We held gold dust in our hands (1/7, Torchwood, Jack/Ianto/Lisa/Gwen/Rhys)
Title: We held gold dust in our hands (1/7)
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team, etc (Jack/Lisa/Ianto/Gwen/Rhys and all permutations thereof with a heavy dose of the first three), Rhys, Rhiannon, Alice, Ten, Lisa (basically everyone!)
Ratings: NC-17 for sexual content (also mild watersports and lactation sex).
Timeline: AU from pre S1 and threads through both seasons, part of CoE and into THE FUTURE. Enjoy the ride.
Wordcount: 63,000 words
Author's Notes: See this post for notes and credits and fanmixes.
Summary: You don't pick your family. They pick you.
We are one body, we are one spirit,
One breath, one dream of life and death,
One god, one sex.
--(Sophie B. Hawkins, 'We Are One Body')
There is nothing new I could give to you
Just a life that's torn, waiting to be born.
--(Keith Green, 'I Can't Believe It')
IANTO
Torchwood One gives them a huge settlement. They might have insisted that Lisa take retcon, but for Ianto sitting next to her at the big table in the rehabilitation center's conference room (she had pushed the papers across the wood finish and said something unrepeatable); but Ianto is staying on with the organisation, albeit in another place, and so she manages to get out of it. Her useless legs say that they owe her, they owe her so much that money cannot buy, and retcon would be a slap in the face. In the end, Ianto wins with logic and cajoling, and a very flat, level voice that he is startled to discover he possesses after Canary Wharf.
She nervously watches them load her boxes of china into the moving lorry. Ianto has told her not to worry, that he'll take care of everything, but she really would rather do it herself. Not that she can. The chair is fitted to her, made for her, and she hasn't learned how to deal with that yet. She runs into the edges and doorjambs in their small flat, and he can hear her swearing under her breath.
They are never so glad to see the city limits.
'You know,' she says, staring out the window, 'sometimes I think that if we hadn't been married, you wouldn't have stuck around for this.' Her head swivels to him and she blinks in rapid succession. 'I know I might not have.'
'Stop,' he tells her.
'I mean, Jesus, look at how fucked this is.' She slaps her knee, as if she can feel it.
Ianto has to pull the car over on the carriageway then. He reaches over and undoes the buckle of her safety belt, then through a series of awkward movements, and her own pushing with her arms, made stronger by the therapy, he settles her in his lap.
He doesn't know what to say once she is there, her limbs akimbo. Of all of the things she could have said, that is the saddest and most untrue thing. Because until she had said it, he had never thought of it, and he doesn't want to think of it.
So instead, he runs his fingers along her neck and presses his forehead into her shoulder. 'I thought we took a vow. Sickness and health and all that.'
Her eyes scan the passing cars, dancing over each one as it zooms past, processing, processing. 'People say those things because they're standing at the altar, and everything is beautiful. They never mean them for the unforeseeable.'
Ianto sighs into her then, because that's all bollocks, well, not always, but for him. For him it had never been a question, from the moment she had sat down across from him at the cafeteria and said, 'You are incredibly dapper.' He wants her to understand this, but he has no words for it. That is why he had trusted the minister to supply them for him in the first place.
He lets the minister supply them for him now. 'I do,' he says. 'I do, always.'
Lisa rests the back of her head on the window, and he can feel her shoulders shaking, so he lets himself cry, just a little, and then they sob together on the birm, fingers wrapped around each other, until a PC pulls over and knocks on the glass, wondering if they are dead or having a quickie on the front seat.
He makes sure that she is settled, in their flat with its extra wide doorways and lift so large that it accommodates her and shopping bags and a small Audi, whatever she needs; she packs a lunch for him, as a joke, really, puts it in a novelty lunchbox with a picture of Tin Tin on it that she must have scrounged from the vintage kitsch shop next door to their building. Ianto tries to hide it for a second when he arrives at work, but then he knows that the last thing Harkness needs to think is that he is hiding anything. Torchwood One has so many black marks on it, it might as well be made of tar. He looks about the tourist office that he is supposed to attempt to man, and then goes downstairs into the underground Hub to try to make nice with The Monster of Torchwood Three, as Yvonne once called him.
Jack Harkness isn't happy to see him, and Ianto remembers that he has been thrust on the man, in a way. Jack-call-me-Jack frowns as they descend the stairs to the Archives, which look like a bomb has gone off. Probably decades of people running about, grabbing what they needed and then just adding it to a pile instead of returning it.
'We don't get a lot of Torchwood One people here,' Jack says, and what he means is that he doesn't like Ianto.
Ianto runs a finger down the filing cabinet next to him. 'I can see that.' What he means is that he is fully aware that Jack doesn't like him.
Jack leans against the wall and crosses his arms. 'Well, you're cute, and the coffee is good.' He pushes off from the wall and rounds on Ianto. 'Yvonne was a bitch, but she had good hiring sense.' He shrugs and steps behind Ianto, and the lack of sound to his movements makes Ianto jumpy. 'I don't quite care about the Archives enough to hire someone, but if they're sending you, then I guess I'll deal with it.'
What he means by that is his archives had been shown to be a mess when UNIT had needed them. Ianto guesses that Jack doesn't like UNIT breathing down his neck; he can completely sympathise.
'I'll try my best to be as effectively unobtrusive as possible,' he says dryly, turning, and Jack is right there. Ianto blinks and starts a little. If this is the way Torchwood Three does things, he is going to have to get better at not being surprised.
Jack reaches out to touch the knot of his tie with one finger, as if it is the button to mastering Ianto, and pressing it will reveal Ianto's dastardly plan. More's the pity that it's just coloured silk, then.
He moves away to start his day, the stacking and shuffling of files an international signal for "Now I shall do my job." Jack seems to understand this, and with a sigh and a warning not to get lost, he leaves him alone.
Ianto notices that Jack has yet to mention Lisa. He had thought that it would be one of the first things out of his mouth; but that might just be because Lisa is his waking thought. He keeps forgetting that she's not everyone else's.
At lunch, Jack raises an eyebrow at Ianto's lunchbox, but when they all sit down at the table to eat, his mouth quirks at the note Lisa has taped to the inside: "Fuck those Cardiff bastards. I love you. XOXO."
Ianto considers Lisa and Jack firmly introduced.
The rest of the group is surly (Owen) and critical (Suzie) and awkward (Tosh). Ianto tries to answer their questions about Torchwood One, about the fires and the daleks and about Lisa, Lisa with her…problems and her chair and her new job working from home for UNIT, back cataloging non secured materials into a massive database, one of those projects that every government organisation says they'll get around to and then never does. Lisa is their man. She says that they owe her. Ianto still isn't sure if she's encoding some sort of worm into the database just to get back at them for mistreating her in the hospital.
Ianto brings coffee, clears take-away boxes and cartons, organises the Tourist Office, and one day is in the middle of 'F' in the Archives when Jack tells him that he wants him to man the Hub when the team is out in the field. Ianto sits at Tosh's desk, Bluetooth in his ear, hands gripping a coffee mug, wondering what he's supposed to be doing when they meet up with trouble, and over the comm he can hear Jack shouting orders; Tosh screams and then Owen is demanding that he hack into things and call up building designs and Suzie is arguing with the local coppers, all at the same time.
He tunes them all out, except for Owen's commands, because that is the only thing he can do anything about, so he misses when Jack tells him that Owen is possessed by some alien being and Ianto gives Owen's alien rider a free pass to the power plant security codes. Jack is furious and there is a scuffle over the comm, ending with gunfire, and Ianto can only sit back in the chair, staring at the screen and wondering if everyone is dead.
When they get back, Owen is bloody and unconscious and Tosh's arm is bandaged and Suzie is too angry to even look at him. Jack sits him down and explains things-this is how we roll in Torchwood Three; there are fewer of us, things are more intense; he's going to have to learn to multitask better. He's going to have to do more than file and fetch tea. He's going to have to be their everything, if he expects Jack to keep him.
'Are we going to have a problem?' Jack ends, cutting the air with a hand that lands on his desk like a meat cleaver on a chopping block.
Ianto thinks of Lisa, and what they've been through, and how Torchwood still owes them, and by extension, Harkness, as Torchwood's leader, is obligated to pay in full. He owes Ianto something, and Ianto will take it in secrets, things that he can take home with him and store in his heart and mind. Sometimes just knowing that his memory is his own, remembering Lisa crushed under the debris, remembering all the therapy and prying the tiles from the shower wall to install the hand rails, remembering that he wouldn't remember these things if he had taken the retcon, is enough. If he doesn't remember these things, then he and Lisa won't know how to confront the raw reality of her chair, of her legs, of the enemas and the stares from little children. On certain days, Lisa holds on to the fact that she had been there when the world almost ended like a badge of honor, and Ianto understands.
He shuffles his feet and shakes his head. 'No, sir, I don't believe we are.'
He can feel Jack's eyes following him all the way out the door. Or maybe just staring at his arse. It's difficult to tell.
He gets better at it. He anticipates their needs, not because he is psychic, but because he watches them. He plays the game of, "If I were Owen, what the hell would I need right this second? Oh, a coffee and a bird." He can help with the coffee. The number of a high priced escort service printed on a sticky note and curved around the belly of the mug is just for pleasure.
Tosh and Suzie treat him well, and seeing as how he had been able to weather the demands of Yvonne Hartmann, Jack Harkness isn't remotely difficult, despite the sexual harassment. Ianto takes to wearing his wedding ring, something that he and Lisa had stopped doing after her fingers had swelled up from using the chair. When she sees that he is wearing the ring again, she teases and crams hers on her finger, and it's not too bad of a fit. And when he tells her that it's to ward off a man, she's doubly intrigued.
'Captain Harkness?' she asks nonchalantly. That kind of nonchalant that she uses when she talks about what she might want for Christmas or her birthday.
Ianto frowns at the salad greens he is chopping. 'Yes,' he bites out, because he doesn't like talking about it. Because it's not precisely something that he's good at parsing right now.
Lisa sets the plates in her lap and wheels out of the kitchen to the dining room. 'He's good looking,' she says, as if she is his yenta. Except for the part where they're married. And straight. Well. Sort of.
He tosses the greens in a bowl and turns to face her when she returns. Lisa's face is knotted in the expression she uses when she doesn't think anyone is looking-brows drawn together, scowling, mouth drawn in an angry line. It makes Ianto uncomfortable; he's done enough that she doesn't have the look all the time, but he senses that instead of feeling better, she's just learned not to show it to anyone.
'He's terribly inappropriate,' he tells her, hoping to tease a smile out of her. He'll even tell her about today's special innuendo, the one about the chipolata.
Instead, her lips curve upward and she gives him the look.
He likes the look, on the rare occasions that he understands what it means.
It goes on like this for a few months, maybe two, before Owen settles down and stops making jokes about Ianto being a Cyberman underneath, a comment that Tosh seems to find particularly offensive on his behalf. Suzie finally relinquishes her death grip on the care and feeding of the SUV, and then Ianto catches the dinosaur and he's officially one of them.
It's Lisa's idea, really, the chocolate, as they lie in bed one night, and he tells her about how they'd chased the thing all over Cardiff, trying not to look like they were scanning the skies, and cringing every time a civilian had looked up and said, 'Is that a dinosaur?' Jack has been going mad with frustration, loading all of the tranquilizer guns in the back of the SUV and roaring at them about being professionals and goddammit, what were they all? Twelve? That they couldn't catch a giant flying lizard.
So in an attempt to make the team like him instead of merely tolerate him, Ianto foolishly goes out into the Cardiff night alone, searching for a creature from the lost land. Trapping her in the warehouse isn't difficult so much as it is shite-luck, but he tries to make it seem more complicated than it had been as he excitedly calls Jack on his comm in the middle of the night, back pressed against the door of the warehouse as the dinosaur screams inside.
Jack makes it there in record time. Ianto doesn't quite know what to make of his boss, except that he's fit and funny and demanding and angry, though what Jack is angry about is usually never what he's pretending to be angry about. He's not angry now so much as amused, and after he makes a few jokes about Torchwood One being prepared like Satanic boy scouts and asking Ianto if he knows how to tie any knots, they dive inside.
Chocolate and a tranquiliser gun had been his plan. It had sounded a lot less insane when he and Lisa had been tipsy in bed the night before. But now Jack has a huge needle and all his jokes are gone when they circle the dinosaur, Ianto waving a very expensive bar of dark chocolate and mumbling what Lisa had told him about serotonin levels. Some days he wonders if she is trying to get rid of him, a sobering thought.
Jack manages to get on the dinosaur, or rather, to grab on when it takes flight, and Ianto can only stand there and helplessly watch as the creature takes him on a wild ride through the warehouse. He is composing the obituary in his head. He is imagining the taste of the retcon that Torchwood will give him for killing his boss. Death by dinosaur. No one remembers what retcon tastes like because no one remembers they've taken it, he realises, when Jack falls towards him and he foolishly holds out his arms as if he can catch the man.
He does, and they roll, and the dinosaur, no, pterodactyl, no, pteranodon, reacts to the sedative Jack shoots her with finally and lands right next to them. Or rather where they would have been if they hadn't rolled at the last minute. Ianto huffs into Jack's face as he lies on top of him, eyes wide, shaking. Underneath him, Jack is limp, neck a little arched, the definition of a come on. Ianto has fifteen dictionaries; he's sure that in every one of them, under 'seduction', is a picture of Jack Harkness's face right now.
'Well now,' Jack says, his voice throaty. 'That was bracing.' He shifts minutely under Ianto's weight, and it feels a little too much like how pornos start.
Ianto pushes himself off of Jack and blushes. His pulse pushes against the gold band on his finger.
Jack props himself up on his elbows, looks over at the sleeping dinosaur and back to Ianto before bursting into laughter. 'Oh Mister Jones, I am so keeping you.'
'I should hope so,' Ianto huffs. 'I caught your fucking dinosaur.'
Jack rises and stuffs his hands in his pockets. Ianto knows that he's wide open for a remark about dinosaurs and sex, but it never comes. In fact, when he looks back at Jack, the man's head is cocked and he's staring at him, much like he had on Ianto's first day.
'Go home,' he says finally, scuffing a foot and pivoting away. 'Kiss that genius wife of yours.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
LISA
It's the flowers that bother her the most, she realises when she's staring at the wallpaper in the loo. If they owned this place, they'd be gone already. Hell, if she could reach the upper walls with a steamer, it'd be gone regardless.
Lisa finds that in the day to day of her life in Cardiff, the futility of the flowered wallpaper in the loo is endemic to her entire situation. Flowers, bright and red and meant to weave together in a happy pattern, meant to subconsciously cheer her up as she lathers up or washes her hands, or uses the Peristeen. Instead, she often finds that she lavishes quite a bit of animosity at them in their insistence toward joviality.
She hasn't mentioned this to Ianto, because he would rip them all down for her in an instant, and that's not exactly what she wants.
But they are there every day, and as she cleans her catheter in the sink and listens to the chiming of her instant messenger program pinging repeatedly (she tells them that she'll be back in fifteen minutes, but they never seem to notice. UNIT is full of people who only read the lines they themselves have written in any given chat room.), they begin to seem less and less like a nuisance and more like a mockery. The more they want her to be happy, the more irritated she gets.
She wheels out into the hallway and bangs the chair on the doorjamb, because no matter how many times she does it, she always misjudges this turn.
By the time she's back at her workstation in her office, a bottle of Perrier, bag of carrots and a sausage roll wedged in between her legs and the side of the chair, there are fifteen new emails and about fifty lines of chat text, none of it pertinent to her. She deletes the emails with her mouse, saying, "click" as she erases each one. She has several emails in her inbox from Torchwood, which means that she's either finally managed to get a hold of Toshiko Sato, or Ianto has a rare moment at a borrowed terminal.
From: Jones, Ianto.
Subject: An Unexpected Outing?
Lis-- I have a few minutes to spare and I wanted to mail and ask if you had any plans for dinner. Jack has given me the evening free, and I intend to not be near any form of communicative device in that space of time. Do you have anything in particular you might fancy? I might be able to persuade Tosh to hack a reservation for us if somewhere you like is full up, and bugger the consequences. We deserve nice flatware once in a while. Love you tragically hip, Ianto
Lisa smiles and hits Reply.
Babe-I don't have anything that I'm thinking I need desperately, actually, and you're the one who knows the Food section, so pick someplace that has those little snail forks and a fish knife and maybe pate or something that still has a head on it. All those posh places leave the heads on. What did you have to do to get the night off? Blow Mount Harkness? Haahhha. Love you tonnes and tonnes and rubber nuns, Lis.
Lisa looks at the dress that has just come back from the dry cleaners and which has been hanging in its plastic bag on the doorknob of the office closet since it had been delivered that afternoon. It is gold and sparkles in the right places and is low cut in the front and high cut up the legs, and she wants to wear it when Ianto makes love to her, but he won't let her, so she'll settle for wearing it tonight.
From: Harkness, Jack.
Subject: Re: A request, please sir!
Ms. Hallet-Jones,
Fine, you sly minx. He's all yours for the evening. Just let him return in one piece; he's the only one who knows how to run that shiny coffee machine we bought last month.
J.
p.s. Fwd pictures. :)
Lisa smiles. She has never met Captain Harkness, but that doesn't mean that she has any hesitation emailing him and demanding that he give Ianto an evening without distraction in which he can sex up his wife right and proper. She might have even mentioned that in her initial email; just because she hasn't met the man doesn't mean that she doesn't know the man.
'Click. Click. Click.'
NEW From: Jones, Ianto.
Subject: Re: Re: An Unexpected Outing?
O_o. If I knew I'd tell you. Let's not look a gift horse, eh?
Seven at Le Tagliatelle. They have breadsticks for fencing. XO -Ianto
Lisa hits "Archive".
Ianto breezes in at six-thirty, makes for the bedroom at breakneck speed, peeling off his clothes as he goes. Lisa spies his bluetooth on the sofa and places it on the counter for safekeeping. His tie is in the hallway. She retrieves it and his dress shirt, tossed over the footboard of the bed. His trousers are slung loosely at the waist, and he's doing that hunched over thing so that they don't fall down as he pulls on the new shirt, talking a mile a minute.
'-so then I had to requisition close to three hundred of them and there's no way they're going to get here in time. Suzie set the kitchen on fire trying to blowtorch one of those wretched Hot Pocket things and I don't even want to think about what's in them. I think I managed to get most of the cheese off everything, but it all smells like the day after a fire in the chem lab. And Tosh, well, you know Tosh, she started coughing and wheezing and Jack had to take her out for air. So that left me in the Hub with Owen and Suzie, and they're at it like, I don't even know what they're like. Do you think blue?'
Lisa tilts her head at the selection of ties in his hands. The shirt is gray. The suit is blue. The tie is a different shade of them both in stripes. She nods and he tosses the others he's had on the back burner of his mind back into the wardrobe and slings the tie around his neck before tucking in his shirttails and doing up his trousers.
'Excellent. So, I was standing there with my hands full of rags and chopped processed ham and Jack comes out of nowhere and says, "Yantoe, take the evening off."' Ianto does a great bad American accent, Lisa thinks. She loves when he says his own name. Ianto leans against the wall as he ties his tie, fingers moving with almost preternatural speed. 'I wasn't about to ask any questions, mind you. Jack's-well, he's-what?'
Lisa realises that she's been shaking her head. 'How much coffee have you had?'
Ianto glares at his tie in the mirror. It's horribly long on the wrong end and his hands are a little shaky. He gives her an innocent grin. They have discussed this-Ianto and coffee is a love affair that if left unchecked will lead to ulcers and two a.m. hyperactivity. Lisa would threaten to lock up the grinder if she wasn't so sure that Ianto knows how to use their local Starbucks.
'Too much.' He fixes his tie and sits on the edge of the bed so that she can wheel to him and they face each other. He places both hands on her thighs and leans in for a kiss, which is sweet. Lisa can taste the coffee and something minty, as if he has brushed his teeth in the car. Again. 'You look fantastically incredible.' He raises an eyebrow. 'Edible.'
She smirks. 'Spreadable?'
He slaps her hands and stands when she backs up. 'Most inevitable.'
She leads the way to the door, stopping only to gather her coat and purse. Ianto won't have his mobile, but she'll have hers. Torchwood can always reach him that way, but it will be considerably more inconvenient. She likes to inconvenience Torchwood.
'You're driving,' she jokes on their way out the door. Ianto almost runs into her chair when they stop at the lifts.
Later, in the quiet of the restaurant, after Ianto has decaffeinated somewhat and they have stuffed themselves with a series of Italian dishes that they ordered solely because they hadn't understood what they were, Lisa sips her wine and sits back in her chair.
'So, this whole Torchwood Cardiff thing,' she begins. 'We said we'd give it three months. Those three months are up. Where do we stand?'
There is a long stretch, and she knows that he has been thinking about it, and that now he has to process everything he thinks and feels about the situation in his head and lay it out for her. Even as he wipes his mouth with the serviette and lays it over his plate (so he doesn't have to look at his uneaten food. It's one of many truly amusing quirks about him.), even as he turns and waves a finger, probably for the pudding trolley, his brain is tabulating, composing, weighing word choices and all but spellchecking his list. She imagines Ianto's communication process partly in Word, partly in Excel. It is hard to tell which. Oh hell, Ianto runs on Linux.
Finally, after the tray is gone and they have a piece of tiramisu in front of them that is big enough to feed a small third world country, he toys with his pudding fork. 'It…it isn't unpleasant,' is what he comes up with. Lisa can hear the click of the 'enter' key in his voice.
'And?'
Ianto smiles. 'They're quite disorganised.' As if on cue, a garcon drops a tray of dishes and they both snort.
'Then you have plenty to keep you busy.'
'They're not as…fun.' He says, and what he means is that they aren't friends. He doesn't want to say that, she knows, because he doesn't want them to get close. Getting close had been one of many little downfalls in a way, and they had both agreed on that when they had come to Cardiff. But Lisa is tired of staring at the same old flat, the same old café, and the same old bus that takes her to her occasional UNIT meetings.
'It has to be better than working for Yvonne, though,' she says smoothly. She wants him to break down everyone for her so that she can pick her strategy.
Ianto sips from his glass before he says anything. 'Jack Harkness is a good man. Not always a wise man, but a good man.'
Lisa smiles. 'All right then.' She plays with her serviette ring. 'You should have them over for dinner.'
The wine glass thunks down and he looks away. 'They're my co-workers,' he mumbles.
Lisa leans forward, even though she has no intention of whispering. She spears the tiramisu with one silver painted nail and scoops out part of the center. 'So were Kyle and Sarah and Simran. Most of our friends were co-workers.' It's the Torchwood way, actually, since they couldn't tell anyone outside Torchwood what they do. The hours were always shite, Lisa and Ianto had found themselves thrown in with the lot of them. Unfortunately, every person she could name is dead. She doesn't want to remind him of that. She doesn't need to. They were lucky to both come out of it, actually. An anomaly.
She licks her finger clean. Ianto tests the pastry with his fork like a civilised man. She doesn't like the tiramisu-too much coffee liqueur.
'You'd hate Owen,' he says finally, raising one eyebrow in his 'judgmental Bond' way.
Lisa laughs then. He's adorable when he's trying to dissuade her. 'You let me deal with Dr Harper.'
'And then there's Suzie, she's alright, and you'll love Tosh.' You'll. It's settled then, almost wrapped in foil and ready to pop into the oven.
Lisa can sense a but coming. 'And Jack?'
Ianto finishes his wine. 'It's a good thing we're married,' is all he replies. Lisa shakes her head. Her silly boy.
'Take me home and remind me why we're married,' she tells him then, reaching over the table to touch his hand, because what she especially wants to do-give him a footjob under the table, is no longer an option. That stings less than it might have before.
Later, they collapse on the sofa and watch a film. It's a ridiculous film, something they ordered through the mailing service because they'd been drunk and going through the queue. Lisa reflects that they should never do that again. On the other hand, drunken video renting had got him to propose to her (over a very bad film about zombie pharaohs, no less), so it might not be all bad in moderation.
Ianto looks away when her hand snakes to his lap whilst they sit on the sofa. His lower lip catches in his teeth and he glances from the telly to stare out the window, as if the film bores him and he hasn't noticed that she is unzipping his trousers.
Any other time, she might have said something, might have turned his face about to say, "I'm right here," but she doesn't bother. They've had sex three times since it happened. By fucking god they are doing it tonight.
Ianto brings his head around to her and they gravitate closer and closer until she can feel his breath hot on her face. This is that cute awkward first time kissing that she likes, that he likes, really, with the butterflies in the stomach, waiting for the other person to zero in and, oh. She grazes his lips with hers, rubbing for a second before opening her mouth to his, and then school is out, and his hand finds the back of her neck, pulling her closer as the kiss deepens and she can close her eyes and just be Lisa Hallet-Jones, in love with Ianto Jones, and married and safe and together and-
Ianto breaks the kiss with a twist of his mouth, like turning a honey jar up and to the side to stop the flow, and he makes a natural progression to her neck, his hands sliding across her shoulders, her back, the gold scales of her dress. She inhales the scent of his hair and can feel him smile into her neck. 'Love the dress.'
He doesn't see her lift her eyebrow, but she knows he knows she does it anyway. 'It looks better on the bedroom floor,' she assures him, her fingers playing on his tie, the nape of his neck. They aren't kissing anymore, just pressed close, too close to see each other's faces, and that's nice, yeah, intimacy. Lisa doesn't have to see his face to know that he wants her. He's hard and ready and she can feel her breasts aching against him, against the fabric of the dress that she didn't wear a bra under, and she wants him to discover that himself, if he doesn't know it already.
She misses the way his face would light up, and he would reach out with both hands; he would smile and say with appreciation, "Oh, yeah, Lis. Yeah."
She won't let him carry her into the room, like she might have long ago, because then they leave the chair behind, and without it she is effectively stranded until she can drag herself into it. Instead, Ianto settles her in the chair himself, and then pushes it. He very rarely pushes the chair, mostly because she won't let him, and so it means something when he does.
Lisa deposits herself on the bed and he watches her inch her way back with her hands, his face shadowed with something that means that he is starting to think logistics and not fucking.
The mood of earlier is slipping away, and Lisa doesn't understand how it always flees. She has tried to carry it here, that playfulness, but it always seems to get lost on the way to the bedroom. He pulls the dress over her head where in the past she would have let it slide off her shoulders to pool around her feet on the floor. He tosses his clothes over the bedroom chair with nary a look back. She pulls herself further back on the bed and whistles when he takes his time with his shorts, rolling his hips for her a little, stripping for her, his lower lip tucked in between his teeth, his thumbs hooking disastrous on the waistband. She reclines a bit, tries to make her legs fall in what looks like an inviting way without being overly crass, but she doesn't want to have to actually manually arrange them herself.
Ianto throws his shorts at her and she laughs when they smack her in the face. 'Oh fuck all romance,' she mutters.
'They have hearts on them,' he offers with a feeble smile as he crawls to her on the bed and settles in the v of her legs. His eyes move over her body and she takes a moment to remember that once upon a time she had been lithe and flexible and silky. He accommodates her want for his skin by coming closer, almost pressing into her chest, and then she is flat on her back, arms around his waist, his neck, and finally, finally, her hands are around his cock, and then there's the snap of the condom going on.
Ianto lowers himself onto her, his kisses gentle and not deep enough, and she wonders when he will just do it. He lubricates her using his fingers and slides in, hitching her legs at the knees and holding them up, or they just flop to the sides. With his hands holding her that way, he cannot touch the rest of her, and she pinches her own nipples when she watches him thrust in her, watching, because it is much like seeing two people on the telly having sex. Her body jerks with the rhythm of the thrusts and she moves herself with her arms, pushing against the wall behind her for something to leverage off of, but it is awkward and she needs both hands, and when she lets go of her breasts to do it, Ianto says, 'No, let me do this.'
Sometimes, when they fuck, and they have not done it enough for her to tell, but she has been wanking like a pro for the past two months, sometimes she thinks she feels something down there. In those moments everything is a pinpoint of perceived sensation that she is desperate to feel, like freezing in the dark to hear better.
Even now, she hitches her breath and closes her eyes, arching her torso as much as she can to change the position, to 'hear' the rhythm of her body, to feel what she knows must be there, down there she is wet and ready. Everything she used to feel is still there, and like a shorted wire, maybe if she twists the right way she can short the circuit again, just for a second, and feel him in her, thrusting, the hardness of his cock, his balls hitting her in rhythm, his hands on her thighs.
There is. It's so very far away, though, that she isn't sure if she's imagining it or if it's real. Sometimes with the vibrator it feels real. Sometimes when he looks at her over the sheets or at the table or in the shower, she can feel it. She wonders if she comes then. The overall sensation is not unlike wondering what an orgasm would feel like before she'd ever had one.
Ianto's hips stutter, he shudders for a second and then stops. 'Shit,' he whispers, and she can hear the rasp in his voice. 'Shit Lis, I-'
She would sigh if she didn't know how damaging it would be. In truth, it hadn't been where she thought it would be either. He avoids falling on her, catching himself with his hands before rolling off. She hears him slide the condom off his softening cock and throw it in the bin next to the bed. They used to call that the 'smexy bin'. Not so much lately.
She lets her legs fall wherever they happen to be and doesn't care really, if her hips aren’t aligned. Instead, Ianto presses his face to her shoulder, slinging one arm around her waist-she can still feel that, at least-and shakes his head. She raises one hand to card his hair, temples dewy with the beginnings of sweat.
'I'm so sorry,' he mumbles, and she wants to stop him before he can continue.
'It will happen,' she says resolutely, because that is what the therapist had told her, and what the physical therapist had told her when she had asked about sex, Ianto's hand loosely gripping hers when they had sat in the office. 'We can do this again.'
Ianto just nods and pulls her closer, but his face is drawn and his eyes are closed. She doesn't reach up to touch the wetness on his cheek, because it's enough to know that it is there.
*~*~*~*~*~*
Master List
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team, etc (Jack/Lisa/Ianto/Gwen/Rhys and all permutations thereof with a heavy dose of the first three), Rhys, Rhiannon, Alice, Ten, Lisa (basically everyone!)
Ratings: NC-17 for sexual content (also mild watersports and lactation sex).
Timeline: AU from pre S1 and threads through both seasons, part of CoE and into THE FUTURE. Enjoy the ride.
Wordcount: 63,000 words
Author's Notes: See this post for notes and credits and fanmixes.
Summary: You don't pick your family. They pick you.
We are one body, we are one spirit,
One breath, one dream of life and death,
One god, one sex.
--(Sophie B. Hawkins, 'We Are One Body')
There is nothing new I could give to you
Just a life that's torn, waiting to be born.
--(Keith Green, 'I Can't Believe It')
IANTO
Torchwood One gives them a huge settlement. They might have insisted that Lisa take retcon, but for Ianto sitting next to her at the big table in the rehabilitation center's conference room (she had pushed the papers across the wood finish and said something unrepeatable); but Ianto is staying on with the organisation, albeit in another place, and so she manages to get out of it. Her useless legs say that they owe her, they owe her so much that money cannot buy, and retcon would be a slap in the face. In the end, Ianto wins with logic and cajoling, and a very flat, level voice that he is startled to discover he possesses after Canary Wharf.
She nervously watches them load her boxes of china into the moving lorry. Ianto has told her not to worry, that he'll take care of everything, but she really would rather do it herself. Not that she can. The chair is fitted to her, made for her, and she hasn't learned how to deal with that yet. She runs into the edges and doorjambs in their small flat, and he can hear her swearing under her breath.
They are never so glad to see the city limits.
'You know,' she says, staring out the window, 'sometimes I think that if we hadn't been married, you wouldn't have stuck around for this.' Her head swivels to him and she blinks in rapid succession. 'I know I might not have.'
'Stop,' he tells her.
'I mean, Jesus, look at how fucked this is.' She slaps her knee, as if she can feel it.
Ianto has to pull the car over on the carriageway then. He reaches over and undoes the buckle of her safety belt, then through a series of awkward movements, and her own pushing with her arms, made stronger by the therapy, he settles her in his lap.
He doesn't know what to say once she is there, her limbs akimbo. Of all of the things she could have said, that is the saddest and most untrue thing. Because until she had said it, he had never thought of it, and he doesn't want to think of it.
So instead, he runs his fingers along her neck and presses his forehead into her shoulder. 'I thought we took a vow. Sickness and health and all that.'
Her eyes scan the passing cars, dancing over each one as it zooms past, processing, processing. 'People say those things because they're standing at the altar, and everything is beautiful. They never mean them for the unforeseeable.'
Ianto sighs into her then, because that's all bollocks, well, not always, but for him. For him it had never been a question, from the moment she had sat down across from him at the cafeteria and said, 'You are incredibly dapper.' He wants her to understand this, but he has no words for it. That is why he had trusted the minister to supply them for him in the first place.
He lets the minister supply them for him now. 'I do,' he says. 'I do, always.'
Lisa rests the back of her head on the window, and he can feel her shoulders shaking, so he lets himself cry, just a little, and then they sob together on the birm, fingers wrapped around each other, until a PC pulls over and knocks on the glass, wondering if they are dead or having a quickie on the front seat.
He makes sure that she is settled, in their flat with its extra wide doorways and lift so large that it accommodates her and shopping bags and a small Audi, whatever she needs; she packs a lunch for him, as a joke, really, puts it in a novelty lunchbox with a picture of Tin Tin on it that she must have scrounged from the vintage kitsch shop next door to their building. Ianto tries to hide it for a second when he arrives at work, but then he knows that the last thing Harkness needs to think is that he is hiding anything. Torchwood One has so many black marks on it, it might as well be made of tar. He looks about the tourist office that he is supposed to attempt to man, and then goes downstairs into the underground Hub to try to make nice with The Monster of Torchwood Three, as Yvonne once called him.
Jack Harkness isn't happy to see him, and Ianto remembers that he has been thrust on the man, in a way. Jack-call-me-Jack frowns as they descend the stairs to the Archives, which look like a bomb has gone off. Probably decades of people running about, grabbing what they needed and then just adding it to a pile instead of returning it.
'We don't get a lot of Torchwood One people here,' Jack says, and what he means is that he doesn't like Ianto.
Ianto runs a finger down the filing cabinet next to him. 'I can see that.' What he means is that he is fully aware that Jack doesn't like him.
Jack leans against the wall and crosses his arms. 'Well, you're cute, and the coffee is good.' He pushes off from the wall and rounds on Ianto. 'Yvonne was a bitch, but she had good hiring sense.' He shrugs and steps behind Ianto, and the lack of sound to his movements makes Ianto jumpy. 'I don't quite care about the Archives enough to hire someone, but if they're sending you, then I guess I'll deal with it.'
What he means by that is his archives had been shown to be a mess when UNIT had needed them. Ianto guesses that Jack doesn't like UNIT breathing down his neck; he can completely sympathise.
'I'll try my best to be as effectively unobtrusive as possible,' he says dryly, turning, and Jack is right there. Ianto blinks and starts a little. If this is the way Torchwood Three does things, he is going to have to get better at not being surprised.
Jack reaches out to touch the knot of his tie with one finger, as if it is the button to mastering Ianto, and pressing it will reveal Ianto's dastardly plan. More's the pity that it's just coloured silk, then.
He moves away to start his day, the stacking and shuffling of files an international signal for "Now I shall do my job." Jack seems to understand this, and with a sigh and a warning not to get lost, he leaves him alone.
Ianto notices that Jack has yet to mention Lisa. He had thought that it would be one of the first things out of his mouth; but that might just be because Lisa is his waking thought. He keeps forgetting that she's not everyone else's.
At lunch, Jack raises an eyebrow at Ianto's lunchbox, but when they all sit down at the table to eat, his mouth quirks at the note Lisa has taped to the inside: "Fuck those Cardiff bastards. I love you. XOXO."
Ianto considers Lisa and Jack firmly introduced.
The rest of the group is surly (Owen) and critical (Suzie) and awkward (Tosh). Ianto tries to answer their questions about Torchwood One, about the fires and the daleks and about Lisa, Lisa with her…problems and her chair and her new job working from home for UNIT, back cataloging non secured materials into a massive database, one of those projects that every government organisation says they'll get around to and then never does. Lisa is their man. She says that they owe her. Ianto still isn't sure if she's encoding some sort of worm into the database just to get back at them for mistreating her in the hospital.
Ianto brings coffee, clears take-away boxes and cartons, organises the Tourist Office, and one day is in the middle of 'F' in the Archives when Jack tells him that he wants him to man the Hub when the team is out in the field. Ianto sits at Tosh's desk, Bluetooth in his ear, hands gripping a coffee mug, wondering what he's supposed to be doing when they meet up with trouble, and over the comm he can hear Jack shouting orders; Tosh screams and then Owen is demanding that he hack into things and call up building designs and Suzie is arguing with the local coppers, all at the same time.
He tunes them all out, except for Owen's commands, because that is the only thing he can do anything about, so he misses when Jack tells him that Owen is possessed by some alien being and Ianto gives Owen's alien rider a free pass to the power plant security codes. Jack is furious and there is a scuffle over the comm, ending with gunfire, and Ianto can only sit back in the chair, staring at the screen and wondering if everyone is dead.
When they get back, Owen is bloody and unconscious and Tosh's arm is bandaged and Suzie is too angry to even look at him. Jack sits him down and explains things-this is how we roll in Torchwood Three; there are fewer of us, things are more intense; he's going to have to learn to multitask better. He's going to have to do more than file and fetch tea. He's going to have to be their everything, if he expects Jack to keep him.
'Are we going to have a problem?' Jack ends, cutting the air with a hand that lands on his desk like a meat cleaver on a chopping block.
Ianto thinks of Lisa, and what they've been through, and how Torchwood still owes them, and by extension, Harkness, as Torchwood's leader, is obligated to pay in full. He owes Ianto something, and Ianto will take it in secrets, things that he can take home with him and store in his heart and mind. Sometimes just knowing that his memory is his own, remembering Lisa crushed under the debris, remembering all the therapy and prying the tiles from the shower wall to install the hand rails, remembering that he wouldn't remember these things if he had taken the retcon, is enough. If he doesn't remember these things, then he and Lisa won't know how to confront the raw reality of her chair, of her legs, of the enemas and the stares from little children. On certain days, Lisa holds on to the fact that she had been there when the world almost ended like a badge of honor, and Ianto understands.
He shuffles his feet and shakes his head. 'No, sir, I don't believe we are.'
He can feel Jack's eyes following him all the way out the door. Or maybe just staring at his arse. It's difficult to tell.
He gets better at it. He anticipates their needs, not because he is psychic, but because he watches them. He plays the game of, "If I were Owen, what the hell would I need right this second? Oh, a coffee and a bird." He can help with the coffee. The number of a high priced escort service printed on a sticky note and curved around the belly of the mug is just for pleasure.
Tosh and Suzie treat him well, and seeing as how he had been able to weather the demands of Yvonne Hartmann, Jack Harkness isn't remotely difficult, despite the sexual harassment. Ianto takes to wearing his wedding ring, something that he and Lisa had stopped doing after her fingers had swelled up from using the chair. When she sees that he is wearing the ring again, she teases and crams hers on her finger, and it's not too bad of a fit. And when he tells her that it's to ward off a man, she's doubly intrigued.
'Captain Harkness?' she asks nonchalantly. That kind of nonchalant that she uses when she talks about what she might want for Christmas or her birthday.
Ianto frowns at the salad greens he is chopping. 'Yes,' he bites out, because he doesn't like talking about it. Because it's not precisely something that he's good at parsing right now.
Lisa sets the plates in her lap and wheels out of the kitchen to the dining room. 'He's good looking,' she says, as if she is his yenta. Except for the part where they're married. And straight. Well. Sort of.
He tosses the greens in a bowl and turns to face her when she returns. Lisa's face is knotted in the expression she uses when she doesn't think anyone is looking-brows drawn together, scowling, mouth drawn in an angry line. It makes Ianto uncomfortable; he's done enough that she doesn't have the look all the time, but he senses that instead of feeling better, she's just learned not to show it to anyone.
'He's terribly inappropriate,' he tells her, hoping to tease a smile out of her. He'll even tell her about today's special innuendo, the one about the chipolata.
Instead, her lips curve upward and she gives him the look.
He likes the look, on the rare occasions that he understands what it means.
It goes on like this for a few months, maybe two, before Owen settles down and stops making jokes about Ianto being a Cyberman underneath, a comment that Tosh seems to find particularly offensive on his behalf. Suzie finally relinquishes her death grip on the care and feeding of the SUV, and then Ianto catches the dinosaur and he's officially one of them.
It's Lisa's idea, really, the chocolate, as they lie in bed one night, and he tells her about how they'd chased the thing all over Cardiff, trying not to look like they were scanning the skies, and cringing every time a civilian had looked up and said, 'Is that a dinosaur?' Jack has been going mad with frustration, loading all of the tranquilizer guns in the back of the SUV and roaring at them about being professionals and goddammit, what were they all? Twelve? That they couldn't catch a giant flying lizard.
So in an attempt to make the team like him instead of merely tolerate him, Ianto foolishly goes out into the Cardiff night alone, searching for a creature from the lost land. Trapping her in the warehouse isn't difficult so much as it is shite-luck, but he tries to make it seem more complicated than it had been as he excitedly calls Jack on his comm in the middle of the night, back pressed against the door of the warehouse as the dinosaur screams inside.
Jack makes it there in record time. Ianto doesn't quite know what to make of his boss, except that he's fit and funny and demanding and angry, though what Jack is angry about is usually never what he's pretending to be angry about. He's not angry now so much as amused, and after he makes a few jokes about Torchwood One being prepared like Satanic boy scouts and asking Ianto if he knows how to tie any knots, they dive inside.
Chocolate and a tranquiliser gun had been his plan. It had sounded a lot less insane when he and Lisa had been tipsy in bed the night before. But now Jack has a huge needle and all his jokes are gone when they circle the dinosaur, Ianto waving a very expensive bar of dark chocolate and mumbling what Lisa had told him about serotonin levels. Some days he wonders if she is trying to get rid of him, a sobering thought.
Jack manages to get on the dinosaur, or rather, to grab on when it takes flight, and Ianto can only stand there and helplessly watch as the creature takes him on a wild ride through the warehouse. He is composing the obituary in his head. He is imagining the taste of the retcon that Torchwood will give him for killing his boss. Death by dinosaur. No one remembers what retcon tastes like because no one remembers they've taken it, he realises, when Jack falls towards him and he foolishly holds out his arms as if he can catch the man.
He does, and they roll, and the dinosaur, no, pterodactyl, no, pteranodon, reacts to the sedative Jack shoots her with finally and lands right next to them. Or rather where they would have been if they hadn't rolled at the last minute. Ianto huffs into Jack's face as he lies on top of him, eyes wide, shaking. Underneath him, Jack is limp, neck a little arched, the definition of a come on. Ianto has fifteen dictionaries; he's sure that in every one of them, under 'seduction', is a picture of Jack Harkness's face right now.
'Well now,' Jack says, his voice throaty. 'That was bracing.' He shifts minutely under Ianto's weight, and it feels a little too much like how pornos start.
Ianto pushes himself off of Jack and blushes. His pulse pushes against the gold band on his finger.
Jack props himself up on his elbows, looks over at the sleeping dinosaur and back to Ianto before bursting into laughter. 'Oh Mister Jones, I am so keeping you.'
'I should hope so,' Ianto huffs. 'I caught your fucking dinosaur.'
Jack rises and stuffs his hands in his pockets. Ianto knows that he's wide open for a remark about dinosaurs and sex, but it never comes. In fact, when he looks back at Jack, the man's head is cocked and he's staring at him, much like he had on Ianto's first day.
'Go home,' he says finally, scuffing a foot and pivoting away. 'Kiss that genius wife of yours.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
LISA
It's the flowers that bother her the most, she realises when she's staring at the wallpaper in the loo. If they owned this place, they'd be gone already. Hell, if she could reach the upper walls with a steamer, it'd be gone regardless.
Lisa finds that in the day to day of her life in Cardiff, the futility of the flowered wallpaper in the loo is endemic to her entire situation. Flowers, bright and red and meant to weave together in a happy pattern, meant to subconsciously cheer her up as she lathers up or washes her hands, or uses the Peristeen. Instead, she often finds that she lavishes quite a bit of animosity at them in their insistence toward joviality.
She hasn't mentioned this to Ianto, because he would rip them all down for her in an instant, and that's not exactly what she wants.
But they are there every day, and as she cleans her catheter in the sink and listens to the chiming of her instant messenger program pinging repeatedly (she tells them that she'll be back in fifteen minutes, but they never seem to notice. UNIT is full of people who only read the lines they themselves have written in any given chat room.), they begin to seem less and less like a nuisance and more like a mockery. The more they want her to be happy, the more irritated she gets.
She wheels out into the hallway and bangs the chair on the doorjamb, because no matter how many times she does it, she always misjudges this turn.
By the time she's back at her workstation in her office, a bottle of Perrier, bag of carrots and a sausage roll wedged in between her legs and the side of the chair, there are fifteen new emails and about fifty lines of chat text, none of it pertinent to her. She deletes the emails with her mouse, saying, "click" as she erases each one. She has several emails in her inbox from Torchwood, which means that she's either finally managed to get a hold of Toshiko Sato, or Ianto has a rare moment at a borrowed terminal.
From: Jones, Ianto.
Subject: An Unexpected Outing?
Lis-- I have a few minutes to spare and I wanted to mail and ask if you had any plans for dinner. Jack has given me the evening free, and I intend to not be near any form of communicative device in that space of time. Do you have anything in particular you might fancy? I might be able to persuade Tosh to hack a reservation for us if somewhere you like is full up, and bugger the consequences. We deserve nice flatware once in a while. Love you tragically hip, Ianto
Lisa smiles and hits Reply.
Babe-I don't have anything that I'm thinking I need desperately, actually, and you're the one who knows the Food section, so pick someplace that has those little snail forks and a fish knife and maybe pate or something that still has a head on it. All those posh places leave the heads on. What did you have to do to get the night off? Blow Mount Harkness? Haahhha. Love you tonnes and tonnes and rubber nuns, Lis.
Lisa looks at the dress that has just come back from the dry cleaners and which has been hanging in its plastic bag on the doorknob of the office closet since it had been delivered that afternoon. It is gold and sparkles in the right places and is low cut in the front and high cut up the legs, and she wants to wear it when Ianto makes love to her, but he won't let her, so she'll settle for wearing it tonight.
From: Harkness, Jack.
Subject: Re: A request, please sir!
Ms. Hallet-Jones,
Fine, you sly minx. He's all yours for the evening. Just let him return in one piece; he's the only one who knows how to run that shiny coffee machine we bought last month.
J.
p.s. Fwd pictures. :)
Lisa smiles. She has never met Captain Harkness, but that doesn't mean that she has any hesitation emailing him and demanding that he give Ianto an evening without distraction in which he can sex up his wife right and proper. She might have even mentioned that in her initial email; just because she hasn't met the man doesn't mean that she doesn't know the man.
'Click. Click. Click.'
NEW From: Jones, Ianto.
Subject: Re: Re: An Unexpected Outing?
O_o. If I knew I'd tell you. Let's not look a gift horse, eh?
Seven at Le Tagliatelle. They have breadsticks for fencing. XO -Ianto
Lisa hits "Archive".
Ianto breezes in at six-thirty, makes for the bedroom at breakneck speed, peeling off his clothes as he goes. Lisa spies his bluetooth on the sofa and places it on the counter for safekeeping. His tie is in the hallway. She retrieves it and his dress shirt, tossed over the footboard of the bed. His trousers are slung loosely at the waist, and he's doing that hunched over thing so that they don't fall down as he pulls on the new shirt, talking a mile a minute.
'-so then I had to requisition close to three hundred of them and there's no way they're going to get here in time. Suzie set the kitchen on fire trying to blowtorch one of those wretched Hot Pocket things and I don't even want to think about what's in them. I think I managed to get most of the cheese off everything, but it all smells like the day after a fire in the chem lab. And Tosh, well, you know Tosh, she started coughing and wheezing and Jack had to take her out for air. So that left me in the Hub with Owen and Suzie, and they're at it like, I don't even know what they're like. Do you think blue?'
Lisa tilts her head at the selection of ties in his hands. The shirt is gray. The suit is blue. The tie is a different shade of them both in stripes. She nods and he tosses the others he's had on the back burner of his mind back into the wardrobe and slings the tie around his neck before tucking in his shirttails and doing up his trousers.
'Excellent. So, I was standing there with my hands full of rags and chopped processed ham and Jack comes out of nowhere and says, "Yantoe, take the evening off."' Ianto does a great bad American accent, Lisa thinks. She loves when he says his own name. Ianto leans against the wall as he ties his tie, fingers moving with almost preternatural speed. 'I wasn't about to ask any questions, mind you. Jack's-well, he's-what?'
Lisa realises that she's been shaking her head. 'How much coffee have you had?'
Ianto glares at his tie in the mirror. It's horribly long on the wrong end and his hands are a little shaky. He gives her an innocent grin. They have discussed this-Ianto and coffee is a love affair that if left unchecked will lead to ulcers and two a.m. hyperactivity. Lisa would threaten to lock up the grinder if she wasn't so sure that Ianto knows how to use their local Starbucks.
'Too much.' He fixes his tie and sits on the edge of the bed so that she can wheel to him and they face each other. He places both hands on her thighs and leans in for a kiss, which is sweet. Lisa can taste the coffee and something minty, as if he has brushed his teeth in the car. Again. 'You look fantastically incredible.' He raises an eyebrow. 'Edible.'
She smirks. 'Spreadable?'
He slaps her hands and stands when she backs up. 'Most inevitable.'
She leads the way to the door, stopping only to gather her coat and purse. Ianto won't have his mobile, but she'll have hers. Torchwood can always reach him that way, but it will be considerably more inconvenient. She likes to inconvenience Torchwood.
'You're driving,' she jokes on their way out the door. Ianto almost runs into her chair when they stop at the lifts.
Later, in the quiet of the restaurant, after Ianto has decaffeinated somewhat and they have stuffed themselves with a series of Italian dishes that they ordered solely because they hadn't understood what they were, Lisa sips her wine and sits back in her chair.
'So, this whole Torchwood Cardiff thing,' she begins. 'We said we'd give it three months. Those three months are up. Where do we stand?'
There is a long stretch, and she knows that he has been thinking about it, and that now he has to process everything he thinks and feels about the situation in his head and lay it out for her. Even as he wipes his mouth with the serviette and lays it over his plate (so he doesn't have to look at his uneaten food. It's one of many truly amusing quirks about him.), even as he turns and waves a finger, probably for the pudding trolley, his brain is tabulating, composing, weighing word choices and all but spellchecking his list. She imagines Ianto's communication process partly in Word, partly in Excel. It is hard to tell which. Oh hell, Ianto runs on Linux.
Finally, after the tray is gone and they have a piece of tiramisu in front of them that is big enough to feed a small third world country, he toys with his pudding fork. 'It…it isn't unpleasant,' is what he comes up with. Lisa can hear the click of the 'enter' key in his voice.
'And?'
Ianto smiles. 'They're quite disorganised.' As if on cue, a garcon drops a tray of dishes and they both snort.
'Then you have plenty to keep you busy.'
'They're not as…fun.' He says, and what he means is that they aren't friends. He doesn't want to say that, she knows, because he doesn't want them to get close. Getting close had been one of many little downfalls in a way, and they had both agreed on that when they had come to Cardiff. But Lisa is tired of staring at the same old flat, the same old café, and the same old bus that takes her to her occasional UNIT meetings.
'It has to be better than working for Yvonne, though,' she says smoothly. She wants him to break down everyone for her so that she can pick her strategy.
Ianto sips from his glass before he says anything. 'Jack Harkness is a good man. Not always a wise man, but a good man.'
Lisa smiles. 'All right then.' She plays with her serviette ring. 'You should have them over for dinner.'
The wine glass thunks down and he looks away. 'They're my co-workers,' he mumbles.
Lisa leans forward, even though she has no intention of whispering. She spears the tiramisu with one silver painted nail and scoops out part of the center. 'So were Kyle and Sarah and Simran. Most of our friends were co-workers.' It's the Torchwood way, actually, since they couldn't tell anyone outside Torchwood what they do. The hours were always shite, Lisa and Ianto had found themselves thrown in with the lot of them. Unfortunately, every person she could name is dead. She doesn't want to remind him of that. She doesn't need to. They were lucky to both come out of it, actually. An anomaly.
She licks her finger clean. Ianto tests the pastry with his fork like a civilised man. She doesn't like the tiramisu-too much coffee liqueur.
'You'd hate Owen,' he says finally, raising one eyebrow in his 'judgmental Bond' way.
Lisa laughs then. He's adorable when he's trying to dissuade her. 'You let me deal with Dr Harper.'
'And then there's Suzie, she's alright, and you'll love Tosh.' You'll. It's settled then, almost wrapped in foil and ready to pop into the oven.
Lisa can sense a but coming. 'And Jack?'
Ianto finishes his wine. 'It's a good thing we're married,' is all he replies. Lisa shakes her head. Her silly boy.
'Take me home and remind me why we're married,' she tells him then, reaching over the table to touch his hand, because what she especially wants to do-give him a footjob under the table, is no longer an option. That stings less than it might have before.
Later, they collapse on the sofa and watch a film. It's a ridiculous film, something they ordered through the mailing service because they'd been drunk and going through the queue. Lisa reflects that they should never do that again. On the other hand, drunken video renting had got him to propose to her (over a very bad film about zombie pharaohs, no less), so it might not be all bad in moderation.
Ianto looks away when her hand snakes to his lap whilst they sit on the sofa. His lower lip catches in his teeth and he glances from the telly to stare out the window, as if the film bores him and he hasn't noticed that she is unzipping his trousers.
Any other time, she might have said something, might have turned his face about to say, "I'm right here," but she doesn't bother. They've had sex three times since it happened. By fucking god they are doing it tonight.
Ianto brings his head around to her and they gravitate closer and closer until she can feel his breath hot on her face. This is that cute awkward first time kissing that she likes, that he likes, really, with the butterflies in the stomach, waiting for the other person to zero in and, oh. She grazes his lips with hers, rubbing for a second before opening her mouth to his, and then school is out, and his hand finds the back of her neck, pulling her closer as the kiss deepens and she can close her eyes and just be Lisa Hallet-Jones, in love with Ianto Jones, and married and safe and together and-
Ianto breaks the kiss with a twist of his mouth, like turning a honey jar up and to the side to stop the flow, and he makes a natural progression to her neck, his hands sliding across her shoulders, her back, the gold scales of her dress. She inhales the scent of his hair and can feel him smile into her neck. 'Love the dress.'
He doesn't see her lift her eyebrow, but she knows he knows she does it anyway. 'It looks better on the bedroom floor,' she assures him, her fingers playing on his tie, the nape of his neck. They aren't kissing anymore, just pressed close, too close to see each other's faces, and that's nice, yeah, intimacy. Lisa doesn't have to see his face to know that he wants her. He's hard and ready and she can feel her breasts aching against him, against the fabric of the dress that she didn't wear a bra under, and she wants him to discover that himself, if he doesn't know it already.
She misses the way his face would light up, and he would reach out with both hands; he would smile and say with appreciation, "Oh, yeah, Lis. Yeah."
She won't let him carry her into the room, like she might have long ago, because then they leave the chair behind, and without it she is effectively stranded until she can drag herself into it. Instead, Ianto settles her in the chair himself, and then pushes it. He very rarely pushes the chair, mostly because she won't let him, and so it means something when he does.
Lisa deposits herself on the bed and he watches her inch her way back with her hands, his face shadowed with something that means that he is starting to think logistics and not fucking.
The mood of earlier is slipping away, and Lisa doesn't understand how it always flees. She has tried to carry it here, that playfulness, but it always seems to get lost on the way to the bedroom. He pulls the dress over her head where in the past she would have let it slide off her shoulders to pool around her feet on the floor. He tosses his clothes over the bedroom chair with nary a look back. She pulls herself further back on the bed and whistles when he takes his time with his shorts, rolling his hips for her a little, stripping for her, his lower lip tucked in between his teeth, his thumbs hooking disastrous on the waistband. She reclines a bit, tries to make her legs fall in what looks like an inviting way without being overly crass, but she doesn't want to have to actually manually arrange them herself.
Ianto throws his shorts at her and she laughs when they smack her in the face. 'Oh fuck all romance,' she mutters.
'They have hearts on them,' he offers with a feeble smile as he crawls to her on the bed and settles in the v of her legs. His eyes move over her body and she takes a moment to remember that once upon a time she had been lithe and flexible and silky. He accommodates her want for his skin by coming closer, almost pressing into her chest, and then she is flat on her back, arms around his waist, his neck, and finally, finally, her hands are around his cock, and then there's the snap of the condom going on.
Ianto lowers himself onto her, his kisses gentle and not deep enough, and she wonders when he will just do it. He lubricates her using his fingers and slides in, hitching her legs at the knees and holding them up, or they just flop to the sides. With his hands holding her that way, he cannot touch the rest of her, and she pinches her own nipples when she watches him thrust in her, watching, because it is much like seeing two people on the telly having sex. Her body jerks with the rhythm of the thrusts and she moves herself with her arms, pushing against the wall behind her for something to leverage off of, but it is awkward and she needs both hands, and when she lets go of her breasts to do it, Ianto says, 'No, let me do this.'
Sometimes, when they fuck, and they have not done it enough for her to tell, but she has been wanking like a pro for the past two months, sometimes she thinks she feels something down there. In those moments everything is a pinpoint of perceived sensation that she is desperate to feel, like freezing in the dark to hear better.
Even now, she hitches her breath and closes her eyes, arching her torso as much as she can to change the position, to 'hear' the rhythm of her body, to feel what she knows must be there, down there she is wet and ready. Everything she used to feel is still there, and like a shorted wire, maybe if she twists the right way she can short the circuit again, just for a second, and feel him in her, thrusting, the hardness of his cock, his balls hitting her in rhythm, his hands on her thighs.
There is. It's so very far away, though, that she isn't sure if she's imagining it or if it's real. Sometimes with the vibrator it feels real. Sometimes when he looks at her over the sheets or at the table or in the shower, she can feel it. She wonders if she comes then. The overall sensation is not unlike wondering what an orgasm would feel like before she'd ever had one.
Ianto's hips stutter, he shudders for a second and then stops. 'Shit,' he whispers, and she can hear the rasp in his voice. 'Shit Lis, I-'
She would sigh if she didn't know how damaging it would be. In truth, it hadn't been where she thought it would be either. He avoids falling on her, catching himself with his hands before rolling off. She hears him slide the condom off his softening cock and throw it in the bin next to the bed. They used to call that the 'smexy bin'. Not so much lately.
She lets her legs fall wherever they happen to be and doesn't care really, if her hips aren’t aligned. Instead, Ianto presses his face to her shoulder, slinging one arm around her waist-she can still feel that, at least-and shakes his head. She raises one hand to card his hair, temples dewy with the beginnings of sweat.
'I'm so sorry,' he mumbles, and she wants to stop him before he can continue.
'It will happen,' she says resolutely, because that is what the therapist had told her, and what the physical therapist had told her when she had asked about sex, Ianto's hand loosely gripping hers when they had sat in the office. 'We can do this again.'
Ianto just nods and pulls her closer, but his face is drawn and his eyes are closed. She doesn't reach up to touch the wetness on his cheek, because it's enough to know that it is there.
*~*~*~*~*~*
Master List