TW-DW Fic: It’s Tinsel Time! - Part 1
Title: It’s Tinsel Time! - Part 1
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack, Ianto, Owen, Gwen.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Christmas is approaching, but Jack’s attempt to brighten up the Hub for the holiday season doesn’t exactly go to plan.
Word Count: 2965 words
Written For: m_findlow’s prompt ‘Jack attempts to bring Christmas cheer to the hub. It turns out that tinsel and alien tech don't mix,’ at torchwood_fest 2016.
Beta: My lovely friend milady_dragon. Thanks so much!
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Christmas was only a couple of weeks away and Jack was seriously disappointed by the lack of festive cheer in the Hub. Ianto had set up a small, very tasteful and understated tree in the Tourist Office, along with matching paper chains supplied by his niece and nephew, but aside from Jack’s very old and slightly wonky personal Christmas tree in his office, the rest of the Hub was bare. It all looked rather bleak and sad, not at all Christmassy.
“Why don’t we have any decorations in the Hub this year?” he asked Ianto mournfully.
Ianto gave him a weary smile. “Sorry, I’ve just been rushed off my feet the last couple of weeks, haven’t had the time or energy to go looking for a tree and there probably won’t be much of a choice now.” They always had a real tree in the Hub and then planted it out on Flat Holm Island afterwards in the hopes of there one day being a nice little wooded area that the residents could enjoy. At the moment, it consisted of a mere half-dozen small trees, but forests didn’t grow overnight. There was no rush anyway; it was one of Torchwood’s long-term projects.
Seeing how tired Ianto looked, Jack instantly felt bad for complaining. The last couple of weeks had been beyond busy for his lover. Not only was he still doing all his own work and helping in the field, but as the most qualified member of the team, he’d also taken on the bulk of Tosh’s job. Torchwood’s resident tech expert was currently in Japan helping her father around the home and caring for her mother, who was recovering from knee replacement surgery.
“Don’t worry about a thing; I’ll get us a tree, even if I have to dig one up myself,” Jack told his lover confidently. “Things are quiet right now, so why don’t you go home early and get some rest? You’ve more than earned it, and I’m sure the rest of us can manage without you until tomorrow. In fact, why don’t you take the morning off too and have a lie in? Can’t have you wearing yourself out.”
“Well, if you’re sure…” Ianto looked a bit uncertain.
“I am. I can feed the inmates for you, it’s not like I’ve never done it before, and the Rift predictor says things should be quiet for the next twenty-four hours or so. I’ll stay here tonight to keep an eye on things though, just to be sure.” And to avoid disturbing Ianto’s beauty sleep, Jack thought to himself, but he didn’t say that part out loud.
“Okay, thank you. I’ll see you around lunchtime tomorrow then. Goodnight, Jack.” Ianto gave his lover a quick kiss, fetched his coat from the stand in Jack’s office, and left the Hub to the accompaniment of the cog door alarms. Ten minutes later, Jack set out in search of a Christmas tree.
Ianto was soon proved right; the best of the available trees had already been snapped up. Nevertheless, persistence paid off and he eventually found a reasonably nice seven-foot tall one with roots. Okay, so one side was a bit bare, with a couple of branches broken off short, but if that side was turned towards the wall nobody would notice, and the other slightly damaged areas could be covered up with decorations.
Taking the tree back to the Hub, Jack endured Owen’s insults as Torchwood’s multi-talented medic and plant expert helped him pot their tree up in its tub before giving it a good watering. Leaving it to settle, Jack went to dig out the decorations.
Between the tree in the Tourist Office and the one in Jack’s office, most of the baubles and other decorations that had survived after last year’s escaped Weevil incident had already been used. There weren’t enough left for a tree even half the size of the one Jack had bought. Shrugging, he decided there was only one thing for it; he’d have to go to the shops and get some more. Ianto usually took charge of buying such things, since he claimed Jack must be colour blind, but surely he wouldn’t mind Jack’s choice just this once. He’d probably be grateful to have another job taken off his hands.
Jack felt like a kid in a candy store as he wheeled his trolley between shelves practically bursting at the seams with a riot of temptingly colourful shiny things. It was impossible to choose, but that was okay because the Hub was huge. As he piled baubles and tinsel, little bells and candy canes, and strings of coloured lights into the trolley, he couldn’t stop smiling; everything was going to look really festive this year. He couldn’t understand why he always left the decorating to Ianto; this was so much fun!
Paying at the till, he carted his bulging shopping bags down to the SUV, parked in the shopping centre’s underground garage, and crammed them into the boot, alongside a containment unit Owen must have left there earlier in the day when he’d gone out on a Rift retrieval. Curious, Jack opened the box and examined the object inside. It was some sort of device, obviously of alien origin, but it didn’t look like anything Jack had ever seen before. It was dome-shaped, but not round, more like half of a rugby ball sliced end to end. The surface was a dull, matt grey colour and on the curved upper part there was an array of buttons and indentations set to either side of a row of what might have been little lights if it was switched on.
Turning it over in his gloved hands to look at the underside, it slipped from his grip, tumbling among the bags of decorations. It took Jack several minutes to retrieve it, and by the time he’d disentangled it from the tinsel, several of the little lights on its surface were blinking and flickering. Some of the buttons must have been knocked when he’d dropped it, or perhaps it had already been turned on, just dormant. It didn’t seem to be doing anything bad though, so Jack popped it back in the containment box. He decided he’d leave it on Tosh’s desk for Ianto to look at when he had time. Maybe his lover would be able to figure out what it was and what it was supposed to do, and if not, he could show it to Tosh next time they talked via Skype. She might have some ideas.
Back at the Hub, as it was after six in the evening Jack sent Gwen and Owen home. They could do with a rest too while the Rift was quiet, and besides, Jack wanted everyone to get a nice surprise in the morning when they came in and saw the Hub looking all bright and Christmassy.
Alone at last, he fetched everything from the SUV, set the containment box holding the odd device on Tosh’s workstation, then spread out all the decorations he’d bought alongside the ones from last year, so he could see exactly what he had to work with. Once he was sufficiently organised, he set about making the Hub look pretty.
His first task was to decorate the tree, so he started with the baubles, in every conceivable colour, many of them made even more garishly gaudy because they were splotched here and there with glitter. Jack loved glitter; it was so twinkly! When he’d squeezed as many baubles as he possibly could onto the tree, saving a few of the brightest and most glittery to add to the tree in his office, he started in on the tinsel, again setting some aside for his own tree. It was odd, there’d been no tinsel at all in the boxes of decorations, and Jack couldn’t remember seeing tinsel on any of the trees they’d had since Ianto had joined the team. He shrugged. Must have been an oversight, which wasn’t like Ianto at all, but no matter. This year would make up for it and they’d never have to go without again.
There turned out to be far more tinsel than Jack remembered buying, not that it worried him. Rummaging around in the bags when he’d dropped the device had messed everything up, so it probably only looked like there was more because it wasn’t all neatly packaged anymore. Sparkly bits dropped off, scattering everywhere as he untangled it, deciding that what wouldn’t fit on the tree could go elsewhere, brightening up the railings along the catwalks and stairs, and around the autopsy bay. There should be more than enough. After all, he had to leave room on the tree for some lights.
Looking from the assortment of fairy lights to the tree and then back again, Jack admitted to himself that he might have gone a little bit overboard buying twenty different strings of them. He just hadn’t been able to make up his mind which ones would be best. Ah well, he’d string the icicle ones underneath the catwalks, along with the other dangly ones, put a set on his own tree, and… He’d think of something for whatever was left over. Waste not, want not. There was just so much variety these days; Christmas decorations had certainly come a long way since the war years!
It took hours to decorate everything, but by the time Jack had finished the Hub looked like a Christmas wonderland. Satisfied, he gathered up the empty bags and packaging, because Ianto hated when people left a mess for him to clear up. The tinsel had shed quite a lot, there were little twinkly bits scattered everywhere across the floor, but to Jack’s eyes, they just added to the festive décor. Who didn’t like twinkles? Besides, he was too tired now to get the vacuum cleaner out, so he headed off to bed. He couldn’t wait to see everyone’s faces in the morning!
OoOoOoO
Gwen’s eyes lit up when she arrived at the Hub the following day. “Wow! Jack, did you do all this yourself?”
“Yep!” Jack beamed at Gwen, practically bouncing. “What d’you think?”
“It’s very colourful. You even decorated our chairs.”
“I had some tinsel left over, seemed a shame not to use it.”
“It’s very bushy.”
“It does look much fluffier this morning than it did last night, now it’s had a chance to settle a bit. It gets kind of squashed in the packaging.”
Gwen nodded. “You can’t even see the bare bits on the tree now either.”
“I know! Took me quite a while to camouflage them, but it seems to have worked.”
The two of them were still standing there admiring Jack’s handiwork when the cog door alarms announced Owen’s arrival.
“Blimey! Looks like Christmas exploded in the middle of the Hub!” The medic winced, shielding his eyes from the blaze of colour.
“Isn’t it great?”
“Don’t know about that, ask me again when I don’t ‘ave a hangover.” Staggering over to his desk, Owen dug a pair of sunglasses out of his drawer and put them on. “That’s better.” He looked around again, the dazzling kaleidoscope of colour muted to a more bearable level by the dark lenses. “I wouldn’t want to be you when Teaboy gets here; he’s going to throw a fit when he sees this!”
Jack shook his head. “No he won’t; I’ve saved him a lot of work by doing the decorating for him. Honestly, I don’t know why we leave it all to him every year. It hardly seems fair.”
“We leave it to him because that’s the way he likes it,” Owen said. “You know how fussy he is, has to have everything just so.”
“He’s not fussy!” Jack defended his boyfriend. “He just likes to do things right first time because it saves work later.”
“Right. You just keep tellin’ yourself that.” Owen looked around the Hub again. “Oh, this is goin’ to be classic! Someone wake me when he gets here; I don’t want to miss seeing his reaction.” With that, Owen slumped into his chair and pillowed his head on his arms for a badly needed nap.
Feeling thoroughly rested, Ianto arrived just after midday, entering the Hub with a spring in his step, his cheery greeting dying on his lips as he took in the spectacle confronting him.
“Morning, Ianto! Or should I say good afternoon?” Smiling happily, Jack made his way over to his lover, confidently expecting a kiss. He didn’t get one.
“On my God! Jack, what have you done?” Ianto’s eyes were like saucers.
“I decorated the Hub for you. Do you like it?” Jack was doing his best eager puppy impression, but Ianto wasn’t showing the expected enthusiasm. His expression looked more horrified than delighted.
“It’s very… colourful,” he finally managed in a weak voice.
Jack deflated. All that hard work, and now… “You don’t like it.” Disappointment flooded through him. Would Ianto make him take it all down?
“I didn’t say that. It’s just, there’s an awful lot of tinsel, isn’t there?” Ianto frowned at the tinsel with an aggrieved expression on his face.
Didn’t Ianto like tinsel? How could anybody not like something so colourful and sparkly? “Where’s your Christmas cheer?” Jack demanded to know. “And what’s wrong with tinsel? It’s pretty!”
“Yes, and it drops bits everywhere, which I’ll no doubt be left to clear up,” Ianto grumbled. “That’s why I never use it.”
“Why bother clearing them up?” Jack cajoled. “They make the floor all twinkly; I like it.”
Ianto let his gaze wander across the cold grey concrete floor, catching little sparks of colour glittering in the glow of the fairy lights Jack had strung everywhere. It did look rather pretty, if you ignored the mess; Ianto had never been good at that, but he made the effort, for Jack’s sake. His partner meant well, even if the decorations weren’t to Ianto’s personal tastes, and he was so pleased with himself. “I suppose it is nice.” He turned to Jack. “Okay, keep your decorations and your twinkly floor, but after Christmas, you get to clean up all the mess and put the decorations away, understood?”
“Deal!” Jack’s eyes lit up like a kid at Christmas, which Ianto suspected he was: The universe’s oldest five-year-old. Grabbing Ianto, he kissed him thoroughly, leaving his lover looking dazed. “Thank you, and Merry Christmas!”
“Um, yes, Merry Christmas. Can I just ask one question?”
“Fire away!”
“How much tinsel did you buy?”
“I’m not sure, there were so many colours I might have got a bit carried away. It’s fluffed up really well since I got it all out of the packaging though. That’s probably making it look like there’s more than there is.”
Ianto nodded vaguely. “That must be it.” Shrugging off any doubts he might have had on the matter, he went to make coffee and order lunch for them all.
OoOoOoO
Aside from working amidst all the gaudy decorations, everything went along as normal. It was a reasonably quiet day for Torchwood; one minor Rift alert, which delivered an alien dictionary, and a Weevil hunt where the team, working together, captured three half-grown juveniles, microchipped them, and released them back into the sewers.
Ianto spent the rest of the day down in the archives, catching up on cataloguing and filing, not returning to the main Hub until after seven. Gwen and Owen had already left for the evening, and Jack was up in his office where Ianto had left him earlier, reluctantly doing paperwork. The Hub was in night mode, but the fairy lights were shining brightly, a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of colours illuminating the cavernous room and chasing away shadows. Even so, Ianto was halfway to the steps leading up to Jack’s office before he could put his finger on what seemed different about the place.
“Jack, did you go out and get more tinsel?” he asked as strode through the open door.
“No, I’ve been right here working my way through this pile since you went down to the archives. Why? Do you think we need more?”
“Definitely not, I think we’ve already got more than enough, it’s just that I don’t remember the workstations being decorated earlier.”
“They’re not, I thought decorations might get in the way, so I didn’t bother.”
“Well they’re decorated now, so if you didn’t do it, then who did?”
“Maybe Gwen moved some of the tinsel around.”
That was a reasonable assumption; Gwen often tweaked things when she thought they could be better. “Yeah, probably. So, are you nearly done?”
Jack looked morosely at the pile of folders still awaiting his attention. “Not yet.”
The pile of completed paperwork was at least three times as tall as the pile yet to be done, so it was clear to Ianto that Jack had been working hard. “You’re a good three-quarters of the way through it. Why don’t you leave the rest until tomorrow?”
“Are you sure? You told me you wanted it all done by tonight.”
“I’m feeling generous; must’ve been infected by all the Christmas cheer around here,” Ianto deadpanned. “I thought we could go out, get a bite to eat, then spend the night at my place. Interested?”
“Always! Let me just finish this one first; it’s almost done, and I don’t want to lose my place. I’d only have to start all over in the morning.”
“Fine, I’ll just pop down to the vaults and feed the inmates, and I’ll meet you in the garage.”
“Works for me!”
Leaving Jack to his papers, Ianto went to finish his own chores, and hardly more than fifteen minutes later they were on their way to one of their favourite restaurants.
Part 2
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack, Ianto, Owen, Gwen.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Christmas is approaching, but Jack’s attempt to brighten up the Hub for the holiday season doesn’t exactly go to plan.
Word Count: 2965 words
Written For: m_findlow’s prompt ‘Jack attempts to bring Christmas cheer to the hub. It turns out that tinsel and alien tech don't mix,’ at torchwood_fest 2016.
Beta: My lovely friend milady_dragon. Thanks so much!
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Christmas was only a couple of weeks away and Jack was seriously disappointed by the lack of festive cheer in the Hub. Ianto had set up a small, very tasteful and understated tree in the Tourist Office, along with matching paper chains supplied by his niece and nephew, but aside from Jack’s very old and slightly wonky personal Christmas tree in his office, the rest of the Hub was bare. It all looked rather bleak and sad, not at all Christmassy.
“Why don’t we have any decorations in the Hub this year?” he asked Ianto mournfully.
Ianto gave him a weary smile. “Sorry, I’ve just been rushed off my feet the last couple of weeks, haven’t had the time or energy to go looking for a tree and there probably won’t be much of a choice now.” They always had a real tree in the Hub and then planted it out on Flat Holm Island afterwards in the hopes of there one day being a nice little wooded area that the residents could enjoy. At the moment, it consisted of a mere half-dozen small trees, but forests didn’t grow overnight. There was no rush anyway; it was one of Torchwood’s long-term projects.
Seeing how tired Ianto looked, Jack instantly felt bad for complaining. The last couple of weeks had been beyond busy for his lover. Not only was he still doing all his own work and helping in the field, but as the most qualified member of the team, he’d also taken on the bulk of Tosh’s job. Torchwood’s resident tech expert was currently in Japan helping her father around the home and caring for her mother, who was recovering from knee replacement surgery.
“Don’t worry about a thing; I’ll get us a tree, even if I have to dig one up myself,” Jack told his lover confidently. “Things are quiet right now, so why don’t you go home early and get some rest? You’ve more than earned it, and I’m sure the rest of us can manage without you until tomorrow. In fact, why don’t you take the morning off too and have a lie in? Can’t have you wearing yourself out.”
“Well, if you’re sure…” Ianto looked a bit uncertain.
“I am. I can feed the inmates for you, it’s not like I’ve never done it before, and the Rift predictor says things should be quiet for the next twenty-four hours or so. I’ll stay here tonight to keep an eye on things though, just to be sure.” And to avoid disturbing Ianto’s beauty sleep, Jack thought to himself, but he didn’t say that part out loud.
“Okay, thank you. I’ll see you around lunchtime tomorrow then. Goodnight, Jack.” Ianto gave his lover a quick kiss, fetched his coat from the stand in Jack’s office, and left the Hub to the accompaniment of the cog door alarms. Ten minutes later, Jack set out in search of a Christmas tree.
Ianto was soon proved right; the best of the available trees had already been snapped up. Nevertheless, persistence paid off and he eventually found a reasonably nice seven-foot tall one with roots. Okay, so one side was a bit bare, with a couple of branches broken off short, but if that side was turned towards the wall nobody would notice, and the other slightly damaged areas could be covered up with decorations.
Taking the tree back to the Hub, Jack endured Owen’s insults as Torchwood’s multi-talented medic and plant expert helped him pot their tree up in its tub before giving it a good watering. Leaving it to settle, Jack went to dig out the decorations.
Between the tree in the Tourist Office and the one in Jack’s office, most of the baubles and other decorations that had survived after last year’s escaped Weevil incident had already been used. There weren’t enough left for a tree even half the size of the one Jack had bought. Shrugging, he decided there was only one thing for it; he’d have to go to the shops and get some more. Ianto usually took charge of buying such things, since he claimed Jack must be colour blind, but surely he wouldn’t mind Jack’s choice just this once. He’d probably be grateful to have another job taken off his hands.
Jack felt like a kid in a candy store as he wheeled his trolley between shelves practically bursting at the seams with a riot of temptingly colourful shiny things. It was impossible to choose, but that was okay because the Hub was huge. As he piled baubles and tinsel, little bells and candy canes, and strings of coloured lights into the trolley, he couldn’t stop smiling; everything was going to look really festive this year. He couldn’t understand why he always left the decorating to Ianto; this was so much fun!
Paying at the till, he carted his bulging shopping bags down to the SUV, parked in the shopping centre’s underground garage, and crammed them into the boot, alongside a containment unit Owen must have left there earlier in the day when he’d gone out on a Rift retrieval. Curious, Jack opened the box and examined the object inside. It was some sort of device, obviously of alien origin, but it didn’t look like anything Jack had ever seen before. It was dome-shaped, but not round, more like half of a rugby ball sliced end to end. The surface was a dull, matt grey colour and on the curved upper part there was an array of buttons and indentations set to either side of a row of what might have been little lights if it was switched on.
Turning it over in his gloved hands to look at the underside, it slipped from his grip, tumbling among the bags of decorations. It took Jack several minutes to retrieve it, and by the time he’d disentangled it from the tinsel, several of the little lights on its surface were blinking and flickering. Some of the buttons must have been knocked when he’d dropped it, or perhaps it had already been turned on, just dormant. It didn’t seem to be doing anything bad though, so Jack popped it back in the containment box. He decided he’d leave it on Tosh’s desk for Ianto to look at when he had time. Maybe his lover would be able to figure out what it was and what it was supposed to do, and if not, he could show it to Tosh next time they talked via Skype. She might have some ideas.
Back at the Hub, as it was after six in the evening Jack sent Gwen and Owen home. They could do with a rest too while the Rift was quiet, and besides, Jack wanted everyone to get a nice surprise in the morning when they came in and saw the Hub looking all bright and Christmassy.
Alone at last, he fetched everything from the SUV, set the containment box holding the odd device on Tosh’s workstation, then spread out all the decorations he’d bought alongside the ones from last year, so he could see exactly what he had to work with. Once he was sufficiently organised, he set about making the Hub look pretty.
His first task was to decorate the tree, so he started with the baubles, in every conceivable colour, many of them made even more garishly gaudy because they were splotched here and there with glitter. Jack loved glitter; it was so twinkly! When he’d squeezed as many baubles as he possibly could onto the tree, saving a few of the brightest and most glittery to add to the tree in his office, he started in on the tinsel, again setting some aside for his own tree. It was odd, there’d been no tinsel at all in the boxes of decorations, and Jack couldn’t remember seeing tinsel on any of the trees they’d had since Ianto had joined the team. He shrugged. Must have been an oversight, which wasn’t like Ianto at all, but no matter. This year would make up for it and they’d never have to go without again.
There turned out to be far more tinsel than Jack remembered buying, not that it worried him. Rummaging around in the bags when he’d dropped the device had messed everything up, so it probably only looked like there was more because it wasn’t all neatly packaged anymore. Sparkly bits dropped off, scattering everywhere as he untangled it, deciding that what wouldn’t fit on the tree could go elsewhere, brightening up the railings along the catwalks and stairs, and around the autopsy bay. There should be more than enough. After all, he had to leave room on the tree for some lights.
Looking from the assortment of fairy lights to the tree and then back again, Jack admitted to himself that he might have gone a little bit overboard buying twenty different strings of them. He just hadn’t been able to make up his mind which ones would be best. Ah well, he’d string the icicle ones underneath the catwalks, along with the other dangly ones, put a set on his own tree, and… He’d think of something for whatever was left over. Waste not, want not. There was just so much variety these days; Christmas decorations had certainly come a long way since the war years!
It took hours to decorate everything, but by the time Jack had finished the Hub looked like a Christmas wonderland. Satisfied, he gathered up the empty bags and packaging, because Ianto hated when people left a mess for him to clear up. The tinsel had shed quite a lot, there were little twinkly bits scattered everywhere across the floor, but to Jack’s eyes, they just added to the festive décor. Who didn’t like twinkles? Besides, he was too tired now to get the vacuum cleaner out, so he headed off to bed. He couldn’t wait to see everyone’s faces in the morning!
OoOoOoO
Gwen’s eyes lit up when she arrived at the Hub the following day. “Wow! Jack, did you do all this yourself?”
“Yep!” Jack beamed at Gwen, practically bouncing. “What d’you think?”
“It’s very colourful. You even decorated our chairs.”
“I had some tinsel left over, seemed a shame not to use it.”
“It’s very bushy.”
“It does look much fluffier this morning than it did last night, now it’s had a chance to settle a bit. It gets kind of squashed in the packaging.”
Gwen nodded. “You can’t even see the bare bits on the tree now either.”
“I know! Took me quite a while to camouflage them, but it seems to have worked.”
The two of them were still standing there admiring Jack’s handiwork when the cog door alarms announced Owen’s arrival.
“Blimey! Looks like Christmas exploded in the middle of the Hub!” The medic winced, shielding his eyes from the blaze of colour.
“Isn’t it great?”
“Don’t know about that, ask me again when I don’t ‘ave a hangover.” Staggering over to his desk, Owen dug a pair of sunglasses out of his drawer and put them on. “That’s better.” He looked around again, the dazzling kaleidoscope of colour muted to a more bearable level by the dark lenses. “I wouldn’t want to be you when Teaboy gets here; he’s going to throw a fit when he sees this!”
Jack shook his head. “No he won’t; I’ve saved him a lot of work by doing the decorating for him. Honestly, I don’t know why we leave it all to him every year. It hardly seems fair.”
“We leave it to him because that’s the way he likes it,” Owen said. “You know how fussy he is, has to have everything just so.”
“He’s not fussy!” Jack defended his boyfriend. “He just likes to do things right first time because it saves work later.”
“Right. You just keep tellin’ yourself that.” Owen looked around the Hub again. “Oh, this is goin’ to be classic! Someone wake me when he gets here; I don’t want to miss seeing his reaction.” With that, Owen slumped into his chair and pillowed his head on his arms for a badly needed nap.
Feeling thoroughly rested, Ianto arrived just after midday, entering the Hub with a spring in his step, his cheery greeting dying on his lips as he took in the spectacle confronting him.
“Morning, Ianto! Or should I say good afternoon?” Smiling happily, Jack made his way over to his lover, confidently expecting a kiss. He didn’t get one.
“On my God! Jack, what have you done?” Ianto’s eyes were like saucers.
“I decorated the Hub for you. Do you like it?” Jack was doing his best eager puppy impression, but Ianto wasn’t showing the expected enthusiasm. His expression looked more horrified than delighted.
“It’s very… colourful,” he finally managed in a weak voice.
Jack deflated. All that hard work, and now… “You don’t like it.” Disappointment flooded through him. Would Ianto make him take it all down?
“I didn’t say that. It’s just, there’s an awful lot of tinsel, isn’t there?” Ianto frowned at the tinsel with an aggrieved expression on his face.
Didn’t Ianto like tinsel? How could anybody not like something so colourful and sparkly? “Where’s your Christmas cheer?” Jack demanded to know. “And what’s wrong with tinsel? It’s pretty!”
“Yes, and it drops bits everywhere, which I’ll no doubt be left to clear up,” Ianto grumbled. “That’s why I never use it.”
“Why bother clearing them up?” Jack cajoled. “They make the floor all twinkly; I like it.”
Ianto let his gaze wander across the cold grey concrete floor, catching little sparks of colour glittering in the glow of the fairy lights Jack had strung everywhere. It did look rather pretty, if you ignored the mess; Ianto had never been good at that, but he made the effort, for Jack’s sake. His partner meant well, even if the decorations weren’t to Ianto’s personal tastes, and he was so pleased with himself. “I suppose it is nice.” He turned to Jack. “Okay, keep your decorations and your twinkly floor, but after Christmas, you get to clean up all the mess and put the decorations away, understood?”
“Deal!” Jack’s eyes lit up like a kid at Christmas, which Ianto suspected he was: The universe’s oldest five-year-old. Grabbing Ianto, he kissed him thoroughly, leaving his lover looking dazed. “Thank you, and Merry Christmas!”
“Um, yes, Merry Christmas. Can I just ask one question?”
“Fire away!”
“How much tinsel did you buy?”
“I’m not sure, there were so many colours I might have got a bit carried away. It’s fluffed up really well since I got it all out of the packaging though. That’s probably making it look like there’s more than there is.”
Ianto nodded vaguely. “That must be it.” Shrugging off any doubts he might have had on the matter, he went to make coffee and order lunch for them all.
OoOoOoO
Aside from working amidst all the gaudy decorations, everything went along as normal. It was a reasonably quiet day for Torchwood; one minor Rift alert, which delivered an alien dictionary, and a Weevil hunt where the team, working together, captured three half-grown juveniles, microchipped them, and released them back into the sewers.
Ianto spent the rest of the day down in the archives, catching up on cataloguing and filing, not returning to the main Hub until after seven. Gwen and Owen had already left for the evening, and Jack was up in his office where Ianto had left him earlier, reluctantly doing paperwork. The Hub was in night mode, but the fairy lights were shining brightly, a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of colours illuminating the cavernous room and chasing away shadows. Even so, Ianto was halfway to the steps leading up to Jack’s office before he could put his finger on what seemed different about the place.
“Jack, did you go out and get more tinsel?” he asked as strode through the open door.
“No, I’ve been right here working my way through this pile since you went down to the archives. Why? Do you think we need more?”
“Definitely not, I think we’ve already got more than enough, it’s just that I don’t remember the workstations being decorated earlier.”
“They’re not, I thought decorations might get in the way, so I didn’t bother.”
“Well they’re decorated now, so if you didn’t do it, then who did?”
“Maybe Gwen moved some of the tinsel around.”
That was a reasonable assumption; Gwen often tweaked things when she thought they could be better. “Yeah, probably. So, are you nearly done?”
Jack looked morosely at the pile of folders still awaiting his attention. “Not yet.”
The pile of completed paperwork was at least three times as tall as the pile yet to be done, so it was clear to Ianto that Jack had been working hard. “You’re a good three-quarters of the way through it. Why don’t you leave the rest until tomorrow?”
“Are you sure? You told me you wanted it all done by tonight.”
“I’m feeling generous; must’ve been infected by all the Christmas cheer around here,” Ianto deadpanned. “I thought we could go out, get a bite to eat, then spend the night at my place. Interested?”
“Always! Let me just finish this one first; it’s almost done, and I don’t want to lose my place. I’d only have to start all over in the morning.”
“Fine, I’ll just pop down to the vaults and feed the inmates, and I’ll meet you in the garage.”
“Works for me!”
Leaving Jack to his papers, Ianto went to finish his own chores, and hardly more than fifteen minutes later they were on their way to one of their favourite restaurants.
Part 2