Notes: if anyone wants any of these snapshots developed into something longer, feel free to ask. I can't promise it'll happen, but I'll give it a go. So far, all the latest requests should be going ahead. Kudos to captainme for inspiring #71. And I can say now that #74 will not be extended.

Sixty-Nine

Jack helped Ianto move into his new flat. The old one Jack had deemed unfit to live in, and he had prodded and poked and pestered (and locked Ianto in the Hub for two days) until Ianto finally caved and agreed to find somewhere else.

But then 'helped' was being generous: Jack had helped him get all the boxes from the old place to the new place without the use of expensive moving companies (mostly aided by the fact that Ianto didn't actually own most of his furniture), but there 'helped' became a redundant verb.

Mostly because Jack had taken one look at Ianto, sweaty and shirtless and in those nice, worn, bum-hugging jeans, and had tackled him onto the sofa.

"We need to christen the place," Jack had said, beaming.

"Bloody insatiable, Harkness!" Ianto protested, and he put up a struggle for the entire principle of the fact that 'christening the new place' happened once the moving-in process was over, not in the middle of it. Or the beginning of it.

But he didn't fight too hard. And he didn't scream.

Much.

Seventy

Jack had invited himself over with the excuse of needing to check that Ianto was 'all in one piece' after their latest visitor-from-another-world had nearly taken his head off.

He had gotten a reluctant Ianto out of his clothes with the desire to make sure that Ianto was 'all in one piece' and not squirming out of things because he didn't want Owen to poke him with medical sorts of things.

And now he had Ianto flat on his back on the bed, gasping and swearing at him, just to make absolutely sure that he wasn't missing anything.

Because you had to check these things very carefully, after all.

Seventy-One

"I officially love you," Jack said, when Ianto joined him on the Hub sofa with two cups of the sweetest hot chocolate that the Earth had ever produced.

"Doesn't 'officially' imply that somewhere along the line, you married me?" Ianto quipped.

Jack's eyebrows shot up into his hairline, before he said: "Well, I love you enough to do it."

"Don't," Ianto advised. "You'd have my mother as a mother-in-law."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"It's bad enough having her for a real mother," Ianto said, rolling his eyes. "Anyway, it's kind of hard to marry a man who died in 1941."

"True," Jack allowed.

There was a short silence, in which they shuffled into a more comfortable position (which ended with Ianto's head on Jack's shoulder in that idle way he seemed to like), before Ianto broke the calm with his quiet voice.

"I love you enough too, though."

Jack squeezed his hand, and said nothing.

Seventy-Two

"Owen's coming," Jack said, turning his attention from his earpiece to Ianto. He had his coat wrapped around both of them, and it was bloody cold, but he was really rather more worried about Ianto's head wound and blatant concussion.

"'Bout time," Ianto mumbled.

"Yep," Jack said. "Oi. Sit up a bit, come on. Never thought I'd say this, but you can't go to sleep on me."

"Why? Y're warm and comfortable and..." Ianto finished the sentence in Welsh - but Jack wasn't sure if he was doing it to annoy him, or if the concussion was worse than he thought.

"Because then you'll die," Jack said, trying to keep the tone light. "And if you die, Suzie's waiting for us, and Suzie bet Owen ages ago that we'd last for five whole years, you and me. And if you die, she'll lose the bet, and she'll kick your dead ass."

Ianto seemed to think about that for a moment before he said, "That's a pretty good reason."

"Yep," Jack said. "And Owen's coming."

"Owen's coming," Ianto echoed.

Then they heard the approaching engine, and Jack wasn't so worried any more.

Seventy-Three

Martha rapped on the locked door of the Tourist Information Office and huffed crossly. She knew it never closed, because she knew Jack lived in the bloody Hub, and surely she'd have a video camera up here? Men, honestly, couldn't do bloody anything right.

She rapped again, louder, and this time got footsteps.

She squeaked in surprise when Jack wrenched the door back perhaps two inches and glowered out at her. He was quite obviously naked, quite obviously annoyed, and had quite obviously had somebody's hands messing up his hair very recently.

"Go to a cafe," he told Martha crossly, "and have a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich. With lots of brown sauce. And then come back, and we'll be open."

"Why can't I come in now?" Martha demanded.

"We're dabbling," Jack said pelutantly, and slammed the door in her face.

Seventy-Four

"Jack," Tosh said when he descended from his office that morning, "next time, can you turn off the CCTV when we all leave?"

"Why?" Jack asked.

"Because Owen just tried to sell the recording of you and Ianto in the shower room to several...websites," Tosh said, and flushed. "And I think he got a few bids, by the look on his face."

"Owen!" Jack bellowed, heading for the autopsy bay at a run.

But it was Ianto who noticed Tosh saving the video file to her personal files.

Seventy-Five

Jack didn't often like this position very much, but tonight he lay with his head pressed into Ianto's chest and listening. Where he was, he could hear Ianto's breathing more clearly than his heartbeat, but it was reassuring anyway, because it went a little bit of a way towards erasing the image of that gun pressed to Ianto's shirt, and the deranged look in his attacker's eyes that told Jack that it would have been so, so easy.

Seventy-Six

Ianto often thought of Jack, rather fondly, as being like a kid in some ways.

Like that morning: he had come back from one of his rooftop jaunts to find Ianto sprawled out on the sofa, reading a book and ignoring Myfanwy's plaintive demands to be fed. It was Ianto's little piece of private time, and Jack usually interrupted it with innuendo.

That morning, though, he had knelt by the sofa and peered his head over the top of armrest, looking down on Ianto's as though peering over the edge of a precipice.

"You look funny upside-down," he observed, then kissed the tip of Ianto's nose and wandered away again.

Ianto had stared after him in bemusement for a moment, before returning to his book and electing to ignore it.

Seventy-Seven

Ianto looked so much younger, so much more vulnerable, in his hoodies and jeans, Jack decided. He was dozing in the front passenger seat of the SUV, suffering from a rather spectacular case of crash and burn, and had already napped on the sofa after Gwen tore him a new one about overdoing it.

Jack had deemed him unfit to drive and was running him home. And with Ianto looking so much in need of someone to look after him right then, it would take one hell of a Rift alarm to get Jack back out of the flat once he was in it.

Seventy-Eight

Jack was practically bouncing in the airport lounge, one foot jiggling impatiently and his fingers flicking and fidgeting at the keys in his pocket. Ianto had been gone for a whole two weeks, and Jack was burning to see him again, and it was cracking Owen up something rotten. He'd actually banished Jack until Ianto was back and, quote, 'you get it out your sodding system!'

Ianto's sister had gotten married. Which Jack hadn't been bothered about until Ianto said that she and her fiance and the fiance's family "which is much bigger than ours" lived in Australia. And Ianto hadn't had a holiday in three years and had made one of it.

Which Jack was fine with. Until he'd woken up on the third day and realised that he missed Ianto terribly.

So now, waiting in the airport for Ianto to appear through those big doors, Jack was just wondering if he had the self-control to make it home, or whether the tinted windows of the SUV would have to make do.