i found the arrow, still unbroke (the team; pg)
Title: i found the arrow, still unbroke
Author: etharei
Rating: PG
Timeline: over season one
Spoilers: "Cyberwoman" (104), "Captain Jack Harkness" (112), "The End of Days" (113), a hint of "Fragments" (212)
Summary: Every friendship has its unique start, and Ianto brings out different things in people.
Author's Notes: Our motto right now shall be DO NOT THINK OF HOW FAR BEHIND WE ARE. Title is from the Longfellow poem, "The Arrow and The Song".
Disclaimer: Torchwood and all the characters and situations featured therein are the property of Russell T. Davies, the BBC and their affiliates. I’m only borrowing them for purely non-profit, recreational purposes.
Written for: horizonssing, Day #12.
"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.""
- C.S. Lewis
i found the arrow, still unbroke
by etharei
( gwen )
She’s hesitant to approach him, at first, because he always looks busy with something or other, and as the newbie she’s naturally wary of interrupting potentially important work. She knows how irritable people can get when the structure of their working day is disrupted, and after the spectacular way in which she ballsed up her first mission, the last thing she needs is to get into the bad books of the man in charge of her food and beverages.
But she notices that the others cheerfully holler for him whenever they need him, and he always stops what he’s doing to attend to them. Never complaining, always attentive. In any case, he doesn’t appear to have a set list of duties.
So she invites him out for lunch with Tosh and herself, sensing that he got along best with their tech expert, and isn’t at all surprised when he declines. But he smiles and thanks her for the invitation, and Gwen can recognize the symptoms of the overworked and over-dedicated. She thinks of mentioning this to Jack, perhaps hinting that he could grant the young man a few days off, poor thing.
And then she forgets.
It’s easy, instinctive, to carve herself a little niche in the existing structure. She finds herself arguing with Owen over pointless nothings and trying to follow Tosh’s explanations about the Hub’s mainframe and listening to Jack’s outrageous stories over takeout. Ianto is... there, bringing coffee and pizza to them and bringing them to the aliens and bringing the dead bodies back to them. Cycle of life for a secret organization.
She is worried, for a while, about his quietness, his compliance, his ability to keep the somewhat dodgy and dysfunctional clockwork ticking. They must be quite close in age, and he’s almost the exact opposite of her. There’s a sense, nagging at her, that he’s hiding something.
One day, they both happen to be in the main Hub when Jack emerges from the shooting range. He beams at them, a sated glow in his expression, and sedately makes his way to his office. Gwen can’t help but think that this must be what Jack Harkness looks like after sex, and the smell of gunpowder clinging to him takes her back to her first time on the shooting range. His body tight against hers, large hands moving over her arms, shoulders, hips... A little mortified and likely red as a tomato, Gwen glances at Ianto to see if he’s noticed.
And finds the young man staring after Jack, cheeks lightly flushed.
Things click together in Gwen’s head. For one terrible moment, she envies Ianto for being free to go after Jack; then Ianto blinks, returning to himself and averting his eyes when he sees Gwen looking at him, and Gwen mentally berates herself for demeaning the good thing that is Rhys in her life.
Ianto is obviously embarrassed - though know why he’s being secretive about the whole thing when Jack clearly finds both genders fair game, Gwen doesn’t know, but maybe it’s more than just a lustful fancy - so she jumps in with, “Normally I don’t like guns, but if ever there was a man made for them, it’s Jack.”
“Yeah,” says Ianto, smiling uncertainly. “But now I’ll have to replace all the targets, if that look was anything to go by.”
There’s a conflict in Ianto’s eyes that Gwen doesn’t understand, and she has to remind herself that this is none of her business. “Still, he does look the hero type, doesn’t he?”
“Noble and devastatingly handsome, but always out of reach?” he suggests with a small smile. But he appears to realize what he’s just said - his eyes won’t meet hers, the color on his cheeks blooming, and he mumbles a few polite excuses before dashing away.
It occurs to her, belatedly, that Ianto might have somebody else, like she has Rhys. She doesn’t think it likely, with the hours he seems to keep, but stranger things have happened, and Ianto’s not bad on the eyes. But it’s nice to finally have something in common with the young man.
Even if it is a mutual appreciation of their very fit boss.
( tosh )
Knowing far too well the lengths a person can be driven to on the slim and unreasonable hope of rescuing a loved one, Tosh has no qualms about giving Ianto her full forgiveness when he returns to work. He seems far too distraught to fully realize and appreciate it, but the small look of gratitude he gives her after she brings him up to speed on the team missions and Rift activity is more than she gets for performing approximately five technological feats of genius on a daily basis. Gwen and Owen look askance at her blatant warmth towards Ianto, and she overhears Owen muttering about her missing most of the threat and terror because she’d been on the surface while the cyberman rampaged through the Hub.
And maybe she had, but she knows perfectly well the potential ramifications of even one cyberman getting loose, or gaining control of the Hub. She’s quite sure it’s starting to sink in for Ianto, as well, because she catches him wearing a thoroughly stricken expression while huddled behind his desk up in the Information Center with a new batch of pamphlets spread out in front of him.
Jack, at least, seems to understand. He’s forgiven Ianto, too, she thinks; but the way he looks at Ianto carries the weight of something complicated, for which she has no point of reference. Not her business, anyway, and it doesn’t look as if Ianto’s in any state to notice. From experience of Jack’s somewhat volatile temperament, she’s surprised he’s talking to Ianto at all.
She’s really not very good at reading people, and Jack is wild card incarnate, inherently unpredictable.
Probably a good thing, then, that she’s swamped with work. Even the relatively brief period of taking on some of Ianto’s administrative duties had pushed a lot of her own tasks into the backburner. She has even appropriated Owen’s computer for a tedious compilation process, countering the man’s protests with pointed reminders about his backlog of autopsies.
Presently she’s growing frustrated at the software she’s putting together for analyzing Rift energy signatures. The numbers for standard Rift activity are within the predicted range, but anything the mainframe doesn’t recognize causes the program to produce either an error message or calculations leapfrogging to ridiculous deviations. Which kind of defeats the point of the software.
She opens up the raw code and resigns herself to rechecking every section. The Hub fades to a distance as she loses herself in the code, in the language of logic, in the instinct that tells her if there is an error or omission. A warm body approaches, and the aroma of strong coffee speeds up her skimming, but she doesn’t look away.
Suddenly a finger juts into her field of vision. Her eyes, startled, take a moment to focus on the indicated line.
“I think you need another set of parentheses here to close that statement,” says Ianto quietly. “Otherwise these five lines won’t be read, and you lose the square root.”
Tosh blinks. “You’re right.” Fingers fly over the keyboard, and the mistake is gone. She runs the sample figures through again. “Thanks, Ianto,” she says, smiling at him. She would have seen it, of course, when she got to that section, but she’s delightedly astonished nonetheless. “You can read Mainframe’s programming language?”
Her smile appears to relax him; had he thought she’d be annoyed for his help? “In a manner of speaking. Had to clobber something together to interfere with the sensors in the lower levels-“ his eyes widen, and he falters, but after a quick wetting of his lips he pushes on, “And there’s plenty of information in the archives. Can’t do anything on your level, of course, but I can tweak existing code and spot mistakes.”
“Excellent.” Tosh beams. “Um, are you busy?”
She doesn’t miss his quick glance up to Jack’s office, and suspects that he’s not really aware of having done so. “Not right now.” Ianto looks down, biting on his lower lip. “Don’t really have much to do.”
“Then you can help me with these.” Tosh pulls up a handful of files, some from her own special projects. Spares a quick read of the Rift signature analyses, and huffs in relief when all the numbers are within the expected parameters. “Same thing, just go through them and find any mistakes. They’re part of a larger program that I haven’t finished yet, so there’s no way to test the calculations, but I absolutely hate waiting for the final phase, only to find out there’s been a mistake.”
“Sure, no problem,” says Ianto, smile larger and sincere. In a quieter voice, he adds, “I’d take anything, to be honest, just so I’ll stop feeling useless.”
She pats his arm in sympathy. “Believe me, I completely understand.”
( jack )
It’s a late night, one of a long line. Jack can tell right off that there’ll be nothing memorable about it; after the recent string of near-catastrophes, it is exactly what he wants.
There are two glasses on his desk, presently empty but with the thinnest meniscus at the bottom suggesting that they had only recently been made so. A bottle of quality whiskey gleams under the light in its luxurious bottle, positioned conveniently near the glasses. Files and papers have been stacked, conscientiously, on the other side of the desk, even though Jack won’t drink anywhere near the amount required to become a threat to them.
He’s a bit blurry, though. Or maybe the world is. There’s another body in the room with him, but at the moment he’s fixated on the fact that the glasses are on coasters.
“Another round?”
So formal. Everything about Ianto is, from the way he dresses to the way he holds himself, especially in Jack’s presence. But at least he’d left out the sir. “Maybe later. But feel free to pour yourself one, if you want.”
“No, thank you, sir. I don’t really indulge.”
Jack’s not sure if the choice of wording is deliberate. During normal work hours, with the rest of the team around, he’d have no doubt that it is; but over the weeks Jack has taken care to distinguish a difference between work-time and... after-time, in the way he behaves and interacts with Ianto. He has hopes that Ianto is easing up accordingly, if by microscopic increments. Looks forward to the day (or night, really) when he can converse with Ianto Jones without the sense that the young man is triple-checking every word and phrase.
And judging by the slightest widening of Ianto’s eyes, only for a flash, Jack’s current special project is producing results. Jack leans back, removing his gaze from the coaster’d glasses and meeting Ianto’s eyes. “Neither do I.”
There’s silence. Then, “Did I ever tell you how I joined Torchwood? Well, if by ‘joined’ you mean being cornered when drunk in an alleyway by two opinionated ladies...”
( owen )
Not too long ago, Owen would not have been able to imagine sitting down for a several pints at a random pub with Ianto. Ianto. The one who’d nearly got them all killed because he’d hidden a bloody cyberman right under their noses, who Jack had then made into a field agent and took out on missions, who had shot Owen for trying to bring Jack and Tosh back.
Shot him. That is the important point. Not to kill (or so he says) but it was still a bullet. In the shoulder. Shot.
Kind of twisted, really. Owen had been trying to get Diane back, and Ianto had been willing to leave Jack behind.
Ianto and Jack. Fuck. He hadn’t known, when he’d been spouting off, but of course the image of the two of them is now burned into the back of Owen’s retinas, thank you Jack.
“Did you know?” starts Owen, staring at his half-finished beer. “Was that why you would have left him in 1941? Because you knew he could just live through it?”
“I know everything,” is Ianto’s reply. Owen wonders if evasiveness is contagious. “And it wasn’t just him, there was Tosh, too. She’s told me what it’d been like for her grandfather, to be Japanese at the end of World War Two. But... you weren’t thinking right.”
Owen shivers. “That was... a weird time.”
“For all of us, in the end,” Ianto agrees.
Amazing how light intoxication makes it easier to get things out. “Sorry about the stuff I said. ‘Specially about Lisa and Jack.”
“Sorry for shooting you.”
Owen downs the rest of the bottle. “At least you know that nothing too bad can happen to Jack. I mean, even death isn’t permanent.”
At first he thinks Ianto didn’t hear him. The young man hasn’t really moved since sitting down with the first beer, only the rare robotic raising of bottle to lips. But, so quietly it’s almost lost in the din of the after-dinner crowd, “At least Diane thought to say goodbye.”
They must look like quite miserable, the two of them. Owen has the nasty feeling that he hadn’t cleaned out his hair as thoroughly as he should have, earlier in the Hub; resists the urge to card his fingers through it, for fear of discovering small, dried husks of a former alien swarm. There’s a bird eyeing him up, the type Owen would go for in another time. But, well. Alien swarm. And there'll be something new in the morning.
He grabs Ianto’s bottle, and his own. “Grab you another one?”
Author: etharei
Rating: PG
Timeline: over season one
Spoilers: "Cyberwoman" (104), "Captain Jack Harkness" (112), "The End of Days" (113), a hint of "Fragments" (212)
Summary: Every friendship has its unique start, and Ianto brings out different things in people.
Author's Notes: Our motto right now shall be DO NOT THINK OF HOW FAR BEHIND WE ARE. Title is from the Longfellow poem, "The Arrow and The Song".
Disclaimer: Torchwood and all the characters and situations featured therein are the property of Russell T. Davies, the BBC and their affiliates. I’m only borrowing them for purely non-profit, recreational purposes.
Written for: horizonssing, Day #12.
"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.""
- C.S. Lewis
i found the arrow, still unbroke
by etharei
( gwen )
She’s hesitant to approach him, at first, because he always looks busy with something or other, and as the newbie she’s naturally wary of interrupting potentially important work. She knows how irritable people can get when the structure of their working day is disrupted, and after the spectacular way in which she ballsed up her first mission, the last thing she needs is to get into the bad books of the man in charge of her food and beverages.
But she notices that the others cheerfully holler for him whenever they need him, and he always stops what he’s doing to attend to them. Never complaining, always attentive. In any case, he doesn’t appear to have a set list of duties.
So she invites him out for lunch with Tosh and herself, sensing that he got along best with their tech expert, and isn’t at all surprised when he declines. But he smiles and thanks her for the invitation, and Gwen can recognize the symptoms of the overworked and over-dedicated. She thinks of mentioning this to Jack, perhaps hinting that he could grant the young man a few days off, poor thing.
And then she forgets.
It’s easy, instinctive, to carve herself a little niche in the existing structure. She finds herself arguing with Owen over pointless nothings and trying to follow Tosh’s explanations about the Hub’s mainframe and listening to Jack’s outrageous stories over takeout. Ianto is... there, bringing coffee and pizza to them and bringing them to the aliens and bringing the dead bodies back to them. Cycle of life for a secret organization.
She is worried, for a while, about his quietness, his compliance, his ability to keep the somewhat dodgy and dysfunctional clockwork ticking. They must be quite close in age, and he’s almost the exact opposite of her. There’s a sense, nagging at her, that he’s hiding something.
One day, they both happen to be in the main Hub when Jack emerges from the shooting range. He beams at them, a sated glow in his expression, and sedately makes his way to his office. Gwen can’t help but think that this must be what Jack Harkness looks like after sex, and the smell of gunpowder clinging to him takes her back to her first time on the shooting range. His body tight against hers, large hands moving over her arms, shoulders, hips... A little mortified and likely red as a tomato, Gwen glances at Ianto to see if he’s noticed.
And finds the young man staring after Jack, cheeks lightly flushed.
Things click together in Gwen’s head. For one terrible moment, she envies Ianto for being free to go after Jack; then Ianto blinks, returning to himself and averting his eyes when he sees Gwen looking at him, and Gwen mentally berates herself for demeaning the good thing that is Rhys in her life.
Ianto is obviously embarrassed - though know why he’s being secretive about the whole thing when Jack clearly finds both genders fair game, Gwen doesn’t know, but maybe it’s more than just a lustful fancy - so she jumps in with, “Normally I don’t like guns, but if ever there was a man made for them, it’s Jack.”
“Yeah,” says Ianto, smiling uncertainly. “But now I’ll have to replace all the targets, if that look was anything to go by.”
There’s a conflict in Ianto’s eyes that Gwen doesn’t understand, and she has to remind herself that this is none of her business. “Still, he does look the hero type, doesn’t he?”
“Noble and devastatingly handsome, but always out of reach?” he suggests with a small smile. But he appears to realize what he’s just said - his eyes won’t meet hers, the color on his cheeks blooming, and he mumbles a few polite excuses before dashing away.
It occurs to her, belatedly, that Ianto might have somebody else, like she has Rhys. She doesn’t think it likely, with the hours he seems to keep, but stranger things have happened, and Ianto’s not bad on the eyes. But it’s nice to finally have something in common with the young man.
Even if it is a mutual appreciation of their very fit boss.
( tosh )
Knowing far too well the lengths a person can be driven to on the slim and unreasonable hope of rescuing a loved one, Tosh has no qualms about giving Ianto her full forgiveness when he returns to work. He seems far too distraught to fully realize and appreciate it, but the small look of gratitude he gives her after she brings him up to speed on the team missions and Rift activity is more than she gets for performing approximately five technological feats of genius on a daily basis. Gwen and Owen look askance at her blatant warmth towards Ianto, and she overhears Owen muttering about her missing most of the threat and terror because she’d been on the surface while the cyberman rampaged through the Hub.
And maybe she had, but she knows perfectly well the potential ramifications of even one cyberman getting loose, or gaining control of the Hub. She’s quite sure it’s starting to sink in for Ianto, as well, because she catches him wearing a thoroughly stricken expression while huddled behind his desk up in the Information Center with a new batch of pamphlets spread out in front of him.
Jack, at least, seems to understand. He’s forgiven Ianto, too, she thinks; but the way he looks at Ianto carries the weight of something complicated, for which she has no point of reference. Not her business, anyway, and it doesn’t look as if Ianto’s in any state to notice. From experience of Jack’s somewhat volatile temperament, she’s surprised he’s talking to Ianto at all.
She’s really not very good at reading people, and Jack is wild card incarnate, inherently unpredictable.
Probably a good thing, then, that she’s swamped with work. Even the relatively brief period of taking on some of Ianto’s administrative duties had pushed a lot of her own tasks into the backburner. She has even appropriated Owen’s computer for a tedious compilation process, countering the man’s protests with pointed reminders about his backlog of autopsies.
Presently she’s growing frustrated at the software she’s putting together for analyzing Rift energy signatures. The numbers for standard Rift activity are within the predicted range, but anything the mainframe doesn’t recognize causes the program to produce either an error message or calculations leapfrogging to ridiculous deviations. Which kind of defeats the point of the software.
She opens up the raw code and resigns herself to rechecking every section. The Hub fades to a distance as she loses herself in the code, in the language of logic, in the instinct that tells her if there is an error or omission. A warm body approaches, and the aroma of strong coffee speeds up her skimming, but she doesn’t look away.
Suddenly a finger juts into her field of vision. Her eyes, startled, take a moment to focus on the indicated line.
“I think you need another set of parentheses here to close that statement,” says Ianto quietly. “Otherwise these five lines won’t be read, and you lose the square root.”
Tosh blinks. “You’re right.” Fingers fly over the keyboard, and the mistake is gone. She runs the sample figures through again. “Thanks, Ianto,” she says, smiling at him. She would have seen it, of course, when she got to that section, but she’s delightedly astonished nonetheless. “You can read Mainframe’s programming language?”
Her smile appears to relax him; had he thought she’d be annoyed for his help? “In a manner of speaking. Had to clobber something together to interfere with the sensors in the lower levels-“ his eyes widen, and he falters, but after a quick wetting of his lips he pushes on, “And there’s plenty of information in the archives. Can’t do anything on your level, of course, but I can tweak existing code and spot mistakes.”
“Excellent.” Tosh beams. “Um, are you busy?”
She doesn’t miss his quick glance up to Jack’s office, and suspects that he’s not really aware of having done so. “Not right now.” Ianto looks down, biting on his lower lip. “Don’t really have much to do.”
“Then you can help me with these.” Tosh pulls up a handful of files, some from her own special projects. Spares a quick read of the Rift signature analyses, and huffs in relief when all the numbers are within the expected parameters. “Same thing, just go through them and find any mistakes. They’re part of a larger program that I haven’t finished yet, so there’s no way to test the calculations, but I absolutely hate waiting for the final phase, only to find out there’s been a mistake.”
“Sure, no problem,” says Ianto, smile larger and sincere. In a quieter voice, he adds, “I’d take anything, to be honest, just so I’ll stop feeling useless.”
She pats his arm in sympathy. “Believe me, I completely understand.”
( jack )
It’s a late night, one of a long line. Jack can tell right off that there’ll be nothing memorable about it; after the recent string of near-catastrophes, it is exactly what he wants.
There are two glasses on his desk, presently empty but with the thinnest meniscus at the bottom suggesting that they had only recently been made so. A bottle of quality whiskey gleams under the light in its luxurious bottle, positioned conveniently near the glasses. Files and papers have been stacked, conscientiously, on the other side of the desk, even though Jack won’t drink anywhere near the amount required to become a threat to them.
He’s a bit blurry, though. Or maybe the world is. There’s another body in the room with him, but at the moment he’s fixated on the fact that the glasses are on coasters.
“Another round?”
So formal. Everything about Ianto is, from the way he dresses to the way he holds himself, especially in Jack’s presence. But at least he’d left out the sir. “Maybe later. But feel free to pour yourself one, if you want.”
“No, thank you, sir. I don’t really indulge.”
Jack’s not sure if the choice of wording is deliberate. During normal work hours, with the rest of the team around, he’d have no doubt that it is; but over the weeks Jack has taken care to distinguish a difference between work-time and... after-time, in the way he behaves and interacts with Ianto. He has hopes that Ianto is easing up accordingly, if by microscopic increments. Looks forward to the day (or night, really) when he can converse with Ianto Jones without the sense that the young man is triple-checking every word and phrase.
And judging by the slightest widening of Ianto’s eyes, only for a flash, Jack’s current special project is producing results. Jack leans back, removing his gaze from the coaster’d glasses and meeting Ianto’s eyes. “Neither do I.”
There’s silence. Then, “Did I ever tell you how I joined Torchwood? Well, if by ‘joined’ you mean being cornered when drunk in an alleyway by two opinionated ladies...”
( owen )
Not too long ago, Owen would not have been able to imagine sitting down for a several pints at a random pub with Ianto. Ianto. The one who’d nearly got them all killed because he’d hidden a bloody cyberman right under their noses, who Jack had then made into a field agent and took out on missions, who had shot Owen for trying to bring Jack and Tosh back.
Shot him. That is the important point. Not to kill (or so he says) but it was still a bullet. In the shoulder. Shot.
Kind of twisted, really. Owen had been trying to get Diane back, and Ianto had been willing to leave Jack behind.
Ianto and Jack. Fuck. He hadn’t known, when he’d been spouting off, but of course the image of the two of them is now burned into the back of Owen’s retinas, thank you Jack.
“Did you know?” starts Owen, staring at his half-finished beer. “Was that why you would have left him in 1941? Because you knew he could just live through it?”
“I know everything,” is Ianto’s reply. Owen wonders if evasiveness is contagious. “And it wasn’t just him, there was Tosh, too. She’s told me what it’d been like for her grandfather, to be Japanese at the end of World War Two. But... you weren’t thinking right.”
Owen shivers. “That was... a weird time.”
“For all of us, in the end,” Ianto agrees.
Amazing how light intoxication makes it easier to get things out. “Sorry about the stuff I said. ‘Specially about Lisa and Jack.”
“Sorry for shooting you.”
Owen downs the rest of the bottle. “At least you know that nothing too bad can happen to Jack. I mean, even death isn’t permanent.”
At first he thinks Ianto didn’t hear him. The young man hasn’t really moved since sitting down with the first beer, only the rare robotic raising of bottle to lips. But, so quietly it’s almost lost in the din of the after-dinner crowd, “At least Diane thought to say goodbye.”
They must look like quite miserable, the two of them. Owen has the nasty feeling that he hadn’t cleaned out his hair as thoroughly as he should have, earlier in the Hub; resists the urge to card his fingers through it, for fear of discovering small, dried husks of a former alien swarm. There’s a bird eyeing him up, the type Owen would go for in another time. But, well. Alien swarm. And there'll be something new in the morning.
He grabs Ianto’s bottle, and his own. “Grab you another one?”