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Torchwood fic: Whiskey
Title: Whiskey
Rating: NC-17. Swearing, adult situations, sex.
Characters: Jack/Ianto, implied Ianto/Lisa
Spoilers: Set some time prior to Torchwood Series One. Spoilers for Cyberwoman.
Other notes: Beta-read (and edited) by ![[info]](https://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
drowning_london who manages to understand what I mean even when basic English eludes me. Merry Christmas to her and katharynne
Comments and constructive criticism welcomed!
Summary: Jack and Ianto take a little roadtrip in search of a reported alien object. The coffee isn't very good, but the whiskey is.
* * *“It’s hardly perfect, sir, but it’s the best that’s on offer. I took the liberty of adding the sugar already.”
Jack grunts, taking the Styrofoam cup of coffee from Ianto without otherwise acknowledging him. The wind off the peaks ruffles his hair and makes his coat billow about him in what Ianto can’t help but notice is a suitably melodramatic way – though granted, the caravan-cum-coffee shop parked on the verge behind them, with its All Day Breakfast!! and Organic Sausages signs, hardly adds any gravitas to the image.
When it becomes clear that it won’t be Jack who starts a conversation, Ianto clears his throat, slides his hands into his pockets, nods towards the coat: “very Wuthering Heights, sir.”
Jack snorts at that: a sharp, rough bark of laughter, and he looks sidelong to Ianto, lowering the cup from his lips to reveal a grin. “Does that make you my Cathy?”
“If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d prefer not to be. If I remember correctly, it’s not a happy story.”
His grin faltering, ever so slightly, Jack shrugs, looks once more out over the hills. “And there I was thinking you just didn’t want to be the girl.”
Ianto smiles at that, turns to face out over the valley with Jack. “Perhaps I just think I’m already on to a good thing with the suit, sir.”
*
When Jack’s finished his coffee he goes over to the car, getting inside to make a call back to the others at the Hub. Ianto doesn’t join him: he needs some time to compose himself; needs some time to reassure himself that nothing will go wrong, that it’s going to be fine – that she’s going to be fine. Inside his pockets, he digs his nails into the palms of his hands, pressing harder and harder and harder as he runs through all the preparations again in his mind; pain in his hands somehow allowing himself to keep his expression blank, to hold his fear and worry back from his face.
He checked the backup power generator for her life support systems. He checked the respirator – twice. He checked every single tube in and out of her body. He made sure that they had a big breakfast together, made sure that there was easy-to-eat food where she could reach it with her right hand (the hand with the most movement left, after the… attack; the hand that she used to eat pizza with him; the hand that she used to grip his fingers when they kissed). He offered to put on a CD for her, whatever she liked on repeat: Damien Rice, Nina Simone, the Scissor Sisters, but she had said ‘no’, just smiled so bravely and – whenever he hesitated – told him to go, kept telling him to, right until the moment when he locked both sets of big doors after him.
Not like he has a choice in the matter. Torchwood is not the kind of institute in which you can turn down a field trip. A family in a small village up north has made a report of finding a very odd piece of machinery in their garden shed, with a matching hole in the roof; from descriptions Jack’s fairly sure it’s harmless, but it needs to be removed. Two man job, for health and safety purposes; Ianto had been roped in since he was the only Welsh speaker, and Jack had already had enough trouble communicating with the family on the telephone. (As Ianto had explained, very slowly, to Owen, just because you can speak English doesn’t mean you should have to speak English. As Owen had replied, “too fucking bad. You let yourself get conquered, you can kiss your odd little language goodbye.”)
So here Ianto is, driving north to the middle of nowhere – precisely where he spent his childhood. Not that he has informed Jack of that: they’re not in the kind of relationship where you share, or pretend to be interested in, each other’s life stories. Ianto keeps the flutters of recognition to himself; doesn’t tell Jack whenever the familiar landscape tugs at something deep down inside of him. Doesn’t tell Jack that he reads the Welsh on the signs before the English. And he resents Jack for being here; resents him for being the one to take this trip with him. He had been intending – before it all – to bring Lisa up for Christmas. They had it all planned: a drive all the way from London and then further, up to Gwynedd, a few weeks with his family. Showing her to his mother and his sisters. Finding out if his brothers approved. And instead these hundreds of miles are shared with a man he barely knows; his boss, no less.
It feels like some kind of betrayal.
He kicks a stone energetically, watches it as it bounces away down the slope. Behind an impassive face, he’s seething and burning up with things he can’t quite name – love and loss and hatred and despair and anger at how unfair it all is. All of it. When you hit the hard wall of the universe, you realize how utterly uncaring it is.
Once he’s calmed himself down again – quieted the worry in his belly, reassured himself that Lisa can cope, that she’s perfectly safe – he goes over and gets into the passenger seat of the car, smiling his best impassive smile to Jack. “Ready to go, sir?”
Jack crumples his now-empty cup in his hands; tosses it into the back seat carelessly. Ianto makes a mental note to tidy it up later.
“Yep. I talked to the others. Owen and Toshiko are out reassuring those pensioners that the tentacle-covered creature that came into their retirement home’s TV room was a kid in an out-of-season Halloween mask, not a sick Nanathyan looking for medical aid. Suzie’s working on the Glove.”
Ianto nods quickly, clips in his belt. “Alright, sir.”
“I told them we’d be back tomorrow afternoon. I figure that we can get to this place, pick up the artifact, spend a night in a hotel somewhere, get up early, drive back.” Grinning, Jack leans over to pat Ianto’s thigh. “I promise I won’t try anything inappropriate in the hotel, Cathy.”
Ianto smiles despite himself, pulling a box of travel sweets from the glove compartment. “I’m sure you won’t, sir.”
*
Ianto has no idea why last year’s Justin Timberlake album is in the CD player, but he wouldn’t put it past Owen. He also has no idea how Jack knows the words to SexyBack.
“So,” Jack says suddenly, breaking off from telling the car at large to get its sexy on, “how’re you enjoying Torchwood?”
Ianto, confused, looks up from the back of a tissue packet which he has been reading very, very intently ever since Jack started singing. “Sir?”
“Three, I mean. How is it? You’ve been here for a bit now. Like the job?”
Ianto thinks of Lisa, and of the evenings they spend together when the others are home and Jack’s out – drinking and pulling, Ianto supposes, though he’s never asked and, naturally, Jack never brings anyone back. He thinks of the mumbled excuse he made to dash to the gents’ and vomit after seeing his first dissection – Owen working diligently on a Weevil, peeling back the skin over its skull. He thinks of Jack’s occasional flirtatious glances; he thinks of walking in on Suzie and Owen going at it in the showers, once; he thinks of Toshiko’s smile, and the way that he understands that blank happy mask so well.
“It’s a change from Torchwood One, sir, but it’s not all that bad,” he says finally, calm and controlled as can be. “Keeps me busy.”
Jack looks over as he flicks on the indicator; just looks steadily at Ianto for the longest of moments. Ianto can feel his eyes, the way that he feels them in the Hub so often: can feel Jack’s eyes on his lips, throat, crotch –
“So when we get there,” Jack says suddenly, eyes back on the road, “you’ll do the talking and I’ll do the grabbing. So to speak.”
Ianto shifts his legs ever so slightly and reaches for the magazine in the glove compartment, opening Nuts (definitely Owen’s) over his lap quickly as he clears his throat. “Yes, sir. That’s a good idea.”
“Charm them with your wicked Welsh ways,” Jack says, ever so slowly, and for a moment Ianto has the stupid, paranoid idea that Jack is relishing each syllable, enjoying making Ianto blush. “That and the suit.”
Ianto suddenly wishes that the magazine he’s using to hide an embarrassing something weren’t in itself designed to titillate. He keeps his eyes as far away from the tits and arse as he can; tries to think of other things – of coffee, of a long hot bath, of Lisa.
And that just makes him feel ill, because she’s hundreds of miles away, in pain, and he’s in a car, getting turned on by some man, and oh fuck, oh fuck, he’s so bad to her, and oh fuck, fuck, he’s not doing enough, he’s not doing enough to help her, he’s failing her, he’s breaking his promise to keep her safe and –
The next thing that he is aware of is Jack’s hand on the back of his head, exerting a light pressure. Other details slowly, slowly trickle in; awareness filling him between panicked breaths. There is the taste of vomit thick and cloying in his mouth. There is the grass a little way below his face, grass and vomit: he is facing downwards. A quick fumble with his hands tells him that he’s still sitting in the car, though: stopped by the side of the road.
Stopped by the side of the road, vomit in his mouth, with Jack Harkness pressed up against him from behind. All things considered, it’s not a great situation to be in.
“Just let it out. Let it all out.” Jack’s voice is soft and smooth in Ianto’s ear; vibrates against his back. And is that –? Yes, that’s Jack stroking his hair, not just holding his head down so he doesn’t choke but actually caressing him, big strong fingers sliding, slow and lazy, over the nape of Ianto’s neck. “Should have told me you got carsick.”
Ianto leans over and is sick again, and he wishes that it were because of the touch. But he knows that it’s not.
*
They do not talk for the rest of the journey. It is not because Jack doesn’t try: occasionally he offers a question, and Ianto responds with a ‘yes’, a ‘no’, or just a ‘sir’. Ianto is more comfortable with the silence; more comfortable closing his eyes and being alone with the taste of water (used to wash out the vomit) in his mouth; with the burning ball of shame and self-hatred in his belly.
He loves Lisa. He loves her more than anything in the world. He loved her even before the Battle of Canary Wharf; and in those terrible moments in Torchwood One that love was fused with heat and fear and terrible pain into something stronger and unending and more terrible, but it’s love, lie-for-you die-for-you love, and if he loves her, how can he have been aroused by Jack’s looks? How can he have let himself think these terrible thoughts?
In his pockets, he squeezes his hands into fists till there’s pain again.
“We’re here,” Jack says finally, killing the engine and leaning forward to peer up at the farmhouse before them. “Nice place. I like the hanging flowers.”
Ianto opens his eyes quickly, sits up straight and counts to ten in his head before blank-smiling to his boss. “Very nice, sir. Rather cheerful.”
Jack raises his eyebrows ever so slightly, saying in a monotone: “cheerful. Huh,” before jumping out of the car and slamming his door after him. The sound sets several dogs barking in the near vicinity.
(Ianto finds himself missing Myfanwy. God, he never thought he’d admit that to himself: missing the pterodactyl.)
He follows Jack out into the yard after a few deep breaths. He’s good at burying his emotions, Ianto. Good at forcing them down under pressure. Other people may say that bottling things up only leads to devastating explosions later; Ianto, however, knows different. Under heat and pressure, limestone changes into marble; layer upon sedimentary layer – the Earth’s memories and regrets, Ianto likes to think – compressed, over time, into something astoundingly beautiful. The skeletons in your closet can be burnt and compressed into nothingness if you only think of them as fossils in sedimentary rock.
Ianto likes to think that what he’s doing here is metamorphosis rather than repression.
Sure enough, Ianto thinks as he gets out of the car, there is something cheerful about the house. The flowers in the hanging baskets are pretty and bright; the mat before the door says welcome in Welsh. Ianto goes to stand behind Jack, waiting for the inhabitants of the house to answer the cheery chimes of the doorbell. Somewhere around the back of the house, the dogs continue to bark.
Jack turns and looks at him, smiles briefly before patting him on the arm. “Just keep them talking.”
*
Through the kitchen window they watch Jack being led out to the garden shed by the man of the house, a tall, thin electrician named Gerallt. Ianto takes a mouthful of biscuit, and it crumbles warm and sweet over his tongue.
“You don’t look like you’re from the police,” the teenage girl of the family says finally, blinking up at Ianto from behind heavy layers of mascara.
Ianto smiles at her awkwardly. “We come in all shapes and sizes, we do.”
The girl taps her fingernails against her mug (of tea, no less) and looks at Ianto cynically. “Right. So the police honestly sent two strange men, out of uniform, to pick up some piece of rubbish that my father thinks came from the sky?”
After composing himself, having choked on his biscuit, Ianto gives her a watery-eyed smile. “Yes. That’s us.”
“…Right. So who’re you, then – PC Jones? And he’s…?”
Ianto looks out across the grass – long and straggly – to where Jack’s back is visible in the small wooden shed. Several gardening tools have already been thrown out and rest on the earth about his feet.
Ianto pauses for a moment before smiling to her, just a quirk of his lips. “Sergeant Harkness, miss.”
There is a long silence. The cat which Ianto was earlier told to call Ceri rubs against his legs with a yowl. Just as he leans down to pet her, the girl sighs, moves to pour herself another juice.
“He’s very handsome.”
Ianto laughs, looks very intently at the cat and nowhere else, especially not out at Jack himself. Smug bastard.
“I’ve heard that one several times, miss.”
*
“I think,” Ianto remarks very calmly as they get back into the car, “that you insulted her.”
Jack raises an eyebrow as he turns the key in the ignition. “When?”
“Right at the moment when you asked us if we were gossiping about you in, quote-unquote, that weird Welsh language thing.”
Jack laughs, braces his arm around the back of Ianto’s chair to look behind them as they reverse. Ianto can smell his cologne. “That’s not that bad, is it? It was a joke.”
Ianto smiles crispily. “Unlike her parents, Eirwen speaks perfect English, sir. Learns it at school. Matter of fact, we were speaking in English at the time. It’s not our fault if you haven’t quite worked out the accent.”
Turning to him, wide-eyed, Jack says slowly, “are you serious?”
Ianto nods. To his annoyance, Jack just howls with laughter and keeps chuckling all the way to the hotel, as if it’s the best joke he’s heard in a long time.
*
They eat dinner in the roadside hotel’s restaurant. The frankly unappetizing sight of the plastic-textured meat and two veg doesn’t overcome Ianto’s residual feelings of nausea, and he leaves his meal untouched. Instead, he has a triple-shot cappuccino.
Jack doesn’t seem to notice that Ianto isn’t eating. Jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled up, he is vibrant and practically throbbing with life and energy: his eyes are flashing, his teeth almost glowing in that perfect white grin.
“So we have sex, as you can imagine, and I tell you now, with a Charelthamopattell girl, it’s pretty damn good. We’re lying there afterwards, and I’m feeling pretty happy with myself – sure I got it in the right hole at least, and I tell you, with aliens that’s a pretty big concern – and then she leans over and ties me to her bed with her side tentacles. And I’m thinking okay, that’s pretty soon for a round two, but you know, kinky isn’t bad, right? And that’s right up till the moment when she slides out her mandibles and I remember why I was told not to screw a Cherlthamopattell girl – they hate the idea of sharing their partners so much, they eat them afterwards to make sure they don’t cheat! So I’m lying there, and boy, I tell you, the old man’s become way less interested all of a sudden, and she’s leaning over me with these mandibles going at a million miles a second –”
Ianto blocks it all out and just laughs when he thinks it’s appropriate. Another tall story from Captain Jack Harkness. He doesn’t know how that man can think they’re all stupid enough to believe these. He’s told so many sexploit stories about aliens, you’d think he’d been out into space itself. Fraternized with the natives.
He must think they’re idiots, to believe that.
Anyway, Ianto can’t focus on it. He feels sick with worry; his stomach muscles clenched, something writhing deep in his belly and making him feel a little ill. What if the power has failed in the Hub, and the emergency generator hasn’t turned on? What if Lisa’s respirator is jammed? What if she’s lonely?
All of a sudden, Ianto is aware of Jack’s hand on his: the heavy weight of Jack’s fingers on his own. Those terrible little tingles flutter over his skin where Jack touches.
When Ianto looks up, his eyes meet Jack’s.
“Ianto. Whatever’s bothering you, I want you to stop thinking about it. Understood? That’s an order.”
That makes Ianto want to laugh for real. Makes him want to laugh and cry and shout, what makes you think you could order my feelings around? What makes you think you could ever erase the thought of her?
He doesn’t laugh, though – but he does feel tears, tears pricking hot and wet at his eyes, and he blinks very fast, tilts his head back a little. Can’t cry in front of Jack. Can’t show that weakness. He smiles his best blank smile, counts to ten inside.
“Nothing’s worrying me, sir.”
Jack looks at him, very steadily, and Ianto can tell he doesn’t believe. “Huh.”
*
It is nearly one a.m., and they are both very drunk. Ianto vaguely knows this – at least, respectable, composed, intelligent Ianto knows this. Alcohol and a late night might have hazed the knowledge around the edges, but it’s there. Just like he knows that it was Jack who brought back the whiskey, laughing at the appropriate name, Jack who said loudly, let’s drown our sorrows, eh? Get over driving hundreds of miles to some godforsaken nowhere on a wild goose chase for a piece of a tractor, dropped by an overloaded magpie. And this is Jack’s room, he knows that: Jack’s room to which Ianto came so warily, coaxed and lured, and where Ianto is now – for reasons he can’t quite remember – sprawled out over Jack’s bed, jacketless and utterly drunk, watching Jack at the desk, pouring them more whiskey. (He cannot remember why he ever agreed to drink: which one of them will drive tomorrow? Jack saying, some time ago, that this would be the 'last time' he got plastered hardly makes it okay now.)
“So, Ianto Jones,” Jack says after a pause, turning with two full tumblers, “tell me about you.”
Ianto doesn’t reply for a while: he has to concentrate on holding the whiskey level, on stopping it from spilling; it takes all his mental capacity to slowly sit up, to take a sip. It’s hot in his mouth, and somehow the tickle of the liquid loosens his tongue, allows him to speak to the cheap plastic kettle on the windowsill before him. “What about me, sir? I told you everything at the interview.”
The bed to his right sags as Jack sits. Ianto thinks it is slightly odd that Jack leans over him, one hand on the other side of Ianto’s body; but then, with the drunken haze, everything is a little odd. The buzz in his body, for one – that’s odd. The way that just here, just now, he finds it hard to remember Lisa’s face – that’s odd. The way that he is suddenly imagining Jack naked, the way that suddenly he’s remembering how, over the months, he has had those little fleeting daydreams of things they could do –
He downs the rest of his whiskey in one, and knows he deserves the burn in his throat.
Jack’s face is all of a sudden very close, and Ianto can feel Jack’s breath on his skin.
“You told me everything I wanted to hear at the interview, yes,” Jack says, slow and smooth in that deep voice. “Perfect candidate, in fact. First from Oxford. Flawless record at Torchwood One. Even plays rugby and classical piano – nicely rounded CV, I have to say. But –” and suddenly Ianto thinks, are those Jack’s fingers slowly, slowly tugging his shirt up? Is Jack seducing him? – “I’ve never seen the real Ianto Jones.”
Ianto’s head suddenly hurts, and there is an aching in his chest. It’s hard to say where the love for Lisa ends and where the burning self-hatred begins – anger that he is doing this, that he is aroused by this, that he wants this, that he is so inadequate, that he is so unable to give her what she needs –
And then there are Jack’s lips on his, Jack’s hand fumbling for his whiskey glass, gently tugging it from Ianto’s fingers, and then the ‘clink’ of it being laid down on the bedside table. It’s good, all things considered, that Jack puts it away – Ianto is sure he would have dropped it otherwise. It is not everyday you have your boss’ tongue in your mouth.
Jack tastes of whiskey, Ianto realizes in those first numb, motionless seconds. Whiskey and something more obscure: no romance-novel vanilla, nothing like that. Something human and slick and hot as his tongue, something that slides like his breath over Ianto’s lips. His late-night stubble rubs a little over Ianto’s skin – Ianto had forgotten that detail, that little reality of kissing men. It’s been years: since University, since a rugby boy with the body of a Greek statue, since a few heady, secret nights that never became anything more. Long enough for Ianto to forget the way men kiss.
Ianto shivers under Jack’s touch, the other man’s fingers ghosting feather-light traces over Ianto’s belly, making his muscles spasm and clench. All about him, he can feel the moment stretching and stretching, tugging closer and closer towards breaking point, a silver thread being pulled tight, tight, tight –
Somehow, when Ianto tries to plant his hands firmly against Jack’s chest and push him up and off, he ends up twisting his hands instead in Jack’s shirt, ends up pulling him closer. His shout of disgust becomes, somewhere between his brain and his lips (wet with Jack’s saliva) a moan of pleasure. His kick becomes an arching of his hips, and suddenly there’re Jack’s legs between his, Jack’s thigh rubbing over Ianto’s impossibly hard cock, and Jack’s entire weight on him – heavy and hot and real and oh, pushing down and rubbing and there are too many clothes between them, too many layers, and they’re fumbling and pulling at them all, impatient and needy and so alone, needing to bridge millions of lonely miles with skin on skin. Ianto can feel the buttons of his shirt popping under Jack’s demanding fingers; he can feel the loose buttons of Jack’s own shirt over his own chest, before they’re pushed aside; tiny plastic discs that are cool over his skin. He plucks at Jack’s braces and soon they’re off, too; and then there’s an undignified scrabble as they reach down to pull off their own trousers and each other's; kick off smooth silk boxers and cotton socks.
(And there is a moment, here, a single moment that somehow hangs still and suspended even as other moments – the first touch of flesh on flesh; the first time Jack’s hand grips his cock; Jack’s first groan – pass: the dread, delicious moment when Ianto knows that they are going to have sex, when it becomes inevitable. The moment when he realizes that wrong can feel right. The moment when he realizes that he has wanted this, he has wanted this wrong, and that he needs it.)
It is all, after that, as if they have done this before. Jack’s body is, under Ianto’s mouth, exactly as Ianto had imagined it: it is as if he already knows the lines of Jack’s pectorals, the dip of his navel, the salty taste of his sweat. As he trails his tongue lower it is as if he hears Jack’s groan through a barrier, as if he is very far away. Too far away to touch.
And all Ianto wants is to touch. He wants to have skin on skin and hands on his body and flesh in him and around him and to just touch, to be pressed closer than possible to another human being, to breathe together and to share a heartbeat, to merge and slowly meld into one. A searing firebrand of lust and passion and want to burn through this barrier he’s had between himself and the world for so long. A body to follow back. A body to teach him how to be close again.
A body without metal everywhere. A body without armour over its skin.
Time seems to last forever in the tiny hotel room. Under the yellowish lights Jack’s skin is pale, shadows throwing muscles into sharp relief – muscles that Ianto licks and learns and threads together, a breathing, pulsing map of humanity without metal. Pectoralis major (a brief suck on each nipple; Jack’s low, throaty, half-begging half-warning “Ianto!”), triceps, biceps, and while Ianto’s tongue slides down over palmaris longus – Jack’s hand opening slowly, trembling as Ianto’s tongue traces a spiral on his palm – his own hands smooth over Jack’s belly, down to his cock.
They are tired and drunk and not in love: it is not fairytale sex. But fuck, it is amazing. Imperfect and flawed and human and that is exactly what Ianto needs right now – to forget, to fail, and, preferably, to be fucked well into next week.
*
The next morning Ianto is sick three times before breakfast and four times after. He wishes that it were because he regretted the sex.
But he knows it’s not.
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