Even to the Edge (1/1)
Title: Even to the Edge
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13, lots of angry cursing
Spoilers: No specific spoilers; intended to take place mid-series two or thereabouts
Disclaimer: Not mine. Title is from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116: "Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/But bears it out even to the edge of doom..."
Summary: A routine operation almost ends disastrously, Jack wants to know exactly why Ianto's been taking so many risks, and Ianto's icy self-control finally snaps.
“What the fuck were you thinking, Ianto?”
Jack’s never sounded quite so enraged, as the five members of the Torchwood team wearily traipse back into the Hub after what should have been a fairly simple alien neutralization and retrieval. Instead, it had become a terrifying illustration of how very near a person (namely, Jack) could come to dismemberment, and how horrifyingly immediate Ianto’s mortality very nearly could have been if Jack hadn’t had that microgrenade in his coat.
And now they are home, mostly safe, and Jack is radiating fury from every line of his body as the rest of the team draws back, leaving Jack and Ianto standing facing each other like duelists. It’s a confrontation Jack’s seen coming for a long time, because Ianto’s taking more and more risks out in the field and Jack spends too many nights awake when the thought that maybe Ianto’s deliberately trying to get himself killed ices his veins.
“I was trying to save you from being torn to pieces,” Ianto snaps as hotly as could be managed with that icy control he imposes upon himself. “Sir,” he adds with a bitter twist, and Jack would almost flinch at the implication in the use of the honorific if he weren’t so damned angry.
“I would have been fine! You wouldn’t have been!” This is all so stupid and pointless and a conversation they never should have to have in the first place that it’s making Jack even angrier. It’s so fucking simple: he’s immortal. They aren’t. He does the dying. They don’t. He takes the stupid risks. They don’t.
Ianto doesn’t.
The thought of Ianto, his Ianto, dying because of him sends a fresh wave of unadulterated rage through Jack’s veins. “You idiot, it almost killed you!” He’s starting to shout now, his voice climbing into the upper registers of volume, and the rest of the team is shrinking away, but he’s too focused on Ianto’s rigid, glacial form to care.
“I noticed that myself.” Ianto’s harshly sarcastic, his tone clipped.
“You can’t take senseless risks like that!”
“It was a calculated risk.” Ianto must be made out of ice, the thought flashes across Jack’s mind. He’s shaking, whether from the aftereffects of adrenaline or barely suppressed anger or exhaustion Jack doesn’t know or care, but that’s all. He’s not moving. He doesn’t even look like he’s breathing. “You were about to be torn to pieces. I had to do something.”
“I would have survived!”
“I don’t care!”
The sound rings in the echoing Hub, and it takes Jack a stunned second to process it.
Ianto had just shouted at him.
Ianto.
Raising his voice.
To Jack. In front of everyone.
Ianto’s breathing hard now, fists clenched at his sides as though that is all that’s keeping him from crossing the room in three steps and punching Jack right in his bloodstained face. “I…don’t…care,” he grits out through clenched teeth. “I do not care, Jack Harkness.” He’s never looked this angry, either.
Jack’s still shocked at Ianto’s outburst, and his shock translates into pure, sobering, icy calm that’s fed by all his barely contained wrath. “So what exactly made you care enough to quite literally stick your neck out like that?” The mental image of how very close Ianto came to not only losing a few limbs but also having his throat slashed open is playing on a loop in Jack’s head, and he wants to be sick, to scream, to kill something, to howl at the world no no a thousand times no you’re not taking Ianto from me not yet not ever.
Ianto doesn’t answer. His eyes are locked on Jack, and if he’d been breathing hard before his breath is now positively hissing between his gritted teeth.
The silence, the pointlessness of it all, his own helpless anger at loyalty and mortality and fucking misplaced selflessness only serve to fan Jack’s flames higher. He wants an answer. Now. “Ianto Jones,” he growls in the tone of voice he has never, ever used or wanted to use with the man he thinks he’s sort of in love with, enunciating every word very pointedly, “I am your captain, and you will answer when I ask you a question.”
He’s way out of line. He knows he is. But he’s too far gone to care.
Ianto’s face twists, and it’s ugly how poisonous his expression is, how anger and leftover fear and contempt are all mingled together on a face that never shows this sort of emotion, not for any reason. He, too, enunciates very clearly as he spits, “Fuck rank, fuck your questions and fuck you, captain. Sir,” he adds savagely, and he whirls away from Jack, taking that first step toward the door that Jack’s been dreading since this confrontation began.
And it’s exactly as if he’s been shot in the head. In the heart. And it’s dizzyingly chilling to realize that things have gotten this out of control, this fast.
This isn’t like Ianto. This isn’t like him, Jack realizes. They’ve never done this to each other before, shouting at each other with rage in their voices, not to mention rowing in front of the entire team.
And he’d started it. In the half-second of frozen clarity Ianto’s bitter sir has burned into his mind, Jack realizes that tonight was the first time since things…changed between him and Ianto that Ianto had come so terrifyingly, immediately close to death.
Jack’s afraid to lose him.
And as always, Jack’s fear comes out sideways.
Fuck.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me, Ianto Jones!”
“Watch me!” Ianto shoots back. He’s almost at the doors now.
This isn’t entirely Jack’s fault, the captain realizes with something very close to desperation. Part of this is Ianto, part of this is Ianto putting his own life on the line when he knows, he knows that Jack can take anything that comes his way and still come out physically unscathed, if not entirely emotionally. There is no good reason for Ianto to do this.
“Ianto, what exactly is your problem?”
It’s not entirely how he’d meant to phrase it.
But it gets a hell of a reaction.
Ianto freezes for a shattering second, then whirls and in what could only be less than half a second is very forcefully invading Jack’s personal space, right in his face and ready to spit fire. Ianto’s never been this out of control, never been this angry, never expressed emotions this deep, not that Jack’s ever seen, and he’s beautiful and terrible at the same time.
Because it looks like the icy control has shattered, and Ianto Jones has finally snapped.
“What, exactly, is my problem, Jack?” he hisses, grabbing the front of Jack’s shirt and hauling the other man up against him. “You want to know what my problem is?”
“It’d be nice,” Jack growls back, not backing down even when inside he wants this to be over, wants things to go back to how they’d been: good, brittle and covered with a façade of normality as they were, because when the good is there on the surface it’s easier to ignore the turmoil brewing beneath. Easier to ignore the increasing attachment, the tension, the stupid careless risks that Ianto’s increasingly starting to take when Jack’s in danger, the stupid careless things Jack’s increasingly starting to say when he’s feeling too vulnerable or open or comfortable. As long as they ignored everything going on under the surface, it was easier to pretend that they were just fucking and not actually starting, maybe, sort of, to make love instead.
“My problem is you, Jack,” Ianto snarls, his tone harsh and his eyes feral and not looking like Ianto Jones at all, but like some wild creature that is Ianto Jones when you strip away the layers of suits and jobs and coffee and loyalty and helpless attachment and need and all that’s left is the basic, human instincts that drive everyone else but that Ianto Jones seems to have tamed. “My problem is you, pretending that you’re disposable. You, dying every day because you think it’s better for you to die than for us to prick our fingers. You, keeping us safe instead of yourself. You, dying a thousand deaths over and over and over again, Jack, for no good reason.”
Jack’s not trying to fight him, but Ianto’s hands are still clutching the front of Jack’s shirt so tightly that Jack knows the shirt’s going to be ruined. It’s a mark of how caught up Ianto is that he’s not noticing. Or caring.
Ianto’s breathing hard again, but his voice drops to a whisper. He sounds less angry, more worn and exhausted and pained and much more himself, and it hurts Jack somewhere very deep that those are the characteristics that make Ianto himself. “And I am so very fucking tired of washing your blood out of that coat.”
Jack’s anger has been ebbing since Ianto grabbed him, but it all goes out of him in a rush at that. He stares at Ianto incredulously, and his voice is much gentler when he asks in genuine surprise and confusion, “Is that what this is about? My blood on your hands?”
“Yes,” Ianto whispers fiercely, his eyes begging Jack to understand. “This is about you protecting us at what cost, Jack?”
Jack wants to cry with relief. This is something simpler, something still exquisitely complicated but yet at the same time the simplest thing in the world. “Ianto,” and his voice is pained tenderness as he reaches up to take Ianto’s hands, unclasping them from his shirt. “Ianto, this is what I do. Put myself on the line because I can and you can’t.”
Ianto glares at him. “At. What. Cost. Jack?”
Jack glares right back, but this is good-old-fashioned Jack frustration at good-old-fashioned Ianto stubbornness. This is familiar. This is good. And in his relief, his mouth runs a few seconds ahead of his brain. “All right. Yes, it hurts to die. Yes, it hurts to wake up. Yes, I wish it didn’t happen. But it would hurt a hell of a lot more to not be able to sacrifice myself for the sake of someone I lo--”
Finally his brain catches up with his mouth.
And Jack breaks off in horror, staring at Ianto’s suddenly wide eyes.
“What?” Ianto asks, incredulous.
Jack stares at him. Again, his mouth picks up ahead of his brain. “I die because that’s how it is, because if I can save someone then it’s worth it--” Ianto’s still staring at him, and Jack absolutely hates floundering but damn it, he’s doing it now.
“No, Jack, you were just about to say something, I believe,” Ianto prompts him, sounding almost breathless.
Jack closes his eyes for a moment. Some things he just can’t say. He doesn’t yet know if he means it, if he’ll have enough time to make it work, if he wants it, if he deserves it.
Something else, however, he can say. And if he manages to say it right, it’ll mend this horrible canyon on the verge of forming between them.
Jack tugs on Ianto’s hands, pulling the younger man closer, and lifts their still-clasped hands to his lips. He considers Ianto for a moment, all wide eyes and remnants of anger, and then says quietly, “Ianto, I am always going to be dying for you. I want to. So you’d better get used to it.”
Ianto stares up at him, conflicting emotions chasing themselves in his eyes and across his face, and then with a low cry wrenches one of his hands free from Jack’s grip and, hand on the back of Jack’s neck, crashes his lips against Jack’s in a harsh, punishing, passionate kiss.
Jack’s arms embrace him automatically, a conditioned reflex, trying to reassure and apologize and convey a million other things that have nothing to do with dying and everything to do with living in his kiss.
He can’t be entirely sure, but he thinks that he succeeds.
And when Ianto’s arms are around him, and Ianto’s face is buried in his shoulder as his whole body shakes with sobs, and the rest of the stunned team is slinking as quietly as possible away into the depths of the Hub to give them some belated privacy, Jack feels, if not totally, at least mostly complete.
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13, lots of angry cursing
Spoilers: No specific spoilers; intended to take place mid-series two or thereabouts
Disclaimer: Not mine. Title is from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116: "Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/But bears it out even to the edge of doom..."
Summary: A routine operation almost ends disastrously, Jack wants to know exactly why Ianto's been taking so many risks, and Ianto's icy self-control finally snaps.
“What the fuck were you thinking, Ianto?”
Jack’s never sounded quite so enraged, as the five members of the Torchwood team wearily traipse back into the Hub after what should have been a fairly simple alien neutralization and retrieval. Instead, it had become a terrifying illustration of how very near a person (namely, Jack) could come to dismemberment, and how horrifyingly immediate Ianto’s mortality very nearly could have been if Jack hadn’t had that microgrenade in his coat.
And now they are home, mostly safe, and Jack is radiating fury from every line of his body as the rest of the team draws back, leaving Jack and Ianto standing facing each other like duelists. It’s a confrontation Jack’s seen coming for a long time, because Ianto’s taking more and more risks out in the field and Jack spends too many nights awake when the thought that maybe Ianto’s deliberately trying to get himself killed ices his veins.
“I was trying to save you from being torn to pieces,” Ianto snaps as hotly as could be managed with that icy control he imposes upon himself. “Sir,” he adds with a bitter twist, and Jack would almost flinch at the implication in the use of the honorific if he weren’t so damned angry.
“I would have been fine! You wouldn’t have been!” This is all so stupid and pointless and a conversation they never should have to have in the first place that it’s making Jack even angrier. It’s so fucking simple: he’s immortal. They aren’t. He does the dying. They don’t. He takes the stupid risks. They don’t.
Ianto doesn’t.
The thought of Ianto, his Ianto, dying because of him sends a fresh wave of unadulterated rage through Jack’s veins. “You idiot, it almost killed you!” He’s starting to shout now, his voice climbing into the upper registers of volume, and the rest of the team is shrinking away, but he’s too focused on Ianto’s rigid, glacial form to care.
“I noticed that myself.” Ianto’s harshly sarcastic, his tone clipped.
“You can’t take senseless risks like that!”
“It was a calculated risk.” Ianto must be made out of ice, the thought flashes across Jack’s mind. He’s shaking, whether from the aftereffects of adrenaline or barely suppressed anger or exhaustion Jack doesn’t know or care, but that’s all. He’s not moving. He doesn’t even look like he’s breathing. “You were about to be torn to pieces. I had to do something.”
“I would have survived!”
“I don’t care!”
The sound rings in the echoing Hub, and it takes Jack a stunned second to process it.
Ianto had just shouted at him.
Ianto.
Raising his voice.
To Jack. In front of everyone.
Ianto’s breathing hard now, fists clenched at his sides as though that is all that’s keeping him from crossing the room in three steps and punching Jack right in his bloodstained face. “I…don’t…care,” he grits out through clenched teeth. “I do not care, Jack Harkness.” He’s never looked this angry, either.
Jack’s still shocked at Ianto’s outburst, and his shock translates into pure, sobering, icy calm that’s fed by all his barely contained wrath. “So what exactly made you care enough to quite literally stick your neck out like that?” The mental image of how very close Ianto came to not only losing a few limbs but also having his throat slashed open is playing on a loop in Jack’s head, and he wants to be sick, to scream, to kill something, to howl at the world no no a thousand times no you’re not taking Ianto from me not yet not ever.
Ianto doesn’t answer. His eyes are locked on Jack, and if he’d been breathing hard before his breath is now positively hissing between his gritted teeth.
The silence, the pointlessness of it all, his own helpless anger at loyalty and mortality and fucking misplaced selflessness only serve to fan Jack’s flames higher. He wants an answer. Now. “Ianto Jones,” he growls in the tone of voice he has never, ever used or wanted to use with the man he thinks he’s sort of in love with, enunciating every word very pointedly, “I am your captain, and you will answer when I ask you a question.”
He’s way out of line. He knows he is. But he’s too far gone to care.
Ianto’s face twists, and it’s ugly how poisonous his expression is, how anger and leftover fear and contempt are all mingled together on a face that never shows this sort of emotion, not for any reason. He, too, enunciates very clearly as he spits, “Fuck rank, fuck your questions and fuck you, captain. Sir,” he adds savagely, and he whirls away from Jack, taking that first step toward the door that Jack’s been dreading since this confrontation began.
And it’s exactly as if he’s been shot in the head. In the heart. And it’s dizzyingly chilling to realize that things have gotten this out of control, this fast.
This isn’t like Ianto. This isn’t like him, Jack realizes. They’ve never done this to each other before, shouting at each other with rage in their voices, not to mention rowing in front of the entire team.
And he’d started it. In the half-second of frozen clarity Ianto’s bitter sir has burned into his mind, Jack realizes that tonight was the first time since things…changed between him and Ianto that Ianto had come so terrifyingly, immediately close to death.
Jack’s afraid to lose him.
And as always, Jack’s fear comes out sideways.
Fuck.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me, Ianto Jones!”
“Watch me!” Ianto shoots back. He’s almost at the doors now.
This isn’t entirely Jack’s fault, the captain realizes with something very close to desperation. Part of this is Ianto, part of this is Ianto putting his own life on the line when he knows, he knows that Jack can take anything that comes his way and still come out physically unscathed, if not entirely emotionally. There is no good reason for Ianto to do this.
“Ianto, what exactly is your problem?”
It’s not entirely how he’d meant to phrase it.
But it gets a hell of a reaction.
Ianto freezes for a shattering second, then whirls and in what could only be less than half a second is very forcefully invading Jack’s personal space, right in his face and ready to spit fire. Ianto’s never been this out of control, never been this angry, never expressed emotions this deep, not that Jack’s ever seen, and he’s beautiful and terrible at the same time.
Because it looks like the icy control has shattered, and Ianto Jones has finally snapped.
“What, exactly, is my problem, Jack?” he hisses, grabbing the front of Jack’s shirt and hauling the other man up against him. “You want to know what my problem is?”
“It’d be nice,” Jack growls back, not backing down even when inside he wants this to be over, wants things to go back to how they’d been: good, brittle and covered with a façade of normality as they were, because when the good is there on the surface it’s easier to ignore the turmoil brewing beneath. Easier to ignore the increasing attachment, the tension, the stupid careless risks that Ianto’s increasingly starting to take when Jack’s in danger, the stupid careless things Jack’s increasingly starting to say when he’s feeling too vulnerable or open or comfortable. As long as they ignored everything going on under the surface, it was easier to pretend that they were just fucking and not actually starting, maybe, sort of, to make love instead.
“My problem is you, Jack,” Ianto snarls, his tone harsh and his eyes feral and not looking like Ianto Jones at all, but like some wild creature that is Ianto Jones when you strip away the layers of suits and jobs and coffee and loyalty and helpless attachment and need and all that’s left is the basic, human instincts that drive everyone else but that Ianto Jones seems to have tamed. “My problem is you, pretending that you’re disposable. You, dying every day because you think it’s better for you to die than for us to prick our fingers. You, keeping us safe instead of yourself. You, dying a thousand deaths over and over and over again, Jack, for no good reason.”
Jack’s not trying to fight him, but Ianto’s hands are still clutching the front of Jack’s shirt so tightly that Jack knows the shirt’s going to be ruined. It’s a mark of how caught up Ianto is that he’s not noticing. Or caring.
Ianto’s breathing hard again, but his voice drops to a whisper. He sounds less angry, more worn and exhausted and pained and much more himself, and it hurts Jack somewhere very deep that those are the characteristics that make Ianto himself. “And I am so very fucking tired of washing your blood out of that coat.”
Jack’s anger has been ebbing since Ianto grabbed him, but it all goes out of him in a rush at that. He stares at Ianto incredulously, and his voice is much gentler when he asks in genuine surprise and confusion, “Is that what this is about? My blood on your hands?”
“Yes,” Ianto whispers fiercely, his eyes begging Jack to understand. “This is about you protecting us at what cost, Jack?”
Jack wants to cry with relief. This is something simpler, something still exquisitely complicated but yet at the same time the simplest thing in the world. “Ianto,” and his voice is pained tenderness as he reaches up to take Ianto’s hands, unclasping them from his shirt. “Ianto, this is what I do. Put myself on the line because I can and you can’t.”
Ianto glares at him. “At. What. Cost. Jack?”
Jack glares right back, but this is good-old-fashioned Jack frustration at good-old-fashioned Ianto stubbornness. This is familiar. This is good. And in his relief, his mouth runs a few seconds ahead of his brain. “All right. Yes, it hurts to die. Yes, it hurts to wake up. Yes, I wish it didn’t happen. But it would hurt a hell of a lot more to not be able to sacrifice myself for the sake of someone I lo--”
Finally his brain catches up with his mouth.
And Jack breaks off in horror, staring at Ianto’s suddenly wide eyes.
“What?” Ianto asks, incredulous.
Jack stares at him. Again, his mouth picks up ahead of his brain. “I die because that’s how it is, because if I can save someone then it’s worth it--” Ianto’s still staring at him, and Jack absolutely hates floundering but damn it, he’s doing it now.
“No, Jack, you were just about to say something, I believe,” Ianto prompts him, sounding almost breathless.
Jack closes his eyes for a moment. Some things he just can’t say. He doesn’t yet know if he means it, if he’ll have enough time to make it work, if he wants it, if he deserves it.
Something else, however, he can say. And if he manages to say it right, it’ll mend this horrible canyon on the verge of forming between them.
Jack tugs on Ianto’s hands, pulling the younger man closer, and lifts their still-clasped hands to his lips. He considers Ianto for a moment, all wide eyes and remnants of anger, and then says quietly, “Ianto, I am always going to be dying for you. I want to. So you’d better get used to it.”
Ianto stares up at him, conflicting emotions chasing themselves in his eyes and across his face, and then with a low cry wrenches one of his hands free from Jack’s grip and, hand on the back of Jack’s neck, crashes his lips against Jack’s in a harsh, punishing, passionate kiss.
Jack’s arms embrace him automatically, a conditioned reflex, trying to reassure and apologize and convey a million other things that have nothing to do with dying and everything to do with living in his kiss.
He can’t be entirely sure, but he thinks that he succeeds.
And when Ianto’s arms are around him, and Ianto’s face is buried in his shoulder as his whole body shakes with sobs, and the rest of the stunned team is slinking as quietly as possible away into the depths of the Hub to give them some belated privacy, Jack feels, if not totally, at least mostly complete.