Fic: Composite (Torchwood, R)

[hope]

Title: Composite
Author: Hope (angstslashhope@LJ, hope@Dth)
Fandom: Torchwood
Wordcount: ~4,400
Genre: Character study, pre-series
Rating: Mature
Characters(s): Suzie, Jack, Ianto (Suzie/Jack, Jack/Ianto)
Warnings: sex & violence, snuff, necrophilia
Notes: written for james, who secured my services in a help_haiti lightning round. TYVM to betas cupidsbow and rexluscus! PS Don’t let the necrophilia warning put you off, there’s only about a line of it.

Summary: The prompt was “I would love to see some Ianto and Susie interaction. Er, before Susie is dead and all. I'm fond of the idea that she knows *something* is up, that Ianto is hiding something, even if she hasn't a clue what.”

Read on the AO3.

Comments

[neifile7.livejournal.com]

This is, as ever, frigging amazing.

It's my personal canon that Suzie's lusts are all about power, all about saying "fuck you" to her own history, and all about having a kind of predatory agency where she always gains the upper hand (so to speak). I don't think the glove made her crazy; I think it consolidated what was already deeply awry, and you've simply made the bloodlust part of that explicit. I've seen other fics where Ianto brings the glove to her attention to get her off his back, but this is by far the most complex and coherent vision I've seen, with the widest range of resonances.

Also my fanon: that Suzie is the most perceptive denizen of the Hub and could definitely have worked out what Ianto was really up to, were it not for her own blind spots. Her interactions with Jack here are spot-on; she gets so much about him, reads him so well, yet he's also a bit opaque and elusive. The implications of his immortality are just a little bit beyond her, because she sees him primarily in relation to her own will to power.

And the email flirtation with Lisa? Oh, utterly brill; especially as she never connects the dots on Ianto. Again, she perceives so much about him, knows his TW1 background makes his behavior inappropriate -- yet, because she's so busy pinning him to the Jack of Hubs card, she fails to see that he's playing her as well.

I think Suzie is one of the hardest characters to write well, but when she works, it takes us right to the core of the collective madness that is TW.

[hope]

Thank you! I'm not sure I thought a lot about Suzie's origins before it came down to writing this - but once I made the connection of knowing about Jack with the rest of the fixation on immortality and violence... it all clicked together, and kept making more sense, drawing the comparisons between the three of them too, then.

Thanks again for the awesome feedback. You're right - a closer look at Suzie really does shine a light on how chaotic and dark team Torchwood really are.