Ficlet: A Brilliant Mind

[badly_knitted]

 


Title: A Brilliant Mind
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack, Tosh.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 554
Spoilers: Fragments.
Summary: Tosh is a rare treasure, and Jack is determined to give her everything she needs to flourish in her new job with Torchwood Three.
Written For: lumiosecity’s prompt ‘any, any, precocious’, at threesentenceficathon.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
 


 
When Jack had first started building his own team, he’d had in mind a techie along the lines of Rose’s sometime boyfriend Mickey Mouse, capable enough with computers, someone he could nurture, educate concerning the differences between earth technology and the alien variety. Instead, he’d stumbled across Toshiko Sato, former DoD employee, currently serving life at a UNIT prison on a charge of treason. The more he’d read about what she’d done, the more he’d known he wanted her for his team. She was a certified genius! If he could just convince UNIT to hand her over into his custody…
 

He'd had to pull a few strings, call in more than a few favours, but in the end, UNIT had agreed, perhaps glad to be rid of their sole female inmate, and he’d brought her back to Cardiff with him, feeling a little like he’d won the lottery. Once she’d got over her initial nerves and understandable wariness, excitement over her new opportunities had begun to surface, and now, after a month with Torchwood, she was settling in nicely.
 

Watching her work, Jack could easily imagine Tosh as a little girl, small, pretty, delicate, intense and full of curiosity. She would have been a precocious child, he thought, always wanting to know what, and why, and how, never content to be fobbed off with easy answers or the favourite adult response of ‘because’ when they wouldn’t admit to not knowing something. He could see her being determined to figure the answers out for herself, nose forever buried in books too big for her small hands, written by adults for adults: science, mathematics, engineering, biology, astronomy, anything and everything that caught her interest and attention.
 

He pictured her taking things apart to see how they worked, then putting them back together again, better than they had been before, not even realising what she’d done. She had an intuitive grasp of the way things should work that couldn’t be taught, something that he’d seen in the way she’d built a working sonic modulator from faulty blueprints, correcting all the errors as she went because she saw how it needed to be, not how it was drawn.
 

The little girl’s fascination for the inner workings of the things around her had matured into a deeper insight into technology in all its forms, but her enthusiasm remained undimmed. She often became so focused on the treasures he brought her that if he didn’t remind her, didn’t sometimes forcefully take something from her and insist that she take a break, she might forget to go home at night, even forget to eat. Her mind had an appetite all its own, demanding to be fed, never sated, always seeking more knowledge, and a greater understanding of the way everything, even the universe itself, worked.
 

She would have withered away to nothing in the UNIT cell, her brilliance stifled, wasted, lost to the world before she could ever show so much as a fraction of her potential. It would have been beyond tragic; UNIT had been completely clueless, as usual, oblivious to the treasure they had locked away. Well, it was their loss and his gain, because with Torchwood, Toshiko Sato would be encouraged, nurtured, carefully tended, given every chance to blossom; Jack couldn’t wait to see what she might become.

 
 
The End