![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fictionalTitle: The Spectacular Catastrophe of Your Endless Childhood
Pairing/Characters: Ianto [Ianto/OFCs, Ianto/Lisa]
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rm & kalichan
Rating/Warning: NC-17, het, pre-slash
Summary: The early education and adventures of Ianto Jones.
Wordcount: ~11,000 [posted in 2 parts]
Authors' Note: This is a prequel to our Jack/Ianto series, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. You don't have to read the rest of the series to read this though. However, if you are reading that, you should read this, as it will be useful/relevant later. It takes place pre-series, and ends just before Doctor Who 2x12: Army of Ghosts begins, i.e. right before the Battle of Canary Wharf. Next up, we return to the main story arc for two more stories which will conclude our series, although after it is done, we plan to return to the 'verse to fill in some gaps and pursue some digressions, such as Jack's childhood on the Boeshane Peninsula, Jack's time on the Valiant, and some interstitial Jack/Ianto adventures (sexual & otherwise!) during season 1 and post-season 2.
Authors' Note, part deux: Ianto's travels abroad clearly owe a great deal to our own, and also to those offaris_nallaneen who was generous enough to allow him to share some of the nuts and bolts of her German experience, since neither of us had ever been there.
The Spectacular Catastrophe of Your Endless Childhood, Part 1
He'd have liked to have said that he found the latter more disconcerting -- as it ought to have been in a proper romance, but in fact, he was still reeling from the whole alien thing and almost didn't notice her just at first.
When it happened, he was alone in a conference room; it was the last in a very long line of computer orientations, and he was starting to believe that this was not just a very expensive prank that someone was playing on him, but only just. All the other new staff had already moved on to the next room, but Ianto couldn't follow yet. He was just staring at the revolving holographic display, still somehow unable to believe that any of this was really happening.
"You all right there?" he heard a voice ask.
He turned and saw a girl standing there. "Yes. Of course," he answered mechanically, starting instinctively to sort through the stack of papers he'd been given -- all full of corporate bullshit about ALIENS.
"You seem a bit... shell shocked," she suggested. Advancing into the room, she asked, "Coffee? Might settle you."
"Are you crazy?" Ianto asked. "That's your suggestion? You think the answer to all this," he said gesturing to the moving display and the building at large, "is to be more wired?"
"You're worried about being over-caffeinated? Shouldn't you worry more about what I might put in the drink? Have you ever watched a movie?"
"Yeah, I studied film, thank you very much," Ianto said defensively, before registering the actual substance of her comment. "You are completely mad."
"Have to be a little bit crazy to work here, don't you think?" she asked with a friendly grin.
"You'd know better than me, I imagine."
"Probably about lots of things," she said tartly and winked at him.
Ianto stared at her. "What are... nevermind. I probably should be getting to my next... thing."
"Of course," she said. "Although you're already in trouble, probably. They don't like lateness here. I'm Lisa Hallett, by the way. I work in computer design and architecture." She shook his hand, firm and steady -- almost like a man's handshake.
"Pleasure," he said reflexively. "I'm Ianto Jones."
"I know," she said.
"How?" he asked.
"Psychic training," she said seriously.
"Pardon?" he asked.
"You heard me."
He stared at her, and then she began to laugh. She nodded down at his jacket; following her look, he saw his new ID badge dangling around his neck. "Oh," he said, and began to laugh with her, sheepishly.
"Better get going," she said, nodding towards the door.
"Right. Yes," he said. "Going."
"I'll be seeing you," she called after him.
When they actually told him about the psychic training, after a week of probation, Ianto couldn't stop himself from bursting into howls of helpless laughter. He was amazed they didn't fire him. He went and found Lisa's desk afterwards, and invited her out. For a cup of coffee, of course.
And when he discovered that they actually did have things they could put in your drinks, and it was best to be cautious, he knew with certainty for the first time something that he'd always wanted to believe and had never quite been able to: that stories were true, and he was living in one.
He liked it. And he liked Lisa even more.
And she, of course knew it, and was, like the rest of Torchwood, clearly hell bent on making sure he didn't get away with any of the things he normally did without even thinking about it. So she didn't fall into bed with him after coffee because neither of them had anything better to do, and she was obviously trying her best not to be amused when he caught up with her in the Institute cafeteria to tell he'd been moved from Communications to the Archives.
"This is really not a good thing," she said to him over another coffee in different coffee shop. It wasn’t good to have habits, she said, if you worked for Torchwood.
"Why? It's a great thing! No more Yvonne leering at me, no more Peter blaming me for assignments he never actually gave me because he thinks I'm somehow actually psychic, and seriously, you would not believe the things I have found down in those files."
"I wouldn't go looking at things you don't need to look at down there," Lisa said, even though he could tell it was hard for her not to share his enthusiasm.
"God, why?"
"Well, for one thing, they already don't like your smart mouth. For another, information is dangerous. And third? Really? Don't you remember what happened when you found out about the aliens!"
"Come on, Lis, everyone freaks out about the aliens."
"Lis is it now?
Ianto shrugged. "I like you."
"And I'm still not going home with you."
Ianto rolled his eyes. "Did I ask? I don't think I asked."
Lisa just laughed.
She took to visiting him in the archives, although she said she didn't mean to, said it wasn't intentional, it was just that this, that or the other person really needed a file.
"They could call down for it," Ianto would always tell her blandly before pointing her to the requisition slips that were actually the proper manner of checking things out.
"Things get lost," was Lisa's excuse.
"Not in the archives," Ianto would tell her. "They just get forgotten."
"You're very grim."
Ianto would just shrug at that. So what if he was. It was Torchwood, and it was grim work. So much of what he filed was paperwork on the dead. So many of them clearly lost to things far outside the realm of natural causes. He didn't know if Lisa knew that and wasn't sure if he should tell her. Information was dangerous, she had said, and maybe, Ianto was starting to think, she was right.
"You just want a snog behind the file cabinets," he teased. It seemed like a good guess and didn't, upon reflection, sound like a bad idea.
She shook her head. "Oh no. None of that. No Torchwood office flings for me. Ask me out. For something better than coffee."
Ianto tilted his head at her and asked her out. To dinner. Somewhere nice.
"You know," he said as they lay in his bed together after they'd shagged for the first time after that very first date, "this all would have been a lot easier had you given me some clear instructions from the start."
Lisa smiled slowly. "So you're that type of boy, are you?"
Ianto laughed a little nervously. "I don't know. You'll have to find out."
"Getting involved inside of Torchwood is bad."
"Why? Everybody seems to do it."
"You don't see it, down there where you work. It's hard to be loyal to people. You're not supposed to be. Loyal to the institute, that's what they want. People will do anything to be sure that you'll break your promises if they need you to."
"Do you like it?" he asked, "Working here?"
Lisa shrugged. "I like my life. I like you. Can't be pulled apart now, can it?"
Ianto nodded. "It's like the apple."
"Hmmm?"
"The Devil relies on curiosity. So does our Institute, I think. I wouldn't quit. I like the files too much."
Lisa pouted. "And what about me?"
Ianto laughed and looked at the ceiling as she snuggled into the circle of his arms. "Suppose I tell you when you find out what type of boy I am?"
Lisa grinned, and Ianto was conscious of the fact that maybe she was just a little bit crazy and, probably, so was he.
On their second date, she got him drunk, and Ianto only caught on to the deliberateness of it when she pushed a finger up into him as she sucked his cock into her mouth, this time in her bed.
The alcohol made him slow and even more detail obsessed than usual -- the smell of the liquor, his sweat, her cunt and the laundry soap on her sheets, which were far nicer than his.
It was good, it was perfect, and in it he lost the moment to protest the intrusion, which he supposed he would have or should have out of some vague instinct. But by the time the idea of speech had finally come to him, all he had for her was praise, and when she crooked her finger just so, Ianto found he hadn't any words left at all.
After, he made her come twice, once with her kneeling over his face and when they were done, he’d curled up with his mouth still messily wet against her breast and told her about Jens and the stopwatch.
In trade she'd talked about her family and said that yeah, working for Torchwood did scare her. A lot, and that she was glad, really glad he was in the Archives. It seemed safer there, she said.
For Torchwood they kept it quiet, although that wasn't necessarily saying much. They didn't kiss in the building or even really touch, except in the accidental transfer of paper from one hand to another or in the crowding of a lift. Lisa brought him news of office politics and Ianto, in turn, memorized all the best information from the best files for her.
"So I had one today on a sex alien," he hissed in amusement, leaning over the table in the latest little French place she had insisted on.
"A what?" she laughed, equally eager.
"It's come to Earth to shag people."
"It has not!"
"It has! Or that's what the researcher thinks."
Lisa's eyes got big. "How are they researching it? Are they shagging it?"
Ianto nodded, and they both broke into uncontrollable and completely inappropriate laughter.
In the archives, Ianto had many tasks, both official and self-appointed. The first, of course, was to just do his damn job. The second was to find things to chat with Lisa about. The third was to discover those files that convinced him that working for Torchwood was, if not beautiful, then at least worth it.
"So do you know anything about the other Torchwoods?" Ianto asked one night, over curries.
Lisa shrugged. "A bit. Why?"
"Because I've found something very strange."
"Is this about the one that we lost?"
"What?"
"One of them's gone missing," she said with a wave of her hand.
"Oh. No. Well. I don't think so."
"So, what has you so excited?"
Ianto lowered his voice and leaned over even farther, holding his tie back from winding up in the curry. "Captain Jack Harkness."
Lisa started laughing and couldn't stop.
"What?" Ianto asked, worried that he'd stumbled into another horrible Torchwood in-joke which had been planted to pique his interest but had no actual basis in reality.
"You... you and half the institute!" Lisa finally managed.
"Huh?"
"Wants to fuck him!"
"What? No. Do you know how old he is?"
"I don't know. Late-thirties? Forty? Met him for half a second once. What are you talking about?"
"I found his service records from World War II."
"Temporal shift?" she offered, still chuckling.
"Twice."
Lisa chewed at her lip. "Huh. Tell me more. Yvonne hates him."
And Ianto hated Yvonne. Because Yvonne was unpleasant and arrogant and always felt a little bit dangerous, and Lisa’s idea of making him feel better about it was to suggest that she just wanted him under her desk.
“As a foot rest?” Ianto had asked in a moment of incredulous naivete.
Lisa shook her head and laughed. “I haven’t heard anything about her liking her toes sucked. You’ll have to let me know.”
Ianto stared at her in horror as she smirked at him and then took another sip of wine.
“Has she started critiquing your suits yet?” she asked. “That's when you're really in trouble.”
“That's sexual harassment,” Ianto had said, finally finding his equilibrium.
“It's Torchwood. Who're you planning on complaining to? Anyway, she does it to all the pretty boys. Take it as a compliment.”
Ianto grinned. “You think I'm pretty, do you? Guess you should take a number.” Lisa tackled him at that. The night, all things considered, ended rather well. Ianto bore the marks of it for weeks, and he smiled every time he hit a sore spot.
Lisa planned an evening in for them after Ianto passed his three month probation.
"I have a surprise for you," she’d said, pushing Ianto down onto the bed, in such a manner that he almost fumbled his drink all over her sheets.
He laughed.
"Close your eyes."
He did, waiting and listening and occasionally complaining about how long she was taking with whatever it was while he continued to nurse his vodka. He wanted to be inside her and wanted her over him and wanted them laughing.
He was loosening his tie when she finally said he could look, and he couldn't help but gape a little and wonder if it was all right to laugh as she stood there, naked and hand on hip wearing some sort of harness and a fake cock and looking at him hopefully.
"You're not kidding, are you?"
"Do you want me to be?" she asked, sounding younger and more lost than Ianto had ever heard her before.
He shook his head and set his drink down on the floor, and then slid off the bed and onto his knees. After that it seemed easy somehow to reach his arms up to wrap around her waist as he sucked the dildo into his mouth. And while he wished it hadn't tasted like chemicals and had been as warm as her (maybe he could shove it up into her next time first), all he could think was that this was perfect and so was she, and that Torchwood and all its murderers and aliens were worth it if it contained mysteries like this.
Lisa dragged her fingers softly through his hair and chuckled warmly. “Have you ever done this before?”
He shook his head, and gave her a muffled no.
“Have you wanted to?” she asked, and he pulled off her and sat back on his heels, realising they were going to have to discuss this, at least a little.
“Yeah,” he said looking up at her. “But I hadn’t imagined this.”
She nodded, and Ianto wondered briefly if she hadn’t got his meaning or just didn’t care.
“Probably easier if you get back on the bed,” she offered with a crooked smile.
Ianto grabbed his drink, took another sip and set the glass down on her night table. “Probably’ll help if I get undressed too.”
Lisa laughed and watched him carefully as he did.
“Mmmm, my Ianto, nice and hard,” she said, grabbing his cock, once he’d gotten naked.
And he’d wanted to laugh and ask her what she expected. She was beautiful and he was getting to lose his virginity twice. Of course he was hard, even if he was a little scared and felt also some small, terrible aching guilt for Jens.
“Still with me?” she asked, and Ianto nodded, working hard to look her in the eye as he tried to recall if he had slipped his stopwatch into his suit jacket pocket or into his briefcase at the end of the work day. He always remembered everything, and yet suddenly couldn’t think of it now.
She told him to kneel and how to arch his back and pour himself across the bed to make it easier for them both, and she murmured to him and smoothed a hand over the small of his back, and kissed his thighs as she pushed her fingers slick with lube into him over and over again until he didn’t know either her name or his own.
The dildo at first seemed too hard, too large, strange and foreign and unkind, but she was stroking his cock, and saying “let me,” and encouraging him to be lost, her hand on the back of his neck, and then she was right up against him and he couldn’t move or breathe. He was the world broken open and poured into this girl’s hands.
It seemed ridiculous, to realize he had waited his whole life for this one perfect type of silence.
He was so loud as she fucked him, he was surprised the neighbors didn’t complain. And after she held him as he clung to her, sore and humming happily. She didn’t even have to ask him if it was good, and that, he thought with a distant chuckle, was confidence he could admire.
She had laughed delightedly when he told her as much and then asked him about which celebrity blokes he fancied.
They had been dating for four months -- four months, and three days, to be precise; Ianto had always had a head for extraneous, irrelevant specificities -- when he got a call from his mother to come home. Her voice was weaker than he remembered, and there was a note of pleading in it that he'd never heard before.
Even though he knew the truth the moment he heard the phone call, it was still a shock to see her. She'd lost startling amounts of weight, her face drawn and thin. She looked like a caricature of herself.
Ianto sat at her bedside quietly, holding her hand in his, and he made lists in his head of all the things he couldn't do (ransack Torchwood for some mysterious alien cure, go back in time and be a better, more attentive son, never have taken the job in London, so he could have spent these last few months with her, just to name a few).
She didn't smile at him, but the nurses told him that she seemed easier now that he was here, and that she'd refused to ring him up until the end was close. He spoke with the doctors about pain medication, he kissed her forehead and told her she was stubborn, and she told him, in a cracked, weak voice that, after all, he'd got it from somewhere.
He told her that he thought he'd finally found work that he liked, a place in the world, and a girl that he thought he might love; he showed her a picture of himself and Lisa, taken by a tourist near the British Museum; she nodded at that, and looked at him approvingly, he thought.
And when she died, four days later, Ianto knelt by her bedside and tried to pray, like she would've wanted, but the world seemed cold and empty, and he was very, very tired.
When he spoke to Lisa on the phone, she offered to come down for the funeral. He refused -- what was the point? He'd have liked to have introduced her to his mother, but standing beside the corpse for all the neighbors to gawk at didn't appeal to him -- and her voice was kind when she said, "Come home soon, Ianto."
Home. Ianto didn't know if the planet contained any such thing for him. Not anymore.
He spent a day packing up the house and putting boxes and furniture in storage, spoke to an estate agent, and handed over the keys. What would he do with a house in Cardiff? His life wasn't there any more, and he was sure it would never be again.
When he got back to London, Yvonne Hartman told him that it was good he'd returned as they couldn't have held the job for him much longer. He restrained himself, somehow, from wondering out loud how essential it could possibly be to file things that no one ever wanted to look at anyway.
"It's her way of telling you she likes you," Lisa informed him, when he was sitting at her flat that evening, telling her all about it.
"I wish she didn't."
"Useful, though," she remarked. "Onwards and upwards. Promotion and all that."
"There's only one position for which Yvonne would be willing to put up with my mouth and that's because she thinks it'd be too busy for conversation there --"
Lisa choked with laughter.
"What?" Ianto said. "You're the one who told me that, and after careful observation, I am forced to agree."
She looked at him levelly. "Are you all right, Ianto?"
"No," he said. "It... I thought the world had rewritten itself enough when my father died. But this... I know it happens to everyone. But I wasn't... I'm not ready. Not for this."
"No one ever is," she said.
"I feel... unharnessed. Like there were these strings keeping me here, and now they've all got untied. And I keep crying, and I hate it."
"I know," she said, and she looked like she wanted to say a million things, and couldn't find the words for any of them. He loved her for that just a little more -- that she hurt for him enough that she couldn't mouth platitudes, and he cried again that night while he was buried inside her, and she only petted his hair, but didn't give him words.
She asked him to move in with her, a couple of months later, and Ianto looked around at his uncomfortable one room flat, smiled up at her and said, "Yes, please."
And so there again, he found home, and they bought sheets from Marks and Spencer, and put up shelves together; they even drove to Cardiff with a removal van, and picked up a few things from the old house to put into her flat. They argued over what kind of dishes to buy and her odd predilection for seventies era prints, and his enormous collection of CDs.
The world continued to move on in its new pattern; when he thought about it, he was grateful for how separate it felt from any of his life before. It was nice to have a role to play, and to know what that role was. He was comfortable with the papers and codes; research puzzles that came down in beautifully organized little folders whose neatness disguised the death and pain that was described inside them. They hardly seemed real to Ianto.
Real was Lisa and their flat and the nights spent watching telly and making love and drinking red wine; real was reading aloud to her (she liked poetry -- Dylan Thomas, Gwendolyn Brooks and Yeats -- and children's books and non-fiction about quantum physics), dressing up and taking her to fancy restaurants, going to the art museum, and the arcade and making her play old video games with him, which she approached with a serious intensity that tickled him immensely.
He knew he'd never make a field operative, and he liked it that way. This way, the folders could remain stolen secrets for him to lay at Lisa's feet -- and not the blood and guts that he knew they actually were.
And so it went, through the Christmas night that she was called in to work on emergency programming for a missile strike on a Sycorax ship, and the time that he misplaced a file, and Yvonne hauled him in to shout at him for twenty minutes straight, and his long stint at helping to archive the searches for UFO activity that Torchwood kept blocking (sometimes with software, and sometimes through installing people in psychiatric wards) and the time where Robert and Patrick made fools of themselves by getting drunk and stealing some alien tech and trying to terrorise a local shop.
That was Ianto's first experience with administering the drug they called Retcon; even after all this time, the name still made him laugh, and he was grateful for it, even if it seemed like a kind of theft he wasn't altogether comfortable with. Still, it kept Torchwood from killing people, and he supposed that was a good thing since gross stupidity, while annoying, wasn't exactly cause for a death sentence. Most days, anyway.
Things continued normally – for Ianto's new definition of normal anyway, which he had become very fond of. There were outlets for everything now: Torchwood had found uses for his rage and curiosity and detachment, and it fed his need for secret corners and dark places. And it was in Torchwood that he'd found Lisa, who was the first person to see all of this, and love him not in spite of, but because.
Then the ghosts arrived.
He hadn't even thought he missed them so much, his parents -- they belonged to a life that was dead and gone -- and that was what convinced him that they were really there. That, and the smell of his father's pipe, and the cloth of his jacket, his mother's perfume and the indefinable sense of their presence. And he found himself overwhelmed with thankfulness for the fact that it was true, that his mother had been right, that there was something after death.
He was thankful too that his parents could see the flat he shared with Lisa, the home that they'd built together, and that his father could finally be eased of his fears, that his son had become a man and the kind of man that he understood at that.
For the first time, Ianto truly felt like all of his pieces had come together into a pleasing whole, and as they clustered around him Lisa remarked on how closely the ghosts clung to him, saying his parents must have loved him very much; Ianto, who had never been as certain of that as he would have liked to be, until now, smiled with pride.
It was strange having all these gaps suddenly filled, and raw places soothed -- some of them he hadn't even known were there. Ianto, who'd always felt so restless, dreamed now of peace, and although he found it odd, he also found it pleasant.
In his spare time he found himself stopping by jewelers' shops and looking at rings in the window. As he did, he thought of Paris and Rome and imagined taking Lisa there and looking at all his old haunts with new eyes that were no longer so alone.
And then one day, a couple of months later, just another ordinary day, in a long string of ordinary, contented days, Lisa stopped by the Archives, and perched on his desk for their regular mid-morning gossip.
"So, did you hear about Adeola and Gareth?"
"Lis, everyone's heard about that."
"You mean real live people actually speak to you? I thought they stuck you down here where there was no possibility of that happening."
"You're here," Ianto remarked dryly. "And you're also sitting on that folder. Which I need. To do actual work? You've heard of that?"
"Whatever. I heard they were trying to keep it under wraps. Not be just another Torchwood fling."
"No wonder everyone's heard about it. Didn't you use that line on me?"
Lisa grinned at him and leaned forward to kiss him on the forehead. "And now you're putty in my hands."
"Very true," he said. "You can prove it to me later tonight, if you want."
"It's a date."
"Good. Now, get lost. I've loads to do."
She hit the side of his head gently, and disappeared through the door.
It was only a few hours later that she came back, when he was well in the thick of trying to get several bins of assorted objects back into the shelving areas they belonged to, but everything was jumbled together and he was increasingly certain the mess was going to have him working overtime.
"What is it now, Lisa?" he asked, turning a small object that looked like some sort of alien electric shaver or lockpicking device or something over and over in his hands. "I'm really busy today."
"You'll never believe it."
"As much as I love chatting about the sex lives of our co-workers --"
She laughed. "I've got real news this time."
"Okay, what?"
She lowered her voice to a whisper. "It's him. The Doctor. He's IN the building."
"Oh come on, Lisa. Someone got you with that one? You've been here longer than me. Someone's always saying that, and it's never true."
"No, really. Don't you want to come see?"
"I can't, really, Lis. I'm in up to my head today.”
“Just… come on,” she said tugging on him.
“I can’t. We can’t leave these out. You know –“
Lisa shoved the bin at Ianto’s feet into a storage locker and slammed the door before glaring at him expectantly.
He held up the device. That still needed its home and more now than later.
She took it out of his hands and shoved it into his pocket. Then she kissed him. “Come on. Live a little. Break the rules. Once in a lifetime.”
Ianto rolled his eyes. “Just like you,” he muttered under his breath.
“Of course,” she said. “You coming?”
“As if there was ever any doubt,” he said and smiled at her, standing in front of him, slim and straight and full of focus.
As he looked at her, Ianto thought, as he often did, that it was so comforting to see her and know without the shadow of a doubt that this was the silhouette that gave shape to all the formless future that lay ahead, that gave meaning to everything that he did. One shape, to define a life. And what a life it was.
He felt the bulge in his pocket, and thought, well, why not? A loan – a theft of nothing but a little time. No one would ever have to know.
“I'm right behind you,” he said, and followed her out the door.
end
Continue to There Are Some Men Who Should Have Mountains To Bear Their Names To Time
Pairing/Characters: Ianto [Ianto/OFCs, Ianto/Lisa]
Authors:
rm & kalichanRating/Warning: NC-17, het, pre-slash
Summary: The early education and adventures of Ianto Jones.
Wordcount: ~11,000 [posted in 2 parts]
Authors' Note: This is a prequel to our Jack/Ianto series, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. You don't have to read the rest of the series to read this though. However, if you are reading that, you should read this, as it will be useful/relevant later. It takes place pre-series, and ends just before Doctor Who 2x12: Army of Ghosts begins, i.e. right before the Battle of Canary Wharf. Next up, we return to the main story arc for two more stories which will conclude our series, although after it is done, we plan to return to the 'verse to fill in some gaps and pursue some digressions, such as Jack's childhood on the Boeshane Peninsula, Jack's time on the Valiant, and some interstitial Jack/Ianto adventures (sexual & otherwise!) during season 1 and post-season 2.
Authors' Note, part deux: Ianto's travels abroad clearly owe a great deal to our own, and also to those of
faris_nallaneen who was generous enough to allow him to share some of the nuts and bolts of her German experience, since neither of us had ever been there.The Spectacular Catastrophe of Your Endless Childhood, Part 1
He'd have liked to have said that he found the latter more disconcerting -- as it ought to have been in a proper romance, but in fact, he was still reeling from the whole alien thing and almost didn't notice her just at first.
When it happened, he was alone in a conference room; it was the last in a very long line of computer orientations, and he was starting to believe that this was not just a very expensive prank that someone was playing on him, but only just. All the other new staff had already moved on to the next room, but Ianto couldn't follow yet. He was just staring at the revolving holographic display, still somehow unable to believe that any of this was really happening.
"You all right there?" he heard a voice ask.
He turned and saw a girl standing there. "Yes. Of course," he answered mechanically, starting instinctively to sort through the stack of papers he'd been given -- all full of corporate bullshit about ALIENS.
"You seem a bit... shell shocked," she suggested. Advancing into the room, she asked, "Coffee? Might settle you."
"Are you crazy?" Ianto asked. "That's your suggestion? You think the answer to all this," he said gesturing to the moving display and the building at large, "is to be more wired?"
"You're worried about being over-caffeinated? Shouldn't you worry more about what I might put in the drink? Have you ever watched a movie?"
"Yeah, I studied film, thank you very much," Ianto said defensively, before registering the actual substance of her comment. "You are completely mad."
"Have to be a little bit crazy to work here, don't you think?" she asked with a friendly grin.
"You'd know better than me, I imagine."
"Probably about lots of things," she said tartly and winked at him.
Ianto stared at her. "What are... nevermind. I probably should be getting to my next... thing."
"Of course," she said. "Although you're already in trouble, probably. They don't like lateness here. I'm Lisa Hallett, by the way. I work in computer design and architecture." She shook his hand, firm and steady -- almost like a man's handshake.
"Pleasure," he said reflexively. "I'm Ianto Jones."
"I know," she said.
"How?" he asked.
"Psychic training," she said seriously.
"Pardon?" he asked.
"You heard me."
He stared at her, and then she began to laugh. She nodded down at his jacket; following her look, he saw his new ID badge dangling around his neck. "Oh," he said, and began to laugh with her, sheepishly.
"Better get going," she said, nodding towards the door.
"Right. Yes," he said. "Going."
"I'll be seeing you," she called after him.
When they actually told him about the psychic training, after a week of probation, Ianto couldn't stop himself from bursting into howls of helpless laughter. He was amazed they didn't fire him. He went and found Lisa's desk afterwards, and invited her out. For a cup of coffee, of course.
And when he discovered that they actually did have things they could put in your drinks, and it was best to be cautious, he knew with certainty for the first time something that he'd always wanted to believe and had never quite been able to: that stories were true, and he was living in one.
He liked it. And he liked Lisa even more.
And she, of course knew it, and was, like the rest of Torchwood, clearly hell bent on making sure he didn't get away with any of the things he normally did without even thinking about it. So she didn't fall into bed with him after coffee because neither of them had anything better to do, and she was obviously trying her best not to be amused when he caught up with her in the Institute cafeteria to tell he'd been moved from Communications to the Archives.
"This is really not a good thing," she said to him over another coffee in different coffee shop. It wasn’t good to have habits, she said, if you worked for Torchwood.
"Why? It's a great thing! No more Yvonne leering at me, no more Peter blaming me for assignments he never actually gave me because he thinks I'm somehow actually psychic, and seriously, you would not believe the things I have found down in those files."
"I wouldn't go looking at things you don't need to look at down there," Lisa said, even though he could tell it was hard for her not to share his enthusiasm.
"God, why?"
"Well, for one thing, they already don't like your smart mouth. For another, information is dangerous. And third? Really? Don't you remember what happened when you found out about the aliens!"
"Come on, Lis, everyone freaks out about the aliens."
"Lis is it now?
Ianto shrugged. "I like you."
"And I'm still not going home with you."
Ianto rolled his eyes. "Did I ask? I don't think I asked."
Lisa just laughed.
She took to visiting him in the archives, although she said she didn't mean to, said it wasn't intentional, it was just that this, that or the other person really needed a file.
"They could call down for it," Ianto would always tell her blandly before pointing her to the requisition slips that were actually the proper manner of checking things out.
"Things get lost," was Lisa's excuse.
"Not in the archives," Ianto would tell her. "They just get forgotten."
"You're very grim."
Ianto would just shrug at that. So what if he was. It was Torchwood, and it was grim work. So much of what he filed was paperwork on the dead. So many of them clearly lost to things far outside the realm of natural causes. He didn't know if Lisa knew that and wasn't sure if he should tell her. Information was dangerous, she had said, and maybe, Ianto was starting to think, she was right.
"You just want a snog behind the file cabinets," he teased. It seemed like a good guess and didn't, upon reflection, sound like a bad idea.
She shook her head. "Oh no. None of that. No Torchwood office flings for me. Ask me out. For something better than coffee."
Ianto tilted his head at her and asked her out. To dinner. Somewhere nice.
"You know," he said as they lay in his bed together after they'd shagged for the first time after that very first date, "this all would have been a lot easier had you given me some clear instructions from the start."
Lisa smiled slowly. "So you're that type of boy, are you?"
Ianto laughed a little nervously. "I don't know. You'll have to find out."
"Getting involved inside of Torchwood is bad."
"Why? Everybody seems to do it."
"You don't see it, down there where you work. It's hard to be loyal to people. You're not supposed to be. Loyal to the institute, that's what they want. People will do anything to be sure that you'll break your promises if they need you to."
"Do you like it?" he asked, "Working here?"
Lisa shrugged. "I like my life. I like you. Can't be pulled apart now, can it?"
Ianto nodded. "It's like the apple."
"Hmmm?"
"The Devil relies on curiosity. So does our Institute, I think. I wouldn't quit. I like the files too much."
Lisa pouted. "And what about me?"
Ianto laughed and looked at the ceiling as she snuggled into the circle of his arms. "Suppose I tell you when you find out what type of boy I am?"
Lisa grinned, and Ianto was conscious of the fact that maybe she was just a little bit crazy and, probably, so was he.
On their second date, she got him drunk, and Ianto only caught on to the deliberateness of it when she pushed a finger up into him as she sucked his cock into her mouth, this time in her bed.
The alcohol made him slow and even more detail obsessed than usual -- the smell of the liquor, his sweat, her cunt and the laundry soap on her sheets, which were far nicer than his.
It was good, it was perfect, and in it he lost the moment to protest the intrusion, which he supposed he would have or should have out of some vague instinct. But by the time the idea of speech had finally come to him, all he had for her was praise, and when she crooked her finger just so, Ianto found he hadn't any words left at all.
After, he made her come twice, once with her kneeling over his face and when they were done, he’d curled up with his mouth still messily wet against her breast and told her about Jens and the stopwatch.
In trade she'd talked about her family and said that yeah, working for Torchwood did scare her. A lot, and that she was glad, really glad he was in the Archives. It seemed safer there, she said.
For Torchwood they kept it quiet, although that wasn't necessarily saying much. They didn't kiss in the building or even really touch, except in the accidental transfer of paper from one hand to another or in the crowding of a lift. Lisa brought him news of office politics and Ianto, in turn, memorized all the best information from the best files for her.
"So I had one today on a sex alien," he hissed in amusement, leaning over the table in the latest little French place she had insisted on.
"A what?" she laughed, equally eager.
"It's come to Earth to shag people."
"It has not!"
"It has! Or that's what the researcher thinks."
Lisa's eyes got big. "How are they researching it? Are they shagging it?"
Ianto nodded, and they both broke into uncontrollable and completely inappropriate laughter.
In the archives, Ianto had many tasks, both official and self-appointed. The first, of course, was to just do his damn job. The second was to find things to chat with Lisa about. The third was to discover those files that convinced him that working for Torchwood was, if not beautiful, then at least worth it.
"So do you know anything about the other Torchwoods?" Ianto asked one night, over curries.
Lisa shrugged. "A bit. Why?"
"Because I've found something very strange."
"Is this about the one that we lost?"
"What?"
"One of them's gone missing," she said with a wave of her hand.
"Oh. No. Well. I don't think so."
"So, what has you so excited?"
Ianto lowered his voice and leaned over even farther, holding his tie back from winding up in the curry. "Captain Jack Harkness."
Lisa started laughing and couldn't stop.
"What?" Ianto asked, worried that he'd stumbled into another horrible Torchwood in-joke which had been planted to pique his interest but had no actual basis in reality.
"You... you and half the institute!" Lisa finally managed.
"Huh?"
"Wants to fuck him!"
"What? No. Do you know how old he is?"
"I don't know. Late-thirties? Forty? Met him for half a second once. What are you talking about?"
"I found his service records from World War II."
"Temporal shift?" she offered, still chuckling.
"Twice."
Lisa chewed at her lip. "Huh. Tell me more. Yvonne hates him."
And Ianto hated Yvonne. Because Yvonne was unpleasant and arrogant and always felt a little bit dangerous, and Lisa’s idea of making him feel better about it was to suggest that she just wanted him under her desk.
“As a foot rest?” Ianto had asked in a moment of incredulous naivete.
Lisa shook her head and laughed. “I haven’t heard anything about her liking her toes sucked. You’ll have to let me know.”
Ianto stared at her in horror as she smirked at him and then took another sip of wine.
“Has she started critiquing your suits yet?” she asked. “That's when you're really in trouble.”
“That's sexual harassment,” Ianto had said, finally finding his equilibrium.
“It's Torchwood. Who're you planning on complaining to? Anyway, she does it to all the pretty boys. Take it as a compliment.”
Ianto grinned. “You think I'm pretty, do you? Guess you should take a number.” Lisa tackled him at that. The night, all things considered, ended rather well. Ianto bore the marks of it for weeks, and he smiled every time he hit a sore spot.
Lisa planned an evening in for them after Ianto passed his three month probation.
"I have a surprise for you," she’d said, pushing Ianto down onto the bed, in such a manner that he almost fumbled his drink all over her sheets.
He laughed.
"Close your eyes."
He did, waiting and listening and occasionally complaining about how long she was taking with whatever it was while he continued to nurse his vodka. He wanted to be inside her and wanted her over him and wanted them laughing.
He was loosening his tie when she finally said he could look, and he couldn't help but gape a little and wonder if it was all right to laugh as she stood there, naked and hand on hip wearing some sort of harness and a fake cock and looking at him hopefully.
"You're not kidding, are you?"
"Do you want me to be?" she asked, sounding younger and more lost than Ianto had ever heard her before.
He shook his head and set his drink down on the floor, and then slid off the bed and onto his knees. After that it seemed easy somehow to reach his arms up to wrap around her waist as he sucked the dildo into his mouth. And while he wished it hadn't tasted like chemicals and had been as warm as her (maybe he could shove it up into her next time first), all he could think was that this was perfect and so was she, and that Torchwood and all its murderers and aliens were worth it if it contained mysteries like this.
Lisa dragged her fingers softly through his hair and chuckled warmly. “Have you ever done this before?”
He shook his head, and gave her a muffled no.
“Have you wanted to?” she asked, and he pulled off her and sat back on his heels, realising they were going to have to discuss this, at least a little.
“Yeah,” he said looking up at her. “But I hadn’t imagined this.”
She nodded, and Ianto wondered briefly if she hadn’t got his meaning or just didn’t care.
“Probably easier if you get back on the bed,” she offered with a crooked smile.
Ianto grabbed his drink, took another sip and set the glass down on her night table. “Probably’ll help if I get undressed too.”
Lisa laughed and watched him carefully as he did.
“Mmmm, my Ianto, nice and hard,” she said, grabbing his cock, once he’d gotten naked.
And he’d wanted to laugh and ask her what she expected. She was beautiful and he was getting to lose his virginity twice. Of course he was hard, even if he was a little scared and felt also some small, terrible aching guilt for Jens.
“Still with me?” she asked, and Ianto nodded, working hard to look her in the eye as he tried to recall if he had slipped his stopwatch into his suit jacket pocket or into his briefcase at the end of the work day. He always remembered everything, and yet suddenly couldn’t think of it now.
She told him to kneel and how to arch his back and pour himself across the bed to make it easier for them both, and she murmured to him and smoothed a hand over the small of his back, and kissed his thighs as she pushed her fingers slick with lube into him over and over again until he didn’t know either her name or his own.
The dildo at first seemed too hard, too large, strange and foreign and unkind, but she was stroking his cock, and saying “let me,” and encouraging him to be lost, her hand on the back of his neck, and then she was right up against him and he couldn’t move or breathe. He was the world broken open and poured into this girl’s hands.
It seemed ridiculous, to realize he had waited his whole life for this one perfect type of silence.
He was so loud as she fucked him, he was surprised the neighbors didn’t complain. And after she held him as he clung to her, sore and humming happily. She didn’t even have to ask him if it was good, and that, he thought with a distant chuckle, was confidence he could admire.
She had laughed delightedly when he told her as much and then asked him about which celebrity blokes he fancied.
They had been dating for four months -- four months, and three days, to be precise; Ianto had always had a head for extraneous, irrelevant specificities -- when he got a call from his mother to come home. Her voice was weaker than he remembered, and there was a note of pleading in it that he'd never heard before.
Even though he knew the truth the moment he heard the phone call, it was still a shock to see her. She'd lost startling amounts of weight, her face drawn and thin. She looked like a caricature of herself.
Ianto sat at her bedside quietly, holding her hand in his, and he made lists in his head of all the things he couldn't do (ransack Torchwood for some mysterious alien cure, go back in time and be a better, more attentive son, never have taken the job in London, so he could have spent these last few months with her, just to name a few).
She didn't smile at him, but the nurses told him that she seemed easier now that he was here, and that she'd refused to ring him up until the end was close. He spoke with the doctors about pain medication, he kissed her forehead and told her she was stubborn, and she told him, in a cracked, weak voice that, after all, he'd got it from somewhere.
He told her that he thought he'd finally found work that he liked, a place in the world, and a girl that he thought he might love; he showed her a picture of himself and Lisa, taken by a tourist near the British Museum; she nodded at that, and looked at him approvingly, he thought.
And when she died, four days later, Ianto knelt by her bedside and tried to pray, like she would've wanted, but the world seemed cold and empty, and he was very, very tired.
When he spoke to Lisa on the phone, she offered to come down for the funeral. He refused -- what was the point? He'd have liked to have introduced her to his mother, but standing beside the corpse for all the neighbors to gawk at didn't appeal to him -- and her voice was kind when she said, "Come home soon, Ianto."
Home. Ianto didn't know if the planet contained any such thing for him. Not anymore.
He spent a day packing up the house and putting boxes and furniture in storage, spoke to an estate agent, and handed over the keys. What would he do with a house in Cardiff? His life wasn't there any more, and he was sure it would never be again.
When he got back to London, Yvonne Hartman told him that it was good he'd returned as they couldn't have held the job for him much longer. He restrained himself, somehow, from wondering out loud how essential it could possibly be to file things that no one ever wanted to look at anyway.
"It's her way of telling you she likes you," Lisa informed him, when he was sitting at her flat that evening, telling her all about it.
"I wish she didn't."
"Useful, though," she remarked. "Onwards and upwards. Promotion and all that."
"There's only one position for which Yvonne would be willing to put up with my mouth and that's because she thinks it'd be too busy for conversation there --"
Lisa choked with laughter.
"What?" Ianto said. "You're the one who told me that, and after careful observation, I am forced to agree."
She looked at him levelly. "Are you all right, Ianto?"
"No," he said. "It... I thought the world had rewritten itself enough when my father died. But this... I know it happens to everyone. But I wasn't... I'm not ready. Not for this."
"No one ever is," she said.
"I feel... unharnessed. Like there were these strings keeping me here, and now they've all got untied. And I keep crying, and I hate it."
"I know," she said, and she looked like she wanted to say a million things, and couldn't find the words for any of them. He loved her for that just a little more -- that she hurt for him enough that she couldn't mouth platitudes, and he cried again that night while he was buried inside her, and she only petted his hair, but didn't give him words.
She asked him to move in with her, a couple of months later, and Ianto looked around at his uncomfortable one room flat, smiled up at her and said, "Yes, please."
And so there again, he found home, and they bought sheets from Marks and Spencer, and put up shelves together; they even drove to Cardiff with a removal van, and picked up a few things from the old house to put into her flat. They argued over what kind of dishes to buy and her odd predilection for seventies era prints, and his enormous collection of CDs.
The world continued to move on in its new pattern; when he thought about it, he was grateful for how separate it felt from any of his life before. It was nice to have a role to play, and to know what that role was. He was comfortable with the papers and codes; research puzzles that came down in beautifully organized little folders whose neatness disguised the death and pain that was described inside them. They hardly seemed real to Ianto.
Real was Lisa and their flat and the nights spent watching telly and making love and drinking red wine; real was reading aloud to her (she liked poetry -- Dylan Thomas, Gwendolyn Brooks and Yeats -- and children's books and non-fiction about quantum physics), dressing up and taking her to fancy restaurants, going to the art museum, and the arcade and making her play old video games with him, which she approached with a serious intensity that tickled him immensely.
He knew he'd never make a field operative, and he liked it that way. This way, the folders could remain stolen secrets for him to lay at Lisa's feet -- and not the blood and guts that he knew they actually were.
And so it went, through the Christmas night that she was called in to work on emergency programming for a missile strike on a Sycorax ship, and the time that he misplaced a file, and Yvonne hauled him in to shout at him for twenty minutes straight, and his long stint at helping to archive the searches for UFO activity that Torchwood kept blocking (sometimes with software, and sometimes through installing people in psychiatric wards) and the time where Robert and Patrick made fools of themselves by getting drunk and stealing some alien tech and trying to terrorise a local shop.
That was Ianto's first experience with administering the drug they called Retcon; even after all this time, the name still made him laugh, and he was grateful for it, even if it seemed like a kind of theft he wasn't altogether comfortable with. Still, it kept Torchwood from killing people, and he supposed that was a good thing since gross stupidity, while annoying, wasn't exactly cause for a death sentence. Most days, anyway.
Things continued normally – for Ianto's new definition of normal anyway, which he had become very fond of. There were outlets for everything now: Torchwood had found uses for his rage and curiosity and detachment, and it fed his need for secret corners and dark places. And it was in Torchwood that he'd found Lisa, who was the first person to see all of this, and love him not in spite of, but because.
Then the ghosts arrived.
He hadn't even thought he missed them so much, his parents -- they belonged to a life that was dead and gone -- and that was what convinced him that they were really there. That, and the smell of his father's pipe, and the cloth of his jacket, his mother's perfume and the indefinable sense of their presence. And he found himself overwhelmed with thankfulness for the fact that it was true, that his mother had been right, that there was something after death.
He was thankful too that his parents could see the flat he shared with Lisa, the home that they'd built together, and that his father could finally be eased of his fears, that his son had become a man and the kind of man that he understood at that.
For the first time, Ianto truly felt like all of his pieces had come together into a pleasing whole, and as they clustered around him Lisa remarked on how closely the ghosts clung to him, saying his parents must have loved him very much; Ianto, who had never been as certain of that as he would have liked to be, until now, smiled with pride.
It was strange having all these gaps suddenly filled, and raw places soothed -- some of them he hadn't even known were there. Ianto, who'd always felt so restless, dreamed now of peace, and although he found it odd, he also found it pleasant.
In his spare time he found himself stopping by jewelers' shops and looking at rings in the window. As he did, he thought of Paris and Rome and imagined taking Lisa there and looking at all his old haunts with new eyes that were no longer so alone.
And then one day, a couple of months later, just another ordinary day, in a long string of ordinary, contented days, Lisa stopped by the Archives, and perched on his desk for their regular mid-morning gossip.
"So, did you hear about Adeola and Gareth?"
"Lis, everyone's heard about that."
"You mean real live people actually speak to you? I thought they stuck you down here where there was no possibility of that happening."
"You're here," Ianto remarked dryly. "And you're also sitting on that folder. Which I need. To do actual work? You've heard of that?"
"Whatever. I heard they were trying to keep it under wraps. Not be just another Torchwood fling."
"No wonder everyone's heard about it. Didn't you use that line on me?"
Lisa grinned at him and leaned forward to kiss him on the forehead. "And now you're putty in my hands."
"Very true," he said. "You can prove it to me later tonight, if you want."
"It's a date."
"Good. Now, get lost. I've loads to do."
She hit the side of his head gently, and disappeared through the door.
It was only a few hours later that she came back, when he was well in the thick of trying to get several bins of assorted objects back into the shelving areas they belonged to, but everything was jumbled together and he was increasingly certain the mess was going to have him working overtime.
"What is it now, Lisa?" he asked, turning a small object that looked like some sort of alien electric shaver or lockpicking device or something over and over in his hands. "I'm really busy today."
"You'll never believe it."
"As much as I love chatting about the sex lives of our co-workers --"
She laughed. "I've got real news this time."
"Okay, what?"
She lowered her voice to a whisper. "It's him. The Doctor. He's IN the building."
"Oh come on, Lisa. Someone got you with that one? You've been here longer than me. Someone's always saying that, and it's never true."
"No, really. Don't you want to come see?"
"I can't, really, Lis. I'm in up to my head today.”
“Just… come on,” she said tugging on him.
“I can’t. We can’t leave these out. You know –“
Lisa shoved the bin at Ianto’s feet into a storage locker and slammed the door before glaring at him expectantly.
He held up the device. That still needed its home and more now than later.
She took it out of his hands and shoved it into his pocket. Then she kissed him. “Come on. Live a little. Break the rules. Once in a lifetime.”
Ianto rolled his eyes. “Just like you,” he muttered under his breath.
“Of course,” she said. “You coming?”
“As if there was ever any doubt,” he said and smiled at her, standing in front of him, slim and straight and full of focus.
As he looked at her, Ianto thought, as he often did, that it was so comforting to see her and know without the shadow of a doubt that this was the silhouette that gave shape to all the formless future that lay ahead, that gave meaning to everything that he did. One shape, to define a life. And what a life it was.
He felt the bulge in his pocket, and thought, well, why not? A loan – a theft of nothing but a little time. No one would ever have to know.
“I'm right behind you,” he said, and followed her out the door.
Continue to There Are Some Men Who Should Have Mountains To Bear Their Names To Time
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-07 01:32 pm (UTC)I'm writing reviews of all the nominees, in hopes of figuring out how to vote, and I'm including this series in tonight's edition. I've been pulling my favorite quotes as I read (yes, very bad, should have reviewed for each story), but as I don't think I'll be able to include them all, I'll put them here for your amusement.
Says Ianto to Jack at one point: I've made a choice to be here and keep being here. It's not that it's the least I can do; it's that in the scheme of things it's not that bad. You're not that bad. Me? Well, we all have our issues.
How someone from the future [Jack] could be so caught up in the past, was one of those things that Ianto was sure he would never be able to really puzzle out.
"You miss having a commanding officer," Ianto said, meaning no innuendo by it, but Jack smirked.
"Why haven't we done this sooner?" [Jack] eventually inquired idly.
Ianto shrugged. "Weevils, sir," he said, deadpan.
Proof that Jack Harkness is not perfect: There were weevils crashing around Cardiff in broad daylight and Jack had decided he [Ianto] should sleep in? And taken his car?!
Ianto angry at Jack: “Curry, pizza or Chinese?”
"Whichever one's hardest for you to poison," Owen said with malicious cheer.
Jack on Ianto: Ianto was so young. And Jack was moving through his life and warping it, like that fixed point the Doctor liked to call him, like the birth of a star nails down and distorts the fabric of space and time.
Jack on his relationship with Ianto: “Okay,” he said to the silent dark. “It doesn't matter. I give up. I give in. No more running. No more rebellion. It never worked anyway. After all, it got me here.”
Ianto: He belonged to Jack, maybe, but Jack couldn't ever belong to him, no matter how much he might wish it otherwise.
Jack on their relationship: "I remembered this time," Jack said, staring up into the sky. "But now I understand that one day, I just won't. No matter what I do. Two thousand years? It felt like an eternity, but it was just a day for you, and one day, even that'll be an eyeblink for me. I promised you once I'd never forget your story, remember?...But I will. I won't be able to help it. Someday I won't even remember your name. You'll be dead all over again, and I won't even know it, but I'll have killed you. For good."
Their relationship, in the end: 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.
Thank you so much for writing and posting these. They're absolutely amazing. Please write more.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-07 08:30 pm (UTC)I don't know why we're in the DW section either (we're also in the Torchwood section, so...) unless it's for some bizarre timey-wimey reason -- the last two installments which we're working on now are very definitely DW crossovers (the Doctor is a main character in both of them) but since we've yet to finish writing those -- I'm really at a loss. But! Thank you for so much for reading. We're delighted it spoke to you, and we hope you'll enjoy the rest! We plan to have the next installment posted in the next week or so.