unmikely

unmikely @ 2008-11-02T06:24:00

2008-11-02T14:26:49Z

Yes, hello, my time zones are all backwards. Damned Rift.

For lack of intergalactic parlance, humans called it The Amplifier. A Miakkian Amplifier, to be specific, constructed by the microscopic species in order to communicate with races of larger auditory or visual speakers. An entire colony of Miakkians could live comfortably on the surface of the device, which by human standards measured less than a cubic centimetre.

-.-.-.-.

It was something that he would have worn in his old life, back when he had Lisa. Just a black cord necklace with a small, modern-looking cube of polished gray metal. It would have rested perfectly at his throat, framed by open collar, back before the suits, the armour, the calculated clean-cut veneer. Back before undressing the overdressed became the definition of seduction in his world.

Now there was Jack and a nervous reevaluation of himself. A new mind for self-preservation, no more youthful headlong fumbling into things. Ianto was artfully partitioned, unaffected at the outermost layers, closed off to so much that there was no reason for a sentimental piece of cheap jewelry to catch his eye. But it had. So he'd bought it.

-.-.-.-.

Jack's left hand slid down his neck, from jaw to shoulder, fingers tracing the precise squared line of his haircut. Jack's voice, low and warm.

“Feel like putting in a little overtime?”

Ianto blushed automatically, as if just realizing the nature of the pose; bent at the waist, weight braced on hands, reading sidelong over Jack's shoulder. A slight cant in his hips would change the picture significantly. He looked at Jack's other wrist, laid flat on the blotter; his watch, it was quite late. Ianto relaxed. He bent a knee to loom just slightly closer, leaning into Jack's touch.

“Didn't we talk about office euphemism?”

Jack chuckled. “Right. Sorry. I forgot.”

“And there's nothing little about my overtime,” Ianto muttered.

Jack grinned and turned his chair so he could almost look at Ianto face to face, the movement drawing his hand around and over Ianto's throat. He pulled a little at the tie. Thumb and index finger slid under the knot, but uncharacteristically, Ianto had left the top button undone. Fingertips lingered, eventually catching at something under the fabric there.

“What's this?”

Ianto stiffened. He had forgotten about his purchase earlier in the day.

“I wouldn't know in 51st Century terms, but around here we call it...” Ianto paused for sarcastic effect. “A necklace.”

Jack tugged more insistently at the tie, pulling Ianto closer. Off-balance, Ianto gripped Jack's knees to steady himself.

“Pretty,” said Jack when he had the tie dangling loose and the next button of Ianto's shirt undone. The small metallic cube glinted from the desk lamp. Jack put his thumb on it, pressed, and watched the square indentation fade from the hollow of Ianto's throat. “Do these necklaces you speak of serve any special purpose, or are they just decorative?”

Ianto swallowed hard, the press and release of Jack's thumb distracting him in unexpected ways. Using the lapse in concentration to his advantage, Jack grabbed one of Ianto's wrists and spun the younger man into his lap. Flustered, Ianto struggled back to his feet.

“Just... decorative,” he said, smoothing over his jacket. “And perhaps... sentimental,” he added after a small pause.

Jack let it go at that. The familiar weight of Ianto's sentimental attachments. The cinema, comic books and certain songs from before Ianto's time. Jack leaves it all alone. Sometimes it's best for someone like Ianto to latch on to a few novelty-type things. They tend to last longest.

unmikely @ 2008-03-27T19:57:00

2008-03-28T03:03:42Z

Title: Innovative
Author: Unmikely
Rating: Fairly mild?
Warnings: Minor spoiler for Adrift.
Characters: Jack/Ianto
Disclaimer: I own nothing. It is all for fun.
Note: A lot of people were concerned about the timing of Ianto's "coffee break". I don't know what it says about me, but it never even occured to me that this wasn't the reason...

Ianto is impervious to the effects of caffeine by now, so it's not the late hour and concern for his sleep patterns that bothers jack. It is, rather, the blasé way in which Ianto takes coffee breaks in the middle of what he might, if pressed, refer to as dabbling.

Bleary eyed and satiated, collapsed with Jack on the floor of the armoury, it looked like he was struck by a jolt of electricity, the way he sat up suddenly, posture crisp as ever, and murmured something about coffee. He had his trousers back on and one arm in his shirt before Jack could process what was happening.

“Ianto,” he called across the Hub, but by then steam was building in the coffee machine and he went unheard. He paused briefly to consider dressing, but opted against it, the concrete floor of the armoury was okay on bare feet, and he hoped he didn't have to cross the metal grating to the coffee station before catching Ianto's attention. Standing at the door, he yelled louder, and this time Ianto held up one hand dismissively, stirring something into his drink with the other. Jack was ready to yell again when the young man finally turned back towards him.

“Oh no no,” warned the Captain as the other man approached. “You finish your coffee over there.”

Scalding liquids and naked bodies did not mix as far as Jack was concerned, but Ianto just smiled sweetly and moved closer. He played out one of those corny expressions from television advertisements as he stalked nearer, two hands on the mug, leaning in and inhaling coffee aroma with a dramatic sigh. Jack put his hands on his hips and shook his head.

“Coffee break is over,” he commanded, though he had yet to see Ianto take a single sip of his drink. They were standing toe-to-toe in the doorway to the armaments storage by then. Well-warmed fingers caught the underside of Jack's chin.

“Jack.” Ianto stared patiently at the other man, as if waiting for some as yet unshared epiphany to dawn on him.

“Mm?”

Ianto kissed him, pointedly drawing Jack's tongue into his mouth before breaking away. It wasn't fair, Ianto's eyes were clear to Jack's suddenly lust-blurred gaze. And he still held that damned cup of coffee off to one side.

“Jack,” he said again, waiting for Jack's focus to sharpen before raising his cup between them and taking a long drink. Jack frowned until Ianto kissed him again, the same tongue-pulling, pressurized move from before, only this time his mouth held some delicious magical heat, drawing Jack onto the balls of his feet, towards the warmth, blood flowing to his lips and mouth with a harsh groan.

“Oh,” he said when Ianto pulled away to sip at his coffee some more. And again when Ianto dropped to his knees. “Ohhh.”

unmikely @ 2008-03-06T15:35:00

2008-03-06T23:37:35Z

Can now be reached at morethanmikely on IM for your convenience.

....Or for my convenience. I still need those recs, people.

unmikely @ 2008-03-06T15:22:00

2008-03-06T23:30:56Z

Helloooo. Remember me? I just survived the flu from hell. I exist! ...albeit at 20 lbs lighter than I had been. I can even read the computer screen now without swimmy eye and nausea action, so rec me anything good that I missed in the last week or so up to Tuesday. I tried to keep up, really I did. And if I spoke any nonsense to anyone, I claim no responsibility. Ahem. So, trying to get back into the swing of things...

Title: untitled
Author: Unmikely
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers up to 2-09
Characters: The TW team members with no lives (in some cases more literally than others), Gwen and Jack also mentioned.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. It is all for fun.
Note: This is for the angst puppies reading too deeply into certain Gwack versus Janto moments. ;)

They’ve started to meet at Owen’s place, tired of pubs and clubs. Tired of floating through crowds of normal people out with normal friends in normal engagements. Besides, Owen doesn’t eat anymore, so his refrigerator has a lot of room for beer. And if Tosh and Ianto absentmindedly tidy up while they all lounge around the living area, Owen is not going to complain.

The night of Gwen’s wedding is a no brainer. After depositing alien remains and data for tomorrow’s reports, they even carpool to Owen’s flat directly from the Hub. If Jack knows where they go these nights, he doesn’t show it. Too busy being preoccupied, brooding… only Ianto is permitted to joke about it, and when he does it’s generally in self defence. At any rate, the three of them know when to make themselves scarce.

DJ Ianto has a solid head start on the drinking, he’s only good for it with a few drinks in him after all, but Tosh is customarily efficient when it comes to equalling that particular score. Owen is of course sober, but subscribes to the theory that water will find its own level, and when the telltale sarcastic and dulled banter of the drunk emerges, he suffers a kind of contact high.

The only problem with Owen’s place, as far as Ianto is concerned, is the lack of drink coasters. Tosh sets her bottle down on the coffee table, end tables and kitchen counter indiscriminately, but Ianto is forced to nurse his bottle more closely, for lack of a resting place that meets his standards. Though he can’t imagine Owen would mind rings on the coffee table; Tosh, a compulsive label peeler, has wallpapered its surface over the last weeks with various ale iconography.

“For God’s sake, Ianto. Just put it down already,” Owen finally scolds him.

There’s a moment of surreal tension before Ianto settles on placing the sweating bottle down on the coffee table, centered on top of a month-old newspaper, a compromise of sensibilities.

Tosh watches this from the edge of the couch where she’s curled up, no glasses, her hair tucked behind her ears. They stick out. She’s beautiful in ways Owen never used to understand back when he could have acted on it. She keeps trying to talk, though; forever looking to attach meaning to things, and if she doesn’t cut it out soon, Owen is going to cut her down just to make her stop.

“The pity in her voice,” Tosh continues, slurring. She’s definitely caught Ianto up in the drinking race. “Like she didn’t expect me to be happy for her considering… But of course it’s fantastic that she can… But then why should she get to…”

“I like weddings,” Ianto interrupts firmly, in the resolute tone of the drunk. It’s a toss up who is more relieved to hear his voice cutting off Tosh’s.

“Nobody likes weddings,” Owen informs him, smoothing down where Tosh’s most recent label is trying to curl back off the table.

“But I do,” Ianto sighs.

And Owen believes him, sort of. It’s not the weddings themselves, or the movies, the pubs or any of the other real world things. It’s them. He remembers a few days ago, Jack handing Tosh a piece of space detritus and demanding a full diagnostic report. But how do I interface with it, she’d asked. Because it looked rather like a whitewashed lump of coal.

“We’re smart,” Tosh announces, suddenly enough that it causes the others to stare at her.

“I mean, we’re brilliant. Why is it we can’t figure this out?”

How do any of them interface with any of it, knowing what they know?

Owen can’t handle her pleading tone, so he gets her a fresh drink and hopes she’ll be dropping off soon. He subtly draws a throw and cushion closer to her end of the couch. Ianto will take the smaller sofa, a poor fit, but he only sleeps for an hour or two before running home to change his suit anyway.

The blanket trick works so quickly that Owen winds up pouring her untouched drink down the kitchen sink. By the time he’s back to tuck her in properly, Ianto has gone horizontal across from her as well. Tea boy in repose. But the soft blue glow peaking out of his pocket indicates the presence of his mobile, at Jack’s beck and call in an instant.

It’s not a life, exactly, but it’s something, this thing Jack has tried to give him. He hasn’t missed how Tosh sometimes has trouble looking at him now. He hasn’t missed Ianto’s wondering admiration. So Jack wasn’t ready to give up on Owen yet. When did he give up on them?

Did she say 27?

2008-02-21T14:25:28Z

This:

is not the face of a 27 year old man.

~~At least I really hope it's not.~~

~~Unless he was previously dead and mummified.~~

unmikely @ 2008-02-17T09:37:00

2008-02-17T17:41:03Z

Title/Prompt: Navigation
Author: Unmikely
Rating: PG
Warnings: Nada
Characters: Whole team, Jack/Ianto implied.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. It is all for fun.
Note: Late valentine's day story, written to fill a spot on my prompt table.

06.Navigation

It's not that Owen doesn't get enough abuse from the girls, it's just that in all honesty he loves the attention from them. He loves the arguments and the doubting. It allows him an extra bit of drama when he gets something exactly right.

Ianto's taken a different, and, naturally, quieter tack. Owen likes to remind them all, though they've never said otherwise, that he is a brilliant physician and scientist. And it's following these loud, often derogatory reminders, that Ianto likes to stand very close to the brilliant Dr. Harper. Because Ianto is tall. And Owen is not. Smiling politely down on Owen's head and agreeing with everything he has to say is a sort of twisted warfare that only Jack ever seems to pick up on.

Something strikes Owen about the navigation system they salvaged earlier in the day. Tosh spends hours trying to interface with it using a variety of energy forms, electric charges and light patterns, anything to get a reaction. She refuses to touch the artifact with her own hands, though it seems harmless. Jack swears if they can figure out how to turn it on, he'll be able to adapt it for monitoring uses. Gwen makes a remark about Jack's declining prowess at turning things on, and something clicks with Owen.

Snagging a passing Ianto by the elbow, Owen arranges the team, save Jack who is lurking somewhere in the back half of his office. He directs Tosh to her chair and Gwen into his own, before standing Ianto down the steps near the cog door.

“Okay watch this,” he announces, and places the shiny metal cube of the navigation system in Ianto's hesitant arms.

“I don't think this is a good idea,” starts Ianto. “Couldn't we try this with Jack first?”

Owen laughs. “Definitely not. Too many variables.”

Ianto fidgets uncomfortably for a while while Owen glances around, making sure everyone remains in their places.

“It's getting warm,” Ianto says nervously, only to be waved off.

“Ah, good. I was starting to worry you were too much a cold fish.” Owen ignores Ianto's look and projects a hushed instruction to Gwen. “Call Jack out here,” he says.

“Oi! Jack! Owen wants you,” Gwen bellows, without looking up from the magazine folded out across her desk. Ianto cringes, holding a potentially harmful alien artifact and wondering why Owen only just now thought it prudent to call in the immortal man. Jack swaggers to the doorway, leans against the frame and shoots a lascivious smile at Gwen.

“Well of course Owen wants...”

He's interrupted as a spiralling magenta beam surges out of the artifact in Ianto's hands and illuminates the centre of his chest. Tosh and Gwen startle to their feet and step as far away from the path of the pinkish light as they can manage and Owen looks on proudly. In the same space, Jack fires a glare at Owen and a concerned look at Ianto, who's mouth is dropped open, eyes wide.

“You okay?”

Ianto, relieved that the beam does not appear to be hurting the captain, shuts his mouth and nods slowly.

“You can probably set that down, then,” Jack informs him. Ianto does so, all too happy to set it on the floor and step away. The moment the box is out of his hands, the beam disappears as suddenly as it had appeared.

“Remember that thing we found in the drainage gutter in Splott? Looked like a big gray brick?” Owen crows, his voice on the brink of gleeful laughter.

Jack nods in understanding. “The Braxtonian navigation pulser. This must be an older model. I've never seen one like it before.”

Gwen looks confused and stares at the box near Ianto's feet. “So that beam was what exactly?”

Tosh smiles suddenly. “Braxtonian navigation! Connects two beings and delineates a path connecting them...”

“Via the power of attraction!” Owen finishes, clearly pleased with his discovery.

Jack's learing smile is back on his face and Gwen and Tosh share a look of “how adorable”. Ianto's face is roughly the same colour as the Braxtonian beam, but he manages to maintain a blank expression as he goes to stand closer to Owen. The rest of the team has gone silent, awaiting what is certain to be brutal revenge. But Ianto only stands close to Owen and looks down at him, bringing one hand up to pat the shorter man gently on the top of the head and wanders off.

“Owen?” Gwen asks after a moment. “When you took the device down to the weevil vaults for testing...”

unmikely @ 2008-02-17T07:53:00

2008-02-17T15:56:06Z

Some abandonned fic pieces. I ended up writing from a completely different vantage point so none of this fits anymore.

Within the Christmas tree shaped hierarchy at Torchwood London, Sam Sutton was the furthest needle on the lowest bough. He was assigned to ten project groups, five recovery teams, and was even beholden to the lower levels of the accounting department. He might, in fact, have been more like the dried up needles that fall forgotten to the floor underneath the presents and cause house fires. But Sam was a cheerful kind of guy, and even though all twenty four of his immediate superiors routinely forgot his name, they were always happy to see him.

Ianto Jones knew everybody’s name. He acknowledged everyone, regardless of rank, with the same level of breezy efficiency and effortless manners. Such was his professionalism that nobody had dared believe the rumour that he was in a relationship with someone from another project group until gift-wrapped cleaning products began arriving for him via the internal post.

He almost never saw Sam, except to receive deliveries of copy paper and biros from general supply, reams of interoffice memos still warm from the Xerox, and occasionally, a bottle of all-purpose cleaner with jaunty bow and inside joke sticky-noted to the side. Each interaction ended in precisely the same manner, Ianto calling “Thank you Sam” while each rushed off to his next bit of work.

Afterwards, Ianto would think it strange that Sam was among the first of the images to come to him, faces and personalities scraping painfully across his memory to be filed as lost.

~*~*~*~

When Jack had been gone for a week, Ianto put the watch, still counting, into a size two hazard containment box. He put the the box on Jack's chair and sat down on the floor by the desk to rest. It was before the team had started to realize how much time he spent alone in the Hub after hours, and he was more than a little bit drunk.

Gwen rousted him the next morning, frantically pulling on his clothes and telling him he had to leave right fucking now, there was a bomb on Jack's chair. Ianto hadn't even noticed how much the watch's persistent ticking was echoed in the box. It always sounded that loud and ominous to him.

The amplified stopwatch had been the first of a few embarrassing explanations Ianto was forced to make to the team, most of which were summed up as not having a life outside of work. Work, they would say, never Jack, because nobody wanted to admit they gave anything up for the man who abandoned them.

There were times when Ianto couldn't make himself leave the Hub at all, for days at a go and the others were surprisingly accommodating. Owen went around to Ianto's place and brought back half his clothes during a particularly long stretch and Tosh reprogrammed the stasis settings in the Hub to keep it warm at night. For her part, Gwen occasionally brought them all meals from home and had things been going better at work, there would have been a lot of jokes about stealing her boyfriend away for his culinary skills.

Truthfully, they all spent a lot more time at the Hub, rebuilding what they could and cordoning off what they couldn't make safe. They managed to guilt Gwen into going home to Rhys as often as possible but she'd taken it on herself to organize the rebuilding efforts and she was happiest when she felt she was being helpful. The Rift was quiet, and they ignored any calls that could be explained away by Owen's “The People of Wales are Insane” theory. Tosh spent two decontamination days living in the conference room after wandering into a damaged section of the archives without proper protective gear. Owen found the missing weevil in Sub-basement Four when it tore off a chunk of his forearm one evening. The Hub was home, even more than usual, and Ianto couldn't say he minded the company.

With Jack gone, they started experimenting with different coffee blends, different take-away food and different work styles. They strayed from traditions where they could and clung to them where they felt shaky.

Despite being relieved of his errand boy status, Ianto still went to the organic market for coffee beans and sandwiches every second Tuesday, just like he had when Jack was there, because nobody told him to stop. And when there was too much food for four people, they all helped clear up so nobody was left staring at Jack's uneaten share. Ianto didn't like to leave the Hub for the same reason he always brought an extra sandwich. He didn't assume Jack would come back, but he didn't want to be caught off guard if it happened. Every second Tuesday he went to the organic market and didn't expect to be surprised. Until he was.

He had finally stopped looking for glimpses of the coat dipping behind shins in a crowd or the tips of spiky brown hair on a head that was tall, but not too tall. He was finally starting to notice other things. The girl at the sandwich counter smiling at him in a more than friendly fashion, the couple that met in the street with a hug, the familiar-looking young man drinking coffee in the cafe, watching Ianto pick up his order.

Watching? Decidedly, Ianto realized, and he tried to place the man's face. He was smaller, skinny. About Owen's size with some of the angles smoothed over. Dark hair, plain features with the exception of a mouth even Jack would admire. His eyes flicked back towards Ianto at the wrong time and they were caught staring at one another. Ianto nodded once, in case he was supposed to know the man from somewhere, but ducked out the moment his order was handed over. There was always a chance the people he recognized were Retcon cases or at least persuasion jobs, though Ianto felt mildly nauseous if this meant he'd finally lied to enough people over the years that he'd stopped remembering their faces.

Mind reeling, trying to place the face from the shop, Ianto didn't realize how far he'd walked until he wound up stranded on a curb during a traffic light. Looking back over the pedestrian crowd behind him, he thought for a moment he saw the man again. Frowning, he straightened up and tried to see over the nearest faces, but the light changed and he had to finish crossing. He'd not taken five more steps before a nervous feeling overtook him. He flipped out his mobile and, shifting the carry bags to one hand, auto-dialled Tosh.

The CCTV search didn't pick anything up, but he started a long detour anyways, Owen and Gwen picking up tailing him until they all decided either the cafe guy gave up or was never following Ianto in the first place. Just to be sure, Gwen and Owen disappeared over a certain paving stone and Ianto let himself into the Tourist Office, freeing his hands by setting down the bags the moment he was inside and moving his gun out from his jacket to his belt. A quick look back through the door, scanning street level for feet, then he closed the door, locked up and headed downstairs with lunch.

"I'm sorry," he told the others, even as he laid out their food for them and served drinks, but Gwen and Owen waved it off and Toshiko was just happy to have been able to really test their renewed CCTV connections for the first time in weeks. They settled down for lunch in the new quiet way they'd developed. Without Jack's raucous storytelling, their meal breaks had turned into a kind of meditative silence, with over-ritualized politeness that paid tribute to Ianto's ways more than anything. If they'd each taken over some of the vacant leadership role, this was the part that belong to Ianto, reflection and civilized discussion.

"Did you get much of a look at him? Could you describe him?" Gwen asked.

Ianto deflected the question and although he still thought differently, he suggested it was just stress and an overactive imagination playing tricks on him.

"I could look back to the footage from right before you called," Tosh offered, but again Ianto eased them off the topic, though he was honestly relieved at how easily they believed him.

While they were clearing up, Owen asked him if he'd be in the archives for the afternoon. The cameras were spotty from all the electrical damage to the Hub and too many things had shaken loose for anyone to stray too far without safety precautions. If Ianto had said yes, they would have had him checking in every half hour.

"I think I need to stay topside for a while," Ianto said, however, and Owen nodded, looking somewhat relieved.

The tourist information desk actually had some of the more impressive high-tech gadgetry; monitoring systems that mimicked the look of the desk's natural wood surface from every angle but Ianto's, voice-activated security features, and a number of other items that meant Ianto could work on classified files in relative security above the ground. It allowed him to lose himself in the paperwork, a fate worse than death as far as Owen was concerned, but Ianto found it relaxing. Even with the overcast sky and the sub-street level bearings, the office felt different than the rest of the underground lair of the Hub, and it was his, really. They always let him have that space.

Most of the paperwork of late was as earthbound as anything they deal with at Torchwood Three. Truthfully, Ianto's work usually was. Requisitions forms and finances-- the guideline was up to two decimal places and the document belongs on Ianto's desk, anything more finite was Tosh's realm, although she delegated a fair share of paperwork to Ianto as well.

After a soothing hour or so of paperwork, Ianto unlocked the door and pulled it open a few inches. He wouldn't be able to keep it that way for long. The air inside the Tourist office was stale but at least it was warm. The wind sweeping off the Bay and through Mermaid Quay was another story. He stood just inside the doorway and took a few breaths of fresh air until a pamphlet or two shuddered and threatened to leave the wall display.

Stretching his neck a little he contemplated making Owen do a workstation ergonomics report. It's in Owen's employment contract, or at least it's in the contract Ianto made up and told him he'd agreed to, but Ianto likes to avoid anything that calls attention to the sedate nature of his work. A sore back from slouching over procurement forms would be far too much fodder for Owen.

It was a subtle shift in air pressure that grabbed Ianto's attention, not a noise, which was unusual since his best and simplest security measure has always been the series of loud chimes hanging off the tourist office door. He could have sworn someone had entered, but of course it was impossible, so with a shake of his head, he turned to answer the instant message that popped up on his screen. Gwen, about to leave for home.

IANTO: Give me a moment to sync up the feeds. I'll give you a CCTV escort to your car.
GWEN: Still on-edge then?
IANTO: Strange feeling. Might just be the weather.
GWEN: Try sleep, Ianto.

He smiled and held back the standard “how would you know anything about sleep” in favour of a short “goodnight” and pulled up the three camera views Tosh had shortcut to everyone's desktop. He watched Gwen step off the paving stone and start across the Plass before he caught some movement in the office with the corner of his eye. Without moving from the shoulders up, he moved a hand towards the shelf to his right under the desk, wrapped his fingers around the cold steel of his gun and tried to look calm as he watched Gwen get into her car safely. With his other hand he tapped a short combination of keys and initiated a level three scan of the office. It would alert Owen and Tosh down in the Hub as well as pick up anything out of place.

There was a lone rat skulking along the outside wall of the tourist office, the only thing picked up by the scan, but just as Ianto was about to send an all-clear message to the others, the man from the cafe stepped forward as if materializing out of smoke. For a split second, Ianto thought about playing it cool, sticking to his tourist office script. Can I help you find anything? Tosh would come up from the Hub and Owen would take the lift out to the Plas and circle the long way around. Back-up was as close as that, but anything that could bypass a level three scan was serious. Ianto stood and raised his gun, so fast that his chair fell over behind him.

“Who are you? How did you...”

The man wavered in front of Ianto, glinting like a mirage. He heard Owen hit the loose plank outside and stop, heard a muted version of Tosh's comms voice in the corridor behind the door to the Hub, and was hit with a sudden flash of recognition.

“Sam?”

The figure of the man seemed to smile at Ianto's stuttered acknowledgement before flickering away to nothing just as the locks on the front door magically clicked open and Owen burst in, Tosh appearing in the other doorway a second later. Guns raised, they swept their focus methodically across the room.

“What is it? Where’s it gone?” Owen shouted at Ianto without looking his way. The man was gone and Ianto was too stunned to answer.

“Ianto” Tosh began in a gentler voice, but kept her gun trained at chest height, kill zone for any human and most alien threats. “Are you okay?”

He blinked twice, mouth still open, waiting for the image to reappear, but he somehow knew that Sam had gone.

“I... I’m sorry,” he muttered finally. “I think it was a false alarm.”

~*~*~*~

“Go home,” Owen said, after a while.

Tosh was running energy readings on the Hub and surroundings, down to the smallest levels, including static electricity. Owen had done five layers of bioscans only to discover that an ordinary earth-species rat had probably lurked outside the tourist office around the time Ianto called in the cavalry. Ianto had tried to denounce the whole thing as shot nerves after a long day or possibly too much coffee, as if the very concept of over-caffeination wasn’t ludicrous to him. Owen had even made two failed attempts to scan Ianto for brain damage without his knowledge. And then Owen decided that he would be in charge for a moment.

“Go home, Tosh. Go home, Owen. Go home, Ianto,” Owen repeated. ”Especially go home Ianto.”

Tosh snorted and exchanged a look with Ianto that clearly said “Just this once we’ll let him pretend we care what he says.” But she wasn’t one to look a gift horse in any of its major orifices, and she grabbed her coat before hurrying for the door.

unmikely @ 2008-02-14T15:34:00

2008-02-14T23:38:08Z

Dubyateaeff. I don't get it. Who's going to retcon Rhys? Wouldn't he remember the day his woman forgot he existed? Someone either explain what I obviously missed or don't understand or write me some Rhys fiction that explains it?

unmikely @ 2008-02-06T06:49:00

2008-02-06T14:55:18Z

Title: Folded
Author: Unmikely
Rating: PG
Warnings: Nada
Characters: Owencentric. Though I tried desperately to Iantofy
Disclaimer: I own nothing. It is all for fun.
Note: 1.Planes. 2.Rifts, flying into. Yes, it is as heavy handed as it gets.

Jack has a quirky sort of fondness for Owen's skillfully crafted paper planes. He outwardly marvels at the accuracy in the tiny reproductions, acknowledging the unspoken respect suggested by Owen's attention to detail and ignoring the occasional abuse of important paper documents. Owen takes pride in the way Jack can easily identify each aircraft's exact model.

Tosh is quite taken by the little masterpieces as well, though her appreciation lies in the science of aeronautics and something else just slightly more grounded. Owen's pointy little fingers seem to have a gift for balance these days. She blushes outrageously on the catwalk, Owen guiding her hand with his as she successfully telegraphs a forties bomber into the gentle updraft near the tower basin.

It's the playfulness that appeals to Gwen. Owen's timing is impeccable for distraction, feeling out the tension in the room and shattering it by sending a fleet of paperclip fighter pilots to their fates. Gwen particularly enjoys the tiny pornographic drawings he occasionally scrawls on the tail rudders. There's something unspeakably charming about a man with a gun and alien body parts scattered across his desk turning to paper airplanes as the ultimate method for making mischief.

Ianto has never minded cleaning up after Owen, really. There's a sort of hangar cupboard in the autopsy bay, with the best examples of certain models preserved alongside crumpled fifty mission cappers retired from active duty. The hangar at least appeals to Ianto's sense of order and reverence for the past. But it's the wreckage that gets to him. He's undertaken hundreds of little rescue operations, fishing soggy planes from the rift pool, crumpled jets out of tangled wires, always smoothing out the salvageable ones and returning them to the cupboard for repairs, whisking the hopeless cases away for silent bin funerals.

And it's Ianto who finds him, legs swinging, arms wrapped tightly over the railing. He's got a box next to his hip on the balcony, filled to the brim with what's left of his collection of planes. A half empty bottle within reach. There was a time when Ianto would have sent him home like that, with one look at his alcohol-slackened face, taken his car keys away and shoved him gently out the door. It's hard to say what makes him crouch down beside Owen instead. Maybe the suspicious lack of airplanes littering the Hub floor.

“Watch,” Owen demands, although he makes no other move to acknowledge Ianto's arrival.

He's been waiting, it seems, for a witness. Ianto is the man for the job. He's never particularly impressed by Owen, but he's quiet and patient. He drops down all the way, only mildly concerned for what the metal grill floor might do to his suit, and sits on the edge of the walkway beside Owen.

Owen extends a forefinger to indicate a point in space.

“There,” he says, and he floats a plane towards the point.

Ianto's eyes are scanning. He's not entirely sure where to look but the white of the paper plane stands out in stark contrast to the dim light of the Hub at night settings.. His glance naturally attaches to it. There is a sudden sort of blue flash, small, like any lone indicator light on a car dashboard. The plane disappears. Ianto's mouth drops open.

“What--”

“Again,” Owen interrupts, and he sends a second plane towards the same spot only to have it disappear just as instantly as the first. A third and fourth plane meet the same fate and Ianto starts to feel sick.

“Stop it, Owen,” he says sharply. “Just stop it.”

He's almost rougher than he intends, hauling Owen to his feet and leading him down the stairs, one hand fisting the back of Owen's shirt at the collar, the other carrying the box of planes. He leaves the box on Tosh's desk and pushes Owen into her chair before turning his back on him. Ianto mutters under his breath while using the greatest care to move Tosh's things in the near-dark. A half-cannibalized circuit board, a scanner undergoing repairs, and finally a cloth-bound hardback book, which Ianto holds out to Owen with both hands.

Sensing more rough treatment if he ignores it, and too tired to fight, Owen takes the book being presented to him and stumbles over the title.

“Hiden Senbazuru Orikata.”

Ianto nods patiently, so Owen pages through the book.

“Oh,” he says. “Origami.”

Letting the pages fall back, he catches sight of the note under the front cover. Tosh's fine handwriting, elegant and simple, inscribed to Owen.

“In case you grow tired of planes,” he reads.

Ianto scoops up the box of aircraft and wanders off to Jack's office, leaving Owen clutching the book and looking over Tosh's workstation, the smallest of smiles breaking free in his eyes.

unmikely @ 2008-02-02T07:27:00

2008-02-02T15:32:41Z

Title: Space Muzzle
Author: Unmikely
Rating: PG
Warnings: Nada
Characters: Jack/Ianto
Disclaimer: I own nothing. It is all for fun.
Note: A little silliness. I am calling everything "space" these days. My space shoes, space car, space briefcase, space pencil, yesterday's space sandwich was delicious....

Jack has spent most of the afternoon working on the SUV and he's told the others to stay away. He's up to something, and even Toshiko has been kept in the dark on the upgrades in-progress. Ianto has been checking in every hour, to offer refreshments or help with the upgrades or just to hang around in the garage for a while, watching Jack work, enjoying the slow week. And, of course, he's also there to spy for the others.

“Gwen wants to know if you're leaving again,” Ianto says with amusement, an unusual tone for him to have on the subject. He's leaning against the frame where the front passenger side door once was. “I think they have it in their minds that you're building a spaceship in here.”

Jack sits up from where he'd lain across the front seats and they smile at one another.

“Then get in here and help me blast off,” Jack suggests.

“Predictable and mysterious. Quite the paradox you are, Sir.”

Ianto is not sure, but he thinks Jack shivers there, so he moves in closer and whispers. “Later. When they're not all spying on you via CCTV.”

Jack laughs. “Did they give you a signal? Something to alert them if my spaceship is ready?”

“No, Sir, of course not.” Ianto's eyes shift back and forth quickly before he indiscreetly taps the side of his nose twice in a meaningful manner. “Don't be ridiculous.”

Another chuckle from Jack. It's great to see Ianto like this, playful and relaxed, but suspiciously rare nonetheless, and Jack can't help but ask.

“What's got you in such an odd mood?”

“I'm sorry sir?”

“Happy. Relaxed. I'm not complaining, mind you.”

“Oh,” says Ianto, and he tries very sincerely to wipe the grin off his face but is only successful for a moment.

“Looks good on you.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

“I think I will take you up on that coffee, if you have a minute.”

“I'll get right on it.”

Ianto is all the way across the garage to the door when Jack calls his name. When he looks back, Jack is leaning on the front of the vehicle, one foot lifted to rest on the bumper, hands wringing smudges into a rag.

“Your mood. It doesn't have anything to do with the artifact on my desk?”

Ianto's grin widens. “Not exactly.”

Jack's eyes narrow. “Not exactly,” he repeats slowly, testing the words for a clue.

“The artifact is no longer on your desk, for one thing.”

“Owen?” Jack guesses and Ianto nods.

“Tell him his voice will come back in a day or two.”

Ianto looks thoughtful for a moment before he shrugs casually.

“Bit of shame, that. Well. Good luck on your spaceship. I'll be right back with your coffee.”

I can has beta?

2008-01-31T04:41:19Z

I'd rather not take this to any of the coms just yet, so does anyone on my friends page want to beta my first long serial type TW fic? Nitpicking and Brit-picking ~~ravenously desired~~ welcome.

Spoiler-free for the you ess and eh. And Canada. Which is just eh.

2008-01-23T22:22:28Z

Titles: Freebie, Namesake, Children
Author: Unmikely
Rating: PG
Warnings: Everything I write is pretty mild biznas.
Characters: Whole team. Iantocentric.
Disclaimer: Don’t be silly. I own nothing. It is all for fun.
Note: I picked a 10x10 prompt table for Iantoism, then cut it in half. So, fifty stories to undertake. Seems like five is a good number to post at a go, so expect ten posts if my mathematics are correct, and they usually are not.
Summary/Prompts: Freebie, Namesake, Children

7. Freebie

As soon as he hears about the small-craft accident, checked and dismissed by Gwen and Tosh for signs of Rift involvement, Ianto puts together where Owen has been all night. Sure enough, he finds Owen there at the crash site, watching the heavy rain douse the last of the flames. Ianto watches from his car for a while. Owen looks pathetically small next to the large pile of debris and the vast line of police tape. He has to be freezing, but he hasn't even got his hands in his pockets.

Ianto is careful to make a little more noise than usual in closing the car door so that he doesn't startle Owen, but his effort is meaningless as Owen is miles away and jumps out of his skin when Ianto lays a hand on his shoulder.

“Hello Owen,” Ianto says, in as apologetic a tone as he can muster having driven for two hours through blinding rain to get here. “I've brought you a blanket,” he adds. For an absurd moment Owen hears the Jeevesesque slant in the voice and thinks Ianto has come to him out of some sort of ridiculous butler-like sense of duty, but Ianto fails to fully conceal the slight sigh at the end and Owen just feels guilty as hell. The guilt shakes him loose of whatever had caught hold of him the moment he arrived at the crash site, and he lets Ianto pull him back towards the car.

Ianto can hardly remember a time when Owen has willingly let him drive. The weather and car engine provide the only soundtrack and hours later when he pulls up to Owen's flat, Ianto is certain the other man has fallen asleep until a sharp intake of breath comes from the passenger seat.

“We won't ever be able to let them go, will we?” Owen asks, his voice small.

Ianto is rendered speechless at what might be the first time Owen has openly acknowledged Lisa as anything more than a monster in metal.

“I'll owe you one then,” Owen adds, quickly and forced, an escape line as he eases open his door and steps out into the street. The door closes behind him and a rush of air hits Ianto before he can get his mouth to form words again.

“It's on the house,” he tells the steering wheel quietly.

19. Namesake

Owen has never named one of his rats before, but Gwen has nixed all testing on living beings since Jack left, resulting in the much-extended lifetime of his current guest. So one afternoon, when Owen feels like bickering and everyone but the teaboy is indulging him, Owen names the rat after Ianto.

Human Ianto more or less ignores the situation until he goes to feed the lab animals one day and discovers a miniature red necktie knotted around the poor thing's neck.

“I'm flattered Owen, really, but surely even you could find something more productive to do than play dress-up with the mice.”

“Why do you think I drew the line at rat-sized waistcoat?”

Ianto doesn't even wait a beat to answer.

“Because you'd be embarrassed when he filled it out so much better than you could.”

Ianto smiles at the long silence that follows before Owen breaks eye contact first and looks to the rat.

“Touché Human Ianto. Touché.”

34. Children

It's simplest to interpret the things they see by clinging to childhood levels of curiosity and imagination. It might be why Gwen has her Converse trainers and Tosh wears a child's gold unicorn pendant and Owen keeps his medical supplies in a student's rucksack, scanning equipment alongside a handheld video game system. Touches of adolescent whimsy that keep things running smoothly on even the most absurd days. When your boss is Peter Pan himself, you tend not to notice the syndrome so easily.

If anyone is immune, it's Ianto, and he's always seemingly the least affected when one of their investigations somehow reaches, harms, or otherwise involves a child. Although, Ianto always manages to appear the least affected when the topic of cybermen is unintentionally broached in his presence.

It's quite by accident that Jack notices Ianto's research project. Ianto falls asleep with his head on the tourist office desk, body precariously balanced on the edge of a chair, and when his arm slides off the desk to hang at his side, it sends a sheaf of papers to the floor at the same time. Before Jack wakes him to coax him downstairs to a more comfortable sleeping spot, he picks up the spilt paperwork and commits a few names to memory.

It takes Jack almost no time to find what he's looking for, but it takes him a week to figure the connection to Ianto and another week to come up with a tactful way to address the issue. He's manipulating CCTV cameras near a schoolyard when Ianto arrives at work the next morning. Jack lets Ianto look after the coffee and bring the first two cups to his office before he starts.

He doesn't notice what is playing on Jack's monitor, or doesn't recognize what it is. He sets Jack's coffee and his own in the middle of the desk before pulling up a chair. Their typical morning routine until Jack turns his screen to make sure Ianto can see more clearly. A group of boys at the schoolyard are playing around with a football in a casual sort of way. They look to be about eight, school bags and coats placed on the grass as carefully measured goalposts suggesting the game is a well-practiced morning ritual.

“His name is Gavin,” Jack says softly, like it could be a question, but not one he expects Ianto to answer. Ianto's mouth is open and his eyes narrow slightly in a pained sort of way, but he doesn't respond.

“Is he yours?” Jack is asking a genuine question this time, although he probably knows the answer here as well. Ianto swallows roughly, but manages to speak.

“There's a chance,” he says, slightly above a whisper.

Jack nods thoughtfully. “How old were you when-- ”

“Seventeen.”

They watch the game and drink their coffee in silence until the schoolbell presumably rings and the boys gather their things on screen, at almost the precise moment the entry alarm sounds and the cog door rolls back as Gwen arrives for the day.

“Seems like a happy kid,” Jack says and the pleading sort of look Ianto shoots back on his way out the door is touchingly childlike.

unmikely @ 2008-01-17T20:13:00

2008-01-18T04:16:27Z

Title: Little Blue Space Pebble
Author: Unmikely
Rating: PG
Warnings: SPOILERish part about S2, but not really. I wrote it before I'd heard the spoiler myself. :P
Characters: Whole team. Iantocentric.
Disclaimer: Don’t be silly. I own nothing. It is all for fun.
Note: I originally started to write this for the baby blue prompt on my prompt table, but it got strange and long. 1500 words or so. The formatting went wacko on me. Anyone know why?

In the end it's nothing more than a milky blue pebble, flat and round,
about the same size around as Ianto's thumbnail. After two weeks of
testing and being groundlessly blamed for Owen's string of migraines,
it is pronounced a pebble and nothing more. They all find the letdown
incredibly hard to swallow. Ianto pockets the thing before anyone
wastes any more time on the subject, and puts it on a shelf in a small
cardboard box that previously housed 100 medium-sized paperclips. He
doesn't think of it for weeks.

Toshiko is drowning in code work. The rest of them can tell because
she hasn't looked anyone in the eye for days and she limits herself to
less than a dozen words of plain English. Everything else is code to
her, and the team dutifully gives her the space she needs to work
through it. It's only after the third time an entire cup of coffee
goes ignored at the far corner of her desk that Ianto becomes
concerned. He waits until everyone else has gone home.

"Tosh?" he says gently. She's glaring meaningfully at her monitors and
gestures distractedly at the corner where her coffee usually sits when
it's being neglected. Ianto says her name again and she spins around
in her chair to blink at him.

"I'm sorry, Ianto. Did you need something?"

An almost imperceptible smile drifts over his eyes for a fraction of a
second and he holds out the box to her with a ceremonial flourish
usually reserved for only his most perfect brews.

"I thought this might help," he says, voice still hushed, as though
he's giving her a delicate but deadly alien tech item, the use of which Jack would
sternly forbid.

"What is it?" Tosh says, matching Ianto's volume level with added
conspiratorial tone.

Ianto shrugs and walks away before the smirk breaks out over his face.
He's nearly at the door to Jack's office when he hears her gasp and stifle a giggle. A few mornings later the blue pebble is at the coffee
station, the paperclip box replaced by a matchbook-sized velvet-lined wooden box. The accompanying note reads "Warmest thanks for the use
of this most precious alien artifact. I could not have finished my program
without such sophisticated technology." Toshiko can't look at Ianto without smiling for days.

~~~

Owen constantly loses things at his desk; Parking tickets he needs
Ianto to fix, lab reports for Jack, and every memo he's ever received.
But when he misplaces the RSVP card for Gwen's wedding, he's more
concerned than usual. He can clearly remember the searching look she
gave him when she eventually presented him with an invitation, the
silent plea for understanding and support. He thought about declining
but after a few awkward e-mails amongst the team, realized that Gwen
sincerely wanted them all there. She probably wanted them to be quiet
and well-behaved too, and she could keep dreaming on that front, but
mostly she just wanted them there to prove that the team cared about
her the way she cared about all of them. A casual word or two wouldn't
do. Owen needed the official formal RSVP card so that she could check him off
the list properly along with Tosh and Ianto and Jack.

"Lost another parking citation, Owen?" Ianto asks, in his typical
bored tone. Owen swishes more papers across the surface of the desk
and tries not to look frantic when he makes his plea.

"Er, yeah. No. Say, you haven't seen my invitation from Gwen around have you?"

Ianto shakes his head, and pulls a tiny wooden box from his pocket,
holding it out as if aiming it at Owen's desk. The look on Owen's face
is more aggravated than confused until Ianto starts scanning the box
back and forth over the surface of the desk. Then it's all sarcasm and
that ugly little skeptical rat face that Owen does so well.

"This should just take a moment," Ianto says evenly. After a moment he
points the box at Owen's keyboard. "There."

Owen lifts one edge of the keyboard and the invitation and all its
inserts are there, sticking out of the torn envelope.

"Give me that," Owen demands, amusement and relief filtering into his
voice. Ianto hands over the box so Owen can see the contents. "Pebble
powered gold leaf detector," Owen says with a nod, then he shakes his head and punches Ianto gleefully in the arm.

~~~

Gwen is shivering noticeably, too exhausted to change out of her
rain-soaked clothes and haunted by the ghosts of the two she couldn't
save that night. Jack drops a blanket over her shoulders, but Gwen
barely moves. They don't understand, none of them were there. Gwen
held a young woman's hand in her own as it turned cold and nobody else
felt that. They don't understand, but at least they know what
happened. She can't tell Rhys.

The coffee Ianto hands her is really half brandy, one of Owen's less
scientific remedies but a Torchwood favourite nonetheless. Gwen
drinks, seems to absorb it like oxygen.

"Can I give you a lift home?" Jack offers gently after a while and Gwen nods slowly.

Before they leave Ianto presses the blue stone into the palm of her
hand. It's warm and smooth and solid. She personally saved at least
five lives tonight, he reminds her and watches her hand squeeze shut
on the pebble. It's not much, but it's something to hold on to.

~~~

Sometimes it takes a while for the blue pebble to work it's way back
to Ianto. Owen almost murders the coffee grinder when he leaves the
resilient little thing in with Ianto's coffee beans. Jack folds a
sticky note into a pink origami envelope and hands it over inside a
file folder one day and it almost gets archived before Ianto notices.
Tosh and Ianto take turns giving it grand and florid names but
eventually, despite their best efforts, it is generally referred to as
"Blue".

The stories are mostly Jack's doing, although Gwen invented a
particularly detailed account of how Ianto was once saved from a fatal
gunshot wound when his magic pebble deflected a bullet at his breast
pocket. It becomes another office mascot, along with the dinosaur and
the long-term weevil residents. The difference being that the pebble
is almost completely unremarkable in every way. It enters the occasional Torchwood case report, glowing but unspecific mentions, meant as
inside jokes, but Ianto worries they will elevate the pebble to myth
status long after they're all dead and gone.

It's pure bad luck that Blue ends up in Ianto's pocket that day. The
rest of the team are out on a call and he just happens to notice it
mixed in a box with Owen's collection of "Things the pteradon has
swallowed" which includes several rusting keys, numerous buttons, and
a mechanical pencil. Ianto pocketed Blue and made a mental note to
disinfect it thoroughly before setting the Hub to absent mode and
going out to a simple weevil sighting on his own.

It's two days before he regains consciousness and although it was his
first thought, he's too embarrassed at the triviality of it all to mention that he's probably lost Blue. Until Jack starts to tell the nurses a version of Gwen’s bulletproof Blue story, then Ianto gets inexplicably choked up over the loss. After he finally explains what happened, Jack goes back to the Hub and digs out the remains of Ianto’s ruined suit from the plastic container of his personal effects and searches for the pebble to no avail.

“It’s quite silly,” Ianto says when he gets the news. “It was only a little space pebble.”

~~~

On Ianto’s first day back at work, there is a little brown pebble sitting in the bottom of a coffee cup set at his place in the conference room. It is still dirty, and little bits of sand or mud or something have flaked off the rock onto the bottom of the ceramic mug.

“Sorry it’s the wrong colour, mate,” Owen apologizes, but Ianto smiles and pockets the stone.

Gwen finds a polished piece of black lava rock in her flat from some vacation ages ago and slips it to Ianto later that day, explaining that it seems fashionable and would better match his suits than Blue had anyways.

Toshiko has kept the little oak box from Blue, so her stone offering for Ianto looks a little more ornate, though it is no more remarkable than Owen’s brown pebble.

“I’m sure you can still work some magic with it,” she assures him.

At the end of the day, Ianto sits quietly in a chair in Jack’s office and waits for him to finish up with a phone call. He sets his rocks carefully on the edge of Jack’s desk and absentmindedly arranges them in a row. Jack keeps talking, but reaches one hand into his top desk drawer. The pebble he sends skittering across the desk’s surface is a milky and translucent sapphire shade and Ianto would almost mistake it for Blue except that it is more rounded. He lines it up in place with the others and when he looks up, Jack smiles.

Assorted junk.

2008-01-12T04:10:45Z

I think most people who write in fandoms have a file or two of odds and ends written for practice or to preserve the odd turn of phrase that struck them as pleasurable. And I can't finish anything of length with series two dangling over my head, so I think I will post some of the odds and ends.

1.
Jack enjoys all kinds of things about all kinds of people, but if he has to truly fall for someone, it’s always the quiet ones, with quirky wits and wry smiles. That’s Ianto, in a nutshell, plus deft fingers and warm breath on a low moan. He’s too young and too old all at once, and this is a quality that appeals to Jack for obvious reasons. Like Estelle and her childlike sense of wonder, human characteristics that bespeak timelessness.

2.
Jack’s never sure about the morality of playing the innuendo game with Ianto. For Jack, it’s just being playful and having fun. But for Ianto it’s a shell game of avoidance. He’s too frequently a scared kid, and not always necessarily as clever as his quips suggest. Jack, all-knowing man of the future, will always have the upper hand and Ianto will always be nervous.

Jack has been taking advantage of people his whole life. His greatest fear is that he’s doing so now, without even realizing it.

3.
Jack’s been gone for… well, Ianto would know the exact count, down to the minutes surely. Owen’s not one for keeping track, but he knows how long it’s been since Diane left. He can feel every night in his bones. What he can’t understand is how Ianto manages to reset the watch; months since Lisa, weeks since Jack.

Even after the third or fourth time, drunk and leering until Ianto seemingly takes pity on him, he’s not presumptuous enough to think he’s another subject of Ianto’s persistent ticking. Owen has never been that cruel.

4.
He probably should have gone to find Jack right off the bat, but Owen was never good at making decisions when he was leaning down the hill to drunk. He’d spent the last hour and a half puzzling his way through the end of a gruelling and frankly malodorous autopsy, overtime all the way, and even after several showers, cheap whiskey seemed to be the only cure for the lingering memory of the smell.

Following the young man on CCTV proved to be a lot harder than Tosh made it look. Thus, warmly intoxicated and a little embittered, Owen chose to follow Ianto down into the labyrinthine lower levels himself. It was a little suspicious that Ianto was in the Hub so late, but Owen always had the fanciful idea that Ianto slept down there somewhere in the archives. In some cabinet, perhaps, like the filing vampire that he was. The sting of the carelessness and betrayal from the robogirlfriend debacle was no longer fresh, but it took very little suspicious activity from Ianto to make Owen’s shoulder twinge. He set out on his own to investigate and, he mused drunkenly, if the teaboy was up to something, maybe Owen would get to shoot him.

The whirring noise coming from the room Ianto disappeared into was unsettling to Owen somehow, and when the thumping noises started up, he drew his gun and approached more cautiously slowly.

5.
Jack sits at his desk to clean his gun and despite his military precision and natural grace at handling the weapon, there will be a greasy mess to clean up afterwards.

“You know I hate it when you do that.” Ianto’s voice, from the doorway.

Jack smiles without looking up and keeps working.

“I thought you’d be longer in the showers,” he admits. That thought makes him sneak a glance at Ianto. The young man is dressed in spare work clothes, sleeves and collar unfastened, belt, tie and jacket missing. His hair still wet to the point of dripping, his shirt damp around his neck. The bruises around his head and neck had darkened slightly and his hands were shaking noticeably. Usually impeccable Ianto is clearly not doing so well.

“I would have done that for you,” he says gently, a dismissive wave of his hand altered as a drop of water slides down his ear and makes him shiver.

Jack’s hands go still as he gives Ianto an appraising look. Recent events had them both behaving awkwardly about guns in one another’s presence. Ianto has a heartbreaking sort of nervous, submissive way about him and Jack projects angry determination that he would have followed through on his threat of execution. Despite this dynamic, it suddenly seems natural to Jack that Ianto would have been more than comfortable handling the firearm that shot his tormentors only hours ago.

“I absolutely admire your professionalism,” Jack starts. “I think you know that.”

Ianto senses the slight and waits.

“But it’s creepy when you simply put off a breakdown for a more convenient time,” says Jack. He’s not surprised when Ianto simply nods. Calm or in shock, even Owen couldn’t say for sure, instead muttering something about the Welsh being consistently pale and dull in hopes of sparking Ianto that way.

“Then you missed the hysterics at the scene, I gather,” Ianto said suddenly, bitterly. He’d developed a nasty habit of offering up enough of himself to draw fire. It worked to silence the others, unnerve them. Occasionally Owen would take the bait and Ianto got the abuse he wanted, but more often it made things universally uncomfortable for everyone, levelling the playing field.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get there sooner,” Jack says gently.

“To see me hysterical?”

“To shoot him dead.”

Ianto shakes his head slowly, disbelieving or disappointed. He’s swaying on his feet by now, but too stubborn to sit down without being ordered, so he lets himself lean against the doorframe. It’s a remarkably adolescent pose, a slouch that pulls on Jack’s mind. The jeans, the modern clothes. Gwen and Owen dress young, clothes for mucking around, and it’s endearing. Ianto dresses his own age and it’s heartbreaking. Jack is on his feet instantly, gesturing at Ianto to sit.

“If I stop now, I won’t make it home,” sighs Ianto.

“You’re going to stay,” says Jack.

Ianto laughs once, coldly, because Jack has said that a few times of late and it’s alternately a threat and a generosity. He is slow on his way to the chair and he sits down as lightly as he can, crossing his arms to stop his hands shaking but hoping it reads more defiantly.

“Have you eaten anything?”

Ianto shakes his head, a subtle look of annoyance flashing over his face.

“No, I guess not,” Jack says quietly, but it’s been a long day’s driving and debriefing since the cleaver and regardless of how nauseous the idea makes him, Ianto should eat something. “I’ll get the takeaway menus, we’ll find something you can handle.”

That's all for now. There's some other stuff I've not given up on and also some attempts at post-cybergrrl torture and retcon insanity that I don't think is my genre and shan't ever see the light of day. Mwah.

Also. I am not dead. Clearly. I am just all sorts of fail at keeping up with all the TW stuff lately. Many good things have been written and... I meant to give feedback, I really did.

unmikely @ 2007-12-19T20:23:00

2007-12-20T03:28:19Z

Titles: 001. Assistance and 027. Drug
Author: Unmikely
Rating: PG
Warnings: You shouldn't put writing implements in your mouth.
Characters: Whole team. Iantocentric.
Disclaimer: Don’t be silly. I own nothing. It is all for fun.
Note: I picked a 10x10 prompt table for Iantoism, then cut it in half. So, fifty stories to undertake.
Summary/Prompts: Assistance, Drug

I have serious issues with people tasting office supplies. So there's a bit of a theme here.

001. Assistance

Ianto has been off-kilter all day. Nobody can blame him, he’s spent the better part of his morning cleaning up the scene of a particularly gruesome weevil attack. It’s just that he’s normally so patently smart and attractively devious about telling Owen to shove it. Today he wandered back into the Hub reeking of bleach and blood, brushing at his coat sleeves in a manner less finicky and more frantic than usual. Owen asked him for an ETA on the coffee and Ianto just sighed, climbing the stairs to the kitchen. It’s more effective at shutting Owen up, in a way, except that Owen’s attempt at a confused and slightly concerned face is kind of grotesque.

The level of gore at a clean-up job is directly proportional to Ianto’s neatness psychosis. The day after a case had him tipping corpses into a sewage lagoon saw him take four showers and refuse to sit down all day lest he crease his suit. Generally the team is accepting of his mildly obsessive rituals. Mostly because they are afraid that calling attention to Ianto’s nerves would result in clean-up duty being redistributed amongst them.

Gwen is at the top of the stairs, blocking the coffee, watching Ianto unconsciously flick at his clothing. She smiles at him in her usual unnerving way and takes two steps towards him. It’s only out of concern for her feelings and the unfortunate location of the stairs that he doesn’t take two big steps backwards away from her. Instead he waits for the inevitable comment, unintentionally demeaning, presupposing to know what is the matter with everyone because Gwen feels.

If only Owen was nearby. He’s proven himself equally capable of inciting and repelling Gwen, but at least he’s a guaranteed minor distraction, and Ianto never needs much of a distraction to disappear into the background. Unfortunately Owen seems to have already buggered off somewhere and Gwen’s eyes are widening into sensitive police psychology mode.

Gwen stands close enough to breathe the air Ianto is exhaling, so he holds his breath. Her hand goes to his sleeve, catching his right arm and holding. He contemplates escaping when her grip eases as she drifts to grab a felt tip marker off the conference table.

“I’m sorry,” he says, excusing himself because common manners dictate she should have excused herself and such omissions are terribly awkward for Ianto. “Is there something I can help you with?”

Gwen smiles in a more endearing and less fraudulent manner, pulling Ianto’s arm under hers, drawing him in closer. All of his personal perimeter alarms are going off at once and he has to fight to keep from yelling and pulling his arm back in a fit. She uncaps the marker with her teeth as she’s smiling, forming a truly unattractive picture and tells him to hold still. Ianto is irrationally panic-stricken and unable to move.

One by one, Gwen carefully blacks out the tiny spots of bleach splatter on his sleeve. Ianto hadn’t even noticed what it was about his suit that had his neurosis fired up.

“Oh,” says Ianto. Then he exclaims it, understanding flooding over him at once. “Oh! Thank you.”

The relief is instant, almost overwhelming, and the smile on his face is almost certainly as hysterical as one of hers. Somehow, he doesn’t think he’ll need that third shower before bed tonight after all.

027. Drug
Owen chews the shit out of his biro pens. A good day sees him methodically destroy at least one with his molars, but a particularly bad day may involve several and one or two choking fits. He’s only faintly aware that he’s doing it. No amount of blatant sexual harassment from Jack on the subject of oral fixation can convince him to stop.

Ages ago, Ianto briefly experimented with dipping the pens into an alien version of hot pepper sauce, but then he’d accidentally used one of Owen’s unchewed pens unthinkingly and later rubbed his eyes. Ianto was dismayed to find that his remaining senses were not heightened during the span of his temporary blindness. Super-hearing would have helped him locate and throttle Owen far more easily. Since then Ianto’s ensured simply that there are several boxes of non-toxic pens on hand at all times and Owen can munch to his heart’s content.

Toshiko warns Owen that he’s probably wrecking his teeth, and Gwen gets miles and miles out of the time the biro exploded in his mouth and he looked like he was wearing blue lipstick every day for a week. He’s gagged once or twice while in his autopsy suite, something he would be categorically ashamed of if it were induced by any circumstance other than near-ingestion of a writing implement. Sewage-scented violently shredded alien innards? Not a problem. Owen keeps chomping away.

It’s not his fault, really, Owen reflects as he rolls the cap of a red biro between his top and bottom second bicuspids. The smell of the ink mingles with the aftertaste of quality roasted coffee and it’s as unavoidable as any emotional attachment. A certain brand of tinned soup that reminds him of a school cafeteria. A shade of green that takes him back to his hospital internship. The time Ianto smiled sweetly and gently brushed a speck of blue plastic off of Owen’s lower lip with his thumb.

unmikely @ 2007-12-17T16:17:00

2007-12-17T23:21:25Z

Titles: Meh, just prompts.
Author: Unmikely
Rating: PG
Warnings: Everything I write is pretty mild biznas.
Characters: Whole team. Iantocentric.
Disclaimer: Don’t be silly. I own nothing. It is all for fun.
Note: I picked a 10x10 prompt table for Iantoism, then cut it in half. So, fifty stories to undertake. Seems like five is a good number to post at a go, so expect ten posts if my mathematics are correct, and they usually are not.
Summary/Prompts: Replace, Grudge, Feedback

013. Replace

It’s absurd, but the feel of Owen’s hands scrabbling over his bare back and hips the first time brings an immediate sense of panic. He’s only ever seen the thorough side of Owen in relation to autopsies. And it’s not like Owen is touching him right, not like he knows what he’s doing here, so the first time, Ianto grabs Owen’s hands roughly in his and asks him to stop.

It’s terrifying, but the second time, they’re stone cold sober. Owen bites Ianto’s bottom lip and nearly growls. Ianto’s fingers dig into Owen’s shoulders. And it’s Owen this time, who feels like he’s reeling and knows that Ianto is not the person to prop him up. There are no answers here. The boy only ever takes instructions; milk and sugar, shred or file. The second time, Owen tells Ianto to get lost.

It’s inevitable, and the third time takes place in Jack’s office. Ianto’s eyes are red but Owen’s never seen him cry, not since Lisa, and he doubts that Jack’s disappearance inspires the same kind of wretched feelings. Overworked, then. Or drunk. And Owen is in his own state of intoxication and embitterment, so he’s not letting Ianto go without giving this a shot. The third time’s a charm.

It’s impossible, and the fourth time should never happen, because Jack is back and Ianto is finally settling in as part of the team and Owen is up to meeting people who don’t work for Torchwood again. It’s a cold night out and Ianto’s hands are like ice sliding under Owen’s shirt and up his chest, but he doesn’t flinch, just draws him back into the flat and kicks the door closed behind them. It’s only natural that Ianto makes coffee in the morning, and Owen doesn’t even realize what’s happened until Ianto kisses him apologetically. The fourth time is goodbye.

032. Grudge
Jack is nearly trembling with rage, his gun raised and trained on the thing dressed in a postman’s uniform, an alien with a somewhat whimsical sense of disguise.

“Try me,” he growls, before he hazards a quick glance over his shoulder to Gwen. She’s kneeling beside Ianto’s prone form, frantically moving her hands under his jacket.

“How’s it look?” Jack calls back to her.

“It’s not good Jack, he’s… oh God.”

The trembling moves up Jack’s arms, into his chest and seems to spew forth with his voice. “What Gwen, what is it? Ianto?”

“I’m sorry Jack, there’s nothing I can do,” Gwen says gently. Not gently enough. Jack cringes and takes a threatening step closer to the alien.

“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t shoot you in some absurdly painful place and let you bleed out agonizingly slowly.”

The creature in the postman’s uniform whimpers. “Because… I will buy him a new suit?”

“Damn right you will,” Jack says, and he eases up on his trigger finger and lets his arms relax.

“If it’s not too much trouble Sir?” Ianto’s voice, as calm and reserved as ever, he seems to be over the shock of the slime attack already, brushing Gwen’s hands away and looking down at his ruined clothing. “It’s just that I’ve always been rather fond of this particular necktie.”

And Jack raises the gun once more.

040. Feedback

It wasn’t really a promotion, although he did the paperwork for that sort of thing himself, so Ianto could easily have made it official. Jack didn’t really care; he just wanted to put a dent into the wall separating the archivist from the rest of the team.

For his part, Ianto took the endorsement seriously. He approached it in his usual methodical way. Realizing that it was impossible to prepare for the various spontaneous aspects of the job, he set about refining the baser elements: shooting practice, concentration drills, physical fitness. Building blocks for improvisation, he called them. And if Owen hated the healthy food take away, that was pure bonus.

Jack felt stupid for not recognizing it sooner, the usefulness of a full archive’s worth of information close at hand in the field. Ianto was a virtual library of accessible knowledge. He was viciously protective of the others and a natural at public relations. The general rule with leadership is the more the merrier, and while Jack felt he had a whole team of people capable of leading in different circumstances, Gwen and Ianto complimented each other especially well in sharing the role.

It’s a testament to his newfound confidence that Jack’s sudden heavy hand on the back of his neck doesn’t cause Ianto to flinch. Not to mention he noticed Jack’s approach in the reflection off his monitor. He’s still working obsessive hours, but he sleeps better these days and his once nervous relationship with Jack has settled into a more comfortable association of equals.

“Loose ends?” Jack says, gesturing at the minor hacking job scrolling down the screen per Ianto’s ministrations. His voice always seems to lower with the lights in the Hub, down to night settings, saving energy or at least fitting his energy levels to Ianto’s.

“I’ll be done in just a moment, Sir” Ianto says distractedly.

Jack smiles and nods, unseen for the most part, but he only takes two steps away towards his quarters before turning back.

“I know you probably don’t need to hear it,” he starts, and then he has to pause, suddenly not sure what sentiment it is exactly that he feels compelled to convey. Ianto stops typing, closes one application on the screen and fires up another before turning in his chair expectantly. At once, it dawns on Jack how awkward it would sound, how sudden. I’m proud of you. Too much. So he just smiles again, and shakes his head.

“Sorry, nevermind. Coming along soon?”

“Yes Sir,” Ianto says softly, and curls it into his little closed-mouth, knowing grin. He waits until Jack is nearly out of range and even then he whispers.

“And thank you, Sir.”

unmikely @ 2007-12-17T09:08:00

2007-12-17T16:11:59Z

The end of the world? A little teary eyed. But takeaway coffee? The HORROR.

I never noticed this before, but the wince and look of terror Ianto gives his coffee cup at the end of EOD is hilarious.

"He can save the world but he can't save the coffee machine??"

Table

2007-12-16T15:09:11Z

001.	Assistance	002.		003.		004.		005.
006.		007.	Freebie	008.	Baby Blue	009.		010.	Music
011.		012.		013.	Replace	014.		015.
016.		017.		018.		019.	Namesake	020.	Hands
021.	(One Sentence)	022.		023.	Approach	024.		025.
026.		027.	Drug	028.		029.	Contact	030.
031.		032.	Grudge	033.		034.	Children	035.
036.		037.	Wound	038.		039.	Comedy	040.	Feedback
041.		042.	Information	043.		044.		045.
046.		047.		048.		049.		050.

unmikely @ 2007-12-13T20:40:00

2007-12-14T03:45:15Z

Titles: Meh, just prompts.
Author: Unmikely
Rating: PG
Warnings: Everything I write is pretty mild stuff.
Characters: Whole team. Iantocentric.
Disclaimer: Don’t be silly. I own nothing. It is all for fun.
Note: I picked a 10x10 prompt table for Iantoism, then cut it in half. So, fifty stories to undertake. Seems like five is a good number to post at a go, so expect ten posts if my mathematics are correct, and they usually are not.
Summary/Prompts: Baby Blue, Hands, Contact

008. Baby blue

He looked particularly young in casual attire to begin with, and once coupled with the now uncharacteristically unruly hair, Ianto looked downright juvenile, lying heavily in Jack’s arms on the couch. It had seemed like such a great idea. Feed the young man a few drinks, settle his nerves, maybe get him talking a little. Jack doubted he could do much to prevent the nightmares, but he might buy Ianto a few hours of sleep and maybe he could build on that. A lighter workload for a few days, some friendly soothing touches, forbidding suits in the Hub on working Saturdays… it wasn’t a detailed plan but it was a part of general initiative that Jack thought would work.

Ianto reached clumsily for the nearly empty glass on the floor, but Jack simply nudged it further away with his foot.

“I think you’ve had enough,” he whispered into Ianto’s ear and followed it up by brushing fingers over the one impossible piece of his hair that was always curling out the wrong way.

“Yes Sir,” Ianto replied softly, letting his eyes close for as long as Jack’s fingers were near his temples. His words were warm against Jack’s collar. He had to be the most polite, quietest drunk Jack had ever seen, but his eyes were red and watery and nobody would mistake him for sober either. When Jack’s hand spread out on his chest and smoothed over his shirt, warming the skin underneath, a gentle smile threatened to break out on his serene features and Ianto nearly purred. Jack kept rubbing in gentle circles.

The ridge of his hip was visible when his shirt moved up with Jack’s hand and also a strip of light blue flannel, the waistband of his boxer shorts, just showing over the line of his jeans. Jack looked closer. The print was a random pattern of cartoon penguins in bowties. Some had hats and one appeared to have a monocle.

“Honestly Ianto, sometimes I don’t know whether to snog you or adopt you,” Jack said with a dramatic sigh.

020. Hands

Gwen’s girly magazine quiz, What Your Man’s Hands Say, has been a profound source of amusement on a slow day in the hub. There are measurements to take and fingernails to inspect and even a table of metrics for determining the size of one’s manhood based on the ratio of index finger length to ring finger length. There is a lot of teasing and general laughter when Toshiko turns out to be more well-hung than any of the men according to the magazine’s parameters.

Gwen, the magazine spread out in her lap, indexes each of the men in turn and proclaims that Jack and Owen should be the best kissers. Ianto pretends to be deeply wounded by the revelation until it’s determined that he would be the best in bed. Jack shocks no one when he suddenly and loudly offers to thoroughly test the theories. Unsurprisingly, Ianto is also the cleanest, as evidenced by his tidy and uniformly short fingernails. And naturally Owen, with the tiny scars around his knuckles, is the feistiest, though they all concede that Jack’s blemish-free hands are not for lack of scrapping.

Ianto passes Toshiko a purple mug of medium roast and soy milk and notices that her eyes linger on his hands.

“Tell me you’re not going in for this daft business as well,” he teases.

Ianto has narrow hands and long fingers that skate over the planes of Jack’s skin gently, outstretched and hopeful, but always light, ghosting. Jack’s hands are clutching, fingers curled and thumbs grasping for holds. While Ianto’s trying to merely glance off of everything and everyone, Jack aims for full-on collisions. Owen throws his hands up sometimes, mocking, and jokingly begs Ianto not to shoot, but it’s obvious to anyone that ever since Diane left, his hands tremble when they’re not attached to a scalpel or a gun.

Tosh blinks and shakes her head, realizing that she hasn’t made a firm enough grasp on the mug yet for Ianto to comfortably let go. She looks up at him and smiles gratefully.

“Of course not,” she says, taking her coffee and turning back to her workstation. “You can’t tell anything from hands.”

029. Contact

It’s just Ianto’s luck lately, that when the doors shut them into compartments of what amounts to a giant alien ice box, Gwen and Owen are on his side while Jack and Toshiko are in the other compartment. Owen is already looking at Gwen salaciously, no doubt working out the best way to convince her to share body heat with him. It’s almost comical the flash of disappointment in his eyes when he realizes that yes, Ianto is there too. Hard to conceive of a worse scenario for poor Owen, Ianto imagines, but his sympathy weakens with the snide look he gets from him when the bastard unzips his jacket and invites Gwen in.

Ianto spends the first few hours checking every inch of the compartment for weakness. The best he can come up with is the duct in the ceiling, but he soon realizes his only real chance to reach it would be if Owen were eleven feet tall and willing to let Ianto stand on his shoulders. They thump on the wall between their compartment and Jack and Tosh’s, but of course the walls are well-insulated to keep the freezing temperatures contained.

Eventually there’s nothing left for Ianto to do but sit down and wait. Maybe Jack and Toshiko have found a solution on their side. He curls his knees up, wraps his arms around them and thinks fancifully about lighting Owen’s clothes on fire and keeping warm from the flames.

Gwen stays pressed to Owen but watches Ianto carefully. He doesn’t like to be touched, she knows, but there will come a point where it is a simple matter of survival. The key is to watch for the moment when he accepts the inevitable and then she’ll make a teasing foray, perhaps borrowing something from Jack’s repertoire and Ianto will have no choice but to make an innuendo-laden joke back before joining their huddle. She sighs and watches the icy cloud of her own breath dissipate.

Owen tries to think, but they’ve been in the freezer for hours and there’s simply nothing to think about. He’s never been good at waiting and even Gwen’s breasts pressing into his arm can’t keep his interest by now. It’s probably hopeless then, he thinks.

“Ianto, are you okay?” Gwen asks suddenly. “You look…”

“C-cold?” he deadpans, and he would have accompanied it with one of his many variations of eyebrow, but the upper part of his face seemed frozen stiff. He’s stopped shaking at least, which he takes as a good sign but deep in some still-functioning part of his brain he knows that it’s not. He watches Owen watching him and it’s like seeing him through water. Slow-motion and garbled. Then Owen curses and seconds later he’s being stood on his feet, Owen holding him up on one side and Gwen on the other.

“Wakey wakey Ianto. K-keep that b-blood moving.”

If Ianto wasn’t so damn tired, he’d have laughed at Owen’s version of a cheerful voice. Gwen slips behind him and her arms, still clad in the doctor’s leather jacket, wrap around his shoulders and push him forwards until he’s in Owen’s arms as well. Gwen’s face presses into Ianto’s back, his forehead drops to Owen’s shoulder and with a groan of annoyance, Owen turns his face in to breathe the almost-warm air from around Ianto’s neck. The three of them are doing some demented version of a slow dance together when Jack and Toshiko finally bust through the door.

Days later, he’s cleaning up a mess in the autopsy lab with Gwen standing too close and relating some horribly personal story about Rhys right into his ear. Owen bounds down the steps and reaches up to ruin Ianto’s neatly combed hair. Nobody is more surprised than Ianto to find that he doesn’t really mind the contact.

unmikely @ 2007-12-07T07:58:00

2007-12-07T15:10:34Z

Titles: Music, Approach, Wound, Comedy, Information
Author: Unmikely
Rating: PG
Warnings: Everything I write is pretty mild stuff.
Characters: Whole team. Iantocentric.
Disclaimer: Don’t be silly. I own nothing. It is all for fun.
Note: I picked a 10x10 prompt table for Iantoism, then cut it in half. So, fifty stories to undertake. Seems like five is a good number to post at a go, so expect ten posts if my mathematics are correct, and they usually are not.
Summary/Prompts: Music, Approach, Wound, Comedy, Information

010. Music

Ianto is discovering jazz music with all the sarcastic quotation marks that implies, and Jack is struggling to find it anything but hopelessly endearing. He lays a hand on Ianto’s shoulder and cringes when the young man startles, knowing he’s brought the terror right back to the surface for the briefest fraction of a second. Jack blames himself for the shock and pain flashing over Ianto’s features, but then Ianto smiles, says, “Listen” and turns up the volume on his iPod dock under the tourist information desk. The pops and scrapes make it obvious he’s gone to the source records and not digitally remastered versions, and it is the flaws to which Jack listens most.

“Beautiful,” he says, meaning the imperfections, and Ianto nods agreement.

Just when Jack is wishing desperately that he could do a better job shielding Ianto from the worst humanity has to offer, Ianto seems to be saying look what we can do, and it warms Jack’s heart in ways he can’t begin to understand.

023. Approach

For the most part, Jack’s return goes fairly well. There are the new security codes, which give him a twinge of pride before the annoyance that he won’t be able to surprise Ianto in the tourist office first thing. Then there’s the gorgeous way Gwen and Owen greet him, guns trained on his chest as he descends via the lift. Tosh is brilliant, pretending to ignore his arrival until she finishes initiating her latest program upgrade. It’s not the welcome he was hoping for, but in a way their scepticism and gentle snark make the eventual smiles and hugs more real. It doesn’t explain everything, though. Jack grins broadly to cover up his latent apprehension.

“I hate to break this up, but we seem to be a man short. Let me guess. Archives?”

Owen shakes his head in a subdued manner that is downright frightening until he explains Ianto is sleeping off a migraine somewhere. Jack navigates frightened to guilt-consumed in point three seconds, because Ianto’s migraines are from stress, but something still doesn’t add up.

“He’s… sleeping?”

Owen shrugs. “It’s sedate him or pick him up off the floor in the archives later when he drops. And nobody likes going down into that mouldy old labyrinth.”

Gwen puts her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “He’s in your quarters,” she says softly.

“It’s the only place… It’s quietest there,” Tosh adds.

Jack manages to pace himself halfway before he starts almost running. He dispenses with the ladder by grazing a single rung, but reins in his haste when he sees Ianto curled up under dark gray suit jacket on the small bed.

It hits Jack at once that he’s never really seen Ianto sleep before, and despite the lingering guilt, this is actually kind of a novelty. He pulls up a chair and takes in the messy hair and slightly slimmer version of Ianto, sleeping a little too heavily, mouth slack and breathing deeply. He looks about twelve and Jack can’t stop himself.

“Ianto. You’ll be late for school,” he urges gently, brushing fingers over the young man’s hair. It’s grown long enough to curl out, and Ianto will probably take perverse pleasure in barbering it into oblivion once he’s back on track. For now he stirs and tilts his head in closer to Jack’s hand before his eyes flicker open. He stares. Jack smiles at him. He sighs.

“I hate this dream,” Ianto mutters, makes a small huffing sound and rolls onto his side, his back turned to Jack.

Jack blinks, still grinning and settles back in his chair, trying to figure out where he’s going to find an espresso machine worthy of Ianto’s forgiveness.

037. Wound

Ianto has been retconned three times, with varying levels of success (he was such an active dreamer) and only once at Jack’s hands. However, at the moment it seems rather like he believes it could be twelve times or more, judging by the furious look on his face, storming into Jack’s office direct from a hushed conference with Owen. Jack could kill Harper for this.

“Make this better,” breathes an impressively restrained Ianto, and it’s neither a command nor a plea. All the times he’s slept with Jack or been close to it burn through his mind and he wonders what could have been so bad about the other times that he had to be retconned. What exactly was Jack capable of?

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” says Jack, though for both their sakes he wishes that it was. “I never coerced you to…”

Ianto looks sick. Sicker. “Am I to be thankful for this? That you… you… Oh God, you did it after I passed out?”

“No!” shouts Jack. His hands fly up into a defensive posture and Ianto looks ready to spit but stays quiet.

“It was after Lisa…” Jack starts out again softly. Ianto has to sit down. His eyes flare but he is too horrified to speak.

“It wasn’t sex, Ianto. I had to know that you hadn’t…” Jack swallows dryly. “Security was breached until I could be sure you had nothing left to hide.”

Ianto has his head in his hands, but Jack can still understand the two icy syllables he chokes out.

“Torture.”

Jack would offer a stiff drink but he’s already died once this week and he wouldn’t blame Ianto in the slightest.

039. Comedy

He sighs at the lack of variety in his life. It's the same old familiar joke, every damn time. The glowing tentacles of green fire start to lash out, impervious to gunfire, they share a quick look, and Owen starts it off, civil to the point of being ridiculously out of character.

"Shall we run, then?"

Barely perceptibly, Ianto frowns before he turns. "Yes, let's."

"Do you think we can outrun this thing?" Owen calls out, already running fullout, feet pounding into the uneven earth in a fantastically spastic sprint.

Ianto sputters a loud, forced laugh and informs Owen, breathlessly, that he only has to outrun him. The old punchline. It becomes less funny in an instant as Owen twists a knee and falls, painfully, at the base of a large rock. Ianto is with him in seconds, dragging him up and along the least rocky path he can make.

"No no no no no," he mutters, holding Owen tightly as they lean heavily against each other. "A little further."

At the narrow creek they both hesitate, until the sky glows green and Ianto essentially throws Owen across to the other side, before daintily stepping over the water himself. Two more steps of limping and shoving and they duck and cover. The green thing fizzes out in series of small electrical explosions the instant it hits the creek. Owen is shaking under Ianto, his back lurching with every breath.

"How bad is it?" Ianto pants, but two arms wind around his neck and he's wrestled down into the grass. Owen is laughing, roughhousing already despite his aching knee. He turns Ianto to watch.

"You stupid ass," Ianto grumbles, although the lightshow is admittedly impressive.

042. Information

Ianto fixes his collar, straightens his tie and almost goes to fiddle with his cufflinks before he realizes he’s short one shirtsleeve and the other is so bloodstained he doesn’t really want to touch the silver piece even if it’s still there. Jack puts his hand on the back of Ianto’s neck and urges him off the examination table.

“Let’s get you home,” he says, holding out Ianto’s coat in a reversal of roles that nearly makes them both smile.

The debriefing is just him and Jack, in Jack’s office, so Ianto knows he’s busted.

“So. Interesting thing about you,” Jack begins casually. “You’re not twenty six.”

Ianto raises his eyebrows calmly. “I’m not?”

Jack grins. “Good point. You could be twenty six.” He sits on the edge of his desk and looks directly into Ianto’s eyes. “But you could also be twenty two, depending on which birth certificate we choose to believe. Your medical records are a little more complete if we choose the twenty two version.”

Ianto’s eyes close and he bites his bottom lip. Rare days, it really does seem like he doesn’t have enough history. He’s too fresh, too much of a blank canvas. The suits are a perfect dress-up disguise. But then today, with the black circles under his eyes and the pale skin of a HUB-dweller, the archivist could easily have passed for thirty-seven, Jack thinks morosely.

Ianto has learned his lesson in the worst possible way, so he opts for the truth, immediate and unedited.

“Torchwood One survivors” he says sombrely and Jack nods for him to continue. “They were retconning the youngest of us and dropping us back in university. I couldn’t…” Ianto trails off and frowns, trying to decide how to phrase it.

“Lisa,” Jack breathes, to save him the trouble, and Ianto ages yet another ten years before his eyes.

Fic: Janto - He who has the floor wins.

2007-11-29T21:02:56Z

Title: He who has the floor wins.
Author: Unmikely
Rating: PG
Warnings: Slash…ish.
Characters: Whole team. Jack/Ianto …ish.
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Don’t be silly.
Note: First time posting Torchwood fic. Be nice!
Summary: Jack can be very disruptive in meetings.

Jack does a good job pretending to listen to Ianto’s carefully constructed speech about expense forms and Ianto appreciates the effort. He’s admittedly made the new instructions particularly brutal, right down to the precise model of pen that should be used filling out the dash-four financial claims form, but desperate times call for desperate measures and after Owen handed in an expense form filled out in what seemed to be purple crayon, Ianto was a desperate man.

“… and as you can see, after hours exceeding a full workday as set out in parameter seven, travel expenses to your primary residence from the workplace…”

Toshiko has dutifully lowered her head and is at least pretending to follow along if not actually paying full attention to the materials Ianto had placed at each seat of the conference table this morning.

“…acceptable under Subsection A, roman numeral two, whereas stopping off at the pub is not an acceptable claim for subsistence mileage.”

Gwen is chewing gum animatedly, a habit which Jack happens to know is found especially offensive by Ianto. His lack of a perturbed look is a testament to his focus on the subject matter at hand.

"...should spirits become a claimable expense, I will gladly adjust this training document..."

Owen smirked heartily at that. Jack wonders if he's been paying attention all along or if the word whiskey had perked his ears momentarily. Jack himself has been steadily losing his ability to feign what Ianto would deem a suitable level of interest.

"...likewise claims stemming from unauthorized use of alien technology, products of rift research..."

It's agony, Jack decides. Watching Ianto at his straight-laced best, pacing his speech perfectly, breathing at measures Jack suspects he rehearsed. There's a red patch of skin on the side of Ianto's jaw, razor burn from shaving, Jack knows because it's where Ianto starts, blade to skin before he's awake enough to give due care. The especially smart looking suit/shirt/tie combination is pure foresight on Ianto’s part, anticipation of this meeting. It's lovely and endearingly neurotic when Ianto chooses and lays out his clothes before bed. The aftershave which Jack knows is seasonal in selection is just noticeable whenever Ianto turns a page over, wafting the smell over and past the warm glow of coffee fumes. Combined with the sweet Welsh accent melting all over primly businesslike words, it is slowly driving Jack insane.

"...refering back to section six dash three, is to be signed in blue ink below..."

The coffee in front of Jack is perfectly dark and rich, industrial strength for morning meetings. Jack only realized for the first time today that Ianto places coffee mugs with handles positioned according to the right or left-handedness of the drinker. Another frustratingly tantalising revelation.

"....In review of paragraph C, let me add that weevils do not usually wear designer shoes and therefore it is unlikely..."

Gwen smiles apologetically at Ianto's knowing look. While Ianto holds the look at his audience for a calculated span, Jack dips just the fleshy part of his left index finger into his drink. In private, Jack knows Ianto would be near tears at the sight of such a blatant contamination. Here, with the team at the conference table, he doesn't even seem to notice.

"...which brings us to stationary supply orders..."

Ianto flicks his tongue against his thumb in order to better nudge over to the next page of his papers. Jack swallows dryly and becomes determined. Desperate times call for desperate measures and as long as the archivist is sitting there being sex personified, Jack is a desperate man. He takes his coffee-damp finger and reaches it towards Ianto's wrist. A perfectly starched three quarters of an inch of light gray shirtsleeve extends past Ianto's jacket and brushes the base of his hand. Pressing firmly, Jack leaves a neat fingerprint stain in medium roast blend on the top of Ianto’s wrist, on the near inch of light fabric.

"...electronically filed...filed...fi..."

More than any of Ianto's Toastmasters manoeuvres, this miniscule coffee mark gets the attention of the listeners. Because Ianto does not take spillage well. Does not take his suits lightly, and does not like coffee being exploited for Jack’s evil games. Jack smiles warmly up at Ianto, who has ground to a sudden halt.

Across the table, Gwen covers her mouth before she can giggle nervously. Toshiko looks distractedly up from her materials, having missed most of the incident, but catching on quickly when all eyes are on Ianto’s shirt cuff. Owen happily anticipates the explosion. This meeting might not yet be the patent snorefest he’s expecting. And Jack just keeps smiling.

Ianto's face is caught midword, expressionless, but his eyes scream confusion. Jack can practically see the neatfreak panic attack setting in just by the way the muscles across the young man's back tense. Ianto inhales, finally, suddenly, nearly a gasp and Jack thinks he probably only just remembered to breathe. For a moment you could hear a pin drop back in the 51st Century.

"Excuse me for a brief moment," Ianto says softly, before hurrying out of the room.

Three shocked and very amused faces turn to Jack, only to grow less amused as a near shriek gurgles out of Ianto in some unseen corner of the Hub. Everyone runs to the glass wall to look.

Ianto is down below them, bent at the waist slightly, hands on his hips as he regains his composure through a series of harsh deep breaths.

"Nicely done, Captain," Owen snarks, "You've broken Ianto."

Gwen snickers and even Tosh has to fight to rein in a rogue smile. Jacks shrugs, a goofily helpless kind of shrug, as if to say it needed to be done.

Downstairs, Ianto stands up straight again and flattens out his jacket, brushing invisble lint off the sleeves. As he turns to look back up at the glass of the conference room, the rest of the team stumbles over one another to get back into their seats. Owen even whistles innocently as Ianto returns.

He’s no longer vibrating with massively suppressed emotion as he takes his place at the table, slipping back into the calm and gentle mannerisms that make him such a comfort to have around. Smiling his sweetest most heartbreaking smile, the one that wrecks Jack every time, Ianto clears his throat to speak, smiles once more and opens his mouth. His voice is music, or poetry, or something else finely crafted, Jack thinks.

"Well, then, “says Ianto. “Let us begin again from the start. If you'd be so kind as to turn back to page one, section A, subsection roman numeral one, article one, paragraph A..."

unmikely @ 2007-11-11T11:47:00

2007-11-11T18:48:50Z

Janto fic. Post Countrycide.

Redemption.

The world is a filthy place, full of slithering lies and deceit. It’s dark and cold and inescapable. People lie. People do terrible things to one another. Everything is calculating, manipulating, what’s in it for me. It’s not so difficult to miss the conversion after all. Just a little more metal, a little colder and still the same language, still the same words even if the meaning is a solicitation rather than genuine. And he tried to keep it safe, what little bit of the genuine remained, in there, under the sharp bits of other worldly alloys. He would be as calculating and razor-edge devastating as anything on earth to save that one bit of good. That love. Now but an aftertaste, but still so sure of himself. It goes. It’s gone. A flash of everything that is wrong and it’s gone.

He never touched anyone after. Never let himself be touched. These things, these people who take and consume and make more noise than their species warrant. Who are we to destroy and pollute. Who are we to take and take. It’s so easy to go unnoticed when everyone else is desperate to make noise. Fade away, fade away. Hide. They don’t care, they’ve forgotten, everything superficial and loud and meaningless fills up the space. Pizza boxes and flashy gadgets and forget about anything real. Reminders just mean discomfort. Nothing human here, please.

And then the countryside. Unimaginable horrors, sick, disgusting terror and Gwen crying why. Why. And something breaks and it would be so easy to go on with it, take the last bit of pain as a push over the edge. Run away, fade away, disappear. End it. It’s time. Nobody would be surprised. But he makes it out, just, with his heart beating in his throat and he has to make the decision himself. Those creatures, those people couldn’t even do that for him.

But Tosh’s voice, so brilliant and full of life and even if she’s saying the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time, the energy of it all is so attractive. Too soon and it’s too raw but she is so very fucking brilliant. The first thing that pulls him back. Her voice. What was it? Only two words, maybe four at the most, just asking if he is okay. She looks so worried but so very alive. Ianto wants to touch someone for the first time since London. And he does. Touches her arm as he nods. She holds his hand there for a moment before she goes. She exhales shortly as she moves away, blowing an errant strand of hair from her eye, all business and she just looks so… so alive.

Owen’s hands, so gentle and out of sync with his still-harsh voice. He ghosts over bruises biting his bottom lip in sympathy every time he makes Ianto wince. A conspiratorial looks passes over his eyes and he makes a joke about how much more pleasant it was to have his hands up under Gwen’s shirt. Ianto almost laughs and it hurts and Owen knows. He just knows. He flattens a palm out gently over Ianto’s ribs.

“There?” His voice has never sounded so soft and beautiful. And then softer still, apologetic as he presses. “Sorry, mate.”

And Ianto knows Owen will look after Gwen and it’s not slimy or sordid anymore, it’s Owen doing the best he can. Stumbling, but genuine.

Ianto’s heart swells and aches because he’s been so withdrawn and cold and outside for so long that it hurts. It actually physically hurts to come back to life but he has to do it fast, because Gwen needs him and she’ll be gone home as soon as they get back to the Hub. He keeps his forehead pressed against the window of the SUV, cool glass against a throbbing bruise. He keeps one hand curled over himself and holding his aching side, but he gifts Gwen with the warmth of the other, slides his hand over her knee slowly, his heart sore from the effort until she lays a shaky hand over his and he hears her sigh. His eyes water from the pain of the first deep breath he’s taken in ages.

It’s surreal at the Hub. He’s so used to willing them all to go, waiting and wishing them away at night so he can hide out in some dark corner, working all night, proving himself to Jack, working until his eyes ache and his head is buzzing at the same frequency as the computer monitor. Working until his shoulders ache and he has to slink home hunched over for a negligible amount of sleep. But now he is sad to see them go. He clasps Toshiko’s hand briefly in his and she smiles, actually smiles at him sweetly after everything that’s happened and when she leaves his eyes follow her dreamily until the door closes.

Owen holds Gwen’s hand dutifully, like Ianto used to hold hands with the girl from next door when crossing the roads on the way to school. They both find smiles for him as well, though Gwen’s is a little distracted.

Jack has been watching Ianto carefully the whole time. He’s watched him reanimate, like a black and white television show turned to colour one pixel at a time. He waits while Ianto puts his aching body through a shower and re-emerges dressed in a work suit. The tie is missing, the jacket is still hung up in his locker, just the impeccably tailored shirt is there, open at the collar, the trousers and shoes somehow looking looser, more casual.

Jack calls to him from his perch at the railing above.

“Going home now?”

Ianto pauses, looks confused for a moment, like he hadn’t thought that far yet. He frowns before he speaks, like his own words are a surprise and Jack worries about the bruises on his head.

“I was thinking I might enjoy a cup of coffee first, Sir, if that’s alright.” He finally looks up at Jack.

“As long as you don’t mind my company,” Jack says, the corner of his mouth curling in a cautious smile.

“I would lo-…” Ianto’s forehead creases and he frowns suddenly. Jack gets ready to sprint down the steps to him, cursing whatever injury Owen might have missed looking Ianto over. But it’s gentle surprise, not pain on Ianto’s face when his gaze meets Jack’s again.

“I would love it. Sir.” He finishes softly, carefully. And he’s amazed to find, to discover, to feel that he’s spoken the truth.

Jack, a beaming smile now stretched over his face, walks quickly down the steps to meet the new Ianto Jones.

unmikely @ 2007-11-08T20:46:00

2007-11-09T04:22:30Z

The interviews.
And that leaves us at Ianto Jones. Your CL dash three?

Jack pauses, smiles, and answers in his best imitation of Ianto's own enduring deadpan tone.

"I've never thought of Ianto as clerical staff."

And yet, CL dash three. Though he's tested capably enough. Perhaps he lacks a certain... ambition?

Jack stifles a laugh.

"I should say not. The young man is a perfectionist. He spends more time working than anyone but myself."

Well, we're all aware of his special after-hours project.

Perceptions.
With Gwen there's always the inevitable, unspoken plea for something human. Something familar and vulnerable that can fit Jack into her own realm of expertise. It's different with Ianto. Ianto understands the stark impossibilities of black and white. Not what Jack is, but enough about what Jack is not. Ianto has no overwhelming expectations of anyone but himself. But then, somehow Ianto is always the one Jack ends up disappointing. Devastating.

With Owen.
Ianto is ever-tolerant of Owen's abuse, with the exception of the occasional returned glint of a patronizing nano-smile, exceedingly frustrating for it's imperceptible qualities. He had to admit, he'd given Owen more than enough material; his clothing, his demeanor and gentle manners, the willing acceptance and participation in Jack's more obscene public flirting, and Owen's new ammunition since Brecon Beacons - Ianto's newfound dedication to vegetarianism.

Paranoia.
"Ianto." Jack's voice shifted gears with the realization that the ordeal was almost over. "Stop."

Manic, sleep-deprived, but at last unarmed, Ianto continued backing away, hands shaking slightly at his sides.

"Yes Sir, but perhaps you were right. I think I'll just go home and take those rest days..."

Jack shifted his gaze past Ianto. "Owen."

Grudgingly, Owen stepped away from his station, blocking Ianto's path to the door. As if on cue, Ianto took one last step backwards before his legs gave out and he collapsed, slumped and sleeping into Owen's arms.

"Restrain him before he wakes up. I'll be there in a minute," Jack ordered.

"Don't go dragging me into your kinky secretary plots," Owen whined, then his voice went up a notch as he looked down. "Oh hell, he's drooling." And with that he dropped Ianto to the floor at once.

Jack was neither amused or terribly concerned by the un-Iantolike heap on the floor, and he turned and stalked off to his office, ignoring Owen's complaints. Gwen quietly scolded Owen while Tosh shook her head disapprovingly.

"Did I say anyone else could stop working?" Jack called back without looking. The girls went back to their workstations.