Friends in High Places [Gimme a Hand] | 1.
1. | "Exploding Santa robots in London," Jack reviewed, "and teeny wisps of energy from some single as-yet-unpinpointed point, also in London."
The Tenth Doctor’s first appearance, from the perspective of Torchwood, prequelling the spinoff’s first season. Written to string together some implicit canon between Torchwood and Who, over a Christmas holiday spent alone but not lonely, long ago.
1.
Quadruple Scrabble was not a game for the faint of heart or feeble of mind -- nor was it a game for folks with families to see, places to be, things to do, or late night news programming to survey, but Toshiko Sato estimated that if she kept one eye on the telly screen and another on her computer screens at least seventy per cent of the time, Jack would forgive her for using the remainder to knock him flat.
"Tell me, Toshiko," Jack said easily, inquiring within casual conversation's Goldilocks zone for once, "How you got around to collecting four Scrabble boards." He sat tapping one of his letter-chips to his lips. Tosh watched the chip carefully in case of revelation.
"That board's yours," Tosh corrected, pointing. "The peeling one."
Jack dropped his ankle from his knee and leaned forward, hovering over the grid of boards on the floor, which had grown half-filled with words in half a day. "Not mine," he replied, more a stretching sigh than a pair of words. Played compound, ‘NOTMINE’ would be worth fourteen points before bonus squares.
"I found that one here," Tosh said (twenty points).
"Yeah, well." Tap-tap-tap, Jack absently nibbled his mystery chip. It might have been a [K]. If it was, that meant only two downfacing [K]s remained in the draw pile, which spelled trouble for Tosh's prized HITCHHI_ERSGUIDETOTHEGALAXY.
"It's been nine minutes since my last turn," Tosh updated. "Ten more, and I'll move to introduce penalties."
Across the Hub, on a battered telly beside the arms display, a high-strung gopher of a man prattled on about the Mars landing. Who thought it was a good idea to plan a space probe landing for Christmas Eve? Scientists with no personal lives, that's who, Tosh forgave silently, relating.
"Hey Tosh?" Jack's focus flicked across to her flat screens. He seemed apprehensive. Was he asking permission? For what?
"You don't have to look it up this time," Tosh offered. "I'll believe you."
Jack didn't answer, just returned to slowly scanning the board.
If Jack was allowed to use both the technological and biological databases to support his word choices, it would be only fair for Tosh to supplement her vocabulary with proper titles. And names. They had agreed upon this hours ago. FEI_ENBAUM, shelved atop a plaid cushion, separated Tosh from her opponent. So many vowels, so little value, even with the potential octuple word score. She maintained it for sentimentality's sake.
Jack was silent and still, lost in either concentration or fantasy, which was frustrating. They had already set the rules. Tosh sipped from her pina colada (she didn't trust the egg nog), and then placed the glass beside her ankle to deter herself, since if she stayed this impatient, she could wind up drunk.
A voice puffed a surprise phrase into Tosh’s ear from behind. She kicked her drink over. Only after she shielded the gameboard from the spill with her foot did the shape of the voice register for her: "You have a cunt."
Toshiko swung out a flat hand, landing Owen one in the upper arm. Owen dumped an industrial-sized roll of paper towel into Tosh’s lap. She ripped off a wad and got to sopping, unamused. Very unamused. Highly, sniggeringly unamused, betraying herself in secret.
Owen misrepresented Tosh's silence as a failure to understand. "There," he said, pointing at her thick stronghold of Scrabble chip walls. "See - You -" He climbed over the coffee table blocking the med suite walkway, which had been moved to make room for the playing field. "Next." He sat on the table to watch the game, elbows to knees, beer perched in lanky fingers. "Tuesday."
"Thank you," Tosh said. "I'll be sure to play it as soon as my IQ drops seventy points."
From a place to his right, Owen retrieved a beer matching his own and opened it with a one-handed swoop of a little bottle opener. Owen was a beercrobat. "Better get started, then," he said, handing the bottle to Tosh. "It's nearly Christmas. How's your etymology?" He asked the question as though Toshiko was recovering from a cold, his caring as substantial as a tissue.
Tosh was beating Jack threefold at Scrabble. She pointed this out by glancing meaningfully at the score sheet. "How do you think?"
"Don't you know what Christmas is all about?" Owen asked.
Jack huffed distantly.
“Sure," Tosh said. Kentucky Fried Chicken. The equinox. Saints. Crusades. Copycat gods. Snowfall in the Sahara, and other miracles. Symbols sold to the bloodiest bidders. Snowballs with stones in their middles. Cold, hard candy. "Not sure etymology plays a starring role."
"It's about getting messed up before Kris shows up." Owen showed off his watch. "You're running out of time," he said, tapping the watch face with the glass lip of his beer. "Pitiful Kris-mess you are, so far." He got up to stroll around the Scrabble board in a semicircle, his head twisted to read upside down, and spied over Jack's shoulder at his pieces. "RAXA-cor-CORICO -- wha -- PHALLUS -- GLORIOUS? Is that what you're going for? You're sick."
"It's a work in progress." Jack's voice was flat. "Learn to spell."
In the upper right quarter, ARKANNIS, BLATHEREEN, DARWIN and TARSIUS crossed ATALEOFTWOCITIES. From the tail end of ARKANNIS, DAWKINS carried BEKARAN through the middle and tops with a tight net of DOGON, GLOOBI and HAWKING.
Hm. BEERCROBAT. Eighteen points. Tosh had it, but for the second [E]. Maybe if she used it in a sentence Jack would allow her to play it, and after a few more turns...
If Jack ever took his turn. He was still distant, seemingly uninvolved. So much for all his posturing as gallant rescuer. Tosh was in dire need of relief from this boredom. She leaned into his line of sight. Was that water or vodka in his hovering glass? How many times has it emptied by now? "Jack?"
"Yeah. Uh, question for you," he said, placing an [S] in the upper-rightmost corner of their playing field.
In response to a grinning face-waggle from Owen, Tosh sipped from her new drink. "I'm all answers," she replied. Confidence tasted like confidence. Nice of Owen to share his wealth.
“We've received a signal from Guinevere One. The Mars landing would seem to be an unqualified success,” said that bearded gopher newsman on the telly. Owen rolled his eyes in exaggerated time with his bottle's neck, Whoop-de-doo.
"Do you believe in fate?" Jack wondered, turning belatedly to Tosh, chasing the words with his face.
Owen spluttered, reclaiming his seat on the coffee table. "You call that a come on? Come on."
“Yes, we... had a bit of a scare... Guinevere seemed to fall off the scope, but ih-ih-iht was just a blip...”
"I'm totally serious."
"Come ons are serious business," Owen bantered. "My point is that you're bankrupt."
A word from the telly repeated in Tosh's head, blip. Hmm. She looked to Jack for instructions, found none, and checked her left monitor. The UNIT orbit map looked... normal. A little blurry so far away, but normal.
Jack placed a [Y] below his [S]. "That's not the kind of fate I'm asking about, Owen." Half his mouth smirked. "Not today."
Tosh smiled at her knees. "I believe in the consequences of probability," she answered.
"I like that," Jack approved. "I really like that."
“O-only disappeared fffor a few seconds, she's fine, now, a-absolutely fine, w-we're getting first pictures transmitted live any minute now... I'd better get back to it, thanks.”
"A blip," Jack said. He still nibbled intermittently on that little tab of wood, ignoring Owen and staring through Tosh the way he had stared through the game board, finding his own words inside her. He seemed to know that she already knew what he was about to say whether she knew that she knew or not, and, squintingly, he expected her to catch up. "Exploding Santa robots in London,” he reviewed, “and teeny wisps of energy from some single as-yet-unpinpointed point, also in London."
Tosh lifted her glasses from where they hung folded over the collar of her mauve sweater, and fit her face into them.
"Out of our jurisdiction. Ask Suze, she'll back me up," Owen defended. Tosh, for one, would be happy to ask Suzie, if only Suzie was happy to come in to work as ordered.
Jack edged toward a bellow, cutting through Owen's whinging: "Now..."
"Speaking of ‘now,’ it so happens that’s exactly the time I was expecting to be sucking down shots from between a stripper's tits.”
“... a blip.”
“It's been a wonderful lesson in disappointment, Jack,” Owen went on, “and I don't think I've thanked you yet.”
Tosh would share in Owen's lonesome holiday woe, but she'd never really had the courage to go to a strip club herself. So she technically did share it, she just hardly noticed because it was perpetual. ’Why don't you... you know, take me with you? I've never seen... well.’ Right, Tosh. Maybe some day. Some time next year, or the year after that, if he’s still surviving the job by then.
Jack's look told Tosh to get moving to her workstation, so she obeyed, bringing her beer with her. It was still Christmas, after all, and Owen had a point: they could celebrate a little. She took a sip, placed her drink on her desk beside her Owen-screwed Rubix Cube, and dug into her keyboard full-handed, up to her elbows in numbers, codes, rules layered with antischematics and modifiers, a technological crescendo building so loudly in her mind that she barely noticed when Owen screamed.
“Coming live, from the depths of space, on Christmas morning: ‘BLOUOOUURRRGGGHHHHHHH.’”
Owen’s reaction to the above was very similar in key to the bellow still echoing through the Hub from the news feed, albeit higher in pitch. Tosh found him banishing the tail end of a shudder from his neck, gaping a disgusted face at the telly and sporting an olive beer splotch down the center of his lime polo.
Jack placed a [C] below the [Y] on the board and studied it carefully, waiting for it to tell him something.
That monster on the screen had looked like a living fossil. A slimy living fossil, bellowing a final cry before sinking back into the La Brea Telly-Static Pits. Tosh shook Owen's contagious shudder from her own neck, raised her bottle to toast the newly hyperactive newscaster, and chugged.
"WAY out of our jurisdiction," Owen said. "Forget it, I'm not going anywhere."
"You'll go wherever I need you to go," Jack crooned to the game board, clicking an [O] into place with his thumb, "because that's how it goes."
to be continued