Work Text:
i. Trying to forget you
Ianto is all immaculate lines and sharp edges, tailored suits and matching ties, coffee brewed to perfection, silences and wit.
It’s late nights and early mornings when all of his flawlessness gets disturbed. Like a sheet of print paper with one corner folded, an almost perfect circle where the artist’s hand has twitched right before finishing the curve.
Like the rim of Jack’s coffee cup after the first sip of morning coffee when there’s a deep brown stain where his lip has brushed against the porcelain.
It’s late nights and early mornings when Ianto’s edges become rounder and his colors become more saturated. That’s when he drops the silences and the usual politeness, and replaces them with gasps, and moans, and endless whispering.
Late nights and early mornings, the Hub is the most timeless place in the universe, locked in its own time pocket where the difference between ten in the evening and five in the morning does not matter. That’s when Ianto’s face is flushed to an impossible shade of magenta, when his expensive tailored trousers are pushed all the way down to his ankles and he is bent over the heavy, old desk in Jack’s office.
Late nights and early mornings are not always about that. Sometimes, trousers stay on and they just talk, voices getting quieter and accents getting thicker all the way into the morning when others would start coming in and calling out hellos; and Ianto would leave the office and get started on the coffee and the daily routine of saving the world, all the way into the next late night.
When they talk all through the night, Jack sees all of Ianto that no one else sees. Not just pale skin and flushed cheeks but also his pale, quiet soul and mind flushed with memories and needs, all unwanted and unwelcome, like self-prescribed torture. This is when Jack thinks he might be helping, when he feels a bit more needed, like maybe fighting his own demons and saving the world is not the only thing he can do. Sometimes, seeing Ianto smile feels like a much bigger victory than another day of Earthly living. Those small, personal victories feel much more important at the end of the night when Ianto’s smile is sleepy and he’s quiet, content.
Late nights and early mornings at the Hub
are long gone. So is Earthly living, and Ianto, and every single detail that is still so vivid in Jack’s mind. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed, he still remembers it all, as if it’s just been another night and another morning and everything is as immortal as he wish he wasn’t.
ii. I’d hook up with anyone
Vortex manipulator constantly strapped to his wrist, Jack ends up anywhere, every night. The concept of nights is kind of blurred when he can travel and in earth terms, he’s more or less been spending his time at night for at least a couple of months.
Always nighttime, always foreign planets, and always their darkest corners and cheapest bars.
If there is one thing that is true in every end of the universe, it is that a low murmur and deep blue eyes do miracles. And that every planet has a cheap bar, or some distant, alien equivalent of the same.
“Are we including non-human life forms,” Jack had joked and now he wishes he could take that joke back. Wishes he could go back to that time when everyone was alive and he could joke, and Ianto would give him a hurt look and he would know that he has all the time in the world to fix it.
Now, there is no time to fix anything, there is not anything left to fix, and non-human life forms are included.
Jack feels like he’s shagged every single species that is even mildly attracted to humans, by now. Sometimes, on planets that look vaguely Earthly, he pays for motel rooms and then lets unimaginable men and not-quite-men and genderless aliens fuck him into old mattresses, and it’s always the same, always ends the same way.
Jack never leaves before the sunrise. He always sticks around and lets himself be caressed as if it matters, he always makes small-talk in languages he barely speaks and feeds on the warmth of another being in a bed that could be his, at least for the night.
By the time his lover of the night stirs awake and starts talking about going back to work and maybe seeing Jack again at the same bar, how about that?, Jack has already found all of his clothes around the room and,
Vortex manipulator constantly strapped to his wrist, he’s off to find another night, somewhere else.
iii. Drinking and lying to myself that I feel great
When Jack drinks, he looks more human than ever. His eyes light up and get a familiar gleam, his face gets bright red, and he gets louder, and laughs.
That’s the only way to get Jack to laugh, nowadays. There are, rarely, nights when he doesn’t find temporary lovers and settles for picking planets where you can be crowned king if you tackle the right drinking challenges.
Most alien alcohol is stronger than human vodka, and sometimes Jack finds himself thinking about things normal humans would say if they could see him drinking – your poor liver, you’re not gonna reach 40, don’t you think you should see someone for that?
And he thinks, fuck that.
He’s never been a normal human, not anymore, not ever. So fuck that, fuck all of it, fuck everyone,
And alien equivalents of vodka taste so much better.
He orders another, and it’s enough solace for the night. And this one is where he starts laughing and feels better, where buttons come undone and he starts yelling and accepting challenges, and by the end of the night,
He’s the king of a bunch of planes.
Or at least, owns nice farms in most of them.
And he drinks to that, and drinks to aliens, and old friends, and cheers, cheers, cheers.
vi. When the morning comes, I go back to hating myself
Sometimes, rarely, Jack chooses to travel to a morning. When the headache gets too much and his coat reeks of alcohol and someone else’s perfume and pheromones, and he needs a light breeze and coffee, and dry cleaners.
Sometimes, rarely, Jack ends up watching a sunrise in Cardiff, drinking bad human coffee and dealing with a hangover like a bad human being.
It feels as if the city is yelling at him, like places that remind him of before are highlighted and oversaturated just so he can see them so, so vivid in his mind and hurt more than ever.
Jack spends days, well into the afternoon, watching the water and buying bad coffee, as if the coffee boy’s welsh accent and baby blue shirt would magically make it better.
They never do, and it just stings more.
When night falls in Cardiff, Jack gets ready to leave and find a different night, somewhere far away, where trying to forget would be easier and the pain he’s left in the city would be so much more distant.
And then a particular – though largely insignificant, random, night falls in Cardiff, and Jack decides he is not going anywhere, not now.
The hotel room he finds is cheap and strikingly human,
The vodka he buys and finishes on his own is cheap and strikingly human,
And hence weak, and doesn’t bring him nearly as much solace and intoxication as alien liquor.
The hangover in the morning is almost nonexistent, the pain is dull in the back of his head, and he doesn’t feel like moving, not now, not ever, not in the next hundred years of the damned eternity he’s got left.
Jack thinks this is where the pain he’s been running away from catches up with him, and he’s captured, done running.
It would take a miracle to make him move, he thinks and,
Vortex manipulator tucked away in a safe, he stays in Cardiff.
For now.