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The Morning Ripped You Away by akire [Reviews - 0] 
## Toshiko Sato only slept when they were home. When they were gone she caught catnaps, stolen moments of almost-rest, and tried not to count the days. Toshiko Sato had not slept in a long time. ## The plinth was gone. The explosion tore it from the ground, leaving only a ragged stump of mangled technology at the base. The main floor of the Hub was now an atrium, hastily built stairs extended up to the fractured surface. But, strangely, the rooms ringing the Hub were left intact. She couldn’t bear to be in Jack’s bunker-like bedroom alone. Instead she chose one of the rooms on the second level, overlooking the remains of their workplace. She filled it with scavenged colours like a jackdaw lining a nest, then went back to work. There was a lot to do. The Rift was now a canyon, the flow of strange creatures a flood. And there were the survivors, a steady stream slowing to a trickle as the months passed as best they could. There were mouths to feed and monsters to slay and hope to keep alive even if she knew deep down that hope was but a faded memory. Space-time around Cardiff wasn’t just warped – it was fractured, broken, making them into a tiny oasis in a pitiless universe. Tosh didn’t know how far the damage had spread. Around the city was nothingness. The Howling, Jack called it, saying the name in a flat tone of voice with carefully blank eyes. She hated that tone, the way he was so careful, so obviously concealing something. After all they had seen, all they had been through, if he thought it was something that would frighten her, it must be truly terrible. Tosh was tired of terrible. She brushed her hair into a ponytail, careful with the elastic; she had so few left now. In the fragment of mirror – a gift from Ianto – her eyes looked dull, her cheekbones prominent. They were cultivating every bit of arable land, but the seasons were gone. Fractured time held few certainties. She took a deep breath, forced a façade of life into her expression. Reaching out, she brushed her fingertips over the photograph – another scavenged gift from Ianto, who always took care of the details. In the photograph, a sweeter Tosh was smiling at a laughing Owen. She thought she might have loved him, once. Now she thought him a coward and a fool and she yearned to have him back so she could tell him to his face how little she thought of him, and how much she missed him. He was a doctor. They needed doctors. They didn’t need self-pitying fools that blew their own brains out at the first sign of the apocalypse. Tosh knew she was a little conflicted. But she didn’t have time – what an ironic saying, these days - to sit and process. She had survivors to rally, things to fix, lies to tell. She’d promised Jack she’d keep things going until he came back. He had made her promise. So she’d keep things going, one day at a time, or as best as could be managed. She climbed the stairs one by one, not quite trusting her weight until she had to. It was raining today, good for their supplies, good for their little gardens. The water fell straight down the chasm that was the Hub, pattering across the floor and flowing into the drain. Tosh stopped at the top and looked down, as she always did, picking out where her workstation used to be, where the couch once was, every last detail overlaying the scene of decay and devastation. One ritual after another, all designed to help her though her day. “Morning Miss Sato.” She managed a smile as she climbed the last flight onto street level. “Hi Andy. Report?” Andy grinned, the mass of scar tissue that occupied the space where his right eye should have been rippling with the movement. “A new survivor.” Tosh’s heart leapt into her throat. The later the arrival, the further they had generally travelled. They may have news. “Show me.” “You’re not going to believe this,” he said as he led her across the Plass and into the stadium, which now served as the true Hub of their little community. Tosh gasped a breath, barely recognizing the man seated under an awning, blowing over a steaming mug of thin soup. “Rhys?” He looked up, and Tosh could see him scanning her face, putting semi-familiar elements together. “You used to work with my Gwen,” he said finally, voice rough as if from disuse. She nodded anxiously, slipping onto the seat beside him. “Where’s Gwen, Rhys? She was with you, right?” Rhys looked away and nodded. “She was.” Tosh sighed silently and closed her eyes. The same flat tone, the carefully averted eyes, like the face in her mirror. The Howling was going to get them all, in the end. She gently laid a hand on the man’s bicep, and offered him what comfort she could without saying a word. ## They couldn’t see the sun. The clouds circled and flickered overhead, letting in light, never letting them see out. Tosh feared she’d forget what sunshine felt like. This light was the wrong colour. She looked at the yellowing leaf, rubbing the fine edge through her fingers over and over as if she could somehow rub life into the dying plant. “They’re all like that, Miss Sato,” the young man said nervously. “They’re just not getting enough light.” None of them were. She could see the signs of malnutrition, lingering injuries and infection and vitamin D deficiency in every face she looked at. If The Howling didn’t snatch them up fast, then they were going to die slow as their bodies crumbled and decayed. She thought of Jack suddenly, his body locked in a cycle of renewal and death forever, trapped in this twilight world. Tosh turned away and stared hard at the ad hoc irrigation system they had strung out along the rows of dying plants. “We’ll think of something. Do the best you can, and when we get power up and running, we’ll rig lights through the growing areas, see if that helps.” UV lamps, she thought to herself, focusing on the details. Make people work under them too. “Yes, Miss Sato.” She could hear it in his voice. Doubt. They hadn’t found a source of power yet, and now the clock was running down. She knew she should talk to him, cajole him, yell at him if she had to. Do something to give him hope. But hope was a scarcer commodity than sunlight. She had none left to give. She walked away without looking back. ## “Is he coming back?” Tosh looked up as Rhys sat beside her. He never really looked at anyone, never bothered with greetings or platitudes. If he had something to say, he said it. “They’re coming back,” she said with conviction. At that, Rhys looked up and looked her in the eye. Tosh held his gaze for a moment before letting hey eyes drift across his face, mapping the scars beneath the skin. “You sound so certain.” “I know them. They’re coming back.” Rhys laughed, a short bitter sound. “I thought I knew Gwen. I watched her go, and I heard her yell another man’s name.” He stood up suddenly, as if he couldn’t bear to stay seated a moment longer. “Guess I didn’t know her at all.” She wanted to scream. It was a sudden burst of energy that had her flying up, latching onto his arm, spinning him around. “Jack has Ianto, Ianto has Jack, and they both have me. They promised they’d come back. They will come back.” Something in Rhys’ face softened for a moment. “You really have that much faith in them, Tosh?” A smile pulled at her cracked, dried lips. “You bet I do.” She reached up and touched his face, delicately. When he didn’t pull away, she cupped his cheek in her hand. “Do you know you’re the only one here who calls me by my first name?” He wrapped a hand around her wrist and pulled her fingers across his lips in a chaste ghost of a kiss. “After all I’ve lost to Torchwood, I think I’ve earned that right.” Tosh brought her fist to her mouth as she watched him leave. ## The crops began to fail. Tosh wasn’t surprised. Neither was Rhys. They were both shocked to discover they were the only ones. “You are their Saint Toshiko of the sunrise,” he whispered into her ear as she stared at herself in the fragment of the mirror. “They would follow you into the night, if you asked them.” Tosh averted her eyes from the shadow in the mirror, ran away, desperate for anything else to be the focus of her attentions. Two days later, they linked a generator to a machine that drew its energy off The Howling itself, like wind through a turbine. The lights came on, replacing the shadows on their faces with smiles. She walked through them all as if in a dream, descending the stairs one at a time. “Am I really their Saint Toshiko?” she asked the other face in her mirror. “You held back the night,” he murmured along the line of her neck. “You’re a goddess they can believe in.” ## There were no seasons, so they made their own. There were no days, so they developed a different rhythm. When Tosh finally laid down to rest as best she could, she thought she could feel their little world spinning. “Time is broken,” she told Rhys once as they watched people work from their eyrie high in the old stadium. “Yet still we try to break it up into little bits and pieces.” “We remake it in our own image.” Toshiko half-remembered to smile. “Were you always this philosophical?” He rose to his feet and headed back down, one stair at a time. When she followed, she took two. Just to prove to herself that she still could. ## Toshiko walked quickly along the rows of plants, noting with pleasure and a small surge of pride the growing greenness of the leaves, the plumpness of the stalks. The artificial lights warmed her skin, like a string of miniature suns. “The new generator seems to have taken care of the flicker in the fourth plantation, Miss Sato,” the Gardener told her with pride. She nodded, acknowledging both his report and his efforts in one smooth gesture. She unconsciously brushed her long black hair back behind her ear as she walked along the row. The Gardeners – somewhere along the line the label had become a title, one worthy of respect and the implicit capitalization – were reporting a bumper harvest. Granted, it was only their third, but it meant for a third time they had held off The Howling. Tosh pushed through the door carefully, mindful of the patchwork of glass inside the abstract wooden frame. Like everything else, it was made of small things reclaimed from the destruction. She moved along the terrace, past the sound of small voices reciting their lessons, and out into the open air of the Old Plass. So much to do, so much to organize… “Toshiko Sato, you are a sight for sore eyes.” Her head snapped up at the unfamiliar sound of her full name. She managed to take in the beaming smile, the well-rested features, the swirl of greatcoat, before she was wrapped in a warm and achingly familiar embrace. “Jack,” she choked out. “The one and only,” he boomed, unaware or uncaring that around them people were working, learning, eating, sleeping in the never-ending cycle that was now the marker of their days. He stepped back, but Tosh barely had a chance to blink before another pair of arms wrapped her in an embrace that brought with it memories of delicate caresses and a soul-deep kindness. “You are a hard woman to find.” “Jack…” she choked out again. “Ianto. You came back.” She felt a pair of lips press a kiss to her forehead. “We promised we would, didn’t we, cariad?” Ianto murmured. Toshiko felt her eyes prickle at the nearly-forgotten sound of his pet name for her. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him fiercely. “It’s been so long,” she whispered into his shoulder. “You were hard to find,” a third voice repeated. Tosh released Ianto and took two quick steps back. “Tosh, meet The Doctor. Doctor, this is Toshiko Sato.” The Doctor grinned at her, wide and manic. “Hello!” he chirped. He seemed too-bright, almost cartoonish against the grey skies and the distant hum of The Howling. Tosh looked around the scene, taking it all in. Jack. Ianto. The Doctor and his blue box, the TARDIS. All here, now, in the middle of her Plass. “What did you find? Did you find others?” The three men shared a look. “There are others,” the Doctor began slowly. “Every city, every group of humans, each on their own island surrounded on all sides.” Jack picked up the explanation. “What Owen did, the explosion? It was like bursting a dam. The tide came in, and drowned the lowlands, turned the highlands into islands.” Ianto finished off. “Where there were enough people, close enough together, an island formed. There are thousands, Tosh. Thousands.” Tosh raked her eyes across the three men. “Can you help them? Rebuild the dam, or something?” The Doctor nodded. “Well, yes, because I’m brilliant. But it will take time, even for me.” Toshiko lifted her chin. “Then the sooner you get started, the sooner you will finish.” Jack grabbed her arm, pulled her close. “Tosh, don’t you understand? We came to get you!” She forced herself to keep her voice from trembling. “Do you need me to fix it? No, you have him. You don’t need me.” Ianto reached out as if to stroke her hair, paused, pulled his hand back. She knew what she’d see if she looked at him, and so she forced herself to keep her eyes on Jack. Jack still hadn’t let go. “But you’re our Toshiko.” She looked him right in the eye as she gestured with her other hand. “No, Jack. Right now, I’m theirs. Their Toshiko.” Around them, the survivors, the city, was staring at these new arrivals. Jack let go of her arm. Toshiko stepped forward. “You were gone so long, we couldn’t wait any longer. We had to do something. I had to do something. And I’ll keep doing it until you fix this.” She took another step. “We did this, Jack. Owen might have thought he was taking the blame, but it was our fault, all of us. We have to make it right.” Jack nodded slowly, leaning over to kiss her chastely on the brow. “We’ll be back soon, Tosh.” She felt her mouth begin to quiver. “Promise?” “Promise.” A ghost of a caress across her arm, and then they were gone, the sound of their leaving swallowed by The Howling. That night, Toshiko Sato slept. ~~~~~ |
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