Ficlet: Eating Alone
Title: Eating Alone
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Lisa
Rating: G
Spoilers: Cyberwoman, maybe Fragments.
Summary: After all the plans they’d made, he was reduced to eating alone.
Word Count: 325
Written For: My own prompt ‘Any, Any, A lonely dinner for one,’ at
fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.
Before Canary Wharf, most nights he and Lisa would have dinner together, picking up a takeaway or whipping something quick up in his kitchen or hers before going out on the town. London was a lively city and there were always places to go, friends to hang out with.
Now Lisa was unable to eat, sustained only by the cyber-conversion chamber he’d cannibalised to provide her with life support. She was safe, locked away in the depths of the Hub, deep in drug-induced sleep so that she wouldn’t suffer through the night when he couldn’t be with her. Which meant he would once again be eating alone.
The microwave oven gave a muted ping and Ianto crossed to the kitchen of the one bedroom apartment he was renting to get his dinner. After all the plans they’d made for their life together, he was reduced to this, a bleak, mostly unfurnished flat and frozen, microwaveable meals for one, eaten in silence.
He sat at the breakfast bar, mechanically shovelling food into his mouth straight from the plastic tray it came in. Too much salt, too much fat, too little flavour, but it hardly mattered. He needed to eat to keep his strength up, otherwise he wouldn’t have the energy to care for Lisa and to do his job. Food was a means to an end these days rather than the pleasure it used to be; a necessary evil, though he begrudged every minute feeding himself took away from the research he was doing, searching for someone who could help restore Lisa to her former self.
The only thing that mattered right now was doing everything he could to save the woman he loved with all his heart, and he’d do whatever he had to in order to achieve that goal, no matter how many lonely dinners for one he had to endure.
He had to believe it would all be worth it in the end.
The End