ALL ARE MADE OF CLAY
Characters: Ianto, Tosh, Jack
Pairing: Ianto&Tosh friendship, Ianto/Jack
Rating: Mild for inference of same-sex relationships
Spoilers: General for series
Disclaimer: Not mine; they belong to the BBC.
Summary: Ianto and Tosh acquire a shared hobby.
The leaflet was on her computer keyboard when she came in that morning. It was for one of the Further Education colleges that ran evening courses and the one for Pottery had been highlighted. After she had settled in her chair and started her computer, Tosh picked it up again curiously. It hadn’t been there last night when she had left, and she had been here after Gwen and Owen, so it had to have been put there by either Jack or Ianto. Neither of them struck her as being the type to suggest that she enrol in a pottery class, unless maybe it was for some kind of undercover mission. She was almost tempted to think that it was a joke, but that seemed highly unlikely so soon after Mary.
She was distracted by a shadow falling on her, which turned out to be Ianto with her first cup of green tea. Tosh gave him a small cautious smile and was encouraged by the very genuine one she got in return. To her surprise, however, he lingered after she had taken the cup from him and picked up the leaflet.
“Did you leave that there?” she asked curiously.
He nodded and gave her another, slightly more nervous smile. “I was wondering if you might be interested?” He reddened slightly at the incredulous look she gave him. “It’s just that…. I’m not sure I’d be able to turn up on my own.”
“You want to do pottery?” Tosh asked in surprise.
Ianto came as close to squirming as she had ever seen him do. “I just want to do something different, something creative. Something as far away from Torchwood as I can imagine,” he finished with a sigh. “Look, I’ll leave it with you and you can let me know. You don’t have to-“
“Yes, I’d like to,” Tosh said decisively. She looked up at him again and smiled. “I think I’d like to play around with some clay and get all messy. I certainly want to see you get all messy, although I don’t think I’ll believe it’s possible until I see it!”
Joining the class was easy and Tosh experienced a strange sense of disorientation for the first few sessions, since this was the most time she had spent with ordinary people in years. After a while, however, she started to relax and even look forward to the lessons. Their teacher was a lanky creature with a husky voice, a passion for atrocious puns that left Ianto wincing and Tosh giggling with appreciation and an enthusiasm for her subject that shone out of every pore and infected her class.
They were a mixed bunch as well, ranging from a builder built like a tank who wanted to make his wife something unique for their 25th wedding anniversary to a pair of young male Goths who looked like they were AWOL from a horror film but who seemed to exert a fascination for Ianto. In between were three housewives, a high powered female executive, two women at different stages of pregnancy, a quiet older man, a boy and a girl who looked to be involved with one another and a woman that Tosh was almost certain was a man in drag.
Ianto turned up for the first lesson wearing a battered pair of jeans that looked like they had had a fight to the death with a paint factory and a worn shirt over a white T-shirt. Tosh suppressed the urge to have him checked for alien possession but soon realised that she was the inappropriately dressed one. The next time she arrived wearing her oldest jeans and a jumper that had been ceremonially retired to the back of her wardrobe as being too tatty to be worn in public anymore. Ianto always seemed to manage to get less clay and slip on him than anyone else in the class though, which led to some discontented muttering from the executive, who was called Sylvia, and the more heavily pregnant of the women, who was called Steff and managed to elicit a deer-in-the-headlights look from Ianto by casually saying that she was currently a week overdue. Tosh had a strong suspicion that when he went home that night he probably researched emergency midwifery techniques, just in case.
A little to Tosh’s surprise, she soon realised that she was acquiring a social life through the class. Sylvia worked for a big international corporation that was forging links with Japan so Tosh found herself volunteering to coach her in basic Japanese. The woman she had thought was a man in drag was a man in drag called Frankie, who had a passion for haiku and Tosh dug out all of her books and brought them in and had long and enjoyably involved conversations on the subject. Classes were soon followed by after-class get-togethers and by the third month she had an invite to two parties, a barbecue, a gallery opening and the inaugural performance of one of the young Goths’ band fastened to her fridge door. She was a little bewildered by it all, but it was nice to be able to turn around and tell Gwen that yes, she did have something planned for the weekend, thank you very much.
Ianto, she was amused but a little sad to see, was just as popular but a lot more diffident about accepting invitations. He came for drinks after the classes, and he had accepted the offer to come and see Morgan’s new band play, but he was a little more elusive when it came to the parties. She knew he was also a lot more serious about the actual pottery than she was, since she had caught him researching glazes and throwing techniques via books and the Web. He had some project in mind, which he had been talking to their tutor about, but whenever Tosh had asked about it, he had gone a little red and refused to be drawn.
Frustrated, she had tried to pump Ceri, their tutor, about it, only to get caught red-handed by Ianto. She had been torn between embarrassment and amusement when he had overdone the dramatic betrayal bit, making Ceri laugh and Tosh promise that she wouldn’t ask again. Then he had swept the two of them off for a drink, at a far more expensive and intimate bar than they usually frequented. It was only afterwards, and with hindsight, that Tosh realised that he had orchestrated the entire evening, manipulating the conversation so Ceri and Tosh found out that they had a lot in common. All Tosh understood that the time was that it was nearly one in the morning before she realised that she and Ceri had been sitting with their heads together and that Ianto had moved away and was sipping a mineral water while watching them with amusement.
After that it had been easy to talk to Ceri and to sometimes go for drinks with just her and Ianto. She’s even been secretly pleased when Ianto had to beg off sometimes so they wound up going alone. And it was amazing how perfectly simple it had seemed to ask Ceri if she wanted to go and see a private showing of some ceramics that a collector was thinking of selling off. They’d gone for dinner after that and Tosh had smelt a rat when she realised that Ianto - who had volunteered to book for her - had selected one of the most romantic restaurants in Cardiff. Ceri had been seriously impressed and somewhere in the evening their friendship had taken a tentative step into less platonic territory.
“You, Mr Jones, are a matchmaker,” she said severely when she saw Ianto the next day. The smile he gave her made her pick up the nearest file and hit him with it. “You are impossible,” she fumed, trying to keep the smile off her face.
Ianto shrugged. “I just helped things along a little, that’s all,” he said innocently. "I like to see you happy."
And she was happy, she realised. Owen's jibes barely registered any more and she enjoyed being able to thwart Gwen's attempts to organise her life with a simple 'I'm already doing something'. It was nice to have something else to think about besides aliens, secrets and blood and they were already talking about going on a summer picnic to Bute Park. It was nice to be... normal.
Although her pot was never going to send any future archaeologist into a frenzy of excitement, Tosh decided a little ruefully.
"It's… unique," Ianto told her truthfully, if tactfully.
Tosh failed to hold down the giggles that threatened as she looked at the lopsided, slightly bulbous at the base but drooping at the top vase that she had produced. About the only thing that she was pleased about was the vivid sapphire colour of the glaze she had put on it. Ianto was quick to point that out as a plus and Ceri agreed with reassuring promptness.
"You're just saying that," Tosh sighed.
"Oh, no," Ceri shook her head. "I never praise where it's not earned. That's a disservice to the student. That really is a gorgeous colour. Try again. It's not like you only get the one chance."
Feeling a familiar stubbornness lay claim to her, Tosh did as she was told. Some of the students had dropped out of the class by now, but the hardcore potters, as they nicknamed themselves, continued. Steff had given Ianto a couple of minor heart attacks but had managed to give birth to her baby with a proper midwife in attendance and Tosh and Ceri had been delegated to take the flowers and fruit to the hospital with an invitation for her and her new child to come to the picnic. Tosh had stared down in wonder at the tiny scrap of life in the cot beside her bed and felt a fierce protective surge inside her. This is why I do what I do, she thought. To protect people like this.
Term gradually came to a close. Tosh had managed to produce a couple of very creditable pieces, including a bowl in the same sapphire blue that she gave to her grandparents, who promptly reduced her to embarrassed pride by clearing out an entire shelf in a curio cabinet and inviting their friends to come around and see it. She knew they wouldn't have done it if they hadn't believed it was worthy of such attention.
Ianto's project had turned out to be a matched pair of chalices. Tosh had caught her breath when she saw the first one after he'd completed it, but it took him a while to produce the exact mate. The style was a mixture of the Celtic and Art Nouveau that had a dream-like quality to it. The main body of the chalice was glazed a rich dark blue, with a black stem that represented the trunk of a tree that entwined itself across the shallow bowl of the chalice. Set at equal points around the edge of the chalice were four medallions that represented the moon at full, dark, crescent and three-quarters. There was a hint of gold and ruby in a tangle of roots at the base of the tree that looked like a fire, while a sinuously Celtic wolf was wrapped around the trunk in the same black of the tree that was somehow dappled in silver, so you only saw it if you held the chalice in the right way. Tiny flecks of some kind of crystalline dust was scattered randomly across the branches of the tree so that they winked in and out of existence as you watched.
"Torchwood," Tosh said softly when she finally worked out the symbolism. She gave him a charmed smile. "You've made all the sweat, pain and tears into a thing of beauty."
Ianto shrugged and looked mildly sheepish. "Sometimes it's the only way to cope with it," he mumbled.
Term came to an end and Tosh wasn't the only one to feel a pang. They took their exams, both practical and written and submitted their pieces to be assessed. Tosh wasn't a bit surprised to find out that Ianto had passed but her eyes had practically fallen out of her head when she saw that she was in the top ten per cent of the class. Ceri had arranged for all of their pieces to be exhibited when they attended their prize-giving ceremony and Tosh finally saw a chance to get her revenge for Ianto's matchmaking. All it needed was a quick word with Ceri and an extra invitation was passed over to her that she took great pleasure in hand-delivering.
Several of her family travelled up to Cardiff to attend her prize-giving so it took Tosh a while to slip away to go and check on Ianto. He was chatting with Morgan about something and Tosh frowned to see that he was on his own. She managed to slide him away from Morgan and dragged him over to his chalices, which Ceri had taken considerable pains to light in such a way that the wolves winked in and out of existence every time the viewer moved or blinked.
"What are you going to do with them?" she asked.
Ianto shrugged. "I don't have anything planned. It was the making of them that was important. Now I've achieved that, I suppose I'll just put them away in a cupboard."
"That would be a shame," came a familiar voice from behind them.
Tosh grinned hugely as she turned to look at Jack. "You're late," she said accusingly, enjoying the expression of total shock on Ianto's face.
"Hey, blame the Weevil, not me," Jack said with a shrug. "I left Owen and Gwen to take it in since I knew I was pushed for time." He turned his attention to Ianto. "So this is what you've been doing all this time? I'm impressed."
"You.." Ianto struggled to regain his poise and turned a look of dark foreboding on Tosh. "There will be a reckoning for this," he warned.
Tosh laughed. "Bring it on. Turnabout is fair play, Mr Jones. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my family. Come over and let me introduce you later, okay? Oh, and Jack?"
Jack tore his gaze away from the flickering ghost of the wolf on the nearest chalice and gave her an inquiring look. "Yeah?"
Tosh gave him her most impish smile. "Whatever you do, don't start him talking about glazes. There are much better ways to spend the night!"
Ianto found himself going very red at the look he got from Jack at that point. "Oh, yeah," Jack said in hearty agreement. "Way better!"
Pairing: Ianto&Tosh friendship, Ianto/Jack
Rating: Mild for inference of same-sex relationships
Spoilers: General for series
Disclaimer: Not mine; they belong to the BBC.
Summary: Ianto and Tosh acquire a shared hobby.
The leaflet was on her computer keyboard when she came in that morning. It was for one of the Further Education colleges that ran evening courses and the one for Pottery had been highlighted. After she had settled in her chair and started her computer, Tosh picked it up again curiously. It hadn’t been there last night when she had left, and she had been here after Gwen and Owen, so it had to have been put there by either Jack or Ianto. Neither of them struck her as being the type to suggest that she enrol in a pottery class, unless maybe it was for some kind of undercover mission. She was almost tempted to think that it was a joke, but that seemed highly unlikely so soon after Mary.
She was distracted by a shadow falling on her, which turned out to be Ianto with her first cup of green tea. Tosh gave him a small cautious smile and was encouraged by the very genuine one she got in return. To her surprise, however, he lingered after she had taken the cup from him and picked up the leaflet.
“Did you leave that there?” she asked curiously.
He nodded and gave her another, slightly more nervous smile. “I was wondering if you might be interested?” He reddened slightly at the incredulous look she gave him. “It’s just that…. I’m not sure I’d be able to turn up on my own.”
“You want to do pottery?” Tosh asked in surprise.
Ianto came as close to squirming as she had ever seen him do. “I just want to do something different, something creative. Something as far away from Torchwood as I can imagine,” he finished with a sigh. “Look, I’ll leave it with you and you can let me know. You don’t have to-“
“Yes, I’d like to,” Tosh said decisively. She looked up at him again and smiled. “I think I’d like to play around with some clay and get all messy. I certainly want to see you get all messy, although I don’t think I’ll believe it’s possible until I see it!”
Joining the class was easy and Tosh experienced a strange sense of disorientation for the first few sessions, since this was the most time she had spent with ordinary people in years. After a while, however, she started to relax and even look forward to the lessons. Their teacher was a lanky creature with a husky voice, a passion for atrocious puns that left Ianto wincing and Tosh giggling with appreciation and an enthusiasm for her subject that shone out of every pore and infected her class.
They were a mixed bunch as well, ranging from a builder built like a tank who wanted to make his wife something unique for their 25th wedding anniversary to a pair of young male Goths who looked like they were AWOL from a horror film but who seemed to exert a fascination for Ianto. In between were three housewives, a high powered female executive, two women at different stages of pregnancy, a quiet older man, a boy and a girl who looked to be involved with one another and a woman that Tosh was almost certain was a man in drag.
Ianto turned up for the first lesson wearing a battered pair of jeans that looked like they had had a fight to the death with a paint factory and a worn shirt over a white T-shirt. Tosh suppressed the urge to have him checked for alien possession but soon realised that she was the inappropriately dressed one. The next time she arrived wearing her oldest jeans and a jumper that had been ceremonially retired to the back of her wardrobe as being too tatty to be worn in public anymore. Ianto always seemed to manage to get less clay and slip on him than anyone else in the class though, which led to some discontented muttering from the executive, who was called Sylvia, and the more heavily pregnant of the women, who was called Steff and managed to elicit a deer-in-the-headlights look from Ianto by casually saying that she was currently a week overdue. Tosh had a strong suspicion that when he went home that night he probably researched emergency midwifery techniques, just in case.
A little to Tosh’s surprise, she soon realised that she was acquiring a social life through the class. Sylvia worked for a big international corporation that was forging links with Japan so Tosh found herself volunteering to coach her in basic Japanese. The woman she had thought was a man in drag was a man in drag called Frankie, who had a passion for haiku and Tosh dug out all of her books and brought them in and had long and enjoyably involved conversations on the subject. Classes were soon followed by after-class get-togethers and by the third month she had an invite to two parties, a barbecue, a gallery opening and the inaugural performance of one of the young Goths’ band fastened to her fridge door. She was a little bewildered by it all, but it was nice to be able to turn around and tell Gwen that yes, she did have something planned for the weekend, thank you very much.
Ianto, she was amused but a little sad to see, was just as popular but a lot more diffident about accepting invitations. He came for drinks after the classes, and he had accepted the offer to come and see Morgan’s new band play, but he was a little more elusive when it came to the parties. She knew he was also a lot more serious about the actual pottery than she was, since she had caught him researching glazes and throwing techniques via books and the Web. He had some project in mind, which he had been talking to their tutor about, but whenever Tosh had asked about it, he had gone a little red and refused to be drawn.
Frustrated, she had tried to pump Ceri, their tutor, about it, only to get caught red-handed by Ianto. She had been torn between embarrassment and amusement when he had overdone the dramatic betrayal bit, making Ceri laugh and Tosh promise that she wouldn’t ask again. Then he had swept the two of them off for a drink, at a far more expensive and intimate bar than they usually frequented. It was only afterwards, and with hindsight, that Tosh realised that he had orchestrated the entire evening, manipulating the conversation so Ceri and Tosh found out that they had a lot in common. All Tosh understood that the time was that it was nearly one in the morning before she realised that she and Ceri had been sitting with their heads together and that Ianto had moved away and was sipping a mineral water while watching them with amusement.
After that it had been easy to talk to Ceri and to sometimes go for drinks with just her and Ianto. She’s even been secretly pleased when Ianto had to beg off sometimes so they wound up going alone. And it was amazing how perfectly simple it had seemed to ask Ceri if she wanted to go and see a private showing of some ceramics that a collector was thinking of selling off. They’d gone for dinner after that and Tosh had smelt a rat when she realised that Ianto - who had volunteered to book for her - had selected one of the most romantic restaurants in Cardiff. Ceri had been seriously impressed and somewhere in the evening their friendship had taken a tentative step into less platonic territory.
“You, Mr Jones, are a matchmaker,” she said severely when she saw Ianto the next day. The smile he gave her made her pick up the nearest file and hit him with it. “You are impossible,” she fumed, trying to keep the smile off her face.
Ianto shrugged. “I just helped things along a little, that’s all,” he said innocently. "I like to see you happy."
And she was happy, she realised. Owen's jibes barely registered any more and she enjoyed being able to thwart Gwen's attempts to organise her life with a simple 'I'm already doing something'. It was nice to have something else to think about besides aliens, secrets and blood and they were already talking about going on a summer picnic to Bute Park. It was nice to be... normal.
Although her pot was never going to send any future archaeologist into a frenzy of excitement, Tosh decided a little ruefully.
"It's… unique," Ianto told her truthfully, if tactfully.
Tosh failed to hold down the giggles that threatened as she looked at the lopsided, slightly bulbous at the base but drooping at the top vase that she had produced. About the only thing that she was pleased about was the vivid sapphire colour of the glaze she had put on it. Ianto was quick to point that out as a plus and Ceri agreed with reassuring promptness.
"You're just saying that," Tosh sighed.
"Oh, no," Ceri shook her head. "I never praise where it's not earned. That's a disservice to the student. That really is a gorgeous colour. Try again. It's not like you only get the one chance."
Feeling a familiar stubbornness lay claim to her, Tosh did as she was told. Some of the students had dropped out of the class by now, but the hardcore potters, as they nicknamed themselves, continued. Steff had given Ianto a couple of minor heart attacks but had managed to give birth to her baby with a proper midwife in attendance and Tosh and Ceri had been delegated to take the flowers and fruit to the hospital with an invitation for her and her new child to come to the picnic. Tosh had stared down in wonder at the tiny scrap of life in the cot beside her bed and felt a fierce protective surge inside her. This is why I do what I do, she thought. To protect people like this.
Term gradually came to a close. Tosh had managed to produce a couple of very creditable pieces, including a bowl in the same sapphire blue that she gave to her grandparents, who promptly reduced her to embarrassed pride by clearing out an entire shelf in a curio cabinet and inviting their friends to come around and see it. She knew they wouldn't have done it if they hadn't believed it was worthy of such attention.
Ianto's project had turned out to be a matched pair of chalices. Tosh had caught her breath when she saw the first one after he'd completed it, but it took him a while to produce the exact mate. The style was a mixture of the Celtic and Art Nouveau that had a dream-like quality to it. The main body of the chalice was glazed a rich dark blue, with a black stem that represented the trunk of a tree that entwined itself across the shallow bowl of the chalice. Set at equal points around the edge of the chalice were four medallions that represented the moon at full, dark, crescent and three-quarters. There was a hint of gold and ruby in a tangle of roots at the base of the tree that looked like a fire, while a sinuously Celtic wolf was wrapped around the trunk in the same black of the tree that was somehow dappled in silver, so you only saw it if you held the chalice in the right way. Tiny flecks of some kind of crystalline dust was scattered randomly across the branches of the tree so that they winked in and out of existence as you watched.
"Torchwood," Tosh said softly when she finally worked out the symbolism. She gave him a charmed smile. "You've made all the sweat, pain and tears into a thing of beauty."
Ianto shrugged and looked mildly sheepish. "Sometimes it's the only way to cope with it," he mumbled.
Term came to an end and Tosh wasn't the only one to feel a pang. They took their exams, both practical and written and submitted their pieces to be assessed. Tosh wasn't a bit surprised to find out that Ianto had passed but her eyes had practically fallen out of her head when she saw that she was in the top ten per cent of the class. Ceri had arranged for all of their pieces to be exhibited when they attended their prize-giving ceremony and Tosh finally saw a chance to get her revenge for Ianto's matchmaking. All it needed was a quick word with Ceri and an extra invitation was passed over to her that she took great pleasure in hand-delivering.
Several of her family travelled up to Cardiff to attend her prize-giving so it took Tosh a while to slip away to go and check on Ianto. He was chatting with Morgan about something and Tosh frowned to see that he was on his own. She managed to slide him away from Morgan and dragged him over to his chalices, which Ceri had taken considerable pains to light in such a way that the wolves winked in and out of existence every time the viewer moved or blinked.
"What are you going to do with them?" she asked.
Ianto shrugged. "I don't have anything planned. It was the making of them that was important. Now I've achieved that, I suppose I'll just put them away in a cupboard."
"That would be a shame," came a familiar voice from behind them.
Tosh grinned hugely as she turned to look at Jack. "You're late," she said accusingly, enjoying the expression of total shock on Ianto's face.
"Hey, blame the Weevil, not me," Jack said with a shrug. "I left Owen and Gwen to take it in since I knew I was pushed for time." He turned his attention to Ianto. "So this is what you've been doing all this time? I'm impressed."
"You.." Ianto struggled to regain his poise and turned a look of dark foreboding on Tosh. "There will be a reckoning for this," he warned.
Tosh laughed. "Bring it on. Turnabout is fair play, Mr Jones. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my family. Come over and let me introduce you later, okay? Oh, and Jack?"
Jack tore his gaze away from the flickering ghost of the wolf on the nearest chalice and gave her an inquiring look. "Yeah?"
Tosh gave him her most impish smile. "Whatever you do, don't start him talking about glazes. There are much better ways to spend the night!"
Ianto found himself going very red at the look he got from Jack at that point. "Oh, yeah," Jack said in hearty agreement. "Way better!"