title: yesterday i died; tomorrow's bleeding
rating: pg-13
pairing: jack/ianto
spoilers: 'exit wounds'
disclaimer: rtd and the beeb own pretty much everyone. i'll have to check, but they might even own me.
writer's note: also for the
horizonssing day twelve challenge, i'm back on schedule! feedback welcome.
summary: it's been a long two thousand years.
"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.""
- C.S. Lewis
are you listening yet?
Jack remembers many different things when he rises from the earth. Important things. Champagne in front of a clock face. A silk tie coming undone under his fingers; the smell of warm body and sweat. Cold metal and colder beings; a voice that still brings chills to his spine. A broken family and a forgotten duty, and the guilt that accompanies it. Big ears and pin-striped suits; a year that never happened except for to him. A girl, and then a boy, and the happiest he’s ever felt in his long, long, endless life. Oddly enough, what he does not remember are friends.
do you remember the fall?
He knows this body, skin against skin, as familiar to him as his own. Soft sheets, dark hair, the warm wetness of a lover’s mouth and a heavy breath sound in the air. A passion play they’re proud of, a mystery solved: where is home? A poem written in pores and birth marks. Yes, he knows this body, even when he cannot recall this name. He stills eager hands and kisses with all of his heart, with every desperate cell within him, until this body groans in deep, satisfied pleasure and starts to move more slowly. A reunion; a re-union. Something that will sear into his memory, brighter than all of the rest.
hush.
It’s the coffee that brings things back to him. Things that seem wrong at first, seem impossible to reconcile with the body he spends most of his time with lately. Blood. Betrayal. Monstrosities. But they are there, and they are true, and they do not matter. The only thing that matters is now, and he smiles at Ianto without a trace of controlled charm, just enthusiasm and a youth he’s almost forgotten. There is a hand to hold, and a face to remember, and a place to just be as quiet as they need.