Part One: Anger

Ianto Jones was pissed off.

He was mad at Jack, for dragging his sorry administrative ass into the field. He was mad at Gwen, for her stupid, childish games back at their pathetic attempt at a camp. He was mad at Owen, for losing the SUV like the bloody ignorant prick he was. He was even mad at Tosh, for making him feel two feet tall when they were trapped in the cellar by trying to protect him from the gory sight in the refrigerator. And he was mad at the bat shit insane villagers of Brynblaidd, eating people every ten years just for the hell of it.

Cannibals. Why did it have to be cannibals?

It was like something out of a horror movie, or worse, a campy slasher flick, only they weren't teenagers, they were Torchwood and shouldn't be dealing with this sort of shit. Frankly, Ianto had always preferred sci-fi cinema: Japanese monsters crashing through skyscrapers and aliens exploding from men's torsos were far easier to deal with than real people who just happened to cook and serve other humans for fun.

Well, at least he had some field experience now. And he had a nice goose egg on his forehead to show for it, along with a bruised kidney from where he'd been kicked, a deep gash on his temple from where the butt of a rifle had knocked him out, and of course myriad other cuts and bruises from being tenderized like a slab of meat. He was tired, dirty, sore, and more than anything, pissed off.

He shouldn't have been there, because he could have been coordinating everything from the hub. He shouldn't have been caught; if he had been quicker, he would have escaped with Tosh. He shouldn't have let them touch him, let alone cuff him and gag him and beat him; he should have fought harder. And he shouldn't have needed rescuing, especially from Jack bloody Harkness.

God, the man had swanned in on a fucking tractor as if he was John McClane and shot off every kneecap in the room like he was playing a video game on the Xbox. He should have killed them, all of them. They should all be dead and on hooks like the poor bastards they murdered every decade. Instead, they'd get to rot in prison, denied their taste for human flesh, yes, but still alive, and that, quite frankly, was too good for them. Any decent horror movie saw the bad guys get their just desserts in the end, usually in the form of a violent death, like being sucked into an airplane engine or thrown off a moving train into a volcano.

Sitting in the back of the SUV holding his throbbing ribs and nursing a bruised ego, Ianto ignored the quiet murmuring around him. Tosh and Owen and Gwen were trying to figure it out, hoping to rationalize something that could never be explained—Owen by swearing at it, Tosh by questioning it, Gwen by denying it. Jack was stoic, staring straight ahead as he pushed past the speed limit in an almost desperate attempt to get them away, get them home. Maybe he was more rattled than he let on sometimes. Maybe playing the Big Damn Hero wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Maybe he had wanted to kill the lot of them after all.

Ianto didn't care. Of all the things that bothered him right then, the one thing he hated the most was his piss-poor performance and ultimate failure in the field. He had gone out with the team and cocked it up on his first try. He'd got caught, got kicked around, and almost got himself filleted with a bloody meat cleaver until his boss had blown the room apart with a shotgun. Some small part of his mind knew he should be in shock, that he had every right to curl up into a quivering, sniveling ball of wooby sobs and tears. He'd earned it, after all: no one else had been caught and handcuffed, kicked and gagged, a dirty burlap sack tossed over their head and a knife held at their throat.

Ianto Jones had every right to break down, right then and there, but Ianto Jones refused.

No, he was not going to break. He had not survived Canary Wharf and lost Lisa to fall apart now. He was not a fragile glass ornament, shattering on his first field mission into a million scattered pieces of himself. He might have a some deep cuts and nasty bruises both inside and out, but Ianto knew how to fix things that were broken, and as he watched the miles roll by and the lights of Cardiff grow nearer, he knew exactly what he needed to do to repair the ornament that had been his life before the Beacons—before the cannibals and the bat and Jack.

And he would not only repair it, he would make it shatterproof.

Author's Note:

So I had another snow day, did a bit of reading, came across some badass pics of Ianto from Countrycide on Tumblr, and decided I needed to write some sort of anti-coda to that episode. Something decidedly NOT the hurt/comfort trope that fandom has come to accept in which Jack takes care of Ianto, who sobs and clings and generally embarrasses his fans with his woobiness.

This may or may not be that fic. What started out as a slightly irreverent poke in the eye turned a bit more serious and *cough* seductive by the end. But at least he doesn't cry. Not that there is anything wrong with crying, but just because a man cries over his dead cybergirlfriend doesn't mean he cries every time he gets clubbed by cannibals.

So that's my story and I'm sticking with it. God bless snow days, Tumblr, and my TW co-conspirators Darcy58 and Cerih. Enjoy!