I'm not entirely sure about this.
Title: Hamartia
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Owen/Ianto (with hints at canon!Jack/Ianto)
Challenge/Prompt: fanfic100, 022. Enemies [did I mention I claimed Ianto on ff100? Oh, well, I have]
Rating: PG-15 (strongish by my standards), maybe even a tentative NC-17 in places.
Genre: Slash
Summary: Ok. After all the shit that when down during the season finale, I felt it was time for some Owen/Ianto “but you shot me” fallout.
Author’s Notes: This runs from outright violence to hatesex to actual fluff. I don’t know how I managed it. God bless alien technology and UST. (Hamartia, in case you’re wondering, means the fatal flaw in a character in tragedy. Love English AS Level.)
And yes, I did write this yesterday in the process of having an emotional breakdown. It turns out I can multitask.
“This is not even slightly funny!” Owen shouts at the closed door. “Fucking let me out!”
“Owen,” Ianto says in a tone of voice that positively screams how frustrated and tired he is, “It didn’t work the first twenty-three times you said it. Why do you think it’s going to work now?”
“Don’t you start,” Owen snaps, turning on him. Ianto doesn’t even bother to look up from where he’s inspecting his fingernails.
“Going to hit me again?” he asks lightly.
Owen is tempted, sorely tempted, but then Ianto finally gets to his feet, brushing off his rumpled suit trousers and there’s a cut above his eyebrow and blood at the corner of his mouth and he has a black eye and Owen can’t.
Instead, he turns back to the reinforced glass door of the cell and bangs on it with his fist.
“Gwen!” he yells. “Tosh! Let us out!”
Ianto gives something that might be a laugh, but it’s so brief and quiet Owen isn’t entirely sure. When he turns around again, Ianto has sat himself down on the bench in the corner of the cell, and is toying with his cufflinks, apparently not caring that their teammates have shut them in this cell for God knows how long. Owen thinks about asking does anything fucking bother you? but he knows- he has seen- that that cold, uncaring shell Ianto wears like armour can crack open at any moment to reveal a man as capable of raw desperation and misery as any of them. Instead, he lets himself slide down the glass wall and sit cross-legged on the floor, and finally touches his face. His cheekbone feels halfway to broken- does Ianto have metal fists or something?- and his ribs ache when he breathes in.
They manage five minutes of pure silence before Owen starts shouting again. Ianto gives him an utterly, utterly unamused look, but that black eye is blossoming onto his face even more and the cut above his eyebrow is still oozing blood. Owen discovers that Tosh and Gwen are still being vastly unsympathetic to their plight, and spits on the floor in general annoyance.
The spit is red-tinged and he wonders exactly when Ianto punched him hard enough for there to be blood in his mouth.
“Yes, Owen, please leave me with more to clear up,” Ianto says tiredly. “As if we haven’t got enough of your bodily fluids all over the Hub as it is.”
“Shut up,” Owen mutters childishly, rubbing his bruised knuckles. The silence between them simmers angrily, and then the door to the cells clicks open.
“Gwen,” Owen says eagerly, pushing himself to his feet, “Gwen, let us out.”
Gwen stands on the other side of the glass and regards the two of them.
“No,” she tells him.
“What the fuck?” Owen demands.
“Owen,” Gwen says softly, “It can’t go on like this. Jack’s been gone over a month-” Her voice catches in her throat, but she forces herself to continue, “-And you and Ianto have been at each other’s throats for the entire time. It’s making things even more difficult.”
“He shot me!” Owen protests, unable to believe he’s hearing this, gesturing towards where Ianto is still sitting and quietly listening.
“And yet you still opened the Rift,” Ianto says, finally walking over to join Owen at the glass. “And look how well that turned out.”
Owen isn’t really aware of pinning Ianto against the wall with his hands around his throat, but he’s shouting torn-off expletives and Gwen is screaming and Ianto is breathing through gritted teeth, face reddening as Owen cuts off his air supply. Then, just as Gwen is about to open the cell door to get in there before he actually kills Ianto, Ianto’s elbow comes up out of nowhere and crashes into Owen’s face. Owen staggers back, hands over his nose, blood dripping between his fingers from somewhere.
“I think,” Gwen says, sounding shocked but resolute, “That you’ve proved my point.”
Ianto is half-slumped on the floor, gasping and rubbing the bruises forming around his neck.
“Gwen,” he begins, “Have you actually thought this through? I’m not sure that locking us both in the same cell is a good idea.”
Gwen’s expression implies she agrees with him, but she keeps talking anyway.
“Tosh and I have decided that the only way we can even begin to get Torchwood functioning properly is to get you two talking again,” she says. “So you’re staying in here until you sort something out.”
“That’s a fucking awful idea,” Owen tells her through the blood streaming down his chin, just in case she was in any doubt.
“For once, he’s right,” Ianto says. “This can’t end well, Gwen.”
Gwen looks at the two of them, biting her lip, but apparently she and Tosh are resolved on this, and she shakes her head.
“You’re down here for as long as it takes,” she says quietly, and walks out. Owen bangs on the glass with one bloody hand for a while, until even that gets tiring, and finally slumps down to sit on the floor.
“I think you’ve broken my nose,” he says thickly.
“Good,” Ianto replies. He sounds smug, even with the blood crusted on his upper lip, and the rather vivid fingermarks bruised around his neck. Owen considers attacking him again, but he doesn’t. The silence is almost a relief, and this time Owen doesn’t break it.
In the time that follows, while Ianto pointedly ignores him, Owen mentally lists all the ways that this isn’t his fault. Although he has to admit that perhaps it did look rather bad when Tosh and Gwen walked in on him straddling Ianto and bashing the other man’s head into the floor, although that didn’t last long, did it, what with Ianto forcing himself up a minute later and kicking Owen in the ribs until he thought one of them was actually going to break. Perhaps being manhandled into one of the downstairs cells wasn’t the worst of ideas, right then. But this- this is madness.
“Ianto,” he begins slowly, but the other man doesn’t move. “Ianto!”
Ianto has his eyes closed and is still breathing but is either doing a really good job of ignoring him or- or- oh shit. Owen is on his feet in a moment crossing to the other side of the cell to shake Ianto awake.
“Ianto,” he says, loudly and clearly, “You can’t go to sleep, you’ve probably got concussion.”
Ianto doesn’t register him.
“Come on,” Owen says, urgently, momentary panic overtaking him, “Fucking wake up.” He slaps the Welshman’s bruised face.
Ianto’s eyes open slowly.
“What do you mean, ‘probably got concussion’?” he asks croakily. “Given how hard you were bashing my head on the floor, I think I’ll be lucky to escape brain damage.”
Owen lets go and falls back, feeling relief bubbling through him. He stays on his back on the floor, closes his eyes for a moment.
“I’ll kill Gwen for this,” he says quietly. “And Tosh too.”
“What, you’re not content with shooting Jack and attempting to beat me to death?” Ianto asks dryly, but there’s enough of an accusation under his words for them to hurt more than any blow Ianto could land on him. Owen takes a breath.
“I was crazy,” he says. “We all were. You know we were. I didn’t mean to kill him. And even you sided against him.”
“What do you mean,” Ianto begins, sounding more awake, “Even me?”
“You’re the one who’s supposed to be in love with him,” Owen points out.
“Am I?” Ianto sounds genuinely interested.
“Don’t think we didn’t notice him snogging you when he recovered,” Owen tells him. Ianto laughs, then makes a sharp, in-pain sort of sound.
“Fuck it,” Owen mutters, and gets to his feet to bang on the glass for a while. “Gwen! Tosh! We need some kind of medical equipment down here!”
It takes a good half hour for the girls to come up trumps, but eventually a first aid kit and some bottled water is delivered down to them. Owen doesn’t even bother to try and make a break for it when they open the door, and Ianto looks like he’s never going to move again. Owen tosses him one of the bottles of water, and begins to search through his medical kit, wiping his face and hands off with antiseptic. His nose really does hurt- who knew their terribly quiet tea boy would be capable of it?- but at least he’s mostly in one piece.
“You’d better chuck me over some plasters or something,” Ianto suggests, shrugging himself reluctantly out of his suit jacket and sitting more upright. Owen instead moves over to kneel in front of him, smoothing an antiseptic wipe over the blood on Ianto’s face so he can investigate the damage properly. The cut above Ianto’s eyebrow really is very, very deep.
“This needs stitches,” he says quietly, aware that he doesn’t even remember how he gave Ianto this cut.
“Go ahead,” Ianto sighs, “Knock yourself out.” Owen searches in the kit for some latex gloves and also finds himself a syringe of local anaesthetic, which he carefully injects into Ianto’s forehead.
“How-” he begins awkwardly as he lays out the sutures.
“That would be when you shoved me backwards and I knocked my head on Tosh’s workstation,” Ianto tells him steadily. “I may have to speak to- to do something about how sharp the corners of the desks are.”
He doesn’t flinch when Owen carefully begins to stitch the edges of the cut together, instead staring pointedly at the opposite wall and ignoring Owen’s close proximity.
“I’m sorry,” Owen offers finally, tying off the suture.
“No, you’re not,” Ianto replies. There’s an awkward pause. “You can move away from me now, Owen.”
Owen becomes aware that he’s still kneeling between Ianto’s thighs, hands still cupping Ianto’s face, and pulls himself away far too quickly. A brief smirk twists Ianto’s mouth, but Owen ignores him and instead focuses on tentatively feeling his nose to find out just how bad the damage is.
“You know,” he says at length, “It might not be broken after all.”
“Must be losing my touch,” Ianto murmurs. “If you come back over here, I’ll break it properly for you.”
“Don’t you dare,” Owen tells him, dabbing up the last of the blood from his face and tentatively lifting the hem of his t-shirt to investigate the damage done to his chest.
“Oh,” Ianto says softly.
Owen sighs and pulls off the rest of the t-shirt, before prodding tentatively at his skin. His ribcage just seems to be one huge bruise, and it hurts.
“Oh,” Ianto says again. He doesn’t sound all that sorry, as such, and he doesn’t really sound surprised either. Owen wonders vaguely if he actually deserved Ianto trying to kick his ribcage in, as he tries to work out if there’s anything medical he can do to alleviate the general ow in his chest region. There probably isn’t. Owen begins to feel tentatively down his ribs, trying to work out if one of them is broken, but he can only think of the pain and isn’t objective enough to try and tell if there’s a fracture.
“Ianto,” he says, lying down on the floor pathetically, “Help?”
He can hear Ianto sighing but a moment later the Welshman is knelt beside him, feeling down his ribcage with cold but professional fingers.
“Nothing broken,” Ianto tells him shortly, moving to sit against the wall again. “I don’t think that you’re nearly as hurt as you’re pretending to be, Owen.” He hunts through the first aid box, chooses a plaster and carefully applies it to his neck. Owen notices that one of his fingernails broke through the skin there when he was trying to strangle Ianto, and feels faintly guilty. It’s a brief emotion, though, so he just stays lying down until it goes away.
“You’ve got to stay awake, Ianto, concussion is a nasty bastard,” he informs the other man, moving to sit beside him, taking care to leave enough space for an elephant to pass between them.
“Reminds me of someone,” Ianto says vaguely. Owen sighs.
“Let it drop,” he tells him tiredly. “It’s getting childish now.”
“If it weren’t for you I would be upstairs making coffee and looking forward to going home,” Ianto points out, “Not sitting down here in the cells with concussion and seven stitches in my head. I think I’m allowed to be a little juvenile here.”
Owen is altogether in too much pain for this.
“Oh fuck you, Ianto,” he says. Ianto laughs.
“Like you could afford me.”
“Could Jack?” Owen asks, and then words are spilling out of his mouth before he can think any of them through. “When exactly did you start fucking him Ianto? Before or after Lisa died? How did it feel kissing her murderer?”
“I have no idea why you weren’t drowned in a bag as a child,” Ianto says, apparently refusing to get drawn into another fight. “Your social skills really do leave a lot to be desired.”
“Says the man whose idea of a conversation begins with ‘and can I get you a coffee?’” Owen mutters.
“As far as I can tell, Owen, your method of introduction seems to be ‘you look alright, I’m Owen Harper, I’m a doctor and I have a big cock, would you like to feel it sometime?’” Ianto retorts.
“At least it’s an attempt at human connection!” Owen snarls, turning to look at him. “You, Ianto, you don’t give a shit about anyone! Take Jack, for example. He goes missing, falls through time, you’re not prepared to do anything to save him, and you shoot me for trying!”
“I was right, though,” Ianto says, but his calm voice is starting to tremble. “And as for human connections, Owen-”
“Don’t go there,” Owen hisses, but Ianto just keeps talking.
“- Diane left forever after one week with you, and as you might have gathered, Gwen will never, ever love you. Or even really care about you. Because all along she’s had Rhys. Who do you have?”
Owen moves with the intention of killing Ianto until he shuts up, but it doesn’t altogether go to plan. For one thing, the hands he reaches out to bang Ianto’s head into the wall (or maybe he could go for the throttling option again) instead cup his face, and their lips meet in an angry, biting kiss. This was not the plan, and Owen has no idea where it all went wrong. Perhaps this is what is supposed to happen. Before he can think more on that idea, though, he pulls himself back.
“Well, that’s different,” Ianto says carefully, licking his lips briefly in something that might be shock. “I have to admit that I didn’t see that one coming.”
Did anyone? Owen wonders, since as far as he’s concerned Ianto should be bleeding or slightly dead or something by now, not peering at him in a curious fashion. It’s a bad, bad idea, but then Owen is really, really good at bad ideas, and so he leans back in to kiss Ianto again. And again. His knees are going to sleep from where he’s kneeling on the cold concrete floor, but somehow this doesn’t actually matter as much as it should do. It’s still a relief, though, when Ianto makes a soft groaning sort of sound and pushes him onto his back on the floor.
Then there’s the soft feeling of Ianto’s lips against his neck, followed by the somewhat more painful feeling of Ianto’s teeth, and Owen shuts his eyes and inhales and tries to work out why this is happening. Ianto’s mouth strays onto his shoulder and- and- oh. Owen opens his eyes and turns his head to see Ianto running his tongue tentatively over the barely-healed scar on Owen’s shoulder. The scar he put there.
“I honestly didn’t think you’d do it,” Owen says. “Didn’t think you’d actually pull that trigger.”
Ianto looks up at him with a grin. “Neither did I,” he admits, before turning back to press one last kiss against the mark. “Still, you won’t underestimate me again, will you?”
“Twat,” Owen says. Ianto ignores him, mouth closing over Owen’s right nipple, and that’s much better. However, it’s only a moment before he rolls them both over, ripping Ianto’s shirt open and sending a couple of buttons pinging off somewhere. They both watch one pearly button bounce off the glass at the front of the cell and then turn back to look at each other, laughing, and Owen bites a bruise into Ianto’s collar bone just because he can.
“Ianto,” he says after a moment’s thought, “Why are we doing this?”
“I have no idea,” Ianto replies, nails digging into Owen’s shoulders.
“I wanted to punch your face in five minutes ago,” Owen gasps, running his tongue up Ianto’s jaw and feeling the raised edge of a scar (Ianto on his knees sobbing around the gag in his mouth, the crazed cannibal with the cleaver shoved to his throat). “I wanted to hurt you.”
“Well,” Ianto says, sounding altogether too logical and sensible for a man with his hand worming inside Owen’s jeans, “Just don’t try this next time we encounter a Weevil.”
“Only you, Ianto, could think of something like that at a time like this,” Owen mutters, shifting his hips restlessly and leaning in to give Ianto another deep, desperate kiss. Ianto laughs breathlessly against his teeth, fingernails of his free hand raking down Owen’s back and leaving trails of pain behind. Owen is in enough agony as it is, and is therefore rather surprised to find himself groaning in pleasure at this.
The next minute Ianto is rolling them both over again so Owen is the one on his back on the floor and Ianto is the one sitting on his hips, grinning like a madman. His white shirt is hanging off his shoulders, irreparably torn, its buttons gone, and between that and the cuts and bruises covering his face, neck and chest, he looks like he’s gone four rounds with a Weevil. Owen can hardly think that he looks any better.
“What do we do now?” Ianto asks, raising an eyebrow, sounding genuinely interested.
“Well,” Owen says calmly, “If you don’t follow through around now I will actually strangle you.”
“I love it when you talk dirty,” Ianto says, laughing in a way Owen hasn’t heard since Lisa tried to- since Lisa. He climbs off Owen carefully and starts to move away.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asks. Ianto turns back to give him a look.
“We keep condoms in the first aid box,” he replies calmly.
Owen sits up, supporting himself with his elbows.
“Why?” he asks incredulously.
“Jack,” Ianto informs him. Owen smirks. Figures.
Around six minutes later, Owen just about hears Gwen opening the door to the cells, and then he hears her screaming.
“Owen! Ianto! What are you doing?”
“I would have thought that was fairly self-explanatory,” Ianto says, and Owen marvels at his ability to form actual words. His knees are just about ready to give up underneath him, aching like crazy from their prolonged contact with the cold concrete floor, his back hurts because he’s not used to being in this position for long periods of time, and every time Ianto thrusts inside him Owen catches his breath and then his ribs hurt more.
“Gwen,” he says helplessly, “Be a sweetheart and just fuck off, all right?”
She backs away quickly, running up the stairs yelling: “Tosh! We have a problem!”
Ianto really is far too good at this (some tiny part of Owen wonders exactly why they haven’t done this before), and the pain screaming through Owen’s body becomes a different kind of screaming entirely. When he’s on the edge, right on the edge, Ianto laughs and then sinks his teeth into the scar on the back of Owen’s shoulder, the scar he put there, and for some reason this doesn’t enrage Owen and instead he shouts out in blessed release.
There are next to no clothes for them to wear, what with the frenzy of clothes-ripping that’s gone on (sooner or later Owen wants to find out exactly why he did this- he hates Ianto, he’s sure he does), so they wind up lying naked and sort of sleepy on the cell floor.
“I hate you,” Ianto says, and he sounds puzzled. “Owen, why did we just do that?”
Owen has his head resting on Ianto’s chest and doesn’t even bother to move.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “Maybe it’s something about the cells that gets you going. Although I thought that was stopwatches. Did you and Jack really-” Owen pushes himself upright. “Shit. Jack. Jack’s going to kill me when he gets back.”
“If he gets back,” Ianto mumbles, pulling Owen back down to rest on his shoulder again. “And I don’t actually belong to Jack. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t have ‘property of Torchwood’ branded on my arse.”
“I know,” Owen replies, and then winces. Shagging Ianto in one of their containment cells was not on his to-do list for today, not even slightly. He aches.
“You’re still concussed, right?” he says after a brief pause.
“Probably,” Ianto tells him. “Why?”
“Does that mean I took advantage of you?” Owen asks. Ianto yawns.
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s a little bit late to be worrying about that now, Owen.” One of his hands runs through Owen’s short hair. “I’m sure we can get into another punch-up about it tomorrow.”
The cell door clanks open again to reveal a very sheepish-looking Tosh and Gwen. Owen can’t even be bothered to sit up.
“Um.” Gwen looks positively terrified. “Um, we’re sorry.”
“Wasn’t this what you wanted?” Ianto asks, sitting up and looking around for his trousers. Owen reluctantly follows suit.
“We didn’t foresee this happening,” Tosh says quietly.
“Well,” Owen points out, “Neither did we. It just came out of nowhere-” Something about that makes a few things in his head go click. He gets to his feet, and walks up to stand against the glass. “What the fuck did you do?”
Tosh opens her hands to reveal a small, blue metallic cube.
“We didn’t realise that it would have quite such strong results,” she says guiltily.
“Oh, God,” Ianto says softly, “You didn’t.”
“Why does everyone but me know what’s going on?” Owen demands. “What did you bloody do?”
“The label said that it was in full working order,” Gwen says, obviously trying not to assign any blame to herself.
“In 1979,” Ianto says in a broken little voice, crossing behind Owen to sit on the bench. “Please don’t go into my archives.”
“It said that it would produce good feelings between the people whose DNA was placed on it,” Gwen continues. “It said it was harmless.”
“Gwen,” Ianto says, and he sounds somewhat desperate, “You do realise the people who take care of the archives are far too tactful to say ‘if you put the DNA of two people onto this cube it will make them want to fuck each other’s brains out’. ‘Good feelings’ was a euphemism.”
“I know that now!” Gwen sounds somewhat panicked. Ianto drops his head into his hands. Owen rubs a hand over his face. He’s got a migraine now on top of everything else.
“Where did you get our DNA?” he enquires, trying to keep the anger out of his tone.
“You left enough blood on the floor after your fight,” Tosh says, cutting in. “We just took some during the clean-up job.”
Ianto makes a little sobbing sort of sound. Owen ignores him.
“And what did you think that this would achieve?” he demands. Both Tosh and Gwen take a step back.
“Look,” Tosh says, trying to sound reasonable, “We know that it was wrong. But we have to be together in this, until we find out where Jack is, until we find out where he’s gone. And you- you’ve been tearing us all apart with your fighting, and we were desperate. We read the label, we followed the instructions. We didn’t know that this would happen.”
“What did you think would happen?” Owen asks.
“Well,” Gwen says, “The cube is supposed to bring all the feelings of goodwill you have for the other person to the surface, whatever your differences. We thought that perhaps it would remind the two of you that you’re friends in spite of everything.”
“So what you’re saying,” Owen says with mounting horror, “Is that underneath it all, I’ve always wanted to fuck Ianto?”
There is an awkward silence.
“It would explain a lot,” Ianto pipes up from behind him.
“You shut up,” Owen says, rounding on him.
“Going to blame me for this?” Ianto asks with a half-crazy little smile. “That’s going to be a stretch of imagination, even for you Owen.”
“This is all your fault!” Owen shouts, storming over to confront him. “You’ve always been there, acting like you’re fucking better than me or something, when you’re not! You brought an honest-to-God fucking cyberman in here and it tried to kill us all! You betrayed Torchwood but that doesn’t matter, does it? You’re forgiven anything and everything and I hate that! I hate you! You’re so smug and quiet and who knows what’s going on in your head! You shot me! You actually fucking shot me when I disagreed with you. You’re a complete madman, Ianto, and I wish that-”
The next thing he knows, he’s grabbing Ianto’s shoulders, pulling him to his feet, and kissing him.
“Tosh,” he groans, “Turn that off.”
“Sorry,” she says. “I just wanted to see if-”
The next second, Owen’s mind clears and he pulls away from Ianto, who is swaying on his feet and not looking good, as such.
“We aren’t puppets,” Ianto tells Tosh quietly, and sits down again. “Owen, I think that you’re a dick. I think you’re smug, you’re cruel, you’re immensely difficult to like, you take me for granted and treat me like your fucking slave, you think that the sun shines out of your arse, you treat women like objects and men like they’re all beneath you, and-”
“Please, both of you, stop!” Tosh screams, opening the door to their cell. “Get some clothes on, go home. We’re sorry. Please continue to hate each other. Please continue to get into fist fights every other day over trivial things, just… stop.”
Ianto can barely stand. Owen, even though he’s trembling with anger and his brain is screaming what have I done? for about six different reasons, loops Ianto’s arm around his shoulders and helps him out. Gwen and Tosh look tormented, but right now Owen can’t be bothered to be angry. He feels almost weak, but at least everything’s out in the open now. That’s got to be better.
“You know,” Ianto says, when they’re back out in the main Hub, “You’re right.”
“About which part?” Owen enquires.
“Cyberwomen don’t make the best girlfriends. You just wind up with nothing to buy them for your anniversary and rivet marks in your arse.” Ianto laughs almost hysterically and then vomits onto the floor. “I want to go home,” he says feebly.
“You can’t go home on your own,” Owen tells him. “You’re definitely concussed, someone needs to keep an eye on you.”
“Fine,” Ianto mutters. “I’ll just stay here then.”
Owen sighs. Today has been surreal enough without adding this to the mix, but what the hell.
“Come on,” he mutters. “I’ll take you home and look after you tonight.”
Ianto looks up at him through bleary eyes.
“Owen,” he says, “You hate me.”
“I do,” Owen agrees, although he’s beginning to wonder if that’s altogether true. “Doesn’t mean I want you dead.”
He and Ianto shuffle towards the paving stone lift.
“I shot you,” Ianto says.
“I remember.”
“I wanted to kill you.”
“You said you were aiming for my shoulder.”
“I lied.”
Owen knows that this is the point at which he should want to actively snap Ianto’s head off. This morning, he’d have done it without hesitation.
“Then I suppose we should both be glad you’re such a crappy shot,” he says eventually, hitting the controls to send the lift upwards. Ianto leans against his shoulder, eyes closing.
“You’ve got to stay with me, Ianto,” he says, “Otherwise I’ll have to take you to A and E and tell them I tried to bash your skull in.”
“I can see that going down well,” Ianto murmurs drowsily. “You know, you could just push me straight into the bay right now, and I’d be quite grateful.”
“Jack would never forgive me,” Owen tells Ianto.
“Jack is never coming back,” Ianto replies shortly, letting Owen lead him to his car.
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Jack is never coming back,” Ianto repeats. “He’s gone. Forever. Haven’t you realised that?”
“Aren’t you the little pessimist,” Owen mutters, pushing Ianto into the passenger seat and buckling the seatbelt for him. “He’ll be back.” He presses a soft kiss to Ianto’s mouth that has nothing to do with alien cubes or pheromones or anger or lust or anything, and closes the car door, walking around to get in behind the wheel.
“I don’t hate you,” Ianto says quietly. “I just don’t like you much.”
Owen says nothing, and starts the ignition.
~Finis~
End notes: Have decided to make Owen/Ianto my new obscure!OTP that I will write far too much of just for the hell of it, just like I love Chase/Wilson in the House fandom (have currently reached the count of 72 C/W fics. I think that deserves something, even if it’s only someone coming along with an axe to cut off my hands and prevent me from typing).
Also: if anyone wants to write a much-better-written-than-this-one sequel to this, that would make my world shiny. But anyway. Ahem.
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Owen/Ianto (with hints at canon!Jack/Ianto)
Challenge/Prompt: fanfic100, 022. Enemies [did I mention I claimed Ianto on ff100? Oh, well, I have]
Rating: PG-15 (strongish by my standards), maybe even a tentative NC-17 in places.
Genre: Slash
Summary: Ok. After all the shit that when down during the season finale, I felt it was time for some Owen/Ianto “but you shot me” fallout.
Author’s Notes: This runs from outright violence to hatesex to actual fluff. I don’t know how I managed it. God bless alien technology and UST. (Hamartia, in case you’re wondering, means the fatal flaw in a character in tragedy. Love English AS Level.)
And yes, I did write this yesterday in the process of having an emotional breakdown. It turns out I can multitask.
“This is not even slightly funny!” Owen shouts at the closed door. “Fucking let me out!”
“Owen,” Ianto says in a tone of voice that positively screams how frustrated and tired he is, “It didn’t work the first twenty-three times you said it. Why do you think it’s going to work now?”
“Don’t you start,” Owen snaps, turning on him. Ianto doesn’t even bother to look up from where he’s inspecting his fingernails.
“Going to hit me again?” he asks lightly.
Owen is tempted, sorely tempted, but then Ianto finally gets to his feet, brushing off his rumpled suit trousers and there’s a cut above his eyebrow and blood at the corner of his mouth and he has a black eye and Owen can’t.
Instead, he turns back to the reinforced glass door of the cell and bangs on it with his fist.
“Gwen!” he yells. “Tosh! Let us out!”
Ianto gives something that might be a laugh, but it’s so brief and quiet Owen isn’t entirely sure. When he turns around again, Ianto has sat himself down on the bench in the corner of the cell, and is toying with his cufflinks, apparently not caring that their teammates have shut them in this cell for God knows how long. Owen thinks about asking does anything fucking bother you? but he knows- he has seen- that that cold, uncaring shell Ianto wears like armour can crack open at any moment to reveal a man as capable of raw desperation and misery as any of them. Instead, he lets himself slide down the glass wall and sit cross-legged on the floor, and finally touches his face. His cheekbone feels halfway to broken- does Ianto have metal fists or something?- and his ribs ache when he breathes in.
They manage five minutes of pure silence before Owen starts shouting again. Ianto gives him an utterly, utterly unamused look, but that black eye is blossoming onto his face even more and the cut above his eyebrow is still oozing blood. Owen discovers that Tosh and Gwen are still being vastly unsympathetic to their plight, and spits on the floor in general annoyance.
The spit is red-tinged and he wonders exactly when Ianto punched him hard enough for there to be blood in his mouth.
“Yes, Owen, please leave me with more to clear up,” Ianto says tiredly. “As if we haven’t got enough of your bodily fluids all over the Hub as it is.”
“Shut up,” Owen mutters childishly, rubbing his bruised knuckles. The silence between them simmers angrily, and then the door to the cells clicks open.
“Gwen,” Owen says eagerly, pushing himself to his feet, “Gwen, let us out.”
Gwen stands on the other side of the glass and regards the two of them.
“No,” she tells him.
“What the fuck?” Owen demands.
“Owen,” Gwen says softly, “It can’t go on like this. Jack’s been gone over a month-” Her voice catches in her throat, but she forces herself to continue, “-And you and Ianto have been at each other’s throats for the entire time. It’s making things even more difficult.”
“He shot me!” Owen protests, unable to believe he’s hearing this, gesturing towards where Ianto is still sitting and quietly listening.
“And yet you still opened the Rift,” Ianto says, finally walking over to join Owen at the glass. “And look how well that turned out.”
Owen isn’t really aware of pinning Ianto against the wall with his hands around his throat, but he’s shouting torn-off expletives and Gwen is screaming and Ianto is breathing through gritted teeth, face reddening as Owen cuts off his air supply. Then, just as Gwen is about to open the cell door to get in there before he actually kills Ianto, Ianto’s elbow comes up out of nowhere and crashes into Owen’s face. Owen staggers back, hands over his nose, blood dripping between his fingers from somewhere.
“I think,” Gwen says, sounding shocked but resolute, “That you’ve proved my point.”
Ianto is half-slumped on the floor, gasping and rubbing the bruises forming around his neck.
“Gwen,” he begins, “Have you actually thought this through? I’m not sure that locking us both in the same cell is a good idea.”
Gwen’s expression implies she agrees with him, but she keeps talking anyway.
“Tosh and I have decided that the only way we can even begin to get Torchwood functioning properly is to get you two talking again,” she says. “So you’re staying in here until you sort something out.”
“That’s a fucking awful idea,” Owen tells her through the blood streaming down his chin, just in case she was in any doubt.
“For once, he’s right,” Ianto says. “This can’t end well, Gwen.”
Gwen looks at the two of them, biting her lip, but apparently she and Tosh are resolved on this, and she shakes her head.
“You’re down here for as long as it takes,” she says quietly, and walks out. Owen bangs on the glass with one bloody hand for a while, until even that gets tiring, and finally slumps down to sit on the floor.
“I think you’ve broken my nose,” he says thickly.
“Good,” Ianto replies. He sounds smug, even with the blood crusted on his upper lip, and the rather vivid fingermarks bruised around his neck. Owen considers attacking him again, but he doesn’t. The silence is almost a relief, and this time Owen doesn’t break it.
In the time that follows, while Ianto pointedly ignores him, Owen mentally lists all the ways that this isn’t his fault. Although he has to admit that perhaps it did look rather bad when Tosh and Gwen walked in on him straddling Ianto and bashing the other man’s head into the floor, although that didn’t last long, did it, what with Ianto forcing himself up a minute later and kicking Owen in the ribs until he thought one of them was actually going to break. Perhaps being manhandled into one of the downstairs cells wasn’t the worst of ideas, right then. But this- this is madness.
“Ianto,” he begins slowly, but the other man doesn’t move. “Ianto!”
Ianto has his eyes closed and is still breathing but is either doing a really good job of ignoring him or- or- oh shit. Owen is on his feet in a moment crossing to the other side of the cell to shake Ianto awake.
“Ianto,” he says, loudly and clearly, “You can’t go to sleep, you’ve probably got concussion.”
Ianto doesn’t register him.
“Come on,” Owen says, urgently, momentary panic overtaking him, “Fucking wake up.” He slaps the Welshman’s bruised face.
Ianto’s eyes open slowly.
“What do you mean, ‘probably got concussion’?” he asks croakily. “Given how hard you were bashing my head on the floor, I think I’ll be lucky to escape brain damage.”
Owen lets go and falls back, feeling relief bubbling through him. He stays on his back on the floor, closes his eyes for a moment.
“I’ll kill Gwen for this,” he says quietly. “And Tosh too.”
“What, you’re not content with shooting Jack and attempting to beat me to death?” Ianto asks dryly, but there’s enough of an accusation under his words for them to hurt more than any blow Ianto could land on him. Owen takes a breath.
“I was crazy,” he says. “We all were. You know we were. I didn’t mean to kill him. And even you sided against him.”
“What do you mean,” Ianto begins, sounding more awake, “Even me?”
“You’re the one who’s supposed to be in love with him,” Owen points out.
“Am I?” Ianto sounds genuinely interested.
“Don’t think we didn’t notice him snogging you when he recovered,” Owen tells him. Ianto laughs, then makes a sharp, in-pain sort of sound.
“Fuck it,” Owen mutters, and gets to his feet to bang on the glass for a while. “Gwen! Tosh! We need some kind of medical equipment down here!”
It takes a good half hour for the girls to come up trumps, but eventually a first aid kit and some bottled water is delivered down to them. Owen doesn’t even bother to try and make a break for it when they open the door, and Ianto looks like he’s never going to move again. Owen tosses him one of the bottles of water, and begins to search through his medical kit, wiping his face and hands off with antiseptic. His nose really does hurt- who knew their terribly quiet tea boy would be capable of it?- but at least he’s mostly in one piece.
“You’d better chuck me over some plasters or something,” Ianto suggests, shrugging himself reluctantly out of his suit jacket and sitting more upright. Owen instead moves over to kneel in front of him, smoothing an antiseptic wipe over the blood on Ianto’s face so he can investigate the damage properly. The cut above Ianto’s eyebrow really is very, very deep.
“This needs stitches,” he says quietly, aware that he doesn’t even remember how he gave Ianto this cut.
“Go ahead,” Ianto sighs, “Knock yourself out.” Owen searches in the kit for some latex gloves and also finds himself a syringe of local anaesthetic, which he carefully injects into Ianto’s forehead.
“How-” he begins awkwardly as he lays out the sutures.
“That would be when you shoved me backwards and I knocked my head on Tosh’s workstation,” Ianto tells him steadily. “I may have to speak to- to do something about how sharp the corners of the desks are.”
He doesn’t flinch when Owen carefully begins to stitch the edges of the cut together, instead staring pointedly at the opposite wall and ignoring Owen’s close proximity.
“I’m sorry,” Owen offers finally, tying off the suture.
“No, you’re not,” Ianto replies. There’s an awkward pause. “You can move away from me now, Owen.”
Owen becomes aware that he’s still kneeling between Ianto’s thighs, hands still cupping Ianto’s face, and pulls himself away far too quickly. A brief smirk twists Ianto’s mouth, but Owen ignores him and instead focuses on tentatively feeling his nose to find out just how bad the damage is.
“You know,” he says at length, “It might not be broken after all.”
“Must be losing my touch,” Ianto murmurs. “If you come back over here, I’ll break it properly for you.”
“Don’t you dare,” Owen tells him, dabbing up the last of the blood from his face and tentatively lifting the hem of his t-shirt to investigate the damage done to his chest.
“Oh,” Ianto says softly.
Owen sighs and pulls off the rest of the t-shirt, before prodding tentatively at his skin. His ribcage just seems to be one huge bruise, and it hurts.
“Oh,” Ianto says again. He doesn’t sound all that sorry, as such, and he doesn’t really sound surprised either. Owen wonders vaguely if he actually deserved Ianto trying to kick his ribcage in, as he tries to work out if there’s anything medical he can do to alleviate the general ow in his chest region. There probably isn’t. Owen begins to feel tentatively down his ribs, trying to work out if one of them is broken, but he can only think of the pain and isn’t objective enough to try and tell if there’s a fracture.
“Ianto,” he says, lying down on the floor pathetically, “Help?”
He can hear Ianto sighing but a moment later the Welshman is knelt beside him, feeling down his ribcage with cold but professional fingers.
“Nothing broken,” Ianto tells him shortly, moving to sit against the wall again. “I don’t think that you’re nearly as hurt as you’re pretending to be, Owen.” He hunts through the first aid box, chooses a plaster and carefully applies it to his neck. Owen notices that one of his fingernails broke through the skin there when he was trying to strangle Ianto, and feels faintly guilty. It’s a brief emotion, though, so he just stays lying down until it goes away.
“You’ve got to stay awake, Ianto, concussion is a nasty bastard,” he informs the other man, moving to sit beside him, taking care to leave enough space for an elephant to pass between them.
“Reminds me of someone,” Ianto says vaguely. Owen sighs.
“Let it drop,” he tells him tiredly. “It’s getting childish now.”
“If it weren’t for you I would be upstairs making coffee and looking forward to going home,” Ianto points out, “Not sitting down here in the cells with concussion and seven stitches in my head. I think I’m allowed to be a little juvenile here.”
Owen is altogether in too much pain for this.
“Oh fuck you, Ianto,” he says. Ianto laughs.
“Like you could afford me.”
“Could Jack?” Owen asks, and then words are spilling out of his mouth before he can think any of them through. “When exactly did you start fucking him Ianto? Before or after Lisa died? How did it feel kissing her murderer?”
“I have no idea why you weren’t drowned in a bag as a child,” Ianto says, apparently refusing to get drawn into another fight. “Your social skills really do leave a lot to be desired.”
“Says the man whose idea of a conversation begins with ‘and can I get you a coffee?’” Owen mutters.
“As far as I can tell, Owen, your method of introduction seems to be ‘you look alright, I’m Owen Harper, I’m a doctor and I have a big cock, would you like to feel it sometime?’” Ianto retorts.
“At least it’s an attempt at human connection!” Owen snarls, turning to look at him. “You, Ianto, you don’t give a shit about anyone! Take Jack, for example. He goes missing, falls through time, you’re not prepared to do anything to save him, and you shoot me for trying!”
“I was right, though,” Ianto says, but his calm voice is starting to tremble. “And as for human connections, Owen-”
“Don’t go there,” Owen hisses, but Ianto just keeps talking.
“- Diane left forever after one week with you, and as you might have gathered, Gwen will never, ever love you. Or even really care about you. Because all along she’s had Rhys. Who do you have?”
Owen moves with the intention of killing Ianto until he shuts up, but it doesn’t altogether go to plan. For one thing, the hands he reaches out to bang Ianto’s head into the wall (or maybe he could go for the throttling option again) instead cup his face, and their lips meet in an angry, biting kiss. This was not the plan, and Owen has no idea where it all went wrong. Perhaps this is what is supposed to happen. Before he can think more on that idea, though, he pulls himself back.
“Well, that’s different,” Ianto says carefully, licking his lips briefly in something that might be shock. “I have to admit that I didn’t see that one coming.”
Did anyone? Owen wonders, since as far as he’s concerned Ianto should be bleeding or slightly dead or something by now, not peering at him in a curious fashion. It’s a bad, bad idea, but then Owen is really, really good at bad ideas, and so he leans back in to kiss Ianto again. And again. His knees are going to sleep from where he’s kneeling on the cold concrete floor, but somehow this doesn’t actually matter as much as it should do. It’s still a relief, though, when Ianto makes a soft groaning sort of sound and pushes him onto his back on the floor.
Then there’s the soft feeling of Ianto’s lips against his neck, followed by the somewhat more painful feeling of Ianto’s teeth, and Owen shuts his eyes and inhales and tries to work out why this is happening. Ianto’s mouth strays onto his shoulder and- and- oh. Owen opens his eyes and turns his head to see Ianto running his tongue tentatively over the barely-healed scar on Owen’s shoulder. The scar he put there.
“I honestly didn’t think you’d do it,” Owen says. “Didn’t think you’d actually pull that trigger.”
Ianto looks up at him with a grin. “Neither did I,” he admits, before turning back to press one last kiss against the mark. “Still, you won’t underestimate me again, will you?”
“Twat,” Owen says. Ianto ignores him, mouth closing over Owen’s right nipple, and that’s much better. However, it’s only a moment before he rolls them both over, ripping Ianto’s shirt open and sending a couple of buttons pinging off somewhere. They both watch one pearly button bounce off the glass at the front of the cell and then turn back to look at each other, laughing, and Owen bites a bruise into Ianto’s collar bone just because he can.
“Ianto,” he says after a moment’s thought, “Why are we doing this?”
“I have no idea,” Ianto replies, nails digging into Owen’s shoulders.
“I wanted to punch your face in five minutes ago,” Owen gasps, running his tongue up Ianto’s jaw and feeling the raised edge of a scar (Ianto on his knees sobbing around the gag in his mouth, the crazed cannibal with the cleaver shoved to his throat). “I wanted to hurt you.”
“Well,” Ianto says, sounding altogether too logical and sensible for a man with his hand worming inside Owen’s jeans, “Just don’t try this next time we encounter a Weevil.”
“Only you, Ianto, could think of something like that at a time like this,” Owen mutters, shifting his hips restlessly and leaning in to give Ianto another deep, desperate kiss. Ianto laughs breathlessly against his teeth, fingernails of his free hand raking down Owen’s back and leaving trails of pain behind. Owen is in enough agony as it is, and is therefore rather surprised to find himself groaning in pleasure at this.
The next minute Ianto is rolling them both over again so Owen is the one on his back on the floor and Ianto is the one sitting on his hips, grinning like a madman. His white shirt is hanging off his shoulders, irreparably torn, its buttons gone, and between that and the cuts and bruises covering his face, neck and chest, he looks like he’s gone four rounds with a Weevil. Owen can hardly think that he looks any better.
“What do we do now?” Ianto asks, raising an eyebrow, sounding genuinely interested.
“Well,” Owen says calmly, “If you don’t follow through around now I will actually strangle you.”
“I love it when you talk dirty,” Ianto says, laughing in a way Owen hasn’t heard since Lisa tried to- since Lisa. He climbs off Owen carefully and starts to move away.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asks. Ianto turns back to give him a look.
“We keep condoms in the first aid box,” he replies calmly.
Owen sits up, supporting himself with his elbows.
“Why?” he asks incredulously.
“Jack,” Ianto informs him. Owen smirks. Figures.
Around six minutes later, Owen just about hears Gwen opening the door to the cells, and then he hears her screaming.
“Owen! Ianto! What are you doing?”
“I would have thought that was fairly self-explanatory,” Ianto says, and Owen marvels at his ability to form actual words. His knees are just about ready to give up underneath him, aching like crazy from their prolonged contact with the cold concrete floor, his back hurts because he’s not used to being in this position for long periods of time, and every time Ianto thrusts inside him Owen catches his breath and then his ribs hurt more.
“Gwen,” he says helplessly, “Be a sweetheart and just fuck off, all right?”
She backs away quickly, running up the stairs yelling: “Tosh! We have a problem!”
Ianto really is far too good at this (some tiny part of Owen wonders exactly why they haven’t done this before), and the pain screaming through Owen’s body becomes a different kind of screaming entirely. When he’s on the edge, right on the edge, Ianto laughs and then sinks his teeth into the scar on the back of Owen’s shoulder, the scar he put there, and for some reason this doesn’t enrage Owen and instead he shouts out in blessed release.
There are next to no clothes for them to wear, what with the frenzy of clothes-ripping that’s gone on (sooner or later Owen wants to find out exactly why he did this- he hates Ianto, he’s sure he does), so they wind up lying naked and sort of sleepy on the cell floor.
“I hate you,” Ianto says, and he sounds puzzled. “Owen, why did we just do that?”
Owen has his head resting on Ianto’s chest and doesn’t even bother to move.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “Maybe it’s something about the cells that gets you going. Although I thought that was stopwatches. Did you and Jack really-” Owen pushes himself upright. “Shit. Jack. Jack’s going to kill me when he gets back.”
“If he gets back,” Ianto mumbles, pulling Owen back down to rest on his shoulder again. “And I don’t actually belong to Jack. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t have ‘property of Torchwood’ branded on my arse.”
“I know,” Owen replies, and then winces. Shagging Ianto in one of their containment cells was not on his to-do list for today, not even slightly. He aches.
“You’re still concussed, right?” he says after a brief pause.
“Probably,” Ianto tells him. “Why?”
“Does that mean I took advantage of you?” Owen asks. Ianto yawns.
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s a little bit late to be worrying about that now, Owen.” One of his hands runs through Owen’s short hair. “I’m sure we can get into another punch-up about it tomorrow.”
The cell door clanks open again to reveal a very sheepish-looking Tosh and Gwen. Owen can’t even be bothered to sit up.
“Um.” Gwen looks positively terrified. “Um, we’re sorry.”
“Wasn’t this what you wanted?” Ianto asks, sitting up and looking around for his trousers. Owen reluctantly follows suit.
“We didn’t foresee this happening,” Tosh says quietly.
“Well,” Owen points out, “Neither did we. It just came out of nowhere-” Something about that makes a few things in his head go click. He gets to his feet, and walks up to stand against the glass. “What the fuck did you do?”
Tosh opens her hands to reveal a small, blue metallic cube.
“We didn’t realise that it would have quite such strong results,” she says guiltily.
“Oh, God,” Ianto says softly, “You didn’t.”
“Why does everyone but me know what’s going on?” Owen demands. “What did you bloody do?”
“The label said that it was in full working order,” Gwen says, obviously trying not to assign any blame to herself.
“In 1979,” Ianto says in a broken little voice, crossing behind Owen to sit on the bench. “Please don’t go into my archives.”
“It said that it would produce good feelings between the people whose DNA was placed on it,” Gwen continues. “It said it was harmless.”
“Gwen,” Ianto says, and he sounds somewhat desperate, “You do realise the people who take care of the archives are far too tactful to say ‘if you put the DNA of two people onto this cube it will make them want to fuck each other’s brains out’. ‘Good feelings’ was a euphemism.”
“I know that now!” Gwen sounds somewhat panicked. Ianto drops his head into his hands. Owen rubs a hand over his face. He’s got a migraine now on top of everything else.
“Where did you get our DNA?” he enquires, trying to keep the anger out of his tone.
“You left enough blood on the floor after your fight,” Tosh says, cutting in. “We just took some during the clean-up job.”
Ianto makes a little sobbing sort of sound. Owen ignores him.
“And what did you think that this would achieve?” he demands. Both Tosh and Gwen take a step back.
“Look,” Tosh says, trying to sound reasonable, “We know that it was wrong. But we have to be together in this, until we find out where Jack is, until we find out where he’s gone. And you- you’ve been tearing us all apart with your fighting, and we were desperate. We read the label, we followed the instructions. We didn’t know that this would happen.”
“What did you think would happen?” Owen asks.
“Well,” Gwen says, “The cube is supposed to bring all the feelings of goodwill you have for the other person to the surface, whatever your differences. We thought that perhaps it would remind the two of you that you’re friends in spite of everything.”
“So what you’re saying,” Owen says with mounting horror, “Is that underneath it all, I’ve always wanted to fuck Ianto?”
There is an awkward silence.
“It would explain a lot,” Ianto pipes up from behind him.
“You shut up,” Owen says, rounding on him.
“Going to blame me for this?” Ianto asks with a half-crazy little smile. “That’s going to be a stretch of imagination, even for you Owen.”
“This is all your fault!” Owen shouts, storming over to confront him. “You’ve always been there, acting like you’re fucking better than me or something, when you’re not! You brought an honest-to-God fucking cyberman in here and it tried to kill us all! You betrayed Torchwood but that doesn’t matter, does it? You’re forgiven anything and everything and I hate that! I hate you! You’re so smug and quiet and who knows what’s going on in your head! You shot me! You actually fucking shot me when I disagreed with you. You’re a complete madman, Ianto, and I wish that-”
The next thing he knows, he’s grabbing Ianto’s shoulders, pulling him to his feet, and kissing him.
“Tosh,” he groans, “Turn that off.”
“Sorry,” she says. “I just wanted to see if-”
The next second, Owen’s mind clears and he pulls away from Ianto, who is swaying on his feet and not looking good, as such.
“We aren’t puppets,” Ianto tells Tosh quietly, and sits down again. “Owen, I think that you’re a dick. I think you’re smug, you’re cruel, you’re immensely difficult to like, you take me for granted and treat me like your fucking slave, you think that the sun shines out of your arse, you treat women like objects and men like they’re all beneath you, and-”
“Please, both of you, stop!” Tosh screams, opening the door to their cell. “Get some clothes on, go home. We’re sorry. Please continue to hate each other. Please continue to get into fist fights every other day over trivial things, just… stop.”
Ianto can barely stand. Owen, even though he’s trembling with anger and his brain is screaming what have I done? for about six different reasons, loops Ianto’s arm around his shoulders and helps him out. Gwen and Tosh look tormented, but right now Owen can’t be bothered to be angry. He feels almost weak, but at least everything’s out in the open now. That’s got to be better.
“You know,” Ianto says, when they’re back out in the main Hub, “You’re right.”
“About which part?” Owen enquires.
“Cyberwomen don’t make the best girlfriends. You just wind up with nothing to buy them for your anniversary and rivet marks in your arse.” Ianto laughs almost hysterically and then vomits onto the floor. “I want to go home,” he says feebly.
“You can’t go home on your own,” Owen tells him. “You’re definitely concussed, someone needs to keep an eye on you.”
“Fine,” Ianto mutters. “I’ll just stay here then.”
Owen sighs. Today has been surreal enough without adding this to the mix, but what the hell.
“Come on,” he mutters. “I’ll take you home and look after you tonight.”
Ianto looks up at him through bleary eyes.
“Owen,” he says, “You hate me.”
“I do,” Owen agrees, although he’s beginning to wonder if that’s altogether true. “Doesn’t mean I want you dead.”
He and Ianto shuffle towards the paving stone lift.
“I shot you,” Ianto says.
“I remember.”
“I wanted to kill you.”
“You said you were aiming for my shoulder.”
“I lied.”
Owen knows that this is the point at which he should want to actively snap Ianto’s head off. This morning, he’d have done it without hesitation.
“Then I suppose we should both be glad you’re such a crappy shot,” he says eventually, hitting the controls to send the lift upwards. Ianto leans against his shoulder, eyes closing.
“You’ve got to stay with me, Ianto,” he says, “Otherwise I’ll have to take you to A and E and tell them I tried to bash your skull in.”
“I can see that going down well,” Ianto murmurs drowsily. “You know, you could just push me straight into the bay right now, and I’d be quite grateful.”
“Jack would never forgive me,” Owen tells Ianto.
“Jack is never coming back,” Ianto replies shortly, letting Owen lead him to his car.
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Jack is never coming back,” Ianto repeats. “He’s gone. Forever. Haven’t you realised that?”
“Aren’t you the little pessimist,” Owen mutters, pushing Ianto into the passenger seat and buckling the seatbelt for him. “He’ll be back.” He presses a soft kiss to Ianto’s mouth that has nothing to do with alien cubes or pheromones or anger or lust or anything, and closes the car door, walking around to get in behind the wheel.
“I don’t hate you,” Ianto says quietly. “I just don’t like you much.”
Owen says nothing, and starts the ignition.
~Finis~
End notes: Have decided to make Owen/Ianto my new obscure!OTP that I will write far too much of just for the hell of it, just like I love Chase/Wilson in the House fandom (have currently reached the count of 72 C/W fics. I think that deserves something, even if it’s only someone coming along with an axe to cut off my hands and prevent me from typing).
Also: if anyone wants to write a much-better-written-than-this-one sequel to this, that would make my world shiny. But anyway. Ahem.