[fic] I am a Cool Indie Band of Fandom. That's why no one's heard of me.
apiphile: I have a thing for writing on people/being written on, y'see.
machineplay: *nodnods*
apiphile: It's not even always a sexual thing. It's just a thing.
apiphile: ... I think I may be a graphomaniac.
machineplay: just a little? with your tattoos and your kinks and your INCESSANT WRITING.
apiphile: and the sad fact that I feel happiest with a pen in my hand, even if I'm not using it?
(LJ-ify your IMs before pasting!)
Title: Graphophilia.
Fandom: Torchwood
Word Count: 5,424
Rating: R
Pairing: Ianto/Jack
Warnings: I have weird fetishes, but this one is not unpleasant. I hope.
Disclaimer: Blah blah BBC blah RTD blah Chibnall blah blah, © someone who isn't me, no money has passed hands but I think sexual favours are okay. I like sexual favours. :D
Notes: I will personally send a 50p stuck to a bit of card to anyone who spots the stand-up comedy reference in there. And, you know, sends me their address. Also, this is derryderrydown's fault for encouraging me to be weird, which most things are at the moment.
The thing when you see a lot of someone is that you start to find these little flaws, and bigger flaws, in them. It's like staring too closely at the weave of a shirt - you notice threads aren't even, that some of them are discoloured, where some are missing or frayed from wear. Not that Jack's ever spent long staring at a shirt, but he did once spend five whole years stuck with one man and the flaws really began to show then - it drove both of them barking mad.
Admittedly they hadn't actually wanted to be together in the first place and they'd only stayed together for so long because they were in a temporal anomaly that they couldn't escape from within but the principle was the same, wasn't it?
Which explains why Jack is currently watching Ianto work with a deepening sense of slightly petulant unease. He's too neat, Jack thinks sulkily, aware that at least part of the neatness had been generated for his benefit.
Right now Ianto is annotating hardcopy archive materials with a red, water-soluble felt-tip pen (water-soluble because solvents rot the paper, as Ianto has explained to Jack several times). The additional information is mostly requests to readers to cross-reference with a particular file on the computer system or a disapproving "disproved" or "inaccurate" in the margin. Better safe than really very sorry when someone less thorough than Ianto Jones, Human Filing Machine, goes through the records in a hurry. Jack's main problem with this scenario unfolding before him is that although Ianto is clearly concentrating he's not sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth.
Jack Harkness has a very strong sense of narrative causality, which is why he occasionally broods on rooftops in the wind. It's not because he's incredibly vain, whatever Owen may say. And Ianto. And Gwen. And Henrietta. And Alex. And Claude. And, if he's honest, Martha, and Rose, and the Doctor, and John, and … most of the people he's met in his long adult life. No, it's due to his finely-tuned sense of cinematic appropriateness, not his overwhelming vanity. His overwhelming vanity is responsible for him spending £50 on hair products every month, though.
The fact remains that Ianto is calmly making notes, without poking out even the very tip of his tongue, which is simply churlish and unfair. If Ianto won't oblige him by looking human and vulnerable while Jack's spying on him openly, how's Jack meant to distract himself by entertaining X-rated thoughts about things that can be done with that wetly pink strip of muscle?
Okay, sure, he's seen enough of it to know what it looks like. He can visualise it perfectly and, if he puts his mind to it for a second or two, he can recall exactly what it feels like on the underside of his dick. In a word: NICE. But a little visual aid never hurt anyone.
He clears his throat. "Ianto, stick your tongue out."
Without looking up and with enough sardonic good manners implied in his pose to kill anyone's wood (unless that one is Jack and happens to get off on such things), Ianto pokes out his tongue and puts it away again, radiating both irritated impatience and good-natured amusement simultaneously.
Jack sighs: "I'll just go and find Gwen, then - "
Ianto's head jerks up like a startled deer. "Did you want something?" He's tense, just like that. Jack can see the whitening of his fingertips as he presses the pen too hard between them.
"Yeah, actually," Jack picks up an uncapped biro (the splintered shards of plastic casing at the end tell him it's his - no one, not even Owen, chews pens as ferociously and doggedly as Jack) and advances on Ianto with a smirk. "Roll your sleeve up."
Cooperative but not entirely uncomplaining, Ianto undoes his left cufflink and pulls back his shirt-sleeve, saying, "Is there some sort of clause in your contract that requires you to be unfathomably weird?"
Jack takes Ianto's wrist with a dazzling smile and, biro poised, says, "It's next to the section about you and sarcastic remarks." He holds Ianto's arm steady with one hand and as Ianto watches him, scrawls "TIE" over the faint blue-green vein.
"What?" Ianto twists his arm as soon as Jack releases it, trying to make out what Jack has written. There is an embarrassingly long interval in which Ianto apparently has difficulty deciphering Jack's three printed letters, and he gives Jack another of his 'you're mad, aren't you? I can see the insanity in your face' looks as he asks carefully, "What is this … for?"
"It's a memo," Jack says, grinning mostly at Ianto's ear from a distance of about two inches, because he's never had to learn the difference between "sexy" and "creepily invasive" - men as attractive as Jack Harkness generally don't bother to*. "I need to remind myself what to do with it later."
Ianto's expression changes from 'suspecting Jack of lunatic tendencies' to 'currently running the internal pornography projector on the white sheet of my mind, please hold' (a charming and inward-aimed smile that always makes Jack want to bite something) and he rolls his shirt sleeve back down without being asked to.
He has not yet picked up his cufflink to refasten his cuff when Jack unbuttons his shirt collar for him (growing impatient, for while Ianto may wait like a viper without a flinch, Jack used up all his stoic steadfastness on a century of uncertain Greyfriar's-Bobbyism and prefers to live like a spoilt toddler where at all possible).
Ianto stops moving and goes ever so slightly limp, his head almost drooping back to allow Jack's fingers access. He is not always so placidly compliant. Jack brushes the throat of Ianto's (beautiful) shirt open once he's loosened the (silk, blood-red) tie restricting it. Ianto's breathing suggests that he expects the touch of Jack's tongue or teeth on the smooth-shaven skin of his Adam's apple, but Jack merely raises his biro again and in more careful letters than before prints:
"LICK"
In the dip between Ianto's collarbones. He is close enough to see Ianto's skin goosebump under the breeze of his fingers' passing, and to hear the subtle quickening of his breath.
Jack has written the word "
" in mirror writing, so what when Ianto goes to check what Jack has written (and Jack knows he will), he will be able to read it without even a second's struggle. So that on seeing this (for Ianto is not in the least bit stupid) he will know for whose benefit the letters are written. As though Jack ever needs reminding to act on his instincts.
Ianto exhales very slowly, and as he links his shirt cuff and rearranges his tie he catches Jack's eye. His pupils are huge and dark and reflect Jack's smile. His cheeks are just a fraction pinker than their ordinary hue, and his lips seem that tiny bit wetter, though that may well be Jack's imagination running riot.
"One thing," Ianto says, and there is a slight hoarseness in his words.
"Yeah?"
Ianto holds the red felt-tip pen the exact same way that Owen holds scalpels. Jack thinks of Ianto advancing on him with a scalpel and cannot work out if the idea is terrifying or arousing. The two so often overlap.
"May I?" Ianto says. It sounds a little like a respectful purr, his voice. It's an odd tone of voice and Jack's never heard anyone else use it.
Jack decides to humour him, and unbuttons his own shirt cuff (Jack's shirts are not as nice as Ianto's, and while he's purloined Ianto's most attractive waistcoat he hasn't quite yet graduated onto stealing his shirts). He rolls the thick cotton back all the way up to his elbow and proffers his forearm, inner side up, to Ianto's pen. He wonders for a second if he'd do the same were Ianto really holding a scalpel in his hand; a year of torture has diminished his enthusiasm for such experiments, but his curiosity over what Ianto might do, over where Ianto's limits lie, remains strong. So much of his "butler" is still a mystery to him that it'd almost be worth the pain.
Ianto's closed-off concentration face returns briefly as he prints in very neat, red capitals (which look enough like blood to get Jack thinking about it again) along Jack's arm, tidily spaced between his wrist and inner elbow - the spots where veins surface like underground rivers at wellsprings:
"M I N E"
Jack walks around with the biro lodged behind his ear for the rest of the day and for the most part he forgets it; no one remarks upon it and he's too busy briefing Gwen on shape-shifter (Nostrovite or otherwise) invasion procedure changes (Ianto has been working hard on cross-referencing the supporting documents, even if Jack thinks it's a little like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted) to mess with his hair, which is how he normally uncovers shit he's left behind his ears. Although in the case of one of Owen's missing hypodermics he'd been absently toying with it had been a lot quicker.
It's a quiet day, inasmuch as Torchwood ever has them: Martha's sent over some tissue samples for Owen to analyse and Owen's been at the growth accelerator for three days, developing first this strain and then that of the alien viruses that had come lodged in the samples. He is so excited by his findings that Jack is genuinely hopeful about his mental state at last; "Happy" and "Owen Harper" are not words usually often associated with each other.
Tosh is slightly less productive - Jack sees her playing Bejewelled at least twice - but he figures that can be let go. She's been working like a maniac on a mid-power sonic disruption implant for him, and if a break playing mind-numbing repetitive puzzle games is what it takes for her to make a breakthrough then Jack is without complaint. Let her play Bejewelled.
And Ianto - well, Jack spots him a couple of times, always busy. "BUSY" is Ianto's default state. His talent for finding things to occupy his time is only matched by his ability to speed through those to-do lists he writes, the ones that resemble epic Welsh poems. Oh, and giving head, which Jack guesses isn't on Ianto's CV even though it really ought to be.
In fact he doesn't really run into Ianto again until 8.30pm (ish), when he collars him for the pizza run. The traditional run is a little pointless tonight as Gwen and Rhys are visiting her parents, Owen doesn't eat anymore, and Tosh has stumbled home to better incubate the cold she seems to be harbouring; this leaves only Jack, who forgets to be hungry whenever it suits him, and Ianto himself, to eat.
"Mighty Meaty?" Ianto asks before Jack can even begin to mouth the word "pizza". And because Jack is congenitally incapable of leaving a feed line like that alone, even though these things frequently get him into trouble, he winks hugely.
"Well, you know me - "
"I do," Ianto sighs, "and I'm not suggesting you're at all predictable or as set in your ways as a Swansea pensioner, but I have correctly predicted every single pizza choice you've made in the last eighteen months. You follow a very, very straight-forwards pattern."
Jack pulls the biro out from behind his ear and toys with it. "You know sometimes, Ianto, you are more than a little scary."
"Does that mean you want to order something else?"
Disconcertingly enough, Jack doesn't feel that he does. He sort of wants to, to prove Ianto wrong about his absolute predictability, but he can't shake the feeling that if he does choose something else it'll already have shown up on a list somewhere under the meticulous heading "'n'Amgen Ddewisiadau Pryd Wynebedig" (only with better grammar than someone whose Welsh was learnt primarily from road signs and people who talked in their sleep) because Ianto would already know.
"No, I think I'll stick with my cheesy innuendo today," he murmurs, and grabs Ianto's wrist before he can get to the phone. Ianto once again stops as dead as a chav confronted with sudoku and lets Jack pull him closer by the forearm.
Jack undoes only the middle two buttons of Ianto's shirt, and pushes aside the dangling tie, the crisp (but now slightly Ianto-scented) cotton stretching out between his fingers so he can, though looking intently at Ianto's sternum, sense the wince on his face at the potential desecration of another perfectly good shirt. He takes the biro and carefully marks - once again in mirror-writing - "KISS".
"Right," he says, straightening up. "Off you go. I'm starving."
The peace does not last. Just as Ianto is starting to make more suggestive glances at Jack and the pizza box disappears in mysterious circumstances, the rift activity alarm goes off with a deafening intensity and Owen comes tumbling back into the main Hub with an expression of dazed irritation.
"What's happening?" he yells over the klaxons and sirens, and Jack sees Ianto shrug. He also sees the flash of "TIE" as Ianto's arm moves.
"GET - TOSH - " Jack shouts, and finds himself shouting over nothing as Ianto fiddles with the right switch and the alarm system shuts out as abruptly as if there is a power-cut. "Get Tosh," Jack repeats, and throws the nearest phone handset towards Ianto, who catches it deftly.
Jack's studying the energy spikes when Tosh arrives. More accurately he's scowling at a screen largely devoid of any evidence of rift activity despite the almost seismic levels of energy recorded only an hour and a quarter ago.
Tosh looks blurry, out-of-focus from lack of sleep, and she yawns at the computer a good few times before asking Jack in a weary, bunged-up voice what the problem's meant to be - Ianto has already slunk away to get her one of the nuclear-strength espressos that he does so well - and enquires as to the whereabouts of Owen with a studied nonchalance that wouldn't fool a four-year-old.
"There was a massive energy spike," Jack explains, indicating the screen, "but so far nothing's coming up as having any residual rift - " he holds up his hand to accept the incoming cup, "- thanks, Ianto."
"It's a flare," Tosh says in something akin to a feeble groan. "Jack, the rift does this all the time, it's just usually under the alarm thresholds. I was in bed, I was sleeping. I can't believe you woke me up for this." She accepts a large, heavenly-smelling espresso from Ianto and sips it pensively, her shoulders shivering up around her ears as the caffeine hits.
"But this time it set off the alarms," Jack persists.
"I'll look at the - stop touching the screen - I'm awake now anyway, I may as well - " she yawns again and sips more traumatically hot coffee as though it's nothing but warm milk. "Just - nyaaaaah - leave it alone, I'll sort it out."
"I don't like it," Jack frowns, holding his own coffee untested between his palms.
"Amazing," Ianto murmurs, "and you're not even the one who was dragged out of bed to look at it."
And that's normal. Jack guesses Ianto will defend to the death his good qualities, but that in no way means he'll automatically take Jack's side when there's a chance for sarcasm. There's just no such thing as uncomplaining loyalty these days.
He tears himself away from the screen after ten minutes of Tosh more or less growling at him like a furious toy poodle, by which time Ianto's disappeared off in the direction of the office. Jack gets out of Tosh's swiping range and goes in search of him.
When he finds Ianto Jack doesn't even bother with a hello. No preamble, no niceties. He simply leans over Ianto's back as he sits behind a slippery pile of invoices and reaches around to undo his tie. Ianto stops writing but, apart from a pause in his breath and the almost audible increase in his heartbeat he might as well not have noticed that Jack's even there.
Jack unbuttons Ianto's shirt to the solar plexus, and Ianto's skin is so warm that he can feel the heat reflecting off his hand, though he's careful not to touch anything but cotton and buttons.
The tension in Ianto's body is more than a little apparent; though he gives the appearance of being lost in work, his muscles are twanging like bowstrings in anticipation of something, and Jack's so very, very tempted to just grab Ianto by the chin, jerk his face upwards so he can kiss him, then fuck him over the desk right now. Then again, seeing Ianto this wired up (so that a single touch might drag one of those throaty sounds out of him) that's kind of something he wants to keep going for as long as he can stand it.
Jack takes his biro and writes, "
" just above Ianto's left nipple. He knows Ianto will be able to read it by looking down and squinting, and buttoning his shirt back up without so much as running his forefinger over the hairs that lightly forest Ianto's sternum is one of the hardest things Jack's done in a month.
Ianto's breath is like a steam train and his hand on the desk is white at the knuckles. Jack can't help grinning, but it's the kind of almost cross-eyed grin that's barely holding down a lunge.
"Seeya," Jack murmurs, and all-but runs to the shooting range to get in a little distracting and utterly unneeded practice.
When Jack returns Ianto is hovering uncertainly by the bank of screens Tosh is working at. He's virtually immaculate, his sleeves carefully rolled down and a steaming cup of coffee in his hand, frozen to the spot as Tosh regards him - or rather, his chest - with a sleep-deprived, rhino-virus-infected cobra stare. It's hard to say whom is hypnotised by whom.
"Is everyone okay?" Jack asks, apparently breaking the spell. Tosh jerks her head up to eyeball the coffee and Ianto hands it to her somewhat mechanically.
"I think I'm seeing things," Tosh says, but she provides no further explanation, just blows on her coffee, ruffling the molasses-coloured surface like a gale on a mountain lake.
"Uh-huh?" Jack asks encouragingly, but Ianto catches his eye and shakes his head urgently, a silent but serious warning. Jack removes the biro from behind his ear and waggles both it and his eyebrows encouragingly at Ianto. Tosh catches him in mid-waggle, chokes on her coffee, and turns away with the kind of sigh that always makes Jack think that she must surely be a great loss to the Teaching the Under-5s profession.
Back in Jack's office Ianto has already undone and rolled up his sleeve by the time Jack's dodged around the inexplicable mess blocking the stairs (where "mess" means "bags of previously refrigerated alien corpse going off in a most unusual manner that smells a little like grass cuttings and that Ianto will bitch about having to clear away"). Ianto holds his right wrist out as expectantly as - and Jack is perturbed by the comparison even as he makes it - a junkie awaiting a fix, and Jack twirls the biro along his extended fingers** with a teasing expression.
"What if I didn't intend it to be your wrist this time?" he says, closing the office door behind him.
Ianto doesn't reply, just loosens his tie and raises a questioning eyebrow. A lot of their communication these days is taking place in gestures and expressions, which is kind of a shame as Jack hasn't lost any of his appreciation for "those beautiful Welsh vowels" and he doesn't see why he should be restricted from hearing them. Jack goes on twirling his pen like a tiny majorette's baton, and says, "To the waist," in the tones of a retired colonel making an important decision RE: A Letter To The Times.
With due care and attention to the integrity of both his ballpoint personal graffiti and his shirt buttons, Ianto strips to his waists, and folds his shirt on the office desk. His trousers are sitting too low, which Jack hadn't noticed before. He grits his teeth as Ianto folds his tie in two and lays it on the cotton Jack knows is soft and (quite strongly by now) Ianto-fragranced. Even he can't work out if the jaw spasm is in frustration at Ianto's deliberately ANAL undressing or the end product of weapons-grade anticipation.
He mimes revolving on the spot with his biro, and Ianto turns until his back is to Jack and to the door. Jack dips to pick up the deep scarlet tie as soon as it is out of Ianto's sightline, holds his trusty - he squints in the low light - niceday slim M*** at the ready and writes in letters legible only to him:
"Property of Cpn Jack Harkness"
across the small of Ianto's back, just where the curve runs up into the hill of his buttocks, just above the line of his too-low belt. Time perhaps to persuade Ianto to start wearing braces - with a swift flourish Jack adds:
"Hands off. Trespassers will be incinerated repeatedly and fed to the pterodactyl."
"If you're planning on immortalising your memoirs," Ianto says a little archly, "you'll find there's a perfectly good Remington typewriter and a stack of paper under your desk."
"Just marking my territory," Jack mutters, and because the way Ianto's skin moves under the nib of the pen is delicious, because the whitening of it with pressure as the metallic-looking dry brown-black ink rolls out is strangely compelling, Jack takes a second to draw an angry face "
" thus below the already-smudged warning.
"How long am I going need to spend in the bath before all this comes off?" Ianto asks, sounding both peeved and excited at the same time. Jack wonders if there's a word for "resigned horniness". If there is, he has yet to encounter it, which is a shame as he has such frequent need of it.
"That depends on whether or not I'm in the bathroom at the time," Jack leers, resting his chin on Ianto's shoulder and his forearm on Ianto's hip. The biro is poised and ready to despoil the sparsely-furred expanse of Ianto's lower belly, but Jack's more interested in the content of his left hand now.
He lowers his voice and says to the side of Ianto's neck, "Give me your wrist. Your wrists."
The fine hairs on Ianto's cheekbones stand up as Jack's breath grazes them; Ianto holds up both wrists with their insides facing, and Jack can feel him swallow hard as he inspects the smudgy "TIE" on the left.
Jack takes the scarlet tie and, awkwardly, his elbows striking Ianto's ribs more than once and his face banging side-on into Ianto's several times, he binds Ianto's wrists together, inner sides facing. The biro ink will probably transfer from one wrist to the other, leaving a mirror "
". And that's fine. Jack likes getting Ianto all dirty and untidy.
Ianto's breath is correspondingly loud and laboured. It is even more difficult to raise Ianto's arms up from behind, but Jack has had long practice in strange physical manoeuvres and with a twirl he has Ianto backed up against the filing cabinet, his spine shoved against the drawer handles, his makeshift bindings hooked neatly over some bit of detritus or other that nestles atop the precarious office furniture.
"Office furniture" drives the constriction of Jack's throat and it may be the vulnerable position or it may be the wait or it may just be his own proximity but from the lump in the line of Ianto's trousers he's not exactly averse to the situation either.
Jack does not answer him, but rolls up his own shirt sleeves to the elbow very deliberately, very slowly, revealing the now-pink letters staining his own arm like a scar "M - I - N - E". He watches Ianto swallow hard again, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat like a cork in a stream, feels warmth suffusing through his own body, and brings his pen hand up to Ianto's collarbones.
He runs his tongue over "
" for the tremor it produces, and he can no more help pressing his hips against Ianto's now than he can prevent his blood from flowing. Next to "
" he writes:
"I have, and it tastes good"
in his more impenetrable hand, letting his fingers drag back over the letters (smearing them with his sweat, or with Ianto's) as he moves to the opposite clavicle. He does not write anything coherent here, simply outlines some untranslatable concepts in Betelgeusean Shapeographs, thrilling somewhat at the smooth stripes covering Ianto's skin, and nibbles the end of his collarbone as delicately as some hillside sheep sampling a thornbush.
Ianto neither squirms nor writhes; the movement is much more subtle than that, and it ends with his spine pushing that welcome trouser-hillock into Jack's pelvis with a gentle hiss of held breath escaping.
As much as Jack must be testing and taunting Ianto's restraint, he's abusing his own, too. It's all he can do not to abandon the fucking pen and yank Ianto's trousers down like a pair of badly-hung curtains, to keep his fingers curled around - respectively - the thin tube of ink and plastic, and the ball of Ianto's shoulder. He cant keep himself from kissing Ianto on the mouth - both languorous and needy - but he does manage to pull back soon enough to leave Ianto reaching for more.
Privately Jack always thinks of this, this kiss-and-pull-away, as "fishing for kissing", because he was once trapped in a tunnel with nothing but a walkman and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue tapes for company for a month, and too much Radio Four does funny things to a man's head. Aside from this personal lunacy, he still has instructions left to follow, from about the only person he's prepared to take them from: himself.
He trails the pen down Ianto's chest like a presentation pointer, his hand on Ianto's upper arm slipping down to follow it, and finds himself faced with "
". Best to do what he's told himself to do, Jack thinks with a smirk. Ianto must be peering down at him, wondering what's happening. It seems likely. Jack doesn't look up.
Instead he takes the word between his teeth, curling his lips back like a threatened dog, and squeezes hard. There's a nipple in there too, of course, and he can hear as loud as bombs the gasp-hiss of pain, and this time Ianto definitely writhes. As it should be.
He pulls on the blackened, smeared section of flesh until Ianto twists away from him and into the filing cabinet again. As soon as he lets go his hand flies from Ianto's arm to pinch, to aggravate the toothmarks, to interfere with the ink, to dig his nails in.
The question mark on Ianto's upper abdomen is largely accidental.
The scrawl of "This is my promise to fuck your brains out every day this week" is very much not.
Jack's tongue is quite blackened with ink by the time he gets as far as unbuckling Ianto's belt, and Ianto has more graffiti on him than a pub toilet door. Jack tucks the pen behind his ear and his smudged and discoloured fingers work the buckle, tearing at Ianto's clothing with the urgency he has not hitherto allowed himself; he fumbles the catch and fly twice and Ianto squirms impatiently above him.
Oh yes, now Ianto is squirming.
Jack finally gets enough of Ianto's trousers out of the way, his boxers pulled down, to get to his cock. It's pretty much the physical embodiment of desperate lust condensed into one biggish blood-engorged human bratwurst, but of course Jack doesn't see it that way. Especially not now, when it's become the red-hot centre of the universe. It's hard to hold back, but Jack has more willpower than even he gives himself credit for.
He takes the biro from behind his ear and gently pushes Ianto's cock aside - the light touch makes Ianto thrust his hips towards Jack's face, which doesn't help his concentration at all. Just above the treeline of Ianto's pubes, where his skin is still more-or-less visible, before thick black curls obliterate it from view, he writes "SUCK" and an arrow pointing down.
"Have to do these things by the book," he murmurs, and above his head he knows Ianto's sigh is eight parts need and two parts exasperation. There is a sickening grating noise as Ianto twists again, and Jack suspects - with the part of his brain that is not chanting "SUCK IT SUCK IT SUCK IT" like a particularly X-rated cheerleading squad - that whatever he tied Ianto to is not very firmly attached and may well come crashing down on both of them if he's not careful.
The wet, dark, blood-hot tip of Ianto's cock is less than an inch from Jack's mouth. There is no question of him stopping now, and the pen is of … less use than it was. He pushes it back behind his ear and closes his lips around the head of Ianto's cock -
-- and Ianto pushes forwards hard enough to almost choke him. Jack only just manages to shove back against Ianto's hips with the palms of his hands, to push him back into the filing cabinet and save them both from the embarrassment of Jack either vomiting or suffocating.
The filing cabinet rattles alarmingly, but Jack's not really paying attention to that. He's got his mind and his mouth full of Ianto's cock, and he's processing only the feel of Ianto's softest skin against his tongue. Like a second tongue, a drier tongue, scraping past his teeth and filling his mouth. He's processing only the heat, the texture, the vague sensation of Ianto's pubic hair (wiry and smooth and wet with sweat) against his thumbpads as Jack grabs and gropes blindly at his hip bones. The sound of Ianto's "running across hot sand in bare feet" breaths, the worrying shifts and rustles from above their heads, the clank of filing cabinet drawers as Ianto bounces off them … all these are lost somewhere in Jack's head. There's no oxygen left there to hear them.
He does register the "sucking a particularly bitter lemon" sound, even though he's concentrating rather more on trying to keep Ianto's hips under control with a combination of his hand-heels and the force of willpower. Jack can feel every throb and twitch of Ianto's cock not only on his tongue but in sympathy, in the caged and frantic twinges of his own, still-clothed penis.
The half-pained hybrid of grunt and yelp reaches his ears after the thrust, twitch and jerk three-step of orgasm has delivered a generous teaspoon of semen over the back of his tongue, where all he can taste is that Ianto drinks far too much coffee. All the tension sags out of Ianto like a snapped rubber band, and Jack finds himself pushing onto a body that is no longer resisting.
For a moment gravity seems not to notice this, but Jack's never had much luck in distracting gravity. He overbalances, dragging Ianto to the floor, and pulling the multi-lobed thing from on top of the filing cabinet down with them.
Ianto is still too boneless to shout much. He curses quietly, and gives Jack a helpless look. "I'm still tied - "
Jack looks at the smashed glass and metal and the loop of crystalline structure that Ianto remains tethered to. He looks at the sparking, twinkling fragments, like the aftermath of an explosion in a Soho Disco. He looks at the fat-but-shrinking cock trapped between his shirt and Ianto's lower belly, at the biro ink that is absolutely everywhere, and at the somewhat worse-for-wear scarlet silk tie.
"Stop laughing," Ianto protests.
"Why?"
"Alright, stop laughing on top of me."
"No."
"Jack, please, really. Stop."
"Why?"
Ianto fixes him with a beautiful, wide-eyed, huge-pupilled stare and says very seriously, "Because you have your shoulder digging into my bladder."
This just makes Jack laugh even harder.
Ianto sighs and says in a lower voice, "And because I have a mark I need to leave on you."
* O HAI THAR PERSONAL POLITICISESES
** An infuriating habit which he has picked up … from me. I can't stop doing it! It's driving me nuts!
*** The pen I wrote this with. REPRESENT, stolen biro from my office!
You would not BELIEVE the tantrums I threw writing that last scene. ARGH I HATE WRITING SEX.
machineplay: *nodnods*
apiphile: It's not even always a sexual thing. It's just a thing.
apiphile: ... I think I may be a graphomaniac.
machineplay: just a little? with your tattoos and your kinks and your INCESSANT WRITING.
apiphile: and the sad fact that I feel happiest with a pen in my hand, even if I'm not using it?
(LJ-ify your IMs before pasting!)
Title: Graphophilia.
Fandom: Torchwood
Word Count: 5,424
Rating: R
Pairing: Ianto/Jack
Warnings: I have weird fetishes, but this one is not unpleasant. I hope.
Disclaimer: Blah blah BBC blah RTD blah Chibnall blah blah, © someone who isn't me, no money has passed hands but I think sexual favours are okay. I like sexual favours. :D
Notes: I will personally send a 50p stuck to a bit of card to anyone who spots the stand-up comedy reference in there. And, you know, sends me their address. Also, this is derryderrydown's fault for encouraging me to be weird, which most things are at the moment.
The thing when you see a lot of someone is that you start to find these little flaws, and bigger flaws, in them. It's like staring too closely at the weave of a shirt - you notice threads aren't even, that some of them are discoloured, where some are missing or frayed from wear. Not that Jack's ever spent long staring at a shirt, but he did once spend five whole years stuck with one man and the flaws really began to show then - it drove both of them barking mad.
Admittedly they hadn't actually wanted to be together in the first place and they'd only stayed together for so long because they were in a temporal anomaly that they couldn't escape from within but the principle was the same, wasn't it?
Which explains why Jack is currently watching Ianto work with a deepening sense of slightly petulant unease. He's too neat, Jack thinks sulkily, aware that at least part of the neatness had been generated for his benefit.
Right now Ianto is annotating hardcopy archive materials with a red, water-soluble felt-tip pen (water-soluble because solvents rot the paper, as Ianto has explained to Jack several times). The additional information is mostly requests to readers to cross-reference with a particular file on the computer system or a disapproving "disproved" or "inaccurate" in the margin. Better safe than really very sorry when someone less thorough than Ianto Jones, Human Filing Machine, goes through the records in a hurry. Jack's main problem with this scenario unfolding before him is that although Ianto is clearly concentrating he's not sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth.
Jack Harkness has a very strong sense of narrative causality, which is why he occasionally broods on rooftops in the wind. It's not because he's incredibly vain, whatever Owen may say. And Ianto. And Gwen. And Henrietta. And Alex. And Claude. And, if he's honest, Martha, and Rose, and the Doctor, and John, and … most of the people he's met in his long adult life. No, it's due to his finely-tuned sense of cinematic appropriateness, not his overwhelming vanity. His overwhelming vanity is responsible for him spending £50 on hair products every month, though.
The fact remains that Ianto is calmly making notes, without poking out even the very tip of his tongue, which is simply churlish and unfair. If Ianto won't oblige him by looking human and vulnerable while Jack's spying on him openly, how's Jack meant to distract himself by entertaining X-rated thoughts about things that can be done with that wetly pink strip of muscle?
Okay, sure, he's seen enough of it to know what it looks like. He can visualise it perfectly and, if he puts his mind to it for a second or two, he can recall exactly what it feels like on the underside of his dick. In a word: NICE. But a little visual aid never hurt anyone.
He clears his throat. "Ianto, stick your tongue out."
Without looking up and with enough sardonic good manners implied in his pose to kill anyone's wood (unless that one is Jack and happens to get off on such things), Ianto pokes out his tongue and puts it away again, radiating both irritated impatience and good-natured amusement simultaneously.
Jack sighs: "I'll just go and find Gwen, then - "
Ianto's head jerks up like a startled deer. "Did you want something?" He's tense, just like that. Jack can see the whitening of his fingertips as he presses the pen too hard between them.
"Yeah, actually," Jack picks up an uncapped biro (the splintered shards of plastic casing at the end tell him it's his - no one, not even Owen, chews pens as ferociously and doggedly as Jack) and advances on Ianto with a smirk. "Roll your sleeve up."
Cooperative but not entirely uncomplaining, Ianto undoes his left cufflink and pulls back his shirt-sleeve, saying, "Is there some sort of clause in your contract that requires you to be unfathomably weird?"
Jack takes Ianto's wrist with a dazzling smile and, biro poised, says, "It's next to the section about you and sarcastic remarks." He holds Ianto's arm steady with one hand and as Ianto watches him, scrawls "TIE" over the faint blue-green vein.
"What?" Ianto twists his arm as soon as Jack releases it, trying to make out what Jack has written. There is an embarrassingly long interval in which Ianto apparently has difficulty deciphering Jack's three printed letters, and he gives Jack another of his 'you're mad, aren't you? I can see the insanity in your face' looks as he asks carefully, "What is this … for?"
"It's a memo," Jack says, grinning mostly at Ianto's ear from a distance of about two inches, because he's never had to learn the difference between "sexy" and "creepily invasive" - men as attractive as Jack Harkness generally don't bother to*. "I need to remind myself what to do with it later."
Ianto's expression changes from 'suspecting Jack of lunatic tendencies' to 'currently running the internal pornography projector on the white sheet of my mind, please hold' (a charming and inward-aimed smile that always makes Jack want to bite something) and he rolls his shirt sleeve back down without being asked to.
He has not yet picked up his cufflink to refasten his cuff when Jack unbuttons his shirt collar for him (growing impatient, for while Ianto may wait like a viper without a flinch, Jack used up all his stoic steadfastness on a century of uncertain Greyfriar's-Bobbyism and prefers to live like a spoilt toddler where at all possible).
Ianto stops moving and goes ever so slightly limp, his head almost drooping back to allow Jack's fingers access. He is not always so placidly compliant. Jack brushes the throat of Ianto's (beautiful) shirt open once he's loosened the (silk, blood-red) tie restricting it. Ianto's breathing suggests that he expects the touch of Jack's tongue or teeth on the smooth-shaven skin of his Adam's apple, but Jack merely raises his biro again and in more careful letters than before prints:
"LICK"
In the dip between Ianto's collarbones. He is close enough to see Ianto's skin goosebump under the breeze of his fingers' passing, and to hear the subtle quickening of his breath.
Jack has written the word "
" in mirror writing, so what when Ianto goes to check what Jack has written (and Jack knows he will), he will be able to read it without even a second's struggle. So that on seeing this (for Ianto is not in the least bit stupid) he will know for whose benefit the letters are written. As though Jack ever needs reminding to act on his instincts.
Ianto exhales very slowly, and as he links his shirt cuff and rearranges his tie he catches Jack's eye. His pupils are huge and dark and reflect Jack's smile. His cheeks are just a fraction pinker than their ordinary hue, and his lips seem that tiny bit wetter, though that may well be Jack's imagination running riot.
"One thing," Ianto says, and there is a slight hoarseness in his words.
"Yeah?"
Ianto holds the red felt-tip pen the exact same way that Owen holds scalpels. Jack thinks of Ianto advancing on him with a scalpel and cannot work out if the idea is terrifying or arousing. The two so often overlap.
"May I?" Ianto says. It sounds a little like a respectful purr, his voice. It's an odd tone of voice and Jack's never heard anyone else use it.
Jack decides to humour him, and unbuttons his own shirt cuff (Jack's shirts are not as nice as Ianto's, and while he's purloined Ianto's most attractive waistcoat he hasn't quite yet graduated onto stealing his shirts). He rolls the thick cotton back all the way up to his elbow and proffers his forearm, inner side up, to Ianto's pen. He wonders for a second if he'd do the same were Ianto really holding a scalpel in his hand; a year of torture has diminished his enthusiasm for such experiments, but his curiosity over what Ianto might do, over where Ianto's limits lie, remains strong. So much of his "butler" is still a mystery to him that it'd almost be worth the pain.
Ianto's closed-off concentration face returns briefly as he prints in very neat, red capitals (which look enough like blood to get Jack thinking about it again) along Jack's arm, tidily spaced between his wrist and inner elbow - the spots where veins surface like underground rivers at wellsprings:
"M I N E"
Jack walks around with the biro lodged behind his ear for the rest of the day and for the most part he forgets it; no one remarks upon it and he's too busy briefing Gwen on shape-shifter (Nostrovite or otherwise) invasion procedure changes (Ianto has been working hard on cross-referencing the supporting documents, even if Jack thinks it's a little like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted) to mess with his hair, which is how he normally uncovers shit he's left behind his ears. Although in the case of one of Owen's missing hypodermics he'd been absently toying with it had been a lot quicker.
It's a quiet day, inasmuch as Torchwood ever has them: Martha's sent over some tissue samples for Owen to analyse and Owen's been at the growth accelerator for three days, developing first this strain and then that of the alien viruses that had come lodged in the samples. He is so excited by his findings that Jack is genuinely hopeful about his mental state at last; "Happy" and "Owen Harper" are not words usually often associated with each other.
Tosh is slightly less productive - Jack sees her playing Bejewelled at least twice - but he figures that can be let go. She's been working like a maniac on a mid-power sonic disruption implant for him, and if a break playing mind-numbing repetitive puzzle games is what it takes for her to make a breakthrough then Jack is without complaint. Let her play Bejewelled.
And Ianto - well, Jack spots him a couple of times, always busy. "BUSY" is Ianto's default state. His talent for finding things to occupy his time is only matched by his ability to speed through those to-do lists he writes, the ones that resemble epic Welsh poems. Oh, and giving head, which Jack guesses isn't on Ianto's CV even though it really ought to be.
In fact he doesn't really run into Ianto again until 8.30pm (ish), when he collars him for the pizza run. The traditional run is a little pointless tonight as Gwen and Rhys are visiting her parents, Owen doesn't eat anymore, and Tosh has stumbled home to better incubate the cold she seems to be harbouring; this leaves only Jack, who forgets to be hungry whenever it suits him, and Ianto himself, to eat.
"Mighty Meaty?" Ianto asks before Jack can even begin to mouth the word "pizza". And because Jack is congenitally incapable of leaving a feed line like that alone, even though these things frequently get him into trouble, he winks hugely.
"Well, you know me - "
"I do," Ianto sighs, "and I'm not suggesting you're at all predictable or as set in your ways as a Swansea pensioner, but I have correctly predicted every single pizza choice you've made in the last eighteen months. You follow a very, very straight-forwards pattern."
Jack pulls the biro out from behind his ear and toys with it. "You know sometimes, Ianto, you are more than a little scary."
"Does that mean you want to order something else?"
Disconcertingly enough, Jack doesn't feel that he does. He sort of wants to, to prove Ianto wrong about his absolute predictability, but he can't shake the feeling that if he does choose something else it'll already have shown up on a list somewhere under the meticulous heading "'n'Amgen Ddewisiadau Pryd Wynebedig" (only with better grammar than someone whose Welsh was learnt primarily from road signs and people who talked in their sleep) because Ianto would already know.
"No, I think I'll stick with my cheesy innuendo today," he murmurs, and grabs Ianto's wrist before he can get to the phone. Ianto once again stops as dead as a chav confronted with sudoku and lets Jack pull him closer by the forearm.
Jack undoes only the middle two buttons of Ianto's shirt, and pushes aside the dangling tie, the crisp (but now slightly Ianto-scented) cotton stretching out between his fingers so he can, though looking intently at Ianto's sternum, sense the wince on his face at the potential desecration of another perfectly good shirt. He takes the biro and carefully marks - once again in mirror-writing - "KISS".
"Right," he says, straightening up. "Off you go. I'm starving."
The peace does not last. Just as Ianto is starting to make more suggestive glances at Jack and the pizza box disappears in mysterious circumstances, the rift activity alarm goes off with a deafening intensity and Owen comes tumbling back into the main Hub with an expression of dazed irritation.
"What's happening?" he yells over the klaxons and sirens, and Jack sees Ianto shrug. He also sees the flash of "TIE" as Ianto's arm moves.
"GET - TOSH - " Jack shouts, and finds himself shouting over nothing as Ianto fiddles with the right switch and the alarm system shuts out as abruptly as if there is a power-cut. "Get Tosh," Jack repeats, and throws the nearest phone handset towards Ianto, who catches it deftly.
Jack's studying the energy spikes when Tosh arrives. More accurately he's scowling at a screen largely devoid of any evidence of rift activity despite the almost seismic levels of energy recorded only an hour and a quarter ago.
Tosh looks blurry, out-of-focus from lack of sleep, and she yawns at the computer a good few times before asking Jack in a weary, bunged-up voice what the problem's meant to be - Ianto has already slunk away to get her one of the nuclear-strength espressos that he does so well - and enquires as to the whereabouts of Owen with a studied nonchalance that wouldn't fool a four-year-old.
"There was a massive energy spike," Jack explains, indicating the screen, "but so far nothing's coming up as having any residual rift - " he holds up his hand to accept the incoming cup, "- thanks, Ianto."
"It's a flare," Tosh says in something akin to a feeble groan. "Jack, the rift does this all the time, it's just usually under the alarm thresholds. I was in bed, I was sleeping. I can't believe you woke me up for this." She accepts a large, heavenly-smelling espresso from Ianto and sips it pensively, her shoulders shivering up around her ears as the caffeine hits.
"But this time it set off the alarms," Jack persists.
"I'll look at the - stop touching the screen - I'm awake now anyway, I may as well - " she yawns again and sips more traumatically hot coffee as though it's nothing but warm milk. "Just - nyaaaaah - leave it alone, I'll sort it out."
"I don't like it," Jack frowns, holding his own coffee untested between his palms.
"Amazing," Ianto murmurs, "and you're not even the one who was dragged out of bed to look at it."
And that's normal. Jack guesses Ianto will defend to the death his good qualities, but that in no way means he'll automatically take Jack's side when there's a chance for sarcasm. There's just no such thing as uncomplaining loyalty these days.
He tears himself away from the screen after ten minutes of Tosh more or less growling at him like a furious toy poodle, by which time Ianto's disappeared off in the direction of the office. Jack gets out of Tosh's swiping range and goes in search of him.
When he finds Ianto Jack doesn't even bother with a hello. No preamble, no niceties. He simply leans over Ianto's back as he sits behind a slippery pile of invoices and reaches around to undo his tie. Ianto stops writing but, apart from a pause in his breath and the almost audible increase in his heartbeat he might as well not have noticed that Jack's even there.
Jack unbuttons Ianto's shirt to the solar plexus, and Ianto's skin is so warm that he can feel the heat reflecting off his hand, though he's careful not to touch anything but cotton and buttons.
The tension in Ianto's body is more than a little apparent; though he gives the appearance of being lost in work, his muscles are twanging like bowstrings in anticipation of something, and Jack's so very, very tempted to just grab Ianto by the chin, jerk his face upwards so he can kiss him, then fuck him over the desk right now. Then again, seeing Ianto this wired up (so that a single touch might drag one of those throaty sounds out of him) that's kind of something he wants to keep going for as long as he can stand it.
Jack takes his biro and writes, "
" just above Ianto's left nipple. He knows Ianto will be able to read it by looking down and squinting, and buttoning his shirt back up without so much as running his forefinger over the hairs that lightly forest Ianto's sternum is one of the hardest things Jack's done in a month.
Ianto's breath is like a steam train and his hand on the desk is white at the knuckles. Jack can't help grinning, but it's the kind of almost cross-eyed grin that's barely holding down a lunge.
"Seeya," Jack murmurs, and all-but runs to the shooting range to get in a little distracting and utterly unneeded practice.
When Jack returns Ianto is hovering uncertainly by the bank of screens Tosh is working at. He's virtually immaculate, his sleeves carefully rolled down and a steaming cup of coffee in his hand, frozen to the spot as Tosh regards him - or rather, his chest - with a sleep-deprived, rhino-virus-infected cobra stare. It's hard to say whom is hypnotised by whom.
"Is everyone okay?" Jack asks, apparently breaking the spell. Tosh jerks her head up to eyeball the coffee and Ianto hands it to her somewhat mechanically.
"I think I'm seeing things," Tosh says, but she provides no further explanation, just blows on her coffee, ruffling the molasses-coloured surface like a gale on a mountain lake.
"Uh-huh?" Jack asks encouragingly, but Ianto catches his eye and shakes his head urgently, a silent but serious warning. Jack removes the biro from behind his ear and waggles both it and his eyebrows encouragingly at Ianto. Tosh catches him in mid-waggle, chokes on her coffee, and turns away with the kind of sigh that always makes Jack think that she must surely be a great loss to the Teaching the Under-5s profession.
Back in Jack's office Ianto has already undone and rolled up his sleeve by the time Jack's dodged around the inexplicable mess blocking the stairs (where "mess" means "bags of previously refrigerated alien corpse going off in a most unusual manner that smells a little like grass cuttings and that Ianto will bitch about having to clear away"). Ianto holds his right wrist out as expectantly as - and Jack is perturbed by the comparison even as he makes it - a junkie awaiting a fix, and Jack twirls the biro along his extended fingers** with a teasing expression.
"What if I didn't intend it to be your wrist this time?" he says, closing the office door behind him.
Ianto doesn't reply, just loosens his tie and raises a questioning eyebrow. A lot of their communication these days is taking place in gestures and expressions, which is kind of a shame as Jack hasn't lost any of his appreciation for "those beautiful Welsh vowels" and he doesn't see why he should be restricted from hearing them. Jack goes on twirling his pen like a tiny majorette's baton, and says, "To the waist," in the tones of a retired colonel making an important decision RE: A Letter To The Times.
With due care and attention to the integrity of both his ballpoint personal graffiti and his shirt buttons, Ianto strips to his waists, and folds his shirt on the office desk. His trousers are sitting too low, which Jack hadn't noticed before. He grits his teeth as Ianto folds his tie in two and lays it on the cotton Jack knows is soft and (quite strongly by now) Ianto-fragranced. Even he can't work out if the jaw spasm is in frustration at Ianto's deliberately ANAL undressing or the end product of weapons-grade anticipation.
He mimes revolving on the spot with his biro, and Ianto turns until his back is to Jack and to the door. Jack dips to pick up the deep scarlet tie as soon as it is out of Ianto's sightline, holds his trusty - he squints in the low light - niceday slim M*** at the ready and writes in letters legible only to him:
"Property of Cpn Jack Harkness"
across the small of Ianto's back, just where the curve runs up into the hill of his buttocks, just above the line of his too-low belt. Time perhaps to persuade Ianto to start wearing braces - with a swift flourish Jack adds:
"Hands off. Trespassers will be incinerated repeatedly and fed to the pterodactyl."
"If you're planning on immortalising your memoirs," Ianto says a little archly, "you'll find there's a perfectly good Remington typewriter and a stack of paper under your desk."
"Just marking my territory," Jack mutters, and because the way Ianto's skin moves under the nib of the pen is delicious, because the whitening of it with pressure as the metallic-looking dry brown-black ink rolls out is strangely compelling, Jack takes a second to draw an angry face "
" thus below the already-smudged warning.
"How long am I going need to spend in the bath before all this comes off?" Ianto asks, sounding both peeved and excited at the same time. Jack wonders if there's a word for "resigned horniness". If there is, he has yet to encounter it, which is a shame as he has such frequent need of it.
"That depends on whether or not I'm in the bathroom at the time," Jack leers, resting his chin on Ianto's shoulder and his forearm on Ianto's hip. The biro is poised and ready to despoil the sparsely-furred expanse of Ianto's lower belly, but Jack's more interested in the content of his left hand now.
He lowers his voice and says to the side of Ianto's neck, "Give me your wrist. Your wrists."
The fine hairs on Ianto's cheekbones stand up as Jack's breath grazes them; Ianto holds up both wrists with their insides facing, and Jack can feel him swallow hard as he inspects the smudgy "TIE" on the left.
Jack takes the scarlet tie and, awkwardly, his elbows striking Ianto's ribs more than once and his face banging side-on into Ianto's several times, he binds Ianto's wrists together, inner sides facing. The biro ink will probably transfer from one wrist to the other, leaving a mirror "
". And that's fine. Jack likes getting Ianto all dirty and untidy.
Ianto's breath is correspondingly loud and laboured. It is even more difficult to raise Ianto's arms up from behind, but Jack has had long practice in strange physical manoeuvres and with a twirl he has Ianto backed up against the filing cabinet, his spine shoved against the drawer handles, his makeshift bindings hooked neatly over some bit of detritus or other that nestles atop the precarious office furniture.
"Office furniture" drives the constriction of Jack's throat and it may be the vulnerable position or it may be the wait or it may just be his own proximity but from the lump in the line of Ianto's trousers he's not exactly averse to the situation either.
Jack does not answer him, but rolls up his own shirt sleeves to the elbow very deliberately, very slowly, revealing the now-pink letters staining his own arm like a scar "M - I - N - E". He watches Ianto swallow hard again, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat like a cork in a stream, feels warmth suffusing through his own body, and brings his pen hand up to Ianto's collarbones.
He runs his tongue over "
" for the tremor it produces, and he can no more help pressing his hips against Ianto's now than he can prevent his blood from flowing. Next to "
" he writes:
"I have, and it tastes good"
in his more impenetrable hand, letting his fingers drag back over the letters (smearing them with his sweat, or with Ianto's) as he moves to the opposite clavicle. He does not write anything coherent here, simply outlines some untranslatable concepts in Betelgeusean Shapeographs, thrilling somewhat at the smooth stripes covering Ianto's skin, and nibbles the end of his collarbone as delicately as some hillside sheep sampling a thornbush.
Ianto neither squirms nor writhes; the movement is much more subtle than that, and it ends with his spine pushing that welcome trouser-hillock into Jack's pelvis with a gentle hiss of held breath escaping.
As much as Jack must be testing and taunting Ianto's restraint, he's abusing his own, too. It's all he can do not to abandon the fucking pen and yank Ianto's trousers down like a pair of badly-hung curtains, to keep his fingers curled around - respectively - the thin tube of ink and plastic, and the ball of Ianto's shoulder. He cant keep himself from kissing Ianto on the mouth - both languorous and needy - but he does manage to pull back soon enough to leave Ianto reaching for more.
Privately Jack always thinks of this, this kiss-and-pull-away, as "fishing for kissing", because he was once trapped in a tunnel with nothing but a walkman and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue tapes for company for a month, and too much Radio Four does funny things to a man's head. Aside from this personal lunacy, he still has instructions left to follow, from about the only person he's prepared to take them from: himself.
He trails the pen down Ianto's chest like a presentation pointer, his hand on Ianto's upper arm slipping down to follow it, and finds himself faced with "
". Best to do what he's told himself to do, Jack thinks with a smirk. Ianto must be peering down at him, wondering what's happening. It seems likely. Jack doesn't look up.
Instead he takes the word between his teeth, curling his lips back like a threatened dog, and squeezes hard. There's a nipple in there too, of course, and he can hear as loud as bombs the gasp-hiss of pain, and this time Ianto definitely writhes. As it should be.
He pulls on the blackened, smeared section of flesh until Ianto twists away from him and into the filing cabinet again. As soon as he lets go his hand flies from Ianto's arm to pinch, to aggravate the toothmarks, to interfere with the ink, to dig his nails in.
The question mark on Ianto's upper abdomen is largely accidental.
The scrawl of "This is my promise to fuck your brains out every day this week" is very much not.
Jack's tongue is quite blackened with ink by the time he gets as far as unbuckling Ianto's belt, and Ianto has more graffiti on him than a pub toilet door. Jack tucks the pen behind his ear and his smudged and discoloured fingers work the buckle, tearing at Ianto's clothing with the urgency he has not hitherto allowed himself; he fumbles the catch and fly twice and Ianto squirms impatiently above him.
Oh yes, now Ianto is squirming.
Jack finally gets enough of Ianto's trousers out of the way, his boxers pulled down, to get to his cock. It's pretty much the physical embodiment of desperate lust condensed into one biggish blood-engorged human bratwurst, but of course Jack doesn't see it that way. Especially not now, when it's become the red-hot centre of the universe. It's hard to hold back, but Jack has more willpower than even he gives himself credit for.
He takes the biro from behind his ear and gently pushes Ianto's cock aside - the light touch makes Ianto thrust his hips towards Jack's face, which doesn't help his concentration at all. Just above the treeline of Ianto's pubes, where his skin is still more-or-less visible, before thick black curls obliterate it from view, he writes "SUCK" and an arrow pointing down.
"Have to do these things by the book," he murmurs, and above his head he knows Ianto's sigh is eight parts need and two parts exasperation. There is a sickening grating noise as Ianto twists again, and Jack suspects - with the part of his brain that is not chanting "SUCK IT SUCK IT SUCK IT" like a particularly X-rated cheerleading squad - that whatever he tied Ianto to is not very firmly attached and may well come crashing down on both of them if he's not careful.
The wet, dark, blood-hot tip of Ianto's cock is less than an inch from Jack's mouth. There is no question of him stopping now, and the pen is of … less use than it was. He pushes it back behind his ear and closes his lips around the head of Ianto's cock -
-- and Ianto pushes forwards hard enough to almost choke him. Jack only just manages to shove back against Ianto's hips with the palms of his hands, to push him back into the filing cabinet and save them both from the embarrassment of Jack either vomiting or suffocating.
The filing cabinet rattles alarmingly, but Jack's not really paying attention to that. He's got his mind and his mouth full of Ianto's cock, and he's processing only the feel of Ianto's softest skin against his tongue. Like a second tongue, a drier tongue, scraping past his teeth and filling his mouth. He's processing only the heat, the texture, the vague sensation of Ianto's pubic hair (wiry and smooth and wet with sweat) against his thumbpads as Jack grabs and gropes blindly at his hip bones. The sound of Ianto's "running across hot sand in bare feet" breaths, the worrying shifts and rustles from above their heads, the clank of filing cabinet drawers as Ianto bounces off them … all these are lost somewhere in Jack's head. There's no oxygen left there to hear them.
He does register the "sucking a particularly bitter lemon" sound, even though he's concentrating rather more on trying to keep Ianto's hips under control with a combination of his hand-heels and the force of willpower. Jack can feel every throb and twitch of Ianto's cock not only on his tongue but in sympathy, in the caged and frantic twinges of his own, still-clothed penis.
The half-pained hybrid of grunt and yelp reaches his ears after the thrust, twitch and jerk three-step of orgasm has delivered a generous teaspoon of semen over the back of his tongue, where all he can taste is that Ianto drinks far too much coffee. All the tension sags out of Ianto like a snapped rubber band, and Jack finds himself pushing onto a body that is no longer resisting.
For a moment gravity seems not to notice this, but Jack's never had much luck in distracting gravity. He overbalances, dragging Ianto to the floor, and pulling the multi-lobed thing from on top of the filing cabinet down with them.
Ianto is still too boneless to shout much. He curses quietly, and gives Jack a helpless look. "I'm still tied - "
Jack looks at the smashed glass and metal and the loop of crystalline structure that Ianto remains tethered to. He looks at the sparking, twinkling fragments, like the aftermath of an explosion in a Soho Disco. He looks at the fat-but-shrinking cock trapped between his shirt and Ianto's lower belly, at the biro ink that is absolutely everywhere, and at the somewhat worse-for-wear scarlet silk tie.
"Stop laughing," Ianto protests.
"Why?"
"Alright, stop laughing on top of me."
"No."
"Jack, please, really. Stop."
"Why?"
Ianto fixes him with a beautiful, wide-eyed, huge-pupilled stare and says very seriously, "Because you have your shoulder digging into my bladder."
This just makes Jack laugh even harder.
Ianto sighs and says in a lower voice, "And because I have a mark I need to leave on you."
* O HAI THAR PERSONAL POLITICISESES
** An infuriating habit which he has picked up … from me. I can't stop doing it! It's driving me nuts!
*** The pen I wrote this with. REPRESENT, stolen biro from my office!
You would not BELIEVE the tantrums I threw writing that last scene. ARGH I HATE WRITING SEX.