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trace_of_scarletI FINISHED A MULTI-PARTER FIC, YOU GUYS. THIS HAS LITERALLY NEVER, EVER, EVER HAPPENED BEFORE.
Fic: Fight Like A Girl – Suzie Costello
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: PG
Words: 1125
Warnings: None. No spoilers.
Previous Chapters: Toshiko and Gwen.
Notes: A love song to the wonderful women of Torchwood, and also to my adored home city. Betaed by my darling housemate,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dowwdor_shal.
Summary: Character study: if each of the Torchwood girls is isolated and confronted by something from the Rift, how do they cope saving Cardiff whilst flying solo? Different women find different ways to win, but fighting like a girl doesn't mean you don't fight hard.
The ground rumbles underfoot, making the river’s sluggish waters churn and suck and the Stadium’s broken-umbrella spines wobble ominously. It must have destabilised the Rift somehow, perhaps because of its sheer size. One thing she will say for it, though: nothing else short of a nuclear strike or Wales versus England could have cleared Cowbridge Road so successfully on a Friday afternoon. The grime and the sludgy, sullen people of Cardiff irritate her, rankle like ants crawling over her skin: much better this way, even if the Rift-creature hasn’t made the weather any less shit. Cleaning her glasses, she wonders dispassionately how much damage it could do if she left it, how many people it would kill before UNIT turned up and popped it like a zit. She wouldn’t care – at least, not much.
More rumbling: the planking of the enormous walkway by the Taff strains and groans as if a camel’s-hair away from buckling. The sound makes her eyes focus and her face harden into stony determination: this is one more piece of shit spewed from the Rift, no more and no less. She knows how to deal with something like this – and shooting it definitely doesn’t even make the list. She’s been doing this job for a long, long time (it seems like forever, and maybe it will be), after all, and she’s experienced enough to know that a slightly more diplomatic approach is called for: speak softly and carry a big stick, or some bollocks like that. But first, she’d better get off this walkway before it collapses.
The bridge is not, perhaps, the perfect solution, but it offers more stability than the Millennium Walkways and its stone railings give her a platform to stand on, so long as she can hold onto a lamppost. She picks up a half-brick, dumped at the edge of the road with a load of other crap, and climbs carefully onto a position several feet away from the thing, surveying it – and the mess it’s making – with narrowed eyes. God, what a shitty job this is, she thinks, and hurls the brick at it.
Her throw is hard and accurate and clips the thing’s shoulder with what she at least hopes is bruising force; she smiles grimly when it turns to her with a wail. Suzie searches out its eyes with her own and holds their gaze with a kind of intense but sullen anger, and while it almost certainly couldn’t understand her if she spoke, it seems quite certain that it sees something in her eyes which frightens it. Frightens it (in the manner of a small child) too much to look away. It is, she thinks with another bitter twist of her lips, the only thing in Cardiff to have actually paid this much attention to her in a long time. Still, that will change soon enough.
Somehow she scrambles down from the wall without breaking the thing’s gaze, advancing on it. It must be at least twice her height but it skitters back nervously, making a noise somewhere halfway between a whine and a snarl. She reaches into her handbag and carefully, reverently withdraws a knife which gleams jaggedly even in the lukewarm murk of Cardiff’s November sunlight. It’s a beautiful thing – the first beautiful thing she’s seen today, but much as she wants to she can’t dwell on that now. She still can’t stop looking at it, but her eyes glitter in its reflected light, and the Rift-creature keeps moving backwards. It seems almost a shame to kill it, but she needs the practice. She’s going to do great things, wonderful things, and nothing can be allowed to slow her down, not even pity.
It is just out of view of Cardiff’s not-quite-ubiquitous CCTV – and almost in the Rift – when Suzie leaps to a windowsill and brings the knife crashing down on its neck.
Avoiding the sick bruise-coloured spurting of ichor has become a talent, by now, and she does so easily. It thrashes, but its reach is pathetically short, and she ignores its death throes once she knows that it cannot reach her. Instead, she focuses on cleaning that beautiful blade until it gleams once more and she can replace it ceremoniously in her bag, withdrawing instead the gauntlet.
It’s a funny thing, this gauntlet: as sickeningly grey as Cardiff in November and still the shining beacon of everything she hopes to achieve, believes she can achieve. She dreams about this gauntlet every night, sees it whenever she closes her eyes, and it is all she wants to see. She slips her brown hand into its gloomy depths, lets her fingers wriggle delightedly and sees the gauntlet’s not-really-iron claws flex in response. She knows she probably hasn’t got much time left until the rest of Torchwood appear, shouting and clattering and smashing her beautiful silence, but still she can’t bring herself to hurry and spoil her little ceremony. The glove’s metal fingers rest like pincers on the Rift-thing’s head; she closes her eyes, breathes in, starting the internal count. She doesn’t need to open her eyes to know when it revives: she can hear its arrhythmic heartbeat reverberate inside her mind.
It lives for precisely thirty-seven seconds before its eyes cloud over again, murky as the Taff, but its heartbeat doesn’t leave her. Dead, it no longer seems to disturb the Rift, which closes with an anticlimactic sucking noise before her heavy-lidded eyes. She removes the glove – reluctantly, and with an effort – and straightens, tucks her treasure away safe in her handbag.
(Th-dump-dump. Th-dump-dump. Th-dump-dump.)
Torchwood’s alleged second-in-command takes out her mobile and calls Jack. He is voluble but unsuspicious, and it is a relief to hang up.
The wind is blowing down the river again, taking pollution and seagulls with it. Suzie crosses her arms across her chest against the cold, but her mind is on fire and her face a mask as she awaits the roaring SUV, watching the red-lit sky.
(Th-dump-dump. Th-dump-dump. Th-dump-dump.)
There’s a storm coming, she can tell.
Fic: Fight Like A Girl – Suzie Costello
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: PG
Words: 1125
Warnings: None. No spoilers.
Previous Chapters: Toshiko and Gwen.
Notes: A love song to the wonderful women of Torchwood, and also to my adored home city. Betaed by my darling housemate,
dowwdor_shal.Summary: Character study: if each of the Torchwood girls is isolated and confronted by something from the Rift, how do they cope saving Cardiff whilst flying solo? Different women find different ways to win, but fighting like a girl doesn't mean you don't fight hard.
The ground rumbles underfoot, making the river’s sluggish waters churn and suck and the Stadium’s broken-umbrella spines wobble ominously. It must have destabilised the Rift somehow, perhaps because of its sheer size. One thing she will say for it, though: nothing else short of a nuclear strike or Wales versus England could have cleared Cowbridge Road so successfully on a Friday afternoon. The grime and the sludgy, sullen people of Cardiff irritate her, rankle like ants crawling over her skin: much better this way, even if the Rift-creature hasn’t made the weather any less shit. Cleaning her glasses, she wonders dispassionately how much damage it could do if she left it, how many people it would kill before UNIT turned up and popped it like a zit. She wouldn’t care – at least, not much.
More rumbling: the planking of the enormous walkway by the Taff strains and groans as if a camel’s-hair away from buckling. The sound makes her eyes focus and her face harden into stony determination: this is one more piece of shit spewed from the Rift, no more and no less. She knows how to deal with something like this – and shooting it definitely doesn’t even make the list. She’s been doing this job for a long, long time (it seems like forever, and maybe it will be), after all, and she’s experienced enough to know that a slightly more diplomatic approach is called for: speak softly and carry a big stick, or some bollocks like that. But first, she’d better get off this walkway before it collapses.
The bridge is not, perhaps, the perfect solution, but it offers more stability than the Millennium Walkways and its stone railings give her a platform to stand on, so long as she can hold onto a lamppost. She picks up a half-brick, dumped at the edge of the road with a load of other crap, and climbs carefully onto a position several feet away from the thing, surveying it – and the mess it’s making – with narrowed eyes. God, what a shitty job this is, she thinks, and hurls the brick at it.
Her throw is hard and accurate and clips the thing’s shoulder with what she at least hopes is bruising force; she smiles grimly when it turns to her with a wail. Suzie searches out its eyes with her own and holds their gaze with a kind of intense but sullen anger, and while it almost certainly couldn’t understand her if she spoke, it seems quite certain that it sees something in her eyes which frightens it. Frightens it (in the manner of a small child) too much to look away. It is, she thinks with another bitter twist of her lips, the only thing in Cardiff to have actually paid this much attention to her in a long time. Still, that will change soon enough.
Somehow she scrambles down from the wall without breaking the thing’s gaze, advancing on it. It must be at least twice her height but it skitters back nervously, making a noise somewhere halfway between a whine and a snarl. She reaches into her handbag and carefully, reverently withdraws a knife which gleams jaggedly even in the lukewarm murk of Cardiff’s November sunlight. It’s a beautiful thing – the first beautiful thing she’s seen today, but much as she wants to she can’t dwell on that now. She still can’t stop looking at it, but her eyes glitter in its reflected light, and the Rift-creature keeps moving backwards. It seems almost a shame to kill it, but she needs the practice. She’s going to do great things, wonderful things, and nothing can be allowed to slow her down, not even pity.
It is just out of view of Cardiff’s not-quite-ubiquitous CCTV – and almost in the Rift – when Suzie leaps to a windowsill and brings the knife crashing down on its neck.
Avoiding the sick bruise-coloured spurting of ichor has become a talent, by now, and she does so easily. It thrashes, but its reach is pathetically short, and she ignores its death throes once she knows that it cannot reach her. Instead, she focuses on cleaning that beautiful blade until it gleams once more and she can replace it ceremoniously in her bag, withdrawing instead the gauntlet.
It’s a funny thing, this gauntlet: as sickeningly grey as Cardiff in November and still the shining beacon of everything she hopes to achieve, believes she can achieve. She dreams about this gauntlet every night, sees it whenever she closes her eyes, and it is all she wants to see. She slips her brown hand into its gloomy depths, lets her fingers wriggle delightedly and sees the gauntlet’s not-really-iron claws flex in response. She knows she probably hasn’t got much time left until the rest of Torchwood appear, shouting and clattering and smashing her beautiful silence, but still she can’t bring herself to hurry and spoil her little ceremony. The glove’s metal fingers rest like pincers on the Rift-thing’s head; she closes her eyes, breathes in, starting the internal count. She doesn’t need to open her eyes to know when it revives: she can hear its arrhythmic heartbeat reverberate inside her mind.
It lives for precisely thirty-seven seconds before its eyes cloud over again, murky as the Taff, but its heartbeat doesn’t leave her. Dead, it no longer seems to disturb the Rift, which closes with an anticlimactic sucking noise before her heavy-lidded eyes. She removes the glove – reluctantly, and with an effort – and straightens, tucks her treasure away safe in her handbag.
(Th-dump-dump. Th-dump-dump. Th-dump-dump.)
Torchwood’s alleged second-in-command takes out her mobile and calls Jack. He is voluble but unsuspicious, and it is a relief to hang up.
The wind is blowing down the river again, taking pollution and seagulls with it. Suzie crosses her arms across her chest against the cold, but her mind is on fire and her face a mask as she awaits the roaring SUV, watching the red-lit sky.
(Th-dump-dump. Th-dump-dump. Th-dump-dump.)
There’s a storm coming, she can tell.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-05 03:00 am (UTC)Frightens it (in the manner of a small child) too much to look away. It is, she thinks with another bitter twist of her lips, the only thing in Cardiff to have actually paid this much attention to her in a long time. Still, that will change soon enough.
So creepy and perfect for Suzie's voice.
I loved all of these, and this one is no exception!