We held gold dust in our hands (3/7, Torchwood, Jack/Ianto/Lisa/Gwen/Rhys)
Title: We held gold dust in our hands (3/7)
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team, etc (Jack/Lisa/Ianto/Gwen/Rhys and all permutations thereof with a heavy dose of the first three), Rhys, Rhiannon, Alice, Ten, Lisa (basically everyone!)
Ratings: NC-17 for sexual content (also mild watersports and lactation sex).
Timeline: AU from pre S1 and threads through both seasons, part of CoE and into THE FUTURE. Enjoy the ride.
Wordcount: 63,000 words
Author's Notes: See the master post for notes and credits and fanmixes.
Summary: You don't pick your family. They pick you.
IANTO
Operation Goldenrod is a rousing failure. The device has been contained finally, but the past three days have been a nightmare. Ianto had fallen onto the sofa at the Hub, trying to unsee the disfigured bodies, to unhear the screaming as he'd gone from body to body, trying to find a place to use the sedative gun on them.
Owen had been working around the clock, but body after body had kept dying. Jack, Owen's surgical assistant, had dashed about, handing over instrument after instrument, tossing piles of bloody rags and body parts into the biohazard bins for Ianto to cart off to the incinerator.
Suzie had taken Tosh home to sleep off her first-kill panic.
Ianto's clothing had been long past ruined-it's been incinerated along with dozens of bodies they couldn't save, people whose families will never know what actually happened to them. He usually tries to find a body to match and disfigure enough to make it resemble the person, so that the families will have something to claim, but this time, it is impossible. He would have to dig into the frozen Torchwood employees, but Jack has drawn the line, saying that people will just have to file missing persons and never know.
They all agree that it's almost better that way, anyway.
Jack is taking the escape of the machine from the Hub badly. Ianto knows that he himself is partly to blame, because he hadn't filed it properly, locked it down like he should have, when Tosh was done with it. Some part of him is insanely grateful that the machine hadn't actually started fusing bodies until after it left the Hub, because the thought of any of them on Owen's table, screaming and writhing with open skin and livers and yowling throats makes him queasier than the last bag of squelchy body parts he'd thrown into the incinerator right before he'd stripped off at the end of the day and burned his clothes.
Then he'd had a proper cry in the showers, where no one could hear him, because that is The Torchwood Way, and donned his spare clothes-a t-shirt and denims that he'd brought in to wear when mucking out the weevil cages.
Now that it is all over, Owen has lit out to crawl inside a bottle; Suzie had never returned from Tosh's, but she is never reliable in that way anyway; as soon as Suzie is free of the Hub sometimes, it is hard to make her return. Jack says that's how she works. Ianto doesn't quite care as long as she comes back eventually. It's not his place to judge.
That leaves the two of them. Ianto decides that he's going to autoclave every instrument in Owen's lab before he gets back, and he staunchly tells himself that hosing down the walls of the autopsy theatre and replacing all the equipment that's been ruined by slamming bodies and Owen's frustrated trashing of the place is his job, a gift to Owen, so that he can come back in whenever he sobers up and pretend that it never happened, that he hadn't been a failure.
Ianto would never say Owen is a failure anyway. The whole thing had been, as Lisa likes to call bad things, 'made of fail'. He runs the water and dumps tools into the basin as he finds them scattered everywhere: scalpel on the floor in the corner, forceps caught in the chain of the upper railing, and so on.
Jack emerges from his office, presumably at the sound. He stands at the upper railing and surveys the wreckage, probably seeing it in its entirety for the first time. 'Go home.'
Ianto glances up at him. 'No, I'll finish this,' he replies, circling about the room to find the last of the loose implements. When he is sure that he has collected them all, he dips his hands in the soapy water and swirls them around. He likes them to be relatively clean before they go into the autoclave, and he has already decided that he's going to run it at least three times, for symbolism.
'I called Lis, told her you'd be home soon,' Jack says, and it nags at Ianto because Jack isn't his keeper, and then he has to remind himself that in this place, Jack is his boss.
He looks at Jack again, hands gripping the chain, eyes not on him, but rather staring at the splashes of blood on the autopsy table, the floor, the morgue drawers, as if Owen had come in to work and said, "You know, I feel like the medical bay just isn't Basqiat enough," and then tossed every blood sample they'd had all over the place.
'I can't go home,' he says softly, 'because you drove me.' That is a lie. Not the driving part-Jack did give him a ride four days ago on their way to work before they had known that the next half-week would be a nightmare. It's a lie because he could take a cab. He could walk to the bus stop. Lisa could come get him if she were so inclined. Ever since she passed the specialised test, she likes to drive the car with its modified steering and pedals.
But it's the first thing he says, and maybe by saying it, he can communicate what he means, which is, 'No one should have to do this alone.'
Jack must agree with the unspoken statement, because he joins Ianto on the lower level and pulls on a pair of gloves. 'This could wait,' he says, but he drags a damp rag along the centrifuge cabinet. 'Go home. I'll take care of it.'
'Jesus, Jack, if you do my job any more than you're already doing, Owen will think I've crawled up your arse completely.' Ianto doesn't know where this is coming from, but he decides to roll with it, and if Jack doesn't like it, he can go back to his office and…clean his gun or call someone important. 'You're not alone in this, you know,' Ianto bites out. 'There's a reason you call us a team.'
It occurs to him that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Jack stops with the rag in his hand and looks at Ianto, studying him, as if he has finally figured out that this is about more than post-mission-failure clean up. 'I don't do your job,' he says softly. And then, as if he is desperate to lighten things, he resumes scrubbing the walls. 'I just like helping. And my coffee is shit.'
Ianto shakes his head. Jack's coffee is like motor oil.
He grabs handfuls of instruments and throws them into the shelving of the autoclave, and it doesn't occur to him that he's sliced his hand open through the glove until he sees red on the outside of the unit and thinks to himself that he hadn't washed as thoroughly as he had supposed. Jack grabs his wrist and holds it up to their eye level.
'Take off the gloves, let me see.' But he doesn't bother waiting for Ianto, and instead he peels the glove off himself, tossing it aside on the table and examining Ianto's palm, which is now sporting an angry two centimeter gash that doesn't look very deep. Blood runs in rivulets down his outstretched fingers and drips onto the floor, mingling with the dirty water and coagulated blood that is there already. Ianto is vaguely surprised that his blood looks just like everyone else's. All the dead people he burnt up.
'Huh,' is all he says, because it hurts, but it feels far away. Pain through a tunnel.
Jack cleans the wound in the sink, then dries it and disinfects it. Ianto can't even sit down, there isn't a clean surface anywhere. They can't find the steri strips and Ianto isn't about to let Jack near him with a suture kit, so they slather it with antibacterial ointment and pack it with gauze. Ianto ignores Jack's suggestion of super glue and then they tape the whole thing together with medical strapping.
They re-glove and set about scrubbing the place rough and raw. Jack moves the furniture as Ianto uses the hose, scouring the walls with the pressure nozzle. Ianto squeegies the floor and Jack removes the last of the blood traces from the table and the sink. Then they move everything back. When they are done, Ianto thinks that he can only smell bleach. His head is a little woozy, and he isn't sure why.
When he de-gloves over the sink, his hand is painted red. Jack recleans and bandages the wound, tutting softly, and then he palms his keys, grabs their coats and leads Ianto from the Hub.
On the way home in the car, the radio station plays "Mack the Knife". Jack turns it off with a decided click.
Ianto smiles at him as they take the lift, and Jack's own smile is weak in return. Ianto isn't even sure why he does it. Just having Jack there is reassuring. He isn't sure what he would say to Lisa if he came home by himself.
Jack has been living with them for two months, coming and going and sharing their bed, setting up his own space in which he keeps books, ammo and clothing, the occasional DVD. Ianto calls the small bedroom that Jack uses "The Lair", because it just has a few shelves, a very small bed, and an overstuffed chair that he never uses for its intended purpose. Jack seems to like small spaces, from his office at the Hub to the hole underneath it, and occasionally Ianto catches him crunched up in the back of the SUV, reading a pulp novel. Those are the times he doesn't want anyone to find him. It's odd that a man who seems to take up so much space actually prefers the opposite, in some of his quieter moments.
They stumble in the door; Ianto falls face-first on the sofa again and closes his eyes. Lisa and Jack are in the kitchen, he can hear them, mumbling or just talking quietly. There's a long silence, and when Ianto raises his head to make sure they aren't on fire, dead or in bloody pieces, Jack is on his knees in front of her wheelchair, arms wrapped around her waist, head buried in her chest. Lisa rests her cheek on the top of his head and her arms over his, threading her fingers through the hair at his temples over and over again.
Ianto lowers his head back to the sofa and mashes his face into the cushions.
When he comes to, later, the house smells like toast. Jack and Lisa are sitting at the table and eating, talking softly. Ianto scrubs at his face with the sleeve of his flannel button down and joins them, blinking in the light. Jack watches him over his mug of tea. Lisa fixes Ianto a cup to his liking and sets it by his bandaged hand. They eat in silence, toast and preserves and cold summer sausage and small digestives and grapes. Ianto appreciates the segmented nature of it.
That night, Ianto crawls in between them and presses himself up against the curve of Lisa's hip, his top arm pulling Jack's over his shoulder like a blanket. Jack shudders into his back, just for a second, and Ianto wants to lick the tears from his face.
So he does.
Operation Goldenrod fades into memory. The team returns to normal. Tosh learns to speak again, Suzie is available to others, and Owen is sober on a more regular basis. Jack pushes the whole thing into a box in his mind, he tells Ianto, a box that holds all the shit he's seen that he doesn't want to dwell on, because it will make him crazy. Ianto understands, but unlike Jack, who locks his box with forced cheerfulness and optimism, Ianto's is clumsily taped shut with determination and minute forays into happiness, like a Milka bar in the afternoon or a footrub in the bathtub with Lisa.
Lisa doesn't ask about it, because she doesn't want any more grief in her life, she tells them, but she lets them know that if they want to tell her, ever, anything, they can say it, because she has room for that, room for the horrors they see, that they capture in their heads, behind their eyes, and bring home with them. Ianto and Jack vow to never breathe a word.
One night, in the middle of dinner, Jack is telling them some far-fetched story about a Norlon and her amazing spinning vagina, when Lisa takes off her wedding ring and gives it to him. Jack stares at the band of gold in his hand, out flat and shaking, when Ianto finds himself sliding his off his finger and dropping it in that palm, listening to the soft jangle of gold on gold on Jack's skin.
Jack looks at him like he doesn't know what it means, though Ianto knows that he does. Jack likes to call Lisa his Thoroughly Modern Millie, and Ianto his Man Friday. Ianto calls him Wooster and Lisa his Gorgeous Dove. Lisa jokingly refers to Ianto as Slave One. Jack has only recently graduated to Slave Two, a step up from Step N' Fetch It.
Ianto rolls his eyes and sets his chin in his hands, elbows on the table. Lisa simply blinks a few times and then refills her glass of water from the pitcher, an attractive filtration system that Jack has bought for them.
Jack stands and walks to the sideboard, opening one of the ornamental Russian nesting dolls that Lisa had brought back from a trip to Moscow. He clinks the rings into the matryoshka, then assembles the whole set, dolls in dolls. Lisa's eyes are bright. Ianto can feel his heart like a jackhammer and Jack shakes the whole thing a little as if to prove to himself that they are in there, and turns to them with a wry smile.
'Safe keeping,' he says.
*~*~*~*~*~*
LISA
She likes to wake up between Jack and Ianto, but it doesn't happen often, because Jack is restless, and he likes to put on pajama bottoms and climb out on the roof, the one place where she cannot follow him. She tries sometimes, her chair at the bottom of the stairs, and she counts the metal steps up to the roof: there are fifteen of them.
Like right now; the stairwell smells like exhaust and stale cigarette smoke (she too is guilty of smoking out here, but only when she's drinking alone, and that's not often), and that car park smell that concrete places get when they're not properly ventilated. She drums her hands on the arms of her chair and wonders what she should do.
It's five-thirty in the morning and she hadn't heard him leave. His coat and shoes are still there, and so she knows that he's not in the flat or gone back to the Hub. Alec Guinness's face is frozen on the telly screen, where Jack has inexplicably paused 'Bridge Over the River Kwai', presumably to go out to the rooftop.
He's been upset since Suzie has died, of course he would be; they haven't told her much about what happened to Suzie, except that she'd gone round the bend and killed herself. That Suzie'd been behind a spate of recent murders. Lisa has a hard time meshing that with the Suzie that she knew, the Suzie who had been so warm and generous and full of something quirky when she had introduced herself and come over for dinner one evening. Ianto had spilled wine on her and she had laughed, with heart, genuine amusement, patting his arm and saying something about him using up all his grace during the on hours. Lisa had liked that because she often thought Ianto needed to turn himself off. He used to, before London had ended so many things.
Jack has spoken of Suzie once since it had happened, and he'd had that look. Lisa knows that look, because sometimes Ianto has it when he meets her eyes across the room, as if he has failed somehow. She thinks about Jack up there on the roof, brooding about something that he probably couldn't have prevented, or even if he could have, he didn't, and so it's over, and he will turn it over and over again until it eats him inside, rotting. She knows that, God does she know that.
It's an experiment then, Lisa considers, as she pulls her chair flush with the stairwell and levers herself out of her seat and onto the second step. Her chair rolls away because she hadn't put on the brakes, oops. Lisa takes a few deep breaths and reverse presses herself up to the next step. It's not the lifting that is tiresome or difficult, it's the dragging; her heel catches on the step. Her pyjama leg snags on the metal stripping at the edge of the step and she curses when she hears it rip.
It's going to be a long trip up, she decides as she looks behind her.
So she's crying and frustrated and swearing when Jack opens the door to the roof to find her halfway up the stairs, and she just knows that she's bruised her legs, and scraped her knee, most assuredly, and this is the first time since the accident that she's damaged herself. Jack takes the stairs three at a time, crouches down next to her and holds her shoulders still for a second before gathering her up and walking up the rest of the way. He toes open the door and walks out onto the roof, gravel surely digging into, no, cutting his feet with her added weight, but he acts as if he doesn't feel it. He sits them both down on a large, metal air duct, and they stare at what looks like it will become the sunrise.
'That wasn't the smartest thing you've ever done,' he says to her, but it's not chastising. It's factual. Jack has never pitied her. Ever.
She doesn't have a response to that. Well maybe, 'I wanted to see what all the fuss was about you on rooftops.' She snorts. 'Ianto says you're good on rooftops.'
Jack's shoulder bumps hers. In the dim light, when she glances over, she sees that he has a severe case of bed head; it's charming and ridiculous. 'Oh, well, I have experience.'
'I know,' she says to him, 'about the files you destroyed. My files in UNIT.' Jack makes his "Wot? Me? Naaaaah." face and she ignores it. 'It's okay you know, we both know about the damage that happened when Ianto-'
'You can't know that for sure,' Jack says suddenly, 'you have to believe that it's not certain.'
Lisa smiles. 'The road to Hell and all that,' she counters.
He nods, and they look out at the moon, falling into the lightening of the sky as it washes out the stars. Lisa pulls her robe about herself and shudders a little. It's cold, and she can never seem to keep herself warm anymore. And when she is warm, she's roasting. Their thermostat has been getting a work out since they moved to Cardiff, one of the many things that she's grateful Ianto is willing to put up with. Jack's hands rest on his knees and he stares resolutely outward. She wonders if she's interrupting, a little awkward, now, because she can't just stand up and excuse herself. In fact, she considers as she looks at her feet, she isn't sure how she'd get back to her chair without Jack.
Everything that shouldn't feels like a fucking metaphor these days.
Jack sets one of his hands on hers. 'Tell me something I don't know,' he says then, head turning to look at her, and she almost says "Quid pro quo, Clarice," until she remembers that Jack doesn't watch films, not quite, and not serial killer ones, and he probably wouldn't find it funny anyway.
She dredges her mind and wonders what she could think of, when the sun shoots the first rays into the sky, a little sliver in the bottom of her vision.
'The last time we went camping in Brittany,' she says, 'we slept in our clothes, it was so cold.' She pats his hand. 'And when we woke up, a dog was pissing on our tent.'
Jack laughs. Lisa likes his laugh, free and easy, but filled with regret. Regret that she isn't part of, and hopes to never be.
'It was our wedding anniversary,' she whispers. 'No, not quite, that was Monday. But we celebrated early, you know? For the weekend.'
Jack looks back out at the sunrise.
She plows on, because that is the thing to do, really. 'He bought me flowers, and I was arranging them on my desk when they came in and rounded us up.' She pauses with the memory of it. 'Their feet were so loud on the concrete. Heavy. Metal.'
He doesn't say anything. Once Ianto had told her that Torchwood Cardiff hadn't been able to get there in time, but that Jack had known too much about Cybermen, had understood them, hinted about them in ways that made them both wonder if he had seen them elsewhere, perhaps elsewhen.
She squeezes his hand in hers and wishes that she could drum the balls of her feet against the metal vent; it feels like the appropriate thing to do in this conversation, bang on the hollow sheet metal for effect, make it a parody of her past terror.
'Anyway, that was our wedding anniversary,' she finishes. 'And here we are.'
Jack sighs. 'I was married once,' he says softly. 'She was sweet.'
Lisa laughs and hopes that if her laugh is as regret-filled, then it is also as unaccusatory as Jack's. 'Sweet. That doesn't seem like something you'd go for.'
'I have moments.' Jack lets go of her hand and instead wraps his arm about her shoulders, pulling her against him. She hadn't even realised that she's been involuntarily shivering. Somewhere down on the street a car horn blares and a dog launches into a volley of barks. She can see lights go on in the buildings around them as people wake up and start their day in near darkness. It feels as if the very world is waking up, and she wonders if this is why Jack comes up here; it's a reminder that there are other people out there who don't know her, to whom her life is a mystery, inconsequential. It's only fair, she supposes, since she doesn't care about them either. That's the way humans are, anyway.
'Ianto is going to freak out,' Jack says, 'when he wakes up and you're gone.'
Lisa snorts. 'I think that's my line.'
Jack's arm tightens. 'Don't belittle.'
'Just,' she says, 'just give me a minute.'
He lets go of her then and stands, walking away to the edge of the roof and stepping up onto it. Lisa closes her eyes and listens to the sounds of horns and traffic, slow and quiet but growing louder. She can feel the breeze that just the arrangement of the buildings next to each other creates. The duct under her shudders once and then begins to shoot heat out of the vent on the side.
When she opens her eyes, Jack is silhouetted by the rising sun, like some superhero. She wants to call out to him, to tell him to be careful, but she's not his mum, and that would be some sort of new dynamic that she isn't ready to confront. Jack doesn't turn, just steps backwards onto the roof and comes back, broad chest bare like a porno Superman.
'Well, Mrs. Miniver,' he says softly as he gathers her up, 'let's go back down and solve your problem. Think we can get your husband off before he wakes up?'
Lisa ponders their lives in intersecting circles, like Jack has suggested. It is a quandary, the concentric circles of their beings all hooked together, humans into venn diagrams. Her ring finger has never once told her that it is lonely or bereft.
'This bears exploration,' she says, 'he's skittish. Needs a saddle.'
Jack raises an eyebrow but doesn't comment. He carries her to her chair and sits her in it. She lets him push her back to the lift. When they are on, he bends down and kisses her, soft, chaste, completely unfilthy. 'You should go camping again,' he says, 'without the dog piss this time.'
Lisa doesn't follow him to the roof again, but she thinks about it often, when they are at work. She thinks about watching people live their lives through the windows. She thinks about how easy it would be, after all that work, to drag herself over the edge, but her mind is burned with Ianto's screaming face when he pulled her from the wreckage of Torchwood One, and she knows that she can never be the cause of that pain again.
Still, one day when she's been inundated with calls regarding useless things--UNIT breathing down her neck needlessly again-she tucks a pack of Superkings into her jacket pocket and wheels herself to the lift. She thinks about leaving a note, just in case she gets trapped up there, but then the doors open and she gets in the lift, punching the button with her thumb.
Fifteen minutes later, when she opens the door and drags herself through the gravel, he's left her an unfolded beach chair.
Later that night, Ianto kisses her temple and asks her what they should do with their rare free weekend, and she looks up at him, smiling. 'Let's go camping.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
GWEN
Gwen loves Ianto and Jack together. Not in a sexual way. Well, maybe in a sexual way. She loves when they leave together, because she is intrigued at the work-relationship dynamic. She thinks about working with Rhys, and knows that they would end up killing each other, or everyone would go to bed angry. But Ianto and Jack don't even acknowledge their relationship, and it hadn't been until she had walked in on them in Jack's office that she had been able to figure it out.
Sure, "walked in on" implies something sexual, not quite what she had witnessed-an embrace, rather, Ianto's hand on the back of Jack's head, Jack's face buried in Ianto's neck, those soft murmurs, the one thigh pressed in between the other's legs, the little gentle sway of a couple embracing and talking and hesitant to let go.
Imagine her surprise when Owen mentions Ianto's wife one time when the two of them are fucking in the backseat of his car in the middle of the afternoon. She thinks to be offended on Lisa's behalf, but when she comes and Owen calls her his beautiful bitch, Gwen feels sheepish and realises that everything in the world is rather complicated.
But she still wants to meet Lisa of Torchwood One.
So, after Jack and Tosh had got back from 1941, and Jack is morose and wistful, Gwen suggests they all go out. Actually, Owen, still smarting from Diane (and a bullet in the shoulder), has installed himself in the Hub, and he suggests that they all go out without him, Doctor's orders, moment of altruism, use it or lose it, etc. etc. Gwen gives Ianto and Tosh the big-eyed look she'd perfected on her father years ago (and on Rhys, oh so easy). Tosh gives Jack her own version of the big-eyed look (perfected in a manner similar to Gwen's), and Ianto just rolls his eyes and says something about how all the women in his life look like sad clowns in a carnival show.
Later that week, she and Jack and Tosh meet Rhys at a restaurant Ianto has selected, and they wait at the table, dissecting breadsticks and folding their serviettes into animals and in general chatting like normal people, as normal as they can be, for Rhys's sake. He doesn't understand special ops, and they can't tell him anything anyway, but he's happy to talk haulage, and Jack asks him ridiculously flirty questions about "tonnage" and what the best routes are to avoid the police. When Jack excuses himself to the loo, Rhys turns to her, his own eyes wide, and tosses a thumb backwards.
'Your boss?'
'Yup.'
'A little queer.'
Tosh laughs and asks Rhys about his routing system. Jack returns and is almost to his seat when Ianto and Lisa arrive.
No one had told her about the chair. Not that it matters, she tells herself; the presence of it, framework cradling her body as she rolls towards them, adds about fifteen chapters to Ianto, to Jack, to their story, slamming into place like the loading of an ammo mag.
So no, no one had told her about the chair, or the fact that Lisa is a total looker. Gwen doesn’t know what she expected, some pale, mousy thing, perhaps. Some scorned cuckolded woman that she could use to feel less affection for Jack and Ianto.
Lisa wheels herself, Ianto behind her with his hands in his coat pockets as if he doesn't trust himself not to push her, steer her. His eyes search the table, the people there. Lisa is almost radiant, though that could be her smile, and her manicured nails click against the rims of her wheels. Her clothes are posh, and her dark hair is short and stylish. Gwen feels vaguely frumpy. Then again, look at Ianto and the way he dresses-why would she have thought Lisa to be any different? They are the epitome of a young couple out for a night on the town. Gwen hides her hands with their scruffy nails under the table.
When Lisa arrives at the table, skidding to a halt at the empty space between Tosh and Ianto's chairs, bumping into it as if she just can't be bothered to stop herself, she reaches out her arms to them. Gwen and Rhys take her hands instinctively, without thinking, and she grasps them, squeezing, her thousand-watt smile working overtime.
'It's about time!' she says, 'Ianto is the worst social planner ever.' Ianto smiles when he slides into his chair, but his eyes are glued to his bread plate. His fingers find Jack's on the table, the barest of brushes.
Jack lets his hand linger there, but his eyes are on Lisa as he reaches across Ianto, leaning on his arm a little, and grabs her wrist, squeezing. 'You look fantastic.'
Lisa gives him that bright smile, and for a second Gwen entertains the thought that the light just reflects from her mouth to his, and they should be filming some sort of toothpaste commercial instead of sitting here waiting for the garcon. Lisa lets go of Rhys and Gwen's hands and when everyone settles back into place, there is a sliding of fingers and arms between Jack and Lisa and Ianto that looks familiar, strange, comfortable and suddenly it all clicks in her head: Jack, Ianto, the intimacy, the leaving together, the comfortable nature of it all.
As everyone gets settled and fusses with flatware and Rhys starts a conversation with Ianto about the Grand Slam, Gwen raises her brows at Tosh and looks at Jack and Ianto. Tosh nods minutely. Oh really.
Dinner is about as spectacular as it can be when four of the people suddenly have to leave to go chasing down a bunch of teddy bears that have been exposed to some sort of alien animation gas and subsequently broken out of a local toy store to have a bloody joyride about Cardiff. Lisa's face is gleeful when they all rush about, trying to finish their entrees and stuffing breadsticks in their pockets, but Rhys looks a little put out. As Gwen kisses him goodbye she watches for Ianto and Lisa, but she must have missed it. When they run out of the restaurant, Lisa is already laughing and ordering another bottle, telling Rhys that as Torchwood widows, it's their job to finish the evening with a bang, out of spite.
Gwen knows that he gave her a ride home, but when she asks him what they had talked about, he gives her a smile and waves his hand, noncommittal.
She lets him own it.
She doesn't think about Jack and Ianto and Lisa again until a week later, when she and Jack are in the SUV, waiting for Tosh to finish a trace on a Weevil they'd tagged and released, only to discover that it had resurfaced in Penarth with a little bit of a human flesh fetish.
Jack plays with his wrist strap and she sits in the passenger seat, looking at the traffic up in the viaduct over-pass.
'I've never asked,' she says, 'and you can tell me to stop at any time-'
'Stop.'
'Okay.' She looks at her hands in her lap.
After a thirty-second lapse of silence, Jack snorts. 'I was just testing to see if you would stop,' he says. 'Go on, ask away.'
'You and Ianto.'
'Me and Ianto. Not a question, Gwen.'
She twists her hands in her lap and sighs. 'You and Ianto and Lisa.'
'Me and Ianto and Lisa. Still not a question.'
She glances at him and he is looking at the wrist strap, his fingers pressing buttons. She wonders what he's doing-texting, programming, playing mini-Space Invaders. 'You know what I'm asking,' she says softly.
Jack opens his mouth and then closes it. He lets his wrist go and places both hands on the steering wheel. Then he turns his head to look at her, and his face is dead serious.
'It's complicated,' he says, 'very complicated.'
Their Bluetooths chirrup and Tosh pops up on the line, as if she has the most convenient timing in the world. She gives them a new set of coordinates for the satnav and they buckle in, ready to race to the warehouse and wrestle Janet into the cage in the back. Owen wants to keep her for good this time. He curses at them over the comm, telling them that they better not bang her up too badly. Ianto comes over the comm and says something mild about roughing up Owen's best girl. Jack laughs and Gwen tries not to roll her eyes too hard.
'We're going to earn that astronomical paycheque tonight, I can feel it,' Jack says cheerfully. 'Aren’t you excited?'
Gwen checks the location they're headed to: a fish packing plant. Lovely. 'I can't wait,' she tells him and he whistles under his breath.
'Are you happy?' she asks as he turns the ignition over, and her question is almost lost in the quiet roar of the engine.
Jack puts the SUV into gear and pulls out before answering. 'Happiness is relative.' And as he turns into traffic, 'But yeah.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
IANTO
Whilst Jack is gone, Lisa has a health episode. He curses the man's name all the way to hospital, and then he curses himself that he hadn't been paying attention to her enough in the chaos to see that she hadn't been paying much attention to her catherization. Lisa has always been meticulous, so very meticulous, and where she fails from sheer exhaustion or hatred for what has happened to her, Ianto has always prided himself on picking up. But some things, sometimes, had fallen to Jack, just a little, and as he holds her hand in the back of the ambulance, he realises that they have placed their bets on something frightfully unsure.
The doctors assure him that the kidney infection is something that is treatable, and that once the fever has subsided and the antibiotics have had a chance to work, she will be right as rain. But getting the infection to release a hold on her body is always harder when it is systemic like this. He shakes their hands and smiles and nods and thanks them profusely because it makes no sense to be rude, but under his breath he is cursing and vowing to be there for her more.
He tells Gwen and the others that he won't be in for a few days, no matter what they might say, and they don't seem to be put out. Gwen makes reassuring noises into the phone, and all Ianto can think is that Torchwood owes him, anyway, owes him time and patience and pretty much anything it could ever pull out of its massive resources to keep her alive. Owen tells him to ask for certain drugs, and he writes them down on his hand in pen. This is what Jack's absence has reduced him to-scribbling on his skin because he hasn't the foresight to bring paper or his PDA.
Lisa murmurs in her delirium, 'Where are my boys? I need my boys,' and all Ianto can do is hold both of her hands in his, pretending that there are two of him, that one hand is hotter than his own and pulses a reassuring beat into her ashen grip.
Tosh comes to him in the middle of the night, a bag of pasties in her hand, and she sits next to him in the waiting room whilst the nurses change Lisa's sheets and give her a sponge bath. Ianto had wanted to do it himself, but they assure him that they are professionals and that if he especially wants to, he can assist in the next one. In retrospect, he thinks as he accepts the bottle of water Tosh gives him, her fingers already having removed the cap as if he is five, there's no reason not to let them do their jobs.
'I can't help but think that he would be here if he could,' Tosh says, meaning to be comforting but failing miserably. She seems to recognise it then, because she furrows her brows. 'Oh, Ianto, I didn't-'
Ianto pats her arm, thinking about how much better it feels to be comforting someone else instead of being comforted. 'No,' he says, and they watch a very old man creak slowly down the hallway with an IV pole.
'I always thought that you had a good thing,' Tosh says, not looking at him. 'I admit, that for a few seconds I was insanely jealous of Lisa, with the two of you and…well, it's uncharitable.'
Ianto thinks that it's remarkably charming that Tosh would be jealous of a crippled woman in a chair. At least, that's what Lisa would have said, but he understands where she is going. 'We never quite "had" him, obviously,' he says. And then he starts to eat the pasty that she has brought him because that is the right thing to do.
Tosh sighs. Somewhere at the other end of the floor someone calls a code and they watch alarmedly as a crew wheels a crash cart down the hall at breakneck speed. Ianto knows it's not Lisa's room, but he wants to jump up and follow them, watch, make sure that they're not going to turn left. They turn right, and he drops the pasty on the floor in relief. Tosh is there right away, scooping it up in her hand and throwing it into the bin next to her. She opens the bag and deposits a new one into his open palm, closing her fingers over it.
He cannot look her in the eyes.
'You eat that or I'll force it in your mouth,' she says cheerfully.
'You sound like Owen,' he tells her, but he takes a bite and chews it. It's a good pasty, he’ll give her credit for finding these secret culinary treasures of Cardiff. In his head he imagines Tosh wandering the streets at night, with her PDA, scanning Chippie Alley for the Best Chips In The Universe.
She stays with him for another hour, not talking about anything at all. The next day Gwen comes and tells him to go home and get changed, get some clothes, take a shower, make something to eat that isn't instant or hasn't come from a machine. Ianto consults the charts (he reads them all, he has since London) and agrees, but he has to take a taxi. Gwen gives him the keys to the SUV and says that she'll stay until he gets back.
He had forgotten how much the SUV is like Jack, or how he associates it with Jack, and he almost punches the sidepanel at the sight of it. But he gets in and sits in the driver's side for a minute, head on the steering wheel because he is trying to smell Jack.
Jack is gone. Has been for three weeks. He isn't coming back.
It had been bad enough when Jack had been cold on the slab, and Ianto had had to go home to tell Lisa, he hadn't been able to say the words then. But Jack had come back from the dead, kissed him there in the Hub in front of everyone, and then gone home to lie in Lisa's arms; Ianto had been thankful that he hadn't had to say that Jack was gone for good. He'd just had to say it a day later, when, after coming back from a coffee run, Gwen had told him that Jack had just disappeared. Ianto isn't stupid, never has been. He knows what that noise had been. He'd checked the footage on the Plass. He hasn't always been with this ragtag backwater coalition, no, he had been Torchwood London; he knows the TARDIS when he sees and hears it.
'You fucking bastard,' he tells the horn symbol in the dead center of the column.
Oh, even now he can't blame Jack. He will, though, just to feel better. He ignores Jack's things in the spare room, simply shutting the door and knocking on it twice out of some OCD display.
He showers and thinks about Lisa, wanking off even though in the forefront of his mind he understands that she is ill and lying on a bed in a drug haze, and neither of them is there for her. After he dresses, he takes a turn through the house, throwing away small things: her catheter tubing (it would have to be replaced anyway); he gets a bin liner and fills it with a few Military History magazines from the coffee table, a series of sketching notebooks filled with drawings of Ianto and Lisa and others. Ianto takes the trash to the skips and stands there, debating tossing it all out. He could have taken a turn through Jack's room, really, but he hadn't, and even now, he just walks back upstairs with the bag and sets it inside the door of Jack's bedroom, shutting the door and knocking on the wood again. He knows it's not for luck. He doesn't have any more time to waste on being a lovesick jilted girl, because his wife is waiting for him in a hospital bed.
Besides, Lisa might want to burn it all when she gets back. She's always been more vengeful than he is, and he would hate to deprive her of an excuse to set something on fire.
On his way out the door he makes one more stop.
When Lisa wakes up, one of the first things she sees is the ring on her finger again. Ianto turns his with his thumb and stares out the window. He wants to play with it in obvious places, so that everyone can see that it is there, so that if Jack is watching them through some celestial window, he can see that they have closed the gap that he has left.
'You know it's not your fault,' she says to him, and he can't look at her. Instead, he watches a bunch of terminal children hobble about in the garden outside, halfheartedly running after balls or playing jacks on the cracked concrete.
His response is noncommittal. It feels much like the rest of him, except the rest of him is renewing his vows to her. He can feel them wrapping around him, settling around him, like a forcefield coming from the ring itself. What is that superhero with the magic ring? The Green Spectre? The Green Light? That one.
Lisa's fever is gone, and she can have fluids, but they suggest water in very small amounts. When she asks for it, he is more than happy to get it. He's more than happy to serve, to prove that he's her husband, that she is his wife, and they are enough for each other.
'It wasn't a mistake,' Lisa says to him when he hands her the cup of ice water. 'I'd do it again.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
LISA
It has been two months since Jack's return, and only a month since he has begun to spend the night again. Lisa isn't sure if he feels like he has been doing penance for his absence, but his revelations in the dark of the night, sometimes in her arms, sometimes in Ianto's, sometimes sitting by himself in the chair as he stares out the window, tell them much. He tells them about the Doctor, and about the time vortex, and the TARDIS. He tells them about his life on Earth for the last hundred and fifty odd years.
The night that he finishes, he shrugs his shoulders in the moonlight. 'And that's it,' he says.
Ianto doesn't say anything for a long time, as they lie there, and then Lisa reaches out for them both and lays her chin on Jack's chest. 'So you're like Dracula,' she says casually. 'Doomed to walk the earth forever.'
Ianto snorts and Jack sighs.
'Come to me, my brides,' Lisa says in a bad accent, curling her hand like a claw.
'If you get her started, she won't shut up,' Ianto warns Jack, his face muffled by a pillow.
Jack shudders, the tears drying on his face. 'You're amazingly unsympathetic.'
Lisa punches his shoulder, then props herself up with her arms so that she can look him in the eye. 'Forgive me if I have little sympathy for someone who can live forever.'
'You're taking this rather well,' Jack says dryly. She can hear his eyeroll.
She sighs against him then, and she feels one of Ianto's hands reach out to her, caressing the back of her neck. 'No, I'm sorry, but what should we say? Forgive me for being selfish, but I'm rather just glad that you’re still alive.'
Jack watches her pull herself up his body and when her mouth finds his, his lips are damp with tear tracks and salt. His tongue is just like she has remembered, dreamed about. 'I am sorry,' she says against his cheek. 'There's nothing I can do, but I am sorry.'
Ianto brushes his cheek against Jack's other shoulder. 'I'm sorry, also,' he murmurs, 'that this conversation is so very sentimental.'
And then he strokes Jack to hardness so that Lisa can suck him off, and they spend the rest of the night forgetting about immortality and death and all the frightening things that come with them.
In the morning he is still there, and Lisa lets him make her breakfast. She even lets him wash the glasses. He doesn't break a single one.
Things have returned to normal, or what passes for Torchwood normal: aliens; guns; sex gas; a frozen soldier thawed out; an invasion of ants bent on taking over the Millennium Centre; a tear in the fabric of time that they close with scientific duct tape. Lisa finishes her job for UNIT and starts a new one that requires a daily commute, and she cannot wait to get out of the house every day. Gwen and Rhys come over once every two weeks, sometimes with Tosh or Owen in tow, play cards or drink, like the twentysomethings they are. Jack hovers in the background sometimes, or stays at the Hub, watching the Rift twist and turn in place, ready to churn out something new and fascinating and deadly or even boring and useless.
She likes Gwen, more than she ever liked Suzie, not as much as she adores Tosh. Then again, she realises as she watches their guests, she shouldn't compare them, because it had never been a contest, and it still isn't. She just likes having people in the flat.
Gwen, and her man Rhys, they sprawl on the sofas with the laziness that comes with being at home wherever you are, and Lisa can identify with that in some ways, because Cardiff will never be her home, just some place that she has learned to stretch out in. Gwen yawns and lifts her arms above her head and her tongue is kittenish, arching up from the lower palate, and Lisa watches when Jack stares at it.
She wants to give Gwen to Jack. Not as a toy, and not discounting Rhys, but unlike herself, scarred in mind and body, and Ianto scarred in spirit, Gwen is unmelted snow, the kind that feeds into streams when the frost melts, the kind people take pictures of to slap on a post card. Rhys beside her is hale and husky and manly, and he probably smells like ale and cologne and motor oil. Lisa shivers despite herself.
But Jack respects the boundary, and Lisa can't help but wonder if he almost fetishises it. She has stopped trying to guess at what Jack wants. Even now, as his things take up their closets and shelves, he presses them together some nights, sliding from the bed and patting their hips, a silent message that they are fine without him, that he is content to not be there, that he wants them to be there. She usually finds him later, out on the roof.
Tonight, Lisa watches him track Gwen's movements through the flat, and she wonders if it's only a matter of time, or if this is something that can be sated from afar. She wonders what she would think if Jack and Gwen decided to have sex, or if Gwen and Rhys invited Jack into their bed. She isn't sure that it would ever happen, but she wonders about it anyway.
Then Jack kisses her cheek when everyone leaves, and she lets him lead her to bed.
One night there is a knock on her door and the rattle of keys, and she knows that it is not one of the boys (her boys), and Rhys sheepishly pokes his head in and says something about being told to look in on her and to bring a curry. She doesn't curse at him, because he is, well the messenger, and she has been that before. It's tandoori, and she likes tandoori, so she forgives everyone, especially when Rhys uncovers the little Styrofoam box of jilebi, and they settle in with dinner on the sofa to watch the game, and then an old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
They complain about being Torchwood widows. Lisa doesn't explain how complex that is, and she has no encouraging words for him.
Rhys slides further down on the sofa. 'You worked for Torchwood, yeah?' he asks, and she wonders how to respond to that. Because it's going to go to the bad place.
'Yeah,' she says off-hand. 'In London.'
He shifts and sips from his glass. 'How was that, then?' He waves his hand, and she knows what he wants to know.
She refills her wineglass. 'I was injured there. Work accident.' And when his face darkens, she hastens to add, 'But it was a singular incident. Nothing that would happen here.'
She kicks herself a little, because she wonders what all Rhys has seen Gwen come home with. She knows that Gwen had been shot in the line of duty last year, but she doesn't know if Rhys knows that. She knows that Gwen had been almost sucked dry by Suzie, and a few other close calls. Some part of her hates the idea that Rhys doesn't know what he's in for, what his fiancée is getting herself into every day. Lisa knows what Ianto is in for.
Her wheels groan a little when she shifts, lifting herself from the chair and onto the sofa, and she makes a mental note to go in and have it checked out.
Rhys finishes his beer and goes for a refill, and Lisa watches him with fondness. He's strapping, and in another life she might have had a greater appreciation for it. Her last boyfriend before Ianto had been a construction worker, Thaddeus, and he had had these shoulders, well, she has an appreciation for bulk. Ianto is all whippiness and ardour. Jack, well, Jack is just himself. If she had to describe him, she would say, "A coil of sex."
'Can I ask?' he says when he settles down. 'You know-'
'Oh,' she says, 'there was a structural flaw in the building, and I didn't get out in time.' She tries to look serious and dismissive, because everything that she cannot say is so fucking terrifying that she has a hard time talking about it. UNIT had sent both she and Ianto to a therapist, one with clearances, and they had talked it out in their six allocated sessions. It was just enough to scrape the skin from the top of the custard, but not much else.
She thinks that she would need about fifteen more years just to explain the noise, the noise of their voices. In her dreams all she hears is "EXTERMINATE".
Ianto had repainted the Delete key on her computer so that now it says "erase".
Rhys is sympathetic. He wisely changes the conversation, and after a few more beers and glasses of wine he turns to her and says, 'I think Gwen is having an affair with Jack.'
Lisa chokes on her wine, and that is the worst thing she could have done, because now he must think it's true. He frowns into his beer and sniffs. His t-shirt is riding up a little, and she can see one of his love handles. She wants to grab it, but he is too far away. She settles for throwing a remote control at him.
'Gwen isn't having an affair with Jack,' she says, 'because he's too busy here,' she adds because he would ask how she knows, and she'd have to tell him anyway. She's glad that she's not very very drunk, because she might have blurted out that Gwen used to be fucking Owen, but that's not her secret to tell, and now that she knows it's over, she is sure that Gwen would be glad to never speak of it again. She wonders if Gwen beats herself up over it.
She doesn't blame Gwen, really, she thinks for a second when Rhys looks into his glass and she understands that he knows nothing, nothing that Gwen has seen, that Lisa has seen, and that is in its own way a blessing and a curse. She wonders who Gwen talks to about Torchwood. Probably no one. Maybe Jack. She wonders if she shouldn't invite her out for lunch, maybe with Tosh, and the three of them can be girls and have girl talk: shoes, menstrual cycles, Bechdel, aliens.
'You two, you three, you….' Rhys's head wraps around the reality of Lisa's arrangement adeptly. She scrolls her hand in a circle, partly to say, "Hurry up, get there", partly to say, "Yeah, what you're imagining".
'Ooh, you lucky girl you,' he says, winking, but she can see that he doesn't believe her. That's okay anyway, as long as he doesn't think that his girl is banging Jack.
Later on, when she emerges from the loo, Rhys has fallen asleep on the sofa. Lisa covers him with an afghan, texts Gwen, and goes to bed. In the morning they have hangover eggy toast and trundle off to their jobs, vowing to do this again the next time they are deserted by their lesser halves.
A few weeks later Ianto doesn't come home, and he doesn't call. Lisa emails him, and then she tries his mobile. It's not that she doesn't trust him, but he doesn't like her to worry, especially since the last time Jack had left.
Jack rarely if ever calls, so that doesn't bother her at all.
She tries Rhys, and he tells her that he had seen Jack and Gwen, but that Gwen is acting strange, doesn't remember him, and he sounds panicked. She tries to talk him down, she wants to talk to Jack, but he's not there. He doesn't answer his mobile.
Some time later she manages to get Ianto to pick up, and when he says, 'Hello?' she starts to yell at him.
'You know, sir, you should call your wife when you think you're going to be too busy to come home. I know it wasn't covered in the wedding vows, but it is the human thing to do-'
'I'm sorry, who is this?'
Lisa checks at the number display on her work phone. 'Ianto?'
'Yes?' It's cautious.
'It's Lisa.'
'I'm sorry, but I think you might have the wrong-'
'Your wife.'
There is a long pause. 'You must be mistaken. I'm afraid I'm not m-'
She hangs up, then sits there in her chair and stares at the phone. Rhys had said that Gwen didn't remember him. What had happened?
The idea that Ianto doesn't remember her is chilling. Had they been playing with retcon? She cannot imagine that Gwen would want to forget Rhys, so it has to be a mistake. Does anyone there remember her? Does Jack? Owen? Tosh? She wants to try their numbers, but she's afraid.
She's going to wait two more days, and then she's going to call Martha Jones, the new UNIT doctor, the one who knows Jack from…from somewhere.
She sits in the bathroom and stares at the wallpaper, the red flowers. She cleans the Peristeen, but even as she does it, her eyes can't seem to leave the blooms scrawled across the walls. Then she turns on the shower, and lets it run hot until there is only cold water. She digs implements out of Ianto's tool box and locates a roll of duct tape. She pulls the mop from the closet and sets about taking care of what she has decided is one of her major life issues.
In the middle of the night, she gets a phone call from Ianto, and when she presses the receiver to her ear she mumbles something like, 'You better be stranded in Svalbard, or have an extremely good excuse, Mister.'
'Lis?' he whispers, and she shoots to her side, because she can't sit up like she used to, not with her leg muscles to balance her. As dramatic gestures go, it's the best she can muster.
'Babe?'
'Lis oh thank god,' he says, his voice a little louder. 'Lis we all lost two days. Have I called you?'
Lisa groans. 'Bloody Torchwood. No, baby, no you haven't.' The clock reads four in the morning. 'Is everyone all right?'
She can hear clattering in the background, Owen yelling something. Ianto sighs. 'Yeah, I think we're okay. I just wanted to check on you. I'll-we'll--be home soon.'
When they stumble in, it is close to six in the morning. They seem to be intact, and they don't remember anything, they say, it looks like they have retconned themselves. Ianto sits on the edge of the bed and stares like a ghost. Lisa runs her hands along his shoulders, planting kisses on his shoulder blades through his shirt. Jack leans against the windowsill and crosses his arms, looking out into the early morning.
'I don't remember, but I feel, hrm,' Jack says. Ianto nods without looking at him.
'I feel as if I should be apologizing for something, but I don't know what,' Ianto says, rubbing his temples with his fingertips. Lisa vows to never say a word, because he would be horrified, and he doesn't need any more grief.
Jack shoves off from the wall and crawls on the bed, setting his head in her lap. 'I think we all need a lie-in. Do you want me to call work, tell them you're playing skivving off?'
Lisa rolls her eyes. 'UNIT will love that.'
Ianto snorts. '"This is Jack Harkness",' he says in his bad American accent, '"my wife can't come in today because she's making up for lost time".'
Lisa's hands freeze and Ianto tenses as soon as the words are out of his mouth. Her eyes rivet to Jack's, because this could go so many ways.
Instead, Jack just yawns. 'I'll do it,' he says, 'just say the words.' The clock in the living room chimes six-thirty.
Ianto's muscles relax and she feels herself smile a little. Ianto stands and unbuttons his shirt, slipping his tie from his neck and throwing it towards the dry cleaner bin as he moves towards the en suite. She loves that shirt, she decides. Ianto looks beautiful in this shade of red. Jack wraps his arms about her waist and groans into her side.
'Oh, go ahead and do it,' she tells him, pulling her mobile from her pocket. 'It will be worth it to see their faces tomorrow.'
Jack flips the mobile open and hits her three speed dial, smiling.
'Lis,' Ianto calls from the bathroom, 'what happened to the wallpaper?'
*~*~*~*~*~*
Master List
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team, etc (Jack/Lisa/Ianto/Gwen/Rhys and all permutations thereof with a heavy dose of the first three), Rhys, Rhiannon, Alice, Ten, Lisa (basically everyone!)
Ratings: NC-17 for sexual content (also mild watersports and lactation sex).
Timeline: AU from pre S1 and threads through both seasons, part of CoE and into THE FUTURE. Enjoy the ride.
Wordcount: 63,000 words
Author's Notes: See the master post for notes and credits and fanmixes.
Summary: You don't pick your family. They pick you.
IANTO
Operation Goldenrod is a rousing failure. The device has been contained finally, but the past three days have been a nightmare. Ianto had fallen onto the sofa at the Hub, trying to unsee the disfigured bodies, to unhear the screaming as he'd gone from body to body, trying to find a place to use the sedative gun on them.
Owen had been working around the clock, but body after body had kept dying. Jack, Owen's surgical assistant, had dashed about, handing over instrument after instrument, tossing piles of bloody rags and body parts into the biohazard bins for Ianto to cart off to the incinerator.
Suzie had taken Tosh home to sleep off her first-kill panic.
Ianto's clothing had been long past ruined-it's been incinerated along with dozens of bodies they couldn't save, people whose families will never know what actually happened to them. He usually tries to find a body to match and disfigure enough to make it resemble the person, so that the families will have something to claim, but this time, it is impossible. He would have to dig into the frozen Torchwood employees, but Jack has drawn the line, saying that people will just have to file missing persons and never know.
They all agree that it's almost better that way, anyway.
Jack is taking the escape of the machine from the Hub badly. Ianto knows that he himself is partly to blame, because he hadn't filed it properly, locked it down like he should have, when Tosh was done with it. Some part of him is insanely grateful that the machine hadn't actually started fusing bodies until after it left the Hub, because the thought of any of them on Owen's table, screaming and writhing with open skin and livers and yowling throats makes him queasier than the last bag of squelchy body parts he'd thrown into the incinerator right before he'd stripped off at the end of the day and burned his clothes.
Then he'd had a proper cry in the showers, where no one could hear him, because that is The Torchwood Way, and donned his spare clothes-a t-shirt and denims that he'd brought in to wear when mucking out the weevil cages.
Now that it is all over, Owen has lit out to crawl inside a bottle; Suzie had never returned from Tosh's, but she is never reliable in that way anyway; as soon as Suzie is free of the Hub sometimes, it is hard to make her return. Jack says that's how she works. Ianto doesn't quite care as long as she comes back eventually. It's not his place to judge.
That leaves the two of them. Ianto decides that he's going to autoclave every instrument in Owen's lab before he gets back, and he staunchly tells himself that hosing down the walls of the autopsy theatre and replacing all the equipment that's been ruined by slamming bodies and Owen's frustrated trashing of the place is his job, a gift to Owen, so that he can come back in whenever he sobers up and pretend that it never happened, that he hadn't been a failure.
Ianto would never say Owen is a failure anyway. The whole thing had been, as Lisa likes to call bad things, 'made of fail'. He runs the water and dumps tools into the basin as he finds them scattered everywhere: scalpel on the floor in the corner, forceps caught in the chain of the upper railing, and so on.
Jack emerges from his office, presumably at the sound. He stands at the upper railing and surveys the wreckage, probably seeing it in its entirety for the first time. 'Go home.'
Ianto glances up at him. 'No, I'll finish this,' he replies, circling about the room to find the last of the loose implements. When he is sure that he has collected them all, he dips his hands in the soapy water and swirls them around. He likes them to be relatively clean before they go into the autoclave, and he has already decided that he's going to run it at least three times, for symbolism.
'I called Lis, told her you'd be home soon,' Jack says, and it nags at Ianto because Jack isn't his keeper, and then he has to remind himself that in this place, Jack is his boss.
He looks at Jack again, hands gripping the chain, eyes not on him, but rather staring at the splashes of blood on the autopsy table, the floor, the morgue drawers, as if Owen had come in to work and said, "You know, I feel like the medical bay just isn't Basqiat enough," and then tossed every blood sample they'd had all over the place.
'I can't go home,' he says softly, 'because you drove me.' That is a lie. Not the driving part-Jack did give him a ride four days ago on their way to work before they had known that the next half-week would be a nightmare. It's a lie because he could take a cab. He could walk to the bus stop. Lisa could come get him if she were so inclined. Ever since she passed the specialised test, she likes to drive the car with its modified steering and pedals.
But it's the first thing he says, and maybe by saying it, he can communicate what he means, which is, 'No one should have to do this alone.'
Jack must agree with the unspoken statement, because he joins Ianto on the lower level and pulls on a pair of gloves. 'This could wait,' he says, but he drags a damp rag along the centrifuge cabinet. 'Go home. I'll take care of it.'
'Jesus, Jack, if you do my job any more than you're already doing, Owen will think I've crawled up your arse completely.' Ianto doesn't know where this is coming from, but he decides to roll with it, and if Jack doesn't like it, he can go back to his office and…clean his gun or call someone important. 'You're not alone in this, you know,' Ianto bites out. 'There's a reason you call us a team.'
It occurs to him that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Jack stops with the rag in his hand and looks at Ianto, studying him, as if he has finally figured out that this is about more than post-mission-failure clean up. 'I don't do your job,' he says softly. And then, as if he is desperate to lighten things, he resumes scrubbing the walls. 'I just like helping. And my coffee is shit.'
Ianto shakes his head. Jack's coffee is like motor oil.
He grabs handfuls of instruments and throws them into the shelving of the autoclave, and it doesn't occur to him that he's sliced his hand open through the glove until he sees red on the outside of the unit and thinks to himself that he hadn't washed as thoroughly as he had supposed. Jack grabs his wrist and holds it up to their eye level.
'Take off the gloves, let me see.' But he doesn't bother waiting for Ianto, and instead he peels the glove off himself, tossing it aside on the table and examining Ianto's palm, which is now sporting an angry two centimeter gash that doesn't look very deep. Blood runs in rivulets down his outstretched fingers and drips onto the floor, mingling with the dirty water and coagulated blood that is there already. Ianto is vaguely surprised that his blood looks just like everyone else's. All the dead people he burnt up.
'Huh,' is all he says, because it hurts, but it feels far away. Pain through a tunnel.
Jack cleans the wound in the sink, then dries it and disinfects it. Ianto can't even sit down, there isn't a clean surface anywhere. They can't find the steri strips and Ianto isn't about to let Jack near him with a suture kit, so they slather it with antibacterial ointment and pack it with gauze. Ianto ignores Jack's suggestion of super glue and then they tape the whole thing together with medical strapping.
They re-glove and set about scrubbing the place rough and raw. Jack moves the furniture as Ianto uses the hose, scouring the walls with the pressure nozzle. Ianto squeegies the floor and Jack removes the last of the blood traces from the table and the sink. Then they move everything back. When they are done, Ianto thinks that he can only smell bleach. His head is a little woozy, and he isn't sure why.
When he de-gloves over the sink, his hand is painted red. Jack recleans and bandages the wound, tutting softly, and then he palms his keys, grabs their coats and leads Ianto from the Hub.
On the way home in the car, the radio station plays "Mack the Knife". Jack turns it off with a decided click.
Ianto smiles at him as they take the lift, and Jack's own smile is weak in return. Ianto isn't even sure why he does it. Just having Jack there is reassuring. He isn't sure what he would say to Lisa if he came home by himself.
Jack has been living with them for two months, coming and going and sharing their bed, setting up his own space in which he keeps books, ammo and clothing, the occasional DVD. Ianto calls the small bedroom that Jack uses "The Lair", because it just has a few shelves, a very small bed, and an overstuffed chair that he never uses for its intended purpose. Jack seems to like small spaces, from his office at the Hub to the hole underneath it, and occasionally Ianto catches him crunched up in the back of the SUV, reading a pulp novel. Those are the times he doesn't want anyone to find him. It's odd that a man who seems to take up so much space actually prefers the opposite, in some of his quieter moments.
They stumble in the door; Ianto falls face-first on the sofa again and closes his eyes. Lisa and Jack are in the kitchen, he can hear them, mumbling or just talking quietly. There's a long silence, and when Ianto raises his head to make sure they aren't on fire, dead or in bloody pieces, Jack is on his knees in front of her wheelchair, arms wrapped around her waist, head buried in her chest. Lisa rests her cheek on the top of his head and her arms over his, threading her fingers through the hair at his temples over and over again.
Ianto lowers his head back to the sofa and mashes his face into the cushions.
When he comes to, later, the house smells like toast. Jack and Lisa are sitting at the table and eating, talking softly. Ianto scrubs at his face with the sleeve of his flannel button down and joins them, blinking in the light. Jack watches him over his mug of tea. Lisa fixes Ianto a cup to his liking and sets it by his bandaged hand. They eat in silence, toast and preserves and cold summer sausage and small digestives and grapes. Ianto appreciates the segmented nature of it.
That night, Ianto crawls in between them and presses himself up against the curve of Lisa's hip, his top arm pulling Jack's over his shoulder like a blanket. Jack shudders into his back, just for a second, and Ianto wants to lick the tears from his face.
So he does.
Operation Goldenrod fades into memory. The team returns to normal. Tosh learns to speak again, Suzie is available to others, and Owen is sober on a more regular basis. Jack pushes the whole thing into a box in his mind, he tells Ianto, a box that holds all the shit he's seen that he doesn't want to dwell on, because it will make him crazy. Ianto understands, but unlike Jack, who locks his box with forced cheerfulness and optimism, Ianto's is clumsily taped shut with determination and minute forays into happiness, like a Milka bar in the afternoon or a footrub in the bathtub with Lisa.
Lisa doesn't ask about it, because she doesn't want any more grief in her life, she tells them, but she lets them know that if they want to tell her, ever, anything, they can say it, because she has room for that, room for the horrors they see, that they capture in their heads, behind their eyes, and bring home with them. Ianto and Jack vow to never breathe a word.
One night, in the middle of dinner, Jack is telling them some far-fetched story about a Norlon and her amazing spinning vagina, when Lisa takes off her wedding ring and gives it to him. Jack stares at the band of gold in his hand, out flat and shaking, when Ianto finds himself sliding his off his finger and dropping it in that palm, listening to the soft jangle of gold on gold on Jack's skin.
Jack looks at him like he doesn't know what it means, though Ianto knows that he does. Jack likes to call Lisa his Thoroughly Modern Millie, and Ianto his Man Friday. Ianto calls him Wooster and Lisa his Gorgeous Dove. Lisa jokingly refers to Ianto as Slave One. Jack has only recently graduated to Slave Two, a step up from Step N' Fetch It.
Ianto rolls his eyes and sets his chin in his hands, elbows on the table. Lisa simply blinks a few times and then refills her glass of water from the pitcher, an attractive filtration system that Jack has bought for them.
Jack stands and walks to the sideboard, opening one of the ornamental Russian nesting dolls that Lisa had brought back from a trip to Moscow. He clinks the rings into the matryoshka, then assembles the whole set, dolls in dolls. Lisa's eyes are bright. Ianto can feel his heart like a jackhammer and Jack shakes the whole thing a little as if to prove to himself that they are in there, and turns to them with a wry smile.
'Safe keeping,' he says.
*~*~*~*~*~*
LISA
She likes to wake up between Jack and Ianto, but it doesn't happen often, because Jack is restless, and he likes to put on pajama bottoms and climb out on the roof, the one place where she cannot follow him. She tries sometimes, her chair at the bottom of the stairs, and she counts the metal steps up to the roof: there are fifteen of them.
Like right now; the stairwell smells like exhaust and stale cigarette smoke (she too is guilty of smoking out here, but only when she's drinking alone, and that's not often), and that car park smell that concrete places get when they're not properly ventilated. She drums her hands on the arms of her chair and wonders what she should do.
It's five-thirty in the morning and she hadn't heard him leave. His coat and shoes are still there, and so she knows that he's not in the flat or gone back to the Hub. Alec Guinness's face is frozen on the telly screen, where Jack has inexplicably paused 'Bridge Over the River Kwai', presumably to go out to the rooftop.
He's been upset since Suzie has died, of course he would be; they haven't told her much about what happened to Suzie, except that she'd gone round the bend and killed herself. That Suzie'd been behind a spate of recent murders. Lisa has a hard time meshing that with the Suzie that she knew, the Suzie who had been so warm and generous and full of something quirky when she had introduced herself and come over for dinner one evening. Ianto had spilled wine on her and she had laughed, with heart, genuine amusement, patting his arm and saying something about him using up all his grace during the on hours. Lisa had liked that because she often thought Ianto needed to turn himself off. He used to, before London had ended so many things.
Jack has spoken of Suzie once since it had happened, and he'd had that look. Lisa knows that look, because sometimes Ianto has it when he meets her eyes across the room, as if he has failed somehow. She thinks about Jack up there on the roof, brooding about something that he probably couldn't have prevented, or even if he could have, he didn't, and so it's over, and he will turn it over and over again until it eats him inside, rotting. She knows that, God does she know that.
It's an experiment then, Lisa considers, as she pulls her chair flush with the stairwell and levers herself out of her seat and onto the second step. Her chair rolls away because she hadn't put on the brakes, oops. Lisa takes a few deep breaths and reverse presses herself up to the next step. It's not the lifting that is tiresome or difficult, it's the dragging; her heel catches on the step. Her pyjama leg snags on the metal stripping at the edge of the step and she curses when she hears it rip.
It's going to be a long trip up, she decides as she looks behind her.
So she's crying and frustrated and swearing when Jack opens the door to the roof to find her halfway up the stairs, and she just knows that she's bruised her legs, and scraped her knee, most assuredly, and this is the first time since the accident that she's damaged herself. Jack takes the stairs three at a time, crouches down next to her and holds her shoulders still for a second before gathering her up and walking up the rest of the way. He toes open the door and walks out onto the roof, gravel surely digging into, no, cutting his feet with her added weight, but he acts as if he doesn't feel it. He sits them both down on a large, metal air duct, and they stare at what looks like it will become the sunrise.
'That wasn't the smartest thing you've ever done,' he says to her, but it's not chastising. It's factual. Jack has never pitied her. Ever.
She doesn't have a response to that. Well maybe, 'I wanted to see what all the fuss was about you on rooftops.' She snorts. 'Ianto says you're good on rooftops.'
Jack's shoulder bumps hers. In the dim light, when she glances over, she sees that he has a severe case of bed head; it's charming and ridiculous. 'Oh, well, I have experience.'
'I know,' she says to him, 'about the files you destroyed. My files in UNIT.' Jack makes his "Wot? Me? Naaaaah." face and she ignores it. 'It's okay you know, we both know about the damage that happened when Ianto-'
'You can't know that for sure,' Jack says suddenly, 'you have to believe that it's not certain.'
Lisa smiles. 'The road to Hell and all that,' she counters.
He nods, and they look out at the moon, falling into the lightening of the sky as it washes out the stars. Lisa pulls her robe about herself and shudders a little. It's cold, and she can never seem to keep herself warm anymore. And when she is warm, she's roasting. Their thermostat has been getting a work out since they moved to Cardiff, one of the many things that she's grateful Ianto is willing to put up with. Jack's hands rest on his knees and he stares resolutely outward. She wonders if she's interrupting, a little awkward, now, because she can't just stand up and excuse herself. In fact, she considers as she looks at her feet, she isn't sure how she'd get back to her chair without Jack.
Everything that shouldn't feels like a fucking metaphor these days.
Jack sets one of his hands on hers. 'Tell me something I don't know,' he says then, head turning to look at her, and she almost says "Quid pro quo, Clarice," until she remembers that Jack doesn't watch films, not quite, and not serial killer ones, and he probably wouldn't find it funny anyway.
She dredges her mind and wonders what she could think of, when the sun shoots the first rays into the sky, a little sliver in the bottom of her vision.
'The last time we went camping in Brittany,' she says, 'we slept in our clothes, it was so cold.' She pats his hand. 'And when we woke up, a dog was pissing on our tent.'
Jack laughs. Lisa likes his laugh, free and easy, but filled with regret. Regret that she isn't part of, and hopes to never be.
'It was our wedding anniversary,' she whispers. 'No, not quite, that was Monday. But we celebrated early, you know? For the weekend.'
Jack looks back out at the sunrise.
She plows on, because that is the thing to do, really. 'He bought me flowers, and I was arranging them on my desk when they came in and rounded us up.' She pauses with the memory of it. 'Their feet were so loud on the concrete. Heavy. Metal.'
He doesn't say anything. Once Ianto had told her that Torchwood Cardiff hadn't been able to get there in time, but that Jack had known too much about Cybermen, had understood them, hinted about them in ways that made them both wonder if he had seen them elsewhere, perhaps elsewhen.
She squeezes his hand in hers and wishes that she could drum the balls of her feet against the metal vent; it feels like the appropriate thing to do in this conversation, bang on the hollow sheet metal for effect, make it a parody of her past terror.
'Anyway, that was our wedding anniversary,' she finishes. 'And here we are.'
Jack sighs. 'I was married once,' he says softly. 'She was sweet.'
Lisa laughs and hopes that if her laugh is as regret-filled, then it is also as unaccusatory as Jack's. 'Sweet. That doesn't seem like something you'd go for.'
'I have moments.' Jack lets go of her hand and instead wraps his arm about her shoulders, pulling her against him. She hadn't even realised that she's been involuntarily shivering. Somewhere down on the street a car horn blares and a dog launches into a volley of barks. She can see lights go on in the buildings around them as people wake up and start their day in near darkness. It feels as if the very world is waking up, and she wonders if this is why Jack comes up here; it's a reminder that there are other people out there who don't know her, to whom her life is a mystery, inconsequential. It's only fair, she supposes, since she doesn't care about them either. That's the way humans are, anyway.
'Ianto is going to freak out,' Jack says, 'when he wakes up and you're gone.'
Lisa snorts. 'I think that's my line.'
Jack's arm tightens. 'Don't belittle.'
'Just,' she says, 'just give me a minute.'
He lets go of her then and stands, walking away to the edge of the roof and stepping up onto it. Lisa closes her eyes and listens to the sounds of horns and traffic, slow and quiet but growing louder. She can feel the breeze that just the arrangement of the buildings next to each other creates. The duct under her shudders once and then begins to shoot heat out of the vent on the side.
When she opens her eyes, Jack is silhouetted by the rising sun, like some superhero. She wants to call out to him, to tell him to be careful, but she's not his mum, and that would be some sort of new dynamic that she isn't ready to confront. Jack doesn't turn, just steps backwards onto the roof and comes back, broad chest bare like a porno Superman.
'Well, Mrs. Miniver,' he says softly as he gathers her up, 'let's go back down and solve your problem. Think we can get your husband off before he wakes up?'
Lisa ponders their lives in intersecting circles, like Jack has suggested. It is a quandary, the concentric circles of their beings all hooked together, humans into venn diagrams. Her ring finger has never once told her that it is lonely or bereft.
'This bears exploration,' she says, 'he's skittish. Needs a saddle.'
Jack raises an eyebrow but doesn't comment. He carries her to her chair and sits her in it. She lets him push her back to the lift. When they are on, he bends down and kisses her, soft, chaste, completely unfilthy. 'You should go camping again,' he says, 'without the dog piss this time.'
Lisa doesn't follow him to the roof again, but she thinks about it often, when they are at work. She thinks about watching people live their lives through the windows. She thinks about how easy it would be, after all that work, to drag herself over the edge, but her mind is burned with Ianto's screaming face when he pulled her from the wreckage of Torchwood One, and she knows that she can never be the cause of that pain again.
Still, one day when she's been inundated with calls regarding useless things--UNIT breathing down her neck needlessly again-she tucks a pack of Superkings into her jacket pocket and wheels herself to the lift. She thinks about leaving a note, just in case she gets trapped up there, but then the doors open and she gets in the lift, punching the button with her thumb.
Fifteen minutes later, when she opens the door and drags herself through the gravel, he's left her an unfolded beach chair.
Later that night, Ianto kisses her temple and asks her what they should do with their rare free weekend, and she looks up at him, smiling. 'Let's go camping.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
GWEN
Gwen loves Ianto and Jack together. Not in a sexual way. Well, maybe in a sexual way. She loves when they leave together, because she is intrigued at the work-relationship dynamic. She thinks about working with Rhys, and knows that they would end up killing each other, or everyone would go to bed angry. But Ianto and Jack don't even acknowledge their relationship, and it hadn't been until she had walked in on them in Jack's office that she had been able to figure it out.
Sure, "walked in on" implies something sexual, not quite what she had witnessed-an embrace, rather, Ianto's hand on the back of Jack's head, Jack's face buried in Ianto's neck, those soft murmurs, the one thigh pressed in between the other's legs, the little gentle sway of a couple embracing and talking and hesitant to let go.
Imagine her surprise when Owen mentions Ianto's wife one time when the two of them are fucking in the backseat of his car in the middle of the afternoon. She thinks to be offended on Lisa's behalf, but when she comes and Owen calls her his beautiful bitch, Gwen feels sheepish and realises that everything in the world is rather complicated.
But she still wants to meet Lisa of Torchwood One.
So, after Jack and Tosh had got back from 1941, and Jack is morose and wistful, Gwen suggests they all go out. Actually, Owen, still smarting from Diane (and a bullet in the shoulder), has installed himself in the Hub, and he suggests that they all go out without him, Doctor's orders, moment of altruism, use it or lose it, etc. etc. Gwen gives Ianto and Tosh the big-eyed look she'd perfected on her father years ago (and on Rhys, oh so easy). Tosh gives Jack her own version of the big-eyed look (perfected in a manner similar to Gwen's), and Ianto just rolls his eyes and says something about how all the women in his life look like sad clowns in a carnival show.
Later that week, she and Jack and Tosh meet Rhys at a restaurant Ianto has selected, and they wait at the table, dissecting breadsticks and folding their serviettes into animals and in general chatting like normal people, as normal as they can be, for Rhys's sake. He doesn't understand special ops, and they can't tell him anything anyway, but he's happy to talk haulage, and Jack asks him ridiculously flirty questions about "tonnage" and what the best routes are to avoid the police. When Jack excuses himself to the loo, Rhys turns to her, his own eyes wide, and tosses a thumb backwards.
'Your boss?'
'Yup.'
'A little queer.'
Tosh laughs and asks Rhys about his routing system. Jack returns and is almost to his seat when Ianto and Lisa arrive.
No one had told her about the chair. Not that it matters, she tells herself; the presence of it, framework cradling her body as she rolls towards them, adds about fifteen chapters to Ianto, to Jack, to their story, slamming into place like the loading of an ammo mag.
So no, no one had told her about the chair, or the fact that Lisa is a total looker. Gwen doesn’t know what she expected, some pale, mousy thing, perhaps. Some scorned cuckolded woman that she could use to feel less affection for Jack and Ianto.
Lisa wheels herself, Ianto behind her with his hands in his coat pockets as if he doesn't trust himself not to push her, steer her. His eyes search the table, the people there. Lisa is almost radiant, though that could be her smile, and her manicured nails click against the rims of her wheels. Her clothes are posh, and her dark hair is short and stylish. Gwen feels vaguely frumpy. Then again, look at Ianto and the way he dresses-why would she have thought Lisa to be any different? They are the epitome of a young couple out for a night on the town. Gwen hides her hands with their scruffy nails under the table.
When Lisa arrives at the table, skidding to a halt at the empty space between Tosh and Ianto's chairs, bumping into it as if she just can't be bothered to stop herself, she reaches out her arms to them. Gwen and Rhys take her hands instinctively, without thinking, and she grasps them, squeezing, her thousand-watt smile working overtime.
'It's about time!' she says, 'Ianto is the worst social planner ever.' Ianto smiles when he slides into his chair, but his eyes are glued to his bread plate. His fingers find Jack's on the table, the barest of brushes.
Jack lets his hand linger there, but his eyes are on Lisa as he reaches across Ianto, leaning on his arm a little, and grabs her wrist, squeezing. 'You look fantastic.'
Lisa gives him that bright smile, and for a second Gwen entertains the thought that the light just reflects from her mouth to his, and they should be filming some sort of toothpaste commercial instead of sitting here waiting for the garcon. Lisa lets go of Rhys and Gwen's hands and when everyone settles back into place, there is a sliding of fingers and arms between Jack and Lisa and Ianto that looks familiar, strange, comfortable and suddenly it all clicks in her head: Jack, Ianto, the intimacy, the leaving together, the comfortable nature of it all.
As everyone gets settled and fusses with flatware and Rhys starts a conversation with Ianto about the Grand Slam, Gwen raises her brows at Tosh and looks at Jack and Ianto. Tosh nods minutely. Oh really.
Dinner is about as spectacular as it can be when four of the people suddenly have to leave to go chasing down a bunch of teddy bears that have been exposed to some sort of alien animation gas and subsequently broken out of a local toy store to have a bloody joyride about Cardiff. Lisa's face is gleeful when they all rush about, trying to finish their entrees and stuffing breadsticks in their pockets, but Rhys looks a little put out. As Gwen kisses him goodbye she watches for Ianto and Lisa, but she must have missed it. When they run out of the restaurant, Lisa is already laughing and ordering another bottle, telling Rhys that as Torchwood widows, it's their job to finish the evening with a bang, out of spite.
Gwen knows that he gave her a ride home, but when she asks him what they had talked about, he gives her a smile and waves his hand, noncommittal.
She lets him own it.
She doesn't think about Jack and Ianto and Lisa again until a week later, when she and Jack are in the SUV, waiting for Tosh to finish a trace on a Weevil they'd tagged and released, only to discover that it had resurfaced in Penarth with a little bit of a human flesh fetish.
Jack plays with his wrist strap and she sits in the passenger seat, looking at the traffic up in the viaduct over-pass.
'I've never asked,' she says, 'and you can tell me to stop at any time-'
'Stop.'
'Okay.' She looks at her hands in her lap.
After a thirty-second lapse of silence, Jack snorts. 'I was just testing to see if you would stop,' he says. 'Go on, ask away.'
'You and Ianto.'
'Me and Ianto. Not a question, Gwen.'
She twists her hands in her lap and sighs. 'You and Ianto and Lisa.'
'Me and Ianto and Lisa. Still not a question.'
She glances at him and he is looking at the wrist strap, his fingers pressing buttons. She wonders what he's doing-texting, programming, playing mini-Space Invaders. 'You know what I'm asking,' she says softly.
Jack opens his mouth and then closes it. He lets his wrist go and places both hands on the steering wheel. Then he turns his head to look at her, and his face is dead serious.
'It's complicated,' he says, 'very complicated.'
Their Bluetooths chirrup and Tosh pops up on the line, as if she has the most convenient timing in the world. She gives them a new set of coordinates for the satnav and they buckle in, ready to race to the warehouse and wrestle Janet into the cage in the back. Owen wants to keep her for good this time. He curses at them over the comm, telling them that they better not bang her up too badly. Ianto comes over the comm and says something mild about roughing up Owen's best girl. Jack laughs and Gwen tries not to roll her eyes too hard.
'We're going to earn that astronomical paycheque tonight, I can feel it,' Jack says cheerfully. 'Aren’t you excited?'
Gwen checks the location they're headed to: a fish packing plant. Lovely. 'I can't wait,' she tells him and he whistles under his breath.
'Are you happy?' she asks as he turns the ignition over, and her question is almost lost in the quiet roar of the engine.
Jack puts the SUV into gear and pulls out before answering. 'Happiness is relative.' And as he turns into traffic, 'But yeah.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
IANTO
Whilst Jack is gone, Lisa has a health episode. He curses the man's name all the way to hospital, and then he curses himself that he hadn't been paying attention to her enough in the chaos to see that she hadn't been paying much attention to her catherization. Lisa has always been meticulous, so very meticulous, and where she fails from sheer exhaustion or hatred for what has happened to her, Ianto has always prided himself on picking up. But some things, sometimes, had fallen to Jack, just a little, and as he holds her hand in the back of the ambulance, he realises that they have placed their bets on something frightfully unsure.
The doctors assure him that the kidney infection is something that is treatable, and that once the fever has subsided and the antibiotics have had a chance to work, she will be right as rain. But getting the infection to release a hold on her body is always harder when it is systemic like this. He shakes their hands and smiles and nods and thanks them profusely because it makes no sense to be rude, but under his breath he is cursing and vowing to be there for her more.
He tells Gwen and the others that he won't be in for a few days, no matter what they might say, and they don't seem to be put out. Gwen makes reassuring noises into the phone, and all Ianto can think is that Torchwood owes him, anyway, owes him time and patience and pretty much anything it could ever pull out of its massive resources to keep her alive. Owen tells him to ask for certain drugs, and he writes them down on his hand in pen. This is what Jack's absence has reduced him to-scribbling on his skin because he hasn't the foresight to bring paper or his PDA.
Lisa murmurs in her delirium, 'Where are my boys? I need my boys,' and all Ianto can do is hold both of her hands in his, pretending that there are two of him, that one hand is hotter than his own and pulses a reassuring beat into her ashen grip.
Tosh comes to him in the middle of the night, a bag of pasties in her hand, and she sits next to him in the waiting room whilst the nurses change Lisa's sheets and give her a sponge bath. Ianto had wanted to do it himself, but they assure him that they are professionals and that if he especially wants to, he can assist in the next one. In retrospect, he thinks as he accepts the bottle of water Tosh gives him, her fingers already having removed the cap as if he is five, there's no reason not to let them do their jobs.
'I can't help but think that he would be here if he could,' Tosh says, meaning to be comforting but failing miserably. She seems to recognise it then, because she furrows her brows. 'Oh, Ianto, I didn't-'
Ianto pats her arm, thinking about how much better it feels to be comforting someone else instead of being comforted. 'No,' he says, and they watch a very old man creak slowly down the hallway with an IV pole.
'I always thought that you had a good thing,' Tosh says, not looking at him. 'I admit, that for a few seconds I was insanely jealous of Lisa, with the two of you and…well, it's uncharitable.'
Ianto thinks that it's remarkably charming that Tosh would be jealous of a crippled woman in a chair. At least, that's what Lisa would have said, but he understands where she is going. 'We never quite "had" him, obviously,' he says. And then he starts to eat the pasty that she has brought him because that is the right thing to do.
Tosh sighs. Somewhere at the other end of the floor someone calls a code and they watch alarmedly as a crew wheels a crash cart down the hall at breakneck speed. Ianto knows it's not Lisa's room, but he wants to jump up and follow them, watch, make sure that they're not going to turn left. They turn right, and he drops the pasty on the floor in relief. Tosh is there right away, scooping it up in her hand and throwing it into the bin next to her. She opens the bag and deposits a new one into his open palm, closing her fingers over it.
He cannot look her in the eyes.
'You eat that or I'll force it in your mouth,' she says cheerfully.
'You sound like Owen,' he tells her, but he takes a bite and chews it. It's a good pasty, he’ll give her credit for finding these secret culinary treasures of Cardiff. In his head he imagines Tosh wandering the streets at night, with her PDA, scanning Chippie Alley for the Best Chips In The Universe.
She stays with him for another hour, not talking about anything at all. The next day Gwen comes and tells him to go home and get changed, get some clothes, take a shower, make something to eat that isn't instant or hasn't come from a machine. Ianto consults the charts (he reads them all, he has since London) and agrees, but he has to take a taxi. Gwen gives him the keys to the SUV and says that she'll stay until he gets back.
He had forgotten how much the SUV is like Jack, or how he associates it with Jack, and he almost punches the sidepanel at the sight of it. But he gets in and sits in the driver's side for a minute, head on the steering wheel because he is trying to smell Jack.
Jack is gone. Has been for three weeks. He isn't coming back.
It had been bad enough when Jack had been cold on the slab, and Ianto had had to go home to tell Lisa, he hadn't been able to say the words then. But Jack had come back from the dead, kissed him there in the Hub in front of everyone, and then gone home to lie in Lisa's arms; Ianto had been thankful that he hadn't had to say that Jack was gone for good. He'd just had to say it a day later, when, after coming back from a coffee run, Gwen had told him that Jack had just disappeared. Ianto isn't stupid, never has been. He knows what that noise had been. He'd checked the footage on the Plass. He hasn't always been with this ragtag backwater coalition, no, he had been Torchwood London; he knows the TARDIS when he sees and hears it.
'You fucking bastard,' he tells the horn symbol in the dead center of the column.
Oh, even now he can't blame Jack. He will, though, just to feel better. He ignores Jack's things in the spare room, simply shutting the door and knocking on it twice out of some OCD display.
He showers and thinks about Lisa, wanking off even though in the forefront of his mind he understands that she is ill and lying on a bed in a drug haze, and neither of them is there for her. After he dresses, he takes a turn through the house, throwing away small things: her catheter tubing (it would have to be replaced anyway); he gets a bin liner and fills it with a few Military History magazines from the coffee table, a series of sketching notebooks filled with drawings of Ianto and Lisa and others. Ianto takes the trash to the skips and stands there, debating tossing it all out. He could have taken a turn through Jack's room, really, but he hadn't, and even now, he just walks back upstairs with the bag and sets it inside the door of Jack's bedroom, shutting the door and knocking on the wood again. He knows it's not for luck. He doesn't have any more time to waste on being a lovesick jilted girl, because his wife is waiting for him in a hospital bed.
Besides, Lisa might want to burn it all when she gets back. She's always been more vengeful than he is, and he would hate to deprive her of an excuse to set something on fire.
On his way out the door he makes one more stop.
When Lisa wakes up, one of the first things she sees is the ring on her finger again. Ianto turns his with his thumb and stares out the window. He wants to play with it in obvious places, so that everyone can see that it is there, so that if Jack is watching them through some celestial window, he can see that they have closed the gap that he has left.
'You know it's not your fault,' she says to him, and he can't look at her. Instead, he watches a bunch of terminal children hobble about in the garden outside, halfheartedly running after balls or playing jacks on the cracked concrete.
His response is noncommittal. It feels much like the rest of him, except the rest of him is renewing his vows to her. He can feel them wrapping around him, settling around him, like a forcefield coming from the ring itself. What is that superhero with the magic ring? The Green Spectre? The Green Light? That one.
Lisa's fever is gone, and she can have fluids, but they suggest water in very small amounts. When she asks for it, he is more than happy to get it. He's more than happy to serve, to prove that he's her husband, that she is his wife, and they are enough for each other.
'It wasn't a mistake,' Lisa says to him when he hands her the cup of ice water. 'I'd do it again.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
LISA
It has been two months since Jack's return, and only a month since he has begun to spend the night again. Lisa isn't sure if he feels like he has been doing penance for his absence, but his revelations in the dark of the night, sometimes in her arms, sometimes in Ianto's, sometimes sitting by himself in the chair as he stares out the window, tell them much. He tells them about the Doctor, and about the time vortex, and the TARDIS. He tells them about his life on Earth for the last hundred and fifty odd years.
The night that he finishes, he shrugs his shoulders in the moonlight. 'And that's it,' he says.
Ianto doesn't say anything for a long time, as they lie there, and then Lisa reaches out for them both and lays her chin on Jack's chest. 'So you're like Dracula,' she says casually. 'Doomed to walk the earth forever.'
Ianto snorts and Jack sighs.
'Come to me, my brides,' Lisa says in a bad accent, curling her hand like a claw.
'If you get her started, she won't shut up,' Ianto warns Jack, his face muffled by a pillow.
Jack shudders, the tears drying on his face. 'You're amazingly unsympathetic.'
Lisa punches his shoulder, then props herself up with her arms so that she can look him in the eye. 'Forgive me if I have little sympathy for someone who can live forever.'
'You're taking this rather well,' Jack says dryly. She can hear his eyeroll.
She sighs against him then, and she feels one of Ianto's hands reach out to her, caressing the back of her neck. 'No, I'm sorry, but what should we say? Forgive me for being selfish, but I'm rather just glad that you’re still alive.'
Jack watches her pull herself up his body and when her mouth finds his, his lips are damp with tear tracks and salt. His tongue is just like she has remembered, dreamed about. 'I am sorry,' she says against his cheek. 'There's nothing I can do, but I am sorry.'
Ianto brushes his cheek against Jack's other shoulder. 'I'm sorry, also,' he murmurs, 'that this conversation is so very sentimental.'
And then he strokes Jack to hardness so that Lisa can suck him off, and they spend the rest of the night forgetting about immortality and death and all the frightening things that come with them.
In the morning he is still there, and Lisa lets him make her breakfast. She even lets him wash the glasses. He doesn't break a single one.
Things have returned to normal, or what passes for Torchwood normal: aliens; guns; sex gas; a frozen soldier thawed out; an invasion of ants bent on taking over the Millennium Centre; a tear in the fabric of time that they close with scientific duct tape. Lisa finishes her job for UNIT and starts a new one that requires a daily commute, and she cannot wait to get out of the house every day. Gwen and Rhys come over once every two weeks, sometimes with Tosh or Owen in tow, play cards or drink, like the twentysomethings they are. Jack hovers in the background sometimes, or stays at the Hub, watching the Rift twist and turn in place, ready to churn out something new and fascinating and deadly or even boring and useless.
She likes Gwen, more than she ever liked Suzie, not as much as she adores Tosh. Then again, she realises as she watches their guests, she shouldn't compare them, because it had never been a contest, and it still isn't. She just likes having people in the flat.
Gwen, and her man Rhys, they sprawl on the sofas with the laziness that comes with being at home wherever you are, and Lisa can identify with that in some ways, because Cardiff will never be her home, just some place that she has learned to stretch out in. Gwen yawns and lifts her arms above her head and her tongue is kittenish, arching up from the lower palate, and Lisa watches when Jack stares at it.
She wants to give Gwen to Jack. Not as a toy, and not discounting Rhys, but unlike herself, scarred in mind and body, and Ianto scarred in spirit, Gwen is unmelted snow, the kind that feeds into streams when the frost melts, the kind people take pictures of to slap on a post card. Rhys beside her is hale and husky and manly, and he probably smells like ale and cologne and motor oil. Lisa shivers despite herself.
But Jack respects the boundary, and Lisa can't help but wonder if he almost fetishises it. She has stopped trying to guess at what Jack wants. Even now, as his things take up their closets and shelves, he presses them together some nights, sliding from the bed and patting their hips, a silent message that they are fine without him, that he is content to not be there, that he wants them to be there. She usually finds him later, out on the roof.
Tonight, Lisa watches him track Gwen's movements through the flat, and she wonders if it's only a matter of time, or if this is something that can be sated from afar. She wonders what she would think if Jack and Gwen decided to have sex, or if Gwen and Rhys invited Jack into their bed. She isn't sure that it would ever happen, but she wonders about it anyway.
Then Jack kisses her cheek when everyone leaves, and she lets him lead her to bed.
One night there is a knock on her door and the rattle of keys, and she knows that it is not one of the boys (her boys), and Rhys sheepishly pokes his head in and says something about being told to look in on her and to bring a curry. She doesn't curse at him, because he is, well the messenger, and she has been that before. It's tandoori, and she likes tandoori, so she forgives everyone, especially when Rhys uncovers the little Styrofoam box of jilebi, and they settle in with dinner on the sofa to watch the game, and then an old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
They complain about being Torchwood widows. Lisa doesn't explain how complex that is, and she has no encouraging words for him.
Rhys slides further down on the sofa. 'You worked for Torchwood, yeah?' he asks, and she wonders how to respond to that. Because it's going to go to the bad place.
'Yeah,' she says off-hand. 'In London.'
He shifts and sips from his glass. 'How was that, then?' He waves his hand, and she knows what he wants to know.
She refills her wineglass. 'I was injured there. Work accident.' And when his face darkens, she hastens to add, 'But it was a singular incident. Nothing that would happen here.'
She kicks herself a little, because she wonders what all Rhys has seen Gwen come home with. She knows that Gwen had been shot in the line of duty last year, but she doesn't know if Rhys knows that. She knows that Gwen had been almost sucked dry by Suzie, and a few other close calls. Some part of her hates the idea that Rhys doesn't know what he's in for, what his fiancée is getting herself into every day. Lisa knows what Ianto is in for.
Her wheels groan a little when she shifts, lifting herself from the chair and onto the sofa, and she makes a mental note to go in and have it checked out.
Rhys finishes his beer and goes for a refill, and Lisa watches him with fondness. He's strapping, and in another life she might have had a greater appreciation for it. Her last boyfriend before Ianto had been a construction worker, Thaddeus, and he had had these shoulders, well, she has an appreciation for bulk. Ianto is all whippiness and ardour. Jack, well, Jack is just himself. If she had to describe him, she would say, "A coil of sex."
'Can I ask?' he says when he settles down. 'You know-'
'Oh,' she says, 'there was a structural flaw in the building, and I didn't get out in time.' She tries to look serious and dismissive, because everything that she cannot say is so fucking terrifying that she has a hard time talking about it. UNIT had sent both she and Ianto to a therapist, one with clearances, and they had talked it out in their six allocated sessions. It was just enough to scrape the skin from the top of the custard, but not much else.
She thinks that she would need about fifteen more years just to explain the noise, the noise of their voices. In her dreams all she hears is "EXTERMINATE".
Ianto had repainted the Delete key on her computer so that now it says "erase".
Rhys is sympathetic. He wisely changes the conversation, and after a few more beers and glasses of wine he turns to her and says, 'I think Gwen is having an affair with Jack.'
Lisa chokes on her wine, and that is the worst thing she could have done, because now he must think it's true. He frowns into his beer and sniffs. His t-shirt is riding up a little, and she can see one of his love handles. She wants to grab it, but he is too far away. She settles for throwing a remote control at him.
'Gwen isn't having an affair with Jack,' she says, 'because he's too busy here,' she adds because he would ask how she knows, and she'd have to tell him anyway. She's glad that she's not very very drunk, because she might have blurted out that Gwen used to be fucking Owen, but that's not her secret to tell, and now that she knows it's over, she is sure that Gwen would be glad to never speak of it again. She wonders if Gwen beats herself up over it.
She doesn't blame Gwen, really, she thinks for a second when Rhys looks into his glass and she understands that he knows nothing, nothing that Gwen has seen, that Lisa has seen, and that is in its own way a blessing and a curse. She wonders who Gwen talks to about Torchwood. Probably no one. Maybe Jack. She wonders if she shouldn't invite her out for lunch, maybe with Tosh, and the three of them can be girls and have girl talk: shoes, menstrual cycles, Bechdel, aliens.
'You two, you three, you….' Rhys's head wraps around the reality of Lisa's arrangement adeptly. She scrolls her hand in a circle, partly to say, "Hurry up, get there", partly to say, "Yeah, what you're imagining".
'Ooh, you lucky girl you,' he says, winking, but she can see that he doesn't believe her. That's okay anyway, as long as he doesn't think that his girl is banging Jack.
Later on, when she emerges from the loo, Rhys has fallen asleep on the sofa. Lisa covers him with an afghan, texts Gwen, and goes to bed. In the morning they have hangover eggy toast and trundle off to their jobs, vowing to do this again the next time they are deserted by their lesser halves.
A few weeks later Ianto doesn't come home, and he doesn't call. Lisa emails him, and then she tries his mobile. It's not that she doesn't trust him, but he doesn't like her to worry, especially since the last time Jack had left.
Jack rarely if ever calls, so that doesn't bother her at all.
She tries Rhys, and he tells her that he had seen Jack and Gwen, but that Gwen is acting strange, doesn't remember him, and he sounds panicked. She tries to talk him down, she wants to talk to Jack, but he's not there. He doesn't answer his mobile.
Some time later she manages to get Ianto to pick up, and when he says, 'Hello?' she starts to yell at him.
'You know, sir, you should call your wife when you think you're going to be too busy to come home. I know it wasn't covered in the wedding vows, but it is the human thing to do-'
'I'm sorry, who is this?'
Lisa checks at the number display on her work phone. 'Ianto?'
'Yes?' It's cautious.
'It's Lisa.'
'I'm sorry, but I think you might have the wrong-'
'Your wife.'
There is a long pause. 'You must be mistaken. I'm afraid I'm not m-'
She hangs up, then sits there in her chair and stares at the phone. Rhys had said that Gwen didn't remember him. What had happened?
The idea that Ianto doesn't remember her is chilling. Had they been playing with retcon? She cannot imagine that Gwen would want to forget Rhys, so it has to be a mistake. Does anyone there remember her? Does Jack? Owen? Tosh? She wants to try their numbers, but she's afraid.
She's going to wait two more days, and then she's going to call Martha Jones, the new UNIT doctor, the one who knows Jack from…from somewhere.
She sits in the bathroom and stares at the wallpaper, the red flowers. She cleans the Peristeen, but even as she does it, her eyes can't seem to leave the blooms scrawled across the walls. Then she turns on the shower, and lets it run hot until there is only cold water. She digs implements out of Ianto's tool box and locates a roll of duct tape. She pulls the mop from the closet and sets about taking care of what she has decided is one of her major life issues.
In the middle of the night, she gets a phone call from Ianto, and when she presses the receiver to her ear she mumbles something like, 'You better be stranded in Svalbard, or have an extremely good excuse, Mister.'
'Lis?' he whispers, and she shoots to her side, because she can't sit up like she used to, not with her leg muscles to balance her. As dramatic gestures go, it's the best she can muster.
'Babe?'
'Lis oh thank god,' he says, his voice a little louder. 'Lis we all lost two days. Have I called you?'
Lisa groans. 'Bloody Torchwood. No, baby, no you haven't.' The clock reads four in the morning. 'Is everyone all right?'
She can hear clattering in the background, Owen yelling something. Ianto sighs. 'Yeah, I think we're okay. I just wanted to check on you. I'll-we'll--be home soon.'
When they stumble in, it is close to six in the morning. They seem to be intact, and they don't remember anything, they say, it looks like they have retconned themselves. Ianto sits on the edge of the bed and stares like a ghost. Lisa runs her hands along his shoulders, planting kisses on his shoulder blades through his shirt. Jack leans against the windowsill and crosses his arms, looking out into the early morning.
'I don't remember, but I feel, hrm,' Jack says. Ianto nods without looking at him.
'I feel as if I should be apologizing for something, but I don't know what,' Ianto says, rubbing his temples with his fingertips. Lisa vows to never say a word, because he would be horrified, and he doesn't need any more grief.
Jack shoves off from the wall and crawls on the bed, setting his head in her lap. 'I think we all need a lie-in. Do you want me to call work, tell them you're playing skivving off?'
Lisa rolls her eyes. 'UNIT will love that.'
Ianto snorts. '"This is Jack Harkness",' he says in his bad American accent, '"my wife can't come in today because she's making up for lost time".'
Lisa's hands freeze and Ianto tenses as soon as the words are out of his mouth. Her eyes rivet to Jack's, because this could go so many ways.
Instead, Jack just yawns. 'I'll do it,' he says, 'just say the words.' The clock in the living room chimes six-thirty.
Ianto's muscles relax and she feels herself smile a little. Ianto stands and unbuttons his shirt, slipping his tie from his neck and throwing it towards the dry cleaner bin as he moves towards the en suite. She loves that shirt, she decides. Ianto looks beautiful in this shade of red. Jack wraps his arms about her waist and groans into her side.
'Oh, go ahead and do it,' she tells him, pulling her mobile from her pocket. 'It will be worth it to see their faces tomorrow.'
Jack flips the mobile open and hits her three speed dial, smiling.
'Lis,' Ianto calls from the bathroom, 'what happened to the wallpaper?'
*~*~*~*~*~*
Master List