Torchwood FF: The ones that stay (Ianto/Owen/Jack, R)
Title: The ones that stay
Series: Sequel to Act as if you have faith and The difference between wanting and having
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Ianto/Owen/Jack
Rating/Warning: R for language and sex
Genre: Drama/Angst
Length: 4,400 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to the BBC
Spoilers: All of Torchwood S1, and allusions to New Who S3
Summary: It has been a long time since Jack was the one on the outside. After what happened, though, part of him thought he might deserve it.
AN: This one refers directly to something that happened in Who, so don't read if you haven't seen it yet.
Three weeks.
* * * *
Three weeks to untangle the bureaucracy, to get hold of what they wanted, to get it working again, to hail the ship. He has been in worse situations for longer stretches, but this is his team. This useless anger, this impotence, this is all about his team, trapped where he can’t see them.
* * * *
Three weeks.
* * * *
“Examination Table,” Owen ordered, dragging Ianto down the steps to his area, ignoring the rest of the team.
Ianto held back. “Owen...”
“Table. Now. Before I drag you up there.”
“Owen, I really don’t think this is...”
“Get on the fucking table, Ianto!”
Ianto stopped trying to answer Jack’s questions and obeyed Owen’s instructions instead.
There was a moment or two when Jack thought he would have to step in - Owen’s hands shook when he unpackaged the needle for the syringe. Then, as suddenly as the fit of shakes had taken him, it left. He took a round of blood samples without speaking, waved an array of scanners over Ianto’s chest and head, then paused to take a long deep breath.
“And yourself,” Ianto prompted quietly.
“I’m fine.”
“Owen.”
“Oh, fine, if you’re gonna be like that about it.” Again, Jack would have come forward, but Owen handed a clean needle to Ianto and let him draw the blood. He repeated the scans on himself while the blood tests ran. They hadn’t been able to figure out how the bulk of the medical tech actually worked, but the scanners were mostly intuitive enough that Owen could use them anyway.
“Fine.” Owen said, after a silent wait. “All clear.”
“I suppose ‘I told you so’ would get a poor response at this point?” Ianto asked dryly.
“Try it and we’ll see,” Owen threw back. “Okay. I’m going home.”
Gwen, who hadn’t said a word since her initial embrace had been rebuffed, cried protest at that.
Owen ignored her and tried to brush past them on the way out of the Hub. Ianto got up as if he might he about to follow him in leaving. Jack reached out one hand to stop Ianto, the other to brush at Owen’s sleeve. Ianto froze under his touch, but it was Owen who reared around with a growl, “Hands off.”
Jack raised an eyebrow.
“How long were we gone?” Owen asked cryptically.
“Three weeks,” Jack answered.
“Then you can wait three weeks.” Owen continued towards the door, though Ianto stopped to see if Jack was going to say anything.
Getting out of the building wasn’t working for Owen anyway - Gwen snatched at him as he passed her. He still jerked back, but she curled an arm around him and buried her head into his neck. Owen’s eyes widened, something more like himself in the back of the cold stare. The tight line of his mouth twisted into something else - not a smile, but less like he was about to snap someone’s neck. Not for the first time, Jack was grateful that he had hired Gwen.
“Oh, Gwen, sweetheart, for God’s sake don’t cry...” Owen said, ineffectually objecting. She continued to sob into his shoulder, and he eventually loped one arm around her waist, stroking down her back.
As if this gave her permission, Tosh ran up the steps to Owen’s side and wrapped both arms around him.
Owen raised his other arm to receive her. “This isn’t how I pictured two gorgeous birds throwing themselves at me,” he muttered, kissing Tosh’s head absently.
Walking up the steps like he didn’t know why, Ianto was pulled into what was now becoming a group hug. The noise, conversely, became quieter.
“God, god, god,” Gwen whispered, like a plea or a thank you. “I thought we’d never see you again.”
“Yeah, well,” Owen said, but no one seemed to notice but Jack. Likewise, no one seemed to notice that the arm Owen had wrapped around Gwen had been pulled tighter to allow him to fist a hand securely in the back of Ianto’s jacket. Well. Jack presumed that Ianto had noticed.
* * * *
“I’ll cut your fucking dick off! Get away from him!” Owen’s eyes snapped open. He reached blindly for the bin under the desk, and for a long moment the only sound was the harsh noise of his retching.
Gwen’s voice was a whisper, “Owen?”
Owen was leaving before she hit the second syllable. The kitchen door slammed shut.
“Ianto.” It was Jack’s turn to ask.
“Nothing happened,” Ianto answered, gathering the mugs lying abandoned around the workstations.
“So, why...?”
Ianto opened the door into the kitchen, and turned around abruptly. “Owen worries,” he answered dryly, as if it were a joke. Not so long ago, it might have been.
The door closed. The last words Jack heard were Owen’s: “I had bloody good reason to worry. You could have been…”
* * * *
He didn’t know whether Ianto was worse or better than Owen. Ianto had fallen asleep in the end, slumped over the conference room desk. The noise he made, a sharp little cry that tore at something inside Jack, could be pain or fear. He wasn’t sure which was better, which to hope for.
So he stayed, standing watch. Every night until he knew the size and shape of each small abrasion, and each yellowing bruise.
They had come back marked. Not like Jack, who hadn’t had a hair out of place - something he knew Owen had resented.
Ianto had bruising around the back of his head. They had hit him as he was walking away. A cuff, an afterthought. As if it hadn’t mattered.
He hadn’t noticed the marks on Owen until later. When the high-collared shirt he was wearing shifted, and Jack had spotted the finger marks. Held against a wall by someone taller, stronger. Owen would still be talking - he never stopped talking - even when he didn’t have the breath to get the words out.
Owen had stopped talking now, working almost silently at his desk. He had been home, at least - Jack had ordered them both to take some time off. But they had returned, simultaneously, early the next morning. Owen looked up at Ianto through the glass, holding the gaze longer than he would have ever dared before. The next time Ianto stirred, Owen reached him first. He touched Ianto’s shoulder gently, and didn’t seem surprised when the younger man jerked backwards. They didn’t speak, but Owen offered Ianto an only-slightly-mocking arm, and the two of them left the Hub. Jack watched them go.
* * * *
The girls were closer to each other now, a response to Owen and Ianto. With Tosh and Gwen it manifested itself as clandestine whispering and all-too-infrequent laughter. Jack wasn’t sure that Owen and Ianto talked to each other any more than they did before. They weren’t even especially pleasant to each other, not in any way that would make you curious.
But when they went out now, Owen stood perhaps half a pace closer to Ianto than he should. Jack took point, but where it would have been Gwen and Owen to one side, now it was Gwen and Tosh. Ianto was to Jack’s other side, with Owen on his six, just a little closer than he should be.
Ianto brought Owen coffee last, and that was not an insult. Where Ianto finished was where he would stand for a few minutes, drinking his own coffee. Once it had been the doorway of Jack’s office; now he leant against Owen’s partition, unspeaking, with every appearance of standing guard. They didn’t speak, save for the ‘thanks’ Owen muttered when Ianto took the mug back with him.
So Jack didn’t notice it.
“What?”
“They watch you,” Gwen said again.
“They watch each other,” he answered, trying for nonchalance but not quite making it.
“Well, yes,” she conceded. “But they watch you too.”
Jack didn’t believe her. He spent all his time watching his team’s two wayward members, waiting for the cracks to split open. He was prepared for every eventuality but this. It wasn’t the sex that surprised him - there has always been tension there - it is the way that they both hold back, just a little, rather than risk breaking whatever it is they have. The way they behaved as though they could only rely on each other now, when Jack was used to playing that role. He spent all his time watching them watching each other - he would notice if they were looking back.
* * * *
Ianto had an arm looped, sloppy and drunk, around Owen’s shoulders. Jack had never seen him drunk before. Owen was using one arm to brace Ianto upright around the waist, the other he used to open the main door.
When Ianto half-slipped, Owen pulled the loose arm back to make a circle round Ianto. “Easy,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”
He caught Jack’s eye, standing watching them from his office door. Saw Jack’s eyes flick to the new marks on Ianto’s neck, no longer hand prints but teeth - red bruises dotted just above his collar. Just in sight.
Owen’s leer was feral, and full of teeth.
* * * *
Jack tried, one more time, to fix things. Ianto had gone home early, and it felt like providence, with just Owen still in the Hub, and three weeks gone. Owen had seemed in a good mood, smirking at whatever his scalpel was uncovering in the autopsy subject. So Jack called Owen up to the office. He reassuringly laid a hand on their doctor’s shoulder and asked what was up. Everything after that was something of a violent blur.
Jack recognised, more than he would like to, that he was partially to blame for what happened with the rift. That Gwen was right about asking his team questions, and Owen was right about answering a few. That he was not always a great leader and that they had not appreciated why he left. But he does not understand how desertion had turned so readily to hatred - it was never that way with him. So it was difficult to reconcile the man that had broken down in his arms with the one tearing at his shirt like it was the only thing preventing him ripping Jack open.
“You left us,” Owen bit into Jack’s shoulder, and Jack couldn’t tell which time he meant. Owen was not tall enough to pin him back, but he had a tight grasp on Jack’s wrists, as if he could hold him there, against the wall. “You fucking left us,” he said again, sharp and unforgiving.
“Owen, please,” he whispered, knowing that it would be enough. Knowing that all Owen wanted was to hear his boss beg.
The cry and the final, jerky, thrust happened all at once. Owen’s eyes shut tight, and his lips made a bitter twist as he shoved himself against Jack. “Bastard,” Owen said, when he had breath enough to speak. He left Jack, still half-hard and aching, without another word.
* * * *
“He left me,” Jack told Owen one night, in his office once again. He has told this story already, as farce instead of tragedy, but this time he dons the other mask.
“That why you turned up in the hospital?” Owen answered, following the track of the conversation effortlessly.
“No. No, that was the time I left him. The first time, he left me. I was dead. The first time for that too. And then I wasn’t, but they were already gone.”
“They?” he said, picking up on the part of the statement Jack considers least important.
“The Doctor. And Rose.”
“The two of them. And you.” Owen said to clarify.
“Yes. Shocked?”
Owen snorted. “This is you. So he left you. He came back. You left with him. And then you left him.”
“Yup.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“So you understand that...”
“Tell Ianto. He’s the one that needs coddling. He’ll care that you came back on purpose.”
“And what about you, Owen,” Jack asked, leaning into the younger man’s space, “What do you care about?”
Owen leant in further, lips close enough that a kiss would be an inch away. “I cared when you left. Now I don’t.”
Jack wasn’t stupid. He could trace the patterns: the Doctor leaving Jack, and Jack leaving the Doctor. Jack leaving Owen, and Owen leaving him. But Owen had not meant to leave, and that was the difference, the dark anger that sparked explosions in Owen’s eyes.
“You waited,” he said, because there is nothing else to say.
“He waited.”
“Owen...”
“He thought you were coming.” The confusion must have shown on his face because Owen continued, stabbing a finger in the air as though he wished it were Jack’s throat. “He didn’t say it, ‘cause when does Ianto ever tell anyone what he wants? He just... waited.”
“And you watched.”
“They took him away. I don’t... I don’t know why, when he came back he was fine, but they...” And Jack knew exactly what it was to scream yourself hoarse calling for someone who wouldn’t come back. This wasn’t his pattern at all. He’d left them three times, not twice. And they hadn’t left at all.
“You didn’t think we would get you back.”
“No.”
“Owen.”
“Can I go now?” Jack waved him out of the office after a long look.
* * * *
There was a familiar leather jacket hanging on the back of the chair, but its owner was nowhere to be found.
When he walked to the office door and looked around, Ianto was missing too.
“Do you think they think they’re being subtle?” Tosh leaned round to ask Gwen, but she was smiling when she said it.
Even Gwen looked more wistful than upset. “Probably not,” she said. “Owen just doesn’t care very much.”
Tosh looked up from the screen, interested again. “He doesn’t care if people know?”
“Well he wouldn’t would he? He’s a really good shag,” Gwen said, in afterthought. She looked over at Tosh, surprised that she had said that part out loud. Tosh giggled, a soft squeak of a thing. Gwen blushed and joined in. The two chairs were shuffled together, dark heads bent close, and Jack knew that he wouldn’t get any more use of them unless there was an emergency.
He turned on his monitor. Not thinking about it. Changed the camera. Still not voicing it, even in his head.
Hands making quick work of a row of tiny buttons. Another pair slipping, slow and teasing, under a white t-shirt. Could fill in the sound in his head, the soundtrack of gasps and wet sucking and biting. The words that would spill over - names, maybe, or just encouragement. One figure dropping out of sight, hidden by the bench and the awkward camera angle. Didn’t need to see them, not when the other’s back arched, mouth open, lips wet even in black and white.
He turned the camera off when, afterwards, they clung to each other on the cot. Tentative as the sex was not, arms pressed tight around slim shoulders, hands smoothing again and again over taut skin. A kiss darted, gentle like Jack had never seen him be, under the loose curl on a damp forehead. He shouldn’t be seeing this.
* * * *
I dreamt my lover came and found me dead. Jack pulled up the archived CCTV footage from after. Gwen at his side, faithful as ever. Ianto in his office, holding his coat, and Jack felt that guilty twinge. Tosh at her computer, restoring files as best she could. Three of them watching the screen with Gwen on it, looking at her with expressions that spoke of fear for her sanity. Owen, he found eventually, in the lower levels, shifting the rubble with Ianto (before or after he was in the office?). Jack trawled the archives to find other angles with his misplaced doctor, and after a long while he found Owen at the computer by the autopsy desk, for no reason at all. In the frame, Owen had the autopsy pictures of what they thought was Jack’s corpse. Jack saw his own face, drained of blood and in a ghastly fixed smile. Owen took a finger and touched it to the dark bruises under Jack’s eyes.
Jack turned the screen off.
Ianto and Tosh had been out looking for evidence of Starn activity in the bay, and had been caught in the floods. Gwen had left to drag them out, and take them both home. It was just him and Owen again.
Jack walked out into the main Hub, and stood behind Owen, looking over his shoulder at the screen.
Owen said, “These aren’t right. What are the chances of aliens visiting more often at Christmas?”
Jack said, “I came back as fast as I could.”
Owen stopped poking at the keyboard. “Liar.”
“Owen.”
“Lying bastard.”
“I couldn’t get back sooner.”
Owen scoffed. “Why - you were kidnapped and tied up for three months solid?”
Jack didn’t speak, and Owen wheeled his chair around abruptly. Jack could tell the precise instant when understanding dawned. Of course, what happened next was the turn to anger, in the space between one second and the next. Owen was worse at not caring than he thought himself to be.
Owen started to stand up, reaching for the gun he wasn’t wearing. Who knew where he thought that he should go. “Was it…?”
Jack could not help but laugh. “No, Owen, it wasn’t him. Sit down. And thank you. I think.”
Owen looked at his face, checking for marks that weren’t there. That had been lost each time Jack had woken up after gunfire or poison or starvation, and that had been lost in the rewind. “A year,” he said, finally. “I have an extra year.”
“You never tell us anything,” Owen said, a little dark, the anger turned back on the one he had been angry for. “Like we…”
“And I have two years missing,” Jack said, no idea why he was telling this now, and telling Owen of all people.
Owen stopped his repeated tirade. “Yeah? Like... you were pissed, or high or...”
“Or,” Jack agreed.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you...?”
“Whoever did it wanted me to forget why I forgot.” The twist his tongue had to make to say that distracted him, distracted Owen too for a long moment.
Then: “So how do you do it?”
“Do what, Owen?”
“Do it to everyone else.”
“I don’t do it to everyone else. Just when it’s necessary. I do a lot of things I don’t like, when it’s necessary.”
“Christ. Ianto’s right, you are a bloody robot.”
But Jack had learnt the difference between the things Owen said to wound, and the times when he just said the first thing that came into his head. He had dealt with worse than second-hand insults, no matter how often his team repeated them. No matter how often he casually wondered if perhaps they were right, and reminded himself that he couldn’t care about that. This was just one more thing that he didn’t have to like, just had to do it. What couldn’t be fixed and couldn’t be changed had to be lived with.
Then Owen grinned, just a little, and clapped Jack on the shoulder as he stood up to leave. “Get some sleep, boss.”
“I don’t sleep.”
“Learn.”
* * * *
Owen still stood in the wrong place when they went in with guns. Too close to Ianto again, and when they came back, claiming that Jack’s tech didn’t work as well as it was supposed to, Owen and Ianto both are three feet too far away. Jack could not get between them and the people who would steal them away for a second time.
There were high spots of colour raised on Ianto’s cheeks (like bruises, like a wound). The colour had drained away from Owen’s face (pale like death).
Jack lifted his gun and fired until each corpse had stopped twitching.
The gun was still hovering in his frame of vision as the red mist cleared; it felt disconnected from him. He wasn’t connected to anything at all. Until, without hearing the movement, they were standing on either side of him. Ianto’s hands were calm and steady as they pried Jack’s fingers away from the gun.
Owen’s breath shuddered, once, (he has always been afraid of Jack) but then his hands, cool and methodical, moved to feel out Jack’s pulse. Strength Jack had not registered before as a shoulder was shifted under his arm to walk him back to the SUV.
The keys were tossed with what looked like practiced ease from Owen to Ianto. Jack was bundled into the back seat. The world was still drained of something, of colour or sound, like the moments just before death, or just after. When he is coming back from the dark place. Owen climbed in beside him and reached out a hand to take his pulse again. Jack snatched at it, at him, grabbed the warm hand from the air and made a circle round Owen’s wrist. The sound Owen made was briefly startled, like Jack had slapped him and not just grabbed on. Ianto’s eyes flicked up at the mirror to watch them. He smiled, oddly, and Jack let out a breath. Loosened his grip on Owen. The hand he had just relinquished made a sudden flutter at his hand. Another at his cheek.
“Wiping the blood away,” Owen explained. His expression was wide-open.
* * * *
The space opened up between the two of them as if they had been keeping it warm for him. (Not that he would ever voice that thought aloud).
They kissed each other first: a giving or granting of permission, Ianto’s tongue in Owen’s mouth. They moved about each other like the dance of stars, like galaxies colliding and making way. They swallowed him up between them.
Owen was all fragile, bird-like bones, and Jack tongued each knuckle carefully as he took the fingers into his mouth. Owen tasted of sweat and metal and the alien smell of the Hub when it rained. The sound he made was gloriously, triumphantly decadent, and Ianto leaned in to swallow it like a prize.
Ianto’s fingers traced the muscles of Jack’s back, which were stretched tight with every too-deep breath. He pressed a thumb below Jack’s shoulder - precise, careful - exactly judged to undo the best of good intentions.
Jack dropped Owen’s hand to pull them all closer together. More skin to more skin. More.
He had seen them together before, and he had been with both. He thought he knew what to expect. Owen’s odd tenderness - the way his hand slid around to lie flat along Jack’s ribs and draw them flush. Ianto’s sly humour, most disconcerting in the way he laughed at a private joke before dropping to his knees.
If he didn’t know better, he would have suspected this was planned.
In his absence - twice - they have learned to get along. Ianto’s fingers worked at the fly, Owen’s were slicked and waiting. They acted in concert: Ianto’s mouth and Owen’s hand.
Jack ran his hand shakily down Ianto’s cheek, to cup his jaw and hold his shoulder tight. To hold himself up. He had missed them, twice for that too. Owen’s head fell against him, as if Jack was not the only one losing his footing. He is hard, but doing nothing about it - just curling his finger up and in, and breathing deep.
The angle of Jack’s arm was awkward, but he reached backwards anyway, to let Owen know that he was there. Owen’s loose hand moved to meet Jack’s, almost like holding hands. Jack wrapped his fingers around Owen’s whole fist, and brought both up under his chin.
Owen’s laughter vibrated up and down Jack’s spine. “When did we put Ianto in charge?”
“You’re complaining?” Jack managed to ask.
“Not right now, no.”
In Owen’s position, Jack might have complained. But then Ianto hummed and sucked him in deeper as Owen’s fingers moved, and speech of any kind became redundant. The world burnt blue and gold behind his eyelids.
They ignored him for a moment, reaching around him to grasp at each other, less leisurely, less planned. The fall to the floor was messy. Owen ended up on the bottom for an uncomfortable second, and he squawked indignantly. Ianto’s laughter was something Jack had half-forgotten, but it was teased out of him when he rescued Owen, and when Owen returned the favour by pulling him back down.
This time was out of sync, all hands and mouths and Jack’s favourite kind of stickiness. Jack had never needed to go first in order to pay attention to his partners, but having the edge off definitely helped. Owen was all out of patience, and it took no effort at all to bring him to and over the brink of screaming.
Ianto required more focus. Either that or, as Jack had often suspected, he liked to be last. Liked to wait, and watch, before he allows himself to fall back and be caught, against Jack’s mouth and Owen’s hands. He didn’t speak (Jack and Owen hadn’t stopped, although intelligibility had suffered), but lay down with a pleased breath of appreciation.
They ended up with Ianto in the middle, his arm draped over Owen, his back pressed into Jack’s chest.
“Are we gonna have to talk about this in the morning?” Owen asked with a moan.
“Yes,” Jack answered solemnly. “Tomorrow we’ll definitely have to dissect all the fun out of everything. But not…”
“Not tonight,” Ianto concluded.
Sleep came slowly, with Owen giving in first, then Ianto. Jack turned more onto his side, letting one arm stretch across both of the others, feeling the double heartbeat underneath his own. In the morning, unless they were very careful, Tosh or Gwen would find out. And Owen was dreadful at taking care. Jack, in truth, wasn’t much better. But Ianto was right. They had all the time in the world to over-think and to decide that what had just happened was a bad idea. He had spent too long waiting to get things back. They had come back to him on their own. Jack kissed the side of Ianto’s head, and squeezed Owen’s hand. It was a change worth exploring.
FIN. Feedback is always appreciated.
Series: Sequel to Act as if you have faith and The difference between wanting and having
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Ianto/Owen/Jack
Rating/Warning: R for language and sex
Genre: Drama/Angst
Length: 4,400 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to the BBC
Spoilers: All of Torchwood S1, and allusions to New Who S3
Summary: It has been a long time since Jack was the one on the outside. After what happened, though, part of him thought he might deserve it.
AN: This one refers directly to something that happened in Who, so don't read if you haven't seen it yet.
Three weeks.
* * * *
Three weeks to untangle the bureaucracy, to get hold of what they wanted, to get it working again, to hail the ship. He has been in worse situations for longer stretches, but this is his team. This useless anger, this impotence, this is all about his team, trapped where he can’t see them.
* * * *
Three weeks.
* * * *
“Examination Table,” Owen ordered, dragging Ianto down the steps to his area, ignoring the rest of the team.
Ianto held back. “Owen...”
“Table. Now. Before I drag you up there.”
“Owen, I really don’t think this is...”
“Get on the fucking table, Ianto!”
Ianto stopped trying to answer Jack’s questions and obeyed Owen’s instructions instead.
There was a moment or two when Jack thought he would have to step in - Owen’s hands shook when he unpackaged the needle for the syringe. Then, as suddenly as the fit of shakes had taken him, it left. He took a round of blood samples without speaking, waved an array of scanners over Ianto’s chest and head, then paused to take a long deep breath.
“And yourself,” Ianto prompted quietly.
“I’m fine.”
“Owen.”
“Oh, fine, if you’re gonna be like that about it.” Again, Jack would have come forward, but Owen handed a clean needle to Ianto and let him draw the blood. He repeated the scans on himself while the blood tests ran. They hadn’t been able to figure out how the bulk of the medical tech actually worked, but the scanners were mostly intuitive enough that Owen could use them anyway.
“Fine.” Owen said, after a silent wait. “All clear.”
“I suppose ‘I told you so’ would get a poor response at this point?” Ianto asked dryly.
“Try it and we’ll see,” Owen threw back. “Okay. I’m going home.”
Gwen, who hadn’t said a word since her initial embrace had been rebuffed, cried protest at that.
Owen ignored her and tried to brush past them on the way out of the Hub. Ianto got up as if he might he about to follow him in leaving. Jack reached out one hand to stop Ianto, the other to brush at Owen’s sleeve. Ianto froze under his touch, but it was Owen who reared around with a growl, “Hands off.”
Jack raised an eyebrow.
“How long were we gone?” Owen asked cryptically.
“Three weeks,” Jack answered.
“Then you can wait three weeks.” Owen continued towards the door, though Ianto stopped to see if Jack was going to say anything.
Getting out of the building wasn’t working for Owen anyway - Gwen snatched at him as he passed her. He still jerked back, but she curled an arm around him and buried her head into his neck. Owen’s eyes widened, something more like himself in the back of the cold stare. The tight line of his mouth twisted into something else - not a smile, but less like he was about to snap someone’s neck. Not for the first time, Jack was grateful that he had hired Gwen.
“Oh, Gwen, sweetheart, for God’s sake don’t cry...” Owen said, ineffectually objecting. She continued to sob into his shoulder, and he eventually loped one arm around her waist, stroking down her back.
As if this gave her permission, Tosh ran up the steps to Owen’s side and wrapped both arms around him.
Owen raised his other arm to receive her. “This isn’t how I pictured two gorgeous birds throwing themselves at me,” he muttered, kissing Tosh’s head absently.
Walking up the steps like he didn’t know why, Ianto was pulled into what was now becoming a group hug. The noise, conversely, became quieter.
“God, god, god,” Gwen whispered, like a plea or a thank you. “I thought we’d never see you again.”
“Yeah, well,” Owen said, but no one seemed to notice but Jack. Likewise, no one seemed to notice that the arm Owen had wrapped around Gwen had been pulled tighter to allow him to fist a hand securely in the back of Ianto’s jacket. Well. Jack presumed that Ianto had noticed.
* * * *
“I’ll cut your fucking dick off! Get away from him!” Owen’s eyes snapped open. He reached blindly for the bin under the desk, and for a long moment the only sound was the harsh noise of his retching.
Gwen’s voice was a whisper, “Owen?”
Owen was leaving before she hit the second syllable. The kitchen door slammed shut.
“Ianto.” It was Jack’s turn to ask.
“Nothing happened,” Ianto answered, gathering the mugs lying abandoned around the workstations.
“So, why...?”
Ianto opened the door into the kitchen, and turned around abruptly. “Owen worries,” he answered dryly, as if it were a joke. Not so long ago, it might have been.
The door closed. The last words Jack heard were Owen’s: “I had bloody good reason to worry. You could have been…”
* * * *
He didn’t know whether Ianto was worse or better than Owen. Ianto had fallen asleep in the end, slumped over the conference room desk. The noise he made, a sharp little cry that tore at something inside Jack, could be pain or fear. He wasn’t sure which was better, which to hope for.
So he stayed, standing watch. Every night until he knew the size and shape of each small abrasion, and each yellowing bruise.
They had come back marked. Not like Jack, who hadn’t had a hair out of place - something he knew Owen had resented.
Ianto had bruising around the back of his head. They had hit him as he was walking away. A cuff, an afterthought. As if it hadn’t mattered.
He hadn’t noticed the marks on Owen until later. When the high-collared shirt he was wearing shifted, and Jack had spotted the finger marks. Held against a wall by someone taller, stronger. Owen would still be talking - he never stopped talking - even when he didn’t have the breath to get the words out.
Owen had stopped talking now, working almost silently at his desk. He had been home, at least - Jack had ordered them both to take some time off. But they had returned, simultaneously, early the next morning. Owen looked up at Ianto through the glass, holding the gaze longer than he would have ever dared before. The next time Ianto stirred, Owen reached him first. He touched Ianto’s shoulder gently, and didn’t seem surprised when the younger man jerked backwards. They didn’t speak, but Owen offered Ianto an only-slightly-mocking arm, and the two of them left the Hub. Jack watched them go.
* * * *
The girls were closer to each other now, a response to Owen and Ianto. With Tosh and Gwen it manifested itself as clandestine whispering and all-too-infrequent laughter. Jack wasn’t sure that Owen and Ianto talked to each other any more than they did before. They weren’t even especially pleasant to each other, not in any way that would make you curious.
But when they went out now, Owen stood perhaps half a pace closer to Ianto than he should. Jack took point, but where it would have been Gwen and Owen to one side, now it was Gwen and Tosh. Ianto was to Jack’s other side, with Owen on his six, just a little closer than he should be.
Ianto brought Owen coffee last, and that was not an insult. Where Ianto finished was where he would stand for a few minutes, drinking his own coffee. Once it had been the doorway of Jack’s office; now he leant against Owen’s partition, unspeaking, with every appearance of standing guard. They didn’t speak, save for the ‘thanks’ Owen muttered when Ianto took the mug back with him.
So Jack didn’t notice it.
“What?”
“They watch you,” Gwen said again.
“They watch each other,” he answered, trying for nonchalance but not quite making it.
“Well, yes,” she conceded. “But they watch you too.”
Jack didn’t believe her. He spent all his time watching his team’s two wayward members, waiting for the cracks to split open. He was prepared for every eventuality but this. It wasn’t the sex that surprised him - there has always been tension there - it is the way that they both hold back, just a little, rather than risk breaking whatever it is they have. The way they behaved as though they could only rely on each other now, when Jack was used to playing that role. He spent all his time watching them watching each other - he would notice if they were looking back.
* * * *
Ianto had an arm looped, sloppy and drunk, around Owen’s shoulders. Jack had never seen him drunk before. Owen was using one arm to brace Ianto upright around the waist, the other he used to open the main door.
When Ianto half-slipped, Owen pulled the loose arm back to make a circle round Ianto. “Easy,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”
He caught Jack’s eye, standing watching them from his office door. Saw Jack’s eyes flick to the new marks on Ianto’s neck, no longer hand prints but teeth - red bruises dotted just above his collar. Just in sight.
Owen’s leer was feral, and full of teeth.
* * * *
Jack tried, one more time, to fix things. Ianto had gone home early, and it felt like providence, with just Owen still in the Hub, and three weeks gone. Owen had seemed in a good mood, smirking at whatever his scalpel was uncovering in the autopsy subject. So Jack called Owen up to the office. He reassuringly laid a hand on their doctor’s shoulder and asked what was up. Everything after that was something of a violent blur.
Jack recognised, more than he would like to, that he was partially to blame for what happened with the rift. That Gwen was right about asking his team questions, and Owen was right about answering a few. That he was not always a great leader and that they had not appreciated why he left. But he does not understand how desertion had turned so readily to hatred - it was never that way with him. So it was difficult to reconcile the man that had broken down in his arms with the one tearing at his shirt like it was the only thing preventing him ripping Jack open.
“You left us,” Owen bit into Jack’s shoulder, and Jack couldn’t tell which time he meant. Owen was not tall enough to pin him back, but he had a tight grasp on Jack’s wrists, as if he could hold him there, against the wall. “You fucking left us,” he said again, sharp and unforgiving.
“Owen, please,” he whispered, knowing that it would be enough. Knowing that all Owen wanted was to hear his boss beg.
The cry and the final, jerky, thrust happened all at once. Owen’s eyes shut tight, and his lips made a bitter twist as he shoved himself against Jack. “Bastard,” Owen said, when he had breath enough to speak. He left Jack, still half-hard and aching, without another word.
* * * *
“He left me,” Jack told Owen one night, in his office once again. He has told this story already, as farce instead of tragedy, but this time he dons the other mask.
“That why you turned up in the hospital?” Owen answered, following the track of the conversation effortlessly.
“No. No, that was the time I left him. The first time, he left me. I was dead. The first time for that too. And then I wasn’t, but they were already gone.”
“They?” he said, picking up on the part of the statement Jack considers least important.
“The Doctor. And Rose.”
“The two of them. And you.” Owen said to clarify.
“Yes. Shocked?”
Owen snorted. “This is you. So he left you. He came back. You left with him. And then you left him.”
“Yup.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“So you understand that...”
“Tell Ianto. He’s the one that needs coddling. He’ll care that you came back on purpose.”
“And what about you, Owen,” Jack asked, leaning into the younger man’s space, “What do you care about?”
Owen leant in further, lips close enough that a kiss would be an inch away. “I cared when you left. Now I don’t.”
Jack wasn’t stupid. He could trace the patterns: the Doctor leaving Jack, and Jack leaving the Doctor. Jack leaving Owen, and Owen leaving him. But Owen had not meant to leave, and that was the difference, the dark anger that sparked explosions in Owen’s eyes.
“You waited,” he said, because there is nothing else to say.
“He waited.”
“Owen...”
“He thought you were coming.” The confusion must have shown on his face because Owen continued, stabbing a finger in the air as though he wished it were Jack’s throat. “He didn’t say it, ‘cause when does Ianto ever tell anyone what he wants? He just... waited.”
“And you watched.”
“They took him away. I don’t... I don’t know why, when he came back he was fine, but they...” And Jack knew exactly what it was to scream yourself hoarse calling for someone who wouldn’t come back. This wasn’t his pattern at all. He’d left them three times, not twice. And they hadn’t left at all.
“You didn’t think we would get you back.”
“No.”
“Owen.”
“Can I go now?” Jack waved him out of the office after a long look.
* * * *
There was a familiar leather jacket hanging on the back of the chair, but its owner was nowhere to be found.
When he walked to the office door and looked around, Ianto was missing too.
“Do you think they think they’re being subtle?” Tosh leaned round to ask Gwen, but she was smiling when she said it.
Even Gwen looked more wistful than upset. “Probably not,” she said. “Owen just doesn’t care very much.”
Tosh looked up from the screen, interested again. “He doesn’t care if people know?”
“Well he wouldn’t would he? He’s a really good shag,” Gwen said, in afterthought. She looked over at Tosh, surprised that she had said that part out loud. Tosh giggled, a soft squeak of a thing. Gwen blushed and joined in. The two chairs were shuffled together, dark heads bent close, and Jack knew that he wouldn’t get any more use of them unless there was an emergency.
He turned on his monitor. Not thinking about it. Changed the camera. Still not voicing it, even in his head.
Hands making quick work of a row of tiny buttons. Another pair slipping, slow and teasing, under a white t-shirt. Could fill in the sound in his head, the soundtrack of gasps and wet sucking and biting. The words that would spill over - names, maybe, or just encouragement. One figure dropping out of sight, hidden by the bench and the awkward camera angle. Didn’t need to see them, not when the other’s back arched, mouth open, lips wet even in black and white.
He turned the camera off when, afterwards, they clung to each other on the cot. Tentative as the sex was not, arms pressed tight around slim shoulders, hands smoothing again and again over taut skin. A kiss darted, gentle like Jack had never seen him be, under the loose curl on a damp forehead. He shouldn’t be seeing this.
* * * *
I dreamt my lover came and found me dead. Jack pulled up the archived CCTV footage from after. Gwen at his side, faithful as ever. Ianto in his office, holding his coat, and Jack felt that guilty twinge. Tosh at her computer, restoring files as best she could. Three of them watching the screen with Gwen on it, looking at her with expressions that spoke of fear for her sanity. Owen, he found eventually, in the lower levels, shifting the rubble with Ianto (before or after he was in the office?). Jack trawled the archives to find other angles with his misplaced doctor, and after a long while he found Owen at the computer by the autopsy desk, for no reason at all. In the frame, Owen had the autopsy pictures of what they thought was Jack’s corpse. Jack saw his own face, drained of blood and in a ghastly fixed smile. Owen took a finger and touched it to the dark bruises under Jack’s eyes.
Jack turned the screen off.
Ianto and Tosh had been out looking for evidence of Starn activity in the bay, and had been caught in the floods. Gwen had left to drag them out, and take them both home. It was just him and Owen again.
Jack walked out into the main Hub, and stood behind Owen, looking over his shoulder at the screen.
Owen said, “These aren’t right. What are the chances of aliens visiting more often at Christmas?”
Jack said, “I came back as fast as I could.”
Owen stopped poking at the keyboard. “Liar.”
“Owen.”
“Lying bastard.”
“I couldn’t get back sooner.”
Owen scoffed. “Why - you were kidnapped and tied up for three months solid?”
Jack didn’t speak, and Owen wheeled his chair around abruptly. Jack could tell the precise instant when understanding dawned. Of course, what happened next was the turn to anger, in the space between one second and the next. Owen was worse at not caring than he thought himself to be.
Owen started to stand up, reaching for the gun he wasn’t wearing. Who knew where he thought that he should go. “Was it…?”
Jack could not help but laugh. “No, Owen, it wasn’t him. Sit down. And thank you. I think.”
Owen looked at his face, checking for marks that weren’t there. That had been lost each time Jack had woken up after gunfire or poison or starvation, and that had been lost in the rewind. “A year,” he said, finally. “I have an extra year.”
“You never tell us anything,” Owen said, a little dark, the anger turned back on the one he had been angry for. “Like we…”
“And I have two years missing,” Jack said, no idea why he was telling this now, and telling Owen of all people.
Owen stopped his repeated tirade. “Yeah? Like... you were pissed, or high or...”
“Or,” Jack agreed.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you...?”
“Whoever did it wanted me to forget why I forgot.” The twist his tongue had to make to say that distracted him, distracted Owen too for a long moment.
Then: “So how do you do it?”
“Do what, Owen?”
“Do it to everyone else.”
“I don’t do it to everyone else. Just when it’s necessary. I do a lot of things I don’t like, when it’s necessary.”
“Christ. Ianto’s right, you are a bloody robot.”
But Jack had learnt the difference between the things Owen said to wound, and the times when he just said the first thing that came into his head. He had dealt with worse than second-hand insults, no matter how often his team repeated them. No matter how often he casually wondered if perhaps they were right, and reminded himself that he couldn’t care about that. This was just one more thing that he didn’t have to like, just had to do it. What couldn’t be fixed and couldn’t be changed had to be lived with.
Then Owen grinned, just a little, and clapped Jack on the shoulder as he stood up to leave. “Get some sleep, boss.”
“I don’t sleep.”
“Learn.”
* * * *
Owen still stood in the wrong place when they went in with guns. Too close to Ianto again, and when they came back, claiming that Jack’s tech didn’t work as well as it was supposed to, Owen and Ianto both are three feet too far away. Jack could not get between them and the people who would steal them away for a second time.
There were high spots of colour raised on Ianto’s cheeks (like bruises, like a wound). The colour had drained away from Owen’s face (pale like death).
Jack lifted his gun and fired until each corpse had stopped twitching.
The gun was still hovering in his frame of vision as the red mist cleared; it felt disconnected from him. He wasn’t connected to anything at all. Until, without hearing the movement, they were standing on either side of him. Ianto’s hands were calm and steady as they pried Jack’s fingers away from the gun.
Owen’s breath shuddered, once, (he has always been afraid of Jack) but then his hands, cool and methodical, moved to feel out Jack’s pulse. Strength Jack had not registered before as a shoulder was shifted under his arm to walk him back to the SUV.
The keys were tossed with what looked like practiced ease from Owen to Ianto. Jack was bundled into the back seat. The world was still drained of something, of colour or sound, like the moments just before death, or just after. When he is coming back from the dark place. Owen climbed in beside him and reached out a hand to take his pulse again. Jack snatched at it, at him, grabbed the warm hand from the air and made a circle round Owen’s wrist. The sound Owen made was briefly startled, like Jack had slapped him and not just grabbed on. Ianto’s eyes flicked up at the mirror to watch them. He smiled, oddly, and Jack let out a breath. Loosened his grip on Owen. The hand he had just relinquished made a sudden flutter at his hand. Another at his cheek.
“Wiping the blood away,” Owen explained. His expression was wide-open.
* * * *
The space opened up between the two of them as if they had been keeping it warm for him. (Not that he would ever voice that thought aloud).
They kissed each other first: a giving or granting of permission, Ianto’s tongue in Owen’s mouth. They moved about each other like the dance of stars, like galaxies colliding and making way. They swallowed him up between them.
Owen was all fragile, bird-like bones, and Jack tongued each knuckle carefully as he took the fingers into his mouth. Owen tasted of sweat and metal and the alien smell of the Hub when it rained. The sound he made was gloriously, triumphantly decadent, and Ianto leaned in to swallow it like a prize.
Ianto’s fingers traced the muscles of Jack’s back, which were stretched tight with every too-deep breath. He pressed a thumb below Jack’s shoulder - precise, careful - exactly judged to undo the best of good intentions.
Jack dropped Owen’s hand to pull them all closer together. More skin to more skin. More.
He had seen them together before, and he had been with both. He thought he knew what to expect. Owen’s odd tenderness - the way his hand slid around to lie flat along Jack’s ribs and draw them flush. Ianto’s sly humour, most disconcerting in the way he laughed at a private joke before dropping to his knees.
If he didn’t know better, he would have suspected this was planned.
In his absence - twice - they have learned to get along. Ianto’s fingers worked at the fly, Owen’s were slicked and waiting. They acted in concert: Ianto’s mouth and Owen’s hand.
Jack ran his hand shakily down Ianto’s cheek, to cup his jaw and hold his shoulder tight. To hold himself up. He had missed them, twice for that too. Owen’s head fell against him, as if Jack was not the only one losing his footing. He is hard, but doing nothing about it - just curling his finger up and in, and breathing deep.
The angle of Jack’s arm was awkward, but he reached backwards anyway, to let Owen know that he was there. Owen’s loose hand moved to meet Jack’s, almost like holding hands. Jack wrapped his fingers around Owen’s whole fist, and brought both up under his chin.
Owen’s laughter vibrated up and down Jack’s spine. “When did we put Ianto in charge?”
“You’re complaining?” Jack managed to ask.
“Not right now, no.”
In Owen’s position, Jack might have complained. But then Ianto hummed and sucked him in deeper as Owen’s fingers moved, and speech of any kind became redundant. The world burnt blue and gold behind his eyelids.
They ignored him for a moment, reaching around him to grasp at each other, less leisurely, less planned. The fall to the floor was messy. Owen ended up on the bottom for an uncomfortable second, and he squawked indignantly. Ianto’s laughter was something Jack had half-forgotten, but it was teased out of him when he rescued Owen, and when Owen returned the favour by pulling him back down.
This time was out of sync, all hands and mouths and Jack’s favourite kind of stickiness. Jack had never needed to go first in order to pay attention to his partners, but having the edge off definitely helped. Owen was all out of patience, and it took no effort at all to bring him to and over the brink of screaming.
Ianto required more focus. Either that or, as Jack had often suspected, he liked to be last. Liked to wait, and watch, before he allows himself to fall back and be caught, against Jack’s mouth and Owen’s hands. He didn’t speak (Jack and Owen hadn’t stopped, although intelligibility had suffered), but lay down with a pleased breath of appreciation.
They ended up with Ianto in the middle, his arm draped over Owen, his back pressed into Jack’s chest.
“Are we gonna have to talk about this in the morning?” Owen asked with a moan.
“Yes,” Jack answered solemnly. “Tomorrow we’ll definitely have to dissect all the fun out of everything. But not…”
“Not tonight,” Ianto concluded.
Sleep came slowly, with Owen giving in first, then Ianto. Jack turned more onto his side, letting one arm stretch across both of the others, feeling the double heartbeat underneath his own. In the morning, unless they were very careful, Tosh or Gwen would find out. And Owen was dreadful at taking care. Jack, in truth, wasn’t much better. But Ianto was right. They had all the time in the world to over-think and to decide that what had just happened was a bad idea. He had spent too long waiting to get things back. They had come back to him on their own. Jack kissed the side of Ianto’s head, and squeezed Owen’s hand. It was a change worth exploring.
FIN. Feedback is always appreciated.