Torchwood - Pavlov's Bell
Title: Pavlov’s Bell
Author: smirnoffmule
Rating: NC-17 (Jack/Ianto)
Prompt: From tw_exchange: Character’s Pasts Prompt 1: Jack and Ianto training Myfanwy after bringing her back to the hub, and trying to train each other.
Summary: “It wasn’t as though his other charges were undemanding. Google wasn’t turning up much in the way of help on caring for your first pterodactyl, and Myfanwy wasn’t eating very well. At least, she wasn’t eating food very well. She ate technology, carrying out dawn raids on the computers and spreading wires about like entrails. She liked paperwork too, and shredded it with relish as fast as Ianto could file. And then there was Jack, who was blessedly uncurious about Ianto’s personal life, but none the less demanding in his own way.”
A/N: Huge love to justinej for the beta, and mercilynn and pikkuinen666 for the read through and encouragement.
Jack and Ianto are quoting lines from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas at each other
Ianto read to Lisa because he’d run out of words. Because “It’ll be alright” lost power with every repetition, and was starting to stick in his throat. When he sat with her in silence, he could feel himself sinking. He’d grabbed handfuls of paperbacks from the bargain bin at a charity shop, thirty pence a pop, and he’d paid for some and not for others, because this was before he got the job, and thirty pence here and there was starting to matter. Besides, he’d just bought the suit, and for all it came from Marks and Sparks and he’d practically heard his dad rolling in his grave as he chose it, it hadn’t been that cheap. They’d had cheaper, but he was his father’s son after all, and they hadn’t been quite so well cut. Jack had taken him all in from head to toe with a sweeping glance the first time they’d met, and Ianto knew he’d notice a badly cut suit if he wore one. On its own it wouldn’t mean much, but he had to watch the little details, or they’d add up and undo him. For Lisa, it was worth the pinch. In some part of his mind, everything he did was a penance for having the stupid dumb luck to still be alive, and he wasn’t paying his debt if he didn’t do things properly. His dad had always said you paid for anything worth having. Mam had always retorted that they paid for what they could afford. Ianto budgeted with sin, and opted to follow the other lesson he’d learned from the kids down his road - that paying was sometimes optional.
He’d felt like a tourist from another life coming back to Cardiff, but as he stuffed those books down the back of his trousers, the bulge hidden by a loose jacket and half an eye on the old dear behind the counter, it suddenly felt like coming home. As he left the shop with his legitimate purchases in a paper bag, and the rest of it digging into his back, he had to fight the urge to leg it as soon as his feet hit the pavement. Not because he needed to, but because that was nicking stuff properly, because all the adrenaline you worked up creeping around the merchandise had to go somewhere. He felt quite giddy with the rush, and it might have been a worry if he hadn’t been too giddy to worry. His heart lived in his throat these days, and his nerves were stretched thin as cling film, and that was just how it was, and he got on with what he had to do. No time to indulge his nerves and his mood swings by paying them any attention.
The books themselves had hardly been worth the trouble, although the memory of that moment of homecoming stayed with him. They were a motley collection, dry as a bone and battle worn, coming apart at the seams, and smelling like somebody’s death bed. He read the ones he’d paid for first, in the grimy bedsit in Adamsdown, but they’d moved to the hub by the time he started on the stolen ones. With each book he’d slammed down on the read-it pile, he felt stretched a little thinner, like they were taking something from him. He longed to get lost in a book, to get taken away, even for a moment, but he found no escape and he concentrated so hard trying that he came away exhausted. He moved around the hub like a ghost, and like a ghost, people only really noticed him when he moved stuff.
Lisa cried and she bled and she cursed and she slept, and sometimes when she slept, he couldn’t stay with her. It was a physical pain in his belly, watching her lie there. He considered it his failure that he didn’t stay, one more thing to do penance for, and he muttered his apologies to her all night long sometimes, over and over like a prayer as his nimble fingers tweaked her wires and needles. He said it so often the words lost all meaning, but the rhythm was a comfort. There were times when his seams were coming apart, and he was disintegrating in his own hands, and he had to find comfort wherever he could get it. If he fell apart, then everything was lost, and in the end it would hardly matter anyway - not when she was better, and they were gone from this place, and together. He told himself that, and he told Lisa too, whispering like a litany in her ear, apologies, excuses and promises all in equal measures.
It wasn’t as though his other charges were undemanding. Google wasn’t turning up much in the way of help on caring for your first pterodactyl, and Myfanwy wasn’t eating very well. At least, she wasn’t eating food very well. She ate technology, carrying out dawn raids on the computers and spreading wires about like entrails. She liked paperwork too, and shredded it with relish as fast as Ianto could file. And then there was Jack, who was blessedly uncurious about Ianto’s personal life, but none the less demanding in his own way.
“If you want to keep that damn pterodactyl,” he’d told Ianto with a growl as he picked through the paper mache wreckage of his in-tray, “You’re going to have to do something about it.” He met Ianto’s eyes with something like a challenge. Jack was all about eye contact, and his gaze was always intense whether he was sharing a joke or barking a reprimand. Ianto had found it difficult to cope at first with being so thoroughly looked at, but he’d figured out before too long that looking at didn’t necessarily mean seeing. He did not point out that it had not been him who wanted to keep said damn pterodactyl in the first place. Instead he said;
“Actually sir, she’s a pteranodon.” Truth be told, he didn’t know that she even was a she, but she had to be a something, and since he’d found the perfect name in the depths of his read-it pile, it would have to do. Jack wiped a hand damp with Myfanwy-spittle on his trousers, and raised his chin. Dealing with Jack required balance. Too much silence presented a challenge to him, one which he would pursue. Ianto had no wish to be pursued. He couldn’t afford even casual curiosity from anyone, so he made himself the most boring person alive, thinking drab and grey thoughts as he went around his work. But it was too late for that with Jack. He was already interested. But he was also pre-occupied, and often self-obsessed, and there was a certain level of banter he could bat back and forth without thinking too hard about it, and this was where Ianto tried to meet him. Thinking too hard in Ianto’s presence was to be heartily discouraged.
“Pterodactyl, pteranodon. Whatever damn dinosaur. Just do something about it.”
“I’ll see what I can do. Though as it happens, pteranodons aren’t dinosaurs.” Jack’s glare at him was hard and cold. For a moment, Ianto thought he might have misjudged his tease, though his own impassive gaze never wavered, and nor did his half smile, as neat and economical as his suit. In the end it was Jack who broke.
“Are pterodactyls dinosaurs?” he asked a little helplessly.
“I’ll look it up, shall I sir?” Ianto relented.
“You do that,” Jack told him. His eyes had a whole different intensity now. “And see if you can’t teach that thing to leave the computers alone before Tosh scratches its eyes out.”
It was hard to say which of the two new arrivals to the hub had been greeted with the least enthusiasm. Owen was unsure what to make of either of them, and so was faintly hostile to both. Tosh was definitely not an animal person. Suzie, it seemed, was not a Ianto person. She was suspicious of his sudden appearance, and of Jack’s motives in hiring him, which were transparent as far as she was concerned. Ianto found he was most inconspicuous to her when he met her expectations, so he flirted gently with Jack whenever she was in earshot, and she rolled her eyes and dismissed him from her mind. She could not dismiss the other newcomer quite so easily, much as she might have liked to; on her first night in the hub, Myfanwy had neatly severed all the power cables that fed Suzie’s computer.
“Most people just have to worry about mice,” she had grumbled.
“Who wants to be most people?” Jack had responded.
Myfanwy’s appetite for destruction had been welcome at first, since she diverted attention quite nicely - until, that was, Jack appointed him the person to fix it. Then suddenly it was always his fault. Well, fine then. He could do something about Myfanwy. Despite being a worry, and a big flying lizard, he found her company soothing. Her demands on him were blessedly uncomplex. All she wanted in life was to eat, shriek, and fly, and she couldn’t care less if he wobbled or wept occasionally. In London they’d had a cat. At least Myfanwy didn’t get hairs in his coffee.
**********
It happened the first time by accident, at least on Ianto’s part. Jack probably had designs, albeit it not very sophisticated ones, just a quick warm body count. Fortunately Jack could make that kind of exchange without thinking very hard about it too. It was late in the evening, that dark space past ten o’clock, and Ianto had thought they had the place to themselves; himself, Myfanwy up above, and Lisa down below, three levels of life forms all haunting the hub. Suzie, Owen and Tosh had retired to their respective pits after an uneventful day, and Jack had gone out hunting weevils, or so he’d told Ianto with a wolfish grin. Ianto wasn’t sure if this was meant to be a euphemism or not. He almost asked to go along, partly because Jack seemed to expect it, and doing what Jack expected had become second nature, and partly because his head was filling up with cobwebs, and he could have done with shifting them. He was getting so good at his act, it took him a moment to remember sometimes why he couldn’t just go gadding, cobwebs or not. There was too much at stake.
For a time he sat with Lisa, sinking until his body became a dead weight of muscle fused to his seat. He was too tired to read, so he just sat and stared. She was asleep, if you could use that word to describe a state so unrestive, her brow scrunched, and her eyes alive and flickering beneath closed lids. Ianto watched until his vision blurred and his eyes refused to focus. He thought he might have fallen asleep himself for a time, because when he came back to awareness, it was with a jolt, and his mouth tasted thick and dry. All around him was silent, but the silence was like a live thing, and the darkness and the spaces of the hub loomed around him. It did not feel safe. He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead and she flinched and twitched at his touch. He left her with a puzzled frown on her sleeping face.
He was not running away, he told himself. He had work to do. Always work to do. Myfanwy started kicking up a racket as soon as she saw him moving around. He collected his equipment and Myfanwy’s supper from the big fridge in the medical bay, taking advantage of his slurring vision to avoid focusing on the alien viscera which Owen saw fit not to bother concealing. Bucket of fish heads in hand, he climbed to the gantry that was the highest point of the hub where Myfanwy flew in ceaseless circles, calling out across the years. A couple of times he stopped to rest, with half a mind to just let himself crumble and roll bonelessly back to the bottom.
When he finally made it, the distance beneath his feet was gratifyingly dizzy. He set up shop on his usual spot, next to a storage cavity which he’d emptied to give himself a bolthole if Myfanwy got too boisterous. She’d taken to clapping her beak in anticipation whenever she saw him approaching, a sound that echoed like a gun shot around the curved roof. Whether this was pterosaur for “Hello,” or “I want to eat you,” Ianto wasn’t quite sure, but it was nice to be acknowledged either way.
Close to, Myfanwy was not unlike a jet plane, or maybe a bat, or maybe what might happen if you crossed the two, a technique Ianto had no doubt there was technology for buried in the archives. As he rolled up his shirt sleeves and slipped on a rubber glove, she started to buzz him, clapping her beak and crying aloud. She passed him, and banked, and passed again, watching him out of each bright amber eye in turn. He removed his whistle from his pocket and dropped the string around his neck, then picked up the bottle of protein sauce and doused the fish heads liberally with it. Pteranodons, according to everything he googled, were meant to be fish eaters, but Myfanwy still needed coaxing. He watched her for a few minutes until her fly-bys got alarmingly close, and then he popped the whistle in his mouth and started to blast on it at intervals. With every blast he threw a fish head, hurling it as hard as he could out into the open space. He was a bad throw, and Myfanwy was a bad catch, and he frequently sent her diving like a gannet into the lower reaches of the hub, but they got into a rhythm, and he caught himself grinning, unguarded. He was so unused to it, his face muscles were aching. He caught himself laughing even, as she rushed close past him, her wings blowing warm, dry air over his upturned face. When she cried out, the echoes made his heart ache. Trapped in the hub, she was oversized and cumbersome; she was made for open oceans and warm air currents, cruising forever against the blessed silence of a prehistoric sky. He wondered if she missed it, or even knew it was gone, and that the cars and the people and the houses weren’t just clumsy terrestrial beasts no stranger than the ones she’d grown up with.
“Let’s call her Elaine,” announced a voice next to him. Ianto jumped so hard he nearly swallowed his whistle. Jack was standing not six feet away from him, leaning on the wall with his arms crossed as though he’d been there for hours. He grinned, and the effect was slightly dazzling. Clearly he had his high beams on tonight. In the end Ianto could come up with no response smoother than an honest one. He blushed and spluttered and fumbled, and said,
“God, you made me jump.” He felt absurdly embarrassed, like he’d been caught with his hand down his pants.
“So I see,” Jack lounged as easy as a big cat. “Hey, no need to stop having fun on my account.” He straightened himself up, and stepped level with Ianto, regarding him calmly and intensely in a way that made Ianto want to look anywhere but back at him.
“Did you get taller?” Jack asked, out of nowhere. Ianto was a couple of inches below Jack’s eye line, but then he thought he always had been. Being inconspicuous was obviously working, or perhaps thinking drab grey thoughts was making him hunch. He had no real answer, and no real way to regain his cool, being up to his elbow in fish heads. He suddenly became conscious that he probably didn’t smell very pleasant, and then wondered why he cared.
“Can I do something for you, sir?” he asked.
“Nope.” Jack said, and stepped forward to lean on the railing next to him, almost aggressive in his casualness. Ianto studied his bucket. Jack was feeling out his welcome, he guessed. Well, a few minutes would keep him happy, and wouldn’t hurt. He tried not to think about what might have happened if he’d been at his other secret project when Jack had sneaked up, though his brain started reeling out horror stories just the same.
“I call her Myfanwy, actually,” he told him, as much to talk over the noise in his brain as anything. “She is Welsh, after all.”
“Did they have Wales in Jurassic times?”
“Cretaceous. And yes.” Really Ianto had no idea, and rather thought not due to shifting landmasses, but Jack seemed to accept his authority. He considered, silent for one moment, head on one side, then stood tall and spread his arms, and began to recite,
“’Myfanwy, Myfanwy…’” His Welsh accent was exaggerated and awful, and he looked at Ianto sideways, inviting him to laugh. Ianto’s heart leapt for his mouth, but he managed to chime in,
“’Before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer…’” He laughed a little laugh which sounded pathetic to his ears. He’d been reading that to Lisa just after they’d first moved, remembering it from A-levels and soothed by the rhythm. Jack studied his face.
“Don’t you like Dylan Thomas?” He asked.
“English A-level,” Ianto replied, slightly nonsensically. And then after a pause, “Funny, I was reading that. Not long ago. It’s what made me think…” he gestured at Myfanwy, now at the furthest point of her radius, a looming ghost in the half dark. He met Jack’s eye again, but his head was dipped and his look was softer. Jack took this as an invitation.
“Isn’t the next line, ‘Will you say yes?’. And I think she did.”
“I think she was only dreaming it though, wasn’t she?”
“True. That’s fairly depressing. Are you okay, Ianto? You look kind of tired. Have you even had a day off yet? I won’t fire you while you’re gone, I promise.”
“I’m fine.” He smiled and tried to make it perky. “Just had a long day. I’m working on something.”
“With wet fish. And a whistle. And a bottle of… what exactly? I’m intrigued.”
“It’s protein sauce.” Ianto explained. “Owen said it was probably dog soup, but I think he was joking. Stinks to high heaven, but it’s very very good for you.”
“I already ate, thanks.”
“Good thing, really. I strongly advise you against trying any. I’m trying to teach her that this is what she eats, so if you get any down your shirt, you’re fair game, I’m afraid.”
Jack shifted to a more comfortable position.
“How come?” He asked.
“It’s the only thing I’ve been able to find that she’ll eat, but she won’t half eat it. I think she’d eat boot leather if you dunked it in this stuff.”
“Yeah, I feel that way about barbeque sauce.”
“The plan is, it’ll stop her eating stuff she shouldn’t. Including me. There is the rather real worry she might eat me.”
“Oh, I don’t think she would eat you,” Jack pretended to consider. “Peck you to pieces, maybe.”
“Not really preferable,” Ianto smiled. It was easier to relax talking about his pet project. “But anyway, Owen says it’s definitely organic, and we can probably synthesize it, so if it gets her eating, as well as sparing our computers and Cardiff’s livestock, it’s killing two birds with one stone. Or two pterodactyls with one condiment.”
“I thought you said she was a pteranodon.”
“Pteranodons are pterodactyls.”
“I give up.” Jack threw his hands up and laughed. “Where’d you find that stuff?”
“In the archives. Where even the alphabetizing is apparently alien.”
“No shit. You’re a brave man even venturing down there. I can’t believe you found barbeque sauce.”
“The bottle leaked over the paperwork, but as near as I can make out, it’s for bottle feeding… something. Something with lots of teeth and even more gills. There was a picture, but it had mostly been eaten.”
Impatient at the pause in her feeding, Myfanwy arced close, crying out and clacking her beak like a hungry fledgling. Ianto gave the whistle a quick blast and lobbed a fish head. It went spiralling down into the darkness and she dropped like a stone in pursuit.
“Why the whistle?” Jack asked, watching her go.
“That’s her recall cue. I’ve started letting her out at night, see, and I thought we ought to be able to get her back in a hurry if we need to. I’m conditioning her that the whistle means food, so hopefully when she hears it, wherever she is, she’ll come running. It’s like Pavlov’s dogs. Except with a pterodactyl.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea, letting her out? People might see.”
“She’s bored. If we keep her banged up in here forever, we’ll be lucky if computers is all she eats. I’ve been keeping an eye on the papers, and nothing so far. Well, a few sheep, but they seem to blame that on the big cats, and who knows, it even might be. If it’s a real problem, I’ll look at other options. Perception filter collar maybe.”
“You’re pretty thorough, aren’t you?” said Jack, after a pause. He sounded approving.
“I do my best, sir.”
“So it’s as simple as that? You whistle, she comes?”
“And drools a little, but I’m not sure what to do about that. It’s a reflexive response.”
“I know about those.”
Ianto believed him. Myfanwy soared back into his line of sight, her beak working. Her skin was the colour and texture of dead leaves, but her eye was as bright as a toad’s. He threw her another fish, forgetting to whistle, and she snatched it neatly from the air.
“She is something, isn’t she,” Jack remarked.
“She is that.”
Jack sat down on the gantry and dangled his legs, and after a moment, Ianto sat beside him, peeling off his rubber glove and dumping in the bucket. They were silent for a few minutes, but it wasn’t awkward. Myfanwy had charisma which drew the eye, and so did Jack if it came to that. Ianto kept looking at his bucket, not allowing his eye to be drawn. It would be too easy, he realised, to forget just what he was doing here, and that they weren’t just two people at liberty to make friends, or… whatever Jack did when he was making friends. All too easy to fall into the pretence that this was his life, where he was allowed to grow fond of pterodactyls and give them stupid pet names. These little things he did, he saw, were a sop to keep himself happy, to stop himself rebelling at the pressure. There was such a fine line between himself and something he didn’t want to gaze on, utter panic in the shadows at the edge of his vision. But he could not afford to forget that Jack was the most dangerous person in the world to him right now.
He had been doing so well. Lisa would be proud of him one day. All sorts of things he’d dealt with. The bodies had been the worst. Junior researchers just didn’t take care of that kind of disposal at Torchwood One. He’d never even seen a dead person before the battle, and that had hardly prepared him. The first time he’d seen someone, a dead girl, lying on Owen’s slab, it had nearly undone him. Floodgates had opened, and he’d had to take himself quietly to the archives, blessing God and the gods and anyone else who’d listen that no one ever paid attention to where he went. Once there he sat down on the floor, hard, his hands shaking and his vision grey. For a time, he was right back in there, trapped in a maze of smoke and stairs, running down endless corridors, always the wrong bloody way. He could do nothing but breathe in and out, trying to feel the hard floor beneath his knees and hear the silence, conscious that there was nothing more to him than muscle and meat and a few bags of air. If anyone had come looking for him then, he would have been beyond faking anything.
But nobody did. And it passed away, and his vision returned, and his ears stopped ringing, and when he could, he got up, and he carried on. Owen was well into his work by the time he came back up, cutting, and discarding, switching utensils with the intensity of an artist. She looked more like anatomy than person by then, and that made it easier. Ianto had leant over the railing for a few minutes and watched, concentrating every molecule of his being on looking merely casually interested. He concentrated so hard it almost started to work, until Owen dumped the girl’s internal organs back into her chest cavity, folded the flaps of skin back into place and started to stitch her up. Ianto moved off as though he were simply continuing with his working day, managing even to nod a greeting at Tosh and to meet Jack’s eye and smile. He took himself calmly and casually to the toilet, and once in there threw up everything he’d ever eaten. Later, he’d sat in the archives and flicked through autopsy reports, studying the pictures until he stopped seeing properly.
And it had worked. Barely three days later, he’d been standing over somebody else dead, chewing idly on his nail and wondering vaguely how best to move this one without all the guts falling out. Owen was useful here - he’d helped him shift the body, and was surprisingly affable all of a sudden, though Ianto was conscious all the time he’d be mocked if he showed weakness. At least it gave him something to measure his performance by. He did not get mocked.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Jack asked him, cutting into his thoughts. Funny, he didn’t look dangerous. “I mean… no offence… and actually, I think you look great, but you do look, well, awful. I mean, it’s been a month. That’s not really a long time.”
Ianto raised his head and met Jack’s eye. The angle of his jaw was a challenge which he couldn’t help. He just dared Jack to mention Canary Wharf, he just dared him. Appearing in his personal space from nowhere without warning was one thing, but this was one violation too many. Not that Ianto could actually do anything about it, whatever Jack said. He had no consequences to offer, considering that shouting, crying, running away, having another ‘Nam style flashback, or pushing Jack off the gantry were all likely to raise suspicion. With a sigh he dropped his head again, the set of his shoulders defeated.
“I prefer to be busy,” he said instead. “Really.”
Jack gave a little shrug.
“You know you best,” he said. “But if you want some time off, just take it. You’re just as entitled to it as anyone. Everyone else, for example, appears to have gone home.”
“Except you,” Ianto couldn’t help pointing out. Jack laughed and shrugged again. He reached out and squeezed Ianto’s knee in what he took to be a comforting gesture, except that the hand seemed to stay there. Ianto looked down at it as though he had never seen the like, but he didn’t move away.
Myfanwy seemed to be full. She gusted past, the sheer size of her ruffling their hair, but her sweep was less urgent, and her calling less frequent. He’d let her out, Ianto thought, just as soon as he moved. He followed her with his eyes as she circled the perimeter, tilting this way and that like a leathery glider.
“By the light of the pterodactyl moon,” Jack said dreamily.
“You like a bit of drama, don’t you sir,” Ianto replied. Jack looked at him again, his head on one side like Myfanwy’s and he licked his lips just a little and Ianto didn’t look away. If he’d looked away it wouldn’t have happened. He told himself he didn’t realise that till afterwards. Jack leaned closer and tilted his head, and Ianto looked at his eye lashes. Jack touched a hand to Ianto’s jaw line and pressed his lips to Ianto’s lips. The pads of his fingers were rough but warm. A long moment seemed to pass, and Jack’s lips lingered, not doing a lot, but most definitely there, until Ianto opened his mouth minutely, and suddenly Jack was everything. He inhaled sharply and Jack’s breath rushed into him and he had to push back or be pushed over. He closed his eyes tight and thought of nothing as hard as he could. When they broke Ianto found his hands were twisted in Jack’s braces while Jack’s hands were in his hair. His heart was running like a rabbit and his head was spinning so hard he thought for a minute he’d fallen off the gantry.
“Oh God,” he said.
“I prefer Jack,” Jack told him. Ianto didn’t laugh. He didn’t do anything, except stare at Jack with an expression of faint incomprehension, as though he were something totally incongruous, a frog in a teapot. This didn’t seem quite the reaction Jack was accustomed to. He pulled back and frowned.
“Ianto,” he said. “I don’t want to sound like a stuck record here, but you’re pulling a face like someone just hit you with one of your own wet fish. Are you sure you’re alright? I mean, was that okay? If I was way out of line or something…”
Ianto shook himself out of his reverie.
“No, no,” he said. “I’m fine. It’s just you kiss… good,” he finished lamely. Oh God, he said to himself, why not just fall off and be done with it. Myfanwy improvises better than you do.
“Ah, the old Harkness black magic,” Jack grinned again, back on the high beams. It must be wonderful to be that happy, Ianto reflected. Jack settled back down to watch Myfanwy like nothing had happened.
“You know,” he announced suddenly, after a few minutes had passed in which Ianto tried to marshal his dizziness and failed. “Years ago, I visited this place… All your 18-30 types used to go there, or 180-300, or whatever their metabolisms, but a typical party planet, you know. Multicoloured cocktails and music to make your ears bleed. Like, literally. It was kind of scary. But every night at sunset, there were firebirds. Big as Myfanwy, and twice as mean, but oh boy… they were orange and gold, and every colour in between, so many shades they seemed to burn with it. We used to lie out on the hillside and we’d watch them. You closed your eyes, and you still saw them, blazing on your eyelids. ‘Course a lot of people used to miss that, with the bleeding ears and all… but I saw it a few times. It was really quite something.”
“A planet?” Ianto said. Jack looked at him sideways.
“Uh-huh.”
Ianto sensed he was supposed to ask more, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to know, truth be told. Or to speak. Or to anything. He shifted his weight uncomfortably, and then became aware of the source of his discomfort, shifted again, and cursed himself for being so obvious. Why Jack couldn’t keep his eyes to himself was beyond him.
“Ianto…” he began again, but then his mobile chirruped, making Ianto jump right out of his skin. Jack slipped it out of his pocket and flicked it open.
“Owen?” he said into it, and frowned into the darkness. Ianto took advantage of the shift in scrutiny, and stared straight ahead, trying to breathe and think unsexy thoughts. Myfanwy, Myfanwy, Myfanwy.
“You were what?” Jack frowned. “Oh come on… well, didn’t she look like…? Owen, it’s the eyes, I told you before, you have to check. If they have a third one… I don’t care how sexy… No make-up is that effective. It’s a third eye, for crying out loud... She did what? … Where are you? I’ll be right there... What, are you going to unstick yourself? I’ll be right there, I said.” He shut his phone with a flick of the wrist.
“Um,” he said. “Owen has a little problem…”
Ianto had composure. He had fought hard for it, but won.
“So I hear,” he said.
“I’d better go and… well, I’d better be quick, because the next stage is spawning, and that never ends well. You, um… should go home to sleep.”
Ianto nodded. He really should. Jack was half way to the stairs when he paused and turned back.
“Or,” he said. “I won’t be very long. Half an hour. Three quarters, max. You could meet me in my office. If you want to.”
Ianto nodded, his throat dry. Nodding, he told himself, to say he understood, not that he’d be there. Before he’d even finished, Jack was gone.
******
The walls around Jack’s office were made of glass. It was both disconcerting and difficult to clean. With the hub dark beyond, Ianto could see his own reflection. He looked at it every morning, to shave and straighten his tie, but suddenly he was seeing. He’d lost weight. His eyes were ringed with shadows. He wished he hadn’t taken his tie off before coming here, he felt quite naked without it.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Jack said, behind him. Ianto didn’t turn around, but met Jack’s eyes in his reflection instead.
“Here I am,” he said. He hadn’t been going to. There’d been no question that he’d ever go. He would go back down to Lisa, and Jack would think he had gone home, or he would actually go home, a crazy notion, but more plausible none the less than his coming here. But then what? That would only pique Jack’s interest. Ianto had given him too many signs that could be interpreted as interest to count on him backing down. He’d be pursued. He’d be considered. He’d be all the things he didn’t want to be. He’d have Jack sneaking up quiet as a cat all over the place, and in a very short space of time, that would spell disaster. And all because he couldn’t just break eye contact. And because you kissed him like your life depended on it. So, another thing for the list then. Another sorry. He’d been making mistakes all evening, and he’d do what it took to put this right now, even if it meant being the crappest shag in history so that Jack would lose interest. In the end, it would hardly matter, who would ever know, and they’d be gone from here, him and Lisa, back to London, off to Mars, as far away from Jack bloody Harkness with his sodding planets and his fucking tongue as it was humanly possible to be. He focused on that thought. Far away. Tongue. He watched Jack’s reflection move closer behind him.
“You didn’t have to, you know that, right?” Jack told him. “It’s not actually a requirement of the job. I mean, I do understand there are people out there somewhere who just don’t want to bang me, so if you’re one of those…”
Say yes.
“No, I’m fine,” he said, through slightly gritted teeth. Making it worse.
“It’s just you look a little…”
“I’m fine.” Almost a snap.
“Been a while, huh?” Jack’s hand brushed the back of his neck.
“Something like that.”
Jack’s hand paused.
“Is this your first time? With a guy, I mean?”
“No,” Ianto lied. He saw Jack’s reflection smile, but the glass was distorting, and he couldn’t read the meaning. Jack reached around and undid the top button of Ianto’s shirt.
“We can take it nice and slow.”
“Whatever,” Ianto said aloud. The voice in his head appeared to be screaming.
Jack moved his hand up into Ianto’s hair and kissed him on the back of the neck. Though Ianto saw it coming in the mirror, the touch still made him flinch a little. His teeth, he found, were clenched, and his fists were tight. He forced his muscles into a relaxed pose. Jack’s breath tickled, and his lips were warm and soft, nuzzling in the fine hairs at Ianto’s hair line. The hand in his hair swept forward, rifling and twisting, while Jack’s other arm slipped down around his waist.
“Relax,” Jack whispered to his neck.
“I am,” Ianto answered through a jaw so tight it hurt.
“Um-hmm,” Jack said against his skin. It buzzed. He splayed his fingers against Ianto’s stomach, pressing their bodies together.
“I like you this height,” he told him. “Short guys give me a crick in the neck.”
Jack’s warmth was pleasant on his aching muscles. Ianto closed his eyes. He kept his hands by his side, unsure what to do with them, but Jack didn’t seem to mind. He kissed his neck again, all the way along the hair line, and then swept his tongue across the top of Ianto’s spine. One hand still pressed him close, and the other started to wander down from his hair, spidering over his face and under his chin, lifting his head back as Jack’s mouth moved along his shoulder, pressing through his shirt. Fingers caressed round his throat and Adam’s apple. Ianto exhaled. It was all he could do with Jack’s fingers under his chin. The tautness of the muscles in his neck increased sensation. He wanted to moan, but didn’t know quite how.
Quite abruptly Jack let go. Ianto opened his eyes and found Jack’s reflection smiling at him wickedly.
“Still with me?” He asked. Ianto swallowed and nodded. His skin felt alive where Jack’s hands had been. Jack reached forward and brushed his cheek, then leaned and kissed him on the ear.
“Good,” he said. He put his hands on Ianto’s hips and pulled him back into him. Ianto felt hardness through fabric pressing at the small of his back. He felt far too shell-shocked for a similar response of his own, but Jack seemed undeterred. His hands were wandering again, his lips on Ianto’s neck again, the kisses getting wider and wetter. Ianto shifted his hips minutely, pushing backwards tentatively. Jack swept an arm around his waist again and pulled him tight and close. There were teeth, then, at the nape of his neck. Ianto wriggled, or struggled, or did something, and Jack made a noise half way between a giggle and a growl.
A thumb sneaked between the buttons of his shirt and pressed into his navel. The other hand ghosted round the hollow of his throat. Ianto couldn’t help it, he leaned, and he moaned, his eyes pressed closed again, beyond pretending he had any clue what he was doing. He tried to think of Lisa, but all his mind gave him were comparisons, how big Jack was compared to her, how strong, how physical, the pressure in his touch, the roughness of his fingers, the scraping of his stubble. Little shudders ran through him, and for a moment, he thought he might cry out, but Jack was there in his ear, crooning soothing noises. Nothing else to do now, he told himself, can’t back out now, he’d know, you shouldn’t have come, but you can’t stop now. The logical part of his brain tested this statement for truth and found it water tight. It relieved him of a burden. He relaxed, and sank back into Jack, pressing himself and shifting until every part of them that could be touching was touching. Jack’s hand had slipped down to his thigh and was squeezing it with splayed fingers. Jack’s hips had started to move a little, not much, and not hard, but a definite movement, a tense and release against Ianto’s buttocks. Ianto let his own hands move backwards, setting up base on Jack’s hips, and feeling for his rhythm. Fully clothed as they both were, he felt safe enough to match it, even as Jack untucked his shirt and slid his hand up his stomach.
He opened his eyes again, and caught himself in the glass, noting abstractly the muss of his hair, the flush of his face and the sheen of sweat on his forehead. His eyes looked huge. Jack’s face was still buried in the back of his neck, and his tongue was doing ridiculous things to that hitherto unsuspected erogenous zone. Ianto tasted salt on his own lip and closed his eyes. Time to worry about everything else tomorrow. Jack had one thumb in the hollow of his throat again, and hardly any pressure there was enough to make him squirm, but it still didn’t escape his notice where the other hand was going.
“Oh God,” he moaned aloud.
“I love the way you say that,” Jack told him “You say it like you’re actually talking to someone.”
Now was possibly not the time for a theological debate, so Ianto made no answer. Jack’s spare hand had gone to his crotch, and had started stroking, feeling through the fabric for the shape of him. The thrust of Jack’s hips picked up a notch. The thumb at Ianto’s throat seemed nonchalant but it was such an absurdly sensitive point that it trapped him, unable to move except with Jack’s tempo without pushing the thumb deeper in. He moved his own hand back and pinched Jack’s buttock, objecting, and when Jack only laughed, he leant back into him with all his weight, hard enough to make him take a step back and dislodge his hands. Disengaged, Jack met his eyes in the mirror. Ianto returned his gaze calmly. He may have even smirked. Jack pushed him playfully between the shoulders with the flat of both hands, and then caught him round the waist to stop him falling forwards.
“Oh yes,” Jack said to his shoulder as he bit it. “Where was I, then?”
“I have no idea,” Ianto gasped. Jack laughed again, and hooked his fingers through Ianto’s belt loops, shifting his weight around until he found the rhythm he liked. He was pushing harder now, more insistent, and Ianto pressed a hand against the glass to give him leverage to answer. He closed his eyes and focused on the rhythm, nothing else, let his head fill up with wide open spaces to keep out the noise. Jack moved to his crotch again, grasping Ianto’s cock though the fabric, gripping with his fingers and teasing with his thumb. The other hand released Ianto’s belt loop and slid down between their bodies, fumbling at the fastening of his own trousers.
“Not doing anything,” Jack said, as Ianto made to twist around. “Just giving myself a little room, is all.”
The thrusting continued, a more definite bump and slide against his lower back now, but Ianto was equal to it, and matched his pace, pushing with insistence into Jack’s hand and hissing nonsense words between his teeth. The friction through the fabric was intense, but when Jack thumbed the top button of his trousers with a practiced flick and plunged his hand down, he was lost. All there was now was rhythm, and somebody was moaning, and Ianto didn’t quite know who. He twisted his head to the side as he came and was met by Jack’s teeth on his cheekbone. Jack’s thrusting became erratic, and his grip tightened. He swore in hot puffs of air in Ianto’s ear, and he shuddered, and Ianto opened his eyes and met reality, thinking belatedly of his shirt as he felt the wetness spread there.
“Fuck,” he said. It was all he could think of.
“I’ll say,” Jack answered. He gave Ianto’s spent cock a friendly squeeze and dropped another kiss on his neck line, affectionate, not sexy this time. They disengaged. Ianto buttoned up the parts of him that had come undone. He turned and met Jack’s eyes properly for the first time since he’d entered the room. Jack was pushing his hair out of his face and reordering his braces. If there was an etiquette for a moment like this, Ianto didn’t know it.
In the end, he just went to make coffee. It seemed like the thing to do.
Author: smirnoffmule
Rating: NC-17 (Jack/Ianto)
Prompt: From tw_exchange: Character’s Pasts Prompt 1: Jack and Ianto training Myfanwy after bringing her back to the hub, and trying to train each other.
Summary: “It wasn’t as though his other charges were undemanding. Google wasn’t turning up much in the way of help on caring for your first pterodactyl, and Myfanwy wasn’t eating very well. At least, she wasn’t eating food very well. She ate technology, carrying out dawn raids on the computers and spreading wires about like entrails. She liked paperwork too, and shredded it with relish as fast as Ianto could file. And then there was Jack, who was blessedly uncurious about Ianto’s personal life, but none the less demanding in his own way.”
A/N: Huge love to justinej for the beta, and mercilynn and pikkuinen666 for the read through and encouragement.
Jack and Ianto are quoting lines from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas at each other
Ianto read to Lisa because he’d run out of words. Because “It’ll be alright” lost power with every repetition, and was starting to stick in his throat. When he sat with her in silence, he could feel himself sinking. He’d grabbed handfuls of paperbacks from the bargain bin at a charity shop, thirty pence a pop, and he’d paid for some and not for others, because this was before he got the job, and thirty pence here and there was starting to matter. Besides, he’d just bought the suit, and for all it came from Marks and Sparks and he’d practically heard his dad rolling in his grave as he chose it, it hadn’t been that cheap. They’d had cheaper, but he was his father’s son after all, and they hadn’t been quite so well cut. Jack had taken him all in from head to toe with a sweeping glance the first time they’d met, and Ianto knew he’d notice a badly cut suit if he wore one. On its own it wouldn’t mean much, but he had to watch the little details, or they’d add up and undo him. For Lisa, it was worth the pinch. In some part of his mind, everything he did was a penance for having the stupid dumb luck to still be alive, and he wasn’t paying his debt if he didn’t do things properly. His dad had always said you paid for anything worth having. Mam had always retorted that they paid for what they could afford. Ianto budgeted with sin, and opted to follow the other lesson he’d learned from the kids down his road - that paying was sometimes optional.
He’d felt like a tourist from another life coming back to Cardiff, but as he stuffed those books down the back of his trousers, the bulge hidden by a loose jacket and half an eye on the old dear behind the counter, it suddenly felt like coming home. As he left the shop with his legitimate purchases in a paper bag, and the rest of it digging into his back, he had to fight the urge to leg it as soon as his feet hit the pavement. Not because he needed to, but because that was nicking stuff properly, because all the adrenaline you worked up creeping around the merchandise had to go somewhere. He felt quite giddy with the rush, and it might have been a worry if he hadn’t been too giddy to worry. His heart lived in his throat these days, and his nerves were stretched thin as cling film, and that was just how it was, and he got on with what he had to do. No time to indulge his nerves and his mood swings by paying them any attention.
The books themselves had hardly been worth the trouble, although the memory of that moment of homecoming stayed with him. They were a motley collection, dry as a bone and battle worn, coming apart at the seams, and smelling like somebody’s death bed. He read the ones he’d paid for first, in the grimy bedsit in Adamsdown, but they’d moved to the hub by the time he started on the stolen ones. With each book he’d slammed down on the read-it pile, he felt stretched a little thinner, like they were taking something from him. He longed to get lost in a book, to get taken away, even for a moment, but he found no escape and he concentrated so hard trying that he came away exhausted. He moved around the hub like a ghost, and like a ghost, people only really noticed him when he moved stuff.
Lisa cried and she bled and she cursed and she slept, and sometimes when she slept, he couldn’t stay with her. It was a physical pain in his belly, watching her lie there. He considered it his failure that he didn’t stay, one more thing to do penance for, and he muttered his apologies to her all night long sometimes, over and over like a prayer as his nimble fingers tweaked her wires and needles. He said it so often the words lost all meaning, but the rhythm was a comfort. There were times when his seams were coming apart, and he was disintegrating in his own hands, and he had to find comfort wherever he could get it. If he fell apart, then everything was lost, and in the end it would hardly matter anyway - not when she was better, and they were gone from this place, and together. He told himself that, and he told Lisa too, whispering like a litany in her ear, apologies, excuses and promises all in equal measures.
It wasn’t as though his other charges were undemanding. Google wasn’t turning up much in the way of help on caring for your first pterodactyl, and Myfanwy wasn’t eating very well. At least, she wasn’t eating food very well. She ate technology, carrying out dawn raids on the computers and spreading wires about like entrails. She liked paperwork too, and shredded it with relish as fast as Ianto could file. And then there was Jack, who was blessedly uncurious about Ianto’s personal life, but none the less demanding in his own way.
“If you want to keep that damn pterodactyl,” he’d told Ianto with a growl as he picked through the paper mache wreckage of his in-tray, “You’re going to have to do something about it.” He met Ianto’s eyes with something like a challenge. Jack was all about eye contact, and his gaze was always intense whether he was sharing a joke or barking a reprimand. Ianto had found it difficult to cope at first with being so thoroughly looked at, but he’d figured out before too long that looking at didn’t necessarily mean seeing. He did not point out that it had not been him who wanted to keep said damn pterodactyl in the first place. Instead he said;
“Actually sir, she’s a pteranodon.” Truth be told, he didn’t know that she even was a she, but she had to be a something, and since he’d found the perfect name in the depths of his read-it pile, it would have to do. Jack wiped a hand damp with Myfanwy-spittle on his trousers, and raised his chin. Dealing with Jack required balance. Too much silence presented a challenge to him, one which he would pursue. Ianto had no wish to be pursued. He couldn’t afford even casual curiosity from anyone, so he made himself the most boring person alive, thinking drab and grey thoughts as he went around his work. But it was too late for that with Jack. He was already interested. But he was also pre-occupied, and often self-obsessed, and there was a certain level of banter he could bat back and forth without thinking too hard about it, and this was where Ianto tried to meet him. Thinking too hard in Ianto’s presence was to be heartily discouraged.
“Pterodactyl, pteranodon. Whatever damn dinosaur. Just do something about it.”
“I’ll see what I can do. Though as it happens, pteranodons aren’t dinosaurs.” Jack’s glare at him was hard and cold. For a moment, Ianto thought he might have misjudged his tease, though his own impassive gaze never wavered, and nor did his half smile, as neat and economical as his suit. In the end it was Jack who broke.
“Are pterodactyls dinosaurs?” he asked a little helplessly.
“I’ll look it up, shall I sir?” Ianto relented.
“You do that,” Jack told him. His eyes had a whole different intensity now. “And see if you can’t teach that thing to leave the computers alone before Tosh scratches its eyes out.”
It was hard to say which of the two new arrivals to the hub had been greeted with the least enthusiasm. Owen was unsure what to make of either of them, and so was faintly hostile to both. Tosh was definitely not an animal person. Suzie, it seemed, was not a Ianto person. She was suspicious of his sudden appearance, and of Jack’s motives in hiring him, which were transparent as far as she was concerned. Ianto found he was most inconspicuous to her when he met her expectations, so he flirted gently with Jack whenever she was in earshot, and she rolled her eyes and dismissed him from her mind. She could not dismiss the other newcomer quite so easily, much as she might have liked to; on her first night in the hub, Myfanwy had neatly severed all the power cables that fed Suzie’s computer.
“Most people just have to worry about mice,” she had grumbled.
“Who wants to be most people?” Jack had responded.
Myfanwy’s appetite for destruction had been welcome at first, since she diverted attention quite nicely - until, that was, Jack appointed him the person to fix it. Then suddenly it was always his fault. Well, fine then. He could do something about Myfanwy. Despite being a worry, and a big flying lizard, he found her company soothing. Her demands on him were blessedly uncomplex. All she wanted in life was to eat, shriek, and fly, and she couldn’t care less if he wobbled or wept occasionally. In London they’d had a cat. At least Myfanwy didn’t get hairs in his coffee.
**********
It happened the first time by accident, at least on Ianto’s part. Jack probably had designs, albeit it not very sophisticated ones, just a quick warm body count. Fortunately Jack could make that kind of exchange without thinking very hard about it too. It was late in the evening, that dark space past ten o’clock, and Ianto had thought they had the place to themselves; himself, Myfanwy up above, and Lisa down below, three levels of life forms all haunting the hub. Suzie, Owen and Tosh had retired to their respective pits after an uneventful day, and Jack had gone out hunting weevils, or so he’d told Ianto with a wolfish grin. Ianto wasn’t sure if this was meant to be a euphemism or not. He almost asked to go along, partly because Jack seemed to expect it, and doing what Jack expected had become second nature, and partly because his head was filling up with cobwebs, and he could have done with shifting them. He was getting so good at his act, it took him a moment to remember sometimes why he couldn’t just go gadding, cobwebs or not. There was too much at stake.
For a time he sat with Lisa, sinking until his body became a dead weight of muscle fused to his seat. He was too tired to read, so he just sat and stared. She was asleep, if you could use that word to describe a state so unrestive, her brow scrunched, and her eyes alive and flickering beneath closed lids. Ianto watched until his vision blurred and his eyes refused to focus. He thought he might have fallen asleep himself for a time, because when he came back to awareness, it was with a jolt, and his mouth tasted thick and dry. All around him was silent, but the silence was like a live thing, and the darkness and the spaces of the hub loomed around him. It did not feel safe. He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead and she flinched and twitched at his touch. He left her with a puzzled frown on her sleeping face.
He was not running away, he told himself. He had work to do. Always work to do. Myfanwy started kicking up a racket as soon as she saw him moving around. He collected his equipment and Myfanwy’s supper from the big fridge in the medical bay, taking advantage of his slurring vision to avoid focusing on the alien viscera which Owen saw fit not to bother concealing. Bucket of fish heads in hand, he climbed to the gantry that was the highest point of the hub where Myfanwy flew in ceaseless circles, calling out across the years. A couple of times he stopped to rest, with half a mind to just let himself crumble and roll bonelessly back to the bottom.
When he finally made it, the distance beneath his feet was gratifyingly dizzy. He set up shop on his usual spot, next to a storage cavity which he’d emptied to give himself a bolthole if Myfanwy got too boisterous. She’d taken to clapping her beak in anticipation whenever she saw him approaching, a sound that echoed like a gun shot around the curved roof. Whether this was pterosaur for “Hello,” or “I want to eat you,” Ianto wasn’t quite sure, but it was nice to be acknowledged either way.
Close to, Myfanwy was not unlike a jet plane, or maybe a bat, or maybe what might happen if you crossed the two, a technique Ianto had no doubt there was technology for buried in the archives. As he rolled up his shirt sleeves and slipped on a rubber glove, she started to buzz him, clapping her beak and crying aloud. She passed him, and banked, and passed again, watching him out of each bright amber eye in turn. He removed his whistle from his pocket and dropped the string around his neck, then picked up the bottle of protein sauce and doused the fish heads liberally with it. Pteranodons, according to everything he googled, were meant to be fish eaters, but Myfanwy still needed coaxing. He watched her for a few minutes until her fly-bys got alarmingly close, and then he popped the whistle in his mouth and started to blast on it at intervals. With every blast he threw a fish head, hurling it as hard as he could out into the open space. He was a bad throw, and Myfanwy was a bad catch, and he frequently sent her diving like a gannet into the lower reaches of the hub, but they got into a rhythm, and he caught himself grinning, unguarded. He was so unused to it, his face muscles were aching. He caught himself laughing even, as she rushed close past him, her wings blowing warm, dry air over his upturned face. When she cried out, the echoes made his heart ache. Trapped in the hub, she was oversized and cumbersome; she was made for open oceans and warm air currents, cruising forever against the blessed silence of a prehistoric sky. He wondered if she missed it, or even knew it was gone, and that the cars and the people and the houses weren’t just clumsy terrestrial beasts no stranger than the ones she’d grown up with.
“Let’s call her Elaine,” announced a voice next to him. Ianto jumped so hard he nearly swallowed his whistle. Jack was standing not six feet away from him, leaning on the wall with his arms crossed as though he’d been there for hours. He grinned, and the effect was slightly dazzling. Clearly he had his high beams on tonight. In the end Ianto could come up with no response smoother than an honest one. He blushed and spluttered and fumbled, and said,
“God, you made me jump.” He felt absurdly embarrassed, like he’d been caught with his hand down his pants.
“So I see,” Jack lounged as easy as a big cat. “Hey, no need to stop having fun on my account.” He straightened himself up, and stepped level with Ianto, regarding him calmly and intensely in a way that made Ianto want to look anywhere but back at him.
“Did you get taller?” Jack asked, out of nowhere. Ianto was a couple of inches below Jack’s eye line, but then he thought he always had been. Being inconspicuous was obviously working, or perhaps thinking drab grey thoughts was making him hunch. He had no real answer, and no real way to regain his cool, being up to his elbow in fish heads. He suddenly became conscious that he probably didn’t smell very pleasant, and then wondered why he cared.
“Can I do something for you, sir?” he asked.
“Nope.” Jack said, and stepped forward to lean on the railing next to him, almost aggressive in his casualness. Ianto studied his bucket. Jack was feeling out his welcome, he guessed. Well, a few minutes would keep him happy, and wouldn’t hurt. He tried not to think about what might have happened if he’d been at his other secret project when Jack had sneaked up, though his brain started reeling out horror stories just the same.
“I call her Myfanwy, actually,” he told him, as much to talk over the noise in his brain as anything. “She is Welsh, after all.”
“Did they have Wales in Jurassic times?”
“Cretaceous. And yes.” Really Ianto had no idea, and rather thought not due to shifting landmasses, but Jack seemed to accept his authority. He considered, silent for one moment, head on one side, then stood tall and spread his arms, and began to recite,
“’Myfanwy, Myfanwy…’” His Welsh accent was exaggerated and awful, and he looked at Ianto sideways, inviting him to laugh. Ianto’s heart leapt for his mouth, but he managed to chime in,
“’Before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer…’” He laughed a little laugh which sounded pathetic to his ears. He’d been reading that to Lisa just after they’d first moved, remembering it from A-levels and soothed by the rhythm. Jack studied his face.
“Don’t you like Dylan Thomas?” He asked.
“English A-level,” Ianto replied, slightly nonsensically. And then after a pause, “Funny, I was reading that. Not long ago. It’s what made me think…” he gestured at Myfanwy, now at the furthest point of her radius, a looming ghost in the half dark. He met Jack’s eye again, but his head was dipped and his look was softer. Jack took this as an invitation.
“Isn’t the next line, ‘Will you say yes?’. And I think she did.”
“I think she was only dreaming it though, wasn’t she?”
“True. That’s fairly depressing. Are you okay, Ianto? You look kind of tired. Have you even had a day off yet? I won’t fire you while you’re gone, I promise.”
“I’m fine.” He smiled and tried to make it perky. “Just had a long day. I’m working on something.”
“With wet fish. And a whistle. And a bottle of… what exactly? I’m intrigued.”
“It’s protein sauce.” Ianto explained. “Owen said it was probably dog soup, but I think he was joking. Stinks to high heaven, but it’s very very good for you.”
“I already ate, thanks.”
“Good thing, really. I strongly advise you against trying any. I’m trying to teach her that this is what she eats, so if you get any down your shirt, you’re fair game, I’m afraid.”
Jack shifted to a more comfortable position.
“How come?” He asked.
“It’s the only thing I’ve been able to find that she’ll eat, but she won’t half eat it. I think she’d eat boot leather if you dunked it in this stuff.”
“Yeah, I feel that way about barbeque sauce.”
“The plan is, it’ll stop her eating stuff she shouldn’t. Including me. There is the rather real worry she might eat me.”
“Oh, I don’t think she would eat you,” Jack pretended to consider. “Peck you to pieces, maybe.”
“Not really preferable,” Ianto smiled. It was easier to relax talking about his pet project. “But anyway, Owen says it’s definitely organic, and we can probably synthesize it, so if it gets her eating, as well as sparing our computers and Cardiff’s livestock, it’s killing two birds with one stone. Or two pterodactyls with one condiment.”
“I thought you said she was a pteranodon.”
“Pteranodons are pterodactyls.”
“I give up.” Jack threw his hands up and laughed. “Where’d you find that stuff?”
“In the archives. Where even the alphabetizing is apparently alien.”
“No shit. You’re a brave man even venturing down there. I can’t believe you found barbeque sauce.”
“The bottle leaked over the paperwork, but as near as I can make out, it’s for bottle feeding… something. Something with lots of teeth and even more gills. There was a picture, but it had mostly been eaten.”
Impatient at the pause in her feeding, Myfanwy arced close, crying out and clacking her beak like a hungry fledgling. Ianto gave the whistle a quick blast and lobbed a fish head. It went spiralling down into the darkness and she dropped like a stone in pursuit.
“Why the whistle?” Jack asked, watching her go.
“That’s her recall cue. I’ve started letting her out at night, see, and I thought we ought to be able to get her back in a hurry if we need to. I’m conditioning her that the whistle means food, so hopefully when she hears it, wherever she is, she’ll come running. It’s like Pavlov’s dogs. Except with a pterodactyl.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea, letting her out? People might see.”
“She’s bored. If we keep her banged up in here forever, we’ll be lucky if computers is all she eats. I’ve been keeping an eye on the papers, and nothing so far. Well, a few sheep, but they seem to blame that on the big cats, and who knows, it even might be. If it’s a real problem, I’ll look at other options. Perception filter collar maybe.”
“You’re pretty thorough, aren’t you?” said Jack, after a pause. He sounded approving.
“I do my best, sir.”
“So it’s as simple as that? You whistle, she comes?”
“And drools a little, but I’m not sure what to do about that. It’s a reflexive response.”
“I know about those.”
Ianto believed him. Myfanwy soared back into his line of sight, her beak working. Her skin was the colour and texture of dead leaves, but her eye was as bright as a toad’s. He threw her another fish, forgetting to whistle, and she snatched it neatly from the air.
“She is something, isn’t she,” Jack remarked.
“She is that.”
Jack sat down on the gantry and dangled his legs, and after a moment, Ianto sat beside him, peeling off his rubber glove and dumping in the bucket. They were silent for a few minutes, but it wasn’t awkward. Myfanwy had charisma which drew the eye, and so did Jack if it came to that. Ianto kept looking at his bucket, not allowing his eye to be drawn. It would be too easy, he realised, to forget just what he was doing here, and that they weren’t just two people at liberty to make friends, or… whatever Jack did when he was making friends. All too easy to fall into the pretence that this was his life, where he was allowed to grow fond of pterodactyls and give them stupid pet names. These little things he did, he saw, were a sop to keep himself happy, to stop himself rebelling at the pressure. There was such a fine line between himself and something he didn’t want to gaze on, utter panic in the shadows at the edge of his vision. But he could not afford to forget that Jack was the most dangerous person in the world to him right now.
He had been doing so well. Lisa would be proud of him one day. All sorts of things he’d dealt with. The bodies had been the worst. Junior researchers just didn’t take care of that kind of disposal at Torchwood One. He’d never even seen a dead person before the battle, and that had hardly prepared him. The first time he’d seen someone, a dead girl, lying on Owen’s slab, it had nearly undone him. Floodgates had opened, and he’d had to take himself quietly to the archives, blessing God and the gods and anyone else who’d listen that no one ever paid attention to where he went. Once there he sat down on the floor, hard, his hands shaking and his vision grey. For a time, he was right back in there, trapped in a maze of smoke and stairs, running down endless corridors, always the wrong bloody way. He could do nothing but breathe in and out, trying to feel the hard floor beneath his knees and hear the silence, conscious that there was nothing more to him than muscle and meat and a few bags of air. If anyone had come looking for him then, he would have been beyond faking anything.
But nobody did. And it passed away, and his vision returned, and his ears stopped ringing, and when he could, he got up, and he carried on. Owen was well into his work by the time he came back up, cutting, and discarding, switching utensils with the intensity of an artist. She looked more like anatomy than person by then, and that made it easier. Ianto had leant over the railing for a few minutes and watched, concentrating every molecule of his being on looking merely casually interested. He concentrated so hard it almost started to work, until Owen dumped the girl’s internal organs back into her chest cavity, folded the flaps of skin back into place and started to stitch her up. Ianto moved off as though he were simply continuing with his working day, managing even to nod a greeting at Tosh and to meet Jack’s eye and smile. He took himself calmly and casually to the toilet, and once in there threw up everything he’d ever eaten. Later, he’d sat in the archives and flicked through autopsy reports, studying the pictures until he stopped seeing properly.
And it had worked. Barely three days later, he’d been standing over somebody else dead, chewing idly on his nail and wondering vaguely how best to move this one without all the guts falling out. Owen was useful here - he’d helped him shift the body, and was surprisingly affable all of a sudden, though Ianto was conscious all the time he’d be mocked if he showed weakness. At least it gave him something to measure his performance by. He did not get mocked.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Jack asked him, cutting into his thoughts. Funny, he didn’t look dangerous. “I mean… no offence… and actually, I think you look great, but you do look, well, awful. I mean, it’s been a month. That’s not really a long time.”
Ianto raised his head and met Jack’s eye. The angle of his jaw was a challenge which he couldn’t help. He just dared Jack to mention Canary Wharf, he just dared him. Appearing in his personal space from nowhere without warning was one thing, but this was one violation too many. Not that Ianto could actually do anything about it, whatever Jack said. He had no consequences to offer, considering that shouting, crying, running away, having another ‘Nam style flashback, or pushing Jack off the gantry were all likely to raise suspicion. With a sigh he dropped his head again, the set of his shoulders defeated.
“I prefer to be busy,” he said instead. “Really.”
Jack gave a little shrug.
“You know you best,” he said. “But if you want some time off, just take it. You’re just as entitled to it as anyone. Everyone else, for example, appears to have gone home.”
“Except you,” Ianto couldn’t help pointing out. Jack laughed and shrugged again. He reached out and squeezed Ianto’s knee in what he took to be a comforting gesture, except that the hand seemed to stay there. Ianto looked down at it as though he had never seen the like, but he didn’t move away.
Myfanwy seemed to be full. She gusted past, the sheer size of her ruffling their hair, but her sweep was less urgent, and her calling less frequent. He’d let her out, Ianto thought, just as soon as he moved. He followed her with his eyes as she circled the perimeter, tilting this way and that like a leathery glider.
“By the light of the pterodactyl moon,” Jack said dreamily.
“You like a bit of drama, don’t you sir,” Ianto replied. Jack looked at him again, his head on one side like Myfanwy’s and he licked his lips just a little and Ianto didn’t look away. If he’d looked away it wouldn’t have happened. He told himself he didn’t realise that till afterwards. Jack leaned closer and tilted his head, and Ianto looked at his eye lashes. Jack touched a hand to Ianto’s jaw line and pressed his lips to Ianto’s lips. The pads of his fingers were rough but warm. A long moment seemed to pass, and Jack’s lips lingered, not doing a lot, but most definitely there, until Ianto opened his mouth minutely, and suddenly Jack was everything. He inhaled sharply and Jack’s breath rushed into him and he had to push back or be pushed over. He closed his eyes tight and thought of nothing as hard as he could. When they broke Ianto found his hands were twisted in Jack’s braces while Jack’s hands were in his hair. His heart was running like a rabbit and his head was spinning so hard he thought for a minute he’d fallen off the gantry.
“Oh God,” he said.
“I prefer Jack,” Jack told him. Ianto didn’t laugh. He didn’t do anything, except stare at Jack with an expression of faint incomprehension, as though he were something totally incongruous, a frog in a teapot. This didn’t seem quite the reaction Jack was accustomed to. He pulled back and frowned.
“Ianto,” he said. “I don’t want to sound like a stuck record here, but you’re pulling a face like someone just hit you with one of your own wet fish. Are you sure you’re alright? I mean, was that okay? If I was way out of line or something…”
Ianto shook himself out of his reverie.
“No, no,” he said. “I’m fine. It’s just you kiss… good,” he finished lamely. Oh God, he said to himself, why not just fall off and be done with it. Myfanwy improvises better than you do.
“Ah, the old Harkness black magic,” Jack grinned again, back on the high beams. It must be wonderful to be that happy, Ianto reflected. Jack settled back down to watch Myfanwy like nothing had happened.
“You know,” he announced suddenly, after a few minutes had passed in which Ianto tried to marshal his dizziness and failed. “Years ago, I visited this place… All your 18-30 types used to go there, or 180-300, or whatever their metabolisms, but a typical party planet, you know. Multicoloured cocktails and music to make your ears bleed. Like, literally. It was kind of scary. But every night at sunset, there were firebirds. Big as Myfanwy, and twice as mean, but oh boy… they were orange and gold, and every colour in between, so many shades they seemed to burn with it. We used to lie out on the hillside and we’d watch them. You closed your eyes, and you still saw them, blazing on your eyelids. ‘Course a lot of people used to miss that, with the bleeding ears and all… but I saw it a few times. It was really quite something.”
“A planet?” Ianto said. Jack looked at him sideways.
“Uh-huh.”
Ianto sensed he was supposed to ask more, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to know, truth be told. Or to speak. Or to anything. He shifted his weight uncomfortably, and then became aware of the source of his discomfort, shifted again, and cursed himself for being so obvious. Why Jack couldn’t keep his eyes to himself was beyond him.
“Ianto…” he began again, but then his mobile chirruped, making Ianto jump right out of his skin. Jack slipped it out of his pocket and flicked it open.
“Owen?” he said into it, and frowned into the darkness. Ianto took advantage of the shift in scrutiny, and stared straight ahead, trying to breathe and think unsexy thoughts. Myfanwy, Myfanwy, Myfanwy.
“You were what?” Jack frowned. “Oh come on… well, didn’t she look like…? Owen, it’s the eyes, I told you before, you have to check. If they have a third one… I don’t care how sexy… No make-up is that effective. It’s a third eye, for crying out loud... She did what? … Where are you? I’ll be right there... What, are you going to unstick yourself? I’ll be right there, I said.” He shut his phone with a flick of the wrist.
“Um,” he said. “Owen has a little problem…”
Ianto had composure. He had fought hard for it, but won.
“So I hear,” he said.
“I’d better go and… well, I’d better be quick, because the next stage is spawning, and that never ends well. You, um… should go home to sleep.”
Ianto nodded. He really should. Jack was half way to the stairs when he paused and turned back.
“Or,” he said. “I won’t be very long. Half an hour. Three quarters, max. You could meet me in my office. If you want to.”
Ianto nodded, his throat dry. Nodding, he told himself, to say he understood, not that he’d be there. Before he’d even finished, Jack was gone.
******
The walls around Jack’s office were made of glass. It was both disconcerting and difficult to clean. With the hub dark beyond, Ianto could see his own reflection. He looked at it every morning, to shave and straighten his tie, but suddenly he was seeing. He’d lost weight. His eyes were ringed with shadows. He wished he hadn’t taken his tie off before coming here, he felt quite naked without it.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Jack said, behind him. Ianto didn’t turn around, but met Jack’s eyes in his reflection instead.
“Here I am,” he said. He hadn’t been going to. There’d been no question that he’d ever go. He would go back down to Lisa, and Jack would think he had gone home, or he would actually go home, a crazy notion, but more plausible none the less than his coming here. But then what? That would only pique Jack’s interest. Ianto had given him too many signs that could be interpreted as interest to count on him backing down. He’d be pursued. He’d be considered. He’d be all the things he didn’t want to be. He’d have Jack sneaking up quiet as a cat all over the place, and in a very short space of time, that would spell disaster. And all because he couldn’t just break eye contact. And because you kissed him like your life depended on it. So, another thing for the list then. Another sorry. He’d been making mistakes all evening, and he’d do what it took to put this right now, even if it meant being the crappest shag in history so that Jack would lose interest. In the end, it would hardly matter, who would ever know, and they’d be gone from here, him and Lisa, back to London, off to Mars, as far away from Jack bloody Harkness with his sodding planets and his fucking tongue as it was humanly possible to be. He focused on that thought. Far away. Tongue. He watched Jack’s reflection move closer behind him.
“You didn’t have to, you know that, right?” Jack told him. “It’s not actually a requirement of the job. I mean, I do understand there are people out there somewhere who just don’t want to bang me, so if you’re one of those…”
Say yes.
“No, I’m fine,” he said, through slightly gritted teeth. Making it worse.
“It’s just you look a little…”
“I’m fine.” Almost a snap.
“Been a while, huh?” Jack’s hand brushed the back of his neck.
“Something like that.”
Jack’s hand paused.
“Is this your first time? With a guy, I mean?”
“No,” Ianto lied. He saw Jack’s reflection smile, but the glass was distorting, and he couldn’t read the meaning. Jack reached around and undid the top button of Ianto’s shirt.
“We can take it nice and slow.”
“Whatever,” Ianto said aloud. The voice in his head appeared to be screaming.
Jack moved his hand up into Ianto’s hair and kissed him on the back of the neck. Though Ianto saw it coming in the mirror, the touch still made him flinch a little. His teeth, he found, were clenched, and his fists were tight. He forced his muscles into a relaxed pose. Jack’s breath tickled, and his lips were warm and soft, nuzzling in the fine hairs at Ianto’s hair line. The hand in his hair swept forward, rifling and twisting, while Jack’s other arm slipped down around his waist.
“Relax,” Jack whispered to his neck.
“I am,” Ianto answered through a jaw so tight it hurt.
“Um-hmm,” Jack said against his skin. It buzzed. He splayed his fingers against Ianto’s stomach, pressing their bodies together.
“I like you this height,” he told him. “Short guys give me a crick in the neck.”
Jack’s warmth was pleasant on his aching muscles. Ianto closed his eyes. He kept his hands by his side, unsure what to do with them, but Jack didn’t seem to mind. He kissed his neck again, all the way along the hair line, and then swept his tongue across the top of Ianto’s spine. One hand still pressed him close, and the other started to wander down from his hair, spidering over his face and under his chin, lifting his head back as Jack’s mouth moved along his shoulder, pressing through his shirt. Fingers caressed round his throat and Adam’s apple. Ianto exhaled. It was all he could do with Jack’s fingers under his chin. The tautness of the muscles in his neck increased sensation. He wanted to moan, but didn’t know quite how.
Quite abruptly Jack let go. Ianto opened his eyes and found Jack’s reflection smiling at him wickedly.
“Still with me?” He asked. Ianto swallowed and nodded. His skin felt alive where Jack’s hands had been. Jack reached forward and brushed his cheek, then leaned and kissed him on the ear.
“Good,” he said. He put his hands on Ianto’s hips and pulled him back into him. Ianto felt hardness through fabric pressing at the small of his back. He felt far too shell-shocked for a similar response of his own, but Jack seemed undeterred. His hands were wandering again, his lips on Ianto’s neck again, the kisses getting wider and wetter. Ianto shifted his hips minutely, pushing backwards tentatively. Jack swept an arm around his waist again and pulled him tight and close. There were teeth, then, at the nape of his neck. Ianto wriggled, or struggled, or did something, and Jack made a noise half way between a giggle and a growl.
A thumb sneaked between the buttons of his shirt and pressed into his navel. The other hand ghosted round the hollow of his throat. Ianto couldn’t help it, he leaned, and he moaned, his eyes pressed closed again, beyond pretending he had any clue what he was doing. He tried to think of Lisa, but all his mind gave him were comparisons, how big Jack was compared to her, how strong, how physical, the pressure in his touch, the roughness of his fingers, the scraping of his stubble. Little shudders ran through him, and for a moment, he thought he might cry out, but Jack was there in his ear, crooning soothing noises. Nothing else to do now, he told himself, can’t back out now, he’d know, you shouldn’t have come, but you can’t stop now. The logical part of his brain tested this statement for truth and found it water tight. It relieved him of a burden. He relaxed, and sank back into Jack, pressing himself and shifting until every part of them that could be touching was touching. Jack’s hand had slipped down to his thigh and was squeezing it with splayed fingers. Jack’s hips had started to move a little, not much, and not hard, but a definite movement, a tense and release against Ianto’s buttocks. Ianto let his own hands move backwards, setting up base on Jack’s hips, and feeling for his rhythm. Fully clothed as they both were, he felt safe enough to match it, even as Jack untucked his shirt and slid his hand up his stomach.
He opened his eyes again, and caught himself in the glass, noting abstractly the muss of his hair, the flush of his face and the sheen of sweat on his forehead. His eyes looked huge. Jack’s face was still buried in the back of his neck, and his tongue was doing ridiculous things to that hitherto unsuspected erogenous zone. Ianto tasted salt on his own lip and closed his eyes. Time to worry about everything else tomorrow. Jack had one thumb in the hollow of his throat again, and hardly any pressure there was enough to make him squirm, but it still didn’t escape his notice where the other hand was going.
“Oh God,” he moaned aloud.
“I love the way you say that,” Jack told him “You say it like you’re actually talking to someone.”
Now was possibly not the time for a theological debate, so Ianto made no answer. Jack’s spare hand had gone to his crotch, and had started stroking, feeling through the fabric for the shape of him. The thrust of Jack’s hips picked up a notch. The thumb at Ianto’s throat seemed nonchalant but it was such an absurdly sensitive point that it trapped him, unable to move except with Jack’s tempo without pushing the thumb deeper in. He moved his own hand back and pinched Jack’s buttock, objecting, and when Jack only laughed, he leant back into him with all his weight, hard enough to make him take a step back and dislodge his hands. Disengaged, Jack met his eyes in the mirror. Ianto returned his gaze calmly. He may have even smirked. Jack pushed him playfully between the shoulders with the flat of both hands, and then caught him round the waist to stop him falling forwards.
“Oh yes,” Jack said to his shoulder as he bit it. “Where was I, then?”
“I have no idea,” Ianto gasped. Jack laughed again, and hooked his fingers through Ianto’s belt loops, shifting his weight around until he found the rhythm he liked. He was pushing harder now, more insistent, and Ianto pressed a hand against the glass to give him leverage to answer. He closed his eyes and focused on the rhythm, nothing else, let his head fill up with wide open spaces to keep out the noise. Jack moved to his crotch again, grasping Ianto’s cock though the fabric, gripping with his fingers and teasing with his thumb. The other hand released Ianto’s belt loop and slid down between their bodies, fumbling at the fastening of his own trousers.
“Not doing anything,” Jack said, as Ianto made to twist around. “Just giving myself a little room, is all.”
The thrusting continued, a more definite bump and slide against his lower back now, but Ianto was equal to it, and matched his pace, pushing with insistence into Jack’s hand and hissing nonsense words between his teeth. The friction through the fabric was intense, but when Jack thumbed the top button of his trousers with a practiced flick and plunged his hand down, he was lost. All there was now was rhythm, and somebody was moaning, and Ianto didn’t quite know who. He twisted his head to the side as he came and was met by Jack’s teeth on his cheekbone. Jack’s thrusting became erratic, and his grip tightened. He swore in hot puffs of air in Ianto’s ear, and he shuddered, and Ianto opened his eyes and met reality, thinking belatedly of his shirt as he felt the wetness spread there.
“Fuck,” he said. It was all he could think of.
“I’ll say,” Jack answered. He gave Ianto’s spent cock a friendly squeeze and dropped another kiss on his neck line, affectionate, not sexy this time. They disengaged. Ianto buttoned up the parts of him that had come undone. He turned and met Jack’s eyes properly for the first time since he’d entered the room. Jack was pushing his hair out of his face and reordering his braces. If there was an etiquette for a moment like this, Ianto didn’t know it.
In the end, he just went to make coffee. It seemed like the thing to do.