it lingered there to touch your hair (Jack/Ianto; G)
Title: it lingered there to touch your hair
Author: etharei
Rating: G
Timeline: set after "Cyberwoman" (104) and before "Countrycide" (106)
Spoilers: "Cyberwoman" (104)
Summary: “Don’t look so surprised,” says Jack with a smile. “I’ve lived with the conventions of this time longer than you have.
Author's Notes: Really, this should be called, In which the neither Jack and Ianto know quite what they're talking about, exactly, and neither does the author.
Disclaimer: Torchwood and all the characters and situations featured therein are the property of Russell T. Davies, the BBC and their affiliates. I’m only borrowing them for purely non-profit, recreational purposes.
Written for: horizonssing, Day #13.
Summer Wind
Frank Sinatra
The summer wind, came blowin' in from across the sea
It lingered there to touch your hair and walk with me
All summer long we sang a song and then we strolled that golden sand
Two sweethearts and the summer wind
Like painted kites, those days and nights, they went flyin' by
The world was new beneath a blue umbrella sky
Then softer than a piper man one day it called to you
I lost you, I lost you to the summer wind
The autumn wind and the winter winds, they have come and gone
And still the days, those lonely days, they go on and on
And guess who sighs his lullabies through nights that never end
My fickle friend, the summer wind
The summer wind
Warm summer wind
Mmm, the summer wind
it lingered there to touch your hair
by etharei
Tinkle tinkle, goes the glass. Cutlery on fine china, clear voices clipping, waiters carrying trays. People, conversation, dancing. Yet there’s an unforced joviality in the general mood of the room, under the rich dressings of pretentious wealth, and it takes away the nerve-honing edge of social scrutiny that comes with any gathering of the affluent. It was mostly a recreation, anyway, of past times when the aristocracy were a world set apart.
Ianto takes a sip of his wine; an excellent vintage, his father would have approved of it. (His father and grandfather Jones, they are who this place reminds Ianto of. Of course, in their time most of the outfits would have been bespoke workmanship, not the made-to-measure products littering the grand ballroom.) It takes a great effort to maintain his stiff, straight-backed posture, and the pleasant but distant expression on his face.
A trill of soft feminine laughter from the two tables over; Ianto doesn’t need to turn around to know that it’s Jack at work. He feels a bit useless, but really there’s not much he can do. Jack’s wrist strap is more discreet at scanning for the alien tech than the scanner Ianto has in his pocket, and in any case Jack had ordered him to “keep watch”. For what, Ianto’s not sure, though he knows better than to rule out the possibility that one of the guests here is an alien.
Something brushes against his elbow. Ianto instinctively pulls his arms in, looking around. A young woman has taken the empty seat next to him at the deserted table, and she appears mildly flushed from several rigorous sets of dancing. The brass band has stayed more or less within the American swing era since Ianto and Jack’s arrival (much to the undisguised joy of the latter).
Seeing his attention on her, the young woman smiles. “Having a good time?”
“Not particularly,” he replies. “Though the wine is excellent.”
She nods in agreement. “I didn’t want to come, even though the Baroness is an old ally of my father’s, but now I’m quite glad I did. It’s amazing what they’ve done to the place.”
“It’s beautiful,” Ianto feels committed to say. The ballroom does look quite unrecognizable, a feast for the eyes, something straight out of another era.
But after his self-imposed isolation in the last few months, first at home on suspension and then in the Hub, the lavish decorations and rich colors feel almost gaudy, excessively hedonistic. Too much.
“Haven’t seen you before,” continues the woman. “And you haven’t danced at all tonight.”
He wonders how long she’s been paying attention. There’s a gleam in her eyes that makes him shift uncomfortably, since it’s been a while (a lifetime) since somebody’s looked at him that way (except for Jack, who doesn’t count because Ianto doubts Jack knows how to turn the gleam off). Still, he’s aware that he should at least make the attempt to socialize. “I’m here with someone. Not really much for dancing, anyway.”
Probably following the Great Cue Card of the Universe, Jack chooses that moment to reappear. The way he’s beaming, clearly pleased with himself, tells Ianto that he’d been successful in extracting the alien tech. (Or that he’d managed a quick but memorable shag in the toilets, but Ianto doesn’t think Jack would find that much of an achievement.) Jack nods at the young woman. “Sorry for cutting in, but we won’t be staying for much longer and-“
On the other side of the room, the band progresses a couple of decades and starts a slow Sinatra number. Ianto feels a faint foreboding knot in his stomach (recreating, absurdly, the one he’d gotten before his first school dance).
Jack holds out a hand. “May I have this dance, Mr. Jones?”
Maybe it’s because Jack looks genuinely happy, smiling eyes a bright blue, the snug three-piece period suit making him look at home in their surroundings; Ianto doesn’t even think about saying no. At least, not until he’s taken Jack’s hand, has stood and walked out to the dance floor already filled with couples.
I’ve never danced with a man before, he almost says, but even inside his head the protest sounds juvenile. He wants to point out that there are other people around them, that people are watching, but he can already hear Jack declaring that such was the point. Besides, now that they’ve achieved their purpose it’s not as if they should be afraid of being kicked out.
“Jack…” he quietly hisses, belatedly trying to pull away. Only a token attempt; there’s already polished hardwood under his shoes.
And he must be honest - the core of his reluctance lies in the proximity, the necessary bodily contact. When Lisa... it hadn’t seemed fair, for him to be able to touch other people when she couldn’t, so he hadn’t... and after, now, the others are wary around him, only the briefest accidental touches. Except for Jack, of course.
If Jack notices his reluctance, he doesn’t acknowledge it, instead pulling and winding his arms around Ianto. Anybody else, and Ianto would have retreated, stumbled, but this is Jack. Even before Ianto moves on to worrying about the logistics of two men dancing in a society that had designed dances for male-female pairs, Jack is holding up Ianto’s left hand, the other hands clasped between them, having taken the conventional woman’s side of the dance.
The familiar positioning does a lot to calm Ianto down, which is fortunate since he’s somewhat overwhelmed by Jack’s sudden and very alarming closeness. He hasn’t... the last time he’d had somebody so far inside his personal space, the world had ended. But dancing like this is something he knows, and from a time far enough back to be safe for reminiscence. Ianto forces in a breath, and manages to affect only a mildly astonished expression.
“Don’t look so surprised,” says Jack with a smile. Ianto tells himself to focus on Jack’s voice, not the warm, hard line of Jack’s body pressed lightly against his front, the subtly enticing scent that can only be the pheromones he mentioned once. “I’ve lived with the conventions of this time longer than you have. Never understood why men think taking the woman’s place threatens their masculinity.”
“It’s a power thing rather than a sexuality thing, I’m afraid,” Ianto murmurs. The lazy notes of the music carry them along (quite beautiful, really), and no one’s paying them any attention. “Where did you find it?”
“Around some Baroness’s wrist; she was wearing it as a bracelet.” Jack’s swaying stutters, and he rubs against Ianto in a way that would have been highly suspicious if not for the small mass he feels stashed away under Jack’s clothes. Ianto absolutely does not think about what the motion would have looked like to the people idly watching the floor.
“What is it?” he asks as Jack returns to the rhythm of the song. Adding to the list of things to not think about: warm breath over the sensitive skin under his earlobe, the smooth skin of Jack’s cheek teasing his.
“Part of a space engine, either Pooshar or Midway.” Jack’s voice, delivered almost directly into one ear, startles Ianto with its intimate nearness. “Advanced enough to not be radioactive, lucky for us. But emitting a low-frequency locater signal. Unfortunately, it’ll be about a thousand years before anyone is listening.”
“Hmm.” One shoe bumps against Jack’s, but Jack easily readjusts his stance, even turning the movement into a sweeping half-spin. “I notice that you’re still leading, though.”
Jack grins at him mischievously, executing another spin. Ianto instinctively relaxes, letting Jack carry them both through a gap in the couples. Luckily the tempo is not fast, and not so slow as to make them stand out. Much. But it’s... nice. And Jack is familiar. (Safe.)
”That Rift surge yesterday must have reactivated it, somehow,” says Tosh over Jack and Owen’s bent heads, the reading print-outs placed in front of them.
“But it’s not dangerous,” asks Owen.
Ianto quietly slips a packet of files Jack had requested earlier into the Captain’s hands, and turns to leave. But Jack catches his wrist, and gestures for him to stay. “The signature resembles that of pieces of relatively harmless space debris we’ve recovered before, most of which Jack dated to around the 40th century. So not dangerous in itself, but it may be visibly anachronistic.”
Ten minutes of Tosh typing and Ianto wondering why Jack wasn’t letting him leave, and the mainframe narrows down the signal’s location: a high-end hotel in the east of Cardiff City. But it can’t seem to get anymore precise than that.
“Stuff like this can lay dormant for years and years.” Jack frowns at Tosh’s screen. “Sometimes people make heirlooms out of them, a curiosity kept within the family. If someone has it, and keeps moving it around, that may be interfering with the scanners. We need to go in there.”
“There’s going to be a ball of some sort later today,” Gwen says, pointing at the announcement on the hotel’s website. Jack’s face breaks out into a wide smile when he reads it.
Owen peers close, and throws up his hands. “Consider me out of this. I’m not dressing up and schmoozing just to fetch a bit of space rubbish.”
“Believe it or not, Owen, inviting you never crossed my mind,” Jack says dryly. “Ianto?”
“I’m on it. One ticket to the 30s, coming right up. I can also recommend a place-“
“Two tickets,” interrupts Jack. “And on that note, you're my plus one.”
“You know, you can tell a lot about someone just by dancing with them,” says Jack, after a while.
“Oh?”
“For one thing, I notice that you’re following my lead.”
Strings of tension tighten the muscles of Ianto’s shoulders and upper back, and he looks away. “It’s not-“
“Hold on. I wasn’t... I didn’t really mean anything by it.” Jack bumps his chin down onto Ianto’s shoulder, which the younger man reads as a kind of apology. “Just hear me out.” It’s so rare for Ianto to hear hesitancy in Jack’s voice, much less feel the uncertainty in his body, that he’s perfectly willing to wait and listen. “You’re following me, right now. You don’t like me, probably hate my guts, but still you followed. Are following. And... that’s all I need to know.”
Ianto uses the ensuing silence to gently nudge their swaying back in tempo with the song. His first reaction is to say, I don’t hate you. Except he does, he does hate Jack, some days more than others, and the rest of it is... confusion. Bewilderment. There’s a constant about Jack, but also a wild unpredictability. (Like now.) Ianto hates him, but each day it’s becoming the sort of hate that could well go completely the other way, thin lines between and all. This is what terrifies him.
Still, or maybe in spite of the mess under his skin of late, Ianto feels inexplicable sadness at Jack only wanting... loyalty (obedience?) from him.
Talking without needing to make eye-contact is strange, but also freeing. “Why did you invite me, Jack?”
“Owen clearly didn’t want to go. Socializing is not Tosh’s forte. And Gwen is... too new.”
“Jack. Really.”
A sigh that teases the hair at the nape of Ianto’s neck. Jack pulls back, meets Ianto’s gaze. “I want you out on the field. As a field agent.”
Ianto blinks. “I’m not... With all due respect, sir, I’m not really qualified.”
“Let me be the judge of that.” Jack moves close again. “And less of this butler business. Though I suspect it’s in the best interest of mankind and the fabric of space and time for you to continue your coffee-making duties.”
Ianto grins, can’t help it. “Wouldn’t dream of stopping, sir.” Silence, quite comfortable, returns between them for the remainder of the song. At the end, they part, and walk sedately out into the lobby. Feeling the need to be polite, at least, Ianto speaks as they emerge into the outside; the cold night air holds the crispness of recent rain. “Thank you, Jack.”
He doesn’t specify what for, but Jack nods. He is quite a looker, Ianto thinks, particularly in the period clothing; a most remarkable, handsome figure from a different time and place. Ianto looks at him, feeling a bit breathless (probably the damp cold). “I’m still... It’s been a long time since somebody asked me to dance. I don’t... And I don’t know if I’m, you know, ready.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Jack smiles, his face gentle and kind and a little bit wistful. “When you are, you’ll ask me to dance.”
Author: etharei
Rating: G
Timeline: set after "Cyberwoman" (104) and before "Countrycide" (106)
Spoilers: "Cyberwoman" (104)
Summary: “Don’t look so surprised,” says Jack with a smile. “I’ve lived with the conventions of this time longer than you have.
Author's Notes: Really, this should be called, In which the neither Jack and Ianto know quite what they're talking about, exactly, and neither does the author.
Disclaimer: Torchwood and all the characters and situations featured therein are the property of Russell T. Davies, the BBC and their affiliates. I’m only borrowing them for purely non-profit, recreational purposes.
Written for: horizonssing, Day #13.
Summer Wind
Frank Sinatra
The summer wind, came blowin' in from across the sea
It lingered there to touch your hair and walk with me
All summer long we sang a song and then we strolled that golden sand
Two sweethearts and the summer wind
Like painted kites, those days and nights, they went flyin' by
The world was new beneath a blue umbrella sky
Then softer than a piper man one day it called to you
I lost you, I lost you to the summer wind
The autumn wind and the winter winds, they have come and gone
And still the days, those lonely days, they go on and on
And guess who sighs his lullabies through nights that never end
My fickle friend, the summer wind
The summer wind
Warm summer wind
Mmm, the summer wind
it lingered there to touch your hair
by etharei
Tinkle tinkle, goes the glass. Cutlery on fine china, clear voices clipping, waiters carrying trays. People, conversation, dancing. Yet there’s an unforced joviality in the general mood of the room, under the rich dressings of pretentious wealth, and it takes away the nerve-honing edge of social scrutiny that comes with any gathering of the affluent. It was mostly a recreation, anyway, of past times when the aristocracy were a world set apart.
Ianto takes a sip of his wine; an excellent vintage, his father would have approved of it. (His father and grandfather Jones, they are who this place reminds Ianto of. Of course, in their time most of the outfits would have been bespoke workmanship, not the made-to-measure products littering the grand ballroom.) It takes a great effort to maintain his stiff, straight-backed posture, and the pleasant but distant expression on his face.
A trill of soft feminine laughter from the two tables over; Ianto doesn’t need to turn around to know that it’s Jack at work. He feels a bit useless, but really there’s not much he can do. Jack’s wrist strap is more discreet at scanning for the alien tech than the scanner Ianto has in his pocket, and in any case Jack had ordered him to “keep watch”. For what, Ianto’s not sure, though he knows better than to rule out the possibility that one of the guests here is an alien.
Something brushes against his elbow. Ianto instinctively pulls his arms in, looking around. A young woman has taken the empty seat next to him at the deserted table, and she appears mildly flushed from several rigorous sets of dancing. The brass band has stayed more or less within the American swing era since Ianto and Jack’s arrival (much to the undisguised joy of the latter).
Seeing his attention on her, the young woman smiles. “Having a good time?”
“Not particularly,” he replies. “Though the wine is excellent.”
She nods in agreement. “I didn’t want to come, even though the Baroness is an old ally of my father’s, but now I’m quite glad I did. It’s amazing what they’ve done to the place.”
“It’s beautiful,” Ianto feels committed to say. The ballroom does look quite unrecognizable, a feast for the eyes, something straight out of another era.
But after his self-imposed isolation in the last few months, first at home on suspension and then in the Hub, the lavish decorations and rich colors feel almost gaudy, excessively hedonistic. Too much.
“Haven’t seen you before,” continues the woman. “And you haven’t danced at all tonight.”
He wonders how long she’s been paying attention. There’s a gleam in her eyes that makes him shift uncomfortably, since it’s been a while (a lifetime) since somebody’s looked at him that way (except for Jack, who doesn’t count because Ianto doubts Jack knows how to turn the gleam off). Still, he’s aware that he should at least make the attempt to socialize. “I’m here with someone. Not really much for dancing, anyway.”
Probably following the Great Cue Card of the Universe, Jack chooses that moment to reappear. The way he’s beaming, clearly pleased with himself, tells Ianto that he’d been successful in extracting the alien tech. (Or that he’d managed a quick but memorable shag in the toilets, but Ianto doesn’t think Jack would find that much of an achievement.) Jack nods at the young woman. “Sorry for cutting in, but we won’t be staying for much longer and-“
On the other side of the room, the band progresses a couple of decades and starts a slow Sinatra number. Ianto feels a faint foreboding knot in his stomach (recreating, absurdly, the one he’d gotten before his first school dance).
Jack holds out a hand. “May I have this dance, Mr. Jones?”
Maybe it’s because Jack looks genuinely happy, smiling eyes a bright blue, the snug three-piece period suit making him look at home in their surroundings; Ianto doesn’t even think about saying no. At least, not until he’s taken Jack’s hand, has stood and walked out to the dance floor already filled with couples.
I’ve never danced with a man before, he almost says, but even inside his head the protest sounds juvenile. He wants to point out that there are other people around them, that people are watching, but he can already hear Jack declaring that such was the point. Besides, now that they’ve achieved their purpose it’s not as if they should be afraid of being kicked out.
“Jack…” he quietly hisses, belatedly trying to pull away. Only a token attempt; there’s already polished hardwood under his shoes.
And he must be honest - the core of his reluctance lies in the proximity, the necessary bodily contact. When Lisa... it hadn’t seemed fair, for him to be able to touch other people when she couldn’t, so he hadn’t... and after, now, the others are wary around him, only the briefest accidental touches. Except for Jack, of course.
If Jack notices his reluctance, he doesn’t acknowledge it, instead pulling and winding his arms around Ianto. Anybody else, and Ianto would have retreated, stumbled, but this is Jack. Even before Ianto moves on to worrying about the logistics of two men dancing in a society that had designed dances for male-female pairs, Jack is holding up Ianto’s left hand, the other hands clasped between them, having taken the conventional woman’s side of the dance.
The familiar positioning does a lot to calm Ianto down, which is fortunate since he’s somewhat overwhelmed by Jack’s sudden and very alarming closeness. He hasn’t... the last time he’d had somebody so far inside his personal space, the world had ended. But dancing like this is something he knows, and from a time far enough back to be safe for reminiscence. Ianto forces in a breath, and manages to affect only a mildly astonished expression.
“Don’t look so surprised,” says Jack with a smile. Ianto tells himself to focus on Jack’s voice, not the warm, hard line of Jack’s body pressed lightly against his front, the subtly enticing scent that can only be the pheromones he mentioned once. “I’ve lived with the conventions of this time longer than you have. Never understood why men think taking the woman’s place threatens their masculinity.”
“It’s a power thing rather than a sexuality thing, I’m afraid,” Ianto murmurs. The lazy notes of the music carry them along (quite beautiful, really), and no one’s paying them any attention. “Where did you find it?”
“Around some Baroness’s wrist; she was wearing it as a bracelet.” Jack’s swaying stutters, and he rubs against Ianto in a way that would have been highly suspicious if not for the small mass he feels stashed away under Jack’s clothes. Ianto absolutely does not think about what the motion would have looked like to the people idly watching the floor.
“What is it?” he asks as Jack returns to the rhythm of the song. Adding to the list of things to not think about: warm breath over the sensitive skin under his earlobe, the smooth skin of Jack’s cheek teasing his.
“Part of a space engine, either Pooshar or Midway.” Jack’s voice, delivered almost directly into one ear, startles Ianto with its intimate nearness. “Advanced enough to not be radioactive, lucky for us. But emitting a low-frequency locater signal. Unfortunately, it’ll be about a thousand years before anyone is listening.”
“Hmm.” One shoe bumps against Jack’s, but Jack easily readjusts his stance, even turning the movement into a sweeping half-spin. “I notice that you’re still leading, though.”
Jack grins at him mischievously, executing another spin. Ianto instinctively relaxes, letting Jack carry them both through a gap in the couples. Luckily the tempo is not fast, and not so slow as to make them stand out. Much. But it’s... nice. And Jack is familiar. (Safe.)
”That Rift surge yesterday must have reactivated it, somehow,” says Tosh over Jack and Owen’s bent heads, the reading print-outs placed in front of them.
“But it’s not dangerous,” asks Owen.
Ianto quietly slips a packet of files Jack had requested earlier into the Captain’s hands, and turns to leave. But Jack catches his wrist, and gestures for him to stay. “The signature resembles that of pieces of relatively harmless space debris we’ve recovered before, most of which Jack dated to around the 40th century. So not dangerous in itself, but it may be visibly anachronistic.”
Ten minutes of Tosh typing and Ianto wondering why Jack wasn’t letting him leave, and the mainframe narrows down the signal’s location: a high-end hotel in the east of Cardiff City. But it can’t seem to get anymore precise than that.
“Stuff like this can lay dormant for years and years.” Jack frowns at Tosh’s screen. “Sometimes people make heirlooms out of them, a curiosity kept within the family. If someone has it, and keeps moving it around, that may be interfering with the scanners. We need to go in there.”
“There’s going to be a ball of some sort later today,” Gwen says, pointing at the announcement on the hotel’s website. Jack’s face breaks out into a wide smile when he reads it.
Owen peers close, and throws up his hands. “Consider me out of this. I’m not dressing up and schmoozing just to fetch a bit of space rubbish.”
“Believe it or not, Owen, inviting you never crossed my mind,” Jack says dryly. “Ianto?”
“I’m on it. One ticket to the 30s, coming right up. I can also recommend a place-“
“Two tickets,” interrupts Jack. “And on that note, you're my plus one.”
“You know, you can tell a lot about someone just by dancing with them,” says Jack, after a while.
“Oh?”
“For one thing, I notice that you’re following my lead.”
Strings of tension tighten the muscles of Ianto’s shoulders and upper back, and he looks away. “It’s not-“
“Hold on. I wasn’t... I didn’t really mean anything by it.” Jack bumps his chin down onto Ianto’s shoulder, which the younger man reads as a kind of apology. “Just hear me out.” It’s so rare for Ianto to hear hesitancy in Jack’s voice, much less feel the uncertainty in his body, that he’s perfectly willing to wait and listen. “You’re following me, right now. You don’t like me, probably hate my guts, but still you followed. Are following. And... that’s all I need to know.”
Ianto uses the ensuing silence to gently nudge their swaying back in tempo with the song. His first reaction is to say, I don’t hate you. Except he does, he does hate Jack, some days more than others, and the rest of it is... confusion. Bewilderment. There’s a constant about Jack, but also a wild unpredictability. (Like now.) Ianto hates him, but each day it’s becoming the sort of hate that could well go completely the other way, thin lines between and all. This is what terrifies him.
Still, or maybe in spite of the mess under his skin of late, Ianto feels inexplicable sadness at Jack only wanting... loyalty (obedience?) from him.
Talking without needing to make eye-contact is strange, but also freeing. “Why did you invite me, Jack?”
“Owen clearly didn’t want to go. Socializing is not Tosh’s forte. And Gwen is... too new.”
“Jack. Really.”
A sigh that teases the hair at the nape of Ianto’s neck. Jack pulls back, meets Ianto’s gaze. “I want you out on the field. As a field agent.”
Ianto blinks. “I’m not... With all due respect, sir, I’m not really qualified.”
“Let me be the judge of that.” Jack moves close again. “And less of this butler business. Though I suspect it’s in the best interest of mankind and the fabric of space and time for you to continue your coffee-making duties.”
Ianto grins, can’t help it. “Wouldn’t dream of stopping, sir.” Silence, quite comfortable, returns between them for the remainder of the song. At the end, they part, and walk sedately out into the lobby. Feeling the need to be polite, at least, Ianto speaks as they emerge into the outside; the cold night air holds the crispness of recent rain. “Thank you, Jack.”
He doesn’t specify what for, but Jack nods. He is quite a looker, Ianto thinks, particularly in the period clothing; a most remarkable, handsome figure from a different time and place. Ianto looks at him, feeling a bit breathless (probably the damp cold). “I’m still... It’s been a long time since somebody asked me to dance. I don’t... And I don’t know if I’m, you know, ready.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Jack smiles, his face gentle and kind and a little bit wistful. “When you are, you’ll ask me to dance.”