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fictionalTitle: In Our Bedroom After the War
Pairing/Characters: Jack/Ianto, Gwen, Mickey, Martha & the rest of the Doctor Who Cast.
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rm & kalichan
Rating/Warning: NC-17, bdsm, d/s,
Summary: Homeward bound. Takes place during and after Doctor Who 4x13: Journey's End.
Wordcount: ~31,700 [posted in 4 parts]
Authors' Notes: This is the seventh installment of our series, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. The title is from a song (and the album) by Stars. This is the first piece of this arc we’ve really had to write concurrent to an episode, because of the woeful lack of Torchwood Hub in DW 4x13. This means if you've not watched Journey's End, that the first part of the story might not make as much sense as it could. Here is a link to a brief recap, a full recap, a funny recap (with captioned pictures) or just the transcript -- in case you want to know what, exactly, is going on. Or you could just dive in and hope for the best! Next up, we'll be posting a Jack/Nine/Rose followed by a few other prequels covering the early education and adventures of both Jack and Ianto before returning to where we’ve left off with them in this timeline.
Previous installments:
A Strange Fashion of Forsaking
Dear Captain, Last Night I Slept in Mutiny
To Learn This Holding and the Holding Back
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
I Imagine You Now in That Other City
Many of My Favorite Things Are Broken
In Our Bedroom After the War, Part 1 and Part 2
"Jack's been going home with you a bit, yeah?" Gwen asked, trying to be casual.
"As much as Jack enjoys being walked in on, I don't," Ianto said lightly even as he braced for yet another nosy Gwen conversation. He’d thought that new people on the team would distract her, but they hadn't, not really. She cried less, but cleaved closer to him and Jack than ever.
"You ever think he should settle in with you?"
He looked at her blandly. "No. Never."
"Well why not?"
"Jack lives here."
"With no windows and a flying dinosaur."
"Yeah, so?"
"Ianto Jones, do not be intentionally dense with me."
"It wouldn't make any sense Gwen, although I'm sure we thank you for your concern."
"Well why bloody not?"
"One? Jack. Two? Me, thank you. Three? He doesn't even need to bloody sleep so what would be the point of that? Watching telly together before we went 'round to my call on my mum, who, by the way, has been dead for five years, on Sunday nights?"
"But it's nice, Ianto, living with someone."
"I remember. But we have this place instead."
***
That night, after Ianto had taken Jack's coat and hung it in his hall closet, he turned to find the other man on his knees.
"Oh Jack, are you ever going to tell me why you lied to me about this?" Ianto asked under his breath. Because Jack had once told him that they didn’t do this kind of thing where he came from, and Ianto was sure now that had been a lie – or at the very least, an evasion of truth. He knew he'd demand an answer at some point, but probably not for some time, or at least not until Jack was done asking Ianto for whatever this was night after night.
Not that it wasn't intoxicating. Not that Jack wasn't beautiful like this. Not that Ianto wasn't glad to learn how to be forceful with Jack without having to truly wound him or catapult them both into a discussion neither wanted to be having. But it was so strange and filled with the most terrible confessions.
Ianto knotted his fingers in Jack's hair and stroked his cheek, while Jack undid his trousers with his teeth and then pulled down his underwear in order to suck Ianto's cock into his mouth. This was still strange, but Ianto was beginning to think he might, on the whole, be able to get used to it.
***
Jack pointed at the screen, where Martha's presentation, explaining the new molecule she had identified contaminating the Cardiff water supply was rotating in all its chemical glory.
"So kids," he said, "the real question now is, are we getting chemical components in through the Rift? Or are we being seeded or dosed or something?"
"By aliens?" Mickey asked.
"Bingo," Jack said.
"I think the second makes more sense," Gwen said.
"I don't agree," Ianto said.
"Why not?" Gwen asked. "It's never happened the other way before. Even the bubonic plague came with plague victims."
"Because," Ianto said, "the idea of the first thing is too horrible to contemplate, and in my experience with Torchwood, that's the one that's usually true."
"Lovely," Mickey said. "When aliens dosing you with weird chemicals is the good answer."
"I still think that's more likely," Gwen declared.
"We should investigate both," Ianto said.
"Okay," Jack said. "Martha will stay here and keep investigating the compound itself for clues. Gwen and I'll look for the creatures who might be responsible. Mickey and Ianto, get with the chemical sniffers and the location of the Rift spikes and see if this stuff's walking in here on its own."
"Wait, that's ridiculous, putting me and Mickey together--"
"Jack, I think it's a waste of time--"
"Quiet!" Jack yelled, cutting them off. "I don't remember asking for all this backchat. Decision's made, troops. Ianto, we're covering all the bases, so don't complain. Gwen, it's important to examine all areas 'til we know what we're dealing with. Conversation over."
Mickey and Martha exchanged glances. The command structure here seemed a bit unclear.
***
He'd told Jack to stroke himself while he watched, and he'd expected preening and porn movie absurdity, not Jack whimpering softly as the man squeezed at his balls and sucked at his own fingers and then certainly not Jack coming when Ianto decided to jerk himself off onto his face.
Laying side by side on the bed and staring at the ceiling, Jack still a mess, they were both quieter after, almost unavoidably, Ianto thought. It surprised him a little. He might have previously suspected this sort of thing would be less complicated with another man, but that didn't seem to be the case.
Jack chuckled to himself.
"What?" Ianto asked, turning his head.
"Just something raunchy. A long time ago."
"Do you want to get cleaned up?" Ianto asked.
"Not really. Do we need to get back?"
"I don't know; you're the boss."
***
"I don't know. Ask Gwen," Ianto said for the third time that day. He was sure he sounded aggravated, but he didn't, at this point, much care anymore. Mickey hadn't learned the great secret of asking for forgiveness not permission at Torchwood and he was sick of having to field each and every one of his ideas, especially when they usually fell nowhere near his purview.
"Why do you keep pushing me off on Gwen, mate?" Mickey asked.
"Pardon?"
"It's not about Captain Flash, is it? Because it's never been anything like that, trust me."
"Like what?" Ianto said, coldly.
"Oi! Never mind," Mickey said and stalked off.
Ianto ran his hands over his face. He supposed he should try to make sense out of what just happened and see if Mickey wanted anything important, but he felt both too distracted and sleep deprived for the task. This routine he and Jack had fallen into was killing him.
Sex and a couple of hours sleep at his flat around dinner time before heading back to the Hub to work until three or four before Ianto caught another few hours of sleep down in Jack's bunk was not a schedule that made even the slightest bit of sense.
He missed actually sleeping in his bed, missed the morning sounds of his flat and Jack feigning reluctance to leave in the pre-dawn hours. He considered that maybe the Doctor had a point. Maybe Jack was hard to look at and easiest to desire when he was sliding away from you. Ianto didn't know and didn't think the answer really mattered, at least not in his case.
After all, he couldn't tear himself away from whatever they were doing, the gift of forgetfulness and bombs. There was so much work to do and all this strangeness to explore with the Rift, true, but with Jack as well.
The man seemed better now. Fine even, but even so Ianto knew he spent part of too many of his own days fantasizing about new ways to hurt him and smiling every time Jack wandered by to show him something random as if eagerly searching for his approval. Funny for a man who came from a time that didn't even have dogs to be so prone to acting like one. When he wasn't giving them orders, Ianto though he seemed so young lately. Except in bed, when after the sex, he seemed so old.
"All times are now," Ianto reminded himself at a whisper and shook his head.
In Jack's quarters, he no longer shied away from looking at the man's possessions. He spent so much time down there alone now, he assumed Jack just simply didn't care. There wasn't much to see anyway. The boxes of photos Ianto was already too familiar with and would never look at without Jack's escort anyway. His clothes. A few books. A few artifacts from places far off -- some Ianto recognized from his work and some he didn't, but he made a point to ask about none of them, not because the stories were surely private or perhaps discomforting, but because he was scared they related to things Jack could no longer remember.
He was back with them, by and large, but Ianto suspected that which was less necessary, less relevant, had restored itself with less precision. But again, he didn't ask. It wasn't his loss to inquire after, after all.
Ianto wondered what inspired Jack to keep the mementos he did and why he hadn't bothered at other times. He wondered what it was like when Jack lost something, too -- a letter crumbling to dust, a photo forgotten in a pair of slacks before being taken to the wash, the notes of a pencil smeared and faded beyond recognition by an accidental swipe of the hand. He wondered if the souvenirs of Jack's life were so meager because of such attrition or if because Jack was so assiduously trying to avoid all those little darts of loss.
In Jack's place, he had no idea what he would have done, but for his own life, he did document. At first, it was because he'd had no one to tell about Lisa and then because he was terrified that he'd be stricken from earth, or at least memory, at any moment because of her. But then it became about Jack, about holding every moment he was sure could never, ever come twice. Because Jack had worlds to fuck and nations to love and Ianto Jones was just a tailor's son from Cardiff with a couple of dead parents and a bad habit of lying.
The thing was, they were a lot alike, he and Jack. Kids of meager means who got up to things and then wound up with bigger lives than had originally been set out for them. Sure, the scale was different, but Ianto thought the problems might be a bit the same. Once he'd wanted a car just to keep up with his friends and couldn't handle the cost until his parents had passed on, while Jack thousands of years later and a long time ago had apparently lain in the dark on sand dunes inhabited by strange animals and stared up at stars he couldn't afford.
It made Ianto smile. Jack had got eternity, and Ianto had got the fun-house. It didn't make either of them glad, not really. But for now, for this little tiny while, they were happy. Maybe not all the time and maybe not for long, but there was a lesson to it somehow, a consistency of the species, a proof that somehow what he was doing, even if it was mostly fetching coffee some days, mattered.
From her perch on the railing, waiting for her gels to be ready to run through the scope -- faster here at Jack's Torchwood than it was even at U.N.I.T., but still not an instantaneous process -- Martha studied Ianto, who seemed to have descended into some kind of abstracted reverie. Exhaustion, she diagnosed instinctively, too much caffeine, and not enough proper food. She was going to have to put her foot down about everyone taking some more rest, she thought. They were all on the ragged edge and pushing it; soon there'd be collapsing, if she weren't mistaken, and she knew she wasn't.
She kicked her feet idly and then watched Gwen, armed with several sheafs of what looked like graph paper, hit Ianto on the side of the head to get his attention. Ianto jumped with surprise. Martha couldn't quite figure out their dynamic these days; the last time she'd been here, she'd been pretty certain that Gwen was carrying a torch for Jack not unlike her own for the Doctor, except Jack seemed much more interested in her in return -- of course, Jack seemed interested in everybody, so she wasn't sure if that meant anything.
And then there were Ianto and Jack, which seemed like it might cause some tension between the two of them, except it didn't seem to. And Ianto seemed more than just the efficient man-of-all-work that he'd been before, except when he didn't.
Everything seemed to have changed since the deaths of Tosh, who she hadn't known well, but who'd been kind, and of Owen, whose absence still, she discovered, gutted her. Martha just tried not to think about it. Analysing Gwen and Ianto though, that was a perfect distraction, and she almost wished she could ring up the Doctor and dish about the whole thing, since obviously Jack wasn't a suitable person to do that with. For once. Still a lack of a suitable gossip buddy wasn't going to stop her because the whole thing was just confusing, and Martha was determined to figure it out.
What were they talking about? She tried to listen more closely while pretending to tap at her PDA, in hopes that they'd just forget she was there.
"At least look. I’ve been thinking about it for days, and I finally figured it out!" Gwen was saying excitedly. "In the middle of the night."
"You're being mad, Gwen, it'll never work."
"No, it will! It hit me like a ton of bricks in the middle of the night. I sat bolt upright in bed, with Rhys snoring in the background like thunder, and I knew. It's perfect!"
Then Ianto looked down at the graph paper, and began sorting through it. "No, wait..." he said, and then trailed off.
"Yes," Gwen said. "Exactly. And Mickey explained to me, about the load-bearing walls, and we have the piece of tech in the archives that they used. You can find it!"
Martha looked around at the Hub. What were they on about? It had pretty much returned to normal; there hadn't been any shaking for days, and the chains and things were back in the walls. Why were they still so obsessed with the Hub structure?
They were both bent over the papers, and then Martha saw Gwen give a little bounce of glee.
"Hmm," Ianto said.
"See?" Gwen said merrily.
"Down, not across."
"Yes!"
He looked up at Gwen with an indecipherable expression.
"Sheets!" Gwen said hurriedly, and Martha started to wonder if they were talking in code.
Just then, Ianto caught sight of her staring, and he started to clear away the papers in a hurry. Gwen looked over, saw her, and immediately began to fall all over herself to help him. Martha decided she'd had enough. Spying wasn't working. She'd have to go in deep to collect any real intelligence.
"Oi," she said. "What are you lot whispering about over there? Is it a conspiracy? Can anyone join?"
Gwen looked over at Ianto, who was staring fixedly at the ground now. Then she looked back towards Martha, and a slow smile spread over her face.
Martha couldn't help smiling in return, although she was beginning to wonder, what precisely, had she just let herself in for?
***
They should have been eating dinner or resting or even working. Something more reasonable than this at any rate, but when they got to his flat, Ianto had stripped out of his own clothes and not bothered to do more than drop Jack's pants, before cuffing the man's hands behind his back and shoving him to his knees. Ianto had gagged him with his briefs then, amused at the way Jack moaned and both struggled against and sucked at them as they held his mouth awkwardly, painfully, humiliatingly wide.
"I hate that you don't sleep," Ianto said, bending Jack over so that his chest rested on the seat of the chair by the window and pressing slick fingers into him roughly. "Hate that I can't make you sleep like this for me."
When Jack didn't just moan, but nodded, Ianto smiled. "You want it too," Ianto said breathless and full of wonder, and Jack nodded again.
It was so good not to think. That was the gift of this and the gift, that Ianto always provided by doing everything he did from managing the paperwork, to looking after the coat, and now to breaking Jack apart.
When he'd dropped the cuffs onto Ianto's bed in the dark the first time, he'd needed this. Now he didn't. But it was fun and fascinating to see what Ianto would come up with, and it seemed a fair trade to take this in return for the look of utter happiness on Ianto's face each day at six when Jack bounded up to him and suggested they take off for a few hours and then said please.
It wouldn't last forever. The balance would shift, again, soon, and if and when it came back to this place at some other time, it wouldn't be quite the same, so Jack was going to ride this as best he could because Ianto wouldn't last forever either, even though that seemed impossible with his mouth filled with the taste of cotton and musk. A fixed point, maybe, this moment as Ianto pressed into him with a hiss.
"So good, Jack," Ianto said softly, fingers digging into Jack's hair as he thrust into him. "Should let you suck my cock at the Hub more. Might calm you down."
Jack nodded frantically, although it wasn't really true, and Ianto laughed and reached around him to pinch his nipples hard.
Ianto didn't know why, but somehow gagging Jack was helping him to stay silent himself on the many things that he wasn't yet ready to say to him, mainly because he wasn't sure of them himself yet. But he was as much Jack's batman as he was anything else and whether it was solving the matter of Jack's current and rather understandable disaffection with his personal space, or giving him these odd, painful, exhilarating hours that he still seemed to require -- it was all perfectly, reasonably within his purview, wasn't it?
If he didn't think about it too hard, anyway.
He made sure Jack came into his hand, lest he stain the chair, and then smeared his come across the man's face and through his hair as he finished himself off inside him. Ianto was always marking Jack any way he could, and he knew now, because Jack had said, that even after they showered, he'd still be able to smell Ianto on him the rest of the long, dark night in the Hub.
And Ianto was glad. His bedroom, much as he loved it, was really too airy to contain what he and Jack were. He found he missed the amber light and stone walls, afraid he might forget the difference in these nights between house and home. Home probably wasn't for people like him and Jack. Not together anyway, and where it should have grieved him, it made him proud. Even if it were hell, and Ianto missed the unbroken nights of sleep, he adored their nights alone together in the Hub, sifting over work in dim light as if they were the last two men alive left to tend to the clockwork of all the universe. Oddly, he found it reassuring.
"Fuck," Jack gasped, when Ianto finally pulled his briefs out of the man's mouth.
"Good?" Ianto asked, still panting, not even having withdrawn from him yet.
"Yeah. Like the improvisation. Can't imagine what you'd do with actual toys," Jack said breathlessly.
Ianto hissed as he pulled out and sat down on the floor, leaning his back against his bed. "Don't need 'em."
Jack chuckled, but made no effort to move. Ianto would uncuff him all in good time.
"God, I'm tired," Ianto said.
"You could stay here tonight," Jack suggested. "I can take the overnight myself."
Ianto shook his head. "No," he said. "I've got stuff to finish up too."
"You're going to fall apart if you try to keep up with me," Jack pointed out good naturedly.
"Old man like you? Hardly," Ianto said, and reached up for Jack's hands so he could unlock the cuffs.
Jack slid down so he was sitting next to Ianto, then cuffed his head playfully. Ianto laughed a little, and then rested his head on Jack's shoulder.
"You're gonna fall asleep right here on the floor."
"Mmmm... no I'm not," Ianto mumbled.
"Yeah. You are."
Ianto sat up straight again, and knuckled his eyes. "No. Awake and ready for business. We should get back."
"Okay," Jack said, and stood up. As he wandered towards the bathroom to wash his face, he said, over his shoulder, "You know, I've been thinking."
"Oh?" Ianto asked, stifling a yawn.
"This isn't working. And with the new Rift stuff... someone needs to be there all the time. For a while, anyway. It was just luck that Martha caught that chemical compound."
"Yeah, so?"
"So I've been thinking. You're right. We need a better solution."
Ianto raised an eyebrow, amazed and slightly befuddled. Was Jack saying what he thought he was saying?
"I think you should get a new flat."
"What?" Ianto said. No, he realised. Jack was not saying what he thought he was saying. He was just being insanely, well, Jack.
"One closer to the Hub. What about some place in the building where Owen lived? That's nice and convenient."
"I like my flat, Jack."
"It's a long drive though, now that I'm spending all this time here."
"I like my flat, Jack," Ianto said again, enunciating every syllable distinctly. "And the drive. I'm not moving just so I can be a more convenient shag, so sorry. You'll have to think of something else."
"But it would be --"
"Jack. Stop. You've given a lot to Torchwood. I'd be the first to say that. But I have too, and this is my life, and it can't all just be about you. Most of it is, anyway. But I like my flat."
Jack came out of the bathroom and looked at him. Then shrugged, and said, "Okay. Just an idea. We'll keep going as we have been then."
Ianto met his eyes and let his affection shine through them. He wasn't sure why he wasn't more insulted; the idea that Jack wanted them not to, say... move in together, however ludicrous that idea was, but instead wanted to install him in a flat nearer to the office, like some kind of secretary cum mistress -- was on the face of it, rather offensive, but after everything, he was willing to cut Jack some slack. Only it was a pretty brilliant reason to simply solve the problem himself, as he'd just been given another stellar example of why Jack should really leave the logistics of all things, from relationships to coffee, to other people. Namely, Ianto.
Jack grinned at him sheepishly, before rubbing a wet flannel over his hair, probably trying to clean it, but only succeeding in slicking it back in a way that looked rather silly.
Ianto laughed and then leapt up and said, "Let me help you with that. We've got to get back. Gwen had some things she wanted me to look at."
***
Martha grimaced. Gwen and Ianto were arguing again. And while they had the decency to do it in low tones, probably so Jack wouldn't hear -- it was always about protecting Jack, it seemed, and that was entirely messed up too -- the strain was obvious.
She didn't like it, but she could manage it. She had a job to do and in many ways medicine answered to no real authority. Besides she hadn't signed her life away to this madness, thank god. It was one thing to have nothing for yourself when you were off in the Tardis, but to live here in a city and have no life, no friends, no nothing that wasn't Torchwood, that wasn't Jack? Well, that was just insane. Gwen's Rhys hardly counted. And Ianto had nothing to count at all.
Martha shook her head. What a mess. She'd left the Doctor because she'd wanted something for herself, and quite rightly too. She knew she wouldn’t stay here at Torchwood forever either. Watching Gwen and Ianto, she couldn't help but be relieved.
"No, Gwen, I get it. Believe me, I get it. But this is a call I need to make," Ianto said, frowning, yet again at the notes she had made.
"I don't know why you're hesitating."
Ianto put his hands on his hips and just stared at her. "Really? I find that hard to believe."
"I'd have done it by now."
Ianto snorted. "No surprise." He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Let me think about it, yeah?"
"I've got the plan, all you have to do is say yes. You want to say yes."
"I do, but I'm also the one that has to live with the consequences. You know, I should just talk to him about the whole thing," he said, dropping his pen onto the stack of papers.
"Do you ever?"
"Remarkably, yes," Ianto said, his voice becoming tart. He loved talking to Jack, loved it the most when it was at its most difficult probably. Ground down and left bright, there wasn't anything Jack did with him that didn't go that way in the end.
"Then why haven't you? About this?"
"It's complicated."
Gwen rolled her eyes.
"Look, go do something useful. I'll let you know, okay?"
"Don't take forever, yeah? There's only so much faffing around you can do before he gets wise," she said, heading back to her workstation.
Ianto repressed the urge to note that wisdom had nothing to do with this little plan, which might, of course, well have been her point.
"I've got those reports on the --"
"Jesus Christ, Mickey, is there some reason you can't bring these things right to Gwen?" Ianto asked, laughing in an utterly miserable way as he shoved the reports back at him. If they didn't involve expenses, he didn't care.
"But --"
"Nope. Gwen."
He saw Mickey catch Martha's eye; she nodded her head towards Gwen, which was what finally got Mickey moving.
"Thanks," Ianto called to her.
She shrugged, unsure of whether to get into the middle of it, or to just go to Jack with it.
***
"All right kids, new plan. We need to put in an actual rotation, otherwise no one is noticing who isn't sleeping, no one is finding any time to spend outside of this place and no one is in good enough condition to get anything done. We still don't know what's in the water and whether it matters --"
"The filters I pulled out of storage are catching it though, sir," Ianto noted.
"Great. Now we just need to find out if we need to reverse engineer them to protect the rest of Cardiff and consider the potential impact of this stuff on the ecosystem as a whole."
"Maybe it'll be irrelevant," Gwen offered.
"Since when do aliens work like that?" Mickey quipped.
"Look, we need to do one thing at a time. We were discussing the rota," Ianto cut in.
"Which is why you shouldn't have interrupted," Jack sighed.
"I don't even see how a rota is practical," Gwen said.
"Yeah, well, what we're doing now isn't practical either," Ianto shot back.
"Bloody hell," Mickey grumbled, running his hands through his hair.
"This needs to be sorted, Jack. Now," Martha said quietly.
"What, exactly, needs sorting here? Because whatever the problem you're all having is, I'm not getting it and we don't have time for it."
"Would someone just please tell me what the hell the command structure is around here?" Mickey pleaded.
Jack looked at Mickey quizzically. "I give orders. You people follow them," he said slowly. "Gwen's in charge if I'm not available. What's the problem?"
"What about Ianto?" Mickey asked.
"What about me?" Ianto looked nervously around the room.
Jack scrubbed a hand over his face. Oh. New people who needed more formal structure to figure out how they fit into place, and Ianto having had a lot more to do than just keep them organized for months now. Power struggle. Great. At least Martha didn’t seem to be involved, and that was very lucky, because Jack was fairly certain he’d hand over the reins of this whole enterprise if she just asked nicely, and batted her eyelashes. He knew when he was outranked, after all. But Martha’d obviously learned a thing or two about command and discipline over at U.N.I.T. Maybe he should send the rest of the team over there for lessons. He cleared his throat.
"As I said. I give the orders. You people follow them. Gwen's in charge if I'm not available. If you're supposed to answer to someone else in the field or on a project, I'll let you know. Any questions?"
Everyone shook their heads.
"I can't hear you," Jack said, not at all pleased.
They each said no in turn, except Ianto, who couldn't help but add sir on the end.
Jack sighed. "Mickey and Martha, go take a break, but stay close. Ianto and Gwen," he said, with false cheer, "let's have a chat."
He waited silently while Martha and Mickey scrambled from the room, and Gwen and Ianto sat there at the table like children waiting to be scolded. Well, he could oblige.
Placing his hands on the table, he leaned over them. Ianto and Gwen shrank back. "What, exactly, is the problem here, kids?" he said sternly.
"No problem, sir," Ianto said, and Gwen nodded.
"Okay, pat answer given, thanks very much for playing. Now, let's get real." They were silent, staring down at the table, not meeting his eyes; he stood back then, and tapped his foot impatiently. "Look, I'm going to wait 'til I get an answer -- even if Cardiff gets swallowed whole by whatever's in the water, so you might want to give in sooner rather than later, huh?"
"It's nothing, Jack," Gwen said firmly.
"I don't have time for this," Jack said. "I don't know what's going on between the two of you, but it ends now. Gwen, you know you're second in command here. Ianto, you've come a long way in the past few months, but you're not ready for that yet. You know it, I know it, Gwen knows it; what the hell is this?"
Gwen and Ianto exchanged glances.
"You're not telling us anything new, Jack," Gwen said. "I just think... well, Mickey. He was a bit... confused. About the two of you."
"Confused?" Jack said. "Hell, it's like pulling teeth. Would one of you just spit it out? You could have cleared this up for Mickey days ago. Martha too, not that she needs it."
"There's a reason they have non-fraternization rules in the army, Jack," Ianto finally said, almost as if he were figuring it out for himself as he spoke. "Not that you ever seemed to have paid attention to them. People get confused. And you've been agreeing with me, sometimes, in meetings...," he said, and then trailed off once he caught sight of the look on Jack's face.
"Are you fucking joking?" Jack asked, disbelief warring with exasperation. Exasperation was winning.
Ianto and Gwen stared back at him, but didn't answer.
"No, really. Are you fucking kidding me or what? Let's remember who you're talking to. You're not going to give me lessons about how they do it in the army, okay?" Jack shook his head in wonder at the idiocy of it all. "Listen up, once and for all. Ianto, the day I make a command decision based on where or with whom I get my dick wet, or who I choose to... how did you put it? 'fraternize with'... it'll be a cold day in hell, all right? Gwen, you're perfectly aware of that, aren't you?"
Gwen nodded. "Yes, Jack."
"Ianto?"
"Yes, sir."
"Now," he said. "Am I correct in assuming there is actually no problem between the two of you? No incipient power struggle or palace coup I should be aware of? No naked mud wrestling?"
They both nodded like marionettes he'd just pulled the strings of.
"Too bad. Mickey's new around here. If he needed straightening out, you should've done it, Gwen. That's what command is all about. Don't just sit there and try to pacify people and hope for the best. Forward momentum, okay?"
"Okay," she said softly.
"Now, would you mind getting the others and telling them to be back here in five? Ianto, stay behind. I'd like a word with you."
Gwen brushed Ianto's shoulder sympathetically on the way out, obviously thinking that he was in trouble and about to get reamed out more than Jack was willing to do with any audience, even her. Jack wasn't sure she was wrong either.
When she'd left, he stared at Ianto until he dropped his eyes to look fixedly at the table.
"Why didn't you talk to me about this little problem before? With Mickey? Before we just had to have a 'let's share our feelings' chick flick moment? In a meeting?" Jack rapped out.
"Sir, I..."
"Yeah?"
Ianto didn't reply.
"Listen, if you think I indulge you when defending the Earth is on the line, you need to have your head examined. And if you don't believe your ideas are worthwhile, don't fucking bring them up."
"It was a stupid thing to say," Ianto admitted.
"Yeah, it was," Jack replied. "Worse, it's boring. And I haven't got time for it."
"You're very right, sir."
"Look," Jack said, softening his voice. "In this organization, you're meant to be my man for details. That means staying on top of all this. You can't let it overwhelm you, or blindside you, or let your insecurities get in the way of thinking clearly and dealing with it all."
Ianto looked up at him, blinking.
"Showing initiative's not the problem, Ianto. Sometimes you're wrong, sometimes you're right. But that's only the first part. Looking around for the consequences of that initiative -- you've gotta think all that through. Step by step, so you know where it's all going to end up. Until it's instinct and you don't have to think any more. It'll just come."
Ianto nodded, as if filing this information away for later perusal, and Jack smiled.
"Okay. Now, no more of the bullshit, yeah? We've wasted enough time."
"Yes, sir," Ianto said.
"Go call the others," Jack said. And then added offhandedly, "Oh, and Ianto? I know you're some exciting combination of embarrassed and angry over all this. You can take it out of me later, yeah?"
Ianto stood stock still, arrested on his way out by Jack's words. He turned to look back at Jack, who could see he was blushing.
"Yeah," Jack purred, with relish. "That's what I thought. Later. 'Til then though... still the boss. And didn't I give you an order? Go get them, Ianto. That alien compound isn't going to wait for us forever."
"I thought it might, sir. Isn't that the problem?"
As Ianto headed out the door, Jack thought he'd probably be fine. Not too flustered to quip, and noticeably excited by the promise of exacting his revenge on Jack's hide. Start of a fun night, Jack was beginning to think.
***
Ianto smiled as he swung the car out of the garage, going what he considered just a little too fast, but these hours in his flat with Jack were necessarily brief and he wanted to scrape every second out of them he could. Besides, Jack liked speed and it wouldn't kill him -- not really and despite all his habits -- to give it to him.
"Did I do this to you?" Jack asked, and Ianto could hear the smile in his voice.
"Oh yeah," Ianto said, glancing at him briefly and accelerating just a hair more.
Everything between them was slivers and fractions, a constant edge, a million tiny tensions. No matter how often it caught him off balance or wounded his pride or found him half-afraid, Ianto was starting to realize that he liked things like this.
Instinct, like Jack had said, he supposed.
He dug his phone out of his pocket and speed dialed Gwen.
"We're in the car," he said, when she picked up, "but yes."
Jack frowned. He had no idea what Ianto was up to or who he was calling, but felt fairly sure it wasn't related to whatever terribly filthy assignation they were about to have. On some distant level Jack thought that might be a pity, but if the 20th century had taught him anything it was the joys of ownership, and there was something to be said for having Ianto all to himself, even if that had been the other way around of late.
He chuckled to himself. Funny thing that, and while it couldn't last Jack was determined to let it go on and on until Ianto could think of no other way to hurt him and had to beg for Jack to turn the tables instead. And that would be luscious.
"What was that?" he asked, when Ianto clicked the phone shut.
"Instinct," the other man said, shifting gears and keeping his eyes on the road.
Ianto didn't even touch Jack until he'd unlocked the door to his flat. Then he pushed him inside and only waited to slap him across the face and shove him up against the wall until Jack took off his bloody coat. In the coat he was still the captain, and Ianto could handle a lot of things, but he couldn't handle that. It would have been too much like the roof, and he didn't like to think about that, especially when the crack of skin under his palm was so pleasant.
There was no gentle submission to Jack today, and Ianto didn't care. It had been a difficult day, and it was almost reassuring to him that Jack was as demanding about taking his pain as his pleasure.
Half undressed, Ianto eventually shoved him away and headed for his bedroom. "Take your clothes off and get in here," he called.
Jack couldn't help but marvel at Ianto turning his back on him, so sure he would follow. He would, of course. How could he not? How could he not reward that? It took a hell of a lot of courage, he knew. He remembered the first time he'd done it himself in another place and time when it hadn't been an act at all.
When he got there, Ianto pushed him down on the bed, straddled his legs and slapped his cock. He gasped at the sharp, bright white of the pain.
"I'm not even going to tie you down. Don't touch me," he said, and Jack fisted his hands in the sheets, hoping that would be enough.
Since this had started, Ianto had sometimes spent ridiculous amounts of time pondering the right idea, the right answer, the right trick that was clever or wanted and absolutely, positively, not a repeat. Some days it was difficult. Some days it wasn't. Today it didn't require thinking at all. He supposed Jack was right. The anger helped. And the shame. And Jack hot and blushing under him, eyes clearly pricking with tears every time Ianto slapped the hard length of him.
He smiled. This was very, very satisfying.
It was even more satisfying when Jack came, whimpering and gasping at the end and obviously sore and miserable and exalted. Ianto chuckled and would have made some dark remark about Jack not being able to even remember his own name, but he knew there was a possibility that this was already true and had been for some time.
Jack sucked him after, quiet and almost sweet. It seemed to go on for a long time, and Ianto would have found it frustrating if it hadn't been so surreally tender and so filled with apology. He played with Jack's hair and stared at his ceiling and merely thought Yes.
Gwen was still at the Hub when they got back, which earned her a quick, half-hearted remark about how she should be home with Rhys before Jack went up to his office, still quiet and full of ease.
"We've got to solve this thing with the compound first or he'll kill us," Ianto said quietly.
"Did you talk to him?"
Ianto shook his head. "It'll sort in the end."
"What made you decide?" she asked, and Ianto noted how she left out the obvious after today.
"We're not the only ones who learned something about how to lead today, yeah?" he said and went to his work station, determined to examine the various problems of their mysterious compound until he was so tired there was no way the answer wouldn't just come to him because something would have to take up residence in his empty, empty brain.
He watched his screen studiously, even as he could feel Gwen's eyes on his back, wondering probably what Jack had said to him after she'd been thrown out of the conference room, wondering if what Ianto had said was really just some nonsense about sex instead. He didn't plan to tell her. It didn't matter. And the differences were slight besides.
***
Mickey watched with interest as they all assembled once more in the boardroom. He wasn’t planning on staying here at Torchwood long, but there was work to be done, and he didn’t want to quit fighting while figuring out what the hell he was going to do with himself back in this universe. Meanwhile, there was a job that needed doing here, and also it was bloody entertaining. This place was some bizarre combination of a nuthouse, army barracks, feeding time at the zoo, and seemed to have the drama quotient of the entire cast of Eastenders, times maybe a billion. At least he didn't think he'd be getting bored any time soon. Better than telly, it was -- especially since he didn't figure in it at all, which after Rose and Jake and the Doctor, Mickey was thanking his lucky stars for.
"Well, there's good news, and there's bad news, sir," Ianto reported. "Which would you like first?"
"The bad news," Jack said. "Hit me."
Gwen chimed in. "The filter devices aren't working as well as we'd hoped. Containment is well... no longer an option."
"Great," Jack said. "That sounds more like catastrophic news."
"No," said Martha. "That's where you're wrong.
"Really?" Jack said. "Astonish me."
"Okay," she answered, addressing them all. "Here's the good news. Thanks to Ianto and his archives," and Ianto nodded in acknowledgement, "and Mickey's work with hacking the leftovers of the Lazarus Project, we've been able to construct a device that we think will advance the isotopic cycle and beta decay on the chemical so we can see what might happen to it."
"You're speeding up time for it?" Jack asked.
"Yep," Martha said. "So far, it seems relatively inert. But I think we've all had enough experience with ticking bombs, eh?"
"Definitely," Jack agreed admiringly. "I'm impressed," he added. "Especially with you, Martha. I didn't think you had fond memories of that particular piece of technology."
She stared straight back at him. "I've dealt with worse," she said unflinchingly.
Jack nodded at her.
"And it seems to be mutating into something else," Martha went on. "I don't recognize it, but I thought you might, Jack. So I've put the model up on the display." She hit a button, and the new molecule rotated in front of them.
Jack looked at it and started to laugh.
"What?" Gwen asked. "What is it?"
"It's birth control," he got out, still sputtering with laughter. "And I thought the estrogen in the rain was funny."
"Birth control?" everyone said together.
"Estrogen in the rain?" Mickey added under his breath, looking around at everyone to see if he were the only one out of the loop. But they all looked equally puzzled, except Gwen who was looking nostalgic and glittery and far away.
"For silicon based life-forms," Jack finished, ignoring him.
They looked at him puzzled.
"You know," Jack mused aloud, "I've always wondered why it took you guys so long to evolve AI. Anyway. Guess we can ignore it. Huh."
They all stared at him with varying degrees of bafflement.
"Okay," he said. "Nice work, everybody. Next?"
"That's it?" Mickey hissed at Gwen. "What about the next time some chemical decides to come through and do a walkabout?"
Gwen looked at Jack as if he'd have an answer. "Nothing we can do," Jack said, in response to her pleading look. "If you think of something, let me know. Otherwise, we just play it as it comes. What's next?"
"Well, Jack," Gwen said while, Mickey noticed, carefully not looking at Ianto. "We seem to be having a small problem with some alien gun runners. Over Aberystwyth way."
Mickey stared at them.
***
Jack tossed a bag full of equipment into the back of the S.U.V.
"Are you sure I oughtn't come with you, Jack?" Ianto asked innocently.
"No," Jack said. "We've been over this. You and Gwen hold down the fort here. Mickey's good in a fight, and he'll be fine to back me up. I want you here monitoring the Rift. It's Aberystwth. How serious can it be?"
"I don't know, Jack," Ianto said. "You might get beat up by some locals when they hear how you pronounce it."
Jack laughed. "That's why I'm bringing the guns."
"Yes sir," Ianto said. "Whatever you say."
"And you've got Martha. Pay attention to her, okay? She's got nerves of solid steel, that woman, and you can always depend on her in a crisis."
"I know, Jack," Ianto said.
"I'll be back before you know it."
"Yes, sir," Ianto said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "We can manage for the number of hours it'll take you to get to Aberystwth. Somehow. We can also tie our own shoes and everything."
"I know, I know," Jack said and laughed again. Ianto pulled him in for a kiss by the collar of his coat, just as Mickey came into the garage.
"Captain," he greeted Jack, who Ianto still had collared. "Nice to see who actually runs the show round here. Ianto, can I talk to you before we take off? I want to show you some new software I've stuck up on the Rift monitor. Might be useful."
"Certainly," Ianto said, letting go of Jack's coat.
"Back in a mo, boss," he said jovially to Jack. "Road trip! I pick the tunes, eh?"
"Sure," Jack answered. "As long as you like big band."
Mickey's face fell. "Fucking great," he said. "Remind me again why I work here?"
Ianto laughed, and Mickey glared at him. "This is going to be a really long day," he grumbled. "Come on, Ianto. Wouldn't want Captain Cheesecake here to get bored and leave without me, would we?"
"How many times do I have to remind you?" Jack yelled after them. "It's Captain Beefcake!"
When they were walking down to the Hub, Ianto looked at Mickey curiously. "What's this new software then?"
"Doesn’t exist," said Mickey.
"What?"
"I said, it doesn’t exist. Lot like those so-called gun runners of yours. That leak about the alien guns? No way a bunch of yokels from Aberystwth hacked this software to even find out about a stockpile, which by the way, doesn't even seem to actually be real. No way, no how."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Ianto said.
"Yeah, whatever. How daft do you think I am? Right, don't answer that. Jack believes you, because he can't imagine why you might lie about something like this and is apparently restless enough to want this sort of ridiculous fight. I don't give two shits about it one way or another, except now that I've got to take a several hour long road trip listening to sodding big band, for Christ's sake. I just wanted you to know that you didn't fool me, okay?"
"I really don't know what you could possibly be referring to."
"And all those questions about blueprints. Listen, I'll keep him busy as long as I can, all right? But you better be done with whatever you're doing by this time tomorrow, because my ability to hang out with fucking Captain Jack's not gonna hold out any longer than that."
Ianto tried to glare at him, but somehow he couldn't. Mickey stuck out a hand, and Ianto shook it.
"Fair enough," Ianto said, and then he added curiously, "you and Jack. How do you do it?"
"Huh?" Mickey asked. "How do I do what?"
"I've never seen anyone so entirely uninterested in him before. Are you just straight or what? And even then..."
Mickey laughed. "Paranoid much? Not everyone's gonna fall for your bloke. Doesn't mean they're not into men. Just means they might not be into Jack."
"I'm not even sure that's possible," Ianto said, actually puzzled enough by the idea to voice the thought aloud. "Not being into Jack."
"Yeah it is," Mickey said. "Trust me. I should know." Then he cocked an eyebrow at Ianto. "Maybe if you started thinking about all this as something you chose -- not something you couldn't help. Works better all round, I'd say."
Ianto stared at him.
"Anyway. Good luck, mate. See you on the flip side."
And with that, he was gone.
***
Ianto was nervous. Possibly even terrified. There was too much to do and too little time to do it in and it seemed that the only way he could cope was to keep reciting the list of tasks and his time estimates for them in his head over and over again as if that would make it true and also, somehow, guarantee that Jack wouldn't come back before they were done.
He wished he trusted Gwen on this more, because if he had he could have sent her out to do parts of this on her own, but he knew that without him there she might do something fatal, like buying something stylish. Jack would recognize her hand in it and be unamused. And despite the fact that he was about to reorganize essentially every facet of Jack's private space he really was trying to change things as little as possible.
None of it, he knew, would placate Jack in the short term. But all of it would help him dig out from under the ire he fully expected to be initially met with. This was a stupid, crazy thing he was doing based entirely on a spur of the moment decision and some horrible mix of Jack's selfishness (he was not moving) and Jack's kindness (Ianto could hardly believe the man was finally learning how to manage).
It was getting the bed into the Hub that made him the most miserable, and not just because it was difficult and because he felt foolish, but also because it reminded him of the night he'd brought Lisa into the Hub.
This time he hadn't bothered to edit or turn off the CCTV. Jack would know before he saw the footage anyway, and it might alleviate some of the trust issues, he thought, if he let Jack see exactly how he had managed this.
"Gwen? What's Ianto doing?" Martha asked.
"I think he's down in the archives," she said.
"No," Martha said, continuing to stare at her screen. "What's he doing?" This time she pointed to the feed she was watching in order to clarify the question.
"Er... I've talked him into something horribly rash."
"He's not moving into the Hub, is he?" Martha asked aghast, as she stared at him struggling with the mattress.
"Oh. No. God, no," Gwen said with some relief. If Martha had asked a question like that she might not be entirely horrified by what they were doing, at least until she got to the part about removing a chunk of the floor. "They actually just had a bit of a thing about it. Jack wanted him to move closer to the Hub."
"That sex at six thing would be less conspicuous if they didn't always come back from their dinner break with dinner," Martha noted.
Gwen snorted. "I think it's sweet. They used to drive us all crazy trying to hide it."
Martha made a distracted noise. "So seriously, what is he doing?"
It was getting things out of Jack's cubby that was rapidly proving to be the most annoying task. It was remarkably inefficient for Ianto to carry things up the ladder into Jack's office himself, but it seemed hideously invasive to allow anyone else to help. But the fact was he needed help if he was to stay on his timetable. Oh stopwatch, he thought, I bet you never imagined being used for this.
Jack and Gwen were close, but he wouldn't like her going through his things. Hell, he didn't even like Ianto going through his things. Martha, on the other hand, who he hadn't even let in on this mess -- that was probably both wrong and foolish of him -- likely knew more of Jack's secrets than they did, but also had no sense of the fallible, human and very small life he lived below ground. It was, really, an unwinnable situation, or so Ianto thought until he emerged from the hole in the floor of Jack's office awkwardly carrying a stack of books only to be met by Martha, who sat there cross-legged on the floor.
"Gwen told me," she said, taking the books from Ianto.
"Do you think I'm daft?" he asked.
"Yes," she said simply.
"That's what I thought," he said, and went back down for more of Jack's things.
"You should have told me," she said, when next he surfaced. "I might have thought you were up to something and called him back. Or shot you."
"You're a doctor," Ianto said.
She shrugged. "I'd do a lot for Jack."
Ianto arched an eyebrow. "Wouldn't we all?"
She shrugged. "Sometimes yes, sometimes no," she said quietly.
"The Doctor," Ianto noted.
"The Doctor," she agreed, and he headed back down, this time for Jack's clothes.
***
Ianto was trying, desperately, not to become hysterical. "Okay, Gwen. Your plan. Your plan failure. What's plan B?" Ianto asked, staring plaintively at the sonic blaster that clearly had no intention of working ever again.
Gwen shrugged. "Explosives, I guess."
Ianto looked to the heavens, or, rather, the ceiling of the archives. He sure as hell wasn't going to get any help there. There wasn't even Myfanwy, who lived up closer to the surface, to threaten to eat him and put him out of his utterly abject misery.
It was one thing to carefully cut a hole (albeit a giant, room-sized one) in a non-load bearing floor that wasn't even a part of the original plans. It was another to just blow it up and hope it all worked out. They were flying blind unless John Hart suddenly showed up to offer advice on controlled explosions, but Ianto really, really hoped he wouldn't. He didn't even have time to shoot the man right now.
"I've changed my mind," Ianto declared.
"You can't do that now," Gwen exclaimed. "We've come too far."
"We're turning off the CCTV," he said despairingly. "I never want Jack to see this."
Continue to next part
Pairing/Characters: Jack/Ianto, Gwen, Mickey, Martha & the rest of the Doctor Who Cast.
Authors:
rm & kalichanRating/Warning: NC-17, bdsm, d/s,
Summary: Homeward bound. Takes place during and after Doctor Who 4x13: Journey's End.
Wordcount: ~31,700 [posted in 4 parts]
Authors' Notes: This is the seventh installment of our series, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. The title is from a song (and the album) by Stars. This is the first piece of this arc we’ve really had to write concurrent to an episode, because of the woeful lack of Torchwood Hub in DW 4x13. This means if you've not watched Journey's End, that the first part of the story might not make as much sense as it could. Here is a link to a brief recap, a full recap, a funny recap (with captioned pictures) or just the transcript -- in case you want to know what, exactly, is going on. Or you could just dive in and hope for the best! Next up, we'll be posting a Jack/Nine/Rose followed by a few other prequels covering the early education and adventures of both Jack and Ianto before returning to where we’ve left off with them in this timeline.
Previous installments:
A Strange Fashion of Forsaking
Dear Captain, Last Night I Slept in Mutiny
To Learn This Holding and the Holding Back
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
I Imagine You Now in That Other City
Many of My Favorite Things Are Broken
In Our Bedroom After the War, Part 1 and Part 2
"Jack's been going home with you a bit, yeah?" Gwen asked, trying to be casual.
"As much as Jack enjoys being walked in on, I don't," Ianto said lightly even as he braced for yet another nosy Gwen conversation. He’d thought that new people on the team would distract her, but they hadn't, not really. She cried less, but cleaved closer to him and Jack than ever.
"You ever think he should settle in with you?"
He looked at her blandly. "No. Never."
"Well why not?"
"Jack lives here."
"With no windows and a flying dinosaur."
"Yeah, so?"
"Ianto Jones, do not be intentionally dense with me."
"It wouldn't make any sense Gwen, although I'm sure we thank you for your concern."
"Well why bloody not?"
"One? Jack. Two? Me, thank you. Three? He doesn't even need to bloody sleep so what would be the point of that? Watching telly together before we went 'round to my call on my mum, who, by the way, has been dead for five years, on Sunday nights?"
"But it's nice, Ianto, living with someone."
"I remember. But we have this place instead."
That night, after Ianto had taken Jack's coat and hung it in his hall closet, he turned to find the other man on his knees.
"Oh Jack, are you ever going to tell me why you lied to me about this?" Ianto asked under his breath. Because Jack had once told him that they didn’t do this kind of thing where he came from, and Ianto was sure now that had been a lie – or at the very least, an evasion of truth. He knew he'd demand an answer at some point, but probably not for some time, or at least not until Jack was done asking Ianto for whatever this was night after night.
Not that it wasn't intoxicating. Not that Jack wasn't beautiful like this. Not that Ianto wasn't glad to learn how to be forceful with Jack without having to truly wound him or catapult them both into a discussion neither wanted to be having. But it was so strange and filled with the most terrible confessions.
Ianto knotted his fingers in Jack's hair and stroked his cheek, while Jack undid his trousers with his teeth and then pulled down his underwear in order to suck Ianto's cock into his mouth. This was still strange, but Ianto was beginning to think he might, on the whole, be able to get used to it.
Jack pointed at the screen, where Martha's presentation, explaining the new molecule she had identified contaminating the Cardiff water supply was rotating in all its chemical glory.
"So kids," he said, "the real question now is, are we getting chemical components in through the Rift? Or are we being seeded or dosed or something?"
"By aliens?" Mickey asked.
"Bingo," Jack said.
"I think the second makes more sense," Gwen said.
"I don't agree," Ianto said.
"Why not?" Gwen asked. "It's never happened the other way before. Even the bubonic plague came with plague victims."
"Because," Ianto said, "the idea of the first thing is too horrible to contemplate, and in my experience with Torchwood, that's the one that's usually true."
"Lovely," Mickey said. "When aliens dosing you with weird chemicals is the good answer."
"I still think that's more likely," Gwen declared.
"We should investigate both," Ianto said.
"Okay," Jack said. "Martha will stay here and keep investigating the compound itself for clues. Gwen and I'll look for the creatures who might be responsible. Mickey and Ianto, get with the chemical sniffers and the location of the Rift spikes and see if this stuff's walking in here on its own."
"Wait, that's ridiculous, putting me and Mickey together--"
"Jack, I think it's a waste of time--"
"Quiet!" Jack yelled, cutting them off. "I don't remember asking for all this backchat. Decision's made, troops. Ianto, we're covering all the bases, so don't complain. Gwen, it's important to examine all areas 'til we know what we're dealing with. Conversation over."
Mickey and Martha exchanged glances. The command structure here seemed a bit unclear.
He'd told Jack to stroke himself while he watched, and he'd expected preening and porn movie absurdity, not Jack whimpering softly as the man squeezed at his balls and sucked at his own fingers and then certainly not Jack coming when Ianto decided to jerk himself off onto his face.
Laying side by side on the bed and staring at the ceiling, Jack still a mess, they were both quieter after, almost unavoidably, Ianto thought. It surprised him a little. He might have previously suspected this sort of thing would be less complicated with another man, but that didn't seem to be the case.
Jack chuckled to himself.
"What?" Ianto asked, turning his head.
"Just something raunchy. A long time ago."
"Do you want to get cleaned up?" Ianto asked.
"Not really. Do we need to get back?"
"I don't know; you're the boss."
"I don't know. Ask Gwen," Ianto said for the third time that day. He was sure he sounded aggravated, but he didn't, at this point, much care anymore. Mickey hadn't learned the great secret of asking for forgiveness not permission at Torchwood and he was sick of having to field each and every one of his ideas, especially when they usually fell nowhere near his purview.
"Why do you keep pushing me off on Gwen, mate?" Mickey asked.
"Pardon?"
"It's not about Captain Flash, is it? Because it's never been anything like that, trust me."
"Like what?" Ianto said, coldly.
"Oi! Never mind," Mickey said and stalked off.
Ianto ran his hands over his face. He supposed he should try to make sense out of what just happened and see if Mickey wanted anything important, but he felt both too distracted and sleep deprived for the task. This routine he and Jack had fallen into was killing him.
Sex and a couple of hours sleep at his flat around dinner time before heading back to the Hub to work until three or four before Ianto caught another few hours of sleep down in Jack's bunk was not a schedule that made even the slightest bit of sense.
He missed actually sleeping in his bed, missed the morning sounds of his flat and Jack feigning reluctance to leave in the pre-dawn hours. He considered that maybe the Doctor had a point. Maybe Jack was hard to look at and easiest to desire when he was sliding away from you. Ianto didn't know and didn't think the answer really mattered, at least not in his case.
After all, he couldn't tear himself away from whatever they were doing, the gift of forgetfulness and bombs. There was so much work to do and all this strangeness to explore with the Rift, true, but with Jack as well.
The man seemed better now. Fine even, but even so Ianto knew he spent part of too many of his own days fantasizing about new ways to hurt him and smiling every time Jack wandered by to show him something random as if eagerly searching for his approval. Funny for a man who came from a time that didn't even have dogs to be so prone to acting like one. When he wasn't giving them orders, Ianto though he seemed so young lately. Except in bed, when after the sex, he seemed so old.
"All times are now," Ianto reminded himself at a whisper and shook his head.
In Jack's quarters, he no longer shied away from looking at the man's possessions. He spent so much time down there alone now, he assumed Jack just simply didn't care. There wasn't much to see anyway. The boxes of photos Ianto was already too familiar with and would never look at without Jack's escort anyway. His clothes. A few books. A few artifacts from places far off -- some Ianto recognized from his work and some he didn't, but he made a point to ask about none of them, not because the stories were surely private or perhaps discomforting, but because he was scared they related to things Jack could no longer remember.
He was back with them, by and large, but Ianto suspected that which was less necessary, less relevant, had restored itself with less precision. But again, he didn't ask. It wasn't his loss to inquire after, after all.
Ianto wondered what inspired Jack to keep the mementos he did and why he hadn't bothered at other times. He wondered what it was like when Jack lost something, too -- a letter crumbling to dust, a photo forgotten in a pair of slacks before being taken to the wash, the notes of a pencil smeared and faded beyond recognition by an accidental swipe of the hand. He wondered if the souvenirs of Jack's life were so meager because of such attrition or if because Jack was so assiduously trying to avoid all those little darts of loss.
In Jack's place, he had no idea what he would have done, but for his own life, he did document. At first, it was because he'd had no one to tell about Lisa and then because he was terrified that he'd be stricken from earth, or at least memory, at any moment because of her. But then it became about Jack, about holding every moment he was sure could never, ever come twice. Because Jack had worlds to fuck and nations to love and Ianto Jones was just a tailor's son from Cardiff with a couple of dead parents and a bad habit of lying.
The thing was, they were a lot alike, he and Jack. Kids of meager means who got up to things and then wound up with bigger lives than had originally been set out for them. Sure, the scale was different, but Ianto thought the problems might be a bit the same. Once he'd wanted a car just to keep up with his friends and couldn't handle the cost until his parents had passed on, while Jack thousands of years later and a long time ago had apparently lain in the dark on sand dunes inhabited by strange animals and stared up at stars he couldn't afford.
It made Ianto smile. Jack had got eternity, and Ianto had got the fun-house. It didn't make either of them glad, not really. But for now, for this little tiny while, they were happy. Maybe not all the time and maybe not for long, but there was a lesson to it somehow, a consistency of the species, a proof that somehow what he was doing, even if it was mostly fetching coffee some days, mattered.
From her perch on the railing, waiting for her gels to be ready to run through the scope -- faster here at Jack's Torchwood than it was even at U.N.I.T., but still not an instantaneous process -- Martha studied Ianto, who seemed to have descended into some kind of abstracted reverie. Exhaustion, she diagnosed instinctively, too much caffeine, and not enough proper food. She was going to have to put her foot down about everyone taking some more rest, she thought. They were all on the ragged edge and pushing it; soon there'd be collapsing, if she weren't mistaken, and she knew she wasn't.
She kicked her feet idly and then watched Gwen, armed with several sheafs of what looked like graph paper, hit Ianto on the side of the head to get his attention. Ianto jumped with surprise. Martha couldn't quite figure out their dynamic these days; the last time she'd been here, she'd been pretty certain that Gwen was carrying a torch for Jack not unlike her own for the Doctor, except Jack seemed much more interested in her in return -- of course, Jack seemed interested in everybody, so she wasn't sure if that meant anything.
And then there were Ianto and Jack, which seemed like it might cause some tension between the two of them, except it didn't seem to. And Ianto seemed more than just the efficient man-of-all-work that he'd been before, except when he didn't.
Everything seemed to have changed since the deaths of Tosh, who she hadn't known well, but who'd been kind, and of Owen, whose absence still, she discovered, gutted her. Martha just tried not to think about it. Analysing Gwen and Ianto though, that was a perfect distraction, and she almost wished she could ring up the Doctor and dish about the whole thing, since obviously Jack wasn't a suitable person to do that with. For once. Still a lack of a suitable gossip buddy wasn't going to stop her because the whole thing was just confusing, and Martha was determined to figure it out.
What were they talking about? She tried to listen more closely while pretending to tap at her PDA, in hopes that they'd just forget she was there.
"At least look. I’ve been thinking about it for days, and I finally figured it out!" Gwen was saying excitedly. "In the middle of the night."
"You're being mad, Gwen, it'll never work."
"No, it will! It hit me like a ton of bricks in the middle of the night. I sat bolt upright in bed, with Rhys snoring in the background like thunder, and I knew. It's perfect!"
Then Ianto looked down at the graph paper, and began sorting through it. "No, wait..." he said, and then trailed off.
"Yes," Gwen said. "Exactly. And Mickey explained to me, about the load-bearing walls, and we have the piece of tech in the archives that they used. You can find it!"
Martha looked around at the Hub. What were they on about? It had pretty much returned to normal; there hadn't been any shaking for days, and the chains and things were back in the walls. Why were they still so obsessed with the Hub structure?
They were both bent over the papers, and then Martha saw Gwen give a little bounce of glee.
"Hmm," Ianto said.
"See?" Gwen said merrily.
"Down, not across."
"Yes!"
He looked up at Gwen with an indecipherable expression.
"Sheets!" Gwen said hurriedly, and Martha started to wonder if they were talking in code.
Just then, Ianto caught sight of her staring, and he started to clear away the papers in a hurry. Gwen looked over, saw her, and immediately began to fall all over herself to help him. Martha decided she'd had enough. Spying wasn't working. She'd have to go in deep to collect any real intelligence.
"Oi," she said. "What are you lot whispering about over there? Is it a conspiracy? Can anyone join?"
Gwen looked over at Ianto, who was staring fixedly at the ground now. Then she looked back towards Martha, and a slow smile spread over her face.
Martha couldn't help smiling in return, although she was beginning to wonder, what precisely, had she just let herself in for?
They should have been eating dinner or resting or even working. Something more reasonable than this at any rate, but when they got to his flat, Ianto had stripped out of his own clothes and not bothered to do more than drop Jack's pants, before cuffing the man's hands behind his back and shoving him to his knees. Ianto had gagged him with his briefs then, amused at the way Jack moaned and both struggled against and sucked at them as they held his mouth awkwardly, painfully, humiliatingly wide.
"I hate that you don't sleep," Ianto said, bending Jack over so that his chest rested on the seat of the chair by the window and pressing slick fingers into him roughly. "Hate that I can't make you sleep like this for me."
When Jack didn't just moan, but nodded, Ianto smiled. "You want it too," Ianto said breathless and full of wonder, and Jack nodded again.
It was so good not to think. That was the gift of this and the gift, that Ianto always provided by doing everything he did from managing the paperwork, to looking after the coat, and now to breaking Jack apart.
When he'd dropped the cuffs onto Ianto's bed in the dark the first time, he'd needed this. Now he didn't. But it was fun and fascinating to see what Ianto would come up with, and it seemed a fair trade to take this in return for the look of utter happiness on Ianto's face each day at six when Jack bounded up to him and suggested they take off for a few hours and then said please.
It wouldn't last forever. The balance would shift, again, soon, and if and when it came back to this place at some other time, it wouldn't be quite the same, so Jack was going to ride this as best he could because Ianto wouldn't last forever either, even though that seemed impossible with his mouth filled with the taste of cotton and musk. A fixed point, maybe, this moment as Ianto pressed into him with a hiss.
"So good, Jack," Ianto said softly, fingers digging into Jack's hair as he thrust into him. "Should let you suck my cock at the Hub more. Might calm you down."
Jack nodded frantically, although it wasn't really true, and Ianto laughed and reached around him to pinch his nipples hard.
Ianto didn't know why, but somehow gagging Jack was helping him to stay silent himself on the many things that he wasn't yet ready to say to him, mainly because he wasn't sure of them himself yet. But he was as much Jack's batman as he was anything else and whether it was solving the matter of Jack's current and rather understandable disaffection with his personal space, or giving him these odd, painful, exhilarating hours that he still seemed to require -- it was all perfectly, reasonably within his purview, wasn't it?
If he didn't think about it too hard, anyway.
He made sure Jack came into his hand, lest he stain the chair, and then smeared his come across the man's face and through his hair as he finished himself off inside him. Ianto was always marking Jack any way he could, and he knew now, because Jack had said, that even after they showered, he'd still be able to smell Ianto on him the rest of the long, dark night in the Hub.
And Ianto was glad. His bedroom, much as he loved it, was really too airy to contain what he and Jack were. He found he missed the amber light and stone walls, afraid he might forget the difference in these nights between house and home. Home probably wasn't for people like him and Jack. Not together anyway, and where it should have grieved him, it made him proud. Even if it were hell, and Ianto missed the unbroken nights of sleep, he adored their nights alone together in the Hub, sifting over work in dim light as if they were the last two men alive left to tend to the clockwork of all the universe. Oddly, he found it reassuring.
"Fuck," Jack gasped, when Ianto finally pulled his briefs out of the man's mouth.
"Good?" Ianto asked, still panting, not even having withdrawn from him yet.
"Yeah. Like the improvisation. Can't imagine what you'd do with actual toys," Jack said breathlessly.
Ianto hissed as he pulled out and sat down on the floor, leaning his back against his bed. "Don't need 'em."
Jack chuckled, but made no effort to move. Ianto would uncuff him all in good time.
"God, I'm tired," Ianto said.
"You could stay here tonight," Jack suggested. "I can take the overnight myself."
Ianto shook his head. "No," he said. "I've got stuff to finish up too."
"You're going to fall apart if you try to keep up with me," Jack pointed out good naturedly.
"Old man like you? Hardly," Ianto said, and reached up for Jack's hands so he could unlock the cuffs.
Jack slid down so he was sitting next to Ianto, then cuffed his head playfully. Ianto laughed a little, and then rested his head on Jack's shoulder.
"You're gonna fall asleep right here on the floor."
"Mmmm... no I'm not," Ianto mumbled.
"Yeah. You are."
Ianto sat up straight again, and knuckled his eyes. "No. Awake and ready for business. We should get back."
"Okay," Jack said, and stood up. As he wandered towards the bathroom to wash his face, he said, over his shoulder, "You know, I've been thinking."
"Oh?" Ianto asked, stifling a yawn.
"This isn't working. And with the new Rift stuff... someone needs to be there all the time. For a while, anyway. It was just luck that Martha caught that chemical compound."
"Yeah, so?"
"So I've been thinking. You're right. We need a better solution."
Ianto raised an eyebrow, amazed and slightly befuddled. Was Jack saying what he thought he was saying?
"I think you should get a new flat."
"What?" Ianto said. No, he realised. Jack was not saying what he thought he was saying. He was just being insanely, well, Jack.
"One closer to the Hub. What about some place in the building where Owen lived? That's nice and convenient."
"I like my flat, Jack."
"It's a long drive though, now that I'm spending all this time here."
"I like my flat, Jack," Ianto said again, enunciating every syllable distinctly. "And the drive. I'm not moving just so I can be a more convenient shag, so sorry. You'll have to think of something else."
"But it would be --"
"Jack. Stop. You've given a lot to Torchwood. I'd be the first to say that. But I have too, and this is my life, and it can't all just be about you. Most of it is, anyway. But I like my flat."
Jack came out of the bathroom and looked at him. Then shrugged, and said, "Okay. Just an idea. We'll keep going as we have been then."
Ianto met his eyes and let his affection shine through them. He wasn't sure why he wasn't more insulted; the idea that Jack wanted them not to, say... move in together, however ludicrous that idea was, but instead wanted to install him in a flat nearer to the office, like some kind of secretary cum mistress -- was on the face of it, rather offensive, but after everything, he was willing to cut Jack some slack. Only it was a pretty brilliant reason to simply solve the problem himself, as he'd just been given another stellar example of why Jack should really leave the logistics of all things, from relationships to coffee, to other people. Namely, Ianto.
Jack grinned at him sheepishly, before rubbing a wet flannel over his hair, probably trying to clean it, but only succeeding in slicking it back in a way that looked rather silly.
Ianto laughed and then leapt up and said, "Let me help you with that. We've got to get back. Gwen had some things she wanted me to look at."
Martha grimaced. Gwen and Ianto were arguing again. And while they had the decency to do it in low tones, probably so Jack wouldn't hear -- it was always about protecting Jack, it seemed, and that was entirely messed up too -- the strain was obvious.
She didn't like it, but she could manage it. She had a job to do and in many ways medicine answered to no real authority. Besides she hadn't signed her life away to this madness, thank god. It was one thing to have nothing for yourself when you were off in the Tardis, but to live here in a city and have no life, no friends, no nothing that wasn't Torchwood, that wasn't Jack? Well, that was just insane. Gwen's Rhys hardly counted. And Ianto had nothing to count at all.
Martha shook her head. What a mess. She'd left the Doctor because she'd wanted something for herself, and quite rightly too. She knew she wouldn’t stay here at Torchwood forever either. Watching Gwen and Ianto, she couldn't help but be relieved.
"No, Gwen, I get it. Believe me, I get it. But this is a call I need to make," Ianto said, frowning, yet again at the notes she had made.
"I don't know why you're hesitating."
Ianto put his hands on his hips and just stared at her. "Really? I find that hard to believe."
"I'd have done it by now."
Ianto snorted. "No surprise." He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Let me think about it, yeah?"
"I've got the plan, all you have to do is say yes. You want to say yes."
"I do, but I'm also the one that has to live with the consequences. You know, I should just talk to him about the whole thing," he said, dropping his pen onto the stack of papers.
"Do you ever?"
"Remarkably, yes," Ianto said, his voice becoming tart. He loved talking to Jack, loved it the most when it was at its most difficult probably. Ground down and left bright, there wasn't anything Jack did with him that didn't go that way in the end.
"Then why haven't you? About this?"
"It's complicated."
Gwen rolled her eyes.
"Look, go do something useful. I'll let you know, okay?"
"Don't take forever, yeah? There's only so much faffing around you can do before he gets wise," she said, heading back to her workstation.
Ianto repressed the urge to note that wisdom had nothing to do with this little plan, which might, of course, well have been her point.
"I've got those reports on the --"
"Jesus Christ, Mickey, is there some reason you can't bring these things right to Gwen?" Ianto asked, laughing in an utterly miserable way as he shoved the reports back at him. If they didn't involve expenses, he didn't care.
"But --"
"Nope. Gwen."
He saw Mickey catch Martha's eye; she nodded her head towards Gwen, which was what finally got Mickey moving.
"Thanks," Ianto called to her.
She shrugged, unsure of whether to get into the middle of it, or to just go to Jack with it.
"All right kids, new plan. We need to put in an actual rotation, otherwise no one is noticing who isn't sleeping, no one is finding any time to spend outside of this place and no one is in good enough condition to get anything done. We still don't know what's in the water and whether it matters --"
"The filters I pulled out of storage are catching it though, sir," Ianto noted.
"Great. Now we just need to find out if we need to reverse engineer them to protect the rest of Cardiff and consider the potential impact of this stuff on the ecosystem as a whole."
"Maybe it'll be irrelevant," Gwen offered.
"Since when do aliens work like that?" Mickey quipped.
"Look, we need to do one thing at a time. We were discussing the rota," Ianto cut in.
"Which is why you shouldn't have interrupted," Jack sighed.
"I don't even see how a rota is practical," Gwen said.
"Yeah, well, what we're doing now isn't practical either," Ianto shot back.
"Bloody hell," Mickey grumbled, running his hands through his hair.
"This needs to be sorted, Jack. Now," Martha said quietly.
"What, exactly, needs sorting here? Because whatever the problem you're all having is, I'm not getting it and we don't have time for it."
"Would someone just please tell me what the hell the command structure is around here?" Mickey pleaded.
Jack looked at Mickey quizzically. "I give orders. You people follow them," he said slowly. "Gwen's in charge if I'm not available. What's the problem?"
"What about Ianto?" Mickey asked.
"What about me?" Ianto looked nervously around the room.
Jack scrubbed a hand over his face. Oh. New people who needed more formal structure to figure out how they fit into place, and Ianto having had a lot more to do than just keep them organized for months now. Power struggle. Great. At least Martha didn’t seem to be involved, and that was very lucky, because Jack was fairly certain he’d hand over the reins of this whole enterprise if she just asked nicely, and batted her eyelashes. He knew when he was outranked, after all. But Martha’d obviously learned a thing or two about command and discipline over at U.N.I.T. Maybe he should send the rest of the team over there for lessons. He cleared his throat.
"As I said. I give the orders. You people follow them. Gwen's in charge if I'm not available. If you're supposed to answer to someone else in the field or on a project, I'll let you know. Any questions?"
Everyone shook their heads.
"I can't hear you," Jack said, not at all pleased.
They each said no in turn, except Ianto, who couldn't help but add sir on the end.
Jack sighed. "Mickey and Martha, go take a break, but stay close. Ianto and Gwen," he said, with false cheer, "let's have a chat."
He waited silently while Martha and Mickey scrambled from the room, and Gwen and Ianto sat there at the table like children waiting to be scolded. Well, he could oblige.
Placing his hands on the table, he leaned over them. Ianto and Gwen shrank back. "What, exactly, is the problem here, kids?" he said sternly.
"No problem, sir," Ianto said, and Gwen nodded.
"Okay, pat answer given, thanks very much for playing. Now, let's get real." They were silent, staring down at the table, not meeting his eyes; he stood back then, and tapped his foot impatiently. "Look, I'm going to wait 'til I get an answer -- even if Cardiff gets swallowed whole by whatever's in the water, so you might want to give in sooner rather than later, huh?"
"It's nothing, Jack," Gwen said firmly.
"I don't have time for this," Jack said. "I don't know what's going on between the two of you, but it ends now. Gwen, you know you're second in command here. Ianto, you've come a long way in the past few months, but you're not ready for that yet. You know it, I know it, Gwen knows it; what the hell is this?"
Gwen and Ianto exchanged glances.
"You're not telling us anything new, Jack," Gwen said. "I just think... well, Mickey. He was a bit... confused. About the two of you."
"Confused?" Jack said. "Hell, it's like pulling teeth. Would one of you just spit it out? You could have cleared this up for Mickey days ago. Martha too, not that she needs it."
"There's a reason they have non-fraternization rules in the army, Jack," Ianto finally said, almost as if he were figuring it out for himself as he spoke. "Not that you ever seemed to have paid attention to them. People get confused. And you've been agreeing with me, sometimes, in meetings...," he said, and then trailed off once he caught sight of the look on Jack's face.
"Are you fucking joking?" Jack asked, disbelief warring with exasperation. Exasperation was winning.
Ianto and Gwen stared back at him, but didn't answer.
"No, really. Are you fucking kidding me or what? Let's remember who you're talking to. You're not going to give me lessons about how they do it in the army, okay?" Jack shook his head in wonder at the idiocy of it all. "Listen up, once and for all. Ianto, the day I make a command decision based on where or with whom I get my dick wet, or who I choose to... how did you put it? 'fraternize with'... it'll be a cold day in hell, all right? Gwen, you're perfectly aware of that, aren't you?"
Gwen nodded. "Yes, Jack."
"Ianto?"
"Yes, sir."
"Now," he said. "Am I correct in assuming there is actually no problem between the two of you? No incipient power struggle or palace coup I should be aware of? No naked mud wrestling?"
They both nodded like marionettes he'd just pulled the strings of.
"Too bad. Mickey's new around here. If he needed straightening out, you should've done it, Gwen. That's what command is all about. Don't just sit there and try to pacify people and hope for the best. Forward momentum, okay?"
"Okay," she said softly.
"Now, would you mind getting the others and telling them to be back here in five? Ianto, stay behind. I'd like a word with you."
Gwen brushed Ianto's shoulder sympathetically on the way out, obviously thinking that he was in trouble and about to get reamed out more than Jack was willing to do with any audience, even her. Jack wasn't sure she was wrong either.
When she'd left, he stared at Ianto until he dropped his eyes to look fixedly at the table.
"Why didn't you talk to me about this little problem before? With Mickey? Before we just had to have a 'let's share our feelings' chick flick moment? In a meeting?" Jack rapped out.
"Sir, I..."
"Yeah?"
Ianto didn't reply.
"Listen, if you think I indulge you when defending the Earth is on the line, you need to have your head examined. And if you don't believe your ideas are worthwhile, don't fucking bring them up."
"It was a stupid thing to say," Ianto admitted.
"Yeah, it was," Jack replied. "Worse, it's boring. And I haven't got time for it."
"You're very right, sir."
"Look," Jack said, softening his voice. "In this organization, you're meant to be my man for details. That means staying on top of all this. You can't let it overwhelm you, or blindside you, or let your insecurities get in the way of thinking clearly and dealing with it all."
Ianto looked up at him, blinking.
"Showing initiative's not the problem, Ianto. Sometimes you're wrong, sometimes you're right. But that's only the first part. Looking around for the consequences of that initiative -- you've gotta think all that through. Step by step, so you know where it's all going to end up. Until it's instinct and you don't have to think any more. It'll just come."
Ianto nodded, as if filing this information away for later perusal, and Jack smiled.
"Okay. Now, no more of the bullshit, yeah? We've wasted enough time."
"Yes, sir," Ianto said.
"Go call the others," Jack said. And then added offhandedly, "Oh, and Ianto? I know you're some exciting combination of embarrassed and angry over all this. You can take it out of me later, yeah?"
Ianto stood stock still, arrested on his way out by Jack's words. He turned to look back at Jack, who could see he was blushing.
"Yeah," Jack purred, with relish. "That's what I thought. Later. 'Til then though... still the boss. And didn't I give you an order? Go get them, Ianto. That alien compound isn't going to wait for us forever."
"I thought it might, sir. Isn't that the problem?"
As Ianto headed out the door, Jack thought he'd probably be fine. Not too flustered to quip, and noticeably excited by the promise of exacting his revenge on Jack's hide. Start of a fun night, Jack was beginning to think.
Ianto smiled as he swung the car out of the garage, going what he considered just a little too fast, but these hours in his flat with Jack were necessarily brief and he wanted to scrape every second out of them he could. Besides, Jack liked speed and it wouldn't kill him -- not really and despite all his habits -- to give it to him.
"Did I do this to you?" Jack asked, and Ianto could hear the smile in his voice.
"Oh yeah," Ianto said, glancing at him briefly and accelerating just a hair more.
Everything between them was slivers and fractions, a constant edge, a million tiny tensions. No matter how often it caught him off balance or wounded his pride or found him half-afraid, Ianto was starting to realize that he liked things like this.
Instinct, like Jack had said, he supposed.
He dug his phone out of his pocket and speed dialed Gwen.
"We're in the car," he said, when she picked up, "but yes."
Jack frowned. He had no idea what Ianto was up to or who he was calling, but felt fairly sure it wasn't related to whatever terribly filthy assignation they were about to have. On some distant level Jack thought that might be a pity, but if the 20th century had taught him anything it was the joys of ownership, and there was something to be said for having Ianto all to himself, even if that had been the other way around of late.
He chuckled to himself. Funny thing that, and while it couldn't last Jack was determined to let it go on and on until Ianto could think of no other way to hurt him and had to beg for Jack to turn the tables instead. And that would be luscious.
"What was that?" he asked, when Ianto clicked the phone shut.
"Instinct," the other man said, shifting gears and keeping his eyes on the road.
Ianto didn't even touch Jack until he'd unlocked the door to his flat. Then he pushed him inside and only waited to slap him across the face and shove him up against the wall until Jack took off his bloody coat. In the coat he was still the captain, and Ianto could handle a lot of things, but he couldn't handle that. It would have been too much like the roof, and he didn't like to think about that, especially when the crack of skin under his palm was so pleasant.
There was no gentle submission to Jack today, and Ianto didn't care. It had been a difficult day, and it was almost reassuring to him that Jack was as demanding about taking his pain as his pleasure.
Half undressed, Ianto eventually shoved him away and headed for his bedroom. "Take your clothes off and get in here," he called.
Jack couldn't help but marvel at Ianto turning his back on him, so sure he would follow. He would, of course. How could he not? How could he not reward that? It took a hell of a lot of courage, he knew. He remembered the first time he'd done it himself in another place and time when it hadn't been an act at all.
When he got there, Ianto pushed him down on the bed, straddled his legs and slapped his cock. He gasped at the sharp, bright white of the pain.
"I'm not even going to tie you down. Don't touch me," he said, and Jack fisted his hands in the sheets, hoping that would be enough.
Since this had started, Ianto had sometimes spent ridiculous amounts of time pondering the right idea, the right answer, the right trick that was clever or wanted and absolutely, positively, not a repeat. Some days it was difficult. Some days it wasn't. Today it didn't require thinking at all. He supposed Jack was right. The anger helped. And the shame. And Jack hot and blushing under him, eyes clearly pricking with tears every time Ianto slapped the hard length of him.
He smiled. This was very, very satisfying.
It was even more satisfying when Jack came, whimpering and gasping at the end and obviously sore and miserable and exalted. Ianto chuckled and would have made some dark remark about Jack not being able to even remember his own name, but he knew there was a possibility that this was already true and had been for some time.
Jack sucked him after, quiet and almost sweet. It seemed to go on for a long time, and Ianto would have found it frustrating if it hadn't been so surreally tender and so filled with apology. He played with Jack's hair and stared at his ceiling and merely thought Yes.
Gwen was still at the Hub when they got back, which earned her a quick, half-hearted remark about how she should be home with Rhys before Jack went up to his office, still quiet and full of ease.
"We've got to solve this thing with the compound first or he'll kill us," Ianto said quietly.
"Did you talk to him?"
Ianto shook his head. "It'll sort in the end."
"What made you decide?" she asked, and Ianto noted how she left out the obvious after today.
"We're not the only ones who learned something about how to lead today, yeah?" he said and went to his work station, determined to examine the various problems of their mysterious compound until he was so tired there was no way the answer wouldn't just come to him because something would have to take up residence in his empty, empty brain.
He watched his screen studiously, even as he could feel Gwen's eyes on his back, wondering probably what Jack had said to him after she'd been thrown out of the conference room, wondering if what Ianto had said was really just some nonsense about sex instead. He didn't plan to tell her. It didn't matter. And the differences were slight besides.
Mickey watched with interest as they all assembled once more in the boardroom. He wasn’t planning on staying here at Torchwood long, but there was work to be done, and he didn’t want to quit fighting while figuring out what the hell he was going to do with himself back in this universe. Meanwhile, there was a job that needed doing here, and also it was bloody entertaining. This place was some bizarre combination of a nuthouse, army barracks, feeding time at the zoo, and seemed to have the drama quotient of the entire cast of Eastenders, times maybe a billion. At least he didn't think he'd be getting bored any time soon. Better than telly, it was -- especially since he didn't figure in it at all, which after Rose and Jake and the Doctor, Mickey was thanking his lucky stars for.
"Well, there's good news, and there's bad news, sir," Ianto reported. "Which would you like first?"
"The bad news," Jack said. "Hit me."
Gwen chimed in. "The filter devices aren't working as well as we'd hoped. Containment is well... no longer an option."
"Great," Jack said. "That sounds more like catastrophic news."
"No," said Martha. "That's where you're wrong.
"Really?" Jack said. "Astonish me."
"Okay," she answered, addressing them all. "Here's the good news. Thanks to Ianto and his archives," and Ianto nodded in acknowledgement, "and Mickey's work with hacking the leftovers of the Lazarus Project, we've been able to construct a device that we think will advance the isotopic cycle and beta decay on the chemical so we can see what might happen to it."
"You're speeding up time for it?" Jack asked.
"Yep," Martha said. "So far, it seems relatively inert. But I think we've all had enough experience with ticking bombs, eh?"
"Definitely," Jack agreed admiringly. "I'm impressed," he added. "Especially with you, Martha. I didn't think you had fond memories of that particular piece of technology."
She stared straight back at him. "I've dealt with worse," she said unflinchingly.
Jack nodded at her.
"And it seems to be mutating into something else," Martha went on. "I don't recognize it, but I thought you might, Jack. So I've put the model up on the display." She hit a button, and the new molecule rotated in front of them.
Jack looked at it and started to laugh.
"What?" Gwen asked. "What is it?"
"It's birth control," he got out, still sputtering with laughter. "And I thought the estrogen in the rain was funny."
"Birth control?" everyone said together.
"Estrogen in the rain?" Mickey added under his breath, looking around at everyone to see if he were the only one out of the loop. But they all looked equally puzzled, except Gwen who was looking nostalgic and glittery and far away.
"For silicon based life-forms," Jack finished, ignoring him.
They looked at him puzzled.
"You know," Jack mused aloud, "I've always wondered why it took you guys so long to evolve AI. Anyway. Guess we can ignore it. Huh."
They all stared at him with varying degrees of bafflement.
"Okay," he said. "Nice work, everybody. Next?"
"That's it?" Mickey hissed at Gwen. "What about the next time some chemical decides to come through and do a walkabout?"
Gwen looked at Jack as if he'd have an answer. "Nothing we can do," Jack said, in response to her pleading look. "If you think of something, let me know. Otherwise, we just play it as it comes. What's next?"
"Well, Jack," Gwen said while, Mickey noticed, carefully not looking at Ianto. "We seem to be having a small problem with some alien gun runners. Over Aberystwyth way."
Mickey stared at them.
Jack tossed a bag full of equipment into the back of the S.U.V.
"Are you sure I oughtn't come with you, Jack?" Ianto asked innocently.
"No," Jack said. "We've been over this. You and Gwen hold down the fort here. Mickey's good in a fight, and he'll be fine to back me up. I want you here monitoring the Rift. It's Aberystwth. How serious can it be?"
"I don't know, Jack," Ianto said. "You might get beat up by some locals when they hear how you pronounce it."
Jack laughed. "That's why I'm bringing the guns."
"Yes sir," Ianto said. "Whatever you say."
"And you've got Martha. Pay attention to her, okay? She's got nerves of solid steel, that woman, and you can always depend on her in a crisis."
"I know, Jack," Ianto said.
"I'll be back before you know it."
"Yes, sir," Ianto said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "We can manage for the number of hours it'll take you to get to Aberystwth. Somehow. We can also tie our own shoes and everything."
"I know, I know," Jack said and laughed again. Ianto pulled him in for a kiss by the collar of his coat, just as Mickey came into the garage.
"Captain," he greeted Jack, who Ianto still had collared. "Nice to see who actually runs the show round here. Ianto, can I talk to you before we take off? I want to show you some new software I've stuck up on the Rift monitor. Might be useful."
"Certainly," Ianto said, letting go of Jack's coat.
"Back in a mo, boss," he said jovially to Jack. "Road trip! I pick the tunes, eh?"
"Sure," Jack answered. "As long as you like big band."
Mickey's face fell. "Fucking great," he said. "Remind me again why I work here?"
Ianto laughed, and Mickey glared at him. "This is going to be a really long day," he grumbled. "Come on, Ianto. Wouldn't want Captain Cheesecake here to get bored and leave without me, would we?"
"How many times do I have to remind you?" Jack yelled after them. "It's Captain Beefcake!"
When they were walking down to the Hub, Ianto looked at Mickey curiously. "What's this new software then?"
"Doesn’t exist," said Mickey.
"What?"
"I said, it doesn’t exist. Lot like those so-called gun runners of yours. That leak about the alien guns? No way a bunch of yokels from Aberystwth hacked this software to even find out about a stockpile, which by the way, doesn't even seem to actually be real. No way, no how."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Ianto said.
"Yeah, whatever. How daft do you think I am? Right, don't answer that. Jack believes you, because he can't imagine why you might lie about something like this and is apparently restless enough to want this sort of ridiculous fight. I don't give two shits about it one way or another, except now that I've got to take a several hour long road trip listening to sodding big band, for Christ's sake. I just wanted you to know that you didn't fool me, okay?"
"I really don't know what you could possibly be referring to."
"And all those questions about blueprints. Listen, I'll keep him busy as long as I can, all right? But you better be done with whatever you're doing by this time tomorrow, because my ability to hang out with fucking Captain Jack's not gonna hold out any longer than that."
Ianto tried to glare at him, but somehow he couldn't. Mickey stuck out a hand, and Ianto shook it.
"Fair enough," Ianto said, and then he added curiously, "you and Jack. How do you do it?"
"Huh?" Mickey asked. "How do I do what?"
"I've never seen anyone so entirely uninterested in him before. Are you just straight or what? And even then..."
Mickey laughed. "Paranoid much? Not everyone's gonna fall for your bloke. Doesn't mean they're not into men. Just means they might not be into Jack."
"I'm not even sure that's possible," Ianto said, actually puzzled enough by the idea to voice the thought aloud. "Not being into Jack."
"Yeah it is," Mickey said. "Trust me. I should know." Then he cocked an eyebrow at Ianto. "Maybe if you started thinking about all this as something you chose -- not something you couldn't help. Works better all round, I'd say."
Ianto stared at him.
"Anyway. Good luck, mate. See you on the flip side."
And with that, he was gone.
Ianto was nervous. Possibly even terrified. There was too much to do and too little time to do it in and it seemed that the only way he could cope was to keep reciting the list of tasks and his time estimates for them in his head over and over again as if that would make it true and also, somehow, guarantee that Jack wouldn't come back before they were done.
He wished he trusted Gwen on this more, because if he had he could have sent her out to do parts of this on her own, but he knew that without him there she might do something fatal, like buying something stylish. Jack would recognize her hand in it and be unamused. And despite the fact that he was about to reorganize essentially every facet of Jack's private space he really was trying to change things as little as possible.
None of it, he knew, would placate Jack in the short term. But all of it would help him dig out from under the ire he fully expected to be initially met with. This was a stupid, crazy thing he was doing based entirely on a spur of the moment decision and some horrible mix of Jack's selfishness (he was not moving) and Jack's kindness (Ianto could hardly believe the man was finally learning how to manage).
It was getting the bed into the Hub that made him the most miserable, and not just because it was difficult and because he felt foolish, but also because it reminded him of the night he'd brought Lisa into the Hub.
This time he hadn't bothered to edit or turn off the CCTV. Jack would know before he saw the footage anyway, and it might alleviate some of the trust issues, he thought, if he let Jack see exactly how he had managed this.
"Gwen? What's Ianto doing?" Martha asked.
"I think he's down in the archives," she said.
"No," Martha said, continuing to stare at her screen. "What's he doing?" This time she pointed to the feed she was watching in order to clarify the question.
"Er... I've talked him into something horribly rash."
"He's not moving into the Hub, is he?" Martha asked aghast, as she stared at him struggling with the mattress.
"Oh. No. God, no," Gwen said with some relief. If Martha had asked a question like that she might not be entirely horrified by what they were doing, at least until she got to the part about removing a chunk of the floor. "They actually just had a bit of a thing about it. Jack wanted him to move closer to the Hub."
"That sex at six thing would be less conspicuous if they didn't always come back from their dinner break with dinner," Martha noted.
Gwen snorted. "I think it's sweet. They used to drive us all crazy trying to hide it."
Martha made a distracted noise. "So seriously, what is he doing?"
It was getting things out of Jack's cubby that was rapidly proving to be the most annoying task. It was remarkably inefficient for Ianto to carry things up the ladder into Jack's office himself, but it seemed hideously invasive to allow anyone else to help. But the fact was he needed help if he was to stay on his timetable. Oh stopwatch, he thought, I bet you never imagined being used for this.
Jack and Gwen were close, but he wouldn't like her going through his things. Hell, he didn't even like Ianto going through his things. Martha, on the other hand, who he hadn't even let in on this mess -- that was probably both wrong and foolish of him -- likely knew more of Jack's secrets than they did, but also had no sense of the fallible, human and very small life he lived below ground. It was, really, an unwinnable situation, or so Ianto thought until he emerged from the hole in the floor of Jack's office awkwardly carrying a stack of books only to be met by Martha, who sat there cross-legged on the floor.
"Gwen told me," she said, taking the books from Ianto.
"Do you think I'm daft?" he asked.
"Yes," she said simply.
"That's what I thought," he said, and went back down for more of Jack's things.
"You should have told me," she said, when next he surfaced. "I might have thought you were up to something and called him back. Or shot you."
"You're a doctor," Ianto said.
She shrugged. "I'd do a lot for Jack."
Ianto arched an eyebrow. "Wouldn't we all?"
She shrugged. "Sometimes yes, sometimes no," she said quietly.
"The Doctor," Ianto noted.
"The Doctor," she agreed, and he headed back down, this time for Jack's clothes.
Ianto was trying, desperately, not to become hysterical. "Okay, Gwen. Your plan. Your plan failure. What's plan B?" Ianto asked, staring plaintively at the sonic blaster that clearly had no intention of working ever again.
Gwen shrugged. "Explosives, I guess."
Ianto looked to the heavens, or, rather, the ceiling of the archives. He sure as hell wasn't going to get any help there. There wasn't even Myfanwy, who lived up closer to the surface, to threaten to eat him and put him out of his utterly abject misery.
It was one thing to carefully cut a hole (albeit a giant, room-sized one) in a non-load bearing floor that wasn't even a part of the original plans. It was another to just blow it up and hope it all worked out. They were flying blind unless John Hart suddenly showed up to offer advice on controlled explosions, but Ianto really, really hoped he wouldn't. He didn't even have time to shoot the man right now.
"I've changed my mind," Ianto declared.
"You can't do that now," Gwen exclaimed. "We've come too far."
"We're turning off the CCTV," he said despairingly. "I never want Jack to see this."
Continue to next part
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 05:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 05:37 am (UTC)Heheh. Glad you liked the boardroom scene. It was great fun giving Jack a little whip cracking of his own *g*
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 06:07 am (UTC)Okay, your story didn't need it but I've fallen in love with Ianto smearing Jack's blood around when he cuts him! But then if you read anything I write you get that already!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 01:25 pm (UTC)Our Ianto is a bit too fastidious and has had one too many awful conversations about body fluids with Jack to be quite too into the blood I suspect. But you never know. He's a much sicker puppy than he thinks most of the time!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 04:32 pm (UTC)So I agree, he's a sick puppy who is basically given 'permission' by Jack to be a sick puppy.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 06:14 pm (UTC)Love, love, LOVE that it was Mickey to point out what's wrong.
And something tells me that the power will shift very soon between Ianto and Jack, especially if they blow up parts of the Hub without having told Jack and on top of that sent him out on a bollocks mission.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 04:06 pm (UTC)Uh, yeah. *laughs* Now I kinda want to write the *conversation* Jack's gonna have with the whole team about that ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 04:55 am (UTC)Awesome is a word I rarely use. But this is.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 05:09 am (UTC)the silicon-based life forms (next in the Periodic Table with 4 electrons in the outer shell and all...)?
OMG. You noticed that. Every single member of my immediate family besides myself is either a physicist (most) with a few stray biologists tucked in for good measure. =D
And my dad brought me up to think realistically about aliens ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 05:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 05:19 am (UTC)*is an enormous dork*
I liked the first Dune book, but after that, no.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 05:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 12:18 pm (UTC)