Work Text
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I will not ask you where you came from
I will not ask, and neither should you
honey, just put your sweet lips on my lips
we should just kiss like real people do
---It's been a while since they've witnessed Gwen at the height of her righteousness. The main difference, this time, is that her point tugs at Ianto's conscience in a way Gwen's crusades rarely do.Victims of the rift, vanished in an instant, swept away by an undertow to no knowing where or when, no trace of their passing – with regards to them, Jack is right. There's nothing Torchwood can do. But for those left behind? Ianto has already been flotsam abandoned in the wake of a path of alien destruction once. For a long, long time he would have preferred to be one of ones who had died in that path, rather than only taking a glancing blow and reeling away as a wreck, ruined for the real world, overwhelmed with too much knowledge and too little control.Owen is also right, that the five of them in this room are not the help that the rift-bereaved really need. The five of them are a hammer, and the rift is an unruly nail: they're suited for this job and this job only. Civilian rift-widows don't need to be exposed to their world of guns and coverups and constant crisis. Gwen wants to make everything all right for every grieving mother out there, and she can't, and she shouldn't try, and that's her problem to deal with on her own time.But there is more they could do. Torchwood nearly killed Ianto, but it also saved him. He knows it's capable of healing people, in the right circumstances.Gwen's rant peaks, and Jack snaps at her to shut it all down before he strides away.When Ianto murmurs “I'll talk to him” to a stormy Gwen, he truly means it.Behind him, Tosh, Owen, and Gwen keep arguing, but Ianto is focused on Jack's back, shoulders tense as a stone wall under his shirt. Ianto reaches out and touches his elbow, and Jack turns back, not quite meeting Ianto's direct gaze.“No,” Jack says immediately.“It won't hurt to tell her about the facility,” Ianto says quietly.“She has to let it go now,” Jack says, brooking no argument. “She can't do anything about it. The further down this rabbit hole she goes, the more it wastes everyone's time.”“That's unfair,” Ianto murmurs, keeping his tone mild. “She's capable of recognizing that she can't improve on what you've set up. She'll let it go, if you show her.”“She shouldn't be questioning me,” Jack snaps.“We aren't military,” Ianto points out. “You shouldn't have recruited an investigator if you can't handle her investigating.”Jack's jaw twitches, and Ianto recognizes that he's made all the point he's going to make. Jack is shutting down, closing off.“You need to tell her,” Ianto tries one last time, but he can't keep the sadness of resignation out of his own voice.“No,” Jack says, and turns away. He isn't angry, Ianto thinks. He's a lot of things, but not truly angry.Ianto looks back at Gwen, sitting alone at the table, and sighs.-Tosh leaves early, allergic to conflict. She seeks Ianto out – not quite up to facing Jack yet – and makes hurried apologies. He tells her she did good work, not to feel bad, to give Jack a little time. She's mollified by the time she slips out, her shoulders less tense.Gwen is long gone, no goodbyes. At some point Owen vanishes as well, although it's harder to pinpoint his absence anymore, since his presence doesn't have a lot of its old markers – empty crisp packets, crumbs and mess, half a cold coffee with a used scalpel propped across the top of the mug, a bit of stray tissue on the floor in the lav, water speckled all over the sink and mirror from the way he shook his hands after washing up. All gone. Now he's either within sight, or he isn't, and if he isn't for long enough, then Ianto can assume he's gone home.So Ianto is standing at a workstation amending a catalogue of weevil sightings to include the one he chased with Jack earlier today, and failed to catch, because of getting distracted behind a church. Ianto's been mildly edgy ever since, because of his own refusal to let Jack scrape his only-just-repaired pinstripe wool against the old, snagging brickwork. Jack had allowed the refusal, but once Ianto had Jack pressed against the wall instead, Jack had pinned his hands at his sides and whispered for ten solid minutes into Ianto's ear about Jack's own storied experiences with churches. And then he'd let go, and they'd gone ahead with weevil tracking. Sort of. Mostly.Ianto hears Jack approaching for entire minutes, clanging down the stairs and pausing to do this or that, pacing around the room to check on stations, leaning over the autopsy rail to look for Owen. Ianto doesn't look around, just finishes the details of the log and saves his work. He's closing the file when Jack's arms wrap around him, Jack's chest pressed to his back, Jack's breath on his ear. "Due diligence," Jack murmurs."Do you want to go back out and try again?""Do you?""No," says Ianto. "It looked like an adolescent, anyway. Hardly a threat.""Want to go back to the church?"Ianto sighs through his nose, audibly enough to make his point.Jack nuzzles under Ianto's ear, lips to skin, not quite pressing, tongue a warm, tiny dot tracing a cool, damp line."Why are you tasting me like a lizard," Ianto murmurs. He opens the quarterly budget and idly scans over it. It'll be due in a couple of days. There's not a decimal point out of place that he can fix, but he looks anyway."Ianto," Jack sighs, gust of breath hot on Ianto's neck, then cold as it dissipates.Ianto reflects. This afternoon, the way he'd spoken to Jack, the way he'd pushed at Jack's boundaries – it would have been unthinkable even as little as six months ago. Jack hadn't clenched a fist, bared his teeth, stormed away, given Ianto the silent treatment. He hadn't resented Ianto's objections. Hadn't blamed the messenger. And at no point had Ianto felt like he needed to walk on eggshells around Jack after, full of silent obeisance for challenging Jack's word. They had disagreed as equals.It's progress. And Jack idly unbuttoning Ianto's shirt, definitely kissing his neck now, that's also progress. Jack's easy stance behind him, and the tone of his voice, don't suggest to Ianto that he's resentful, or that the earlier disagreement has put even the remotest damper on the playful mood he obviously woke up in this morning.Ianto shifts his weight slightly, dragging his back against Jack's shirt, pressing his hips back firmly. Jack makes a pleased hum."I need to finish this budget," Ianto lies, and they both know it's a lie, so Ianto can feel the curl of Jack's grin against his neck. Ianto drops his hand to his trouser pocket and pulls out the stopwatch, metal warmed by contact with his leg. "Five minutes," he says, thumb poised."Of just standing here?" Jack asks, propping his chin on Ianto's shoulder."How distracted do you want me to be?" Ianto chides."Infinitely, indefinitely."Ianto leans his head back a bit, cheek to Jack's. "In five minutes," he says, "I come looking for you."Jack breathes out a quiet 'ah.' A game they've played before. "And you'll have...""Fifteen minutes to find you," Ianto says."Winner gets worshipped," Jack says.Ianto snorts. "You won't let the church thing go, will you?""I've never let anything go in my life," says Jack, cupping a firm hand around Ianto's burgeoning interest to prove his point.Ianto makes a disgruntled sound and clicks the button. "Four fifty-nine," he tells Jack. The warm wall of pressure disappears from behind him, and he stares determinedly at the budget report while he listens to hurried rustling, the thunks of boots hitting the grating, the soft tread of bare feet on the metal floor. He hadn't even said the word naked, but after that first time, when a challenge to Ianto's knowledge of the vault layouts had caused great affront mid-striptease, and a wager was set to prove who knew all the secrets of the tunnels best – well, Jack barely needs an excuse. Non-naked hide and seek apparently no longer exists in Jack's vocabulary.When the stopwatch has two minutes left to go and the Hub is echoing with silence, Ianto closes down all the open files and sets the monitoring software to passive mode. He spends the last minute picking up Jack's clothes, folding them and setting them aside on the sofa behind Tosh's station.He resets the stopwatch; he has fifteen minutes but it'll take him eight at most to find Jack, who always underestimates Ianto's sensitivity to the scent trail he leaves behind. Inside Tosh's top left drawer, he finds a pile of discarded devices, tech too primitive or outdated for use as anything but a source of parts. She'd tossed the old GPS unit in there last week. It's still perfectly functional, just a bit too human for Tosh's alien-tech-spoiled standards.Ianto hesitates for a moment after entering the coordinates on the small device. He could wipe this. He has three minutes yet before he needs to move. He could let Jack have the final word, and Gwen fume and sulk, and Tosh suffer like a child who doesn't know how to please both parents when they're having a domestic. He feels a tiny stab of guilt at his relapse into using Jack's eager libido to lure his attention away while Ianto undermines his authority. The right thing to do here isn't clear-cut, but it rarely ever is.Except, unlike before, Ianto hasn't suggested a game to Jack just to keep Jack distracted. He's suggested a game because he damn well wants to play it. Ten minutes remaining, and Ianto might lose track of the pheromone trail, and given Jack's promised prize, Ianto definitely wants to win.So he makes the call, knowing he won't be able to take his decision back, but for once he feels all right about it. For once, after so many years of uncertainty, he feels reasonably confident that he has done the right thing. He seals the GPS in an evidence packet and leaves it on Gwen's desk, figuring she'll find it in the morning.-“Oh, God!”Or maybe she'll find it now.-Jack always cheats, but he cheats in a new way every time, which makes it difficult to plan for. It's one of the things Ianto enjoys, maybe more than he should, because he probably shouldn't encourage Jack's behavior. But Jack, being Jack, also very much enjoys being punished for his cheating.Last time, Jack had cheated by going directly to the monitor room and making himself at home to enjoy the CCTV show of Ianto methodically searching the vaults. Walking along the line of the containment cells to check that Jack hadn't holed up in one, weevils following his every bare-ass naked movement with their beady black eyes, had been the last straw for Ianto that evening. Unfortunately, spanking Jack did worse than nothing to discourage him from inventing new ways to break the spirit, if not the letter, of the agreed terms of any given game.Ianto had, of course, won this round. Jack had finally figured out that Ianto could literally sniff him out and had tried a dunk under the water tower as though Ianto could be fooled like a bloodhound. The barest edges of damp footprints on concrete told another story. Jack, lounging on a spare gurney in storeroom seven, hadn't seemed particularly sorry to have lost. His cheat, Ianto thought, was definitely the surplus ultrasound gel he'd already lubed himself up with. After breaking one of the wheels on the spare gurney and accidentally knocking all the contents off a low shelf, Ianto felt considerably less on-edge and more relaxed, but not particularly worshipped.Getting dressed again lasted exactly long enough for the argument to ensue about how Jack had not executed his reward in the spirit in which it was promised, and for Ianto to go into the hothouse to try to straighten up some pots Jack had knocked awry in his earlier search for a hiding spot, and for Jack to wrap Ianto up in his arms and start mouthing at his neck, promising that the night wasn't over yet, mass was still in session.Then, interruption.And now, Ianto's phone, which he had frankly forgotten was still in his pocket, buzzes at him while he's in the middle of making a dose of much-needed caffiene if he's to keep up with Jack for any greater length of time.Gwen, needing affirmation. Needing a co-conspirator. Ianto blows her off kindly enough, knowing she doesn't need any more help. And it was so unfair of her, really, to wheedle Tosh into keeping secrets for her, even if only for an afternoon; Ianto can't be so easily bought with a sweet voice.Jack's voice shouting his name to the rafters is not particuarly sweet.Coffee finished, Ianto leaves his phone on the cart and heads upstairs, pushing into Jack's office. “You'll wake all of cryostorage with that,” Ianto tells Jack, settling back into Jack's chair.“Well, you just walk off and leave me here, what am I supposed to do?” Jack rattles his metaphorical chains. Actually, he's sitting in relative comfort on the sofa, feet clamped to the floor with a pair of alien gravity shackles that Jack has assurred Ianto are safe to touch bare skin when activated, arms bound firmly behind his back with Ianto's tie. Ianto's tie is the only thing on his body that could technically qualify as clothing.“Not shout for attention like a child throwing a tantrum?” Ianto suggests, taking a drink and flipping idly through papers on Jack's desk.Jack huffs, throwing his head back against the sofa. “I thought you wanted your proper prize for winning. I can't worship you from over here.”“Of course you can,” Ianto says mildly, pulling open drawers and examining the contents. A whole drawer of different kinds of lube, from all sorts of species of origin, does not surprise Ianto one whit.“Are you looking for something?” Jack asks dryly.“I think it's under the bed,” Ianto says.Jack makes a throaty noise of recognition, since there's only one thing that's gotten lost under the bed recently. “Let me go get it,” he says, squirming.“Nice try.” Ianto gets up, climbs down the ladder and reemerges after a brief search with one item that looks like a many-faceted lipstick tube and another oblong, ridged disc. Ianto raises an eyebrow at Jack, holding up the small tube. Jack whines. It's exaggerated for show, Ianto thinks, but not by as much as Jack would like Ianto to believe.Ianto kneels in front of the sofa, spreading his palms up the insides of Jack's thighs until his fingertips meet damp, tacky skin, still wet with ultrasound gel and smeared come. Jack needs filth today. Sometimes he needs calm, cleanliness, and order, a slow lovemaking and a quick cleanup. This isn't one of those times. He's pliant in Ianto's hands, muscles thrumming with the base animal need to be used hard. If Ianto could leave a mark on him that would stick, Jack would be demanding bruises to wear like jewelry.The tube is smaller than any plug and Ianto presses it inside all the way, not worried about losing it. If anything, it can be hard to keep in, so Ianto follows it with a couple of fingers, rubbing at Jack's still-slick walls, pulling at his rim. Jack writhes against the couch, twisting his arms, knocking his knees into Ianto's ribs. “Yeah,” Jack sighs, and moans when Ianto licks his cock from root to tip, tongue wide and flat. “Yeah, fuck, who's worshipping who here,” and then Jack laughs to himself, and Ianto thumbs along the first ridge of the remote in his other hand.Jack spasms against the sofa and Ianto removes his fingers, wiping them undecorously on Jack's thigh, before retreating to the chair behind the desk and picking up his coffee mug. Ianto thumbs the remote up to the next setting without waiting, and Jack groans. Ianto has had the hard-light projector in his own arse on more than one occasion, because Jack, being Jack, had long ago hacked and reprogrammed the innocent alien carpentry multitool so that its eight settings project simulations of various species' genitalia. Ones with protruding bits, anyway. (Except Jack has assurred him that the species represented by setting 5 doesn't actually use that tentacle for sex acts, and that the lady of said species with whom Jack had been acquainted had always been bemused by Jack's fascination with the appendage.)Ianto brushes his thumb over the ridge for setting 5, and Jack's jaw goes slack.“Look at me,” Ianto says. Jack sucks in a deep breath and opens his half-closed, rolled-up eyes to direct his gaze towards Ianto. “Worship is an interesting word, coming from you,” says Ianto, placing the remote on the desk and wrapping his hands around his mug. “You mean it interchangably with savor, I think. Or else you mean to imply that you want no requital, that you want to be the font of another person's pleasure, an object that gives but cannot take.”“This is the best Freudian couch roleplay I've ever accidentally stumbled into,” Jack says, smirking.“So this is you worshipping me, now,” Ianto says, “because I'm taking a great deal of pleasure from making you this uncomfortable.”Jack rocks his hips against the sofa, pushing the hard-light projector around as much as he can without any real thrusting power. None of the simulations move very much – the device's capacity for programming is limited – but setting 5 has a wriggle and squirm animation that loops every twenty seconds or so. “I'm not uncomfortable,” Jack says, grinning, leaning his head back and watching Ianto with lowered eyelids.Ianto smiles back, benign. The tentacle writhing against Jack's prostate has nothing to do with Ianto making him uncomfortable, and the fact that Jack denies any discomfort is proof that Ianto is succeeding.“Have you ever considered a physical location sacred?” Ianto asks idly, drinking.Jack makes a mildly disgruntled sound.“Or a representative location, perhaps. A particular gathering of people, regardless of the location.”Jack is silent, and his gaze locked on Ianto has become somewhat baleful.“That place,” Ianto murmurs, leaning forward in the chair. He has an idea of where Jack might consider sacred – a certain blue box. “Where you worship. It means more than savoring a moment, doesn't it? You feel the need to respect it. Something about it humbles you. The absence of your own ego in that space is about more than just a denied orgasm, or sexual masochism. It frightens you, to be undone so completely. And fear and arousal feel so, so similar.”Jack's tongue touches his lips. His nostrils flare slightly. Ianto is well under his skin now, and his resistance is failing.“So I get my prize, Jack,” Ianto says quietly, standing up and moving around the desk to lean against the front, arms folded, one foot crossed over the other ankle. “Because I want you to imagine me in that space. Make it as real as you can, and I know how vivid that imagination of yours can be. I'm there, inside you, holding your arms back, pulling your hair until your throat is too tight to breathe, making you watch the holiest place you can imagine while I use you to desecrate it.”The bloom of physical change over Jack is amazing to watch. His breathing is harsh, legs trembling, arms idly writhing against the bindings of the tie. His pupils are blown so wide his eyes are more black than blue. His cock is flush to his stomach, jumping a little with his heartbeat and the idle pace of his imagination; at the word desecrate, a clear droplet slides down, catching the lamplight.Ianto reaches back and picks up the remote again, examining it. He slides his finger slowly along two ridges while holding a sensor on the back, which causes a gradiant shift from one setting to the next. The tentacle will be solidifying and flaring, thicker at the base, squirming with a mass of cilia at the end. They have little suckers, and tend to cling and pop against the prostate. Jack's breath catches on a low moan.“The whole of existence and time and wonder laid out before you and all you can think of is me,” Ianto tells Jack, watching his chest flush mottled red, more precome drooling from his cock. “Even without touching you, all you can feel is me. That's the worship I want for my prize. You need to be used for my pleasure, Jack? Then let me use you. No hard fuck could leave you as filthy as this. Ruin something holy with the image of me.”Jack is panting hard, jaw tight, and an involuntary tear slides from the corner of his eye. His whole body is taught as a bowstring. Ianto is giddy and lightheaded with power. He hadn't necessarily meant to take it this far, but now that he's here, he can't back away. He steps away from the desk, towards Jack, softly kneeling in front of the sofa, not quite close enough to be really between Jack's legs. Jack watches him, fixated, tongue touching his lips.“Can you come like this?” Ianto asks honestly. He isn't going to make a demand that would only frustrate Jack. Jack has come untouched before, but only from a deep, grinding fuck, not a barely-mobile, passive toy.Jack licks his lips. “Keep talking,” he whispers.“You cheat,” Ianto says. “Because you want the punishment. But you always set the terms of punishment, don't you? Ruining your body is fun, but it has no real consequences. If I tie you too tight, the marks heal before you feel them properly. Come washes off. But I can leave one kind of mark that will stick, Jack. When you think of your holy place, there's an innocence in that feeling, a seed of innocence you don't remember how to feel about anything else. I've got my finger on that seed. One bruise, that's all. The shadow of me that you'll think of when you remember that place.”Each inhale is shuddering, his hips shoving down for all he's worth, mouth twisted in a wrecked grimace. His length twitches hard, smacking his stomach, and Ianto thinks he's as close to the edge as words alone can get him.Ianto leans forward, puts gentle hands on the insides of Jack's thighs, and gusts a warm breath over his straining cock.Jack comes with a scream, body contorting against the binding points holding him in place, leg muscles jumping under Ianto's hands. His release coats his stomach, length spasming with every gasped half-breath. Ianto shuffles a little closer on his knees and takes Jack in his mouth, gentling his tongue along the oversensitive skin to soothe it, thumbs massaging into the crease at the tops of Jack's thighs. A final, weak twitch, and one last salty drop that Ianto licks away, and Jack unravels bonelessly into the cushions, a ruin of sweat and ache and stickiness, too wiped to even push Ianto's cruel mouth away.Ianto releases Jack with a slick pop, pushes his thighs apart to retrieve the hard-light toy. It's still on the cilia-ended pseudopod setting, so between the wriggling and the slipperiness it takes Ianto a couple of tries to get it out and turn it off. The translucent, faintly glowing shape of the projection flicks away, leaving only the small projector tube, which Ianto sets aside on the floor. He shuts off the power on the gravity shackles, too, but Jack doesn't move to lift his feet out of them.“Jack?” Ianto asks quietly, moving up to sit on the sofa next to him. Jack's eyes are closed, his breathing evening out. “All right?”Jack makes a faint affirmative noise.“Too far?”Jack's lips curl into an exhausted grin.“Not possible, right,” Ianto says dryly. “Sit up a bit.”Jack groans complaint, but Ianto manages to push him forward enough to get at his arms and untie his wrists. Abandoning the ripped and twisted tie on the floor by the projector, Ianto settles himself against the back of the couch and slumps his unresisting lover back against his chest, leaning his face on Jack's shoulder and kissing the sweat off his skin.“The fucking mouth you've got on you, Ianto Jones,” Jack says at last, hoarse.Ianto huffs, turning his nose into Jack's neck.“Do you feel rewarded?” Jack asks, leaning into the touch. He slides his hand up the inseam of Ianto's trousers, stopping short at the middle of his thigh.“Entirely,” Ianto says, picking Jack's hand up and twining their fingers together, before trailing both hands over the mess of Jack's chest and stomach. Jack makes an appreciative noise, rolling his head to the side to nudge Ianto into a sideways kiss. A little twisting and leaning, and Jack gets an arm around the back of Ianto's neck, and then the kiss is direct and deep and intense, Jack pouring a jumble of emotions out in the only way he really knows how.After a while, when they've slowed to barely more than melting together and sharing breaths, Jack murmurs, “You're right about Flat Holm.”Ianto's mouth twitches into something intended to be a smile, which feels more like a grimace.“Whatever you did, it's okay,” Jack says, watching him through half-lidded eyes.Ianto lets out a long, slow breath. “None of – this – was a punishment about that. None of this was because of a work argument. You know that, right?”Jack shakes his head slightly. “I know, I know. But it's can't be entirely untangled. You knew what I needed, and I only needed it because of the kind of day it was.” He's silent for a moment, eyes closed. “What did you tell her?”“Location,” Ianto says. “She'd have found it on her own.”“Yeah,” Jack sighs. He leans his head into Ianto's chest. “She would have. I'll go out tomorrow to meet her.”Ianto runs a hand through Jack's hair, over the back of his head. “Don't think about it now,” he says. “Let it go.”“Thanks,” Jack breathes.Ianto gives him time. Plenty of it. Too much of it, probably. He tips his head down, trying to see Jack's face. “Are you asleep?” No response. “Jack.” Beat. “Jack, my arm's gone numb.”Jack grumbles.“Jack, I'm still dressed, and you're filthy.”“Whose fault is that,” Jack grouses under his breath.But Ianto eventually gets him up (only staggering a little) and down the ladder and showered and horizontal, and himself stripped down somewhere in between the rest of it, so that when Jack crowds and bullies Ianto into being the little spoon, he's no longer sticky and only smells of mild soap and warm skin. Jack wraps an arm around Ianto's middle, sighs heavily against his shoulder.“Sure you feel rewarded enough?” Jack mumbles.“Jack,” Ianto chides.“Mm.” Jack nuzzles his skin. “Wake-up blowjob in eight hours, then.”Ianto rolls his eyes to himself before closing them. “Go to sleep, or at least let me sleep.”Jack squeezes him faintly and falls silent, his breathing evening out over the next few minutes. He may sleep longer than usual, Ianto thinks. Five hours, maybe even six. Ianto drained something vaguely poisonous out of him tonight.Ianto isn't sure he'll ever have the courage to ask Jack if the bruise he left was a lasting one. Maybe it was just dirty talk, something taboo and titillating enough to get Jack off and nothing more. But for a little while, at least, Ianto dares to imagine that whenever Jack touches that place in his mind, he'll feel a little ache, and think of Wales.