Fic: Taceas; Taceam (Jack/Ianto, PG) for blue_fjords
The recipient is getting a paper copy of this all dolled up, but because it won't get there before she leaves on her holidays, I am posting it early.
Title: Taceas; Taceam*
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG
Wordcount:
Author's Notes: I might have written the whole last half of this with Ashokan Farewell on repeat. Fuck might've. I did. (Then the maudlin po-po came and broke my iPod.) Beta work by the loverly and viscous misswinterhill. This is for blue_fjords, a lovely person and excellent beta, but overall, a great friend. I only met her this year, but in some ways, it feels like a lot longer. Ampersand hearts semicolon, baby.
Summary: Still, he rather resented the loss of what he only now realised had been a holiday ritual of its own: beer and Motown, smugness and laziness. Sock feet on the hardwood. A ratty sweatshirt. All of that had been replaced with a wet suit, a cold, congealed dinner, tap water, and an overwhelming exhaustion and sense of uncleanliness that came from following three Blowfish through the alleys of Grangetown for hours on end.
I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
and it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth.
The snow was gone, but the barrage was flooded. The snow had been a fluke, actually, the result of alien activity, sure, not that Ianto could tell anyone that. Instead, he kicked the sandbags that blocked the door to the tourist centre and sighed. He'd have to use an alternate exit for the foreseeable future.
Gwen was gone, off for a bit of seasonal holiday fun (Jack had pressed a roll of notes twice as thick as his finger into Rhys's hand the night before and told him to take her someplace where she could forget, just for a while, a little while), and he hadn't much to do anyway, so he thought he might go home. He just wasn't leaving through the Quay. Well, he thought as he retrieved his coat and umbrella, perhaps the car park or the-
The paving stone slid aside and the lift descended, water sluicing through the square hole to pour down on the floor and into the Hub Tub. Ianto wished that Jack wouldn't do this, since the hydraulics never seemed to work well for a few days after they were doused with Plass water, but he ruefully admitted to himself that the alternatives were, well they were unavailable.
Jack shielded his head with a drenched arm, but it was mostly so that he could see where he was going as the lift descended. His hair was plastered to his skull and Ianto wondered if the man understood the practical usage of the umbrella. The umbrella he'd handed Jack when he'd left, and which was probably at the foot of the passenger seat of the SUV, toasty and dry and bereft of occupation.
"It's pissing down out there!" Jack exclaimed, shaking his head like a wet dog. He leapt from the lowered stone and dug into his coat sleeve to depress the buttons on his wrist strap and close the stone above them. There was a whirring noise from one of Tosh's computers. "Where is everyone?" he asked, visibly flinching, his eyes cutting to Ianto's. Yeah, well, they all had problems remembering that five minus two made three these days.
"Gwen is probably on her way to Jamaica," Ianto said, his coat hooked over his arm as he peered out from the umbrella he'd been wise enough to deploy. "You gave Rhys marching papers. Besides, it is a holiday." That last bit as if it explained the others, when it didn't, it so very much didn't.
"Why do people who work for Torchwood forget that they have no life?" Jack said grumpily, and Ianto didn't need to point out the obvious. "Do you have plans?"
Ianto shrugged. "I have no engagements, no significant other, no parents, and my only living relative is with her husband's family in Llanrwst." He cocked his head when Jack didn't even flinch at the SO part. "So no, I have literally nothing to do."
Jack smiled, and it was his 'bad idea face'. "Nothing to do? I could think of loads of things. But for now, Peruvian." He lifted the paper bag by the handles, hooked over one finger, and waved it back and forth. "Broiled bananas. Eh?"
Ianto tried not to look too disgusted. "Oh. I suppose."
Jack handed him the bag as he shrugged out of the coat and tossed it on the sofa. "Come on," he said, all but skipping to the butler's pantry, rolling his sleeves as he went. Ianto stared at the line of his braces stretched over his shoulders and down his back. The braces were red. He hadn't seen those in a while. Perhaps it was Jack's nod to the holidays. Ianto's was the very small tiepin in the shape of a holly leaf. Gwen's had been a red top and a Father Christmas hat, which she wore around the Hub for the morning, mostly because her ears were cold.
Ianto liked to follow Jack for many reasons, and most of the time they were doubled and tripled at the same time, like thousand-layer cake at the dim sum shop. Those fishtail trousers, Jack's chatter about raining and Peruvian ladies and bananas being a peaceful fruit notwithstanding, Ianto came out of his own head to discover that he was watching Jack pull disposable plates from the bag.
"Enrollados and humitas," Jack said, rolling his r's as he set about unpacking the containers and ripping off the plastic lids. Bananas, of course." He smiled weakly. "I was going to get the ceviche, but there's something about raw fish that doesn't come from a man named Miyazaki."
Ianto rolled his eyes. "Just as well. I take it you have a translation card for all this?"
Jack grinned. "I pointed at the pictures."
Ianto poked what looked like a series of cornhusks stuffed with something. "Are there vegetables in this?"
Jack took the containers up to the conference room and rummaged in the small rolling sideboard for silverware, coming up with a few plastic forks and knives, the kinds of plastic knives the sushi place always gave them, despite that a) they were ineffective and b) they never ordered anything that needed to be cut.
"Fork you," Jack said, smiling. It was one of his favorite jokes. Ianto wasn't sure if he liked it because he thought it was actually funny, or if it wasn't funny, or if he knew how incredibly lame it was. Jack was a man with a complicated nature (Once Ianto caught him colouring with crayons. He said it relieved stress. Later investigations of the desk drawers had revealed that it was The Cunt Colouring Book, so all was still well.).
Ianto waved the fork away. "Stick me."
"Really? It's from South America."
"Stick me."
"You don't have to eat everything with chopsticks, you know," Jack said, laughing as he handed one of the many spares to him, and Ianto slid them from the paper wrapper, snapped them and arranged them in his right hand with his left.
"The only way I'll learn is practice." He stabbed Jack in the shoulder with the chopsticks as they rounded the conference table and took seats at the far end. "Didn't your mother ever tell you that?"
Jack settled into his chair and slid one of the containers towards him. "I don't think so. Maybe. Though my first girlfriend-"
Ianto stuck a chopstick through one of the humitas and lifted it out of the tray and onto his plate. "Don't. You'll shatter the image I have of you being genetically engineered with all sexual knowledge."
Jack winked. "My parents didn't spring for that package. Alas."
Ianto narrowed his eyes at Jack, hand poised over the container. It was hard to tell when Jack was joking and when he was serious. Most of the time Ianto didn't care, but lately he had noticed that he had become more…magpie-like with Jack's stories. Maybe it was because Owen and Tosh's deaths had reminded him that nothing lasted. Ianto had always believed in the value of preservation, collecting knowledge and information for its own sake.
The last time Jack had left, Ianto could tell himself that he wasn't that invested in the man, that he didn't care too much, so the fact that Jack's personality was riddled with holes in his mind's eye wasn't nearly as terrifying as it would be now.
Ianto had a filing cabinet in his head for Jack, like he did for all important things, and everything, even the lies, made up the shape of him, like they did for Ianto. Because a lie that you stressed and no one could disprove might as well have been the truth. Joke or not, truth nor not, Jack said it, and it had meaning. It painted another translucent layer on the photoshopped Jack in Ianto's skull. Someday he could stand back and look at it, and understand what it really meant.
But for now, they ate in silence, plastic fork scraping across the paper of the plate, dull thump of food falling from Ianto's chopsticks, the rustle of serviettes in hands, the occasional thud of a water glass landing back on the wood of the table. Ianto tried to figure out what he was eating, but like many things, he just gave up, deciding that it was meat and veg and he'd not die.
"You do, you know," Jack said softly, brightly, as if he was gently asking for a fork.
Ianto wrestled with the chopsticks before giving up. "I do what?" he asked, distracted and a little irritated that the mastery of the chopsticks was still a long ways off.
Jack flicked a plastic fork across the table to Ianto, but he brushed it away with his hand. "Have a significant other."
Ianto looked up then, and Jack sat chewing thoughtfully, staring at the runner lights on the conference room's giant LCD screen.
"I mean, that word is so general. I'm not sure exactly why people would use something so bland to point out that they have someone in their life? You know," he glanced at Ianto before returning to study his plate and pushing things around with his fork, presumably looking for chicken. "When they go to all the trouble to bring it up, obviously it means something more important."
"I thought you didn't like labels," Ianto grumbled. He set down his chopsticks, admitted defeat in the face of hunger and picked up a plastic fork.
Jack smiled at him, plucked the fork from his hand and nodded at the chopsticks. "Mind your mum. And to answer your question," he said, rising in his chair and walking over to the sideboard to snag another bottle of water. "There's nothing wrong with labelling something that's already labelled."
Ianto listened to the click-criik of the seal on the bottle snapping and watched Jack pour, first for Ianto, then himself. "Ah," he said, because that was the best way to ask, 'What the fuck are you talking about?'
"This," Jack said, pointing at his plate. "Is food. But it's more useful to know that it's chicken."
Ianto set his chopsticks down and pushed away from the table. "This is a metaphor wrapped in corn husk." He glared at Jack. "You have to stop doing this."
Jack raised his hands. "Doing what?"
"Making simple things meaningful."
Jack glanced at his plate. "It's chicken."
Ianto wiped at his mouth with his serviette and sighed. "Yeah, look-"
The alarms went off and Ianto glared. "It's like you planned this." He stood and Jack spread his hands.
"What?" he shouted at Ianto's retreating back.
***
As all things are filled with my soul
you emerge from the things, filled with my soul.
You are like my soul, a butterfly of dream,
and you are like the word Melancholy.
Five hours later they reconvened at the table, wet, cold, miserable, and tired. Well, Ianto was tired. It was officially Christmas, had been for about fifteen minutes.
He didn't want to make a big deal out of the holiday. It wasn't as if he had a huge holiday past-his family did all the normal Christmas stuff, but nothing extraordinary-no sleighs and decorating gingerbread or making things out of suet, but at the same time he hadn't had a Dickensian Scrooge-like holiday either. The general secularity and relaxed attitude about the whole thing had bred in him a laissez-faire attitude, one that meant that he liked sending Rhi a gourmet basket every year and getting her box of welsh cakes in return, but he wasn't putting up lights or getting a tree.
He had liked the time off, though. There was something relaxing about sitting in his flat, listening to Otis and drinking heavily and knowing that he didn't have to be in the next day, because no one was going to be in. The two holiday seasons he had spent with Lisa had been laid back and filled with poor telly programming and beer. One year she'd burnt a lamb leg. He'd put a lampshade on his head at New Year's as they'd stumbled about the flat, drunk, not even bothering to go out.
He wasn't big on going out.
Still, he rather resented the loss of what he only now realised had been a holiday ritual of its own: beer and Motown, smugness and laziness. Sock feet on the hardwood. A ratty sweatshirt. All of that had been replaced with a wet suit, a cold, congealed dinner, tap water, and an overwhelming exhaustion and sense of uncleanliness that came from following three Blowfish through the alleys of Grangetown for hours on end.
Jack speared his dinner on his fork and lifted it from the plate in one lump. "Oh, nasty."
Ianto pushed his plate away. "I'm done. And I'm going home."
Jack cocked his head. "Hrm. Okay."
Ianto stood and left the conference room. He'd clean up when he came in tomorrow-oh Lord that was depressing. No, no wait, he wasn't coming in tomorrow. The tourist centre was blocked off, the barrage was flooded. Jack was here, and the last time they'd seen something dangerous come though the rift had been…had been…
That he couldn't remember was sign enough.
Ianto gathered his empty lunch container and a pound of the good coffee (he ordered more than they needed and took the "runoff"; he was a nice person, he liked to think, just not always a good one.), then shrugged on his sopping coat and walked towards the lift, calling out instead of looking for Jack.
"Jack, I'm going now-"
Jack stood on the lift already, fingers fumbling with the buttons on his equally sodden coat. "I know. Let's go."
Well this was a fine thing. "Where are you going?" He was rewarded with a look that seemed like a cartoon. "Oh." And then, "What about the ri-"
Jack smiled and finished buttoning his coat. "Three weeks ago, we went through a stretch of time in which not one rift alarm went off. Do you remember it?"
He tried to think back, and realised that he couldn't. Usually he kept track of that stuff because it was so odd. At one point he could have rattled off every rift break from 2006 onward, but he seemed to have lost that ability around the time he'd lost his memory, they'd all lost their memory for two days.
"I'll take your word for it. I just-you don't usually…" He waved a hand. "This."
Jack's face was plain. "Jesus, don't you ever just get lonely, Ianto?" His fingers flattened his stripes nervously, the ticking of a small trigger waiting to be depressed.
And there it was. Jack's hands finally came to rest at his sides, still, lifeless, save the one index finger that jerked involuntarily. Eyes looked everywhere but him. Interesting.
Ianto handed Jack the umbrella. "Fine. Open this from the--"
The umbrella shook out, all rain and nylon, and Jack gave him the 'Hey! It's me!' smile. "I know how to use an umbrella."
The lift began to move and Ianto watched the stone slide away; he was able to sense his doom a full three seconds before the sheet of water drenched them both. He turned back to Jack, who had switched out faces for his, 'Oh. Oops.' expression. Water dripped down his nose. "Apparently not."
***
I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.
It sounds as though you were lamenting, a butterfly cooing like a dove.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you:
Let me come to be still in your silence.
So this was it then: an hour later, in the dead of night, he emerged from his shower to find Jack naked and rolled in a blanket on the seat of the bay window, his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee. His clothes, Ianto was aware, were wrung out and draped over the stove and barstools in the kitchenette; his coat dripped onto the welcome mat from the back of the door.
Ianto tugged on his sweatshirt and tossed the extras at Jack. "Get warm."
He expected a comment, a suggestion-most of the time Ianto was the one doing the suggesting really, but Jack was no slouch with a good 'That's what she said' joke-but nothing came, just the quiet sliding of the blanket down skin that Ianto knew without looking would be dry and warm. Jack's hair was all but dry by now, flattened from rain and lack of product, it was curled a bit, as if it would be wavy if Jack let it grow out.
Ianto glanced over his shoulder when he made his way into the kitchenette for coffee; Jack's back to him, dressing in front of the ground floor bay window, curtains open, well, some things never changed.
Jack was still there when Ianto returned with a steaming cup in his hands and crawled over the back of the sofa to slide down and rest against the cushions. He wasn't going to sleep. And he wasn't to go in tomorrow, so he didn't quite care. Jack crossed his arms in front of his chest and buried his hands under his arms. What he saw was anyone's guess; maybe it was one of those thousand yard vacant stares that he wore when he was thinking about Things.
Ianto thought about Things rather a lot.
"It's a nice night for a fire," Jack said softly, and as if on cue, the thunder rolled above them, restless giants turning in their sleep.
"I don't have a fireplace," Ianto grumbled, slouching on the sofa. To his left, Jack moved through the room, presumably for a refill, a warm up, maybe to check that his shirt hadn't caught fire from the pilot light.
So it was a surprise when Jack's hands found his shoulders and slid down until they touched the mug cradled in Ianto's hands, but they didn't remove it. Ianto could feel his breath on the back of his neck, but where he expected a kiss, none came. Just the tickle of Jack's hair right behind his ear, and finally the light pressure of Jack's chin on his shoulder. Ianto stared at the hairless forearms, corded with years of lifting and throwing and bracing, and wondered if Jack's lack of body hair was something his parents had ordered in their package.
Sometimes he wanted to dig in the freezer and look for similarities.
"Hrn."
"Look, Jack, I-"
"I seem to be interrupting you a lot today."
"Yeah, about that-"
"Maybe I'm doing it for a reason," Jack whispered, lips still not making contact with skin. Usually by now Jack would have his shirt off and they'd be desperately looking for mistletoe. Or condoms. Or mistletoe-scented condoms.
Ianto shrugged and the arms slackened as Jack pulled back. "I think I'm doing it for a reason," Jack muttered, "but I'm not sure what it is."
"I could get you some duct tape," Ianto offered.
It was an easy opening. Jack didn't take it. "It never seems to snow here. You ever notice that?"
"What?"
"I miss snow, and I've never lived in a place that would get much of any. Ianto looked behind him to find Jack away, at the window again, tucked into himself. "Maybe I miss the idea of snow." He looked at Ianto, grinning. "Sometimes I find myself longing for the ideas of things, and not the things themselves. What is that, nostalgia?"
Ianto shrugged. "Possibly." His eyes were riveted to Jack's arms, wrapped around his chest. He set the mug on the coffee table and rose, plodding in sock feet to stand next to Jack and look out the window, where a dog was pissing on the tyres of the SUV. "Lovely. Festive."
Jack laughed. "It's a dog." But his brow knitted in some far away look that meant that he didn't really care about the dog.
Ianto found his hand running up Jack's arm next to him, fingers looking for fine invisible hairs and finding them, just barely. Jack snorted but leant into him, body warm and breathing light, face tilted away still to look out at the street.
"We don't have to do this, you know," Jack whispered. They watched the dog sniff the bumper and then shuffle on, looking wet and pitiful. If Ianto'd had anything remotely meat-like, he might have gone out and thrown the poor thing a sausage, but as it was, he was distracted by the skin beside him, and something in Jack's voice struck a bell-like note in his skull.
"Do what?"
Jack's hand turned, palm up, and he grabbed Ianto's wandering one in his own, lacing the fingers so that he could bring it to his chest. "Sometimes, you hear something and it stays with you all day," he said lightly. "That ever happen to you? Someone's throwaway strikes a chord and you find yourself obsessing about it in your thoughts."
Ianto's mind tried to keep up with the changes in subject. Jack's thumb moved absently on the back of his hand and he turned so that he was facing Jack's shoulder, eyes on the slightly pained face. "I wasn't really upset earlier-"
"'Significant' is a haunting word," Jack said, not even bothering to acknowledge that he had interrupted Ianto.
"Oh, bollocks, Jack-"
"'Meaning' is another one." His face turned then, open and quiet and noticeably fraught. "That you would think that you aren't significant, well, hngh." He paused. "But that wasn't what you said. What you implied. I just got that after we got back from Grangetown. You said that I wasn't significant, right?"
"I think it's a bit more complicated-"
"Yeah, it's always complicated," Jack said, looking back out over the street. "Tell you what," he murmured. "Can we, just tonight, tomorrow, whatever, until we go back to work, can we just pretend that it's not complicated?" He tugged Ianto's arm so that he stumbled a little bit, into Jack's shoulder and chest, his face brushed against Jack's ear and hair. His fingers unlaced from Jack's hand and dug into the sweatshirt on the warm chest, wrinkled it in his hands as if preparing to toss Jack out into the street through the window. The wind reached a little bit of a pitch and the loose upper pane rattled in the window frame.
The power went out. Ianto sighed. The heat would be gone as well, an act whose meaning was suddenly tripled when he realised what that meant for the two of them, huddled in bed. Or that it had happened right at that moment, as if Jack had engin-
Jack didn't control the weather or the power; all magical thinking was the responsibility of one Ianto B. Jones. Sad, really.
"I think I have candles," Ianto said mildly, his mouth finally functional. Jack took advantage of the dark, not to place his hands in suggestive places, but to clasp them over Ianto's on the sweatshirt and bury his face in Ianto's neck
"We don't need them."
The lightning played one more time then, a flash for a celestial photograph of them, right here, in the dark, and Ianto breathed a sigh.
"You're right," he told Jack, and they stood in the stillness and just waited, waited for more thunder, more lightning, more events without meaning to be reborn into significance. "We don't."
And let me talk to you with your silence
that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations.
Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid.
I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
distant and full of sorrow as though you had died.
One word then, one smile, is enough.
And I am happy, happy that it's not true.
Pablo Neruda, I Like For You to Be Still
END
*Translation: stolded from a university website: Taceas" Shut up!" Taceam: "If only I could keep my mouth shut!"
Title: Taceas; Taceam*
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG
Wordcount:
Author's Notes: I might have written the whole last half of this with Ashokan Farewell on repeat. Fuck might've. I did. (Then the maudlin po-po came and broke my iPod.) Beta work by the loverly and viscous misswinterhill. This is for blue_fjords, a lovely person and excellent beta, but overall, a great friend. I only met her this year, but in some ways, it feels like a lot longer. Ampersand hearts semicolon, baby.
Summary: Still, he rather resented the loss of what he only now realised had been a holiday ritual of its own: beer and Motown, smugness and laziness. Sock feet on the hardwood. A ratty sweatshirt. All of that had been replaced with a wet suit, a cold, congealed dinner, tap water, and an overwhelming exhaustion and sense of uncleanliness that came from following three Blowfish through the alleys of Grangetown for hours on end.
I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
and it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth.
The snow was gone, but the barrage was flooded. The snow had been a fluke, actually, the result of alien activity, sure, not that Ianto could tell anyone that. Instead, he kicked the sandbags that blocked the door to the tourist centre and sighed. He'd have to use an alternate exit for the foreseeable future.
Gwen was gone, off for a bit of seasonal holiday fun (Jack had pressed a roll of notes twice as thick as his finger into Rhys's hand the night before and told him to take her someplace where she could forget, just for a while, a little while), and he hadn't much to do anyway, so he thought he might go home. He just wasn't leaving through the Quay. Well, he thought as he retrieved his coat and umbrella, perhaps the car park or the-
The paving stone slid aside and the lift descended, water sluicing through the square hole to pour down on the floor and into the Hub Tub. Ianto wished that Jack wouldn't do this, since the hydraulics never seemed to work well for a few days after they were doused with Plass water, but he ruefully admitted to himself that the alternatives were, well they were unavailable.
Jack shielded his head with a drenched arm, but it was mostly so that he could see where he was going as the lift descended. His hair was plastered to his skull and Ianto wondered if the man understood the practical usage of the umbrella. The umbrella he'd handed Jack when he'd left, and which was probably at the foot of the passenger seat of the SUV, toasty and dry and bereft of occupation.
"It's pissing down out there!" Jack exclaimed, shaking his head like a wet dog. He leapt from the lowered stone and dug into his coat sleeve to depress the buttons on his wrist strap and close the stone above them. There was a whirring noise from one of Tosh's computers. "Where is everyone?" he asked, visibly flinching, his eyes cutting to Ianto's. Yeah, well, they all had problems remembering that five minus two made three these days.
"Gwen is probably on her way to Jamaica," Ianto said, his coat hooked over his arm as he peered out from the umbrella he'd been wise enough to deploy. "You gave Rhys marching papers. Besides, it is a holiday." That last bit as if it explained the others, when it didn't, it so very much didn't.
"Why do people who work for Torchwood forget that they have no life?" Jack said grumpily, and Ianto didn't need to point out the obvious. "Do you have plans?"
Ianto shrugged. "I have no engagements, no significant other, no parents, and my only living relative is with her husband's family in Llanrwst." He cocked his head when Jack didn't even flinch at the SO part. "So no, I have literally nothing to do."
Jack smiled, and it was his 'bad idea face'. "Nothing to do? I could think of loads of things. But for now, Peruvian." He lifted the paper bag by the handles, hooked over one finger, and waved it back and forth. "Broiled bananas. Eh?"
Ianto tried not to look too disgusted. "Oh. I suppose."
Jack handed him the bag as he shrugged out of the coat and tossed it on the sofa. "Come on," he said, all but skipping to the butler's pantry, rolling his sleeves as he went. Ianto stared at the line of his braces stretched over his shoulders and down his back. The braces were red. He hadn't seen those in a while. Perhaps it was Jack's nod to the holidays. Ianto's was the very small tiepin in the shape of a holly leaf. Gwen's had been a red top and a Father Christmas hat, which she wore around the Hub for the morning, mostly because her ears were cold.
Ianto liked to follow Jack for many reasons, and most of the time they were doubled and tripled at the same time, like thousand-layer cake at the dim sum shop. Those fishtail trousers, Jack's chatter about raining and Peruvian ladies and bananas being a peaceful fruit notwithstanding, Ianto came out of his own head to discover that he was watching Jack pull disposable plates from the bag.
"Enrollados and humitas," Jack said, rolling his r's as he set about unpacking the containers and ripping off the plastic lids. Bananas, of course." He smiled weakly. "I was going to get the ceviche, but there's something about raw fish that doesn't come from a man named Miyazaki."
Ianto rolled his eyes. "Just as well. I take it you have a translation card for all this?"
Jack grinned. "I pointed at the pictures."
Ianto poked what looked like a series of cornhusks stuffed with something. "Are there vegetables in this?"
Jack took the containers up to the conference room and rummaged in the small rolling sideboard for silverware, coming up with a few plastic forks and knives, the kinds of plastic knives the sushi place always gave them, despite that a) they were ineffective and b) they never ordered anything that needed to be cut.
"Fork you," Jack said, smiling. It was one of his favorite jokes. Ianto wasn't sure if he liked it because he thought it was actually funny, or if it wasn't funny, or if he knew how incredibly lame it was. Jack was a man with a complicated nature (Once Ianto caught him colouring with crayons. He said it relieved stress. Later investigations of the desk drawers had revealed that it was The Cunt Colouring Book, so all was still well.).
Ianto waved the fork away. "Stick me."
"Really? It's from South America."
"Stick me."
"You don't have to eat everything with chopsticks, you know," Jack said, laughing as he handed one of the many spares to him, and Ianto slid them from the paper wrapper, snapped them and arranged them in his right hand with his left.
"The only way I'll learn is practice." He stabbed Jack in the shoulder with the chopsticks as they rounded the conference table and took seats at the far end. "Didn't your mother ever tell you that?"
Jack settled into his chair and slid one of the containers towards him. "I don't think so. Maybe. Though my first girlfriend-"
Ianto stuck a chopstick through one of the humitas and lifted it out of the tray and onto his plate. "Don't. You'll shatter the image I have of you being genetically engineered with all sexual knowledge."
Jack winked. "My parents didn't spring for that package. Alas."
Ianto narrowed his eyes at Jack, hand poised over the container. It was hard to tell when Jack was joking and when he was serious. Most of the time Ianto didn't care, but lately he had noticed that he had become more…magpie-like with Jack's stories. Maybe it was because Owen and Tosh's deaths had reminded him that nothing lasted. Ianto had always believed in the value of preservation, collecting knowledge and information for its own sake.
The last time Jack had left, Ianto could tell himself that he wasn't that invested in the man, that he didn't care too much, so the fact that Jack's personality was riddled with holes in his mind's eye wasn't nearly as terrifying as it would be now.
Ianto had a filing cabinet in his head for Jack, like he did for all important things, and everything, even the lies, made up the shape of him, like they did for Ianto. Because a lie that you stressed and no one could disprove might as well have been the truth. Joke or not, truth nor not, Jack said it, and it had meaning. It painted another translucent layer on the photoshopped Jack in Ianto's skull. Someday he could stand back and look at it, and understand what it really meant.
But for now, they ate in silence, plastic fork scraping across the paper of the plate, dull thump of food falling from Ianto's chopsticks, the rustle of serviettes in hands, the occasional thud of a water glass landing back on the wood of the table. Ianto tried to figure out what he was eating, but like many things, he just gave up, deciding that it was meat and veg and he'd not die.
"You do, you know," Jack said softly, brightly, as if he was gently asking for a fork.
Ianto wrestled with the chopsticks before giving up. "I do what?" he asked, distracted and a little irritated that the mastery of the chopsticks was still a long ways off.
Jack flicked a plastic fork across the table to Ianto, but he brushed it away with his hand. "Have a significant other."
Ianto looked up then, and Jack sat chewing thoughtfully, staring at the runner lights on the conference room's giant LCD screen.
"I mean, that word is so general. I'm not sure exactly why people would use something so bland to point out that they have someone in their life? You know," he glanced at Ianto before returning to study his plate and pushing things around with his fork, presumably looking for chicken. "When they go to all the trouble to bring it up, obviously it means something more important."
"I thought you didn't like labels," Ianto grumbled. He set down his chopsticks, admitted defeat in the face of hunger and picked up a plastic fork.
Jack smiled at him, plucked the fork from his hand and nodded at the chopsticks. "Mind your mum. And to answer your question," he said, rising in his chair and walking over to the sideboard to snag another bottle of water. "There's nothing wrong with labelling something that's already labelled."
Ianto listened to the click-criik of the seal on the bottle snapping and watched Jack pour, first for Ianto, then himself. "Ah," he said, because that was the best way to ask, 'What the fuck are you talking about?'
"This," Jack said, pointing at his plate. "Is food. But it's more useful to know that it's chicken."
Ianto set his chopsticks down and pushed away from the table. "This is a metaphor wrapped in corn husk." He glared at Jack. "You have to stop doing this."
Jack raised his hands. "Doing what?"
"Making simple things meaningful."
Jack glanced at his plate. "It's chicken."
Ianto wiped at his mouth with his serviette and sighed. "Yeah, look-"
The alarms went off and Ianto glared. "It's like you planned this." He stood and Jack spread his hands.
"What?" he shouted at Ianto's retreating back.
***
As all things are filled with my soul
you emerge from the things, filled with my soul.
You are like my soul, a butterfly of dream,
and you are like the word Melancholy.
Five hours later they reconvened at the table, wet, cold, miserable, and tired. Well, Ianto was tired. It was officially Christmas, had been for about fifteen minutes.
He didn't want to make a big deal out of the holiday. It wasn't as if he had a huge holiday past-his family did all the normal Christmas stuff, but nothing extraordinary-no sleighs and decorating gingerbread or making things out of suet, but at the same time he hadn't had a Dickensian Scrooge-like holiday either. The general secularity and relaxed attitude about the whole thing had bred in him a laissez-faire attitude, one that meant that he liked sending Rhi a gourmet basket every year and getting her box of welsh cakes in return, but he wasn't putting up lights or getting a tree.
He had liked the time off, though. There was something relaxing about sitting in his flat, listening to Otis and drinking heavily and knowing that he didn't have to be in the next day, because no one was going to be in. The two holiday seasons he had spent with Lisa had been laid back and filled with poor telly programming and beer. One year she'd burnt a lamb leg. He'd put a lampshade on his head at New Year's as they'd stumbled about the flat, drunk, not even bothering to go out.
He wasn't big on going out.
Still, he rather resented the loss of what he only now realised had been a holiday ritual of its own: beer and Motown, smugness and laziness. Sock feet on the hardwood. A ratty sweatshirt. All of that had been replaced with a wet suit, a cold, congealed dinner, tap water, and an overwhelming exhaustion and sense of uncleanliness that came from following three Blowfish through the alleys of Grangetown for hours on end.
Jack speared his dinner on his fork and lifted it from the plate in one lump. "Oh, nasty."
Ianto pushed his plate away. "I'm done. And I'm going home."
Jack cocked his head. "Hrm. Okay."
Ianto stood and left the conference room. He'd clean up when he came in tomorrow-oh Lord that was depressing. No, no wait, he wasn't coming in tomorrow. The tourist centre was blocked off, the barrage was flooded. Jack was here, and the last time they'd seen something dangerous come though the rift had been…had been…
That he couldn't remember was sign enough.
Ianto gathered his empty lunch container and a pound of the good coffee (he ordered more than they needed and took the "runoff"; he was a nice person, he liked to think, just not always a good one.), then shrugged on his sopping coat and walked towards the lift, calling out instead of looking for Jack.
"Jack, I'm going now-"
Jack stood on the lift already, fingers fumbling with the buttons on his equally sodden coat. "I know. Let's go."
Well this was a fine thing. "Where are you going?" He was rewarded with a look that seemed like a cartoon. "Oh." And then, "What about the ri-"
Jack smiled and finished buttoning his coat. "Three weeks ago, we went through a stretch of time in which not one rift alarm went off. Do you remember it?"
He tried to think back, and realised that he couldn't. Usually he kept track of that stuff because it was so odd. At one point he could have rattled off every rift break from 2006 onward, but he seemed to have lost that ability around the time he'd lost his memory, they'd all lost their memory for two days.
"I'll take your word for it. I just-you don't usually…" He waved a hand. "This."
Jack's face was plain. "Jesus, don't you ever just get lonely, Ianto?" His fingers flattened his stripes nervously, the ticking of a small trigger waiting to be depressed.
And there it was. Jack's hands finally came to rest at his sides, still, lifeless, save the one index finger that jerked involuntarily. Eyes looked everywhere but him. Interesting.
Ianto handed Jack the umbrella. "Fine. Open this from the--"
The umbrella shook out, all rain and nylon, and Jack gave him the 'Hey! It's me!' smile. "I know how to use an umbrella."
The lift began to move and Ianto watched the stone slide away; he was able to sense his doom a full three seconds before the sheet of water drenched them both. He turned back to Jack, who had switched out faces for his, 'Oh. Oops.' expression. Water dripped down his nose. "Apparently not."
***
I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.
It sounds as though you were lamenting, a butterfly cooing like a dove.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you:
Let me come to be still in your silence.
So this was it then: an hour later, in the dead of night, he emerged from his shower to find Jack naked and rolled in a blanket on the seat of the bay window, his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee. His clothes, Ianto was aware, were wrung out and draped over the stove and barstools in the kitchenette; his coat dripped onto the welcome mat from the back of the door.
Ianto tugged on his sweatshirt and tossed the extras at Jack. "Get warm."
He expected a comment, a suggestion-most of the time Ianto was the one doing the suggesting really, but Jack was no slouch with a good 'That's what she said' joke-but nothing came, just the quiet sliding of the blanket down skin that Ianto knew without looking would be dry and warm. Jack's hair was all but dry by now, flattened from rain and lack of product, it was curled a bit, as if it would be wavy if Jack let it grow out.
Ianto glanced over his shoulder when he made his way into the kitchenette for coffee; Jack's back to him, dressing in front of the ground floor bay window, curtains open, well, some things never changed.
Jack was still there when Ianto returned with a steaming cup in his hands and crawled over the back of the sofa to slide down and rest against the cushions. He wasn't going to sleep. And he wasn't to go in tomorrow, so he didn't quite care. Jack crossed his arms in front of his chest and buried his hands under his arms. What he saw was anyone's guess; maybe it was one of those thousand yard vacant stares that he wore when he was thinking about Things.
Ianto thought about Things rather a lot.
"It's a nice night for a fire," Jack said softly, and as if on cue, the thunder rolled above them, restless giants turning in their sleep.
"I don't have a fireplace," Ianto grumbled, slouching on the sofa. To his left, Jack moved through the room, presumably for a refill, a warm up, maybe to check that his shirt hadn't caught fire from the pilot light.
So it was a surprise when Jack's hands found his shoulders and slid down until they touched the mug cradled in Ianto's hands, but they didn't remove it. Ianto could feel his breath on the back of his neck, but where he expected a kiss, none came. Just the tickle of Jack's hair right behind his ear, and finally the light pressure of Jack's chin on his shoulder. Ianto stared at the hairless forearms, corded with years of lifting and throwing and bracing, and wondered if Jack's lack of body hair was something his parents had ordered in their package.
Sometimes he wanted to dig in the freezer and look for similarities.
"Hrn."
"Look, Jack, I-"
"I seem to be interrupting you a lot today."
"Yeah, about that-"
"Maybe I'm doing it for a reason," Jack whispered, lips still not making contact with skin. Usually by now Jack would have his shirt off and they'd be desperately looking for mistletoe. Or condoms. Or mistletoe-scented condoms.
Ianto shrugged and the arms slackened as Jack pulled back. "I think I'm doing it for a reason," Jack muttered, "but I'm not sure what it is."
"I could get you some duct tape," Ianto offered.
It was an easy opening. Jack didn't take it. "It never seems to snow here. You ever notice that?"
"What?"
"I miss snow, and I've never lived in a place that would get much of any. Ianto looked behind him to find Jack away, at the window again, tucked into himself. "Maybe I miss the idea of snow." He looked at Ianto, grinning. "Sometimes I find myself longing for the ideas of things, and not the things themselves. What is that, nostalgia?"
Ianto shrugged. "Possibly." His eyes were riveted to Jack's arms, wrapped around his chest. He set the mug on the coffee table and rose, plodding in sock feet to stand next to Jack and look out the window, where a dog was pissing on the tyres of the SUV. "Lovely. Festive."
Jack laughed. "It's a dog." But his brow knitted in some far away look that meant that he didn't really care about the dog.
Ianto found his hand running up Jack's arm next to him, fingers looking for fine invisible hairs and finding them, just barely. Jack snorted but leant into him, body warm and breathing light, face tilted away still to look out at the street.
"We don't have to do this, you know," Jack whispered. They watched the dog sniff the bumper and then shuffle on, looking wet and pitiful. If Ianto'd had anything remotely meat-like, he might have gone out and thrown the poor thing a sausage, but as it was, he was distracted by the skin beside him, and something in Jack's voice struck a bell-like note in his skull.
"Do what?"
Jack's hand turned, palm up, and he grabbed Ianto's wandering one in his own, lacing the fingers so that he could bring it to his chest. "Sometimes, you hear something and it stays with you all day," he said lightly. "That ever happen to you? Someone's throwaway strikes a chord and you find yourself obsessing about it in your thoughts."
Ianto's mind tried to keep up with the changes in subject. Jack's thumb moved absently on the back of his hand and he turned so that he was facing Jack's shoulder, eyes on the slightly pained face. "I wasn't really upset earlier-"
"'Significant' is a haunting word," Jack said, not even bothering to acknowledge that he had interrupted Ianto.
"Oh, bollocks, Jack-"
"'Meaning' is another one." His face turned then, open and quiet and noticeably fraught. "That you would think that you aren't significant, well, hngh." He paused. "But that wasn't what you said. What you implied. I just got that after we got back from Grangetown. You said that I wasn't significant, right?"
"I think it's a bit more complicated-"
"Yeah, it's always complicated," Jack said, looking back out over the street. "Tell you what," he murmured. "Can we, just tonight, tomorrow, whatever, until we go back to work, can we just pretend that it's not complicated?" He tugged Ianto's arm so that he stumbled a little bit, into Jack's shoulder and chest, his face brushed against Jack's ear and hair. His fingers unlaced from Jack's hand and dug into the sweatshirt on the warm chest, wrinkled it in his hands as if preparing to toss Jack out into the street through the window. The wind reached a little bit of a pitch and the loose upper pane rattled in the window frame.
The power went out. Ianto sighed. The heat would be gone as well, an act whose meaning was suddenly tripled when he realised what that meant for the two of them, huddled in bed. Or that it had happened right at that moment, as if Jack had engin-
Jack didn't control the weather or the power; all magical thinking was the responsibility of one Ianto B. Jones. Sad, really.
"I think I have candles," Ianto said mildly, his mouth finally functional. Jack took advantage of the dark, not to place his hands in suggestive places, but to clasp them over Ianto's on the sweatshirt and bury his face in Ianto's neck
"We don't need them."
The lightning played one more time then, a flash for a celestial photograph of them, right here, in the dark, and Ianto breathed a sigh.
"You're right," he told Jack, and they stood in the stillness and just waited, waited for more thunder, more lightning, more events without meaning to be reborn into significance. "We don't."
And let me talk to you with your silence
that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations.
Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid.
I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
distant and full of sorrow as though you had died.
One word then, one smile, is enough.
And I am happy, happy that it's not true.
Pablo Neruda, I Like For You to Be Still
END
*Translation: stolded from a university website: Taceas" Shut up!" Taceam: "If only I could keep my mouth shut!"