Chapter Text
Ianto Jones is a man who loves quietly, fiercely, and with such honesty and emotional sincerity that the object of these affections must be a special kind of monster to ever think themselves worthy of such. He is also a man of quite perverse sexual appetites, but he is currently unaware of them as he is comfortably in a very vanilla relationship with one Lisa Hallett, with whom he works at the Torchwood One Institute in the department of administration. Not the most exciting of workplaces. This morning he is sixteen seconds late for work, which may be the deciding factor in his survival today, although probably not.
"Look who's late."
"Late seems to be a bit of a stretch," Ianto replies, passing by Lisa's desk and smiling at her. He does not do public displays of affection, especially not while on the job, not while he is supposed to be collating data or running diagnostics or any of the other myriad of things his job entails. Ianto Jones is a man who keeps himself professional in the workplace.
Lisa, on the other hand, is a woman who prides herself on her emotional honesty. While she knows it makes her boyfriend uncomfortable, she stands and places a peck on his lips irregardless. Ianto frowns, but says nothing.
"I need the files on last month's expenditure as soon as you can," she says, waving him off as she resumes her station. Ianto smiles softly as he leaves her cubicle, moving down the rows to the break room to fix himself a morning coffee. If there is anything Ianto Jones is good at, it is coffee.
The break room is mostly empty at this time of morning; only one man stands in the room, fiddling with the coffee machine in frustration. It's Billy, from human resources, a man with the emotional range of a toothpick and the empathy of a dead cat. Not a man particularly suited to a job that requires dealing with and aiding emotional employees with complaints they have blown out of proportion, but Billy does try, much like he does try to make coffee: badly and with unnecessary anger.
"Give us a hand here, will you, Ianto? I can't get this fucking thing to work," Billy growls, glancing at Ianto from where his head is so far underneath the nozzle he may as well be inside the machine. Ianto sighs, but elbows Billy out of his way and sets to work on fixing whatever he's done to the poor thing.
"So, how's the whole thing with Lisa going?" Billy asks. He is skeptical of Ianto's ability to keep a girl like Lisa, gorgeous as she is, and while he thinks Ianto's a top bloke and all, he's been waiting to jump on that for years. On the other hand, if their relationship does go down the shitter, that means more paperwork for him and Billy has never really been one for doing a whole lot of work.
"Fine. We're talking about moving in together," Ianto replies, filling the filter with coffee grounds. Torchwood One never thinks it's necessary to buy unground coffee, reasoning to the frustrated Jones that the time he would take to grind his own could be better spent doing his job. This excuse doesn't fly, but Ianto knows better than to fight his higher ups on the matter.
Billy, at once both relieved and disappointed, nods and offers to finish the coffee. Ianto waves him off, placing two mugs underneath the filter and switching the machine on. He turns.
"How's it that a man who builds robot fighters in his spare time is unable to get a simple coffee machine to work?"
"It hates me, I'm sure of it," Billy growls, scowling at the machine. "Either that, or it just loves you so much nobody else can use it."
"It's probably that," Ianto says, turning back to froth the milk. He hands one cup to Billy, warm with a matching smile, and takes the other to his desk, placing it on the cool wood. He straightens his pressed suit jacket before sitting, slotting his briefcase underneath the desk beside the drawers. This is a morning like all mornings, with the bag sitting where it does every day, a steaming mug of delectable coffee, and Ianto's fingers flying over the keyboard of the old Dell computer as he logs in. There is nothing special about this morning.
----
Jack Harkness is a man of perverse sexual appetites. There are only a few things he has not tried in his incredibly long life, most due to physical impossibility, but some for reasons he himself cannot describe. In truth, they remain unattempted as he has yet to find a partner whom he trusts and adores enough to do these things. Unbeknownst to him, Jack Harkness is actually a man who cares deeply, loves strongly, and has the capacity to fall so deeply in love that he could not see a future in which he loves any other. It is, perhaps, a good thing Jack is unaware of this, as the realisation is one that could emotionally ruin him, destroy him so deeply that he would avoid emotional intimacy for fear of finding any one person with the power to make him love them until the end of his days. Besides, in his line of work, one can rarely find the time to pursue romantic relationships.
“Jack, incoming, on your left!”
“Got it, Owen, just let me-” The breath is knocked out of Jack as the weevil slams into his left side; they hit the ground in a scramble of limbs and firearms and teeth. He can hear the shouts of his team in his earpiece over the growling and laboured breath of the weevil on top of him, can hear the shots of their guns.
“Damn it, Suzie, don’t shoot! You’ll hit him!”
“It’ll kill him anyway, Owen!”
“Shut up both of you!” Jack shouts, wrestling the weevil from his body and shooting it square in the chest. Catching his breath, he turns to his team, the doctor and the soldier standing over him in a similar state. He stands, realises his leg has been injured in the tussle - either by the weevil’s claws or a stray bullet - and steels himself against the pain, showing none of it on his face.
“You shoot,” he says. “I’m being attacked, you don’t know if I’ll live, you shoot, no matter the risk to me. Our priority is protecting this city.”
Owen opens his mouth to object, but Jack has already swept away through the alleyway towards the exit, looking for the SUV. Owen glances at Suzie, who is grinning at him, smug in Jack’s support. Owen scowls, stomping off after his captain, hands in his pockets and head hung low. Suzie follows, stowing her gun in the holster on her hip. She is in the good books tonight.
Surrounded by the cement decor of the Hub, Owen heaves the corpse of the weevil through the main floor and down into the furnaces. Jack follows behind, not lending a hand, but instead watching as Owen struggles. His punishment for what Jack views as a miscalculation. He does not take it without complaint.
“Why don’t we have a lackey to do this sort of shit?”
“What, like a butler?” Jack asks, amused.
“Why not? We’ve both got better shit to do than this.”
Jack shakes his head, opening the furnace. He doesn’t reply, but the idea rolls around in his mind, and lodges itself in the forefront.
----
Everything is burning. The world is burning. Pain is all he can feel, everything he can think, and somewhere, somehow, in the middle of that hurricane of sensation, he hears her crying out for him, a tiny spark that grows and grows and overthrows the fire that burns without him, replacing it with one inside that screams “save her, save her, save her!”
Ianto forces his eyes open, stares at the ceiling of the break room, and asks himself what that smell is. He glances along his prone form, and realises with a soft pang of distress that it’s his trouser cuff, burning. That explains that. Dimly, he thinks he should be more worried about this, rather than calmly patting at the smoldering fabric. He's probably in shock. He doesn't remember how he got here, why he's here, in this room, why he was on fire. But he's not particularly worried.
Until he registers the screaming.
It's all around him, boxing him in, clawing at his ears and pulling him from the ground. He's wobbly, he's dizzy, and he's determined to figure out exactly what the fuck is happening. He takes a shuffling step forward. He nearly collapses, but catches himself on the break room table. He squeezes his eyes closed, opens them, and comes to the conclusion that the world isn't going to stop spinning any time soon. The screams don't stop.
He makes it out of the break room, can still smell the stench of smoke. It's coming from the direction of the bay of cubicles he works in, so he pulls himself along the wall in the opposite direction, towards the bay Lisa works in. It's surrounded by plastic sheeting, and the screams are louder here. Flashing lights dance behind the sheets, mechanical buzzing underscores the human devastation cutting through the air. He feels sick, and not just from the way his head is spinning.
Behind the sheets, the smell of smoke shifts to the stench of burning flesh. It's rancid, sharp, it's an assault in every sense of the word. It cuts deep into Ianto's soul, and he physically feels it in his stomach. Or that may just be the nausea that comes with smelling the actual body of another human being burnt. Ianto can't say: he's never had to distinguish the two before.
He actually does vomit when he sees what’s waiting for him.
It’s her. Her screams filling his head, her body burning, and her new part-mechanical form grinding and whirring as the monster above-around-inside her builds her over again. His throat stings, his eyes overflow, his limbs move of their own accord and pull at the cords, the thick slabs of metal violating her. It takes time, too long maybe, but eventually he frees her. Blood courses down his arms, soaks his hands, and he notices from a distance that it isn’t only hers, but his own, too. His hands are covered in deep cuts, seared and scored by the hot metal of the conversion unit. She’s stopped screaming, passed out or dead from the shock of being removed. His screams replace them.
“No, please God, no! Somebody help us! Help us!”
Desperation.
Fear.
He falls.
A sharp pain in his chest, a blossom of blood, and blackness.
He awakes some time later.Everything is quiet, dark. There are no sounds in the distance, nobody screaming as he had. Lisa lies still in his arms, not quite gone yet. He knows any normal man would have died; the warped iron rod pierced right through his heart. Gingerly, he lifts himself from it, wincing at the sickening squelch. He hears footsteps.
“Oh Jesus Christ.”
Billy from HR drops to a knee beside him, concern flitting across his face, chased away by relief as he registers that Ianto seems unhurt, merely soaked in blood. He turns to Lisa, and visibly recoils.
“Oh God, Ianto, I’m so sorry,” he whispers, touching the little amount of skin still on her face. He closes his eyes, willing down the revulsion and tears, for Ianto’s sake.
“You have to help us,” Ianto says.
“Nothing I can do.”
“She’s still alive.”
Billy’s eyes burst open, looking to Ianto and blown wide in desperate fear. He knows what the Cybermen did, saw the destruction they caused. He has the unshakable urge to wrap his hand around Lisa’s throat and squeeze until he feels the last shred of life leave her body. But the look on Ianto’s face stops him.
“You have to help me.”
----
It’s a little over a month later when Ianto is hired at Torchwood Three. Billy helped him design and build the life support system for Lisa, helped him smuggle the unit into the Hub while the team was out on call, and cut all ties with them, claiming trauma as his excuse. They both knew he was actually just frightened of Lisa, but neither mentioned it as he left the Hub. Ianto felt too grateful to call Billy out on his lie, and resolved to let him live out his life without fear of the Cybermen.
The charismatic captain of Torchwood Three had already asserted himself as a distraction to his cause. At the beginning, the flirting had seemed like an easy way to keep him off his guard while Ianto used his basement to resurrect his nearly lost girlfriend. But after the first meeting, Ianto couldn’t shake the attraction he felt towards Jack: an attraction that has not subsided since beginning work.
----
“Okay, that is the only special equipment you’ve got?”
Jack pauses with the hypodermic needle poised in his hands, glances back at Ianto from inside the boot of the SUV.
“Yeah, because I keep dinosaur nets in the back of the SUV.”
“Torchwood London would’ve.”
Jack pushes past him, opens the door to the warehouse. The pterodactyl shrieks as she dives towards them-
“Nope,” Ianto says, shutting the door in her face.
“How did you find it?”
“Rift activity locator,” Ianto replies, feeling his stomach do a tiny flip at the impressed note in Jack’s voice. “Torchwood London. See? Quality kit.”
“Yeah, it’s quite excitable,” Jack says, grinning.
“Must be your aftershave.”
“Never wear any.”
“You smell like that naturally?” Now it’s Ianto’s turn to be impressed, turning to Jack with a newfound appreciation for the fact that this man could shake him so much, especially without any chemical help besides his own natural musk.
“Fifty-first century pheromones. You people have no idea.” Ianto feels a shiver go through his body, is about to ask what he meant by the whole ‘fifty-first century bit’, but Jack beats him to it. “Ready for another go?”
“I’m game if you are.”
“Three, two, one… Split up!” They fling the door open, race around the pterodactyl in opposite directions, approach her slowly from the front as she settles, wary, on the ground in front of the door.
“We’re not gonna harm you,” Jack says, a calming lilt to his voice as he smiles at the dinosaur. “You can’t stay here. Come back with me; I’ve got somewhere nice and big where you can fly around.”
“Okay, so you’ll let the pterodactyl in but not me?” Ianto whispers, aggressive but not rude.
“We need a guard dog,” Jack replies, rude.
“I can be that. Like a receptionist, building maintenance, food and drink. Dry cleaning, even. That coat of yours must take a battering.” Don’t think of what sorts of stains you want to add to it. “Like a butler, I could be a butler.”
“We don’t need a butler.” They need a butler.
“Excuse me, dried egg on your collar,” Ianto growls.
“It was a busy week.”
“What, exactly, is your plan?”
“I’m going to be the decoy.”
“And it will rip you to shreds.” Can’t have it. Safer for Ianto to do it, ripped to shreds is something he’s survived many times, once in the last month. Something he’ll survive many times more.
“Dinosaurs? Had ‘em for breakfast. Had to: only source of pre-killed food protein after the asteroid crashed.” Ianto gives him a disbelieving side glance. “Long story. Here you go.” He shoves the hypodermic needle at Ianto’s chest. “One injection to the central nervous cortex. I’ll keep it occupied. Move.”
“No.”
“What?” He’s not used to being so abruptly disobeyed in high stakes environments. He finds he feels a slight thrill at it, underneath the annoyance. Doesn’t hurt that Ianto is so attractive. The needle is shoved back at him.
“It knows me. I’ll be a better decoy.”
“Way too dangerous.” What, now you give a shit, Jack? Five minutes ago you were threatening his life with your shitty driving. That’s more than even a pretty pair of eyes can achieve - although, they are very pretty.
“No, I’ve got a secret weapon. Chocolate: preferably dark.” He waves the bar in Jack’s face, moves towards the pterodactyl in an assured way that leaves no room for more discussion. Jack shuffles around to approach her from the back.
“I got your favourite, yeah,” Ianto cajoles, tossing the bar to her. “It’s good for your serotonin levels. If you’ve got serotonin levels.”
Jack must have done something wrong, because she’s spooked and takes off. He launches himself at her, catching her leg, brought along for the ride as she soars through the warehouse.
“Whoa! Ianto!”
He injects her, drops to the ground. But instead of the hard concrete floor, he hits something soft, something that says ‘oof’. He looks down at Ianto underneath him, feels blood rushing southward at the sight of his flushed face.
“Sorry.”
Ianto grabs his shoulders, forces him to roll to the left as the pterodactyl collapses out of the sky right where they’d been lying. Ianto ends up on top, the two laughing until they lock eyes. They are really very pretty eyes, Jack thinks, staring up with his mouth only centimetres from Ianto’s.
This is wrong, Ianto thinks. He’s in love with Lisa, that’s what this has all been for, saving her, escaping with her, loving her. But looking at Jack now, laid out beneath him and his hands gripping his upper arms tight, Ianto can’t help but feel the stirrings of attraction, arousal, and maybe something a little more emotional and raw.
“I should go,” he says, heaving himself up and walking away, tears filling his eyes as the feeling of having betrayed Lisa wells up inside him, warring with the confusion over Jack.
“Hey,” Jack says, straightening. “Report for work first thing tomorrow. Like the suit, by the way.” The tears fall.
For reasons other than the ones he tells himself - flirt, it’ll keep him off your scent. He arrives at work the next morning in a clean and pressed three-piece suit, and every day afterwards.
----
Ianto emerges from the lower levels of the Hub, having just administered another dose of painkillers to Lisa in the basement. He’s been here for three months now, pottering around after the field members of the team, cleaning what is honestly the filthiest place he’s ever seen. It’s taken him this long to just get the top level under control; his next self-assigned task is the lower level archives of Torchwood-requisitioned alien wares and personnel documents. Suzie gives him an odd look from her workstation where she is pouring herself over some kind of ceremonial knife, but says nothing. Keeps to herself, that Suzie. Ianto can sympathise. Jack appears like a ghost in front of him, atop the stairs, a small grin on his face.
“We have a situation.”