Title: A Very Private War (5/7)

Author: Emma

Characters: John Hart, Torchwood Three team, Andy Davidson

Rating: R

Disclaimer: Oh, please. If I owned them, would I let some of those idiots write the scripts? And if I were making any money off them, would I be where they could find me?

Spoilers: None. This takes place in my Homecoming AU

Summary: John Hart is pulled back in time to fight a war he does not remember
Author's Note: cleddyfwyr means "swordsmen" or "gladiators" in Welsh (or so the translator said!)

 Part one is here; Part two is here; Part three is here; Part four is here

             Once they had the randomiser redirecting the Rift was a matter of modifying the chronodetector and then linking both of them to Toshiko’s Rift machine. John fed the coordinates of every uninhabited-due-to-lousy-conditions-for-survival solar system, planet and asteroid belt in his vortex manipulator’s star charts into the Rift monitoring subroutines of the Hub’s computer. When an opening was detected by the sensors, the randomiser reached into the coordinate list and fed a location to the chronodetector which would use the Rift machine to realign the opening to the new location. As Toshiko pointed out to the others, the contraption was basically a dumbed-down version of John’s wrist-strap.

            One night John found Gwen standing in front of the new equipment.

            “What’s wrong, tough lady?”

            “Do you ever think of all the innocents who’ll walk through an opening?”

            “Yes. As much as I think about a future overrun by Toclafane. It’s a lousy choice but it’s the only one we have.”

            “You sound like Jack.”

            “Thank you.” He took her hand in both of his. “Gwen, you are going to be one hell of a commander one day, but you have to lose the delusion that you are going to be able to save all the innocents. That’s the thing about war. The innocents always pay the price.”

            She nodded and walked away, leaving him alone with his dark thoughts.

            While he reforged the swords, John started everyone on fencing lessons. They were all well trained in down-and-dirty street fighting – something John expected of people under Jack’s command – except for Rhys, who made up for his lack of formal training with a hard pair of fists. John had worried a little about Rhys, the amateur among professionals, but his fears dissipated after a couple of training sessions. Rhys was a natural with a cutting blade. John trained him with an elegant Toledana from the eleventh century, and he took to it as if he had been a knight in the court of Castile and Leon in a previous life. It was Rhys who counted first coup on a Toclafane who was harrying several women during one the periodic sweeps for the laborers needed in the weapons factories.

            Gwen and Owen were competent enough, but they preferred guns, and, as Owen put it, things that go boom in the night. Gwen usually took the lead in sabotage. She was a hell of a tactician, and worked with John in identifying targets and planning the missions. The Doctor spent much less time in the field; after several of the Flat Holm staff were captured and  sent to the weapons factories, Ianto had been forced to reveal Jack’s secret to the team. Owen had taken over care of the patients and staff and divided his time between the hospital and the Hub’s labs.

            Ianto was as efficient at his swordsmanship as he was at everything else, but he excelled at information gathering. He used Torchwood’s files to construct a network of informants, both human and alien, who harvested all sort of intelligence and funneled it back to them. His ability to pass unnoticed in a crowd made John positively green with envy; he could chat up total strangers and have them spilling out their guts without their ever noticing doing it.

            But it was Toshiko who was a revelation to John. His memories of her were of a stunningly beautiful computer geek. That was present – what Toshiko could do with a computer was downright obscene – but there was so much more. She was a crack shot. She had medical training and assisted Owen in the lab. And with a katana in her hand she was a force of nature.

            She had been immediately drawn to it and insisted in using it even when John told her it would be too long for her. When she found out that the blade had been made by Soshu Yukimitsu, she dug in her heels and he had to relent. She spent most of her free time practising, usually with Ianto or Rhys as opponents. She seemed leery of him, so John kept his distance, but he couldn’t help following her with his eyes or keeping as close to her as he could during missions.

            If John thought he had managed to disguise his attraction, he was disabused of the notion one day when, in a move worthy of a bad romantic comedy, he tripped over a chair while trying to walk and watch Toshiko at the same time. Ianto snagged him before he broke both his nose and his dignity in the metal stairs.

            “You know,” the Welshman said with exaggerated patience, “she’s not involved with anyone and neither are you.”

            John nodded but ignored the advice. He told himself their lives were too complicated, that a relationship between them would play havoc with team dynamics, or that he had no right to be attracted to a woman for whose death he was partially responsible. It was only during sleepless nights that John acknowledged, if only to himself, that the true reason for his unlikely reticence was his conviction that if he fell in love with Toshiko – and he was quite certain he could love her deeply – he would do whatever it took to keep her alive, the future be damned.

            It was, John thought, a hell of a time to grow a conscience.

            Instead he threw himself into what he had come to consider his own private war. Saxon and his Toclafane allies had turned the whole planet into a weapons factory. Everything, from food production to childbirth, was geared to support their damned countdown. By common consent, the team concentrated on disrupting supply lines and freeing prisoners. Andy Davidson and Ianto’s contact in UNIT keep them informed of important developments and they would choose and plan accordingly.

            The existence of a resistance cell armed with swords that could actually hurt the Toclafane couldn’t be kept a secret for long. Wild rumors circulated about them which they did their best to encourage. Andy managed to get himself assigned to the intelligence unit handling counter-resistance for the Cardiff area and used his position to redirect attention to the wildest speculations. People nicknamed their new heroes the Cleddyfwyr; nobody ever suspected that it was the old Torchwood in a new disguise, or, if they did, never shared their speculations publicly.

            It was relentless warfare and it was useless. They all knew it. There were millions of Toclafane, and day by day the human population fell under the twin hammers of slave labor and disease. The discovery that Harold Saxon was a mad Time Lord who was keeping the Doctor and Jack Harkness prisoner seemed almost anti-climactic. It hurt unbearably at a personal level but in the larger scheme of things all that mattered was that the human race not go down without a fight.

            So they fought on, with a price on their heads that got larger each month. Andy reported that the only reason Cardiff hadn’t been blasted off the map was that Saxon – none could bring themselves to call him the Master – had been informed by his UNIT science advisors that anything happening to the city would destabilize the Rift. In a fit of pique he had ordered the construction of a massive uranium processing plant right on the bay, poisoning the water and burying the city in a permanent miasma of tainted water vapor. Food had to be smuggled in or grown in cellars. Root vegetables and mushrooms became the main source of nutrients. Scurvy, dysentery, and just plain starvation decimated the remnants of the population.

            Owen managed to keep the team healthy with a daily cocktail of human and alien drugs he concocted in the Hub’s medical lab. John and Rhys turned one of the old tunnels into a greenhouse, and managed to put some tomatoes, peppers, and berries on the table along with the potatoes and mushrooms. Still, they grew whipcord lean, nothing but muscle and sinew. They kept going on nothing but discipline and anger.

            Most of their missions now dealt with getting food and medicine to the pockets of survivors. Ianto had located several of the old cold-war supply dumps, and they raided them for water purification tablets, vitamins, and ration packs. They had to be much more cautious now, but, to John’s infinite surprise, nobody ever tried to collect the bounty on their heads.

            “It’s the bloody Welsh stubbornness,” Owen explained. “Resisting the government is what they do best.”

            It was around then that they heard about Martha Jones and her search for a weapon, supposedly developed by Torchwood and UNIT, which could permanently kill a Time Lord by preventing his regeneration. The story made no sense to them.

            “There is no such weapon,” Ianto said. “There are no traces of it in any of the Archives. The Doctor worked with UNIT for a long time. Why would they want to harm him? And after Canary Wharf Jack confiscated all the archives, including all the lab records and Yvonne Hartman’s secret files. There wasn’t even a hint of anything like it. Jack would have moved heaven and earth to destroy it.”

            “So what is going on?” asked Rhys.

            John, who had been slumped in his chair only half-listening to the conversation, nearly jumped out of his skin as sudden certainty flooded through him. “It’s not the weapon. It’s the message. Don’t you see? In each place she visits she tells the story of the Doctor and tells them to think of him when the countdown reaches zero. She tells them that’s the best way they can help. Whatever the doctor is planning will happen at the end of the countdown, and he needs some sort of psychic energy from the rest of us to do it.”

            “That’s what we do, then,” Rhys said. “We hold on until that bloody countdown. We keep as many people alive as we can. And we spread the word.”