Fic: Third Wheeling
Feb. 29th, 2024 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jupiter2932Title: Third Wheeling
Author:jupiter2932
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: T
Word Count: 3066
Characters: Ianto, Tosh, Owen
Notes: Written for Febuwhump, day 21: Unresponsive
Content Notes: part six of the our blank to fill series, so like all others, blanket series warnings for rape/the aftermath of rape, ptsd, anxiety, flashbacks, and dissociation
Summary: It's not a bad day—right until it is. And Ianto is fine—right until he isn't.
Luckily, he calls just the right wrong person.
It's not a bad day, is the thing.
Ianto's day is perfectly fine before he gets home and spends four hours crouched in front of his refrigerator. He gets a lot of work done in the Archives before lunch, goes out on a run to liaise with the police about some weevil sightings with Gwen in the afternoon—and doesn't get nervous about it at all. They're on their way back to the Hub when they get news of another weevil en route and make a pit stop to catch it; they manage without so much as a scratch between them, working out a trap and executing it cleanly.
Jack tells them they did a good job, even, and he slaps Ianto on the upper arm when he says it, grinning so his pearly whites show, and Ianto absolutely does not preen like Gwen says he's doing when she teases him, but he can admit he's feeling pretty good.
Almost back to normal, he thinks, except it leaves a sour taste in his mouth when he does, but it's only the second time he thinks about the incident that day so he shoves the thought away and just thinks, it's a good day, instead and picks his smile back up and leaves it at that.
He sets off for home at a reasonable hour, stopping off at Tesco's to pick up a couple of board games because he told Rhiannon he'd look after the kids on Saturday evening while she and Johnny have a date night, and he texts her on his way home to confirm they're still on.
It's nice, is the thing. He parks his Audi—a new car he traded in his Jeep for two weekends back with Jack for company—in the car park down the street from his flat, and when he walks that last three hundred feet to his home, the wind gusts up and whips into him, ruffling the hair the drizzle on the weevil hunt washed the gel out of, and it's bracing and cool and he doesn't want to crawl out of his skin, which is a somewhat new and pleasant, but increasingly present, change.
So he's feeling all right when the lift takes him up to his flat, and thinking maybe he'll catch a match on the TV tonight—because it's Friday, so there will be some on, and he has time, and it's been ages since he watched anything even remotely related to sports.
It's the one thing of Johnny's that rubbed off on him, that summer he helped out when Ianto broke his leg. There wasn't much on the TV that Ianto could stand for long, but Johnny had videotapes of old matches, and he taught Ianto how to analyze them.
And maybe, he thinks, he could call Jack after the match. Or before it. Just to see how he's doing, instead of waking him up in the middle of the night when he can't sleep.
It could be a good evening. It's on track to be a good evening. First good evening he's had since it happened.
And then he steps into his flat, and heads to the kitchen to find the pile of take-out menus he keeps in his junk drawer, because if he's kicking back and watching sports he is going to do this properly. And he drapes his jacket over the back of a chair and loosens his tie, and he grabs a beer from the fridge and pops the top off and finds the menus, and when one of them, laminated slippery, drops between the counter and his trash bin, he pushes the bin aside and picks it up, and he picks up the receipt he finds behind it, the one that's sat there for over a month since Jack went to throw it out and missed, the receipt for the meal Jack bought him when he brought Ianto home the night he was kidnapped.
The flat goes quiet around Ianto; or the blood rushing in his head gets loud. He's not sure, exactly. His vision tunnels, too, and his hand moves without his meaning it to and crumples the receipt, and he thinks no, no, not this again, and his mind sort of tunnels too, like his vision, except it tunnels to places he doesn't want it to be in, places he doesn't want to go, it grabs him by the shoulders and dunks him down into the memory of it like it's all brand new and fresh and no, he thinks, no no no no no no no no
and when he comes out of it again it's pitch black outside, and all the muscles in his body hurt, and it turns out that that's because he's just spent four hours curled up with his back wedged in the corner his refrigerator makes against the wall, and he's been very tense, apparently, throughout.
Rhiannon, he thinks after a long while passes. Maybe he can call Rhiannon. And go and spend the night with her again. Tell her he's just feeling like shit because—because whatever. She won't care. And if she does he'll just tell her he doesn't want to talk about it, and she'll understand.
He takes his phone out of his pocket at some point, and scrolls down his contacts list and hits dial, and his mouth is dry and he's not breathing right and he feels, still, the phantom touch of a stranger's hand on the back of his neck.
"Ianto?" Tosh says on the other end of the line. "Ianto? Hello? Is something wrong?"
Oh.
"Sorry," he says. His voice sounds strange. Even to his ears. "Sorry. Didn't mean to call you."
He hangs up. It rings again, and it's loud, so he turns the volume all the way down.
I'm fine, he texts, and texting is easier, he can text. Sorry, dialed you by mistake, everything's fine.
It buzzes in his hand again after he sends it, and he managed that well enough but a full-on conversation is not—
It's beyond him, he thinks.
He isn't—no.
He sets the phone down on the floor and gets to his feet and stumbles and steadies himself and hobbles over to the armchair in the living room.
He's still in his waistcoat and shirt, he realizes after a while.
He should probably change. Sometime. When he gets up again.
The foyer light's on, and the front kitchen light is too, so it's not too dark. He's got his back to the hallway that leads to his bedroom, so that's fine. It's dark that way. Which is fine, he's not scared, he's not a child, but standing up and walking over to the light switch and turning it on feels like so much work just now.
He's so tired.
His head's so full of nothing just now, the big noise of it crowds everything out and doesn't leave him space to want to do things even if they're things he should be doing.
But it's fine.
He can stay in his armchair as long as he wants and not move and not get up and walk to the light switch and turn it on and do the work of getting changed. He's tired just thinking about it.
He's tired anyway.
He never called Rhiannon, he realizes.
It's too late by the time he thinks to do it again. She must be asleep. He could wake her; her and Johnny. He could. She's made it clear he can, they both have. But he's not a dick, and he's not a child, and he's not going to wreck her night just because he had a—
He's fine just sitting here until he's got himself together again. He'll go get changed and head to bed eventually.
It's fine.
He's sitting in the armchair still twenty minutes after that when someone knocks on his door.
It takes him a few moments to realize it is his door. He thinks it must be his neighbor's at first, even though his flat's fairly well soundproofed and it's too loud to be really if he thinks about it, but thinking is hard just like moving is hard just like everything is hard right now, and it takes more knocking, and knocking again, and Tosh calling out, "Ianto? Are you all right?" before he realizes that it is for him and also that he should answer it.
Doing it is another thing, but he forces himself. Heaves himself up, walks over, unlocks the door and opens up.
"Sorry," he's starting when he swings it open, expecting Tosh to be standing on the other side, face drawn with worry.
And Tosh is standing on the other side, face drawn with worry. Tosh, in a flowing green top with a chic blazer over it, in heels and new dark-wash jeans, with her hair done. And Owen standing behind her, his left hand settled at the small of her back.
"Why did you answer your phone if you were on a date?" he asks her, stupidly.
"I thought it might be a work thing," Tosh says.
Right. That makes sense. Because they work at Torchwood, and aliens don't always wait until convenient times to try to take over the world, and Ianto's the office admin which means he's the one Jack will delegate things like 'Call the rest of the team in,' to.
He knows that.
He thinks of it right after Tosh says it.
He thinks of it, and realizes, oh, it was dumb of him not to realize.
"Can we come in?" Tosh asks a few moments after that.
"Yeah, sorry," he says, and he moves aside and lets them in.
He knows he's not acting normal.
They look worried; it must be worrying, having a colleague—a friend, maybe—calling you up in the middle of your date night and then acting like a weirdo who can't string ten words together. Ianto knows it must be worrying to them, but he can't—he can't do things right, right now. He shoots for normal; asks them if they want to sit and apologizes again for calling her, says it was an accident, he hit her name by mistake.
He's not very eloquent about it.
Also he misses normal by a mile and just makes them worry more, makes it worse. So he shuts up eventually and lets Tosh flick the living room light on and Owen go make some tea in his kitchen.
"Your cell's on the floor," Owen calls out after a second.
Ianto's sat back down in his armchair, because sitting is easy. Tosh, for her part, has perched on the edge of his love seat and is looking over at him with a mixture of empathy and apprehension.
"Yeah," Ianto says. "I left it there."
His fingers feel numb. A little bit. Maybe not numb, exactly, but light, kind of cold. Like they're not really there. Like they're not really his.
"Ianto," Tosh says. "Do you want to change? You've been wearing that all day."
Right. Changing. He'd meant to do that. He'd forgotten he'd meant to do that.
He says as much and heads to his room.
He's tempted to sprawl down on his bed and sleep when he gets there, he's so tired, but he knows even as off as he's feeling that would be rude, so he makes himself take off his work clothes and dig out some track pants and a worn, comfortable t-shirt his mother bought him after she had surgery and he slept the night at her house and wore one of his holey Punk tees from his teens.
Owen and Tosh are hip to hip on the couch when he comes out, heads bowed together in a hushed conversation that cuts off when he steps into the room. His cell phone's sitting on his coffee table in front of the armchair, and there are three cups of tea as well.
They look over at him when he walks up and it's very awkward, but he's not sure what he can say to make it better, and he's not sure that even if he were up to his usual levels of wit that there's anything he could find.
"You didn't need to interrupt your date," he tries. "I'm just—tired."
Owen reaches over to the table and grabs the remote.
"Have some tea," Tosh says as a late-night game show flickers on.
"I made decaff," Owen says, which is really a little pointless because of course Ianto knows it's decaff because it's his tea from his cupboard, and he knows what sort of tea he has in his own flat.
Except when he picks it up and takes a sip he finds himself surprised at the taste.
He finds himself surprised it has a taste.
It tastes like blackberries.
He settles into the armchair and looks at the TV, because Tosh and Owen are watching the TV now and it would be rude not to, and he doesn't know exactly what he should do in a situation like this, where they're keeping him company because he's acting deranged, but he doesn't want to be rude.
"'S good tea," Owen says, taking a sip from his own cup.
Tosh is the sort of person who likes to flip between channels during commercials, and Owen is the sort of person who finds that mildly enraging, apparently; they work things out when Tosh lights on the replay of a football match from earlier and Ianto says, Oh, I was going to watch that.
He's pretty sure neither of them likes football much, and they don't seem to be familiar with any Welsh teams, but they leave it on the match and watch it with what looks like avid interest, Owen with his arm around Tosh's shoulders and Tosh with her head just resting against his shoulder, both of them sneaking looks in Ianto's direction when they don't think he's looking.
He doesn't really follow the football match, but there's something in the rhythm of it—of the cheering and the whistling and the commentators' back and forth—that tugs at a memory somewhere deep in Ianto's head.
A good one, this time.
It doesn't come out entirely, but he sinks back into the armchair cushions a little, muscles looser, takes some more sips of his tea and savors the splash of blackberry and hibiscus on his tongue.
His fingers feel warm from the sides of the cup, now. And that's better.
"Hey, mate," Owen says, and Ianto starts and reaches to catch the cup he was holding just a second ago, but it's gone.
Owen's on the couch, facing him, and there's the familiar clink of porcelain in the sink in the direction of the kitchen.
The TV's still on, but it's on mute, and there's an infomercial playing instead of the match.
He doesn't remember the match ending. It was still going, wasn't it?
"Maybe you should get some sleep," Owen says. "It's late."
It is late. Ianto doesn't have a clock nearby to look at, because his living room clock broke a few months ago and he hasn't replaced it, but he can tell it's late.
"Okay," he says. He stands up too fast and sways. Owen sets a hand on his back, and it feels warm through Ianto's t-shirt.
"Easy does it." Owen pats him and lets him take the lead but follows him all the way back to his room. "If you need some sleeping pills, I can get you some."
Ianto nods, but he pulls the covers back on his bed, lies down, and pulls them back up over himself.
"I'm good," he says, and yawns. He is, too. He'll sleep. He's pretty sure he'll sleep all right, too. He's just so tired right now. Wrung out. It's stupid, because it's not like he did anything arduous, just huddled up in his kitchen and was terrified for a few hours, like—
"All right," Owen says.
(—like he did then. Scared. Helpless.)
"Good night," Owen says.
(Weak.)
No. No, he's not. He's not.
"Hey," he mumbles, just before he falls asleep. "Thanks for coming."
If Owen answers him, he misses it.
He's back to normal when he wakes up, memories of the night before blessedly distant.
So it is with something between surprise and chagrin that he finds Tosh scrolling through her phone on his couch.
She slept here, that much is obvious. Owen must have dropped off some things for her, because she's wearing a t-shirt he recognizes from Owen's rotation along with a pair of shorts that are much too long for her, and there's a bag from a corner store with a pack of makeup wipes and an opened three-pack of toothbrushes sitting on the coffee table.
She doesn't look put out in the least when she sees him; she smiles at him, instead, and sets her phone down.
"Feeling better?" she asks.
"Jesus. Yeah. Tosh—" he shifts his weight to his left foot. He's got bedhead, he realizes. Must have. And his breath must smell terrible, and—oh, God, he was a mess last night. He barely remembers it, but he knows he was fucking out of it, zoned out and—and he misdialed her on a date. With Owen. Not their first date, clearly, and somewhere nice enough she'd dressed up and Owen had—hell, had Owen been wearing a blazer? "I'm so sorry," he starts. "I was a mess last night, and I didn't mean to crash your date."
She smiles again. "You didn't. Really. It's fine. We were happy to come."
And that's that, apparently, because her phone buzzes with an incoming text, and she picks it up again and immediately starts typing out a reply.
"You look better," she says when he heads off to the kitchen. "I didn't touch your coffee machine, but there's hot water in your kettle if you want tea. Don't bother with breakfast, though, Owen's bringing something over in half an hour."
Well, bollocks, he thinks. Like he hasn't fucked enough of their plans up this weekend. And it's not like he wants to be a third wheel for them when he's not in a mental crisis.
But he pulls another cup and saucer out of the cupboard all the same.
Author:
jupiter2932Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: T
Word Count: 3066
Characters: Ianto, Tosh, Owen
Notes: Written for Febuwhump, day 21: Unresponsive
Content Notes: part six of the our blank to fill series, so like all others, blanket series warnings for rape/the aftermath of rape, ptsd, anxiety, flashbacks, and dissociation
Summary: It's not a bad day—right until it is. And Ianto is fine—right until he isn't.
Luckily, he calls just the right wrong person.
It's not a bad day, is the thing.
Ianto's day is perfectly fine before he gets home and spends four hours crouched in front of his refrigerator. He gets a lot of work done in the Archives before lunch, goes out on a run to liaise with the police about some weevil sightings with Gwen in the afternoon—and doesn't get nervous about it at all. They're on their way back to the Hub when they get news of another weevil en route and make a pit stop to catch it; they manage without so much as a scratch between them, working out a trap and executing it cleanly.
Jack tells them they did a good job, even, and he slaps Ianto on the upper arm when he says it, grinning so his pearly whites show, and Ianto absolutely does not preen like Gwen says he's doing when she teases him, but he can admit he's feeling pretty good.
Almost back to normal, he thinks, except it leaves a sour taste in his mouth when he does, but it's only the second time he thinks about the incident that day so he shoves the thought away and just thinks, it's a good day, instead and picks his smile back up and leaves it at that.
He sets off for home at a reasonable hour, stopping off at Tesco's to pick up a couple of board games because he told Rhiannon he'd look after the kids on Saturday evening while she and Johnny have a date night, and he texts her on his way home to confirm they're still on.
It's nice, is the thing. He parks his Audi—a new car he traded in his Jeep for two weekends back with Jack for company—in the car park down the street from his flat, and when he walks that last three hundred feet to his home, the wind gusts up and whips into him, ruffling the hair the drizzle on the weevil hunt washed the gel out of, and it's bracing and cool and he doesn't want to crawl out of his skin, which is a somewhat new and pleasant, but increasingly present, change.
So he's feeling all right when the lift takes him up to his flat, and thinking maybe he'll catch a match on the TV tonight—because it's Friday, so there will be some on, and he has time, and it's been ages since he watched anything even remotely related to sports.
It's the one thing of Johnny's that rubbed off on him, that summer he helped out when Ianto broke his leg. There wasn't much on the TV that Ianto could stand for long, but Johnny had videotapes of old matches, and he taught Ianto how to analyze them.
And maybe, he thinks, he could call Jack after the match. Or before it. Just to see how he's doing, instead of waking him up in the middle of the night when he can't sleep.
It could be a good evening. It's on track to be a good evening. First good evening he's had since it happened.
And then he steps into his flat, and heads to the kitchen to find the pile of take-out menus he keeps in his junk drawer, because if he's kicking back and watching sports he is going to do this properly. And he drapes his jacket over the back of a chair and loosens his tie, and he grabs a beer from the fridge and pops the top off and finds the menus, and when one of them, laminated slippery, drops between the counter and his trash bin, he pushes the bin aside and picks it up, and he picks up the receipt he finds behind it, the one that's sat there for over a month since Jack went to throw it out and missed, the receipt for the meal Jack bought him when he brought Ianto home the night he was kidnapped.
The flat goes quiet around Ianto; or the blood rushing in his head gets loud. He's not sure, exactly. His vision tunnels, too, and his hand moves without his meaning it to and crumples the receipt, and he thinks no, no, not this again, and his mind sort of tunnels too, like his vision, except it tunnels to places he doesn't want it to be in, places he doesn't want to go, it grabs him by the shoulders and dunks him down into the memory of it like it's all brand new and fresh and no, he thinks, no no no no no no no no
and when he comes out of it again it's pitch black outside, and all the muscles in his body hurt, and it turns out that that's because he's just spent four hours curled up with his back wedged in the corner his refrigerator makes against the wall, and he's been very tense, apparently, throughout.
Rhiannon, he thinks after a long while passes. Maybe he can call Rhiannon. And go and spend the night with her again. Tell her he's just feeling like shit because—because whatever. She won't care. And if she does he'll just tell her he doesn't want to talk about it, and she'll understand.
He takes his phone out of his pocket at some point, and scrolls down his contacts list and hits dial, and his mouth is dry and he's not breathing right and he feels, still, the phantom touch of a stranger's hand on the back of his neck.
"Ianto?" Tosh says on the other end of the line. "Ianto? Hello? Is something wrong?"
Oh.
"Sorry," he says. His voice sounds strange. Even to his ears. "Sorry. Didn't mean to call you."
He hangs up. It rings again, and it's loud, so he turns the volume all the way down.
I'm fine, he texts, and texting is easier, he can text. Sorry, dialed you by mistake, everything's fine.
It buzzes in his hand again after he sends it, and he managed that well enough but a full-on conversation is not—
It's beyond him, he thinks.
He isn't—no.
He sets the phone down on the floor and gets to his feet and stumbles and steadies himself and hobbles over to the armchair in the living room.
He's still in his waistcoat and shirt, he realizes after a while.
He should probably change. Sometime. When he gets up again.
The foyer light's on, and the front kitchen light is too, so it's not too dark. He's got his back to the hallway that leads to his bedroom, so that's fine. It's dark that way. Which is fine, he's not scared, he's not a child, but standing up and walking over to the light switch and turning it on feels like so much work just now.
He's so tired.
His head's so full of nothing just now, the big noise of it crowds everything out and doesn't leave him space to want to do things even if they're things he should be doing.
But it's fine.
He can stay in his armchair as long as he wants and not move and not get up and walk to the light switch and turn it on and do the work of getting changed. He's tired just thinking about it.
He's tired anyway.
He never called Rhiannon, he realizes.
It's too late by the time he thinks to do it again. She must be asleep. He could wake her; her and Johnny. He could. She's made it clear he can, they both have. But he's not a dick, and he's not a child, and he's not going to wreck her night just because he had a—
He's fine just sitting here until he's got himself together again. He'll go get changed and head to bed eventually.
It's fine.
He's sitting in the armchair still twenty minutes after that when someone knocks on his door.
It takes him a few moments to realize it is his door. He thinks it must be his neighbor's at first, even though his flat's fairly well soundproofed and it's too loud to be really if he thinks about it, but thinking is hard just like moving is hard just like everything is hard right now, and it takes more knocking, and knocking again, and Tosh calling out, "Ianto? Are you all right?" before he realizes that it is for him and also that he should answer it.
Doing it is another thing, but he forces himself. Heaves himself up, walks over, unlocks the door and opens up.
"Sorry," he's starting when he swings it open, expecting Tosh to be standing on the other side, face drawn with worry.
And Tosh is standing on the other side, face drawn with worry. Tosh, in a flowing green top with a chic blazer over it, in heels and new dark-wash jeans, with her hair done. And Owen standing behind her, his left hand settled at the small of her back.
"Why did you answer your phone if you were on a date?" he asks her, stupidly.
"I thought it might be a work thing," Tosh says.
Right. That makes sense. Because they work at Torchwood, and aliens don't always wait until convenient times to try to take over the world, and Ianto's the office admin which means he's the one Jack will delegate things like 'Call the rest of the team in,' to.
He knows that.
He thinks of it right after Tosh says it.
He thinks of it, and realizes, oh, it was dumb of him not to realize.
"Can we come in?" Tosh asks a few moments after that.
"Yeah, sorry," he says, and he moves aside and lets them in.
He knows he's not acting normal.
They look worried; it must be worrying, having a colleague—a friend, maybe—calling you up in the middle of your date night and then acting like a weirdo who can't string ten words together. Ianto knows it must be worrying to them, but he can't—he can't do things right, right now. He shoots for normal; asks them if they want to sit and apologizes again for calling her, says it was an accident, he hit her name by mistake.
He's not very eloquent about it.
Also he misses normal by a mile and just makes them worry more, makes it worse. So he shuts up eventually and lets Tosh flick the living room light on and Owen go make some tea in his kitchen.
"Your cell's on the floor," Owen calls out after a second.
Ianto's sat back down in his armchair, because sitting is easy. Tosh, for her part, has perched on the edge of his love seat and is looking over at him with a mixture of empathy and apprehension.
"Yeah," Ianto says. "I left it there."
His fingers feel numb. A little bit. Maybe not numb, exactly, but light, kind of cold. Like they're not really there. Like they're not really his.
"Ianto," Tosh says. "Do you want to change? You've been wearing that all day."
Right. Changing. He'd meant to do that. He'd forgotten he'd meant to do that.
He says as much and heads to his room.
He's tempted to sprawl down on his bed and sleep when he gets there, he's so tired, but he knows even as off as he's feeling that would be rude, so he makes himself take off his work clothes and dig out some track pants and a worn, comfortable t-shirt his mother bought him after she had surgery and he slept the night at her house and wore one of his holey Punk tees from his teens.
Owen and Tosh are hip to hip on the couch when he comes out, heads bowed together in a hushed conversation that cuts off when he steps into the room. His cell phone's sitting on his coffee table in front of the armchair, and there are three cups of tea as well.
They look over at him when he walks up and it's very awkward, but he's not sure what he can say to make it better, and he's not sure that even if he were up to his usual levels of wit that there's anything he could find.
"You didn't need to interrupt your date," he tries. "I'm just—tired."
Owen reaches over to the table and grabs the remote.
"Have some tea," Tosh says as a late-night game show flickers on.
"I made decaff," Owen says, which is really a little pointless because of course Ianto knows it's decaff because it's his tea from his cupboard, and he knows what sort of tea he has in his own flat.
Except when he picks it up and takes a sip he finds himself surprised at the taste.
He finds himself surprised it has a taste.
It tastes like blackberries.
He settles into the armchair and looks at the TV, because Tosh and Owen are watching the TV now and it would be rude not to, and he doesn't know exactly what he should do in a situation like this, where they're keeping him company because he's acting deranged, but he doesn't want to be rude.
"'S good tea," Owen says, taking a sip from his own cup.
Tosh is the sort of person who likes to flip between channels during commercials, and Owen is the sort of person who finds that mildly enraging, apparently; they work things out when Tosh lights on the replay of a football match from earlier and Ianto says, Oh, I was going to watch that.
He's pretty sure neither of them likes football much, and they don't seem to be familiar with any Welsh teams, but they leave it on the match and watch it with what looks like avid interest, Owen with his arm around Tosh's shoulders and Tosh with her head just resting against his shoulder, both of them sneaking looks in Ianto's direction when they don't think he's looking.
He doesn't really follow the football match, but there's something in the rhythm of it—of the cheering and the whistling and the commentators' back and forth—that tugs at a memory somewhere deep in Ianto's head.
A good one, this time.
It doesn't come out entirely, but he sinks back into the armchair cushions a little, muscles looser, takes some more sips of his tea and savors the splash of blackberry and hibiscus on his tongue.
His fingers feel warm from the sides of the cup, now. And that's better.
"Hey, mate," Owen says, and Ianto starts and reaches to catch the cup he was holding just a second ago, but it's gone.
Owen's on the couch, facing him, and there's the familiar clink of porcelain in the sink in the direction of the kitchen.
The TV's still on, but it's on mute, and there's an infomercial playing instead of the match.
He doesn't remember the match ending. It was still going, wasn't it?
"Maybe you should get some sleep," Owen says. "It's late."
It is late. Ianto doesn't have a clock nearby to look at, because his living room clock broke a few months ago and he hasn't replaced it, but he can tell it's late.
"Okay," he says. He stands up too fast and sways. Owen sets a hand on his back, and it feels warm through Ianto's t-shirt.
"Easy does it." Owen pats him and lets him take the lead but follows him all the way back to his room. "If you need some sleeping pills, I can get you some."
Ianto nods, but he pulls the covers back on his bed, lies down, and pulls them back up over himself.
"I'm good," he says, and yawns. He is, too. He'll sleep. He's pretty sure he'll sleep all right, too. He's just so tired right now. Wrung out. It's stupid, because it's not like he did anything arduous, just huddled up in his kitchen and was terrified for a few hours, like—
"All right," Owen says.
(—like he did then. Scared. Helpless.)
"Good night," Owen says.
(Weak.)
No. No, he's not. He's not.
"Hey," he mumbles, just before he falls asleep. "Thanks for coming."
If Owen answers him, he misses it.
He's back to normal when he wakes up, memories of the night before blessedly distant.
So it is with something between surprise and chagrin that he finds Tosh scrolling through her phone on his couch.
She slept here, that much is obvious. Owen must have dropped off some things for her, because she's wearing a t-shirt he recognizes from Owen's rotation along with a pair of shorts that are much too long for her, and there's a bag from a corner store with a pack of makeup wipes and an opened three-pack of toothbrushes sitting on the coffee table.
She doesn't look put out in the least when she sees him; she smiles at him, instead, and sets her phone down.
"Feeling better?" she asks.
"Jesus. Yeah. Tosh—" he shifts his weight to his left foot. He's got bedhead, he realizes. Must have. And his breath must smell terrible, and—oh, God, he was a mess last night. He barely remembers it, but he knows he was fucking out of it, zoned out and—and he misdialed her on a date. With Owen. Not their first date, clearly, and somewhere nice enough she'd dressed up and Owen had—hell, had Owen been wearing a blazer? "I'm so sorry," he starts. "I was a mess last night, and I didn't mean to crash your date."
She smiles again. "You didn't. Really. It's fine. We were happy to come."
And that's that, apparently, because her phone buzzes with an incoming text, and she picks it up again and immediately starts typing out a reply.
"You look better," she says when he heads off to the kitchen. "I didn't touch your coffee machine, but there's hot water in your kettle if you want tea. Don't bother with breakfast, though, Owen's bringing something over in half an hour."
Well, bollocks, he thinks. Like he hasn't fucked enough of their plans up this weekend. And it's not like he wants to be a third wheel for them when he's not in a mental crisis.
But he pulls another cup and saucer out of the cupboard all the same.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-01 09:52 pm (UTC)I hope things will improve for him though, with fewer flashbacks and panic attacks. He's been through so much, but although he's doing better, he can't convince himself he's fine when he's not.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-04 09:14 pm (UTC)I mean, Ianto is doing better already; this flashback is the first he's had in a while. But he's definitely not fine, for sure. And yes, Tosh and Owen were just the right people for him through this. I worried about writing them, especially Owen, too much like their season 2 personas even though this is still technically in his season 1 era, but I figured that if they're dating it can kind of be assumed they've already made some personal progress. Because Ianto definitely needs some good friends right now, not just colleagues.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-04 09:28 pm (UTC)