Fffc Bingo Card - Forever young

[m_findlow]

Title: Forever young 
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Gwen 
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,000 words
Content notes: none 
Author notes: Written for Bingo Card Prompt 65 - Young at fffc
Summary: Ianto discovers a fact about Torchwood he suspected he already knew. 

Torchwood 1918 might have left the team in 2007 sealed orders that would only reveal themselves when the time was right, but that wasn't going to stop Ianto from finding out absolutely everything he could about the people who had set them in this perplexing assignment to begin with. 

Jack hadn't precisely asked him to go digging, but he did it out of a sense of habit and duty. He felt like it was his job to arm his captain with as much information as possible. Everyone else was busy trying to wrap their heads around the man who had been frozen in time in their morgue for nearly a hundred years. Owen found him a medical marvel, or perhaps just the technology that made it possible to cryogenically put a man to sleep and then to awaken him at some future point in time with no physical degradation or aging whatsoever. Gwen was fascinated to learn what Tommy remembered of his time before he'd met Torchwood and whether there was anything he recalled from the time in between, watching the world evolve one day at a time. Tosh however was simply enamored with the young man. It didn't take a genius to see that she and Tommy were growing unusually close, this being the third year in a row that she'd been here when they'd woken Tommy from his slumber. 

Ianto had of course done this before as well, but there was something different about it this year, like he could feel in his bones that those sealed orders might give up their secrets. Or maybe it was just the strange rift readings they were getting from Saint Teilo's Hospital, which had been defunct and abandoned for years, but had also been the same hospital that in 1918 had cared for the Empire's wounded men, bringing them back from the British front line just long enough to treat their fatal wounds before sending them back to risk their lives once more. 

Ianto felt strange to think of Tommy and the era in which he'd lived. They were about the same age, yet Ianto's life - or at least the lives of people his age living in this time - were relatively danger free. The dangers came from those they inflicted upon themselves for the most part: drugs, alcohol, dangerous driving. 

Being sent to fight a war was not part of their existence. No one had ever, or would ever, put a gun in his hand and send him off to kill men the same age as him, just because they lived in a different country or spoke a different language. Boys far younger than him had gone off to war a hundred years ago. Jack had gone off to war, several times, and Ianto couldn't fathom it. Yes, he had chosen a dangerous occupation where he carried a gun and risked death, but it was a different kind of danger. It wasn't the kind that you faced every minute of the day and night, taking orders from those who stayed well back from the front lines, and never knowing which moment might be your last. He'd signed up for this in one sense, but to have walked into a recruitment office and signed himself up for war? He wasn't sure he was brave enough for that. 

The old personnel files were easy enough for him to find. He'd reorganised that part of the archives as one of his very first jobs. It was one of the few sections of filing cabinets that hadn't required much work. Torchwood had been surprisingly meticulous in keeping their employee records organised. As he started to flip through them, he began to understand why. There were just so many of them. Torchwood Three had always been such a tiny little outpost, watching over the rift, and it had never been home to more than a half dozen people at any given time, but all of them seemed to have one thing in common - they were young. Not just when they'd joined, but more importantly, when they'd died. 

He pulled the files for Gerald Carter and Harriet Derbyshire from the cabinet and pushed it gently back shut, carrying them back to his desk. He started with their Commander's dossier. Carter had been something of a long serving Torchwood officer, at least relatively speaking. He was also, Ianto noticed, quite handsome. He wondered what Jack knew of the man, since they must have worked together once. He wondered if Carter was charming in the same way Jack was charming. 

The other file made for much harder reading. Harriet, just twenty six when she and Gerald Carter had found Tommy Brockless in that hospital and brought him back here. Six months later she'd been killed in a terrible accident involving alien technology. Carter's final report was laden with sorrow at the loss of a woman with intelligence far surpassing most of her university colleagues. Ianto felt his own heart breaking for a woman he'd never known, but whose delicate smile and golden hair shone out of the few collected photographs that accompanied her file. He'd be twenty six next year, and there was no telling whether he'd make it to see another birthday. There were no assurances that any of them would. He swallowed down the lump forming in the back of his throat. His teammates - friends - were all going to die young, just like him. That was how this job worked. Theirs was a war of a different kind, one where the enemy wasn't easily identified. 

Gwen knocked on the door. Jack must have told her he was down here conducting research. 

‘Any luck with those old files?’ 

He spread his arms out across the desk, indicating the piles of files and photos. He put on a smile for her even though he didn't feel like smiling. He couldn't bear to think that she was going to die just like him. It was only a matter of time.