She believes that life is made up of all that you're used to
In the Kashtta Tower's lounge, Suzie Costello is sipping an unholy concoction made mostly of hot cocoa, with some coffee and whiskey added for flavour. It has whipped cream on the top. She's frowning down at a small device, probably alien in origin, which is rattling in a regular repeating pattern, and poking at it
( Read more... )
Pity that's about to change.
J is wandering, keeping to back hallways and odd corners of the building. Like he does. He's trying to use the rhythm of his footsteps to moderate his own emotions, to keep anyone - the people he's trying not to run into, the one person who will feel it regardless - from picking up that his mind's nowhere near the Tower, that it's turning over theories of morphogenic field transmission and the like instead.
He opens a door, not really curious as to what's inside. It's probably an unused custodial hallway. Most of the ones on this floor are unused.
Except that beyond the door, there's a room far, far too large for this part of the building.
What the...?He glances behind him. Same old hallway. And it's not exactly unheard-of for the Tower to ( ... )
Reply
And there's a J. Who is not supposed to be down here.
Well, really, no one ever told J he wasn't supposed to be down here, as that particular prohibition exists only in Ianto's head, but... Well, it does not help, to his mind, that this is the second time he's setting up a habitat in a basement for someone who used to be someone he loved and isn't anymore.
So he's been thinking of Lisa, and Jack, and... Well, doing quite a bit of thinking about when he might get out and see Winter again. He's starting to get that twitchy, hungry look again, and it's possible he's forgotten to shave in the past couple of days. Again ( ... )
Reply
And-
Well.
FuckJ freezes entirely when Ianto comes into view, tenses very muscle he can focus on to keep any of them from shifting, and cringes back slightly, ready to extract himself if there's any possibility that Ianto doesn't notice him immediately, which of course he does ( ... )
Reply
He starts off with a soft, "Is everything all right?" and, after a moment to consider the room J's in vs. where he was seen, follows it with, "And should I start looking for something that might make you teleport randomly...?"
He forces himself to leave the 'sir' off.
Reply
J turns, giving the room he's in a quiet glare before turning back to Ianto with a contrite expression. "I didn't want to bother you," he says, which is neither an answer nor half of what he should/could/might be saying here. It might be an apology - not for slinking off, but for being in the basement to begin with. "I'm sure I can... find may way out of the basement. Given time."
And then hide under a metaphorical rock for a bit until everyone's forgotten he was down here and any pressures to chisel out a space for him in anyone's life have faded away.
Reply
"...In that case," he says, "I'll leave you to... find your way out of the basement. Let me know if you need anything." He smiles, and even if it doesn't reach his eyes, it's still something. "It's really no bother at all."
There are so many things he should say, things he wants to say, but to say them would be to admit to things he's not ready to share with much of anyone yet.
He remembers Winter and Anna, and how they know him better than the man he's been stupidly, desperately in love with for over three years, and/or a close approximation thereof.
He thinks that perhaps Jack would've commanded that much honesty from him, but... This isn't Jack.
So he doesn't say he's sorry. He doesn't try to explain. He just makes a note about a ramp for the tank, and withdraws from the room, holding two faces in his mind like a they have all the power in the world to protect him from remembering Jack.
Maybe it'll even work, though he doubts it.
Reply
J turns back to the boiler, reading the warning labels. He glances at a gauge or two. Flicks a fingernail against a pipe. The pipe does not attack him. That's a good sign.
After a minute or so he exhales, steps out of the room, and COLLIDES with Ianto despite the fact that Ianto was almost certainly nowhere near the boiler room and J himself really should have been.
"Vakoxe!"
He reaches out to make sure Ianto doesn't go toppling into anything on instinct, and then follows up the curse with a selection of other Ransham invectives, both offensive and obscene. None of them are targeted at the faun. He'd just like to know why this is happening.
Aaaand his hands are still on Ianto's shoulders. He'll be fixing that, now, and giving Ianto a thin grimace to replace them.
Leaving? Apparently not happening.
The grimace fades after a moment and he sticks his hands in his pockets, stepping back until his back rests against a wall. What's he supposed to do, here? There's nothing to do, nothing to say, nothing ( ... )
Reply
Those happen to be hands he hasn't felt since Jack Harkness left the Conrad to avoid bringing the wrath of Romana Angelos down on his team, back when Ianto was still human. For all the time between then and now, for all the shock of contact, it's far too familiar. For a moment, it's like nothing's changed.
He stops breathing for a moment, heart pounding in his chest, and then he remembers, albeit unwillingly, that nothing good is going to come of this.
He tries to think of Winter's hands down his spine, long and graceful and completely unlike J's; of tracing the curve of Anna's hip while she favoured him with a lazy smile; but even as those recollections hit, even as his chest tightens and aches because he hasn't seen them in far too long, none of it even touches the overwhelming awareness of Jack -- no, J, just J -- of J's hands on his his shoulders, of the space he occupies in the ( ... )
Reply
"Filtration." There's an odd tinge to his voice - half fond remembrance, half dry commentary. Sooner or later, it does all come back to the sea. "Got it."
He walks over to the machinery, crouching down to inspect it, familiarize himself with it. He's good with machines because he's had cause to be - more now than before he got those seven years back in all their searing glory - and he can read a few extra specifics from things he saw in his sister's labs, basic-basic systems like a plane mechanic's interest in simple gears. He can pull himself down into the moment, anchor himself to feeling these things out, testing their configuration against his hands, but he catches himself and stops because that, too, has been pollutedHe does his best to ignore the tension being pushed back into his shoulders from ( ... )
Reply
"I'm sure you've worked out why this is here," he finally says, since there's really no getting around that. "Of course, now that it's been built, it's never going to see use, but if it hadn't been, you'd randomly be stuck as a dolphin for a week." He shrugs. "Same reason I bought bicycles for everyone in Torchwood, myself excluded."
He frowns a little at the readings he's getting on the water itself, then makes another quick note. "We couldn't get seawater out here, though. But it's a fair approximation."
And then, apropos of nothing: "...I'm sorry."
He's not talking about the water.
Reply
That's not entirely true. He hasn't been at zero since he got down here - probably not for a while since then. Possibly not since the Master's entry showed up on the journal network, though he's doing a good job of not thinking about that given the state the rest of his mind is. And he's already written off fighting and fleeing. Still, there's a visible hitch when it feels like his entire body grits, from his teeth right down through to his bones.
"...I seriously doubt anyone in this Tower has cause to apologize to me," he says, wresting his attention back onto the filtration system and popping off a casing to give its inner workings more direct attention than they probably need.
His voice is almost even.
If anything, he almost says, but he can't make the words move up through his throat with his breath. If anything, I still haven't made my own apologies, and I feel like I should apologize for giving up trying.In the mean time he's just going to keep his hands moving, ( ... )
Reply
"Surprising as it may seem," he says, focusing intently on his notebook, "I tend to think that the sort of loss of control that leads to me flinging accusations about is cause for an apology. Really, if I'm going to be causing a scene, I'd rather the accusations in question be ones that I can back up in some significant way. Not just a... a need to believe the worst for my own comfort."
He's not going to say he didn't mean it -- at the time, he did. Of course, at the time, he was hardly rational.
Of course, he's still not looking at J. That would make this... harder.
Reply
And what would be the point, he's too far down to ask aloud, apologizing to someone like me? I've survived everything. I'll survive everything to come. And if I don't, I'll know it ceased to matter.
"When it comes to Torchwood, 'the worst' is usually a safe thing to believe," he says. When it comes to him, him like this, ready to become any sort of atrocity at the drop of a hat, perhaps it's the safest. "Just - don't apologize."
Or he'll rip his own throat out to keep himself from screaming. He doesn't understand it, this trait of decent people to apologize for the mess he's made of his life. It feels like he did once, but not any more; these are the rules, this is how things go, you get hurt and you hurt everyone around you and you fit yourselves in where you can savor the bits where you're kiting on endorphins and brag about your myriad of scars, and attempts to subvert that as the dominant ( ... )
Reply
The emptiness in J's expression hurts, deep and raw, and before he can think too hard about it, he's flipped his journal open and is jotting a quick note. After he's scrawled a few lines, he shuts the journal with a snap, grabs some sea salt mix, and goes back up the ladder -- tricky with the hooves, but he's got the knack for it now.
He'll just be measuring that into the tank now. Quietly.
He'd deny that his hands are shaking.
Reply
Eventually, though, the last bits fall into their proper configuration, the last diagnostics he can do with nothing but eyes, hands, ears, and the machine in front of him come back clean, and he pulls away.
"There." The machinery sounds healthy, looks heathy. He presses his fingers into the tank wall, watching the displacement of fine particles in the water.
It doesn't smell like the sea. That would be too much to ask for.
After a moment he closes his eyes, leans forward to rest his forehead against the wall, and listens. Until Chicago he spent his entire planetbound life by one ocean or another, and here... no. There's Lake Michigan, but aside from that it's just land, all land, too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, crowded except where it stretches out into industrial parks and farmland and plains. The sea is very far away ( ... )
Reply
...He's leaving soon anyway. And he's going to see Winter, and that'll help. He might as well.
"I never knew you had a sister," he says, just as softly. There's no reproach in his voice. Even with Jack, even when it seemed like they had... something, he never pried, and never really expected to be told much. Jack had his secrets, and that was just how things were.
He wonders if Jack knew about Rhiannon. He wonders if Jack would have cared. He was just the part-time shag, after all. Owen was right, and for all that he'd insisted otherwise at the time -- He needs me! -- it hadn't really come to anything in the end, had it?
He'll see Winter soon.
He finishes the note in his journal, and looks at the tank. At this point, he's done everything he can think of to get it running properly. Anything else he could do is just decorative.
He'll see Winter soon. And then... he'll decide from there. ( ... )
Reply
Leave a comment