Title: The Floating World
By: _usakeh_
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack Harkness, Toshiko Sato
Rating: PG
Author's Note: This was written for cerebel.

“I’ve always loved ruins,” Toshiko Sato said as she made her way around the rocks littering the path up to the ancient castle. “When I was young, I wanted to be an archeologist.”

“Did you now?” Jack raised an eyebrow. “What happened to that?”

“My parents told me that it wasn’t a very practical goal.”

“And now look at you here hunting aliens. You think they’d approve?” Jack grinned.

“I told them that I’m a computer specialist working for an organization whose work is classified. They liked that just fine.” Tosh sighed. “Hunting aliens. They’d never believe it. Even if a Weevil escaped, headed straight for their home, and stayed outside in the yard for a week, they’d deny that aliens exist. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so harsh in my judgments, though. Sometimes, when I’m out of the Hub, out shopping for groceries or taking walks through the neighborhood, I find it pretty hard to believe myself.”

“Good thing we don’t give you much downtime, then,” Jack joked. “We wouldn’t want you to turn into one of your parents.”

“God no.” Tosh shuddered. “I love them dearly, but sometimes they’re too…focused on the details, I suppose.”

“Can’t see the forest for the trees?” Jack offered.

“Yes.” Tosh nodded. “Precisely.” Then she turned her attention back to the sight before her. They were nearly at the door, now, and the device strapped to Tosh’s wrist was blinking bright red. “This has to be it,” she said crisply.

“Yup.” Jack checked his watch. “The source of the signal is locked up in this 16th century castle. Too bad they shut down the museum three months ago; we could have gotten a tour.”

“Three months ago. That’s precisely when the signal started.” Tosh’s eyes widened.

“Yup. Unusual things were occurring, apparently.”

“How unusual?” Tosh inquired anxiously.

“I don’t know. Never said.” Jack pulled a small device out of his greatcoat pocket and attached it to the lock on the door. “I guess we’re about to see for ourselves.”


The scene that confronted them as soon as they pushed their way through was rather anticlimactic. All was silent. The castle was completely empty; all the period furniture and décor had been taken back to the main part of the museum, in London. Only a sign, pointing the way to what was now an empty room, remained.

“Hm.” Jack scanned the area; then he turned back to Tosh, no less perplexed. “It has got to be here,” he continued indignantly. “Something here has been sending out a signal for the past three months. It can’t have disappeared.”

“Not if the signal is still transmitting.” Tosh took a deep breath. The stillness was downright unnatural; even Jack’s voice – loud and bold as it was – didn’t make a dent in it. She didn’t like it one bit. “Can we get any closer to its source?”

“Closer?” Jack placed his hands in his pockets. “We’re already right on top of it, Tosh. It’s coming from here.”

“But…how?” Tosh scrutinized her surroundings. She knew he was right; her device, too, was glowing a solid red. Finally, Tosh cast her eyes up to the ceiling in desperation. Just as she’d been about to reprimand herself for being silly enough to imagine that something would be floating there, the castle walls disappeared. Blinding white light burst out before her; gasping, Tosh shut her eyes. But it wasn’t enough. The light tore its way through nonetheless. In the last seconds before it all went black, Tosh could have sworn that a raging fire was burning itself out from within her, flaring up inside every single cell.


When Tosh opened her eyes once more, she was standing in the middle of a street illuminated only by the faint light streaming out of the lanterns lining the side of the road. She stared down at her hands, moved them back and forth to ensure that she was, indeed, alive. That this was real. Then she gazed down at herself. Her black skirt was gone; in its place was the bottom part of a long, elegant kimono. Tosh ran her hands over the fabric in wonder. For a moment, the feel of the silk became her entire world. She could not even wonder where she was, or what she was doing there. Not yet. Not–

“Sumimasen.” Tosh jerked her head back up and stumbled over to the side of the street. “Arigato gozaimasu,” the man who been waiting said as he passed her by. Tosh was too shocked to reply. Japan. She was in Japan. And it wasn’t Japan as it was now; it was the Japan of the tales her parents used to tell her as a young girl. She glanced up at the lanterns once more. Pre-war Japan. That short, fleeting period before the military took control and the regime grew hard, brutal. Her parents had told her story after story about the way artists and writers had gathered in the cities late at night. About the glamorous young actors and the beautiful geishas. About The Floating World.

For that is what they’d called it. The Floating World. They’d never seen it themselves, of course; they had only heard about it from their parents. But they passed the story on, passed it on to Tosh so that it could become part of her, too. Now she was here. She was really here, within the world itself. She could hear voices being raised within the bars lining the street. The Floating World’s very beauty lay in its fragility. When the sun rose, it vanished with the early morning mist.

“Sumimasen.” Tosh stepped further to the side. She wondered whether they could tell that she was from another time, another place. Then she realized that she didn’t mind one way or the other. Tosh watched as the people passed her by, flooding in and out of brightly lit restaurants and bars. Laughing and telling jokes. She couldn’t have said how long she spent there. It could have been mere minutes; it could have been hours. She would have been ready to stay there, she thought, forever.

But then a girl in a blue kimono stepped out of the shadows and, without a word, offered Tosh her hand.


Tosh took it without hesitation. The girl’s face with perfectly smooth, symmetrical. Her mouth was curved up into a half-smile; her eyes were shining. She was shorter and slimmer than Tosh, and she moved with the grace and agility of a dancer. Tosh never for a moment considered introducing herself, or saying anything at all. The girl’s touch – so soft, so gentle – said more than any words ever could.

The girl in the blue kimono led her into a bar first. They made their way around the crowded counter; silently, Tosh then followed the girl up a narrow flight of stairs. The wood creaked beneath her feet, and the air, somehow, smelled of cherry blossoms. The girl in the blue kimono opened a door and stepped inside; with a smile, she beckoned Tosh in towards her.

“Watashi no heya wa koko desu,” the girl murmured. Her voice was so musical that even this simple phrase sounded like poetry. “Toshiko-san.” Tosh wasn’t surprised that the girl knew her name; nothing could have been more natural. “Toshiko-san,” the girl repeated, approaching her and then slowly placing her arms around Tosh and holding her close. “Anata wa kireina desu, Toshiko-san.” Tosh bent down and whispered a response into the girl’s ear.

When she heard the girl’s laugh, Tosh knew that she had found home, at last. And that she never wanted to leave, ever again.


The vision vanished as abruptly as it had emerged. One moment Tosh was in the girl’s arms; the next, she was lying on the cold floor. Jack was sprawled out beside her, a small, silver orb clutched in his right hand.

“Tosh.” His voice was unsteady. Tosh didn’t trust herself to speak at all; instead, she simply sat up. “Tosh,” Jack repeated, getting to his feet, “we’ve found it. Now let’s go.” Only after they’d both climbed into the SUV did he clear his throat and speak again. In slow, measured tones, he said, “It came from Calypso.”

“Calypso?”

“A planet on the other side of the galaxy,” Jack said, leaning back in the driver’s seat with a heavy sigh. “It was very beautiful there, once.”

“You were there?” Tosh had long since assumed that Jack’s travels had been extensive, but he’d never heard him say anything about it in such a straightforward manner. He hadn’t reacted quite as intensely as she had to whatever it was he’d seen there, but it had affected him, too; of that she was quite certain.

“Yes. I have. Many years ago, Tosh, I was there.” Jack made a movement towards the keys, and for a second Tosh thought that he was going to start the car and end the conversation there. But he evidently thought better of it; instead, he crossed his arms over his chest. “A month or so after I left, a civil war broke out there. Ever since, they’ve gone back and forth between oppressive governments and near-anarchy.”

“Oh,” Tosh responded. Her first thought had been of the headlines on the morning paper – bombs going off in Iraq, in Israel, in the Palestinian Territories – but she couldn’t bring herself to comment upon it. What was there to say about such situations, after all? “How can you be sure it came from there?” Tosh inquired at last.

“Because of what we saw.” Jack looked her right in the eye. “You saw something you wanted very much, didn’t you? A dream, a fantasy, made to look so real you could practically feel it. Didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“We both did.” Tosh didn’t blame Jack for his reluctance to elaborate upon his vision. She wasn’t exactly eager to go into the details herself. Even if she wanted to, moreover, she doubted that she could find it in her to describe it. To describe, fully, what she had experienced. What she had felt. “There was a device in that spacecraft that was designed precisely for that purpose.”

“To make fantasies feel real?”

“Yes. To make fantasies feel real.” Jack brushed back his hair. “The Calypsians cannot survive on any other planet besides their own. They’re too sensitive; even the finest filters and life support systems can’t assure them their safety from contaminants. So the refugees set out knowing, from the start, that they’re not going to survive.”

“And yet they still leave?”

“They have a choice: certain death at the hands of a warring group that hates them, or certain death on their own terms. Most choose the latter. And these are their terms.”

“The fantasies?”

“Yes. The fantasies. From the moment they lift off until they run out of fuel or food, or crash land, they live out their deepest desires.”

“But it’s just a lie,” Tosh protested. “They know that! How can it mean anything to them, then?”

“It meant something to you.”

“I didn’t know that it was a lie! If I had…” Tosh’s voice drifted off as the images ran through her mind. “No,” she said at last. “It wouldn’t have made a difference if I had known beforehand. I would…I would have felt it just as powerfully.”

“Precisely,” Jack said, pulling the car keys out of his pocket. Seconds later the car’s engine roared to life, and the two of them started off down the empty roads that had led them to the castle. Tosh held the small silver device she’d picked up in the palm of her hand. “If you want to study that,” Jack added, glancing over at her, “you should do it now.”

“Why’s that?”

“It only remained intact before because it was still being protected from our atmosphere. I had to strip off the shell that was shielding it to tear it loose. It’s already disintegrating; by the time we get back to the Hub, it’ll be gone.”

“Oh.” Tosh stared down at the silver orb, ran her fingers along its smooth edges. It was so fragile. Faded away entirely when exposed to the air. Then she looked up again, looked at Jack – his expression less guarded, and far sadder than she’d ever seen it – and then at the road stretching out before them. At the Cardiff skyline, starting to shimmer out at them from afar. “Perhaps it’s for the best,” she said at last. Jack didn’t respond.


Neither of them said another word until they got back to the Hub. The silver orb vanished completely by the time they arrived, just as Jack had said it would. For the five weeks that followed, Toshiko Sato dreamt of a girl in a blue kimono.