Fic: If You Know Despair or Can See It in Others [One-Shot]
Title: If You Know Despair or Can See It in Others
Author: heddychaa
Pairings: Ianto/Tosh, Jack/Ianto
Rating: R
Genre: Character Study, set post-"Countrycide"
Disclaimer: Torchwood's characters, concepts, and events belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russell T Davies and the BBC. This is a work of fan-appreciation and no profit is being made.
Summary: Ianto Jones had resolved that, if he was going to die, he would at least do so memorably, with purpose. Instead, he is faced with the day-to-day humiliations of survival, a state of being where even what was supposed to be his final honest gesture can be snatched away from him.
A/N: Title from David Whyte's poem "Self Portrait". Beta-d by _lullabelle_. Thanks for all the love on my last story, folks! We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming of relentless misery.
If You Know Despair or Can See It in Others
This is how it all begins.
He turns to her, chest puffed out all bravado, and says, “Get ready to run.” He says it like he expects them both to make it out.
He doesn’t expect them both to make it out.
He does not (cannot) believe that she would leave him if she knew that he doesn’t expect them both to make it out.
This is how it all begins.
With an unhinged how-do-you-do-sir smile as he hits the self-destruct button at the centre of his own consciousness.
In that blindingly heroic moment he thinks he is ready to die.
He isn’t.
This is how it all begins.
Doubled over on his side, pain everywhere, whimpering like a little boy, like the universe itself is punishing him for ever fancying himself anyone’s hero. No, no, no, the world chides, the words stuttering themselves out in the Morse code of his body, the long pains of his muscles and the short beats of his heart. Not you. You don’t save anyone, you just sit down right here and take what you’re given until we beat this defiant streak out of you.
The pain tightens around him like being tangled in barbed wire, reminding him he is alive. He feels a dog’s self-preservation instinct running through him like blind panic, and writhes around in the darkness, choking on the smell of sweat and blood and tears and snot and viscera. The analytical parts of his mind shut down one by one, until he stops tracking movement, stops eavesdropping on plans. Everything outside him becomes rats in the wall.
This is how it all begins.
Coiling up like a centipede, touching his knees to his chest, his nose to his kneecaps. He plays dead. He wills himself an exoskeleton. He dreams up primordial womb-places where this warm damp human smell, this darkness, can be safe. He wishes there was someone who cared enough to save him.
There are no safe places left for him to retreat to. Not in his mind, and not in this world.
He tries to pretend he’s dead, but the gag biting into the corners of his mouth keeps him present. It’s tearing him at the seams.
This is how it all begins.
When those callused fingers grab him by the face, under the nose rough and intimate. When he feels the cold blade of an old cleaver heavy against his throat.
The light hurts his prehistoric eyes and he makes an animal noise, a sound that rises up from him like it rises from the depths of the Mariana Trench.
This is how it all begins.
Sitting in the back of the ambulance, wrapped up in an emergency blanket, fighting off fever shudders, struggling to regain his composure. It’s all he has left in this awful world that will not let him die and will not let him live. The paramedic smears a cool cream on the friction burns at the corners of his mouth and he puts his head down and starts to weep.
With no witnesses, Jack Harkness pushes a kiss onto his forehead before they close up the ambulance and take him away.
Two days later he’s woken by knocking at the door. He slips off the sofa, rubbing bleary eyes, and opens it without detaching the chain. It’s Toshiko, looking like she hasn’t slept.
All he’s done is slept.
“Can I come in?” she asks. “I brought something to eat.” She tries to make it sound enticing rather than lonely, but he sees through it.
He closes the door, pulls the chain. Opens it again. Steps aside to let her in.
“You look like shit,” she says to him without preamble. She has the decency to sound pitying.
“So do you,” he says, but he doesn’t sound pitying at all.
She laughs humourlessly. “I made onigiri,” she says.
“I didn’t know you cooked.” He closes the door, clicks the deadbolt, reattaches the chain. Leads her into the living room. He can tell she’s sizing up his boxer shorts, his t-shirt from a show he saw in Amsterdam a few years back. Ianto Jones, secret slob, and Toshiko Sato, secret Japanese housewife.
“I don’t. I haven’t even really used the kitchen in my flat. I had to buy a rice cooker especially for these. Called my mother up to find out what brand was good.” She pushes aside the accumulated empty beer bottles on the coffee table to make room and sets down the plastic bag she’s carrying, perching on the edge of his sofa. He sits down beside her, watching her warily.
She unwraps two Tupperware tubs and pries the lids off them both, revealing that each contains two rows of riceballs wrapped in seaweed. They’re a little misshapen and sized unevenly. When she picks one up, a few little hunks of rice fall off. She flicks them off of her lap.
“Comfort food,” she explains. “My mother used to make them for me when I was a kid. I figured we needed them.” She takes a bite. “Well, go on!”
He takes one at her urging, has a bite. It’s sticky and mostly flavourless. She’s a terrible cook.
“How’s the pain?” she asks, mouth full.
He wants to ask her “Which pain?” The pain from losing Lisa? The pain of being left alone on that floor for what felt like hours wondering if he was going to be joining her? The phantom pains of being “tenderized”? The nightmares of suffocating blackness? The post traumatic stress disorder that leads to blind panic gripping him at the smell of his own sweat? The knowledge that he is the expendable one on the team?
“I’m taking paracetamol every couple of hours to keep ahead of it,” he replies, blandly. He washes the rice down with a mouthful of warm beer.
When she doesn’t reply right away, he turns to look at her, even though he’d rather not. She is studying him with one of her scholarly expressions, the one that looks guilty to not be maintaining appropriate emotional distance. The guilt shows in that infinitesimal stitch between her neat eyebrows.
A hunk of sticky rice falls off of the rice ball clutched in her fist. She hasn’t gotten a manicure yet. Since.
“Has Jack visited you?” she asks. The question sounds huge in the empty apartment. Hanging in the air, punctuated by the hum of the fridge.
“No,” he lies.
Jack was here a few hours ago, he doesn’t know how long. Maybe it was yesterday, maybe it was fifteen minutes. He’d shook Ianto’s shoulder to rouse him, gave him water. Kissed him even though Ianto hadn’t brushed his teeth. Hurt the corners of his mouth with all the kissing. Ended with Ianto defiantly smudging tears off with the butts of his palms. They’d fucked for the first time since Lisa in Ianto’s bed, and every time Jack had touched him it had hurt, every palm and every squeeze and every finger and every escaping noise finding bruises. Afterwards, a hesitant hand had brushed Ianto’s hair away from his forehead in a fatherly gesture, and Ianto’d thought for one torturous moment that he was going to stay, and then his big body had risen and before long there was the sound of his boots, the sound of the front door, the lonely absence of his breathing. Neither of them had said one word to the other.
Can’t she smell him? Ianto can smell him all over, like a ghost walking through the apartment: here where he went to the cupboards, to the fridge, and then, resigned, to the sink. Lingering at the couch, where the smell of sex blossoms tentative then sure.
Oh, but she wants to say something else. He pushes at the neck of one of the beer bottles until it tips, taking three more with it like dominoes. They spin together, roll to the floor. There’s the dull thud of glass that doesn’t have the decency to break properly.
“Has he . . . apologized?” She’s put the rice ball back into the Tupperware container, having apparently realized, too, that she is a bad cook. She has her hands folded in her lap like a schoolgirl. He focuses on her chipped nails.
“For what?” he asks. That’s a cheap ploy. He bloody well knows what, but he wants to hear if she can say it aloud, if she can make it real and face it, the way he has had to face it.
But no, she averts her eyes, turns her head. Her ponytail twitches and he catches a shade of her shampoo, mint and rosemary. Sometimes she is surprisingly lovely.
“Ianto,” she says, and the primness is gone from her voice. She is about to be unpredictable and they are bound together by the terror lurking in the possibility. She looks him in the eyes, and her eyes are huge, full of angry questions. He stares back at her, because he has to relearn not to avert his eyes, even though he wants so badly to bow his head to her, to stare at her kneecaps, to stare at her hands, to study the way the light catches the glass of the beer bottles.
She grabs one of his hands in both her own, her grasp clutching and terrorized. “Why did you do it?” she asks, giving a tug that pops his wrist, the joints in his fingers. Her voice shakes.
He lets out a breath through his nose, a long string of a sigh between them that she opens her mouth to receive. Now they are tied lung to lung, capillary to capillary. He sits with his hand in hers, staring at the beer bottles on the coffee table, at their labels all peeled off by his anxious fingers.
“Ianto, I need to know,” she pleads, squeezing his hand. “Because we-I,” she amends, “I don’t deserve anything from you.” Her thumb sweeps up and over the bruise on the skin of his wrist. Where they’d restrained him. He feels a little thrill of anxiety rush through him, wants to tear his hand from hers. She holds him tight with that infinitely gentle thumb stroking back and forth slow and sure.
“It was the right thing to do,” he says, all bravado. He can’t say “I thought I was ready to die, and I wanted to make it a good show for you.” He doesn’t want to spook her. He doesn’t want to reveal that much.
Oh, she looks disappointed. Oh, she doesn’t believe him. Oh, it isn’t what she wanted to hear.
She turns his hand over, where the bruise continues in a loop onto the underside of his wrist, where his skin is fleshy and the tendons are exposed. His fingers curl up like the legs of dead bugs, beckoning to her. She has released her hold, he realizes. His hand is just resting in her lap, now, with the tip of her finger tracing the pattern of his bruise. He sees the matching blotch on her own small wrist, partially obscured by her watch. They match and meet each other in this dark place.
“You could have died,” she murmurs, and now she is afraid to meet his eyes.
“Yes,” he says, with finality. He doesn’t say, “I intended to.” Her hand coils up, her nails etching the surface of his palm.
“I don’t understand you,” she says, brow furrowing. “I don’t understand how you can go from having every reason to hate me-us-to laying yourself down like that.”
He’s angry at her, in that brief second. He’s not a fucking puzzle to be solved, not a code to be broken, not a language to be translated. But then it fades away again, watching her body language and hearing her sigh.
“Loyalty,” he tells her in a cheap imitation of his old dry humour, forcing a smile, and she laughs bitterly. Ianto Jones is capable of many things, says the laugh, but loyalty isn’t one of them. She’s here, though, so maybe she doesn’t mind.
“You don’t owe us loyalty,” she barks out. “You don’t owe Torchwood shit.” Her voice is husky when she’s bitter, like she’s talking dirty.
“Who said anything about Torchwood?” he asks, and tilts toward her like a drunk, so that their shoulders bump against one another. Then their foreheads, rocking roundness to roundness until their noses settle up alongside each other.
She heaves a shuddering little breath that spills itself out over his mouth, the skin of his lips. That is what she wanted to hear. He’s good at that, saying what people want to hear. He feels her palm cup his cheek, soft against the bruises and the shifting bones. The pads of her fingers trace up along his cheekbone like a fingerpainter. She breathes. She breathes. The tips of their noses knock together; he feels the slow ache drawing up through his cartilage.
She wants so badly for his lies to be true. She wants for him to be a hero, for him to be a lover. She wants him to be fierce and desperate for her the way he was fierce and desperate for Lisa, laying everything out. He hears it in her breath, feels it in the tension of her muscles under her skin.
She wants him to have been intending to die for her. Can’t he have just one damn thing for himself?
This is how it ends.
With her nudging her mouth onto his, her lips chapped and smeared with lip balm. She kisses him chastely without passion, holding everything close to her. They are matched.
He pushes her down with his body, back, laying her out flat beneath him, his hands slipping up underneath her jumper, feeling her skin move over her ribs.
Her small hands are at the nape of his neck, fingers twining in the hair that grows there curly like a little boy’s.
This is how it ends.
Her motherly noises at the sight of the bruising, the extent of it, the purple and yellow and black that webs over his chest and back and hipbones.
It flatters her to see him like this, naked above her in the grey afternoon light, casting no shadow, wounded and weary for her. She’ll own him, now: his life, his grand gesture that he can never take back for himself. He will keep her, now, her heartbeat, her secret, the quiet desperation at the core of her.
This is how it ends.
Wearing a suit, again. Bruises fading, tucked underneath the cuffs of an ironed shirt. Clean-shaven. Composed. Smiling, even.
Like his stomach’s full of rats.
Author: heddychaa
Pairings: Ianto/Tosh, Jack/Ianto
Rating: R
Genre: Character Study, set post-"Countrycide"
Disclaimer: Torchwood's characters, concepts, and events belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russell T Davies and the BBC. This is a work of fan-appreciation and no profit is being made.
Summary: Ianto Jones had resolved that, if he was going to die, he would at least do so memorably, with purpose. Instead, he is faced with the day-to-day humiliations of survival, a state of being where even what was supposed to be his final honest gesture can be snatched away from him.
A/N: Title from David Whyte's poem "Self Portrait". Beta-d by _lullabelle_. Thanks for all the love on my last story, folks! We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming of relentless misery.
If You Know Despair or Can See It in Others
This is how it all begins.
He turns to her, chest puffed out all bravado, and says, “Get ready to run.” He says it like he expects them both to make it out.
He doesn’t expect them both to make it out.
He does not (cannot) believe that she would leave him if she knew that he doesn’t expect them both to make it out.
This is how it all begins.
With an unhinged how-do-you-do-sir smile as he hits the self-destruct button at the centre of his own consciousness.
In that blindingly heroic moment he thinks he is ready to die.
He isn’t.
This is how it all begins.
Doubled over on his side, pain everywhere, whimpering like a little boy, like the universe itself is punishing him for ever fancying himself anyone’s hero. No, no, no, the world chides, the words stuttering themselves out in the Morse code of his body, the long pains of his muscles and the short beats of his heart. Not you. You don’t save anyone, you just sit down right here and take what you’re given until we beat this defiant streak out of you.
The pain tightens around him like being tangled in barbed wire, reminding him he is alive. He feels a dog’s self-preservation instinct running through him like blind panic, and writhes around in the darkness, choking on the smell of sweat and blood and tears and snot and viscera. The analytical parts of his mind shut down one by one, until he stops tracking movement, stops eavesdropping on plans. Everything outside him becomes rats in the wall.
This is how it all begins.
Coiling up like a centipede, touching his knees to his chest, his nose to his kneecaps. He plays dead. He wills himself an exoskeleton. He dreams up primordial womb-places where this warm damp human smell, this darkness, can be safe. He wishes there was someone who cared enough to save him.
There are no safe places left for him to retreat to. Not in his mind, and not in this world.
He tries to pretend he’s dead, but the gag biting into the corners of his mouth keeps him present. It’s tearing him at the seams.
This is how it all begins.
When those callused fingers grab him by the face, under the nose rough and intimate. When he feels the cold blade of an old cleaver heavy against his throat.
The light hurts his prehistoric eyes and he makes an animal noise, a sound that rises up from him like it rises from the depths of the Mariana Trench.
This is how it all begins.
Sitting in the back of the ambulance, wrapped up in an emergency blanket, fighting off fever shudders, struggling to regain his composure. It’s all he has left in this awful world that will not let him die and will not let him live. The paramedic smears a cool cream on the friction burns at the corners of his mouth and he puts his head down and starts to weep.
With no witnesses, Jack Harkness pushes a kiss onto his forehead before they close up the ambulance and take him away.
Two days later he’s woken by knocking at the door. He slips off the sofa, rubbing bleary eyes, and opens it without detaching the chain. It’s Toshiko, looking like she hasn’t slept.
All he’s done is slept.
“Can I come in?” she asks. “I brought something to eat.” She tries to make it sound enticing rather than lonely, but he sees through it.
He closes the door, pulls the chain. Opens it again. Steps aside to let her in.
“You look like shit,” she says to him without preamble. She has the decency to sound pitying.
“So do you,” he says, but he doesn’t sound pitying at all.
She laughs humourlessly. “I made onigiri,” she says.
“I didn’t know you cooked.” He closes the door, clicks the deadbolt, reattaches the chain. Leads her into the living room. He can tell she’s sizing up his boxer shorts, his t-shirt from a show he saw in Amsterdam a few years back. Ianto Jones, secret slob, and Toshiko Sato, secret Japanese housewife.
“I don’t. I haven’t even really used the kitchen in my flat. I had to buy a rice cooker especially for these. Called my mother up to find out what brand was good.” She pushes aside the accumulated empty beer bottles on the coffee table to make room and sets down the plastic bag she’s carrying, perching on the edge of his sofa. He sits down beside her, watching her warily.
She unwraps two Tupperware tubs and pries the lids off them both, revealing that each contains two rows of riceballs wrapped in seaweed. They’re a little misshapen and sized unevenly. When she picks one up, a few little hunks of rice fall off. She flicks them off of her lap.
“Comfort food,” she explains. “My mother used to make them for me when I was a kid. I figured we needed them.” She takes a bite. “Well, go on!”
He takes one at her urging, has a bite. It’s sticky and mostly flavourless. She’s a terrible cook.
“How’s the pain?” she asks, mouth full.
He wants to ask her “Which pain?” The pain from losing Lisa? The pain of being left alone on that floor for what felt like hours wondering if he was going to be joining her? The phantom pains of being “tenderized”? The nightmares of suffocating blackness? The post traumatic stress disorder that leads to blind panic gripping him at the smell of his own sweat? The knowledge that he is the expendable one on the team?
“I’m taking paracetamol every couple of hours to keep ahead of it,” he replies, blandly. He washes the rice down with a mouthful of warm beer.
When she doesn’t reply right away, he turns to look at her, even though he’d rather not. She is studying him with one of her scholarly expressions, the one that looks guilty to not be maintaining appropriate emotional distance. The guilt shows in that infinitesimal stitch between her neat eyebrows.
A hunk of sticky rice falls off of the rice ball clutched in her fist. She hasn’t gotten a manicure yet. Since.
“Has Jack visited you?” she asks. The question sounds huge in the empty apartment. Hanging in the air, punctuated by the hum of the fridge.
“No,” he lies.
Jack was here a few hours ago, he doesn’t know how long. Maybe it was yesterday, maybe it was fifteen minutes. He’d shook Ianto’s shoulder to rouse him, gave him water. Kissed him even though Ianto hadn’t brushed his teeth. Hurt the corners of his mouth with all the kissing. Ended with Ianto defiantly smudging tears off with the butts of his palms. They’d fucked for the first time since Lisa in Ianto’s bed, and every time Jack had touched him it had hurt, every palm and every squeeze and every finger and every escaping noise finding bruises. Afterwards, a hesitant hand had brushed Ianto’s hair away from his forehead in a fatherly gesture, and Ianto’d thought for one torturous moment that he was going to stay, and then his big body had risen and before long there was the sound of his boots, the sound of the front door, the lonely absence of his breathing. Neither of them had said one word to the other.
Can’t she smell him? Ianto can smell him all over, like a ghost walking through the apartment: here where he went to the cupboards, to the fridge, and then, resigned, to the sink. Lingering at the couch, where the smell of sex blossoms tentative then sure.
Oh, but she wants to say something else. He pushes at the neck of one of the beer bottles until it tips, taking three more with it like dominoes. They spin together, roll to the floor. There’s the dull thud of glass that doesn’t have the decency to break properly.
“Has he . . . apologized?” She’s put the rice ball back into the Tupperware container, having apparently realized, too, that she is a bad cook. She has her hands folded in her lap like a schoolgirl. He focuses on her chipped nails.
“For what?” he asks. That’s a cheap ploy. He bloody well knows what, but he wants to hear if she can say it aloud, if she can make it real and face it, the way he has had to face it.
But no, she averts her eyes, turns her head. Her ponytail twitches and he catches a shade of her shampoo, mint and rosemary. Sometimes she is surprisingly lovely.
“Ianto,” she says, and the primness is gone from her voice. She is about to be unpredictable and they are bound together by the terror lurking in the possibility. She looks him in the eyes, and her eyes are huge, full of angry questions. He stares back at her, because he has to relearn not to avert his eyes, even though he wants so badly to bow his head to her, to stare at her kneecaps, to stare at her hands, to study the way the light catches the glass of the beer bottles.
She grabs one of his hands in both her own, her grasp clutching and terrorized. “Why did you do it?” she asks, giving a tug that pops his wrist, the joints in his fingers. Her voice shakes.
He lets out a breath through his nose, a long string of a sigh between them that she opens her mouth to receive. Now they are tied lung to lung, capillary to capillary. He sits with his hand in hers, staring at the beer bottles on the coffee table, at their labels all peeled off by his anxious fingers.
“Ianto, I need to know,” she pleads, squeezing his hand. “Because we-I,” she amends, “I don’t deserve anything from you.” Her thumb sweeps up and over the bruise on the skin of his wrist. Where they’d restrained him. He feels a little thrill of anxiety rush through him, wants to tear his hand from hers. She holds him tight with that infinitely gentle thumb stroking back and forth slow and sure.
“It was the right thing to do,” he says, all bravado. He can’t say “I thought I was ready to die, and I wanted to make it a good show for you.” He doesn’t want to spook her. He doesn’t want to reveal that much.
Oh, she looks disappointed. Oh, she doesn’t believe him. Oh, it isn’t what she wanted to hear.
She turns his hand over, where the bruise continues in a loop onto the underside of his wrist, where his skin is fleshy and the tendons are exposed. His fingers curl up like the legs of dead bugs, beckoning to her. She has released her hold, he realizes. His hand is just resting in her lap, now, with the tip of her finger tracing the pattern of his bruise. He sees the matching blotch on her own small wrist, partially obscured by her watch. They match and meet each other in this dark place.
“You could have died,” she murmurs, and now she is afraid to meet his eyes.
“Yes,” he says, with finality. He doesn’t say, “I intended to.” Her hand coils up, her nails etching the surface of his palm.
“I don’t understand you,” she says, brow furrowing. “I don’t understand how you can go from having every reason to hate me-us-to laying yourself down like that.”
He’s angry at her, in that brief second. He’s not a fucking puzzle to be solved, not a code to be broken, not a language to be translated. But then it fades away again, watching her body language and hearing her sigh.
“Loyalty,” he tells her in a cheap imitation of his old dry humour, forcing a smile, and she laughs bitterly. Ianto Jones is capable of many things, says the laugh, but loyalty isn’t one of them. She’s here, though, so maybe she doesn’t mind.
“You don’t owe us loyalty,” she barks out. “You don’t owe Torchwood shit.” Her voice is husky when she’s bitter, like she’s talking dirty.
“Who said anything about Torchwood?” he asks, and tilts toward her like a drunk, so that their shoulders bump against one another. Then their foreheads, rocking roundness to roundness until their noses settle up alongside each other.
She heaves a shuddering little breath that spills itself out over his mouth, the skin of his lips. That is what she wanted to hear. He’s good at that, saying what people want to hear. He feels her palm cup his cheek, soft against the bruises and the shifting bones. The pads of her fingers trace up along his cheekbone like a fingerpainter. She breathes. She breathes. The tips of their noses knock together; he feels the slow ache drawing up through his cartilage.
She wants so badly for his lies to be true. She wants for him to be a hero, for him to be a lover. She wants him to be fierce and desperate for her the way he was fierce and desperate for Lisa, laying everything out. He hears it in her breath, feels it in the tension of her muscles under her skin.
She wants him to have been intending to die for her. Can’t he have just one damn thing for himself?
This is how it ends.
With her nudging her mouth onto his, her lips chapped and smeared with lip balm. She kisses him chastely without passion, holding everything close to her. They are matched.
He pushes her down with his body, back, laying her out flat beneath him, his hands slipping up underneath her jumper, feeling her skin move over her ribs.
Her small hands are at the nape of his neck, fingers twining in the hair that grows there curly like a little boy’s.
This is how it ends.
Her motherly noises at the sight of the bruising, the extent of it, the purple and yellow and black that webs over his chest and back and hipbones.
It flatters her to see him like this, naked above her in the grey afternoon light, casting no shadow, wounded and weary for her. She’ll own him, now: his life, his grand gesture that he can never take back for himself. He will keep her, now, her heartbeat, her secret, the quiet desperation at the core of her.
This is how it ends.
Wearing a suit, again. Bruises fading, tucked underneath the cuffs of an ironed shirt. Clean-shaven. Composed. Smiling, even.
Like his stomach’s full of rats.