Of Waxing Shapes and Waning
Title: Of Waxing Shapes and Waning
Author: sariagray
Characters/Pairings: Ianto/Lisa, Ianto/Jack
Word Count: ~1400
Rating: PG13
Spoilers: Through Season 2.
Warnings: Death.
Disclaimer: I do not own Torchwood. I do not make money off of Torchwood. In fact, it seems as though Torchwood owns and makes money off of ME. This is for entertainment purposes only.
Beta: analineblue
Summary: After Lisa, things don't change for Ianto. Not really.
Author’s Note: Written for the redisourcolor challenge #18. The theme is "Medicine" and the words are "tightwad," "creamy," and "babbling." The phrase is "Well then, how about you try it, and see how it goes?" The poem around which this has been written is "A Wasted Illness" by Thomas Hardy.
Of Waxing Shapes and Waning
Through vaults of pain,
Enribbed and wrought with groins of ghastliness,
I passed, and garish spectres moved my brain
To dire distress.
In the bowels of secrecy, she lays, her flesh kept from rotting by a saline drip and artificial breathing and synthesized plasma and anything else she asks for because Ianto can deny her nothing. Daily, he treads through the gates of horn and ivory, as though he’s sleepwalking, to tend to her. And she’s been slipping, slipping into the darkness with the demons that plague him.
“Don’t be such a tightwad,” Lisa chides jokingly, even though her features are contorted in pain. “Just a little more and it should work.”
Ianto hesitates. “We don’t know what it could do to you.”
“Well, then,” she insists. “Why don’t you try it, see how it goes?”
So he increases the voltage incrementally until the lines in her face ease.
“It’s good,” she whispers with the hint of a flickering smile, like the allusion of sunshine through closed blinds. “I feel strong today.”
He’s grateful that her suggestion worked, that the alterations to the current of electricity brought back the light in her eyes.
Still, every breath he takes is a breath of betrayal. His suits, his flip remarks, his carefully-wrought smiles all cut into Lisa with sharp blades. And yet, every time he follows the dank pathway to her chamber, his heart clenches uncomfortably.
Soon, he reminds himself. Soon it will all be over. He’ll nurse her back to health.
And hammerings,
And quakes, and shoots, and stifling hotness, blent
With webby waxing things and waning things
As on I went.
Sometimes Ianto’s convinced that he’s already dead, that the flames of the fallen tower have engulfed him completely. Superheated metal beams pierce through his body in his dreams and, in his nightmares, he survives.
Without Lisa, there is no purpose. He’s only allowed to live in order to save her because she is so good. Her salvation is his repentance, his final task before he can be at peace in the afterlife he’s certain he already occupies.
Other times, a large warm hand on the small of his back, a fire of another sort, and he’s absolutely aware of the life that throbs in his veins. He clings to that heat because he’s suffocating, drowning in cold, dark depths.
“You need to take better care of yourself.”
The Captain’s voice is soft and honeyed in his ear and Ianto tries so very hard not to lean towards his mouth, closer, closer, until he sinks into it, swallowed whole.
“Sleep more,” he continues. “Get some sunlight. Eat more vegetables.”
But the dead, they don’t need these things.
"Where lies the end
To this foul way?" I asked with weakening breath.
Thereon ahead I saw a door extend -
The door to death.
Hell breaks loose rather more frequently than the outside world seems to realize.
In the strange, panicked lights of the Hub, Lisa’s skin looks strange. It is no longer gleaming, creamy and smooth, but harsh and shadowed and his heart pounds with a rush of survivalist adrenaline. And Ianto has blood on his hands, too much blood. It seeps into his pores and condemns him almost as loudly as the voice in his head.
It’s a babbling voice, excusing Lisa with a thousand different pardons, all of them hollow and terrified. It questions when he wants submission, it hems and haws when he needs direction, and sometimes it frustratingly screams JackJackJack, as if that’s supposed to do anything productive.
As he drags Dr. Tanizaki’s body away, that’s exactly what the voice is saying. Maybe, just maybe, that’s where the answer lies. But it doesn’t make the burden any lighter.
It loomed more clear:
"At last!" I cried. "The all-delivering door!"
And then, I knew not how, it grew less near
Than theretofore.
It is the firm press of cool steel to his temple that eases the thrum of the pounding in his ears. Lisa is finally dead, body and mind, and spirit, too, though that was laid to rest long ago. So he’s been told. So he begins to believe.
The gun is properly cocked, the chamber clicks over, and that damned inner voice is chanting a duet of JackJackJack and Yesyesyes in the one way he never thought would happen. But it’s good, it lightens him like a strong drug. There is no more pain.
And then the gun is gone.
“Not tonight,” Jack mutters, like he’s trying to beg off of execution because of a headache. “I’m tired of people dying on my watch.”
And back slid I
Along the galleries by which I came,
And tediously the day returned, and sky,
And life--the same.
He still feels dead, hollowed out as if his organs have already gone ahead and disintegrated like the rest of him. His spirit died long ago, too - gone - and yet these people are still trying to save him like he’s worth something more than a metal shell. He’d find it ironic but he's too apathetic to be bothered.
Time passes, days into weeks, a month. It’s easy like this, easy until there’s a blade pressed to his throat and instinct kicks in and there is a burning desire to live that consumes him.
Later, Jack is sitting next to him on his couch, a hand absently tracing patterns along his denim-clad thigh. They may as well be question marks, a constant repetition of Are you alive? until it degenerates completely. Are you? Alive? ?
It finally dawns on him that he is, in fact, alive; bruises and broken ribs don’t hurt corpses.
And all was well:
Old circumstance resumed its former show,
And on my head the dews of comfort fell
As ere my woe.
“You know,” Jack says, grinning, “you spoil me.”
“All part of the plan, sir.”
“Yeah?”
Jack props himself up on his elbows and the sheet drapes around his waist in a pool of crisp white folds. Early morning sunlight peeks through the blinds, or tries to, at any rate. Ianto smiles sleepily.
“Mmm. For world domination,” he manages through a yawn and Jack laughs as he flops back down onto the bed, pulling Ianto closer in the process.
“I’m watching you, Mr. Jones. I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every time I see you talking to Toshiko, I have to resist the urge to put us into lockdown.”
Ianto snorts and buries his face in the surprisingly soft skin of Jack’s shoulder.
I roam anew,
Scarce conscious of my late distress . . . And yet
Those backward steps through pain I cannot view
Without regret.
Suzie comes back. Jack leaves, Jack comes back. Owen dies, Owen comes back. A pattern is starting to form that makes him dizzy. And yet, it’s comforting to know that nothing is forever. Except maybe Jack, which is a comforting thought in its own right.
Ianto has a thousand excuses for not examining the reasons behind that.
The day-to-day of simple tasks and regularly-scheduled apocalypses carry him through the months until, when he tries to remember Lisa, she ends up with Jack’s laugh. And it hurts. It should hurt more, but he’s numb to it all, like he’s been anesthetized.
He’s brewing coffee when Jack rests a hand on his shoulder and unnecessarily uses him for leverage to reach the package of chocolate digestives in the cabinet. Jack leans into him a little on the downswing and the warmth of his body is soothing, alive and real. It’s started to snow outside.
Ianto takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry and thank you.”
Freezing in place, his hand still on Ianto’s shoulder, Jack turns to face him. His brow is slightly furrowed and there’s a vague, bemused smile that’s toying with his lips. Finally, he shrugs.
“You’re forgiven and you’re welcome.”
Ianto watches, his mouth slightly agape, as Jack saunters out of the kitchen and into the living room.
“Is the coffee ready yet?” Jack calls amidst the crinkling of the cellophane packaging and the underlying hum of some late night program.
Shaking himself from his thoughts (tooeasytooeasy), Ianto calls back, “Just about.”
For that dire train
Of waxing shapes and waning, passed before,
And those grim aisles, must be traversed again
To reach that door.
Seventeen minutes and twenty two seconds. That is how long it takes for Jack to come back after drowning. There is nothing to knit back into place and the water doesn’t regenerate itself back into the bay. Ianto manages to get Jack’s body to expel as much as it can, but his limbs are heavy with death and a thorough soaking.
Droplets drip from strands of Ianto’s hair; they land on his eyelashes, his nose, his cheek, his lips as he bends over Jack and wills him to wake up. Soon, because the exhaustion borne of pulling Jack from the shadowy depths of the bay is starting to weigh on him.
When Jack gasps back to life, Ianto gasps, too, with the realization that he is exactly where he started.
Jack coughs up a bit of the remaining water and looks at him. “You’re going to freeze to death. When are you going to learn that you don’t need to sacrifice yourself to save me?”
And the medicine, that bitter pill, is still circulating through his bloodstream.
The end
Author: sariagray
Characters/Pairings: Ianto/Lisa, Ianto/Jack
Word Count: ~1400
Rating: PG13
Spoilers: Through Season 2.
Warnings: Death.
Disclaimer: I do not own Torchwood. I do not make money off of Torchwood. In fact, it seems as though Torchwood owns and makes money off of ME. This is for entertainment purposes only.
Beta: analineblue
Summary: After Lisa, things don't change for Ianto. Not really.
Author’s Note: Written for the redisourcolor challenge #18. The theme is "Medicine" and the words are "tightwad," "creamy," and "babbling." The phrase is "Well then, how about you try it, and see how it goes?" The poem around which this has been written is "A Wasted Illness" by Thomas Hardy.
Of Waxing Shapes and Waning
Through vaults of pain,
Enribbed and wrought with groins of ghastliness,
I passed, and garish spectres moved my brain
To dire distress.
In the bowels of secrecy, she lays, her flesh kept from rotting by a saline drip and artificial breathing and synthesized plasma and anything else she asks for because Ianto can deny her nothing. Daily, he treads through the gates of horn and ivory, as though he’s sleepwalking, to tend to her. And she’s been slipping, slipping into the darkness with the demons that plague him.
“Don’t be such a tightwad,” Lisa chides jokingly, even though her features are contorted in pain. “Just a little more and it should work.”
Ianto hesitates. “We don’t know what it could do to you.”
“Well, then,” she insists. “Why don’t you try it, see how it goes?”
So he increases the voltage incrementally until the lines in her face ease.
“It’s good,” she whispers with the hint of a flickering smile, like the allusion of sunshine through closed blinds. “I feel strong today.”
He’s grateful that her suggestion worked, that the alterations to the current of electricity brought back the light in her eyes.
Still, every breath he takes is a breath of betrayal. His suits, his flip remarks, his carefully-wrought smiles all cut into Lisa with sharp blades. And yet, every time he follows the dank pathway to her chamber, his heart clenches uncomfortably.
Soon, he reminds himself. Soon it will all be over. He’ll nurse her back to health.
And hammerings,
And quakes, and shoots, and stifling hotness, blent
With webby waxing things and waning things
As on I went.
Sometimes Ianto’s convinced that he’s already dead, that the flames of the fallen tower have engulfed him completely. Superheated metal beams pierce through his body in his dreams and, in his nightmares, he survives.
Without Lisa, there is no purpose. He’s only allowed to live in order to save her because she is so good. Her salvation is his repentance, his final task before he can be at peace in the afterlife he’s certain he already occupies.
Other times, a large warm hand on the small of his back, a fire of another sort, and he’s absolutely aware of the life that throbs in his veins. He clings to that heat because he’s suffocating, drowning in cold, dark depths.
“You need to take better care of yourself.”
The Captain’s voice is soft and honeyed in his ear and Ianto tries so very hard not to lean towards his mouth, closer, closer, until he sinks into it, swallowed whole.
“Sleep more,” he continues. “Get some sunlight. Eat more vegetables.”
But the dead, they don’t need these things.
"Where lies the end
To this foul way?" I asked with weakening breath.
Thereon ahead I saw a door extend -
The door to death.
Hell breaks loose rather more frequently than the outside world seems to realize.
In the strange, panicked lights of the Hub, Lisa’s skin looks strange. It is no longer gleaming, creamy and smooth, but harsh and shadowed and his heart pounds with a rush of survivalist adrenaline. And Ianto has blood on his hands, too much blood. It seeps into his pores and condemns him almost as loudly as the voice in his head.
It’s a babbling voice, excusing Lisa with a thousand different pardons, all of them hollow and terrified. It questions when he wants submission, it hems and haws when he needs direction, and sometimes it frustratingly screams JackJackJack, as if that’s supposed to do anything productive.
As he drags Dr. Tanizaki’s body away, that’s exactly what the voice is saying. Maybe, just maybe, that’s where the answer lies. But it doesn’t make the burden any lighter.
It loomed more clear:
"At last!" I cried. "The all-delivering door!"
And then, I knew not how, it grew less near
Than theretofore.
It is the firm press of cool steel to his temple that eases the thrum of the pounding in his ears. Lisa is finally dead, body and mind, and spirit, too, though that was laid to rest long ago. So he’s been told. So he begins to believe.
The gun is properly cocked, the chamber clicks over, and that damned inner voice is chanting a duet of JackJackJack and Yesyesyes in the one way he never thought would happen. But it’s good, it lightens him like a strong drug. There is no more pain.
And then the gun is gone.
“Not tonight,” Jack mutters, like he’s trying to beg off of execution because of a headache. “I’m tired of people dying on my watch.”
And back slid I
Along the galleries by which I came,
And tediously the day returned, and sky,
And life--the same.
He still feels dead, hollowed out as if his organs have already gone ahead and disintegrated like the rest of him. His spirit died long ago, too - gone - and yet these people are still trying to save him like he’s worth something more than a metal shell. He’d find it ironic but he's too apathetic to be bothered.
Time passes, days into weeks, a month. It’s easy like this, easy until there’s a blade pressed to his throat and instinct kicks in and there is a burning desire to live that consumes him.
Later, Jack is sitting next to him on his couch, a hand absently tracing patterns along his denim-clad thigh. They may as well be question marks, a constant repetition of Are you alive? until it degenerates completely. Are you? Alive? ?
It finally dawns on him that he is, in fact, alive; bruises and broken ribs don’t hurt corpses.
And all was well:
Old circumstance resumed its former show,
And on my head the dews of comfort fell
As ere my woe.
“You know,” Jack says, grinning, “you spoil me.”
“All part of the plan, sir.”
“Yeah?”
Jack props himself up on his elbows and the sheet drapes around his waist in a pool of crisp white folds. Early morning sunlight peeks through the blinds, or tries to, at any rate. Ianto smiles sleepily.
“Mmm. For world domination,” he manages through a yawn and Jack laughs as he flops back down onto the bed, pulling Ianto closer in the process.
“I’m watching you, Mr. Jones. I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every time I see you talking to Toshiko, I have to resist the urge to put us into lockdown.”
Ianto snorts and buries his face in the surprisingly soft skin of Jack’s shoulder.
I roam anew,
Scarce conscious of my late distress . . . And yet
Those backward steps through pain I cannot view
Without regret.
Suzie comes back. Jack leaves, Jack comes back. Owen dies, Owen comes back. A pattern is starting to form that makes him dizzy. And yet, it’s comforting to know that nothing is forever. Except maybe Jack, which is a comforting thought in its own right.
Ianto has a thousand excuses for not examining the reasons behind that.
The day-to-day of simple tasks and regularly-scheduled apocalypses carry him through the months until, when he tries to remember Lisa, she ends up with Jack’s laugh. And it hurts. It should hurt more, but he’s numb to it all, like he’s been anesthetized.
He’s brewing coffee when Jack rests a hand on his shoulder and unnecessarily uses him for leverage to reach the package of chocolate digestives in the cabinet. Jack leans into him a little on the downswing and the warmth of his body is soothing, alive and real. It’s started to snow outside.
Ianto takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry and thank you.”
Freezing in place, his hand still on Ianto’s shoulder, Jack turns to face him. His brow is slightly furrowed and there’s a vague, bemused smile that’s toying with his lips. Finally, he shrugs.
“You’re forgiven and you’re welcome.”
Ianto watches, his mouth slightly agape, as Jack saunters out of the kitchen and into the living room.
“Is the coffee ready yet?” Jack calls amidst the crinkling of the cellophane packaging and the underlying hum of some late night program.
Shaking himself from his thoughts (tooeasytooeasy), Ianto calls back, “Just about.”
For that dire train
Of waxing shapes and waning, passed before,
And those grim aisles, must be traversed again
To reach that door.
Seventeen minutes and twenty two seconds. That is how long it takes for Jack to come back after drowning. There is nothing to knit back into place and the water doesn’t regenerate itself back into the bay. Ianto manages to get Jack’s body to expel as much as it can, but his limbs are heavy with death and a thorough soaking.
Droplets drip from strands of Ianto’s hair; they land on his eyelashes, his nose, his cheek, his lips as he bends over Jack and wills him to wake up. Soon, because the exhaustion borne of pulling Jack from the shadowy depths of the bay is starting to weigh on him.
When Jack gasps back to life, Ianto gasps, too, with the realization that he is exactly where he started.
Jack coughs up a bit of the remaining water and looks at him. “You’re going to freeze to death. When are you going to learn that you don’t need to sacrifice yourself to save me?”
And the medicine, that bitter pill, is still circulating through his bloodstream.
The end