Primary Sources

Jack woke to an empty bed.

This was not normal, nor did he find he liked it much. He was used to waking up to the solid comfort of Ianto next to him, of being able to wrap his arms around Ianto and have them thrown off as he shuffled away, mumbling drowsily about at least having his own goddamn space since they spent every waking moment with each other, thank you very much. Jack would chuckle, run his hand over some part of Ianto's body, and leave him to his rest. It was just reassuring to know he was there, ready to grumble at a moment's notice.

If he was feeling lucky, Jack would run his hand over Ianto's body several times, hoping the man would give in for a quick, middle-of-the-night shag. More times than not, Jack won that particular battle of wills, even if Ianto was half asleep. It wasn't as much fun, so Jack preferred the nights when Ianto got so irritated by Jack's petting he rolled Jack over, shagged him senseless, and fell back asleep before Jack had hardly climbed back into bed after cleaning them up.

Once Ianto had grabbed the comforter and stormed into the living room, where he'd spent the night sprawled alone and quite comfortable on the couch. He had woken up fresh, relaxed, and warm, while Jack had shivered by himself in the bed, unable to find another blanket and too worried that Ianto was genuinely angry with him to sleep the rest of the night.

Rarely did Jack sleep in later than Ianto, particularly on the weekends. At the very least they got up together, or Jack would have been up for hours already, working if they were at the Hub, reading and simply watching Ianto sleep if they were back at Ianto's flat.

It was Saturday, so they should have spent the night at Ianto's, but a late night Weevil chase had brought them back to the Hub too dirty and exhausted to do anything but tumble into bed, connect with a quickie, and drop off to sleep. For Ianto to be up and apparently out before Jack even woke up was not only unusual, but disconcerting.

Jack pulled on some casual clothes and climbed up to his office. He was pleased to taste the familiar scent of coffee in the air, and yet surprised to find Ianto sitting at his desk, frowning at the computer. He was only half dressed, with his hands wrapped around his mug, his eyes scanning rapidly over some sort of computer file. Jack came up behind him and placed his hands on Ianto's shoulders, and the man jumped, spilling coffee onto his pyjama pants.

"Whoa, tiger, it's just me," Jack laughed, turning the chair around so that Ianto was facing him. "Want me to lick that up?"

He was met with wide-eyes and open mouth. "My god, you really do talk like that," said Ianto.

"Good morning to you too, sunshine," Jack replied. "And I've always talked like that, why are you surprised?" He glanced around Ianto to peer at the computer screen. "And what are you working on so early? You've been at it for days."

"I had an email update," Ianto murmured, turning back around. He closed the windows he had been reading before facing Jack and offering a wan smile. "I should probably go change."

Jack sensed something was off though. Ianto had been unusually tight-lipped about whatever project he had been working on, and for it to have gone this far, and garnered this sort of reaction without Ianto saying anything was starting to worry Jack. He crossed his hands over his chest and blocked Ianto's way out of the chair.

"Whatcha been reading?" he asked casually. "Must be really good if you're getting updates that pull you out of bed on a Saturday morning."

Ianto coughed in embarrassment, which was rare and always utterly adorable. "I wouldn't say good, no. Just…interesting."

"Oh, how so?" Jack was enjoying Ianto's unease, which was vaguely unfair of him, but he knew Ianto also delighted in Jack's own small discomforts as well, so he didn't feel all that guilty about it. He was too intrigued by whatever Ianto was hiding on the screen that seemed to embarrass him so much.

Ianto's mouth opened and closed several times before he finally hung his head with a soft laugh. "You really don't want to know."

"Of course I do," Jack said, suddenly serious. Teasing had got him nowhere, and he was starting to worry. He tipped Ianto's head back up. "You don't have to be embarrassed, Ianto. You don't have to hide anything." God forbid they hid anything from one another at this point; Jack valued Ianto's honesty too much to lose it now.

"Oh, I'm not embarrassed…not exactly." There was a roll of cool blue eyes. "And I'm not hiding anything, it's out there for the whole world to see."

Jack frowned. "What is?"

Ianto took a deep breath, as if steeling himself for a deep confession. "Do you know what RPF is?" he asked.

Jack shook his head. "No, although I'm sure I could come up with something. Random Pornographic Fun? Racy Pink Fantasy? Really Perfect Fuckbuddies?" He winked at the last, and Ianto gave that little half shrug, half grin that usually meant he liked the answer even if it was wrong.

"No, it's real person fiction." He waited for a response, but Jack had none.

"And—?" he asked. "What's that exactly?"

"Fiction written about real people, obviously," Ianto replied with that tone that told Jack he was clearly missing something. Again Jack just nodded slowly, not seeing the significance. "And there's a shit ton of it out there about us."

Jack raised an eyebrow, both intrigued and troubled. Obviously Ianto was feeling the latter, as he ran a nervous hand through his morning hair before turning back to the computer and pulling up the windows he'd had open earlier.

"Jack, this is insane. There are people out there writing stories about us. About you. About me. About all of us." Ianto seemed genuinely upset about it, and though Jack had could understand why, he decided to have a bit of fun with it first.

"Are they any good?" he asked, leaning over Ianto's bare shoulder and planting a kiss at his neck. The man just glared at him before gesturing at the computer wordlessly.

"No!" he finally got out. "They're awful. They're disgusting, they're degrading, they're—"

"Are they a security threat?" Jack asked to stop the alliterative diatribe.

Ianto snorted. "Maybe, although most people don't know whether your office is upstairs or on the main level. They have no idea where the car park actually is, how big the archives really are, or that we actually have a water tank for aquatic aliens." He paused, slightly breathless with annoyance, and Jack merely waved his hand for Ianto to continue.

"They seem to think we all shower communally, eat nothing but pizza, that Mfanwy is a pterodactyl—"

"She isn't?" asked Jack, and Ianto groaned.

"Pteranodon, Jack. We've gone over this before."

"Right. Sorry. What about us, then?" Jack gave him a grin, hoping to diffuse the tension. "They get us right at all?"

Ianto narrowed his eyes before sighing in defeat. "Tosh is still a sweetheart, although a lot of people think she's got a dark, kinky side."

"I could see that," Jack murmured, and Ianto punched him lightly on the arm before continuing. Jack pretended to pout.

"Owen is almost always a sarcastic prick, and yet people keep trying to redeem him—usually with Tosh—and mostly fail."

"Mostly?" asked Jack, and Ianto shrugged.

"There may have been a good moment or two." He stopped, but Jack pressed him for more, finding it both interesting and amusing.

"Okay, what about Gwen?"

"Oh, they hate Gwen. The internet is an awful, awful place, Jack." Ianto actually shuddered, and Jack wondered what the man had read that could have been so awful. He was also concerned. If these stories hated Gwen, what would they possibly have to say about Jack?

"So what about me?" he asked as casually as he could, and now Ianto leaned back in the chair, a smug smile on his face.

"Well, you are always ridiculously handsome, will shag anything that moves, never sleep, and love to play the dashing hero."

Jack breathed a sigh of relief. "But that's mostly true, then. I'm in character." Ianto raised an eyebrow at Jack's use of the lingo, but didn't say anything about it; Jack lived in the ground, not under a rock, after all.

"You also shoot yourself after bad missions, leaving me to clean up the mess, are incredibly dark and broody, and drive the SUV like a Chula spaceship."

"Two out of three on that last," Jack winked. "And I wouldn't make you clean it up if I did."

"Jack!"

"Kidding." Jack grinned again. "So what about you? Do I even want to know?"

"It's ludicrous," said Ianto, shaking his head. "I speak Welsh and six other languages, I have an eidetic memory, I'm a perfect shot, and sometimes I even play acoustic guitar at nearby pubs, where I'm a local favorite."

Jack stared at that last. "What?"

"Oh yes. I was also a top secret field agent at Torchwood One, of course that's assuming I'm not actually a Time Lord with a fob watch and chameleon arch. And I can cook like a master chef, at least when I'm not crying all the time."

"You burn your fish and chips every time I'm over and have haven't cried once about it," said Jack, trying to stay flippant. For some reason the secret agent thing didn't seem that crazy of an idea, but he didn't want to think about the other.

"Jack, it gets worse."

"Do you need me to hold you?" teased Jack. He leaned against the desk and squinted at the screen. "And how does it get worse?"

"Shipping." One word, and yet the way Ianto let it fall from his lips said everything: voice filled with scorn, disgust, fear, and outrage, this was not something Ianto Jones approved of. At all.

"Like…with boats?" Jack asked, dragging out the question. "We do have a boat."

"Not boats, Jack," said Ianto, sounding weary. "Relationships. Ships—shipping."

"Ah." Jack thought about it, then shook his head. "I don't get it."

"Apparently these amateur authors like to pair us up with each other in as many possible combinations as they can create in their tiny warped minds." When Jack stared at him blankly, Ianto threw up his hands and huffed. "Do I really need to spell it out?"

"Yes."

"Fine. There are stories about you and Gwen, Gwen and Owen, Owen and Tosh, Tosh and Gwen, Tosh and you, you and me, me and Tosh, even me and Owen." He paused, ran a hand over his eyes, and whispered the last. "And Mfanwy."

"You get around," Jack noted somewhat proudly, earning himself another glare.

"And then there are stories about three of us, or even four or five of us…and I'm not talking about hunting aliens and saving the world as the tried and true team of Torchwood Three. I'm talking—"

"You're talking amateur porn." Jack grinned broadly. "But that's amazing. Can I see some?"

Ianto's eyes flashed. "No, you cannot see some! They're atrocious!"

"How so? It's just people having sex. On paper. What could be so bad about that?"

"First of all, there is a distinct lack of proper grammar and punctuation, and half the time even our names are spelled wrong. Second of all, I almost had to Retcon myself when I came upon me having sex with Owen. And third of all, regardless of the participants, it is always loud, kinky, and mindblowing."

"Again—what's the problem?" asked Jack. "Loud, kinky, mindblowing sex sounds like a good thing to me. Perfect bedtime read."

"But it's not like that, Jack. It's not realistic."

"It's Torchwood. It's fiction."

"It's absurd," said Ianto. "We're not all sex-crazed teenagers here, nor are we sex experts either."

"Speak for yourself," murmured Jack.

"Jack, we need to do something about this." Ianto sighed and crossed his hands over his chest. "Before the girls see it. Before Owen sees it—god, he'd get off on most of it, and we'd never hear the end of it. We can't let that happen."

"We can't just go in and take it all down," Jack pointed out. "Free speech and all that."

"How about national security and all that?" Ianto replied. "It may be fiction, and bad fiction at that, but they get a lot right about us, enough to raise suspicion if anyone decided to look a bit deeper."

"It's just harmless fun, Ianto," Jack said, patting his knee. "Internet porn was probably one of the first emails ever sent. It's not a security threat."

"Oh, really?" asked Ianto, turning back to the keyboard. A few quick taps of the keys, and he had pulled up what must have been one of the more offensive stories. "What about this?"

Jack squinted at the screen. It was just a jumble of letters interspersed with random punctuation. It looked familiar, but hardly dangerous.

"What about it?" he finally asked.

"It's Arcadian, Jack!" Ianto exclaimed. "Someone wrote a story in Arcadian."

"Who?" asked Jack, his instincts finally starting to kick in and follow Ianto's line of thinking. No one on the planet should know Arcadian except Torchwood.

"Some user named IantoJones-Harkness." Ianto snorted. "As if I'd ever hyphenate and take your name."

Jack leaned around and glanced at his face. "Why not? What's wrong with my name?"

"Besides the fact that it's not really yours?" Ianto tossed back. "It's too long. And it's—why are we even talking about this? Jack, someone is writing about us. In an alien language.

"So probably not a native?" offered Jack.

"I don't want aliens writing about my sex life," Ianto replied stubbornly. "I mean, read it!"

Jack tried to recall his Arcadian as he skimmed through the first few paragraphs to get a general idea of the story. With each line felt his jaw go a little more slack until he finally reached over and hit the delete key. "That's positively vile and depraved."

"And that's coming from you," Ianto murmured. "Imagine how I feel."

"Okay, I agree this is not the best thing, but what do you really think we should do about it?"

"Have Tosh create a program that continuously scans the internet for this rubbish and then automatically deletes it."

Jack raised an eyebrow. "You don't think it'd be obvious we were covering up something?"

"We are covering up something, Jack. We're a secret organization dedicated to protecting the planet from extraterrestrial threats, not the cast of an online role playing game."

Jack shrugged. "Cardiff knows about us."

"Cardiff hates us," replied Ianto. "So maybe we should spare the good people of Cardiff the pain of seeing our exceptionally sordid sex lives played out on the screen."

"True," Jack said, remembering what he'd just read. As if he'd ever do such a thing…"Okay. Let's get Tosh on it when she comes in. You're right: it could be a security risk, and maybe she can come up with something discreet."

"Thank you, Jack." Ianto turned back to the screen and began typing something.

"What are you doing?" asked Jack curiously.

"I'm leaving a review and correcting every bit of incorrect punctuation and grammar. I'd love to tell them that Tosh doesn't usually swear that much and that Gwen is actually very gracious when she remembers, but that would be giving up too much."

Jack watched Ianto type, a gleeful look in his eyes as he apparently eviscerated the story. "Um, Ianto? Couldn't a good hacker trace it back to us?"

"Doubt it," said Ianto. "I'm using a fake user name routed through a dozen proxy servers. And we've got good firewalls."

Jack raised an eyebrow in what he knew was a very Ianto-like gesture. "You have a user name? What is it?"

Ianto grinned up at him. "WhoDoctor3. It's an anagram."

"Of course it is. And it's not obvious at all." Jack rolled his eyes. "I think you're secretly enjoying this."

"Not really, although I now know my waistcoats are quite popular, which is nice. As are your braces."

"Maybe we can start a fashion trend," Jack laughed, and Ianto finally joined him.

"Doubt it. All right, review done. It was really a crap story." He turned back toward Jack. "But I had to know how it ended."

"And?"

"You died."

"Tough ending."

"Well, I did kill the bad guys, you came back, and we lived happily ever after in a small cottage in the Welsh mountains with our pet dinosaur."

Jack snorted. "Right. You hate the mountains."

"I left that in the review for future reference," Ianto winked.

Jack thought for a moment. "Ianto, could you save me some to read, before Tosh takes it all down? Just for fun?"

"I wouldn't call it fun, Jack," Ianto replied. "Awful, appalling, and alarming would be more appropriate."

"I want some of the sexy stuff," Jack whispered, leaning closer. "You know, for slow days, late nights, that sort of thing…" He let his voice trail off suggestively.

"Because you don't have enough ideas of your own?" Ianto asked dryly.

"Always looking for more," Jack grinned. "I mean, if it reads well, why not try it?"

Ianto turned around toward the computer once more. "Who says we haven't?" he asked.

"What?" Jack spun him back, hands gripping the edge of the chair. "Are you serious? Have you tried internet porn on me?"

"That depends," said Ianto, gazing into his eyes with a highly amused—and seductive—look. "Did you enjoy last night?"

"Last night?" Jack repeated. "What do you mean—oh." And then it hit him. Ianto had read that, read a story about him and Jack and actually tried it—yes, it should probably stop, good as it had been. "Get rid of it, all of it."

"Yes, sir."

"But print last night's story first."

"Of course, sir."

"And maybe a few other good ones too."

"I'll scour the world wide web until my eyes are bleeding."

Jack kissed his ear and turned to head back downstairs to shower and clean up. He paused half way down. "If you've read anything with a good shower scene, feel free to join me and try it out."

Ianto cocked his head and slowly nodded. He reached back toward the keyboard, hit a key, and grinned at Jack. "Actually, I did read one of those. But you were hurt. Or I was hurt. One of us was hurt. Comfort sex is very popular."

"I can pretend," Jack offered.

"I can improvise," replied Ianto.

"Then what are you waiting for?"

"The printer."

"Ianto Jones, you have a dirty mind."

"According the internet, you are exactly right about that."

"Let's just make our own stories, shall we?"

"On my way."

Jack figured one of them could write it down later; they weren't one for sticking to a script, but it might be nice to have something to reference later on should they enjoy the ending.

And as primary sources were always the best sources for information, they might as well get started stocking the library.

Author's note:

I have no idea where this came from, I really don't. But it was like word vomit, it came out so fast and easy. Hope you enjoyed it. Yes, it's tongue-in-cheek. No offense intended and all that. Just have a laugh, because I was practically cackling as I wrote it.

Now back to chaptered intrigue…