It was quiet in the Hub. Which was good. It meant the Sue had not arrived yet and thus that the agents had still time to find a hiding place. They decided on the kitchenette where Ianto was making coffee.
"I swear," Emma said. "The first author I see that doesn't use the words Ianto and coffee in the same sentence, I'm going to kiss, on the lips, with tongue."
"I would say, I'm going to keep you to that, except, I know I won't have to."
In the mean time someone had entered the hub without anyone noticing.
"Charge one, everyone too busy with whatever they were doing to set the alarm." Emma pulled a notepad and pen from her bag and made a note.
Gwen noticed the woman soon enough and pulled her gun on the Sue. Ianto walked out of the kitchenette and greeted the visitor. He asked her what she was doing at the Hub. Before she could answer Jack came out of his office and yelled at Ianto for his coffee. Ianto told him the coffee had to wait. Then Jack noticed the visitor.
"Well, it's nice to see you too dad."
The agents knew this was coming, but still cringed.
Ianto and Gwen looked at each other in surprise. They hadn't seen that one coming.
"What? You didn't think I would live over 100 years and not have one single kid?"
"I was actually kind of hoping you knew how to use contraceptives," Emma commented. She finished writing down a variety of charges relating to bad punctuation.
The Sue said she and Jack needed to talk: she was pregnant.
"Of course it would have been too much to expect she would know how to use contraceptives," Tasmin said.
Jack asked how, who and when. The Sue changed the subject.
By the way Ianto, still know how to play naked hide and seek?
"Eeew." The agents cringed again.
"I guess, it would have been too much to expect this Sue to have any sense of propriety," Tasmin added.
"Even if your dad is Jack Harkness, you don't introduce your lover to him with anything remotely like the phrase: by the way, this is the guy I've been boinking." Emma turned her head to her partner and smirked. "If your dad is Jack Harkness, you probably don't introduce your lover to him unless you were willing to share."
"Which seems to have been the case here."
The Sue explained that Ianto was her first boyfriend, her first lover. Jack reproached Ianto for this. Ianto replied he didn't even know Jack back then.
"Well you could have kept it in your pants."
"The dialogue was hard enough to follow without the speech tags, but if people start to say things they are unlikely to say…" Tasmin made a gesture towards the notepad in Emma's hand.
"To be fair, I doubt Jack would have said, 'you sly dog' to Ianto."
"Of course not."
"Probably more something along the lines of complimenting the Sue with her choice in men, or mentioning that she's a Harkness so Ianto never stood a chance. With a sly grin to Ianto."
When the Sue heard that Ianto and Jack were currently lovers her eyes grew big. She asked why he hadn't brought Ianto as his date to her wedding. Jack would get another chance though: like her father the Sue was immortal.
"Fuck. She'll be hell to kill."
Tasmin rolled her eyes. "She's impossible to kill. Unless we can come up with a logical reason why she can't be immortal."
Emma tapped her pen against her forehead. "I'm thinking about it."
Gwen was standing in a rather awkward position next to Ianto with her face on the floor. She was so surprised at the banter between Jack, Ianto and the Sue that she was unable to ask any questions.
"At least this is post Exit Wounds so the number of out of character people will be limited."
"Small favours."
The Sue said she had an appointment with Jack for the shooting range. While they headed there, she asked him if he knew any real-estate agents. She and her husband would be moving to Cardiff. Jack was very pleased to hear that.
The agents, who stayed behind in the kitchenette because they decided it was smarter not to get too near a Sue sporting a gun, were not pleased to hear that.
"What does her husband do for a living that he can just up and move to Cardiff if his wife gets a new job?" Emma asked.
"Well he has to finish a scene in the movie he's in. So he won't be here for another 3 weeks."
"Apparently, he's a not-too-bright actor. Three weeks to finish a scene? Who's paying for that flick?"
Because the Sue's job didn't start for another four weeks, and Jack was afraid she would be bored within a few days he offered her a job.
"Well I except."
"I take exception too," Tasmin said.
"But will you accept this as a charge for bad spelling?" Emma smirked.
"I expect nothing else."
Jack, Ianto and the Sue spend three hours on the firing range, after that they called in some Chinese food.
"You know what would have been a fun game to play?" Emma asked. "As two of them are immortal, shooting them and timing how long it would take for them to come alive again."
Tasmin growled.
During the meal Jack told Gwen and Ianto the Sue was going to work at Torchwood for a month, doing some of the work Tosh had been doing. Gwen didn't know what to say.
Gwen, I'm not trying to replace Tosh you know. Losing her and Owen was hard, but they could never be replaced.
"What's with all this crap that Jack can't fill the jobs Owen and Tosh used to do because he can't replace them?" Emma asked. "Torchwood's been operational for over a hundred years. In that time many people have died, and new people have been hired to fill the vacancies. Just because viewers grew attached to Tosh and Owen doesn't mean that Jack didn't like any of his previous coworkers in the same way."
"He was pretty cut up about what happened on New Year's Eve 1999."
"Exactly. Just because he hires a new tech expert doesn't mean he's going to forget he ever knew Tosh. Jack certainly, but also Gwen and Ianto, have enough room in their hearts to be able to make friends with new people without giving up any of their old friends. I wish these authors would stop suggesting that isn't the case."
"Maybe as a teenager, you don't know this yet. Perhaps they think that there is only a limited amount of friendship space. Torchwood crew would know better."
"At the very least they would know that if they got another doctor to cut open the aliens doesn't mean they'd be getting someone with Owen's bubbling personality."
The Sue told Gwen that Owen and Tosh would always be in her heart.
"Thanks for noticing, but I don't think Gwen needs to be told this by you." Tasmin glared at the Sue.
"I'm pretty sure Gwen is actually older than the Sue. Seen the Sue's first boy-friend was Ianto, and at that time she was still young enough for her parents to tell her what to do."
Tasmin nodded in agreement. "Add making a character think like a fourteen-year-old to the list."
Gwen helped the Sue to settle in to her new job and then more food was ordered. Someone asked if the Sue had any stories to share about Jack.
"Oh yeah. Okay let's see. Well there was the time when accidently used some alien technology and ended up with a tale for…. How many days was that?"
"12. And it wasn't funny. You try getting a tale to fit inside a pair of jeans so people don't notice it."
"A tale," Tasmin said, "is a narrative that relates the details of some real or imaginary event, incident, or case; a tail is the hindmost part of an animal. You could thus have a tale about how Jack got his tail. But not vice versa."
"That would be the tale of the tail, but that tale could have a tail itself."
The rest of the conversation was hard to follow for the agents. They couldn't make out who was saying what. It seemed it ended with Ianto making an attempt to leave the room when Jack suggested he had cheated on his daughter, and Jack then having to follow Ianto all the way down to the archives before he could apologise.
"This Sue really does not know what words mean," Emma said. "Getting homophones wrong is one thing. But confusing 'about to leave' for 'leaving' leaves me to wonder whether she even knows what she's talking about."
"Ianto's so upset with Jack's suggestion that he's hiding in the archives cradling his knees. I hazard a guess that she doesn't know what she's talking about."
Three weeks -- in which apparently nothing worth mentioning happened -- passed. It was the day the Sue's husband would arrive in Cardiff and the Sue had told him to meet her at Torchwood. So Emma and Tasmin went up to the Tourist Information Centre to look at the postcards and get a first look at this fellow.
They did not have to wait long before a young man walked in and asked after the Sue. Ianto gathered he was the husband and introduced himself.
"Oh right. Mac's ex. Nice to finally meet you, Mac talks about you all the time."
"This husband is an odd lad," Emma whispered in Tasmin's ear. "Men don't generally like to hear what wonderful persons their wives' exes used to be."
"Not everyone is jealous by nature. Some people never even get jealous."
"He must be one of those. Or it's because he really thinks the Sue is too nice to ever say anything bad about another person."
Ianto and the husband went down to the Hub. The agents stayed behind in the Information Centre.
"Shouldn't we follow them, and take the opportunity to charge the Sue?"
"Charge a Sue that thinks she's immortal, so she might throw herself at you, while her Sue-husband is there and a bunch of canon characters that are mesmerised by her?" Tasmin asked. "We could get hurt."
"Okay, bad idea. I guess we wait until she's alone. Or at least not so well guarded."
Tasmin studied the Words. "There's an opportunity in a moment when Ianto and the husband go to feed Janet, or later when the two of them are shopping."
"Two men that go shopping together?"
"Grocery shopping. Ianto's going to cook and the husband is going to watch," Tasmin replied a little annoyed. "Here's a good moment: Jack and the Sue are going for a little walk."
"Let's join them." Emma pulled the remote activator from her bag.
"I think we first should think of a way to dispose of the Sue."
"I already have an idea. Do you have anything to tie up the Sue with?"
Tasmin pulled a role of duct tape from her bag. "I never leave home without it."
-oOo-
The agents stepped out of the portal by the bay. The Sue and Jack were sitting on a bench not far from them. Tasmin pulled one of her guns from her duffel bag and screwed a silencer on.
"It would be best if you stayed a little behind me. So you don't get into the firing line."
"Sounds like a good idea."
The agents walked closer to the Sue. About ten feet away they came to a halt. Tasmin pointed her gun at the Sue, and called out her name, "Mackenzie Skyler Harkness McPhee?"
The Sue and Jack looked up. The Sue was spooked for a moment, but then her face turned into a scowl. "What do you want?"
"We are protectors of the plot continuum. We are here to charge you with crimes against Torchwood and crimes against fanfic in general. Emma?"
Emma stepped to the side of Tasmin. She smiled at the Sue and Jack and started reciting from her notepad. "We charge you with being a Mary Sue; we charge you with being abrasive, while you're trying to be flirtatious and or coy; we charge you with suggesting Gwen thinks a replacement for Tosh's job means a replacement for Tosh the person; we charge you with Jack not using contraceptives, or knowing what's involved for a woman to get pregnant."
"What?" Jack pushed himself a little off the bench and glared at the agent. "I know very well how women get pregnant."
"When she told you she was pregnant you asked how and who, even though you've been to her wedding. You do know what married people do, and what that can lead to?"
"Yeah, but have you met her husband?"
Emma frowned. "Okay, fair question. But we're still charging her with making you look dumb about procreation." Emma turned to the Sue. "We charge you with glancing over the consequences of being an immortal, although we accept that you might be too young to realise the full extend of the consequences. We charge you with bad spelling and abuse of homophones; we charge you with disregard for the reader by not using any dialogue tags. We had to guess at who was saying what. We charge you with your husband becoming Ianto's new boyfriend. You have been charged. Your punishment is death."
The Sue seemed to have been listening with growing irritation, but at this last comment she started to laugh. "You're going to kill me? You and what army?"
"That one." Emma nodded her head to the left.
Tasmin shot the Sue through the head. She slumped back over the bench.
Jack edged away from her. "She's not going to stay dead for long," he said.
"Doesn't matter. As long as she stays dead long enough." Emma jumped towards the Sue and tore a piece of duct tape from the role. She bound the hands of the Sue together, then her feet. Just before the Sue awoke, Emma stuck a piece of duct tape over her mouth.
The Sue struggled against her bounds.
"Now what do we do with her?" Tasmin asked.
"We could stick her behind one of the doors in the freezer of the Hub," Jack suggested.
"Thanks, but no. We couldn't risk keeping her alive in this fandom. Her influence could come to prominence again any time your freezer had a melt down."
"And we wouldn't be at all surprised if that ever happened," Emma added. "You seem to store a lot of interesting stuff in there. Both in canon and in fanfics."
"You said you had an idea about what we could do with her."
"I thought we could call a couple of agents that drive a TARDIS, and then drop this Sue off at an event horizon, like the Doctor did with one of the members of the family of blood. They wanted to be immortal too."
"While I appreciate the irony of that, it would mean the Sue is still in the same fandom."
"Okay, small oversight on my part." Emma pondered for a moment.
The Sue managed to tear the piece of duct tape from her mouth, but before she could yell something Tasmin had shot her again.
"We could try to reason with her that she only as a limited amount of resurrections," she suggested. "Preferably only two. Which means she won't be coming back alive now."
"How do you figure that?"
"She must have died once to find out she didn't stay dead, and I've now killed her twice."
"All the same, she could have a limited amount of a hundred, or a thousand. Do you have that many bullets?"
"I'd have to restock." Tasmin checked the clip of her gun. "Or we could argue that since Jack is an impossible thing, she would be doubly impossible and thus not even exist. She would just go poof. No?" Tasmin shook her head in response to her partner shaking her head. "I hate that this canon allows for impossible things. It makes our job so much harder."
"Do you have a broad sword, like the Highlanders use?"
"How am I going to pack a broad sword in this?" Tasmin shook her duffel bag.
Emma shrugged. "I don't know. The Highlanders seem to be able to conceal them underneath their jackets. Anyway, something else to cut off her head with? I figure that if we keep her head separate from her body she can't resurrect."
Tasmin nodded. "That could work."
"Then we throw her body in the incinerator and bury hear head in concrete, or vice versa."
Tasmin started digging through her duffel bag and pulled out a bread knife and a moment later a large plastic sheet.
"American psycho," Emma commented holding the items.
"Uh, ladies, I think I better get going." Jack scrambled off the bench and quickly left.
Tasmin shot the Sue again to make sure she stayed dead, and would not struggle while Emma cut off her head. They wrapped the body and the head up individually.
"For safety's sake, we better not throw the head in the same incinerator as the body. We don't want it to reassemble before it's burned to a crisp fully."
Tasmin nodded. She wrapped the knife in a plastic bag so it would not leave any stains in her bag. "We also still got to shoot her husband."
"Any chances we could kill him with fright if we showed him Medusa's head here?" Emma held up the head of the Sue by the hair.
"The death of his wife may cause him to die of grief."
"I remember, she was the nicest person ever." Emma pulled the remote activator from her bag. "Let's drop the body off at an incinerator. Then we go and find him."