Title: Scrutiny and no surprises
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Jack/Ianto/Owen and iterations thereof
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama
Length: 1,200 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to RTD and the BBC.
Spoilers: Up to end of S1
Summary: Watching, a plan coming together, and a lack of surprise that isn't always a bad thing.
Ianto knows Owen thinks him needy. Typical: not naturally self-reflective, Owen picks out as loathsome in Ianto the characteristic he hates most in himself. Or so Ianto would think, if he had retained any faith in psychiatry. But it's no effort to see in Owen, who is so obvious about it. So desperate. Gwen calls him lazy and Tosh is ever unsurprised to find herself stuck with his paperwork, but Ianto has seen Owen fired up on a case; running at full stretch; absorbed over a microscope. When it isn't filing, isn't the stuff anyone could be doing. Owen shows off for Jack. 'You can't do this without me' is in each line of his sharp movements, cutting into the corpse with an economy of motion that doesn't translate to his lips. 'Look how clever I am, how funny, how handsome. You need me.' And when Jack hadn't, when he had thrown Owen out of the Hub with a centuries-old plague to be dealt with... well, Ianto had seen the look on Owen's face. Owen pictures Ianto with a troubled childhood, but Ianto knows that Owen is the one with demons. Ianto is drawn to look into the abyss, he doesn't deny this. But when he does, it only whispers. He imagines with Owen it screams.
Jack, now, when Jack looks into the abyss, the abyss blinks first. Ianto isn't afraid of Jack (Owen is, he thinks) – he has betrayed his boss in all possible ways, and he's still alive. If Jack wanted him dead, he would be dead. And Ianto thinks that, by now, with all this knowledge lurking under their touches, Jack would do him the courtesy of making it quick. If he wanted to. Which he probably doesn't. But Ianto has stood by his Captain's shoulder on the job; has seen what the man is willing to do. And sometimes, unbidden, a scrap of remembered prose drifts across his mind - 'what evil lurks in the heart of man?' - a reaction to the look in Jack's eyes. But Jack is a man, and not a monster, whatever he might have said. Whatever it is, or was, it is in check, and Ianto has long lost the right to judge him for it. Whatever Jack might think of it himself, and sometimes Ianto wonders about that too.
- - -
Owen breaks against him like storm clouds bursting. One moment his arms are folded tight across his body, frowning in scorn, leaning away. In the next breath, the next heartbeat, Jack has an armful of him, mouth wet and open, gasping nonsense against his neck. There's never warning, never a hint that this is one of those days. Because Jack knows Owen pretty well by now, but he's never wanted to investigate those fault lines too closely. If Jack probed, if he got to know his team that intimately, it stands to reason that they might provoke fewer inadvertent apocalypses. But to add omniscience to immortality would bring him too close to that line he's been pulling away from as hard as he's able. So Jack has no idea what provokes it, what makes Owen crack instead of snapping back at him, but his arms have been open wide, just in case.
Ianto, though, bends. Ianto will stand right alongside him, brush their hands together without flinching, and not say a word. It has been a long, long while since Jack was able to surprise Ianto, who is as unperturbed by the comforting hand as he is by each double entendre. To force Ianto to react would be to force him to break, and Jack has never been under the delusion that he knows how to put people back together. It takes completely different tactics for Ianto than for Owen, and the rewards for his efforts are correspondingly dissimilar. When Jack pulls Ianto in, it is the slow unfurling he waits for, Ianto's arms coming inch by inch around his back until he folds, quiescent and yielding, into the embrace.
- - -
Ianto shot him. Of all the things that had happened to Owen since the moment the gorgeous guy in period military had put an arm around his shoulder, that was the weirdest. Not against the laws of physics, not in defiance of everything he'd ever been taught about anatomy, just bloody weird. He'd started watching Ianto more closely after the cyberwoman-in-the-vaults incident, and come to the conclusion that it had been an act of desperation. Ianto was a kid, he'd read too much Shakespeare or something, and he'd decided to act out Romeo and Juliet in the Hub. It was an anomaly, nothing more. And then he had shot Owen. In the shoulder, sure, and it was hardly an evil masterplan, but Owen couldn't get his head around it. He had been forced to start watching Ianto again, tracking him across the Hub, trying to work out when the lines between tea-boy with sad crush on Jack, and a man with the balls to shoot one of his team-mates, had turned so fucking blurred. And had he always been so tall, coming up behind Owen with the coffee like an apparition? Before he drifts towards Jack, provoking low giggles from the girls, who don't seem to realise that even if Jack and Ianto are having an illicit affair, they're probably not doing it in the glass conference room, with all the blinds up.
And anyway, sure Jack tells plenty of stories. It was just that they were all the kind of stories that might as well have begun 'a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.' It was never 'I met a guy in the pub last night', was it? Owen had seen Jack kiss someone, more than a few someones actually, and they had all looked like satisfied customers, but that was it. The man was pure sexual energy – practically a walking dynamo – but he never seemed to do anything with it. Now maybe it was the unkillable thing, and sex had just lost the edge without the danger (and if that was the case, Owen was quite alright with treading the mortal coil thank-you-very-much). Maybe anything got boring once you'd tried all the combinations from all the angles - another depressing thought. Whichever it was, Owen felt he was well within his rights to acknowledge that Jack hadn't, recently, when you actually got down to it, been getting a whole lot of action. Recently. So it was perfectly natural that when he did, inevitably, catch him and Ianto together, it was a bit shocking. The other emotion, the uncoiling lust at seeing those fantasies, those hints that Jack had dropped again and again, played out in front of him in glorious Technicolor detail... well, that didn't surprise anyone, did it?
And when Jack offered an innuendo as invitation, when Ianto nodded with his eyes in a signal Owen didn't realise he was waiting for, somehow that wasn't a complete surprise either.
FIN