Title: Future Impurrfect
Author:
nancybrownFandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Jack, John Hart (mentioned)
Rating: PG
Words: 700
Spoilers: up through COE
Warnings: Captain Bad Touch says, "Read the trope."
Summary: Not for the first time, Ianto hated the future.
AN: Written for
pearlseed's prompt of a missing bit from
Intersecting Geodesics. Also fills Trope Bingo square: animal transformation
***
Not for the first time, Ianto hated the future.
He could adjust to waking up three thousand years after his death, could manage biding his time with a much younger version of the man he loved back home, could wrap his head around working with aliens every day. He'd mastered the skills to get to and from the flat he, for lack of a better word, shared with Jack. He worked hard in a pub for an alien whose name he couldn't pronounce, cleaning up and running errands for two different aliens whose names he had yet to learn. (He thought of them as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They thought of him as a mentally-challenged sex slave on loan for janitor duty. And so it went.) He kept his head down, hoping to avoid interest from the Time Agency, who wanted to plop him on a planet somewhere far away raising sheep, and from John Hart, whose wants Ianto didn't care to consider. He made his own continuous, quiet plans to find a way back to 2009 and to the task of cleaning up whatever mess Jack had made of things in his absence. He'd even managed to impress younger Jack by very stupidly attacking an alien hell-bent on killing him.
In short, Ianto could very nearly handle anything the future threw at him whilst he worked on getting back home.
Nearly. Very nearly.
He sighed heavily, and was displeased to hear how much it sounded like a purr.
Jack didn't even try not to laugh. "I warned you."
Ianto growled. Jack snorted again, and the bastard actually stroked him behind the ears with a certain amount of affection. "'Be careful what you eat,' I said. 'Some of the things the customers bring into the pub aren't good for humans,' I said."
Ianto narrowed his eyes. He'd seen what the less-savoury patrons brought. Jack wasn't on any drugs that Ianto knew of, and hadn't been for some months, but Hart came to visit frequently with a new bag or box or snifter. "It passes the time and numbs the pain," Jack had said once, when Ianto had asked.
Not content with dropping a sample of his latest finds into Jack's drinks, Hart had slipped Ianto the occasional dose of nothing good. Thankfully, Tweedledum, who doubled as a bouncer, had sharp eyes. Even with the language barrier, he'd warned Ianto more than once. The warnings may have saved his life. They almost certainly had saved what remained of his virtue and dignity.
Last night had been the evening of a Nardek holy day, which meant the Tweedles were off. Ianto had been run off his feet working alone. No-one had been watching his water glass. It may not have been Hart. It didn't matter much now.
He let out a plaintive sound, and suffered the indignity of Jack lifting him up and setting him uncomfortably on his lap. Sitting so close, and swimming with brand new senses, Ianto could taste the air around Jack, could almost see it heavy and rich with his scent. He was a three-dimensional cloud radiating out, all of him wafting through the air: sex sex sex. Ianto growled again, this time in frustrated annoyance. He twitched his tail, smacking the hairless appendage against Jack's leg.
"The good news is," Jack said, continuing to scratch Ianto behind the ears, "this will wear off in about a day."
Ianto sank onto his ungainly perch on Jack's lap. He tilted his ears up, hoping the questioning signal would get through.
"I don't know what the bad news is," Jack admitted, "other than your being a nimbom for a while. By the way, I'll set papers on the floor in case you need to pee. If they see you walking down the hall to the private, I'll get evicted. No pets." And because this Jack was learning, he even managed a mumbled, "Sorry."
He wasn't sure how later, because the small furry creature he'd become apparently didn't have the muscle control to do the action, but Ianto rolled his eyes anyway.
***
The End
***