Title: To Guide, Rather Than Lead
Authors: Analine & Sariagray
Characters/Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Word Count: ~2,500
Rating: PG
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Beta: Nancybrown
Summary: Flat Holm lay on the horizon, far enough away to be nothing more than a dark smudge against the brightness of sun-on-water. Jack and Ianto, navigating the silence after an argument.
Notes: Written with Sariagray for the Torchwood Collaboration Festival on LJ.
To Guide, Rather Than Lead
Flat Holm lay on the horizon, far enough away to be nothing more than a dark smudge against the brightness of sun-on-water. The air was warm except where the wind cut through it.
Ianto's hands gripped the railing of the boat, matching the thin line of his lips and the squint of his eyes, closed off and coiled tight as a spring. Jack seemed to be faring better, hands coaxing the wheel and eyes opened wide, but the line of his back was taut and his mouth was just as unyielding as Ianto's.
They hadn't spoken since last night. That they'd even managed to coordinate this short trip to drop off supplies and collect reports on the island had been a miraculous feat that had unfolded over breakfast (because that, for some reason, hadn't been affected by the silence – Jack hadn't left Ianto's flat in the middle of the night and Ianto had still placed toast and coffee for two on the kitchen table).
The cold of the metal railing bit into Ianto's palms, and when he released his hold to flex his fingers against the stiffness, they were red. He shoved his hands into his pockets to warm them.
Thirteen hours of it so far, of the thick pressure of silence bearing down - because the things Ianto wanted to say were crueler than Jack deserved and because the things Jack would say in retaliation were crueler than Ianto wanted to hear.
Left unattended, silences were like fire, growing impossibly large, burning hot, threatening to overtake even the most sound of structures in an instant. It had been Lisa who had described it that way once and, at the time, Ianto had been so angry that he'd dismissed it, despite realizing that there had probably been some truth in her words. But he still hadn't found it in him to open his mouth, then or now.
Ianto was grateful when the lighthouse, and then the bleached limestone shelf of the island, came into view. He was even more grateful when they were finally docked and able step off onto solid land.
It was business as usual at the facility. He took a strange sort of pleasure in the crisp flatness of the clipboard clasped tightly between his fingers, the papers anxiously awaiting signatures, confirmations, seals of approval. Boxes to be checked off and papers filed into their respective folders as if someone's life depended on it. Maybe it did. Maybe he should be glad that Jack hadn't thrown him overboard on the way over. Or vice versa.
Ianto chuckled a little at this and one of the nurses raised an eyebrow.
Jack, for his part, had disappeared down the east corridor immediately upon entering the facility, boxes of supplies in hand. Ianto hadn't seen him since. Once he'd finished his appointed tasks and collected the requisite paperwork, he didn't bother looking for Jack. He began to make his way back instead, head up but with slow feet.
There had been a time when he probably would have welcomed the extra time here. He might have stopped off to visit a patient or two, or spent a moment in the kitchens with the staff, but right now he found himself eager to get back to the hub. Perhaps there the silence would feel a little less concentrated, a little more manageable.
Gwen would fill the empty spaces with her voice – at turns cheerful and worried and annoyed –and the tap of her feet against the floor or her fingers against the desk would work their way into the hub's soundtrack. There'd be the comforting whir of machinery, and the trickle of water from the tower's base, too. Jack could go slam his office door shut and Ianto could retreat into the furthest reaches of the archives, and then by nightfall-
Ianto looked up. Jack stood in front of him and tilted his head, one eyebrow raised in inquiry. Ianto took a step back, glanced at his clipboard, and nodded once. He handed it over to one of the nurses who seemed to have followed him out unnoticed. He took a stack of files beneath his arm and let Jack lead them onto the boat.
Jack's back was no longer taut and his shoulders were slumped. His face, when he turned against the heavy afternoon sun, looked more lined and drawn than it had on the way out.
He wondered if he should say something, a word or phrase to lighten the mood or break the tension, but he'd spent the day almost entirely silent, aside from the requisite instructions and acknowledgments to the staff, and his vocal chords seemed to be luxuriating in the rest; it felt too much like work to put them to use now.
Instead, Ianto stared out over the deck at the expanse of darkening water.
"You're like clones," Gwen had told him a few days ago. "Finishing each other's sentences like that – it's downright creepy."
She'd given him a huge toothy grin that betrayed her feigned annoyance, claiming that they did it on purpose, to throw her off her game. Ianto really had no idea what she was on about.
It was probably true, though, that he and Jack had somehow become more in sync since Torchwood had become (by necessity, not by choice) a team of three against the world. It was as if somehow they could sense each other's thoughts and needs in a way that hadn't been possible before; a sort of communications upgrade. It seemed a bit ironic to think of it like that now, after all this silence.
But perhaps, instead of finishing each other's sentences, they would be able to join together the blank spaces and silences in the Hub. They could transform the void that Owen and Tosh had left behind and make it into something useful. Perhaps these silences could evolve into something less like wildfire and more like the peaceful wave-swell of the bay.
The sunlight glazed over the surface of the water, still blindingly bright, but less so now that they were headed towards the quay. Cardiff loomed before them, cheerfully bathed in light. Still, he couldn't distinguish much from out here, with the distance and the spray causing him to regularly blink mist from his eyes.
Jack cleared his throat, the first sound Ianto had heard him make since the half-hearted grunt of thanks after breakfast this morning (at least, that's how Ianto interpreted it – gratitude was a sweeter thing to swallow than aggravation). It was loud, almost painfully so, despite the whir of the boat's engine and the slosh of the water and the wind in his ears.
He looked over.
Jack's face seemed to have relaxed a bit as he guided the boat along the water. The home stretch, Ianto thought, and he had a feeling his face was calmer, too, tension easing its way out, hitching a ride on ripples of water that carried it far out to sea, maybe.
To his surprise, Ianto's mind was quieter than it had been in ages. An unforeseen consequence of all that silence, maybe.
There were no stray thoughts or questions hanging there in the balance, no overwhelming urge to ask Jack, for example, how many details he would be able to produce, if pressed, about their current team's predecessors – how they took their afternoon tea, what kind of biscuits they preferred. No lingering doubts floated to the front of his mind, about how much Jack would remember about him, or about Gwen, after they were gone. Nothing about how much time any of them had left. All of these questions had been on the tip of his tongue for weeks, but it was almost as if they'd burrowed deeper inside of him with each passing day.
And somewhere along the line, his perception had shifted.
It seemed like a million years ago that Ianto had once felt a tiny pang of jealousy at Gwen's easy rapport with Jack. Back then, he hadn't known what to say, hadn't known how to prove himself, how to raise himself in Jack's esteem. And Gwen had seemed to have all the answers.
He wasn't sure that any of them had the answers now, but at least there were some things he was sure of.
Like how he fit into Jack's reflection and Jack fit into his, without urgency or fuss. Two superimposed images – were they always this similar, or had pieces of them altered until they were able to slide together comfortably?
Not that it was all comfortable, or that caring for Jack was a simple thing. Ianto was also fairly certain that he wasn't always an easy man to be around either. They both had their hang-ups, their arguments and petty fights and all-out feuds.
And then someone would die, and the laundry wouldn't matter and the ex-lovers bent on world domination would fade back into the past where they belonged and their careless, selfless acts in the field would be brushed away as temporary necessity.
Jack was just a man, not a fearless leader, not even necessarily any sort of leader at all. Just a man who had been cast into his role by little more than default. Much like himself. Much like all of them. That it didn't make him love Jack any less was perhaps the most terrifying and comforting realization that had come out of all of this.
Perhaps there had been some good in letting Jack loom over him like a god. The thought allowed a strange sort of restfulness to ease him, and to consider that Jack was no more or less than anyone else. The simplicity of it (we're the same, he and I) was breathtaking.
Ianto contemplated charting out the course of their quiet, from pained and angry to awkward to comfortable and contemplative – the rise and fall of the silence, a parabola that stretched out over the day's pages.
He glanced at Jack, who grinned at him.
"Hello."
And that was it. As it always had, their shared stillness crashed into a million, jagged pieces. Ianto blinked against the sunlight behind Jack's head and the loudness of the word, almost forgetting the proper response. He rolled his eyes.
"Hi."
It could go either way, now. The fork in the road. Jack would either spout the inanities that had built up, ceaselessly, behind his lips all day or he would turn contemplative and weigh each word before he spoke it.
No matter Jack's mood, Ianto would still be required to speak very little, which suited him just fine.
To Ianto's surprise, Jack didn't immediately continue. He just guided the ship into the last stretch of the bay, as if that one word hadn't been significant, as if it didn't represent anything at all, let alone a day's worth of silence. As if maybe the greetings had been so small that they didn't register as proper words.
When they were close enough, Ianto hopped up over the deck, nodding to the men at the dock as he helped reel the ship in. He and Jack exchanged several brief half-sentences, filled with phrases that meant next to nothing at all, yet still allowed them to move from the boat, to the boardwalk, to the hub with all the necessary paperwork and supplies they'd need to make their report later.
A nod of affirmation, a directional tilt of the head, a handful of files, the cold plastic handle of Owen's medicine case (it was still Owen's, always would be) and somehow Ianto found himself staring at Jack's back as he rummaged in his pocket for the keys to the Tourist Information Center. Ianto sidestepped him to open the door with his more accessible set.
After they'd passed through, Jack thanked him, and smiled.
Ianto smiled back, and after he set the papers down on the desk, he turned to Jack.
"You know the first thing Gwen is going to ask us when we see her is if we're speaking again."
Jack gave a little smile, no more than the quirked right corner of his lips. It was less than his other smiles, and somehow also more. It faded quickly.
"Well, we are, aren't we?"
And yes, that was true, to an extent. Speech existed between them right now, words leaping to bridge the empty space. Perhaps that was enough. Perhaps simple vocalization would appease Gwen (it would; she was more startled by the sometimes long silences of the Hub, the chills in the atmosphere, and less concerned with whether or not they shared actual meaningful conversation.)
Ianto nodded. "Right."
"She's probably watching us now."
Jack leaned forward and pressed his mouth to Ianto's. It was soft, almost hesitant, and when he pulled away, his eyes were soft and hesitant, too. This worked much better than words to close the distance.
Words could be flat things, he mused, as he let Jack guide him further inside, his hand on the small of Ianto's back. They could be spoken without color or shape. And even when they existed bright and rounded, they could fall heavy.
But there were some things that were truer and deeper than words, a language unspoken yet universally understood.
Jack's hand, this gesture, certainly seemed to hold some strange power of communication. It remained there on Ianto's back, just below the edge of his shoulder blades – if those long fingers stretched down to their full length, they would just barely touch the waistband of his trousers, his cotton shirt tucked up neatly underneath.
There was no influence of a day, a week, a month's worth of arguments, nothing hidden below the surface. Just affection and trust – steadying, yielding. It was in an instant both completely overwhelming and entirely comforting. Most things with Jack worked like this, though.
Sometimes Ianto wondered if Jack had used up all of his words decades before. He imagined countless heated debates – lovers' quarrels numbering in the hundreds, the thousands. Perhaps Jack was worn out. And perhaps this, now, was some kind of elaborate experiment to do away with all of it, to communicate simply by touch; like guiding their ship to Flat Holm and back, across Cardiff Bay, Jack would navigate him, too.
Ianto stopped moving. He leaned back into the touch for a moment. He didn't turn to face Jack, just let their bodies hover close for a moment. A transfer of energy, of heat. Built upon by what had come before, by countless identical transmissions, moments when words failed them, but this didn't.
This silent language between them would allow Jack to guide him, would allow them to find their way.
A month, a year, even a week ago it might have felt like he was being led, pulled along by some force outside of himself, but Ianto was certain now. There was synchronization here. They were the same, and Jack was simply showing him the way.
Which was a very different thing after all.
end