Fanfic - Torchwood - Aftermaths, 1/1
Summary: None, really
Author's Notes: None, really. Inspired by season two premier. Ficlet.
Disclaimer: Torchwood? Do I look like I own Torchwood?
Pairings: Jack/Ianto, Jack/Owen or Ianto/Owen referred to
Rating: NC-17 for explicitly implied sex
Aftermaths
It was often in the aftermath of sex that Jack told the truth. Not the rushed, half-disbelieving handjobs in between crises, their clothes rucked frantically apart at zippers and their bodies jerking in ungainly shoves. Those encounters Ianto privately classified as merely one of his Captain's more unusual habits. Brief possessions, as though a man who could walk away from death could mark out humans as prizes the fates would do well to leave whole. He suspected Jack did the same to most of Torchwood's employees, sooner or later - to Owen, at least, who always calmed into usefulness if fucked (hard and fast and panting out words only a real bastard would call him on and tears smearing between his face and the wall of the supply closet) just at the moment when general irritability shifted into anger. Perhaps not to the girls. It would wound everyone's pride to have a second-rate encounter, and neither Tosh nor Gwen seemed like the type for five-minute fucks. (Torchwood One had trained him too well to wonder if Suzie had been, before he knew her.)
There were nights when the rift was quiet, though. Nights when the systems were all perfectly calibrated, alarms waiting for emergencies, the team scattered but whole. Then Ianto could lure Jack into his apartment. He'd spread out the kind of simple, filling food take-out couldn't quite match. Over his grandmother's soup (ninety-two next spring, and she still wouldn't tell him how she made it, only chortling about how he nearly ruined her best stock pot when he was four) his friend would re-emerge from under the worries about lost aliens crashing into the Eiffel Tower. (Why the Eiffel Tower, Jack wouldn't say.) By the time they'd demolished a good chunk of beef and the sweet rolls he picked up at the Portugese bakery down the road, they'd be laughing together, bodies nearly humming with it.
Then he'd lay Jack out on his bed, kissing his clothing away, murmuring sweetly in Welsh things he never said any other way. He could indulge both their romantic sides those nights. They'd come together again and again, almost lazy with it, smooth glides and elegantly arching bodies receiving each other. Jack could open to him with smiles and gasps, his neck thrown back and his eyes so bright they seemed to be trying to encompass all reality. He could drown himself in touch, drag every inch of skin along another's, fill up the empty places at the edges of his self.
Until they were both exhausted. When movements became slow instead of languid, he wrapped himself around his lover. Bare arms snuggled around shoulders and waists, legs shifting every now and again as they rocked each other.
"I've done a lot of things I regret," Jack would whisper, sounding awed. "But this - here, Cardiff, twenty-first century, Torchwood - this is where I should be. I can respect the man who chooses this place, this time."
"I can, too," he'd whisper back, because truths should be encouraged.