the certain knot of peace
Jan. 10th, 2024 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jupiter2932Torchwood fic! Which started life as an ostensibly 200-word ficlet reply on ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
comment_fic and mutated. Ianto/Jack, angst (ish?), post-Countrycide (because literally the first thing I did when I came into this fandom was see dozens of fifteen-year-old fics set after Cyberwoman and Countrycide and say, You know what this fandom needs? More of that!).
Title: the certain knot of piece
Characters: Ianto-focused, Ianto/Jack, the team pops up a bit
Rating: PG-13, probably?
Content Warnings: Discussion of suicide
Note: Does mention some plot from the audio drama Broken
Summary: Four thousand odd words of Ianto having sleeping problems, sort of.
He starts sleeping with the lights on after the Beacons.
He doesn't start off doing it on purpose; that first night back, when he ends up calling Mandy sobbing, he falls asleep with the top light on after she urges him to his bed. She sits with him until he drifts off, brushing her fingers through his hair and shushing him every time he jerks himself awake just before he falls off, just like his mother used to when he was four years old and Rhiannon told him that story about a serial killer ghost who slept in children's wardrobes.
It's an accident the next three times after that. Absent the soothing effects of drugs, alcohol, and a friendly barmaid, Ianto soon finds that rather than being plagued by nightmares, he simply can't sleep.
He ends up watching marathons of the Forensic Files past late night and into early morning, sprawled out on the couch with the kitchen light on to his left, grabbing two or three hours in deep, dead sleep at a go. On the one hand, keeping himself awake until he drops from exhaustion does cut down on the nightmares; on the other, binging dozens of shows about bloody murders doesn't help the waking paranoia about closed rooms and dark corners.
Of course, sleep deprivation isn't a forever solution; Ianto happily deludes himself into thinking it might be—telling himself that nodding into micro-sleeps at work and dozing off when he takes public transit is normal behavior and there's nothing to worry about. Five weeks later on his way into the Hub parking lot he shuts his eyes while driving, finds his head dipping in a swoop, and jerks awake just in time to ram the front end of his Jeep into the back bumper of Tosh's sedan.
Tosh isn't even angry. She plops down on the top step to the morgue and watches Owen patch him up with big, worried eyes.
"I'm so sorry," she tells him when Owen sets him loose, coming up to him with a mug of herbal tea with a thin slice of lemon floating in it. "I heard—when I had the pendant, I heard a few things I knew I should have worried about, but I was so wrapped up in—I mean, I should have asked you about it, or told Jack, and instead I haven't even been looking out for—"
"No, it's fine," he tells her, smiling. "I'm fine, really, I've been feeling a lot better. I just got distracted today. Absolutely my fault. Nothing to worry about, though. I'm fine. One hundred percent."
Owen, in the morgue below them, huffs, but Ianto doesn't worry about it. He told a really good story while Owen was checking him for concussion; totally convinced Owen that there wasn't any need to go to Jack with any concerns about his sleeping or his mental state.
Sometimes he's just so good he surprises himself.
"You're sure?" Tosh asks him, looking unusually suspicious.
He smiles, the smile he gave her every morning the first four months he worked there. "One hundred percent," he repeats.
She smiles back, the same gullible way she used to, and pushes the tea on him and leads him to the couch to drink it.
He doesn't realize how thoroughly she's distracted him from Owen until Jack comes striding over to them ten minutes later and she melts away to join Gwen and Owen in the conference room.
"They're worried about you," is what Jack says when he snaps out something short and probably unfair about it. "Ianto, you look like shit."
And it's a little rich for Jack to say something now, Ianto thinks, when they've slept together twice now and it hasn't come up, but—but that's probably unfair, too. Ianto wasn't exactly hiding how badly he was doing when they first hooked up.
It doesn't matter, anyway; Ianto finds himself driven home with some sleeping pills (a single dose, he notices, though he saw Owen give Jack a whole bottle) and firm instructions not to come back to the Hub until he's gotten a solid night's sleep.
He tries, he really does. Turns all the lights off first and slips into bed and doesn't sleep, turns on the hallway light and cracks the door and slips into bed and doesn't sleep, turns on his table lamp and, five minutes later, his overhead light, and still doesn't sleep because the corner behind his wardrobe is uncomfortably dark.
He ends up taking an Uber to and from the nearest Asda to buy himself a floor lamp.
And, finally, he sleeps.
He never told Jack exactly what happened the night after Brynblaidd, why he called Mandy in, but a single dose of sleeping pills starts appearing every morning on his desk after that.
Seven weeks after a man holds a butcher's cleaver through his throat, Ianto is leaving every single light on in his flat when he leaves for work so they'll be blazing merrily when he comes back home.
He can afford the power bills, so it's not a concern, and as nobody else ever visits his flat, nobody else ever has an opinion about it.
It's not like any of his coworkers would be any real help: they all know the sort of work they signed up for. It's bloody and dangerous and traumatizing, and the only people they can talk about it to are each other. They're not going to stop doing it probably until they die, and there's no way to be any more careful while they're doing it, and even if there were they probably wouldn't bother trying.
Really, they're all just great big bloody hypocrites, the lot of them.
So he does what he needs to and gets on with it.
It's all fine until Jack spends the night.
They haven't done, before; Jack's quarters in the Hub aren't built for comfort, and Ianto refuses to spend an entire night sleeping on the abomination Jack calls a bed. It's been fine, like that.
They said it would just be a one-time thing, anyway, the first time around. And, all right, maybe it's been more than a few times, now, in Jack's quarters and all over the Hub after hours, but the arrangement hasn't changed, fundamentally, into something else yet, something more.
At least not until Ianto gets a little slashed up on a routine weevil retrieval.
It's not a serious cut at all—just four claws raked across his shoulder—and he even takes down the weevil by himself, before anyone comes to back him up—but Jack gets a little weird about it. It's not obvious to anyone who doesn't know him really well, but he lingers just a little too long in the morgue when Owen bandages him up, laughs just a little too hard when Gwen cracks a friendly joke about it over pizza in the conference room.
And at the end of the day he tells Ianto he'll drive him home.
Ianto could say no, and Jack probably wouldn't push it too hard, but sitting in the driver's seat would put his seatbelt directly over the bandages, and, hell. It's been a long day.
He doesn't think about the lights until they're pulling into the parking garage. He's not sure Jack's planning on walking him all the way up, but he suddenly gets the mental image of Jack making jokes about sun lights and seasonal depression.
"Oh, I hope they've fixed the power," he says, straightening up as Jack parks. "There was a little outage this morning, just before I left."
Not that he can't do what he wants with his own house lights. But he doesn't want Jack to get any ideas about his—his mental preparedness to go on missions, or whatever. They've just started taking him out on more of them, and he doesn't want to regress.
He doesn't think Jack notices, much. Ianto goes with, "Huh, that's weird," when they make it into his flat proper, and that's all he manages because at some point in the lift on their way up Jack crossed his arms and Ianto saw the muscles flex and licked his lips, and by the time they're at his door Jack has his hand on Ianto's ass and his tongue in Ianto's mouth, so slamming the door open to find his flat looking bright as an illicit greenhouse isn't top of Ianto's mind, so much, and he yanks Jack all the way back to his bedroom before it registers.
Of course, the sex combined with the day's earlier blood loss wears him right out, and he's the one left drifting in and out of an exhausted doze in bed while Jack potters around, grabbing him some water and a washcloth once they finish.
Ianto hears the lights in the hallway and the bathroom click off but doesn't clock in it as an independent action. Jack comes back in the room, dressed modestly for a post-coital Jack in boxers and undershirt. Ianto watches through half-lidded eyes, pleasantly muzzy, as he sets a glass of water on his nightstand and then leans over him, wiping Ianto off gently and tucking the covers up around him when he's done.
He straightens when that's done, and steps back, and Ianto can see him scanning the room for his pants, and—
"Stay?" Ianto says, and his hand shoots out of its own volition and grabs Jack's arm. He's just that side of sleepy enough that he isn't horrified at himself for it yet, and it's an easy enough thing to slip off when Jack slips back into the bed after only a moment's hesitation.
Ianto is vaguely aware of Jack reaching over him and switching off the lamp on his nightstand—and some distant part of him is aware that that's bad—but then Jack shifts down behind him and curls his arm around his waist, breath huffing softly into the crook of his shoulder, and it's Jack, so Ianto drifts off to sleep comfortable and warm.
He comes up swinging in the pitch black, elbow catching Evan in the gut before he can slice Ianto's neck open with the cleaver, head rearing back in a follow-up that would've made the lads back home proud, crown of it missing the nose but smacking solidly into a mouth and chin, stunning Evan into letting go, into falling back and setting Ianto loose.
Ianto scrambles away, hands scrabbling for purchase in the dark. He makes it half a foot and drops, lands on the floor, legs tangled in the bed sheets, which he kicks off and grabs then, to cover himself with because—he's naked, why the hell is he naked, what—
"Ianto!"
Corner, corner's good, corner's defensible, at the very least no one can get up behind him with a meat cleaver and slit his throat in a corner; big lover of corners, Ianto. He backs up into one, feels his way in the dark, wraps himself up in the bed sheet—linen, soft, nice quality, smell, recently laundered with gardenia-scented detergent—and feels around him for a weapon, a rock, a knife, anything he can use to defend himself, to hold them off and give Tosh more time to find the others and—
"Ianto."
Oh.
It takes about two seconds after Jack flicks on the lamp for Ianto to realize he's in his bedroom in Cardiff. Not Brynblaidd, not the fucking cannibal community center. Safe.
With Jack, who's got bedhead and a split lip.
"Ianto, it's okay. You're okay. You just had a—"
"Nightmare. Yeah." He gasps it out—and he's fine, see, he's talking; he can't be too freaked out if he's talking—but his chest hurts, lungs too small, a band tight around him, pressing down on his ribs, and he reaches up and rubs his sternum with his fist, breathes, heaves some air out and tries again.
"It's okay," Jack says, and slowly, telegraphing all his movements, sits down next to Ianto and puts his arm around his shoulders.
"It's okay," Jack says, and tugs him in and waits.
Christ.
"Sorry," Ianto blurts out when he catches his breath. He stiffens against Jack's chest, clutches the sheet more tightly about himself and squeezes his eyes shut for a second. Fucking bollocks. "Oh, God, Jack, I'm so—"
"It's fine, Ianto," Jack says. His left thumb rubs Ianto's upper arm, soothing, and his breath ruffles Ianto's hair. "It happens. Nice elbow, by the way. Took the wind right out of me—no, it's fine, nice to know you've been hitting the gym. If you can figure out a way to inspire Owen and Tosh, let me know."
Ianto huffs a laugh. Chokes on it. Takes a breath and lets it out.
"It was Brynnblaid," he says eventually. "Evan, with the meat cleaver. I thought you were—shit."
"Ah," Jack replies intelligently.
They huddle in the corner for a while longer, until Ianto realizes he didn't shower the night before and starts to feel icky.
Jack doesn't mention the lights or his nightmare—nor, even, the fact that he spent the night—before work, and half an hour after they get in Eugene Jones walks into the middle of traffic and gets run over, and by the time they get a chance to talk, any moment they had has passed.
Ianto decides it's better this way. They'll just play it by ear, next time they shag, and see where it goes from there.
God, he really hopes Jack doesn't try to make it a thing.
The next shag they have, though, ends up being a rushed but thorough blowie down in Archives while the others are busy getting a head start on lunch; then a quickie in Jack's office just before the others make it in, morning after that; then Ianto giving Jack an efficient but, apparently, quite satisfactory hand job in the SUV after they've come back from checking out a weevil sighting that turned out to have been a large and feral dog.
That one's all Jack's fault; he looks over after he parks, gives Ianto that knowing smirk and pouts when Ianto doesn't immediately kiss him, and next thing Ianto knows he's licking his hand and shoving it down Jack's pants, letting Jack unzip them as an afterthought.
"Oh, fuck's sake," Owen says when they make it to the conference room, like he can tell.
Jack grins at him and grabs a slice of pizza and settles into the chair next to Tosh with a very contented sigh.
He doesn't ask to head to Ianto's that night, though, like he hasn't the day before this and the day before that.
And Ianto goes back to his flat with all the lights on and falls asleep sitting up on his couch and watching a Murder She Wrote marathon on channel three.
The next day he not only makes it to bed, he switches off the lights in his kitchen, living room, and bathroom before he goes.
The next night, the overhead light, leaving just the floor lamp and the one on his nightstand. The night after that, He switches off the floor lamp.
He wakes up screaming at four in the morning and doesn't fall back asleep at all, but it's progress. It's fine.
He goes out after work and buys himself a TV for the bedroom, sets it up and drifts off that night in the twin embraces of the soft yellow light from the lamp on his nightstand and the kind but no-nonsense tones of Jessica Fletcher's voice.
What difference does it make, anyway, how he sleeps? It's between him and no one else, now.
Except four days later, Jack corners him when he's printing out a new 'The sink is not a trash can' sign to tape up in the kitchen and the others are busy doing something involving lots of laughter over in the morgue.
"So," Jack says, "Is it sleeping with someone that's the problem?"
Of course, Ianto, whose head is full of pipes blocked with bits of pizza and cupcake wrappers, takes a few moments to catch up, and he blurts out, "What?" rather louder than he should, panic spilling up full-formed, somehow, from his gut up to his chest, because what's he done to make Jack think he has a problem with sex? Has he not, in fact, spent the last two months demonstrating his full-throated enthusiasm (in metaphor, because in deed they're still working their way up to that) about sleeping with him?
"Your nightmares," Jack clarifies. "Was it me that triggered it? Sleeping right behind you."
The morgue, a distant part of Ianto's mind notices with chagrin, has gone suspiciously quiet.
"Oh, no," he says. He picks the sign up from the printer. "No. Not at all."
Jack smiles. Nods. Hands Ianto a roll of tape from Gwen's desk. "Good," he says, and kisses Ianto on the tip of his ear and wanders off.
"So, Ianto," Gwen says, drawing near some hours later, looking concerned and innocent like he didn't see her playing rock paper scissors in the break room with Tosh and Owen five minutes previously. "How are you doing?"
The thing is, rock, paper, scissors or not, she means it.
So, "I'll be okay," he says, instead of, "I'm fine."
The soft, earthy colors and Aran knits of 1980s New England give way, on Murder She Wrote, to the bright jewel tones and steadily-increasing shoulder pads of 1990s New York. Ianto usually manages two and a half episodes before he drops off. He dutifully takes the sleeping pills that keep appearing on his desk, though they stop two evenings after the SUV handy, and, counting backwards, he realizes it's been a full month since he scraped the paint off Tosh's bumper.
Jack doesn't say, "Ask Owen if you need more," but it's fairly implicit.
He wonders if Jack's reluctance to bring it up has to do with squeamishness initiating a conversation about suicide—perhaps a side effect of being effectively immortal—or if it, like nightmares and overnights, is something that they just don't talk about protractedly because it's to do with their relationship. Jack never seems to have a problem bringing up other people's personal relationships in conversation, quite bluntly in fact, but, like any questions about his past, pinning him down about his own is a lesson in futility.
Who are we and what are we doing? Ianto wants to ask him, sometimes. And then he catches himself and realizes that, most of the time, he isn't sure he wants to know.
Maybe that's why it works as well as it does, this thing that they're doing. That most of the time they're both equally unwilling to try to make it work.
Except, except that's only most of the time. And only most of the time, it turns out, leaves a remarkable amount of space for nerves and worries and gnawing doubt to settle in and grow a home deep in the recesses of his stomach.
Jessica Fletcher goes to Athens and Nashville and stops off for a jaunt in an Amish community, and work is busy enough that Ianto and Jack don't even get the chance to neck in the storage closet off the boiler room, and Ianto doesn't ask Owen about more sleeping pills even though he probably should.
It's not too bad, anyway. He has a routine. Go home, keep the lights on while he eats, if he eats, keep on the hallway and bedroom lights while he showers, and switch off everything but the TV and the table lamp on his nightstand when he goes to bed.
The sound definitely helps. It becomes a Pavlovian thing, to some extent: one afternoon he and Tosh are chasing down a Traskadarian that's gotten loose in a department store and someone's set the display TVs to one of those family-friendly cable channels that shows reruns of mediocre dramas from Ianto's childhood, and when the theme song for Murder She Wrote comes on over the speakers Ianto starts yawning and can't seem to stop.
"Late night?" Tosh asks when they ease out into traffic later, and Ianto realizes why she's refused to let him drive.
"Not particularly," he says, which is the absolute truth and ought in no way to make Tosh look even more concerned for him, which is unfortunate because that is exactly what it does.
But, "Right," is all she says, and starts talking about some blood test's Owen's hoping to run now they've gotten a Traskadarian safe and sound and seemingly unaffected by the virus that's wiped most of their species out.
The nice thing about Tosh is that once she starts talking about Owen, she can go on indefinitely.
She probably does mention it to Owen at some point, though, because the doctor comes up to him before he heads out that evening with a brand new bottle of sleeping pills.
"Two a night, you know the drill," he says. "Something terrible happens, go to A&E immediately, etcetera, please feel free to take these home where you'll actually use them, 'stead of keeping them in Jack's office in case you want a nap after a shag."
He's off before Ianto can protest.
He puts the pills in his messenger bag while he finishes his work that evening but takes them out before he leaves, holds the plastic orange bottle in his hand and thinks.
He's not going to be tempted to overdose, if he takes them home. Not now, not tonight, not any time soon. He'll take them two at a time until the bottle's exhausted again, probably, and ask Owen for a lower dose next month, probably, and maybe try a nightlight and an audiobook on his phone, probably, and keep on going without thinking too hard about it and never have to call for somebody to save him in the middle of the night again, probably, and ignore the small voice in the back of his head that woke up the minute Owen handed him the bottle, the one that says, You don't have to take them tonight; you can save them up for later, just in case. For if you ever need a backup plan.
Probably.
He slings his messenger back over his shoulder and clambers up the steps to Jack's office.
"Hey," he says.
And, "Hey," Jack says, smiling. "Heading out?"
"For the night."
He stops. Thinks. Makes sure.
Pops the cap and shakes two pills out into his palm, closes it up again and tosses it over for Jack to catch.
"Hold on to that for me?" he asks.
Jack nods, a sharp thing, eyes searching Ianto's face for trouble.
Ianto thinks, I'm trusting this man with my life, right now, and then he thinks, Maybe I was waiting for him to ask, but he was waiting for me?, and then he thinks, Jesus fuck, we're both idiots, and then his heart sort of skips in his chest uncomfortably and he takes a breath and he thinks, What the hell.
"Drive me home?" he asks, smiling back.
He's only left one light on in the living room that greets them when they make it to his flat, this time around. They're busy again, much the same as they were last time, Jack's hands on the buttons of his waistcoat and Ianto's busy with Jack's fly.
The messenger bag drops somewhere in the vicinity of the couch with bad aim but a fervent hope; one shoe lands underneath his new armchair, the three others pointing the way like breadcrumbs down the hall.
He doesn't have to ask Jack to stay this time; Jack sinks down next to him when they finish, all heavy muscles and loose limbs, resting so his hand sits flat just over Ianto's heart, as if he wants the reassurance.
He does, though, gather himself and tense up, muscles bunching in preparation to sit up, just before Ianto starts to fall asleep, and Ianto knows what's coming—the stretch up and over his chest to reach the lamp on the nightstand and switch it off.
But Jack flops back down before he moves, head sinking deeper into his pillows.
"You can turn it off," Ianto says. "It's fine."
Jack's eyes open up, big and bright and soft, kind blue, and his lips quirk up against Ianto's bicep.
"All the better to see you with," he says, and reaches up and traces Ianto's face like he is something very precious.
And he shuts his eyes, and Ianto follows suit, and falls asleep.
comment_fic and mutated. Ianto/Jack, angst (ish?), post-Countrycide (because literally the first thing I did when I came into this fandom was see dozens of fifteen-year-old fics set after Cyberwoman and Countrycide and say, You know what this fandom needs? More of that!). Title: the certain knot of piece
Characters: Ianto-focused, Ianto/Jack, the team pops up a bit
Rating: PG-13, probably?
Content Warnings: Discussion of suicide
Note: Does mention some plot from the audio drama Broken
Summary: Four thousand odd words of Ianto having sleeping problems, sort of.
He starts sleeping with the lights on after the Beacons.
He doesn't start off doing it on purpose; that first night back, when he ends up calling Mandy sobbing, he falls asleep with the top light on after she urges him to his bed. She sits with him until he drifts off, brushing her fingers through his hair and shushing him every time he jerks himself awake just before he falls off, just like his mother used to when he was four years old and Rhiannon told him that story about a serial killer ghost who slept in children's wardrobes.
It's an accident the next three times after that. Absent the soothing effects of drugs, alcohol, and a friendly barmaid, Ianto soon finds that rather than being plagued by nightmares, he simply can't sleep.
He ends up watching marathons of the Forensic Files past late night and into early morning, sprawled out on the couch with the kitchen light on to his left, grabbing two or three hours in deep, dead sleep at a go. On the one hand, keeping himself awake until he drops from exhaustion does cut down on the nightmares; on the other, binging dozens of shows about bloody murders doesn't help the waking paranoia about closed rooms and dark corners.
Of course, sleep deprivation isn't a forever solution; Ianto happily deludes himself into thinking it might be—telling himself that nodding into micro-sleeps at work and dozing off when he takes public transit is normal behavior and there's nothing to worry about. Five weeks later on his way into the Hub parking lot he shuts his eyes while driving, finds his head dipping in a swoop, and jerks awake just in time to ram the front end of his Jeep into the back bumper of Tosh's sedan.
Tosh isn't even angry. She plops down on the top step to the morgue and watches Owen patch him up with big, worried eyes.
"I'm so sorry," she tells him when Owen sets him loose, coming up to him with a mug of herbal tea with a thin slice of lemon floating in it. "I heard—when I had the pendant, I heard a few things I knew I should have worried about, but I was so wrapped up in—I mean, I should have asked you about it, or told Jack, and instead I haven't even been looking out for—"
"No, it's fine," he tells her, smiling. "I'm fine, really, I've been feeling a lot better. I just got distracted today. Absolutely my fault. Nothing to worry about, though. I'm fine. One hundred percent."
Owen, in the morgue below them, huffs, but Ianto doesn't worry about it. He told a really good story while Owen was checking him for concussion; totally convinced Owen that there wasn't any need to go to Jack with any concerns about his sleeping or his mental state.
Sometimes he's just so good he surprises himself.
"You're sure?" Tosh asks him, looking unusually suspicious.
He smiles, the smile he gave her every morning the first four months he worked there. "One hundred percent," he repeats.
She smiles back, the same gullible way she used to, and pushes the tea on him and leads him to the couch to drink it.
He doesn't realize how thoroughly she's distracted him from Owen until Jack comes striding over to them ten minutes later and she melts away to join Gwen and Owen in the conference room.
"They're worried about you," is what Jack says when he snaps out something short and probably unfair about it. "Ianto, you look like shit."
And it's a little rich for Jack to say something now, Ianto thinks, when they've slept together twice now and it hasn't come up, but—but that's probably unfair, too. Ianto wasn't exactly hiding how badly he was doing when they first hooked up.
It doesn't matter, anyway; Ianto finds himself driven home with some sleeping pills (a single dose, he notices, though he saw Owen give Jack a whole bottle) and firm instructions not to come back to the Hub until he's gotten a solid night's sleep.
He tries, he really does. Turns all the lights off first and slips into bed and doesn't sleep, turns on the hallway light and cracks the door and slips into bed and doesn't sleep, turns on his table lamp and, five minutes later, his overhead light, and still doesn't sleep because the corner behind his wardrobe is uncomfortably dark.
He ends up taking an Uber to and from the nearest Asda to buy himself a floor lamp.
And, finally, he sleeps.
He never told Jack exactly what happened the night after Brynblaidd, why he called Mandy in, but a single dose of sleeping pills starts appearing every morning on his desk after that.
Seven weeks after a man holds a butcher's cleaver through his throat, Ianto is leaving every single light on in his flat when he leaves for work so they'll be blazing merrily when he comes back home.
He can afford the power bills, so it's not a concern, and as nobody else ever visits his flat, nobody else ever has an opinion about it.
It's not like any of his coworkers would be any real help: they all know the sort of work they signed up for. It's bloody and dangerous and traumatizing, and the only people they can talk about it to are each other. They're not going to stop doing it probably until they die, and there's no way to be any more careful while they're doing it, and even if there were they probably wouldn't bother trying.
Really, they're all just great big bloody hypocrites, the lot of them.
So he does what he needs to and gets on with it.
It's all fine until Jack spends the night.
They haven't done, before; Jack's quarters in the Hub aren't built for comfort, and Ianto refuses to spend an entire night sleeping on the abomination Jack calls a bed. It's been fine, like that.
They said it would just be a one-time thing, anyway, the first time around. And, all right, maybe it's been more than a few times, now, in Jack's quarters and all over the Hub after hours, but the arrangement hasn't changed, fundamentally, into something else yet, something more.
At least not until Ianto gets a little slashed up on a routine weevil retrieval.
It's not a serious cut at all—just four claws raked across his shoulder—and he even takes down the weevil by himself, before anyone comes to back him up—but Jack gets a little weird about it. It's not obvious to anyone who doesn't know him really well, but he lingers just a little too long in the morgue when Owen bandages him up, laughs just a little too hard when Gwen cracks a friendly joke about it over pizza in the conference room.
And at the end of the day he tells Ianto he'll drive him home.
Ianto could say no, and Jack probably wouldn't push it too hard, but sitting in the driver's seat would put his seatbelt directly over the bandages, and, hell. It's been a long day.
He doesn't think about the lights until they're pulling into the parking garage. He's not sure Jack's planning on walking him all the way up, but he suddenly gets the mental image of Jack making jokes about sun lights and seasonal depression.
"Oh, I hope they've fixed the power," he says, straightening up as Jack parks. "There was a little outage this morning, just before I left."
Not that he can't do what he wants with his own house lights. But he doesn't want Jack to get any ideas about his—his mental preparedness to go on missions, or whatever. They've just started taking him out on more of them, and he doesn't want to regress.
He doesn't think Jack notices, much. Ianto goes with, "Huh, that's weird," when they make it into his flat proper, and that's all he manages because at some point in the lift on their way up Jack crossed his arms and Ianto saw the muscles flex and licked his lips, and by the time they're at his door Jack has his hand on Ianto's ass and his tongue in Ianto's mouth, so slamming the door open to find his flat looking bright as an illicit greenhouse isn't top of Ianto's mind, so much, and he yanks Jack all the way back to his bedroom before it registers.
Of course, the sex combined with the day's earlier blood loss wears him right out, and he's the one left drifting in and out of an exhausted doze in bed while Jack potters around, grabbing him some water and a washcloth once they finish.
Ianto hears the lights in the hallway and the bathroom click off but doesn't clock in it as an independent action. Jack comes back in the room, dressed modestly for a post-coital Jack in boxers and undershirt. Ianto watches through half-lidded eyes, pleasantly muzzy, as he sets a glass of water on his nightstand and then leans over him, wiping Ianto off gently and tucking the covers up around him when he's done.
He straightens when that's done, and steps back, and Ianto can see him scanning the room for his pants, and—
"Stay?" Ianto says, and his hand shoots out of its own volition and grabs Jack's arm. He's just that side of sleepy enough that he isn't horrified at himself for it yet, and it's an easy enough thing to slip off when Jack slips back into the bed after only a moment's hesitation.
Ianto is vaguely aware of Jack reaching over him and switching off the lamp on his nightstand—and some distant part of him is aware that that's bad—but then Jack shifts down behind him and curls his arm around his waist, breath huffing softly into the crook of his shoulder, and it's Jack, so Ianto drifts off to sleep comfortable and warm.
He comes up swinging in the pitch black, elbow catching Evan in the gut before he can slice Ianto's neck open with the cleaver, head rearing back in a follow-up that would've made the lads back home proud, crown of it missing the nose but smacking solidly into a mouth and chin, stunning Evan into letting go, into falling back and setting Ianto loose.
Ianto scrambles away, hands scrabbling for purchase in the dark. He makes it half a foot and drops, lands on the floor, legs tangled in the bed sheets, which he kicks off and grabs then, to cover himself with because—he's naked, why the hell is he naked, what—
"Ianto!"
Corner, corner's good, corner's defensible, at the very least no one can get up behind him with a meat cleaver and slit his throat in a corner; big lover of corners, Ianto. He backs up into one, feels his way in the dark, wraps himself up in the bed sheet—linen, soft, nice quality, smell, recently laundered with gardenia-scented detergent—and feels around him for a weapon, a rock, a knife, anything he can use to defend himself, to hold them off and give Tosh more time to find the others and—
"Ianto."
Oh.
It takes about two seconds after Jack flicks on the lamp for Ianto to realize he's in his bedroom in Cardiff. Not Brynblaidd, not the fucking cannibal community center. Safe.
With Jack, who's got bedhead and a split lip.
"Ianto, it's okay. You're okay. You just had a—"
"Nightmare. Yeah." He gasps it out—and he's fine, see, he's talking; he can't be too freaked out if he's talking—but his chest hurts, lungs too small, a band tight around him, pressing down on his ribs, and he reaches up and rubs his sternum with his fist, breathes, heaves some air out and tries again.
"It's okay," Jack says, and slowly, telegraphing all his movements, sits down next to Ianto and puts his arm around his shoulders.
"It's okay," Jack says, and tugs him in and waits.
Christ.
"Sorry," Ianto blurts out when he catches his breath. He stiffens against Jack's chest, clutches the sheet more tightly about himself and squeezes his eyes shut for a second. Fucking bollocks. "Oh, God, Jack, I'm so—"
"It's fine, Ianto," Jack says. His left thumb rubs Ianto's upper arm, soothing, and his breath ruffles Ianto's hair. "It happens. Nice elbow, by the way. Took the wind right out of me—no, it's fine, nice to know you've been hitting the gym. If you can figure out a way to inspire Owen and Tosh, let me know."
Ianto huffs a laugh. Chokes on it. Takes a breath and lets it out.
"It was Brynnblaid," he says eventually. "Evan, with the meat cleaver. I thought you were—shit."
"Ah," Jack replies intelligently.
They huddle in the corner for a while longer, until Ianto realizes he didn't shower the night before and starts to feel icky.
Jack doesn't mention the lights or his nightmare—nor, even, the fact that he spent the night—before work, and half an hour after they get in Eugene Jones walks into the middle of traffic and gets run over, and by the time they get a chance to talk, any moment they had has passed.
Ianto decides it's better this way. They'll just play it by ear, next time they shag, and see where it goes from there.
God, he really hopes Jack doesn't try to make it a thing.
The next shag they have, though, ends up being a rushed but thorough blowie down in Archives while the others are busy getting a head start on lunch; then a quickie in Jack's office just before the others make it in, morning after that; then Ianto giving Jack an efficient but, apparently, quite satisfactory hand job in the SUV after they've come back from checking out a weevil sighting that turned out to have been a large and feral dog.
That one's all Jack's fault; he looks over after he parks, gives Ianto that knowing smirk and pouts when Ianto doesn't immediately kiss him, and next thing Ianto knows he's licking his hand and shoving it down Jack's pants, letting Jack unzip them as an afterthought.
"Oh, fuck's sake," Owen says when they make it to the conference room, like he can tell.
Jack grins at him and grabs a slice of pizza and settles into the chair next to Tosh with a very contented sigh.
He doesn't ask to head to Ianto's that night, though, like he hasn't the day before this and the day before that.
And Ianto goes back to his flat with all the lights on and falls asleep sitting up on his couch and watching a Murder She Wrote marathon on channel three.
The next day he not only makes it to bed, he switches off the lights in his kitchen, living room, and bathroom before he goes.
The next night, the overhead light, leaving just the floor lamp and the one on his nightstand. The night after that, He switches off the floor lamp.
He wakes up screaming at four in the morning and doesn't fall back asleep at all, but it's progress. It's fine.
He goes out after work and buys himself a TV for the bedroom, sets it up and drifts off that night in the twin embraces of the soft yellow light from the lamp on his nightstand and the kind but no-nonsense tones of Jessica Fletcher's voice.
What difference does it make, anyway, how he sleeps? It's between him and no one else, now.
Except four days later, Jack corners him when he's printing out a new 'The sink is not a trash can' sign to tape up in the kitchen and the others are busy doing something involving lots of laughter over in the morgue.
"So," Jack says, "Is it sleeping with someone that's the problem?"
Of course, Ianto, whose head is full of pipes blocked with bits of pizza and cupcake wrappers, takes a few moments to catch up, and he blurts out, "What?" rather louder than he should, panic spilling up full-formed, somehow, from his gut up to his chest, because what's he done to make Jack think he has a problem with sex? Has he not, in fact, spent the last two months demonstrating his full-throated enthusiasm (in metaphor, because in deed they're still working their way up to that) about sleeping with him?
"Your nightmares," Jack clarifies. "Was it me that triggered it? Sleeping right behind you."
The morgue, a distant part of Ianto's mind notices with chagrin, has gone suspiciously quiet.
"Oh, no," he says. He picks the sign up from the printer. "No. Not at all."
Jack smiles. Nods. Hands Ianto a roll of tape from Gwen's desk. "Good," he says, and kisses Ianto on the tip of his ear and wanders off.
"So, Ianto," Gwen says, drawing near some hours later, looking concerned and innocent like he didn't see her playing rock paper scissors in the break room with Tosh and Owen five minutes previously. "How are you doing?"
The thing is, rock, paper, scissors or not, she means it.
So, "I'll be okay," he says, instead of, "I'm fine."
The soft, earthy colors and Aran knits of 1980s New England give way, on Murder She Wrote, to the bright jewel tones and steadily-increasing shoulder pads of 1990s New York. Ianto usually manages two and a half episodes before he drops off. He dutifully takes the sleeping pills that keep appearing on his desk, though they stop two evenings after the SUV handy, and, counting backwards, he realizes it's been a full month since he scraped the paint off Tosh's bumper.
Jack doesn't say, "Ask Owen if you need more," but it's fairly implicit.
He wonders if Jack's reluctance to bring it up has to do with squeamishness initiating a conversation about suicide—perhaps a side effect of being effectively immortal—or if it, like nightmares and overnights, is something that they just don't talk about protractedly because it's to do with their relationship. Jack never seems to have a problem bringing up other people's personal relationships in conversation, quite bluntly in fact, but, like any questions about his past, pinning him down about his own is a lesson in futility.
Who are we and what are we doing? Ianto wants to ask him, sometimes. And then he catches himself and realizes that, most of the time, he isn't sure he wants to know.
Maybe that's why it works as well as it does, this thing that they're doing. That most of the time they're both equally unwilling to try to make it work.
Except, except that's only most of the time. And only most of the time, it turns out, leaves a remarkable amount of space for nerves and worries and gnawing doubt to settle in and grow a home deep in the recesses of his stomach.
Jessica Fletcher goes to Athens and Nashville and stops off for a jaunt in an Amish community, and work is busy enough that Ianto and Jack don't even get the chance to neck in the storage closet off the boiler room, and Ianto doesn't ask Owen about more sleeping pills even though he probably should.
It's not too bad, anyway. He has a routine. Go home, keep the lights on while he eats, if he eats, keep on the hallway and bedroom lights while he showers, and switch off everything but the TV and the table lamp on his nightstand when he goes to bed.
The sound definitely helps. It becomes a Pavlovian thing, to some extent: one afternoon he and Tosh are chasing down a Traskadarian that's gotten loose in a department store and someone's set the display TVs to one of those family-friendly cable channels that shows reruns of mediocre dramas from Ianto's childhood, and when the theme song for Murder She Wrote comes on over the speakers Ianto starts yawning and can't seem to stop.
"Late night?" Tosh asks when they ease out into traffic later, and Ianto realizes why she's refused to let him drive.
"Not particularly," he says, which is the absolute truth and ought in no way to make Tosh look even more concerned for him, which is unfortunate because that is exactly what it does.
But, "Right," is all she says, and starts talking about some blood test's Owen's hoping to run now they've gotten a Traskadarian safe and sound and seemingly unaffected by the virus that's wiped most of their species out.
The nice thing about Tosh is that once she starts talking about Owen, she can go on indefinitely.
She probably does mention it to Owen at some point, though, because the doctor comes up to him before he heads out that evening with a brand new bottle of sleeping pills.
"Two a night, you know the drill," he says. "Something terrible happens, go to A&E immediately, etcetera, please feel free to take these home where you'll actually use them, 'stead of keeping them in Jack's office in case you want a nap after a shag."
He's off before Ianto can protest.
He puts the pills in his messenger bag while he finishes his work that evening but takes them out before he leaves, holds the plastic orange bottle in his hand and thinks.
He's not going to be tempted to overdose, if he takes them home. Not now, not tonight, not any time soon. He'll take them two at a time until the bottle's exhausted again, probably, and ask Owen for a lower dose next month, probably, and maybe try a nightlight and an audiobook on his phone, probably, and keep on going without thinking too hard about it and never have to call for somebody to save him in the middle of the night again, probably, and ignore the small voice in the back of his head that woke up the minute Owen handed him the bottle, the one that says, You don't have to take them tonight; you can save them up for later, just in case. For if you ever need a backup plan.
Probably.
He slings his messenger back over his shoulder and clambers up the steps to Jack's office.
"Hey," he says.
And, "Hey," Jack says, smiling. "Heading out?"
"For the night."
He stops. Thinks. Makes sure.
Pops the cap and shakes two pills out into his palm, closes it up again and tosses it over for Jack to catch.
"Hold on to that for me?" he asks.
Jack nods, a sharp thing, eyes searching Ianto's face for trouble.
Ianto thinks, I'm trusting this man with my life, right now, and then he thinks, Maybe I was waiting for him to ask, but he was waiting for me?, and then he thinks, Jesus fuck, we're both idiots, and then his heart sort of skips in his chest uncomfortably and he takes a breath and he thinks, What the hell.
"Drive me home?" he asks, smiling back.
He's only left one light on in the living room that greets them when they make it to his flat, this time around. They're busy again, much the same as they were last time, Jack's hands on the buttons of his waistcoat and Ianto's busy with Jack's fly.
The messenger bag drops somewhere in the vicinity of the couch with bad aim but a fervent hope; one shoe lands underneath his new armchair, the three others pointing the way like breadcrumbs down the hall.
He doesn't have to ask Jack to stay this time; Jack sinks down next to him when they finish, all heavy muscles and loose limbs, resting so his hand sits flat just over Ianto's heart, as if he wants the reassurance.
He does, though, gather himself and tense up, muscles bunching in preparation to sit up, just before Ianto starts to fall asleep, and Ianto knows what's coming—the stretch up and over his chest to reach the lamp on the nightstand and switch it off.
But Jack flops back down before he moves, head sinking deeper into his pillows.
"You can turn it off," Ianto says. "It's fine."
Jack's eyes open up, big and bright and soft, kind blue, and his lips quirk up against Ianto's bicep.
"All the better to see you with," he says, and reaches up and traces Ianto's face like he is something very precious.
And he shuts his eyes, and Ianto follows suit, and falls asleep.
