Hearts (hand-made): 1.50 quid a piece
FESTIVE TITLE BITCHES YO: Hearts (hand-made): 1.50 quid a piece
RECIPIENT WHO HAD BETTER BE GRATEFUL BECAUSE I SPENT TIME THAT I COULD HAVE BEEN DRINKING WRITING THIS SHIT: lionessvalenti
SUMMARY: HEARTS, YEAH?
BETA: DEFINITELY NOT FOXY
RATING: FESTIVE
WARNING: IMMA REALLY CRAP WRITER AND YOU'RE ALL MUCH BETTER THAN ME
SPOILERS: JESUS PEOPLE IT'S JUST ABOUT THE TORCHWOOD TEAM DRINKING EGGNOG
DISCLAIMER: THEY'RE NOT MINE. EXCEPT WHEN THEY ARE. IN MAH PANTS.
He's cutting paper animals with scissors. Well, animals is stretching it, but he could easily point out the elephant and the tiger and the snake (he's fucking brilliant with snakes) on the desk, moving a little in the breeze coming in through the half-open tourist office door, cut from cheap copy machine paper. The scissors he uses are the small ones you get in WH Smith's at train stations where everything is downsized to travel-perfect. Their mini highlighters break his fingers and he ends up with neon yellow and green and pink over fingertips and palms as he gives the snake a pattern of office supply colours. The non-animals, the paper scraps cut away from perfection, really, sail to the floor at his feet and litter as the undergrowth of his private African jungle with wild animals. For once, Cardiff decides to comply with his fantasies, gives him the heatwave the rest of Britain has been complaining about for weeks now and makes the small office by the Bay stuffy.
Amidst paper animals, looking like he's scrapbooking for five-year olds, that's Ianto Jones. His office has an i for tourist information next to the door, and being right down from the water taxis, the odd person pokes their head in, in Hello and Do you possibly know where... or even The public restrooms, are they.... Ianto sometimes spares a half-guilty look for the postcards at the side that start to go yellow around the edges.
Heavy steps on the pier announce someone, then an ice cream cone makes it through the half-open door, followed by floral pattern and khakis, shades.
"Hello?" Ianto says, looking up in mid-cut of the next elephant's trunk (he's up to five now, building a proper herd).
"Castle," the man says, gesturing with the ice cream.
Ianto waits for further elaboration but none is forthcoming. "Cardiff Castle?"
The man grunts, tongue and lips buried in ice cream, sucking. Vanilla or lemon or whatever flavour it is runs down the cone and he catches it with his tongue.
Ianto puts down the scissors with the paper, the elephant's arse protruding, the front still stuck in the plains of white and up to the imagination, and draws the map from the far right of the counter closer to him, then beckons the man to step forward.
"Up Lloyd George Avenue here, St Mary's here, cross here and there you are," Ianto explains, one of the mini highlighters is serving to point out the trail.
"Ah," the man says, too busy with his ice cream for much more than that and, "thank you," and he turns back around, studies the postcards dated too old and stating Cardiff greets the new millenium!. It gives him a moment's pause, a catch in his sway towards the door and back out into the sun.
"Have a good day!" Ianto says, scissors back in his hand to make this elephant happen, and that releases the man from whatever niggling thought was trying to get through sunscreen and heat headache and lack of fashion sense.
The ice cream is the first to find its way out, followed by shades, then floral pattern and khakis.
Ianto likes ice cream, but he doesn't like the cones. He usually feeds those to the gulls just outside until they're circling like World War II airplanes above him, ready to attack.
"Dddddddssssssssshhhheeee ratatatata," Ianto imitates enemy fire under his breath, cutting around the tip of the elephant trunk, then, "I'm hit, I'm hit, eaaaaaaaargh shrkkk crash skrrrrrrrt." They used to play that in the playground, as kids. Well, playground, they played in Roath Park or down here by the docks where he is sitting now before Cardiff had been touristed up. It's been good, Cardiff's been good, people like it these days.
The best thing though, as Ianto finishes that second ear half hidden and around the head, freeing the elephant from the paper plains, the best thing about Cardiff is that it has aliens. Ianto gives the elephant neon pink eyes, then eyebrows with long lashes. It's a girl elephant. The boy elephants have biro eyes, that's how it works.
He sets the scissors down and leans back in his desk chair; it creaks, rolls back a little, flattening the undergrowth of paper shrubs under IKEA plastic wheels. His coffee's gone cold, but he's stopped drinking it for the taste. He sneaks up to Starbucks for that.
Ah, there's a lie.
Idle fingers, he picks up the girl elephant and gallops it over to the boys, making smoochy sounds as he presses the girl to one of the biro-eyed ones, entwining their trunks, then sets her down to have him mount her with sex noises. "Ugh ugh ugh, yeah." That kind of sex noises.
He laughs, a little subdued for propriety's sake, snorts when he notices his hips instinctively moving with his elephant sex display. The thing is, when he was five, and when he was ten, and when he went off to London at sixteen, he thought that aliens in Cardiff were the best. They used to throw stones at the sewer monsters, circling them, daring each other to go closer, closer, even closer. Nothing ever happened. Then, when he called his ma from London one night, as he was not-going to college with all the other stragglers, she told him that Daf had disappeared. It's not difficult to put two and two together.
The elephants are down to gentle humping now. They're making elephant love.
The super secret door in his office, just to the left of him, slides back and the i on the door is missing the M in front and the 5 in the back to be really cool. He has the sharpies (in travel-perfect size) to change that. Maybe later.
"Ianto!" Coat despite the heat, and a blue shirt underneath, Ianto's boss stops by the counter. Past him the others crawl up from the sewers slip through the door and outside. They're Ianto's co-workers, really, they are the M and the 5, while Ianto's office space proudly proclaims the i for ice-cream welcome, information offered. They look like danger, while Ianto is clutching his girl elephant with the long neon pink lashes.
"Sir?"
"I'll stay in touch, routine check, small blip on the radar." Ianto's boss stuffs his hands into the pockets of his trousers, scuffs his foot at the undergrowth of paper litter behind Ianto's desk. "Enjoying yourself?"
"Yes, sir. Showed someone to the castle earlier," Ianto says, and thinks vrrrrooom, ratatatatata of enemy fire as he always does when he sees his boss's military coat that he seems to wear for style.
His boss raises an eyebrow, another at the zoo animal parade that is forming on the counter under Ianto's scissors and imagination. "Are they-" he gestures at the girl elephant humping one of the tigers by Ianto's hand. Ianto looks down, slows in mid-movement.
Ianto puts the elephant down and picks up the humped tiger, holds it up in offering to his boss. Confused eyebrows ask for an explanation so, "Tiger. Rawwwr," has to do.
Ianto's boss laughs, takes the tiger and stuffs him into his pocket. "Not what I'm paying you for," he says with a grin, but pats the outside of the pocket.
"Wait, he's lonely," Ianto says, trying for earnest and thrusts the girl elephant into the pocket to the tiger.
"He'll eat her alive," Ianto's boss says and it sounds oddly foreboding.
"She's tough," Ianto replies. He might as well paint his own eyelids neon pink. He flushes red instead.
His boss grins. "Be back soon," he says and saunters out into the heat of a mid-summer afternoon in Cardiff. Vrrrrr-vrrrrr-vrrrrrrrom ratatatata ratata ratatata, Ianto thinks.
The steps disappear down the pier. Ianto gets up from his chair and walks over to the door, avoids stepping on any of the throw-away paper even and pulls the door into the lock.
His fingers sting with papercuts.
His face slides from elephant glee to neutral to something much darker. Ianto glances at the camera in one corner, the camera n the other and sags against the door, taking that one moment for something like breath in his chest, something that doesn't feel like he'll collapse to the floor any second, something that doesn't need coffee to keep going.
Then that's gone, and he leaves his scissors and the highlighters and the paper and all that there, only grabs an elephant and the snake, he likes the snake, and makes it through the secret door and down to the M and the 5 of this whole venture and down to Lisa.
Cardiff has aliens, and when Ianto was five and fifteen and even sixteen, he thought that the monsters and the aliens were what made this place special. Now he's twenty-something, feels much older and wishes he'd grown up somewhere where the world doesn't collapse into an apocalypse every other day. When he was five and fifteen he thought that heroes existed.
He works for one of them now and thinks of enemy fire whenever he sees him, and how completely fucked is that.
Lisa is his girlfriend, and sometimes now, he's not sure how much Lisa is like whatever had got Daf, and how much Lisa is like the girl he loved in London, still. Sometimes now, he's not sure he knows her. And sometimes now, sitting in the dark, away from ice cream men and directions to Cardiff Castle, and listening to the pipes down in the room he has for her, where she lives on wires and machines, sometimes now he doesn't know if he still loves her, or if she can still love him, and under the sound of lung machines and heart monitors, he wishes he didn't.
Ianto sets out the neon coloured snake between her fingers, and one of the biro-elephants. He isn't painting his lids pink for her.
She doesn't react and she doesn't wake up and she doesn't say anything to him, nothing like I love you and nothing like I need you and nothing like anything. Ianto draws hearts over the walls with his fingertips and hearts onto her skin to spell it out for her.
And sometimes she says it. Sometimes she says I love you while he is cutting pink-eyed elephants for enemy fire like a five year old believing in a war hero.
His name is Ianto, and this is Lisa, and his boss is called Jack, and they hunt aliens, except Lisa is becoming one, and it scares him. He wants to be back up with the ice cream man and the cheap directions and in the sun, and it hurts that all that is so much better than all this.
Eventually the alarm pings, announcing that M and 5 are back soon, and Lisa has not woken up and the biro-eyed elephant has slipped to the floor, and Ianto leaves it there, and he'll cry later and pick it up.
He makes it back to the sticky heat of his office with the i on the door after erasing the footage of himself crawling through the lower levels of the sewers like a monster, opens the door back up for a bit of air and the sound of people and of life. He steps around the undergrowth around his desk chair, sits, picks up the scissors and a new sheet of paper, a smile lopsided on his face as he starts on the tail-end of another elephant.
Elephants are his favorites. He's even ridden on one at the zoo when he was six or seven. His boss storms back in through the door, with the rest tagging behind and rushing past without sparing Ianto a glance. Their breeze disturbs his animals, making them flutter. Ianto's boss stops in front of Ianto before following the others down low and lower where the monsters lived. Vrrrrooom ratatata, Ianto thinks as he looks up the shirt and the coat, to the face.
"You've been crying," Ianto's boss says.
Ianto laughs, a little strained, trying for the ease of animal humping and only coming up with monsters in the dark. "Not a girl," he says, and absently, the new elephant cut out, he gives this one pink girl eyes again, hesitates on the last stroke.
"No," his boss replies.
It's not easy to say I love you amidst the monsters in his head, and Ianto knows that you don't say things like that to enemy fire.
He tries it anyway, "I love you." Because he loves monsters, and aliens, and everything that is a little broken like the undergrowth litter of throw-away paper under his desk chair he can't make himself get rid off, because it could mean something to someone.
His boss understands something, maybe, not hearts drawn on walls, and offers, "I'm sorry," but his hand is in his pocket, clutched around the tiger and the pink-eyed elephant maybe.
Ianto's boss turns and leaves and disappears down with the monsters, and Ianto finishes that last eyelash on the girl elephant and feels his forehead for the heart he must have pinned there. He feels five and fifteen when Cardiff was grand, and not twenty-something when Cardiff is more beautiful than ever and feels more ugly than it's done before.
Ianto wants someone in khakis to come in and ask for directions, and he wants ice cream without the cone, and he wants to sleep without nightmares and he wants to not think of enemy fire. Vroooom ratatatata. Mostly, Ianto wants to love someone, especially when sometimes it's so hard to love Lisa now, when he doesn't know who she is anymore. It's like loving an idea, a paper cut-out.
He's not sure if his boss is any more than that, either.
It leaves Ianto with a metaphorical heart pinned to his forehead. He almost reaches up to feel for it, but he doesn't cut out hearts, he only cuts out animals.
Sometimes, he understands those better.
RECIPIENT WHO HAD BETTER BE GRATEFUL BECAUSE I SPENT TIME THAT I COULD HAVE BEEN DRINKING WRITING THIS SHIT: lionessvalenti
SUMMARY: HEARTS, YEAH?
BETA: DEFINITELY NOT FOXY
RATING: FESTIVE
WARNING: IMMA REALLY CRAP WRITER AND YOU'RE ALL MUCH BETTER THAN ME
SPOILERS: JESUS PEOPLE IT'S JUST ABOUT THE TORCHWOOD TEAM DRINKING EGGNOG
DISCLAIMER: THEY'RE NOT MINE. EXCEPT WHEN THEY ARE. IN MAH PANTS.
He's cutting paper animals with scissors. Well, animals is stretching it, but he could easily point out the elephant and the tiger and the snake (he's fucking brilliant with snakes) on the desk, moving a little in the breeze coming in through the half-open tourist office door, cut from cheap copy machine paper. The scissors he uses are the small ones you get in WH Smith's at train stations where everything is downsized to travel-perfect. Their mini highlighters break his fingers and he ends up with neon yellow and green and pink over fingertips and palms as he gives the snake a pattern of office supply colours. The non-animals, the paper scraps cut away from perfection, really, sail to the floor at his feet and litter as the undergrowth of his private African jungle with wild animals. For once, Cardiff decides to comply with his fantasies, gives him the heatwave the rest of Britain has been complaining about for weeks now and makes the small office by the Bay stuffy.
Amidst paper animals, looking like he's scrapbooking for five-year olds, that's Ianto Jones. His office has an i for tourist information next to the door, and being right down from the water taxis, the odd person pokes their head in, in Hello and Do you possibly know where... or even The public restrooms, are they.... Ianto sometimes spares a half-guilty look for the postcards at the side that start to go yellow around the edges.
Heavy steps on the pier announce someone, then an ice cream cone makes it through the half-open door, followed by floral pattern and khakis, shades.
"Hello?" Ianto says, looking up in mid-cut of the next elephant's trunk (he's up to five now, building a proper herd).
"Castle," the man says, gesturing with the ice cream.
Ianto waits for further elaboration but none is forthcoming. "Cardiff Castle?"
The man grunts, tongue and lips buried in ice cream, sucking. Vanilla or lemon or whatever flavour it is runs down the cone and he catches it with his tongue.
Ianto puts down the scissors with the paper, the elephant's arse protruding, the front still stuck in the plains of white and up to the imagination, and draws the map from the far right of the counter closer to him, then beckons the man to step forward.
"Up Lloyd George Avenue here, St Mary's here, cross here and there you are," Ianto explains, one of the mini highlighters is serving to point out the trail.
"Ah," the man says, too busy with his ice cream for much more than that and, "thank you," and he turns back around, studies the postcards dated too old and stating Cardiff greets the new millenium!. It gives him a moment's pause, a catch in his sway towards the door and back out into the sun.
"Have a good day!" Ianto says, scissors back in his hand to make this elephant happen, and that releases the man from whatever niggling thought was trying to get through sunscreen and heat headache and lack of fashion sense.
The ice cream is the first to find its way out, followed by shades, then floral pattern and khakis.
Ianto likes ice cream, but he doesn't like the cones. He usually feeds those to the gulls just outside until they're circling like World War II airplanes above him, ready to attack.
"Dddddddssssssssshhhheeee ratatatata," Ianto imitates enemy fire under his breath, cutting around the tip of the elephant trunk, then, "I'm hit, I'm hit, eaaaaaaaargh shrkkk crash skrrrrrrrt." They used to play that in the playground, as kids. Well, playground, they played in Roath Park or down here by the docks where he is sitting now before Cardiff had been touristed up. It's been good, Cardiff's been good, people like it these days.
The best thing though, as Ianto finishes that second ear half hidden and around the head, freeing the elephant from the paper plains, the best thing about Cardiff is that it has aliens. Ianto gives the elephant neon pink eyes, then eyebrows with long lashes. It's a girl elephant. The boy elephants have biro eyes, that's how it works.
He sets the scissors down and leans back in his desk chair; it creaks, rolls back a little, flattening the undergrowth of paper shrubs under IKEA plastic wheels. His coffee's gone cold, but he's stopped drinking it for the taste. He sneaks up to Starbucks for that.
Ah, there's a lie.
Idle fingers, he picks up the girl elephant and gallops it over to the boys, making smoochy sounds as he presses the girl to one of the biro-eyed ones, entwining their trunks, then sets her down to have him mount her with sex noises. "Ugh ugh ugh, yeah." That kind of sex noises.
He laughs, a little subdued for propriety's sake, snorts when he notices his hips instinctively moving with his elephant sex display. The thing is, when he was five, and when he was ten, and when he went off to London at sixteen, he thought that aliens in Cardiff were the best. They used to throw stones at the sewer monsters, circling them, daring each other to go closer, closer, even closer. Nothing ever happened. Then, when he called his ma from London one night, as he was not-going to college with all the other stragglers, she told him that Daf had disappeared. It's not difficult to put two and two together.
The elephants are down to gentle humping now. They're making elephant love.
The super secret door in his office, just to the left of him, slides back and the i on the door is missing the M in front and the 5 in the back to be really cool. He has the sharpies (in travel-perfect size) to change that. Maybe later.
"Ianto!" Coat despite the heat, and a blue shirt underneath, Ianto's boss stops by the counter. Past him the others crawl up from the sewers slip through the door and outside. They're Ianto's co-workers, really, they are the M and the 5, while Ianto's office space proudly proclaims the i for ice-cream welcome, information offered. They look like danger, while Ianto is clutching his girl elephant with the long neon pink lashes.
"Sir?"
"I'll stay in touch, routine check, small blip on the radar." Ianto's boss stuffs his hands into the pockets of his trousers, scuffs his foot at the undergrowth of paper litter behind Ianto's desk. "Enjoying yourself?"
"Yes, sir. Showed someone to the castle earlier," Ianto says, and thinks vrrrrooom, ratatatatata of enemy fire as he always does when he sees his boss's military coat that he seems to wear for style.
His boss raises an eyebrow, another at the zoo animal parade that is forming on the counter under Ianto's scissors and imagination. "Are they-" he gestures at the girl elephant humping one of the tigers by Ianto's hand. Ianto looks down, slows in mid-movement.
Ianto puts the elephant down and picks up the humped tiger, holds it up in offering to his boss. Confused eyebrows ask for an explanation so, "Tiger. Rawwwr," has to do.
Ianto's boss laughs, takes the tiger and stuffs him into his pocket. "Not what I'm paying you for," he says with a grin, but pats the outside of the pocket.
"Wait, he's lonely," Ianto says, trying for earnest and thrusts the girl elephant into the pocket to the tiger.
"He'll eat her alive," Ianto's boss says and it sounds oddly foreboding.
"She's tough," Ianto replies. He might as well paint his own eyelids neon pink. He flushes red instead.
His boss grins. "Be back soon," he says and saunters out into the heat of a mid-summer afternoon in Cardiff. Vrrrrr-vrrrrr-vrrrrrrrom ratatatata ratata ratatata, Ianto thinks.
The steps disappear down the pier. Ianto gets up from his chair and walks over to the door, avoids stepping on any of the throw-away paper even and pulls the door into the lock.
His fingers sting with papercuts.
His face slides from elephant glee to neutral to something much darker. Ianto glances at the camera in one corner, the camera n the other and sags against the door, taking that one moment for something like breath in his chest, something that doesn't feel like he'll collapse to the floor any second, something that doesn't need coffee to keep going.
Then that's gone, and he leaves his scissors and the highlighters and the paper and all that there, only grabs an elephant and the snake, he likes the snake, and makes it through the secret door and down to the M and the 5 of this whole venture and down to Lisa.
Cardiff has aliens, and when Ianto was five and fifteen and even sixteen, he thought that the monsters and the aliens were what made this place special. Now he's twenty-something, feels much older and wishes he'd grown up somewhere where the world doesn't collapse into an apocalypse every other day. When he was five and fifteen he thought that heroes existed.
He works for one of them now and thinks of enemy fire whenever he sees him, and how completely fucked is that.
Lisa is his girlfriend, and sometimes now, he's not sure how much Lisa is like whatever had got Daf, and how much Lisa is like the girl he loved in London, still. Sometimes now, he's not sure he knows her. And sometimes now, sitting in the dark, away from ice cream men and directions to Cardiff Castle, and listening to the pipes down in the room he has for her, where she lives on wires and machines, sometimes now he doesn't know if he still loves her, or if she can still love him, and under the sound of lung machines and heart monitors, he wishes he didn't.
Ianto sets out the neon coloured snake between her fingers, and one of the biro-elephants. He isn't painting his lids pink for her.
She doesn't react and she doesn't wake up and she doesn't say anything to him, nothing like I love you and nothing like I need you and nothing like anything. Ianto draws hearts over the walls with his fingertips and hearts onto her skin to spell it out for her.
And sometimes she says it. Sometimes she says I love you while he is cutting pink-eyed elephants for enemy fire like a five year old believing in a war hero.
His name is Ianto, and this is Lisa, and his boss is called Jack, and they hunt aliens, except Lisa is becoming one, and it scares him. He wants to be back up with the ice cream man and the cheap directions and in the sun, and it hurts that all that is so much better than all this.
Eventually the alarm pings, announcing that M and 5 are back soon, and Lisa has not woken up and the biro-eyed elephant has slipped to the floor, and Ianto leaves it there, and he'll cry later and pick it up.
He makes it back to the sticky heat of his office with the i on the door after erasing the footage of himself crawling through the lower levels of the sewers like a monster, opens the door back up for a bit of air and the sound of people and of life. He steps around the undergrowth around his desk chair, sits, picks up the scissors and a new sheet of paper, a smile lopsided on his face as he starts on the tail-end of another elephant.
Elephants are his favorites. He's even ridden on one at the zoo when he was six or seven. His boss storms back in through the door, with the rest tagging behind and rushing past without sparing Ianto a glance. Their breeze disturbs his animals, making them flutter. Ianto's boss stops in front of Ianto before following the others down low and lower where the monsters lived. Vrrrrooom ratatata, Ianto thinks as he looks up the shirt and the coat, to the face.
"You've been crying," Ianto's boss says.
Ianto laughs, a little strained, trying for the ease of animal humping and only coming up with monsters in the dark. "Not a girl," he says, and absently, the new elephant cut out, he gives this one pink girl eyes again, hesitates on the last stroke.
"No," his boss replies.
It's not easy to say I love you amidst the monsters in his head, and Ianto knows that you don't say things like that to enemy fire.
He tries it anyway, "I love you." Because he loves monsters, and aliens, and everything that is a little broken like the undergrowth litter of throw-away paper under his desk chair he can't make himself get rid off, because it could mean something to someone.
His boss understands something, maybe, not hearts drawn on walls, and offers, "I'm sorry," but his hand is in his pocket, clutched around the tiger and the pink-eyed elephant maybe.
Ianto's boss turns and leaves and disappears down with the monsters, and Ianto finishes that last eyelash on the girl elephant and feels his forehead for the heart he must have pinned there. He feels five and fifteen when Cardiff was grand, and not twenty-something when Cardiff is more beautiful than ever and feels more ugly than it's done before.
Ianto wants someone in khakis to come in and ask for directions, and he wants ice cream without the cone, and he wants to sleep without nightmares and he wants to not think of enemy fire. Vroooom ratatatata. Mostly, Ianto wants to love someone, especially when sometimes it's so hard to love Lisa now, when he doesn't know who she is anymore. It's like loving an idea, a paper cut-out.
He's not sure if his boss is any more than that, either.
It leaves Ianto with a metaphorical heart pinned to his forehead. He almost reaches up to feel for it, but he doesn't cut out hearts, he only cuts out animals.
Sometimes, he understands those better.