Discover Top Posts Tagged with #torchwoodsecretsanta

Check it Twice

Rating: General Length: 4.1k Characters: Ianto Jones, Jack Harkness, the Tenth Doctor Summary: It's pretty hard to faze Ianto Jones. A day-in-the-life fic that would probably be considered crack if the show in question wasn't already there. For Gaia, known also as ianto-joness, whose wonderful blog full of all sorts of fantastic Torchwood things was a huge inspiration. Happy holidays from your secret santa, beautiful! ~Ao3

~*~

It wasn't like this sort of thing hadn't happened before.

It had been a fairly normal sort of day. Wake up, fumble through the bare kitchen before remembering he’d not had a chance to do the shopping in at least a week. Shrug into a fresh suit, every motion smooth and speaking of long familiarity {a moment also to think on the possibility of Jack taking it all off again at the end of the day}. Guiltily water the mournful-looking plant his sister had given him.

The morning crowds on the way to the Plass were normal too. It was different in the traffic when he didn’t have a hulking SUV to bully his way through the multitude of sleepy morning commuters, and he passed the time by alternating between his plans for the day and daydreaming of just mounting the sidewalk and hoping that the horn would convince everyone to move out the bloody way.

Even accounting for the tiny grans peering over their steering wheels and the business men too busy texting to notice when the lights turned, he managed to get to the tourist office before seven. This was all also normal.

The blue box by the front door was not normal.

The tall, skinny man with the wild hair and wilder look in his eyes was also not normal.

“Ianto!” the man called, brightening up immediately, “Ianto Jones, was it? I’ve been waving at the camera for thirty seconds, can you let me in?”

“Hello, Doctor,” Ianto said, reaching for his keys. “Do you like coffee?”

~*~

The Doctor had no interest in coffee.

Ianto would have found this concerning, except that he had a moment to watch the other man –Time Lord, alien, whathaveyou- shift from stand to stand in the shop as they waited for Jack, and decided that giving caffeine to someone with that much natural energy likely wouldn’t end well.

He’d paged Jack up with the intercom, saying there was something important the cameras had missed and Jack had better come have a look. It took approximately thirteen seconds for Jack to come bursting into the tiny office {three of which had probably been wasted staring at the camera feed} and pile onto the Doctor in a massive hug.

“What are you doing here?” Jack demanded, once he’d been persuaded to let the alien go. “What’s wrong?”

The Doctor’s shoulders twitched upward. “Well…” he said, looking slightly embarrassed.

Ianto went to go put the kettle on. He had a feeling they were going to need it.

He was right.

~*~

“So you went to see the Arbolites,” Jack said some ten minutes later, “because you wanted a new suit.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said, plucking at the hem of his jacket, which was starting to look a bit worn.

“Understandable,” Ianto put in, and was treated to a pair of Looks, which he ignored.

“And you happened to mention Earth as a source of past fashion choices.”

The Doctor shrugged. “I was always very sharp. Except for the celery.”

“Celery,” Ianto said, but Jack was talking again.

“So they did some research and have decided that Earth, although populated, happens to be the perfect climate conditions to raise the animals that produce the material they use to make all their fabrics. And now they’re on their way to annihilate the human race.”

“They were perfectly reasonable up to that point,” the Doctor admitted.

~*~

“Why are we not more worried about this?” Ianto asked, setting the tray of coffee down on the table with practiced ease. “You could have just rung us up, but you decided to come in person. That seems like something we should be concerned about.”

“When will they be here?” Jack asked, reaching for his favourite mug. “How long do we have to come up with a plan?”

The Doctor, who hadn’t sat down once and was now circling the room and pausing to look out over the Hub, said, “Come on, Jack, I can’t just pop in for a visit?”

“Historically, bad things happen,” Jack said, smiling but stern, and the Doctor’s shoulders twitched upward again.

“The Arbolites are generally pleasant people. Historically very polite, very strict to their rules, very easy to reason with, the most amazing technology... Fascinating, really—“

“They want to exterminate the planet, Doctor. For animals.”

The Doctor blinked, straightened. He suddenly looked much more business-like, if one ignored the hair and the dirty white trainers. “Right. Which is why I came. Sometimes they get a bit over-excited.”

A bone-shaking ping sounded from above. It set the lights swinging, sent them all ducking for cover and Ianto swore as he reached for a gun and found nothing. Jack and the Doctor turned instantly to the nearest computer bank just in time to see all the screens go dark.

Another ping followed, a sound that reminded Ianto of the submarine radar in all those old spy movies, and a figure appeared near the main door. There were more limbs than were strictly necessary. Ianto wished again, very fervently, for his gun. “Over-excited,” he said dryly. “Right.”

~*~

“Ooh, that’s nice,” the alien said, reaching out to draw a spindly finger down the lapel of Ianto’s suit.

Ianto fought the very real urge to shudder. It had been a long time since he’d had the time to crawl through the depths of the internet, and even longer since he’d been afraid of anything he found there, but the Arbolites looked so much like Slender Man with an extra set of arms that it makes him nervous. Owen would have laughed at him, but Ianto didn’t really give a shit about that when there was a skeletal hand that close to his neck.

Instead, he fought down his instinct to run far and fast and put on the blasé smile he used for particularly dense tourists. “Thank you. It’s a personal favourite.”

“What is the fabric?” The finger was back, flicking along the edges and lines, lingering on the buttons.

Ianto shot a look to Jack. The captain was watching, apparently entirely unconcerned. It shouldn’t have been comforting, but it was. Jack wouldn’t let anything happen. “Cashmere. Better than cotton, much better than polyester, not as expensive as most Merino wool.”

The alien, for all that it didn’t seem to have eyes or even a mouth, brightened. “Ah! A connoisseur. This Merino, how is it made? Does it imitate the fall of this--”

And that’s how Ianto found himself going over the ins and outs of menswear with an alien, detailing the main cuts and why he preferred the English style, and admitting that although he had a bespoke suit that had been custom made for him down to the last stitch, most of his suits were made-to-fit. “Too many accidents means I’d rather not put too much money into something that might get ripped.”

“Yes,” the alien mused. “Do you mind if I…” All sixteen of its long fingers twitched towards Ianto’s shoulders.

Ianto looked again to Jack, who had shifted to confer silently with the Doctor. He didn’t really want to hand his favourite suit jacket over to Slendie, but if he could buy them more time… He reached up and undid the first button, already making a mental note to call the dry cleaners.

~*~

“Jacket,” the alien said a few minutes later, “waistcoat, tie. Trousers.”

“Yeah,” Ianto said, reminding himself for the twentieth time that he got paid to do this sort of thing, “all custom-fit.”

The alien gave the impression of a smile. “Wonderful. I’m glad I found someone to discuss these things with. We’ll be so sorry to see all this disappear, it’ll be nice to have a bit of a record.”

“About that,” Ianto said, accepting his jacket back, but not putting it on. “I-we-“ gesturing to indicate the rest of the room and everything beyond, “would really appreciate if you didn’t.”

“It’s a shame,” the alien agreed. “But when we searched our records, it clearly stated that this planet was available for the taking. A very old record, yes, but all the same. We have your friend to thank for reminding us of its existence.”

The Doctor bristled. “Your records must be wrong. Earth has been claimed. It’s occupied.”

What followed was a terrifically boring technical talk in which the Doctor and the alien discussed rules and records and who-did-this and they-recorded-that, until the alien shook its head and said, calm and oh-so-polite, “Unfortunately, the records are law, and we’ll hold to them. Would you prefer vaporization or something different?”

~*~

“Funny,” Jack said when the alien had disappeared in a flash of light, “I don’t feel like I’ve ever been threatened so nicely before.”

“It’s still early,” Ianto pointed out, just to see the familiar unimpressed look cross Jack’s face. “Should we call Gwen? She said she was feeling better.”

“Rhys would kill us.”

True.

“They gave us two hours,” the Doctor said, still bristly –how did his hair do that—, “they must not know me very well.”

Ianto set his jacket down in the nearest chair, and then sat on it. It could wrinkle all it liked, he wasn’t putting it back on without having it dry cleaned at least twice, by that expensive business downtown. “Meticulous, aren’t they?”

“Records,” the Doctor sniffed, miffed. “Annihilating a planet based on out-of-date, wrong records. Ridiculous.”

“Why not just… update the records?”

The Doctor paused. “Ahhh,” he said, planting his feet and swiveling. Ianto, used to penetrating stares from Weevils and Blowfish and Jack with no coffee, met it squarely. “Now, there’s an idea.”

“Ianto’s always been good with those,” Jack said, and Ianto fought the urge to preen under the praise. “Whatcha thinkin’, Yan?”

“If they’re so set on going by their records, why don’t we just change them? Change them and have them check again before they set their death ray on us? Maybe they’ll just leave us alone. Worth a shot, if nothing else.”

Jack turned to the Doctor. “Does that fit with their past deals?”

The Doctor broke away from eying Ianto and began to flit around again, too much energy in his skinny frame. “Clever. Might even work. But not from down here. We’d have to get up into their spaceship, do some hand-on editing.”

Ianto sat up a bit straighter. “Could we do that?” He turned to the Doctor. “Can we do that?”

The Doctor looked back and grinned. “Ianto Jones, come outside with me. There’s something I want you to see.”

{“I know what I want to see,” Jack said with a leer as they headed out the door, but neither of the other two listened to him.}

~*~

“It’s…”

“Yes?”

“It’s…”

“Yeeesss?”

“…not what I expected.”

“That…isn’t what I expected either.”

“If you wanna see something bigger on the—“

“Jack, no.”

~*~

The TARDIS was incredible—every cell of Ianto’s body that still remembered the years and years of reading science fiction under the covers was screaming about it—but there was no time to sit and admire her. Two hours seemed like a lot until the fate of the world was at stake. Even less when you had to go sneaking around looking for a likely bank of computers with the full knowledge that if you got caught, everything would {quite literally} blow up in your face.

“You and Jack can go together,” the Doctor said, clinging casually to the console as his ship bucked around them, “and I’ll go the other way. We’ll cover more ground if we split up.”

“I can go myself,” Ianto said, running the fingers of the hand that wasn’t latched to Jack’s shoulder along the railing. The TARDIS felt alive; she had to be, the way the Doctor and Jack talked about her and considering what she could do. “I know record systems better than Jack, if they’re organized anything like how we do it on Earth.”

The Doctor ‘hm’d a bit, twisting a knob here and kicking a panel there. “Jack?”

Jack turned, and Ianto put every drop of ‘if you try swaddling me while the fate of the planet is at stake I’m never sleeping with you again’ into his own face and bearing. “Ianto’s right,” Jack said smoothly, reaching out to clap a hand on Ianto’s shoulder, “he’s more than capable.”

The Doctor eyed them, considering. “Usually I tell people to stay put.”

“When have I ever listened to people?” Jack asked, shooting a cheeky wink Ianto’s way. Ianto’s eyes rolled heavenward.

“…point,” the Doctor agreed. He looked at Ianto then, and Ianto felt the weight of hundreds of years in that gaze. “Are you sure?”

He met the Time Lord’s eyes squarely. “It’s my job, sir. Save the earth and all. Normal day.”

The Doctor softened just a bit. “Well, all right.” And then, as he turned to the doors, Ianto caught a hint of, “they never do listen anyway. Okay!” he said louder, clapping his hands. “Off we go then. Quick and quiet and back here fast as you can. Got it?”

Jack’s hand came up to rest at the small of Ianto’s back, just for a moment. “Got it,” he said, and Ianto nodded.

The Doctor grinned, wide and mad and Ianto understood then a little of what had kept Jack chasing after him for so long. “Allonsy!”

They slipped out the door, crept to the nearest corner, and were promptly apprehended by a whole pack of Arbolites, each of whom had a solid grip on a small laser rifle.

~*~

“That was the shortest mission ever,” Ianto said, watching the cell door shut behind their captors. “Of all time.”

Jack tested the handcuffs. The Arbolites had cuffed them all together in a line, apologising in a courteous tone that managed to chastise at the same time, a sort of ‘we’re dreadfully sorry about this, but if you had stayed away you wouldn’t be in this mess, sirs.’ For all the aliens’ platitudes, the cuffs would not budge. They were well and truly stuck. “How’d they know we were there, anyway?”

“Might have been that screechy, vworp-y sound,” Ianto said absently, inspecting the cuffs. For things belonging to a terrifyingly advanced race of aliens, everything looked oddly old-fashioned.

In fact, the whole ship was like that. Their current cell looked more like Ianto’s grandfather’s sitting room than a prison. The glimpse of the ship he’d seen as they were hustled along had it styled as something Victorian, rather than something capable of vaporizing every human being on the planet. A pretty aesthetic, but not all that effective for holding prisoners. He shuffled closer to Jack, giving their chains a bit of slack and allowing him to reach into his jacket and retrieve a tiny packet from a hidden pocket. Jack pressed a shoulder against his, all solid and comforting warmth, as he argued with the Doctor about stealth vs appearances.

“Sure, it’s distinctive,” Jack said, waving a hand as the chains clinked softly.

“Yes, it is.”

“And it’s helped me find you before—“

“Yes, it has.”

“But for sneaking aboard an alien ship for a stealth mission? Why didn’t you just turn it off?”

“Sir—”

The Doctor looked shifty. “It’s my calling card, Jack—“

“You don’t remember how!” Jack said, sounding both delighted and exasperated. “You don’t, do you?”

“Well—“

“Sir—“

Jack gestured, the motion broad and sweeping as he fought to keep from laughing. “You are the most—“

“Jack.” They turned to Ianto, who was waiting patiently by the door, lockpick kit in his un-cuffed hands. “They’re trying to blow up the planet?”

~*~

Ianto crept through the wood-panelled corridors, feeling an awful lot like he was playing naked hide-and-seek. The stakes were much higher here though, and he had far more to lose. He had a gun, liberated from a cabinet outside the cell, in one hand, the four-fingered grip different but the overall weight of it comforting. Admittedly, he wasn’t keen the idea of firing a handheld weapon in a spaceship, although both the Doctor and Jack had assured him he couldn’t do any damage.

The Doctor hadn’t been thrilled about the gun at all, but Jack had insisted. And honestly, Ianto was far more comfortable with it than without it. Just because the Arbolites had been perfect… gentlemen, for lack of a better term… during their first arrest, didn’t mean that they’d do the same the second time around. No one could be that adherent to the rules.

He peeked in through a door and grinned at the sight of a sleek computer bank. The grin widened as an alarm sounded deep in the belly of the ship as Jack instigated a distraction. Now they were getting somewhere.

~*~

The records were surprisingly easy to navigate. He’d been worried that he wouldn’t be able to work the technology at all, let alone read the alien languages. The Doctor had assured him that the TARDIS would do all the ‘tricky bits’ and sent him on his way with little other than a ‘good luck’. There was no reason to doubt, but as he opened the first file and the familiar roman characters appeared on the screen, relief flooded him anyway.

He tapped a couple of keys experimentally, flicking through a couple files here and there as he got used to the interface, then popped over into the directory and bent over the keys to type.

~*~

It was when he was on his way back to the TARDIS that he ran into trouble. Four hands caught him as he stepped past a particularly shadowed corner: two around his arms, one at the nape of his neck, and the other slapping against his mouth before he could do much more than startle.

“Drop the weapon, if you please.” The cultured voice had, for the first time, a true hint of menace to it.

Ianto obeyed.

“I enjoyed our talk earlier,” the Arbolite said, hustling him through the ship at a ridiculous pace. “I do wish you’d stayed away.”

“Yeah well,” Ianto puffed, sure his face had gone pink to match his shirt as they all but ran along, “I’d be dead anyway if you vaporized us all.”

“The fabric we could gain from your planet is the most sought-after in all the galaxies. Softer than anything you’ve ever felt, and twice as strong as your steel cables. Kings and queens pay handsomely for a single bolt of cloth.”

“Seven billion people!”

“Well worth it. We did apologize, you know.” The Arbolite had the gall to sound offended.

Ianto swung round to… to do something, and fell over his own two feet as they came to a halt in a massive engine room, scorch marks fresh on the walls. He skidded a bit and landed at the base of another computer bank, this one covered in ominous-looking red writing. He didn’t pay too much attention to this though, a bit preoccupied with staring up at the number of old-but-very-dangerous-looking guns levelled at his head.

“Input the algorithm,” Ianto’s Arbolite said to one of its companions. “We’d better get it over with now before something else goes wrong.”

“You said—“ Ianto took a breath as fingers shifted on the triggers, “you said two hours.”

There was a lot more strength in those spindly arms than he thought. The force of the blow sent him sprawling back onto the floor. “That was before you and your friends violated the rules of conduct. Have you no manners whatsoever?”

Ianto went to push himself up, words that Owen would be proud of gathering at the back of his mouth, and felt something cold press against the back of his neck. He went very still.

“Hey!” a voice boomed out, and Ianto craned his neck until he could spot Jack and the Doctor at the entrance to the room. The Doctor had something in his hands that buzzed, but Jack’s Webley looked far more menacing. Especially as it was pointed directly at the alien standing over Ianto. “Let him up.”

A mutter of protest swept the room. “He violated—“ the Arbolite started, puffing up.

Jack, for a miracle, ignored the choice of words and locked gazes with Ianto. Ianto nodded once, very slightly.

The Doctor saw it too, and straightened up a bit, putting his sonic screwdriver back into his pocket and wandering over to the computers, wondering aloud about the mechanics of them as he went.

The Arbolites watched this progression, bemused. Good manners apparently didn’t dictate that they fire at him midsentence, because he made it all the way there before turning and saying, “I think you should let him up. There’s been a horrible misunderstanding.”

The gun at the back of Ianto’s head actually pulled away a little. He breathed again.

“How do you mean?”

The Doctor was poking around at the computer, tapping here and there in an apparently random pattern. There was the sound of humming weaponry dying down. “You said you checked your records before coming to this planet?”

“Of course.”

The Doctor’s eyes glittered. “Check them again.”

There was a pause. A very long pause. Ianto exhaled against the alien-wood flooring and very deliberately did not look at Jack.

A shift above him. The gun stayed where it was. “You. Pull the records up.”

The pause that followed was even longer, and this time Ianto did look up. So he was first to see the dip of Jack’s gun, the flicker of triumph on his face as he strode forward to give Ianto a hand up.

~*~

“That went… well,” Ianto said as the TARDIS shuddered into existence on the Plass.

“It did, didn’t it?” the Doctor said, twisting one final knob and patting the console.

“Lucky,” Jack huffed. He hadn’t gone more than three steps away from Ianto since pulling him off the floor. Later this would be irritating, especially as Ianto had things to do in their own records today and Jack was not well-suited to papers and dust, but for now? For now it was nice. “Lucky that they’re so obsessed with rules. Did you see their faces when they read the new bits?”

Ianto hadn’t, and he said as much, but he had been the recipient of the multitude of apologies, the bowing, the hand-shaking, the apologies again. “It really didn’t occur to them we might’ve changed it?”

“Double-crossing and breaking the rules is unthinkable to them and their culture,” the Doctor said with a shrug, the incident already in the past in his mind. “It’s a bit like these insectoids over in the Andromeda Galaxy, the Ylkk. They’re physically incapable of telling lies. Great fun at parties.” He came down the ramp to stand by them at the door. His next words were casual. “Don’t suppose you’d like to pop along and see?”

Ianto stared. He was tempted. Oh, he was tempted. Even the idea of giant insects wasn’t so much a deterrent as it should have been. A real, alien planet.

The alarm on Jack’s wristband went off, loud and jarring in the quiet. Jack was already tapping away, face hidden and tenseness written in the line of his posture. “Weevil,” he said a few seconds later, voice a little too casual.

Ianto straightened. The spell broke. “Well, let’s get on with it then.” He shifted the bundle of fabric {the Arbolites were right—it was incredibly soft and strong and would make a wonderful new suit if done by the right person} in his arms so he could reach out to shake the Doctor’s hand. “No rest for the wicked,” he said in semi-apology.

“Oh, you are far from wicked, Ianto Jones.” The Doctor shook Ianto’s hand with a grin and turned to give Jack a tight hug.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Jack said into the Doctor’s skinny shoulder.

“Maybe leave out the alien invaders next time though,” Ianto said, and then the Doctor was shooing them out the door, flapping his hands and promising ‘all sorts of adventures, just call me up when you’re free and we’ll—‘

The door had hardly shut behind them before Jack pulled him into a kiss, one of those ‘I’m glad you’re alive, just you wait until later’ types that was full of promise and left him breathless. “SUV?” Jack asked when his wristband beeped insistently.

He’d met a Time Lord, travelled in an actual time-and-space-machine, and saved the planet, all before breakfast. He loved his job sometimes, he really did. Normal was so much more interesting working in Torchwood. “Yes sir,” Ianto affirmed, and went to fetch the keys with a smile.

#torchwoodsecretsanta

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#torchwoodsecretsanta