Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Cocktail" hummed playfully in the night, just loud enough to drown out the occasional motorist or passers by on the street, which were rare at this hour. It was easy to recline in this small flat and just take in the night falling over another day in the twenty-first century. The sun had began to sink lazily below the line of roofs some hours ago, the traffic buzzing about as people left the city centre to go home to school children, televisions, dinners, and simple normal lives. When at last the sun winked beneath the top of a tall ash tree, the Fraxinus excelsior, or European Ash, at the end of the street, the curtains had been drawn, but the light was persistent enough to cast shadows of the tree's boughs onto the fabric. Minutes later the refracting light in the atmosphere, the colors that seem to have fascinated humans for millennia, painted the backdrop to the low-lying rooftops and pressed its palate of reds and violets onto the curtains.
These curtains were drawn because Ianto had the decency to close them when they were naked. Though it was tempting to give the passing viewer something to really enjoy, Captain Jack Harkness was a sensible man on the matters of sex, courtesy, and on occasion decency. Jack was the one to draw them closed today. After getting to know quite intimately Ianto's body and all its subtle triggers over the last few weeks of after-hours time with him, Jack knew what he was doing when he tossed Ianto down onto the sofa, pressing his arms above his head and holding them there as he took his time pressing down onto his prostate. The afternoon had been slow like that.
Ianto had gone to the shower by now, working to wash the humanity off of himself again to go back to being the working man that he is to the eyes of everyone else. The curtains were open again, night filling the frame of the window and the dozy sound of "Moonlight Cocktail" being played through a moderately new stereo. The inner workings of how the music went from Ianto's music player as data to the plastic, foil, and wire speakers drifted through Jack's mind as he nursed the last of his scotch and the last ringing harmony of the brass faded.
Lazily he watched the stars, naming the galaxies out of habit, and thumbing through a mental scrapbook of terrains and cityscapes that would not exist for centuries or would not be uncovered until after mankind had touched nearly ever last one of them. It was difficult to dismiss the urge to leap from the sofa in his borrowed dressing robe and run off to the stars, but that was an option he no longer had. There was no ship to carry him off, no one to seduce or bargain with to get away, just his job and the long years of waiting. Even with the sound of the shower in the next room, a constant whisper of the man inside, was not going to give him a reason to want to stay behind. Without even giving it a second thought, his reflex to distance himself forced any chance that anyone, not just Ianto Jones, would be close enough to keep him there should his ship come.
The track changed to Benny Goodman's "Jersey Bounce" some moments ago. The upbeat introduction had faded into the smooth solos. The soft singing of the clarinet was enough to put everything else away in his mind, just for a moment. As the glass parted from his lips and he leaned forward, a small smile chased the scent of the scotch. For now, the music, mixed with the musing of water on tile and skin would be enough of a lullaby, even if he wasn't actually going to sleep. This was a close as he got, and right now, it didn't seem all so bad.