wonder they thought so highly of themselves. It was forced into your consciousness at every possible moment. The building would have to be completely refitted before anyone could occupy it, but he didn't want a single scrap of glass or metal left lying in some council tip marked with the words or even the symbol. They were supposed to be under the radar, but this huge gleaming edifice of arrogance had been anything but. Small wonder the whole world didn't know about Torchwood by now. Just covering up the invasion of London by the two most powerful and dangerous beings in the known universe was a small miracle, even if he couldn't mask the grief of the thousands of people who'd lost loved ones in the process. Some things even he couldn't cover up and hide. 

The building would have to remain, much as he hated it, but he could strip it down to nothing more than a shell. This was the commercial district. Let them fill this place with bland office workers, insurance brokers and investment bankers, who wouldn't think twice about anything other than what absorbed their daily work lives. 

Lights from the cars in front of him faded from red brake light glow to moving and Jack eased his cramping ankle towards the accelerator. Traffic snaked slowly but assuredly towards the city skyline, letting it loom larger and larger the closer they got. It would all be over soon, he told himself. Just a few more weeks and life could go back to normal again. Or at least as normal got for him. He'd be grateful for being woken at three am to go chase down rogue weevils, for trawling through dumpsters and alien autopsies, and getting covered in blood and slime. He'd even be grateful for putting his life on the line, dying, painfully and slowly and coming back again, just to save the lives of others. Torchwood Three and Cardiff had never felt more like home.