Tea and Sympathy, part 4
Jun. 28th, 2008 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerTitle: Tea and Sympathy, part 4
Author: osprey_archer
Pairing: Owen/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Sequel to: Tea and Sympathy, Tea and Sympathy, part 2, Tea and Sympathy, part 3, and Tea and Sympathy: The Shower Scene
Disclaimer: Still don't own them.
Summary: “I’m going to die from a germ that made an impossible interspecies jump,” says Owen. “Want my liquor stash, Gwen?"
Two weeks after getting sick (three weeks and a day after Jack…whatevered…not that Ianto’s counting) Owen shows no signs of getting better, so Tosh insists on a blood test.
Team Torchwood stands clustered around the autopsy table, watching Owen draw blood samples from the crook of his elbow. “We should take bets,” says Owen, his voice dreamy and appallingly cheerful. “What kind of alien plague this is, and how quickly it’s going to kill me.”
Blood always makes Ianto nauseous.
“It’s not going to kill you,” Gwen says gently.
“Put you down for three weeks, shall I?” says Owen. “You always were an optimist. Tosh for two. Ianto, I guess that leaves you one…”
Ianto wants, desperately, to be elsewhere. “Coffee, anyone?”
“It will contaminate the blood samples,” says Tosh.
“Perhaps later,” says Gwen.
“Winner gets my eulogy!” cries Owen, clapping his hands.
Ianto doesn’t like the smell of blood either; it makes his throat hurt and his eyes smart.
“Do members of Torchwood get eulogies?” Owen asks. “If they don’t go bat shit like Suzie.”
Tosh is absorbed in the blood samples (and perhaps willfully ignoring him). Gwen glances at Ianto uncertainly. “No,” snaps Ianto.
He’s lying, but he wants to quash the conversation, not move step by step through Owen’s dream eulogy.
Owen is not chastened. “You can have my record collection, Tosh,” he says, still in that awful cheerful voice.
Tosh is definitely ignoring Owen. Ianto can tell from the tense set of her shoulders. Gwen’s breath is odd and jerky, and Ianto’s fists (safely hidden behind his back) are clenched. He wishes Owen would stop talking.
“You can throw out the ones you don’t like,” Owen tells Tosh’s back, as if she were worried only about never-used records cluttering up her flat. She makes a warding gesture with one hand and punches a computer key. DNA scrolls across the screen. “It’s a bacterium,” Tosh says. “From the weevils.”
“Is that even possible?” asks Owen.
Tosh has evidently dissociated right out of Owen’s imaginary funeral: her voice is appalling buoyant. “It shouldn’t be,” she chirps. “But evidently—”
“I’m going to die from a germ that made an impossible interspecies jump,” says Owen. “Want my liquor stash, Gwen? A year’s supply of single-malt whisky.”
“Only if I can drink it with you,” says Gwen, squeezing his shoulder. “Tosh will find a cure, won’t you, Tosh?”
Gwen wasn’t here when the woman before Suzie got Martian pneumonia. Jodie, or was it Josie? Died all in spots. Ianto pushes his fists into his pockets. They have better computers now. Josie wasn’t very healthy anyway. (Because Owen was in such good health, living on liquor and coffee and snippets of sleep in between alien hunting.)
“—histamine in the parietel cells,” Tosh is saying, bouncy as a child high on candy floss. Ianto wants to brain her. “It’s really quite fascinating. The effects on gastric acid…” her voice fades as her hands flickered over the keyboard.
“Will Owen…?” Ianto asks, his voice odd and floating and unable to settle into a sentence. His stomach churns like cake batter.
“Ianto!” says Owen, as if he’s just noticed him. “You don’t want a gigantic television set, do you?”
“No.”
“It’s quite the interspecies jump,” says Tosh, pounding obnoxiously on her keyboard. “This could revolutionize our understanding of epidemiology—”
“My coffee machine!” cries Owen, thrusting a finger at Ianto. “Essence of Owen in every espresso—”
Ianto snaps. “Owen, shut up.”
Owen kicks the leg of the autopsy table.
“Is Owen going to be all right?” Gwen asks.
Tosh blinks at her, confused. “Didn’t I mention—yes,” she says. “I’m synthesizing the antibiotic right now. Four or five days and he’ll be fine.”
Owen collapses on the autopsy table, his breathing uneven. Ianto shouldn’t listen, he knows Owen would hate for them to hear him anywhere in the vicinity of tears. But he listens greedily until Gwen, pressing her thumbs to the inner corners of her eyes, sends him for coffee.
When he returns, Tosh has moved her attention from the computer to the centrifuge and is doing something horrible and complicated to it while excitedly expostulating on Owen’s disease, and Gwen is sitting next to Owen demonstrating her difficulties with the concept of professional boundaries. Owen looks simultaneously pleased and horrified by the attention, as he does when Ianto holds him. It wounds Ianto’s pride; he had liked to think he was unique.
“Here we go,” says Tosh, as a hail of lime green pellets spew from the centrifuge. She hands Owen a pill and returns to her computer. “The bacteria is stored in the salivary glands, so you must have contracted it when you got bitten.”
Bitten. Ianto doesn’t touch his collarbone. How many bites would it take, and how deep? Is there a casual way to ask Tosh if, oh, three or four bites that drew just a little blood—?
Owen gags on the pill. “You’re trying to kill me,” he accuses, removing the tray of coffee from Ianto’s custody and draining the cups like shots of vodka. “This pill tastes like crystallized Weevil spit.”
Tosh, high on her own brilliance, is impervious to even Owen’s criticism. “Take a pill every four hours,” she instructs.
“My tongue will fall out,” says Owen.
“You don’t use it for anything good anyway,” says Gwen.
“Oh really?” says Owen. “You weren’t saying that—”
“Do you want more coffee?” Ianto interposes.
“He should try to get some rest,” says Tosh. “No more caffeine. Sleep, drink lots of fluids—”
“Did your computer tell you that I was going deaf? Because I’m right here, don’t talk about me like I can’t hear,” says Owen.
Ianto volunteers to drive Owen home.
He goes to his own flat instead of Owen’s. Owen’s flat is neat enough on the surface, but in the corners and linen closets and the back of the refrigerator horrid things dwell (Ianto, in moments of irritation, thinks it’s just like Owen’s mind). Owen, evidently addled by the mixture of Weevil pills and caffeine, doesn’t notice until they’re in the lift.
“Where have you taken me?” he asks, staring dismally at the rucked-up flowered carpet on the lift floor
“My flat,” said Ianto.
“I’m not going to your flat,” says Owen.
“I promise not to make you wear a tie.”
Owen tugs Ianto’s tie: testing the ligature potential. Ianto’s neck seems to fizz under his fingers. “I want to go to my own flat.”
“I don’t particularly care what you want, Owen.”
Owen leans on Ianto, head lowered against Ianto’s collar. The lift huffs anemically. Ianto feels he’s said the wrong thing. “I have better coffee at my flat,” he says. “And actual food instead of desiccated aliens.”
“You’re taking me to some kind of etiquette-laden hell where I have to keep my feet off the furniture and use special forks for asparagus.”
The lift chimes as it reaches Ianto’s floor. “At least in my flat the asparagus hasn’t grown fangs,” says Ianto.
Owen prowls around Ianto’s living room. Ianto retreats to the kitchen, but it’s only separated from the living room by a counter so his eyes keep rising irresistibly to Owen no matter how he tells himself to focus on cooking an omelet. He likes watching Owen move, and despite himself he wants Owen to approve the flat.
Ianto cracks the eggs with unnecessary force as Owen pokes around the coffee table: CD cases, half-read copies of the Times, a crumb-dotted toast plate and a three-day-old coffee cup that never made it back to the kitchen.
The kettle hisses. Ianto pours tea and flips the omelet, and Owen moves on to Ianto’s shelves: books, a scattering of geodes (Ianto used to collect), photographs.
Ianto still has an embarrassing number of Jack photographs (although most are Jack with the rest of the team, so it isn’t that embarrassing). Ianto jitters the spatula. Owen’s fingers, spider-like, trace the figures in the photographs. Ianto hopes he doesn’t find the photograph of Lisa tucked behind the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ianto takes it out on their monthly anniversaries.
Owen lets the pictures pass without comment. “This is…less anal-retentive than I expected.”
Ianto is inordinately pleased. (Is he really that desperate for approval?) “What did you expect?” asks Ianto, carrying the tea and omelet to the coffee table.
“Everything alphabetized.”
“Only the books,” Ianto assures him.
Owen laughs until he has to grab the shelves for support.
“Sit down,” Ianto says. Owen ignores him. Ianto moves to stand beside him, in case he falls again. He doesn’t look at Owen (for an exhibitionist Owen really doesn’t like being watched) but fixes his eyes on the bookshelves and watches Owen peripherally.
He looks (Owen would kill Ianto if he ever said it aloud) like a doll: very pale with very red cheeks. He blinks lethargically, eyelashes drifting like butterflies; his lips are red and bitten.
Owen glances over at Ianto. “Brooding about Jack again?”
“No.”
“Lisa?”
Ianto tenses, defensive. “No.”
“I’m running out of people you’ve fancied for you to brood about. The coffee machine?”
“Owen—”
“Perhaps you’ve got a well-disguised fancy for Tosh?”
“Why don’t you sit down and eat the omelet, Owen?”
Owen will not be deterred, any more than he would shut up about his funeral. “Brooding about me, then?”
Ianto is tired of playing games. “Yes.”
It seems Owen didn’t want that answer. His eyes grow wide and confused and he is, unbelievably, silent—for three seconds too long, before he snaps, “You really have no standards.”
“You really ought to lie down,” says Ianto. Owen ignores him again, but that’s all right; Ianto likes picking Owen up and carrying him, even if Owen does grab Ianto’s neck like he’s drowning and stiffen like a cadaver, even if Ianto always thinks uneasily that Owen’s even lighter than before (but maybe it’s just that Ianto’s getting stronger). It’s fun; it’s like a game.
He settles on the couch, leaning Owen against his chest and settling a plate with the omelet on Owen’s lap.
“Eat,” he orders playfully. Owen clenches his fists and refuses the fork, so Ianto spears a piece of omelet himself and pokes it at Owen’s mouth.
Owen yanks the fork away and hurls it across the room. “I hate you.”
“I didn’t realize you objected so strongly to cutlery.”
“Can you just sexually harass me and get it over with?” snaps Owen.
Ianto always tells himself that if Owen really objected to being harassed, he would have killed Ianto by now; but that would require Owen to be honest with himself, and admitting to being used might be a greater blow to his self-image than said usage.
Owen rams his elbow into Ianto’s ribs: tired of being ignored. “Ianto,” he complains.
“I’ll try,” says Ianto. He leans around Owen and kisses him right between his wide eyes. Owen flinches. It’s hard to muster enthusiasm. “You need to sleep,” Ianto says, and tries to pull away, but Owen’s hands are wrapped around Ianto’s elbows and he’s staring at Ianto with unreadable intensity.
“I don’t want to sleep,” says Owen. “I don’t want an omelet. I hate omelets. I don’t want—”
“Owen.”
“And you couldn’t give a fuck,” says Owen. He tries to push Ianto off the couch but succeeds only in pressing his face into Ianto’s stomach after a failed attempt at a head-butt. Ianto attempts to displace his own confusion by disarranging Owen’s hair. It’s very soft. Owen is sulking.
“I want you to get well,” says Ianto, after rejecting half an etiquette book of soothing, meaningless phrases. “And—if—Owen, just go to sleep.”
“You just wait till I’m healthy,” says Owen, threatening as he can be when he’s curled against Ianto like a kitten.
Ianto likes Owen falling asleep in his lap too much to look forward to it, but he makes sure Owen takes Tosh’s pills on schedule anyway.
Owen’s fever has broken by morning. He leaves Ianto’s apartment without so much as a cup of coffee.
Author: osprey_archer
Pairing: Owen/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Sequel to: Tea and Sympathy, Tea and Sympathy, part 2, Tea and Sympathy, part 3, and Tea and Sympathy: The Shower Scene
Disclaimer: Still don't own them.
Summary: “I’m going to die from a germ that made an impossible interspecies jump,” says Owen. “Want my liquor stash, Gwen?"
Two weeks after getting sick (three weeks and a day after Jack…whatevered…not that Ianto’s counting) Owen shows no signs of getting better, so Tosh insists on a blood test.
Team Torchwood stands clustered around the autopsy table, watching Owen draw blood samples from the crook of his elbow. “We should take bets,” says Owen, his voice dreamy and appallingly cheerful. “What kind of alien plague this is, and how quickly it’s going to kill me.”
Blood always makes Ianto nauseous.
“It’s not going to kill you,” Gwen says gently.
“Put you down for three weeks, shall I?” says Owen. “You always were an optimist. Tosh for two. Ianto, I guess that leaves you one…”
Ianto wants, desperately, to be elsewhere. “Coffee, anyone?”
“It will contaminate the blood samples,” says Tosh.
“Perhaps later,” says Gwen.
“Winner gets my eulogy!” cries Owen, clapping his hands.
Ianto doesn’t like the smell of blood either; it makes his throat hurt and his eyes smart.
“Do members of Torchwood get eulogies?” Owen asks. “If they don’t go bat shit like Suzie.”
Tosh is absorbed in the blood samples (and perhaps willfully ignoring him). Gwen glances at Ianto uncertainly. “No,” snaps Ianto.
He’s lying, but he wants to quash the conversation, not move step by step through Owen’s dream eulogy.
Owen is not chastened. “You can have my record collection, Tosh,” he says, still in that awful cheerful voice.
Tosh is definitely ignoring Owen. Ianto can tell from the tense set of her shoulders. Gwen’s breath is odd and jerky, and Ianto’s fists (safely hidden behind his back) are clenched. He wishes Owen would stop talking.
“You can throw out the ones you don’t like,” Owen tells Tosh’s back, as if she were worried only about never-used records cluttering up her flat. She makes a warding gesture with one hand and punches a computer key. DNA scrolls across the screen. “It’s a bacterium,” Tosh says. “From the weevils.”
“Is that even possible?” asks Owen.
Tosh has evidently dissociated right out of Owen’s imaginary funeral: her voice is appalling buoyant. “It shouldn’t be,” she chirps. “But evidently—”
“I’m going to die from a germ that made an impossible interspecies jump,” says Owen. “Want my liquor stash, Gwen? A year’s supply of single-malt whisky.”
“Only if I can drink it with you,” says Gwen, squeezing his shoulder. “Tosh will find a cure, won’t you, Tosh?”
Gwen wasn’t here when the woman before Suzie got Martian pneumonia. Jodie, or was it Josie? Died all in spots. Ianto pushes his fists into his pockets. They have better computers now. Josie wasn’t very healthy anyway. (Because Owen was in such good health, living on liquor and coffee and snippets of sleep in between alien hunting.)
“—histamine in the parietel cells,” Tosh is saying, bouncy as a child high on candy floss. Ianto wants to brain her. “It’s really quite fascinating. The effects on gastric acid…” her voice fades as her hands flickered over the keyboard.
“Will Owen…?” Ianto asks, his voice odd and floating and unable to settle into a sentence. His stomach churns like cake batter.
“Ianto!” says Owen, as if he’s just noticed him. “You don’t want a gigantic television set, do you?”
“No.”
“It’s quite the interspecies jump,” says Tosh, pounding obnoxiously on her keyboard. “This could revolutionize our understanding of epidemiology—”
“My coffee machine!” cries Owen, thrusting a finger at Ianto. “Essence of Owen in every espresso—”
Ianto snaps. “Owen, shut up.”
Owen kicks the leg of the autopsy table.
“Is Owen going to be all right?” Gwen asks.
Tosh blinks at her, confused. “Didn’t I mention—yes,” she says. “I’m synthesizing the antibiotic right now. Four or five days and he’ll be fine.”
Owen collapses on the autopsy table, his breathing uneven. Ianto shouldn’t listen, he knows Owen would hate for them to hear him anywhere in the vicinity of tears. But he listens greedily until Gwen, pressing her thumbs to the inner corners of her eyes, sends him for coffee.
When he returns, Tosh has moved her attention from the computer to the centrifuge and is doing something horrible and complicated to it while excitedly expostulating on Owen’s disease, and Gwen is sitting next to Owen demonstrating her difficulties with the concept of professional boundaries. Owen looks simultaneously pleased and horrified by the attention, as he does when Ianto holds him. It wounds Ianto’s pride; he had liked to think he was unique.
“Here we go,” says Tosh, as a hail of lime green pellets spew from the centrifuge. She hands Owen a pill and returns to her computer. “The bacteria is stored in the salivary glands, so you must have contracted it when you got bitten.”
Bitten. Ianto doesn’t touch his collarbone. How many bites would it take, and how deep? Is there a casual way to ask Tosh if, oh, three or four bites that drew just a little blood—?
Owen gags on the pill. “You’re trying to kill me,” he accuses, removing the tray of coffee from Ianto’s custody and draining the cups like shots of vodka. “This pill tastes like crystallized Weevil spit.”
Tosh, high on her own brilliance, is impervious to even Owen’s criticism. “Take a pill every four hours,” she instructs.
“My tongue will fall out,” says Owen.
“You don’t use it for anything good anyway,” says Gwen.
“Oh really?” says Owen. “You weren’t saying that—”
“Do you want more coffee?” Ianto interposes.
“He should try to get some rest,” says Tosh. “No more caffeine. Sleep, drink lots of fluids—”
“Did your computer tell you that I was going deaf? Because I’m right here, don’t talk about me like I can’t hear,” says Owen.
Ianto volunteers to drive Owen home.
He goes to his own flat instead of Owen’s. Owen’s flat is neat enough on the surface, but in the corners and linen closets and the back of the refrigerator horrid things dwell (Ianto, in moments of irritation, thinks it’s just like Owen’s mind). Owen, evidently addled by the mixture of Weevil pills and caffeine, doesn’t notice until they’re in the lift.
“Where have you taken me?” he asks, staring dismally at the rucked-up flowered carpet on the lift floor
“My flat,” said Ianto.
“I’m not going to your flat,” says Owen.
“I promise not to make you wear a tie.”
Owen tugs Ianto’s tie: testing the ligature potential. Ianto’s neck seems to fizz under his fingers. “I want to go to my own flat.”
“I don’t particularly care what you want, Owen.”
Owen leans on Ianto, head lowered against Ianto’s collar. The lift huffs anemically. Ianto feels he’s said the wrong thing. “I have better coffee at my flat,” he says. “And actual food instead of desiccated aliens.”
“You’re taking me to some kind of etiquette-laden hell where I have to keep my feet off the furniture and use special forks for asparagus.”
The lift chimes as it reaches Ianto’s floor. “At least in my flat the asparagus hasn’t grown fangs,” says Ianto.
Owen prowls around Ianto’s living room. Ianto retreats to the kitchen, but it’s only separated from the living room by a counter so his eyes keep rising irresistibly to Owen no matter how he tells himself to focus on cooking an omelet. He likes watching Owen move, and despite himself he wants Owen to approve the flat.
Ianto cracks the eggs with unnecessary force as Owen pokes around the coffee table: CD cases, half-read copies of the Times, a crumb-dotted toast plate and a three-day-old coffee cup that never made it back to the kitchen.
The kettle hisses. Ianto pours tea and flips the omelet, and Owen moves on to Ianto’s shelves: books, a scattering of geodes (Ianto used to collect), photographs.
Ianto still has an embarrassing number of Jack photographs (although most are Jack with the rest of the team, so it isn’t that embarrassing). Ianto jitters the spatula. Owen’s fingers, spider-like, trace the figures in the photographs. Ianto hopes he doesn’t find the photograph of Lisa tucked behind the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ianto takes it out on their monthly anniversaries.
Owen lets the pictures pass without comment. “This is…less anal-retentive than I expected.”
Ianto is inordinately pleased. (Is he really that desperate for approval?) “What did you expect?” asks Ianto, carrying the tea and omelet to the coffee table.
“Everything alphabetized.”
“Only the books,” Ianto assures him.
Owen laughs until he has to grab the shelves for support.
“Sit down,” Ianto says. Owen ignores him. Ianto moves to stand beside him, in case he falls again. He doesn’t look at Owen (for an exhibitionist Owen really doesn’t like being watched) but fixes his eyes on the bookshelves and watches Owen peripherally.
He looks (Owen would kill Ianto if he ever said it aloud) like a doll: very pale with very red cheeks. He blinks lethargically, eyelashes drifting like butterflies; his lips are red and bitten.
Owen glances over at Ianto. “Brooding about Jack again?”
“No.”
“Lisa?”
Ianto tenses, defensive. “No.”
“I’m running out of people you’ve fancied for you to brood about. The coffee machine?”
“Owen—”
“Perhaps you’ve got a well-disguised fancy for Tosh?”
“Why don’t you sit down and eat the omelet, Owen?”
Owen will not be deterred, any more than he would shut up about his funeral. “Brooding about me, then?”
Ianto is tired of playing games. “Yes.”
It seems Owen didn’t want that answer. His eyes grow wide and confused and he is, unbelievably, silent—for three seconds too long, before he snaps, “You really have no standards.”
“You really ought to lie down,” says Ianto. Owen ignores him again, but that’s all right; Ianto likes picking Owen up and carrying him, even if Owen does grab Ianto’s neck like he’s drowning and stiffen like a cadaver, even if Ianto always thinks uneasily that Owen’s even lighter than before (but maybe it’s just that Ianto’s getting stronger). It’s fun; it’s like a game.
He settles on the couch, leaning Owen against his chest and settling a plate with the omelet on Owen’s lap.
“Eat,” he orders playfully. Owen clenches his fists and refuses the fork, so Ianto spears a piece of omelet himself and pokes it at Owen’s mouth.
Owen yanks the fork away and hurls it across the room. “I hate you.”
“I didn’t realize you objected so strongly to cutlery.”
“Can you just sexually harass me and get it over with?” snaps Owen.
Ianto always tells himself that if Owen really objected to being harassed, he would have killed Ianto by now; but that would require Owen to be honest with himself, and admitting to being used might be a greater blow to his self-image than said usage.
Owen rams his elbow into Ianto’s ribs: tired of being ignored. “Ianto,” he complains.
“I’ll try,” says Ianto. He leans around Owen and kisses him right between his wide eyes. Owen flinches. It’s hard to muster enthusiasm. “You need to sleep,” Ianto says, and tries to pull away, but Owen’s hands are wrapped around Ianto’s elbows and he’s staring at Ianto with unreadable intensity.
“I don’t want to sleep,” says Owen. “I don’t want an omelet. I hate omelets. I don’t want—”
“Owen.”
“And you couldn’t give a fuck,” says Owen. He tries to push Ianto off the couch but succeeds only in pressing his face into Ianto’s stomach after a failed attempt at a head-butt. Ianto attempts to displace his own confusion by disarranging Owen’s hair. It’s very soft. Owen is sulking.
“I want you to get well,” says Ianto, after rejecting half an etiquette book of soothing, meaningless phrases. “And—if—Owen, just go to sleep.”
“You just wait till I’m healthy,” says Owen, threatening as he can be when he’s curled against Ianto like a kitten.
Ianto likes Owen falling asleep in his lap too much to look forward to it, but he makes sure Owen takes Tosh’s pills on schedule anyway.
Owen’s fever has broken by morning. He leaves Ianto’s apartment without so much as a cup of coffee.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-03 05:11 am (UTC)I think people tend to make Ianto emote because it's easier to write people who stalk onstage and declaim their state of mind (like Jack, although clearly his apparent openness is an illusion). Part of Ianto's charm is that he's usually as expressive as a hard-boiled egg--but it can be hard to write.