We held gold dust in our hands (4/7, Torchwood, Jack/Ianto/Lisa/Gwen/Rhys)
Title: We held gold dust in our hands (4/7)
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.
GWEN
She hates the dress, she decides, but it's a miracle there's a wedding at all, after the day they've had. But Rhys is heroic and brave, and Jack and Ianto and the rest use the big gun, and everything is remarkably…saved. No one is dead but the bad guy. Super Torchwood to the rescue.
She lets Jack spin her out on the dance floor, and she can feel the heat radiating from his arm as it is wrapped about her waist. Tosh and Owen whirl past them, dancing impossibly fast to what is actually a rather slow song. Jack holds her hand curled to his chest, and it creates a distance in between them that she both hates and appreciates.
At times like this she tries to imagine him as her older brother, but that never makes her feel better.
'So, what will you do while I'm gone?' she asks, and the music turns over, something even slower. She sees Ianto at the turntable and can't restrain a small smile. Somewhere behind her, Lisa is chatting with her bridesmaids at a table. Rhys is taking his mother out for a turn.
'Oh, the usual,' Jack says, mock lost in thought, 'pizza, Ianto, save the world a couple of times.' And they laugh.
She wants to ask. She has before, but she just can't bring herself to, not now. Jack's hand presses on her waist again, and she realises that in this moment, with Ianto's horrible song selection playing, she wants Jack. With her rings glinting on his shoulder.
Rings don't mean much to Jack, she knows. And that is petty. Once Ianto had told her that Jack is sex-scented. They'd had a few, and Jack had been back at the Hub, and Lisa and Rhys had been giggling and fighting over the controls to Sonic the Hedgehog in the living room, and Gwen and Ianto had sat on the floor in the kitchen, and he had told her about Jack and his ways. To be fair, she had asked, and he'd been drunk enough to indulge her.
It's hard to keep all that from swimming to the surface right now.
'Will you miss me?' she jokes, batting her eyelashes.
'Always,' he replies, and she realises that he is dead serious.
Well, that's hard to respond to. She doesn't have to, because Ianto cuts in, and when she tries to step up to him, he turns towards Jack and they have an awkward split-second of scuffling as to who is going to lead and who will follow. Rather, Jack's hands move to follow, but Ianto gets there first, and Jack sets his hand on Ianto's waist with a sigh and a crooked smile, as if this is an argument they've had before. Gwen covers up her smile with her hand and seeks out their third.
They are still pressed close together, swaying to the music, when she finds Lisa and sits down next to her. Gwen watches her watch the two of them, her brown eyes darting over the lines of their bodies. Is she jealous? Is it the embrace? Or is it the dancing in general? Gwen realises with a little bit of shame that Lisa might have other things to be bitter about other than Jack and Ianto's closeness. She tries to follow the other woman's line of sight. Is it Ianto's hand on Jack's waist? Jack's feet as they turn slowly?
She wants to say something, but she knows that anything she might say would be insensitive, probably.
'So, married lady, any advice?' she asks, because truth, that wouldn't be unwelcome. If there is anyone whose advice would probably be the most helpful, actually, it would be Lisa, who she still thinks of as "Lisa from Torchwood One". Owen once called her "cyber Lisa", and she can't stop herself from thinking that too, when she sees Lisa at the flat when they arrive sometimes, wheeled into her desk, headset on, wearing the silver gloves she uses to handle UNIT's illuminated projector keyboard.
Now, Lisa looks her in the eye and sips from her champagne glass. 'Don't ever lie to him,' she says, 'except when you do.'
Gwen knows exactly what she means. It's Torchwood, binding them all together in lies and secrets and an openness of spirit that she has never had with other humans. She knows things about Owen and Tosh and Ianto and Jack that she shouldn't even know about her husband, her family. She wonders sometimes if she shouldn't marry them all instead. Maybe she already has.
Her eyes seek out Rhys again, and there he is, laughing with her mother, spinning on the dance floor. He passes Jack and Ianto, winks at them, and she understands then, that he is hers and hers alone, not Torchwood's, and that is in itself a small measure of happiness. Looking at him in his dapper tie and suit paints her insides with comfort and anticipation for a nice two weeks away in which she will not call home, will not call Jack or Owen or Tosh, not even Ianto and Lisa. She and Rhys will be two people in love, free to run and forget and roll about in sheets and not even get dressed if they don't want to. And she cannot say that for anyone else here.
Lisa places her hand over Gwen's, their wedding bands clinking against each other. She thinks idly again, how rings don't mean much to Jack. 'It's worth it,' Lisa says, though her eyes are glassy. 'It really really is.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
JACK
After the Skypoint incident, Ianto turns to him and says something about how the flats are rather nice, and that if they can ever get it cleared out, Lisa would love the penthouse. Jack understands the wording completely, and he cannot disagree.
Gwen and Rhys are married, back from their honeymoon and trying on houses for size. Gwen tells Jack in the car that she isn't quite interested in having a house, not quite, since then she'll have to clean it, and he jokes and says something like, 'Well, doesn't Rhys do that now?' and she doesn't speak to him for three hours of a sixhour stakeout. Apparently Rhys does, but they don't talk about it. Jack doesn't quite care, actually, who does the cleaning in any given relationship, as long as it isn't him. He had his years of hospital corners in the military. Now it's so much easier to pull the blankets up over the pillows and pretend everything is tucked in (This is also the Lisa method.).
So after Besnik Lucca is fully charged and his condo goes on the market, Ianto and Toshiko pull some computerised strings, and within a week, the papers have been signed. Jack and Ianto wheel Lisa in for her first look without ever having shown it to her, but there is little to worry about; there's no floral wallpaper in sight.
Lisa loves the plants and the patio and the birds. She loves the wide hallways and the accessibility and she loves them both, she says, when they kneel down beside her and she wraps her warm arms around them, and Jack takes her mouth with his. Ianto touches Jack's neck and face while they kiss, and Jack knows that he is impatient, urgent, eager to get in on it too, to have her approval (Ianto always wants her approval, as if he is afraid that she will never give it, when she does, she always does.).
Lisa hires movers, and one day Ianto and Jack simply come home to a different place. It's surreal, actually-two days before his room had been in a small Grangetown flat with bad plumbing and inadequate wiring, and the next he's moved on up, like that Jeffersons show from America (Jack blames Alex and his love of American sitcoms for this bit of useless knowledge that no one he knows will understand.). Ianto prods around the kitchen, rearranges the freezer so that everything is where he likes it. Jack hides a few firearms in places where he thinks they will be unobtrusive and useful.
Lisa and Jack excitedly set up the hot tub two days after they move in, and they spend another day explaining to Ianto how no one will see him. Jack illustrates this by stripping down and walking about the entire outdoor garden patio, hands on hips. Ianto locks them out there, and to spite him they have sex in the hot tub, with lots of noises.
He isn't sure when the change happened in Ianto. Sometime after they had lost time, maybe around the wedding, or maybe it was when Owen had died, and…come back. Ianto has always been skittish, not nervous, but pulled back, hesitant. Lisa moves forward for him, she is the one who reaches out and pulls things towards them both.
That night, Jack sits on the very topmost roof and listens to them down in the garden below. He has a Marlowe novel, a booklight and a box of blueberries from Tesco's, a gift from Toshiko, and he intends on eating them in peace. It doesn't hurt that if he lies on his back, there is nothing above him, not even light pollution.
The Rift has been quiet, so that means it's only a matter of time before something bubbles out of it, hopefully in some collectible corporeal form, and not in a gaseous or invisible state. Jack thinks about how lucky they are that they've never actually had to deal with the ******, the noiseless, (tasteless, incidentally) and very very invisible beings from [s]tar [o]ne. There are other things that Jack would prefer never show up (in his dreams for the past few months he has been twelve, and when he wakes his hand reaches for something that isn't there, but should be), so he supposes that it's only a matter of time.
Jack wonders if, as he gets older and older, he will eventually be able to wish events to happen. If he ever does, he decides that he's going to found a free love colony and get laid a lot. And grow fruit. Everyone loves fruit.
'You need to stop worrying about it,' Lisa says as one of them slides the door shut to keep the bugs out of the house. Jack lowers the book and listens to the sound of plates being set on the glass table.
Ianto must have sighed, or rolled his eyes, because Lisa responds. 'That's not right. You know it's not right.' She pauses for a long time. 'And it's not fair. Not to Jack. Or me.'
'This isn't about you, or Jack, or anyone else.' Ianto sounds gravelly, as if he has been smoking or crying, or drinking heavily. Jack doesn't smell smoke, even though he knows that Lisa has started again. He keeps meaning to yell at her about it, but there are so many other things to worry about, that it's nothing.
'Defleeeeeeeeeeeeeecting,' Lisa sings. 'Lying liar who lies,' she adds, and it's a joke, a secret joke that Jack only knows about because they had told him the Debenham's story, the one where Ianto had tried to impress Lisa by telling her that his father was a master tailor when he really worked at a department store. Jack had decided that he preferred the story because it made role-play more fun, and once they had even played "The Randy Tailor Hides the Thimble" (Lisa had named it that, on a whim.). But the joke is still there, adding layers to Ianto and what he feels he needs to do to get what he wants.
As far as Jack is concerned, all Ianto needs to do is breathe and smile.
'I don't think I can keep up with you,' Ianto says, 'You're both brilliant, and fast and I feel like I'm lagging behind.'
'How is a racing metaphor even applicable?' Lisa asks, her voice rough and exasperated. Jack hears the clink and scrape of forks on plates. Ah, they finally broke out that cheesecake. Jack almost interrupts them before he remembers that they can't know he's there. It's rude to eavesdrop, no matter how accidental. But he really wants cheesecake.
Ianto mumbles something noncommittal.
'Look, whatever you think, Jack and I aren't going to run away without you,' Lisa says. 'You know that, right?
Jack rolls onto his stomach and peers over the edge of the roof as noiselessly as he can, feeling strangely like his ten-year old self eavesdropping on his parents with Gray, hiding in the dunes and listening for hints and snatches of their own names in the conversation. He'll childishly admit that there is some secret thrill in listening to a conversation that involves oneself that one is not meant to hear.
Whatever easiness they have had has been shaken by something, something, a strain in the fabric. Their fabric actually, some slipshod thing that they had woven together out of faulty and defective strands that they had each brought to the table. Jack thinks that if they are indeed true to this comparison, then the thing that they had formed, while beautiful and strong, was not made for long term-like a blanket left in the back of a sun bleached car will light-rot after a few months.
He doesn't know what Lisa thinks of that, but it is obvious what Ianto thinks, as he sniffles into his cheesecake, and Lisa forces herself to breathe heavily and steadily to keep herself from crying.
Jack shakes his head. Birthing pangs.
Because really, they're not some bolt of fabric. Jack lays his chin on his hands and thinks about the fall of Lisa's hands on the arms of her chair, of Ianto's little forehead crinkles he gets when he cleans the stovetop. He remembers a conversation on a rooftop once, in which Lisa had told him that she didn't like to imagine the future, and another one, in the quiet darkness of the Hub, in which Ianto had told him that he liked things to be set, planned out. Jack likes things that come in sets, actually, one for each side, like book ends. He finds it helpful if people come that way too. Some of the best people he's known came in a set: Gerald and Harriet, Greg and Cam, the Doctor and Rose, the Doctor (again) and Martha.
Jack is bad at being a bookend, because he always slides off the shelf (He does look attractive bound in leather, though.).
Finally, Lisa reaches across the table for Ianto's hand, pulling it forward and kissing it. 'It's about you,' Lisa says. Her hand squeezes his and she glances up then, at Jack, purposefully, deliberately, before looking back at Ianto. Jack cannot see his face, but Ianto is a messy crier, so he can imagine what it looks like. 'It's always been about you, babe.'
Ianto shrugs one shoulder.
He's difficult. Jack wants to intervene, but this isn't his issue, and he just rolls onto his back and thinks about how being stuck here, even voluntarily, is sometimes a mystery. He drowns out the rest of their conversation, because that's not for his ears, and he's nosy, but not that nosy.
The next morning, Jack is contemplating his coffee cup with the stripes as he sits at his desk. Why is it his cup? When had they decided that it was his? Had he just chosen it from the tray too many times without thinking about it? And if so, is there something inherently about this cup that he likes, on an aesthetic level? Does he care? Should he care? Jack thinks that just to be contrary, to show how much it doesn't matter he should go get another cup and transfer his coffee to it, but that's too much effort. Also, the ceramic is warm, and his hands curve around it just so and-oh hell, it's his mug.
Ianto clears his throat and Jack looks up then. 'Is there something wrong? Do you need a warm up?' He starts to rise, but Jack waves a hand.
'No. You know I-' he stops, looking at Ianto, and then the mug, and then he realises that Ianto had decided that this is his mug. Somewhere Ianto had decided, because Ianto is the one who gives it to him. And subsequently Jack had assumed that it was his so now he just reaches for it.
Ianto raises his brows, half-out of his chair, hands holding his weight on the arms. 'Yeah?'
Jack opens his mouth. 'Ianto, I-'
'Good morning!' Gwen says cheerily as she enters the conference room and picks her coffee mug up from Ianto's tray and gives him a smile and a pat before settling into her chair. 'Are we doing those figures today?'
Ianto glances at Jack and furrows his brows. It's his version of, "Are we done here?" and Jack nods. Gwen doesn't even notice that she's interrupted something, but Jack is glad that she did, because this was not the time and place to say what he had been about to say. What he had been about to say needs a time and place. A specific time and place, because like soufflé, they need a lack of shouting, and they need a steady heat to effectively set. He watches Ianto lean forward and slide the papers to Gwen, noting about the Rift and the spikes and the police; he sits back and sips his coffee, thinking about times and places and meanings. The meaning of three words, the meaning of the Hub, the SUV, the penthouse, the coffee cup in his hands, a piece of cheesecake left in the fridge with his name written on it in raspberry syrup, discovered after everyone else in the flat had gone to bed. Ianto's cursive 'J' and the way it hooks just so.
He waits three days, one for each word. It's not on purpose. The time never seems right, actually. They're at work too much and that's a bad location, and then they're naked too much, and that is a bad time. And then Lisa is there, and she is a lovely audience, but it has to be just him. Ianto needs to hear it himself, with just himself, because that will make it more real.
It dances in Jack's mouth like a melting hard sweet. For three days.
He's thinking about it as he combs his hair in the mirror and Ianto finishes shaving one morning. Lisa is still passed out in the bed, because she had drunk eight shots of Akvavit on a dare the night before while out with her "UNIT buddies", and Jack is just thankful that she hasn't been booting all night. Ianto leans in closer to the mirror and narrows his eyes, but he's not drawing the blade up.
'I have gray hair,' he says dully.
Jack doesn't bother to look. He doesn't. 'No you don't.' It's the light, probably. 'It's the light in here.'
Ianto still has the razor pressed to his throat, right where his carotid artery is, actually, up where he will drag it across his hyoid bone and-
'I don't think so. My god, that's pathetic,' he says and then he resumes shaving while still shaking his head, and then his hand jolts away from his face and he winces. 'Oh fuck.'
Jack hands him a wad of loo roll and stands there while Ianto presses it to his neck. The paper comes away red. Ianto is still looking at his hair. 'Mind you, I always knew I would go gray, but I truly didn't think it would be at twenty-six-"
'I love you,' Jack says suddenly, eyes on Ianto's handful of red tissue. As soon as the words are out of his mouth, his brain does the claxon of "WRONG PLACE WRONG TIME WRONG EVERYTHING DANGER JACK HARKNESS DANGER DANGER", but there is nothing to do but plow on where angels fear to…plow. 'I do,' he adds, 'love you, you know. I don't think I've ever said it, and I guess that-'
Ianto claps a hand over his mouth and smiles. 'Now you are done, and it is fine.'
'What are you two on about?' Lisa grouses, wheeling in and shaking her head. 'Ianto, you're bleeding.'
Jack looks at her then, her spiky hair and the creases from the pillow on the side of her face. 'I love you, Lis.'
Lisa glances from Ianto to Jack, then back to Ianto, to Jack. Maybe it is too early for her, for this for her. She lifts her hands from the wheels and shrugs.
'You say this now. Right now when I'm like this,' she adds, gesturing to her pajamas and her hair and her face. 'You have the worst timing ever.'
Jack ducks his head and regards her through his lashes. Her contacts are out, but she's not blind enough that she can't see that. 'Doesn't it mean more now, while you're all,' he pauses, searching for the word, 'hungover and gross?'
Behind him, Ianto ties his tie. He can hear the catching of silk on silk. Lisa watches Ianto over his shoulder, then gestures that Jack sit down, so he lowers the toilet lid and perches. She takes both of his hands in hers and leans forward.
'I love you, Jack Harkness,' she says softly, 'but so help me God, if you don't repeat this conversation at a better time, I'm going to have your balls on a plate.' And she winks. 'A non-sexy plate.'
Jack smiles then, he can feel things clicking into place. 'How about tonight, after pudding, before Ianto discovers that Goldfinger is on the telly?'
'It's Moonraker,' Ianto calls from the bedroom, then appears, buttoning his waistcoat. 'We can skip that one.'
Jack lets Lisa roll around to her reply in her own time. One of her hands lets go of his and brushes a stray nothing from his shoulder before she pats his cheek. 'I'll pencil you in. Now both of you leave me the fuck alone.'
Ianto rolls his eyes and Jack grins his way out of the bathroom, but he can hear her muttering under her breath, 'Boys.'
Soon after they do that flat-warming party thing, because Lisa says they should show off their "swanky new digs". She orders a bunch of food so they won't have to cook, despite what Ianto mockingly calls "the kitchen of the fifty-third century" in their house. Jack smiles and tells them that in the fifty-third century they have the food beamed into their stomachs, and Lisa says "Where's the fun in that?" and that causes a giant exchange about what the hell the future will be like.
Lisa says she doesn't care what the rest of the universe is like, but that if someone doesn't invent the Excessive Pleasure Machine, she'll be disappointed.
Jack makes a mental note.
Gwen and Rhys show up with a bottle, and Toshiko meanders in, sprawling on the floor in her skirt and heels, resting her feet on the coffee table, and Lisa plays a little jazz fusion for her. Jack lounges in the doorway and thinks to himself that he wants to have them all here, so that he can love them all, so that they can love each other. It's a maudlin thought, that; Toshiko is such a solitary creature, for all that she is looking for love, and Owen, being dead, well, he won't let anyone ever love him again, and that is just as well.
When he wanders away, he doesn't think that he will be caught as he sneaks one of Lisa's piss-poor cigarettes. He misses them sometimes, actually, no matter how nasty they are. They make him think of The War, and opening his rations pack and seeing them there, as reliable as the dawn and the death of the man sitting next to you.
'They've discovered that they all know how to play Hearts,' Rhys says, and Jack realises with a start that he's about to have a conversation with Gwen's husband, without anyone else. This has to be some sort of milestone.
Rhys hands him a beer and sits next to him out on the patio, groaning and rubbing his shoulders. 'Well, you're all sorted here, aye?'
Jack swills the beer and remembers why he doesn't drink, but he restrains the face he wants to pull, instead setting the bottle on the glass tabletop. 'Looks like.'
'They're rather chuffed,' Rhys says lightly, and Jack might be reading too much into it, but it sounds like what Rhys means is, "Don't fuck this up, old man."
He takes one last drag on the cigarette and puts it out in the plants off to the side, stuffing the butt into his shirt pocket to throw away inside. The acrid smell of it assaults his nose, so he moves it to another pocket. 'Happiness is relative,' is what he tells Rhys, distractedly before it occurs to him that he doesn't really mean it. It's one of his old chestnuts that he uses to fill empty space.
Rhys snorts. 'You sound like Gwen.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
IANTO
'It's funny,' Ianto says, as they move boxes of Gwen and Rhys's things to storage, 'that this would happen this way.'
Gwen tosses a broken lampshade at him, apologising afterwards even though she is angry and not sorry at all, and still more than a little irate that her neighbors couldn't manage to fix their pipes and wiring. The sodden, slightly singed nature of their flat (with a patch of mould in the lounge that Ianto would swear has always been there) is sad and pathetic, really. Rhys good-naturedly tosses salvageable things in boxes and Gwen throws things out the window right into the skip. Ianto tries it a few times-therapeutic, tossing one's life right in the bin. He's pretty sure if he and Lisa would try that now, they'd accidentally kill someone's poodle.
Jack likes to supervise the moving process, though he'll gladly compete with Rhys for hauling bragging rights, carrying two boxes at once. Rhys points to the side of the lorry, Harwood's Haulage, and pretty much raises an eyebrow, and Jack capitulates; he's been outgunned.
It's only until they buy a house, and really, that won't be that long, a few weeks. It's easier than staying in a hotel, and Rhys and Lisa seem to have a rapport. They probably bitch about the rest of them when they're out all the time.
Tosh and Jack head back to the Hub to relieve Owen, and Ianto and Rhys drive the lorry to the storage place to unload all their things. Gwen takes the things they need over to unpack in the third bedroom at the penthouse. Over the comm, Jack makes rude noises about how it's only a matter of time before they can convince Tosh to move in. Ianto ignores him, but he leaves the comm on. He notices that Jack says nothing about Owen, but Ianto is sure that it's in there, some master plan. Some giant incestuous plan.
Ianto had rather facilitated that when he'd suggested they buy such a huge place, he can't help but think, in a 'if you build it, they will come' sort of way.
Gwen and Rhys are barely settled in when they get the signal at the abandoned building site, and Ianto wishes in retrospect that there had been some sort of ominous sound effect to give him a heads up on how bad the next twenty-four hours would be starting with a building falling on his head and ending with Tosh bleeding out on the floor of the autopsy theatre.
It nags at him that he hadn't got to say goodbye, really, especially to Owen, who he sometimes thought could have been him, if he had lost Lisa at Canary Wharf.
The Skypoint is blessedly safe when Hart--when Gray--blows everything up, and Ianto is grateful that Lisa is one thing he doesn't have to worry about in the weeks of clean up. He works until he can't anymore, cleaning Tosh's body and filing it away, rerouting the Rift calculations as much as he can without having Tosh's sublime brain, tearing down the chains that Hart had put up on the walls.
By the time they get to Tosh's video message, tucked away in the computer like finding a twenty-pound note in the laundry, Ianto is ready to drop.
At some point he wakes up in the Hub, wakes up from a dream of having sex with Jack in a pool of Tosh's blood, and he sits up on the couch to see the back of Lisa's chair in his line of vision. He scrubs at his eyes and almost falls when he tries to stand. Lisa is in her chair, he can see her now, black hair and black shirt so dark that she blends into the background of the Hub, leaning forward, talking to someone.
By the time he gets over there, Lisa is chuckling softly, and he rounds her chair to see that she and Rhys are leaning over a folding table of blueprints. They look up when he stands there, feeling as if he is underdressed and overdressed and in desperate need of a shower. He's probably all of these.
Lisa points to the empty chair on her left. It occurs to him that he hasn't hugged her, kissed her, held her since the-the everything. Instead, he drops into the chair and lays his hands in his lap. Rhys leans back and sips from a half-empty can of Irn-Bru.
The Hub feels empty. Jack and Gwen are out somewhere, obviously. He's only minutely worried that they hadn't woken him. It occurs to him that this is the first time Lisa has been in Torchwood Three, and he curses himself for not asking her if she is okay, if it bothers her. He leans forward, putting his fingers on the edge of the table, but she just smiles.
'Jack called, said that he wanted someone awake here.' She shrugs. 'We're awake.'
Sparks fly out of the far wall, and Lisa snorts. 'It's been doing that all day. Bullets in the wiring.' She doesn't ask, and he doesn't volunteer how it happened.
Myfanwy pokes her head out of her hole to survey the area, and it occurs to him that he hasn't fed her. His hands jerk on the tabletop, because he wants to stand, but he can't bring himself to.
Rhys follows his stare up to the makeshift aerie. 'I fed the girl.' He lifts a hand, and it is bandaged. 'Next time I need some of those Harry Potter gloves.'
Lisa laughs. 'Next time you need to use that sauce like Jack told you to, and not try to hand-feed her.' Her fingers card her hair and she shifts in her chair. Ianto knows that if she's in it too long she gets restless. He can see that she's packed her facility tools in a bag on the side of her chair, so obviously she's planning on staying for a while. He feels badly, because the Hub isn't made for the disabled. She had probably taken the lift down and let Rhys and Jack lever her chair. Now she's restrained to one level. There aren't even any toilets within three flights of stairs.
He accepts the thermos of coffee Lisa hands him -the coffee machine had taken a bullet ricocheted from Hart's gun spree, and for that alone he will severely hurt him if and when he ever sees the man again-and pours it right into the thermos cap. Lisa 's face is patient, waiting for him to caffeinate himself. Rhys opens another can and examines the blueprints to the Hub, flat out on the table between them. Lisa looks away from Ianto and points to something on the plans, picking up her conversation with Rhys where they left off, something about rerouting lines and the like to put in a ramp. It doesn't even occur to Ianto to ask. He just sits there and watches the two of them take over Torchwood.
Jack and Gwen come back, Lisa and Rhys leave, Ianto energizes and it's back to weevil catching and cleanup. Jack stares at the walls a lot. Gwen cries, and they all go home in the same vehicle. Gwen and Rhys cuddle up on the sofa and watch bad telly, Jack hides out on the upper roof, and Ianto and Lisa lie on the master bed and talk about how they want to paint the walls a soothing colour, like blue.
Someone (read: Owen) had defaced the 'penthouse' label in the lift so that it says, "LOVE SHACK". Ianto doesn't even notice it until three weeks after he is dead. They are coming back from a mission and his eyes drift over to it. He knows that he is surprised because he can feel his brows knit for a second as he reads it.
'This is why our condo fee is so high,' he says to Jack. But he doesn't rub it off.
*~*~*~*~*~*
RHYS
He certainly hadn't picked the arrangements, such as they are, and he has a hell of a time explaining it to anyone who asks, Daffyd or Banana, but he doesn't quite have much to say when he explains it. It's unconventional, sure, but Rhys has seen aliens and weevils and has incinerated an alien baby from his wife while it was still in her, so he's become less and less concerned with conventional.
He is, however, concerned with the fact that everyone else has become outsiders. Almost as if Torchwood has relocated from below the Plass to this lush three bedroom penthouse. He thinks to make a funny sign out of the hexagonal Ts and hang it on the front door for a lark, but these days Jack isn't as amused by that shite as he used to be.
Rhys can't blame him. Tosh and Owen are dead, and Rhys might wonder if he and Gwen had taken their places in the penthouse but for the fact that when he had joked about it, Ianto had turned his face to the sink and said something about Tosh and Owen being their own selves; as far as Rhys had known, Tosh and Owen hadn't been dating, but hey, he isn't a member of Team Cardiff Torchwood, so perhaps he's got it wrong.
The night it happens, Rhys feels it in the air, like charged ozone. Gwen and Ianto and Lisa are sitting out in the garden, drinking piss ale, and Lisa is chain smoking and Ianto is bothering her about it. Then Jack comes back from UNIT and throws his coat over the chair in that "Daddy's home!" way of his; Lisa tosses her cigarette off the balcony. Gwen and Ianto make their innocent faces, and Rhys, who had been watching telly and had seen all of it, is relegated to the bleachers for a few minutes while Gwen and Ianto play patsy for Lisa. Jack, of course, is having none of it.
There is temporising, and someone sprays them all with beer, and when Rhys slides the glass door back to ask them all what they want for dinner, he finds himself suddenly doused, and Gwen is laughing and laughing and laughing, wild and crazy like she used to do when they were back at Uni on the grass and in love. Back before Torchwood. Back before Jack had pulled the scales from her eyes. From both their eyes, actually.
Rhys is smart enough to know that seeing isn't always wise.
She kisses him there, in front of them all, and that isn't new, but when she's done and Rhys looks over her shoulder, Lisa's eyes are afire with something, and Jack is smirking, and Ianto has hidden his face behind a wide palm, though Rhys can see the corner of his mouth upturned. Jack claps and tells them all how lively and drenched and bad they smell, and that there had been a reason that Ianto and Lisa had purchased this monstrosity of a place, and that reason was the hot tub.
Five hours. Five hours, three bottles of red wine and a mountain of sweet and sour chicken later, and Rhys hasn't come to.
The most cliched place in the world for an orgy, like every porno Rhys has ever seen, and there he is, screwing his wife into the side of the hot tub wall. Someone else, he hasn't even checked, is working himself in him from behind, and Rhys doesn't want to think too hard about this, so he pretends that it just feels good. It does, and he's not new entirely to this game, yeah, a few drunk parties at Uni. Gwen's eyes are open and they keep moving from him to the man behind him, the man who rides him like his hips are liquid, whose hands on his chest and stomach are long and tapered and tangle in his chest hair, carding it with affection even as Rhys comes, and then Gwen comes and this man, who he never quite sees, comes wordlessly, wet hair brushing Rhys's ears.
Rhys kisses Gwen's mouth, bites her ear, laps at her breasts because he doesn't want to turn around and find the person who's just had him. Now that it's over, the blanket of sobriety is wet and cold, and he isn't sure how this might change anything. Gwen's eyes are wide and she is smiling, smiling at him, and the man who has moved away, so that now Rhys can only guess as to whether it had been Jack or Ianto.
Lisa gasps behind him, and he turns then, because he wants to see, and there she is, in Ianto's arms, her thin arms tossed around his waist as he hefts her so that he can take one of her breasts in his mouth. The water must make lifting her easier, Rhys thinks when he glances under the surface to see her legs. Ianto has hooked one of them over the crook of an elbow, and after a second he abandons her chest to claim her mouth, lowering her a little to make it easier.
Gwen reaches under the water and fingers Rhys's hole and he flinches until she twists a finger in and bites his shoulder. He's sore, but it's good sore, and easy to forget about in the hot water and swim of his head. Rhys forgets about who else is with them, or rather, it occurs to him that he simply doesn't care. Jack saved his wedding, his wife. Lisa is his Torchwood Widow Clubmate, and Ianto keeps them all happy, keeps them all together. And he and Gwen are here now, too, aren't they? In this merry band of hot tub dwellers with scars and aches and a few too many drinks in their systems.
Ianto lifts Lisa and pushes inside her, and while she hangs onto the sides of the tub with her hands, Ianto presses his forehead to hers and does things with his hands, touching and not touching, scraping and teasing, and all but fucking her eyes, he is. Rhys understands when he glances over at Jack, sees the look on his face, that this is something they have discovered in each other, something new, something flowering, something that Jack has given them.
He wonders, fleetingly, what Jack would give to him and Gwen, if he could.
Gwen ceases her teasing finger routine, and her arms go about his shoulders, so they sit back to watch what is essentially live porno. Rhys feels as if it should be more sordid, that if he was reading this story in Penthouse letters he'd feel dirty, but it’s hard to see it as anything but heart pounding, terrifyingly amorous when Lisa calls Ianto's name and slaps the surface of the water, and Jack moves to support Ianto when he comes inside her, arching back and almost falling. Rhys studies Jack's fingers with suspicion.
When they are done, when Ianto slides from her and lathes her neck with his tongue like some big cat before turning to do the same to a patient Jack, Rhys wonders if he should applaud.
'Well, that's,' is what he manages to say when their eyes turn to him and Gwen.
'Now we all switch,' Jack says, grinning. When Ianto hits his shoulder, he raises his hands. 'Musical chairs?'
Lisa leans back heavily on her arms and waves her hand, nodding her head. 'I'm going to need a breather, gents,' she moans. 'Someone come hold me up.'
Rhys goes to Lisa with her luscious breasts and open arms, and Gwen settles in the curve of Ianto's bear-hug embrace. Jack seems to float almost, moving among them and against them, and sometimes away from them all, some host or faerie or god, something poetic, Rhys thinks, something Greek and sinful, yeah, like he'd learnt in primary school.
The water is scalding hot, actually, and in the cool evening, it's welcome. Rhys tilts his head back and stares at the stars in front of his vision. They are so high up, displaced, stabbing the sky, up here in this posh place, a far cry from his and Gwen's flat, or the houses that they occasionally look at in their spare time.
They haven't looked at one in the last week. It feels increasingly less and less urgent.
Ianto kicks his knee as he shifts and Rhys's eyes meet Gwen's. Her hand is buried in Ianto's chest hair, and she smiles at him, just for Rhys, in this tub full of people, with Jack on her other side, and Lisa's beautiful arms about Rhys's neck, her smile is full of everything that she told him when she'd slipped the gold band on his finger. All they've added is another layer.
'Well,' he says as Lisa lays her head on his shoulder, and Jack flips the switch on the jets, mumbling something about 'dialing to eleven'. The water almost erupts and Ianto curses, moving away and to Lisa's other side
Jack smiles and runs his hands through Gwen's hair, and Rhys doesn't feel one stab of jealousy. Because there, in Jack Harness's arms, Gwen's eyes stare at him, Rhys Williams, and they hold all the promise of their future. Strange, that.
'Well,' he tries again, not minding that Ianto's arm crosses over his behind Lisa, 'that's all sorted, then.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
JACK
Ianto cheats shamelessly at cards. Gwen can tell most of the time and she opts out when he raises his bid. But Rhys falls for it every time, and at this point he probably owes Ianto something like five rubbish trips or fifteen plates of spag bol, hell maybe three hand jobs, Jack doesn't know and he doesn't ask what their arrangement is.
The card games have gotten heated, especially on the nights when they all have a chance to tumble in from the Hub at around the same time, and for several hours at least, they can lounge around. Gwen and Ianto usually declare their independence from Torchwood by drinking something fortifying, and if they do get called back in, which feels more and more rare these days now that they have Ravi and Karen and that very draconian woman who Jack thinks he might have to fire working at the tourist office, they make themselves useless on purpose.
'Oh now,' Gwen says when Ianto lays down his hand, 'there is no way you got that hand on the first draw.' She tilts her chair back on two legs and sips from a glass of Pimm's the size of her head.
Ianto smirks and shuffles the deck with a bridge arch. 'I'm sorry you're shite, Gwen.'
Gwen thuds forward on her chair. 'You're looking for trouble,' she says.
Ianto raps the edge of the deck off the tabletop and smiles, reaching across to pull the rest of the IOU slips towards himself. 'How many is that?'
Gwen looks at Rhys. 'It's not solid, mate,' she tells Ianto.
Jack and Lisa glance at each other. Apparently Gwen and Ianto have some sort of currency exchange that they don't understand. Maybe it's a Welsh thing, because Rhys folds his hands behind his neck and sighs. 'Oh no, don't look at me. You agreed to it.'
Ianto pulls five slips of paper from his stack and holds them out to her, waving them like a fan. 'Five blow jobs equals one masterful fuck,' he says, and Gwen rolls her eyes. 'I'll trade you to Jack.'
Jack can feel his brain hitting the inside of his skull as it jerks from Lisa to Ianto to Rhys and Gwen. What? 'Excuse me?'
Gwen grabs all the slips and jumps from her chair. 'Sold.'
She runs from the room, Ianto chasing her and calling out, 'I was joking!'
Rhys shakes his head and glances at Jack over his pint glass. 'Sometimes I think they're distantly related.'
Jack is still processing the fact that Gwen might have just been traded to the majors for the evening. Three minutes later, Ianto returns to the room, face smeared with red lipstick, hair mussed. 'What?' Jack asks, 'kind of card game are you people playing here? I thought this was poker.'
Ianto's shirt is on backwards. 'Five card stud,' he deadpans and sits back in his chair. 'Gwen is tied up at the moment. Jack, want to sit in?'
Jack does.
From the bedroom they hear Gwen shout, 'I'm done now! Really! Ianto! Rhys!'
Rhys stands. 'I'll be back,' he tells them in a bad Austrian accent. As he leaves, Jack watches his arse. It's a nice arse.
Ianto catches his eyes. 'I love poker,' he says with a smile.
Jack does too. By the end of the first three hands, Lisa and Jack owe Ianto everything. Jack might even have bartered his wrist strap and a trip in the TARDIS.
Lisa laughs and buys them shirts for when they play-Team Jack, Team Gwen, Team Rhys, Team Ianto, Team Lisa, in black block letters across the front. Rhys grumbles and tugs his on, and then later Gwen draws a red heart on the back of it in magic marker while he sleeps on the sofa after the game. Ianto and Lisa switch often, wearing their own names, and for the past week, Gwen has been wearing Team Jack as a sleeping shirt.
Jack doesn't quite understand just how confused and tangled they are until he's sitting at the dining room table one morning and Rhys and Ianto stumble out of the spare room together, Gwen behind them, in nothing but Team Ianto. Later in the week, after the laundry is done, Lisa wheels out of the bedroom, clad in nothing but the Team Rhys shirt, and waggles her eyebrows at Jack.
This kind of living isn't lost on him, and part of it makes his heart ache, because it cannot last. His childhood home had been a haunt of couples and individuals moving in and out, sometimes staying for years, and when his dad and Gray had-well, he and his mother had been the movers then, actually, and Jack had had a succession of "sisters" and "brothers". He had never thought to ask his mother about the movement of it, because it hadn't seemed strange, like it does now. After over a century of twentieth century mores and trends, something had been bound to stick. Maybe if he had asked his mother about it, she might have sighed, like Ianto had yesterday, and said something about how Jack was being daft and that sometimes things just felt right, and that the outside world could go bugger itself.
His mum probably would have left out the bugger part.
*~*~*~*~*~*
IANTO
The flat is very large, Ianto knows, and it is possible to avoid everyone easily, but it's hard to avoid the noise. Ravi and Rhys are playing some game at the table with Lisa, and Gwen is on duty with Karen, investigating the synchronised talking child thing. Jack-who knows where Jack is. Ianto stands in the centre of the flat and realises that he hasn't actually read a book, a real honest-to-God book in a year.
He peruses the small shelves in their bedroom, and then the ones in the Lisa's office, and then the ones in the lounge. A lot of their books are the standard issue Uni ones that they had bought for classes and then never resold. Lisa had finished Uni, and so a lot more of the books are hers than his, things like Cousine Bette and Effective C++ and Steal this Book. Ianto never finished Uni. It had seemed like a waste at the time, and he had been going through a phase, and then he'd got caught up in Torchwood, and well, there just never seemed to be time or reason.
He stares at the shelves, eyes off centre, listening to Lisa tell Ravi that he has to give her money because she has three hotels or something. Ravi says something about capitalism, and Lisa shoves away from the table, laughing. She wheels past Ianto, stopping to place a hand in one of his trouser pockets.
'Reading?' she asks.
'Looking.'
She examines the shelves, then pulls a slim volume from a waist high shelf, handing it to him. 'Have at it. See me after the shower scene.' Ianto is fairly sure there is no shower scene in Tom Jones, so she's making a Dressed To Kill joke again.
Ianto watches her roll into the kitchen and glances about. The house is too full.
Late in the night, Jack finds him in the drained and cleaned hot tub, reading by a small booklight. He leans against the edge of the tub and bends down, putting his chin on his arms.
'It's cold.'
'I am wearing a coat.'
'It's dark.'
Ianto waves the book with the light attached to it.
'The hot tub is empty.'
'Which explains my inexplicable dryness.'
Jack stands, swings a leg over, and climbs in with him. He props his feet up on the far edge. 'Okay, not comfortable, but it has some sort of cradling, nurturing thing going, I can respect that.' Jack shoves his hands in his coat pockets and pulls out a pair of gloves with the tips cut off. 'I'd offer a blow job, but I think your dick would freeze.'
Ianto closes his book, but he sets it on the edge of the tub with the booklight still on. It's only September,' he tells Jack, but that is pointless. Jack gets cold. He likes to joke that he was genetically bred for heat, but Ianto wonders if it's a joke.
'So, what are we doing out here?' Jack asks. 'I mean, I'm out here because of you, but that doesn't explain you being out here, hiding in your tub fort, reading classic lit.'
Ianto sighs and wishes that he had a drink. Water maybe, or something hot to curl his hands around. He doesn't actually want to drink anything, really. He just wants something to do with his hands. 'There were too many people in the house,' he says, and now it sounds ridiculous.
'Wishing you were back to the old days?' Jack asks. 'Do you want me to go?'
God, that's loaded with buckshot and bullshite. Ianto stretches, bending at the waist to touch his toes. 'Not precisely. Just wish it was, hrm.' He doesn't have an answer.
Jack clucks his tongue. 'You and Lisa should have a kid. That'd clear us all out.' It comes out of nowhere and Ianto turns his head to look at Jack, who is wiggling his fingers in the gloves. 'These always cut off your circulation, why is that? It's not like they didn't fit when the fingers were on.'
'I'm sorry, what?'
Jack waves his fingers. 'They cut off-'
'Yeah, I heard that part. The other part, please.'
'Oh, the kid part? Yeah,' Jack replies, settling down and stilling his body as much as he seems capable of most days. 'I hear all the cool people are doing it these days. It's what people do when they have the time and…I dunno, it was just a suggestion.' He snorts. 'Rhys has baby fever.'
Ianto crosses his arms. He doesn't want to have this conversation. And yet. He looks at his trainers, the rubber on the bottoms causing his feet to cling to the tub wall. 'Then maybe Rhys and Gwen should be having this conversation,' he mumbles. He doesn't even want to consider the physical logistics of Lisa's condition being compounded by…well.
The heater kicks on, and the vent up on the roof rumbles to life.
Jack waves his hands. 'I had a kid once. Well, a few. Kids are fun. You know,' he winks, 'when they're not yours, I guess. Your sister has kids, right?'
Ianto slams his head back into the wall of the tub, but it just makes a hollow noise and it doesn't hurt. If he can wound himself, then he can drive himself to A&E. Or he could just leave the hot tub, even though he realises with some petulance that he was here first.
'When a television show is failing, they try to bring in a kid,' Ianto says. 'It's usually the kiss of death.'
Jack rolls his eyes. 'Good thing we're not on the telly, then. We'd be X-rated anyway. Made for HBO. Showtime.' He says that last one with a little bit of jazz hands.
Ianto sighs. 'A kid would not solve our problems.'
Jack winks and ignores him. 'What if we were a sexy show about polyamory? We could corner the market on that.' He does a little soft-shoe routine on the tub wall.
'Then a kid will very much not solve our problems.'
'And our problems,' Jack says solemnly, not looking at him, 'they are legion.'
Ianto wants to argue, he really does, but he agrees with Jack, Jack who is humouring him in a lot of ways. It's easy, Ianto thinks, to be the one who can leave, to be the third who just, well, isn't legally bound, who has left before, who's just along for the ride.
Jack stretches and toes off his shoes, even though he grumbles that it's obscenely cold outside. His socks are white. Ianto remembers reading that good guys always wear white socks. Ianto's white tube socks are dingy because he washes them with his dark dress socks.
Ianto looks up at the stars and wonders if anyone is looking right back at him. Once he and Rhi had tried to dig a hole in the back of the house, as deep as they could get it, and the whole time Ianto had imagined that some child on the other side of the planet was digging a hole as well. Just thinking of meeting in the middle of the earth, chests puffed out with pride and accomplishment for going all the way through had made his heart thump in his chest, wild and sonorous.
Then they had hit a water pipe and Tad had beat both of their bums black and blue.
Still, as he stares at the stars, he thinks, Someone is looking right at my face from trillions of miles away. This way, we are always face to face, even when we aren't.
'I love you, Jack,' he says. Jack doesn't reply, just continues his foot tapping, and Ianto senses that Jack is waiting for more before the moment is acceptably impactful. 'I love Lisa, and I love you.' He waves a hand in a 'voila' gesture. 'There.'
'Was that so hard?'
'I've told you before.'
'February twenty-ninth, no joke,' Jack says, lowering his feet to the floor of the hot tub and reaching over to turn out the booklight, as if that one synthetic pinpoint bothers him in a sea full of natural ones. 'I was beginning to think you only said it on leap years.'
Ianto wonders if they are going to quarrel. It's funny watching it unfold as it happens. Most of the time he is so caught up in the actual issues of the argument itself that he doesn't even know he's in the middle of one until it's too late. But right now, maybe the cold is making them sluggish, their dialogue is viscous; it reminds him of the name of the martial art Lisa had learnt in London, "trapping-hands Aikido".
He grabs for the hand nearest him with its fingerless gloves. 'If you love someone, you shouldn't have to say it all the time. You should just live it, with every action.'
Jack considers this, looking at him, cocking his head and then turning to look out over the skyline. 'Lovely and poetic, but kinda lacking, unless you're in a novel.' With his free hand he ticks off his fingers, thinking. 'Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Sense and-hey wait-is this from The Princess Bride?'
Ianto can feel his face get warm. 'I might've had a thing for Princess Buttercup, okay?' he mumbles.
Jack almost cackles, throwing one arm around Ianto and pulling him in. 'Only you would draw romance lessons from the Dread Pirate Roberts,' he says. Ianto resists the cuddle, because that's what it is, presenting Jack with his back and shoulder instead, so Jack has to almost spoon him on the bench. 'Stop being difficult,' Jack whispers in his ear, and turns him around. He presses his lips to Ianto's temple, and Ianto can feel the heat in them, hear the sound of his breath through his nose. Hell, he can see his own breath. It really is cold.
They sit there, in the dark, in the stillness. Out of the corner of his eyes Ianto sees the lights in the harbour, far far away, red and green warning signals for boats. He wishes that all buoys in life had little flashing warnings to let you know where they were.
'You know I wasn't pressuring you to have a kid,' Jack says, turning his hands over and staring at the backs of them through the gloves. 'I just don't want you to lose an opportunity, to…not do something you might want to do because I'm-'
Ianto can't listen to it anymore or it will just make him irate. He grabs the lapels of Jack's coat and yanks them in, lips meeting Jack's in the centre of their gravities, opening his mouth and tasting Jack's tongue, his heart nattering on and on about something important, most surely. He can feel Jack's scratchy gloves grasp his face, palms cupping his jaw, and it's good then, in the hot tub, hollow and dark, nothing above them but sky, trillions of beings watching them from trillions of miles away.
Jack undoes Ianto's trousers, laughing as he angles himself in front to pull the denims down. 'These jeans are scandalous,' he purrs, letting the vibration roll through his throat as he lays his vibrating Adam's apple on Ianto's hard cock. 'You make everything so hard, you know.'
Ianto fists Jack's hair and doesn't say anything, because that is impossible to deny. Everything with him is so hard, no, so difficult, Ianto knows. His tad used to say that, Ianto, why do you have to be so difficult?, or his teachers, Ianto is a difficult child. Ianto thinks about why that is, but he doesn't want to care. He wants to just be, actually, and Jack makes that easy, even as he chides Ianto for a quasi-fault that he cannot diagnose or fix.
Jack swallows him down, and the chill air that he had complained about is nonexistent, just the coldness of the hot tub under Ianto's arse, but he can't even feel that. Jack's coat flares around him, hiding his body, his arms framing Ianto, hands reaching up for Ianto's shirt. Every time he pulls away from the base of Ianto's cock, the cold air rushes in, and Ianto gasps; it feels like being hit with a wet towel a little.
Jack's tongue is almost rough, cat-like, when he runs it around the tip of Ianto's cock, or mouths the shaft and takes everything in. He does that thing with the foreskin and his knuckles that he calls 'the Harkness special', and his other hand plays with Ianto's balls, fingers looking for the testicles to roll about, almost to the point of pain. His eyes roll up to watch Ianto, and when he smiles, the inner edges of his molars scrape a little.
The gulls that live in their upper roof launch themselves, and Ianto wonders why they're awake in the middle of the night. One of them dives for the tub and lands on the edge, blinking and squawking at them collapsed in the tub, Jack's mouth hot around his cock, Ianto's hands fluttering about his head like wings, mantling around Jack's ears. He blinks at the bird, which then hops down to land on Jack's back.
They freeze, and Ianto waves a hand then, making quiet 'shoo' noises, and he can feel Jack laughing around his cock, still sucking, his tongue pressing in the underside. Ianto smacks the bird with the flat of his hand and it just jumps backwards, further away from him and down Jack's back.
Jack pulls off his cock but uses both hands to grab it, perhaps shielding it from cold. 'Leave it,' he says, grin wide and eyebrows raised in amused disbelief. Ianto covers his face with both hands and pretends that he's not here. This is one of the many times in the past few years that he feels as if everyone is more amused than he is. But hands are replaced with an expert mouth and seconds later he forgets about the bird and the books and the kid and everything but the fact that he's coming into Jack's mouth, Jack's mouth that sucks in a steady pulse so strong that he can't be all human, no. By the time he's aware of his surroundings again, the bird is gone.
Jack tucks him back into his trousers, and they finally stretch out on the floor of the tub, giving up on the benches entirely. Ianto pulls his coat about him, but then Jack crawls up and half lays on him, half next to him, his coat covering them both. Ianto reaches out and presses his fingerpads into the wool, leaving a bit of him on it, skin flakes, microscopic cells, markings that he has made a difference on a subatomic level.
'That was bracing,' Ianto whispers, recalling a night that seems so very long ago now, it's a miracle that he even remembers it.
There's a chuckle against his chest. 'You were so shocked and confused,' Jack says, snorting into his neck. 'I thought you were going to fuck me on the floor in front of Myfanwy.'
Ianto rolls his eyes. 'Not in front of a giant flying bird,' he says. The thought is worse than the seagull. Myfanwy is family. He'd have to look her in the beady little eyes every day.
'I refuse to be cockblocked by a bird,' Jack says into his ear.
'Now we can say that for sure,' he replies, running a circle around the small of Jack's back. They chuckle halfheartedly and fall quiet.
'I'm sorry I don't say it,' he says into the silence. The hand on his neck tightens a little, and he suspects that Jack is checking for his pulse. He does that sometimes. It's a thing, and it is comforting. 'But it's true.'
'Don't be sorry, Ianto. Just,' Jack says to him hoarsely, 'It wouldn't kill you to say it more often, okay?'
Ianto smiles at the phantoms in the sky, so far far away. 'As you wish.'
They doze in the hot tub, what Jack calls the unsexiest use of a hot tub ever until Ianto reminds him of the time they let that visiting alien with all the fur use the industrial one at the Hub, and Jack relents, agreeing that that, and the ensuing cleanup of fifteen tonnes of green fur from the traps, had been indeed the unsexiest use of a hot tub ever.
The explosion wakes them up, and they jolt, limbs flailing, feet ringing the walls of the tub like gongs. They can see the fire and the cloud roiling through the pre-dawn sky. Ianto's neck is stiff, and his cheek is cold with a patch of drool that he wipes away with his hand. Jack stumbles out of the tub towards the balcony edge.
Ianto understands what has happened almost immediately. Or rather, he doesn't understand it at all, except that the direction in which they are looking, on which their eyes are riveted, is the familiar slide of east, the oft pointed to direction of work. Jack's hands grip the railing, and Ianto stands next to him, squinting as if the smoke will clear for him, or he has somehow developed x-ray vision.
'What is it?'
Jack doesn't say anything, just stares at the orange in the horizon, his jaw grinding.
Lisa wheels out with the mobile and their Bluetooths in her lap. Her face is white. 'It's Gwen. The Hub is gone.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
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.
GWEN
She hates the dress, she decides, but it's a miracle there's a wedding at all, after the day they've had. But Rhys is heroic and brave, and Jack and Ianto and the rest use the big gun, and everything is remarkably…saved. No one is dead but the bad guy. Super Torchwood to the rescue.
She lets Jack spin her out on the dance floor, and she can feel the heat radiating from his arm as it is wrapped about her waist. Tosh and Owen whirl past them, dancing impossibly fast to what is actually a rather slow song. Jack holds her hand curled to his chest, and it creates a distance in between them that she both hates and appreciates.
At times like this she tries to imagine him as her older brother, but that never makes her feel better.
'So, what will you do while I'm gone?' she asks, and the music turns over, something even slower. She sees Ianto at the turntable and can't restrain a small smile. Somewhere behind her, Lisa is chatting with her bridesmaids at a table. Rhys is taking his mother out for a turn.
'Oh, the usual,' Jack says, mock lost in thought, 'pizza, Ianto, save the world a couple of times.' And they laugh.
She wants to ask. She has before, but she just can't bring herself to, not now. Jack's hand presses on her waist again, and she realises that in this moment, with Ianto's horrible song selection playing, she wants Jack. With her rings glinting on his shoulder.
Rings don't mean much to Jack, she knows. And that is petty. Once Ianto had told her that Jack is sex-scented. They'd had a few, and Jack had been back at the Hub, and Lisa and Rhys had been giggling and fighting over the controls to Sonic the Hedgehog in the living room, and Gwen and Ianto had sat on the floor in the kitchen, and he had told her about Jack and his ways. To be fair, she had asked, and he'd been drunk enough to indulge her.
It's hard to keep all that from swimming to the surface right now.
'Will you miss me?' she jokes, batting her eyelashes.
'Always,' he replies, and she realises that he is dead serious.
Well, that's hard to respond to. She doesn't have to, because Ianto cuts in, and when she tries to step up to him, he turns towards Jack and they have an awkward split-second of scuffling as to who is going to lead and who will follow. Rather, Jack's hands move to follow, but Ianto gets there first, and Jack sets his hand on Ianto's waist with a sigh and a crooked smile, as if this is an argument they've had before. Gwen covers up her smile with her hand and seeks out their third.
They are still pressed close together, swaying to the music, when she finds Lisa and sits down next to her. Gwen watches her watch the two of them, her brown eyes darting over the lines of their bodies. Is she jealous? Is it the embrace? Or is it the dancing in general? Gwen realises with a little bit of shame that Lisa might have other things to be bitter about other than Jack and Ianto's closeness. She tries to follow the other woman's line of sight. Is it Ianto's hand on Jack's waist? Jack's feet as they turn slowly?
She wants to say something, but she knows that anything she might say would be insensitive, probably.
'So, married lady, any advice?' she asks, because truth, that wouldn't be unwelcome. If there is anyone whose advice would probably be the most helpful, actually, it would be Lisa, who she still thinks of as "Lisa from Torchwood One". Owen once called her "cyber Lisa", and she can't stop herself from thinking that too, when she sees Lisa at the flat when they arrive sometimes, wheeled into her desk, headset on, wearing the silver gloves she uses to handle UNIT's illuminated projector keyboard.
Now, Lisa looks her in the eye and sips from her champagne glass. 'Don't ever lie to him,' she says, 'except when you do.'
Gwen knows exactly what she means. It's Torchwood, binding them all together in lies and secrets and an openness of spirit that she has never had with other humans. She knows things about Owen and Tosh and Ianto and Jack that she shouldn't even know about her husband, her family. She wonders sometimes if she shouldn't marry them all instead. Maybe she already has.
Her eyes seek out Rhys again, and there he is, laughing with her mother, spinning on the dance floor. He passes Jack and Ianto, winks at them, and she understands then, that he is hers and hers alone, not Torchwood's, and that is in itself a small measure of happiness. Looking at him in his dapper tie and suit paints her insides with comfort and anticipation for a nice two weeks away in which she will not call home, will not call Jack or Owen or Tosh, not even Ianto and Lisa. She and Rhys will be two people in love, free to run and forget and roll about in sheets and not even get dressed if they don't want to. And she cannot say that for anyone else here.
Lisa places her hand over Gwen's, their wedding bands clinking against each other. She thinks idly again, how rings don't mean much to Jack. 'It's worth it,' Lisa says, though her eyes are glassy. 'It really really is.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
JACK
After the Skypoint incident, Ianto turns to him and says something about how the flats are rather nice, and that if they can ever get it cleared out, Lisa would love the penthouse. Jack understands the wording completely, and he cannot disagree.
Gwen and Rhys are married, back from their honeymoon and trying on houses for size. Gwen tells Jack in the car that she isn't quite interested in having a house, not quite, since then she'll have to clean it, and he jokes and says something like, 'Well, doesn't Rhys do that now?' and she doesn't speak to him for three hours of a sixhour stakeout. Apparently Rhys does, but they don't talk about it. Jack doesn't quite care, actually, who does the cleaning in any given relationship, as long as it isn't him. He had his years of hospital corners in the military. Now it's so much easier to pull the blankets up over the pillows and pretend everything is tucked in (This is also the Lisa method.).
So after Besnik Lucca is fully charged and his condo goes on the market, Ianto and Toshiko pull some computerised strings, and within a week, the papers have been signed. Jack and Ianto wheel Lisa in for her first look without ever having shown it to her, but there is little to worry about; there's no floral wallpaper in sight.
Lisa loves the plants and the patio and the birds. She loves the wide hallways and the accessibility and she loves them both, she says, when they kneel down beside her and she wraps her warm arms around them, and Jack takes her mouth with his. Ianto touches Jack's neck and face while they kiss, and Jack knows that he is impatient, urgent, eager to get in on it too, to have her approval (Ianto always wants her approval, as if he is afraid that she will never give it, when she does, she always does.).
Lisa hires movers, and one day Ianto and Jack simply come home to a different place. It's surreal, actually-two days before his room had been in a small Grangetown flat with bad plumbing and inadequate wiring, and the next he's moved on up, like that Jeffersons show from America (Jack blames Alex and his love of American sitcoms for this bit of useless knowledge that no one he knows will understand.). Ianto prods around the kitchen, rearranges the freezer so that everything is where he likes it. Jack hides a few firearms in places where he thinks they will be unobtrusive and useful.
Lisa and Jack excitedly set up the hot tub two days after they move in, and they spend another day explaining to Ianto how no one will see him. Jack illustrates this by stripping down and walking about the entire outdoor garden patio, hands on hips. Ianto locks them out there, and to spite him they have sex in the hot tub, with lots of noises.
He isn't sure when the change happened in Ianto. Sometime after they had lost time, maybe around the wedding, or maybe it was when Owen had died, and…come back. Ianto has always been skittish, not nervous, but pulled back, hesitant. Lisa moves forward for him, she is the one who reaches out and pulls things towards them both.
That night, Jack sits on the very topmost roof and listens to them down in the garden below. He has a Marlowe novel, a booklight and a box of blueberries from Tesco's, a gift from Toshiko, and he intends on eating them in peace. It doesn't hurt that if he lies on his back, there is nothing above him, not even light pollution.
The Rift has been quiet, so that means it's only a matter of time before something bubbles out of it, hopefully in some collectible corporeal form, and not in a gaseous or invisible state. Jack thinks about how lucky they are that they've never actually had to deal with the ******, the noiseless, (tasteless, incidentally) and very very invisible beings from [s]tar [o]ne. There are other things that Jack would prefer never show up (in his dreams for the past few months he has been twelve, and when he wakes his hand reaches for something that isn't there, but should be), so he supposes that it's only a matter of time.
Jack wonders if, as he gets older and older, he will eventually be able to wish events to happen. If he ever does, he decides that he's going to found a free love colony and get laid a lot. And grow fruit. Everyone loves fruit.
'You need to stop worrying about it,' Lisa says as one of them slides the door shut to keep the bugs out of the house. Jack lowers the book and listens to the sound of plates being set on the glass table.
Ianto must have sighed, or rolled his eyes, because Lisa responds. 'That's not right. You know it's not right.' She pauses for a long time. 'And it's not fair. Not to Jack. Or me.'
'This isn't about you, or Jack, or anyone else.' Ianto sounds gravelly, as if he has been smoking or crying, or drinking heavily. Jack doesn't smell smoke, even though he knows that Lisa has started again. He keeps meaning to yell at her about it, but there are so many other things to worry about, that it's nothing.
'Defleeeeeeeeeeeeeecting,' Lisa sings. 'Lying liar who lies,' she adds, and it's a joke, a secret joke that Jack only knows about because they had told him the Debenham's story, the one where Ianto had tried to impress Lisa by telling her that his father was a master tailor when he really worked at a department store. Jack had decided that he preferred the story because it made role-play more fun, and once they had even played "The Randy Tailor Hides the Thimble" (Lisa had named it that, on a whim.). But the joke is still there, adding layers to Ianto and what he feels he needs to do to get what he wants.
As far as Jack is concerned, all Ianto needs to do is breathe and smile.
'I don't think I can keep up with you,' Ianto says, 'You're both brilliant, and fast and I feel like I'm lagging behind.'
'How is a racing metaphor even applicable?' Lisa asks, her voice rough and exasperated. Jack hears the clink and scrape of forks on plates. Ah, they finally broke out that cheesecake. Jack almost interrupts them before he remembers that they can't know he's there. It's rude to eavesdrop, no matter how accidental. But he really wants cheesecake.
Ianto mumbles something noncommittal.
'Look, whatever you think, Jack and I aren't going to run away without you,' Lisa says. 'You know that, right?
Jack rolls onto his stomach and peers over the edge of the roof as noiselessly as he can, feeling strangely like his ten-year old self eavesdropping on his parents with Gray, hiding in the dunes and listening for hints and snatches of their own names in the conversation. He'll childishly admit that there is some secret thrill in listening to a conversation that involves oneself that one is not meant to hear.
Whatever easiness they have had has been shaken by something, something, a strain in the fabric. Their fabric actually, some slipshod thing that they had woven together out of faulty and defective strands that they had each brought to the table. Jack thinks that if they are indeed true to this comparison, then the thing that they had formed, while beautiful and strong, was not made for long term-like a blanket left in the back of a sun bleached car will light-rot after a few months.
He doesn't know what Lisa thinks of that, but it is obvious what Ianto thinks, as he sniffles into his cheesecake, and Lisa forces herself to breathe heavily and steadily to keep herself from crying.
Jack shakes his head. Birthing pangs.
Because really, they're not some bolt of fabric. Jack lays his chin on his hands and thinks about the fall of Lisa's hands on the arms of her chair, of Ianto's little forehead crinkles he gets when he cleans the stovetop. He remembers a conversation on a rooftop once, in which Lisa had told him that she didn't like to imagine the future, and another one, in the quiet darkness of the Hub, in which Ianto had told him that he liked things to be set, planned out. Jack likes things that come in sets, actually, one for each side, like book ends. He finds it helpful if people come that way too. Some of the best people he's known came in a set: Gerald and Harriet, Greg and Cam, the Doctor and Rose, the Doctor (again) and Martha.
Jack is bad at being a bookend, because he always slides off the shelf (He does look attractive bound in leather, though.).
Finally, Lisa reaches across the table for Ianto's hand, pulling it forward and kissing it. 'It's about you,' Lisa says. Her hand squeezes his and she glances up then, at Jack, purposefully, deliberately, before looking back at Ianto. Jack cannot see his face, but Ianto is a messy crier, so he can imagine what it looks like. 'It's always been about you, babe.'
Ianto shrugs one shoulder.
He's difficult. Jack wants to intervene, but this isn't his issue, and he just rolls onto his back and thinks about how being stuck here, even voluntarily, is sometimes a mystery. He drowns out the rest of their conversation, because that's not for his ears, and he's nosy, but not that nosy.
The next morning, Jack is contemplating his coffee cup with the stripes as he sits at his desk. Why is it his cup? When had they decided that it was his? Had he just chosen it from the tray too many times without thinking about it? And if so, is there something inherently about this cup that he likes, on an aesthetic level? Does he care? Should he care? Jack thinks that just to be contrary, to show how much it doesn't matter he should go get another cup and transfer his coffee to it, but that's too much effort. Also, the ceramic is warm, and his hands curve around it just so and-oh hell, it's his mug.
Ianto clears his throat and Jack looks up then. 'Is there something wrong? Do you need a warm up?' He starts to rise, but Jack waves a hand.
'No. You know I-' he stops, looking at Ianto, and then the mug, and then he realises that Ianto had decided that this is his mug. Somewhere Ianto had decided, because Ianto is the one who gives it to him. And subsequently Jack had assumed that it was his so now he just reaches for it.
Ianto raises his brows, half-out of his chair, hands holding his weight on the arms. 'Yeah?'
Jack opens his mouth. 'Ianto, I-'
'Good morning!' Gwen says cheerily as she enters the conference room and picks her coffee mug up from Ianto's tray and gives him a smile and a pat before settling into her chair. 'Are we doing those figures today?'
Ianto glances at Jack and furrows his brows. It's his version of, "Are we done here?" and Jack nods. Gwen doesn't even notice that she's interrupted something, but Jack is glad that she did, because this was not the time and place to say what he had been about to say. What he had been about to say needs a time and place. A specific time and place, because like soufflé, they need a lack of shouting, and they need a steady heat to effectively set. He watches Ianto lean forward and slide the papers to Gwen, noting about the Rift and the spikes and the police; he sits back and sips his coffee, thinking about times and places and meanings. The meaning of three words, the meaning of the Hub, the SUV, the penthouse, the coffee cup in his hands, a piece of cheesecake left in the fridge with his name written on it in raspberry syrup, discovered after everyone else in the flat had gone to bed. Ianto's cursive 'J' and the way it hooks just so.
He waits three days, one for each word. It's not on purpose. The time never seems right, actually. They're at work too much and that's a bad location, and then they're naked too much, and that is a bad time. And then Lisa is there, and she is a lovely audience, but it has to be just him. Ianto needs to hear it himself, with just himself, because that will make it more real.
It dances in Jack's mouth like a melting hard sweet. For three days.
He's thinking about it as he combs his hair in the mirror and Ianto finishes shaving one morning. Lisa is still passed out in the bed, because she had drunk eight shots of Akvavit on a dare the night before while out with her "UNIT buddies", and Jack is just thankful that she hasn't been booting all night. Ianto leans in closer to the mirror and narrows his eyes, but he's not drawing the blade up.
'I have gray hair,' he says dully.
Jack doesn't bother to look. He doesn't. 'No you don't.' It's the light, probably. 'It's the light in here.'
Ianto still has the razor pressed to his throat, right where his carotid artery is, actually, up where he will drag it across his hyoid bone and-
'I don't think so. My god, that's pathetic,' he says and then he resumes shaving while still shaking his head, and then his hand jolts away from his face and he winces. 'Oh fuck.'
Jack hands him a wad of loo roll and stands there while Ianto presses it to his neck. The paper comes away red. Ianto is still looking at his hair. 'Mind you, I always knew I would go gray, but I truly didn't think it would be at twenty-six-"
'I love you,' Jack says suddenly, eyes on Ianto's handful of red tissue. As soon as the words are out of his mouth, his brain does the claxon of "WRONG PLACE WRONG TIME WRONG EVERYTHING DANGER JACK HARKNESS DANGER DANGER", but there is nothing to do but plow on where angels fear to…plow. 'I do,' he adds, 'love you, you know. I don't think I've ever said it, and I guess that-'
Ianto claps a hand over his mouth and smiles. 'Now you are done, and it is fine.'
'What are you two on about?' Lisa grouses, wheeling in and shaking her head. 'Ianto, you're bleeding.'
Jack looks at her then, her spiky hair and the creases from the pillow on the side of her face. 'I love you, Lis.'
Lisa glances from Ianto to Jack, then back to Ianto, to Jack. Maybe it is too early for her, for this for her. She lifts her hands from the wheels and shrugs.
'You say this now. Right now when I'm like this,' she adds, gesturing to her pajamas and her hair and her face. 'You have the worst timing ever.'
Jack ducks his head and regards her through his lashes. Her contacts are out, but she's not blind enough that she can't see that. 'Doesn't it mean more now, while you're all,' he pauses, searching for the word, 'hungover and gross?'
Behind him, Ianto ties his tie. He can hear the catching of silk on silk. Lisa watches Ianto over his shoulder, then gestures that Jack sit down, so he lowers the toilet lid and perches. She takes both of his hands in hers and leans forward.
'I love you, Jack Harkness,' she says softly, 'but so help me God, if you don't repeat this conversation at a better time, I'm going to have your balls on a plate.' And she winks. 'A non-sexy plate.'
Jack smiles then, he can feel things clicking into place. 'How about tonight, after pudding, before Ianto discovers that Goldfinger is on the telly?'
'It's Moonraker,' Ianto calls from the bedroom, then appears, buttoning his waistcoat. 'We can skip that one.'
Jack lets Lisa roll around to her reply in her own time. One of her hands lets go of his and brushes a stray nothing from his shoulder before she pats his cheek. 'I'll pencil you in. Now both of you leave me the fuck alone.'
Ianto rolls his eyes and Jack grins his way out of the bathroom, but he can hear her muttering under her breath, 'Boys.'
Soon after they do that flat-warming party thing, because Lisa says they should show off their "swanky new digs". She orders a bunch of food so they won't have to cook, despite what Ianto mockingly calls "the kitchen of the fifty-third century" in their house. Jack smiles and tells them that in the fifty-third century they have the food beamed into their stomachs, and Lisa says "Where's the fun in that?" and that causes a giant exchange about what the hell the future will be like.
Lisa says she doesn't care what the rest of the universe is like, but that if someone doesn't invent the Excessive Pleasure Machine, she'll be disappointed.
Jack makes a mental note.
Gwen and Rhys show up with a bottle, and Toshiko meanders in, sprawling on the floor in her skirt and heels, resting her feet on the coffee table, and Lisa plays a little jazz fusion for her. Jack lounges in the doorway and thinks to himself that he wants to have them all here, so that he can love them all, so that they can love each other. It's a maudlin thought, that; Toshiko is such a solitary creature, for all that she is looking for love, and Owen, being dead, well, he won't let anyone ever love him again, and that is just as well.
When he wanders away, he doesn't think that he will be caught as he sneaks one of Lisa's piss-poor cigarettes. He misses them sometimes, actually, no matter how nasty they are. They make him think of The War, and opening his rations pack and seeing them there, as reliable as the dawn and the death of the man sitting next to you.
'They've discovered that they all know how to play Hearts,' Rhys says, and Jack realises with a start that he's about to have a conversation with Gwen's husband, without anyone else. This has to be some sort of milestone.
Rhys hands him a beer and sits next to him out on the patio, groaning and rubbing his shoulders. 'Well, you're all sorted here, aye?'
Jack swills the beer and remembers why he doesn't drink, but he restrains the face he wants to pull, instead setting the bottle on the glass tabletop. 'Looks like.'
'They're rather chuffed,' Rhys says lightly, and Jack might be reading too much into it, but it sounds like what Rhys means is, "Don't fuck this up, old man."
He takes one last drag on the cigarette and puts it out in the plants off to the side, stuffing the butt into his shirt pocket to throw away inside. The acrid smell of it assaults his nose, so he moves it to another pocket. 'Happiness is relative,' is what he tells Rhys, distractedly before it occurs to him that he doesn't really mean it. It's one of his old chestnuts that he uses to fill empty space.
Rhys snorts. 'You sound like Gwen.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
IANTO
'It's funny,' Ianto says, as they move boxes of Gwen and Rhys's things to storage, 'that this would happen this way.'
Gwen tosses a broken lampshade at him, apologising afterwards even though she is angry and not sorry at all, and still more than a little irate that her neighbors couldn't manage to fix their pipes and wiring. The sodden, slightly singed nature of their flat (with a patch of mould in the lounge that Ianto would swear has always been there) is sad and pathetic, really. Rhys good-naturedly tosses salvageable things in boxes and Gwen throws things out the window right into the skip. Ianto tries it a few times-therapeutic, tossing one's life right in the bin. He's pretty sure if he and Lisa would try that now, they'd accidentally kill someone's poodle.
Jack likes to supervise the moving process, though he'll gladly compete with Rhys for hauling bragging rights, carrying two boxes at once. Rhys points to the side of the lorry, Harwood's Haulage, and pretty much raises an eyebrow, and Jack capitulates; he's been outgunned.
It's only until they buy a house, and really, that won't be that long, a few weeks. It's easier than staying in a hotel, and Rhys and Lisa seem to have a rapport. They probably bitch about the rest of them when they're out all the time.
Tosh and Jack head back to the Hub to relieve Owen, and Ianto and Rhys drive the lorry to the storage place to unload all their things. Gwen takes the things they need over to unpack in the third bedroom at the penthouse. Over the comm, Jack makes rude noises about how it's only a matter of time before they can convince Tosh to move in. Ianto ignores him, but he leaves the comm on. He notices that Jack says nothing about Owen, but Ianto is sure that it's in there, some master plan. Some giant incestuous plan.
Ianto had rather facilitated that when he'd suggested they buy such a huge place, he can't help but think, in a 'if you build it, they will come' sort of way.
Gwen and Rhys are barely settled in when they get the signal at the abandoned building site, and Ianto wishes in retrospect that there had been some sort of ominous sound effect to give him a heads up on how bad the next twenty-four hours would be starting with a building falling on his head and ending with Tosh bleeding out on the floor of the autopsy theatre.
It nags at him that he hadn't got to say goodbye, really, especially to Owen, who he sometimes thought could have been him, if he had lost Lisa at Canary Wharf.
The Skypoint is blessedly safe when Hart--when Gray--blows everything up, and Ianto is grateful that Lisa is one thing he doesn't have to worry about in the weeks of clean up. He works until he can't anymore, cleaning Tosh's body and filing it away, rerouting the Rift calculations as much as he can without having Tosh's sublime brain, tearing down the chains that Hart had put up on the walls.
By the time they get to Tosh's video message, tucked away in the computer like finding a twenty-pound note in the laundry, Ianto is ready to drop.
At some point he wakes up in the Hub, wakes up from a dream of having sex with Jack in a pool of Tosh's blood, and he sits up on the couch to see the back of Lisa's chair in his line of vision. He scrubs at his eyes and almost falls when he tries to stand. Lisa is in her chair, he can see her now, black hair and black shirt so dark that she blends into the background of the Hub, leaning forward, talking to someone.
By the time he gets over there, Lisa is chuckling softly, and he rounds her chair to see that she and Rhys are leaning over a folding table of blueprints. They look up when he stands there, feeling as if he is underdressed and overdressed and in desperate need of a shower. He's probably all of these.
Lisa points to the empty chair on her left. It occurs to him that he hasn't hugged her, kissed her, held her since the-the everything. Instead, he drops into the chair and lays his hands in his lap. Rhys leans back and sips from a half-empty can of Irn-Bru.
The Hub feels empty. Jack and Gwen are out somewhere, obviously. He's only minutely worried that they hadn't woken him. It occurs to him that this is the first time Lisa has been in Torchwood Three, and he curses himself for not asking her if she is okay, if it bothers her. He leans forward, putting his fingers on the edge of the table, but she just smiles.
'Jack called, said that he wanted someone awake here.' She shrugs. 'We're awake.'
Sparks fly out of the far wall, and Lisa snorts. 'It's been doing that all day. Bullets in the wiring.' She doesn't ask, and he doesn't volunteer how it happened.
Myfanwy pokes her head out of her hole to survey the area, and it occurs to him that he hasn't fed her. His hands jerk on the tabletop, because he wants to stand, but he can't bring himself to.
Rhys follows his stare up to the makeshift aerie. 'I fed the girl.' He lifts a hand, and it is bandaged. 'Next time I need some of those Harry Potter gloves.'
Lisa laughs. 'Next time you need to use that sauce like Jack told you to, and not try to hand-feed her.' Her fingers card her hair and she shifts in her chair. Ianto knows that if she's in it too long she gets restless. He can see that she's packed her facility tools in a bag on the side of her chair, so obviously she's planning on staying for a while. He feels badly, because the Hub isn't made for the disabled. She had probably taken the lift down and let Rhys and Jack lever her chair. Now she's restrained to one level. There aren't even any toilets within three flights of stairs.
He accepts the thermos of coffee Lisa hands him -the coffee machine had taken a bullet ricocheted from Hart's gun spree, and for that alone he will severely hurt him if and when he ever sees the man again-and pours it right into the thermos cap. Lisa 's face is patient, waiting for him to caffeinate himself. Rhys opens another can and examines the blueprints to the Hub, flat out on the table between them. Lisa looks away from Ianto and points to something on the plans, picking up her conversation with Rhys where they left off, something about rerouting lines and the like to put in a ramp. It doesn't even occur to Ianto to ask. He just sits there and watches the two of them take over Torchwood.
Jack and Gwen come back, Lisa and Rhys leave, Ianto energizes and it's back to weevil catching and cleanup. Jack stares at the walls a lot. Gwen cries, and they all go home in the same vehicle. Gwen and Rhys cuddle up on the sofa and watch bad telly, Jack hides out on the upper roof, and Ianto and Lisa lie on the master bed and talk about how they want to paint the walls a soothing colour, like blue.
Someone (read: Owen) had defaced the 'penthouse' label in the lift so that it says, "LOVE SHACK". Ianto doesn't even notice it until three weeks after he is dead. They are coming back from a mission and his eyes drift over to it. He knows that he is surprised because he can feel his brows knit for a second as he reads it.
'This is why our condo fee is so high,' he says to Jack. But he doesn't rub it off.
*~*~*~*~*~*
RHYS
He certainly hadn't picked the arrangements, such as they are, and he has a hell of a time explaining it to anyone who asks, Daffyd or Banana, but he doesn't quite have much to say when he explains it. It's unconventional, sure, but Rhys has seen aliens and weevils and has incinerated an alien baby from his wife while it was still in her, so he's become less and less concerned with conventional.
He is, however, concerned with the fact that everyone else has become outsiders. Almost as if Torchwood has relocated from below the Plass to this lush three bedroom penthouse. He thinks to make a funny sign out of the hexagonal Ts and hang it on the front door for a lark, but these days Jack isn't as amused by that shite as he used to be.
Rhys can't blame him. Tosh and Owen are dead, and Rhys might wonder if he and Gwen had taken their places in the penthouse but for the fact that when he had joked about it, Ianto had turned his face to the sink and said something about Tosh and Owen being their own selves; as far as Rhys had known, Tosh and Owen hadn't been dating, but hey, he isn't a member of Team Cardiff Torchwood, so perhaps he's got it wrong.
The night it happens, Rhys feels it in the air, like charged ozone. Gwen and Ianto and Lisa are sitting out in the garden, drinking piss ale, and Lisa is chain smoking and Ianto is bothering her about it. Then Jack comes back from UNIT and throws his coat over the chair in that "Daddy's home!" way of his; Lisa tosses her cigarette off the balcony. Gwen and Ianto make their innocent faces, and Rhys, who had been watching telly and had seen all of it, is relegated to the bleachers for a few minutes while Gwen and Ianto play patsy for Lisa. Jack, of course, is having none of it.
There is temporising, and someone sprays them all with beer, and when Rhys slides the glass door back to ask them all what they want for dinner, he finds himself suddenly doused, and Gwen is laughing and laughing and laughing, wild and crazy like she used to do when they were back at Uni on the grass and in love. Back before Torchwood. Back before Jack had pulled the scales from her eyes. From both their eyes, actually.
Rhys is smart enough to know that seeing isn't always wise.
She kisses him there, in front of them all, and that isn't new, but when she's done and Rhys looks over her shoulder, Lisa's eyes are afire with something, and Jack is smirking, and Ianto has hidden his face behind a wide palm, though Rhys can see the corner of his mouth upturned. Jack claps and tells them all how lively and drenched and bad they smell, and that there had been a reason that Ianto and Lisa had purchased this monstrosity of a place, and that reason was the hot tub.
Five hours. Five hours, three bottles of red wine and a mountain of sweet and sour chicken later, and Rhys hasn't come to.
The most cliched place in the world for an orgy, like every porno Rhys has ever seen, and there he is, screwing his wife into the side of the hot tub wall. Someone else, he hasn't even checked, is working himself in him from behind, and Rhys doesn't want to think too hard about this, so he pretends that it just feels good. It does, and he's not new entirely to this game, yeah, a few drunk parties at Uni. Gwen's eyes are open and they keep moving from him to the man behind him, the man who rides him like his hips are liquid, whose hands on his chest and stomach are long and tapered and tangle in his chest hair, carding it with affection even as Rhys comes, and then Gwen comes and this man, who he never quite sees, comes wordlessly, wet hair brushing Rhys's ears.
Rhys kisses Gwen's mouth, bites her ear, laps at her breasts because he doesn't want to turn around and find the person who's just had him. Now that it's over, the blanket of sobriety is wet and cold, and he isn't sure how this might change anything. Gwen's eyes are wide and she is smiling, smiling at him, and the man who has moved away, so that now Rhys can only guess as to whether it had been Jack or Ianto.
Lisa gasps behind him, and he turns then, because he wants to see, and there she is, in Ianto's arms, her thin arms tossed around his waist as he hefts her so that he can take one of her breasts in his mouth. The water must make lifting her easier, Rhys thinks when he glances under the surface to see her legs. Ianto has hooked one of them over the crook of an elbow, and after a second he abandons her chest to claim her mouth, lowering her a little to make it easier.
Gwen reaches under the water and fingers Rhys's hole and he flinches until she twists a finger in and bites his shoulder. He's sore, but it's good sore, and easy to forget about in the hot water and swim of his head. Rhys forgets about who else is with them, or rather, it occurs to him that he simply doesn't care. Jack saved his wedding, his wife. Lisa is his Torchwood Widow Clubmate, and Ianto keeps them all happy, keeps them all together. And he and Gwen are here now, too, aren't they? In this merry band of hot tub dwellers with scars and aches and a few too many drinks in their systems.
Ianto lifts Lisa and pushes inside her, and while she hangs onto the sides of the tub with her hands, Ianto presses his forehead to hers and does things with his hands, touching and not touching, scraping and teasing, and all but fucking her eyes, he is. Rhys understands when he glances over at Jack, sees the look on his face, that this is something they have discovered in each other, something new, something flowering, something that Jack has given them.
He wonders, fleetingly, what Jack would give to him and Gwen, if he could.
Gwen ceases her teasing finger routine, and her arms go about his shoulders, so they sit back to watch what is essentially live porno. Rhys feels as if it should be more sordid, that if he was reading this story in Penthouse letters he'd feel dirty, but it’s hard to see it as anything but heart pounding, terrifyingly amorous when Lisa calls Ianto's name and slaps the surface of the water, and Jack moves to support Ianto when he comes inside her, arching back and almost falling. Rhys studies Jack's fingers with suspicion.
When they are done, when Ianto slides from her and lathes her neck with his tongue like some big cat before turning to do the same to a patient Jack, Rhys wonders if he should applaud.
'Well, that's,' is what he manages to say when their eyes turn to him and Gwen.
'Now we all switch,' Jack says, grinning. When Ianto hits his shoulder, he raises his hands. 'Musical chairs?'
Lisa leans back heavily on her arms and waves her hand, nodding her head. 'I'm going to need a breather, gents,' she moans. 'Someone come hold me up.'
Rhys goes to Lisa with her luscious breasts and open arms, and Gwen settles in the curve of Ianto's bear-hug embrace. Jack seems to float almost, moving among them and against them, and sometimes away from them all, some host or faerie or god, something poetic, Rhys thinks, something Greek and sinful, yeah, like he'd learnt in primary school.
The water is scalding hot, actually, and in the cool evening, it's welcome. Rhys tilts his head back and stares at the stars in front of his vision. They are so high up, displaced, stabbing the sky, up here in this posh place, a far cry from his and Gwen's flat, or the houses that they occasionally look at in their spare time.
They haven't looked at one in the last week. It feels increasingly less and less urgent.
Ianto kicks his knee as he shifts and Rhys's eyes meet Gwen's. Her hand is buried in Ianto's chest hair, and she smiles at him, just for Rhys, in this tub full of people, with Jack on her other side, and Lisa's beautiful arms about Rhys's neck, her smile is full of everything that she told him when she'd slipped the gold band on his finger. All they've added is another layer.
'Well,' he says as Lisa lays her head on his shoulder, and Jack flips the switch on the jets, mumbling something about 'dialing to eleven'. The water almost erupts and Ianto curses, moving away and to Lisa's other side
Jack smiles and runs his hands through Gwen's hair, and Rhys doesn't feel one stab of jealousy. Because there, in Jack Harness's arms, Gwen's eyes stare at him, Rhys Williams, and they hold all the promise of their future. Strange, that.
'Well,' he tries again, not minding that Ianto's arm crosses over his behind Lisa, 'that's all sorted, then.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
JACK
Ianto cheats shamelessly at cards. Gwen can tell most of the time and she opts out when he raises his bid. But Rhys falls for it every time, and at this point he probably owes Ianto something like five rubbish trips or fifteen plates of spag bol, hell maybe three hand jobs, Jack doesn't know and he doesn't ask what their arrangement is.
The card games have gotten heated, especially on the nights when they all have a chance to tumble in from the Hub at around the same time, and for several hours at least, they can lounge around. Gwen and Ianto usually declare their independence from Torchwood by drinking something fortifying, and if they do get called back in, which feels more and more rare these days now that they have Ravi and Karen and that very draconian woman who Jack thinks he might have to fire working at the tourist office, they make themselves useless on purpose.
'Oh now,' Gwen says when Ianto lays down his hand, 'there is no way you got that hand on the first draw.' She tilts her chair back on two legs and sips from a glass of Pimm's the size of her head.
Ianto smirks and shuffles the deck with a bridge arch. 'I'm sorry you're shite, Gwen.'
Gwen thuds forward on her chair. 'You're looking for trouble,' she says.
Ianto raps the edge of the deck off the tabletop and smiles, reaching across to pull the rest of the IOU slips towards himself. 'How many is that?'
Gwen looks at Rhys. 'It's not solid, mate,' she tells Ianto.
Jack and Lisa glance at each other. Apparently Gwen and Ianto have some sort of currency exchange that they don't understand. Maybe it's a Welsh thing, because Rhys folds his hands behind his neck and sighs. 'Oh no, don't look at me. You agreed to it.'
Ianto pulls five slips of paper from his stack and holds them out to her, waving them like a fan. 'Five blow jobs equals one masterful fuck,' he says, and Gwen rolls her eyes. 'I'll trade you to Jack.'
Jack can feel his brain hitting the inside of his skull as it jerks from Lisa to Ianto to Rhys and Gwen. What? 'Excuse me?'
Gwen grabs all the slips and jumps from her chair. 'Sold.'
She runs from the room, Ianto chasing her and calling out, 'I was joking!'
Rhys shakes his head and glances at Jack over his pint glass. 'Sometimes I think they're distantly related.'
Jack is still processing the fact that Gwen might have just been traded to the majors for the evening. Three minutes later, Ianto returns to the room, face smeared with red lipstick, hair mussed. 'What?' Jack asks, 'kind of card game are you people playing here? I thought this was poker.'
Ianto's shirt is on backwards. 'Five card stud,' he deadpans and sits back in his chair. 'Gwen is tied up at the moment. Jack, want to sit in?'
Jack does.
From the bedroom they hear Gwen shout, 'I'm done now! Really! Ianto! Rhys!'
Rhys stands. 'I'll be back,' he tells them in a bad Austrian accent. As he leaves, Jack watches his arse. It's a nice arse.
Ianto catches his eyes. 'I love poker,' he says with a smile.
Jack does too. By the end of the first three hands, Lisa and Jack owe Ianto everything. Jack might even have bartered his wrist strap and a trip in the TARDIS.
Lisa laughs and buys them shirts for when they play-Team Jack, Team Gwen, Team Rhys, Team Ianto, Team Lisa, in black block letters across the front. Rhys grumbles and tugs his on, and then later Gwen draws a red heart on the back of it in magic marker while he sleeps on the sofa after the game. Ianto and Lisa switch often, wearing their own names, and for the past week, Gwen has been wearing Team Jack as a sleeping shirt.
Jack doesn't quite understand just how confused and tangled they are until he's sitting at the dining room table one morning and Rhys and Ianto stumble out of the spare room together, Gwen behind them, in nothing but Team Ianto. Later in the week, after the laundry is done, Lisa wheels out of the bedroom, clad in nothing but the Team Rhys shirt, and waggles her eyebrows at Jack.
This kind of living isn't lost on him, and part of it makes his heart ache, because it cannot last. His childhood home had been a haunt of couples and individuals moving in and out, sometimes staying for years, and when his dad and Gray had-well, he and his mother had been the movers then, actually, and Jack had had a succession of "sisters" and "brothers". He had never thought to ask his mother about the movement of it, because it hadn't seemed strange, like it does now. After over a century of twentieth century mores and trends, something had been bound to stick. Maybe if he had asked his mother about it, she might have sighed, like Ianto had yesterday, and said something about how Jack was being daft and that sometimes things just felt right, and that the outside world could go bugger itself.
His mum probably would have left out the bugger part.
*~*~*~*~*~*
IANTO
The flat is very large, Ianto knows, and it is possible to avoid everyone easily, but it's hard to avoid the noise. Ravi and Rhys are playing some game at the table with Lisa, and Gwen is on duty with Karen, investigating the synchronised talking child thing. Jack-who knows where Jack is. Ianto stands in the centre of the flat and realises that he hasn't actually read a book, a real honest-to-God book in a year.
He peruses the small shelves in their bedroom, and then the ones in the Lisa's office, and then the ones in the lounge. A lot of their books are the standard issue Uni ones that they had bought for classes and then never resold. Lisa had finished Uni, and so a lot more of the books are hers than his, things like Cousine Bette and Effective C++ and Steal this Book. Ianto never finished Uni. It had seemed like a waste at the time, and he had been going through a phase, and then he'd got caught up in Torchwood, and well, there just never seemed to be time or reason.
He stares at the shelves, eyes off centre, listening to Lisa tell Ravi that he has to give her money because she has three hotels or something. Ravi says something about capitalism, and Lisa shoves away from the table, laughing. She wheels past Ianto, stopping to place a hand in one of his trouser pockets.
'Reading?' she asks.
'Looking.'
She examines the shelves, then pulls a slim volume from a waist high shelf, handing it to him. 'Have at it. See me after the shower scene.' Ianto is fairly sure there is no shower scene in Tom Jones, so she's making a Dressed To Kill joke again.
Ianto watches her roll into the kitchen and glances about. The house is too full.
Late in the night, Jack finds him in the drained and cleaned hot tub, reading by a small booklight. He leans against the edge of the tub and bends down, putting his chin on his arms.
'It's cold.'
'I am wearing a coat.'
'It's dark.'
Ianto waves the book with the light attached to it.
'The hot tub is empty.'
'Which explains my inexplicable dryness.'
Jack stands, swings a leg over, and climbs in with him. He props his feet up on the far edge. 'Okay, not comfortable, but it has some sort of cradling, nurturing thing going, I can respect that.' Jack shoves his hands in his coat pockets and pulls out a pair of gloves with the tips cut off. 'I'd offer a blow job, but I think your dick would freeze.'
Ianto closes his book, but he sets it on the edge of the tub with the booklight still on. It's only September,' he tells Jack, but that is pointless. Jack gets cold. He likes to joke that he was genetically bred for heat, but Ianto wonders if it's a joke.
'So, what are we doing out here?' Jack asks. 'I mean, I'm out here because of you, but that doesn't explain you being out here, hiding in your tub fort, reading classic lit.'
Ianto sighs and wishes that he had a drink. Water maybe, or something hot to curl his hands around. He doesn't actually want to drink anything, really. He just wants something to do with his hands. 'There were too many people in the house,' he says, and now it sounds ridiculous.
'Wishing you were back to the old days?' Jack asks. 'Do you want me to go?'
God, that's loaded with buckshot and bullshite. Ianto stretches, bending at the waist to touch his toes. 'Not precisely. Just wish it was, hrm.' He doesn't have an answer.
Jack clucks his tongue. 'You and Lisa should have a kid. That'd clear us all out.' It comes out of nowhere and Ianto turns his head to look at Jack, who is wiggling his fingers in the gloves. 'These always cut off your circulation, why is that? It's not like they didn't fit when the fingers were on.'
'I'm sorry, what?'
Jack waves his fingers. 'They cut off-'
'Yeah, I heard that part. The other part, please.'
'Oh, the kid part? Yeah,' Jack replies, settling down and stilling his body as much as he seems capable of most days. 'I hear all the cool people are doing it these days. It's what people do when they have the time and…I dunno, it was just a suggestion.' He snorts. 'Rhys has baby fever.'
Ianto crosses his arms. He doesn't want to have this conversation. And yet. He looks at his trainers, the rubber on the bottoms causing his feet to cling to the tub wall. 'Then maybe Rhys and Gwen should be having this conversation,' he mumbles. He doesn't even want to consider the physical logistics of Lisa's condition being compounded by…well.
The heater kicks on, and the vent up on the roof rumbles to life.
Jack waves his hands. 'I had a kid once. Well, a few. Kids are fun. You know,' he winks, 'when they're not yours, I guess. Your sister has kids, right?'
Ianto slams his head back into the wall of the tub, but it just makes a hollow noise and it doesn't hurt. If he can wound himself, then he can drive himself to A&E. Or he could just leave the hot tub, even though he realises with some petulance that he was here first.
'When a television show is failing, they try to bring in a kid,' Ianto says. 'It's usually the kiss of death.'
Jack rolls his eyes. 'Good thing we're not on the telly, then. We'd be X-rated anyway. Made for HBO. Showtime.' He says that last one with a little bit of jazz hands.
Ianto sighs. 'A kid would not solve our problems.'
Jack winks and ignores him. 'What if we were a sexy show about polyamory? We could corner the market on that.' He does a little soft-shoe routine on the tub wall.
'Then a kid will very much not solve our problems.'
'And our problems,' Jack says solemnly, not looking at him, 'they are legion.'
Ianto wants to argue, he really does, but he agrees with Jack, Jack who is humouring him in a lot of ways. It's easy, Ianto thinks, to be the one who can leave, to be the third who just, well, isn't legally bound, who has left before, who's just along for the ride.
Jack stretches and toes off his shoes, even though he grumbles that it's obscenely cold outside. His socks are white. Ianto remembers reading that good guys always wear white socks. Ianto's white tube socks are dingy because he washes them with his dark dress socks.
Ianto looks up at the stars and wonders if anyone is looking right back at him. Once he and Rhi had tried to dig a hole in the back of the house, as deep as they could get it, and the whole time Ianto had imagined that some child on the other side of the planet was digging a hole as well. Just thinking of meeting in the middle of the earth, chests puffed out with pride and accomplishment for going all the way through had made his heart thump in his chest, wild and sonorous.
Then they had hit a water pipe and Tad had beat both of their bums black and blue.
Still, as he stares at the stars, he thinks, Someone is looking right at my face from trillions of miles away. This way, we are always face to face, even when we aren't.
'I love you, Jack,' he says. Jack doesn't reply, just continues his foot tapping, and Ianto senses that Jack is waiting for more before the moment is acceptably impactful. 'I love Lisa, and I love you.' He waves a hand in a 'voila' gesture. 'There.'
'Was that so hard?'
'I've told you before.'
'February twenty-ninth, no joke,' Jack says, lowering his feet to the floor of the hot tub and reaching over to turn out the booklight, as if that one synthetic pinpoint bothers him in a sea full of natural ones. 'I was beginning to think you only said it on leap years.'
Ianto wonders if they are going to quarrel. It's funny watching it unfold as it happens. Most of the time he is so caught up in the actual issues of the argument itself that he doesn't even know he's in the middle of one until it's too late. But right now, maybe the cold is making them sluggish, their dialogue is viscous; it reminds him of the name of the martial art Lisa had learnt in London, "trapping-hands Aikido".
He grabs for the hand nearest him with its fingerless gloves. 'If you love someone, you shouldn't have to say it all the time. You should just live it, with every action.'
Jack considers this, looking at him, cocking his head and then turning to look out over the skyline. 'Lovely and poetic, but kinda lacking, unless you're in a novel.' With his free hand he ticks off his fingers, thinking. 'Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Sense and-hey wait-is this from The Princess Bride?'
Ianto can feel his face get warm. 'I might've had a thing for Princess Buttercup, okay?' he mumbles.
Jack almost cackles, throwing one arm around Ianto and pulling him in. 'Only you would draw romance lessons from the Dread Pirate Roberts,' he says. Ianto resists the cuddle, because that's what it is, presenting Jack with his back and shoulder instead, so Jack has to almost spoon him on the bench. 'Stop being difficult,' Jack whispers in his ear, and turns him around. He presses his lips to Ianto's temple, and Ianto can feel the heat in them, hear the sound of his breath through his nose. Hell, he can see his own breath. It really is cold.
They sit there, in the dark, in the stillness. Out of the corner of his eyes Ianto sees the lights in the harbour, far far away, red and green warning signals for boats. He wishes that all buoys in life had little flashing warnings to let you know where they were.
'You know I wasn't pressuring you to have a kid,' Jack says, turning his hands over and staring at the backs of them through the gloves. 'I just don't want you to lose an opportunity, to…not do something you might want to do because I'm-'
Ianto can't listen to it anymore or it will just make him irate. He grabs the lapels of Jack's coat and yanks them in, lips meeting Jack's in the centre of their gravities, opening his mouth and tasting Jack's tongue, his heart nattering on and on about something important, most surely. He can feel Jack's scratchy gloves grasp his face, palms cupping his jaw, and it's good then, in the hot tub, hollow and dark, nothing above them but sky, trillions of beings watching them from trillions of miles away.
Jack undoes Ianto's trousers, laughing as he angles himself in front to pull the denims down. 'These jeans are scandalous,' he purrs, letting the vibration roll through his throat as he lays his vibrating Adam's apple on Ianto's hard cock. 'You make everything so hard, you know.'
Ianto fists Jack's hair and doesn't say anything, because that is impossible to deny. Everything with him is so hard, no, so difficult, Ianto knows. His tad used to say that, Ianto, why do you have to be so difficult?, or his teachers, Ianto is a difficult child. Ianto thinks about why that is, but he doesn't want to care. He wants to just be, actually, and Jack makes that easy, even as he chides Ianto for a quasi-fault that he cannot diagnose or fix.
Jack swallows him down, and the chill air that he had complained about is nonexistent, just the coldness of the hot tub under Ianto's arse, but he can't even feel that. Jack's coat flares around him, hiding his body, his arms framing Ianto, hands reaching up for Ianto's shirt. Every time he pulls away from the base of Ianto's cock, the cold air rushes in, and Ianto gasps; it feels like being hit with a wet towel a little.
Jack's tongue is almost rough, cat-like, when he runs it around the tip of Ianto's cock, or mouths the shaft and takes everything in. He does that thing with the foreskin and his knuckles that he calls 'the Harkness special', and his other hand plays with Ianto's balls, fingers looking for the testicles to roll about, almost to the point of pain. His eyes roll up to watch Ianto, and when he smiles, the inner edges of his molars scrape a little.
The gulls that live in their upper roof launch themselves, and Ianto wonders why they're awake in the middle of the night. One of them dives for the tub and lands on the edge, blinking and squawking at them collapsed in the tub, Jack's mouth hot around his cock, Ianto's hands fluttering about his head like wings, mantling around Jack's ears. He blinks at the bird, which then hops down to land on Jack's back.
They freeze, and Ianto waves a hand then, making quiet 'shoo' noises, and he can feel Jack laughing around his cock, still sucking, his tongue pressing in the underside. Ianto smacks the bird with the flat of his hand and it just jumps backwards, further away from him and down Jack's back.
Jack pulls off his cock but uses both hands to grab it, perhaps shielding it from cold. 'Leave it,' he says, grin wide and eyebrows raised in amused disbelief. Ianto covers his face with both hands and pretends that he's not here. This is one of the many times in the past few years that he feels as if everyone is more amused than he is. But hands are replaced with an expert mouth and seconds later he forgets about the bird and the books and the kid and everything but the fact that he's coming into Jack's mouth, Jack's mouth that sucks in a steady pulse so strong that he can't be all human, no. By the time he's aware of his surroundings again, the bird is gone.
Jack tucks him back into his trousers, and they finally stretch out on the floor of the tub, giving up on the benches entirely. Ianto pulls his coat about him, but then Jack crawls up and half lays on him, half next to him, his coat covering them both. Ianto reaches out and presses his fingerpads into the wool, leaving a bit of him on it, skin flakes, microscopic cells, markings that he has made a difference on a subatomic level.
'That was bracing,' Ianto whispers, recalling a night that seems so very long ago now, it's a miracle that he even remembers it.
There's a chuckle against his chest. 'You were so shocked and confused,' Jack says, snorting into his neck. 'I thought you were going to fuck me on the floor in front of Myfanwy.'
Ianto rolls his eyes. 'Not in front of a giant flying bird,' he says. The thought is worse than the seagull. Myfanwy is family. He'd have to look her in the beady little eyes every day.
'I refuse to be cockblocked by a bird,' Jack says into his ear.
'Now we can say that for sure,' he replies, running a circle around the small of Jack's back. They chuckle halfheartedly and fall quiet.
'I'm sorry I don't say it,' he says into the silence. The hand on his neck tightens a little, and he suspects that Jack is checking for his pulse. He does that sometimes. It's a thing, and it is comforting. 'But it's true.'
'Don't be sorry, Ianto. Just,' Jack says to him hoarsely, 'It wouldn't kill you to say it more often, okay?'
Ianto smiles at the phantoms in the sky, so far far away. 'As you wish.'
They doze in the hot tub, what Jack calls the unsexiest use of a hot tub ever until Ianto reminds him of the time they let that visiting alien with all the fur use the industrial one at the Hub, and Jack relents, agreeing that that, and the ensuing cleanup of fifteen tonnes of green fur from the traps, had been indeed the unsexiest use of a hot tub ever.
The explosion wakes them up, and they jolt, limbs flailing, feet ringing the walls of the tub like gongs. They can see the fire and the cloud roiling through the pre-dawn sky. Ianto's neck is stiff, and his cheek is cold with a patch of drool that he wipes away with his hand. Jack stumbles out of the tub towards the balcony edge.
Ianto understands what has happened almost immediately. Or rather, he doesn't understand it at all, except that the direction in which they are looking, on which their eyes are riveted, is the familiar slide of east, the oft pointed to direction of work. Jack's hands grip the railing, and Ianto stands next to him, squinting as if the smoke will clear for him, or he has somehow developed x-ray vision.
'What is it?'
Jack doesn't say anything, just stares at the orange in the horizon, his jaw grinding.
Lisa wheels out with the mobile and their Bluetooths in her lap. Her face is white. 'It's Gwen. The Hub is gone.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
Master List