Advent '10 Fic: Daddy Issues
Title: Daddy Issues
Author: heddychaa
Characters: Jack/Ianto
Rating: R
Genre: Character study
Wordcount: ~1803
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and Torchwood's characters, concepts, and events belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, and the BBC.
Summary: Ianto and Jack wrap Christmas presents. It's just as awkward for both of them as it sounds.
A/N: Advent fic 22, this one for wildeagain, who requested "The Christmas spirit ruined for wee Ianto". This is a long one! And a total promptfail, but oh well, I tried my best. Thank you to azn_jack_fiend, _lullabelle_, and count_to_seven for the support and beta for all of this month's stories!
Daddy Issues
“Ian-to!” Jack calls as he shoulders his way through the Tourist Centre door. A cold breeze, littered with snowflakes, follows him in and hits Ianto, behind the desk, full force. It’s a permeating wet cold, the kind that nefariously sinks into your body inch by inch until it claims your bones.
“Ja-ack!” Ianto calls back, mimicking Jack’s tone and wrapping his arms around himself irritably, “Shut the bloody door, would you?”
Jack flashes him a sheepish smile and kicks one foot back. Behind him, the door slams shut, taking the sound of the wind with it. They’re left with the sound of the ancient computer on the desk chugging away, the high-pitched crackle of its old monitor, the hesitant clicking of the bead curtain at Ianto’s back as it settles and goes still. Ianto stares at Jack across the desk and shivers out the last of the cold from his body.
Jack’s cheeks and nose are ruddy, the collar of his coat turned up to cover his neck and chin, and there are a few fast-melting snowflakes dangling in his hair. His arms are full to the point of overflowing with shopping bags, brown paper packages, that sort of thing.
Jack notices him staring at his armload and twitches a smile. It’s that same look as always, the look that says, ‘Oh Ianto, I forget how brilliant and talented you are ninety-percent of the time, except for when I happen to benefit from exploiting said brilliance and talents.’
He dumps the collected packages and bags across Ianto’s desk with a horrible clatter. Ianto rolls his chair back three inches and crosses his legs.
“How’s your attention to detail?” Jack asks, and Ianto just raises an eyebrow, “Would you rate yourself as a perfectionist?”
“Do I even need to answer that?” Ianto replies, poking distastefully at one of the bags in his line of vision.
“Good enough for me. Okay. Wait here!” Jack seems to bounce in place, putting up his hands like telling a dog to stay, good boy, stay and then he’s out the door again. Ianto shrinks back from the blast of cold air he lets in.
It only takes about thirty seconds for Ianto’s curiosity to get the best of him. He pokes through the packages and realizes very quickly that they’re Christmas presents, for a little boy it looks like, almost generic-seeming. There’s an RC car, red with two white stripes down the bonnet; an ADIDAS football; several t-shirts; the latest iPod, in green; four or five DVDs; an obscene amount of chocolate; and then, in the last bag, a stack of Christmas picture books, not quite age-appropriate by the looks of it.
Jack returns just then, arms full again, this time with shiny tubes of wrapping paper and sticky bows and a roll of sellotape in his teeth. The door slams shut behind him and he spits the tape roll onto Ianto’s desk.
“I need your help wrapping these,” he explains. “I’m rubbish at it. I like the striped paper but I can never get it to line up on the ends.”
“Oh, to make a square?” Ianto asks, absently, sorting through the picture books without really looking at them. “Who are these for, anyway? You have a lovechild I don’t know about?”
Jack snorts as he lets the wrapping paper roll out of his forearms and onto the desk. “No, no, don’t be-no. They’re for a friend’s kid.”
Ianto lets that one slide, biting back, “You have friends?” instead. He stacks the gifts, arranging them by size.
“Smartass,” Jack snaps, “Are you gonna help me or not?”
“Of course I’m going to help you,” Ianto replies. He reaches for his favourite scissors and cuts the air with them. “Never could resist a bit of shiny ribbon.”
They wrap the RC car first, Jack making a face when Ianto asks if he remembered batteries. “It’s a wonder you ever survived without me,” he says, and then feels sorry for it when Jack winces.
They pass the rest of the time in mindless conversation, Jack half-whistling-half-singing old Bing Crosby Christmas tunes and Ianto occasionally recruiting him to pin down the paper with his finger or tear a piece of sellotape or run his thumbnail over a crease.
“What was Christmas like for you, growing up?” Jack asks, and Ianto doesn’t look up from the tricky work of wrapping a jumper without having a shirt box for it.
“Pretty much universally disappointing,” he replies, blandly, and puts out his hand. “Tape.”
Jack doesn’t ask him to elaborate on that, so he doesn’t (not that he’d have told the truth even if Jack had asked). Instead, Jack tells him about the time he and John spent Christmas eve in jail and the lady guard had snuck them booze and then, the next morning, slipped them her number and Ianto calls him a liar and Jack looks mock-offended and Ianto laughs.
The pile of wrapped presents grows, Ianto taking care to stack them neatly, all shiny paper and curled ribbon and coordinating sticky bows, red and green and silver. The second last gift to wrap is one of the age-inappropriate picture books: “The Bears’ Christmas”, a book Ianto remembers well, even if the cover’s been updated somewhere between now and when he was five.
He holds it in his hands, just staring at the cover, tracing the line of the spine with his thumb.
“Alright?” Jack asks, interrupting him, and rolls out another length of paper across the desk. Ianto lays the book down in the middle of it, picking up the scissors. “You know that one? The woman at the store said it was pretty good, but I dunno.”
“Yeah, I do,” Ianto replies. He cuts the paper, but can’t bring himself to fold it around the book. Instead, he presses his palm flat to the cover, remembering the shape and feel of it. “I had a copy when I was a kid. Rhi-Rhiannon read it to me every Christmas, up until I got too cool for bedtime stories, that is.”
Jack quirks a tender smile: that privileged, wondering expression he gets sometimes when Ianto accidentally opens up to him. “You must have liked it,” he says, sounding more than a little hopeful, “When you were younger I mean.”
Ianto opens the cover, staring down at the illustration on the first page. “Not really, no,” he says. He draws a finger over the lines of Papa Bear: the loop of his nose, the jagged shape of his fur. “I always thought it was false advertising, you know? Put Christmas up on this happy pedestal that my life could never even hope of duplicating, and maybe if I didn’t know any better it never would have mattered, but I did know better.”
“Huh,” Jack says. Ianto can’t meet his eyes.
He closes the book decisively and pulls the wrapping paper to cover it. Jack hands him an inch-long strip of tape. “I’d get up on Christmas morning expecting snow, and there’d just be two inches of slush, and I’d get up wanting to make snow angels or god forbid a snow man, and my Mam’d just ban me from going outside because I’d only get wet but you know, even if I wanted to go outside, it wouldn’t look like the Christmas in my head, the way I thought Christmas should be. I’d want big green pine trees dusted with frost and I’d get another goddamn streetlight grey and bleak, like a boy’s first Bladerunner.”
Jack hands him the ribbon, green and glittery. Ianto measures it by eye and cuts it. “And it’s all well and good to say presents don’t count to have a lovely Christmas, and it’s about togetherness, but-” he tugs the ribbon roughly into a knot, loops the bow “-but what if you don’t have the presents or the togetherness, Jack? What then?”
“So what I’m hearing is... it’s not your favourite holiday, then?” Jack jokes, nervously. He sets the gift aside and takes Ianto’s hand in his own. Ianto gives him a squeeze, then continues on, almost compulsively,
“But the worst thing, the absolute worst thing? It wasn’t Father Christmas not existing or there never being proper snow or there not being presents even if you were ‘Nice’ or having to make do with a plastic tree if anything at all, it was my father. Because he could never measure up to that ideal, and you know, I always felt like if he didn’t measure up, it must be because I didn’t measure up, either.”
He realizes, belatedly, that his eyes are a bit wet, frustrated tears, and he starts to laugh. “Bet you’d have never guessed your boyfriend that’s not even half your age would turn out to have Daddy issues, eh?”
He laughs until he starts to hiccup, and Jack laughs along, and just the sound of that makes Ianto feel better, if only because there’s no judgment or discomfort in it, only a hint of bitter commiseration. When they quiet down, Jack watches thoughtfully as Ianto begins the work of putting all the wrapped gifts into shopping bags.
He doesn’t realize he’s talking again until it’s too late. “There was this one year, I think I was seven, maybe? It was just after my mother died. Christmas was this completely hollow affair, and we had the tree up but nobody ever bothered to string the lights in it, and there was nobody to cook a proper Christmas dinner, and I got it in mind that if only we could all go skating, then everything would be alright and everything would be normal and we would save Christmas.”
“And?” Jack asks.
“I pestered my father all morning about it until he finally hopped out of his chair, and I thought we were going to do it, and then I saw the cruelty in his smile as he said, and I’ll never forget it, ‘I’ll just run out into the garden and run the hose to make us a rink, shall I?’” And there he goes again, laughing, and he can picture the whole scene, the smell of the living room, the colour of his father’s chair, the half-decorated Christmas tree, all of it.
At first Jack doesn’t respond, just sits blinking and staring off into the distance, and Ianto realizes he’s waiting for something. Ianto’s hands ball into fists. “We didn’t have a garden, Jack,” he grits out.
“Oh,” Jack says.
It’s awkward, so Ianto excuses himself.
--
A week later, on Christmas Eve, Jack hands him a large, poorly-wrapped package. Smiles earnestly and says, “Go on, open it!”
It’s a big, butch pair of black men’s hockey skates, blades gleaming silver.
“That’s fucked up,” Ianto says. “Thank you.”
Author: heddychaa
Characters: Jack/Ianto
Rating: R
Genre: Character study
Wordcount: ~1803
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and Torchwood's characters, concepts, and events belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, and the BBC.
Summary: Ianto and Jack wrap Christmas presents. It's just as awkward for both of them as it sounds.
A/N: Advent fic 22, this one for wildeagain, who requested "The Christmas spirit ruined for wee Ianto". This is a long one! And a total promptfail, but oh well, I tried my best. Thank you to azn_jack_fiend, _lullabelle_, and count_to_seven for the support and beta for all of this month's stories!
Daddy Issues
“Ian-to!” Jack calls as he shoulders his way through the Tourist Centre door. A cold breeze, littered with snowflakes, follows him in and hits Ianto, behind the desk, full force. It’s a permeating wet cold, the kind that nefariously sinks into your body inch by inch until it claims your bones.
“Ja-ack!” Ianto calls back, mimicking Jack’s tone and wrapping his arms around himself irritably, “Shut the bloody door, would you?”
Jack flashes him a sheepish smile and kicks one foot back. Behind him, the door slams shut, taking the sound of the wind with it. They’re left with the sound of the ancient computer on the desk chugging away, the high-pitched crackle of its old monitor, the hesitant clicking of the bead curtain at Ianto’s back as it settles and goes still. Ianto stares at Jack across the desk and shivers out the last of the cold from his body.
Jack’s cheeks and nose are ruddy, the collar of his coat turned up to cover his neck and chin, and there are a few fast-melting snowflakes dangling in his hair. His arms are full to the point of overflowing with shopping bags, brown paper packages, that sort of thing.
Jack notices him staring at his armload and twitches a smile. It’s that same look as always, the look that says, ‘Oh Ianto, I forget how brilliant and talented you are ninety-percent of the time, except for when I happen to benefit from exploiting said brilliance and talents.’
He dumps the collected packages and bags across Ianto’s desk with a horrible clatter. Ianto rolls his chair back three inches and crosses his legs.
“How’s your attention to detail?” Jack asks, and Ianto just raises an eyebrow, “Would you rate yourself as a perfectionist?”
“Do I even need to answer that?” Ianto replies, poking distastefully at one of the bags in his line of vision.
“Good enough for me. Okay. Wait here!” Jack seems to bounce in place, putting up his hands like telling a dog to stay, good boy, stay and then he’s out the door again. Ianto shrinks back from the blast of cold air he lets in.
It only takes about thirty seconds for Ianto’s curiosity to get the best of him. He pokes through the packages and realizes very quickly that they’re Christmas presents, for a little boy it looks like, almost generic-seeming. There’s an RC car, red with two white stripes down the bonnet; an ADIDAS football; several t-shirts; the latest iPod, in green; four or five DVDs; an obscene amount of chocolate; and then, in the last bag, a stack of Christmas picture books, not quite age-appropriate by the looks of it.
Jack returns just then, arms full again, this time with shiny tubes of wrapping paper and sticky bows and a roll of sellotape in his teeth. The door slams shut behind him and he spits the tape roll onto Ianto’s desk.
“I need your help wrapping these,” he explains. “I’m rubbish at it. I like the striped paper but I can never get it to line up on the ends.”
“Oh, to make a square?” Ianto asks, absently, sorting through the picture books without really looking at them. “Who are these for, anyway? You have a lovechild I don’t know about?”
Jack snorts as he lets the wrapping paper roll out of his forearms and onto the desk. “No, no, don’t be-no. They’re for a friend’s kid.”
Ianto lets that one slide, biting back, “You have friends?” instead. He stacks the gifts, arranging them by size.
“Smartass,” Jack snaps, “Are you gonna help me or not?”
“Of course I’m going to help you,” Ianto replies. He reaches for his favourite scissors and cuts the air with them. “Never could resist a bit of shiny ribbon.”
They wrap the RC car first, Jack making a face when Ianto asks if he remembered batteries. “It’s a wonder you ever survived without me,” he says, and then feels sorry for it when Jack winces.
They pass the rest of the time in mindless conversation, Jack half-whistling-half-singing old Bing Crosby Christmas tunes and Ianto occasionally recruiting him to pin down the paper with his finger or tear a piece of sellotape or run his thumbnail over a crease.
“What was Christmas like for you, growing up?” Jack asks, and Ianto doesn’t look up from the tricky work of wrapping a jumper without having a shirt box for it.
“Pretty much universally disappointing,” he replies, blandly, and puts out his hand. “Tape.”
Jack doesn’t ask him to elaborate on that, so he doesn’t (not that he’d have told the truth even if Jack had asked). Instead, Jack tells him about the time he and John spent Christmas eve in jail and the lady guard had snuck them booze and then, the next morning, slipped them her number and Ianto calls him a liar and Jack looks mock-offended and Ianto laughs.
The pile of wrapped presents grows, Ianto taking care to stack them neatly, all shiny paper and curled ribbon and coordinating sticky bows, red and green and silver. The second last gift to wrap is one of the age-inappropriate picture books: “The Bears’ Christmas”, a book Ianto remembers well, even if the cover’s been updated somewhere between now and when he was five.
He holds it in his hands, just staring at the cover, tracing the line of the spine with his thumb.
“Alright?” Jack asks, interrupting him, and rolls out another length of paper across the desk. Ianto lays the book down in the middle of it, picking up the scissors. “You know that one? The woman at the store said it was pretty good, but I dunno.”
“Yeah, I do,” Ianto replies. He cuts the paper, but can’t bring himself to fold it around the book. Instead, he presses his palm flat to the cover, remembering the shape and feel of it. “I had a copy when I was a kid. Rhi-Rhiannon read it to me every Christmas, up until I got too cool for bedtime stories, that is.”
Jack quirks a tender smile: that privileged, wondering expression he gets sometimes when Ianto accidentally opens up to him. “You must have liked it,” he says, sounding more than a little hopeful, “When you were younger I mean.”
Ianto opens the cover, staring down at the illustration on the first page. “Not really, no,” he says. He draws a finger over the lines of Papa Bear: the loop of his nose, the jagged shape of his fur. “I always thought it was false advertising, you know? Put Christmas up on this happy pedestal that my life could never even hope of duplicating, and maybe if I didn’t know any better it never would have mattered, but I did know better.”
“Huh,” Jack says. Ianto can’t meet his eyes.
He closes the book decisively and pulls the wrapping paper to cover it. Jack hands him an inch-long strip of tape. “I’d get up on Christmas morning expecting snow, and there’d just be two inches of slush, and I’d get up wanting to make snow angels or god forbid a snow man, and my Mam’d just ban me from going outside because I’d only get wet but you know, even if I wanted to go outside, it wouldn’t look like the Christmas in my head, the way I thought Christmas should be. I’d want big green pine trees dusted with frost and I’d get another goddamn streetlight grey and bleak, like a boy’s first Bladerunner.”
Jack hands him the ribbon, green and glittery. Ianto measures it by eye and cuts it. “And it’s all well and good to say presents don’t count to have a lovely Christmas, and it’s about togetherness, but-” he tugs the ribbon roughly into a knot, loops the bow “-but what if you don’t have the presents or the togetherness, Jack? What then?”
“So what I’m hearing is... it’s not your favourite holiday, then?” Jack jokes, nervously. He sets the gift aside and takes Ianto’s hand in his own. Ianto gives him a squeeze, then continues on, almost compulsively,
“But the worst thing, the absolute worst thing? It wasn’t Father Christmas not existing or there never being proper snow or there not being presents even if you were ‘Nice’ or having to make do with a plastic tree if anything at all, it was my father. Because he could never measure up to that ideal, and you know, I always felt like if he didn’t measure up, it must be because I didn’t measure up, either.”
He realizes, belatedly, that his eyes are a bit wet, frustrated tears, and he starts to laugh. “Bet you’d have never guessed your boyfriend that’s not even half your age would turn out to have Daddy issues, eh?”
He laughs until he starts to hiccup, and Jack laughs along, and just the sound of that makes Ianto feel better, if only because there’s no judgment or discomfort in it, only a hint of bitter commiseration. When they quiet down, Jack watches thoughtfully as Ianto begins the work of putting all the wrapped gifts into shopping bags.
He doesn’t realize he’s talking again until it’s too late. “There was this one year, I think I was seven, maybe? It was just after my mother died. Christmas was this completely hollow affair, and we had the tree up but nobody ever bothered to string the lights in it, and there was nobody to cook a proper Christmas dinner, and I got it in mind that if only we could all go skating, then everything would be alright and everything would be normal and we would save Christmas.”
“And?” Jack asks.
“I pestered my father all morning about it until he finally hopped out of his chair, and I thought we were going to do it, and then I saw the cruelty in his smile as he said, and I’ll never forget it, ‘I’ll just run out into the garden and run the hose to make us a rink, shall I?’” And there he goes again, laughing, and he can picture the whole scene, the smell of the living room, the colour of his father’s chair, the half-decorated Christmas tree, all of it.
At first Jack doesn’t respond, just sits blinking and staring off into the distance, and Ianto realizes he’s waiting for something. Ianto’s hands ball into fists. “We didn’t have a garden, Jack,” he grits out.
“Oh,” Jack says.
It’s awkward, so Ianto excuses himself.
--
A week later, on Christmas Eve, Jack hands him a large, poorly-wrapped package. Smiles earnestly and says, “Go on, open it!”
It’s a big, butch pair of black men’s hockey skates, blades gleaming silver.
“That’s fucked up,” Ianto says. “Thank you.”