sam_storyteller (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-17 03:23 pm
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-17 03:23 pm
Your Face Is Turned, 7/9
Title: Your Face Is Turned
Part: 7 of 9
Rating: R
Summary: Lo Boeshane has a promising career ahead of him as he enters his first year of Fleet Officer Training, but the war is still with him and life at Quantico Station can be difficult. Meanwhile, Ianto Jones is just trying to figure out why the Doctor kidnapped him to the fifty-first century and why Jack abandoned him at a school for the Fleet's military elite. He suspects it may have something to do with Lo, but his attempts to help the troubled young veteran may damage his own timestream beyond repair.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Blithe looked gleeful when Ianto asked her to find him somewhere on the seaside for him to rent for the two weeks of leave.
"You're going off with Boeshane, aren't you?" she asked. "He likes beaches. That'll be good for him. Plus he's gorgeous. You and Boeshane, hmm." Her eyes glazed over a little.
"Seaside," Ianto reminded her. She shook herself out of her little daydream as he continued. "Lo said there were some agricultural planets a system over."
"Well, it's short notice, but agritourism is on the decline, shouldn't be hard to find you something. City or country?"
"Country," Ianto said firmly, thinking about Lo's ideas on nudity and beaches. Blithe's fingers danced over her porterminal.
"Yep, couple of leads. Give me a few hours and I'll memo you the coordinates. Booking a flight, or is Lo flying?"
"I don't know." Ianto thought about it, couldn't really decide. He had the money for the trip, no doubt; his salary was generous and he spent very little of it. On the other hand, Lo might prefer privacy.
"I'll ask him," she said, patting his hand as she turned to go.
"No pumping him about us," he called after her.
"Wouldn't dream of it!" she called back, which of course meant she was going to ask Lo everything, and Lo would probably tell her in graphic detail. Well, Lo would enjoy that, and it wasn't as if he and Blithe hadn't been reasonably avant-garde in Cardiff.
He wondered how people kept up this kind of thing in this century. It was amazing everyone wasn't absolutely knackered.
There was a strange atmosphere on the station, in those final two days; a mixture of elation that humanity had conquered what had once seemed an insurmountable foe, and a sense of loss, the subtle pervasive feeling that finally it was permissible to mourn the dead. Students smiled more but spoke less, and joyful reports that someone's brother or mother or lover was coming home were tempered with respect for those whose loved ones never would. Someone stole flowers from the station's garden and left them in front of the plaque to the fallen that stood just outside Admiral Cullen's office door. One of the instructors proudly showed off photographs of his daughter, who had been a wing captain at the Cineve Blockade and would be home in a matter of weeks, and just as proudly displayed a holo of his wife, who had died in the Boe sector scrums of two years earlier.
Even Lo seemed more cheerful than usual, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Ianto had fretted about him, but if he was faking his smiles he was doing a good job of it, and he came into the library at the end of the day bursting to tell Ianto a dirty story about how he and Myles had made out in the bath. Lo had a bizarre passion for bathtubs that Ianto found baffling. He was certain Jack had never been so fascinated by them.
"Are you packed?" Lo asked eagerly, all but bouncing on his toes. "What are you bringing?"
"Not much," Ianto said. "Clothing -- " Lo snorted. " -- a book, my porterminal. Why, should I bring something else?"
"Wait till you see what I got off the engineering students," Lo said, leaning in conspiratorially. Ianto gave him an alarmed look. "It's okay, you'll love it. I've loaded my gear already and I'm signed out for leave, so we can go when you close up."
Ianto looked around. The library was empty, and it wasn't likely anyone would come in the next half-hour. Lo gave him a wicked grin.
"Or I could blow you behind your desk," he offered.
"Not necessary, thank you," Ianto said, though he considered it for a split second first. "I'll close up. There's a bag on my bed, will you fetch it?"
Lo ran off to grab his luggage while Ianto powered down the monitors and made sure the library was secure. He put out a hand to take the bag but Lo ignored that, so Ianto locked the doors and followed him down the hallway towards the shuttle bay.
Lo slung Ianto's bag in the back, climbed into the pilot's seat, and waved Ianto into the copilot's chair.
"You know I don't actually know how to work this, right?" Ianto said, staring at the dials and manual feeds.
"It's really just for combat flight," Lo told him. "So, we'll exit high, do a slingshot around Mars, that'll take us on a thirty degree trajectory above the asteroid belt, and from there it's a straight shot until we hit Eden Six. We're bound for Eden Two. Nice and warm," he added, hands moving confidently over the controls. "By the way, you are banned from picking the music."
"What?" Ianto asked, mildly outraged.
"Unless you pick good stuff," Lo informed him.
"Like what?" Ianto demanded. Lo plugged his porterminal into the console and flicked a switch.
Come fly with me, come fly
Let's fly away
Just say the word and we'll beat the birds
Down to Acapulco bay...
Ianto rolled his eyes. Lo hummed along with it as he went through preflight, and then as the bay doors opened and he lifted up the little craft, he began to sing along.
Come fly with me, let's fly
Let's fly away
If you can use some exotic booze
There's a bar in far Bombay
There was an odd slur to his words that worried Ianto for a minute, until he realised he wasn't hearing a translation of what Lo said -- Lo was singing along in English (Late English, his memory supplied) without knowing quite what the words meant or how to say them. Like Owen used to do with Tosh's J-pop.
Then Lo pulled the control yoke back slightly and flicked another switch, and the stars did a streaky thing, like out of Star Wars. Lo didn't skip a beat; Ianto felt his heart speed up slightly before he realised he was bracing for an acceleration that had already happened.
Lo cast a sidelong grin at him. "Once I'm around Mars in another hour or so, I'll set the destination coordinates and it'll fly itself. This time tomorrow, we'll be there."
"Well, the scenery's not very interesting," Ianto said, although in some respects it was. He could see Earth shrinking behind them on one of the scroll screens, and there was a little pointer on the front screen blinking where Mars would eventually appear. Mars. Another whole planet, Earth's nearest cousin, an industrial center and shipping port. Beyond that the Eden system, first of the settled colonies outside the home system, with seven inhabitable planets crowding together around a sun just a little older than Earth's. This time tomorrow he'd be standing on an alien planet.
Lo had been born on an alien planet, way out near the edge of civilised space. He'd fought his war there and been carried on a space cruise ship from there back to the origin, the home system, and hadn't even cared much to see where his ancestors came from. Quantico, Cardiff, Eden Two; it was all one to Lo, but to Ianto it needed careful thought and examination.
"Smile, Mr. Jones," Lo said, and Ianto looked up to find him giving Ianto his own very uncertain smile. "We're on leave."
Ianto smiled back, and Lo's brightened. "So we are."
***
They could actually have shaved a few hours off their flight time if they'd left the home system a little sooner, but Lo wanted to show off for Ianto, and it paid off big time. As they zipped just over the leading edge of the asteroid belt, Ianto sucked in a breath and leaned forward as if he could actually see out of the ship. Lo smiled over his instruments and let Ianto look, while he engaged the autopilot and proximity beacons. A ship of this size didn't have a lot of room to spare, but he didn't think they needed a very big bed, and if it had a food heater and a toilet that was all Lo required. He'd lived rough in a rustbucket before.
Ianto was still staring as Lo stood up, stretched, and edged into the back of the craft to rummage for a snack. He had plans for leave, extensive plans. First thing, he was going to go down to the water and go swimming; then he was going to build a beach fire and probably try to get Ianto out of his clothes, and then go to bed, and the next day, apparently there were farms nearby, they could get good cheese and Bovv so fresh it was still bleeding, and he heard there was fishing. If he could get his hands on a javelin he could catch fish, which would definitely be impressive and cool.
He heard Ianto get up and turned to wave him into the back, offering him a sweet-curl from the bag he'd brought with him. Ianto sat down on the narrow bed and took a bite, studying it.
"We called these palmieres," Ianto said, and Lo rolled the word around in his mouth. Palmiere. He couldn't wait until he was a Time Agent and would have a translation implant like Ianto probably had. Or maybe Ianto was just good with languages. Either way, Lo was hungry to actually comprehend most of what he heard in the songs, instead of just reading the translations.
Lo sat down next to him, thigh against Ianto's, and put his free hand on Ianto's leg.
"I swear to god," Ianto said, turning to him in amusement. "I never thought I'd have the opportunity to kiss anyone in deep space."
"Really? Is it different somehow?" Lo asked, honestly curious.
"It is for me," Ianto said. Lo kissed him, sweet pastry and sugar on his lips.
"Stay there," he said, and went to the opposite wall, activating the scroll screen. Outside wasn't much of interest, a few stars and the black expanse of empty space between systems, but Ianto's eyes widened a little.
Lo knelt in front of Ianto and ran his hands up his thighs, smiling.
"You're...almost dangerous," Ianto said, sounding like he was torn between a laugh and a moan. Lo ignored him and undid the snaps on his trousers, pressing his face to Ianto's stomach. Ianto's hands cupped his head, sliding through his hair, almost cradling it, and Lo felt -- safe, here in a ship he understood, leaving the home system behind. There was more certainty here. At least, for him.
They spent most of the flight in bed. Lo got up from time to time to check on the instruments, and Ianto cooked them a few meals in the little heater, but for the most part Lo unwound -- and slowly unwound Ianto -- from months of school and long endless corridors and chafing against something he couldn't even name.
But the war was done, and classes at least for a little while. Ianto made such lovely noises when Lo kept him on the edge, and when he tumbled over it.
Ianto was asleep when the pilot's alert went off, letting Lo know that they were passing Eden Six and he should take the yoke again. He slid out from the bed carefully and walked naked to the pilot's chair, checking their speed. He dressed, not bothering with his boots or collar, and was just sliding them into a sweet orbit when Ianto stirred.
"Almost there," he called over his shoulder. Ianto sat up, eyes dark and vivid from sleep. "You might want to put some pants on."
"Mm," Ianto agreed, easing out of bed. "God, it's green."
Lo gazed down at one of the major landmasses of Eden Two, swirled with blue where land met ocean. "Like what you see?"
"It's strange," Ianto said, buttoning his shirt as he slid into the copilot's seat. Lo began the sequence for atmospheric entry. "I'm used to seeing Earth's continents."
"Early terraforming wasn't very regular," Lo observed, peering at it. "You should see the factory farm planets. Grids for continents."
Ianto was silent as they penetrated Eden Two's atmosphere and Lo guided them over the northeastern continent. The coordinates Steward had given him -- in exchange for a few juicy details about him and Ianto -- put them on the east coast, just far enough above the equator to avoid the hottest weather. A house on the coast, she'd said. Walk to the water from your door. What will you two do with each other for ten days?
Lo had a few ideas.
The closest landing pad was miles from the house waiting for them and it was getting dark when they landed, but the obliging farm-manager who owned the house met them and gave them a lift, speeding down the dusty rural roads and skewing around corners in a way Lo deeply appreciated in his wingheaded soul. The farm-manager gave them a key to the house, told them there was a hoverbus to the nearest town that came past twice a day, and left them to it with a wink at Ianto, who had apparently been cast in the role of Wealthy Man Taking A Young Lover.
Lo didn't even wait to go inside. From the front porch of the small, rather rundown-looking house, he could see the waves crash on the beach. As soon as the car was gone, he began stripping off his clothes, ignoring Ianto's lifted eyebrow and leaving his bag on the porch. He ran down to the beach naked, crashed into the sea, and dove under a wave, blowing salt water out his nose as he surfaced. It smelled like home.
Ianto was standing on the beach, still fully dressed, watching him with a small smile on his face.
"It's warm!" Lo called.
"It's eight at night," Ianto called back.
"So? They don't switch the ocean off when it gets dark," Lo yelled. He ducked underwater again as another wave crashed, letting it drag him back towards the shore a little ways. It was quiet and dark, under the wave, until the edge broke and pushed him along with a roar. "If you don't want to swim, go inside, I'll come up when I'm done."
"I can wait," Ianto said, leaning back against the scrubby trunk of a beach-tree. Lo amused himself testing his speed against the waves, diving to try and catch small dappled fish with his fingers, seeing if he still knew how to do a handstand. The water was rougher than on Boeshane, but a wave was a wave.
He finally looped back in towards shore, heaving himself out of the water and shaking his hair to get the excess out of it. Ianto was still there, sitting below the tree now, his boots and socks neatly arranged next to him, shirtsleeves rolled up.
For just a second, the war had never happened; he was fourteen again, bathing in the surf on a beach on the peninsula, and here was a stranger, very much worth interest, worth the effort perhaps to get him out of all those clothes. He offered his hand, water dripping off his fingertips, and Ianto took it and let himself be pulled up.
"Come up to the house with me," Lo said, "and let me get you salty."
Ianto laughed. "That's a terrible line."
Lo pressed his thumb to Ianto's lips and eventually they opened, sucking the tip in. He let Ianto taste the ocean on him, the clean salt tang, and then pulled back, offering his hand instead. Ianto took it and let himself be led back to the house Lo hadn't even seen the inside of yet.
He could always build a beach fire tomorrow.
***
Eden Two was a planet without pollution, or at least without the sort of pollution Ianto had been accustomed to, hadn't even really noticed, on Earth. The water was clear and clean, much less perilous to swim in than the cloudy water back home. He let Lo coax him into it mainly because the water pressure in the little rented house wasn't very good for showers and Lo assured him nobody was around for miles.
The first few days were quiet, sedate, mostly consumed with swimming and coming up to the house to eat something and then going back down to the beach. Somewhere Lo found a sharp short spear he called a fishing javelin, and Ianto watched from the beach as Lo hunted with it, way out in the water, a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Still, usually when he came back he had at least a fish or two in a net bag tied to his wrist, and it wasn't as if it was a hardship to watch a naked seventeen-year-old hunting in the waves.
Wik said that the peninsula of the major landmass of Boeshane had been famous for its fishing, before the war. Ianto imagined that Lo had grown up learning to swim before he could walk, playing on the beaches, bathing in the surf. A nice childhood -- nicer than Ianto's, perhaps -- at least until the Flyers had come. And then, no more childhood at all.
"What are you thinking?" Lo asked, casually gutting and skinning fish as he sat crosslegged across a fire from Ianto one afternoon. He was naked; Ianto didn't think Lo had actually put proper trousers on since they'd arrived. Then again, Ianto was naked too; nudity was an effect Jack Harkness tended to have on people. It wasn't like it was cold -- the sun was out in force, and there was a hot breeze. The fire was just for the fish, which looked mouthwatering even raw, a translucent sapphire blue that Ianto knew, from previous meals, would darken to navy when cooked.
"Deep thoughts, hm?" Lo prodded.
"Not especially," Ianto replied. He watched Lo fling the guts across the sand. Scavenger birds, bright pink and noisy, picked the offal apart. "Thought I might go into town at some point."
"We need laals," Lo told him, nodding.
"...we do?" Ianto said warily.
"Mmhm."
"What are laals?" Ianto asked.
"The little citrus fruits? I know you've had them, they serve them at mess all the time."
"Well, sometimes I don't know the name of what I'm eating," Ianto replied.
"The small yellow ones you eat whole. They go with fish. Sweet," Lo said. He laid the fillets out on a wet bit of driftwood he'd found and shoved it into the flame. "Good fishing in these parts."
He looked up past Ianto's shoulder and his eyes narrowed briefly; Ianto turned to see a figure standing on the dune above them, and he belatedly realised that his pants were several feet away.
"Afternoon," the woman called, descending the dune as Lo shaded his eyes to see her better. "Either of you know how far I am from Central One?"
Ianto pulled his legs up to his chest. Lo gave him a sardonic look.
"About an hour by hovercar," he said.
"Ah," the woman looked disappointed. She was pretty: light-brown skin darkened a little by the sun, brown eyes, lovely hair that fell in three neat braids to her shoulders. She was older than them, but not by more than a few years for Ianto, if that. Thirty, maybe a young-looking thirty-five. "Mine's broken down. I saw a bus sign -- "
"Already come through today," Lo shrugged. "You can call road service from our place if you want."
"I called already. They said the earliest they can get out here is tomorrow."
"Rural," Lo remarked to Ianto, who was trying to disappear. He looked back over Ianto's shoulder again and grinned. "Sorry about my friend. He's shy."
"It's nothing I haven't already seen, sweetheart," the woman told him. Ianto put his hands over his face, trying not to laugh, wishing he could sink into the sand. He saw, through his fingers, Lo stand up and dust the sand off his arse.
"Lo Boeshane," he said, holding out a hand. "That's Ianto Jones. We're renting the house up the dune."
Ianto could see where this was going. Even before she gave her name -- "Tatia Bloom, I'm a tourist too!" -- he could see the smile on Lo's face. Pulled just slightly to one side, a pretty curl of his lips, bright even teeth, and the light in his eyes that made you feel like you were the only person in the world.
Ianto did not fall for the smile anymore, hadn't since the twenty-first century, but pretty much everyone else he'd ever met did. He listened as Lo talked to her, flirted and made gentle innuendo and finally suggested a solution -- they could, of course, call their landlord and have him come give her a lift. Or she could stay the night with them, and they'd be happy to walk her back to her hovercar in the morning to meet road services.
"Why don't you have a swim before you decide?" Lo asked, and Tatia said yes, of course she said yes. Lo was really terrible at making friends in the military but in one-on-one flirtation was difficult to beat. Not that anyone would really want to try. You'd start making out before the judges could declare a winner.
"Ianto?" Lo asked, as Tatia began to undress, already walking down towards the waves. Lo stopped halfway between the fire and the water-line. He gave Ianto a hesitant look.
"She's pretty," Ianto said, as Tatia stripped off her trousers.
"Yeah, but -- I dunno, twenty-first-century morals and all..."
"I don't mind," Ianto said. "I didn't mind you and Myles -- you don't fuss about me and Blithe. I get it, Lo."
Lo frowned. Then he shrugged, turned, and ran into the water, past Tatia, diving headlong through the waves. Tatia glanced back at Ianto, smiled a little at him, and followed Lo.
Ianto, while they weren't looking, hastily got up and went to fetch his trousers.
The fish that Lo had prepared was just about finished by the time he and Tatia emerged from the water. Ianto anticipated being at least a little more coherent now that he was less naked, though (as expected, really) both Tatia and Lo didn't bother putting their clothing back on. They did cast odd little sidelong glances at each other, but plenty of people did that when naked and anticipating sex.
"Lo says you work for the Fleet," Tatia said, while Lo crammed half a fillet in his mouth at a go.
"I'm the librarian at Quantico station," Ianto answered. "Lo's a Cadet there."
"Men in uniform," Tatia said, grinning.
"Or out of it, apparently," Ianto replied. He glanced at Lo, who rolled his eyes and then leaned back, wriggling, showing off his evenly tanned skin. All of it.
"Nobody cares, Ianto," he said.
"Well, I do," Ianto said. "Sorry if I feel more talkative when I'm not...dangling."
"I think it's sweet," Tatia remarked. "Sort of old-fashioned."
"You have no idea," Lo said.
"Oi! Right here!" Ianto flicked sand at him. Lo let out a yelp and put his hands up, flinching away.
"So, Tatia says she'd like to stay the night," he said, when he was done laughing. "Dinner for three?"
"Oh -- well, I -- " Ianto cast about, awkwardly. "You're welcome to, of course," he said. "I thought I might sleep out on the porch..."
Lo looked perplexed. Ianto looked down at his fish. He honestly didn't mind; after all, in one sense, he was being unfaithful to Jack just being here (though the fifty-first century was the strangest infidelity he'd ever committed, which was not lessened by the fact that it was the only infidelity he'd ever committed). This wasn't his time, and sex meant something different here. It was just so very...awkward, not knowing how to handle this, what to do about it.
"Do you only like men?" Tatia asked, into the silence. Lo snorted. "Or maybe you don't find me attractive. It's all right, I have very good self-esteem, you can say so."
Ianto looked up, bewildered now too. All three of them stared at each other in silence for a few confused seconds.
"Ohh," Lo said finally, and a light dawned in his eyes. "You thought -- oh," he said, and put his hand over his mouth to hide a laugh. He looked at Tatia. "He thought I wanted you all to myself. He thought he wasn't invited!"
Ianto blinked. "Isn't that...?" he asked, slowly, and then the realisation hit him too. "Oh, you want..."
"It'd be a waste to leave you out," she said, leaning forward, smiling at him. "I do detest a waste."
Ianto swallowed and looked to Lo for guidance. Lo was studying him intently.
"You've never been with two people before," Lo said.
"Have you?" Ianto asked, trying to keep his voice level.
"Well, yes." Lo frowned. "That explains it, I suppose. Think we can be gentle with him?" he asked Tatia, whose smile increased by a few watts.
"Oh yes, I think so," she said.
"You don't have to," Lo added to Ianto. "If you don't want to. Hope you want to," he added, helping himself to the last of the fish.
"So do I," Tatia told him.
Ianto couldn't say he was unused to the sweeping, appreciative way she was looking at him. Jack used to do that, but Ianto always thought it was one part deliberate charm and one part habit. He wasn't hideous, but he wasn't particularly special either. Just Ianto: a bit pale, not terribly well-muscled, not especially weedy. Average.
And, well, no, he had never done this, but he had done arguably kinkier things with Jack. Looked at in one light, adding a third was really fairly tame.
"I smell like fish," Lo announced, licking his fingers. "I'm going back in. Tatia?"
"All right," she agreed, but she glanced at Ianto curiously.
"I think I'll go back up to the house," Ianto said, piling sand on the dying fire. Tatia looked faintly dismayed, but Lo gave him a quick nod.
As he turned to go, he heard Lo say in a quiet voice, "He needs to think. It's the way he is."
Ianto collected his shirt from where he'd hung it on the nearby beach-tree and walked back to the house above the dunes. His porterminal, plugged into the house's scroll screen, showed no messages. He washed briefly to get the sand off his skin and the fish off his hands (it certainly was pungent) and then dressed, casting about for something to do.
Eventually he took his porterminal out to the porch with him and checked his daily feed: newsvids, a few photos from Blithe on her public access page, status reports from Quantico. It was warm, and the chair was comfortable, and Ianto had spent most of the day swimming, trying to keep up with Lo until his shoulders were sore. He dozed off with his porterminal in his lap, feet propped on the railing of the porch.
He woke to salty lips on his -- Lo kissing him, hair still damp from the ocean, Tatia leaning over his shoulder and smiling. Ianto let his eyes rest on their faces for a while, not all that compelled to speak, until Lo leaned back a little.
"Inside?" Lo asked, his voice rich with meaning. In that second, he really did sound like Jack; a lower register, a wealth of experience and promise, gentleness behind steel.
Ianto nodded. Lo ran his hands up Ianto's forearms and then back again, pulling him out of the chair. Ianto was, damn it, still the only one wearing trousers.
Tatia had already wandered into the house, and perhaps Lo had already shown her around while Ianto slept -- she was nowhere to be seen until Lo led him to the bedroom and left him at the doorway, to enter or not of his own accord.
Ianto lingered there, watching. Tatia was sitting on the bed, not especially posed, as if she were waiting more than anything; Lo crawled up to the headboard and pulled her back, so that he sat looking at Ianto and Tatia was secured against him with his arm around her waist. She turned her head and kissed Lo's jaw.
They were beautiful together. He was tempted to simply stay in the doorway, watching, and tell them to go on. Lo would be perplexed, but he'd accept that, and Tatia probably wouldn't care.
But Lo was beckoning him forward. He went, kneeling to face them, not quite a part of their coupling yet.
"This is comfy," Lo said casually, nipping Tatia's ear. He rolled his hips and she laughed. "Don't you think, Ianto?"
Ianto wasn't sure what to say.
"And this? Yes?" Lo reached out, pushing Tatia forward for a second. He grasped Ianto's wrist, tugging him closer. Tatia put her arms around his neck.
"Shy," she said, kissing him. "Say yes, shy man."
Ianto rested his forehead against the curve of her shoulder. He realised both of them were waiting; that if he said no, or even if he just didn't say yes, nothing would happen. Lo with the blush of arousal high in his cheeks, Tatia's quick heartbeat, all of that would go away. A waste, yes, a waste and a shame.
"Yes," he said, and Lo laughed deep and Tatia petted his hair, approvingly.
***
Lo knew that sex, for Ianto, was wrapped up in all kinds of codes and emotions that he couldn't hope to untangle or even, mostly, comprehend: monogamy, ownership, power, control. Most of the time it didn't matter; Ianto was also quick and smart and someone, probably the dancing boyfriend, had taught him to breathe through the scary stuff. (The idea of sex as something to be feared was a truly unsettling one.)
Why this in particular should make Ianto so recalcitrant, so silent and withdrawn, was a mystery to Lo, but he didn't have to understand it. Ianto was not someone to let others decide for him, and if he said yes then he meant it, whatever unfathomable mental process it had taken him to get there.
Tatia was asleep now, arm flung over Ianto's waist, and Ianto was drowsing, eyes closed but not quite unconscious yet. Lo lay facing them both, watching, very pleased with himself. Tatia was marvelous, and had managed to teach Lo a thing or two in the course of the evening. Ianto had been quiet and a little reserved, but he'd been enthusiastic enough. He'd shown off for her, even, when she said she wanted to watch them together.
The noise in Lo's head had been mercifully quiet, of late. The long sleep he'd had when the war was finally over, that must have helped. Lo still sometimes dreamed of the 43rd or of Gray, but his waking hours weren't so haunted as they had been. Perhaps this was simply what happened to soldiers; perhaps it really did fade the way Chaplain was always telling him it would. Maybe he could ask Admiral Levy, the next time he saw him.
Still, sometimes he dreamed that he was on the peninsula, the beach where he'd played games with Gray and his parents or bathed with them, and the legions of the dead began to march out of the water. Gath, Beal, his mother and father, his friends and neighbours, his fellow pilots, dripping water and blood and trailing red streaks up the sand.
He didn't want to dream about that tonight. Perhaps he should just stay awake. He could get his porterminal and read all night, or wait until Ianto was asleep and then get up and go out to the porch to watch the tide come in.
Ianto shifted his weight a little, and his eyes opened hazily on Lo, who smiled.
"Go to sleep," Lo said softly. Ianto drifted out a hand, tentative, and Lo inched closer.
"I will if you will," Ianto said.
"I'm here, aren't I?"
Ianto cocked an eyebrow, which was ruined slightly by a yawn. "Are you?" he asked, when he was done.
"Where else would I be?" Lo asked, amused.
"Miles away," Ianto replied. "Quantico. Boeshane, for all I know."
Lo let himself be drawn up against Ianto, their faces almost touching on the pillow. "I'm trying to stay here."
"I know," Ianto mumbled sleepily. His hand was warm and broad on Lo's waist, anchoring him. "I'm trying to help."
"Go to sleep," Lo repeated. "I'll stay."
He meant to stay awake, watching over them -- that was a soldier's job, after all -- but eventually he drifted off too.
His dreams, if he had any, were formless and unremembered.
***
Jack had been one of the most annoying bed-mates of Ianto's existence, in the twenty-first century: a light sleeper, he was always getting out of bed and back in, rolling over, waking and falling back asleep, usually dragging Ianto up out of sleep along with him. Nights spent with him, unless Jack just got up and left him alone entirely (as he sometimes did), were not Ianto's most restful nights.
Lo on the other hand, once you got him to sleep at all, tended to sleep like a rock. He didn't move, he wouldn't be moved, a dead weight in the bed until he woke. Admittedly sometimes those few minutes before waking were unpleasant; Ianto suspected he had nightmares, but if he did he wouldn't talk about them. Still, it was usually reassuring to wake up and find Lo where he'd left him.
When Ianto woke the morning after Tatia's visit, he was alone in the bed. Lo would have woken him if something were wrong, but he still felt unsettled, and grappled for his porterminal. 0823. Later than he usually slept, and --
There was music coming from the kitchen, muffled by the bedroom door. Ianto found a pair of trousers and stumbled through the door, yawning, to be met with a blast of horn fanfare.
"Morning," Lo yelled above the music before turning it down. He was standing at the heater, stirring something on top of it. Ianto didn't even know the boy knew how to use a saucepan; he'd shown no evidence of this knowledge in the past.
"Morning," Ianto yawned, sitting down across the counter from him and accepting the glass of juice Lo pressed on him. Sometimes Ianto couldn't tell what kind of fruit was in the juice; good old orange and apple had given way a millennia ago to other, more exotic alien foodstuffs.
"Tatia went off. She said to say goodbye and thanks. Service called around six, said they were ready to come get her. Assholes," Lo declared.
"I'm sorry I missed her," Ianto said, genuinely regretful. He would have liked to have told her thank-you.
"Well, she might be back this way before we leave, never know your luck," Lo said, grinning at him. "You were great."
"One tries," Ianto drawled. Lo laughed. Over the scroll screen speakers, Ella was singing. If a custom-tailored vet asks me out for something wet, when the vet begins to pet I shout hooray...
"But I'm always true to you, darling, in my fashion," Lo sang along in Jack's clear tenor. "I'm always true to you, darling, in my way."
"You know what that one means?" Ianto asked, finding it oddly appropriate both for the previous night's activities and for his own deeply bizarre relationship with Jack -- Lo -- Levy. Ella was already on the Boss of Boston's tender passes.
"Sure, it's about marriage," Lo said. Ianto's jaw dropped.
"How do you get that?" he asked.
"Well, she has lovers all over, rich men and women who want to make her happy," Lo explained, as if this were obvious. "But she has one special lover she would never leave. That's marriage, isn't it?"
"Not in my time. Not for many, anyway," Ianto replied. Ella crooned about meals with steel tycoons.
"My father had a lover, he was a traveling supplier. Fishing gear, mostly. Whenever he came to the peninsula he stayed with us," Lo said absently, tasting whatever was in the pot on the heater. It was pink, which made Ianto deeply suspicious. "Sometimes my mother would spend a night with one of the teachers at the upper school. She had a thing for teachers," he added.
Ianto watched, wondering if he was remembering them or just making conversation without thinking about it.
"But they were married, so they meant something special to each other," Lo concluded. "Beal's parents had a wife, I always thought it would have been nice to have three parents. You could probably get one of them to say yes if you wanted something."
Ianto couldn't help but laugh. "Working an angle."
"If you like." Lo took the pot off the heater and poured it out into two bowls. "I think the song is nice. She wants her lover to know she'll always love them no matter what."
"What is this?" Ianto asked, poking the food with a spork.
"Sweetgrain porridge. It's good, try it," Lo urged. Ianto tasted it, decided it probably wouldn't kill him, and kept eating. Lo watched him, curiosity lurking in his eyes.
"What?" Ianto asked, swallowing.
"Can I ask you something weird?" Lo asked. Ianto shrugged. "Last night -- why were you nervous? I mean," he added hurriedly, "it's fine, it didn't matter to me, but -- I don't know why you would be."
Ianto considered it. He wasn't sure himself. "We didn't know her. Where...when...I'm from, well, not always, but...you want to know the person you're with. I do, anyway. How did you know you could trust her, that it was okay to...how did you know it would be all right?"
Lo cocked his head. "I didn't, I suppose. I just..."
Ianto watched a slow transformation wash over Lo's face -- first confusion, then surprise, then an odd pleasure.
"I just did," he said, smiling. "A leap of faith. It's been -- that was the first time, I think, for a long time. Huh."
Ianto smiled back. "Happy?"
"I am, yeah. I -- " Lo swallowed and then gave him the most direct look he'd ever seen on the young man's face. "I have a brother, did you know that?"
Ianto wanted to give him a sardonic look for the non-sequiter, but he suspected he knew what was coming, and his insides clenched.
"No," he lied. "Do you?"
"His name's Gray." Lo looked down. "I haven't told anyone that. Beal knew, some of the 43rd probably knew, there were Boeshane soldiers there."
And suddenly the whole story was pouring out, a story Ianto already knew at least part of. The attack on the peninsula, Gray's disappearance, Lo's futile search first on the beach and then throughout the peninsula, his mother's search across all of Boeshane, but there were so many people looking for their loved ones. He didn't know, before now, that Lo's mother had given up, or that Lo suspected she had wasted and died of grief. He'd never heard Jack speak very directly about his plans to find Gray, to join the Time Agency and use that power to search out his brother.
But he knew the ending of that story, one Lo didn't know. Gray's torture, his reappearance, how he had tried to destroy Cardiff and succeeded in murdering Tosh and Owen, the horrors he had inflicted on Jack. Lo was looking for a child, but Gray would be a grown man, a crazed murderer, by the time he and Lo met again.
When Lo was finished, he looked at Ianto like he was expecting a slap, like he thought anyone who knew would turn away from him in disgust. Ianto set his bowl on the counter and came around to stand next to him. Lo didn't turn to face him.
"Everyone said it wasn't my fault," Lo murmured. "I was a boy, I didn't know any better, they made excuses. Doesn't help. Even if it wasn't my fault, I'm the only one left. I have to find him. Nobody else will."
Ianto considered his profile, so young and so afraid.
"I had a girlfriend," he said slowly. He couldn't tell Lo the truth; he couldn't even tell him a very complicated lie, because it would take too long and would hurt too much. "She got sick. Then violent. She tried to kill me."
Lo looked up at him, eyes wide.
"I still protected her. I thought I could fix her, all on my own, because nobody else would help me. We'd been forgotten," Ianto continued. Hours, weeks, months alone in the depths of the Hub, with the hiss of Lisa's respirator, the constant knot in his stomach. "Someone I...knew, he -- found out, he killed her. He was protecting me. I didn't understand that. I thought I'd lost her, that it was my fault. I know it's not, now, that there was nothing I could do. Sometimes someone outside of you has to tell you," he added, fumbling. "We try to, anyway."
"It was still my fault," Lo muttered.
"I'm not to know," Ianto said. "I wasn't there. But if it was your fault, I forgive you."
Lo frowned. "Is that supposed to help?"
"Can't hurt," Ianto said. "It means it doesn't matter to me what you did or didn't do. It changes nothing."
He turned Lo, very carefully, and pulled Lo's head down to his shoulder. Lo's arms went around his waist automatically. Ianto rested his chin on the crown of Lo's head. This was not something Jack would have permitted, not any of this, but Jack Harkness wasn't here and Lo Boeshane was.
"Thank you for telling me," he said. Lo nodded against his neck.
"You won't tell anyone?" Lo asked. "If the Time Agency found out, they'd never let me in."
Ianto shook his head. "Nope."
"Not even Steward."
"She is not privy to all my secrets," Ianto said gently.
"Am I?"
"The ones I can tell you, yes."
"And the ones you can't?" Lo pressed, leaning back to look at him.
"I can't tell anyone those," Ianto said, rubbing Lo's cheek with his thumb. "Might rip a hole in time. Not so good."
"No, I guess not," Lo agreed. He paused, then plunged ahead. "When you leave at the end of the year, where will you go?"
Ianto ducked his head. "Home. My own time."
"I thought -- "
"And I can't tell you how I know," Ianto added, before Lo could finish.
"I could come visit you," Lo said slyly. "I'll be a Time Agent. Come sweep you off your feet in the twenty-first."
"We'll see, won't we?" Ianto asked lightly, and Lo let him go. "Swimming today?"
Lo shook his head. "Not today. I'm tired."
Ianto smiled. "Fair enough. What shall we do?"
"For a start, eat your porridge before it gets cold," Lo said, pointing at his bowl. Ianto wisely withdrew to his chair again, and ate quietly while Lo sang along with the songs on the porterminal.
See how the shadows deepen, darken
You and your girl should get to sparkin'
I got someone that I love so --
Glow little glow-worm, glow
They stayed inside that day, pulled down all the shades on the windows and watched old films Ianto found in the entertainment database -- Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart, Tim Burton, the James Bond films Ianto hadn't seen. Lo was entranced by Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, frightened by Sleepy Hollow, confused over how James Bond would seduce a woman to get what he wanted but would shoot a man for the same thing.
"I get it," he said, hands describing a perplexed arc in the air. "I mean, I get the idea. But if you're going to be a secret agent you have to want to use everything you can. Sex is better than shooting," he added. "Some of the bad guys must have been attracted to him. He could have used that."
"Different time," Ianto said, because explaining it wearied him, and thinking about returning to it sometimes wearied him even more. "Different rules."
"No wonder everyone goes around shooting everyone else. It must have been frustrating."
Ianto thought about Jack. About Gwen's wedding, where he'd danced with Jack and seen the looks on peoples' faces. About how the day before he'd been shot, he and Jack had gone to dinner at that French place by the Memorial and he'd tried, he really had, not to notice the looks -- until he saw a familiar face, couldn't place it, knew it was trouble all the same.
"What's wrong?" Jack had asked.
"Nothing," he'd said, and tried harder, and been tired of trying. Even if Jack was worth it. God, he'd been tired.
"Yeah," he said to Lo, and pulled him close, because he could, because here it was normal. Nobody stared. Nobody cared. "Frustrating's the word."
The next morning Lo wanted to swim and Ianto wanted there to be something other than crackers in the kitchen. He left Lo on the beach and caught the hoverbus (he would never get used to hoverbuses) into town, and that was where he ran straight into Jack.
"Fucking hell," he said, when Jack appeared like a ghost from behind the meat freezer in the little grocer's. "I'm going to put a bloody bell on you."
"You need to come with me," Jack said.
And Ianto, god help him, put the basket of food down in the middle of the aisle and followed Jack out, down the street and into a little cafe, where Jack bought them coffee with eerie precision and sat them in the table furthest from the door.
"I don't suppose you're on a random farm planet by accident," Ianto said, because obviously Jack was going to play mysterious and secretive like he always did.
"No," Jack said, and tossed a folder across the table to him. "I couldn't transmit this over open channels. Even over secure ones."
Ianto realised, belatedly, Jack wasn't wearing his Fleet uniform. Civs; he'd never seen Jack when he wasn't wearing some uniform or other, except of course for the moments he'd seen him wearing nothing at all.
He looked down and saw the Torchwood logo embossed on the cover of the folder.
"Fleet Admiral, Time Agent, now good old Torchwood," he murmured. "Is there a pie in this galaxy you've not got your finger in, Jack?"
"You live long enough, you learn the value of information. All of the information," Jack said. "Read it."
Ianto opened the folder. Inside were two pieces of paper, each in a thin metal frame.
"Those are time-locked," Jack continued. "They're preserved against changes in the timestream. They're just how they were when they were printed out, eight and nine days ago. Nine days is on top."
Ianto skimmed the first page until he saw his name. Then he squinted at it -- name, date of birth, security clearance, date of employ.
"This is my employee record," he said. "From Torchwood. I shouldn't be seeing this."
"Desperate times," Jack said.
Ianto looked down at the paper again. It wasn't his detailed file, just a staff summary. There was his suspension after Lisa's death, his first and second pay rises, a listing of arms he was qualified in --
Date of Death: 9.7.2009.
"July n -- that's three weeks after I left," he said, looking up at Jack in horror. "Jesus Christ, I die three weeks after -- you bring me here, make them heal me, give me a life -- and you're sending me back to die?"
"Read the -- "
"Jack, I can't know this," Ianto said, finding he was oddly detached about his own death. Sometimes the fabric of time took priority. "You can't be telling me this, and anyway -- you had to know, so why tell me now? Why are you -- what..." he looked down at the paper, honestly confused, and then back up at Jack. "You'll have to retcon me. They do that in this century, right?"
"Read the second page," Jack said, not breaking his gaze. Ianto shuffled the first page aside and looked down at the second one. The top half looked the same -- all his vital statistics, name, rank, serial number...
But the bottom half was different. Longer. Yes, there was his suspension, his pay increases, his arms qualifications --
And then there were eight more pay increases, over the course of ten years. Two hospital stays. Added qualifications, including a liaison clearance with UNIT.
And nothing at all under his date of death. For all this paper could tell him, he was still bloody well alive.
He looked back and forth between the two.
"I don't understand," he said.
"You're right, I shouldn't be telling you this, but I have to," Jack said. "Are you familiar with the Centre?"
"The Time Agency supercomputer? A bit," Ianto said.
"It picked you up as an anomaly nine days ago. Nine days ago you were going to die on July ninth, but look what's not on that report."
Ianto looked again. No extended hospital stays. His shooting wasn't on the report.
"Eight days ago suddenly nobody knows when you died anymore."
"That can't be right," Ianto murmured, trying to puzzle it out. Paperwork was supposed to make everything make sense. "Then this one must be wrong," he said, tapping the first page.
"Ten days ago both your death and that hospital stay were there," Jack said. "I didn't get a printout of that one, so you'll just have to trust me. Nine days ago the hospital stay disappears. Eight days ago there's no record of you dying, ever. Since then, it fluctuates. Sometimes by the hour."
"So either I never got shot and died, or I got shot and then died, or I got shot and never die?" Ianto raised an eyebrow. "Not that I think immortality is so great, I've seen what it does to you, but not dying two weeks after I come home would be nice."
"You're an anomaly. Right now, right here, you're in a state of temporal flux. Every decision we make has branches -- "
"Spare me the explanation, Jack, I've seen the films."
"Fine. But most branches just lead back to the same conclusion. Call that destiny or time logic or whatever you want, usually we only have two or three paths in life," Jack said.
"And? So?"
"So your branches fell off the tree," Jack said. "The Centre is designed to see what should-have-been, after the Time War, and the Time Agency sends people out to make sure should-have-been becomes is. The Centre can't tell what's going to happen to you even though it happened three thousand years ago. It literally doesn't know what your future is or should be. You have no ending. That's never happened before."
Ianto picked up his coffee to stop his hands shaking. Why did they have to make it so fucking sweet?
"So what now?" he asked. "Quick execution? Retcon? Put me in a box somewhere until you figure out why I'm suddenly the freak?"
Jack leaned back, fingers drumming on the table.
"The Time Agency wants me to fix it," he said. "Torchwood isn't so sure."
"And us caught in the middle. Lucky you," Ianto said.
"Thousands of years of human myth and a hundred years of Time Agency experience have taught us that when you act in order to stop something from happening, that pretty much guarantees the action will be what makes it happen," Jack said.
"Then you shouldn't have told me."
"They didn't want me to. They don't know I'm here. But something that is happening right now, in this place, to you, is changing the outcome that was supposed to be -- back and forth, between certainty and chaos. I didn't take you from your time to make you pretty again, Ianto. The fact that you were going to go home again and die, that this is literally a year's grace, didn't come into it. I'm sorry if that hurts you."
"You're not my Jack," Ianto said. "And I knew he could be a ruthless bastard, anyway."
"I need you to understand that the decisions you're making affect your outcome. And I need you to choose this one," Jack said, tapping the first page, the one with the ominous date of death on it. "You have to, because that was the set outcome when you came here. If you go flying loose in time, it could pull the universe apart. I know you know this because you just got pissed at me about it."
"Well, the whole universe. Makes me feel important," Ianto said.
"Don't make fun. You have to understand this. I'm asking you to choose to die."
Ianto leaned forward. "You gave me the extra year. It wasn't like I expected old age, Jack."
Jack looked like he'd been expecting a fight, and was at a loss now that he couldn't have one.
"What about Lo?" Ianto asked, into the silence. "Is his future still set?"
"I'm here, aren't I?" Jack said. He had a point.
"Then take this back," Ianto said, closing the folder and handing it across to him. "I'll have my year. That'll have to be enough. How do I make sure...?"
Jack shook his head. "I don't know. Just walk carefully."
"So very helpful," Ianto said.
"I'm sorry -- "
"Don't fucking apologise," Ianto snapped. "I'll be your good soldier and I'll save your life, Jack, because I like Lo and what happened to him shouldn't have happened to anyone. I will make him what you are. I'll go back to my time and smile at you like I don't know I'm dying and I'll die when I'm supposed to die, because there are things that are more important. You taught me that. So don't apologise to me."
Jack closed his mouth.
"Now leave," Ianto added, and he was actually stunned when Jack stood and tucked the folder under his arm and left, swiping his porterminal for payment as he walked out the door. Ianto sat over his coffee for a while, then bent his head and rested it in his hands.
What the hell could possibly happen on Eden Two that would set him adrift from predictable time? All he did was eat and swim and have sex.
He got up from the table and went back to the grocer's. Lo wanted some laal fruit, and Ianto had the idea that fried newtatoes would go well with another round of fish.
Chapter Eight
Michael Buble - Come Fly With Me | Sendspace mirror
Mills Borothers - Glow Worm | Sendspace mirror
Part: 7 of 9
Rating: R
Summary: Lo Boeshane has a promising career ahead of him as he enters his first year of Fleet Officer Training, but the war is still with him and life at Quantico Station can be difficult. Meanwhile, Ianto Jones is just trying to figure out why the Doctor kidnapped him to the fifty-first century and why Jack abandoned him at a school for the Fleet's military elite. He suspects it may have something to do with Lo, but his attempts to help the troubled young veteran may damage his own timestream beyond repair.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Blithe looked gleeful when Ianto asked her to find him somewhere on the seaside for him to rent for the two weeks of leave.
"You're going off with Boeshane, aren't you?" she asked. "He likes beaches. That'll be good for him. Plus he's gorgeous. You and Boeshane, hmm." Her eyes glazed over a little.
"Seaside," Ianto reminded her. She shook herself out of her little daydream as he continued. "Lo said there were some agricultural planets a system over."
"Well, it's short notice, but agritourism is on the decline, shouldn't be hard to find you something. City or country?"
"Country," Ianto said firmly, thinking about Lo's ideas on nudity and beaches. Blithe's fingers danced over her porterminal.
"Yep, couple of leads. Give me a few hours and I'll memo you the coordinates. Booking a flight, or is Lo flying?"
"I don't know." Ianto thought about it, couldn't really decide. He had the money for the trip, no doubt; his salary was generous and he spent very little of it. On the other hand, Lo might prefer privacy.
"I'll ask him," she said, patting his hand as she turned to go.
"No pumping him about us," he called after her.
"Wouldn't dream of it!" she called back, which of course meant she was going to ask Lo everything, and Lo would probably tell her in graphic detail. Well, Lo would enjoy that, and it wasn't as if he and Blithe hadn't been reasonably avant-garde in Cardiff.
He wondered how people kept up this kind of thing in this century. It was amazing everyone wasn't absolutely knackered.
There was a strange atmosphere on the station, in those final two days; a mixture of elation that humanity had conquered what had once seemed an insurmountable foe, and a sense of loss, the subtle pervasive feeling that finally it was permissible to mourn the dead. Students smiled more but spoke less, and joyful reports that someone's brother or mother or lover was coming home were tempered with respect for those whose loved ones never would. Someone stole flowers from the station's garden and left them in front of the plaque to the fallen that stood just outside Admiral Cullen's office door. One of the instructors proudly showed off photographs of his daughter, who had been a wing captain at the Cineve Blockade and would be home in a matter of weeks, and just as proudly displayed a holo of his wife, who had died in the Boe sector scrums of two years earlier.
Even Lo seemed more cheerful than usual, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Ianto had fretted about him, but if he was faking his smiles he was doing a good job of it, and he came into the library at the end of the day bursting to tell Ianto a dirty story about how he and Myles had made out in the bath. Lo had a bizarre passion for bathtubs that Ianto found baffling. He was certain Jack had never been so fascinated by them.
"Are you packed?" Lo asked eagerly, all but bouncing on his toes. "What are you bringing?"
"Not much," Ianto said. "Clothing -- " Lo snorted. " -- a book, my porterminal. Why, should I bring something else?"
"Wait till you see what I got off the engineering students," Lo said, leaning in conspiratorially. Ianto gave him an alarmed look. "It's okay, you'll love it. I've loaded my gear already and I'm signed out for leave, so we can go when you close up."
Ianto looked around. The library was empty, and it wasn't likely anyone would come in the next half-hour. Lo gave him a wicked grin.
"Or I could blow you behind your desk," he offered.
"Not necessary, thank you," Ianto said, though he considered it for a split second first. "I'll close up. There's a bag on my bed, will you fetch it?"
Lo ran off to grab his luggage while Ianto powered down the monitors and made sure the library was secure. He put out a hand to take the bag but Lo ignored that, so Ianto locked the doors and followed him down the hallway towards the shuttle bay.
Lo slung Ianto's bag in the back, climbed into the pilot's seat, and waved Ianto into the copilot's chair.
"You know I don't actually know how to work this, right?" Ianto said, staring at the dials and manual feeds.
"It's really just for combat flight," Lo told him. "So, we'll exit high, do a slingshot around Mars, that'll take us on a thirty degree trajectory above the asteroid belt, and from there it's a straight shot until we hit Eden Six. We're bound for Eden Two. Nice and warm," he added, hands moving confidently over the controls. "By the way, you are banned from picking the music."
"What?" Ianto asked, mildly outraged.
"Unless you pick good stuff," Lo informed him.
"Like what?" Ianto demanded. Lo plugged his porterminal into the console and flicked a switch.
Come fly with me, come fly
Let's fly away
Just say the word and we'll beat the birds
Down to Acapulco bay...
Ianto rolled his eyes. Lo hummed along with it as he went through preflight, and then as the bay doors opened and he lifted up the little craft, he began to sing along.
Come fly with me, let's fly
Let's fly away
If you can use some exotic booze
There's a bar in far Bombay
There was an odd slur to his words that worried Ianto for a minute, until he realised he wasn't hearing a translation of what Lo said -- Lo was singing along in English (Late English, his memory supplied) without knowing quite what the words meant or how to say them. Like Owen used to do with Tosh's J-pop.
Then Lo pulled the control yoke back slightly and flicked another switch, and the stars did a streaky thing, like out of Star Wars. Lo didn't skip a beat; Ianto felt his heart speed up slightly before he realised he was bracing for an acceleration that had already happened.
Lo cast a sidelong grin at him. "Once I'm around Mars in another hour or so, I'll set the destination coordinates and it'll fly itself. This time tomorrow, we'll be there."
"Well, the scenery's not very interesting," Ianto said, although in some respects it was. He could see Earth shrinking behind them on one of the scroll screens, and there was a little pointer on the front screen blinking where Mars would eventually appear. Mars. Another whole planet, Earth's nearest cousin, an industrial center and shipping port. Beyond that the Eden system, first of the settled colonies outside the home system, with seven inhabitable planets crowding together around a sun just a little older than Earth's. This time tomorrow he'd be standing on an alien planet.
Lo had been born on an alien planet, way out near the edge of civilised space. He'd fought his war there and been carried on a space cruise ship from there back to the origin, the home system, and hadn't even cared much to see where his ancestors came from. Quantico, Cardiff, Eden Two; it was all one to Lo, but to Ianto it needed careful thought and examination.
"Smile, Mr. Jones," Lo said, and Ianto looked up to find him giving Ianto his own very uncertain smile. "We're on leave."
Ianto smiled back, and Lo's brightened. "So we are."
***
They could actually have shaved a few hours off their flight time if they'd left the home system a little sooner, but Lo wanted to show off for Ianto, and it paid off big time. As they zipped just over the leading edge of the asteroid belt, Ianto sucked in a breath and leaned forward as if he could actually see out of the ship. Lo smiled over his instruments and let Ianto look, while he engaged the autopilot and proximity beacons. A ship of this size didn't have a lot of room to spare, but he didn't think they needed a very big bed, and if it had a food heater and a toilet that was all Lo required. He'd lived rough in a rustbucket before.
Ianto was still staring as Lo stood up, stretched, and edged into the back of the craft to rummage for a snack. He had plans for leave, extensive plans. First thing, he was going to go down to the water and go swimming; then he was going to build a beach fire and probably try to get Ianto out of his clothes, and then go to bed, and the next day, apparently there were farms nearby, they could get good cheese and Bovv so fresh it was still bleeding, and he heard there was fishing. If he could get his hands on a javelin he could catch fish, which would definitely be impressive and cool.
He heard Ianto get up and turned to wave him into the back, offering him a sweet-curl from the bag he'd brought with him. Ianto sat down on the narrow bed and took a bite, studying it.
"We called these palmieres," Ianto said, and Lo rolled the word around in his mouth. Palmiere. He couldn't wait until he was a Time Agent and would have a translation implant like Ianto probably had. Or maybe Ianto was just good with languages. Either way, Lo was hungry to actually comprehend most of what he heard in the songs, instead of just reading the translations.
Lo sat down next to him, thigh against Ianto's, and put his free hand on Ianto's leg.
"I swear to god," Ianto said, turning to him in amusement. "I never thought I'd have the opportunity to kiss anyone in deep space."
"Really? Is it different somehow?" Lo asked, honestly curious.
"It is for me," Ianto said. Lo kissed him, sweet pastry and sugar on his lips.
"Stay there," he said, and went to the opposite wall, activating the scroll screen. Outside wasn't much of interest, a few stars and the black expanse of empty space between systems, but Ianto's eyes widened a little.
Lo knelt in front of Ianto and ran his hands up his thighs, smiling.
"You're...almost dangerous," Ianto said, sounding like he was torn between a laugh and a moan. Lo ignored him and undid the snaps on his trousers, pressing his face to Ianto's stomach. Ianto's hands cupped his head, sliding through his hair, almost cradling it, and Lo felt -- safe, here in a ship he understood, leaving the home system behind. There was more certainty here. At least, for him.
They spent most of the flight in bed. Lo got up from time to time to check on the instruments, and Ianto cooked them a few meals in the little heater, but for the most part Lo unwound -- and slowly unwound Ianto -- from months of school and long endless corridors and chafing against something he couldn't even name.
But the war was done, and classes at least for a little while. Ianto made such lovely noises when Lo kept him on the edge, and when he tumbled over it.
Ianto was asleep when the pilot's alert went off, letting Lo know that they were passing Eden Six and he should take the yoke again. He slid out from the bed carefully and walked naked to the pilot's chair, checking their speed. He dressed, not bothering with his boots or collar, and was just sliding them into a sweet orbit when Ianto stirred.
"Almost there," he called over his shoulder. Ianto sat up, eyes dark and vivid from sleep. "You might want to put some pants on."
"Mm," Ianto agreed, easing out of bed. "God, it's green."
Lo gazed down at one of the major landmasses of Eden Two, swirled with blue where land met ocean. "Like what you see?"
"It's strange," Ianto said, buttoning his shirt as he slid into the copilot's seat. Lo began the sequence for atmospheric entry. "I'm used to seeing Earth's continents."
"Early terraforming wasn't very regular," Lo observed, peering at it. "You should see the factory farm planets. Grids for continents."
Ianto was silent as they penetrated Eden Two's atmosphere and Lo guided them over the northeastern continent. The coordinates Steward had given him -- in exchange for a few juicy details about him and Ianto -- put them on the east coast, just far enough above the equator to avoid the hottest weather. A house on the coast, she'd said. Walk to the water from your door. What will you two do with each other for ten days?
Lo had a few ideas.
The closest landing pad was miles from the house waiting for them and it was getting dark when they landed, but the obliging farm-manager who owned the house met them and gave them a lift, speeding down the dusty rural roads and skewing around corners in a way Lo deeply appreciated in his wingheaded soul. The farm-manager gave them a key to the house, told them there was a hoverbus to the nearest town that came past twice a day, and left them to it with a wink at Ianto, who had apparently been cast in the role of Wealthy Man Taking A Young Lover.
Lo didn't even wait to go inside. From the front porch of the small, rather rundown-looking house, he could see the waves crash on the beach. As soon as the car was gone, he began stripping off his clothes, ignoring Ianto's lifted eyebrow and leaving his bag on the porch. He ran down to the beach naked, crashed into the sea, and dove under a wave, blowing salt water out his nose as he surfaced. It smelled like home.
Ianto was standing on the beach, still fully dressed, watching him with a small smile on his face.
"It's warm!" Lo called.
"It's eight at night," Ianto called back.
"So? They don't switch the ocean off when it gets dark," Lo yelled. He ducked underwater again as another wave crashed, letting it drag him back towards the shore a little ways. It was quiet and dark, under the wave, until the edge broke and pushed him along with a roar. "If you don't want to swim, go inside, I'll come up when I'm done."
"I can wait," Ianto said, leaning back against the scrubby trunk of a beach-tree. Lo amused himself testing his speed against the waves, diving to try and catch small dappled fish with his fingers, seeing if he still knew how to do a handstand. The water was rougher than on Boeshane, but a wave was a wave.
He finally looped back in towards shore, heaving himself out of the water and shaking his hair to get the excess out of it. Ianto was still there, sitting below the tree now, his boots and socks neatly arranged next to him, shirtsleeves rolled up.
For just a second, the war had never happened; he was fourteen again, bathing in the surf on a beach on the peninsula, and here was a stranger, very much worth interest, worth the effort perhaps to get him out of all those clothes. He offered his hand, water dripping off his fingertips, and Ianto took it and let himself be pulled up.
"Come up to the house with me," Lo said, "and let me get you salty."
Ianto laughed. "That's a terrible line."
Lo pressed his thumb to Ianto's lips and eventually they opened, sucking the tip in. He let Ianto taste the ocean on him, the clean salt tang, and then pulled back, offering his hand instead. Ianto took it and let himself be led back to the house Lo hadn't even seen the inside of yet.
He could always build a beach fire tomorrow.
***
Eden Two was a planet without pollution, or at least without the sort of pollution Ianto had been accustomed to, hadn't even really noticed, on Earth. The water was clear and clean, much less perilous to swim in than the cloudy water back home. He let Lo coax him into it mainly because the water pressure in the little rented house wasn't very good for showers and Lo assured him nobody was around for miles.
The first few days were quiet, sedate, mostly consumed with swimming and coming up to the house to eat something and then going back down to the beach. Somewhere Lo found a sharp short spear he called a fishing javelin, and Ianto watched from the beach as Lo hunted with it, way out in the water, a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Still, usually when he came back he had at least a fish or two in a net bag tied to his wrist, and it wasn't as if it was a hardship to watch a naked seventeen-year-old hunting in the waves.
Wik said that the peninsula of the major landmass of Boeshane had been famous for its fishing, before the war. Ianto imagined that Lo had grown up learning to swim before he could walk, playing on the beaches, bathing in the surf. A nice childhood -- nicer than Ianto's, perhaps -- at least until the Flyers had come. And then, no more childhood at all.
"What are you thinking?" Lo asked, casually gutting and skinning fish as he sat crosslegged across a fire from Ianto one afternoon. He was naked; Ianto didn't think Lo had actually put proper trousers on since they'd arrived. Then again, Ianto was naked too; nudity was an effect Jack Harkness tended to have on people. It wasn't like it was cold -- the sun was out in force, and there was a hot breeze. The fire was just for the fish, which looked mouthwatering even raw, a translucent sapphire blue that Ianto knew, from previous meals, would darken to navy when cooked.
"Deep thoughts, hm?" Lo prodded.
"Not especially," Ianto replied. He watched Lo fling the guts across the sand. Scavenger birds, bright pink and noisy, picked the offal apart. "Thought I might go into town at some point."
"We need laals," Lo told him, nodding.
"...we do?" Ianto said warily.
"Mmhm."
"What are laals?" Ianto asked.
"The little citrus fruits? I know you've had them, they serve them at mess all the time."
"Well, sometimes I don't know the name of what I'm eating," Ianto replied.
"The small yellow ones you eat whole. They go with fish. Sweet," Lo said. He laid the fillets out on a wet bit of driftwood he'd found and shoved it into the flame. "Good fishing in these parts."
He looked up past Ianto's shoulder and his eyes narrowed briefly; Ianto turned to see a figure standing on the dune above them, and he belatedly realised that his pants were several feet away.
"Afternoon," the woman called, descending the dune as Lo shaded his eyes to see her better. "Either of you know how far I am from Central One?"
Ianto pulled his legs up to his chest. Lo gave him a sardonic look.
"About an hour by hovercar," he said.
"Ah," the woman looked disappointed. She was pretty: light-brown skin darkened a little by the sun, brown eyes, lovely hair that fell in three neat braids to her shoulders. She was older than them, but not by more than a few years for Ianto, if that. Thirty, maybe a young-looking thirty-five. "Mine's broken down. I saw a bus sign -- "
"Already come through today," Lo shrugged. "You can call road service from our place if you want."
"I called already. They said the earliest they can get out here is tomorrow."
"Rural," Lo remarked to Ianto, who was trying to disappear. He looked back over Ianto's shoulder again and grinned. "Sorry about my friend. He's shy."
"It's nothing I haven't already seen, sweetheart," the woman told him. Ianto put his hands over his face, trying not to laugh, wishing he could sink into the sand. He saw, through his fingers, Lo stand up and dust the sand off his arse.
"Lo Boeshane," he said, holding out a hand. "That's Ianto Jones. We're renting the house up the dune."
Ianto could see where this was going. Even before she gave her name -- "Tatia Bloom, I'm a tourist too!" -- he could see the smile on Lo's face. Pulled just slightly to one side, a pretty curl of his lips, bright even teeth, and the light in his eyes that made you feel like you were the only person in the world.
Ianto did not fall for the smile anymore, hadn't since the twenty-first century, but pretty much everyone else he'd ever met did. He listened as Lo talked to her, flirted and made gentle innuendo and finally suggested a solution -- they could, of course, call their landlord and have him come give her a lift. Or she could stay the night with them, and they'd be happy to walk her back to her hovercar in the morning to meet road services.
"Why don't you have a swim before you decide?" Lo asked, and Tatia said yes, of course she said yes. Lo was really terrible at making friends in the military but in one-on-one flirtation was difficult to beat. Not that anyone would really want to try. You'd start making out before the judges could declare a winner.
"Ianto?" Lo asked, as Tatia began to undress, already walking down towards the waves. Lo stopped halfway between the fire and the water-line. He gave Ianto a hesitant look.
"She's pretty," Ianto said, as Tatia stripped off her trousers.
"Yeah, but -- I dunno, twenty-first-century morals and all..."
"I don't mind," Ianto said. "I didn't mind you and Myles -- you don't fuss about me and Blithe. I get it, Lo."
Lo frowned. Then he shrugged, turned, and ran into the water, past Tatia, diving headlong through the waves. Tatia glanced back at Ianto, smiled a little at him, and followed Lo.
Ianto, while they weren't looking, hastily got up and went to fetch his trousers.
The fish that Lo had prepared was just about finished by the time he and Tatia emerged from the water. Ianto anticipated being at least a little more coherent now that he was less naked, though (as expected, really) both Tatia and Lo didn't bother putting their clothing back on. They did cast odd little sidelong glances at each other, but plenty of people did that when naked and anticipating sex.
"Lo says you work for the Fleet," Tatia said, while Lo crammed half a fillet in his mouth at a go.
"I'm the librarian at Quantico station," Ianto answered. "Lo's a Cadet there."
"Men in uniform," Tatia said, grinning.
"Or out of it, apparently," Ianto replied. He glanced at Lo, who rolled his eyes and then leaned back, wriggling, showing off his evenly tanned skin. All of it.
"Nobody cares, Ianto," he said.
"Well, I do," Ianto said. "Sorry if I feel more talkative when I'm not...dangling."
"I think it's sweet," Tatia remarked. "Sort of old-fashioned."
"You have no idea," Lo said.
"Oi! Right here!" Ianto flicked sand at him. Lo let out a yelp and put his hands up, flinching away.
"So, Tatia says she'd like to stay the night," he said, when he was done laughing. "Dinner for three?"
"Oh -- well, I -- " Ianto cast about, awkwardly. "You're welcome to, of course," he said. "I thought I might sleep out on the porch..."
Lo looked perplexed. Ianto looked down at his fish. He honestly didn't mind; after all, in one sense, he was being unfaithful to Jack just being here (though the fifty-first century was the strangest infidelity he'd ever committed, which was not lessened by the fact that it was the only infidelity he'd ever committed). This wasn't his time, and sex meant something different here. It was just so very...awkward, not knowing how to handle this, what to do about it.
"Do you only like men?" Tatia asked, into the silence. Lo snorted. "Or maybe you don't find me attractive. It's all right, I have very good self-esteem, you can say so."
Ianto looked up, bewildered now too. All three of them stared at each other in silence for a few confused seconds.
"Ohh," Lo said finally, and a light dawned in his eyes. "You thought -- oh," he said, and put his hand over his mouth to hide a laugh. He looked at Tatia. "He thought I wanted you all to myself. He thought he wasn't invited!"
Ianto blinked. "Isn't that...?" he asked, slowly, and then the realisation hit him too. "Oh, you want..."
"It'd be a waste to leave you out," she said, leaning forward, smiling at him. "I do detest a waste."
Ianto swallowed and looked to Lo for guidance. Lo was studying him intently.
"You've never been with two people before," Lo said.
"Have you?" Ianto asked, trying to keep his voice level.
"Well, yes." Lo frowned. "That explains it, I suppose. Think we can be gentle with him?" he asked Tatia, whose smile increased by a few watts.
"Oh yes, I think so," she said.
"You don't have to," Lo added to Ianto. "If you don't want to. Hope you want to," he added, helping himself to the last of the fish.
"So do I," Tatia told him.
Ianto couldn't say he was unused to the sweeping, appreciative way she was looking at him. Jack used to do that, but Ianto always thought it was one part deliberate charm and one part habit. He wasn't hideous, but he wasn't particularly special either. Just Ianto: a bit pale, not terribly well-muscled, not especially weedy. Average.
And, well, no, he had never done this, but he had done arguably kinkier things with Jack. Looked at in one light, adding a third was really fairly tame.
"I smell like fish," Lo announced, licking his fingers. "I'm going back in. Tatia?"
"All right," she agreed, but she glanced at Ianto curiously.
"I think I'll go back up to the house," Ianto said, piling sand on the dying fire. Tatia looked faintly dismayed, but Lo gave him a quick nod.
As he turned to go, he heard Lo say in a quiet voice, "He needs to think. It's the way he is."
Ianto collected his shirt from where he'd hung it on the nearby beach-tree and walked back to the house above the dunes. His porterminal, plugged into the house's scroll screen, showed no messages. He washed briefly to get the sand off his skin and the fish off his hands (it certainly was pungent) and then dressed, casting about for something to do.
Eventually he took his porterminal out to the porch with him and checked his daily feed: newsvids, a few photos from Blithe on her public access page, status reports from Quantico. It was warm, and the chair was comfortable, and Ianto had spent most of the day swimming, trying to keep up with Lo until his shoulders were sore. He dozed off with his porterminal in his lap, feet propped on the railing of the porch.
He woke to salty lips on his -- Lo kissing him, hair still damp from the ocean, Tatia leaning over his shoulder and smiling. Ianto let his eyes rest on their faces for a while, not all that compelled to speak, until Lo leaned back a little.
"Inside?" Lo asked, his voice rich with meaning. In that second, he really did sound like Jack; a lower register, a wealth of experience and promise, gentleness behind steel.
Ianto nodded. Lo ran his hands up Ianto's forearms and then back again, pulling him out of the chair. Ianto was, damn it, still the only one wearing trousers.
Tatia had already wandered into the house, and perhaps Lo had already shown her around while Ianto slept -- she was nowhere to be seen until Lo led him to the bedroom and left him at the doorway, to enter or not of his own accord.
Ianto lingered there, watching. Tatia was sitting on the bed, not especially posed, as if she were waiting more than anything; Lo crawled up to the headboard and pulled her back, so that he sat looking at Ianto and Tatia was secured against him with his arm around her waist. She turned her head and kissed Lo's jaw.
They were beautiful together. He was tempted to simply stay in the doorway, watching, and tell them to go on. Lo would be perplexed, but he'd accept that, and Tatia probably wouldn't care.
But Lo was beckoning him forward. He went, kneeling to face them, not quite a part of their coupling yet.
"This is comfy," Lo said casually, nipping Tatia's ear. He rolled his hips and she laughed. "Don't you think, Ianto?"
Ianto wasn't sure what to say.
"And this? Yes?" Lo reached out, pushing Tatia forward for a second. He grasped Ianto's wrist, tugging him closer. Tatia put her arms around his neck.
"Shy," she said, kissing him. "Say yes, shy man."
Ianto rested his forehead against the curve of her shoulder. He realised both of them were waiting; that if he said no, or even if he just didn't say yes, nothing would happen. Lo with the blush of arousal high in his cheeks, Tatia's quick heartbeat, all of that would go away. A waste, yes, a waste and a shame.
"Yes," he said, and Lo laughed deep and Tatia petted his hair, approvingly.
***
Lo knew that sex, for Ianto, was wrapped up in all kinds of codes and emotions that he couldn't hope to untangle or even, mostly, comprehend: monogamy, ownership, power, control. Most of the time it didn't matter; Ianto was also quick and smart and someone, probably the dancing boyfriend, had taught him to breathe through the scary stuff. (The idea of sex as something to be feared was a truly unsettling one.)
Why this in particular should make Ianto so recalcitrant, so silent and withdrawn, was a mystery to Lo, but he didn't have to understand it. Ianto was not someone to let others decide for him, and if he said yes then he meant it, whatever unfathomable mental process it had taken him to get there.
Tatia was asleep now, arm flung over Ianto's waist, and Ianto was drowsing, eyes closed but not quite unconscious yet. Lo lay facing them both, watching, very pleased with himself. Tatia was marvelous, and had managed to teach Lo a thing or two in the course of the evening. Ianto had been quiet and a little reserved, but he'd been enthusiastic enough. He'd shown off for her, even, when she said she wanted to watch them together.
The noise in Lo's head had been mercifully quiet, of late. The long sleep he'd had when the war was finally over, that must have helped. Lo still sometimes dreamed of the 43rd or of Gray, but his waking hours weren't so haunted as they had been. Perhaps this was simply what happened to soldiers; perhaps it really did fade the way Chaplain was always telling him it would. Maybe he could ask Admiral Levy, the next time he saw him.
Still, sometimes he dreamed that he was on the peninsula, the beach where he'd played games with Gray and his parents or bathed with them, and the legions of the dead began to march out of the water. Gath, Beal, his mother and father, his friends and neighbours, his fellow pilots, dripping water and blood and trailing red streaks up the sand.
He didn't want to dream about that tonight. Perhaps he should just stay awake. He could get his porterminal and read all night, or wait until Ianto was asleep and then get up and go out to the porch to watch the tide come in.
Ianto shifted his weight a little, and his eyes opened hazily on Lo, who smiled.
"Go to sleep," Lo said softly. Ianto drifted out a hand, tentative, and Lo inched closer.
"I will if you will," Ianto said.
"I'm here, aren't I?"
Ianto cocked an eyebrow, which was ruined slightly by a yawn. "Are you?" he asked, when he was done.
"Where else would I be?" Lo asked, amused.
"Miles away," Ianto replied. "Quantico. Boeshane, for all I know."
Lo let himself be drawn up against Ianto, their faces almost touching on the pillow. "I'm trying to stay here."
"I know," Ianto mumbled sleepily. His hand was warm and broad on Lo's waist, anchoring him. "I'm trying to help."
"Go to sleep," Lo repeated. "I'll stay."
He meant to stay awake, watching over them -- that was a soldier's job, after all -- but eventually he drifted off too.
His dreams, if he had any, were formless and unremembered.
***
Jack had been one of the most annoying bed-mates of Ianto's existence, in the twenty-first century: a light sleeper, he was always getting out of bed and back in, rolling over, waking and falling back asleep, usually dragging Ianto up out of sleep along with him. Nights spent with him, unless Jack just got up and left him alone entirely (as he sometimes did), were not Ianto's most restful nights.
Lo on the other hand, once you got him to sleep at all, tended to sleep like a rock. He didn't move, he wouldn't be moved, a dead weight in the bed until he woke. Admittedly sometimes those few minutes before waking were unpleasant; Ianto suspected he had nightmares, but if he did he wouldn't talk about them. Still, it was usually reassuring to wake up and find Lo where he'd left him.
When Ianto woke the morning after Tatia's visit, he was alone in the bed. Lo would have woken him if something were wrong, but he still felt unsettled, and grappled for his porterminal. 0823. Later than he usually slept, and --
There was music coming from the kitchen, muffled by the bedroom door. Ianto found a pair of trousers and stumbled through the door, yawning, to be met with a blast of horn fanfare.
"Morning," Lo yelled above the music before turning it down. He was standing at the heater, stirring something on top of it. Ianto didn't even know the boy knew how to use a saucepan; he'd shown no evidence of this knowledge in the past.
"Morning," Ianto yawned, sitting down across the counter from him and accepting the glass of juice Lo pressed on him. Sometimes Ianto couldn't tell what kind of fruit was in the juice; good old orange and apple had given way a millennia ago to other, more exotic alien foodstuffs.
"Tatia went off. She said to say goodbye and thanks. Service called around six, said they were ready to come get her. Assholes," Lo declared.
"I'm sorry I missed her," Ianto said, genuinely regretful. He would have liked to have told her thank-you.
"Well, she might be back this way before we leave, never know your luck," Lo said, grinning at him. "You were great."
"One tries," Ianto drawled. Lo laughed. Over the scroll screen speakers, Ella was singing. If a custom-tailored vet asks me out for something wet, when the vet begins to pet I shout hooray...
"But I'm always true to you, darling, in my fashion," Lo sang along in Jack's clear tenor. "I'm always true to you, darling, in my way."
"You know what that one means?" Ianto asked, finding it oddly appropriate both for the previous night's activities and for his own deeply bizarre relationship with Jack -- Lo -- Levy. Ella was already on the Boss of Boston's tender passes.
"Sure, it's about marriage," Lo said. Ianto's jaw dropped.
"How do you get that?" he asked.
"Well, she has lovers all over, rich men and women who want to make her happy," Lo explained, as if this were obvious. "But she has one special lover she would never leave. That's marriage, isn't it?"
"Not in my time. Not for many, anyway," Ianto replied. Ella crooned about meals with steel tycoons.
"My father had a lover, he was a traveling supplier. Fishing gear, mostly. Whenever he came to the peninsula he stayed with us," Lo said absently, tasting whatever was in the pot on the heater. It was pink, which made Ianto deeply suspicious. "Sometimes my mother would spend a night with one of the teachers at the upper school. She had a thing for teachers," he added.
Ianto watched, wondering if he was remembering them or just making conversation without thinking about it.
"But they were married, so they meant something special to each other," Lo concluded. "Beal's parents had a wife, I always thought it would have been nice to have three parents. You could probably get one of them to say yes if you wanted something."
Ianto couldn't help but laugh. "Working an angle."
"If you like." Lo took the pot off the heater and poured it out into two bowls. "I think the song is nice. She wants her lover to know she'll always love them no matter what."
"What is this?" Ianto asked, poking the food with a spork.
"Sweetgrain porridge. It's good, try it," Lo urged. Ianto tasted it, decided it probably wouldn't kill him, and kept eating. Lo watched him, curiosity lurking in his eyes.
"What?" Ianto asked, swallowing.
"Can I ask you something weird?" Lo asked. Ianto shrugged. "Last night -- why were you nervous? I mean," he added hurriedly, "it's fine, it didn't matter to me, but -- I don't know why you would be."
Ianto considered it. He wasn't sure himself. "We didn't know her. Where...when...I'm from, well, not always, but...you want to know the person you're with. I do, anyway. How did you know you could trust her, that it was okay to...how did you know it would be all right?"
Lo cocked his head. "I didn't, I suppose. I just..."
Ianto watched a slow transformation wash over Lo's face -- first confusion, then surprise, then an odd pleasure.
"I just did," he said, smiling. "A leap of faith. It's been -- that was the first time, I think, for a long time. Huh."
Ianto smiled back. "Happy?"
"I am, yeah. I -- " Lo swallowed and then gave him the most direct look he'd ever seen on the young man's face. "I have a brother, did you know that?"
Ianto wanted to give him a sardonic look for the non-sequiter, but he suspected he knew what was coming, and his insides clenched.
"No," he lied. "Do you?"
"His name's Gray." Lo looked down. "I haven't told anyone that. Beal knew, some of the 43rd probably knew, there were Boeshane soldiers there."
And suddenly the whole story was pouring out, a story Ianto already knew at least part of. The attack on the peninsula, Gray's disappearance, Lo's futile search first on the beach and then throughout the peninsula, his mother's search across all of Boeshane, but there were so many people looking for their loved ones. He didn't know, before now, that Lo's mother had given up, or that Lo suspected she had wasted and died of grief. He'd never heard Jack speak very directly about his plans to find Gray, to join the Time Agency and use that power to search out his brother.
But he knew the ending of that story, one Lo didn't know. Gray's torture, his reappearance, how he had tried to destroy Cardiff and succeeded in murdering Tosh and Owen, the horrors he had inflicted on Jack. Lo was looking for a child, but Gray would be a grown man, a crazed murderer, by the time he and Lo met again.
When Lo was finished, he looked at Ianto like he was expecting a slap, like he thought anyone who knew would turn away from him in disgust. Ianto set his bowl on the counter and came around to stand next to him. Lo didn't turn to face him.
"Everyone said it wasn't my fault," Lo murmured. "I was a boy, I didn't know any better, they made excuses. Doesn't help. Even if it wasn't my fault, I'm the only one left. I have to find him. Nobody else will."
Ianto considered his profile, so young and so afraid.
"I had a girlfriend," he said slowly. He couldn't tell Lo the truth; he couldn't even tell him a very complicated lie, because it would take too long and would hurt too much. "She got sick. Then violent. She tried to kill me."
Lo looked up at him, eyes wide.
"I still protected her. I thought I could fix her, all on my own, because nobody else would help me. We'd been forgotten," Ianto continued. Hours, weeks, months alone in the depths of the Hub, with the hiss of Lisa's respirator, the constant knot in his stomach. "Someone I...knew, he -- found out, he killed her. He was protecting me. I didn't understand that. I thought I'd lost her, that it was my fault. I know it's not, now, that there was nothing I could do. Sometimes someone outside of you has to tell you," he added, fumbling. "We try to, anyway."
"It was still my fault," Lo muttered.
"I'm not to know," Ianto said. "I wasn't there. But if it was your fault, I forgive you."
Lo frowned. "Is that supposed to help?"
"Can't hurt," Ianto said. "It means it doesn't matter to me what you did or didn't do. It changes nothing."
He turned Lo, very carefully, and pulled Lo's head down to his shoulder. Lo's arms went around his waist automatically. Ianto rested his chin on the crown of Lo's head. This was not something Jack would have permitted, not any of this, but Jack Harkness wasn't here and Lo Boeshane was.
"Thank you for telling me," he said. Lo nodded against his neck.
"You won't tell anyone?" Lo asked. "If the Time Agency found out, they'd never let me in."
Ianto shook his head. "Nope."
"Not even Steward."
"She is not privy to all my secrets," Ianto said gently.
"Am I?"
"The ones I can tell you, yes."
"And the ones you can't?" Lo pressed, leaning back to look at him.
"I can't tell anyone those," Ianto said, rubbing Lo's cheek with his thumb. "Might rip a hole in time. Not so good."
"No, I guess not," Lo agreed. He paused, then plunged ahead. "When you leave at the end of the year, where will you go?"
Ianto ducked his head. "Home. My own time."
"I thought -- "
"And I can't tell you how I know," Ianto added, before Lo could finish.
"I could come visit you," Lo said slyly. "I'll be a Time Agent. Come sweep you off your feet in the twenty-first."
"We'll see, won't we?" Ianto asked lightly, and Lo let him go. "Swimming today?"
Lo shook his head. "Not today. I'm tired."
Ianto smiled. "Fair enough. What shall we do?"
"For a start, eat your porridge before it gets cold," Lo said, pointing at his bowl. Ianto wisely withdrew to his chair again, and ate quietly while Lo sang along with the songs on the porterminal.
See how the shadows deepen, darken
You and your girl should get to sparkin'
I got someone that I love so --
Glow little glow-worm, glow
They stayed inside that day, pulled down all the shades on the windows and watched old films Ianto found in the entertainment database -- Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart, Tim Burton, the James Bond films Ianto hadn't seen. Lo was entranced by Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, frightened by Sleepy Hollow, confused over how James Bond would seduce a woman to get what he wanted but would shoot a man for the same thing.
"I get it," he said, hands describing a perplexed arc in the air. "I mean, I get the idea. But if you're going to be a secret agent you have to want to use everything you can. Sex is better than shooting," he added. "Some of the bad guys must have been attracted to him. He could have used that."
"Different time," Ianto said, because explaining it wearied him, and thinking about returning to it sometimes wearied him even more. "Different rules."
"No wonder everyone goes around shooting everyone else. It must have been frustrating."
Ianto thought about Jack. About Gwen's wedding, where he'd danced with Jack and seen the looks on peoples' faces. About how the day before he'd been shot, he and Jack had gone to dinner at that French place by the Memorial and he'd tried, he really had, not to notice the looks -- until he saw a familiar face, couldn't place it, knew it was trouble all the same.
"What's wrong?" Jack had asked.
"Nothing," he'd said, and tried harder, and been tired of trying. Even if Jack was worth it. God, he'd been tired.
"Yeah," he said to Lo, and pulled him close, because he could, because here it was normal. Nobody stared. Nobody cared. "Frustrating's the word."
The next morning Lo wanted to swim and Ianto wanted there to be something other than crackers in the kitchen. He left Lo on the beach and caught the hoverbus (he would never get used to hoverbuses) into town, and that was where he ran straight into Jack.
"Fucking hell," he said, when Jack appeared like a ghost from behind the meat freezer in the little grocer's. "I'm going to put a bloody bell on you."
"You need to come with me," Jack said.
And Ianto, god help him, put the basket of food down in the middle of the aisle and followed Jack out, down the street and into a little cafe, where Jack bought them coffee with eerie precision and sat them in the table furthest from the door.
"I don't suppose you're on a random farm planet by accident," Ianto said, because obviously Jack was going to play mysterious and secretive like he always did.
"No," Jack said, and tossed a folder across the table to him. "I couldn't transmit this over open channels. Even over secure ones."
Ianto realised, belatedly, Jack wasn't wearing his Fleet uniform. Civs; he'd never seen Jack when he wasn't wearing some uniform or other, except of course for the moments he'd seen him wearing nothing at all.
He looked down and saw the Torchwood logo embossed on the cover of the folder.
"Fleet Admiral, Time Agent, now good old Torchwood," he murmured. "Is there a pie in this galaxy you've not got your finger in, Jack?"
"You live long enough, you learn the value of information. All of the information," Jack said. "Read it."
Ianto opened the folder. Inside were two pieces of paper, each in a thin metal frame.
"Those are time-locked," Jack continued. "They're preserved against changes in the timestream. They're just how they were when they were printed out, eight and nine days ago. Nine days is on top."
Ianto skimmed the first page until he saw his name. Then he squinted at it -- name, date of birth, security clearance, date of employ.
"This is my employee record," he said. "From Torchwood. I shouldn't be seeing this."
"Desperate times," Jack said.
Ianto looked down at the paper again. It wasn't his detailed file, just a staff summary. There was his suspension after Lisa's death, his first and second pay rises, a listing of arms he was qualified in --
Date of Death: 9.7.2009.
"July n -- that's three weeks after I left," he said, looking up at Jack in horror. "Jesus Christ, I die three weeks after -- you bring me here, make them heal me, give me a life -- and you're sending me back to die?"
"Read the -- "
"Jack, I can't know this," Ianto said, finding he was oddly detached about his own death. Sometimes the fabric of time took priority. "You can't be telling me this, and anyway -- you had to know, so why tell me now? Why are you -- what..." he looked down at the paper, honestly confused, and then back up at Jack. "You'll have to retcon me. They do that in this century, right?"
"Read the second page," Jack said, not breaking his gaze. Ianto shuffled the first page aside and looked down at the second one. The top half looked the same -- all his vital statistics, name, rank, serial number...
But the bottom half was different. Longer. Yes, there was his suspension, his pay increases, his arms qualifications --
And then there were eight more pay increases, over the course of ten years. Two hospital stays. Added qualifications, including a liaison clearance with UNIT.
And nothing at all under his date of death. For all this paper could tell him, he was still bloody well alive.
He looked back and forth between the two.
"I don't understand," he said.
"You're right, I shouldn't be telling you this, but I have to," Jack said. "Are you familiar with the Centre?"
"The Time Agency supercomputer? A bit," Ianto said.
"It picked you up as an anomaly nine days ago. Nine days ago you were going to die on July ninth, but look what's not on that report."
Ianto looked again. No extended hospital stays. His shooting wasn't on the report.
"Eight days ago suddenly nobody knows when you died anymore."
"That can't be right," Ianto murmured, trying to puzzle it out. Paperwork was supposed to make everything make sense. "Then this one must be wrong," he said, tapping the first page.
"Ten days ago both your death and that hospital stay were there," Jack said. "I didn't get a printout of that one, so you'll just have to trust me. Nine days ago the hospital stay disappears. Eight days ago there's no record of you dying, ever. Since then, it fluctuates. Sometimes by the hour."
"So either I never got shot and died, or I got shot and then died, or I got shot and never die?" Ianto raised an eyebrow. "Not that I think immortality is so great, I've seen what it does to you, but not dying two weeks after I come home would be nice."
"You're an anomaly. Right now, right here, you're in a state of temporal flux. Every decision we make has branches -- "
"Spare me the explanation, Jack, I've seen the films."
"Fine. But most branches just lead back to the same conclusion. Call that destiny or time logic or whatever you want, usually we only have two or three paths in life," Jack said.
"And? So?"
"So your branches fell off the tree," Jack said. "The Centre is designed to see what should-have-been, after the Time War, and the Time Agency sends people out to make sure should-have-been becomes is. The Centre can't tell what's going to happen to you even though it happened three thousand years ago. It literally doesn't know what your future is or should be. You have no ending. That's never happened before."
Ianto picked up his coffee to stop his hands shaking. Why did they have to make it so fucking sweet?
"So what now?" he asked. "Quick execution? Retcon? Put me in a box somewhere until you figure out why I'm suddenly the freak?"
Jack leaned back, fingers drumming on the table.
"The Time Agency wants me to fix it," he said. "Torchwood isn't so sure."
"And us caught in the middle. Lucky you," Ianto said.
"Thousands of years of human myth and a hundred years of Time Agency experience have taught us that when you act in order to stop something from happening, that pretty much guarantees the action will be what makes it happen," Jack said.
"Then you shouldn't have told me."
"They didn't want me to. They don't know I'm here. But something that is happening right now, in this place, to you, is changing the outcome that was supposed to be -- back and forth, between certainty and chaos. I didn't take you from your time to make you pretty again, Ianto. The fact that you were going to go home again and die, that this is literally a year's grace, didn't come into it. I'm sorry if that hurts you."
"You're not my Jack," Ianto said. "And I knew he could be a ruthless bastard, anyway."
"I need you to understand that the decisions you're making affect your outcome. And I need you to choose this one," Jack said, tapping the first page, the one with the ominous date of death on it. "You have to, because that was the set outcome when you came here. If you go flying loose in time, it could pull the universe apart. I know you know this because you just got pissed at me about it."
"Well, the whole universe. Makes me feel important," Ianto said.
"Don't make fun. You have to understand this. I'm asking you to choose to die."
Ianto leaned forward. "You gave me the extra year. It wasn't like I expected old age, Jack."
Jack looked like he'd been expecting a fight, and was at a loss now that he couldn't have one.
"What about Lo?" Ianto asked, into the silence. "Is his future still set?"
"I'm here, aren't I?" Jack said. He had a point.
"Then take this back," Ianto said, closing the folder and handing it across to him. "I'll have my year. That'll have to be enough. How do I make sure...?"
Jack shook his head. "I don't know. Just walk carefully."
"So very helpful," Ianto said.
"I'm sorry -- "
"Don't fucking apologise," Ianto snapped. "I'll be your good soldier and I'll save your life, Jack, because I like Lo and what happened to him shouldn't have happened to anyone. I will make him what you are. I'll go back to my time and smile at you like I don't know I'm dying and I'll die when I'm supposed to die, because there are things that are more important. You taught me that. So don't apologise to me."
Jack closed his mouth.
"Now leave," Ianto added, and he was actually stunned when Jack stood and tucked the folder under his arm and left, swiping his porterminal for payment as he walked out the door. Ianto sat over his coffee for a while, then bent his head and rested it in his hands.
What the hell could possibly happen on Eden Two that would set him adrift from predictable time? All he did was eat and swim and have sex.
He got up from the table and went back to the grocer's. Lo wanted some laal fruit, and Ianto had the idea that fried newtatoes would go well with another round of fish.
Chapter Eight
Michael Buble - Come Fly With Me | Sendspace mirror
Mills Borothers - Glow Worm | Sendspace mirror
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Sorry, Sam
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Class can be good unless you have to tell what a chord is just by listening to it. Then I'll find any reason NOT to go. Including/Especially fanfiction. :D
edited for html fail sorry.