Fic: Torchwood: Demolition Lovers (Jack/Ianto)
TITLE: Demolition Lovers
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
WARNINGS: Does it count as character death if it's Jack? Hurt/comfort's not a warning but I'll list it here.
PAIRINGS: Jack/Ianto
SUMMARY: As we're falling down I'll see your eyes, and in this pool of blood I'll meet your eyes, I mean this forever… Jack and Ianto are trapped under a building.
WORDS: 2265
Ianto's life kept getting stranger after being made a field agent. Last week it had been the aliens who communicated through dance (kinesic linguistics, Jack kept telling him just before teaching them the Charleston), the day before it had been eggs laid in the public water system, and today…
Well this was more painful than strange. Still Ianto had never been trapped under a building before. He supposed that was one more thing to cross off his list of "problems to find oneself in before one dies," and at least he was still at the point when those list items weren't quite killing him on their own.
He was trapped, though. He couldn't feel his legs. He couldn't feel anything below his hips and that sent a spike of fear through him until he kicked out and felt something there. Hs right arm was extended off to his side and numb, his left arm trapped against his chest, and he couldn't move. He tried to move his right arm and his vision swam. His left wrist was sprained at best, and that combined with all the other aches and bruises and the pounding in his skull and the ringing in his ears made him almost black out again. A hurt whimper escaped from his lips.
A headache was stabbing up from wherehis skull was on the ground, unless the ground was just stabbing him with a scalpel to the exact rhythm of his heartbeat. It made it hard to seel anything, but…
"Ianto?"
…after a second or two he realized that he wasn't trapped under a wall or debris or anything like that. He felt a warm, soft weight across him and hot breath on his neck.
"Jack?"
Jack moved a bit. He didn't get up, and Ianto was sure that this wasn't the best time for… well, anything but getting up and getting out. He couldn't see any light and his nose was clogged with dust and smoke. They might not have much oxygen. If Jack would get up he could reach his torch and see where they were.
"Sorry," Jack said. "I got you down as fast as I could. Then the whole damn building fell on top of us."
"Of course," Ianto said. Then he added "Thank you" as an afterthought. "Could you get up off me now?"
"Actually…" Jack sounded quieter than normal. Maybe that was just the way his voice echoed in the rubble. "I can't. We're pinned down here." He wiggled a bit, as if to demonstrate. "Sorry."
Jack's voice sounded flat, and he was hissing on his S's. Ianto stopped moving, to listen to the sound of him breathing. "Jack, are you all right?"
Jack swallowed. Ianto could feel it across his neck. "We're stuck under a building. Of course I'm not all right."
"Yes, but…" Ianto knew when Jack was lying to him. Usually. He liked to think he did; sometimes Jack was easy to read and sometimes he wasn't. "Jack, what happened?"
Jack shook his head, and Ianto could feel his breathing become more labored. "This great, stupid lump of metal," he said. "Caught me right in the ribs. Cut pretty deep." He tried to laugh, but it didn't sound right, with a little hiss and a thick liquid burble that shouldn't have been there. "It's not exactly…"
Ianto tried not to panic. He was in a bad position for panicking. "How deep?"
Jack exhaled, slowly and unevenly. "I'm bleeding to death," he said, and sounded more resigned than anyone ever should. "I hate bleeding to death."
"Jack!" Ianto instinctively tried to get out from under Jack, to get to a position where he could help. Even rudimentary medical care might help: put pressure on the wound, get something absorbent against it. He only managed to move a bit before Jack groaned, one hand grabbing at his jacket.
"Ianto, seriously." Jack's sounded spectral in the dark, like there wasn't any difference between being this side of dying or the other. "I'm stuck under a girder or something and it hurts. Please don't move."
"Sorry." Ianto stopped moving. After a second he flexed his hand. "If you don't mind my asking sir, is there something you'd rather I do?"
Jack made a little strained "Mm…" noise at the top of his throat and forced all of the air out of his lungs and past Ianto's ear. "My mobile keeps going," he said, and now that Ianto was paying attention he could hear all the ways Jack didn't sound right and put them into neat lists in his mind. The lists didn't help but he couldn't help making them. The breathiness and the tightness on the vowels was resistance to the pain. The burble was something to do with the lungs; possibly a cut into the lungs and blood collecting. The roughness was pain and the dust in the air. "Ringtone sounds like Gwen, but I got one from Tosh too. If they're calling, they're probably okay."
And if they were okay then they'd be coming to get them, Ianto reasoned. "All right. And until then…" At least it wouldn't be the most compromising position he'd ever been caught in, stuck here underneath Jack. This wasn't quite the sort of being under Jack he enjoyed.
Jack sunk his head down, resting against Ianto's neck. Ianto blinked. There was some grit in his eyes but that was to be expected. He should have guessed this would happen. Shouldn't just expect that they'd always be able to defuse everything. There were probably contingency plans he should have thought out.
Jack breathed out, warming Ianto's neck in shudders and gasps. Ianto tried to move a hand to touch him, but the stuck one was still stuck and the free one was still sprained. "Jack?"
"I hate the slow deaths," Jack said. Ianto closed his eyes, but it didn't change anything. With all that darkness, Jack's voice sounded like it was coming from a nightmare. Ianto always had nightmares about people he couldn't save.
"They'll find us," Ianto said. He had to say something.
"Not before…" Jack shook his head. Ianto could feel his cheek against his neck. His skin was colder than usual. Colder than it should have been.
"You'll come back…" Ianto said, but he said it hesitantly, like he wasn't sure it was the right answer. "You'll be fine. Won't you?" Unless there was some sort of "except in case of rubble" clause in Jack's immortality. It didn't make the situation better, but it was all he really had to offer.
Jack chuckled a little, and then stopped chuckling with a gasp. If Ianto paid attention to the way Jack was lying over him, he could feel that pain all the way to his shins. Jack's arms pulled in a centimeter or two, as much as they could. His stomach tightened, his shins pressed down and in.
"Perhaps you shouldn't talk," Ianto said, amending his question.
"It's all right" Jack said. "Yeah. I'll be fine."
Ianto knew the other man well enough by now to recognize a lie in his voice. He closed his eyes, but with no light to cut out in the first place his eyelids didn't make much of a difference. It was just a way of avoiding the truth that he didn't know what to do. In these situations it was supposed to be Jack who knew what to do.
He started to work his left arm out from under Jack, gasping at the way Jack's weight and his own motion tugged at the sprain. Jack shifted on top of him and his hand kneaded in Ianto's jacket again.
"Ianto?"
"Sorry." Ianto tried to keep his shoulder back, working at the rubble around his right arm with his fingers. One big chunk of the stuff holding his arm down was all cords, and after organizing the cords for Toshiko's computer station in the Hub he was sure he could organize the Gordian Knot. It was just a matter of working this one free, then that one…
"What are you doing?" Jack kept getting quieter.
"Trying to free my arms," Ianto said. He winced; freeing his wrist involved twisting his forearm at an unnatural angle. "Pins and needles. Tell me if I'm hurting you."
"Not more than I'm already…" Jack decided against that sentence. "It's all right."
Just a few more centimeters, and then… there. His left hand fell to his side and hit the rubble beside them,and a spear of pain travelled up his arm. He cried out, right hand tightening on the wires until he could steady his breathing again. As he did, he forced out words to keep from admitting the pain: "Why the slow ones?" Maybe not the best topic, but what else was there to think about down here?
Jack made a noise that Ianto didn't want to think was a whimper. "They're slow," he said.
Ianto tried to figure out what to say to that at the same time he tried to figure out how to pull his right arm out from its trap without jostling Jack too much.
"I can't get it over with," Jack said. "I just have to sit lie there and feel it. Every drop of blood. Every scrap of life, leaking out. And I know what's waiting, and I can't get away from it…" He pressed down again, breathing in the smell of Ianto's sweat and the dust that covered both of them. Ianto closed his eyes again. The only time Jack got this close was during sex, and this was absolutley dissimilar to that. "It's death. That's all there is. All I can do is think about it. I can't die and I can't stop dying. And every damn time…"
"It's all right," Ianto said.
Jack shook, first his head and then the rest of him. "No it's not. I'm not afraid of death anymore, but… I'm afraid of dying. I always was. And it hasn't gone away. It's just gotten worse."
Ianto's right arm was almost free, and he tugged it. The rubble gave way and he tugged a bit harder, and then his arm was out and a miniature landslide followed it back to his shoulder and rolled in against his armpit. Something shifted around them and Jack's body jerked, he gave a strangled yell, and his hand made a fist through Ianto's jacket and down into his shirt: "God… Ianto!"
"I'm sorry!" Ianto's hand braced Jack's shoulder and his own breathing jumped. The rocks and pebbles settled, and he pulled his hand away and rested it morecomfortingly on Jack's shoulder. "I'm sorry."
Jack made a weak Uh-huh noise and Ianto grit his teeth. He'd been trying not to hurt Jack and look what had happened.
"Do you mind if I…" he said. Jack's hand was still fisted right by his stomach and he didn't wait for an answer. He let his fingers walk up Jack's side, tracing the line of his ribs through the greatcoat until the wool became damp under his fingers. A bit above that he found the wound with a hunk of metal still sticking out of it. The metal went up and bent back to where he could tell it was a ribbed reinforcing rod, one of those things so ubiquitous in concrete contstruction… and then true to form the bar disappeared into a concrete wall and Ianto let his hand fall again. He needed superhuman strength. Or boltcutters and appropriate leverage.
"I'm sorry," Ianto said again.
"There's nothing you can do," Jack said. His hand opened and closed again, taking a it more jacket, pressing a bit closer to the skin. "God…"
Ianto moved. He nosed down against Jack's face, trying to feel the breath he could just barely feel in the shudder of Jack's chest against his own. After a momenthis hand drifted from the wound to the back of Jack's neck, skin against skin, and he guided Jack's cheek back to his own neck, skin against skin.
"Does it make any difference if…" he said. "If there's something else there. If you don't have to think about dying."
"Ianto, no offense…" Jack's voice sounded small and weak as a child's. "You try feeling yourself exsanguinate and not thinking about dying."
"I know," Ianto said, working his fingers up Jack's nape and into the hair at the back of his head, just stroking. "but if there was something else…"
Jack moved his head, settling down into him. "M-mm?" he said, hand working at the jacket again. His grip wasn't as strong this time.
"I just thought… I was just thinking," Ianto said. "It is death, but that's not all there is."
For a moment all Jack did was breathe. Even that was getting harder to feel, and Ianto's own skin began to feel cold where Jack's breath was warming it.
"Ianto," Jack said.
Ianto brought his left hand up, biting down so the pain of moving the sprain didn't shake him. He put his arm across Jack's shoulders, and his right hand kept stroking Jack's hair.
"I'll be here," he said. Then he added "I've got you," even if it made him feel like an idiot.
One more breath came in a gasp of warm air, out of Jack's lungs, over Ianto's skin.
Jack didn't exactly reply, and Ianto didn't expect him to. But he held on until Jack stopped moving.
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
WARNINGS: Does it count as character death if it's Jack? Hurt/comfort's not a warning but I'll list it here.
PAIRINGS: Jack/Ianto
SUMMARY: As we're falling down I'll see your eyes, and in this pool of blood I'll meet your eyes, I mean this forever… Jack and Ianto are trapped under a building.
WORDS: 2265
Ianto's life kept getting stranger after being made a field agent. Last week it had been the aliens who communicated through dance (kinesic linguistics, Jack kept telling him just before teaching them the Charleston), the day before it had been eggs laid in the public water system, and today…
Well this was more painful than strange. Still Ianto had never been trapped under a building before. He supposed that was one more thing to cross off his list of "problems to find oneself in before one dies," and at least he was still at the point when those list items weren't quite killing him on their own.
He was trapped, though. He couldn't feel his legs. He couldn't feel anything below his hips and that sent a spike of fear through him until he kicked out and felt something there. Hs right arm was extended off to his side and numb, his left arm trapped against his chest, and he couldn't move. He tried to move his right arm and his vision swam. His left wrist was sprained at best, and that combined with all the other aches and bruises and the pounding in his skull and the ringing in his ears made him almost black out again. A hurt whimper escaped from his lips.
A headache was stabbing up from wherehis skull was on the ground, unless the ground was just stabbing him with a scalpel to the exact rhythm of his heartbeat. It made it hard to seel anything, but…
"Ianto?"
…after a second or two he realized that he wasn't trapped under a wall or debris or anything like that. He felt a warm, soft weight across him and hot breath on his neck.
"Jack?"
Jack moved a bit. He didn't get up, and Ianto was sure that this wasn't the best time for… well, anything but getting up and getting out. He couldn't see any light and his nose was clogged with dust and smoke. They might not have much oxygen. If Jack would get up he could reach his torch and see where they were.
"Sorry," Jack said. "I got you down as fast as I could. Then the whole damn building fell on top of us."
"Of course," Ianto said. Then he added "Thank you" as an afterthought. "Could you get up off me now?"
"Actually…" Jack sounded quieter than normal. Maybe that was just the way his voice echoed in the rubble. "I can't. We're pinned down here." He wiggled a bit, as if to demonstrate. "Sorry."
Jack's voice sounded flat, and he was hissing on his S's. Ianto stopped moving, to listen to the sound of him breathing. "Jack, are you all right?"
Jack swallowed. Ianto could feel it across his neck. "We're stuck under a building. Of course I'm not all right."
"Yes, but…" Ianto knew when Jack was lying to him. Usually. He liked to think he did; sometimes Jack was easy to read and sometimes he wasn't. "Jack, what happened?"
Jack shook his head, and Ianto could feel his breathing become more labored. "This great, stupid lump of metal," he said. "Caught me right in the ribs. Cut pretty deep." He tried to laugh, but it didn't sound right, with a little hiss and a thick liquid burble that shouldn't have been there. "It's not exactly…"
Ianto tried not to panic. He was in a bad position for panicking. "How deep?"
Jack exhaled, slowly and unevenly. "I'm bleeding to death," he said, and sounded more resigned than anyone ever should. "I hate bleeding to death."
"Jack!" Ianto instinctively tried to get out from under Jack, to get to a position where he could help. Even rudimentary medical care might help: put pressure on the wound, get something absorbent against it. He only managed to move a bit before Jack groaned, one hand grabbing at his jacket.
"Ianto, seriously." Jack's sounded spectral in the dark, like there wasn't any difference between being this side of dying or the other. "I'm stuck under a girder or something and it hurts. Please don't move."
"Sorry." Ianto stopped moving. After a second he flexed his hand. "If you don't mind my asking sir, is there something you'd rather I do?"
Jack made a little strained "Mm…" noise at the top of his throat and forced all of the air out of his lungs and past Ianto's ear. "My mobile keeps going," he said, and now that Ianto was paying attention he could hear all the ways Jack didn't sound right and put them into neat lists in his mind. The lists didn't help but he couldn't help making them. The breathiness and the tightness on the vowels was resistance to the pain. The burble was something to do with the lungs; possibly a cut into the lungs and blood collecting. The roughness was pain and the dust in the air. "Ringtone sounds like Gwen, but I got one from Tosh too. If they're calling, they're probably okay."
And if they were okay then they'd be coming to get them, Ianto reasoned. "All right. And until then…" At least it wouldn't be the most compromising position he'd ever been caught in, stuck here underneath Jack. This wasn't quite the sort of being under Jack he enjoyed.
Jack sunk his head down, resting against Ianto's neck. Ianto blinked. There was some grit in his eyes but that was to be expected. He should have guessed this would happen. Shouldn't just expect that they'd always be able to defuse everything. There were probably contingency plans he should have thought out.
Jack breathed out, warming Ianto's neck in shudders and gasps. Ianto tried to move a hand to touch him, but the stuck one was still stuck and the free one was still sprained. "Jack?"
"I hate the slow deaths," Jack said. Ianto closed his eyes, but it didn't change anything. With all that darkness, Jack's voice sounded like it was coming from a nightmare. Ianto always had nightmares about people he couldn't save.
"They'll find us," Ianto said. He had to say something.
"Not before…" Jack shook his head. Ianto could feel his cheek against his neck. His skin was colder than usual. Colder than it should have been.
"You'll come back…" Ianto said, but he said it hesitantly, like he wasn't sure it was the right answer. "You'll be fine. Won't you?" Unless there was some sort of "except in case of rubble" clause in Jack's immortality. It didn't make the situation better, but it was all he really had to offer.
Jack chuckled a little, and then stopped chuckling with a gasp. If Ianto paid attention to the way Jack was lying over him, he could feel that pain all the way to his shins. Jack's arms pulled in a centimeter or two, as much as they could. His stomach tightened, his shins pressed down and in.
"Perhaps you shouldn't talk," Ianto said, amending his question.
"It's all right" Jack said. "Yeah. I'll be fine."
Ianto knew the other man well enough by now to recognize a lie in his voice. He closed his eyes, but with no light to cut out in the first place his eyelids didn't make much of a difference. It was just a way of avoiding the truth that he didn't know what to do. In these situations it was supposed to be Jack who knew what to do.
He started to work his left arm out from under Jack, gasping at the way Jack's weight and his own motion tugged at the sprain. Jack shifted on top of him and his hand kneaded in Ianto's jacket again.
"Ianto?"
"Sorry." Ianto tried to keep his shoulder back, working at the rubble around his right arm with his fingers. One big chunk of the stuff holding his arm down was all cords, and after organizing the cords for Toshiko's computer station in the Hub he was sure he could organize the Gordian Knot. It was just a matter of working this one free, then that one…
"What are you doing?" Jack kept getting quieter.
"Trying to free my arms," Ianto said. He winced; freeing his wrist involved twisting his forearm at an unnatural angle. "Pins and needles. Tell me if I'm hurting you."
"Not more than I'm already…" Jack decided against that sentence. "It's all right."
Just a few more centimeters, and then… there. His left hand fell to his side and hit the rubble beside them,and a spear of pain travelled up his arm. He cried out, right hand tightening on the wires until he could steady his breathing again. As he did, he forced out words to keep from admitting the pain: "Why the slow ones?" Maybe not the best topic, but what else was there to think about down here?
Jack made a noise that Ianto didn't want to think was a whimper. "They're slow," he said.
Ianto tried to figure out what to say to that at the same time he tried to figure out how to pull his right arm out from its trap without jostling Jack too much.
"I can't get it over with," Jack said. "I just have to sit lie there and feel it. Every drop of blood. Every scrap of life, leaking out. And I know what's waiting, and I can't get away from it…" He pressed down again, breathing in the smell of Ianto's sweat and the dust that covered both of them. Ianto closed his eyes again. The only time Jack got this close was during sex, and this was absolutley dissimilar to that. "It's death. That's all there is. All I can do is think about it. I can't die and I can't stop dying. And every damn time…"
"It's all right," Ianto said.
Jack shook, first his head and then the rest of him. "No it's not. I'm not afraid of death anymore, but… I'm afraid of dying. I always was. And it hasn't gone away. It's just gotten worse."
Ianto's right arm was almost free, and he tugged it. The rubble gave way and he tugged a bit harder, and then his arm was out and a miniature landslide followed it back to his shoulder and rolled in against his armpit. Something shifted around them and Jack's body jerked, he gave a strangled yell, and his hand made a fist through Ianto's jacket and down into his shirt: "God… Ianto!"
"I'm sorry!" Ianto's hand braced Jack's shoulder and his own breathing jumped. The rocks and pebbles settled, and he pulled his hand away and rested it morecomfortingly on Jack's shoulder. "I'm sorry."
Jack made a weak Uh-huh noise and Ianto grit his teeth. He'd been trying not to hurt Jack and look what had happened.
"Do you mind if I…" he said. Jack's hand was still fisted right by his stomach and he didn't wait for an answer. He let his fingers walk up Jack's side, tracing the line of his ribs through the greatcoat until the wool became damp under his fingers. A bit above that he found the wound with a hunk of metal still sticking out of it. The metal went up and bent back to where he could tell it was a ribbed reinforcing rod, one of those things so ubiquitous in concrete contstruction… and then true to form the bar disappeared into a concrete wall and Ianto let his hand fall again. He needed superhuman strength. Or boltcutters and appropriate leverage.
"I'm sorry," Ianto said again.
"There's nothing you can do," Jack said. His hand opened and closed again, taking a it more jacket, pressing a bit closer to the skin. "God…"
Ianto moved. He nosed down against Jack's face, trying to feel the breath he could just barely feel in the shudder of Jack's chest against his own. After a momenthis hand drifted from the wound to the back of Jack's neck, skin against skin, and he guided Jack's cheek back to his own neck, skin against skin.
"Does it make any difference if…" he said. "If there's something else there. If you don't have to think about dying."
"Ianto, no offense…" Jack's voice sounded small and weak as a child's. "You try feeling yourself exsanguinate and not thinking about dying."
"I know," Ianto said, working his fingers up Jack's nape and into the hair at the back of his head, just stroking. "but if there was something else…"
Jack moved his head, settling down into him. "M-mm?" he said, hand working at the jacket again. His grip wasn't as strong this time.
"I just thought… I was just thinking," Ianto said. "It is death, but that's not all there is."
For a moment all Jack did was breathe. Even that was getting harder to feel, and Ianto's own skin began to feel cold where Jack's breath was warming it.
"Ianto," Jack said.
Ianto brought his left hand up, biting down so the pain of moving the sprain didn't shake him. He put his arm across Jack's shoulders, and his right hand kept stroking Jack's hair.
"I'll be here," he said. Then he added "I've got you," even if it made him feel like an idiot.
One more breath came in a gasp of warm air, out of Jack's lungs, over Ianto's skin.
Jack didn't exactly reply, and Ianto didn't expect him to. But he held on until Jack stopped moving.