Y Llanc Glandeg Didrugaredd
Title: "Y Llanc Glandeg Didrugaredd"
Disclaimer: Being a bloke likes to slash other blokes doesn't make me RTD, I don't work for the BBC, and as much as I might like to, I don't own Jack or Ianto or any part of Torchwood. I do, however, order pizza under that name on principle. And I do it online for maximum geekiness.
Pairings: Ianto/PC Andy. Gwen/Rhys mentioned. Implied Jack/Ianto.
Rating: 18-ish. Hard to say. Some language, sex, dark-ish themes.
Notes/Summary: A series of seemingly random incidents on the periphery of Torchwood operations puts PC Andy on Ianto's personal radar, but can he cope with a world of Retcon, obsession, and control? Takes place between S1 and S2. Betaed by damalan. The title should (if I've succeeded at putting the right words in the right order) translate to "The Beautiful Man Without Mercy." If you know your Keats, you know the rest. Now that I've posted this, let's hope the muse lets me get back to this year's NaNovel.
Edit to Add: Another writer, jimcski was inspired and wrote a piece called "When Andy Met Ianto" that references/echoes this one. You can find it here.
The first time you meet him, you’re covered in blood.
You’re shaking and sitting on the concrete floor of some warehouse with your knees pressed to your chest and your arms wrapped around your knees. You can’t take your eyes off the thing that killed your partner. You just stare at it, trying to grasp the way its teeth come out of the front of its mouth like a fucking piranha. You vaguely remember bashing at its skull with a brick until it went down, but by then Ben had bled out all over the floor while you desperately called for backup that never came.
You’re not sure why you phoned Gwen except that she’s Special Ops now, and she’s helped you before. You whimper under your breath and think to yourself how this could have been her dead on the ground with her throat ripped out. It’s like the sickest of sick coincidences.
When he steps in through the warehouse door, he’s wearing a suit. He says some things you don’t quite catch into an earpiece before he leads you away from the scene in a blanket. You don’t remember giving him directions to your flat, but that’s where he takes you. He helps you out of your uniform and into the bath. He washes the blood out of your hair and off of your hands and face before wrapping you in a thick plush bathrobe and wiping out the tub. He’s dead silent the whole time except to give you instructions, and he never quite looks you in the eye.
Before he leaves, he makes you a hot cup of tea. In the morning, you don’t remember what happened at all. The department psychologist puts it down to trauma. Ben’s death is blamed on a big cat attack. Cardiff panics for a week.
# # #
The second time, you’re in Bute Park.
You’re leaning against the sundial fence when you see him jog past in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. You don’t know him from Adam, but he stops and puts his hands on your shoulders and tells you to run. There’s something about the way he says it that makes you bolt. By the time you realize what you’re doing, you’re nearly to the Gorsedd stones. You swear and turn around, but he’s nowhere in sight.
You sigh and call in to the station just in case, but your description of him is so vague that Jenny tells you off for wasting her time.
You don’t notice the black SUV when it whizzes down the road because you’re too busy being angry at yourself.
# # #
The third time is a bit of a disaster.
You run into Gwen at the pub. She’s sitting at a table with a Japanese girl you don’t recognize. She squeaks and jumps up and hugs you and starts telling you all about her and Rhys when a thin-lipped man with messy hair and a man in a suit walk up with drinks for the table. Your eyes meet his and suddenly you feel like you’ve been hit in the skull with a sledgehammer.
You lurch and drop your drink. The glass shatters, but you barely hear because you’re remembering the thing that murdered Ben and how it wasn’t a big cat at all and before you know it you’re in that same sedan again with him driving you away. He turns the radio off and tells you to calm down. You shout at him and take a swing at his face. You miss. To his credit, he does not crash. Instead, he pulls a gun and tells you to sit still.
You tell him you’re a police officer and he laughs at you.
He doesn’t have to tell you that the tea is drugged. He simply watches you drink and then waits for you to lose consciousness. You wake up the next morning on the sofa with a banging hangover and no idea how you got home, but your car is parked outside and your keys are in your jacket pocket.
# # #
The fourth time, he comes to you.
You’re in a pub. He buys you a drink and introduces himself with a name that sounds both uncomfortably familiar and unbelievably Welsh. His smile strikes you as coy until you realize he’s quietly devouring you with his eyes. You protest quietly - without prompting - that you’re not gay, but he disarms you by accepting that outright and shrugging off the issue entirely.
Later on, when you’re in bed with him, you wonder about the nature of that exchange.
He is not gentle. That would be altogether too romantic, and this is anything but that. Instead, he’s precise. He pins you beneath him, moving your hips when it suits him. He hurts you a little, and makes you come almost against your will. It’s only when you choke out your own orgasm that he spasms inside you and bites down on your shoulder with a sob.
When you try to touch him afterward, he flinches. You’re not sure if he’s crying or not as he gets dressed and leaves you with barely a word. In the morning, you remember him with a nervous, injured longing.
Six days later, he comes up behind you at a bookstore. You rut in a public toilet. After that, you’re his entirely.
# # #
It goes on for a month. Then two. He appears at random intervals, meeting you on the street or after work. One evening, he finds you at dinner with your mum and introduces himself as an old school mate. You spend the whole meal trying not to let your face shift when his hand slips into your lap.
He never stays. Even when he lets you fall asleep against him you wake up in bed by yourself. The only signs that he even exists are the bruises he leaves on your hips and ribs and shoulders.
You cling to him, but it’s like trying to hold a fistful of sand.
# # #
Sometime in October, just before that nasty business with the Prime Minister, he finally disappears.
One week passes, and another, and nothing. You start going out shopping at strange hours just in case. You spend most of a chilly Saturday in November wandering around the touristy bits of the City Centre. You go to libraries. Galleries. You sit on park benches. You’d ask Yvonne to track him down, but after discovering how many I. Joneses there are in the local telephone directory you figure she’d have you sectioned for even asking.
And then, one night just before the New Year, you catch sight of him in front of the Millennium Centre with Gwen and that American in the coat. You reel and stumble and brace yourself against one of the pillars on the Plass as the sledgehammer-in-the-skull feeling hits you between the eyes a second time. By the time your vision clears, he’s vanished. They all have.
That night, hours later, he finds you wandering near Mermaid Quay. He pulls you into an alcove and whispers a single sentence into your ear. When he presses his mouth against yours, you take the tablet from his tongue and swallow it gladly. He lingers for a moment, and then releases you.
You bolt. You know what happens next.
By the time you get to your flat you’re already stumbling. Your knees buckle on the way to your sofa, and you send the glass coffee table crashing over. You press your hands to your face and keen until it all goes black.
Disclaimer: Being a bloke likes to slash other blokes doesn't make me RTD, I don't work for the BBC, and as much as I might like to, I don't own Jack or Ianto or any part of Torchwood. I do, however, order pizza under that name on principle. And I do it online for maximum geekiness.
Pairings: Ianto/PC Andy. Gwen/Rhys mentioned. Implied Jack/Ianto.
Rating: 18-ish. Hard to say. Some language, sex, dark-ish themes.
Notes/Summary: A series of seemingly random incidents on the periphery of Torchwood operations puts PC Andy on Ianto's personal radar, but can he cope with a world of Retcon, obsession, and control? Takes place between S1 and S2. Betaed by damalan. The title should (if I've succeeded at putting the right words in the right order) translate to "The Beautiful Man Without Mercy." If you know your Keats, you know the rest. Now that I've posted this, let's hope the muse lets me get back to this year's NaNovel.
Edit to Add: Another writer, jimcski was inspired and wrote a piece called "When Andy Met Ianto" that references/echoes this one. You can find it here.
The first time you meet him, you’re covered in blood.
You’re shaking and sitting on the concrete floor of some warehouse with your knees pressed to your chest and your arms wrapped around your knees. You can’t take your eyes off the thing that killed your partner. You just stare at it, trying to grasp the way its teeth come out of the front of its mouth like a fucking piranha. You vaguely remember bashing at its skull with a brick until it went down, but by then Ben had bled out all over the floor while you desperately called for backup that never came.
You’re not sure why you phoned Gwen except that she’s Special Ops now, and she’s helped you before. You whimper under your breath and think to yourself how this could have been her dead on the ground with her throat ripped out. It’s like the sickest of sick coincidences.
When he steps in through the warehouse door, he’s wearing a suit. He says some things you don’t quite catch into an earpiece before he leads you away from the scene in a blanket. You don’t remember giving him directions to your flat, but that’s where he takes you. He helps you out of your uniform and into the bath. He washes the blood out of your hair and off of your hands and face before wrapping you in a thick plush bathrobe and wiping out the tub. He’s dead silent the whole time except to give you instructions, and he never quite looks you in the eye.
Before he leaves, he makes you a hot cup of tea. In the morning, you don’t remember what happened at all. The department psychologist puts it down to trauma. Ben’s death is blamed on a big cat attack. Cardiff panics for a week.
# # #
The second time, you’re in Bute Park.
You’re leaning against the sundial fence when you see him jog past in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. You don’t know him from Adam, but he stops and puts his hands on your shoulders and tells you to run. There’s something about the way he says it that makes you bolt. By the time you realize what you’re doing, you’re nearly to the Gorsedd stones. You swear and turn around, but he’s nowhere in sight.
You sigh and call in to the station just in case, but your description of him is so vague that Jenny tells you off for wasting her time.
You don’t notice the black SUV when it whizzes down the road because you’re too busy being angry at yourself.
# # #
The third time is a bit of a disaster.
You run into Gwen at the pub. She’s sitting at a table with a Japanese girl you don’t recognize. She squeaks and jumps up and hugs you and starts telling you all about her and Rhys when a thin-lipped man with messy hair and a man in a suit walk up with drinks for the table. Your eyes meet his and suddenly you feel like you’ve been hit in the skull with a sledgehammer.
You lurch and drop your drink. The glass shatters, but you barely hear because you’re remembering the thing that murdered Ben and how it wasn’t a big cat at all and before you know it you’re in that same sedan again with him driving you away. He turns the radio off and tells you to calm down. You shout at him and take a swing at his face. You miss. To his credit, he does not crash. Instead, he pulls a gun and tells you to sit still.
You tell him you’re a police officer and he laughs at you.
He doesn’t have to tell you that the tea is drugged. He simply watches you drink and then waits for you to lose consciousness. You wake up the next morning on the sofa with a banging hangover and no idea how you got home, but your car is parked outside and your keys are in your jacket pocket.
# # #
The fourth time, he comes to you.
You’re in a pub. He buys you a drink and introduces himself with a name that sounds both uncomfortably familiar and unbelievably Welsh. His smile strikes you as coy until you realize he’s quietly devouring you with his eyes. You protest quietly - without prompting - that you’re not gay, but he disarms you by accepting that outright and shrugging off the issue entirely.
Later on, when you’re in bed with him, you wonder about the nature of that exchange.
He is not gentle. That would be altogether too romantic, and this is anything but that. Instead, he’s precise. He pins you beneath him, moving your hips when it suits him. He hurts you a little, and makes you come almost against your will. It’s only when you choke out your own orgasm that he spasms inside you and bites down on your shoulder with a sob.
When you try to touch him afterward, he flinches. You’re not sure if he’s crying or not as he gets dressed and leaves you with barely a word. In the morning, you remember him with a nervous, injured longing.
Six days later, he comes up behind you at a bookstore. You rut in a public toilet. After that, you’re his entirely.
# # #
It goes on for a month. Then two. He appears at random intervals, meeting you on the street or after work. One evening, he finds you at dinner with your mum and introduces himself as an old school mate. You spend the whole meal trying not to let your face shift when his hand slips into your lap.
He never stays. Even when he lets you fall asleep against him you wake up in bed by yourself. The only signs that he even exists are the bruises he leaves on your hips and ribs and shoulders.
You cling to him, but it’s like trying to hold a fistful of sand.
# # #
Sometime in October, just before that nasty business with the Prime Minister, he finally disappears.
One week passes, and another, and nothing. You start going out shopping at strange hours just in case. You spend most of a chilly Saturday in November wandering around the touristy bits of the City Centre. You go to libraries. Galleries. You sit on park benches. You’d ask Yvonne to track him down, but after discovering how many I. Joneses there are in the local telephone directory you figure she’d have you sectioned for even asking.
And then, one night just before the New Year, you catch sight of him in front of the Millennium Centre with Gwen and that American in the coat. You reel and stumble and brace yourself against one of the pillars on the Plass as the sledgehammer-in-the-skull feeling hits you between the eyes a second time. By the time your vision clears, he’s vanished. They all have.
That night, hours later, he finds you wandering near Mermaid Quay. He pulls you into an alcove and whispers a single sentence into your ear. When he presses his mouth against yours, you take the tablet from his tongue and swallow it gladly. He lingers for a moment, and then releases you.
You bolt. You know what happens next.
By the time you get to your flat you’re already stumbling. Your knees buckle on the way to your sofa, and you send the glass coffee table crashing over. You press your hands to your face and keen until it all goes black.