After Jack disappears, an uncomfortable silence settles around Ianto as everyone tries to re-organise their thinking around Ianto's gaybiwhatever/Ianto's shagging Jack/Jack's gone and decide how much, if any, sympathy he's due.
Well, Gwen and Tosh seem to be. Owen eyes Ianto and then the other two as if he's deciding when it's going to be acceptable to make snide comments.
Myfanwy is the only one who doesn't change her attitude. So he finds himself, that first week, spending a lot of his time up near her, sharing giant bars of Cadbury's with her.
"Karrrk," she says conversationally one day, and headbutts him gently. He nearly falls twenty feet into his coffee machine.
Ianto stops spending extra time with her, and puts up with the sulking.
Tosh is the first of the human population to make overtures. Ianto would be shocked, except, well, he's avoiding Gwen like the plague. He's very fond of her, but if he's persuaded to talk he might cry. Or shoot someone. Owen had been very therapeutic.
She wanders into the kitchen, an event unto itself. Normally, the kitchen is Ianto's domain through and through unless Gwen gives up on Snack-a-Jacks and tries for a sneaky chocolate digestive or five.
"I…" she says, and then stops, staring at her shoes for inspiration. Ianto and Tosh's relationship is based around the fact that they're the quiet ones. The ones that don't need to talk constantly, or create a spectacle of themselves. They're the ones that can just be. And the nearly being eaten by cannibals thing. "How are you, Ianto?" she asks, finally.
"I'm fine," he replies, lying automatically.
From the look she gives him, she doesn't believe him. "It's just…" she tries again. "I didn't realise you and…"
She can't bring herself to say his name, apparently. "You weren't meant to," he says flatly. It was meant to be nothing. Just… two people who found it easier to lose themselves in each other than just to be lost. Jack had been lonely, Ianto had been alone, and it was easier to offer comfort than accept that he might have needed it himself. "It wasn't important," he finds himself adding, although that's not true. It hadn't been hearts and flowers and declarations of love, but it had been forgetting, and odd shades of laughter, and teasing, and having someone to cling onto, if only for a long second.
"It didn't look like nothing," Tosh offers next.
Ianto shrugs. "You know him." Melodrama. It hadn't felt like nothing, though, not with everyone watching, but that wasn't the point.
She hesitates. "Did you know… about the…" She waves her hand in the universal Torchwood sign for rising from the dead. Honestly, Ianto hasn't thought about that, what with the Gone Gone Gone that circles his head, taking up his time. He's got a lot of that on his hands, without Jack there, and he feels the weight of it sometimes. The tick of the second hand restrictive rather than comforting; a rigid amount of movement that doesn't take variables into account, going on and on and on. But nothing's permanent.
He shakes his head, the suspicions he's deliberately left unthought-of tumbling through his brain as a whirlwind contrast to his calm exterior. He isn't even sure what species he'd been sleeping with, anymore. Try-sexual. Try anything. Very Jack. Sex and the City, and that led him back to Lisa. God, he was going mad. He was going to be one of those people that snapped, and mowed down a supermarket full of people one day.
Tosh was still speaking.
"I just… I know it's a shock, when you find out something like that, about someone you…" she continues.
Ianto's now had lovers turning out to be not-so-mortal and lovers trying to kill everyone, but he does concede that Tosh managed to compress both of those traits into one partner. She's efficient like that.
"Well, it's not like we thought he was normal," he says, rather lamely.
Tosh leans her head briefly against his shoulder, offering comfort rather than seeking support. It's been a while since someone's just touched him for the hell of it. He presses a chaste kiss to the top of her head, and she smiles at him before heading back to her workstation.
Gwen's next. She has to corner him, like a mouse, but she's a tenacious bugger and she pounces eventually.
"Are you sure you're okay?" she asks, after wandering around the topic for a few minutes with pointless chatter. "Because, you know, we didn't realise you were shagging him and if we had… we might've, you know…" She waves her hand around aimlessly, leaving Ianto to wonder what she'd change if she had known. "I worry about you."
"You worry about all of us," Ianto points out. She's taken over unofficial command, mainly because Owen can't be arsed to get up in the morning and Ianto offered to do the paperwork for her, but the responsibility's been good for her. She's more tired now, but more decisive. Sharper.
"Well, yes, but I worry about you 'specially, you know," she concedes. "Did you love him?"
The question blindsides Ianto for a moment, in both its directness and its tense. "We all did, in our own way," he says carefully. She gives him an exasperated look that suggests that he's not getting away with that. He doesn't know how to describe it, the mixture of lust, loyalty and longing, but he's fairly sure it's not love. Wasn't love. He's felt love, the kind that left you wanting to spend your life with somebody, and he thinks he's still too damaged to even attempt to feel it again. Lisa took all the fight away from him, there.
"Ianto," Gwen prompts.
"No," he says slowly.
Gwen makes a sound, as if she can't decide whether to be relieved or disappointed (he's become the spurned boy in the Mills and Boon-like plot in her mind, he can tell, and he doesn't appreciate it).
"Could you have been in love with him, if you'd let yourself?"
"What?" Ianto's hand flies up, almost protectively. He doesn't want to answer that, doesn't want to think about it. Because he was frightened the answer was yes. Maybe not straight away, not after Lisa.
(He'd told her he loved her after the Tube ticket gates had eaten his Oyster card. She'd laughed, kissed him over the barrier that separated them, and then gone for help. He'd had to wait ten minutes for her to stop talking to the security guard – she'd always been a right chatterbox, in her own words – and she'd only stopped so she could laugh at Ianto, still stuck behind the barrier and waiting patiently for her. But she'd got him out.)
But still…
Gwen just sighs. "Oh, Ianto," she says, and hugs him. Gwen sometimes treats people like puppies; helpless, and in desperate need of physical affection. Ianto hasn't quite figured out how he feels about that, yet; it's simultaneously reassuring, comforting, and deeply disturbing. "Anyway, I was thinking, yeah, that we need another person out in the field," she continues, as if she's just been talking about budget reports. "And lucky for us, we have the perfect man for the job."
Ianto tenses, and given that she's still hugging him there's no way she won't notice that.
Gwen sighs. "No cannibals, I promise," she says.
Ianto snorts. "That's what they all say," he teases her, gently, and then gets back to work. Three days later he's Weevil hunting in the red light district near Splott, with Owen in his ear making disbelieving noises about the area being called 'the magic roundabout'. He and Gwen exchange looks, and decide not to tell Owen that the red light district used to be over the top of the Hub.
Owen, predictably, prefers not to say much. There's an uneasy truce of sorts, and it's communicated – in subtext and looks – that this is only because Owen doesn't want to be hurt in inventive ways by Gwen and Tosh, who have inexplicably taken Ianto's side. Ianto responds in kind by implying that he understands, that he still hates Owen's guts, and would shoot him again if it wasn't going to be him cleaning up the bloodstains.
Ceasefire is observed.
And then one day, when there's been a few more call outs than any of them might be expected to cope with and stay sane, Owen mutters, "Fuck people that piss off and leave," as he passes Ianto in the Hub. After that the truce is slightly less uneasy, and sometimes they'll even go for a beer together; drinking in previously (silently) agreed upon animosity and getting in alternate rounds. They prefer the nights the rugby or football is on – Owen, unsurprisingly, is a Millwall fan – as they can hurl insults against the other's nation and parentage freely.
They tumble back into the Hub, drunk, clinging to each other on the invisible lift because Ianto can't get the keys in the Tourist Office door and they're both carrying too much to even attempt to balance properly. Not that they're drunk at all.
Myfanwy circles them, and Owen mutters, "fuck," because it looks like she's glaring at them accusingly. Ianto throws pizza at her, and she catches as it deftly as she must have once caught the smaller flying reptiles that were her natural diet. Cheese doesn't agree with her, but with any luck she'll shit on Owen's desk and Ianto can't bring himself to care right at this second. He likes being drunk, at least whilst he's rat arsed he likes it; it gives him the option not to care or worry, and it's the only time he feels like sticking a finger up to the universe in a giant fuck you, I'm pissed. He hasn't verbalised that thought sober since he was fifteen and nicking CDs from Woolworths. Doesn't do that anymore. Got the internet.
Tosh and Gwen are watching the three of them now – man, prick and pterodactyl – and as the lift jerks to a stop, Gwen puts her hands on her hips and glares at them, trying to look leaderly. Leaderly – was that a word?
"Owen, what have you done to him?" she demands, eyeing Ianto and his lack of tie or jacket, and his socks hanging off his feet.
"Shoes," he says suddenly. He's sure he used to have some.
Gwen looks torn between crying and laughing, so Ianto smiles at her helplessly.
"Car," Owen says, in a tone of voice normally reserved for Eureka! or I know how to get rid of the alien!
Oh. That explains that, then.
"Beer," Owen adds, holding some up. Ianto remembers that he used to have some, too, and it's there, at the end of his arm, and he hasn't lost it. Good. And Ianto knows that Tosh has a bottle opener hidden in her second drawer. The one that she's eyeing speculatively now.
And they end up, the four of them, the definitely human, definitely here members of Torchwood Three; they end up playing Jenga (Owen's been trying to feed the blocks – unsuccessfully – to Myfanwy) and drinking beer and giggling like drunken students, and Ianto wakes up when Gwen makes him wake up, rolling down a step on the Hub floor by accident, and works because she makes him, even if she can't make Owen. But no-one can make Owen work, and Ianto needs that normality there just like he needs Gwen to wander up to the Tourist Office and lay her head on the desk, because she might be leader, but she's not Superwoman and she's not afraid to let the world know she's hurting.
"I'm so hungover," she admits. "Bloody hell. I don't want to be boss. I want to go home."
Ianto lets his head thump gently against the desk, too. It would be funny if his head didn't hurt so much. He laces his fingers through Gwen's. "One step at a time," he says gravely, and for some reason this sets them both off laughing again before Gwen turns her attention to kicking Owen until the autopsy report lands on her desk, and Ianto resumes his and Tosh's surveillance tracking of that idiotic joyriding blowfish.
And then, of course, Jack comes back.