We held gold dust in our hands (6/7, Torchwood, Jack/Ianto/Lisa/Gwen/Rhys)
Title: We held gold dust in our hands (6/7)
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team, etc (Jack/Lisa/Ianto/Gwen/Rhys and all permutations thereof with a heavy dose of the first three), Rhys, Rhiannon, Alice, Ten, Lisa (basically everyone!)
Ratings: NC-17 for sexual content (also mild watersports and lactation sex).
Timeline: AU from pre S1 and threads through both seasons, part of CoE and into THE FUTURE. Enjoy the ride.
Wordcount: 63,000 words
Author's Notes: See the master post for notes and credits and fanmixes.
Summary: You don't pick your family. They pick you.
IANTO
Ever a traditionalist, Ianto had set himself on hating the new archives, despite that they had been constructed per his specifications (and some Victorian guidelines in the Torchwood charter that he couldn't bypass). He hadn't wanted a new system. The old one had been just fine, thank you very much.
And so he had sullenly followed Jack and Gwen down into the new archives, resisting the urge to cross his arms, and then, when the auto lights had blinked on, he'd almost come in his trousers right there in front of God, Wales and everyone.
There are hermetic seals, deadlock seals, drawers in the walls. There is a clean room, four of them, in fact. Twelve blast rooms, one lead lined storage cell (in case they get their hands on some Kryptonite, Jack jokes), seven, count them, seven rooms for the card catalogue that he will construct just to navigate the archives alone. There is a humidified room, a cool room for things that need to be kept at a lower temperature. There is a morgue (cryo storage is technically part of the archives) five times larger than the one they used to have, and already sadly stocked with a dozen bodies. There's a storage closet for his supplies that is relatively similar in size to his London flat.
Ianto'd had to sit down the first time he saw the whole place, but that had been less from shock and more from illness. Now that he has gone to the other side of time and back, that isn't an issue anymore.
Ianto doesn't talk about the time he'd spent in the TARDIS. Sometimes he and Lisa talk about New New York, and the Face of Boe, the person they had met there briefly (The Doctor hadn't been rather keen on them talking to The Face; in fact, he'd been peeved that he'd--it'd? she'd?--somehow shown up there out of the blue.). Upon their return Jack hadn't pressed them, said something about spoilers and laughed, and anything they might have told him about their two weeks (five days!) away is still locked in their chests, dying to come out, like a music box that only plays when the lid is lifted.
So they talk about it in the dark, the visit to the Hospital, the cat-nun-people, the treatments, the trip back, which had been blessedly event-free. Ianto feels as if he has had his one adventure of a lifetime, like how people save for years to go on a Caribbean cruise, and then talk about it for the rest of their lives.
Except Jack doesn't want to hear. Ianto knows why. It's just stymieing, is all.
So he is in the middle of cataloguing something stubbornly heavy and a little sticky ('It's just going to be like that,' Jack says, 'so wrap it in plastic and shove it in the archives.') when Jack calls over the comms that they should all go home. He taps his comm to answer, but Ravi is already whooping into it, and he hears the clatter of metal steps in the background as he races Melissa to the exit. Gwen murmurs something to them both that is non-committal and tired, and he can completely sympathise. He would like to go home, as well.
But he stays for Jack, leaving the archives and mounting the stairs, finding Jack at his desk, cleaning his gun and smiling.
'Early night,' Ianto says, 'What's the occasion?'
Jack snaps the auto loader into place. 'Dead Rift activity. Gwen's looking wasted. You-' he looks up at Ianto and raises an eyebrow, 'Look as if you haven't had a good night's sleep in ages.'
Ianto sits across from him and slouches down in his chair, a gentleman's ungentleman. 'I believe you are to blame for a great deal of that,' he says.
Jack's face is unreadable. 'We don't know that for sure. We could do testing-'
Ianto snorts. 'I think Lisa wants it to be a mystery.'
Jack cocks his head. 'And you? Mister I Know Everything?'
Ianto thinks about that for a second before replying. The answer is fitting for the moment. 'I know everything I need to know for now.'
Jack doesn't reply, but packs his kit away, stowing the gun in the desk drawer. Ianto doesn't move when Jack rises from the desk, crosses the room, and kneels in front of his chair, wedging himself in between Ianto's parted legs. His hands slide up Ianto's thighs, up to the waistband on the sides to pull at the small love handles that Ianto is trying to get rid of. Ianto squirms and Jack smiles into his knee, mumbles something about sexiness. His fingers continue their jaunt up the starched shirt to the underarms, and then slide behind to scratch the shoulder blades before tracing the spine back down to the waist, where they tug, and Ianto slides further down the chair and a little forward. He plants his feet on the floor and grins.
Jack shakes his head, groans into Ianto's thigh. 'Still fantastic, Jones, Ianto Jones.'
'Hrm,' Ianto replies, because in some ways he doubts it, and other ways he is too sure. They make him sexy, he is sure of it, but without them, he is just a council estate chav with a good vocabulary and a vast knowledge of men's dress wear.
Jack obviously has plans for their position, or maybe not. As Ianto runs his hands through the spikes in Jack's hair, he contemplates the dusting of gray he sees. Jack isn't aging physically, not bodily, but stressors sometimes come to wreak havoc on him, and they have decided that gray hair is apparently his body's tell. Jack plucks them, and they have noticed that they grow back in brown, but stress will turn some of them, a strange physiological thing Ianto only ever remembers seeing in Poltergeist, a film from which he wouldn't choose to glean accurate medical information.
The quietness of the Hub, and they only call it that because that's what they called the old place, invades the room and settles in on them, a wet, plaster shell of silence. He finds himself listening for the fall of water where there is none. He wonders if the others would think him odd for setting up a recording of it; the water had been foul sometimes, and it had played merry cob with the electronics, especially in the summers, but the sound of it had been calming. He'd often suspected that the water sound had soothed Owen after certain stressful nights, and more than once he had caught Tosh before she had fallen asleep in her chair at her workstation, to which she had remarked on the hypnotic sounds of the tower and pool.
Ianto finds that he looks back a great deal more than he used to, probably because this new place, for all that it is new no longer, isn't anything like the old place. It's better, certainly, but not the same thing. Other issues have chosen to resurrect the past in his personal life, Ianto knows, and that merits thought as well, but not right at this moment, not when Jack is sleepy-eyed with his cheek resting against Ianto's thigh, hands kneading the flesh of Ianto's hips.
'Would you be angry with me if I told you I'm too tired for this?' Jack asks. 'Jesus, too tired for sex. What the hell is wrong with me?' He presses his lips to Ianto's clothed leg and sits back, arms sliding down Ianto's thighs.
Ianto leans forward then, bracing his hands on Jack's forearms. 'Come on. Let's go home.'
They don't even bother to take the same car. Ianto knows that Jack will leave in the middle of the night, that he doesn't like leaving the Hub unattended. He might stay into the night, though, he might putter about in his room, or play with the juicer in the kitchen. He might do many things. Jack has his own routine, or rather, lack thereof, and living with him is living with that.
Ianto has his own routines.
They take the lift up, and as he loosens his tie, Jack's hand can't seem to resist coming to rest on the hollow of his neck, secret smile just for him, secret smile that means something when one is in on the secret. Ianto wonders when everyone important in his life developed secret expressions around him, ones that he cannot interpret.
Lisa looks up when they come in the door, and Jack flings his coat on the back of the sofa. Ianto toes his shoes off and stands there, inspecting the room: everything is in place; nothing is out of the ordinary. Lisa is smiling and Jack has fallen over the back of the sofa to lie on his back on the cushion, head tilted to face her, laughing softly. She reaches out with one hand to ruffle his hair.
Ianto hangs up his coat and wonders if there is any coffee in the carafe. He would make fresh, but he's damn tired, and his new stance, as of late, has been that beggars cannot be choosers.
On his way to the kitchen, he trips over the nappie bag and almost cracks his head open on the edge of the counter. Jack and Lisa raise their heads in alarm and Jack rolls off the sofa to collect him, pulling him by his wrists and tutting about sleep deprivation. He deposits Ianto on the sofa, and Lisa kisses his temple, then hands over his son before standing and promising to make him some tea.
Ianto is torn between watching her walk freely and of her own volition to the kitchen, and the little face that blinks up at him, eyes drooping and hands waving a little bit. Both are equally befuddling. Jack and Lisa play about in the kitchen, but Ianto dulls them out, staring at the baby's skin, his eyes, his toothless mouth that roots for Lisa's breasts even when he brushes his finger against his cheek.
He smiles at the brown eyes, no longer baby blue, and the shock of black hair on his head. He lifts the child up and onto his stomach so that he rests against his own chest, and something about the weight of it makes his heart skip a bit.
Something Ravi had told him weeks ago sticks with him, something about, 'They're different when they're your kids, man. Don't have any meself, but that's what they always say.' That's an interesting thought. He knows that Gwen would agree.
Jack has done the hand waving "Nah, I'm bad with kids" thing, and Ianto doesn't believe a word of it, but he humors it. He thinks to himself that it is reassuring that Jack is still here, with them, actually, and that should the inevitable happen, their son will have someone to look after him. That Lisa will have someone to look after her, to not retcon her into tomorrow and just wash their hands of her.
Ianto knows that he's the one who isn't good with children. He doesn't know what his son feels, and Lisa says that that is normal. How could he possibly understand what is going on in what Lisa lovingly refers to as his "peanut brain"? He rests his head on the back of the sofa and closes his eyes, knowing that there will be kid drool on this shirt. That's okay then, anyway. Kid drool will wash.
Jack wakes him up by pulling the baby from his chest. He holds him in his hands and turns him, letting the infant rest on his shoulder, one hand placed under his bum, and walks away, his torso twisting a little as he walks as if he is the human swing. Ianto blinks and rubs his eyes.
Lisa sits down next to him and hands him a mug of tea, her own eyes tracking Jack's journey to the back bedroom and its rugby border and jungle bedding.
'Before you start,' Lisa says quietly, 'he wanted to.' They hear humming and the slight click of the mobile being wound.
Ianto turns his head and buries his face in her neck. 'God, I don't have the strength to fight you anymore about it. What happens to us will happen.' When he breathes deep, she smells like baby oil and milk.
Lisa snorts. 'That's how life is, sweetheart. It happens.' She steals his mug and sips his tea. 'And what Jack does, he does.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
LISA
It's surreal, and entirely Gwen's fault. It's probably because she has been trying and succeeding in remaking Torchwood in her own image, and Jack has, for whatever secret reasons, been allowing it. Lisa knows about as much about the inner workings of Torchwood Three as anyone who works there, and sometimes she fancies that she should just get a job there, but that would be too much, too much for them all, for her. Her legs still twitch in the evenings, no matter what amazing fifty billionth-century treatment the Doctor granted her, and when she dreams, she still cannot walk.
She wonders if she will ever run in her dreams again.
But here they all are, some bizarre rag-tag group gathered for an afternoon at the park: Ravi with his sisters and Melissa and her girlfriend all chatting at a park table, young and carefree; Rhys and Gwen playing tumble and badminton with Mica and Steven and David; Ianto and Jack sitting off to the side in folding chairs, their feet touching. One of Jack's bare feet rocks the bouncer that Gwen and Rhys's little Ioan is working as if he can take off for the stars at any minute.
Lisa sips from her Coke and listens to Rhiannon coo over her son. On the other side of her, Alice is lax and boneless, the result of too many lagers.
Alice has introduced herself as Jack's sister, and no one bats an eye. Lisa is grateful that they think she's the younger sister, because she'd had to cajole Alice into coming (Gwen had given her the task and she hadn't wanted it, actually, but for different reasons. Jack had shrugged and said, 'If she wants to, she'll come'), and she isn't sure that it would be going nearly as well as it has been if people had thought her older.
'What are you naming this little thing?' Rhiannon says, putting the child on her shoulder.
Lisa squints into the sun. 'I don't know.'
It's been over a month with no name for the child. Jack calls him "Nugget". Ianto calls him "the baby" or "my boy". Lisa calls him "Little Mister". Every once in a while they toss names out over the dinner table or in the dark of night, spooned around each other like large cats. Nothing seems to fit. Once Ianto had texted her, 'j says nick. nicky? niiiiiick.' And she had texted back, 'no. 2 much father christmas.'
Rhiannon fusses with the baby's overly-precious toes. 'You have to name him eventually.' She looks up. 'Our tad was named "Alun".' Lisa smiles, but Rhiannon quickly amends, 'But Ianto probably wouldn't want that.' The baby waves his fists and makes a noise and Lisa takes him from Rhiannon, unbuttoning her shirt and unhooking her bra. She's a modern woman; this doesn't bother her.
Across the grass, Jack's eyes glitter and he smiles. She sees his hand ghost over Ianto's when he hands him a beer, and she wonders what they're talking about. Sometimes they have a secret language that isn't Torchwood or their home life. Ianto and Jack speak in gestures and half phrases that she has yet to decipher, and she has pretty much been there from the beginning. It's comforting, in a way.
Alice tilts her head, winding a shredded serviette over her index finger until the tip is purple. 'I'm surprised. My-Lucia always said that Jack had names picked. Wanted to name his kid Gray if it was a boy.' She sighed. 'Gray. Dismal.'
Lisa lets the baby latch onto her breast and can't help but shudder. It's a sweet sensation, and she wonders if she'll miss it when the baby is weaned and on formula or cow's milk. Alice watches her with interest.
'I have to ask,' she says, and it occurs to Lisa that Alice is related, possibly, to this little thing, and that might be something she would be interested in.
Upon their return from the future, from the stars, Lisa and Jack and Ianto had spent a frenzied three weeks re-learning everything. Lisa's repaired nervous system had opened the world to her not unlike rediscovering an old, long shut-off wing of a library that is filled with one's favorite books-she had fallen on them like something indescribable. Something that she would claim smells and tastes like peaches.
Even now she doesn't regret it, filled nights on her knees, or with Jack behind her, Ianto in front, or pressed up against the wall of the shower, or riding one or the other of them on the patio ground, or in the garden boxes (Jack had made fertility jokes, and now, now.). She hadn't even thought of the pill, they hadn't used condoms in years, not quite, and maybe they had all decided that it hadn't mattered. Maybe the moment she had run from the TARDIS and into Jack's arms, showing him, look, look what I can do now, they had all decided that they could plow through everything together. Maybe they had declared in silent kisses and sweaty limbs and giggling orgasms that they weren't afraid of anything.
And she isn't. Not so much when Ianto doesn't need the vapouriser anymore and they had thrown it out even though they had known that they would just need to get another one for the baby, one that looks like a blue penguin. Her chair is gone; she hadn't even brought it back to Cardiff with her, just shoved it out of the TARDIS as they barreled through the cosmos (Ianto had carved a message on the arm, a message he had told her will spin in the void for all time, and which in some way, she agrees, makes it true forever.). Jack sits with her and the baby sometimes, whilst Ianto sleeps and she's up, breastfeeding, and they talk about the Doctor, about New New Earth and the people she'd met there, but only in very vague terms. Jack doesn't want to know any details about the planet or the people. He doesn't want to know their names. She thinks ruefully that Jack is trying not to spoil himself, because he'll get there eventually, one way or another. That doesn't frighten her, either.
Lisa knows that Alice has asked her about the baby, and she knows what it is implying, and so she gives her the only answer she has.
'I honestly don't know,' she finally replies.
It's not that she doesn't want to know. It's that she feels as if she shouldn't know. Perhaps if the baby grows up to be a child and then a man, they will see whom he more closely resembles, and then they will know. Perhaps he will learn to walk and talk and dance and fight and they will never be able to see in his face, in his body, in his manner, who he is more like, and that might mean more than any computer printout could ever tell them.
They pretend that he is Ianto's, and everyone but the three of them is fooled. And maybe Gwen, but she has never cared about those things, anyway.
Johnny, Rhiannon's husband, joins the game, and he and Rhys allow themselves to be tackled by the kids. Gwen lies on her back in the grass, and her knees are stained green. Jack and Ianto laugh at something they've said. The baby lets go and she switches breasts, even though she doesn't usually. She wants this moment to stretch out a little longer; the medical books she has say that breastfeeding releases a drug into her system, and it feels hazy, like she could sleep soon. Maybe she will, just lie on a blanket in the grass with the baby in her arms and trust that everyone here will keep an eye on her.
Alice sighs and stretches, cat-like, her arms shooting in the air like delicate, drunken fronds. Rhiannon smiles at the game on the grass, then looks at Lisa. 'Ianto was an unhappy child,' she says, 'and God knows I tried, but with mam gone, he just never seemed to settle.'
Lisa glances over at Ianto, lax and happy in the sun. She knows that he is happy because his eyes are closed. When Ianto is disturbed, his eyes widen and he cannot stop looking around. Now though, the sun hits him and he tilts his face up to it. Jack's finger beats a rhythm on the arm of his chair, because he is never at rest, he just affects it well.
'I was a happy child,' she tells Rhiannon, 'but I was a broody teenager. That's slightly worse, I think.' She cocks her head. 'At least with Ianto you know what you're in for.'
Rhiannon smiles into her drink. 'Well, with the three,' she pauses, 'the four of you, I don’t worry as much.' She gestures with her glass. 'You never quite stop worrying, and I wouldn't have picked it, but your thing is good.'
Lisa crooks her mouth up when Ianto turns his head to blink at her, as if he is checking to make sure she is still there and she feels rooted to the spot. Yeah, still here.
Ravi stands up alarmedly and pulls something from his belt, then glances at Jack. Ianto sets his beer down and glances at his watch as he rolls his trouser legs down. Gwen's face can't hide the disappointment when she jogs over to Jack and they confer with bowed heads before she scoops her son up in her arms and showers him with kisses.
Well, an hour forty without disaster. Job well done.
Alice's face is one of cynical amusement, but she lets Jack kiss her cheek and grab Steven in a bear hug before he turns to press his lips to Lisa's, one hand reaching out to run along the baby's head. It is easy to miss, and Lisa is surprised that he has done it.
'Roger?' he whispers to her.
Her mouth curves; she can feel it. 'Executive veto. Roger Moore.'
He snaps his fingers as he backs away, smiling. 'Rats.'
Melissa pecks her girlfriend on her cheek and Gwen leaves Ioan crying in Rhys's arms as they all race for the SUV. Ianto is last, pulling her in and nuzzling her neck before bending down to smell his son's head and smile to himself, eyes closed, and she wonders if he is, in this moment, taking up the mantle that has been hovering above his shoulders. Or if he understands that when he runs for the SUV, leaving Lisa to explain that they all have to go to work, special ops, yeah, that it could be the last time he sees them (They can't have known Melissa wouldn't be coming back. That Ianto would almost lose his sight. That Gwen would have a limp for the rest of her life.).
Maybe it's the family, the setting that does it, but whatever it is, the relief of it makes Lisa smile at his retreating form. Rhiannon huffs and sits back in her chair. 'Special ops, really?' she asks. 'Like some sort of spy?'
Alice snorts, but she bites her lower lip, her grin wry. 'Special ops,' she confirms. Because Alice can play the company game as well. Lisa likes her for that. She wonders if in looking at Alice, she is seeing her own child's future.
Alice meets her eyes, and Jesus, is her father in them, no matter how brown they are. Something about the arch of her brow. Lisa wonders what she looks like when she fights, full out, violent, maybe she never has, but somehow Lisa doubts that. She wonders if Alice thrums with extra life. Not immortality, of course, but something extra, something special.
She wonders what Jack's DNA looks like under a scanner.
'If you had another boy,' Lisa asks her, 'what would you call him?'
*~*~*~*~*~*
JACK
So with Ianto and Gwen in London ('Could Torchwood please send two representatives that are not Captain Harkness? The Home Office steno pool will be quite distracted if there is a repeat of last time'), Jack finds himself in the SUV with Ravi and their convenient backup, Rhys Williams. Rhys is actually a better shot than Ravi, and Jack's seen him in action with golf clubs, a chainsaw and a butcher block, so he thinks that Rhys is an appropriate substitute for Gwen, minus the police skills and the training, and the years on the job.
On the downside, if something happens to Rhys, if he gets a hangnail or a split end, Gwen will cut off Jack's balls and sauté them in brown butter. Torchwood would be paying for a child-minder too, if Lisa hadn't taken Ioan. Jack rolls his eyes at the idea of babysitting expenses being a fiscal Torchwood concern.
Ravi reclines his seat and puts one trainer-clad foot on the dashboard. Jack half wants it to trigger the airbag just for kicks, but then he remembers that he likes Ravi, and that they're supposed to be working, and that airbags have dust. And the SUV won't restart with a blown bag. Stupid twenty-first century computers.
They are waiting for this Gleeph gambling ring to break up, and then they're going to irradiate all of them with blacklight so that they turn green, the idea being that the Gleeph will be so embarrassed about their unsightly colour that they'll just…shove off the planet and never come back.
Jack loves the idea of it. He almost left his gun back at the Hub. Almost.
'So she wants to get married,' Ravi says darkly. 'Married. Like permanent.'
'That's what a marriage is, Rav,' Jack jokes.
'Open marriage, I says, and she gets all stroppy,' Ravi continues, and Jack winces. Rhys whistles under his breath. 'What? I'm not ready.' He turns to the backseat. 'How did you know when you were ready?'
Jack glances at Rhys in the rearview mirror. He's curious himself. He has his own answers to this, but they involve hand waving and a good impression of the Doctor saying, 'Weeeeeell, it's all timey-wimey.'
Rhys smiles and glances out the window. 'Oh, I just knew.'
Jack cannot resist a grin of his own. The rain starts then, pounding on the windshield like a car wash. Huh. He is supposed to wash the SUV while Ianto is away, but he wonders if he can just get away with driving it around extremely fast through the downpour. Ianto will probably glance at the undercarriage and then give him his disappointed face (Jack thinks his disappointed frowny face is hysterical, but chooses not to tell him that.).
Ravi turns back around and sighs. 'There's just so many girls, man.'
'How long has it been since you had one of those other nebulous girls?' Jack asks, because he figures that if they have to wait here, they might as well have a little chat. 'Or a boy. I don't like to discriminate.'
Ravi snorts. 'Not my style, man.'
Jack boggles, not for the first time, at the fact that he has finally, completely unintentionally, managed to hire someone who is actually straight. Not bi, or bi-curious, or in the closet, but straight. Ravi is adorable in his honesty about it, saying, 'Yeah, well, I tried to have a threesome once, me girl and this other bloke, but I just couldn't get it up. We were all hot and heavy and there she was, begging for it, and I just couldn't.'
Jack says something about performance anxiety and Ravi smiles, toying with the tech in his hand, something small and useless to keep his fingers busy, no doubt. 'Oh no, like to keep an open mind. Picked up a bloke in a pub to see what the fuss was about; he sucked me off in the head.' He shrugged. 'Just kept wishing it was someone with a pair of tits, and well. A mouth's a mouth, but girls, man, girls are stellar. But I wanted to be sure.'
Jack gives it some thought that maybe there are some people who are straight and some people who are gay, no matter how many people fall in between. And he wonders when his horse had got so goddamn high. Huh. Ravi sighs out the window. 'You, man, I can see why you do it, you know, I just think it'd be better if they were both birds.'
Jack stops to think about Ianto as a woman, because that warrants a moment's consideration. Then that switches to himself as a woman and Ianto as a man, or he and Ianto as women and Lisa with a giant cock…wow, he has a job to do here. He clears his throat and puts his hands on the motionless steering wheel.
'There are advantages,' he says. Rhys grunts from the backseat. Jack had almost forgotten he was there for a second. He looks for Rhys again and their eyes meet in the mirror.
Jack and Rhys had only had sex the one time, in the hot tub, but man, it had been a good ride. Well, Jack had thought it was. He wouldn't have minded another go or four, or five, but Rhys isn't that kind of swinger. Wasn't. Now he's all family man, and Jack is comforted by the fact that he doesn't seem to care about what happened at the penthouse, that he is content with the past, how everything happened, and he doesn't mind acknowledging it.
Jack deliberately doesn't mention it, not because it is awkward, but because it is the right thing to do. Rhys will only take so much, and casual flirting is off the menu now.
'I like the sex and the closeness and all that. What do they call that, intimacy?' Ravi shrugs. 'It's the other stuff I can do without,' he adds. 'Doin' the dishes, meetin' the in-laws, livin' together.'
'Leaving the loo seat down,' Rhys chimes in.
'Telling her she looks beautiful first thing in the morning,' Ravi says, and there, Jack grins out the window and refrains from mentioning that everyone looks kinda scrotty first thing in the morning, even Ravi.
Jack won't admit that sometimes he prefers it, because it is unguarded, real, uncomplicated, those first fifteen minutes in which no one is awake and they stumble about in the bathroom, prepping the shower, brushing teeth. Ianto's hair is always a mess, and Lisa is usually so groggy that she tells Jack the truth about anything he asks. He always asks her where she's hidden all the Hob-Nobs; he has priorities.
Well, okay, he likes the first fifteen minutes directly after Ianto brushes his teeth, because man, that's nasty. Lisa wouldn't let him kiss her that early in the morning if her mouth was on fire and his was a fire extinguisher. He's tried and been decked.
Jack thinks about the last time he did the dishes and cannot remember. They have an autowasher, and Lisa is pretty much on top of that, these days. Ianto likes to wash dishes, actually. Ianto likes to wipe dirt from a lot of things. Ianto likes the appearance of cleanliness. Jack just prefers that things not have a layer of scum on them.
Lisa's parents had visited right after the baby had arrived. Jack had voluntarily bunked in the Hub, waving his hands and saying something about how the twenty-first century changes only so much. They had stayed for a week, and then gone back to their home in Little Whinging, Privet Drive, wherever. Lisa had waved a hand dismissively and said something about cupboards and Dementors.
'Oh look,' Ravi says, 'they're coming.' Jack follows his finger to the Gleeph emerging from the warehouse door. They all look a little pink; that's about to change. Rhys is already fingering the big modified light on the stick that they have rigged. This is going to be epically funny, if only for the fact that Jack hates Gleeph because they always cheat at Qrilinium Blackjack, and he still remembers a particularly stunning loss he'd sustained that had ended in losing his shirt, literally.
At least John had thought it funny. Then again, what John finds funny is always hit and miss, mostly miss.
Jack flips his collar up and feels the little heartbeat increase that he gets when he's about to confront something, for whatever reason. Sometimes his hands shake, but not today. Today is for fun. 'All right then, gentlemen,' he says, dredging a line from somewhere in his brain's recesses, 'It's time to make the donuts.'
Behind him, Rhys groans as he gets out of the car. 'You're daft, Harkness.'
Well, yeah, sometimes.
It works like a charm. Jack has never had a mission go so well, or so humorously. Rhys had waved the light stick, and Ravi had shouted 'fire in th' hole!' and then the flash had hit all the Gleeph at once, and when it fizzled out (the battery pack has a life of about ten seconds, stupid alien tech), they had had five green splotchy Gleeph keening and wailing. Jack had given them his "I'm the Sheriff of Cardiff-ham-ford-shire" speech, and then the three of them had escorted the Gleeph to their ship and made them solemnly swear to never return. The likelihood that they will is slim, but Jack takes their ship's internal schematics anyway, and then he sets their Navistar Flight memory for Earth to self-destruct in ten minutes.
Everybody lives.
They drop Ravi off at his place, and Jack can see the lights on. His girl is waiting up for him.
Jack wants to grab his wrist as he gets out, grab it and say, 'Put a ring on her finger. Trust me,' but he doesn't give that kind of advice. And it's none of his business. Well, it's not Torchwood business, so he has no say, and your boss telling you to get married sounds off. Plus, Jack doesn't know Sandy, doesn't know what she's like, other than what Ravi mentions (and he's crazy about her, Jack can tell from the look in his eye), so he won't add his two pence.
On the way back to the flat though, Rhys sighs and chuckles. 'He needs to just up and marry that girl.'
When he and Rhys return to the penthouse, Lisa is asleep in the bedroom, the baby in his cot, and Ioan settled in her arms. She rouses enough to transfer the toddler to Rhys's capable hands and then rolls backward onto the bed, already in dreamland.
Jack wanders out into the living area, spinning the rattle globe on Evan's bouncer, because he likes the circus lights. He shoves his hands in his pockets and listens to the short electronic tune that plays for about five seconds. He doubles back out of curiosity and steps into Evan's room. Sometimes, he just needs to see him, as if he's afraid that he'll turn away and Evan will be gone. He thinks about Jonah Bevan, who has recently died out at Flat Holm, and how one day he had been a teenager coming home from practice and then the next, just gone, lost to the Rift and then returned, broken and old.
The vapouriser is running because Evan has a cold, Jack knows, and even as he enters he knows that he shouldn't. Jack smiles at the clay nameplate hanging on the door, the big "E" backwards as a joke when Stephen had made it in school and given it to him the last time he had dropped in on Alice. She'd named the baby, Lisa had told them suddenly a few nights after the mission crisis had died down and Melissa's cold body had been tucked into a vault, and they had been lying in the dark, listening to the quiet snores of the kid in the middle of the bed. Jack doesn't ask Lisa why she had picked that name, but Alice is chuffed a little, and Jack can live with that. God, he could live with that forever, but he knows that someday he will disappoint Alice, and their fragile peace will be broken.
Evan is asleep on his back, and Jack doesn't want to touch him, wake him. He just wants to lay two fingers on his head, on his hair, feel the warmth from his skin, then back away slowly and close the door on the green glow of the night light.
While he walks down the hallway, Jack thinks about Ravi and the things that he doesn't like to do. He glances at the photos of the three of them on the wall at the end of the hallway, the hallway of family photos that Lisa and Ianto plaster up everywhere they live. It's a double picture of the three of them at Gwen and Rhys's wedding, back to back with one from right after Evan had been born. Ianto and Lisa are slung about each other in the pictures. In the first, Jack is on Lisa's other side, extra, added on. In the second, he is behind them, cheek resting on the crown of Lisa's head as she looks at the baby in her arms. Still pasted on, Jack. Photoshopped into their lives.
The kitchen is overflowing with dishes, because the autowasher is broken and they have been washing manually, but with two children under the age of three in the house for the evening, Lisa is probably worn. Bottles with shrunken liners stack in the sink, Ioan's 'sippy cups' and a few of Lisa's own dishes as well.
Jack looks backwards once at the pictures on the wall, rolls up his sleeves and turns on the tap, bent on affixing himself for good.
*~*~*~*~*~*
LISA
She loves the fact that Jack sleeps in the center sometimes. Because that's how it has to be sometimes, on the days in which Ianto is angry at the baby and she is angry at him or any number of reasons, and rarely are they upset at Jack. Well, rarely is Lisa upset at Jack. When she does get cross with Jack, it's usually for something so inconsequential that she doesn't even tell him what it is. She just sort of grits her teeth at the dirty dishes in the sink, or the biro that has been washed with a load of shirts and tells herself that this? Not the end of the universe. Not by a long shot.
When Ianto is upset with Jack it is always over something work-related, and she can understand that. They have places in which they reside at work, and that has almost never followed them home, except on certain occasions, and on those occasions Jack sleeps on the sofa, voluntarily, or on the other side of Lisa, turned away from her so that she can spoon him, and even then, Ianto presses up against her back and reaches over her hip to touch Jack, as if skin will make everything better. Sometimes it does.
On the very very odd occasions that it is Jack who is angry, he doesn't come home.
But often, Lisa can sense that Ianto is worried. Worried about what is going to happen to them, all of them. She often wonders if Ianto would freeze time if he could, freeze them all together in this flat. If she were to ask him, he would deny it; he probably doesn't think about it in that way, and he certainly carries a great deal of love for their child, in that detached parent way that she often sees in men his age.
Still. It's all rather mystifying. Not unlike any number of amazing things that have happened to her in the past year, starting with the fact that she is wiggling her toes as she lies on the sofa.
Jack comes to her in the morning, well past the time when he should be at work. Evan is sleeping in the vibrating chair on the floor in the living room, and she is lying on the sofa , dozing lightly and occasionally waking long enough to feel guilty about not starting in on the laundry and dishes. She'll get to them soon enough. Morning is for lazing about in the sunshine, enjoying the fact that she is alive and whole, and her child is alive and whole, and her husband…well that they are all alive, and whole. She has tonnes of things to do, not the least of which is prepping herself to return to work, something to which she is, after three long months, looking forward in a reluctant manner.
Jack's keys jingle in the door and he comes in with a minimum of fuss, just slips in through the smallest crack he can make before pocketing his keys and crossing the room. His eyes search for Evan and find him, and his shoulders seem to relax, as if he had been strangely worried. She doesn't even bother to move. Some part of her thinks of The Great Gatsby and its women in white lounging listlessly in the heat, dying of ennui.
'Well, you're here,' she says, wanting to say, Why are you here? but knowing that's not even really the question.
Jack smiles and kneels down by the sofa, burying his face in her neck. 'Ianto needs clothes. He's starkers at the Hub. I think he might have been relegated to a pair of medical scrubs, and we all know how that makes him feel.' His arm slings over her shoulders.
Lisa smiles. Ianto forgetting extra clothes at the Hub is one of his pet peeves. She imagines him slamming things about, burning the coffee beans, swearing under his breath at the monitors. Ianto in a bad mood is a passive-aggressive something to behold. She raises a hand and runs it through Jack's hair. He smells like Jack, whatever that is, those pheromones and some sort of hair wax that Ianto and he have been using, something that smells like flowers. Manly flowers, Jack would tell her.
'Oh, then I'd better not keep you,' she says, 'Himself will be wanting proper raiment.' And they both chuckle. Lisa loves Ianto's suits; he'd been wearing one the first time she'd met him, and the cuts might have changed, but Ianto's posture in them hasn't. And she loves a man who wears cloth like a costume. Her fingers travel down Jack's coat arm.
The baby makes a snorting noise and they both look over.
'Ianto thinks you'll leave because of-'
'Yeah, let's not get into that,' Jack says.
Lisa can feel his mouth on her neck, and the sensation isn't unpleasant. 'Oh, then, you're here for clothes?' She starts to get up, but he doesn't move, his weight on her shoulders and his hair tickling her face as he breathes, as if he has fallen asleep. She wonders if his eyes are closed.
'I'm not a talker, Lis.'
Now she really does have to roll her eyes, because that is so very true but not.
Instead she says, 'I know. Still.'
Jack lifts his head and stares at her, just stares at her, his eyes darting back and forth across her eyesight. His arms are lead on her shoulder. The sun cuts behind him, and he blocks it with his head.
'Marry me,' he says.
She shakes her head. 'Taken.'
Jack sighs. 'I'll marry him too,' he says, rolling his eyes, breaking what could have been romantic if he hadn't just proposed to a married woman. 'I'll ask him, and he'll say yes, you know he will.'
That's what she's afraid of.
'Bullshit,' she says, slapping his arm from her captive space below.
Jack laughs, free, easy, more regret than before, and now this time she knows that she is the cause of some of it. 'What do we have to do? Sign some papers, whatever, legal documents, blah blah blah. None of that means anything.' He winks. 'I'll put another ring on your finger, and you can have fun explaining it to strangers when they ask.'
Lisa pretends to consider. 'That would be fun at parties,' she muses.
Jack bends down then, brushing his nose against hers and then he kisses her, hullo, rather soundly, and that is lovely. She's obviously just along for the ride, she realises, as he steers the kiss like he drives-breakneck, haphazard, just a touch in a hurry. When he is done, he bites his way down her neck, mumbling into her skin.
'We'll put the baby to bed, and then tonight I'll marry you, in front of Ianto and everything. I'll wear white, just for you.'
The idea of Jack in white makes her shiver. White, virginal.
She unbuttons her blouse, because she can feel her breasts throbbing with letdown; this happens from time to time and now she feels impossibly full, sore with it. Her fingers fumble on the buttons, and Jack's hand takes over, giant fingers working where hers could not, opening the damp material, unhooking the bra up at the nursing clasp so that her breast, her dark nipple is framed in a circle of white. He plants sloppy spit kisses down her sternum until he can latch on to her breast, full to hardness, a small moan coming from the back of his throat.
Jack's mouth is hungry, and she would chastise him that there is another mouth that needs it more, but she alternates breasts anyway, so she closes her eyes and listens as Jack suckles from her full breast, licking and rubbing with his chin, his teeth pulling at her nipple. His free hand slides down the open length of her shirt to slip into her denims, bypassing the panties and tugging at her pubic hair before finding her clit and running one fingertip down it. He skips her cunt and pushes further, to where she is newly scarred from where they had cut her, cut her, she says, to make the way for Ianto's big-headed child. She smiles at the thought even as she reaches for Jack's face, bringing her hands into his hair like she does when the baby is nursing.
Jack's eyes open then, and something in her heart skips a little. He sucks harder, swallowing her down, tongue and teeth working, his nose breathing hard against her skin. His fingers massage her scar, and the action of it makes her let down more, her other breast leaking through her bra, into her shirt.
She wants to find his trousers. She wants to open his belt and hold him, but he won't let her, batting her hand away, taking it up to his chest and crushing it in his grip as if they are dancing, in that casual way he has when they move across the floor.
'Jack,' she says finally. But like before, she doesn't have anything to add.
He stares at her, and she has to push her finger in between his mouth and her breast to release the suction. Even then, he licks around the areola, cleaning off his spit and her milk, anything that might remain before he finally pulls the nursing bra back up, hooks it into place, and then withdraws his hand from her denims, licking the fingers clean before he buttons her shirt and rests his head on her breast.
Lisa watches the cleanup act in mild amusement.
'I can't stop,' he tells her then. 'You always have to tell me when to stop.'
Ah, here, she has something to say. 'I'll always tell you when to stop.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team, etc (Jack/Lisa/Ianto/Gwen/Rhys and all permutations thereof with a heavy dose of the first three), Rhys, Rhiannon, Alice, Ten, Lisa (basically everyone!)
Ratings: NC-17 for sexual content (also mild watersports and lactation sex).
Timeline: AU from pre S1 and threads through both seasons, part of CoE and into THE FUTURE. Enjoy the ride.
Wordcount: 63,000 words
Author's Notes: See the master post for notes and credits and fanmixes.
Summary: You don't pick your family. They pick you.
IANTO
Ever a traditionalist, Ianto had set himself on hating the new archives, despite that they had been constructed per his specifications (and some Victorian guidelines in the Torchwood charter that he couldn't bypass). He hadn't wanted a new system. The old one had been just fine, thank you very much.
And so he had sullenly followed Jack and Gwen down into the new archives, resisting the urge to cross his arms, and then, when the auto lights had blinked on, he'd almost come in his trousers right there in front of God, Wales and everyone.
There are hermetic seals, deadlock seals, drawers in the walls. There is a clean room, four of them, in fact. Twelve blast rooms, one lead lined storage cell (in case they get their hands on some Kryptonite, Jack jokes), seven, count them, seven rooms for the card catalogue that he will construct just to navigate the archives alone. There is a humidified room, a cool room for things that need to be kept at a lower temperature. There is a morgue (cryo storage is technically part of the archives) five times larger than the one they used to have, and already sadly stocked with a dozen bodies. There's a storage closet for his supplies that is relatively similar in size to his London flat.
Ianto'd had to sit down the first time he saw the whole place, but that had been less from shock and more from illness. Now that he has gone to the other side of time and back, that isn't an issue anymore.
Ianto doesn't talk about the time he'd spent in the TARDIS. Sometimes he and Lisa talk about New New York, and the Face of Boe, the person they had met there briefly (The Doctor hadn't been rather keen on them talking to The Face; in fact, he'd been peeved that he'd--it'd? she'd?--somehow shown up there out of the blue.). Upon their return Jack hadn't pressed them, said something about spoilers and laughed, and anything they might have told him about their two weeks (five days!) away is still locked in their chests, dying to come out, like a music box that only plays when the lid is lifted.
So they talk about it in the dark, the visit to the Hospital, the cat-nun-people, the treatments, the trip back, which had been blessedly event-free. Ianto feels as if he has had his one adventure of a lifetime, like how people save for years to go on a Caribbean cruise, and then talk about it for the rest of their lives.
Except Jack doesn't want to hear. Ianto knows why. It's just stymieing, is all.
So he is in the middle of cataloguing something stubbornly heavy and a little sticky ('It's just going to be like that,' Jack says, 'so wrap it in plastic and shove it in the archives.') when Jack calls over the comms that they should all go home. He taps his comm to answer, but Ravi is already whooping into it, and he hears the clatter of metal steps in the background as he races Melissa to the exit. Gwen murmurs something to them both that is non-committal and tired, and he can completely sympathise. He would like to go home, as well.
But he stays for Jack, leaving the archives and mounting the stairs, finding Jack at his desk, cleaning his gun and smiling.
'Early night,' Ianto says, 'What's the occasion?'
Jack snaps the auto loader into place. 'Dead Rift activity. Gwen's looking wasted. You-' he looks up at Ianto and raises an eyebrow, 'Look as if you haven't had a good night's sleep in ages.'
Ianto sits across from him and slouches down in his chair, a gentleman's ungentleman. 'I believe you are to blame for a great deal of that,' he says.
Jack's face is unreadable. 'We don't know that for sure. We could do testing-'
Ianto snorts. 'I think Lisa wants it to be a mystery.'
Jack cocks his head. 'And you? Mister I Know Everything?'
Ianto thinks about that for a second before replying. The answer is fitting for the moment. 'I know everything I need to know for now.'
Jack doesn't reply, but packs his kit away, stowing the gun in the desk drawer. Ianto doesn't move when Jack rises from the desk, crosses the room, and kneels in front of his chair, wedging himself in between Ianto's parted legs. His hands slide up Ianto's thighs, up to the waistband on the sides to pull at the small love handles that Ianto is trying to get rid of. Ianto squirms and Jack smiles into his knee, mumbles something about sexiness. His fingers continue their jaunt up the starched shirt to the underarms, and then slide behind to scratch the shoulder blades before tracing the spine back down to the waist, where they tug, and Ianto slides further down the chair and a little forward. He plants his feet on the floor and grins.
Jack shakes his head, groans into Ianto's thigh. 'Still fantastic, Jones, Ianto Jones.'
'Hrm,' Ianto replies, because in some ways he doubts it, and other ways he is too sure. They make him sexy, he is sure of it, but without them, he is just a council estate chav with a good vocabulary and a vast knowledge of men's dress wear.
Jack obviously has plans for their position, or maybe not. As Ianto runs his hands through the spikes in Jack's hair, he contemplates the dusting of gray he sees. Jack isn't aging physically, not bodily, but stressors sometimes come to wreak havoc on him, and they have decided that gray hair is apparently his body's tell. Jack plucks them, and they have noticed that they grow back in brown, but stress will turn some of them, a strange physiological thing Ianto only ever remembers seeing in Poltergeist, a film from which he wouldn't choose to glean accurate medical information.
The quietness of the Hub, and they only call it that because that's what they called the old place, invades the room and settles in on them, a wet, plaster shell of silence. He finds himself listening for the fall of water where there is none. He wonders if the others would think him odd for setting up a recording of it; the water had been foul sometimes, and it had played merry cob with the electronics, especially in the summers, but the sound of it had been calming. He'd often suspected that the water sound had soothed Owen after certain stressful nights, and more than once he had caught Tosh before she had fallen asleep in her chair at her workstation, to which she had remarked on the hypnotic sounds of the tower and pool.
Ianto finds that he looks back a great deal more than he used to, probably because this new place, for all that it is new no longer, isn't anything like the old place. It's better, certainly, but not the same thing. Other issues have chosen to resurrect the past in his personal life, Ianto knows, and that merits thought as well, but not right at this moment, not when Jack is sleepy-eyed with his cheek resting against Ianto's thigh, hands kneading the flesh of Ianto's hips.
'Would you be angry with me if I told you I'm too tired for this?' Jack asks. 'Jesus, too tired for sex. What the hell is wrong with me?' He presses his lips to Ianto's clothed leg and sits back, arms sliding down Ianto's thighs.
Ianto leans forward then, bracing his hands on Jack's forearms. 'Come on. Let's go home.'
They don't even bother to take the same car. Ianto knows that Jack will leave in the middle of the night, that he doesn't like leaving the Hub unattended. He might stay into the night, though, he might putter about in his room, or play with the juicer in the kitchen. He might do many things. Jack has his own routine, or rather, lack thereof, and living with him is living with that.
Ianto has his own routines.
They take the lift up, and as he loosens his tie, Jack's hand can't seem to resist coming to rest on the hollow of his neck, secret smile just for him, secret smile that means something when one is in on the secret. Ianto wonders when everyone important in his life developed secret expressions around him, ones that he cannot interpret.
Lisa looks up when they come in the door, and Jack flings his coat on the back of the sofa. Ianto toes his shoes off and stands there, inspecting the room: everything is in place; nothing is out of the ordinary. Lisa is smiling and Jack has fallen over the back of the sofa to lie on his back on the cushion, head tilted to face her, laughing softly. She reaches out with one hand to ruffle his hair.
Ianto hangs up his coat and wonders if there is any coffee in the carafe. He would make fresh, but he's damn tired, and his new stance, as of late, has been that beggars cannot be choosers.
On his way to the kitchen, he trips over the nappie bag and almost cracks his head open on the edge of the counter. Jack and Lisa raise their heads in alarm and Jack rolls off the sofa to collect him, pulling him by his wrists and tutting about sleep deprivation. He deposits Ianto on the sofa, and Lisa kisses his temple, then hands over his son before standing and promising to make him some tea.
Ianto is torn between watching her walk freely and of her own volition to the kitchen, and the little face that blinks up at him, eyes drooping and hands waving a little bit. Both are equally befuddling. Jack and Lisa play about in the kitchen, but Ianto dulls them out, staring at the baby's skin, his eyes, his toothless mouth that roots for Lisa's breasts even when he brushes his finger against his cheek.
He smiles at the brown eyes, no longer baby blue, and the shock of black hair on his head. He lifts the child up and onto his stomach so that he rests against his own chest, and something about the weight of it makes his heart skip a bit.
Something Ravi had told him weeks ago sticks with him, something about, 'They're different when they're your kids, man. Don't have any meself, but that's what they always say.' That's an interesting thought. He knows that Gwen would agree.
Jack has done the hand waving "Nah, I'm bad with kids" thing, and Ianto doesn't believe a word of it, but he humors it. He thinks to himself that it is reassuring that Jack is still here, with them, actually, and that should the inevitable happen, their son will have someone to look after him. That Lisa will have someone to look after her, to not retcon her into tomorrow and just wash their hands of her.
Ianto knows that he's the one who isn't good with children. He doesn't know what his son feels, and Lisa says that that is normal. How could he possibly understand what is going on in what Lisa lovingly refers to as his "peanut brain"? He rests his head on the back of the sofa and closes his eyes, knowing that there will be kid drool on this shirt. That's okay then, anyway. Kid drool will wash.
Jack wakes him up by pulling the baby from his chest. He holds him in his hands and turns him, letting the infant rest on his shoulder, one hand placed under his bum, and walks away, his torso twisting a little as he walks as if he is the human swing. Ianto blinks and rubs his eyes.
Lisa sits down next to him and hands him a mug of tea, her own eyes tracking Jack's journey to the back bedroom and its rugby border and jungle bedding.
'Before you start,' Lisa says quietly, 'he wanted to.' They hear humming and the slight click of the mobile being wound.
Ianto turns his head and buries his face in her neck. 'God, I don't have the strength to fight you anymore about it. What happens to us will happen.' When he breathes deep, she smells like baby oil and milk.
Lisa snorts. 'That's how life is, sweetheart. It happens.' She steals his mug and sips his tea. 'And what Jack does, he does.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
LISA
It's surreal, and entirely Gwen's fault. It's probably because she has been trying and succeeding in remaking Torchwood in her own image, and Jack has, for whatever secret reasons, been allowing it. Lisa knows about as much about the inner workings of Torchwood Three as anyone who works there, and sometimes she fancies that she should just get a job there, but that would be too much, too much for them all, for her. Her legs still twitch in the evenings, no matter what amazing fifty billionth-century treatment the Doctor granted her, and when she dreams, she still cannot walk.
She wonders if she will ever run in her dreams again.
But here they all are, some bizarre rag-tag group gathered for an afternoon at the park: Ravi with his sisters and Melissa and her girlfriend all chatting at a park table, young and carefree; Rhys and Gwen playing tumble and badminton with Mica and Steven and David; Ianto and Jack sitting off to the side in folding chairs, their feet touching. One of Jack's bare feet rocks the bouncer that Gwen and Rhys's little Ioan is working as if he can take off for the stars at any minute.
Lisa sips from her Coke and listens to Rhiannon coo over her son. On the other side of her, Alice is lax and boneless, the result of too many lagers.
Alice has introduced herself as Jack's sister, and no one bats an eye. Lisa is grateful that they think she's the younger sister, because she'd had to cajole Alice into coming (Gwen had given her the task and she hadn't wanted it, actually, but for different reasons. Jack had shrugged and said, 'If she wants to, she'll come'), and she isn't sure that it would be going nearly as well as it has been if people had thought her older.
'What are you naming this little thing?' Rhiannon says, putting the child on her shoulder.
Lisa squints into the sun. 'I don't know.'
It's been over a month with no name for the child. Jack calls him "Nugget". Ianto calls him "the baby" or "my boy". Lisa calls him "Little Mister". Every once in a while they toss names out over the dinner table or in the dark of night, spooned around each other like large cats. Nothing seems to fit. Once Ianto had texted her, 'j says nick. nicky? niiiiiick.' And she had texted back, 'no. 2 much father christmas.'
Rhiannon fusses with the baby's overly-precious toes. 'You have to name him eventually.' She looks up. 'Our tad was named "Alun".' Lisa smiles, but Rhiannon quickly amends, 'But Ianto probably wouldn't want that.' The baby waves his fists and makes a noise and Lisa takes him from Rhiannon, unbuttoning her shirt and unhooking her bra. She's a modern woman; this doesn't bother her.
Across the grass, Jack's eyes glitter and he smiles. She sees his hand ghost over Ianto's when he hands him a beer, and she wonders what they're talking about. Sometimes they have a secret language that isn't Torchwood or their home life. Ianto and Jack speak in gestures and half phrases that she has yet to decipher, and she has pretty much been there from the beginning. It's comforting, in a way.
Alice tilts her head, winding a shredded serviette over her index finger until the tip is purple. 'I'm surprised. My-Lucia always said that Jack had names picked. Wanted to name his kid Gray if it was a boy.' She sighed. 'Gray. Dismal.'
Lisa lets the baby latch onto her breast and can't help but shudder. It's a sweet sensation, and she wonders if she'll miss it when the baby is weaned and on formula or cow's milk. Alice watches her with interest.
'I have to ask,' she says, and it occurs to Lisa that Alice is related, possibly, to this little thing, and that might be something she would be interested in.
Upon their return from the future, from the stars, Lisa and Jack and Ianto had spent a frenzied three weeks re-learning everything. Lisa's repaired nervous system had opened the world to her not unlike rediscovering an old, long shut-off wing of a library that is filled with one's favorite books-she had fallen on them like something indescribable. Something that she would claim smells and tastes like peaches.
Even now she doesn't regret it, filled nights on her knees, or with Jack behind her, Ianto in front, or pressed up against the wall of the shower, or riding one or the other of them on the patio ground, or in the garden boxes (Jack had made fertility jokes, and now, now.). She hadn't even thought of the pill, they hadn't used condoms in years, not quite, and maybe they had all decided that it hadn't mattered. Maybe the moment she had run from the TARDIS and into Jack's arms, showing him, look, look what I can do now, they had all decided that they could plow through everything together. Maybe they had declared in silent kisses and sweaty limbs and giggling orgasms that they weren't afraid of anything.
And she isn't. Not so much when Ianto doesn't need the vapouriser anymore and they had thrown it out even though they had known that they would just need to get another one for the baby, one that looks like a blue penguin. Her chair is gone; she hadn't even brought it back to Cardiff with her, just shoved it out of the TARDIS as they barreled through the cosmos (Ianto had carved a message on the arm, a message he had told her will spin in the void for all time, and which in some way, she agrees, makes it true forever.). Jack sits with her and the baby sometimes, whilst Ianto sleeps and she's up, breastfeeding, and they talk about the Doctor, about New New Earth and the people she'd met there, but only in very vague terms. Jack doesn't want to know any details about the planet or the people. He doesn't want to know their names. She thinks ruefully that Jack is trying not to spoil himself, because he'll get there eventually, one way or another. That doesn't frighten her, either.
Lisa knows that Alice has asked her about the baby, and she knows what it is implying, and so she gives her the only answer she has.
'I honestly don't know,' she finally replies.
It's not that she doesn't want to know. It's that she feels as if she shouldn't know. Perhaps if the baby grows up to be a child and then a man, they will see whom he more closely resembles, and then they will know. Perhaps he will learn to walk and talk and dance and fight and they will never be able to see in his face, in his body, in his manner, who he is more like, and that might mean more than any computer printout could ever tell them.
They pretend that he is Ianto's, and everyone but the three of them is fooled. And maybe Gwen, but she has never cared about those things, anyway.
Johnny, Rhiannon's husband, joins the game, and he and Rhys allow themselves to be tackled by the kids. Gwen lies on her back in the grass, and her knees are stained green. Jack and Ianto laugh at something they've said. The baby lets go and she switches breasts, even though she doesn't usually. She wants this moment to stretch out a little longer; the medical books she has say that breastfeeding releases a drug into her system, and it feels hazy, like she could sleep soon. Maybe she will, just lie on a blanket in the grass with the baby in her arms and trust that everyone here will keep an eye on her.
Alice sighs and stretches, cat-like, her arms shooting in the air like delicate, drunken fronds. Rhiannon smiles at the game on the grass, then looks at Lisa. 'Ianto was an unhappy child,' she says, 'and God knows I tried, but with mam gone, he just never seemed to settle.'
Lisa glances over at Ianto, lax and happy in the sun. She knows that he is happy because his eyes are closed. When Ianto is disturbed, his eyes widen and he cannot stop looking around. Now though, the sun hits him and he tilts his face up to it. Jack's finger beats a rhythm on the arm of his chair, because he is never at rest, he just affects it well.
'I was a happy child,' she tells Rhiannon, 'but I was a broody teenager. That's slightly worse, I think.' She cocks her head. 'At least with Ianto you know what you're in for.'
Rhiannon smiles into her drink. 'Well, with the three,' she pauses, 'the four of you, I don’t worry as much.' She gestures with her glass. 'You never quite stop worrying, and I wouldn't have picked it, but your thing is good.'
Lisa crooks her mouth up when Ianto turns his head to blink at her, as if he is checking to make sure she is still there and she feels rooted to the spot. Yeah, still here.
Ravi stands up alarmedly and pulls something from his belt, then glances at Jack. Ianto sets his beer down and glances at his watch as he rolls his trouser legs down. Gwen's face can't hide the disappointment when she jogs over to Jack and they confer with bowed heads before she scoops her son up in her arms and showers him with kisses.
Well, an hour forty without disaster. Job well done.
Alice's face is one of cynical amusement, but she lets Jack kiss her cheek and grab Steven in a bear hug before he turns to press his lips to Lisa's, one hand reaching out to run along the baby's head. It is easy to miss, and Lisa is surprised that he has done it.
'Roger?' he whispers to her.
Her mouth curves; she can feel it. 'Executive veto. Roger Moore.'
He snaps his fingers as he backs away, smiling. 'Rats.'
Melissa pecks her girlfriend on her cheek and Gwen leaves Ioan crying in Rhys's arms as they all race for the SUV. Ianto is last, pulling her in and nuzzling her neck before bending down to smell his son's head and smile to himself, eyes closed, and she wonders if he is, in this moment, taking up the mantle that has been hovering above his shoulders. Or if he understands that when he runs for the SUV, leaving Lisa to explain that they all have to go to work, special ops, yeah, that it could be the last time he sees them (They can't have known Melissa wouldn't be coming back. That Ianto would almost lose his sight. That Gwen would have a limp for the rest of her life.).
Maybe it's the family, the setting that does it, but whatever it is, the relief of it makes Lisa smile at his retreating form. Rhiannon huffs and sits back in her chair. 'Special ops, really?' she asks. 'Like some sort of spy?'
Alice snorts, but she bites her lower lip, her grin wry. 'Special ops,' she confirms. Because Alice can play the company game as well. Lisa likes her for that. She wonders if in looking at Alice, she is seeing her own child's future.
Alice meets her eyes, and Jesus, is her father in them, no matter how brown they are. Something about the arch of her brow. Lisa wonders what she looks like when she fights, full out, violent, maybe she never has, but somehow Lisa doubts that. She wonders if Alice thrums with extra life. Not immortality, of course, but something extra, something special.
She wonders what Jack's DNA looks like under a scanner.
'If you had another boy,' Lisa asks her, 'what would you call him?'
*~*~*~*~*~*
JACK
So with Ianto and Gwen in London ('Could Torchwood please send two representatives that are not Captain Harkness? The Home Office steno pool will be quite distracted if there is a repeat of last time'), Jack finds himself in the SUV with Ravi and their convenient backup, Rhys Williams. Rhys is actually a better shot than Ravi, and Jack's seen him in action with golf clubs, a chainsaw and a butcher block, so he thinks that Rhys is an appropriate substitute for Gwen, minus the police skills and the training, and the years on the job.
On the downside, if something happens to Rhys, if he gets a hangnail or a split end, Gwen will cut off Jack's balls and sauté them in brown butter. Torchwood would be paying for a child-minder too, if Lisa hadn't taken Ioan. Jack rolls his eyes at the idea of babysitting expenses being a fiscal Torchwood concern.
Ravi reclines his seat and puts one trainer-clad foot on the dashboard. Jack half wants it to trigger the airbag just for kicks, but then he remembers that he likes Ravi, and that they're supposed to be working, and that airbags have dust. And the SUV won't restart with a blown bag. Stupid twenty-first century computers.
They are waiting for this Gleeph gambling ring to break up, and then they're going to irradiate all of them with blacklight so that they turn green, the idea being that the Gleeph will be so embarrassed about their unsightly colour that they'll just…shove off the planet and never come back.
Jack loves the idea of it. He almost left his gun back at the Hub. Almost.
'So she wants to get married,' Ravi says darkly. 'Married. Like permanent.'
'That's what a marriage is, Rav,' Jack jokes.
'Open marriage, I says, and she gets all stroppy,' Ravi continues, and Jack winces. Rhys whistles under his breath. 'What? I'm not ready.' He turns to the backseat. 'How did you know when you were ready?'
Jack glances at Rhys in the rearview mirror. He's curious himself. He has his own answers to this, but they involve hand waving and a good impression of the Doctor saying, 'Weeeeeell, it's all timey-wimey.'
Rhys smiles and glances out the window. 'Oh, I just knew.'
Jack cannot resist a grin of his own. The rain starts then, pounding on the windshield like a car wash. Huh. He is supposed to wash the SUV while Ianto is away, but he wonders if he can just get away with driving it around extremely fast through the downpour. Ianto will probably glance at the undercarriage and then give him his disappointed face (Jack thinks his disappointed frowny face is hysterical, but chooses not to tell him that.).
Ravi turns back around and sighs. 'There's just so many girls, man.'
'How long has it been since you had one of those other nebulous girls?' Jack asks, because he figures that if they have to wait here, they might as well have a little chat. 'Or a boy. I don't like to discriminate.'
Ravi snorts. 'Not my style, man.'
Jack boggles, not for the first time, at the fact that he has finally, completely unintentionally, managed to hire someone who is actually straight. Not bi, or bi-curious, or in the closet, but straight. Ravi is adorable in his honesty about it, saying, 'Yeah, well, I tried to have a threesome once, me girl and this other bloke, but I just couldn't get it up. We were all hot and heavy and there she was, begging for it, and I just couldn't.'
Jack says something about performance anxiety and Ravi smiles, toying with the tech in his hand, something small and useless to keep his fingers busy, no doubt. 'Oh no, like to keep an open mind. Picked up a bloke in a pub to see what the fuss was about; he sucked me off in the head.' He shrugged. 'Just kept wishing it was someone with a pair of tits, and well. A mouth's a mouth, but girls, man, girls are stellar. But I wanted to be sure.'
Jack gives it some thought that maybe there are some people who are straight and some people who are gay, no matter how many people fall in between. And he wonders when his horse had got so goddamn high. Huh. Ravi sighs out the window. 'You, man, I can see why you do it, you know, I just think it'd be better if they were both birds.'
Jack stops to think about Ianto as a woman, because that warrants a moment's consideration. Then that switches to himself as a woman and Ianto as a man, or he and Ianto as women and Lisa with a giant cock…wow, he has a job to do here. He clears his throat and puts his hands on the motionless steering wheel.
'There are advantages,' he says. Rhys grunts from the backseat. Jack had almost forgotten he was there for a second. He looks for Rhys again and their eyes meet in the mirror.
Jack and Rhys had only had sex the one time, in the hot tub, but man, it had been a good ride. Well, Jack had thought it was. He wouldn't have minded another go or four, or five, but Rhys isn't that kind of swinger. Wasn't. Now he's all family man, and Jack is comforted by the fact that he doesn't seem to care about what happened at the penthouse, that he is content with the past, how everything happened, and he doesn't mind acknowledging it.
Jack deliberately doesn't mention it, not because it is awkward, but because it is the right thing to do. Rhys will only take so much, and casual flirting is off the menu now.
'I like the sex and the closeness and all that. What do they call that, intimacy?' Ravi shrugs. 'It's the other stuff I can do without,' he adds. 'Doin' the dishes, meetin' the in-laws, livin' together.'
'Leaving the loo seat down,' Rhys chimes in.
'Telling her she looks beautiful first thing in the morning,' Ravi says, and there, Jack grins out the window and refrains from mentioning that everyone looks kinda scrotty first thing in the morning, even Ravi.
Jack won't admit that sometimes he prefers it, because it is unguarded, real, uncomplicated, those first fifteen minutes in which no one is awake and they stumble about in the bathroom, prepping the shower, brushing teeth. Ianto's hair is always a mess, and Lisa is usually so groggy that she tells Jack the truth about anything he asks. He always asks her where she's hidden all the Hob-Nobs; he has priorities.
Well, okay, he likes the first fifteen minutes directly after Ianto brushes his teeth, because man, that's nasty. Lisa wouldn't let him kiss her that early in the morning if her mouth was on fire and his was a fire extinguisher. He's tried and been decked.
Jack thinks about the last time he did the dishes and cannot remember. They have an autowasher, and Lisa is pretty much on top of that, these days. Ianto likes to wash dishes, actually. Ianto likes to wipe dirt from a lot of things. Ianto likes the appearance of cleanliness. Jack just prefers that things not have a layer of scum on them.
Lisa's parents had visited right after the baby had arrived. Jack had voluntarily bunked in the Hub, waving his hands and saying something about how the twenty-first century changes only so much. They had stayed for a week, and then gone back to their home in Little Whinging, Privet Drive, wherever. Lisa had waved a hand dismissively and said something about cupboards and Dementors.
'Oh look,' Ravi says, 'they're coming.' Jack follows his finger to the Gleeph emerging from the warehouse door. They all look a little pink; that's about to change. Rhys is already fingering the big modified light on the stick that they have rigged. This is going to be epically funny, if only for the fact that Jack hates Gleeph because they always cheat at Qrilinium Blackjack, and he still remembers a particularly stunning loss he'd sustained that had ended in losing his shirt, literally.
At least John had thought it funny. Then again, what John finds funny is always hit and miss, mostly miss.
Jack flips his collar up and feels the little heartbeat increase that he gets when he's about to confront something, for whatever reason. Sometimes his hands shake, but not today. Today is for fun. 'All right then, gentlemen,' he says, dredging a line from somewhere in his brain's recesses, 'It's time to make the donuts.'
Behind him, Rhys groans as he gets out of the car. 'You're daft, Harkness.'
Well, yeah, sometimes.
It works like a charm. Jack has never had a mission go so well, or so humorously. Rhys had waved the light stick, and Ravi had shouted 'fire in th' hole!' and then the flash had hit all the Gleeph at once, and when it fizzled out (the battery pack has a life of about ten seconds, stupid alien tech), they had had five green splotchy Gleeph keening and wailing. Jack had given them his "I'm the Sheriff of Cardiff-ham-ford-shire" speech, and then the three of them had escorted the Gleeph to their ship and made them solemnly swear to never return. The likelihood that they will is slim, but Jack takes their ship's internal schematics anyway, and then he sets their Navistar Flight memory for Earth to self-destruct in ten minutes.
Everybody lives.
They drop Ravi off at his place, and Jack can see the lights on. His girl is waiting up for him.
Jack wants to grab his wrist as he gets out, grab it and say, 'Put a ring on her finger. Trust me,' but he doesn't give that kind of advice. And it's none of his business. Well, it's not Torchwood business, so he has no say, and your boss telling you to get married sounds off. Plus, Jack doesn't know Sandy, doesn't know what she's like, other than what Ravi mentions (and he's crazy about her, Jack can tell from the look in his eye), so he won't add his two pence.
On the way back to the flat though, Rhys sighs and chuckles. 'He needs to just up and marry that girl.'
When he and Rhys return to the penthouse, Lisa is asleep in the bedroom, the baby in his cot, and Ioan settled in her arms. She rouses enough to transfer the toddler to Rhys's capable hands and then rolls backward onto the bed, already in dreamland.
Jack wanders out into the living area, spinning the rattle globe on Evan's bouncer, because he likes the circus lights. He shoves his hands in his pockets and listens to the short electronic tune that plays for about five seconds. He doubles back out of curiosity and steps into Evan's room. Sometimes, he just needs to see him, as if he's afraid that he'll turn away and Evan will be gone. He thinks about Jonah Bevan, who has recently died out at Flat Holm, and how one day he had been a teenager coming home from practice and then the next, just gone, lost to the Rift and then returned, broken and old.
The vapouriser is running because Evan has a cold, Jack knows, and even as he enters he knows that he shouldn't. Jack smiles at the clay nameplate hanging on the door, the big "E" backwards as a joke when Stephen had made it in school and given it to him the last time he had dropped in on Alice. She'd named the baby, Lisa had told them suddenly a few nights after the mission crisis had died down and Melissa's cold body had been tucked into a vault, and they had been lying in the dark, listening to the quiet snores of the kid in the middle of the bed. Jack doesn't ask Lisa why she had picked that name, but Alice is chuffed a little, and Jack can live with that. God, he could live with that forever, but he knows that someday he will disappoint Alice, and their fragile peace will be broken.
Evan is asleep on his back, and Jack doesn't want to touch him, wake him. He just wants to lay two fingers on his head, on his hair, feel the warmth from his skin, then back away slowly and close the door on the green glow of the night light.
While he walks down the hallway, Jack thinks about Ravi and the things that he doesn't like to do. He glances at the photos of the three of them on the wall at the end of the hallway, the hallway of family photos that Lisa and Ianto plaster up everywhere they live. It's a double picture of the three of them at Gwen and Rhys's wedding, back to back with one from right after Evan had been born. Ianto and Lisa are slung about each other in the pictures. In the first, Jack is on Lisa's other side, extra, added on. In the second, he is behind them, cheek resting on the crown of Lisa's head as she looks at the baby in her arms. Still pasted on, Jack. Photoshopped into their lives.
The kitchen is overflowing with dishes, because the autowasher is broken and they have been washing manually, but with two children under the age of three in the house for the evening, Lisa is probably worn. Bottles with shrunken liners stack in the sink, Ioan's 'sippy cups' and a few of Lisa's own dishes as well.
Jack looks backwards once at the pictures on the wall, rolls up his sleeves and turns on the tap, bent on affixing himself for good.
*~*~*~*~*~*
LISA
She loves the fact that Jack sleeps in the center sometimes. Because that's how it has to be sometimes, on the days in which Ianto is angry at the baby and she is angry at him or any number of reasons, and rarely are they upset at Jack. Well, rarely is Lisa upset at Jack. When she does get cross with Jack, it's usually for something so inconsequential that she doesn't even tell him what it is. She just sort of grits her teeth at the dirty dishes in the sink, or the biro that has been washed with a load of shirts and tells herself that this? Not the end of the universe. Not by a long shot.
When Ianto is upset with Jack it is always over something work-related, and she can understand that. They have places in which they reside at work, and that has almost never followed them home, except on certain occasions, and on those occasions Jack sleeps on the sofa, voluntarily, or on the other side of Lisa, turned away from her so that she can spoon him, and even then, Ianto presses up against her back and reaches over her hip to touch Jack, as if skin will make everything better. Sometimes it does.
On the very very odd occasions that it is Jack who is angry, he doesn't come home.
But often, Lisa can sense that Ianto is worried. Worried about what is going to happen to them, all of them. She often wonders if Ianto would freeze time if he could, freeze them all together in this flat. If she were to ask him, he would deny it; he probably doesn't think about it in that way, and he certainly carries a great deal of love for their child, in that detached parent way that she often sees in men his age.
Still. It's all rather mystifying. Not unlike any number of amazing things that have happened to her in the past year, starting with the fact that she is wiggling her toes as she lies on the sofa.
Jack comes to her in the morning, well past the time when he should be at work. Evan is sleeping in the vibrating chair on the floor in the living room, and she is lying on the sofa , dozing lightly and occasionally waking long enough to feel guilty about not starting in on the laundry and dishes. She'll get to them soon enough. Morning is for lazing about in the sunshine, enjoying the fact that she is alive and whole, and her child is alive and whole, and her husband…well that they are all alive, and whole. She has tonnes of things to do, not the least of which is prepping herself to return to work, something to which she is, after three long months, looking forward in a reluctant manner.
Jack's keys jingle in the door and he comes in with a minimum of fuss, just slips in through the smallest crack he can make before pocketing his keys and crossing the room. His eyes search for Evan and find him, and his shoulders seem to relax, as if he had been strangely worried. She doesn't even bother to move. Some part of her thinks of The Great Gatsby and its women in white lounging listlessly in the heat, dying of ennui.
'Well, you're here,' she says, wanting to say, Why are you here? but knowing that's not even really the question.
Jack smiles and kneels down by the sofa, burying his face in her neck. 'Ianto needs clothes. He's starkers at the Hub. I think he might have been relegated to a pair of medical scrubs, and we all know how that makes him feel.' His arm slings over her shoulders.
Lisa smiles. Ianto forgetting extra clothes at the Hub is one of his pet peeves. She imagines him slamming things about, burning the coffee beans, swearing under his breath at the monitors. Ianto in a bad mood is a passive-aggressive something to behold. She raises a hand and runs it through Jack's hair. He smells like Jack, whatever that is, those pheromones and some sort of hair wax that Ianto and he have been using, something that smells like flowers. Manly flowers, Jack would tell her.
'Oh, then I'd better not keep you,' she says, 'Himself will be wanting proper raiment.' And they both chuckle. Lisa loves Ianto's suits; he'd been wearing one the first time she'd met him, and the cuts might have changed, but Ianto's posture in them hasn't. And she loves a man who wears cloth like a costume. Her fingers travel down Jack's coat arm.
The baby makes a snorting noise and they both look over.
'Ianto thinks you'll leave because of-'
'Yeah, let's not get into that,' Jack says.
Lisa can feel his mouth on her neck, and the sensation isn't unpleasant. 'Oh, then, you're here for clothes?' She starts to get up, but he doesn't move, his weight on her shoulders and his hair tickling her face as he breathes, as if he has fallen asleep. She wonders if his eyes are closed.
'I'm not a talker, Lis.'
Now she really does have to roll her eyes, because that is so very true but not.
Instead she says, 'I know. Still.'
Jack lifts his head and stares at her, just stares at her, his eyes darting back and forth across her eyesight. His arms are lead on her shoulder. The sun cuts behind him, and he blocks it with his head.
'Marry me,' he says.
She shakes her head. 'Taken.'
Jack sighs. 'I'll marry him too,' he says, rolling his eyes, breaking what could have been romantic if he hadn't just proposed to a married woman. 'I'll ask him, and he'll say yes, you know he will.'
That's what she's afraid of.
'Bullshit,' she says, slapping his arm from her captive space below.
Jack laughs, free, easy, more regret than before, and now this time she knows that she is the cause of some of it. 'What do we have to do? Sign some papers, whatever, legal documents, blah blah blah. None of that means anything.' He winks. 'I'll put another ring on your finger, and you can have fun explaining it to strangers when they ask.'
Lisa pretends to consider. 'That would be fun at parties,' she muses.
Jack bends down then, brushing his nose against hers and then he kisses her, hullo, rather soundly, and that is lovely. She's obviously just along for the ride, she realises, as he steers the kiss like he drives-breakneck, haphazard, just a touch in a hurry. When he is done, he bites his way down her neck, mumbling into her skin.
'We'll put the baby to bed, and then tonight I'll marry you, in front of Ianto and everything. I'll wear white, just for you.'
The idea of Jack in white makes her shiver. White, virginal.
She unbuttons her blouse, because she can feel her breasts throbbing with letdown; this happens from time to time and now she feels impossibly full, sore with it. Her fingers fumble on the buttons, and Jack's hand takes over, giant fingers working where hers could not, opening the damp material, unhooking the bra up at the nursing clasp so that her breast, her dark nipple is framed in a circle of white. He plants sloppy spit kisses down her sternum until he can latch on to her breast, full to hardness, a small moan coming from the back of his throat.
Jack's mouth is hungry, and she would chastise him that there is another mouth that needs it more, but she alternates breasts anyway, so she closes her eyes and listens as Jack suckles from her full breast, licking and rubbing with his chin, his teeth pulling at her nipple. His free hand slides down the open length of her shirt to slip into her denims, bypassing the panties and tugging at her pubic hair before finding her clit and running one fingertip down it. He skips her cunt and pushes further, to where she is newly scarred from where they had cut her, cut her, she says, to make the way for Ianto's big-headed child. She smiles at the thought even as she reaches for Jack's face, bringing her hands into his hair like she does when the baby is nursing.
Jack's eyes open then, and something in her heart skips a little. He sucks harder, swallowing her down, tongue and teeth working, his nose breathing hard against her skin. His fingers massage her scar, and the action of it makes her let down more, her other breast leaking through her bra, into her shirt.
She wants to find his trousers. She wants to open his belt and hold him, but he won't let her, batting her hand away, taking it up to his chest and crushing it in his grip as if they are dancing, in that casual way he has when they move across the floor.
'Jack,' she says finally. But like before, she doesn't have anything to add.
He stares at her, and she has to push her finger in between his mouth and her breast to release the suction. Even then, he licks around the areola, cleaning off his spit and her milk, anything that might remain before he finally pulls the nursing bra back up, hooks it into place, and then withdraws his hand from her denims, licking the fingers clean before he buttons her shirt and rests his head on her breast.
Lisa watches the cleanup act in mild amusement.
'I can't stop,' he tells her then. 'You always have to tell me when to stop.'
Ah, here, she has something to say. 'I'll always tell you when to stop.'
*~*~*~*~*~*