FIC: Love is in the Air (3/4)
Title: Love is in the Air
Rating: R
Pairings: Jack/Ianto mainly, but mild Gwen/Rhys, Jack/Gwen, Jack/Tosh and Jack/Owen.
Warnings: Crack
Summary: Every member of Torchwood has a sudden new love interest ... and it's all the same man! Set after "Meat 2-04". Complete in four parts.
Disclaimer: I truly wish I did own Torchwood, but I don't. So ... yeah. Don't sue me.
~Part One~ ~Part Two~
Ianto leant against the wall as he watched his parents bicker. For as long as he could remember they had argued over every single little thing. Their arguments were always so loud that even heavy metal (a genre of music Ianto kept only for the one purpose) on full blast would only drown some of the yelling out, so long that they would often last a week, and so violent that once his mother had actually thrown a knife at his father, missing him by a hair’s breadth.
When Ianto turned eighteen he had moved out, away from the insanity. His sister, who was fifteen at the time, had begged him not to go, but he couldn’t cope any more. So he’d moved to London and got himself a simple apartment and a job at Torchwood one. Then everything had fallen to pieces and he’d moved back home for a week until he could find an apartment in Cardiff. His sister had left for collage not long before and spent hours on the phone gloating about her having escaped and him ending up back home after all.
Annoyingly for her, it only took him a week to get a new apartment and, unlike her, he got to live alone. He’d had a few months of fun gloating over that in return.
But, as he watched his parents, he couldn’t help wishing he hadn’t invited them round to visit. They were arguing, at the moment, over the fact his mother didn’t like him working at a tourist office and that his dad thought as long as he was happy it didn’t matter.
Ianto grimaced as the doorbell rang and quickly crossed the room to open the door.
The sight that greeted him wasn’t what he was expecting.
Jack was stood there, a pitiful expression on his face.
Owen was clinging to his right arm, resting his head on his shoulder, eyes closed with contentment. Tosh had her arms around Jack’s waist from behind and Gwen was gripping his left arm with a determined scowl on her face.
“Help,” Jack whined.
That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Or, the word that made Ianto lose grip on his emotions. His steely exterior dropped and he burst out laughing, hysterically, making his parents turn and stare at him as he staggered across the room and leant on the sofa, his legs unable to support his weight thanks to the hysterics.
“This isn’t funny!” Jack moaned, making Ianto laugh harder.
“Oh, Jack, it is!” he exclaimed, breathless.
“It’s not!” Jack whined again, making Ianto double over and pant.
“Only you could get into this situation, Jack. I love that about you,” he said, around laughs.
What happened next neither Jack nor Ianto was expecting. Gwen reached for a vase, picking it up and launching it across the room at Ianto, who ducked. Anticipating the next move, Ianto reached into the back of his jeans, drawing his gun, at the same moment that Gwen grabbed hers from Jack’s back pocket. Pointing their weapons at each other, Ianto looked at Jack, helplessly. “Okay, not funny,” he conceded.
“You have a gun?” his mother breathed.
“Not now, mam!” Ianto snapped. Then he turned to Gwen. “Put it down,” he said.
Gwen shook her head, aiming the gun at Ianto, then at Tosh and Owen, then back at Ianto. “I love him and he loves me! Not you! He doesn’t love you! You’re just a toy!” She turned to Owen and Tosh. “And you’re delusional!”
Ianto, never taking his eyes of Gwen, considered, briefly, and decided to use her sense of reason against her. “Look, I doubt Jack would ever love you if you shot one of his friends.” Gwen’s hand wavered. “If you want to earn his love, put the gun down.”
Gwen looked between Ianto, Jack and Tosh and Owen. Jack held out his hand. “Give it to me …” he said, then added, quietly, with an eye roll, “… again.”
Gwen reluctantly handed over her gun. Quickly, without even visibly thinking about it, Jack removed the ammo from each gun and tossed it at Ianto, who caught it and slipped it into his pocket. Jack replaced the guns in his coat and turned to Ianto. “We need to talk. Kitchen. Now.”
He rounded on Gwen, Tosh and Owen. “You! Go back to the hub and try and work out that sphere. I know this has something to do with that.” They looked at him, distantly, not keen on leaving his side, especially with Ianto there.
“We’re not leaving you here to shag him!” Owen snapped, gesturing at Ianto, who blushed.
Jack closed his eyes in despair. “His parents are here. I’m not going to shag him with them here. Use your brain, Owen.” He pointed at the door. “Go! Now! And don’t kill each other!”
As the trio left the apartment, Ianto’s mother walked across to her son. “Who … who is he?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly.
“My boss,” Ianto replied.
“At the … tourist office?”
Ianto nodded.
“Why do you have a gun?”
Ianto smiled slightly. “Tourists can be dangerous, you know.” And, with that, he walked into the kitchen with Jack. “You want to tell me what I missed while I was out?”
“I’m sorry I interrupted your time with your parents,” Jack said, sincerely.
“You did me a favour, trust me,” Ianto replied. “Now, talk,” he said in his most commanding tone.
Jack smiled. He liked that tone. “I don’t know … one minute everything was normal … next thing I know Gwen is coming onto me … then Tosh … then Owen kissed me!” He couldn’t help wiping his mouth just thinking about it. “Owen!”
Ianto chuckled, although he was secretly planning on how to kill Owen slowly and painfully.
“Owen ran some tests on Gwen and Tosh. But I left the data back at the hub.”
Ianto nodded. “We should go there and get it, then.”
Jack looked at him with fear. “But … they’re there!”
“And so’s Janet. Your point?”
Jack closed his eyes. “Alright … fine … but if they try anything I’m locking them in the vaults.”
“We need their help, Jack,” Ianto said, walking across and planting a small kiss on Jack’s lips. “I’ll protect you from the big bad Gwen-monster, don’t worry.”
“I’m not scared of Gwen!” Jack exclaimed. “I’m afraid of Owen! He’s a lot more … predatory than I ever imagined.”
Ianto grimaced. He didn’t need to know that about his co-worker. Then he paused, eyes widening. “You imagined Owen?”
“No! I …” Jack had a feeling no matter what he said it would be wrong. “I imagine you more.”
Ianto raised an eyebrow with a smirk. “Sweet talker.”
“I try my best.”
Jack was attempting to lighten the mood and, maybe, soften Ianto up enough so that they could skip the country rather than going back to the hub. But, judging by the younger man’s expression, he wasn’t going to budge.
“Alright,” Jack said, with a deep sigh. “Let’s get this over with.” He paused then, with a small smirk, he added, “But, if Owen kisses me again it’s your fault.”
Ianto chuckled, kissing Jack hard before leaving the kitchen and going out to his parents. “Mam, dad, look … we need to go into work …”
“At the tourist office?” his mother said, obviously confused.
“Uh … yeah,” Ianto said. “We probably won’t be back until late so … go home.”
“We?”
Ianto swore internally, he hadn’t meant to say ‘we’ … he didn’t have time to explain. “Jack and me. We.”
His mother gaped. “The comment that girl with the gun made … Oh my …”
Ianto grimaced. “I don’t have time for this,” he said, angrily. “Go home!” He grabbed Jack’s hand and dragged him through the door, leaving his parents gaping behind him.
“I’m going to need to requisition some RetCon, please,” he said, once they were out of the way.
Jack nodded. “I understand.”
*
Stealth mode enabled, Jack and Ianto entered the hub to find each of the team working at their respective desks. Letting go of Jack’s hand, Ianto gestured that he should head for the office, while Ianto went in and turned to the team. “Would anyone like coffee?”
While their attention was diverted, Jack ran up the stairs and went into his office, opening the folder and looking through the pages. The readings Owen had collected reminded him of something. It nagged at the back of his memory, driving him insane. He knew that, if he could just remember, he would be able to put all this right.
He rifled through the papers, searching for something - anything - that could jog his memory. He couldn’t understand most of the medical jargon Owen had written down and didn’t even have a hope of reading the little notes he had made in the margins.
He lifted his hand up and ran it through his hair. Noticing something on his palm he paused and moved his hand in front of his face. There it was, a strange symbol; it was a square with a large dot in the middle. The square was faded as though it was an old scar, but the dot was a fresh, livid burn. Yet it didn’t hurt.
Again, Jack had the feeling he knew what this was. He touched the mark, gently. Nothing happened.
The sphere. That had caused it.
Everything beginning to drop into place, Jack raced down the stairs and grabbed Ianto, holding his right palm up and gazing at it. “You have one!”
“I didn’t know you’d started fortune-telling, Jack,” Ianto said, sarcastically, but his expression changed when he saw what Jack was pointing at. His symbol, though fundamentally the same as Jack’s, had the dot and three sides of the square faded, but one side was clear, the corner marked with a dot, much like the one in the middle.
“Gwen, come here,” Jack said, beckoning her over.
Like a trained puppy she came, almost skipping. “I didn’t know you were here!” she squealed. Jack grimaced as she threw her arms around his neck. He pulled her right arm away and held up her palm. Same symbol, different side.
Jack looked across at Tosh and Owen. “I bet they have them too,” he said.
Ianto glanced at his palm. “Okay. What is it?”
Jack looked across at the sphere. “That.”
“What about it?” Ianto said, a little slow on the uptake for once.
“That’s what’s causing this! I’ve seen it before. I told you!” He walked across and picked up the sphere, examining it closely. “So the question is … how do we turn it off?”
Ianto huffed. “It’s probably complicated and it’ll take us forever to work out how it works.”
Jack grinned at him as he grabbed the sphere and twisted half in one direction and half the other, effectively splitting it in two, revealing two buttons inside. Just above the left was the word ‘ON’ and above the right was ‘OFF’.
“We need a translation program,” Ianto said. “It’s not in English.”
Jack glanced at the words again. Definitely English. Then he grinned as he realised the TARDIS was still translating for him. He reached out and hit the off button. “Off,” he said, with grin.
He felt Gwen let go of him (she’d been clinging to his waist ever since he’d examined her palm) and she looked at him in confusion. “What happened?” she said.
“How did you know what to do?” Ianto asked, impressed.
“I’ll never tell,” Jack replied, with a grin, as he realised where he’d seen the sphere before. It was a black market item that was sold all over the galaxy, used for making men and women into loving sex toys. It was more complex than that, really, but that was the simple explanation. Jack had never used one, himself; they were more up John’s alley.
~Part Four~
A/N: Part four is merely an epilogue, as such I decided to post it at the same time as this part.