Fic: Doppelganger - Chapter 9, "Fists and Tendons" [WIP 12/?]
Title: Doppelganger: Chapter 9, "Fists and Tendons"
Author: heddychaa
Pairings: John/Ianto, Jack/Ianto, Jack/Alonso, Mickey/Martha, other canon relationships
Rating: R, with NC-17 chapters clearly labelled.
Genre: Timey-wimey Post-CoE eventual fix-it
Disclaimer: "Doctor Who" and "Torchwood", including characters, concepts, and events, belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russel T Davies and the BBC. This is a work of fan-appreciation and no profit is being made.
Summary: Ianto Jones is searching for someone, and he's willing to risk and give anything if it brings him just one step closer. After materializing on an alternate Earth, the first person he happens upon is the smug and decidedly untrustworthy Captain John Hart, Time Agent. Hart seems to know what's going on in this world, and also knows more about Ianto himself than he's letting on, but most importantly he promises to take Ianto to Torchwood in London where he can continue his desperate search. However, when Hart's vortex manipulator takes them a crucial few months into the future, Ianto finds himself depending on him for much more than just directions . . . but at what cost?
A/N: Thanks as always to _lullabelle_ for the beta, and to all my commenters. :D
Chapter 9: Fists and Tendons
Jones wakes up hung over. Catastrophically hung over. The light presses down on him, hard, seeping into all the crags of his brain. He groans, clutching his head, and rolls onto his back, shielding his eyes.
“Learn your lesson?” Hart asks him, his voice bemused. Jones opens one eye, very carefully, to peer at him. He’s sitting across the room on his own cot, fully dressed, back straight, looking somewhat formal.
“And what lesson would that be?” Jones manages to croak out. His throat is absolutely parched. He struggles to sit up, feels his stomach lurch and heave.
“Don’t trust the bartender,” Hart replies matter-of-factly.
“Don’t trust the bartender! That’s funny, I don’t remember her rushing to snog a man who’s so pissed he can barely stand.” He says it meaning to be accusatory, but is surprised to hear a smile in his voice.
“Hey, don’t blame me for the fact that you’re apparently irresistible,” Hart jokes, although his body language doesn’t relax to match his tone.
“Alright, I won’t then,” Jones says, suddenly eager to be agreeable. His left eyebrow twitches, confused by his own response. He rolls his shoulders against an itch he can’t scratch.
Hart groans, his own brow stitching slightly. “I didn’t mean it that way!” he exclaims. “No, don’t ask what way I meant it. Nevermind.” What’s wrong with him? He seems . . . off, somehow. Jones thinks better of questioning it.
“Anyway, get up. We’re leaving soon,” Hart manages to say amid all the flustering. Jones stands. A pause. “Oh, and, your shoelace has come loose. You should tie it before we go. Don’t want you getting eaten by any escalators.” Jones doesn’t even look down to confirm that his shoe is, indeed, untied, before he drops to a crouch, making quick work of the laces.
When he returns to a standing position, Hart is staring at him with one of his dark expressions, mouth pinched. “Come here,” he commands.
Jones walks straight up to him, feeling that strange itch running through his body again as his feet move one in front of the other mechanically. He stops when he and Hart are chest to chest, breathing each others’ air. Hart leans forward, nearly close enough for his lips to touch Jones’. They glower into one another’s eyes for a moment, neither moving, until Hart finally speaks, his voice low, predatory. “When you’re angry at me tonight, Ianto Jones? I want you to remember this moment.” His eyes narrow and he spins on his heel, headed for the door of the hotel.
“Come,” he snaps, and despite himself, Jones follows.
They make a quick stop at a storage locker, which Hart opens using a function on his wrist strap. It’s number three-thirty-one in a long row of them, all locked up tight, numbered in yellow stencils, the whole facility tucked out of the way at the end of one of the spider legs.
“Is there anything that thing can’t do?” Jones asks of the wrist strap, peering into the locker over Hart’s shoulder, on tiptoes.
“Can’t mix drinks,” Hart replies. “Can’t resurrect the dead.” He disappears into the locker, which is apparently deceptively deep, re-emerging after a moment with a pile of clothing draped over one arm. “Change of clothes?” he offers, holding out the arm. “You don’t seem like the type to enjoy wearing the same outfit several days in a row.”
Jones feels his head pull back on his neck, an eyebrow twitching upward. “Where did you get that idea?” he asks. “I don’t exactly like it, but this isn’t the first time I’ve gone a few days in the same shirt.” In fact, he’s barely noticed the sensation. It kind of comes with the Torchwood territory: being on the road and hiding out, one learns to give up on creature comforts. Jones considers himself lucky that their hotel room was equipped with a shower that he could make use of.
He takes the proffered clothes. “Are these yours? Because I don’t think they’ll fit if they are.” He fingers the fabric absently: stretchy, a gaudy hyperblue colour. The clothes of a pretty flamboyant man, a far cry from Jones’ own decidedly monotone palette of white, black, and grey. Uncomplicated, that.
“Come on now,” Hart says with a roll of his eyes, changing his own shirt. “You think you’re the first man I’ve brought back here with me? Stop thinking so hard and just get changed, would you?”
Jones can’t be bothered to protest at the fact that they’re in public, and begins to strip down, exchanging his own clothes for the ones Hart has provided without comment or complaint. They’re slightly ill-fitting, but they work well enough. As he’s buttoning the fly of the new jeans, Hart thrusts a thin black wallet into his hands. “You’ll need this. Open it, tell me what it says.”
Jones flips the wallet open, scrutinizing it. “It’s blank,” he replies. “Just a piece of paper. What am I going to need a blank piece of paper for? Are we going to be playing naughts and crosses? Hangman?”
Hart makes an exasperated noise. “Of course it wouldn’t work on you.” He rolls his eyes, snatching the wallet from Jones’ hands. “It’s not ‘just a piece of paper’, so you can cut the cheek. It’s psychic paper. Shows people what you want them to see, sometimes what they want to see. Standard issue for time agents. Think of it as the best fake ID ever invented.” He glances down at it. “See? For you it says . . . Oh. ‘Not gay’.” Hart snorts, and Jones feels his face go red hot.
“Give me that!” he snaps, snatching it back again. “Why would it say something like that?”
“I guess that’s what you’re desperate for me to know about you. Best keep those kinds of thoughts to yourself when you’re doing infiltration later today, or you’re not going to get very far. Really, you twenty-first century men and your labels.” He gives a dramatic shrug, slapping his thighs as if to dust his hands.
“Well why couldn’t I see what you’re desperate to know about me?” Jones asks, trying to rein in his facial expression again, get things back under control. “What’s wrong with me that it won’t work?”
“Self-esteem problems, much?” Hart snorts. “It’s not what’s wrong with you, it’s what’s right. Psychic paper is basic trickery, and you’re immune to it. That’s a good thing. You have a rare skill.” For a moment, he almost seems proud. “And anyway, if it had have worked, you wouldn’t have seen my embarrassing inner thoughts, you would have seen something remotely useful to me, say like, I’m a Torchwood operative, or the Prime Minister of England-”
“England doesn’t have a Prime Minister,” Jones interrupts.
“Anyway, what I mean is, in my hands this paper is a dangerous tool, and the people I use it on are generally none-the-wiser. I don’t just flash my wishful thinking at people left and right.” Jones steels himself against the lecture, feeling his chest puff up slightly.
“Well, never mind that,” he says, cutting Hart off indignantly. “What do I need this ‘psychic paper’ for, exactly?”
“Oh, keep up, would you? The job we took? The assassination we’re going to carry out in, oh, seven hours? This psychic paper is going to get that handsome little body of yours right into the enemy camp, or so to speak.”
Jones’ hands curl up into fists. He feels his jaw set tight. “No. I said I wasn’t going to go through with it.”
Hart stares him down, his eyes cold and black as a shark’s. “Yes, you are. Cormac Scully is going to die today by twenty-hundred hours, and you, Ianto Jones, are going to be the one to execute him.”
Jones feels the nails of his fingers biting into the palms of his hands. He doesn’t protest.
Frankly, it’s joyless. John’s heard of blokes who buy “Obedient” and use it as a sex aid, on partners willing and unwilling alike, to get them to perform all manner of nasty acts, even ones they’d have been willing to do without the patch, just for the thrill of knowing they can’t refuse. He’d almost fallen for its charms, at first, watching Ianto bending to tie his shoe like a child, eager to please. For a brief moment he’d relished the thought of watching him fall all over himself to do any number of other things, many of them which could be referred to as “degrading” by certain sectors of society.
Now, though, he sees through that broken will to the small war that happens in the tiny flashes in Ianto’s pupils, the fractional winces of his eyelids, the twitches of his eyebrows, the subconscious hatred and resentment beneath the compliance that expresses itself in his tendons and his fists. He doesn’t know it now, the patch prevents him from accessing those responses, but that doesn’t mean that, on some level, they aren’t still happening. John had said he wanted him alert. His will is suppressed, but only temporarily, and when the drugs wear off, John has no idea how things are going to pan out. He doesn’t stop to think about it.
“Why me?” Ianto asks as they board the transport, a dented up Chula warship the bartender has apparently scrounged up for them from somewhere. John hisses through his teeth, damning himself for not commanding him to not ask questions about his orders. Could do it now, he supposes. No! John Hart should be able to talk his way out of anything. He shouldn’t have to resort to these child’s tricks. He clambers into the pilot’s seat, preoccupying himself with the controls for a moment or two.
He can feel Ianto at his back, staring at him. He can be downright creepy sometimes. Like a butler. That suit must have only made it worse. Does Jack have some sort of fetish about sleeping with the help?
“Hart,” Ianto says. “Answer me.”
“Call me ‘John’ and maybe I will,” John replies, flipping a switch and feeling the engines of the ship hum to life, miniscule vibrations running up the bones of his legs.
“John, then. Why do you need me to do this? Can’t you just. . .” he trails off.
“Kill him myself? Would that make you feel morally clean, Ianto? Do you think it makes you a better man to stand by and watch evil happen rather than perpetrating it yourself?” He feels derision in his voice. The ship rises from the flight deck. Ianto doesn’t reply. “You think pretty poorly of men like me, don’t you? The way I see it, though, is that if you stand by watching things you don’t approve of, that makes you even worse because you lack any conviction at all: conviction to do either good or evil in the universe. You become totally irrelevant. But I suppose that’s how you like it, isn’t it? Surrounding yourself with powerful men, real forces of personality, staying passive, sometimes to the point of playing the victim, happy to let them take the glory or the blame as they would.”
They’re in space, now: dark, empty space, silent space. John sets the coordinates for Earth.
“You talk a lot for a man who’s only known me a couple of days,” Ianto says, clearly choosing his words carefully. He says them one at a time, slowly, as though rolling and musing them around in his mouth like sweets.
“I know your type,” John replies, keeping his eyes on the viewscreen, although it’s pointless. The likelihood of encountering anything he’d need to take evasive manoeuvres for out here is positively infinitesimal.
“That’s a lie and you know it,” Ianto challenges. “Complete cop-out answer.”
“And what if it is a lie? What do you think the real answer is, Ianto Jones? -That was a rhetorical question. Don’t answer it.” He says it humourlessly, and he can see Ianto’s lips press shut, his soft mouth firming up into a tight line. He sees the hate flash behind Ianto’s eyes.
He returns his attention to the viewscreen just so he doesn’t have to look at Ianto’s face. “The reason why it has to be you, in all practicality, is because you don’t exist. The target is in a bunker equipped with surveillance technology that uses the kind of facial-recognition your Torchwood could only dream of. If I went in there, they’d have me identified in a second. I do have a relatively sizeable record in this century, by this point. And if they can get me, they can get the Hive. That happens? Even if Scully dies, I’ve failed.” And you don’t fail the Hive. You don’t fail the bartender. “But you, you! Even if there was an Ianto Jones in this universe at some point in history, he’s long dead now.” He emphasizes the “if there was”, hoping to discourage Ianto’s suspicions that John knows otherwise. “Even if by some miracle they get a positive ID on you, it’s going to be totally garbled. It’ll lead them nowhere helpful,” he prattles on.
“The ‘target’,” Ianto murmurs, his tone haunted, his voice very soft. “Do you even hear yourself? You may be planning on killing him-well, using me to kill him-but he’s still a man, John. A man with a family, fears and insecurities and neuroses and private little joys. And you’re . . . dehumanizing him.” The revulsion, sadness, terror, in the way he says that word. Dehumanizing. John doesn’t think he’s ever heard so much plain, honest emotion come through in that voice.
“If it makes you feel better to think about a man’s happy little white picket fence family when you kill him, go right ahead,” John says dismissively; a little hurt, maybe. “Dream up a whole guilt-ridden fantasy to wallow in.” There’s a moment’s pause, filled by Ianto’s breathing, his physical presence at John’s shoulder. “No, don’t take that literally,” John amends, and feels tired.
Go to Chapter 10: "Autopilot".
View the Masterlist for full chapter list and complete header info.
Author: heddychaa
Pairings: John/Ianto, Jack/Ianto, Jack/Alonso, Mickey/Martha, other canon relationships
Rating: R, with NC-17 chapters clearly labelled.
Genre: Timey-wimey Post-CoE eventual fix-it
Disclaimer: "Doctor Who" and "Torchwood", including characters, concepts, and events, belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russel T Davies and the BBC. This is a work of fan-appreciation and no profit is being made.
Summary: Ianto Jones is searching for someone, and he's willing to risk and give anything if it brings him just one step closer. After materializing on an alternate Earth, the first person he happens upon is the smug and decidedly untrustworthy Captain John Hart, Time Agent. Hart seems to know what's going on in this world, and also knows more about Ianto himself than he's letting on, but most importantly he promises to take Ianto to Torchwood in London where he can continue his desperate search. However, when Hart's vortex manipulator takes them a crucial few months into the future, Ianto finds himself depending on him for much more than just directions . . . but at what cost?
A/N: Thanks as always to _lullabelle_ for the beta, and to all my commenters. :D
Chapter 9: Fists and Tendons
Jones wakes up hung over. Catastrophically hung over. The light presses down on him, hard, seeping into all the crags of his brain. He groans, clutching his head, and rolls onto his back, shielding his eyes.
“Learn your lesson?” Hart asks him, his voice bemused. Jones opens one eye, very carefully, to peer at him. He’s sitting across the room on his own cot, fully dressed, back straight, looking somewhat formal.
“And what lesson would that be?” Jones manages to croak out. His throat is absolutely parched. He struggles to sit up, feels his stomach lurch and heave.
“Don’t trust the bartender,” Hart replies matter-of-factly.
“Don’t trust the bartender! That’s funny, I don’t remember her rushing to snog a man who’s so pissed he can barely stand.” He says it meaning to be accusatory, but is surprised to hear a smile in his voice.
“Hey, don’t blame me for the fact that you’re apparently irresistible,” Hart jokes, although his body language doesn’t relax to match his tone.
“Alright, I won’t then,” Jones says, suddenly eager to be agreeable. His left eyebrow twitches, confused by his own response. He rolls his shoulders against an itch he can’t scratch.
Hart groans, his own brow stitching slightly. “I didn’t mean it that way!” he exclaims. “No, don’t ask what way I meant it. Nevermind.” What’s wrong with him? He seems . . . off, somehow. Jones thinks better of questioning it.
“Anyway, get up. We’re leaving soon,” Hart manages to say amid all the flustering. Jones stands. A pause. “Oh, and, your shoelace has come loose. You should tie it before we go. Don’t want you getting eaten by any escalators.” Jones doesn’t even look down to confirm that his shoe is, indeed, untied, before he drops to a crouch, making quick work of the laces.
When he returns to a standing position, Hart is staring at him with one of his dark expressions, mouth pinched. “Come here,” he commands.
Jones walks straight up to him, feeling that strange itch running through his body again as his feet move one in front of the other mechanically. He stops when he and Hart are chest to chest, breathing each others’ air. Hart leans forward, nearly close enough for his lips to touch Jones’. They glower into one another’s eyes for a moment, neither moving, until Hart finally speaks, his voice low, predatory. “When you’re angry at me tonight, Ianto Jones? I want you to remember this moment.” His eyes narrow and he spins on his heel, headed for the door of the hotel.
“Come,” he snaps, and despite himself, Jones follows.
They make a quick stop at a storage locker, which Hart opens using a function on his wrist strap. It’s number three-thirty-one in a long row of them, all locked up tight, numbered in yellow stencils, the whole facility tucked out of the way at the end of one of the spider legs.
“Is there anything that thing can’t do?” Jones asks of the wrist strap, peering into the locker over Hart’s shoulder, on tiptoes.
“Can’t mix drinks,” Hart replies. “Can’t resurrect the dead.” He disappears into the locker, which is apparently deceptively deep, re-emerging after a moment with a pile of clothing draped over one arm. “Change of clothes?” he offers, holding out the arm. “You don’t seem like the type to enjoy wearing the same outfit several days in a row.”
Jones feels his head pull back on his neck, an eyebrow twitching upward. “Where did you get that idea?” he asks. “I don’t exactly like it, but this isn’t the first time I’ve gone a few days in the same shirt.” In fact, he’s barely noticed the sensation. It kind of comes with the Torchwood territory: being on the road and hiding out, one learns to give up on creature comforts. Jones considers himself lucky that their hotel room was equipped with a shower that he could make use of.
He takes the proffered clothes. “Are these yours? Because I don’t think they’ll fit if they are.” He fingers the fabric absently: stretchy, a gaudy hyperblue colour. The clothes of a pretty flamboyant man, a far cry from Jones’ own decidedly monotone palette of white, black, and grey. Uncomplicated, that.
“Come on now,” Hart says with a roll of his eyes, changing his own shirt. “You think you’re the first man I’ve brought back here with me? Stop thinking so hard and just get changed, would you?”
Jones can’t be bothered to protest at the fact that they’re in public, and begins to strip down, exchanging his own clothes for the ones Hart has provided without comment or complaint. They’re slightly ill-fitting, but they work well enough. As he’s buttoning the fly of the new jeans, Hart thrusts a thin black wallet into his hands. “You’ll need this. Open it, tell me what it says.”
Jones flips the wallet open, scrutinizing it. “It’s blank,” he replies. “Just a piece of paper. What am I going to need a blank piece of paper for? Are we going to be playing naughts and crosses? Hangman?”
Hart makes an exasperated noise. “Of course it wouldn’t work on you.” He rolls his eyes, snatching the wallet from Jones’ hands. “It’s not ‘just a piece of paper’, so you can cut the cheek. It’s psychic paper. Shows people what you want them to see, sometimes what they want to see. Standard issue for time agents. Think of it as the best fake ID ever invented.” He glances down at it. “See? For you it says . . . Oh. ‘Not gay’.” Hart snorts, and Jones feels his face go red hot.
“Give me that!” he snaps, snatching it back again. “Why would it say something like that?”
“I guess that’s what you’re desperate for me to know about you. Best keep those kinds of thoughts to yourself when you’re doing infiltration later today, or you’re not going to get very far. Really, you twenty-first century men and your labels.” He gives a dramatic shrug, slapping his thighs as if to dust his hands.
“Well why couldn’t I see what you’re desperate to know about me?” Jones asks, trying to rein in his facial expression again, get things back under control. “What’s wrong with me that it won’t work?”
“Self-esteem problems, much?” Hart snorts. “It’s not what’s wrong with you, it’s what’s right. Psychic paper is basic trickery, and you’re immune to it. That’s a good thing. You have a rare skill.” For a moment, he almost seems proud. “And anyway, if it had have worked, you wouldn’t have seen my embarrassing inner thoughts, you would have seen something remotely useful to me, say like, I’m a Torchwood operative, or the Prime Minister of England-”
“England doesn’t have a Prime Minister,” Jones interrupts.
“Anyway, what I mean is, in my hands this paper is a dangerous tool, and the people I use it on are generally none-the-wiser. I don’t just flash my wishful thinking at people left and right.” Jones steels himself against the lecture, feeling his chest puff up slightly.
“Well, never mind that,” he says, cutting Hart off indignantly. “What do I need this ‘psychic paper’ for, exactly?”
“Oh, keep up, would you? The job we took? The assassination we’re going to carry out in, oh, seven hours? This psychic paper is going to get that handsome little body of yours right into the enemy camp, or so to speak.”
Jones’ hands curl up into fists. He feels his jaw set tight. “No. I said I wasn’t going to go through with it.”
Hart stares him down, his eyes cold and black as a shark’s. “Yes, you are. Cormac Scully is going to die today by twenty-hundred hours, and you, Ianto Jones, are going to be the one to execute him.”
Jones feels the nails of his fingers biting into the palms of his hands. He doesn’t protest.
Frankly, it’s joyless. John’s heard of blokes who buy “Obedient” and use it as a sex aid, on partners willing and unwilling alike, to get them to perform all manner of nasty acts, even ones they’d have been willing to do without the patch, just for the thrill of knowing they can’t refuse. He’d almost fallen for its charms, at first, watching Ianto bending to tie his shoe like a child, eager to please. For a brief moment he’d relished the thought of watching him fall all over himself to do any number of other things, many of them which could be referred to as “degrading” by certain sectors of society.
Now, though, he sees through that broken will to the small war that happens in the tiny flashes in Ianto’s pupils, the fractional winces of his eyelids, the twitches of his eyebrows, the subconscious hatred and resentment beneath the compliance that expresses itself in his tendons and his fists. He doesn’t know it now, the patch prevents him from accessing those responses, but that doesn’t mean that, on some level, they aren’t still happening. John had said he wanted him alert. His will is suppressed, but only temporarily, and when the drugs wear off, John has no idea how things are going to pan out. He doesn’t stop to think about it.
“Why me?” Ianto asks as they board the transport, a dented up Chula warship the bartender has apparently scrounged up for them from somewhere. John hisses through his teeth, damning himself for not commanding him to not ask questions about his orders. Could do it now, he supposes. No! John Hart should be able to talk his way out of anything. He shouldn’t have to resort to these child’s tricks. He clambers into the pilot’s seat, preoccupying himself with the controls for a moment or two.
He can feel Ianto at his back, staring at him. He can be downright creepy sometimes. Like a butler. That suit must have only made it worse. Does Jack have some sort of fetish about sleeping with the help?
“Hart,” Ianto says. “Answer me.”
“Call me ‘John’ and maybe I will,” John replies, flipping a switch and feeling the engines of the ship hum to life, miniscule vibrations running up the bones of his legs.
“John, then. Why do you need me to do this? Can’t you just. . .” he trails off.
“Kill him myself? Would that make you feel morally clean, Ianto? Do you think it makes you a better man to stand by and watch evil happen rather than perpetrating it yourself?” He feels derision in his voice. The ship rises from the flight deck. Ianto doesn’t reply. “You think pretty poorly of men like me, don’t you? The way I see it, though, is that if you stand by watching things you don’t approve of, that makes you even worse because you lack any conviction at all: conviction to do either good or evil in the universe. You become totally irrelevant. But I suppose that’s how you like it, isn’t it? Surrounding yourself with powerful men, real forces of personality, staying passive, sometimes to the point of playing the victim, happy to let them take the glory or the blame as they would.”
They’re in space, now: dark, empty space, silent space. John sets the coordinates for Earth.
“You talk a lot for a man who’s only known me a couple of days,” Ianto says, clearly choosing his words carefully. He says them one at a time, slowly, as though rolling and musing them around in his mouth like sweets.
“I know your type,” John replies, keeping his eyes on the viewscreen, although it’s pointless. The likelihood of encountering anything he’d need to take evasive manoeuvres for out here is positively infinitesimal.
“That’s a lie and you know it,” Ianto challenges. “Complete cop-out answer.”
“And what if it is a lie? What do you think the real answer is, Ianto Jones? -That was a rhetorical question. Don’t answer it.” He says it humourlessly, and he can see Ianto’s lips press shut, his soft mouth firming up into a tight line. He sees the hate flash behind Ianto’s eyes.
He returns his attention to the viewscreen just so he doesn’t have to look at Ianto’s face. “The reason why it has to be you, in all practicality, is because you don’t exist. The target is in a bunker equipped with surveillance technology that uses the kind of facial-recognition your Torchwood could only dream of. If I went in there, they’d have me identified in a second. I do have a relatively sizeable record in this century, by this point. And if they can get me, they can get the Hive. That happens? Even if Scully dies, I’ve failed.” And you don’t fail the Hive. You don’t fail the bartender. “But you, you! Even if there was an Ianto Jones in this universe at some point in history, he’s long dead now.” He emphasizes the “if there was”, hoping to discourage Ianto’s suspicions that John knows otherwise. “Even if by some miracle they get a positive ID on you, it’s going to be totally garbled. It’ll lead them nowhere helpful,” he prattles on.
“The ‘target’,” Ianto murmurs, his tone haunted, his voice very soft. “Do you even hear yourself? You may be planning on killing him-well, using me to kill him-but he’s still a man, John. A man with a family, fears and insecurities and neuroses and private little joys. And you’re . . . dehumanizing him.” The revulsion, sadness, terror, in the way he says that word. Dehumanizing. John doesn’t think he’s ever heard so much plain, honest emotion come through in that voice.
“If it makes you feel better to think about a man’s happy little white picket fence family when you kill him, go right ahead,” John says dismissively; a little hurt, maybe. “Dream up a whole guilt-ridden fantasy to wallow in.” There’s a moment’s pause, filled by Ianto’s breathing, his physical presence at John’s shoulder. “No, don’t take that literally,” John amends, and feels tired.
Go to Chapter 10: "Autopilot".
View the Masterlist for full chapter list and complete header info.