TW Fic: A Sort of Solitude (1/1)

[lizzledpink]

Title: A Sort of Solitude
Author: lizzledpink 
Characters: Gwen, Ianto, TW3
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Five times Ianto Jones shared something about himself (and one time Gwen found out all her own).

A/N: The last part may be a bit off, as I could hardly bear rereading the transcript, and I don’t think I could actually watch that scene/episode/season again without breaking down a bit. Sorry.
Beta: None; I'm impatient and ECSTATIC that I finally finished this. If you see a mistake/typo LET ME KNOW for my eternal thanks!
Disclaimer: I don't own this. I don't make any money for this. Et cetera.
Dedication: For the ever so brilliant pocky_slash , who is awesome and first helped me to appreciate Gwen+Ianto and this is TOTALLY HERS. Oh – and completely by chance, I even got them snuggling in bed! YAY! Bonus point to me!

:::

i.

“So, I’m told you’re the one to ask about coffee,” Gwen says, smiling and friendly.

Ianto smiles at her, pouring the aforementioned beverage with the ease of long practice. “Tell Tosh I said thanks. You’re adding yourself to the list?”

“Mm-hmm. Could you make mine-”

Ianto cuts her off. “Don’t tell me.”

“Why?”

“I like figuring it out for myself. There’s a trick to it, as any connoisseur of coffee knows. It’s a challenge. And I like to be challenged, if nothing else.” His hands work ever so deftly, tilting one pot and then another, pouring five cups of coffee at a speed that makes it seem like Ianto is preparing for an Olympic medal on the matter. “And there’s another challenge to it. To take that guess, you need to know that person. Study them, and figure them out. What makes them tick? Why are they here at Torchwood?” He glances at Gwen, who tries to look less interested than she is. “As it happens, everybody in Torchwood refuses to take decaf, and I’m the only one who takes my coffee thoroughly black. Everybody has a different style, and the trick is reading them and finding out what that style is before they even know it.”

“How?” she asks.

“Practise, and paying attention,” he answers. He holds up a simple white mug, with a delicate floral pattern around the rim and circling the handle. “Go on, try it.”

A bit hesitantly, Gwen obeys. It doesn’t take long for her eyes to fly open, revealing that this is the best coffee of her life. “Oh, Lord. Is that honey?”

Just a bit smug, Ianto nods.

“This is perfect,” Gwen gushes, taking another sip. “Thank you, Ianto.”

For the next few weeks, she will forget to thank him for the coffee when he serves it, and by the time she realizes that fact it will be too late for her to do anything but regret it. But for now, neither of them know this, and nothing is made of her remark.

“Anytime.” A smile curls its way around his lips. “You’re a good person, Gwen. Don’t let it get in the way of doing your job.” On that cryptic remark, he turns around and leaves her alone with her perfectly brewed, piping hot, honey-flavoured coffee.

Gwen finds herself unsettled. She decides that Ianto is a bit too mysterious and off-putting, and feels herself prickling with dislike. Ianto seems like a good enough bloke, but Gwen doubts she’ll ever come to like him. Too much of an oddball.

But he really does make a good cup of coffee.

ii.

After the long drive home, Owen sits them both down and looks at them with criticizing eyes.

“Alright. Which of you feels like going first?”

Gwen looks at Ianto. He sits there, his lips pressed into a tight line, looking straight past Owen without any recognition. He hasn’t spoken more than a few words, and she can’t help but be worried. “Ianto? Your choice. I can hold out.”

He looks at her, and shakes his head. “No, Gwen, you -” he cuts himself, off, frowning. His eyes dart to the side. “Actually, I’d like to go first,” he corrects. When Ianto looks back, Owen looks skeptical, so Ianto gives him a firm nod. “Me first.”

“I’ll just slip out, then,” Gwen says.

“Wait!” Ianto blurts. Gwen turns around, surprised. “You… You don’t need to go.”

Gwen doesn’t know Ianto well, but she does know he is the kind of person who will almost never admit to hurting or weakness. The fact that he has asked to go first, and that he is asking her to stay, tells her how much pain he’s in at the moment. For once she is wise enough to keep her mouth shut. She glides back, and sits gingerly on the autopsy table once more.

“Right. I’ll need you to take your shirt off. Do you need your trousers off, too?” Owen asks. His tone is as acerbic as ever, but with a hint of clinical respect and care. Whatever she might say of his bedside manner, Owen knows what he is doing. His degrees are well earned.

“No,” Ianto answers grimly. “They bruised my calves, but they didn’t have time to go any higher. They just wanted to knock me down.”

Owen mutters something crude under his breath. Gwen appreciates the sentiment, barely able to keep herself from cringing at Ianto’s flat way of reporting his injuries.

“Shirt off, then.”

Ianto shifted slightly, looking away.

“Can’t?”

He nodded. “Stiff,” he mumbled.

“Not surprising. Gwen, help me out, but be gentle.” To her surprise, Owen is surprisingly gentle with his fingers. With a soft precision, Owen lifts the hem of Ianto’s shirt and pulls it up, revealing skin that might well have been tie-dyed underneath. Gwen does the same to Ianto’s other side, and within a few minutes, they’ve pulled Ianto’s shirt off with little resistance and only a bit of flinching on Ianto’s part.

Swallowing, Gwen finally allows herself to look at the damage. Ianto’s skin is swollen, mixing purple and yellow, brown and green, with no particular care. There is a particularly bad blow over his left side, right across his ribs. There is another enormous dark splotch on the corresponding shoulder, and his other forearm might well be a dandelion for all the yellow it has incurred. And those are only the worst.

“You could have died,” Gwen says, again, without thinking.

Ianto glances at her coolly. “Yep,” he says simply.

Allowing the pair to speak, Owen quietly pulls out the antiseptic and other tools that should ease and quicken Ianto’s healing – the rift makes for an excellent source of accelerated medical technology.

“That’s it?”

“I’ve almost died before. It’s nothing new,” he says. “I once fell out of a tree and cracked my skull open. I was eight. Another time, I was injured in a car accident. Then there was Canary Wharf… And then here, with…” He doesn’t say Lisa’s name, but it quivers in the air, loud as the drop of a pin. “I’m… somewhat used to it.”

But in her direct manner, Gwen immediately sees the flaw in his words. “But it’s never been humans before. It was people who hurt us, Ianto. Human people.”

Ianto clenches his jaw, blue eyes troubled. Gwen reaches and puts her hand over his.

Owen begins to put adhesive bandages over some of Ianto’s wounds. The bandages are alien, and already the swelling seems to be going down.

“No,” Ianto says, finally. “Canary Wharf was an attack by the Cybermen, and the Daleks, but humans caused it. All they wanted was knowledge and power, so they went after it and damned the consequences. And it’s not the first time.” He looked down. “These things happen all over history, again and again. Most people are… good. But some aren’t. Many aren’t. I wonder sometimes if some of the aliens are right, trying to get rid of us before we can leave this planet and spread across the stars, like a plague.”

“Maybe,” Gwen conceded. She disagreed, but she knew Ianto wasn’t going to budge, not now. “I don’t know. But more importantly, we won, Ianto. They’re finished, and we’ve survived. We did well. We caught them, and you, Ianto, saved Tosh. Isn’t that worth something? One point for the good people?”

Ianto looked at her sharply. “Gwen… Sometimes, you remind me…”

“What?”

Owen carefully peeled away the bandages. While not completely healed, some of the skin underneath looked better. A little less discolored, and somewhat less puffy. A minor tussle, instead of a brutal beating.

“You’re free to go, mate. Take these when you get home, and these the next morning. Did you know some of your ribs were cracked.”

“Suspected, really.”

“Yes. Well, it’s up to you to do the healing now. You’ll be fine.” Owen claps a hand over Ianto’s shoulder. “You’re stubborn and I like coffee, so I’m expecting you to come in to work, but if it’s too much let me know and I’ll deal with Jack. Hero or not, Harkness is mainly an insensitive wanker.”

Ianto snorts, amused. “Thanks. I’ll let you know. Take care of Gwen.”

He slowly slips to his feet, and then turns, smiling slightly at Gwen. “My mother always said the same thing – that as long as one person helps another, it’s a point for the good people, even in the face of everything else. Thanks, Gwen. Don’t stay out too late.”

Puzzling over the last few words, Gwen looks at Owen, who shrugs. Later, she’ll wonder if Ianto guessed she would fall into Owen’s arms that night. At the time, she presses her hand softly against her gunshot wound, and watches Ianto walk out the door, pulling on his shirt, casual, as though he has nothing to hide.

iii.

There’s this one time, while Jack’s gone, that Ianto turns to her and kisses her, up against a wall, quite suddenly. After the initial shock, she can’t help but respond, moaning a little when sucks her lip into his mouth and nibbles on it ever so gently, while his hands circle her waist and his thumbs brush feather-light against the ticklish skin just above her hip bones.

After a moment of this wonderful snogging, Ianto pulls away and rests his forehead against her. She gets the feeling this wasn’t about attraction or emotion. This was something Ianto had wanted to do for some entirely unrelated reason, and she had learned to rely on and trust Ianto in the past couple months. He continues to hold her, panting, and she relaxes, also taking the moment to catch her breath.

“What was that about?” she finally asks, suspecting that (tragically) there will be no repeat performance.

“Sorry – it wasn’t… personal, per se.” He sighs. “I wanted to see why Jack all… You know…”

She doesn’t, and this fact must be as easy to read from her face as a children’s picture book, because Ianto explains, smiling in a wobbly manner that somewhat hurts her to see.

“I know there’s never been anything going on between you and Jack, but you do have that weird mutual thing going on. I wanted to know why…” He licked his lips. “Why it was you, your kiss, that woke him up. When he was dead.”

Gwen understands and really, really doesn’t know what to say. There’s nothing he’s said that is untrue. Nothing to deny or refute. So, she changes the subject. “Well, did you find out why?” she asks, smiling in that cheerfully fake way.

Ianto shrugs. “You’re a good kisser, actually. And fairly attractive. Maybe if I’d kissed Jack’s corpse first, he’d have woken up. Wouldn’t surprise me, being, well, Jack.”

“Imagine how he’d come back to life if you’d given his body a blowjob,” Gwen thinks out loud. She flushes the moment she realizes what she has said, as does Ianto, who is bright red as he stumbles back a bit, chuckling.

“R-right,” he says. “Well… Thanks. Sorry.”

“It’s fine. You’re a very good kisser, Ianto.”

Ianto nods, unable to find a way to break the awkward silence.

Gwen, unable to help herself, breaks it first. “Why didn’t you try to kiss him? You didn’t even go down there.”

With just a bit of hesitance, Ianto answers her. “I believed he was gone. I had to believe he was gone.” He swallows. “I lose everybody, eventually. It was easier for me to start mourning him, rather than hinge my hopes that he’d return on the fact that I’d seen him die before, once.”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry, Ianto!”

“No, it’s… You’re lucky, Gwen. You really are. Just… Stay lucky. If any of us survive Torchwood, I hope it’s you, Gwen. You can still fit with the world outside all this. You still have your chance. I hope you survive.”

Ianto scrambles out of the hallway, walking briskly, in the manner that tells Gwen he is very much Not Running Away.

Gwen bites her lip. “You’re young and you’ve already lived so much. You stay lucky too,” she whispers, crossing her fingers behind her back.

iv.

Apparently, Ianto grew up speaking Welsh and English. He’s bilingual, at minimum, but she’s fairly certain she’s heard other languages from him before, ones she didn’t know.

Gwen knows Welsh too, so they spend an entire day chatting in Welsh over everybody. They flirt and gossip and have a bit of fun at the others’ expense. Owen, who is still rather crabby at times over the whole “now a zombie” thing, growls and seems a little more animated when he’s venting about the bloody Welsh and their bloody vowels.

Jack seems to be in a mixture of personal heaven and hell all day. Ianto’s Welsh is seriously turning him on (and Gwen’s too, but he tries to be more discreet about that), but whenever they talk in front of him, he asks that they repeat what they’ve said in English. Ianto and Gwen are very good at acting innocent and evasive, and manage to keep from translating themselves the entire time. They both know that by tomorrow there will be an official “no speaking Welsh at Torchwood” rule, so for the next 24 hours they are making the most of it.

Over coffee, Gwen and Ianto have a cheerful conversation regarding Tosh, whom they both agree deserves far better than Owen, especially with her looks. It strikes Gwen, as Ianto asks a question about Tosh’s figure, then that they have become friends, and she’s not sure when that happened. It’s still a fairly casual thing, and there’s still some weird resentful dynamic between them regarding Jack, but they get on very well these days.

“You look like you’ve been hit with a brick,” Ianto says. “Did the world explode without remembering to warn us first?”

Gwen blinks at him. “We’re friends.”

Ianto blinks right back, stunned. “So we are.”

“Weird.”

“Very. I haven’t… Well, Tosh. Jack doesn’t count. And…” Ianto seems just as bewildered by this turn of events as she. “We’re friends.”

“I really didn’t like you when we first met.”

“I thought you were incredibly annoying,” Ianto says, shrugging. He pauses. “Then again, still do.”

She slaps his shoulder, grinning wide enough to show that gap-toothed smile she often hides out of misplaced vanity. Ianto rolls his eyes.

“Well, that settles it. Only friends are allowed to hit each other,” he says. He gives her a little smile. “I’ve never had many friends. Tosh, Lisa, Mark, and Lynn. That’s about it,” he says, shrugging.

Gwen’s face softens. “That’s not even enough for one hand.”

“Two, with you and Jack added.”

“True,” she says, smiling. “Mark and Lynn were before Torchwood?”

Ianto shook his head. “Mark was my best friend in Torchwood. He was the only other Junior Archivist with a sense of humour. We got on well. I made fun of him for being from the North and he poked fun at my Welsh accent. Lynn was my friend in both primary and secondary, and my first kiss. She was a sweetheart, but she moved to the States, and, well…” Ianto shrugged. “So, thank you, Gwen.”

She pulls him in for an impulsive hug, and says in English, “Yes, I think Tosh’s arse is great, too.”

They both hear a little squeak from the other end of the hallway, and collapse into laughter.

v.

Things become so much darker, and she when she isn’t clinging to Rhys for dear life, she’s clinging to them, albeit less literally.

There are nights when Tosh’s desk isn’t empty. It’s full of memories, painted with emotion and polished with grief. Sometimes, they go into the autopsy bay, and they find a sticky note attached to a set of surgical tools. It reads, “Harkness, don’t screw up my tools, you bastard. :)” Of course, he left the smiley there just to annoy her.

Some nights she goes home and cries against Rhys. Other nights, she seems to have picked up some of Ianto’s infamous obstinacy, and refuses to cry when she needs to.

This is one of those nights. Jack had left the hub a couple hours ago, for a quick meeting with UNIT. He will, of course, return the next morning, but until then it is only Ianto who remains with her in the Hub, and life feels so empty this night.

Gwen finds herself at the shooting range. She can’t shoot the cardboard Weevil targets, not tonight. She focuses on the targeted ones instead.

The first thing she grabs is a pistol, with enhanced bullets. Instead of a copper shell they are cased with a variant of steel that has had its molecular structure artificially altered by alien technology. Apparently it was built to get around a Cord-something signal – Gwen doesn’t remember the exact report.

She isn’t thinking about this; she doesn’t care about the bullets. She cares about the kickback of the gun, which sends a little shock from her hands all the way to the tips of her toes every time. She cares about the satisfying bang when the pistol goes off, which she can hear the echo of even through the protective gear.

It’s another messed-up Torchwood way of expelling her demons. She needs it. God, but she needs it, this power, and this noise, setting her off, filling the already-full spaces in the Hub.

The pistol runs out of ammo. She turns, intending to swap the gun for something a little bigger – and then there’s Ianto, already standing there, holding out a machine-gun with a solemn, too-understanding look on his face.

She doesn’t want it anymore. She shakes her head, drained suddenly of all that anger and fury, leaving only a bit of listlessness. She’s tired by everything. Tired by life.

Ianto tugs the pistol out of her hands, and puts both it and the machine gun down. He takes her hand, and leads her. She can only follow at this point. She allows him to pull off her jacket as he leads her into Jack’s office. She barely notices when he hangs it up on the coat rack, or when he digs out her phone, sends a quick text to Rhys, and then shuts it off.

He helps her down the ladder into Jack’s hole-room. Ianto guides her to a door she’s never noticed, and it looks oddly new. Pushing it open, she discovers a tiny, secluded room with deep red walls, a soft white carpet, and a soft, large bed in the center of the room, with only end tables to accompany it.

Gwen looks at him questioningly. He gives her an enigmatic smile, and nods.

He hugs her warmly. Before she realizes it, the tears begin to fall all over again, because she misses them. She misses everything. Her relationships with Jack and Ianto and Rhys have all grown closer, but that doesn’t fill the hole in her heart where their teammates used to be. It helps, but it doesn’t necessarily make things any better.

Ianto lets her soak his shirt – when did he take off that waistcoat, anyway? – for a while. Then, as her tears wind down, he takes her over to the bed. He doesn’t need to say that this bed is his and Jack’s, meant to be for them alone. She knows. She also knows that it doesn’t matter, and that neither of them will be doing anything but resting and asking for comfort in this bed. This is place where, for one moment, Gwen can hide from the world and weep in silence.

Tucking her in, Ianto presses a kiss to her forehead. He crawls beneath the sheets on the other side, and stays there until Gwen inches closer and wraps her arms around him, taking as much comfort as giving it.

He turns and holds her too. He tucks her head beneath his chin, and they close their eyes, letting every too-hard emotion wash over them and slowly fade into the background, finding some semblance of peace.

Before she falls asleep, she hears Ianto say something softly, and it will stick with her for the rest of her life.

“When Lisa died, and I was suspended, I snuck into the shooting range a few times. Shot a few rounds. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I wasn’t even supposed to be field trained – I had been, at Torchwood One, but technically Jack hadn’t taught me yet, and didn’t know. The third time, I turned around. He was leaning against the door, cool as anything. He didn’t say a word. He just handed me another gun.” Ianto sighs. “He always looks after us. It hurts him, again and again, because he loses us all in the end – even more than I do, Gwen. He cares about us both. We’re closer than anybody has been in a very long time. When we’re gone, it’ll hurt him. More than Owen and Tosh. We have to take care of ourselves as long as we can, and each other, for Jack. And because… You’re important Gwen. To all of us. To me.”

Gwen drifts to sleep, sad, empty, but content. If nothing else, she knows she belongs here. In Torchwood. Married to Rhys. In Cardiff. On Earth. Here, in this bed, with Ianto, falling asleep comforted by the knowledge that he’s there, and he’ll still be there when she wakes up. He’ll still be there when she needs him.

vi.

“He worked in Debenhams! If Ianto gave you that old shit, then you didn't know him at all!”

Gwen recoils, shocked.

Perhaps she didn’t. Maybe everything she knew about Ianto was a lie.

No, of course it was a lie. Ianto was a lie. The son of a master tailor, who worked for Debenhams… It fits in with everything else she knows about Ianto. He worked in a tourist office, by which she means Ianto worked for the crown in an organization specializing in aliens. He was a perfect gentleman, who could always be counted on for a snarky riposte. He was a straight man, who was in a relationship with Jack. He was her friend, no, her family, but she knew nothing about him except the names of some lost friends. He cared, so he continually pushed people away. He was very passionate about life, and proved it by always looking utterly emotionless. He liked to make coffee. He was dead.

And that last thought steels her resolve.

“I swear on my life you have got to get those kids out of this house,” she insists, knowing the world was going to hell. Whatever else he was, this is still Ianto’s family, and Ianto himself a fallen comrade-in-arms. The least she can do is care for Rhiannon and her children, even if all it does is buy them another moment free of horror, free to live unaware of the horror humans are capable of crafting.

Even if this only prolongs the inevitable, Gwen will do all she can, while the world falls apart around her.

~fin~