FIVE FOODS THAT WILL ALWAYS MAKE IANTO SMILE (AND ONE THAT MAKES HIM WEEP)
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Tosh, Lisa
Pairing: Jack/Ianto, Ianto and Tosh friendship
Rating: Mild PG
Disclaimer: Not mine; they belong to the BBC.
Spoilers: General, for first season
Summary: As it says in the title
Popcorn
The scent and taste of hot, fresh, buttered popcorn always makes Ianto think of his Tad. A great shaggy bear of a man with a laugh that would rumble up from deep in his chest and fingers as equally adroit at creating marvellous garments as they were fashioning kites or writing poems with an old-fashioned quill. It was from his Tad that Ianto learned the magic of the written word; thoughts and dreams committed to paper with careful penmanship.
He remembers Saturday mornings, when his Tad left the shop in the care of Uncle Matthew and Dai Silk. Mam would dress Ianto in the suit Tad had made for him, supposedly for a special occasion but Ianto stubbornly translated that into ‘every Saturday morning’, handing him the fob watch his tadcu had left him so he could tuck it into the waistcoat pocket. He would check his image in the mirror, very conscious of his 7-year old dignity. His father would chuckle and then nod approvingly while his mother would smile and kiss him softly on one cheek. With the correct coats selected, depending on the weather, they would set out for the cinema and the wonders of cartoons, serials and the main feature.
For over two hours Ianto would be transported to worlds of high adventure and fantasy. He would have his own paper cone of buttered popcorn, freshly made as they arrived; a sign that he was now grown up enough not to have to share his father’s. Sometimes, if the danger was particularly fraught or the villain especially evil, Ianto would lean that little bit closer to his father and his father would always wrap an arm around him and whisper that he hoped Ianto didn’t mind but Tad was a bit scared right now and could do with a hug.
Afterwards they would walk back home. Ianto would giggle over the funniest bits of the cartoons and wonder how the hero or heroine could possibly escape the mortal peril they had been left in this week. He would marvel over the beautiful costumes, songs and dances, fights and escapes and clever detective work in the films and his tad would enter into the spirit of things until they got home to find Mam waiting with lunch ready. Ianto and Tad would then tell her everything again, with her exclaiming suitably in all the right places. Afterwards his Tad would get up and kiss Mam, ruffle Ianto’s hair and go to the shop while Ianto would go upstairs to change out of his suit, putting it away carefully until next Saturday.
Those Saturday mornings are gone now, but never forgotten. Now he has Sunday afternoons on the couch with Jack, DVDs and pizza, but never popcorn. Popcorn belongs to the past, to a time when he was loved and loved back unconditionally and there was no blood on his hands. Popcorn belongs to his Tad and to his innocence.
Cawl
His mother had not been born Welsh but when he’s feeling fanciful Ianto often thinks she had been a soul in exile who managed to find her way home to where she belonged. She certainly ended up more Welsh than a lot of people he knows. She learned the language, the history and the culture, wrapping them around her like a well-loved and comfortable shawl. Few people remembered how she had been found, mute and wide-eyed, wandering the rain-lashed streets of Cardiff, but she did and she loved the country and the people who had taken her in with a deep and grateful passion.
She had certainly learned the culinary traditions of her adopted home. Her baked ham was fought over, her jams and other preserves sought after as gifts. Ianto sneered at most attempts at elderflower champagne and Gwen had been both impressed and disconcerted to find out that Ianto not only knew how to make laver bread from scratch but also knew where to go to harvest the seaweed.
But it was Mam’s cawl that made everything else pale into insignificance.
Ianto knows that his own attempts are a poor imitation, even if Jack does constantly pester him to make it. Some of Ianto’s strongest and happiest memories are of coming home after a day in school or at play and opening the door to be greeted by that heavenly scent. He would make haste to wash his hands and then sit at the battered wooden table in the kitchen while Mam ladled some cawl into the wooden bowls. That was the tradition. Everything else was eaten from crockery and silver cutlery but cawl and the other homemade soups were eaten out of wooden bowls using a wooden spoon. It’s a tradition Ianto still adheres to, even though he had to have the spoons specially carved.
Then the ceremony of actually eating the cawl would begin. First of all the pieces of carrot, swede and leek would be picked out and eaten with a little bit of the liquid, the sweet earthiness of the vegetables imbued with the taste of the cawl. Then the small pieces of the meat, soft as velvet from the slow and steady simmering, would be savoured. After that would come the rich spoonfuls of liquid, eaten with thick slice of bread and butter and chunks of sharp, strong cheese. Finally only the potatoes would be left, hot and juicy, to be mashed up and have a knob of butter stirred in before they were also eaten. Cawl potch, the taste of which was indescribable, except it was home and safe and love and the emotion that came when you knew you had all three.
Ianto remembers how astonished Jack was the first time he watched Ianto eat cawl. Jack, for whom food was nothing more than fuel he crammed into himself before heading off to the next great adventure. Now Jack eats his cawl the Jones way and throws a strop if he has fewer potatoes than Ianto at the end.
Ianto rarely wastes his time on what might have been but he often wishes that Jack could have met his mother, because he knows that Jack would have adored her. And he knows, he knows, that she would have adored Jack and spoiled him and maybe chased away some of the shadows in his eyes with a bowl of good Welsh cawl made with love.
Dark Chocolate
Chocolate will save the world one day. Ianto Jones knows this for a fact, although he’s not sure if it will be dark or milk. He knows this because Weevils are allergic to it, Nmett mercenaries consider it legal tender, it’s toxic to twenty two alien species and considered medicinal by another thirty six and pteranodons are addicted to it.
Ianto has to admit that the latter had been a bit surprising.
He sometimes wonders how he came to be so fond of Myfanwy. ‘She’ was an ‘it’ in the beginning and a means to an end, since Jack was proving stubborn and he hadn’t drunk enough of the doctored coffee for it to take effect. Ianto had found her by chance and discovered her predilection for dark chocolate when she had ruthlessly mugged him for the bar he had been carrying. His foreknowledge came in handy and he had been able to impress Jack enough to hire him when they had captured her together.
That should have been the end of it. She had served her purpose and that was all Ianto was supposed to care about. Somehow it hadn’t turned out that way. With the exception of Jack, who delighted in his newest pet, the others had become largely indifferent to her once her novelty value had worn off, so the burden of caring for Myfanwy had landed on Ianto’s shoulders. That it also meant he spent a lot of time with Jack left him thoroughly confused, guilty and elated. He sometimes wonders if the time he and Jack had spent together with Myfanwy had been the reason why Jack hadn’t killed or retconned him after Lisa. Easy to dispose of some virtual stranger who emptied the bins or made the coffee but a lot more difficult to do the same with the man you had sat up with into the small hours of the morning because your pteranodon was having a nasty reaction to some leftover chilli.
For whatever reason, what he thought would be a burden turned out to be an unexpected ray of light at a time when his world was as dark and bitter as the chocolate Myfanwy loves.
Maltesers
Tosh is many things. Genius is at the very top of the list but close behind that is the fact that she is a good friend. After Lisa she had done her best to take the lesson it had taught her on board. After Brynblaidd she had taken all her courage in both hands and pushed for something more than casual smiles and token gestures from Ianto.
She had already claimed him for help with some of her projects. When she was in her own domain, all awkwardness and hesitation fell away and she was energised and confident, pushing and manoeuvring Ianto into revealing far more than he was comfortable with. He suspected that she had originally put him to work on token jobs out of pity, and the idea had burned, but once she had got an idea of what he could do, Ianto found himself becoming more and more involved. Tosh was queen and huntress in her own realm and so beautiful inside and out that Ianto sometimes wondered what was wrong with him that he didn’t fall in love with her, even in his grief. Then Jack would be there and Ianto knew why, even though he fought against it bitterly.
Between Jack and Tosh, Ianto had no chance of letting go of life. Jack’s mercy was largely inexplicable, since Ianto refused to believe the easy lies that fell from the man’s lips. Tosh, however, acted out of empathy for trying to do something for love and have it blow up in your face. Finding out about what UNIT did to her explained so much. Timid and awkward her gestures might be, but they were honest and heartfelt and Ianto loved her for that courage. Later, after Mary, Ianto returned the favour and did his best to remind her that life wasn’t all despair and death. Convincing her had the unexpected side-effect of helping him lay most of his own remaining ghosts.
He found out about her addiction to Maltesers by accident. After Brynblaidd, Tosh decided that Ianto needed to learn how to get loose if he’s ever tied up again. Knowing better than to do anything even remotely connected to bondage where there’s a chance of Jack finding them, they relocated to Ianto’s house for the lessons. Halfway through Ianto trying to work out how to wriggle free of nylon rope, Tosh found the promotional Maltesers tin Ianto had got from somewhere and she had let out the same kind of muted squeal a good piece of alien tech usually provoked. When an amused Ianto had told her she could keep it, she had reacted much like Ianto had when Jack had given him that Lalique scent-bottle he had been quietly lusting over.
Well apart from the kissing.
After that it’s an in-joke between them. Every time Ianto knows that Tosh is having a bad day he will quietly deposit a bag of Maltesers on her desk with her favourite coffee. If it’s a really bad day it’s a box. She, in turn, will do the same for him with Jaffa cakes. (Ianto knows he’s slipping when he gets Jaffa cakes from Tosh and Jack at the same time.)
True happiness, Ianto decides, is lying half-asleep on the sofa and watching Jack and Tosh going head-to-head in the Malteser Olympics, with Jack yelling about cheats and wanting Ianto to adjudicate on a sudden-death Malteser-blowing competition.
Cheese on toast
Cheese on toast used to be just a quick, cheap meal. When he had met Lisa, who was lactose intolerant, it had dropped off the culinary map. Ianto started to eat it again when he moved back to Cardiff but it had still been little more than a cheap and fast meal. Then Jack Harkness gatecrashed his life.
Jack has the most appalling manners in bed. He was bad enough in that ridiculous bunk he had underneath his office but Ianto gradually started to have cause to have fits over the things Jack did while staying over at Ianto’s. Crisp packets under the pillows had Ianto fuming but discovering a scattering of chocolate Hobnob crumbs the hard way while in the throes of passion led to some very strong words. (And make-up sex, but that was after Ianto had made Jack change the bed.)
All that paled into insignificance, however, when Jack came back and decided that having breakfast in bed with Ianto should become a regular thing. Ianto didn’t know whether to be pleased or terrified by this development. Most days he decided it’s a mixture of both. Ianto’s not exactly the poster boy for mornings and he’s simply not capable of handling exploding croissants and all manner of sticky and/or gloopy substances at the ungodly hour he generally has to get up at. Especially in his bed. And with an enthusiastic Jack involved. Especially with an enthusiastic Jack involved.
Jack’s nothing if not adaptable, however. After working his way through croissants, yogurts, fruit and porridge, Jack finally hits paydirt with cheese on toast. Not because cheese on toast is any less messy than any of the other things Jack has tried. If anything, it’s worse, what with the crumbs and the grease. It’s just that somehow; somehow, Jack manages to make cheese on toast sexy. (This does tend to worry Ianto on some distant level.)
The first time Jack used cheese on toast as a sex aid, Ianto decided that he was never disbelieving any of Jack’s tall tales again. After a couple of repeat performances, he also realises he can never east cheese on toast in public again. And that never fails to make him laugh.
Mangoes
Mangoes were Lisa’s favourite fruit. Ianto was pretty certain he had never even tasted mangoes before he met her but he soon more than made up for that. He cooked chicken with mango the first time he invited her back to his place and when they had moved in together he surprised her with a miniature mango tree. It never produced any fruit but the blossoms were beautiful. Looking back he finds that somewhat apt.
Lisa had teased him that he was a success with her mother after she had promised to give him her secret recipe for mango salsa. Ianto never got it before Canary Wharf blew up in their faces. Lisa’s parents had been informed that she had died and Ianto hadn’t been able to say anything different for fear of alerting people of her existence when he had worked so hard to make sure that UNIT and Torchwood had forgotten that her body had not been found. He had consoled himself with imagining how thrilled they would be when he succeeded in curing her and he could reunite Lisa with her family.
During the dark months, when Ianto had been trying so hard to keep Lisa focused and hopeful, mango played a pretty big part. He fed her slivers of the whole fruit, flavoured ice cream and mango smoothies and burned candles scented with mango. He told her that they would go to St Lucia and pick mangoes off the trees and eat them there and then, the juice running down their chins as they walked through the surf on the beach.
Ianto can never decide if he wants to throw up or weep when he tastes or smells mango.
Sometimes he does both.
Pairing: Jack/Ianto, Ianto and Tosh friendship
Rating: Mild PG
Disclaimer: Not mine; they belong to the BBC.
Spoilers: General, for first season
Summary: As it says in the title
Popcorn
The scent and taste of hot, fresh, buttered popcorn always makes Ianto think of his Tad. A great shaggy bear of a man with a laugh that would rumble up from deep in his chest and fingers as equally adroit at creating marvellous garments as they were fashioning kites or writing poems with an old-fashioned quill. It was from his Tad that Ianto learned the magic of the written word; thoughts and dreams committed to paper with careful penmanship.
He remembers Saturday mornings, when his Tad left the shop in the care of Uncle Matthew and Dai Silk. Mam would dress Ianto in the suit Tad had made for him, supposedly for a special occasion but Ianto stubbornly translated that into ‘every Saturday morning’, handing him the fob watch his tadcu had left him so he could tuck it into the waistcoat pocket. He would check his image in the mirror, very conscious of his 7-year old dignity. His father would chuckle and then nod approvingly while his mother would smile and kiss him softly on one cheek. With the correct coats selected, depending on the weather, they would set out for the cinema and the wonders of cartoons, serials and the main feature.
For over two hours Ianto would be transported to worlds of high adventure and fantasy. He would have his own paper cone of buttered popcorn, freshly made as they arrived; a sign that he was now grown up enough not to have to share his father’s. Sometimes, if the danger was particularly fraught or the villain especially evil, Ianto would lean that little bit closer to his father and his father would always wrap an arm around him and whisper that he hoped Ianto didn’t mind but Tad was a bit scared right now and could do with a hug.
Afterwards they would walk back home. Ianto would giggle over the funniest bits of the cartoons and wonder how the hero or heroine could possibly escape the mortal peril they had been left in this week. He would marvel over the beautiful costumes, songs and dances, fights and escapes and clever detective work in the films and his tad would enter into the spirit of things until they got home to find Mam waiting with lunch ready. Ianto and Tad would then tell her everything again, with her exclaiming suitably in all the right places. Afterwards his Tad would get up and kiss Mam, ruffle Ianto’s hair and go to the shop while Ianto would go upstairs to change out of his suit, putting it away carefully until next Saturday.
Those Saturday mornings are gone now, but never forgotten. Now he has Sunday afternoons on the couch with Jack, DVDs and pizza, but never popcorn. Popcorn belongs to the past, to a time when he was loved and loved back unconditionally and there was no blood on his hands. Popcorn belongs to his Tad and to his innocence.
Cawl
His mother had not been born Welsh but when he’s feeling fanciful Ianto often thinks she had been a soul in exile who managed to find her way home to where she belonged. She certainly ended up more Welsh than a lot of people he knows. She learned the language, the history and the culture, wrapping them around her like a well-loved and comfortable shawl. Few people remembered how she had been found, mute and wide-eyed, wandering the rain-lashed streets of Cardiff, but she did and she loved the country and the people who had taken her in with a deep and grateful passion.
She had certainly learned the culinary traditions of her adopted home. Her baked ham was fought over, her jams and other preserves sought after as gifts. Ianto sneered at most attempts at elderflower champagne and Gwen had been both impressed and disconcerted to find out that Ianto not only knew how to make laver bread from scratch but also knew where to go to harvest the seaweed.
But it was Mam’s cawl that made everything else pale into insignificance.
Ianto knows that his own attempts are a poor imitation, even if Jack does constantly pester him to make it. Some of Ianto’s strongest and happiest memories are of coming home after a day in school or at play and opening the door to be greeted by that heavenly scent. He would make haste to wash his hands and then sit at the battered wooden table in the kitchen while Mam ladled some cawl into the wooden bowls. That was the tradition. Everything else was eaten from crockery and silver cutlery but cawl and the other homemade soups were eaten out of wooden bowls using a wooden spoon. It’s a tradition Ianto still adheres to, even though he had to have the spoons specially carved.
Then the ceremony of actually eating the cawl would begin. First of all the pieces of carrot, swede and leek would be picked out and eaten with a little bit of the liquid, the sweet earthiness of the vegetables imbued with the taste of the cawl. Then the small pieces of the meat, soft as velvet from the slow and steady simmering, would be savoured. After that would come the rich spoonfuls of liquid, eaten with thick slice of bread and butter and chunks of sharp, strong cheese. Finally only the potatoes would be left, hot and juicy, to be mashed up and have a knob of butter stirred in before they were also eaten. Cawl potch, the taste of which was indescribable, except it was home and safe and love and the emotion that came when you knew you had all three.
Ianto remembers how astonished Jack was the first time he watched Ianto eat cawl. Jack, for whom food was nothing more than fuel he crammed into himself before heading off to the next great adventure. Now Jack eats his cawl the Jones way and throws a strop if he has fewer potatoes than Ianto at the end.
Ianto rarely wastes his time on what might have been but he often wishes that Jack could have met his mother, because he knows that Jack would have adored her. And he knows, he knows, that she would have adored Jack and spoiled him and maybe chased away some of the shadows in his eyes with a bowl of good Welsh cawl made with love.
Dark Chocolate
Chocolate will save the world one day. Ianto Jones knows this for a fact, although he’s not sure if it will be dark or milk. He knows this because Weevils are allergic to it, Nmett mercenaries consider it legal tender, it’s toxic to twenty two alien species and considered medicinal by another thirty six and pteranodons are addicted to it.
Ianto has to admit that the latter had been a bit surprising.
He sometimes wonders how he came to be so fond of Myfanwy. ‘She’ was an ‘it’ in the beginning and a means to an end, since Jack was proving stubborn and he hadn’t drunk enough of the doctored coffee for it to take effect. Ianto had found her by chance and discovered her predilection for dark chocolate when she had ruthlessly mugged him for the bar he had been carrying. His foreknowledge came in handy and he had been able to impress Jack enough to hire him when they had captured her together.
That should have been the end of it. She had served her purpose and that was all Ianto was supposed to care about. Somehow it hadn’t turned out that way. With the exception of Jack, who delighted in his newest pet, the others had become largely indifferent to her once her novelty value had worn off, so the burden of caring for Myfanwy had landed on Ianto’s shoulders. That it also meant he spent a lot of time with Jack left him thoroughly confused, guilty and elated. He sometimes wonders if the time he and Jack had spent together with Myfanwy had been the reason why Jack hadn’t killed or retconned him after Lisa. Easy to dispose of some virtual stranger who emptied the bins or made the coffee but a lot more difficult to do the same with the man you had sat up with into the small hours of the morning because your pteranodon was having a nasty reaction to some leftover chilli.
For whatever reason, what he thought would be a burden turned out to be an unexpected ray of light at a time when his world was as dark and bitter as the chocolate Myfanwy loves.
Maltesers
Tosh is many things. Genius is at the very top of the list but close behind that is the fact that she is a good friend. After Lisa she had done her best to take the lesson it had taught her on board. After Brynblaidd she had taken all her courage in both hands and pushed for something more than casual smiles and token gestures from Ianto.
She had already claimed him for help with some of her projects. When she was in her own domain, all awkwardness and hesitation fell away and she was energised and confident, pushing and manoeuvring Ianto into revealing far more than he was comfortable with. He suspected that she had originally put him to work on token jobs out of pity, and the idea had burned, but once she had got an idea of what he could do, Ianto found himself becoming more and more involved. Tosh was queen and huntress in her own realm and so beautiful inside and out that Ianto sometimes wondered what was wrong with him that he didn’t fall in love with her, even in his grief. Then Jack would be there and Ianto knew why, even though he fought against it bitterly.
Between Jack and Tosh, Ianto had no chance of letting go of life. Jack’s mercy was largely inexplicable, since Ianto refused to believe the easy lies that fell from the man’s lips. Tosh, however, acted out of empathy for trying to do something for love and have it blow up in your face. Finding out about what UNIT did to her explained so much. Timid and awkward her gestures might be, but they were honest and heartfelt and Ianto loved her for that courage. Later, after Mary, Ianto returned the favour and did his best to remind her that life wasn’t all despair and death. Convincing her had the unexpected side-effect of helping him lay most of his own remaining ghosts.
He found out about her addiction to Maltesers by accident. After Brynblaidd, Tosh decided that Ianto needed to learn how to get loose if he’s ever tied up again. Knowing better than to do anything even remotely connected to bondage where there’s a chance of Jack finding them, they relocated to Ianto’s house for the lessons. Halfway through Ianto trying to work out how to wriggle free of nylon rope, Tosh found the promotional Maltesers tin Ianto had got from somewhere and she had let out the same kind of muted squeal a good piece of alien tech usually provoked. When an amused Ianto had told her she could keep it, she had reacted much like Ianto had when Jack had given him that Lalique scent-bottle he had been quietly lusting over.
Well apart from the kissing.
After that it’s an in-joke between them. Every time Ianto knows that Tosh is having a bad day he will quietly deposit a bag of Maltesers on her desk with her favourite coffee. If it’s a really bad day it’s a box. She, in turn, will do the same for him with Jaffa cakes. (Ianto knows he’s slipping when he gets Jaffa cakes from Tosh and Jack at the same time.)
True happiness, Ianto decides, is lying half-asleep on the sofa and watching Jack and Tosh going head-to-head in the Malteser Olympics, with Jack yelling about cheats and wanting Ianto to adjudicate on a sudden-death Malteser-blowing competition.
Cheese on toast
Cheese on toast used to be just a quick, cheap meal. When he had met Lisa, who was lactose intolerant, it had dropped off the culinary map. Ianto started to eat it again when he moved back to Cardiff but it had still been little more than a cheap and fast meal. Then Jack Harkness gatecrashed his life.
Jack has the most appalling manners in bed. He was bad enough in that ridiculous bunk he had underneath his office but Ianto gradually started to have cause to have fits over the things Jack did while staying over at Ianto’s. Crisp packets under the pillows had Ianto fuming but discovering a scattering of chocolate Hobnob crumbs the hard way while in the throes of passion led to some very strong words. (And make-up sex, but that was after Ianto had made Jack change the bed.)
All that paled into insignificance, however, when Jack came back and decided that having breakfast in bed with Ianto should become a regular thing. Ianto didn’t know whether to be pleased or terrified by this development. Most days he decided it’s a mixture of both. Ianto’s not exactly the poster boy for mornings and he’s simply not capable of handling exploding croissants and all manner of sticky and/or gloopy substances at the ungodly hour he generally has to get up at. Especially in his bed. And with an enthusiastic Jack involved. Especially with an enthusiastic Jack involved.
Jack’s nothing if not adaptable, however. After working his way through croissants, yogurts, fruit and porridge, Jack finally hits paydirt with cheese on toast. Not because cheese on toast is any less messy than any of the other things Jack has tried. If anything, it’s worse, what with the crumbs and the grease. It’s just that somehow; somehow, Jack manages to make cheese on toast sexy. (This does tend to worry Ianto on some distant level.)
The first time Jack used cheese on toast as a sex aid, Ianto decided that he was never disbelieving any of Jack’s tall tales again. After a couple of repeat performances, he also realises he can never east cheese on toast in public again. And that never fails to make him laugh.
Mangoes
Mangoes were Lisa’s favourite fruit. Ianto was pretty certain he had never even tasted mangoes before he met her but he soon more than made up for that. He cooked chicken with mango the first time he invited her back to his place and when they had moved in together he surprised her with a miniature mango tree. It never produced any fruit but the blossoms were beautiful. Looking back he finds that somewhat apt.
Lisa had teased him that he was a success with her mother after she had promised to give him her secret recipe for mango salsa. Ianto never got it before Canary Wharf blew up in their faces. Lisa’s parents had been informed that she had died and Ianto hadn’t been able to say anything different for fear of alerting people of her existence when he had worked so hard to make sure that UNIT and Torchwood had forgotten that her body had not been found. He had consoled himself with imagining how thrilled they would be when he succeeded in curing her and he could reunite Lisa with her family.
During the dark months, when Ianto had been trying so hard to keep Lisa focused and hopeful, mango played a pretty big part. He fed her slivers of the whole fruit, flavoured ice cream and mango smoothies and burned candles scented with mango. He told her that they would go to St Lucia and pick mangoes off the trees and eat them there and then, the juice running down their chins as they walked through the surf on the beach.
Ianto can never decide if he wants to throw up or weep when he tastes or smells mango.
Sometimes he does both.