Peace...

There is no way to peace along the way to safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1906 - 1945

FIC: Torchwood (drabble) - Out In The Cold

Title: Out In the Cold
Author: fajrdrako
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Captain John Hart, Ianto (implied Jack/Ianto, Jack/John)
Challenge: tw100, challenge: winter
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine, no claims, all property of the BBC.
Notes: Cross-posted to my lj, guns_n_poodles, and to tw100.

( Out In the Cold )

Torchwood: Captain Jack loses his gun (and finds it again)

Last week my wonderful new Captain Jack Harkness action figure came in the mail. (Don't ask what the postage cost. Just don't. It was worth it.)

( Captain Jack )

I was thrilled, of course, and I took it up to show maaseru. But as I was knocking on her door, Jack dropped his Webley. It may be hard to tell scale in the picture, but that little gun is only about one centimetre long. It disappeared on the carpet.

So I left Captain Jack with maaseru, and borrowed her flashlight, and started hunting on the hallway carpet for the gun.

A young man came out of the apartment next door, and asked what I was looking for. "A plastic gun," I said, and did my best to describe it. So he's down on his hands and knees looking for it, and I'm waving around the light, and who'd have though a gun one cm long could hide so well?

Eventually we found it, and it is now taped to the plinth that Jack stands on. It looks to me like a little plastic stand with the Torchwood logo on it, but the packaging calls it a 'plinth'. maaseru, always precise in her English usage, looked at it in disgust: "That is not a plinth."

Jack is a little larger than my action figures of Ten and Martha and DW Jack, so he looms beside them in my bathroom, awaiting a Doctor of suitable size to be posed with. Symbolically suitable, now I think of it.

The E Words...

Meme from wijsgeer:

It's harder than it looks!

Rules: Copy to your own note, erase my answers, enter yours, and tag 10 people. Use the first letter of your name to answer each of the following questions. They have to be real . . . nothing made up! If the person before you had the same first initial, you must use different answers. You cannot use any word twice and you can't use your name for the boy/girl name question.

01. What is your name: Elizabeth
02. A four letter word: Elle
03. A boy's name: Evan
04. A girl's name: Emma
05. An occupation: Elephant-trainer (with a salute to Archie Abernethy)
06. A colour: Egyptian blue
07. Something you wear: Earring
09. A food: Edam
10. Something found in the bathroom: Electric hair dryer
11. A place: Edmonton
12. A reason for being late: Epstein Barr infectious mononucleosis
13. Something you shout: Eeek!
14. A movie title: The Emerald Forest
15. Something you drink: Evian water
16. A musical group: Eurhythmics
17. An animal: Eagle
18. A street name: Elgin Street
19. A type of car: Enterra
20. The title of a song: Eleanor Rigby

Curiosity: one of my many favourite poems..

I got this meme from janne_d: When you see this, post your favorite poem in your journal.

Of course I have more than one favourite poem. And janne_d had already picked two of them. How did she do that?

In any case, here's another. ( Curiosity )

[It wasn't till after I'd posted it and read it over again that I thought: Hmm, sounds like Captain Jack Harkness. My favourite type.]

Meme: Questions from gillo...

This is from gillo:

1. Leave me a comment saying, 'interview me'.
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions. (You must do this, even if it's filtered for my eyes only!)
4. Include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

My Questions from gillo:

1. Who is better and why: Captain Jack or Spike?

The question is, of course, unanswerable. They are both the pinnacle of fictional brilliance. If you really, really push me to pick a favourite, I would answer, "I'm a both/and person in an either/or world" - the tagline of a bi activist friend of mine that I always thought was marvellous. And if I still have to make a choice, it's Captain Jack, on the following rationale:

1. I've only seen about half the episodes of Buffy and Angel with Spike in them, so I don't have a proper overview of the character. Of what I've seen, we know and see less of his life than we have of Captain Jack, so I feel I know Captain Jack better.
   
2. Captain Jack died for the Doctor.
   
3. Captain Jack's friends, lovers, associates and acquaintances give him an edge.

But just thinking about this question made me realize how very much they have in common, especially in terms of attributes for which I most love them. Their differences and contrasts tend to be things I don't care about; their similarities are what make them delectable.

2. What's your favourite play?

Equus by Peter Shaffer. I love its statement of pantheism and human values, its insight into human fears and frailties, it's sense of understanding the inexplicable. I might have said Hamlet, but Hamlet is so variable in presentation; I love the play but I don't love all presentations of the play.

3. If you could do a Thursday Next and go inside a book to tell a character something which would save a lot of angst, would you, and who would it be?

Maybe not (though I love the idea), because if I loved a book enough to go into it, I probably love it enough to want it the way it is. And anyway, if I (for example) went to Thorfinn and said "don't fight that final battle", would he listen to me? No way. Even if I had the credentials of a great seer from the future. Because a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

In any really, really good book or movie there's a rightness and a structure to the inevitability of it so that even if you can't guess what's coming (and preferably not), when you get there, it's what ought to have happened. Even if tragic.

I might, however, sneak into Elsinore and say to Hamlet, "Laertes poisoned his sword, and whatever you do, don't drink from that cup!"

4. Given a magic wand to engineer the opportunity, what would you do for a living?

Write.

5. When did you first encounter Dorothy Dunnett's books? What was your first reaction to Francis Crawford?

I was fifteen. I found this random interesting-looking novel in the library, set in Scotland. I started to read. "This is strange," I thought, on the first page. Or the second. "Interesting, different sort of style. I'm not sure I like it. The hero seems sort of ... strange."

Then I got to page three and the pig got drunk and I fell hopelessly and totally in love. With the man, not the pig, in case you wondered.

I realized he was the most wonderful swashbuckling hero of all time. I was with him from that moment on, and now, forty years later, I'm as besmitten as ever.

I fell in love with the style of writing, too.

Torchwood: Adam and James...

I wanted to make a comparison here that I'm sure has been made before, though I haven't come across it. I'll make a cut because there are spoilers here for the novel Torchwood: Border Princes and the episode "Adam". ( In the Torchwood novel... )