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invisible_lift Apr. 23rd, 2009 05:54 pm)
invisible_lift Apr. 23rd, 2009 05:54 pm)Title: "If It's Not Love Then It's The Bomb That Will Bring Us Together"
Disclaimer: Being a bloke who likes to slash pretty men doesn't make me RTD, I don't work for the BBC, and as much as I might like to, I don't own Jack or Ianto or any part of Torchwood. I do, however, order pizza under that name on principle.
Pairings: Overall: Ianto/Andy, Jack/Ianto, Jack/Ianto/Andy, with occasional guest cameos.
Rating: Series ranges from relatively safe to hard NC-17. This one is in the PG-ish range.
Notes/Summary: Part #35 of the "It'll End In Tears" cluster. Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sanginmychains and resourceress for giving this the sweet, hot beta-fu over and over. References 2x13. Title is from "Ask" by the Smiths.
Also, I've sort of held off mentioning this, butlove_jackianto did me an awesome cover for IEIT. Seems the sort of thing one should unveil when the final installment goes up, no?
Cardiff does not end with a bang. It doesn’t end at all.
It’s a near, near thing. Gray had planned fastidiously in four dimensions, and the city’s back is broken, but less than a week later things are already beginning to mend. There are road crews everywhere and emergency assistance from all over. Cardiff will bury her dead and then rise again, stronger than before.
Ianto crosses his arms, rests them on a metal rail, and stares out at what’s left of the Turnmill nuclear power station. He hasn’t slept in days, and he’s so tired that he’s begun to go numb. Jack sent him home hours ago to get some proper rest, but he wants to witness this – just a bit of it – for Owen. The parts of the building complex that could be demolished have already been taken down. The rest they’ll seal up like a giant cement coffin. It isn’t a funeral, or a proper grave, and Ianto can’t shake the feeling that Owen deserves better. Maybe, when he’s had more sleep, he’ll ask Jack look into something like a plaque or a marker like they got for Toshiko.
He barely registers the flash of hazard yellow coat beside him until the paper cup is offered.
“You looked like you could do with a coffee,” Andy says, not quite casual.
“Thanks.” Ianto takes the cup and drinks from it. It’s awful but he’s glad for it all the same. The wind is picking up, and he has to squint to look back out toward the work site. “It should have been me in there, not him.” Ianto sighs, looks down at his coffee.
Andy rests his own arms on the rail and bows his head. “A lot of good people died that night.”
“Yeah.”
There’s something soothing about having another human being beside him who can watch the workmen and their machinery. Ianto is sure he’s heard it said that it takes two people to make a thing true, though he can’t remember where. “I suppose this means you’ve remembered everything.”
Andy kicks at the gravel at their feet. His expression is blanker than usual. More subdued. “I saw you in a shop a few weeks ago. Before that, I was having dreams. I wound up crouched in an alley when everything started coming back properly. I thought I was losing my mind.”
Ianto’s fingers tighten slightly around his paper cup. Hearing it from Andy feels like a punch in the chest, and when he inhales to speak he imagines pain. “Oh god, Andy, I’m –”
“Don’t you dare tell me you’re sorry. Fuck’s sake,” Andy snaps and throws his empty cup into a nearby plastic barrel. He crosses his arms as if to protect himself and leans back against the rail. “He overdosed me. I should be dead.”
Ianto steps back and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Look, Andy, it wasn’t my decision.”
Andy scoffs. “Yeah, right. You looked me in the eyes before you walked away. That’s not a decision?”
“No, it isn’t.” Ianto lets out a huff of frustration and drops his own unfinished coffee in the bin. He can’t do this. Not now, and not on top of everything else. “Do you have any idea how much we sacrifice to do what we do? To be Torchwood? You can’t even begin to imagine. There’s so much that no one else can know –”
“Yeah, no one but Rhys Williams and half of Cardiff,” Andy says through gritted teeth.
“Look,” Ianto says, hands on hips. “If you want to have a go at me, just have a go, alright?”
“Why, so you can run off to Jack and have him come after me when I’m done? What do you think he’ll do this time now that he knows your little pills don’t work anymore, hm? Lock me up somewhere? Kill me?” Andy takes a step closer. “I’ll bet he wouldn’t even have to make it look like an accident. All you lot do is march all over Cardiff acting like heroes, but all you do is fuck things up.”
The urge to take a swing is enormous, and Ianto is too tired and far too broken for this conversation right now. He lets his hands fall to his sides, then raises them in a helpless gesture. “What exactly do you want from me, Andy?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Andy asks, and for the first time the hurt is clear in his expression. He looks over his shoulder, as if he’s afraid of being seen before he meets Ianto’s eyes again. “I trusted you, body and soul. I’d have done anything for you. And unlike Rhys fucking Williams, I can keep a secret. All you had to do was ask. The least you could do is take some fucking responsibility.”
With that, Andy turns away and walks along the rail, back toward his empty uniform car.
Ianto stares after him, stunned. He wants, more than anything, to just stop. He wants to fall apart here among the dirt and stones and let his pain bleed out into the earth. “Andy,” he calls out, but Andy ignores him. He sighs, jogs up behind him. “Andy, wait.”
“Piss off,” Andy says, burrowed deep in his coat. He jerks away when Ianto tries to rest a hand on his shoulder.
“Will you just stop for a minute?” Ianto says, frustrated and a little desperate. “Please?”
Andy halts grudgingly and turns around.
“You want me to take responsibility? Alright then. The drug we gave you, the amnesia pill? It comes up on police and SOCO tox screens as B67, but we call it Retcon. The hospitals misidentify it. They’re supposed to.” Ianto searches Andy’s face for any hint of sympathy but finds none. Ianto carries on with his olive branch anyway. “Usually we dispense it to civilians in low doses. Considering the sorts of things we see, most people are happy to forget.”
“And everyone else?”
Ianto shrugs. “Well, they don’t exactly know about it after to complain.”
Andy turns as if to start walking again. Ianto steps into his path.
“You didn’t know,” Ianto says, “and you never would have known that we’d drugged you if I hadn’t got involved with you. You want me to take responsibility? Fine. I should never have invited you up to my flat. I knew the risks and I ignored them.”
“Why?” Andy asks. He looks skeptical, and Ianto doesn’t blame him. Any version of the truth would ring false at this point.
“Because it was good to be with someone of my own,” Ianto says and pulls a face when he realizes how that sounds. Andy doesn’t look impressed either. “One of these days, probably sooner than later, working for Torchwood is going to kill me. You felt like a refuge. You made me feel normal.”
Andy pulls back a bit, raises his eyebrows. “If that’s what passes for normal, I’d hate to see your day-to-day.”
“Yeah,” Ianto says and coughs out a dry, slightly hysterical chuckle. “I imagine you probably would. But Andy, this is what I’m saying. What I put you through? What happened with the Retcon and the secrets? That’s all Torchwood. My whole life is like this. How was I supposed to walk away from you?”
“Easy,” Andy says as he pushes past. “You turn around, put one foot after the other.”
As snubs go, it’s blatant enough that Ianto finds himself at a bit of a loss for words. “I kept your bracelet,” he calls out as Andy unlocks his car door. “I almost threw it into the Bay a dozen times, but I couldn’t.”
Andy pauses and stands stock still, still facing away. Ianto holds his breath.
“Tell me one thing,” Andy says when he turns around. “What happened to Jonah Bevan?”
Ianto licks his lips, looks down, and then looks back up again. One more secret seems only fair. “He’s in a managed care facility. He,” Ianto hesitates, unsure of how to proceed or explain. “He fell through time and space and it shattered him. We can’t fix any of it, but we can keep him safe and comfortable.”
“Alright,” Andy says and leans against his car. “So what happens now? Do I walk away from this whole or do I wake up in hospital?”
“Whole.”
“Do I get my things back?”
“If you want them,” Ianto says. “How should I –”
Andy opens the car door. “Call me in a week. I assume you’ve still got the number.”
Ianto watches the uniform car as it spins out of the gravel patch and back onto the tarmac. He looks after it until it disappears from view, and stands watching in that direction until the fatigue in his bones demands that he move on, drive home, and go to sleep.
# # #
“What’s with the box?” Jack asks through a mouthful of apple. He holds the rest of the fruit in his hand. He likes apples. They’re firm and bright, and a good one tastes as nice as it looks. He’s been eating a lot of things, lately. All sorts of different things. They help him remember.
Ianto looks up. He doesn’t look entirely pleased. “Andy’s things. I figured, as he’s remembered everything, it’s only appropriate to give them back.”
“Andy,” Jack says, and frowns. He knows the name, but can’t place it in context. It’s another empty place that he hadn’t noticed until now.
“Gwen’s old police partner. You let me take him as a lover.”
“Oh,” Jack says, surprised. Ianto hadn’t seemed the type. “Are you still –”
Ianto closes the top of the box, tapes it shut. “No. You Retconned him, actually.”
A faint memory of forcing golden light into a dying man drifts up in Jack’s mind, but it’s fragile. Too thin to hold. He can’t be sure of what he’s remembering. “Did I have a good reason?”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly,” Jack says and sits down on the edge of his desk. The look on Ianto’s face isn’t encouraging.
“I think you had good intentions,” Ianto says and sits next to him.
Jack leans against him slightly. He wants to touch with the whole side of his body. He puts his arm around Ianto’s waist. “But it was a bad decision,” Jack says, understanding but still not quite remembering.
“Very.” Ianto’s skin is warm and smells pleasantly of soap. His suit smells of nothing in particular but warm wool and silk. He makes a contented sound when Jack kisses his shoulder and rubs his face against the cloth.
“If you want him and he’ll have you, take him back,” Jack says. “Whatever it is that he did, I’ve forgotten it.”
A brief flicker of anguish crosses Ianto’s face. It makes Jack sick to see it, but it’s short lived, and Ianto doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge it. “We’ll see,” he says. Ianto stands, kisses Jack’s forehead, and then carries the box out into the Hub.
# # #
Andy stares at what he’s written. He hates the clumsiness of his hand, and the way that the right words refuse to come. This is not progress. He’s been trying off and on for three days to come to some kind of satisfactory conclusion, but so far he’s just going around in circles.
This would all be a hell of a lot simpler if he’d just told Ianto to fuck off, Or – better yet – just kept his distance in the first place.
Frustrated, he tears the page out of his spiral notebook, crumples it, and throws it across the room in the general direction of the bin. The wire that holds the pages in order is already bent and pulled uneven. It’s a mirror of his own distress that Andy refuses steadfastly to acknowledge. He glares down at the blank page, and when nothing worthy occurs to him, he slaps the cover shut and tosses it over onto the coffee table where it lays too flat and too thin. His carpet is littered with crumpled paper.
A walk won’t fix this. A run would only make him feel like he has something to run away from. He turns on the telly and then turns it off again when the first image onscreen is a man in a suit with a gun. Andy gives his notebook an apologetic look. He’ll need to buy a new one tomorrow. It’s the second one he’s bought this week. What he needs is a bloody drink.
The temptation to call Trav and go out for a proper piss-up makes him reach for the phone, but Andy stops just shy of dialing. Trav would do his level best to get them both shattered, which would be fine until Trav started making sarky commentary about Swanson being a bit of a dyke, or Elliot being a closet queer, or whatever. By then Andy knows it would be too late to disengage properly, especially if Trav is already trying to pull for one or both of them. And really, how creepy is that?
Probably not as creepy as shagging someone you’ve memory-wiped, or dumping someone in a park to cover your tracks. And yet, here he is on edge like a kid at Christmas, wondering what will happen when Ianto calls.
If he calls. If they meet. Oh god.
No, he thinks as he lies back and laces his fingers behind his head, best to stay home and try to work this out on his own. It would probably help to know for certain where he actually stands, though to be honest he’s afraid he won’t like the answer. It’s a bit like old maps, and how they sometimes end without explanation. Or, better still, the maps that presumed only the sea. Here be dragons. He snorts at that – it’s a damn hilarious thing to think in Cardiff – but he can’t shake that edge of the world feeling. He isn’t who he thought he was. He’s at the edge of his map. He’s falling off.
# # #
Ianto calls him four days later, seven days exactly since Turnmill. They speak only briefly, and Ianto is uncharacteristically awkward, which Andy finds perversely satisfying. It’s nice for once not to be the only one who’s off-balance. He suggests Forte’s and Ianto agrees. It seems best to do these things on neutral ground.
Even so, Andy arrives nearly thirty minutes early. He doesn’t intend to, but he’s so damn anxious that it’s easier to sit alone in his booth with a cup of tea pretending to read the battered copy of Nightfall he’s brought along with him. When Ianto arrives, Andy tucks the book away because now that he’s got a handle on what Ianto actually does, reading Asimov in front of him feels too daft for words.
Not that he cares what Ianto thinks of him.
“I’ve brought your things,” Ianto says as he lets the box rest on the tabletop. He’s wearing one of his suits, which means he’s probably come straight from work. “It should all be here. Let me know if you think anything’s still missing. Jack can be haphazard.”
“Thanks,” Andy says. He doesn’t open it, just slides it to the end of the table that meets the wall. After a moment he looks up at Ianto, who is still standing next to the bench on the other side of the booth. “You can sit down if you like.”
Ianto looks down at the seat before he sits down across from Andy. He doesn’t say anything right away, so Andy retrieves Ianto’s t-shirt from his backpack and passes it across the table.
“I think this is yours.”
“Yeah. Thanks,” Ianto says as he accepts the shirt. He smiles a little, but the expression is strained, and Andy gets the feeling that there’s another shoe waiting to drop. “Look, there are a couple of things I didn’t put in the box. I didn’t know if you wanted them.”
Andy frowns, but when he recognizes the square of folded notebook paper, he feels his breath desert him. Ianto puts it down in the middle of the tabletop. Neither of them moves.
“We should burn this,” Andy says after a minute. He picks the contract up and turns it between his fingers, handling it gingerly like it’s a piece of broken glass. “I mean, you weren’t planning on, uh –”
“Collecting?” Ianto folds his hands on the tabletop and rubs at the joint at the base of his thumb. He keeps his eyes on his hands. “No. No, I don’t think that will be a problem.”
“Oh. Right. Good.” Andy knows he should be relieved by that answer, and on the whole he is, but he’s also faintly disappointed, and the readiness with which Ianto doesn’t seem to have considered it stings. Andy kicks himself, asks the obvious question. “What about Jack?”
Ianto sits back and shrugs. “Let’s just say that Jack’s out of the equation for now. As far as the two of us are concerned, I’m my own man.”
Andy scoffs and stuffs the note in his pocket. “You’re never your own man, Ianto.”
“No,” Ianto agrees. “I guess I’m not.”
With a gulp, Andy finishes his tea. It’s cold, and he grimaces as he sets the cup down with a gentle thunk. “So what’s the other thing?”
Ianto reaches into his jacket pocket. He lays the bracelet down on the table between them, and while his expression is mostly closed, Andy thinks he can make out something that looks like a hint of reluctance. “Like I said, I never could bring myself to get rid of it.”
If Ianto’s dismissal before had stung, it’s nothing compared to the way that his admission – or, rather, the proof of what he’d said at Turnmill – makes him ache. It also makes him feel curiously light. He picks up the bracelet and looks it over. The scratched steel snap gleams dully against the dark brown leather in the café’s low light.
“Seems a funny thing to give back after everything you took away,” he says as he strokes the leather with his thumb. In his peripheral vision, he notices how closely Ianto is watching him. Andy lays the bracelet over the top of his wrist but doesn’t move to close it.
Across the table, Ianto’s composure breaks slightly. “You don’t have to keep it. I mean, if you don’t want –”
The corner of Andy’s mouth tics up and he holds his arm out across the table. Ianto freezes, and Andy smiles a little more broadly, pleased at having put him in the headlights. “I thought you were supposed to be the expert on what I want,” he says and nods down at his wrist.
Ianto takes Andy’s hand into his own, careful not to dislodge the bracelet from where it rests. “Shows what I know, doesn’t it?”
“Certainly puts a few things in perspective,” Andy says. Ianto’s hands are warm and familiar. It’s good, albeit a lot more public than he’s at all comfortable with. He’d half intended this to be a bluff, but the moment has gone well beyond that now. “You forgave me. You know, when you gave me this. I never understood why.”
Ianto traces a finger along Andy’s hand. “What we did to each other was so well-intentioned and terrible, and it seemed unfair to lay all of it at your feet. I wanted to start again, and you wanted to be worthy.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“Neither was I,” Ianto says with a grimace.
“But you wish you were.” Andy purses his lips and tilts his head slightly. “It’s sort of funny, isn’t it? I want to start again, and you want to be worthy.”
Ianto gives Andy a sharp look, but the anger in it is blunted. “Andy –”
“I’m not joking,” Andy says and nods at his wrist again. It feels good, suddenly, to be so certain of himself, and to do this properly. “I’m offering.”
It takes Ianto a moment to respond. He looks down at Andy’s wrist, swallows, and closes his eyes. “This isn’t going to end well,” he says.
“No, it really isn’t,” Andy says, but smiles. “But does anything?”
“No. Never.” He looks up and gives Andy one last questioning look. When Andy nods, he snaps the bracelet closed and then kisses Andy’s fingers. “To mad endeavor, and the inevitable train wreck.”
Andy laughs.
---
Prev (Pt #34) (Warnings: just a little bit of violence and maybe some language.
.
Disclaimer: Being a bloke who likes to slash pretty men doesn't make me RTD, I don't work for the BBC, and as much as I might like to, I don't own Jack or Ianto or any part of Torchwood. I do, however, order pizza under that name on principle.
Pairings: Overall: Ianto/Andy, Jack/Ianto, Jack/Ianto/Andy, with occasional guest cameos.
Rating: Series ranges from relatively safe to hard NC-17. This one is in the PG-ish range.
Notes/Summary: Part #35 of the "It'll End In Tears" cluster. Thanks to
sanginmychains and resourceress for giving this the sweet, hot beta-fu over and over. References 2x13. Title is from "Ask" by the Smiths. Also, I've sort of held off mentioning this, but
love_jackianto did me an awesome cover for IEIT. Seems the sort of thing one should unveil when the final installment goes up, no?Cardiff does not end with a bang. It doesn’t end at all.
It’s a near, near thing. Gray had planned fastidiously in four dimensions, and the city’s back is broken, but less than a week later things are already beginning to mend. There are road crews everywhere and emergency assistance from all over. Cardiff will bury her dead and then rise again, stronger than before.
Ianto crosses his arms, rests them on a metal rail, and stares out at what’s left of the Turnmill nuclear power station. He hasn’t slept in days, and he’s so tired that he’s begun to go numb. Jack sent him home hours ago to get some proper rest, but he wants to witness this – just a bit of it – for Owen. The parts of the building complex that could be demolished have already been taken down. The rest they’ll seal up like a giant cement coffin. It isn’t a funeral, or a proper grave, and Ianto can’t shake the feeling that Owen deserves better. Maybe, when he’s had more sleep, he’ll ask Jack look into something like a plaque or a marker like they got for Toshiko.
He barely registers the flash of hazard yellow coat beside him until the paper cup is offered.
“You looked like you could do with a coffee,” Andy says, not quite casual.
“Thanks.” Ianto takes the cup and drinks from it. It’s awful but he’s glad for it all the same. The wind is picking up, and he has to squint to look back out toward the work site. “It should have been me in there, not him.” Ianto sighs, looks down at his coffee.
Andy rests his own arms on the rail and bows his head. “A lot of good people died that night.”
“Yeah.”
There’s something soothing about having another human being beside him who can watch the workmen and their machinery. Ianto is sure he’s heard it said that it takes two people to make a thing true, though he can’t remember where. “I suppose this means you’ve remembered everything.”
Andy kicks at the gravel at their feet. His expression is blanker than usual. More subdued. “I saw you in a shop a few weeks ago. Before that, I was having dreams. I wound up crouched in an alley when everything started coming back properly. I thought I was losing my mind.”
Ianto’s fingers tighten slightly around his paper cup. Hearing it from Andy feels like a punch in the chest, and when he inhales to speak he imagines pain. “Oh god, Andy, I’m –”
“Don’t you dare tell me you’re sorry. Fuck’s sake,” Andy snaps and throws his empty cup into a nearby plastic barrel. He crosses his arms as if to protect himself and leans back against the rail. “He overdosed me. I should be dead.”
Ianto steps back and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Look, Andy, it wasn’t my decision.”
Andy scoffs. “Yeah, right. You looked me in the eyes before you walked away. That’s not a decision?”
“No, it isn’t.” Ianto lets out a huff of frustration and drops his own unfinished coffee in the bin. He can’t do this. Not now, and not on top of everything else. “Do you have any idea how much we sacrifice to do what we do? To be Torchwood? You can’t even begin to imagine. There’s so much that no one else can know –”
“Yeah, no one but Rhys Williams and half of Cardiff,” Andy says through gritted teeth.
“Look,” Ianto says, hands on hips. “If you want to have a go at me, just have a go, alright?”
“Why, so you can run off to Jack and have him come after me when I’m done? What do you think he’ll do this time now that he knows your little pills don’t work anymore, hm? Lock me up somewhere? Kill me?” Andy takes a step closer. “I’ll bet he wouldn’t even have to make it look like an accident. All you lot do is march all over Cardiff acting like heroes, but all you do is fuck things up.”
The urge to take a swing is enormous, and Ianto is too tired and far too broken for this conversation right now. He lets his hands fall to his sides, then raises them in a helpless gesture. “What exactly do you want from me, Andy?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Andy asks, and for the first time the hurt is clear in his expression. He looks over his shoulder, as if he’s afraid of being seen before he meets Ianto’s eyes again. “I trusted you, body and soul. I’d have done anything for you. And unlike Rhys fucking Williams, I can keep a secret. All you had to do was ask. The least you could do is take some fucking responsibility.”
With that, Andy turns away and walks along the rail, back toward his empty uniform car.
Ianto stares after him, stunned. He wants, more than anything, to just stop. He wants to fall apart here among the dirt and stones and let his pain bleed out into the earth. “Andy,” he calls out, but Andy ignores him. He sighs, jogs up behind him. “Andy, wait.”
“Piss off,” Andy says, burrowed deep in his coat. He jerks away when Ianto tries to rest a hand on his shoulder.
“Will you just stop for a minute?” Ianto says, frustrated and a little desperate. “Please?”
Andy halts grudgingly and turns around.
“You want me to take responsibility? Alright then. The drug we gave you, the amnesia pill? It comes up on police and SOCO tox screens as B67, but we call it Retcon. The hospitals misidentify it. They’re supposed to.” Ianto searches Andy’s face for any hint of sympathy but finds none. Ianto carries on with his olive branch anyway. “Usually we dispense it to civilians in low doses. Considering the sorts of things we see, most people are happy to forget.”
“And everyone else?”
Ianto shrugs. “Well, they don’t exactly know about it after to complain.”
Andy turns as if to start walking again. Ianto steps into his path.
“You didn’t know,” Ianto says, “and you never would have known that we’d drugged you if I hadn’t got involved with you. You want me to take responsibility? Fine. I should never have invited you up to my flat. I knew the risks and I ignored them.”
“Why?” Andy asks. He looks skeptical, and Ianto doesn’t blame him. Any version of the truth would ring false at this point.
“Because it was good to be with someone of my own,” Ianto says and pulls a face when he realizes how that sounds. Andy doesn’t look impressed either. “One of these days, probably sooner than later, working for Torchwood is going to kill me. You felt like a refuge. You made me feel normal.”
Andy pulls back a bit, raises his eyebrows. “If that’s what passes for normal, I’d hate to see your day-to-day.”
“Yeah,” Ianto says and coughs out a dry, slightly hysterical chuckle. “I imagine you probably would. But Andy, this is what I’m saying. What I put you through? What happened with the Retcon and the secrets? That’s all Torchwood. My whole life is like this. How was I supposed to walk away from you?”
“Easy,” Andy says as he pushes past. “You turn around, put one foot after the other.”
As snubs go, it’s blatant enough that Ianto finds himself at a bit of a loss for words. “I kept your bracelet,” he calls out as Andy unlocks his car door. “I almost threw it into the Bay a dozen times, but I couldn’t.”
Andy pauses and stands stock still, still facing away. Ianto holds his breath.
“Tell me one thing,” Andy says when he turns around. “What happened to Jonah Bevan?”
Ianto licks his lips, looks down, and then looks back up again. One more secret seems only fair. “He’s in a managed care facility. He,” Ianto hesitates, unsure of how to proceed or explain. “He fell through time and space and it shattered him. We can’t fix any of it, but we can keep him safe and comfortable.”
“Alright,” Andy says and leans against his car. “So what happens now? Do I walk away from this whole or do I wake up in hospital?”
“Whole.”
“Do I get my things back?”
“If you want them,” Ianto says. “How should I –”
Andy opens the car door. “Call me in a week. I assume you’ve still got the number.”
Ianto watches the uniform car as it spins out of the gravel patch and back onto the tarmac. He looks after it until it disappears from view, and stands watching in that direction until the fatigue in his bones demands that he move on, drive home, and go to sleep.
# # #
“What’s with the box?” Jack asks through a mouthful of apple. He holds the rest of the fruit in his hand. He likes apples. They’re firm and bright, and a good one tastes as nice as it looks. He’s been eating a lot of things, lately. All sorts of different things. They help him remember.
Ianto looks up. He doesn’t look entirely pleased. “Andy’s things. I figured, as he’s remembered everything, it’s only appropriate to give them back.”
“Andy,” Jack says, and frowns. He knows the name, but can’t place it in context. It’s another empty place that he hadn’t noticed until now.
“Gwen’s old police partner. You let me take him as a lover.”
“Oh,” Jack says, surprised. Ianto hadn’t seemed the type. “Are you still –”
Ianto closes the top of the box, tapes it shut. “No. You Retconned him, actually.”
A faint memory of forcing golden light into a dying man drifts up in Jack’s mind, but it’s fragile. Too thin to hold. He can’t be sure of what he’s remembering. “Did I have a good reason?”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly,” Jack says and sits down on the edge of his desk. The look on Ianto’s face isn’t encouraging.
“I think you had good intentions,” Ianto says and sits next to him.
Jack leans against him slightly. He wants to touch with the whole side of his body. He puts his arm around Ianto’s waist. “But it was a bad decision,” Jack says, understanding but still not quite remembering.
“Very.” Ianto’s skin is warm and smells pleasantly of soap. His suit smells of nothing in particular but warm wool and silk. He makes a contented sound when Jack kisses his shoulder and rubs his face against the cloth.
“If you want him and he’ll have you, take him back,” Jack says. “Whatever it is that he did, I’ve forgotten it.”
A brief flicker of anguish crosses Ianto’s face. It makes Jack sick to see it, but it’s short lived, and Ianto doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge it. “We’ll see,” he says. Ianto stands, kisses Jack’s forehead, and then carries the box out into the Hub.
# # #
Andy stares at what he’s written. He hates the clumsiness of his hand, and the way that the right words refuse to come. This is not progress. He’s been trying off and on for three days to come to some kind of satisfactory conclusion, but so far he’s just going around in circles.
This would all be a hell of a lot simpler if he’d just told Ianto to fuck off, Or – better yet – just kept his distance in the first place.
Frustrated, he tears the page out of his spiral notebook, crumples it, and throws it across the room in the general direction of the bin. The wire that holds the pages in order is already bent and pulled uneven. It’s a mirror of his own distress that Andy refuses steadfastly to acknowledge. He glares down at the blank page, and when nothing worthy occurs to him, he slaps the cover shut and tosses it over onto the coffee table where it lays too flat and too thin. His carpet is littered with crumpled paper.
A walk won’t fix this. A run would only make him feel like he has something to run away from. He turns on the telly and then turns it off again when the first image onscreen is a man in a suit with a gun. Andy gives his notebook an apologetic look. He’ll need to buy a new one tomorrow. It’s the second one he’s bought this week. What he needs is a bloody drink.
The temptation to call Trav and go out for a proper piss-up makes him reach for the phone, but Andy stops just shy of dialing. Trav would do his level best to get them both shattered, which would be fine until Trav started making sarky commentary about Swanson being a bit of a dyke, or Elliot being a closet queer, or whatever. By then Andy knows it would be too late to disengage properly, especially if Trav is already trying to pull for one or both of them. And really, how creepy is that?
Probably not as creepy as shagging someone you’ve memory-wiped, or dumping someone in a park to cover your tracks. And yet, here he is on edge like a kid at Christmas, wondering what will happen when Ianto calls.
If he calls. If they meet. Oh god.
No, he thinks as he lies back and laces his fingers behind his head, best to stay home and try to work this out on his own. It would probably help to know for certain where he actually stands, though to be honest he’s afraid he won’t like the answer. It’s a bit like old maps, and how they sometimes end without explanation. Or, better still, the maps that presumed only the sea. Here be dragons. He snorts at that – it’s a damn hilarious thing to think in Cardiff – but he can’t shake that edge of the world feeling. He isn’t who he thought he was. He’s at the edge of his map. He’s falling off.
# # #
Ianto calls him four days later, seven days exactly since Turnmill. They speak only briefly, and Ianto is uncharacteristically awkward, which Andy finds perversely satisfying. It’s nice for once not to be the only one who’s off-balance. He suggests Forte’s and Ianto agrees. It seems best to do these things on neutral ground.
Even so, Andy arrives nearly thirty minutes early. He doesn’t intend to, but he’s so damn anxious that it’s easier to sit alone in his booth with a cup of tea pretending to read the battered copy of Nightfall he’s brought along with him. When Ianto arrives, Andy tucks the book away because now that he’s got a handle on what Ianto actually does, reading Asimov in front of him feels too daft for words.
Not that he cares what Ianto thinks of him.
“I’ve brought your things,” Ianto says as he lets the box rest on the tabletop. He’s wearing one of his suits, which means he’s probably come straight from work. “It should all be here. Let me know if you think anything’s still missing. Jack can be haphazard.”
“Thanks,” Andy says. He doesn’t open it, just slides it to the end of the table that meets the wall. After a moment he looks up at Ianto, who is still standing next to the bench on the other side of the booth. “You can sit down if you like.”
Ianto looks down at the seat before he sits down across from Andy. He doesn’t say anything right away, so Andy retrieves Ianto’s t-shirt from his backpack and passes it across the table.
“I think this is yours.”
“Yeah. Thanks,” Ianto says as he accepts the shirt. He smiles a little, but the expression is strained, and Andy gets the feeling that there’s another shoe waiting to drop. “Look, there are a couple of things I didn’t put in the box. I didn’t know if you wanted them.”
Andy frowns, but when he recognizes the square of folded notebook paper, he feels his breath desert him. Ianto puts it down in the middle of the tabletop. Neither of them moves.
“We should burn this,” Andy says after a minute. He picks the contract up and turns it between his fingers, handling it gingerly like it’s a piece of broken glass. “I mean, you weren’t planning on, uh –”
“Collecting?” Ianto folds his hands on the tabletop and rubs at the joint at the base of his thumb. He keeps his eyes on his hands. “No. No, I don’t think that will be a problem.”
“Oh. Right. Good.” Andy knows he should be relieved by that answer, and on the whole he is, but he’s also faintly disappointed, and the readiness with which Ianto doesn’t seem to have considered it stings. Andy kicks himself, asks the obvious question. “What about Jack?”
Ianto sits back and shrugs. “Let’s just say that Jack’s out of the equation for now. As far as the two of us are concerned, I’m my own man.”
Andy scoffs and stuffs the note in his pocket. “You’re never your own man, Ianto.”
“No,” Ianto agrees. “I guess I’m not.”
With a gulp, Andy finishes his tea. It’s cold, and he grimaces as he sets the cup down with a gentle thunk. “So what’s the other thing?”
Ianto reaches into his jacket pocket. He lays the bracelet down on the table between them, and while his expression is mostly closed, Andy thinks he can make out something that looks like a hint of reluctance. “Like I said, I never could bring myself to get rid of it.”
If Ianto’s dismissal before had stung, it’s nothing compared to the way that his admission – or, rather, the proof of what he’d said at Turnmill – makes him ache. It also makes him feel curiously light. He picks up the bracelet and looks it over. The scratched steel snap gleams dully against the dark brown leather in the café’s low light.
“Seems a funny thing to give back after everything you took away,” he says as he strokes the leather with his thumb. In his peripheral vision, he notices how closely Ianto is watching him. Andy lays the bracelet over the top of his wrist but doesn’t move to close it.
Across the table, Ianto’s composure breaks slightly. “You don’t have to keep it. I mean, if you don’t want –”
The corner of Andy’s mouth tics up and he holds his arm out across the table. Ianto freezes, and Andy smiles a little more broadly, pleased at having put him in the headlights. “I thought you were supposed to be the expert on what I want,” he says and nods down at his wrist.
Ianto takes Andy’s hand into his own, careful not to dislodge the bracelet from where it rests. “Shows what I know, doesn’t it?”
“Certainly puts a few things in perspective,” Andy says. Ianto’s hands are warm and familiar. It’s good, albeit a lot more public than he’s at all comfortable with. He’d half intended this to be a bluff, but the moment has gone well beyond that now. “You forgave me. You know, when you gave me this. I never understood why.”
Ianto traces a finger along Andy’s hand. “What we did to each other was so well-intentioned and terrible, and it seemed unfair to lay all of it at your feet. I wanted to start again, and you wanted to be worthy.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“Neither was I,” Ianto says with a grimace.
“But you wish you were.” Andy purses his lips and tilts his head slightly. “It’s sort of funny, isn’t it? I want to start again, and you want to be worthy.”
Ianto gives Andy a sharp look, but the anger in it is blunted. “Andy –”
“I’m not joking,” Andy says and nods at his wrist again. It feels good, suddenly, to be so certain of himself, and to do this properly. “I’m offering.”
It takes Ianto a moment to respond. He looks down at Andy’s wrist, swallows, and closes his eyes. “This isn’t going to end well,” he says.
“No, it really isn’t,” Andy says, but smiles. “But does anything?”
“No. Never.” He looks up and gives Andy one last questioning look. When Andy nods, he snaps the bracelet closed and then kisses Andy’s fingers. “To mad endeavor, and the inevitable train wreck.”
Andy laughs.
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Prev (Pt #34) (Warnings: just a little bit of violence and maybe some language.
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