She Shouldn't - Torchwood fic
Title: She Shouldn't
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, female character to be determined by the reader, mentions of others
Pairing: Jack/said female character, mentions Jack/Ianto
Rating: M, to be on the safe side; mentions sex, both het and slash
Warning: sex, post-COE
Disclaimer: They all belong to the BBC and RTD. I just love playing with broken toys.
Summary: She knows she should break it off with him. But she won't - will she?
She knows she shouldn’t do it. It’s all kinds of wrong. She’s a married woman and a mother, and she really should know better.
Yet, the grieve is beyond reason. Her grieve. His grieve. She can feel it, when he moves inside her, taste it in every bitter, tear-stained kiss they share. She can hear it in the way his voice breaks, when he comes, and she knows he isn’t thinking of her, not really. That’s okay. She isn’t thinking of him either, not then.
She thinks of him at any other time, though. At the queue in the supermarket, when she sees two tall, dark-haired men casually holding hands. With her husband drawing her closer on the sofa, while Bruce Willis is holding a fallen comrade-in-arms on the telly screen. Standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee, listening to children laughing and shrieking outside. She is always thinking of him.
“Do you think of me?”, she asks him once, after.
“All the time,” he answers.
“Liar,” she says. “If you did, you would stop.”
He kisses her. She guesses it’s to shut her up. His kisses taste like extra-dark chocolate. Sometimes, she wonders about that.
She can’t get enough of kissing him. Maybe she hopes that if she tastes him long enough, deep enough, she will some day find some trace of Ianto left within him. She knows how twisted that is, but she stopped caring about things like that when she saw the body. Sometimes, she thinks he knows what she is trying to do. Sometimes, she thinks he is after the same thing.
The kisses make up for all the things he doesn’t say. He talks a lot, but says nothing she wants to hear. He tells her she’s his anchor, his light in the darkness, the only thing holding him together, all the tiny, shattered pieces of him. He tells her she’s beautiful. She doesn’t believe any of it.
She wants him to talk about Ianto. She wants to hear about everything they did together, in bed or otherwise, about every single breath they drew standing side by side, and about the times he didn’t breathe, too. Her twisted little mind draws pictures of these stories, delicate like her daughter’s watercolours, only much less innocent, if just as pure. She hungers for his words as much as for his touch, sometimes more.
She is pretty sure he knows about this hunger of hers. There are days when she believes that he uses his words and withholding them to seduce her into his bed, to make her come back day after day after day. Of course, those are the days when she tries to lay the blame at his feet entirely, the days she wants to feel seduced and used, but guiltless. It almost never works. In her heart of hearts she knows they are both to blame, and she has always been an honest woman.
She is having an affair. She is being very sneaky about it. The gossips won’t find out easily, and neither will her husband. She says she’s working again and uses the money on the bank only she knows about, the blood money, to make her story believable. Day after day she leaves the house in the afternoon to go to his hotel room and his warm, soft mouth, his bitter kisses and his sweet words. She comes back smelling of shower-gel and nothing else.
Some day, soon, someone will rip her net of lies apart. Probably, it will be the children. Probably, they already know. They feel that their mother is lying to them, that she has changed, that she is only partly there. Some day, soon, one of them will ask. She has no idea what she will answer or what she will do then. Of course, she knows this can’t go on forever. She also knows that she won’t put a stop to it.
It started when she went to him the first time, two days after the funeral. She had seen him skulking around the graveyard, pale, broken, and beautiful, keeping his distance, so sure of not being welcome. She had seen him standing at the grave afterwards, too, a lone, desolate figure, and had decided then and there to look for him. He had been visibly surprised finding her standing at the door of his hotel room, and she had demanded testily if he had actually thought that Ianto was the clever one in the family. His smile had been like broken glass, and she had kissed it. For a moment, he had stilled, frozen beneath her lips, but then he kissed her back like he was starving and she was bread.
He still looks at her body like she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. He touches her like that, too, buries his nose in her hair that always smells faintly of kitchen fumes, sucks her fingers that taste like bubble-gum and other sticky children-things, caresses her soft breasts that have nursed two babies, and licks places between her legs nobody has ever paid much attention to. He does it all like he is administering a sacrament, like she is the only thing that exists from the moment he sets eyes on her. She wonders if he makes everyone he sleeps with feel like that. She suspects that he does.
Sometimes, the thought that she might be looked at and touched by him like her brother was, makes the grieve almost bearable. At other times, the very same thought makes it all that much worse. She likes to imagine that he looked differently at Ianto than at her, than at everybody else, touched him in very special ways he reserved for him, and him only. There are times, however, when she wonders what special place you can reserve for anyone if you make the whole world the centre of your universe. She hates those moment with a passion. They make her hate him, too.
She loves him. It’s no use lying to herself about it. She fell in love with him when she saw him breaking at her brother’s grave, and then, again, when he touched her for the first time like she was the blessed virgin. She told him, too. He tried to explain that this didn’t mean that she loves her husband any less. She almost understands what he was trying to say.
“I love you, too, you know”, he tells her.
“As what? A mistress, a sister, or a mother?” she asks.
“Labels,” is his grumbled answers. He sounds slightly disgusted and very sad.
“A mother, then,” she decides. He doesn’t deny it.
She rides him with a desperate passion that is very much unlike her. Afterwards, she makes him tea or hot chocolate, though never coffee. She holds him when he cries, and rocks him like Mica or David. He doesn’t cry over grazed knees and broken toys, but it’s not that much different. That’s how she knows about the mother-thing. She suspects he hasn’t had a mother for a very long time. It’s weird and twisted and maybe a little sick. She doesn’t care. Somehow, he and what he was to her brother have become the centre of her universe.
It is Mica that finally brings the whole thing tumbling down.
“Mummy? Are you going away?” she asks Rhiannon one night, while she is being tucked in. Rhiannon freezes.
“What makes you say that, sweetheart?”
“You are never here,” Mica says. “Don’t you love us anymore?”
Rhiannon was wrong, or maybe she has been lying to herself for all this time. There is one thing that will make her put an end to her thing with Jack immediately.
“You’re leaving me?” he says the moment she walks into the room. He is scarily perceptive. She doesn’t think a lot of people realize that. She hopes that Ianto knew, for both their sakes.
“My children need me,” she says. It’s a low blow, and she knows it.
“I need you, too,” he says. He sounds younger than David. “You’re the only thing keeping me here.”
He has told her so before. She never believed him.
“You knew this would end sooner rather than later, Jack.”
He looks at her like she is cutting out his heart.
“You and your bloody twenty-first-century hang-ups,” he spits out. “Why can’t I just be part of…” He stops mid-sentence. Even his fortieth-or-whatever-century libertine attitudes have their limits. He knows there is no place for him in her other life. Rhiannon’s heart hurts for him, but she has made her decision.
“I’ve never thanked you for sending Gwen to save my children,” she says to him. “So, thank you, Jack. Thank you for everything.”
“Don’t go. Don’t leave me, please,” he says. But she does.
Jack has said his tearful goodbye to Gwen and Rhys, and it hurts in all the wrong ways. He feels all empty, all shell. There is nothing left of him. There can’t be. He huddles in the small cabin granted him on the cold-fusion cruiser und draws his great-coat around him. Ianto’s great-coat. Ianto … There is nothing but holes in his heart. One for Ianto. One for Steven. One for Alice. At least Rhiannon’s alive, oh so alive. She did the right thing, breaking things up with him. Who knows how long she would have survived him?
Maybe he has turned into Death without realizing it. He thinks of the thing Owen fought. Maybe that’s all he is anymore, a skeleton made out of darkness, hiding inside a body that draws people in despite themselves. Like Lucia. Like Ianto. Like Rhiannon. Death is all he has to offer.
Jack tries to hide within the folds of his great-coat. It feels bigger than it used to. Maybe it is. His hands are cold and he buries them in the pockets of the coat. He knows he will never again feel anything else but the cold, but it’s instinct to seek warmth anyway. Jack tried to find it in Rhiannon and believed for a while he had succeeded. Now, all that he has left is Ianto’s coat.
Paper crinkles against his left hand. Confused, Jack pulls a ragged piece of paper out of his coat-pocket. It looks like one of Rhiannon’s shopping lists.
“Two pounds of minced meat, peas, lettuce, orange juice, socks for David, hobnobs,” Jack reads, his confusion increasing. Why would Rhiannon leave this with him? Jack has had his share of weird souvenirs over the years, but a torn shopping list makes the top five easily. Yet, he already knows that he will keep it. Anything to remember. Jack won’t forget. Not ever.
He plays with the crinkled paper in his hands, thinking of Rhiannon’s body and Ianto’s grave. Therefore, it takes some time for him to realize that there is something else written on the back of the shopping list. It’s only five words, but they turn his world upside down:
I will call him Ianto.
For the first time in six months, Jack realizes that he is still alive. "A baby", he thinks, "a baby." He feels tears running down his face, but they don't taste like death anymore. And that is something, he thinks.
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, female character to be determined by the reader, mentions of others
Pairing: Jack/said female character, mentions Jack/Ianto
Rating: M, to be on the safe side; mentions sex, both het and slash
Warning: sex, post-COE
Disclaimer: They all belong to the BBC and RTD. I just love playing with broken toys.
Summary: She knows she should break it off with him. But she won't - will she?
She knows she shouldn’t do it. It’s all kinds of wrong. She’s a married woman and a mother, and she really should know better.
Yet, the grieve is beyond reason. Her grieve. His grieve. She can feel it, when he moves inside her, taste it in every bitter, tear-stained kiss they share. She can hear it in the way his voice breaks, when he comes, and she knows he isn’t thinking of her, not really. That’s okay. She isn’t thinking of him either, not then.
She thinks of him at any other time, though. At the queue in the supermarket, when she sees two tall, dark-haired men casually holding hands. With her husband drawing her closer on the sofa, while Bruce Willis is holding a fallen comrade-in-arms on the telly screen. Standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee, listening to children laughing and shrieking outside. She is always thinking of him.
“Do you think of me?”, she asks him once, after.
“All the time,” he answers.
“Liar,” she says. “If you did, you would stop.”
He kisses her. She guesses it’s to shut her up. His kisses taste like extra-dark chocolate. Sometimes, she wonders about that.
She can’t get enough of kissing him. Maybe she hopes that if she tastes him long enough, deep enough, she will some day find some trace of Ianto left within him. She knows how twisted that is, but she stopped caring about things like that when she saw the body. Sometimes, she thinks he knows what she is trying to do. Sometimes, she thinks he is after the same thing.
The kisses make up for all the things he doesn’t say. He talks a lot, but says nothing she wants to hear. He tells her she’s his anchor, his light in the darkness, the only thing holding him together, all the tiny, shattered pieces of him. He tells her she’s beautiful. She doesn’t believe any of it.
She wants him to talk about Ianto. She wants to hear about everything they did together, in bed or otherwise, about every single breath they drew standing side by side, and about the times he didn’t breathe, too. Her twisted little mind draws pictures of these stories, delicate like her daughter’s watercolours, only much less innocent, if just as pure. She hungers for his words as much as for his touch, sometimes more.
She is pretty sure he knows about this hunger of hers. There are days when she believes that he uses his words and withholding them to seduce her into his bed, to make her come back day after day after day. Of course, those are the days when she tries to lay the blame at his feet entirely, the days she wants to feel seduced and used, but guiltless. It almost never works. In her heart of hearts she knows they are both to blame, and she has always been an honest woman.
She is having an affair. She is being very sneaky about it. The gossips won’t find out easily, and neither will her husband. She says she’s working again and uses the money on the bank only she knows about, the blood money, to make her story believable. Day after day she leaves the house in the afternoon to go to his hotel room and his warm, soft mouth, his bitter kisses and his sweet words. She comes back smelling of shower-gel and nothing else.
Some day, soon, someone will rip her net of lies apart. Probably, it will be the children. Probably, they already know. They feel that their mother is lying to them, that she has changed, that she is only partly there. Some day, soon, one of them will ask. She has no idea what she will answer or what she will do then. Of course, she knows this can’t go on forever. She also knows that she won’t put a stop to it.
It started when she went to him the first time, two days after the funeral. She had seen him skulking around the graveyard, pale, broken, and beautiful, keeping his distance, so sure of not being welcome. She had seen him standing at the grave afterwards, too, a lone, desolate figure, and had decided then and there to look for him. He had been visibly surprised finding her standing at the door of his hotel room, and she had demanded testily if he had actually thought that Ianto was the clever one in the family. His smile had been like broken glass, and she had kissed it. For a moment, he had stilled, frozen beneath her lips, but then he kissed her back like he was starving and she was bread.
He still looks at her body like she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. He touches her like that, too, buries his nose in her hair that always smells faintly of kitchen fumes, sucks her fingers that taste like bubble-gum and other sticky children-things, caresses her soft breasts that have nursed two babies, and licks places between her legs nobody has ever paid much attention to. He does it all like he is administering a sacrament, like she is the only thing that exists from the moment he sets eyes on her. She wonders if he makes everyone he sleeps with feel like that. She suspects that he does.
Sometimes, the thought that she might be looked at and touched by him like her brother was, makes the grieve almost bearable. At other times, the very same thought makes it all that much worse. She likes to imagine that he looked differently at Ianto than at her, than at everybody else, touched him in very special ways he reserved for him, and him only. There are times, however, when she wonders what special place you can reserve for anyone if you make the whole world the centre of your universe. She hates those moment with a passion. They make her hate him, too.
She loves him. It’s no use lying to herself about it. She fell in love with him when she saw him breaking at her brother’s grave, and then, again, when he touched her for the first time like she was the blessed virgin. She told him, too. He tried to explain that this didn’t mean that she loves her husband any less. She almost understands what he was trying to say.
“I love you, too, you know”, he tells her.
“As what? A mistress, a sister, or a mother?” she asks.
“Labels,” is his grumbled answers. He sounds slightly disgusted and very sad.
“A mother, then,” she decides. He doesn’t deny it.
She rides him with a desperate passion that is very much unlike her. Afterwards, she makes him tea or hot chocolate, though never coffee. She holds him when he cries, and rocks him like Mica or David. He doesn’t cry over grazed knees and broken toys, but it’s not that much different. That’s how she knows about the mother-thing. She suspects he hasn’t had a mother for a very long time. It’s weird and twisted and maybe a little sick. She doesn’t care. Somehow, he and what he was to her brother have become the centre of her universe.
It is Mica that finally brings the whole thing tumbling down.
“Mummy? Are you going away?” she asks Rhiannon one night, while she is being tucked in. Rhiannon freezes.
“What makes you say that, sweetheart?”
“You are never here,” Mica says. “Don’t you love us anymore?”
Rhiannon was wrong, or maybe she has been lying to herself for all this time. There is one thing that will make her put an end to her thing with Jack immediately.
“You’re leaving me?” he says the moment she walks into the room. He is scarily perceptive. She doesn’t think a lot of people realize that. She hopes that Ianto knew, for both their sakes.
“My children need me,” she says. It’s a low blow, and she knows it.
“I need you, too,” he says. He sounds younger than David. “You’re the only thing keeping me here.”
He has told her so before. She never believed him.
“You knew this would end sooner rather than later, Jack.”
He looks at her like she is cutting out his heart.
“You and your bloody twenty-first-century hang-ups,” he spits out. “Why can’t I just be part of…” He stops mid-sentence. Even his fortieth-or-whatever-century libertine attitudes have their limits. He knows there is no place for him in her other life. Rhiannon’s heart hurts for him, but she has made her decision.
“I’ve never thanked you for sending Gwen to save my children,” she says to him. “So, thank you, Jack. Thank you for everything.”
“Don’t go. Don’t leave me, please,” he says. But she does.
Jack has said his tearful goodbye to Gwen and Rhys, and it hurts in all the wrong ways. He feels all empty, all shell. There is nothing left of him. There can’t be. He huddles in the small cabin granted him on the cold-fusion cruiser und draws his great-coat around him. Ianto’s great-coat. Ianto … There is nothing but holes in his heart. One for Ianto. One for Steven. One for Alice. At least Rhiannon’s alive, oh so alive. She did the right thing, breaking things up with him. Who knows how long she would have survived him?
Maybe he has turned into Death without realizing it. He thinks of the thing Owen fought. Maybe that’s all he is anymore, a skeleton made out of darkness, hiding inside a body that draws people in despite themselves. Like Lucia. Like Ianto. Like Rhiannon. Death is all he has to offer.
Jack tries to hide within the folds of his great-coat. It feels bigger than it used to. Maybe it is. His hands are cold and he buries them in the pockets of the coat. He knows he will never again feel anything else but the cold, but it’s instinct to seek warmth anyway. Jack tried to find it in Rhiannon and believed for a while he had succeeded. Now, all that he has left is Ianto’s coat.
Paper crinkles against his left hand. Confused, Jack pulls a ragged piece of paper out of his coat-pocket. It looks like one of Rhiannon’s shopping lists.
“Two pounds of minced meat, peas, lettuce, orange juice, socks for David, hobnobs,” Jack reads, his confusion increasing. Why would Rhiannon leave this with him? Jack has had his share of weird souvenirs over the years, but a torn shopping list makes the top five easily. Yet, he already knows that he will keep it. Anything to remember. Jack won’t forget. Not ever.
He plays with the crinkled paper in his hands, thinking of Rhiannon’s body and Ianto’s grave. Therefore, it takes some time for him to realize that there is something else written on the back of the shopping list. It’s only five words, but they turn his world upside down:
I will call him Ianto.
For the first time in six months, Jack realizes that he is still alive. "A baby", he thinks, "a baby." He feels tears running down his face, but they don't taste like death anymore. And that is something, he thinks.