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themegalooTitle: And it Was.
Rating: PG?
Word Count: 3,000
Pairings: You know, the canon ones.
Spoilers: TORCHWOOD SEASON 3: CHILDREN OF EARTH: DAY FOUR. You have been warned.
Summary: In which Ianto saves the world, there is coffee, an interesting STD and hopefully a good bit of humor.
Notes: Big thank you for the verbal beta (and couch space) to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
angryhamster, for she is lovely. It's fun to actually hear people snicker as they beta, hope it works for you lot too.
It was dark, it was dark and it had been for a long time and he felt like he was choking, suffocating and something was crawling up his arm.
It was cold, cold and dark and something was moving, moving and crawling and it was dark, so dark and there was nothing. Nothing at all, nothing out there, nothing in here, nothing but the dark and the cold and the crawling and the and the and the and the.
Aliens.
His eye, it twitched. A blink. Wink? It was just the one, which made it a wink, not a blink, but winking usually was a bit more fun than that.
Waking up hurt.
--
When Ianto came to, it was to be surrounded by bodies. Oh, that was lovely. Laid out on the floor like some sort of fallen hero, surrounded by the noble (or not so noble, really, it was all a bit of a mess, wasn’t it) dead. Well, really, the first thing he’d see was red, and hadn’t that been fun. Someone had so kindly decided to cover him up. Once he’d gotten rid of the sheet, he could wonder where they’d unearthed so many red pallets and sheets, didn’t seem like something they’d ordinarily keep en masse in Thames House. Bit strange, that, but of course he was fairly certain he’d been dead a few minutes ago and now he wasn’t, so really all that was a bit strange too. Still, it was easier to ponder over the oddity of several red sheets than over the whole waking-up business. No one else seemed to be.
Aside from the obviously empty spot beside him, but that bit was fairly easily explained. Jack had been there too, after all. He’d have been insulted that he hadn’t waited, but then again, he wasn’t supposed to wake up, now was he. Can’t go about sitting in front of supposedly-dead bodies when the world’s about to end and all.
Ah, right. World ending. He ought to get on that.
He reached up to straighten his tie. Someone had done it for him. At least someone out of this lot of miscreants appreciated the necessity of a properly straightened tie (though it did leave him at something of a loss as to what to do with his hands).
--
The world ending business seemed to be well in hand by the time he’d made it back to the warehouse. Or “Hub 2” as Rhys had dubbed it. Well, decorated it. Really, it was still missing far too many of the finer things in life to be the Hub. Namely Jack and a bed at the moment, they never had gotten to make the most of that time earlier, and Ianto had never thought he’d be irritated by coffee beans. No one was there now, though. Off saving the world, again, of course. It would have been nice of them to leave some sort of note if they were going to go haring off, mind. Not that they knew he’d be back, but still, it would have been nice.
There was still a functional laptop, though. That was a start. He had no idea where Gwen or Jack might be, (saving the world, he told himself again, because it probably bore repeating), but he was here and he had a laptop and there were aliens invading the Earth (again, really, could they stop?) and he had a laptop.
Well, surely he could manage something with that.
It was the work of about half an hour after that to hack into the UN satellites and start hunting for the 456 ship. There’d been a bit too much going on earlier to make a solid go of it and there was shorthand to be read and really, Gwen was good but she wasn’t a hacker. Tosh had been better than he was, but he managed alright. Harder now, without all the resources of the Hub, but he had the access codes for half the major world organizations memorized and knew the basics of each database. Most databases were set up in the same ways, and Ianto Jones was an archivist. A bloody good one at that.
He was trying not to think of the fact that his archives were gone now, blown up with Jack. But Jack could come back, years worth of archival material and months worth of time and labor, that was all gone now. A mile radius. There were some parts of the Hub that might have made it, the very deepest parts, but those would be inaccessible under the rubble for months and no one really even knew what all was down there anymore. Ghosts, mostly, and a lot of dust. Rubble now too, probably. One hell of a clean-up, that would be.
There was a trick to dealing with satellites and ships and cloaking devices, he’d learned it at Torchwood One, read it in a file from the 80’s and he never forgot something he’d read. Useful, that. Especially for an archivist. (Though most archivists would argue the usefulness of being able to find a cloaked spaceship in orbit, wasn’t that better left to the tech lot? Ianto almost smiled at the thought. In Torchwood, everything was useful.) The trick was, of course, to look for dead spots. Which should have been perfectly obvious, but dead spots in space were a bit trickier. It was all one big dead spot. But there was space dust out there, atmospheric interference, and that, that was all random. Cloaking devices couldn’t do random, not perfectly, there was always a pattern. Sometimes a very good pattern or a very big pattern, but a pattern all the same, and the trick was to find it, isolate it, find the frequency hiding that part of the sky and disable it.
It was harder than it sounded, but pattern recognition software helped and running six different ones on three computers cut down the time considerably.
Two hours later, he had it. And he hadn’t spent those two hours twiddling his thumbs either. He’d been digging through the Torchwood databases to find out what remnant of Torchwood One were still in London. Surely there was something, he knew not everything had been moved into the Tower, there were plenty of storage areas from before the discovery of the pressure point, the start of the Ghost Shifts. There had to be something. Torchwood London hadn’t been confined to one point, it was a huge base of operations and yes, with its archives gone, it was hard to find what was where but there were backups, Ianto had been working on them for months back in Cardiff, at first looking for anything to help Lisa, and after because it was an unfinished job.
They’d had weapons. Big ones. Hidden away all over the Isle and they could be used in tandem to make one very, very big boom. A few were inactive now, one had been in the Tower, another in the Hub, but Archie had given him control of the one in Scotland once he’d explained (and bribed him a bit, but that was irrelevant, he had the gun) and the rest he’d done overrides for.
Powering up now, target locked, not moving.
He waited. He pressed enter. He saved the world and he was fairly certain he deserved a decent cup of coffee for the effort.
--
Jack had been making the 456 in the glass chamber’s life a living hell as best he could when the screaming started. It was like listening to a schoolteacher drag too-long fingernails across a chalkboard. Only worse. A lot worse. He was fairly certain his brain was starting to hemorrhage in addition to the damage the gas was doing but the fucker was going to die and it was going to die now and he didn’t care if he went with it and stayed that way, honestly. Or if it had friends that would come back and finish the job it had started. He really just. Didn’t. He was standing up now because that’s what he should have done before and it’s what was needed now and Ianto had been right about that. And he wasn’t letting that be forgotten just yet, if ever.
When he gasped back to life, the glass was shattered, the gas had dissipated and the 456 (or whatever its proper name was) was dead on the floor, the child it had taken slumped amongst its wreckage. Though he was reasonably certain that hadn’t been his doing, had it?
--
When it happened for Gwen, she was outside, guns blazing. She saw the sky light up, saw the ship flicker into visibility before being blown to bits and she wondered, briefly, why in the bleeding hell no one had done that earlier.
--
When the ash of the ship started drifting down to Earth for Ianto, he was having a tolerably good cup of coffee and hoping he could modify a new machine like the one he’d had back in the Hub. He’d made two more cups. Jack and Gwen should be back soon. He had a sixth sense about these things. And then maybe he’d get some answers as to why he was still here, not that he minded, really, no one really wanted to be dead, obviously. But it had been a good death, it would have been alright to go, knowing that. He wouldn’t have minded. Well, he wouldn’t have minded much at all, really, he’d have been dead. And he rather hoped Gwen had made it because he had her coffee waiting and that would be a bit of a waste of coffee, now wouldn’t it.
--
He’d be right, as it turned out, the coffee was still hot when Gwen limped back into the hub and stared at him in shock.
“I really have no idea,” he’d told her before handing her the coffee. “Did give me time to make a nice sized explosion. Strange how many people aren’t trying to kill you when they think you’ve already died. Bit handy, that, might have to remember it.”
She’d done that ridiculous face where her eyes looked like the eyes of a goldfish about to be eaten by a cat and her lips went into that little pucker they did. He smiled. Really, there wasn’t much else for it, was there?
“I should be less surprised, this is Torchwood, after all, but…do you mind explaining that trick? Thought that was just Jack!” Gwen ignored her coffee. Ianto thought this was a travesty. After all, it’d been a hell of a week.
“Like I said, really couldn’t say. Jack might have an idea, I suppose. Should be him now.” He gave Jack’s industrial strength coffee a final stir as the man in question walked in. He looked terrible, dirt, blood, vomit from that nasty beast in the chamber—which Ianto hoped meant it was very, very dead—and wasn’t exactly in the best of moods, obviously enough. Though the whole world-ending thing was over, he ought to be a bit happy at least. It made Ianto smile a bit to think that maybe a bit of that upset was because of him and his body that ought to be back at Thames House beside a cardboard 14. Which was…highly inappropriate. But he wasn’t always terribly good at appropriate.
Jack had stopped dead when he’d seen Ianto. Well, he supposed it would be a bit shocking, he wasn’t supposed to be the one that popped back from the dead and all, really was just Jack’s thing, generally. “Coffee?” he asked with a vague smile, walking over to him and actually wrapping his hands about the mug for him. “Industrial strength, of course, not quite as good as I could do with proper facilities but I think you may have done something to me, Jack. Pretty sure I’m meant to be dead about now. Don’t suppose that was on purpose, was it? Only you might have mentioned it, save me the embarrassing dying words business. Feel free to interrupt any time.”
Jack stood silent for a long moment, hands around the coffee mug before finally choking out the obvious “You’re alive.”
Ianto quirked a smile at him. “So it would seem, sir.”
“You’re alive,” he repeated, “you were definitely dead, I checked, I wouldn’t have left if there was a chance…”
The coffee cup hit the ground and shattered (bad quality on that, Ianto thought to himself) before he was wrapped in a patented Jack Harkness hug, the sort that knocked the air out of you and broke your ribs. Ianto let him, for a little bit at least. “Jack. Breathing is generally a good thing.” Jack let him go, only to clutch at his shoulder with one hand and take hold of his jaw with the other. It dawned on Ianto as he ran a thumb across his cheekbone that it ought to have hurt, there had been a cut there, last he’d checked, a fairly bad one. But the last he’d checked, he’d also died so he supposed a missing cut wasn’t too terrible, really.
“How?” Jack examined the spot where the cut should have been with his fingers, dropped his other hand to the small of Ianto’s back, kept hold of him, touching with firm and steady hands, as though to make sure he was real and not going anywhere.
“Was rather hoping you might answer that one. Pretty sure that wasn’t in my bag of tricks, at least.”
Jack shook his head and kissed him while Gwen laughed in the background and said she was calling Rhys now and to get a room if they could find one, she didn’t want to walk in on any shenanigans in their temporary Hub anymore than she had the first one.
It was over.
--
A few weeks later once they finally got back to Cardiff after having dealt with all the politics in London, properly recruited Lois and had a word with the Queen (something Ianto was still a bit in awe over, Jack had brought him along for that one) about funding to rebuild the Hub, they finally settled down to the big question about those last few days. They’d picked up some basic scanners from a hospital and a few bits of alien tech from a storage facility in London and cobbled the two together to get a look.
“Nanogenes,” Jack stated, staring at the monitor. “All through you, you’re lit up like a Christmas tree in there, how the hell did that happen, I wonder.” Ianto glared at him and buttoned up his shirt. They were in his flat, which was painfully clean, it wasn’t as though he’d spent much time there in the past few months, he’d all-but lived at the Hub with Jack, needed someone there in case something went wrong and he wasn’t going to let Jack go at it alone.
“I can hazard a guess.” He took the scanner and turned it on Jack, not bothering with the clothing removal (he’d get to that later). Sure enough, Jack lit up even more brightly than he had on the screen.
Jack laughed and flicked the equipment off, stopping Ianto from re-doing his tie. “Well I knew that, those have been there for centuries. I’ve no idea how they got into you, though. Tend to stay in one place, nanogenes.”
Ianto batted his hands away and did up his tie. They were still on work time, technically, though they didn’t have a base yet. “I don’t suppose they like fluids, do they?”
“Never happened before!” Jack shrugged and moved closer, trying to thwart the tie effort again. “And I should know.” There was a moment of that timelessness that he got sometimes before Ianto glared at him and stole his tie back.
“Apparently then, sir,” he emphasized the sir, hoping that would encourage him to some sense of decorum. Gwen was just in the next room on the phone with another construction company, “they activated somehow. I think I’d have noticed if all my scans before lit up like Christmas trees, as you put it.” He remembered Jack kissing him, barely, as he had died. That might have done it, he supposed, but really, there was no way to know. “I’d ask if there’s any way to turn them off, but I suppose they might be useful.”
Gwen hung up the phone in the next room and shouted something about lunch with Rhys, looking at a house. They needed a place with a spare room for a nursery now, it had been a hopeful sort of ‘just looking’ before, when the whole mess had started, but now there was even more reason to dig in properly, set up a real home. Lois was still in London, working there for now before she transferred down at the end of the month. There was plenty still to be taken care of there, after all, but Cardiff was home. Where the accent was right and the city smaller and their families lived. It was comforting, to be home.
It was empty now though, but for him and Jack and his tie was being removed again. He gave Jack the look of one who was not terribly impressed, but Jack just grinned at him and started work on the buttons.
“Jack.” Though the tone wasn’t as scandalized as it ought to have been, really. At least he’d managed some sort of coherent protest, many better men would have failed, he knew.
“Ianto,” Jack grinned, “if I am going to watch you grow old, I’m making the most of your youth right now, got it? Thirty minutes? Or do you think we can manage a whole hour?”
Ianto huffed in amusement before reaching for Jack’s braces. “Not quite the same as when the world might be ending, but alright, Jack. Alright.”
And it was.
Feedback would be lovely. I like this fandom. Pretty new to it though, mind!
Rating: PG?
Word Count: 3,000
Pairings: You know, the canon ones.
Spoilers: TORCHWOOD SEASON 3: CHILDREN OF EARTH: DAY FOUR. You have been warned.
Summary: In which Ianto saves the world, there is coffee, an interesting STD and hopefully a good bit of humor.
Notes: Big thank you for the verbal beta (and couch space) to
angryhamster, for she is lovely. It's fun to actually hear people snicker as they beta, hope it works for you lot too.It was dark, it was dark and it had been for a long time and he felt like he was choking, suffocating and something was crawling up his arm.
It was cold, cold and dark and something was moving, moving and crawling and it was dark, so dark and there was nothing. Nothing at all, nothing out there, nothing in here, nothing but the dark and the cold and the crawling and the and the and the and the.
Aliens.
His eye, it twitched. A blink. Wink? It was just the one, which made it a wink, not a blink, but winking usually was a bit more fun than that.
Waking up hurt.
--
When Ianto came to, it was to be surrounded by bodies. Oh, that was lovely. Laid out on the floor like some sort of fallen hero, surrounded by the noble (or not so noble, really, it was all a bit of a mess, wasn’t it) dead. Well, really, the first thing he’d see was red, and hadn’t that been fun. Someone had so kindly decided to cover him up. Once he’d gotten rid of the sheet, he could wonder where they’d unearthed so many red pallets and sheets, didn’t seem like something they’d ordinarily keep en masse in Thames House. Bit strange, that, but of course he was fairly certain he’d been dead a few minutes ago and now he wasn’t, so really all that was a bit strange too. Still, it was easier to ponder over the oddity of several red sheets than over the whole waking-up business. No one else seemed to be.
Aside from the obviously empty spot beside him, but that bit was fairly easily explained. Jack had been there too, after all. He’d have been insulted that he hadn’t waited, but then again, he wasn’t supposed to wake up, now was he. Can’t go about sitting in front of supposedly-dead bodies when the world’s about to end and all.
Ah, right. World ending. He ought to get on that.
He reached up to straighten his tie. Someone had done it for him. At least someone out of this lot of miscreants appreciated the necessity of a properly straightened tie (though it did leave him at something of a loss as to what to do with his hands).
--
The world ending business seemed to be well in hand by the time he’d made it back to the warehouse. Or “Hub 2” as Rhys had dubbed it. Well, decorated it. Really, it was still missing far too many of the finer things in life to be the Hub. Namely Jack and a bed at the moment, they never had gotten to make the most of that time earlier, and Ianto had never thought he’d be irritated by coffee beans. No one was there now, though. Off saving the world, again, of course. It would have been nice of them to leave some sort of note if they were going to go haring off, mind. Not that they knew he’d be back, but still, it would have been nice.
There was still a functional laptop, though. That was a start. He had no idea where Gwen or Jack might be, (saving the world, he told himself again, because it probably bore repeating), but he was here and he had a laptop and there were aliens invading the Earth (again, really, could they stop?) and he had a laptop.
Well, surely he could manage something with that.
It was the work of about half an hour after that to hack into the UN satellites and start hunting for the 456 ship. There’d been a bit too much going on earlier to make a solid go of it and there was shorthand to be read and really, Gwen was good but she wasn’t a hacker. Tosh had been better than he was, but he managed alright. Harder now, without all the resources of the Hub, but he had the access codes for half the major world organizations memorized and knew the basics of each database. Most databases were set up in the same ways, and Ianto Jones was an archivist. A bloody good one at that.
He was trying not to think of the fact that his archives were gone now, blown up with Jack. But Jack could come back, years worth of archival material and months worth of time and labor, that was all gone now. A mile radius. There were some parts of the Hub that might have made it, the very deepest parts, but those would be inaccessible under the rubble for months and no one really even knew what all was down there anymore. Ghosts, mostly, and a lot of dust. Rubble now too, probably. One hell of a clean-up, that would be.
There was a trick to dealing with satellites and ships and cloaking devices, he’d learned it at Torchwood One, read it in a file from the 80’s and he never forgot something he’d read. Useful, that. Especially for an archivist. (Though most archivists would argue the usefulness of being able to find a cloaked spaceship in orbit, wasn’t that better left to the tech lot? Ianto almost smiled at the thought. In Torchwood, everything was useful.) The trick was, of course, to look for dead spots. Which should have been perfectly obvious, but dead spots in space were a bit trickier. It was all one big dead spot. But there was space dust out there, atmospheric interference, and that, that was all random. Cloaking devices couldn’t do random, not perfectly, there was always a pattern. Sometimes a very good pattern or a very big pattern, but a pattern all the same, and the trick was to find it, isolate it, find the frequency hiding that part of the sky and disable it.
It was harder than it sounded, but pattern recognition software helped and running six different ones on three computers cut down the time considerably.
Two hours later, he had it. And he hadn’t spent those two hours twiddling his thumbs either. He’d been digging through the Torchwood databases to find out what remnant of Torchwood One were still in London. Surely there was something, he knew not everything had been moved into the Tower, there were plenty of storage areas from before the discovery of the pressure point, the start of the Ghost Shifts. There had to be something. Torchwood London hadn’t been confined to one point, it was a huge base of operations and yes, with its archives gone, it was hard to find what was where but there were backups, Ianto had been working on them for months back in Cardiff, at first looking for anything to help Lisa, and after because it was an unfinished job.
They’d had weapons. Big ones. Hidden away all over the Isle and they could be used in tandem to make one very, very big boom. A few were inactive now, one had been in the Tower, another in the Hub, but Archie had given him control of the one in Scotland once he’d explained (and bribed him a bit, but that was irrelevant, he had the gun) and the rest he’d done overrides for.
Powering up now, target locked, not moving.
He waited. He pressed enter. He saved the world and he was fairly certain he deserved a decent cup of coffee for the effort.
--
Jack had been making the 456 in the glass chamber’s life a living hell as best he could when the screaming started. It was like listening to a schoolteacher drag too-long fingernails across a chalkboard. Only worse. A lot worse. He was fairly certain his brain was starting to hemorrhage in addition to the damage the gas was doing but the fucker was going to die and it was going to die now and he didn’t care if he went with it and stayed that way, honestly. Or if it had friends that would come back and finish the job it had started. He really just. Didn’t. He was standing up now because that’s what he should have done before and it’s what was needed now and Ianto had been right about that. And he wasn’t letting that be forgotten just yet, if ever.
When he gasped back to life, the glass was shattered, the gas had dissipated and the 456 (or whatever its proper name was) was dead on the floor, the child it had taken slumped amongst its wreckage. Though he was reasonably certain that hadn’t been his doing, had it?
--
When it happened for Gwen, she was outside, guns blazing. She saw the sky light up, saw the ship flicker into visibility before being blown to bits and she wondered, briefly, why in the bleeding hell no one had done that earlier.
--
When the ash of the ship started drifting down to Earth for Ianto, he was having a tolerably good cup of coffee and hoping he could modify a new machine like the one he’d had back in the Hub. He’d made two more cups. Jack and Gwen should be back soon. He had a sixth sense about these things. And then maybe he’d get some answers as to why he was still here, not that he minded, really, no one really wanted to be dead, obviously. But it had been a good death, it would have been alright to go, knowing that. He wouldn’t have minded. Well, he wouldn’t have minded much at all, really, he’d have been dead. And he rather hoped Gwen had made it because he had her coffee waiting and that would be a bit of a waste of coffee, now wouldn’t it.
--
He’d be right, as it turned out, the coffee was still hot when Gwen limped back into the hub and stared at him in shock.
“I really have no idea,” he’d told her before handing her the coffee. “Did give me time to make a nice sized explosion. Strange how many people aren’t trying to kill you when they think you’ve already died. Bit handy, that, might have to remember it.”
She’d done that ridiculous face where her eyes looked like the eyes of a goldfish about to be eaten by a cat and her lips went into that little pucker they did. He smiled. Really, there wasn’t much else for it, was there?
“I should be less surprised, this is Torchwood, after all, but…do you mind explaining that trick? Thought that was just Jack!” Gwen ignored her coffee. Ianto thought this was a travesty. After all, it’d been a hell of a week.
“Like I said, really couldn’t say. Jack might have an idea, I suppose. Should be him now.” He gave Jack’s industrial strength coffee a final stir as the man in question walked in. He looked terrible, dirt, blood, vomit from that nasty beast in the chamber—which Ianto hoped meant it was very, very dead—and wasn’t exactly in the best of moods, obviously enough. Though the whole world-ending thing was over, he ought to be a bit happy at least. It made Ianto smile a bit to think that maybe a bit of that upset was because of him and his body that ought to be back at Thames House beside a cardboard 14. Which was…highly inappropriate. But he wasn’t always terribly good at appropriate.
Jack had stopped dead when he’d seen Ianto. Well, he supposed it would be a bit shocking, he wasn’t supposed to be the one that popped back from the dead and all, really was just Jack’s thing, generally. “Coffee?” he asked with a vague smile, walking over to him and actually wrapping his hands about the mug for him. “Industrial strength, of course, not quite as good as I could do with proper facilities but I think you may have done something to me, Jack. Pretty sure I’m meant to be dead about now. Don’t suppose that was on purpose, was it? Only you might have mentioned it, save me the embarrassing dying words business. Feel free to interrupt any time.”
Jack stood silent for a long moment, hands around the coffee mug before finally choking out the obvious “You’re alive.”
Ianto quirked a smile at him. “So it would seem, sir.”
“You’re alive,” he repeated, “you were definitely dead, I checked, I wouldn’t have left if there was a chance…”
The coffee cup hit the ground and shattered (bad quality on that, Ianto thought to himself) before he was wrapped in a patented Jack Harkness hug, the sort that knocked the air out of you and broke your ribs. Ianto let him, for a little bit at least. “Jack. Breathing is generally a good thing.” Jack let him go, only to clutch at his shoulder with one hand and take hold of his jaw with the other. It dawned on Ianto as he ran a thumb across his cheekbone that it ought to have hurt, there had been a cut there, last he’d checked, a fairly bad one. But the last he’d checked, he’d also died so he supposed a missing cut wasn’t too terrible, really.
“How?” Jack examined the spot where the cut should have been with his fingers, dropped his other hand to the small of Ianto’s back, kept hold of him, touching with firm and steady hands, as though to make sure he was real and not going anywhere.
“Was rather hoping you might answer that one. Pretty sure that wasn’t in my bag of tricks, at least.”
Jack shook his head and kissed him while Gwen laughed in the background and said she was calling Rhys now and to get a room if they could find one, she didn’t want to walk in on any shenanigans in their temporary Hub anymore than she had the first one.
It was over.
--
A few weeks later once they finally got back to Cardiff after having dealt with all the politics in London, properly recruited Lois and had a word with the Queen (something Ianto was still a bit in awe over, Jack had brought him along for that one) about funding to rebuild the Hub, they finally settled down to the big question about those last few days. They’d picked up some basic scanners from a hospital and a few bits of alien tech from a storage facility in London and cobbled the two together to get a look.
“Nanogenes,” Jack stated, staring at the monitor. “All through you, you’re lit up like a Christmas tree in there, how the hell did that happen, I wonder.” Ianto glared at him and buttoned up his shirt. They were in his flat, which was painfully clean, it wasn’t as though he’d spent much time there in the past few months, he’d all-but lived at the Hub with Jack, needed someone there in case something went wrong and he wasn’t going to let Jack go at it alone.
“I can hazard a guess.” He took the scanner and turned it on Jack, not bothering with the clothing removal (he’d get to that later). Sure enough, Jack lit up even more brightly than he had on the screen.
Jack laughed and flicked the equipment off, stopping Ianto from re-doing his tie. “Well I knew that, those have been there for centuries. I’ve no idea how they got into you, though. Tend to stay in one place, nanogenes.”
Ianto batted his hands away and did up his tie. They were still on work time, technically, though they didn’t have a base yet. “I don’t suppose they like fluids, do they?”
“Never happened before!” Jack shrugged and moved closer, trying to thwart the tie effort again. “And I should know.” There was a moment of that timelessness that he got sometimes before Ianto glared at him and stole his tie back.
“Apparently then, sir,” he emphasized the sir, hoping that would encourage him to some sense of decorum. Gwen was just in the next room on the phone with another construction company, “they activated somehow. I think I’d have noticed if all my scans before lit up like Christmas trees, as you put it.” He remembered Jack kissing him, barely, as he had died. That might have done it, he supposed, but really, there was no way to know. “I’d ask if there’s any way to turn them off, but I suppose they might be useful.”
Gwen hung up the phone in the next room and shouted something about lunch with Rhys, looking at a house. They needed a place with a spare room for a nursery now, it had been a hopeful sort of ‘just looking’ before, when the whole mess had started, but now there was even more reason to dig in properly, set up a real home. Lois was still in London, working there for now before she transferred down at the end of the month. There was plenty still to be taken care of there, after all, but Cardiff was home. Where the accent was right and the city smaller and their families lived. It was comforting, to be home.
It was empty now though, but for him and Jack and his tie was being removed again. He gave Jack the look of one who was not terribly impressed, but Jack just grinned at him and started work on the buttons.
“Jack.” Though the tone wasn’t as scandalized as it ought to have been, really. At least he’d managed some sort of coherent protest, many better men would have failed, he knew.
“Ianto,” Jack grinned, “if I am going to watch you grow old, I’m making the most of your youth right now, got it? Thirty minutes? Or do you think we can manage a whole hour?”
Ianto huffed in amusement before reaching for Jack’s braces. “Not quite the same as when the world might be ending, but alright, Jack. Alright.”
And it was.
Feedback would be lovely. I like this fandom. Pretty new to it though, mind!
