Tea and Sympathy, Part 3
Apr. 22nd, 2008 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerTitle: Tea and Sympathy, part 3
Author: osprey_archer
Pairing: Owen/Ianto, Past Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13 for language
Sequel to: "Tea and Sympathy" and "Tea and Sympathy, part 2"
Disclaimer: Still don't own them.
Summary: The brontosaur whuffs and Owen, in an outbreak of sentimentality that is surely of symptom of his illness, entertains the idea of old blankets in some corner of his flat for the thing, which he will call George or Fluffy or possibly Ianto (in case it explodes).
Owen wakes up Ianto-less the next morning, which irritates him no end. If Ianto wants to hold him all night, then he damn well ought to stay for breakfast, not sneak off and leave Owen shivering and bereft and wondering what the hell the teaboy is thinking.
The question is unanswerable. Owen sulks as he warms up the weak milky coffee Ianto left him and, once it’s percolated through his brain enough to wake him up, considers how to regain control of the Ianto situation.
A) He can avoid Ianto. Unfortunately this will only work if Ianto agrees to avoid him too, which he won’t, so either Owen will have to put an exploding lock on his door or start living under a bridge or it isn’t even really an option.
B) He can be even more horrible to Ianto than usual. Eventually even Ianto will give up in the face of unceasing abuse. (The evidence of the past two nights not-withstanding.) There is a distinct chance that this course will lead to Ianto shooting Owen, though, and Owen is pretty sure that Ianto’s spent some time practicing with firearms since last time.
C) He can fuck Ianto. Of course this will make things even more awkward and bitter and awful, but being awkward and awful because of extremely ill-advised sex is smack in the center of Owen’s comfort zone. Unfortunately, he suspects that repeatedly sleeping with Jack will have ruined Ianto for this option; having had the best sex in the universe, how could Ianto possibly settle for less?
Owen doesn’t decide right away. He layers on coats till he looks like a derelict and goes to work (if he and Ianto have to interact, at least Owen can put them on relatively neutral ground).
Ianto, damn him, greets Owen with coffee and concern. “Perfectly fine,” snaps Owen, before Ianto can ask. The coffee makes him nauseous. Everything makes him nauseous. He wants to curl up on a couch and die somewhere. “Where are Tosh and Gwen?”
“Getting food for Anwen—the brontosaur.”
Shit. The whole point of coming to work was that he wouldn’t be alone with Ianto again.
“There are brontosaurus bits in the autopsy room,” says Ianto, cool as if he hadn’t spent the night with Owen. “See if you can find out what made it explode.”
Fortunately Ianto leaves Owen alone to wobble to the autopsy room with his dignity intact. Owen sits on the steps and stares at the bits of brightly-scaled flesh waiting in test tubes, holding the coffee mug between his hands and drifting into a fugue state. Somehow he tests the brontosaur bits with something, and next thing he knows one of the test tubes explodes.
Ianto checks in on the lab. “What was it then?” he asks.
“Caffeine,” says Owen, certain he’s right although uncertain why, and not thinking about it too hard because not vomiting in front of Ianto occupies all his attention.
Ianto leaves and Owen makes it to a toilet before he’s sick. It occurs to him afterward that Ianto surely heard that—Ianto has the preternatural ability to hear anything that might dirty the Hub—but Ianto leaves him alone and Owen leans his head against the sink and tells himself he’s glad.
He stays there until Tosh and Gwen get back with a bag of lettuce that brings a knee-high brontosaur running. “Morning!” calls Gwen, almost as cheerful as before Jack left. “Onward, Anwen!” she cries, and a blue-striped brontosaur rushes to tackle Owen.
Tosh and Ianto get it off him before it loves him to death, like a blue scaly golden retriever. Ianto hauls Owen to his feet. “She’s cute, isn’t she?” says Tosh, in the breathless voice that means she’s recalled that she thinks she’s in love with Owen.
“As a tarantula,” Owen says, hoping to cut her off early. But Tosh taught Anwen a trick and she’s determined to show him, and it would actually be pretty fantastic if it didn’t make Owen feel sick to his stomach just watching the thing do a somersault.
Ianto praises the brontosaur and gives Tosh coffee, Gwen gives Owen a look laden with disgust (he suspects she sicced Anwen on him as preemptive punishment), and Tosh watches Owen and gets flustered and unhappy and takes her new pet away to teach it how to use her computer or something.
Owen wants to take Tosh aside sometimes and explain the world to her. Pretty much everyone, he would say, is really a bastard like him, except they hide it better so they can get you right where they want you before they strike. Tosh would be so much better off if she’d stop letting people see how much she wants to be liked and just acted like him instead.
But that would require spending time with Tosh, and Owen thinks her puppy act will be catching and they’ll collapse into a pathetic mutually adoring relationship until her prince will appear through the Rift (perhaps Tommy Brockess will finally stick around), and she’ll run off with him and they’ll be happily ever after forever, because what can you do when you’ve fallen into someone else’s time but cling to the people who rescued you? It’s not like you’ve got anywhere else to go! And Owen will be left out in the cold, and Tosh will know how much it fucking hurts because of their previous state of mutual soppiness.
“Owen?” says Ianto, and Owen realizes that everyone else has wandered off to do productive work.
“Don’t give that thing any coffee,” he says. “Caffeine, you know.”
“I’ll stick to decaf,” says Ianto.
“You keep decaf here?”
Ianto’s mouth twitches into a tiny smirk. Owen suspects Ianto of using the decaf coffee to exact very subtle revenges on his teammates. It’s the kind of thing he would do.
“Owen?” says Ianto again.
Owen has the feeling that he’s been standing immobile in the middle of the Hub for far too long. “Yes?”
“You’re cluttering up the Hub. Don’t you have some kind of work to do?”
“Paperwork,” says Owen, because if he fucks it up (and he will) Ianto will be saddled with clearing it up. Ianto isn’t the only one who can be passive aggressive.
But Ianto, unlike Owen, has allies. “You have to examine Anwen,” yells Gwen.
“Great. I always wanted to die being trampled by a brontosaur.”
“Scratch her behind the ears,” Tosh calls. “That will put her right to sleep.”
Owen can’t even find the ears so he sedates it, with difficulty; his fingers tremble on the syringe. He runs through the examination on autopilot, blood samples, x-rays, etc., so tired, should have stayed home. The brontosaur breaths soft and deep like sleeping Ianto. It has big bluish eyes with creepy slit pupils and it blinks at him lazily just as he finishes checking its blood pressure.
Owen scratches its neck ridges and it swoons. It’s a pity people aren’t so simple.
Then again, he basically collapsed for Ianto with no more stimulus than that. But Owen is hardly a representative sample.
The brontosaur whuffs and Owen, in an outbreak of sentimentality that is surely of symptom of his illness, entertains the idea of old blankets in some corner of his flat for the thing, which he will call George or Fluffy or possibly Ianto (in case it explodes).
“Done?” says Gwen from the top of the stairs. She’s been watching, he can see it in the evil “I always knew you had a squishy, pathetic heart!” look on her face.
“Am I getting in the way of you killing this one too?” says Owen.
Gwen gives him a vile look. Owen wonders sometimes if she blames him about Jack—like Owen’s brattiness might have tipped the scales on Jack’s leaving. “Come along, Anwen,” says Gwen, and the brontosaur bounds up the stairs to her like a puppy. “Ianto’s ordered in lunch.”
Owen’s hands are trembling too hard for chopsticks, so he takes a carton of fried rice back to the autopsy room where he can eat with his fingers. The chatter and laughter of the rest of the team drifts down the stairs in bursts. They haven’t laughed like that since Jack left. Presumably it’s the addition of the brontosaur, not the fact that Owen isn’t eating with them.
The rice nearly puts Owen to sleep. He oughtn’t to have come to work. He would go back to his flat, but Ianto would see and he would probably insist on giving Owen a ride home and the whole point of coming to work would be shot.
So he goes to Jack’s room, instead. At least he can sleep in a bed. And no one goes down there anymore, at least not when the others could see, although for all Owen knows Ianto angsts down there when he isn’t harassing Owen.
Owen’s been in Jack’s room once before, because having sex with Jack is a Torchwood rite of passage. The room hasn’t changed much. Not that Owen was really looking at the scenery the first time around, but he does remember Jack’s shelves of weird stuff from the Rift. Jack wouldn’t explain what any of it was.
Owen collapses on the optimistically sized bed and waits for the room to stop spinning. He feels haunted; he imagines Jack and Ianto standing just in front of the shelves, Jack’s arms around Ianto with his hands in Ianto’s front pockets, explaining some completely unsexy alien artifact so that it sounds pornographic. Ianto leaning back against Jack with that tiny smirk.
Owen hurls one of the pillows at ghost-Ianto. It breaks one of Jack’s specimens (serves Jack right). Owen frets at the bed, trying to get comfortable.
He’s interrupted by the sudden appearance of Ianto, looking around the room wide-eyed and excited and then confused and finally, when Owen throws a pillow at him to see if he’s real, disappointed. “It’s you,” he says.
“Who did you expect?”
Ianto presses his lips together and moves to the first pillow Owen threw. Ianto picks up the pieces of whatever it broke gently, like they’re parts of an heirloom. “Why did you come into work today?” he asks.
“Figured you couldn’t last another day without me.”
“If we need you that badly we’d call you.” Ianto sets the artifact pieces on the corner of the shelf and comes to sit beside Owen. He touches Owen’s hair. “You need a shower.”
“You offering?”
“Do you want me to?”
Owen presses his face into Ianto’s suit coat and refuses to hear the question. Ianto pets his hair. Owen kisses his hand, and just to make a bad situation worse sits up and kisses Ianto’s lips.
The response is gratifyingly intense. Owen’s too dizzy for this to feel more than all right but he wraps his arms around Ianto and he can feel Ianto’s heart and his breath and Ianto kissing him back, Ianto’s hands in Owen’s hair, Ianto’s throat vibrating under Owen’s lips.
This is going to make things even more awkward and bitter and awful, but Owen is comfortable with awful.
Ianto pins Owen’s wrists next to the pillow and leans his hip into Owen’s stomach to make him stop. “No,” he says. “This is a terrible idea.”
Owen leans up and kisses him and Ianto pushes him back down. Jack’s sheets are satin. “You’re wrong,” Owen mutters.
“I’m never wrong,” says Ianto.
Owen is too tired to list the reasons why that’s ridiculous, and anyway Ianto probably has a long, pent-up list of Owen’s wrongs that he’s just dying to voice and by the end of it he’ll recall why he doesn’t want to be in the same room with Owen, let alone pin him to Jack’s bed. Owen tries to part Ianto’s legs with his knee, get him back in the appropriate mood. He doesn’t have the strength to overcome Ianto’s resistance.
“You’re just too chicken to cuckold Jack in his own bed,” says Owen.
“Jack never cared who else I slept with,” Ianto mutters, and flushes as if ashamed by the admission.
“Then live a little,” Owen mutters, and arches his back so he’s pressed against Ianto. Ianto whimpers and bites his lip until it bleeds. “You can be louder,” Owen murmurs, shooting for seductive. “Unless you’re afraid Gwen and Tosh will hear? Come down and join in?”
“So you can ruin the tattered remains of your relationships with all the members of Torchwood at once? Anyway, the room’s soundproof.”
Because that’s not creepy at all. “How did you know to come down here then?” asks Owen.
Ianto shifts uncomfortably. His breath tickles Owen’s ear. “I have a bug in here.”
That might be even creepier. “It wouldn’t ruin all my relationships, anyway. I can have relationships with people I’ve had sex with.”
“Gwen hardly speaks to you.”
“Jack still spoke to me.”
Owen didn’t mean that as a dig, he just wasn’t thinking. Ianto’s mouth wavers and his face droops and he’s moving away from Owen. Owen really wants him back. He slips his wrists from Ianto’s loosened grasp and catches Ianto’s head and pulls Ianto down on top of him.
Ianto lands awkwardly, his chin on Owen’s nose and his muscles stiff with protest.
“It was only the once,” Owen says, and adds, lying, “It was before you were, um.”
“Sleeping with my girlfriend’s murderer?” Owen can’t read Ianto’s voice, which is unusual (Ianto’s blank façade is showy but not nearly as functional as Ianto would probably like). Wry. Self-deprecating. Angry? With Jack?—more likely with Owen.
Anger is all right. Owen appreciates anger.
Ianto wriggles so his mouth is pressed in Owen’s hair. Owen nibbles ruminatively at Ianto’s shirt, over his collarbone. It’s very cozy. If this goes on Ianto may notice that Owen likes him.
“So about that cuckoldry,” murmurs Owen.
“And I thought you were going to be sick on me if I tried anything funny.”
It’s entirely possible. “Meet here same time tomorrow?”
Ianto kisses his ear. Owen melts. Thank God Ianto can’t see his face. “Or, you know, my place again,” Owen says, and tries not to die because his voice sounds pathetic.
A kaboom blasts through the Hub.
Ianto’s off Owen in seconds, in a fresh shirt (he has a supply of suits down here) in moments more, and up Jack’s ladder before Owen even sits up. He follows, too dazed to be concerned although for all he knows that sound was the world ending (or Jack coming back).
But it’s the brontosaur. Evidently sweet and sour sauce didn’t agree with it.
Of course it makes Owen vomit. Gwen squeaks that he oughtn’t have come into work like that and Tosh brushes at her eyes and upbraids him for contaminating the evidence (this is why Owen, in a parallel universe, might love Tosh: the mixture of sentimentality and taking her work seriously and Ianto drives him home. There’s tea and a promise to be back later. Owen pretends it irritates him.
Once Ianto's gone, Owen stares out his windows and considers his options again.
Author: osprey_archer
Pairing: Owen/Ianto, Past Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13 for language
Sequel to: "Tea and Sympathy" and "Tea and Sympathy, part 2"
Disclaimer: Still don't own them.
Summary: The brontosaur whuffs and Owen, in an outbreak of sentimentality that is surely of symptom of his illness, entertains the idea of old blankets in some corner of his flat for the thing, which he will call George or Fluffy or possibly Ianto (in case it explodes).
Owen wakes up Ianto-less the next morning, which irritates him no end. If Ianto wants to hold him all night, then he damn well ought to stay for breakfast, not sneak off and leave Owen shivering and bereft and wondering what the hell the teaboy is thinking.
The question is unanswerable. Owen sulks as he warms up the weak milky coffee Ianto left him and, once it’s percolated through his brain enough to wake him up, considers how to regain control of the Ianto situation.
A) He can avoid Ianto. Unfortunately this will only work if Ianto agrees to avoid him too, which he won’t, so either Owen will have to put an exploding lock on his door or start living under a bridge or it isn’t even really an option.
B) He can be even more horrible to Ianto than usual. Eventually even Ianto will give up in the face of unceasing abuse. (The evidence of the past two nights not-withstanding.) There is a distinct chance that this course will lead to Ianto shooting Owen, though, and Owen is pretty sure that Ianto’s spent some time practicing with firearms since last time.
C) He can fuck Ianto. Of course this will make things even more awkward and bitter and awful, but being awkward and awful because of extremely ill-advised sex is smack in the center of Owen’s comfort zone. Unfortunately, he suspects that repeatedly sleeping with Jack will have ruined Ianto for this option; having had the best sex in the universe, how could Ianto possibly settle for less?
Owen doesn’t decide right away. He layers on coats till he looks like a derelict and goes to work (if he and Ianto have to interact, at least Owen can put them on relatively neutral ground).
Ianto, damn him, greets Owen with coffee and concern. “Perfectly fine,” snaps Owen, before Ianto can ask. The coffee makes him nauseous. Everything makes him nauseous. He wants to curl up on a couch and die somewhere. “Where are Tosh and Gwen?”
“Getting food for Anwen—the brontosaur.”
Shit. The whole point of coming to work was that he wouldn’t be alone with Ianto again.
“There are brontosaurus bits in the autopsy room,” says Ianto, cool as if he hadn’t spent the night with Owen. “See if you can find out what made it explode.”
Fortunately Ianto leaves Owen alone to wobble to the autopsy room with his dignity intact. Owen sits on the steps and stares at the bits of brightly-scaled flesh waiting in test tubes, holding the coffee mug between his hands and drifting into a fugue state. Somehow he tests the brontosaur bits with something, and next thing he knows one of the test tubes explodes.
Ianto checks in on the lab. “What was it then?” he asks.
“Caffeine,” says Owen, certain he’s right although uncertain why, and not thinking about it too hard because not vomiting in front of Ianto occupies all his attention.
Ianto leaves and Owen makes it to a toilet before he’s sick. It occurs to him afterward that Ianto surely heard that—Ianto has the preternatural ability to hear anything that might dirty the Hub—but Ianto leaves him alone and Owen leans his head against the sink and tells himself he’s glad.
He stays there until Tosh and Gwen get back with a bag of lettuce that brings a knee-high brontosaur running. “Morning!” calls Gwen, almost as cheerful as before Jack left. “Onward, Anwen!” she cries, and a blue-striped brontosaur rushes to tackle Owen.
Tosh and Ianto get it off him before it loves him to death, like a blue scaly golden retriever. Ianto hauls Owen to his feet. “She’s cute, isn’t she?” says Tosh, in the breathless voice that means she’s recalled that she thinks she’s in love with Owen.
“As a tarantula,” Owen says, hoping to cut her off early. But Tosh taught Anwen a trick and she’s determined to show him, and it would actually be pretty fantastic if it didn’t make Owen feel sick to his stomach just watching the thing do a somersault.
Ianto praises the brontosaur and gives Tosh coffee, Gwen gives Owen a look laden with disgust (he suspects she sicced Anwen on him as preemptive punishment), and Tosh watches Owen and gets flustered and unhappy and takes her new pet away to teach it how to use her computer or something.
Owen wants to take Tosh aside sometimes and explain the world to her. Pretty much everyone, he would say, is really a bastard like him, except they hide it better so they can get you right where they want you before they strike. Tosh would be so much better off if she’d stop letting people see how much she wants to be liked and just acted like him instead.
But that would require spending time with Tosh, and Owen thinks her puppy act will be catching and they’ll collapse into a pathetic mutually adoring relationship until her prince will appear through the Rift (perhaps Tommy Brockess will finally stick around), and she’ll run off with him and they’ll be happily ever after forever, because what can you do when you’ve fallen into someone else’s time but cling to the people who rescued you? It’s not like you’ve got anywhere else to go! And Owen will be left out in the cold, and Tosh will know how much it fucking hurts because of their previous state of mutual soppiness.
“Owen?” says Ianto, and Owen realizes that everyone else has wandered off to do productive work.
“Don’t give that thing any coffee,” he says. “Caffeine, you know.”
“I’ll stick to decaf,” says Ianto.
“You keep decaf here?”
Ianto’s mouth twitches into a tiny smirk. Owen suspects Ianto of using the decaf coffee to exact very subtle revenges on his teammates. It’s the kind of thing he would do.
“Owen?” says Ianto again.
Owen has the feeling that he’s been standing immobile in the middle of the Hub for far too long. “Yes?”
“You’re cluttering up the Hub. Don’t you have some kind of work to do?”
“Paperwork,” says Owen, because if he fucks it up (and he will) Ianto will be saddled with clearing it up. Ianto isn’t the only one who can be passive aggressive.
But Ianto, unlike Owen, has allies. “You have to examine Anwen,” yells Gwen.
“Great. I always wanted to die being trampled by a brontosaur.”
“Scratch her behind the ears,” Tosh calls. “That will put her right to sleep.”
Owen can’t even find the ears so he sedates it, with difficulty; his fingers tremble on the syringe. He runs through the examination on autopilot, blood samples, x-rays, etc., so tired, should have stayed home. The brontosaur breaths soft and deep like sleeping Ianto. It has big bluish eyes with creepy slit pupils and it blinks at him lazily just as he finishes checking its blood pressure.
Owen scratches its neck ridges and it swoons. It’s a pity people aren’t so simple.
Then again, he basically collapsed for Ianto with no more stimulus than that. But Owen is hardly a representative sample.
The brontosaur whuffs and Owen, in an outbreak of sentimentality that is surely of symptom of his illness, entertains the idea of old blankets in some corner of his flat for the thing, which he will call George or Fluffy or possibly Ianto (in case it explodes).
“Done?” says Gwen from the top of the stairs. She’s been watching, he can see it in the evil “I always knew you had a squishy, pathetic heart!” look on her face.
“Am I getting in the way of you killing this one too?” says Owen.
Gwen gives him a vile look. Owen wonders sometimes if she blames him about Jack—like Owen’s brattiness might have tipped the scales on Jack’s leaving. “Come along, Anwen,” says Gwen, and the brontosaur bounds up the stairs to her like a puppy. “Ianto’s ordered in lunch.”
Owen’s hands are trembling too hard for chopsticks, so he takes a carton of fried rice back to the autopsy room where he can eat with his fingers. The chatter and laughter of the rest of the team drifts down the stairs in bursts. They haven’t laughed like that since Jack left. Presumably it’s the addition of the brontosaur, not the fact that Owen isn’t eating with them.
The rice nearly puts Owen to sleep. He oughtn’t to have come to work. He would go back to his flat, but Ianto would see and he would probably insist on giving Owen a ride home and the whole point of coming to work would be shot.
So he goes to Jack’s room, instead. At least he can sleep in a bed. And no one goes down there anymore, at least not when the others could see, although for all Owen knows Ianto angsts down there when he isn’t harassing Owen.
Owen’s been in Jack’s room once before, because having sex with Jack is a Torchwood rite of passage. The room hasn’t changed much. Not that Owen was really looking at the scenery the first time around, but he does remember Jack’s shelves of weird stuff from the Rift. Jack wouldn’t explain what any of it was.
Owen collapses on the optimistically sized bed and waits for the room to stop spinning. He feels haunted; he imagines Jack and Ianto standing just in front of the shelves, Jack’s arms around Ianto with his hands in Ianto’s front pockets, explaining some completely unsexy alien artifact so that it sounds pornographic. Ianto leaning back against Jack with that tiny smirk.
Owen hurls one of the pillows at ghost-Ianto. It breaks one of Jack’s specimens (serves Jack right). Owen frets at the bed, trying to get comfortable.
He’s interrupted by the sudden appearance of Ianto, looking around the room wide-eyed and excited and then confused and finally, when Owen throws a pillow at him to see if he’s real, disappointed. “It’s you,” he says.
“Who did you expect?”
Ianto presses his lips together and moves to the first pillow Owen threw. Ianto picks up the pieces of whatever it broke gently, like they’re parts of an heirloom. “Why did you come into work today?” he asks.
“Figured you couldn’t last another day without me.”
“If we need you that badly we’d call you.” Ianto sets the artifact pieces on the corner of the shelf and comes to sit beside Owen. He touches Owen’s hair. “You need a shower.”
“You offering?”
“Do you want me to?”
Owen presses his face into Ianto’s suit coat and refuses to hear the question. Ianto pets his hair. Owen kisses his hand, and just to make a bad situation worse sits up and kisses Ianto’s lips.
The response is gratifyingly intense. Owen’s too dizzy for this to feel more than all right but he wraps his arms around Ianto and he can feel Ianto’s heart and his breath and Ianto kissing him back, Ianto’s hands in Owen’s hair, Ianto’s throat vibrating under Owen’s lips.
This is going to make things even more awkward and bitter and awful, but Owen is comfortable with awful.
Ianto pins Owen’s wrists next to the pillow and leans his hip into Owen’s stomach to make him stop. “No,” he says. “This is a terrible idea.”
Owen leans up and kisses him and Ianto pushes him back down. Jack’s sheets are satin. “You’re wrong,” Owen mutters.
“I’m never wrong,” says Ianto.
Owen is too tired to list the reasons why that’s ridiculous, and anyway Ianto probably has a long, pent-up list of Owen’s wrongs that he’s just dying to voice and by the end of it he’ll recall why he doesn’t want to be in the same room with Owen, let alone pin him to Jack’s bed. Owen tries to part Ianto’s legs with his knee, get him back in the appropriate mood. He doesn’t have the strength to overcome Ianto’s resistance.
“You’re just too chicken to cuckold Jack in his own bed,” says Owen.
“Jack never cared who else I slept with,” Ianto mutters, and flushes as if ashamed by the admission.
“Then live a little,” Owen mutters, and arches his back so he’s pressed against Ianto. Ianto whimpers and bites his lip until it bleeds. “You can be louder,” Owen murmurs, shooting for seductive. “Unless you’re afraid Gwen and Tosh will hear? Come down and join in?”
“So you can ruin the tattered remains of your relationships with all the members of Torchwood at once? Anyway, the room’s soundproof.”
Because that’s not creepy at all. “How did you know to come down here then?” asks Owen.
Ianto shifts uncomfortably. His breath tickles Owen’s ear. “I have a bug in here.”
That might be even creepier. “It wouldn’t ruin all my relationships, anyway. I can have relationships with people I’ve had sex with.”
“Gwen hardly speaks to you.”
“Jack still spoke to me.”
Owen didn’t mean that as a dig, he just wasn’t thinking. Ianto’s mouth wavers and his face droops and he’s moving away from Owen. Owen really wants him back. He slips his wrists from Ianto’s loosened grasp and catches Ianto’s head and pulls Ianto down on top of him.
Ianto lands awkwardly, his chin on Owen’s nose and his muscles stiff with protest.
“It was only the once,” Owen says, and adds, lying, “It was before you were, um.”
“Sleeping with my girlfriend’s murderer?” Owen can’t read Ianto’s voice, which is unusual (Ianto’s blank façade is showy but not nearly as functional as Ianto would probably like). Wry. Self-deprecating. Angry? With Jack?—more likely with Owen.
Anger is all right. Owen appreciates anger.
Ianto wriggles so his mouth is pressed in Owen’s hair. Owen nibbles ruminatively at Ianto’s shirt, over his collarbone. It’s very cozy. If this goes on Ianto may notice that Owen likes him.
“So about that cuckoldry,” murmurs Owen.
“And I thought you were going to be sick on me if I tried anything funny.”
It’s entirely possible. “Meet here same time tomorrow?”
Ianto kisses his ear. Owen melts. Thank God Ianto can’t see his face. “Or, you know, my place again,” Owen says, and tries not to die because his voice sounds pathetic.
A kaboom blasts through the Hub.
Ianto’s off Owen in seconds, in a fresh shirt (he has a supply of suits down here) in moments more, and up Jack’s ladder before Owen even sits up. He follows, too dazed to be concerned although for all he knows that sound was the world ending (or Jack coming back).
But it’s the brontosaur. Evidently sweet and sour sauce didn’t agree with it.
Of course it makes Owen vomit. Gwen squeaks that he oughtn’t have come into work like that and Tosh brushes at her eyes and upbraids him for contaminating the evidence (this is why Owen, in a parallel universe, might love Tosh: the mixture of sentimentality and taking her work seriously and Ianto drives him home. There’s tea and a promise to be back later. Owen pretends it irritates him.
Once Ianto's gone, Owen stares out his windows and considers his options again.
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Date: 2008-04-25 12:32 pm (UTC)