TW: Improbabilities [T-M]
Fandom:
Torchwood
Title:
Improbabilities
In which Jack and Ianto have another unfortunate bedroom experience, Rhys loses a leg and the author has an unexpected visit.
Author:
lt_indigo
Pairing(s):
Jack/Ianto
Warning(s):
Crack. Extreme, ridiculous crack. Also, self-insert.
Disclamer:
I belong to me. Sadly, I only got to play with the boys for a little while, but it was fun while it lasted.
Word count:
1,734
Author's note:
Once again, this is a not-on-purpose prompt from badly_knitted. It was only supposed to be a little flashfic about ridiculous positions and too many hands, but it got a bit out of control, especially when I went purposely looking for bad fic and stumbled across wtffanfiction.com, whereupon I located a competition to write the most improbable sex scene ever. The Doctors' orgy wasn't even close, believe me.
Ianto sighed and extricated himself from Jack’s embrace. “I know I said you were innovative, but this is getting ridiculous.”
Jack shrugged. “We get to try out some interesting things.”
Ianto shot him a look. “Some of them are physically impossible,” he countered. “I mean, look at the mess down here.” He held up a detached leg as evidence. “Whose is this?”
“Yours,” Jack said lazily. They were getting used to this by now, feeling like they were made like Ken dolls (without the plastic underpants, thank you very much). Limbs seemed to go in all directions during sex when a newbie author was in control, not all of them actually physically possible. Dislocations and even disembodiment of limbs was commonplace: legs got detached easily. He helped Ianto pop his leg back in place, and sorted through the remaining limbs.
“Ooh, we’ve got an extra,” he said excitedly at the end. “Whose do you reckon this is?”
Ianto took it from him and assessed it critically. “Going off length and size, I’d have to say Rhys’. He’ll want it back: I’ll go and pop it in a stasis unit.” He got out of bed reluctantly, taking the spare left leg with him, and ascended the ladder to Jack’s office, leaving Jack to finish relocating his right hip.
.oOo.
“This has got to stop,” Ianto said, staring at the stasis box on the backs seat of the SUV.
“We don’t have it so bad,” Jack pointed out as he eased the vehicle out of the garage. “Did you hear what the Doc got subjected to by… what was that kid’s name?”
“‘x-sparklegurl1997-x’?” Ianto suggested, muffling a snigger. He had heard the story.
Jack snorted. “That actually wasn’t the one I was thinking of. Some Twilight fangirl, I think, got hundreds of versions of the Doctor together for a massive orgy. Sonic screwdrivers were involved.”
Ianto raised his eyebrows. “That one was bad on purpose, I think.”
Jack blanched and the SUV swerved. Ianto grabbed the wheel to right them as Jack exploded: “What? Good authors are writing bad fanfic ON PURPOSE?!”
“They’re poking fun at the genuine bad fic around,” Ianto explained patiently.
“But… but… Right, that does it - we drop off Rhys’ leg, then I need to point a gun at some of these writers! If even the good ones are guilty of things like this!”
Ianto sighed and laid a calming hand on Jack’s arm. “They don’t understand.”
“They need to!”
“I agree, but pointing guns at them isn’t the way.”
“What is?”
Ianto thought for a moment. “Why don’t we go and have a word in lt-indigo’s ear? She’s reasonable.”
There was silence as Jack tried to remember which author Ianto was talking about. “Ooh, is she the one with the fisting?”
“I still can’t believe you like that, but yes.”
“And the banana? That was fun, winding you up like that. Unwinding you afterwards was more fun, though.”
“She’s also the one who made me short-sighted, as if you’d accept a field agent who can’t see three feet in front of their nose.”
“You’re a good agent, Ianto. Myopia doesn’t matter.”
“What if I lose a contact?”
“Don’t,” Jack said simply.
“Jack.”
“If you lose a contact, you spend the rest of the day coordinating any field activity from the Hub and looking completely fuckable in your glasses.”
Ianto blushed, glancing away from Jack.
“Shouldn’t we try someone, I don’t know, a bit more reputable? She’s not exactly well known yet.”
Ianto shrugged. “Possibly, but can you think of someone you want to approach with anything this ridiculous?”
“badly_knitted?”
Ianto shook his head. “She doesn’t do smut, remember? She sticks to fluff.”
“Okay, we’ll go talk to Indigo.”
.oOo.
Ianto took over driving at the last services on the M4. Jack had no patience with the North Circular Road, or east London in general, and he preferred to get there in one piece, thank you. Even just off the M4, driving through Ealing was bad enough.
“Should I give her a call?”
“She’ll freak out enough having us on the doorstep,” Ianto said. “Ringing her will only make it worse. She still thinks we’re fictional, remember?”
“Good point. How the hell does the GPS still think it’ll take us an hour to get there? It’s only twenty-five miles. It only took us two hours to do the hundred and fifty miles from Cardiff. And we stopped!”
“Welcome to London,” Ianto said wryly. “This is why I never had a car here.”
.oOo.
lt-indigo’s flat was small. She clearly lived alone, given the pile of laundry she had to pull off the sofa in order to make space for them to sit down.
“Er… Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee? It’s, um, decaf…”
Ianto’s eyes widened, almost imperceptibly and she flushed, looking resolutely at her kitchen floor, admitting: “I’m an addict. I have orange juice, or some still lemonade?”
“Tap water will be fine,” Jack assured her, flashing his mega-Watt grin at her.
“Oh, you don’t want that round here,” she scoffed, pulling a filter jug out of the fridge. “I wouldn’t even put it in the kettle! Ianto?”
“Is the tea decaf too?”
“Only the herbal ones,” she said. “I’ve got a nice box of Ceylon for guests. My dad likes it.”
“Tea then, please.”
She busied herself in the kitchenette. “So, what brings two fictional characters here?”
“Sex.”
She choked at Jack’s word. “What?”
“What Jack means is… This is going to be difficult to explain.”
“Two fictional characters turned up on my doorstep, and I just offered Ianto Jones decaf coffee. Try me.”
Ianto got up, wandered over to her bookcase. Instead of the masses of Doctor Who and Torchwood novels he expected to find, it was crammed full of folders and text books. He inspected the spines as Jack spoke again.
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m clever and I’m listening.”
“You’re a science teacher?”
“As I said, clever.” She turned back to them and handed Jack a glass of water.
“All the fan fiction you and the others write; it’s all true. It happens.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure on how it works, but everything that gets written, everything posted online, actually happen to us.”
She blushed furiously as she thought about her own fanfics. “Ohmigod.”
Jack started chuckling at her expression. He got up and whispered in her ear: “I’m looking forward to your next instalment.”
She whimpered, her knees going weak.
“Jack, behave. Sorry about him; you know how he is.”
“Yeah,” she said faintly, just as the kettle boiled. Ianto took pity on her and filled the two Ikea mugs with hot water, starting the tea steeping.
“See, there are a lot of writers we don’t mind having pulling the strings for a while,” Ianto said, moving around her to the fridge and pulling the milk out. “People who have some knowledge of anatomy, some idea of how sex works.”
“Um… Yeah, let’s go with that. Oh, I get it: it’s the twelve-year-olds and the trolls that are the issue.”
Jack winked at her.
“See to the tea, I’ll show you what we mean.” He indicated to her laptop. “May I?”
“Um, sure.”
“Ooh, are there any interesting documents open?” Jack asked, looking over Ianto’s shoulder as the machine booted up.
“Spoilers,” she sang.
Ianto slapped his hands away. “Not the time.”
“Come on, you don’t want to know?”
Ianto sighed, his fingers flying over the keyboard, logging onto the Torchwood mainframe. “It was something to do with Tosh, not us. You need to get a better security suite, by the way.”
“I can barely afford my rent, let alone something as frivolous as that.” She came to his side and placed the mug of tea at his elbow, cradled her own mint tea in her hands. “What exactly do you want to show me?”
“CCTV footage from the Hub.”
“Oh, in that case…” She pulled a VGA cable out from behind the TV, and an audio jack. Ianto smiled and plugged them in. He waited for her to configure the television before playing the video footage. It was one of their previous exploits, in Jack’s office. She blinked, realising what was about to happen, but unable to tear her eyes from the screen.
“Hang on… Where the hell?”
Ianto paused the playback and sipped his tea as she squinted at the screen, counting the number of hands.
“There’s five!”
“Yep.”
“Where’s the extra one come from?”
“That one was Gwen’s,” Ianto said.
“How?”
“There were too many hands in the fic,” Jack told her. “The extra has to come from someone. Don’t worry, we reattached it easily enough.”
Ianto was pulling up more and more images of disembodied extra hands or legs, of them contorted into impossible positions, of him carrying Rhys’ leg through the Hub that very morning.
“That’s… This is completely mental. So what do you need me for?”
“Tell the world,” Ianto said. “People need to know what happens when they write these stories.”
“And you think I can do that?” She sounded completely incredulous. “I’m no-one; just a two-bit writer who came late to the fandom.”
“Late?” Jack asked. “You had me visiting Rose Tyler during the nineties before it even made it onto TV.”
She looked away, blushing again. “I… It just seemed likely. You loved her.”
He nodded. “I did. I always will. She made me a better person.”
She was brave, reached out and brushed a lock of Jack’s hair back into place, her fingertips making gentle contact with his flawless skin. “She did. You need to remember that, once in a while.”
Ianto glanced around at her, smiling gently. “She’s got a point, Jack.”
Jack awarded them both a small smile. “I do. Will you help us?”
“No-one’s going to believe me,” she said. “I mean, I wouldn’t believe this if I hadn’t seen it for myself. Why not ask someone big in the fandom?”
“Not many people write that prolifically any more,” Ianto said bluntly. “Especially not that many willing to write smut for us.”
“You could have done this yourself,” she added. “It’s not exactly difficult to set up an LJ account, or a fanfic.net one, or even Teaspoon.”
Jack grinned. “Call it a plot hole. Just go with it, will you?”
“Fine. Gimme.”
She pulled the laptop over, opened Semagic, and started typing.
For more improbable goings-on in this verse, check out ' Team Free Will (UK Branch)