Still Waters
Oct. 13th, 2011 02:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wailing_owlFandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Ianto
Words: 3,042
Spoilers/Setting: Immediately following S02E04, Meat
Warnings: Mild violence
Still Waters
-“Pray they survive.”-
Ianto pours hot water into the teapot and tries not to notice his hands shaking. What’s happening to him? He reaches into his waistcoat pocket and pulls out his stopwatch.
-The door slams open under his foot, throwing a man backwards-
The blue glow of the Hub lights aren’t quite able to steal away the warm gleam of antique nickel from the watch casing.
-his foot lashes out (when had he learned to do that?) and a gun goes flying-
The rich, bitter tang of tea begins to drift up from the pot as the water stains brown. He fumbles twice before he manages to click the button on the watch.
-It’s too late, he can hear Gwen shrieking or maybe it’s the alien or his own mind, but he shoves the gun up anyway – away from the others, away from Jack-
Four minutes and forty-five seconds. He clicks the stopwatch off and puts the teapot on the tray with the sugar. Four cups, because Gwen is off with Rhys, who knows about Torchwood, which isn’t right at all, there are rules about that, but Jack was going to let it happen anyway-
Ianto takes a deep breath. He straightens the serviettes on the tray so that their points align, just so, and tries to ignore the erratic beating of his heart. Four cups. Eight serviettes. Four spoons. One jar of sugar. One small pitcher of milk, chilled. The tea is going to get bitter if he doesn’t serve it now. He picks up the tray.
-The plastic of the stun gun’s grip is hot against the pulse of his hand as he pulls the trigger. The man to whose forehead it’s pressed jerks violently and his eyes roll back-
Tosh is slanting longing glances at Owen again. Owen, oblivious, enters something into his computer, stabbing each key as if the keyboard is his conscience. Jack leans on the doorway to his office, arms crossed, staring across the Hub with unfocussed, haunted eyes. Ianto looks away from him so that he doesn’t do something stupid like forget the tea and everything else and go ask Jack what’s wrong.
He isn’t like them. They’re larger than life, all of them. Living loudly, violently, tossing their emotions everywhere, destroying and rebuilding their lives with equal abandon, over and over again. Ianto sets the tray down carefully. The quiet click of silver on aluminium seems to rouse the others.
“It’s a shame we had to incinerate it,” Tosh says as Ianto pours her a cup of tea, black, and hands it to her. “I wonder where it came from.”
Owen turns on her, eyes hot with rage (or pain). “You were the one so eager to kill it before, in case you’ve forgotten. And to- what was it? Use it to feed the world’s hungry or some such rot? Never mind its suffering.” Owen tosses back his tea with a snarl – one level teaspoon sugar, one ounce of milk – and turns back to his computer.
“I didn’t-”
Jack puts a hand on her shoulder. “We know.” Ianto silently holds out a cup, filled with tea and an obscene amount of sugar, but no milk, and Jack takes it. Their fingers touch. It’s deliberate on Jack’s part, certainly,
“I wouldn’t change that for the world.” The look in Jack’s eyes says something terrifyingly intimate, something like “because of you,” and Ianto finds himself kissing Jack, holding on with a fierce grip as Jack caresses him like he matters-
but Ianto avoids the Captain’s searching gaze and pours his own cup. Now that people are watching his hands don’t shake at all.
No, he isn’t like them. He has control of things. Of himself. He’s an observer and an organiser. He cleans up messes, he doesn’t make them. In a world with aliens and time rifts and fairies it was the only way anything could be counted on to make any sense.
“Are you alright, Ianto?” Jack asks, his gaze still intent.
Ianto looks up from his cup (pale and opaque with milk but without sugar; he likes to taste the tea) and smiles. “Of course, sir.”
Gwen cares ostentatiously, flinging her heart at everyone and everything she can. Owen, he’s the worst – random, chaotic, vicious in his rejection of vulnerability. Toshika pretends to be in control, but she’s really just barely holding on, and a single word of kindness is usually enough to make her let go. And Jack... Jack doesn’t seem to need control. The world swirls into his orbit without effort, even Ianto does, and despite nights like tonight he seems to thrive on the turmoil. Ianto gave up on understanding Jack long ago.
“Alright, Tosh, Owen – go home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Ianto turns to straighten the tea tray, noting that his name is ostentatiously not on the list.
-He’s alive. Impossibly, miraculously- Ianto’s thoughts have been full, these last few days, with regret over the maybes and the might-have-beens and why was he always such a coward? Walking toward the Captain – Jack – now, Ianto isn’t sure what to do, how to act. He hides his relief and joy behind his professional mask and offers his hand. Still a coward, even now. But Jack ignores the hand and pulls him close and then kisses him, right on the mouth and yes, this is what Ianto wants. Warm lips – alive – and strong hands around his face, and the scent of wool that always clings to Jack, and he doesn’t even care that everyone else is watching this-
“When you’re done straightening up, Ianto, come see me in my office.”
“Yes, sir.” He spends the next several minutes tidying things. There’s not much to do, since they were out most of the day
-he’s lying, thoughts racing. “Just us.” Please believe it. All he can see is the blood on Rhys’s mouth, and the barrel of a gun pointed right at him. It looks so much bigger from this end-
but some small objects are out of place and he puts them where they belong – pens, capped, back in the cup Tosh keeps on her desk, the empty beer bottles scattered on Owen’s desk picked up and disposed of, papers neatened into orderly stacks. He runs out of things to do long before he’s ready.
“Ianto.”
He puts down the gadget he just pointlessly moved from one side of Gwen’s desk to the other (he doesn’t even know what it is) and looks up at Jack.
“What’s wrong?” It’s less a question than a demand.
“Nothing,” he replies with a small shrug. He begins to walk away and Jack is on him, pressing him hard against the wall. Something angular digs into his spine and he squirms away from it, only to realise how close Jack is, their legs entangled, their torsos flush, chest to chest, Jack’s breath hot on his cheek. He freezes. His body will betray him any moment. Already his mind has been shocked out of itself and the world narrows to the overwhelming force of Jack’s attention, the blue eyes fixed on his, the line of Jack’s watch chain cool against his stomach through his shirt. His eyes, he knows, are ridiculously wide.
“Now that’s more like it,” Jack says in a tone of great satisfaction. “Don’t you dare hide from me, Ianto.”
“I- I’m not, sir.”
“Yes, you are.”
A long silence. Ianto can only hear a heartbeat, he’s not sure whose. “I don’t know what you want from me, sir,” he says, proud that his voice sounds completely bland.
“I want you to tell me what’s bothering you. And stop calling me sir!”
Ianto flinches. The silence draws out and he knows he has to say something. “It’s nothing, really.” He tries to believe it. “Just that today was a bit...intense.”
Jack backs off some, now that Ianto’s talking, and Ianto rubs the dent in his back where whatever it was on the wall dug into him and pretends he doesn’t miss the feel of Jack’s body a little bit.
“Intense. Yes. But you caught the men who did it, kept them from getting away when the rest of us couldn’t. You did a great job.”
Does Jack know him so little? Still? Something flashes through him, something like the furious fear he’d felt at the warehouse
-scuffling on the floor, hands still raw from the ropes, a moment of clarity and the click of an empty gun, empty, thank God-
and he lashes out not with his foot but with his words. “You arrogant bastard. That’s not me.”
The look on Jack’s face is priceless, almost worth it, but the words seem to be building in his mouth as though his teeth are a cracked dam, and they spill out before he can stop it. “I’m not some action hero, out to split heads and eliminate evildoers. I’m the office boy. I’m supposed to pick things up and ensure things run smoothly and make coffee, for God’s sake! Things out there make no sense!”
Jack steps forward again, this time more sheltering than threatening, and Ianto looks away. He realises he’s panting, breathing harder than he has during any of the fights earlier in the day.
“What are you afraid of?” Jack asks.
Ianto refuses to back down. He’s had enough of being a coward. He wants Jack to understand this. He wants to understand this himself. “There’s no order out there. No way to be sure I’m doing the right thing. It’s all guesses, and terror, and things being changed round at the last minute, and never knowing what’s going to happen next.”
The last time he’d let himself lose control had been with Lisa. Her laughter had made him feel wild and her lips had tasted like freedom,
-Lisa’s body lies at his feet, what little humanity still left in her cut open and butchered, and the thing that did it stands in front of him, pleading with him through the eyes of the cute pizza delivery girl. And he has to shoot it, he knows that, knows that there’s nothing left of Lisa, but it sounds like her, mentions things only she would know, and his hand shakes uncontrollably on the gun-
and look how that had turned out. He looks back on that time, on all of it, even the parts he’d thought were good, then, and he doesn’t recognise himself at all.
“Life is random, Ianto,” Jack says, and Ianto remembers where he is, and that Lisa’s been dead over a year now. “We can only control it through our actions. Timepieces, schedules, calendars – those do nothing. You have to act if you want control.”
-the gun fires wildly as they struggle and in the distance he hears bellows of pain and cascading crashes. His kidney hurts like fuck where the other bloke’s punch landed and his hand hurts from landing his own punches, and everything is a blur of black coat and elbows and filthy concrete floor, and something is pumping through his veins that feels like panic and passion and triumph, and then he’s thrown off and the bastard’s getting away-
It isn’t acting that’s the problem. It’s why, and what it makes him. Ianto stares into Jack’s concerned face. “I loved it,” he says in a low, ferocious voice. “I fucking loved it and that terrifies me.”
For a moment Jack just stares and the silence is broken only by the faint trickling of water from the fountain. Then Jack shakes his head and steps forward. “Hiding from who you really are isn’t going to make it go away. Learn to be that person. You weren’t out of control today. In fact, I think you might have been more in control than I’ve ever seen you. More alive. You did exactly what needed to be done.”
Jack is leaning in and Ianto backs away. “No,” he says. He can’t. He can’t be this person of wild emotions, this person he can’t predict. If he accepts this, how can he even know who he’ll be tomorrow?
“You can’t go back to just being the tea boy, Ianto,” Jack says. He puts a hand flat on Ianto’s chest and Ianto jumps back, only to find that the wall at his back again. Jack’s hand radiates heat that feels almost unnatural compared to the cool air of the Hub. “Not now that you know you’re so much more than that.”
-“Two more! Far corner. They can’t get out – it’s locked.” Ianto springs towards Jack’s hiding place, but the ringleader, Dale or whatever-his-name-is, catches him and shoves the barrel of his gun bruisingly hard into the back of Ianto’s neck-
“I can. I will. It’s what I want.”
Jack steps back and crosses his arms. He’s back to being intimidating, but he’s farther away and Ianto feels like he can breathe again.
“Why today?” Jack asks suddenly.
“What?”
“What was different about today? You’ve been in fights before – that time last year, out in the country with the cannibal village, for one, and you were about to shoot that blowfish John was chasing before I showed up, for another. But I’ve never seen you this bothered before. What was different about today?”
-The corridors are confusing, industrial yellow and black smeared with old blood and grime. Every step throbs through his lower back but Jack said “go,” and so he’s running. Then Jack’s voice comes over the comm, sounding calm and cool like this is all some lark, “We’re trapped. The creature’s breaking free. If we try and get past we’ll be crushed.” And it feels like he’s the one being crushed, fear pressing down on his chest with jagged, choking edges. He can’t let it happen. Not Jack. Not again, not like that. He finds Owen, not getting the sedative like he ought but struggling with one of the bastards who did this instead. A quick pulse from the stun gun and the man drops. “We have to help him,” Ianto says to Owen, panting, voice still hoarse from the chokehold the ringleader had on him, and he hopes “him” can pass for “them”. When he sees that Owen is moving he limps on after the ringleader. He’s going to stop these fuckers, whatever it takes-
“Nothing,” he says firmly, swallowing. “Nothing was different. It was just too much-”
Jack lunges, fist in Ianto’s shirt. “Tell me!”
Something feral and immoderate lurches up inside Ianto. He shoves Jack away, into Gwen’s desk. Papers and random bits of metal and plastic scatter over the floor, but Ianto doesn’t even look at them. “You,” he snarled, his voice as hoarse again as it had been earlier in the day,
-“Pray they survive.”-
when his throat was still raw and sore. He advanced on Jack, barely registering the broad grin the other man wore. “You were what was different. You were trapped, Jack. They tried to shoot you and they locked you in with a raging beast they’d created, and I couldn’t stand it! Are you happy now? I couldn’t stand the fact that something might happen to you!” He’s the one looming now, forearms knotted with tension and braced on the desk on either side of Jack’s head. Jack, still sprawled on the pile of random detritus Gwen kept on her desk, looks up at him and begins to laugh.
“You didn’t have to worry. I can’t die, remember?”
Ianto punches him.
-Jack smiles. “I found my Doctor.” He looks relaxed and happy and it twists like a knife. “When are you going back to him?” Ianto asks in a voice he hopes is cool and professional and not as wounded as he feels. Jack looks at him and his eyes soften. “I came back for you,” he says. His eyes flicks down, then up again and he catches Ianto’s gaze with his own and holds it for a momentous second. Then he looks around. “All of you,” he says, but his gaze returns to Ianto-
It’s amazing how good it feels. Ianto shakes out his hand as Jack dabs tenderly at the corner of his mouth and stares at him with disbelieving eyes.
“You can’t die,” Ianto repeats. “Well, that’s bloody brilliant. You can still get hurt, you pen pidyn! And you can still leave! Or have you forgotten already?”
“No, I haven’t. I’m sorry.”
“You keep saying that, but you don’t act very sorry.”
Jack stands and reaches out, hesitantly, as if he’s not sure what reception he’s going to get. Fair enough. Ianto’s not sure what reception he’s going to give. “Ianto. You’re not going to lose me. Not this soon.”
Ianto doesn’t move. “But one day I will.”
Jack takes a hesitant step forward. “I can’t pretend to understand your era’s need for monogamy, or the compulsion to put everyone in neatly labelled boxes. How I feel right now, that’s all that matters. And I swear to you, that’s real.”
“And how long can I rely on that?”
“I can’t promise you forever, Ianto. No one can. You could find a nice, modern Welsh girl, settle down, get married – and then one of you could find a new lover the next week, or die the next day.”
“I don’t want a nice, modern Welsh girl.”
Jack’s hand settles lightly on Ianto’s arm, like a bird unsure of its perch. “That’s not my point. Don’t mess up the present with thoughts of the future. Life’s never certain. I can only give you today.”
Ianto looks down, the scuff on his right shoe suddenly all he can bear to look at. “And do you? Give me today?”
“Yes.” Jack folded his arms around Ianto’s tense shoulders, wrapping him in warmth and the smell of wool. “Just be yourself. All of yourself. Live. That’s what I love about you.”
Ianto looks up, quick enough almost to crack Jack’s nose on his skull. “Lo-?”
Jack’s lips cover his, and he’s lost. One hand cups his cheek and he leans into it, the soft nip of teeth and slide of tongues stealing his thoughts, all but one.
-Today is enough. From him, from me. Tomorrow will take care of itself-
Finis.
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Ianto
Words: 3,042
Spoilers/Setting: Immediately following S02E04, Meat
Warnings: Mild violence
Still Waters
-“Pray they survive.”-
Ianto pours hot water into the teapot and tries not to notice his hands shaking. What’s happening to him? He reaches into his waistcoat pocket and pulls out his stopwatch.
-The door slams open under his foot, throwing a man backwards-
The blue glow of the Hub lights aren’t quite able to steal away the warm gleam of antique nickel from the watch casing.
-his foot lashes out (when had he learned to do that?) and a gun goes flying-
The rich, bitter tang of tea begins to drift up from the pot as the water stains brown. He fumbles twice before he manages to click the button on the watch.
-It’s too late, he can hear Gwen shrieking or maybe it’s the alien or his own mind, but he shoves the gun up anyway – away from the others, away from Jack-
Four minutes and forty-five seconds. He clicks the stopwatch off and puts the teapot on the tray with the sugar. Four cups, because Gwen is off with Rhys, who knows about Torchwood, which isn’t right at all, there are rules about that, but Jack was going to let it happen anyway-
Ianto takes a deep breath. He straightens the serviettes on the tray so that their points align, just so, and tries to ignore the erratic beating of his heart. Four cups. Eight serviettes. Four spoons. One jar of sugar. One small pitcher of milk, chilled. The tea is going to get bitter if he doesn’t serve it now. He picks up the tray.
-The plastic of the stun gun’s grip is hot against the pulse of his hand as he pulls the trigger. The man to whose forehead it’s pressed jerks violently and his eyes roll back-
Tosh is slanting longing glances at Owen again. Owen, oblivious, enters something into his computer, stabbing each key as if the keyboard is his conscience. Jack leans on the doorway to his office, arms crossed, staring across the Hub with unfocussed, haunted eyes. Ianto looks away from him so that he doesn’t do something stupid like forget the tea and everything else and go ask Jack what’s wrong.
He isn’t like them. They’re larger than life, all of them. Living loudly, violently, tossing their emotions everywhere, destroying and rebuilding their lives with equal abandon, over and over again. Ianto sets the tray down carefully. The quiet click of silver on aluminium seems to rouse the others.
“It’s a shame we had to incinerate it,” Tosh says as Ianto pours her a cup of tea, black, and hands it to her. “I wonder where it came from.”
Owen turns on her, eyes hot with rage (or pain). “You were the one so eager to kill it before, in case you’ve forgotten. And to- what was it? Use it to feed the world’s hungry or some such rot? Never mind its suffering.” Owen tosses back his tea with a snarl – one level teaspoon sugar, one ounce of milk – and turns back to his computer.
“I didn’t-”
Jack puts a hand on her shoulder. “We know.” Ianto silently holds out a cup, filled with tea and an obscene amount of sugar, but no milk, and Jack takes it. Their fingers touch. It’s deliberate on Jack’s part, certainly,
“I wouldn’t change that for the world.” The look in Jack’s eyes says something terrifyingly intimate, something like “because of you,” and Ianto finds himself kissing Jack, holding on with a fierce grip as Jack caresses him like he matters-
but Ianto avoids the Captain’s searching gaze and pours his own cup. Now that people are watching his hands don’t shake at all.
No, he isn’t like them. He has control of things. Of himself. He’s an observer and an organiser. He cleans up messes, he doesn’t make them. In a world with aliens and time rifts and fairies it was the only way anything could be counted on to make any sense.
“Are you alright, Ianto?” Jack asks, his gaze still intent.
Ianto looks up from his cup (pale and opaque with milk but without sugar; he likes to taste the tea) and smiles. “Of course, sir.”
Gwen cares ostentatiously, flinging her heart at everyone and everything she can. Owen, he’s the worst – random, chaotic, vicious in his rejection of vulnerability. Toshika pretends to be in control, but she’s really just barely holding on, and a single word of kindness is usually enough to make her let go. And Jack... Jack doesn’t seem to need control. The world swirls into his orbit without effort, even Ianto does, and despite nights like tonight he seems to thrive on the turmoil. Ianto gave up on understanding Jack long ago.
“Alright, Tosh, Owen – go home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Ianto turns to straighten the tea tray, noting that his name is ostentatiously not on the list.
-He’s alive. Impossibly, miraculously- Ianto’s thoughts have been full, these last few days, with regret over the maybes and the might-have-beens and why was he always such a coward? Walking toward the Captain – Jack – now, Ianto isn’t sure what to do, how to act. He hides his relief and joy behind his professional mask and offers his hand. Still a coward, even now. But Jack ignores the hand and pulls him close and then kisses him, right on the mouth and yes, this is what Ianto wants. Warm lips – alive – and strong hands around his face, and the scent of wool that always clings to Jack, and he doesn’t even care that everyone else is watching this-
“When you’re done straightening up, Ianto, come see me in my office.”
“Yes, sir.” He spends the next several minutes tidying things. There’s not much to do, since they were out most of the day
-he’s lying, thoughts racing. “Just us.” Please believe it. All he can see is the blood on Rhys’s mouth, and the barrel of a gun pointed right at him. It looks so much bigger from this end-
but some small objects are out of place and he puts them where they belong – pens, capped, back in the cup Tosh keeps on her desk, the empty beer bottles scattered on Owen’s desk picked up and disposed of, papers neatened into orderly stacks. He runs out of things to do long before he’s ready.
“Ianto.”
He puts down the gadget he just pointlessly moved from one side of Gwen’s desk to the other (he doesn’t even know what it is) and looks up at Jack.
“What’s wrong?” It’s less a question than a demand.
“Nothing,” he replies with a small shrug. He begins to walk away and Jack is on him, pressing him hard against the wall. Something angular digs into his spine and he squirms away from it, only to realise how close Jack is, their legs entangled, their torsos flush, chest to chest, Jack’s breath hot on his cheek. He freezes. His body will betray him any moment. Already his mind has been shocked out of itself and the world narrows to the overwhelming force of Jack’s attention, the blue eyes fixed on his, the line of Jack’s watch chain cool against his stomach through his shirt. His eyes, he knows, are ridiculously wide.
“Now that’s more like it,” Jack says in a tone of great satisfaction. “Don’t you dare hide from me, Ianto.”
“I- I’m not, sir.”
“Yes, you are.”
A long silence. Ianto can only hear a heartbeat, he’s not sure whose. “I don’t know what you want from me, sir,” he says, proud that his voice sounds completely bland.
“I want you to tell me what’s bothering you. And stop calling me sir!”
Ianto flinches. The silence draws out and he knows he has to say something. “It’s nothing, really.” He tries to believe it. “Just that today was a bit...intense.”
Jack backs off some, now that Ianto’s talking, and Ianto rubs the dent in his back where whatever it was on the wall dug into him and pretends he doesn’t miss the feel of Jack’s body a little bit.
“Intense. Yes. But you caught the men who did it, kept them from getting away when the rest of us couldn’t. You did a great job.”
Does Jack know him so little? Still? Something flashes through him, something like the furious fear he’d felt at the warehouse
-scuffling on the floor, hands still raw from the ropes, a moment of clarity and the click of an empty gun, empty, thank God-
and he lashes out not with his foot but with his words. “You arrogant bastard. That’s not me.”
The look on Jack’s face is priceless, almost worth it, but the words seem to be building in his mouth as though his teeth are a cracked dam, and they spill out before he can stop it. “I’m not some action hero, out to split heads and eliminate evildoers. I’m the office boy. I’m supposed to pick things up and ensure things run smoothly and make coffee, for God’s sake! Things out there make no sense!”
Jack steps forward again, this time more sheltering than threatening, and Ianto looks away. He realises he’s panting, breathing harder than he has during any of the fights earlier in the day.
“What are you afraid of?” Jack asks.
Ianto refuses to back down. He’s had enough of being a coward. He wants Jack to understand this. He wants to understand this himself. “There’s no order out there. No way to be sure I’m doing the right thing. It’s all guesses, and terror, and things being changed round at the last minute, and never knowing what’s going to happen next.”
The last time he’d let himself lose control had been with Lisa. Her laughter had made him feel wild and her lips had tasted like freedom,
-Lisa’s body lies at his feet, what little humanity still left in her cut open and butchered, and the thing that did it stands in front of him, pleading with him through the eyes of the cute pizza delivery girl. And he has to shoot it, he knows that, knows that there’s nothing left of Lisa, but it sounds like her, mentions things only she would know, and his hand shakes uncontrollably on the gun-
and look how that had turned out. He looks back on that time, on all of it, even the parts he’d thought were good, then, and he doesn’t recognise himself at all.
“Life is random, Ianto,” Jack says, and Ianto remembers where he is, and that Lisa’s been dead over a year now. “We can only control it through our actions. Timepieces, schedules, calendars – those do nothing. You have to act if you want control.”
-the gun fires wildly as they struggle and in the distance he hears bellows of pain and cascading crashes. His kidney hurts like fuck where the other bloke’s punch landed and his hand hurts from landing his own punches, and everything is a blur of black coat and elbows and filthy concrete floor, and something is pumping through his veins that feels like panic and passion and triumph, and then he’s thrown off and the bastard’s getting away-
It isn’t acting that’s the problem. It’s why, and what it makes him. Ianto stares into Jack’s concerned face. “I loved it,” he says in a low, ferocious voice. “I fucking loved it and that terrifies me.”
For a moment Jack just stares and the silence is broken only by the faint trickling of water from the fountain. Then Jack shakes his head and steps forward. “Hiding from who you really are isn’t going to make it go away. Learn to be that person. You weren’t out of control today. In fact, I think you might have been more in control than I’ve ever seen you. More alive. You did exactly what needed to be done.”
Jack is leaning in and Ianto backs away. “No,” he says. He can’t. He can’t be this person of wild emotions, this person he can’t predict. If he accepts this, how can he even know who he’ll be tomorrow?
“You can’t go back to just being the tea boy, Ianto,” Jack says. He puts a hand flat on Ianto’s chest and Ianto jumps back, only to find that the wall at his back again. Jack’s hand radiates heat that feels almost unnatural compared to the cool air of the Hub. “Not now that you know you’re so much more than that.”
-“Two more! Far corner. They can’t get out – it’s locked.” Ianto springs towards Jack’s hiding place, but the ringleader, Dale or whatever-his-name-is, catches him and shoves the barrel of his gun bruisingly hard into the back of Ianto’s neck-
“I can. I will. It’s what I want.”
Jack steps back and crosses his arms. He’s back to being intimidating, but he’s farther away and Ianto feels like he can breathe again.
“Why today?” Jack asks suddenly.
“What?”
“What was different about today? You’ve been in fights before – that time last year, out in the country with the cannibal village, for one, and you were about to shoot that blowfish John was chasing before I showed up, for another. But I’ve never seen you this bothered before. What was different about today?”
-The corridors are confusing, industrial yellow and black smeared with old blood and grime. Every step throbs through his lower back but Jack said “go,” and so he’s running. Then Jack’s voice comes over the comm, sounding calm and cool like this is all some lark, “We’re trapped. The creature’s breaking free. If we try and get past we’ll be crushed.” And it feels like he’s the one being crushed, fear pressing down on his chest with jagged, choking edges. He can’t let it happen. Not Jack. Not again, not like that. He finds Owen, not getting the sedative like he ought but struggling with one of the bastards who did this instead. A quick pulse from the stun gun and the man drops. “We have to help him,” Ianto says to Owen, panting, voice still hoarse from the chokehold the ringleader had on him, and he hopes “him” can pass for “them”. When he sees that Owen is moving he limps on after the ringleader. He’s going to stop these fuckers, whatever it takes-
“Nothing,” he says firmly, swallowing. “Nothing was different. It was just too much-”
Jack lunges, fist in Ianto’s shirt. “Tell me!”
Something feral and immoderate lurches up inside Ianto. He shoves Jack away, into Gwen’s desk. Papers and random bits of metal and plastic scatter over the floor, but Ianto doesn’t even look at them. “You,” he snarled, his voice as hoarse again as it had been earlier in the day,
-“Pray they survive.”-
when his throat was still raw and sore. He advanced on Jack, barely registering the broad grin the other man wore. “You were what was different. You were trapped, Jack. They tried to shoot you and they locked you in with a raging beast they’d created, and I couldn’t stand it! Are you happy now? I couldn’t stand the fact that something might happen to you!” He’s the one looming now, forearms knotted with tension and braced on the desk on either side of Jack’s head. Jack, still sprawled on the pile of random detritus Gwen kept on her desk, looks up at him and begins to laugh.
“You didn’t have to worry. I can’t die, remember?”
Ianto punches him.
-Jack smiles. “I found my Doctor.” He looks relaxed and happy and it twists like a knife. “When are you going back to him?” Ianto asks in a voice he hopes is cool and professional and not as wounded as he feels. Jack looks at him and his eyes soften. “I came back for you,” he says. His eyes flicks down, then up again and he catches Ianto’s gaze with his own and holds it for a momentous second. Then he looks around. “All of you,” he says, but his gaze returns to Ianto-
It’s amazing how good it feels. Ianto shakes out his hand as Jack dabs tenderly at the corner of his mouth and stares at him with disbelieving eyes.
“You can’t die,” Ianto repeats. “Well, that’s bloody brilliant. You can still get hurt, you pen pidyn! And you can still leave! Or have you forgotten already?”
“No, I haven’t. I’m sorry.”
“You keep saying that, but you don’t act very sorry.”
Jack stands and reaches out, hesitantly, as if he’s not sure what reception he’s going to get. Fair enough. Ianto’s not sure what reception he’s going to give. “Ianto. You’re not going to lose me. Not this soon.”
Ianto doesn’t move. “But one day I will.”
Jack takes a hesitant step forward. “I can’t pretend to understand your era’s need for monogamy, or the compulsion to put everyone in neatly labelled boxes. How I feel right now, that’s all that matters. And I swear to you, that’s real.”
“And how long can I rely on that?”
“I can’t promise you forever, Ianto. No one can. You could find a nice, modern Welsh girl, settle down, get married – and then one of you could find a new lover the next week, or die the next day.”
“I don’t want a nice, modern Welsh girl.”
Jack’s hand settles lightly on Ianto’s arm, like a bird unsure of its perch. “That’s not my point. Don’t mess up the present with thoughts of the future. Life’s never certain. I can only give you today.”
Ianto looks down, the scuff on his right shoe suddenly all he can bear to look at. “And do you? Give me today?”
“Yes.” Jack folded his arms around Ianto’s tense shoulders, wrapping him in warmth and the smell of wool. “Just be yourself. All of yourself. Live. That’s what I love about you.”
Ianto looks up, quick enough almost to crack Jack’s nose on his skull. “Lo-?”
Jack’s lips cover his, and he’s lost. One hand cups his cheek and he leans into it, the soft nip of teeth and slide of tongues stealing his thoughts, all but one.
-Today is enough. From him, from me. Tomorrow will take care of itself-
Finis.
