Dr. Harkness & Nurse Jones: Ghana (Part Two)
The next day, Alex was swamped with sick kids. There had been a flu outbreak at two of the schools in Accra. Ianto made all the staff wear masks, as they were unused to the strain of flu on this continent. They were all drooping by 22:00, but Jack counted the day as an unequivocal success, since no patients had to be hospitalized overnight and no one had died. Dinner had been put off for hours. Thankfully, it was Mickey and Harriet’s turn, so it had at least been made as they were not part of the medical staff. Everyone gathered in Mickey’s guard station to down large bowls of vegetarian chili and thick slices of crumbly cornbread.
Mickey’s the one who started it.
“Alright, you lot, you know what this reminds me of? Eating camp food around a makeshift fire,” he gestured to the flickering screen of the CCTV, which showed a view of the road outside their gate. “Just like the good old days, eh Jackie Boy? And what do soldiers around a campfire do?”
Andy looked puzzled. “Are you going to get out a harmonica?”
“Much better - I’m going to tell a story that will curl your hair,” Mickey assessed Andy, and looked around at the others. All but one had at least slightly curly hair. “Right, it will curl Jack’s hair, then. I call it ‘Robots Take Over the World.’”
Jack groaned loudly. He had heard this one before.
“Quiet you. It’s going to curl your hair.”
Mickey launched into a bloody little tale, using his cutlery to make various points, about robots from another dimension taking over London by some crazy pod-person method. Beth looked rather freaked out, but relaxed a bit as Harriet began to pepper Mickey with questions.
“You say that the robots become human, but how can you tell the difference? Do they sound the same? What do they look like?”
Mickey scowled at her. “They suck the brains out of humans! The point is *not* to be able to tell the difference! Except some of the really hot robot women wear metal bikinis.”
Andy laughed heartily at that, and Harriet looked at Mickey with disgust. “That is so improbable.”
“Do you even know the point of campfire tales?” Mickey asked her.
“Harriet! Perhaps you have a story for us?” Jack broke in as Harriet opened her mouth angrily to reply to Mickey.
She paused, then nodded. “Right. I have a ghost story. Like you would tell around a campfire.”
Mickey rolled his eyes.
Harriet leaned forward and began the tale of Tommy, a young soldier snatched from his encampment during the Great War, and forced into servitude by Death, made to escort the souls of dead soldiers from life to the underworld. Harriet was actually an engrossing story-teller, and Jack found himself settling into the story. He was sitting on Mickey’s desk, and his foot rested on Ianto’s folding chair. Ianto circled his ankle with his hand, thumb gently caressing his heel as Harriet spoke of Tommy’s love, who tried to make a deal with Death to take his place. Death wouldn’t allow it, and as punishment for her temerity, he banished Tommy to the deepest bowels of the Underworld, where he languishes to this day, pining for his lost love.
Andy was gazing at her with a rapt expression as she concluded her tale. Jack leaned across Ianto and gently nudged him in the shoulder.
“Andy?”
He gave himself a shake. “Uh, right. My turn? I have a bit of a spooky-do for you lot, all the creepier for being real.”
Mickey shot him a skeptical look.
“Indeed it is! Just ask Ianto; he was there.”
“Is this the one about the - ?” Ianto asked, making a curious gesture with his hands.
“Yeah. Okay. The setting: Flat Holm, formerly home to an insane asylum. The location: deserted island in the middle of Cardiff Bay. The protagonists: one Andy Davidson, one Ianto Jones, and one Gwen Cooper.”
Jack shifted on the desk, bringing his other leg down so that Ianto had something to lean on other than his flimsy chair. Andy’s story was not especially creepy, but Jack loved hearing about the adolescent Ianto Jones. Ianto had somehow talked a fisherman into loaning them his boat, and they had packed some food and sleeping bags and sailed out to the island for a weekend. The first night they were there, the wind and rain were so terrible, they had to take shelter inside the abandoned asylum. Andy’s voice hushed, as he attempted to set the appropriate atmosphere. He was thwarted by a loud snore from Alex’s corner of the room (“Sorry, old chap,” Alex apologized, even managing to look slightly sorry; that was a useful skill), and Andy fumbled to get his train of thought back on track.
“So then, then Gwen realizes that the scratchings on the wall are actually words, but not in English or Welsh. They’re some kind of alien tongue!”
(“Except for the wall that said ‘chips with vinegar, please,’” Ianto murmured to Jack.)
“And then we came across a room, filled with fake body parts!”
Everyone perked up at that.
“So…sex?” Mickey asked.
“Huh? No! We were followed around by one of the fake hands!” Andy cried.
“I thought you said this was a true story,” Harriet said, frowning.
“It is! Ask Ianto!”
Everyone turned to look at Ianto. Jack began to chuckle.
“The hand really did move on its own,” Ianto agreed, staunchly supporting his old friend.
“Ha!” Andy shot Harriet a triumphant look.
“Alright, then, what did the hand do?” she asked.
“Come on, it was creepy. It was a disembodied hand!”
Mickey couldn’t keep a straight face anymore and started to laugh along with Jack. Then Harriet sniggered, Beth caught the giggles, and even Alex cracked a smile.
“You all are a bunch of wankers!” Andy threw up his hands in disgust.
“Hey!” Ianto protested, indignantly.
“’Cept for you, Ianto,” Andy corrected himself.
“Indubitably.” Ianto clapped his hands together. “Time for my story.”
Ianto told a truly disgusting story about a band of cannibals living in a remote Welsh village. Jack was a little shocked at how descriptive he got, painting a picture with his words of teeth dripping with blood and farmers beating their prey with baseball bats to tenderize them. Ianto’s hands clenched in fists throughout his tale, and he only relaxed when he described how the hero appeared at the last minute on his noble steed, and decapitated the cannibalistic villagers, freeing the innocent travelers who had fallen into their clutches.
“Wow, Ianto mate, that was truly gory,” Mickey said admiringly when Ianto had finished. “Thanks.”
Ianto gave him a slight smile.
“I have one with a lot of blood, too,” Beth spoke up.
“Let’s hear it then!” Mickey enthused.
Beth’s story was actually chilling. She had a low-pitched voice that was very soothing to babies. It was disconcerting to hear those same tones speak about a thief who broke into a house and was subsequently stalked by the possessions he did not steal. He was finally cornered in an alley by a roll of gaffer’s tape and a pair of scissors.
“. . . and the coppers found bits of the thief washed up on the riverbank for the next three months,” Beth finished in her gentle voice.
Everyone looked slightly taken aback. Jack cleared his throat. “That was excellent, Beth, thank you. Alex, you have something on a lighter note, perhaps?”
Alex looked up, bemused. “I’m Alex, Jack. I don’t really do ‘light.’”
He stood up and walked into the middle of the room. “Ten years ago,” he began, “I had a practice in the north of Scotland, in the Orkney Islands, in a tiny village of about fifty souls. It was where my aunt had grown up, and I went there to take care of her for a month and wound up staying for a year.
“One of my frequent patients was a young woman, Mary, who was married to a fisherman named Mac. No one ever called him by his full name; I never even learned what it was. The point is that he wasn’t around much, and Mary was left to her own devices, trying to raise six young children.
“She spent weeks cooped up with them in their small cottage, as they didn’t have a car, and Mac had the boat out on the water. Whenever I paid a house call, she would tell me about her neighbors, complaining that they were messy and noisy and much too interested in her children. It worried me, actually, and I talked to the local police. They told me her neighbors were a perfectly harmless older couple; the man was bedridden and the woman had extreme arthritis and couldn’t leave the house in the winter.
“One night there was a devastating storm, caused loads of damage. I drove out to check on Mary.”
Alex paused in his tale, and looked off into the distance. Whatever he saw there made him grimace in pain.
“Mary had killed them all. All six of her children. One had a blackened face from poison. Another was hanging from the rafters. Two of them had been butchered with an axe. The youngest had been suffocated. And the last child was stabbed to death.
“Mary was still alive. She said she was waiting for Mac. She had to talk to Mac, to warn him that something was coming for him. I asked her what had happened there. She said the neighbors were going to take her children, so she took them first. I stepped out of the cottage to use my phone. When I looked back inside, she was starting a fire. She had gas for Mac’s boat, and she poured it all over the front room. I was - I think I was a little in shock, because for some reason it didn’t occur to me that she was planning to burn herself to death. But that’s what happened. She lit a match and whoosh! She was gone very quickly, but the cottage was wet from the storm. It took hours.
“Mac’s body washed up on shore the next day. His boat had overturned in the storm. He drowned at the same time the rest of his family died.”
There was a deep silence before Jack finally found his voice. “Alex, that is a terrible story.”
“It’s true, though,” Alex replied calmly.
“And terrible.” Jack slid off the desk. “Right, you lot. I think it’s high time I turned in for the night, work to do tomorrow.”
“Come on, Jack, you haven’t told us a story,” Mickey protested, just like a little kid.
“Anticipation, Mickey.”
Mickey laughed, and everyone got to their feet, shuffling towards the door. Ianto allowed Jack to sling his arm around his shoulders as they left the guardroom.
That night Jack clung to Ianto a little closer than usual. He couldn’t shake Alex’s story from his thoughts. He could see the dead bodies in his mind’s eye, mixing with corpses from battlefields in Serbia, the ocean-bloated remains of tsunami victims in Thailand, and the dead of all of the other places Jack had practiced medicine throughout the years. Ianto’s breath, instead of being deep and even, was coming in a wheezing rattle, providing a melancholy soundtrack to Jack’s nightmares. His worst ones were of the attack on Torched Wood in Kenya. He didn’t like to talk about it, but he was haunted by the image of Ianto standing over him in a protective crouch, clutching a gun he had no idea how to fire. They had managed to protect each other then, but what about the next time? Jack shivered, and wrapped himself firmly around Ianto’s body.
The next morning it was apparent that Ianto had definitely caught the flu from yesterday, despite all of his precautions. Jack banned him from seeing patients, and Ianto reluctantly went back to their bed. Jack checked on him periodically, bringing him tea and drugs, and cold cloths for his forehead. It was a busy day at the clinic. Beth had double the workload, and Jack helped her as best he could. She told him privately that she didn’t mind the very busy days; she preferred having something to occupy her mind. Jack knew how that felt. At the end of the day, Andy volunteered for his first night of on-call so that Jack could concentrate on seeing to Ianto’s needs. (Jack wasn’t sure if Andy was aware of how much innuendo he let slide by.)
Jack carefully balanced a cold bottle of clear apple juice, a small plate of toast, and a couple of little bottles of pills on a tray and carried it up to his and Ianto’s room. It didn’t look like Ianto had moved since Jack last checked on him.
“Ianto? Hey, Beautiful, time for some meds,” Jack called softly, kicking the door closed behind him.
Ianto groaned and buried his head deeper under the pillows.
“Come on, now, this will make you feel better,” Jack wheedled.
“Is it that nasty tea that definitely does not do anything?” Ianto rasped out.
“Nasty tea, nasty tea…nope! No nasty tea here,” Jack said with the false cheer one adopts around the sick, inwardly cringing at his tone. He never used it around his patients, but when it came to his family…and then he almost tripped on his way to the bed, realizing that he had just thought of Ianto as his family.
Ianto was squinting at him. “All right there, Jack?” he asked, sounding bemused.
“Fine, fine,” Jack assured him, plastering on a grin that quickly became sincere when Ianto sat up and groped for the apple juice. Some people did not carry off the “sick” look well at all. Ianto’s pale skin and dark hair was made for the flush of a bad cold, however. Jack let his eyes wander down the other man’s body as Ianto shook out a couple of pills, swallowed them down (and, wow, Jack could write a sonnet about that man’s throat), and started in on the toast. He was, of course, holding the little plate under his chin to catch any errant crumbs. It just turned Jack on even more, and really, since when had cleanliness become one of his kinks?
Jack sat on the edge of the bed and toed off his boots and socks. He stood to lift up his scrub shirt and toss it in the corner. Ianto was watching him through half-closed slits as he licked the crumbs from his fingers. Jack swept off his scrub bottoms and boxers with one practiced move and tossed them aside to join his shirt.
“Jack. You’re naked,” Ianto said slowly as Jack walked on his knees across the bed to Ianto.
“Astute observation, Nurse Jones,” Jack murmured, taking the plate from Ianto’s hands and sliding it back onto the tray.
“But I’m sick,” Ianto feebly protested as Jack straddled him and began to suck at his neck.
“What is it with you and your careful observations? I’m beginning to think you have eyes and skin. Such beautiful eyes and skin,” Jack continued, licking the hollow of Ianto’s throat.
Ianto tried one more time. “But - I mean, I can’t -“
“Don’t worry about anything. I can take care of both of us.” Jack looked up from his ministrations, moving lower on Ianto’s chest. “Let me take care of you,” he said softly.
Ianto held his gaze, and nodded slowly. Jack lifted his body off Ianto’s, and helped him stretch back out on his back before lowering himself once more, grinding against him. Ianto’s breath began to quicken, his wide blue eyes filling with what Jack privately labeled ‘Ianto’s Trust & Adoration Look.’ Jack felt himself flush with pride and love to get the Look. He bent his mouth to Ianto’s and began to kiss him slowly, starting at the corners of his lips before moving to a fuller kiss, darting in with his tongue, and breaking often for air in deference to Ianto’s stuffed nose.
Jack caressed Ianto’s sides with his hands, murmuring sweet nothings into his mouth between kisses. His left hand settled around Ianto’s hip, his right moving over to grip them both. Ianto gasped into his mouth at the first tug. Jack grinned, and added grinding. Ianto threw his head back, gasping for air, but his own hands were firmly holding Jack in place at the small of his back. Jack redoubled his efforts, his fingers rubbing them both together, getting close to the edge himself at the sight of Ianto spread out in front of him, barely holding on. One more caress-like tug, and Ianto came in Jack’s hand, Jack’s name on his lips. Jack leaned farther down and bit into that neck he loved so well and came with a violent shudder.
He rolled off of Ianto and kissed his forehead, breathing in the scent of him, sweat-soaked and sick, but still his Ianto. Ianto grinned lazily up at him, a sated expression on his face. “Thank you, Dr. Harkness.”
Jack snorted. “The pleasure was half mine, Nurse Jones.” He kissed him again, this time on the lips. “I’m going to get you a cold cloth. Don’t go anywhere,” he admonished playfully. Naked, he padded into their bathroom and poured some bottled water over a large washcloth. Wringing it out somewhat, he padded back over to the bed and wiped down Ianto’s sweat-soaked brow.
“Ummmmmm…that feels good…”
Jack continued down his neck and chest, belly and crotch and legs. Finally he scrubbed off his own stomach, rinsed out the cloth, and crawled back into bed. Ianto moved onto his side, facing Jack. Jack smiled at him, and moved a wet lock off his forehead to kiss him yet again. “Sleep now, Ianto.”
“I love you, Jack, “ Ianto whispered, closing his eyes slowly. He looked so innocent and young like this. Often, Jack forgot that he had fifteen years on his partner; Ianto seemed so much older. It was at moments like this that Jack allowed himself to wonder what life would be like if he was a parent. When Ianto was defenseless and trusting, so full of love, Jack thought that, just maybe, he would like to be one. Sighing, he closed his own eyes and tried to fall asleep.
“Jack.”
“Hmmmm.”
“Tell me a story.”
Jack cracked an eye open. Ianto was still lying on his side, watching Jack through half-closed feverish eyes.
“You should get some sleep,” Jack said gently.
Ianto nodded, eyes opening wider to fix Jack with a pleading look. “Maybe a story will help.”
Jack chuckled, pulling Ianto closer, and scoffing at his protestations that Jack would get sick now, too. “I never get sick. Besides, after what we just did, I don’t think a little snuggling is going to make a difference.”
Ianto flushed even deeper, but moved closer to Jack, resting his head in the crook of Jack’s neck and entangling his feet with Jack’s.
“Have I ever told you about how I came to meet Rose Tyler?”
Jack felt Ianto stiffen against him, and breathe out a “no.”
Jack smiled sadly. “Relax, Ianto. I want to tell you about her now. It’s a good story; one of my favorites.”
Part three: blue-fjords.livejournal.com/5388.html#cutid1
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