Tea and Sympathy: the Finale
Aug. 6th, 2008 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerTitle: Tea and Sympathy: the Finale
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
osprey_archer
Pairing: Owen/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Sequel to: Tea and Sympathy, Tea and Sympathy, part 2, Tea and Sympathy, part 3, Tea and Sympathy: The Shower Scene, and Tea and Sympathy, part 4
Beta:sanginmychains
Disclaimer: Still don't own them.
Summary: Owen isn’t content just to grab Ianto and kiss him like the climax of a romantic movie; no, he has to tackle Ianto to the floor and nearly rip his hair out by the roots and half-strangle him with tongue and hyperventilation.
Three days later, a troop of twenty-third century pygmies invade the Hub, searching for their cultic oracle, Roald Dahl. Gwen and Tosh calm them down and take them out to tour Cardiff, Owen hides in the autopsy room, and Ianto is left to make one hundred and fifty cups of coffee alone.
Owen has been avoiding Ianto ever since he started to get well. Ianto is irritated and depressed and it makes him so clumsy with the coffee cups that he chips one.
He considers hurling it against the wall. The problem with Owen—or rather, Ianto’s problem that Owen is causing by not wanting to be his Raggedy Ann doll—is that Ianto was using Owen to fill the time he used to spend with Jack, and now that Owen is well (and mostly refusing to be in the same room with him) Ianto has nothing to do but brood. And now he has to sulk about Owen as well as Jack.
It surely is a bad thing that Torchwood has so many coffee cups that they can serve a hundred fifty people without running out. The coffee will be cold by the time the pygmies get back, but screw it, what’s the point of controlling the coffee if he can’t inflict his bad mood on everyone else?
The espresso machine grumbles. Ianto kicks it, so it can share the hate too.
Maybe Ianto could get a cat. It would take care of his cuddling needs, and surely he could teach it to like coffee eventually.
The machine whines recalcitrantly. Ianto smacks it, realizes that the first coffee pot is overflowing, and replaces it with another one. He smacks the machine again for good measure. He really needs to get laid.
Unfortunately, while people in bars might be lithe and sexy, they are not surly or obstinate, they will not insult Ianto unceasingly, and they aren’t in the least mysterious. There is no mystery in a bar. Everyone is there to get laid.
The machine whines again. Ianto throws a pencil at it and contemplates possible hobbies (beyond stalking Owen, which is just to creepy now that he doesn’t have the excuse of Owen’s ill health). Crossword puzzles. Sudoku. Running marathons. He has the legs—
The machine floods. The damned stupid espresso machine, into which Ianto has poured so much time and effort, the only trustworthy thing in Torchwood, has repaid his attentions flooding with water right when he needs it.
Ianto hits the machine again.
The machine keens, flashes little red lights, billows smoke from its grille, and shoots a jet of steam over his hand. Ianto shrieks, stumbles out of the room, and collapses.
The machine explodes. Ianto barely cares. His hand. Red. Swollen. Painful beyond the power of expletives to describe it. He’s going to die.
It’s not the physical equivalent of losing Lisa, not quite of being abandoned by Jack, (as bad as if Owen had died of Weevil flu?)—but, God, it hurts.
Ianto barely manages to wobble to the autopsy room.
Owen doesn’t look up from his game of minesweeper. “I’m feeling fine. I don’t want coffee,” he says. “I don’t want tea, I don’t want any beverages, I was going to break my record on this game if you hadn’t interrupted me, why aren’t you leaving?” He turns to glare at Ianto, but he falters when he sees Ianto’s blistered red hand and twisted face. “Ianto?”
“Coffee machine,” Ianto hiccups.
Owen ushers Ianto into the room and searches for painkillers. “Was that the noise?”
Ianto is in too much pain to answer.
Torchwood, whatever its faults, has excellent painkillers. After Owen dopes him, Ianto can’t even feel his hand. He might not even be attached to his body anymore, he floats around himself and Owen as Owen rinses and soaps and washes Ianto’s hand, and slathers it with some sort of paste before wrapping it in bandages until it looks like a paw.
“The coffee machine betrayed me,” Ianto says, as Owen tucks the edges of the bandages under.
“Mhmm.”
“Why did it have self-destruct lights attached?”
“I think Tosh experimented on it.”
That shoots through the painkiller haze straight to Ianto’s heart. “On my coffee machine?” he wavers.
Owen hoists himself onto the autopsy table next to Ianto and leans Ianto’s head on his shoulder. “That’s just what she does,” he offers. “She probably wanted to vivisect me when she realized I had Weevil fever.”
“She didn’t,” Ianto says, but Owen snorts and Ianto is too tired to argue. He closes his eyes and collapses in Owen’s lap. Owen’s hip bone digs into Ianto’s cheek. His jeans smell like laundry detergent and musk instead of fever. “I broke the coffee machine,” Ianto says again.
“We’ll get you a new one,” says Owen, running his fingers through Ianto’s hair and cupping his skull possessively.
Suddenly Ianto feels suffocated. He sits up so sharply that he hits Owen’s nose.
“What?” snaps Owen.
“I need to get back to work.”
“You have blisters the size of bottle caps. And you blew up the coffee machine,” says Owen. “There’s nothing you can possibly do.”
“The pygmies will want coffee.”
“Let Gwen take them to a Starbucks,” says Owen. “They’ll think it’s picturesque and quaintly twenty-first century.”
“I can’t let them think that Torchwood serves Starbucks,” says Ianto. He stands but stumbles, wobbling until Owen pulls him to lie down.
“Lie still,” says Owen, kneeling over Ianto: straddling his hips, palms flat on the table on either side of his head, leaning over him full length but not touching him anywhere. Ianto feels the heat radiating off Owen. He wants more, he wants Owen pressed against him, he wants, and the intensity unnerves him. Owen’s breath ruffles his hair.
“What kind of painkillers did you give me?” asks Ianto.
“Don’t you like them?” asks Owen, ghosting his lips along Ianto’s forehead. Ianto can’t breathe.
“This isn’t fair,” he mumbles.
“Payback’s a bitch,” Owen says, and kisses him hard, fierce, with teeth and tongue until Ianto’s thoughts spiral around the kiss and his whole body aches with it.
Owen breaks the kiss. Ianto wants to touch, press his hands against the muscles in Owen’s stomach, pull him down to kiss again, but one hand doesn’t work and the other feels boneless and floppy from the painkillers. He’s not sure he can move. Owen shifts, still not touching, but Ianto’s body thrums like a plucked string. “Owen,” he pleads.
Owen is definitely smirking when he kisses Ianto again, his mouth closed no matter how Ianto entreats with his tongue. Ianto caresses Owen’s elbow with his good hand (that’s as high as the hand will go) but Owen pins his wrist to the table. “Please?” Ianto says.
Owen moves as if to touch Ianto’s face but doesn’t. Ianto swallows. His face burns; he can feel Owen’s closeness, then suddenly it’s gone. Owen climbs off the autopsy table, dusts of his trousers and sticks his thumbs in his pockets.
“You can’t leave,” Ianto protests.
“Watch me,” says Owen.
The rat bastard. Ianto would follow, but he can’t quite seem to move or even open his eyes, and soon he falls asleep.
***
Owen, because he is evil, insists that Ianto stay at the Hub overnight for observation. Just in case the alien artifacts Tosh grafted onto the coffee maker made the steam poisonous, he explains. Tosh hangs her head. Gwen hugs Ianto and asks if he wants her to bring him anything the next morning (a hit man to kill Owen, probably, but he doesn’t say that), and they leave Ianto and Owen alone.
“Coffee?” says Owen, in a tone that might be solicitous if it wasn’t so gleeful.
“No, thank you.”
“Tea?”
He’s gone through this set of question approximately five hundred times. “No thank you.”
A long pause. Owen pretends to watch the Rift monitors on his laptop while in fact using it to hide his snickers (or so Ianto imagines). But eventually Owen can’t help himself, and begins again: “Coffee?”
“No thank you.”
“Tea?”
“No thanks.”
“Bovril?”
Ianto presses his good arm over his face and moans.
“You’re a rotten patient,” says Owen.
“I learned from a master.”
“You’re worse than I ever was.”
“You pointed a gun at me; you nearly concussed me, twice; you were the patient from hell. I’m being very patient with your total lack of a bedside manner.”
Owen is silent. “All right,” he says. “I was a worse patient.”
“Damn straight you were,” says Ianto, sitting up. The room doesn’t spin, thank God. “Can I go home now?”
“If you want,” says Owen.
“Really?”
“No, you twat, I’m saying that just to torment you. You’re getting boring anyway. Get out. No, wait, I have to change the bandages.”
The bandages unwind surprisingly painlessly, especially considering that Owen snaps off the last three feet with a flourish. Ianto stares dumbly at his arm—healed already. “Burn salve,” says Owen. “Tosh made it. Has an unfortunate sedative side effect but it’s brilliant otherwise.”
Ianto may have to forgive Tosh for tampering with his coffee machine.
“See, I didn’t knock you out because I’m a sadist,” said Owen, stretching like a cat. “All for your own good all along.”
Ianto stares at the muscles moving under Owen’s t-shirt. “And if you got to cop a feel along the way—”
“—you have no room to complain.”
“Touché.” And he wouldn’t have complained anyway, if Owen had shown any follow-through.
A silence. Owen taps at his computer keyboard. “I’m bored,” he complains. “I think the Rift left with Jack.”
The Rift has been unnaturally quiet since Jack left. A horrible thought: maybe Jack somehow drew things out of the Rift to torment Cardiff because he had been bored.
If anyone had the ability it would be Jack. Ianto doesn’t want to think Jack would inflict horrors on Cardiff, but maybe he didn’t care about wrecking the city. Maybe Jack can’t care about anything (Torchwood; or Ianto); maybe being immortal leached his soul.
“Bo-ored,” repeats Owen, stabbing his keyboard.
This seems close enough to an invitation that Ianto attempts to distract them both by snogging Owen. It would have worked better if Owen would have opened his mouth, or at least tilted his head so Ianto could kiss more than the corner of his mouth, or at very least refrained from pushing Ianto away. “Do you want your libido to be responsible for monsters from the Rift getting out unnoticed?” asks Owen, sounding…bored.
Ianto slumps back on the autopsy table. “Your computer will beep if the Rift so much as burps,” he says sullenly. Bored? Even Jack appreciated Ianto’s kissing.
Jack, whatever his faults, whether or not he was capable of love or even like, always, always wanted Ianto.
Owen’s smile is far too pointy. Ianto wants to snog him again and storm out just when Owen is begging for more. Or at least annoy the hell out of him.
“Do you want coffee?” asks Ianto.
“You broke the machine, remember?” Owen pokes at his computer again.
“I have a kettle in my office,” Ianto says. “I could make drip coffee.”
“I spent the entire afternoon hunting up coffee for the pygmies because they refused to drink Starbucks, because the company invaded Liverpool in 2308, I don’t want—”
“Did you take them to Café Minuet? They have great espresso.”
Owen covers his ears. “You’re so goddamn obsessed with coffee. How can you possibly be that dull? I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with you that didn’t involve coffee.”
“We have.”
“Aside from the discussion that ended with you shooting me. And that time we talked about Jack, your other favorite fucking topic.”
“Every time we’ve discussed Jack it’s you who brought him up.”
Owen is suddenly conspicuously silent. Ianto would love to say, Owen? Are you jealous?, but it’s too likely that Owen is jealous because he wanted Jack (because who would want Ianto Jones, the living breathing coffee machine, especially with Jack as the other option).
Ianto is sick of not understanding Owen. It’s hardly a stable enough foundation for a working relationship, let alone…whatever.
“I’m going back to my flat,” he announces. “Where the coffee machine works. And I can sob over my photo albums of Jack.”
He’s halfway across the Hub before Owen tackles him.
Owen isn’t content just to grab Ianto and kiss him like the climax of a romantic movie; no, he has to tackle Ianto to the floor and nearly rip his hair out by the roots and half-strangle him with tongue and hyperventilation. “You are not,” Owen says haughtily, “leaving me all alone to be bored out of my skull.”
“And I thought I was even more boring than solitude.”
“No,” says Owen. “You make no fucking sense. You and your stupid coffee and stupid Jack and your stupid fucking caretaking—kiss me already, damn you.”
There are few things hotter than Owen pressed full-length against him, one hand working Ianto’s shirt buttons (no coat, no tie, no armor) and the other twisting Ianto’s hair as Owen bites his lips.
Owen, Ianto learns over the next two weeks, bites a lot. Ianto has bite marks on his collarbones and wrists, where his cufflinks chaff them all day, which is annoying except when Owen notices Ianto fiddling at his cuffs and grins and Ianto wants to push him into the next available broom closet.
Owen, once he’s naked and panting and (preferably) pinned to the wall, the floor, the bed, the table (Ianto may have developed a fetish), is surprisingly pliant. He won’t let Ianto fuck him (Ianto knows he won’t; he doesn’t even ask) but he’ll twitch and arch his hips and back under Ianto’s hands and mouth.
Sometimes he’ll say Ianto’s name as he comes. Ianto doesn’t know what to do with that, and neither does Owen. He slides away and spirals off, and Ianto won’t see him again until he’s clean, dressed, business-like, and bad-tempered. His shirts cling temptingly over his shoulder blades. It’s always a bad idea to touch Owen in these moods.
Ianto does anyway, once, nearly two weeks after Owen got well. Owen threatens to break his fingers.
So maybe Owen’s just desperately horny, now that he doesn’t have access to pheronome spray. Maybe Ianto is just desperately desperate. Ianto isn’t sure if Owen wants him, knows Owen doesn’t love him, and thinks that Owen even liking him is a fifty-fifty chance. But maybe (Ianto thinks, wincing to himself because the thought is so desperate)—maybe they could work something out.
But then Jack comes back.
***
The bullet wound from Captain John Hart means that Owen can’t drive himself home, so Ianto, as ever, steps into the breach.
“Don’t be too long,” says Jack, forehead pressed against Ianto’s, one hand caressing Ianto’s biceps.
“Of course not, sir,” says Ianto.
“I want to hear your date ideas,” says Jack, half-laughing, holding Ianto so close that Ianto could count his eyelashes. Ianto is in freefall, as he always is with Jack, loose and light and wonderful but also nauseating.
When Jack kisses him, Ianto can’t stand quite steady, and he lets go. “Off you go now,” whispers Jack.
Owen is quiet and drawn on the ride home. Ianto’s lips tingle from the aftermath from Jack’s kiss, and the desire to pull over and kiss Owen now.
He really should get over this obsession with Owen in various states of pain. It’s not healthy.
He makes Owen coffee when they get back to Owen’s flat: drip coffee, because Owen broke his coffee maker in a fit of rage a few days ago. The percolation will give Ianto time to talk to Owen.
Owen is lying on his bed, arms crossed like an Egyptian mummy, bluish because the only light is from the window. Ianto makes to sit next to him on the burgundy duvet, but Owen cuts a hand between them. “Wouldn’t want to upset Jack, would you? Be a good boy and go right back.”
“No,” says Ianto, stung.
“Yes,” says Owen. “Don’t lie to yourself. One bat of his eyelashes and you’re on your knees. ‘Don’t waste any time at Owen’s, Ianto, I’m going to fuck you until you forgive me for running out on you.’”
Ianto examines his cuticles.
“Say something,” demands Owen.
“You don’t even like me,” says Ianto. “You just can’t stand anyone having anything you don’t.”
Owen’s face twists. Ianto flees to the kitchen and stands over the sink, hands flexed, breathing, staring down at Owen’s dirty dishes and listening until the maddening plink of coffee stops. He pours it through the filter again and returns to Owen’s bedroom.
Owen refuses to look away from the ceiling. The moonlight is sharp on his silhouette. Ianto wants to touch his face.
“Are you mad at me for going back to Jack?” he asks. “Or are you mad at Jack for coming back to me?”
Owen closes his eyes. God, Ianto wants to kiss him. “I wish Captain Jack Harkness stayed on Neptune or wherever the hell he went,” he says. Ianto feels better, minutely. “And I wish you’d gone with him.”
Ianto rocks on his heels and sucks on his teeth. “I could come back,” he says. “Later. To check on you.”
“Fuck that, Ianto, I’m not going to be your piece on the side to fulfill whatever it is about you that Jack won’t bother noticing.”
“Maybe Jack would be the piece on the side.”
“You’re fucking kidding me. Do you think Jack would let you get away with that? He’s a fucking black hole. You won’t be able to resist getting sucked into his orbit.”
Jack isn’t a black hole. Ianto returns to the kitchen so he doesn’t have to argue with the shifting sands of Owen’s moods. Jack is solid and firm and safe as houses. Owen is about as safe as a sandcastle. Jack may make Ianto feel like a bungee jumper, but Owen is skydiving with Russian roulette parachutes.
Ianto pours the coffee through the filter again. This is going to be the bitterest coffee Owen ever drank.
Ianto goes back to Owen’s room. “He wants me,” he says. “That’s not—”
“He needs you,” mocks Owen. “Do you still believe that?”
Maybe. Sort of. Not really. “He came back,” says Ianto.
“If he needed you,” says Owen, “he wouldn’t have left.”
Ianto tries to study his face, but Owen turns away so it’s a disordered collection of shadows that Ianto can’t read. “Do you have any morphine?” Owen asks.
“No.”
“What use are you, then?”
“Owen,” says Ianto, quietly. “I’ll stay if you want.”
Owen doesn’t answer. Ianto listens to cars skidding past on the streets below, the shouts of a drunken bevy of uni students, music rumbling out of a taxi. The electric lights stretch out beyond Owen’s window until they are only tiny pinpoints on the horizon that make Ianto feel freefall again, sickening and dizzy.
He fetches Owen’s coffee from the kitchen and sets it down on Owen’s bedside table. “Owen,” he says, crouching beside him, trying not to plead, “Owen. Do you want me to stay?”
Owen shakes his head slightly. Ianto kisses his cheeks, tasting salt, lingering. Owen turns away.
Ianto goes back to Jack.
Author:
osprey_archerPairing: Owen/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Sequel to: Tea and Sympathy, Tea and Sympathy, part 2, Tea and Sympathy, part 3, Tea and Sympathy: The Shower Scene, and Tea and Sympathy, part 4
Beta:
sanginmychainsDisclaimer: Still don't own them.
Summary: Owen isn’t content just to grab Ianto and kiss him like the climax of a romantic movie; no, he has to tackle Ianto to the floor and nearly rip his hair out by the roots and half-strangle him with tongue and hyperventilation.
Three days later, a troop of twenty-third century pygmies invade the Hub, searching for their cultic oracle, Roald Dahl. Gwen and Tosh calm them down and take them out to tour Cardiff, Owen hides in the autopsy room, and Ianto is left to make one hundred and fifty cups of coffee alone.
Owen has been avoiding Ianto ever since he started to get well. Ianto is irritated and depressed and it makes him so clumsy with the coffee cups that he chips one.
He considers hurling it against the wall. The problem with Owen—or rather, Ianto’s problem that Owen is causing by not wanting to be his Raggedy Ann doll—is that Ianto was using Owen to fill the time he used to spend with Jack, and now that Owen is well (and mostly refusing to be in the same room with him) Ianto has nothing to do but brood. And now he has to sulk about Owen as well as Jack.
It surely is a bad thing that Torchwood has so many coffee cups that they can serve a hundred fifty people without running out. The coffee will be cold by the time the pygmies get back, but screw it, what’s the point of controlling the coffee if he can’t inflict his bad mood on everyone else?
The espresso machine grumbles. Ianto kicks it, so it can share the hate too.
Maybe Ianto could get a cat. It would take care of his cuddling needs, and surely he could teach it to like coffee eventually.
The machine whines recalcitrantly. Ianto smacks it, realizes that the first coffee pot is overflowing, and replaces it with another one. He smacks the machine again for good measure. He really needs to get laid.
Unfortunately, while people in bars might be lithe and sexy, they are not surly or obstinate, they will not insult Ianto unceasingly, and they aren’t in the least mysterious. There is no mystery in a bar. Everyone is there to get laid.
The machine whines again. Ianto throws a pencil at it and contemplates possible hobbies (beyond stalking Owen, which is just to creepy now that he doesn’t have the excuse of Owen’s ill health). Crossword puzzles. Sudoku. Running marathons. He has the legs—
The machine floods. The damned stupid espresso machine, into which Ianto has poured so much time and effort, the only trustworthy thing in Torchwood, has repaid his attentions flooding with water right when he needs it.
Ianto hits the machine again.
The machine keens, flashes little red lights, billows smoke from its grille, and shoots a jet of steam over his hand. Ianto shrieks, stumbles out of the room, and collapses.
The machine explodes. Ianto barely cares. His hand. Red. Swollen. Painful beyond the power of expletives to describe it. He’s going to die.
It’s not the physical equivalent of losing Lisa, not quite of being abandoned by Jack, (as bad as if Owen had died of Weevil flu?)—but, God, it hurts.
Ianto barely manages to wobble to the autopsy room.
Owen doesn’t look up from his game of minesweeper. “I’m feeling fine. I don’t want coffee,” he says. “I don’t want tea, I don’t want any beverages, I was going to break my record on this game if you hadn’t interrupted me, why aren’t you leaving?” He turns to glare at Ianto, but he falters when he sees Ianto’s blistered red hand and twisted face. “Ianto?”
“Coffee machine,” Ianto hiccups.
Owen ushers Ianto into the room and searches for painkillers. “Was that the noise?”
Ianto is in too much pain to answer.
Torchwood, whatever its faults, has excellent painkillers. After Owen dopes him, Ianto can’t even feel his hand. He might not even be attached to his body anymore, he floats around himself and Owen as Owen rinses and soaps and washes Ianto’s hand, and slathers it with some sort of paste before wrapping it in bandages until it looks like a paw.
“The coffee machine betrayed me,” Ianto says, as Owen tucks the edges of the bandages under.
“Mhmm.”
“Why did it have self-destruct lights attached?”
“I think Tosh experimented on it.”
That shoots through the painkiller haze straight to Ianto’s heart. “On my coffee machine?” he wavers.
Owen hoists himself onto the autopsy table next to Ianto and leans Ianto’s head on his shoulder. “That’s just what she does,” he offers. “She probably wanted to vivisect me when she realized I had Weevil fever.”
“She didn’t,” Ianto says, but Owen snorts and Ianto is too tired to argue. He closes his eyes and collapses in Owen’s lap. Owen’s hip bone digs into Ianto’s cheek. His jeans smell like laundry detergent and musk instead of fever. “I broke the coffee machine,” Ianto says again.
“We’ll get you a new one,” says Owen, running his fingers through Ianto’s hair and cupping his skull possessively.
Suddenly Ianto feels suffocated. He sits up so sharply that he hits Owen’s nose.
“What?” snaps Owen.
“I need to get back to work.”
“You have blisters the size of bottle caps. And you blew up the coffee machine,” says Owen. “There’s nothing you can possibly do.”
“The pygmies will want coffee.”
“Let Gwen take them to a Starbucks,” says Owen. “They’ll think it’s picturesque and quaintly twenty-first century.”
“I can’t let them think that Torchwood serves Starbucks,” says Ianto. He stands but stumbles, wobbling until Owen pulls him to lie down.
“Lie still,” says Owen, kneeling over Ianto: straddling his hips, palms flat on the table on either side of his head, leaning over him full length but not touching him anywhere. Ianto feels the heat radiating off Owen. He wants more, he wants Owen pressed against him, he wants, and the intensity unnerves him. Owen’s breath ruffles his hair.
“What kind of painkillers did you give me?” asks Ianto.
“Don’t you like them?” asks Owen, ghosting his lips along Ianto’s forehead. Ianto can’t breathe.
“This isn’t fair,” he mumbles.
“Payback’s a bitch,” Owen says, and kisses him hard, fierce, with teeth and tongue until Ianto’s thoughts spiral around the kiss and his whole body aches with it.
Owen breaks the kiss. Ianto wants to touch, press his hands against the muscles in Owen’s stomach, pull him down to kiss again, but one hand doesn’t work and the other feels boneless and floppy from the painkillers. He’s not sure he can move. Owen shifts, still not touching, but Ianto’s body thrums like a plucked string. “Owen,” he pleads.
Owen is definitely smirking when he kisses Ianto again, his mouth closed no matter how Ianto entreats with his tongue. Ianto caresses Owen’s elbow with his good hand (that’s as high as the hand will go) but Owen pins his wrist to the table. “Please?” Ianto says.
Owen moves as if to touch Ianto’s face but doesn’t. Ianto swallows. His face burns; he can feel Owen’s closeness, then suddenly it’s gone. Owen climbs off the autopsy table, dusts of his trousers and sticks his thumbs in his pockets.
“You can’t leave,” Ianto protests.
“Watch me,” says Owen.
The rat bastard. Ianto would follow, but he can’t quite seem to move or even open his eyes, and soon he falls asleep.
***
Owen, because he is evil, insists that Ianto stay at the Hub overnight for observation. Just in case the alien artifacts Tosh grafted onto the coffee maker made the steam poisonous, he explains. Tosh hangs her head. Gwen hugs Ianto and asks if he wants her to bring him anything the next morning (a hit man to kill Owen, probably, but he doesn’t say that), and they leave Ianto and Owen alone.
“Coffee?” says Owen, in a tone that might be solicitous if it wasn’t so gleeful.
“No, thank you.”
“Tea?”
He’s gone through this set of question approximately five hundred times. “No thank you.”
A long pause. Owen pretends to watch the Rift monitors on his laptop while in fact using it to hide his snickers (or so Ianto imagines). But eventually Owen can’t help himself, and begins again: “Coffee?”
“No thank you.”
“Tea?”
“No thanks.”
“Bovril?”
Ianto presses his good arm over his face and moans.
“You’re a rotten patient,” says Owen.
“I learned from a master.”
“You’re worse than I ever was.”
“You pointed a gun at me; you nearly concussed me, twice; you were the patient from hell. I’m being very patient with your total lack of a bedside manner.”
Owen is silent. “All right,” he says. “I was a worse patient.”
“Damn straight you were,” says Ianto, sitting up. The room doesn’t spin, thank God. “Can I go home now?”
“If you want,” says Owen.
“Really?”
“No, you twat, I’m saying that just to torment you. You’re getting boring anyway. Get out. No, wait, I have to change the bandages.”
The bandages unwind surprisingly painlessly, especially considering that Owen snaps off the last three feet with a flourish. Ianto stares dumbly at his arm—healed already. “Burn salve,” says Owen. “Tosh made it. Has an unfortunate sedative side effect but it’s brilliant otherwise.”
Ianto may have to forgive Tosh for tampering with his coffee machine.
“See, I didn’t knock you out because I’m a sadist,” said Owen, stretching like a cat. “All for your own good all along.”
Ianto stares at the muscles moving under Owen’s t-shirt. “And if you got to cop a feel along the way—”
“—you have no room to complain.”
“Touché.” And he wouldn’t have complained anyway, if Owen had shown any follow-through.
A silence. Owen taps at his computer keyboard. “I’m bored,” he complains. “I think the Rift left with Jack.”
The Rift has been unnaturally quiet since Jack left. A horrible thought: maybe Jack somehow drew things out of the Rift to torment Cardiff because he had been bored.
If anyone had the ability it would be Jack. Ianto doesn’t want to think Jack would inflict horrors on Cardiff, but maybe he didn’t care about wrecking the city. Maybe Jack can’t care about anything (Torchwood; or Ianto); maybe being immortal leached his soul.
“Bo-ored,” repeats Owen, stabbing his keyboard.
This seems close enough to an invitation that Ianto attempts to distract them both by snogging Owen. It would have worked better if Owen would have opened his mouth, or at least tilted his head so Ianto could kiss more than the corner of his mouth, or at very least refrained from pushing Ianto away. “Do you want your libido to be responsible for monsters from the Rift getting out unnoticed?” asks Owen, sounding…bored.
Ianto slumps back on the autopsy table. “Your computer will beep if the Rift so much as burps,” he says sullenly. Bored? Even Jack appreciated Ianto’s kissing.
Jack, whatever his faults, whether or not he was capable of love or even like, always, always wanted Ianto.
Owen’s smile is far too pointy. Ianto wants to snog him again and storm out just when Owen is begging for more. Or at least annoy the hell out of him.
“Do you want coffee?” asks Ianto.
“You broke the machine, remember?” Owen pokes at his computer again.
“I have a kettle in my office,” Ianto says. “I could make drip coffee.”
“I spent the entire afternoon hunting up coffee for the pygmies because they refused to drink Starbucks, because the company invaded Liverpool in 2308, I don’t want—”
“Did you take them to Café Minuet? They have great espresso.”
Owen covers his ears. “You’re so goddamn obsessed with coffee. How can you possibly be that dull? I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with you that didn’t involve coffee.”
“We have.”
“Aside from the discussion that ended with you shooting me. And that time we talked about Jack, your other favorite fucking topic.”
“Every time we’ve discussed Jack it’s you who brought him up.”
Owen is suddenly conspicuously silent. Ianto would love to say, Owen? Are you jealous?, but it’s too likely that Owen is jealous because he wanted Jack (because who would want Ianto Jones, the living breathing coffee machine, especially with Jack as the other option).
Ianto is sick of not understanding Owen. It’s hardly a stable enough foundation for a working relationship, let alone…whatever.
“I’m going back to my flat,” he announces. “Where the coffee machine works. And I can sob over my photo albums of Jack.”
He’s halfway across the Hub before Owen tackles him.
Owen isn’t content just to grab Ianto and kiss him like the climax of a romantic movie; no, he has to tackle Ianto to the floor and nearly rip his hair out by the roots and half-strangle him with tongue and hyperventilation. “You are not,” Owen says haughtily, “leaving me all alone to be bored out of my skull.”
“And I thought I was even more boring than solitude.”
“No,” says Owen. “You make no fucking sense. You and your stupid coffee and stupid Jack and your stupid fucking caretaking—kiss me already, damn you.”
There are few things hotter than Owen pressed full-length against him, one hand working Ianto’s shirt buttons (no coat, no tie, no armor) and the other twisting Ianto’s hair as Owen bites his lips.
Owen, Ianto learns over the next two weeks, bites a lot. Ianto has bite marks on his collarbones and wrists, where his cufflinks chaff them all day, which is annoying except when Owen notices Ianto fiddling at his cuffs and grins and Ianto wants to push him into the next available broom closet.
Owen, once he’s naked and panting and (preferably) pinned to the wall, the floor, the bed, the table (Ianto may have developed a fetish), is surprisingly pliant. He won’t let Ianto fuck him (Ianto knows he won’t; he doesn’t even ask) but he’ll twitch and arch his hips and back under Ianto’s hands and mouth.
Sometimes he’ll say Ianto’s name as he comes. Ianto doesn’t know what to do with that, and neither does Owen. He slides away and spirals off, and Ianto won’t see him again until he’s clean, dressed, business-like, and bad-tempered. His shirts cling temptingly over his shoulder blades. It’s always a bad idea to touch Owen in these moods.
Ianto does anyway, once, nearly two weeks after Owen got well. Owen threatens to break his fingers.
So maybe Owen’s just desperately horny, now that he doesn’t have access to pheronome spray. Maybe Ianto is just desperately desperate. Ianto isn’t sure if Owen wants him, knows Owen doesn’t love him, and thinks that Owen even liking him is a fifty-fifty chance. But maybe (Ianto thinks, wincing to himself because the thought is so desperate)—maybe they could work something out.
But then Jack comes back.
***
The bullet wound from Captain John Hart means that Owen can’t drive himself home, so Ianto, as ever, steps into the breach.
“Don’t be too long,” says Jack, forehead pressed against Ianto’s, one hand caressing Ianto’s biceps.
“Of course not, sir,” says Ianto.
“I want to hear your date ideas,” says Jack, half-laughing, holding Ianto so close that Ianto could count his eyelashes. Ianto is in freefall, as he always is with Jack, loose and light and wonderful but also nauseating.
When Jack kisses him, Ianto can’t stand quite steady, and he lets go. “Off you go now,” whispers Jack.
Owen is quiet and drawn on the ride home. Ianto’s lips tingle from the aftermath from Jack’s kiss, and the desire to pull over and kiss Owen now.
He really should get over this obsession with Owen in various states of pain. It’s not healthy.
He makes Owen coffee when they get back to Owen’s flat: drip coffee, because Owen broke his coffee maker in a fit of rage a few days ago. The percolation will give Ianto time to talk to Owen.
Owen is lying on his bed, arms crossed like an Egyptian mummy, bluish because the only light is from the window. Ianto makes to sit next to him on the burgundy duvet, but Owen cuts a hand between them. “Wouldn’t want to upset Jack, would you? Be a good boy and go right back.”
“No,” says Ianto, stung.
“Yes,” says Owen. “Don’t lie to yourself. One bat of his eyelashes and you’re on your knees. ‘Don’t waste any time at Owen’s, Ianto, I’m going to fuck you until you forgive me for running out on you.’”
Ianto examines his cuticles.
“Say something,” demands Owen.
“You don’t even like me,” says Ianto. “You just can’t stand anyone having anything you don’t.”
Owen’s face twists. Ianto flees to the kitchen and stands over the sink, hands flexed, breathing, staring down at Owen’s dirty dishes and listening until the maddening plink of coffee stops. He pours it through the filter again and returns to Owen’s bedroom.
Owen refuses to look away from the ceiling. The moonlight is sharp on his silhouette. Ianto wants to touch his face.
“Are you mad at me for going back to Jack?” he asks. “Or are you mad at Jack for coming back to me?”
Owen closes his eyes. God, Ianto wants to kiss him. “I wish Captain Jack Harkness stayed on Neptune or wherever the hell he went,” he says. Ianto feels better, minutely. “And I wish you’d gone with him.”
Ianto rocks on his heels and sucks on his teeth. “I could come back,” he says. “Later. To check on you.”
“Fuck that, Ianto, I’m not going to be your piece on the side to fulfill whatever it is about you that Jack won’t bother noticing.”
“Maybe Jack would be the piece on the side.”
“You’re fucking kidding me. Do you think Jack would let you get away with that? He’s a fucking black hole. You won’t be able to resist getting sucked into his orbit.”
Jack isn’t a black hole. Ianto returns to the kitchen so he doesn’t have to argue with the shifting sands of Owen’s moods. Jack is solid and firm and safe as houses. Owen is about as safe as a sandcastle. Jack may make Ianto feel like a bungee jumper, but Owen is skydiving with Russian roulette parachutes.
Ianto pours the coffee through the filter again. This is going to be the bitterest coffee Owen ever drank.
Ianto goes back to Owen’s room. “He wants me,” he says. “That’s not—”
“He needs you,” mocks Owen. “Do you still believe that?”
Maybe. Sort of. Not really. “He came back,” says Ianto.
“If he needed you,” says Owen, “he wouldn’t have left.”
Ianto tries to study his face, but Owen turns away so it’s a disordered collection of shadows that Ianto can’t read. “Do you have any morphine?” Owen asks.
“No.”
“What use are you, then?”
“Owen,” says Ianto, quietly. “I’ll stay if you want.”
Owen doesn’t answer. Ianto listens to cars skidding past on the streets below, the shouts of a drunken bevy of uni students, music rumbling out of a taxi. The electric lights stretch out beyond Owen’s window until they are only tiny pinpoints on the horizon that make Ianto feel freefall again, sickening and dizzy.
He fetches Owen’s coffee from the kitchen and sets it down on Owen’s bedside table. “Owen,” he says, crouching beside him, trying not to plead, “Owen. Do you want me to stay?”
Owen shakes his head slightly. Ianto kisses his cheeks, tasting salt, lingering. Owen turns away.
Ianto goes back to Jack.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 12:21 am (UTC)*smacks them both*
stupid stubborn boys. Jack would have been happy to share.
Twisted, broken and wonderful.
Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 12:51 am (UTC)heartbreaking and messed up, but so wonderful. I almost thought they'd end up together, somehow...but of course, Jack comes back. For a while there I'd forgot! Loved this series :)
no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 11:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 01:45 am (UTC)But two men wouldn't really talk and explain to each other, would they.
Thankyou for not writing Ianto as a girlywife mush thing.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 02:12 am (UTC)You write the best summaries, by the way.
p.s. Do we get Andromeda soon?!
no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 11:32 pm (UTC)Andromeda is almost done, but for the sample RP and the "possible plotlines" section, because I'm not quite sure what to write--it seems presumptuous to say, Oh, I thought that Andromeda could reconnect with her favorite cousin, Sirius, and they could argue about--I don't know--behaving like grown-ups. Or something.
I hadn't realized quite how difficult it would be to write the sample RP, because it can't really have dialogue. I need a twelve-step program to wean me off of dialogue.
(no subject)
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Date: 2008-08-07 02:20 am (UTC)...Jack probably wouldn't object to sharing you know. Just going by his stories he's be totally cool with it, lol
no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 11:35 pm (UTC)Jack would love sharing, but it would totally destroy the tattered remains of Owen's soul. He would still end up emotionally abandoned by Ianto, except it would happen much more slowly. Death by a thousand pin pricks.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 04:36 am (UTC)But no more Tea and Sympathy in future: Sadness.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 11:43 pm (UTC)I might write other things in the future. I have this great idea about Owen moonlighting as a rent boy as a perverse way of proving to himself that he's desirable. Because everyone always leaves him.
Of course Ianto's going to find him. Then there will be Trouble.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 11:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 01:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 01:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 02:27 pm (UTC)I can't decide whether Ianto like's Owen despite his unpredictability and unavailability and cruelty or because of it: I suspect the latter. Which still confuses me greatly, but then maybe Ianto is just that screwed up himself.
Regardless, the ending is spot-on because if it comes down to Owen having to make a bald-faced choice, he'll choose poorly.
I love the parts about the cat and Ianto working something out with Owen even if he doesn't actually like him. All the writing is fantastic and compelling and totally worth the wait.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 11:57 pm (UTC)When Owen hurts people, it's a result of his impulsive maliciousness.
I think Ianto finds it flattering that Owen pays enough attention to him, and cares enough (although not necessarily in a positive way) about Ianto, that when he hurts Ianto he usually does so on purpose. Because Ianto has low self-esteem like whoa.
I'm not sure what would count as a good choice for Owen at the end, though. I don't think a love triangle would have worked out (but hey, you can always try to convince me) so Owen had to end things--although his manner of doing so is pretty immature.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 01:36 am (UTC)As you've said a few times before Ianto and Owen are the anti-OTP. Even when they're together, they don't really work. They're rough, they don't fit, and they don't really like each other, but their stories are so complementary that it's hard to resist their chemistry.
And, of course, you're brilliant. I may be a little devastated that T&S is over, but what an ending. Obviously, it ends with Jack's return, but it's nice the way you did it: that Ianto knows Jack is just as self-destructive a choice as Owen, but at least he acts like he likes Ianto.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 05:04 pm (UTC)The great thing about Owen and Ianto's anti-OTPness is that it makes it really easy to resist the centripetal force of Romance. Jack and Ianto can have a happy fairy tale romance with only minor character tweaking, but Owen and Ianto become really, really obviously OOC if you try to squeeze them into that mold.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2008-08-09 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-09 11:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-09 07:50 pm (UTC)I don't usually ship Owen/Ianto but I have a weakness for fics where Jack is missing and comes back at the very end with Owen and Ianto sort of finding comfort in each other in the meantime.
I think the pair of them, works better as an affair (i.e. not as a finality but more like as two hot and needy people). The giant jack shadow looming over them is a shade I love.
By the way at the very end Ianto called Jack "Sir" and I think (and maybe other people more verse in canon could confirm) Ianto completely stop calling Jack Sir since the office scene in KKBB. I just happened to watch reset this afternoon and Ianto called Jack by his name in front of everyone else.
I'm now searching your torchwood tag in hope of finding your other works.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-10 04:14 am (UTC)On the topic of "sir"--this is just a few hours after the office scene, so I don't think it's stretching canon horribly to have Ianto call Jack "sir." I think he stops after KKBB because he and Jack are in a real relationship--and at the point in the fic where he calls Jack "sir" they aren't, yet.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-10 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-11 02:50 am (UTC)I love that you mention both Owen's pride and Ianto's addiction--they were both big character motivations when I was writing, and I'm glad to know they came through in the story.
By the way, is the default icon over at your journal Diana Rigg from The Avengers? I LOVE The Avengers, but they're forty years old and no one else watches them any more.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
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From:no subject
Date: 2008-08-10 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-11 02:30 am (UTC)If you're just dying of withdrawal, I do have a couple of non-T&S fics posted.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-15 11:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-26 10:39 am (UTC)I may just have to add a mental coda where it all works out all right!
Love & hugs
xxx
no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 04:57 pm (UTC)I do feel a little bad about breaking them up, though. If for no other reason than because it means I need to find something new to write. o_O.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-02 09:54 am (UTC)I think you've captured Owen wonderfully (and Ianto too, but Owen is harder I think) His complete inability to DEAL with closeness seems exactly right. Especially the shower scene, that was perfect.
Also Ianto *knowing* that this is all ohsofuckedup and almost abuse and needing it all the same and still being so very oblivious that it isn't Jack that Owen wants and the end? GAH! *grabby hands* WHY ISN'T THERE MORE!? *throws a coffee cup (almost) at your head*
*breathes* Ok, I'm done squeeing now, go about your business :p
no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 03:48 am (UTC)And I agree, Owen is harder to write. He lacks Ianto's basic honesty with himself.
Reading this review made me very happy, because you just distilled the story down to its essence. Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2009-06-27 09:31 am (UTC)I love this. I want to smack them both and hurt Jack and cry from laughter at Starbucks hating pygmies and dinosaurs that explode....and oh. I love this.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-28 03:01 am (UTC)I still feel a little guilty about the exploding dinosaurs. But I couldn't have them run around being cute all over the Hub forever, now could I?
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 02:03 pm (UTC)describes owen perfectly. He and Ianto could be good if they didn't hate themselves sooooo much
no subject
Date: 2009-08-13 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-11 08:21 pm (UTC)I think my favourite part of TW, which you distill perfectly, is they're so goddamn dysfunctional, but they're in charge of saving the world. Total insanity.
And this? Was just lovely and achy and unfulfilled and very, very canon. You rock.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-12 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-30 12:02 pm (UTC)At least Ianto has Jack to turn back to.
Didn't see this coming!!!
Wow, what a heartbreaking end to a wonderfully bittersweet story.
Thanks so much!!
no subject
Date: 2009-12-30 04:38 pm (UTC)