Ficlet: Unexpected Treasure
Mar. 27th, 2026 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
badly_knittedTitle: Unexpected Treasure
Author:
badly_knittedCharacters: Ianto.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 690
Spoilers: Nada. Set late in Season 1.
Summary: Ianto makes a fascinating discovery in the archives.
Written For:
scytale’s prompt ‘Any, any, bones’, at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
threesentenceficathon.Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Unlike Torchwood One’s meticulously arranged and carefully catalogued storage areas, the maze of interconnecting rooms and corridors that constituted Torchwood Three’s archives were home to more junk than a hundred jumble sales. Not that the majority of it could be put up for sale; most of it wasn’t even of earth origin, having been dumped in and around Cardiff by the vagaries of the Rift.
It was difficult not to think of the Rift as a living entity, since it seemed to delight in snatching random objects from any place and time in the universe, just to annoy the team, dumping things in the most inaccessible places it could fine. Then, of course, someone had to go find everything before it could fall into the wrong hands, bringing it back to the Hub for safe storage, which usually seemed to mean handing it to Ianto and leaving him to deal with it. He’d somehow managed to end up in charge of everything that came through the Rift, including the unenviable task of restoring order where, as far as he could tell, it had never existed in the first place.
He would never understand exactly why he’d let Jack volunteer him into taking charge of the cluttered, dusty, poorly lit lower levels, with their banks of filing cabinets, and ranks of shelves laden with boxes of random artefacts and sundry badly labelled, mostly unidentified objects. Clearly, he must be a glutton for punishment; the job was going to take years, and with the life expectancy at Torchwood being on the short side, there was some doubt as to whether he’d get to finish it. Still, he might as well get as much sorted as he could. It would leave less for the next person to deal with.
Besides, it was quite interesting, and he was nothing if not conscientious, painstakingly sorting through the ephemera of over ten decades, not to mention countless planets and times. He identified as much as he could by means of careful research, measured, photographed, and catalogued each item, assigning it shelf space and a reference number, then entering all the details into the Hub’s computer database. After all, there was no knowing if or when the team might urgently need a set of callipers from Degneb IV, or a broken data storage device from the Viffniff Cluster.
Okay, those weren’t particularly good examples, they were unlikely to prove useful to anyone, but he was sure there must be some things stored in the archives that might one day come in handy, even if he hadn’t found them yet, so he wanted to make sure that regardless of how useless many items seemed, each and every one of them could be easily located. If nothing else, they might be useful for spare parts.
What he really couldn’t figure out though was what to do with the crate of old bones he’d just unearthed from behind a cabinet on sublevel eight. They weren’t fossilised, but they were clearly very old, and they appeared to have been cleaned, or at least they didn’t have any bits of dried-up flesh still attached to them. To Ianto’s relief, they weren’t human bones, because that would have been a bit much for him to deal with, even more than ten months after the affair with the cannibals, but as he laid them out on the floor, he realised quite a few had faded labels attached.
Studying them closely, he was able to make out what was written on them. Apparently, these were the bones of a dinosaur that had come through the Rift, already dead… Ianto sat back on his heels and stared at them. How many palaeontologists would have given everything they owned to study such a treasure? And sadly, they’d never get the chance, because it would be impossible to explain how genuine dinosaur bones could exist in the present day.
Looked like he’d just have to re-do the labels, catalogue everything according to his system, then put the bones back in their box and tuck it away again. What a tragic waste of priceless artefacts of incalculable scientific importance.
The End
It was difficult not to think of the Rift as a living entity, since it seemed to delight in snatching random objects from any place and time in the universe, just to annoy the team, dumping things in the most inaccessible places it could fine. Then, of course, someone had to go find everything before it could fall into the wrong hands, bringing it back to the Hub for safe storage, which usually seemed to mean handing it to Ianto and leaving him to deal with it. He’d somehow managed to end up in charge of everything that came through the Rift, including the unenviable task of restoring order where, as far as he could tell, it had never existed in the first place.
He would never understand exactly why he’d let Jack volunteer him into taking charge of the cluttered, dusty, poorly lit lower levels, with their banks of filing cabinets, and ranks of shelves laden with boxes of random artefacts and sundry badly labelled, mostly unidentified objects. Clearly, he must be a glutton for punishment; the job was going to take years, and with the life expectancy at Torchwood being on the short side, there was some doubt as to whether he’d get to finish it. Still, he might as well get as much sorted as he could. It would leave less for the next person to deal with.
Besides, it was quite interesting, and he was nothing if not conscientious, painstakingly sorting through the ephemera of over ten decades, not to mention countless planets and times. He identified as much as he could by means of careful research, measured, photographed, and catalogued each item, assigning it shelf space and a reference number, then entering all the details into the Hub’s computer database. After all, there was no knowing if or when the team might urgently need a set of callipers from Degneb IV, or a broken data storage device from the Viffniff Cluster.
Okay, those weren’t particularly good examples, they were unlikely to prove useful to anyone, but he was sure there must be some things stored in the archives that might one day come in handy, even if he hadn’t found them yet, so he wanted to make sure that regardless of how useless many items seemed, each and every one of them could be easily located. If nothing else, they might be useful for spare parts.
What he really couldn’t figure out though was what to do with the crate of old bones he’d just unearthed from behind a cabinet on sublevel eight. They weren’t fossilised, but they were clearly very old, and they appeared to have been cleaned, or at least they didn’t have any bits of dried-up flesh still attached to them. To Ianto’s relief, they weren’t human bones, because that would have been a bit much for him to deal with, even more than ten months after the affair with the cannibals, but as he laid them out on the floor, he realised quite a few had faded labels attached.
Studying them closely, he was able to make out what was written on them. Apparently, these were the bones of a dinosaur that had come through the Rift, already dead… Ianto sat back on his heels and stared at them. How many palaeontologists would have given everything they owned to study such a treasure? And sadly, they’d never get the chance, because it would be impossible to explain how genuine dinosaur bones could exist in the present day.
Looked like he’d just have to re-do the labels, catalogue everything according to his system, then put the bones back in their box and tuck it away again. What a tragic waste of priceless artefacts of incalculable scientific importance.
The End
(no subject)
Date: 2026-03-27 11:52 pm (UTC)