The
tension was palpable for days afterwards.
Ianto going quietly about his business of clearing up after the rest of
them, a silent apology perhaps, perhaps not.
Perhaps he didn't think he owed them one. Perhaps he didn't. Gwen, Owen and Toshiko definitely thought that
he did.
Jack, for
the most part, sulked in his office or in the boardroom, looking over the
results of the scans he had running over as much of their galaxy as he could
reach, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every week since he'd
arrived at Torchwood.
During
those long, difficult days there was one alien sighting. Jack went alone, took his anger and
frustration out on the poor innocent Gyglyte in a dark back alley after
shooting the bulb out in the closest sodium street light. After that, the alien had turned around,
crawled back into its pod and gone straight back to wherever it had come
from. No one said a word. Gwen especially kept quiet for once, keeping
her moral speech to herself, wondering who it was who Jack Harkness had loved
so much that just alluding to them sent him into a downwards spiral worse than
the one Ianto seemed to be descending.
It
couldn't last, and the break finally came one afternoon. Gwen and Owen were out talking to a couple of
witnesses who'd spotted the UFO above Cardigan Bay days before, minutes before
all hell had broken loose in the hub.
Toshiko was working away at her desk, busy with something or other. Ianto made coffee - Blue Mountain, the very best - and took two mugs
up to the boardroom where Jack was busy studying his readouts.
He tapped
his knuckles on the glass and waited for Jack to look up before pushing open
the door and closing it behind him, putting one mug down in front of his boss,
taking the seat directly opposite.
"I'm
sorry." It was a good start in his
opinion.
He
watched Jack fold up the printed papers and push them to one side, watched him
wrap his hands around the mug and breathe in the strong aroma, a hint of
pleasure on his face.
"For
which part?" Ianto slid his eyes
onto Jack's, then away. "Hiding a
cyberwoman in the basement? Bringing a
stranger into our secret base of operations?
Holding a gun on me, threatening to shoot me? Punching me so hard my face didn't heal for three
days? Putting all of us in danger? Or letting loose a killer who tried to delete
me twice?" To his relief there was
no malice, no anger in Jack's tone. It
was all fact, he was simply asking a question.
"For
putting you all in danger. For that, I'm
sorry."
Jack
nodded. "For that, you're
forgiven."
For a
long time, Ianto sat, sipping his coffee, watching Jack sitting and drinking
his own. And when he finished, he smiled
once at Jack, stood up and left.
~
Another
alien. Another long night. The team returned battered and bruised,
dropped off their weapons and went to their respective homes to clean up and
rest. Jack went into his office, waited
for his wounds to heal. The cyberwoman's
double attack had drained him. He was
exhausted but he couldn't sleep. All he
could do was sit down, close his eyes and let his mind wander.
Slowly he
became aware of Ianto moving quietly around the hub, cleaning up, making
coffee. He let the sounds filter into
his daydreams and in his head a picture of the hub drew itself around a neatly
dressed Welshman picking up their rubbish and dropping it into a black bin bag.
He
drifted, and sometime later he started to realise that the sound being carried
up through the cylinder of the underground base was no longer that of domestic
solitude. Slowly he swung his legs off
the desk, stretched his bunched, knotted muscles and popped his spine back into
alignment as he rose. He could hear
sobbing, the sound of soul-deep grief.
"Ianto…."
Jack
moved silently out onto the mezzanine and looked across. He was sitting on the couch, head in his
hands, shoulders rising and falling with the destructive strength of his
emotions, his whole body shaking. Jack
went to him, putting aside his residual anger, wrapping his arms around the man
he desperately wanted to call his friend and trapping him, fighting resistance
for the couple of seconds that it took for Ianto to give in to what he needed
the most.
Jack
didn't say a word, didn't flinch when short fingernails bit into his arms. He rested his face against short dark hair
and made the right white noise so that Ianto quieted quickly, sobs muted to
weeping, crying himself out. "I'm
sorry," he managed eventually in a voice as broken as the rest of
him.
Jack
loosened his arms, still keeping his ward against him, the dark head rested in
the crook of his shoulder. "What
are you sorry for?" he asked gently.
"For
holding a gun in your face. For hitting
you. For calling you a monster."
Shaking
his head, Jack rubbed his cheek against Ianto's hair. "Apology accepted holding a gun to my
face and you're forgiven for that powerful right hook. But you don't need to apologise for calling
me a monster. I am a monster."
"You're
not…"
"I
am. There's so much you don't know about
me, almost as much as I don't know about you.
For example, I didn't know you were in London during the invasion. And you didn't know that the cyberwoman killed
me - deleted me - twice." He let it
sink in, knew the moment it did because Ianto pulled away from him enough to be
able to look into his face and see that he wasn't exaggerating. Leaving one around the narrow shoulders, Jack
let the other one fall and sat back into the couch, taking Ianto with him.
"But
you're… you're here."
"I
can't die. Something happened a while
back and ever since then I've been immortal.
Something kills me and I just… get up, I heal and I go on living. The second time around I knew how much it
hurt, and I felt so… dead already I honestly thought it would be enough. All my limbs went numb, my heart was dancin'
random beats, and the pain was more than I'd felt in a very long time. When I woke, realised I wasn't dead, and saw
you lying there, I thought I'd better do something about you, because no way
were you getting away without another damn good yellin' at."
Ianto
nodded slowly. "I remember,"
he sniffed once, "you were… kissing me." The other thing was too much to take in, Jack
knew from previous experience, and what was he supposed to say anyway, to a man
who was telling him he couldn't die?
"You
weren't dead. You were breathing. You just needed a bit of a boost. You'd have opened your eyes eventually but by
then we might all have been dead. Didn't
want us dying without you there to witness it.
Seeing as it was your fault and all." The man under his arm tensed, and Jack
squeezed him. "Hey, come on. I forgive you for that too. No point in holding a grudge, life's too
short." The irony wasn't lost on
him. "At least, it's supposed to
be."
"Do
you understand why I did it?"
"Yeah. But you need to understand why I was so
angry." He paused, not sure if what
he was about to divulge was too much information, decided it was, but he was
going to say it anyway. "I've come
across them before, the Cybermen, before the invasion in London.
I was almost upgraded." He
stared down at the base of the water tower, letting the ever-moving flow
hypnotise him just a little. "I was
in a conversion unit, trapped, that torturous cradle holding me in place while
the knives and the blades and the needles started to tear me up. I felt it, every slice, every jab as it
started to drain the blood…. And then it
all stopped, everything but the agony of it.
And someone got me out, pulled blades from my face, a rotary blade from
my leg and two fucking great syringes from my arms. He saved me, just before they could do any
real damage. But I don't mind admitting
I was scared to death. Not of dying, but
of becoming one of those things; mindless, featureless, without an inch of
humanity. That's what they do, and once
you've been converted it's the end."
He dragged his focus back to Ianto, aching when he saw the wet,
red-rimmed eyes; the enormity of what he was saying at the edge of the other's
comprehension, knowing in Ianto's mind he was seeing the London conversion facility Lisa had been
dragged from. Best to leave him thinking
that way. Jack ghosted his fingers over the short hairs at his temple. "Lisa
died a long time ago. All you did was
set her soul free."
More
tears blossomed. "I know. It was just so hard… I loved her. I really loved her and for so long I'd
believed I could save her, make her whole again."
"I
know. And I'm sorry."
Jack
welcomed the silence that settled over them, broken only by Ianto sniffing now
and again. It was a while before either
of them spoke and it was Ianto who did eventually. "Who was she?"
Running
his fingernail over his trousers, Jack glanced up. "Who was who?"
"When
I talked about loving Lisa… I thought you might actually cry. There was someone, someone you'd have done
the same for, someone you'd die for."
If I could.
Again, Jack thought about it, but if he wanted Ianto to start opening up
to him, he needed to open up a little himself. "He.
It's a he. Sad thing is I never
knew how much I loved him until I'd lost him."
"Is
he… dead?"
"No. At least, I don't think so. He's out there, somewhere."
A tiny
smile touched Ianto's lips. "So
Owen's right then? You are gay."
Jack
couldn't help his own smile. "If
everyone stopped using labels, this world would be a much more peaceful
place. I'm adaptable. It just so happens that the one I fell in
love with has a penis. Or at least, I'm
making that assumption." He met Ianto's
quizzical stare. "It's a very long
story and I'm not going to tell it to you, at least, not tonight. You can tell me something though. When you were in London, in Torchwood, did you see
anything… odd? I mean, apart from the
cybermen and the daleks and the chaos…."
Jack trailed off, thinking he was on to a losing thing with the
question. But Ianto shifted under his
arm.
"There
was something. When I was… taking Lisa
out of the facility, the whole place was coming down on us. There was a man in a brown suit, didn't look
like he belonged there somehow, and he'd been crying. I almost ran into him and he looked at me
with such sadness in his eyes… then he ran down the steps into the equipment
storage area and I shouted to him that there was no way out but he… he walked
into this big blue box - like one of the old 1960s police boxes - and it… it
vanished." Jack closed his
eyes. He'd seen that sight himself and
he could still feel the stab of abandonment and betrayal. "I didn't stop to think about it, I got
us both out of there, got Lisa to safety.
And afterwards I was so busy salvaging any of the conversion equipment
that I could I didn't think about it again."
It was a
missed opportunity. And Jack couldn't
help but wonder if Rose's absence from Ianto's tale had anything to do with the
Doctor's tears. "I should have been
there." Ianto sat forward and Jack
followed him, tightening his hand on the slim, suited shoulder, turning to face
him. "We're here for you," he
blurted out, "okay? Don't think
that we're not. I don't want you to ever
feel like you're alone, like you have to keep something like this from us
again. I know what it's like to be
alone, believe me, and I know how hard it is."
Frozen in
place, large blue eyes stared up at him.
"But you're alone, aren't you?
I mean, you play with the others - games and stuff - you interact with
them and go out with them. But you
separate yourself from them in such subtle ways they don't see it. Only ever drinking water when you're in bars,
sleeping - living - here at the hub, not revealing anything important about yourself."
Jack
responded gently, "I thought I just had." His other hand strayed to Ianto's face.
"Why
did you kiss me?"
"I
told you, I needed you conscious. I
couldn't leave you there, she would have hurt you."
"Then
why didn't it feel functional? Why did
it feel… sexual?"
Holding
the watery gaze, Jack apologised.
"I'm sorry about that. It
got out of hand. Everything did. I was angry, you were pushing all the right
buttons and…" he shrugged, "I can't explain it. I can promise you that it won't happen
again." He leaned closer. "If you don't want it to."
Ianto
made no move to get away, but neither did he move towards Jack. "I don’t… I don't know about that…"
"No
pressure, Ianto," but he knew his very presence was pressure. He flirted with everyone and everything and
got away with it. It was just who and
what he was that made him irresistible.
Before the Doctor had strolled into his life, Jack had been used to
getting what and who he wanted. Now… now
he was more cautious about who he approached, as cautious as he was with
setting his heart on something. Because
his heart had been ripped from him at the same time as he'd been stabbed in the
back.
It was a
confident voice that replied, "No pressure needed, Sir."
"It's
Jack." He kissed Ianto with his own
name on his lips, pressing his tongue into the wet warmth of the other man's
mouth. What happened next was a blur,
and it was some time later when he worked out what he'd tasted in the kiss.
Fingers
were at his shirt buttons, tugging them through the holes with more urgency
than he would have believed possible from the quiet Welshman who made the
coffee. Hot skin touched his flesh,
possessive, almost fevered. Getting
Ianto's tie undone, he worked the buttons of the white shirt like a pro and
once he'd pulled the tails from loose, soft trousers, Jack lay back on the
couch and pulled his companion over him, hands at either side of his head,
melding their mouths back together.
He could
feel a wrist pressing into the side of his neck and a hand working his own fly,
insinuating itself inside his trousers, then inside his underwear, grasping his
cock in a tight grip that tore a howl from his throat, forced him to yank his
face from Ianto's just to draw breath.
"Gods… where'd you learn this?"
Jack
didn't get an answer. Instead, Ianto
knelt up, straddling one of Jack's legs in order to work his clothing down over
his hips, over his knees and off, dropped to the floor in an untidy heap he'd
clear up later. Jack pushed his hands
into the waistband of Ianto's trousers and helped him undress, shirt and tie
too even though Jack's shirt was still framing his torso.
He had a
moment to admire Ianto's length and girth - neither quite up to his own
proportions he he'd never been one for comparisons. Quality, over quantity when it came to the
actual tool, and the one before him was perfect. His head felt light, like he'd been starved
of air for too long, and when he was covered again and his mouth claimed, he
felt a blackout at the edges of his consciousness, held at bay only by the
incredible sensation of turgid flesh pressing against his own begging erection.
Fingers
in Ianto's hair, much like he'd done before, Jack yanked his head up and stared
into a mask of passion. "Is this
who you really are? Have you been
keeping this from me?" A shake of
the head - he didn't know. "Fuck
me. You said… one day you'd leave me to
suffer and die the way I left her. Get
your revenge another way. Take me. I know you want to so do it."
Uncertainty
breezed over the wonderfully hot expression, not something Jack wanted to see. "What about… lubrication?"
"Use
spit. I don't care. Just do it, please."
It was
painful at first, hard and almost brutal, a side of Ianto Jack would never have
guessed even existed before he'd felt the force of the man's fist connect with
his jaw. But it was so good. Jack lay back, let it happen, let the pain of
being breached wash over him, and revelled in the duel stimulation of hot skin
and sweat over his cock and the pounding to his prostate. He felt as if the earth was melting from
under him and Ianto was the only thing keeping him from drowning in it.
He felt
his lover's climax moments before his own, felt a mouth over his, hands on his
body, weight pressing down on him. Just
before the sickening darkness covered his mind and he blacked out.
When he
came to, he was alone. There was a
blanket covering him where he still lay on the couch, and a cooling mug of
coffee on the floor next to him. Ianto
was nowhere to be seen or heard. He
could only hope he hadn't fucked things up any worse than they already
were. He'd been fucked, that was for
sure. His ass hurt in a way he hadn't
felt in a long while and he felt like he might be stuck to the cushion. Whisky.
He'd tasted whisky in Ianto's mouth when they'd first kissed and it had
gone straight to his head, literally.
For some reason, since he'd returned from the dead on Satellite Five,
alcohol had had a bad, bad effect on him.
Even just the hint of it in a lover's mouth was enough to send his brain
fuzzy.
He needed
to find Ianto before morning. He needed
to explain. Unsticking himself from the
seat, he leaned down and picked up his mug.
First and foremost, he needed coffee.
Fin
Instant Feedback! (No Flames Please)