Torchwood Fic: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics 2/2
When Jack decides that investigating a series of rural disappearances calls for a camping trip, he ponders whether to take Ianto with them. On one hand, he’s sure that Ianto’s presence will be invaluable in smoothing over the dozens of small inconveniences that are bound to crop up. He probably knows how to make fire by rubbing sticks together. On the other hand, taking Ianto as well as the rest of the team will leave the Hub unattended. They’ll all have their mobiles, but what if the alien invasion happens when they’re right in the middle of a dead spot?
And that’s without taking Ianto’s personal situation into account. For some reason, he strongly associates camping with his memories of Lisa--taking him on a camping trip seems like it might be downright cruel. Or it might be just the thing to prompt him to open up a bit and bond with the rest of the team. On that hope, Jack decides to take him along.
Later, he’ll think that it might have worked, if not for the village full of cannibals.
There’s nothing in Ianto’s behavior--when he’s not drugged--to remind any of them that he’s recently lost someone he loved. Considering that, Jack isn’t at all surprised when Gwen--apparently having the same idea Jack had, about team bonding--tries to start up a truth game concerning who each team member last snogged.
But he is mildly surprised when Ianto takes the opportunity to remind them all that Lisa had existed.
But it doesn’t lead to anything except an awkward moment, and then the SUV is stolen and there’s no time to worry about Ianto, beyond the same worry he has about the rest of the team--namely, getting them out alive.
Later, once they’ve all made it back to the Hub and safety, he talks to each one separately, checking how they’re holding up. Gwen is researching cannibalism on the internet, coping by trying to understand. Owen makes himself busy cleaning out the communal refrigerator, throwing out anything that resembles meat--whether it belongs to him or not. When he sees Jack watching him, he says defensively, “Some of this stuff’s been in here for months. It’s a health hazard.”
“Of course,” Jack agrees.
“I’ve been thinking about going vegetarian anyway. It’s much better for your heart,” he explains, picking up a meat pie with two fingers, as if he barely wants to touch it. “Cholesterol. And…things.”
He finds Toshiko brushing her teeth, the buildup of foam in the sink suggesting that she’s been at it for a while. He pats her shoulder and decides to find Ianto next, then double back to Tosh.
With Owen occupying the kitchen, the likeliest place to find Ianto is the tourist office, and indeed, that’s where he is. He’s standing at the computer, fingers poised on the keyboard and focusing on the screen as though he’s absorbed in reading something on it--but the screen is blank except for the desktop background. He glances up at Jack for a bare second, then turns his eyes back to the screen.
Jack clears his throat. “You’re all right, then?” He knows Ianto isn’t, just as he knows Ianto will never tell him so.
Ianto doesn’t look away from the blank screen. “Of course I’m all right.”
Jack thinks of the Doctor. “You’re always all right, hm?”
Ianto’s eyes flick over to him, and he nods.
Scrubbing his face with his hand, Jack sighs. Ianto seems to be coping about as well as any of the others are, but Jack thinks of him as a bit more fragile. “We’ll talk later,” he offers.
Ianto hesitates, then drops his chin. “That might be a good idea.”
#
Eventually, Owen finishes with the fridge and drags Gwen away from her research and out of the Hub. A little later, Tosh throws her toothbrush away and heads home, too. Only Ianto’s left, slowly straightening piles of papers that he’s already straightened three or four times since getting back from the country.
When the cog door closes behind Tosh, Ianto straightens up slowly, meeting his eyes. “I’m ready if you are, sir.”
Jack’s surprised to hear Ianto volunteering to talk, but doesn’t comment on it. “Sure. Just a minute, all right?”
Going red around the ears, Ianto nods quickly and straightens another pile of papers.
Jack putters for a few minutes, taking a leak and getting himself a cup of tea. Maybe the cannibal camping disaster is getting Ianto to open up a bit, even if it’s not exactly how Jack had pictured it happening. Probably not worth it, but he hasn’t been given a choice, he might as well take the good with the bad.
In that frame of mind, he goes Ianto-hunting, and quickly finds him on the couch. He’s taken off his jacket and tie, and when Jack sits next to him, looks at him expectantly.
Jack glances down at the cup of tea in his hand. He should have made Ianto one--he’s lived in Britain long enough to know that’s what you do when someone’s upset. He hands the cup to Ianto. “Uh, two sugars, right?”
“Close enough.” Ianto takes a sip of the tea, then peers into it as if he’s not quite sure what it is. “I thought you said it was tablets.”
“Hm?”
“The truth serum,” he explains, taking another sip.
Oh.
Isn’t that interesting.
For a few seconds, Jack considers going with it, letting Ianto think he’s been drugged. He could say it’s a milder formula; it might work, just on the power of suggestion. Ianto wants to talk--he doesn’t think he can, without the tablets, but he wants to. But they have a deal. No more secrets. “I thought we’d try without this time,” Jack says instead.
Very carefully, Ianto puts the tea mug down, centering it precisely on a coaster. He tucks his chin against his chest and looks at Jack. “I don’t think so.”
For a second, Jack sees himself pointing out how ridiculous Ianto sounds, demanding to be drugged insensible and interrogated. But he stops himself. “Why? You won’t remember--”
“I know.”
“But you won’t forget enough, either,” Jack says gently.
Ianto looks away and picks up the mug of tea. He sips slowly, rearranging his hands on the mug as if it’s meant for someone with a different number of fingers than he has. Finally he says, “It’s the only way I sleep properly.”
Ianto’s just told him something personal, without benefit of drugs. Maybe they are getting somewhere, after all. “You could ask Owen to prescribe something. Sleeping tablets, I mean.”
Ianto turns back to look at him. “Of course. I hadn’t thought of that, because after all, I am extremely stupid.”
“Oh. Didn’t work, huh?”
“Not unless having screaming nightmares and not being able to wake up is an improvement, no.”
Jack thinks about that for a moment. “I’ll get the tablets.”
#
Not having any questions prepared this time, Jack gives Ianto the tablets and waits. Ianto, he thinks, wants to talk. If he does, once he’s relaxed enough, he’ll start up on his own. If not, at least he’ll get a nice rest.
For a while, it seems like that’s the way it’s going to go. Ianto’s head drops back against the sofa cushions, and a few times he opens and closes his mouth like a guppy, but nothing comes out.
Not even drool. The drug takes some people like that, but--Jack is faintly relieved--Ianto isn’t one of them.
Finally, Ianto says, “I didn’t mind they were going to kill me. But they were going to--put me up in the pantry until they needed me. Couldn’t take that. Waiting.”
A shudder rolls across Jack’s shoulders. Being held captive by aliens who plan to eat him has never been one of his favorite things, and somehow, having it be humans makes it worse. He makes a small, affirmative noise.
“So I thought, I’ll goad them in to killing me right away. And maybe Tosh would get away. She thinks that’s the whole reason. But it’s mostly that I didn’t want to wait.”
Is that it? Jack wonders. Ianto’s worried that his actions while being held captive by cannibals are being interpreted as more selfless than they were?
“But then they didn’t kill me,” Ianto continues. “And I think I was…relieved.”
Relieved. Does that mean he isn’t suicidal anymore? Not that he exactly had been before. Too depressed to be suicidal, was how he’d described himself. Not sure how to respond, Jack settles for nodding and saying, “Okay.”
Ianto scrunches down, resting his cheek against the arm of the sofa. “Okay,” he repeats. “O…….kay. Oak-ay.” He turns his face into the upholstery and giggles.
He’s more relaxed than he was in the previous sessions--he’d always managed to talk lucidly before. Of course, this time he’d taken the DubCon on an empty stomach. And he doesn’t have Jack controlling the session, keeping him on track with questions.
Maybe he should think one up, then. Since he hadn’t planned on doing this, he doesn’t have any prepared. And maybe he ought to just let Ianto be silly for a while, until he passes out.
Except if he doesn’t do this right, he’ll have to do it again soon, and even if Ianto has decided he sort of likes DubCon, Jack isn’t going to use it on him any more often than necessary. “Anything else I should know? Scratch that--anything else you don’t want me to know?”
Ianto’s eyes go wide and he gulps air. Jack realizes with a sharp stab of dread that this is Ianto trying to fight the drug. Whatever Ianto’s trying not to say, Jack doubts he wants to hear it any more than Ianto wants to say it. “C’mon,” Jack says. “Out with it.”
“Sometimes,” Ianto says, and jams a hand into his mouth.
Jack pulls the hand out of his mouth, and catches Ianto’s other wrist for good measure. “What?”
“Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to kiss you.”
Whatever Jack had been expecting, that certainly wasn’t it. Sometimes when he flirts with Ianto, Ianto flirts back. But not recently--not since Lisa. He’d figured it must have been part of the role Ianto was playing.
Before he has time to organize a response, Ianto rolls on, “I think it would be rather nice. You’re so…bendy.”
#
In the morning, when Ianto begins showing signs of waking up, Jack ducks out and buys him a cup of coffee and a muffin. There’s an awkward moment at the shop when Jack realizes he has no idea what kind of muffins Ianto likes, but he finally settles on blueberry--everyone likes blueberry, don’t they? Back at the Hub, he puts Ianto’s breakfast where he’s sure to see it, and studiously ignores him.
After Ianto’s revelation, Jack had laughed out loud and thanked gods he didn’t believe in, but when Ianto lurched forward, saying, “Should we try it?” he’d sobered up fast.
Thing was, Ianto had always--in the pre-Lisa, or rather the pre-Jack-knowing-about-Lisa days--responded to Jack’s flirtation with a sort of distance. It reminded Jack of flirting with married women in the mid nineteenth century--it was a game, fun for everyone, and the most important rule was that would never, ever lead to anything (except when it did, but one way you could tell who was having an affair was if they stopped flirting in public). And after Lisa--well, after Lisa he’d stopped cold. Ianto was clearly in no state to play, and Jack was leery of giving him the impression that submitting to sex with him was part of the cost of keeping his life and his memory. He was sure he’d be able to clear up the misunderstanding before anything went too far, but it wouldn’t exactly be fun.
Now, though--well, Ianto isn’t going to remember having told him, and it’s always possible that “sometimes” means when he’s on DubCon. Still, he guesses he has license to start flirting with Ianto again--except now, now it might go somewhere. That changes things.
So he sits at his desk and pretends to work, and tries not to notice when Ianto stretches and sits up.
Failing completely at not noticing, he settles for not being obvious about it.
Ianto rubs at his eyes and reaches for the paper cup of coffee. He takes a sip, then winces and puts it back down. Untangling the blanket from his legs, he gets up and pads, barefoot, over to the kitchenette.
After a moment of fussing around out of Jack’s sight, he returns to fetch the paper coffee cup and disappears again.
He returns, carrying the same paper cup, but now with the lid off, and sits on the couch, drawing his feet up under him. After a moment, he starts picking at the muffin, pinching off bits and popping them in his mouth. Either eating the blueberries, or eating around them; Jack can’t tell.
He wrenches his attention back to his paperwork, for a few minutes. When he looks back at Ianto, he’s reading a newspaper. It must be an old one--Jack didn’t think to get one for today.
He’s seen Ianto showering, sobbing, spilling his guts under DubCon, but somehow, watching him eat breakfast and read the paper seems voyeuristic.
What he ought to do is not watch, but that’s a non-starter, so Jack decides the next best thing is to let Ianto know he’s being watched. Picking up a mug, he heads downstairs.
As soon as he leaves his office, the scent of fresh-brewed coffee slaps him in the face. Ianto glances up at him, and he raises the mug in explanation, heading for the kitchenette. That’s a bit weird--Ianto got up and made coffee, when he’s still drinking the stuff from the shop?
No, Jack decides, evaluating the level of coffee in the carafe. He’d dumped out the coffee Jack bought him and refilled the disposable cup with what he’d made.
When he goes back into the main room, Ianto is hurriedly putting on his shoes, his tie draped around his neck. “I thought the others weren’t coming in until late,” he explains, head down, like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t have.
“They aren’t.”
Ianto looks up at him, his face blank.
“Take your time,” Jack adds. “You’d have time to go home, if you want to.”
Ianto shakes his head quickly. “I have some things here. Thank you.”
Jack wonders exactly what he’s being thanked for. Probably not the muffin. “Did you sleep all right?”
“I must have. Don’t remember.” He flips up his collar and adjusts his tie, as if he’s not sure whether to go ahead and tie it or not.
“You asked for it.”
“I remember that.” Ianto lets his head drop onto the back of the sofa. “Don’t suppose I want to know what I said.”
Jack thinks for a moment. “Probably not.” He grins. “Anyway, it’s all classified. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
Ianto picks his head up and stares at him for a moment. “That was…almost funny.”
“Almost, huh? I’ll keep trying,” Jack says, and bounds up the stairs to his office.
#
For a while, Jack fools himself into thinking that Ianto must be doing better. He’s still very quiet, but he somehow seems more subdued than despairing. And-more importantly-he doesn’t ask Jack to DubCon him again. Jack wonders if he ought to offer him some to take at home-but unsupervised access to powerful drugs isn’t really the best thing for a man who’s only a few days past suicidal.
Then Tosh gets hold of a pendant that lets her read people’s minds. He tells her he doesn’t want to know-she doesn’t want to know, either; he doesn’t need to read minds to know that-but she hesitates and says, “Ianto-he’s….” She doesn’t seem to be able to put a word to what Ianto is.
“I’m keeping an eye on him.”
She nods. “Good. That’s…someone should be.”
The next day, Jack asks Ianto if he has any plans after work.
“No,” Ianto says cautiously.
Jack grins at him. “You do now. I’ll pick you up at six.”
“Pick me up? From where?”
“Well, here,” Jack admits. “Wear the suit.”
“This one?” Ianto asks, looking down at himself.
“Sure. Six,” he says again, and goes off to bother Owen.
A few minutes after six Ianto is standing by the door to the tourist office, with his jacket on and his umbrella in his hand. His back is to the Hub door, and as Jack approaches, he checks his watch. “Worried I’m going to stand you up?” Jack asks.
“I thought maybe something had come up.”
“I have better manners than that.”
“No, you don’t,” Ianto answers, and immediately looks horrified.
Jack shrugs. “No, you’re right. If the world needed saving, I’d stand you up. But it doesn’t, so let’s go.”
Outside, Jack opens the umbrella while Ianto locks up behind them, and holds it over them as they start across the Plass. “Where are we going?” Ianto asks after a few moments.
“I’m not sure. I’m thinking Italian. You fancy Italian?”
Ianto gives him a sharp look, full of honest confusion.
“Dinner. You didn’t eat already, did you?” He already knows the answer-a few bites of a grilled chicken salad at lunch, and half a digestive with his afternoon coffee. He’ll give himself an ulcer if he isn’t careful.
“No. No, I didn’t eat.”
“All right, then.”
“But-why?”
Jack pretends to misunderstand. “I have a craving for pasta. Maybe something in a cream sauce. I can’t tell you what a relief it was when the era of canned spaghetti was over. Have you had it, or was that before your time?”
“Uh-my gran used to do it for Friday tea. Looked sort of like something you’d give the dog.”
“That’s about the size of it.” Jack steers them to an Italian restaurant-nothing fancy, but nice enough, with tablecloths made of actual cloth and prices a little too high for students looking for something to soak up liquor. Jack orders fettuccine Alfredo and the house red; Ianto looks lost for a moment before asking for the same.
After the waitress brings their wine, Ianto traces along the rim of his glass with a fingertip. “What did Tosh tell you?”
“Nothing I didn’t already know.”
“That’s less helpful than you may think.”
Jack shrugs. Ianto knows why they’re here, if he chooses to think about it. Jack’s checking up on him. Jack’s flirting with him. Jack wants to make sure he’s getting enough to eat. Jack likes the way his ass looks in his suit. Bringing any of it out into the open won’t make any of it less awkward. “Wanted some information about the local tourists sites. Heard you were the man to ask.”
Ianto humors him by launching into a spiel on Cardiff Castle, touching on the Gothic towers, Norman keep, and modern flush toilets for both gentlemen and ladies.
“Ah, but is there a little shop? I won’t visit a castle that doesn’t have a little shop.”
“There is a shop. Postcards, knick-knacks, full range of traditional Welsh crafts.”
“Excellent. Can I get a tea towel with something saucy written on it in Welsh?”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you could.”
“I know where I’m doing my Christmas shopping, then.”
With a little encouragement, Ianto proves willing to tell all about the silly things tourists have asked him. For a moment, Jack’s able to imagine that Ianto is a normal man, with a normal job. That he’s never catalogued an alien artifact, hosed down a Weevil cell, kept a dead half-robot girlfriend alive in a basement. Perhaps it’s who he’d be if he’d taken the severance package.
“But I’d say at least half want to know where the toilets are, and not all of them want to listen when I say they have to go across to the pizza shop. One woman tried to convince me it was against the law not to have them. She wasn’t as bad, though, as the one who kept insisting we must have them somewhere, telling me all about her bladder problem, as though once she’d convinced me she really needed one, I’d finally admit we had secret ones hidden somewhere.”
“Which we do, actually.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t about to admit it. ‘Yes, just go through the secret doorway, ma’am, and take a left at the pterodactyl.’”
Jack laughs. “We’d need a lot more RetCon that way.”
Their food comes, and Jack supplies a few anecdotes of his own, light and carefully edited not to give away too much. It works-Ianto probably knows he’s being managed, but he goes along with it, laighs in the right places, eats his food instead of playing with it.
The waitress comes by to offer dessert. “Cheesecake?” Jack suggests. “Zabaglione?” There was sorbet on the menu, too, but he thought Ianto wanted fattening up.
“Just coffee,” Ianto says.
“Two,” Jack tells the waitress.
Ianto has evidently decided that they’re done playing at being normal people, because he says, “You didn’t bring me here to talk about blue-haired tourists and Chinese gymnasts.”
“Guess not,” Jack admits. Ianto’s toying with his dessert spoon; Jack plucks it out of his fingers and takes Ianto’s hand in his, winking.
Ianto huffs and looks at the ceiling, but doesn’t pull his hand away. “What now?”
“Now, later, I’m easy.” He grins broadly.
“I gathered,” Ianto says, so dry you could mummify it.
The coffee comes. Ianto takes his hand back now, to add sugar to his coffee and stir.
“Not as good as yours,” Jack says, after a sip.
“It rarely is.”
“I wonder, Ianto Jones, if you have other talents you’ve been hiding.”
It’s a misstep. Ianto had been relaxed-not laid bare the way DubCon leaves him, but with his guard lowered a few notches. Now he goes stiff; Jack can see him thinking that he’s in a completely different conversation than he thought they were having. “Sorry. That was supposed to be a double entendre,” he says, hoping to salvage the moment.
Ianto nods. “It came out more of a triple.”
Moment salvaged. Maybe that’s another of Ianto’s hidden talents. “I guess I’ll have to try being direct.”
Ianto closes his eyes.
“How are you in bed?”
“And I thought you were going to say something inappropriate.”
“Avoiding the question?”
“Above average.”
Jack nodded appreciatively. “Now, if five is average, are we talking six…nine…what?”
Ianto shook his head and sipped his coffee. “I don’t have a large enough statistical sample to be accurate.”
“You know,” Jack said, leaning forward. “I could help you with that.”
“Could you?”
“Big hobby of mine, statistics.”
Ianto’s eyes meet his, and Jack can almost feel him thinking. After a long moment, he breaks eye contact and says, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
It’s not a no, Jack decides. It’s a not yet. He sits back, and as they finish their coffee, he tells the one about the time he was shot down by the Germans.
It’s not until he gets to the part about the pork chops that he realizes Ianto may have questions about how, exactly, he was flying missions over occupied France when he doesn’t look a day over thirty-six. But Ianto just says, “You never.”
“I did. And the American cook says back, ‘How many of these fucking pork chops do you want?’ I had four, and I have to admit, they were the best fucking pork chops I’ve ever had.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t shoot you.” Ianto shakes his head. “There were rumors at Torchwood One, about…time travel.”
“Yeah. I can’t really tell you more about it. Paradox stuff.” It’s not exactly true, but it’s close enough, and neither of them either pretended to think that the no secrets thing goes both ways.
#
After dinner, Jack walks Ianto to his car and leaves him with a more-or-less chaste kiss. The low-level flirtation he keeps up for the next few weeks seems to roll off Ianto like water off a duck’s back, but Jack notices that not quite fading into the background to the extent that he had before. Jack can’t officially take credit for that, but really, who wouldn’t be more confident when he’s being fancied by Jack Harkness? Answering back to Owen’s barbs, instead of sighing and walking away, is definitely a good sign, and Jack once catches him participating in an entirely-non-work-related conversation with Tosh and Gwen, ranging over the subjects of bin liners, traffic snarls, and saucy underwear.
Then two dead bodies are found with “Torchwood” painted over the corpses in their own blood. More people die; they bring back Suzie, and as it turns out, Ianto is way down the list when it comes to evil masterminds of Torchwood. Not even in the top ten.
He’s been on the receiving end of enough passes that he used to be pretty sure he’d always spot one coming a mile away, but he almost misses Ianto’s. Maybe stopwatches are teeming with sexual possibility, but if so, the possibilities have so far escaped him. Something to do with statistics, maybe.
It’s the timing, and the setting, of the pass that’s really different. Jack knows all about life-affirming sex, two soldiers coming together over the body of a dead comrade, but usually it’s slightly more metaphorical, and it doesn’t seem like that’s what Ianto is proposing, somehow.
It’s not until Jack’s out of the room and back in his office, getting out lube and adjusting lighting conditions, that he thinks about the symmetry of it. Suzie isn’t the only woman who’s had to die more than once, and “Death by Torchwood” could apply as much to Lisa as to her.
It’s some kind of message, but when Ianto shows up, tie at half-mast and stopwatch in hand, Jack forgets to ask what kind.
Fin