"Come in, I've just...I've got to lie down."
Ianto left the door open and shuffled down the short hall to his bedroom. Tosh followed him in, pulling the door shut and sliding the three deadbolts home behind her. The flat was still painted a dull white, but there was more furniture now, at least in the living room before her. Before, when she had checked in after Lisa, there had just been boxes everywhere, stacked in the corners of the room, a threadbare sofa, and a few mismatched chairs. The chairs were still there, but now there was a new sofa and art on the walls.
"I see you took my advice on the Shashin print," she said, recognizing one of the pieces from an image search she and Ianto had whiled away a slow day on.
"Yeah," he said, voice echoing out from the bathroom, speaking loudly over the running sink. "I wanted the original, but it turns out the Smithsonian is less than impressed with Torchwood since that incident in '95."
"Seriously?"
"Well, no. Not about the painting, anyway. They are still peeved with us, though."
She smiled slightly, imagining Ianto trying to talk a curator into shipping over an original, claiming there was an alien message encoded in it or that it emitted an otherwordly radiation. Ianto interrupted her daydreaming, sticking his head out of the open bathroom door.
"Do you want a shower or anything? I've settled for the sink, but I can leave some towels out for you if you'd like."
"No," she shouted back, "I showered before I came over."
Belatedly she considered whether she should have come at all, but the memory of Ianto's fingers trembling around her own on the ride back to Cardiff re-solidified her resolve.
She wandered into the apparent living room, home of the couch and print, and still the omnipresent boxes.
She trailed fingers over the errant cardboard flaps reading "LISA - Books," and "LISA - Photos," loathe to investigate further with Ianto in just the other room. Thankfully, she was examining the DVDs on the flimsy, second-hand bookshelf when he emerged from the steaming shower, hair wet but body fully clothed, bruises on his neck and wrists the only sign of their shared ordeal.
"Did you want to watch something?" he asked, rubbing his hair with another damp towel.
She trailed her fingers over a box-set of James Bond videos, unable to lie in the startling sadness of her coworker's life.
"I just don't want to be alone," she whispered, almost inaudible, even under the bathroom fans and the traffic sounds filtering in through the curtains.
Ianto just nodded, giving a final, almost decisive rub to his hair before dropping the towel to the floor. He snatched the corner of a throw off of the nearest corner of the sofa next to him and, throwing it to Tosh, said, "I'm going to go heat up whatever I have in the fridge that's vegetarian."
Tosh tried to cut him off, because after all, she hadn't had to spend as much time in the fridge as he had.
As though he had read her thoughts, he shook his head and threw the rest of the blanket at her. "It may just be tea and popcorn," he said, "but at least...well, you know."
She nodded, and watched him limp into the kitchenette. Snuggling deeper into the threadbare duvet, she knew that this was where she was meant to be in this moment.
Jack could have added flash, Gwen a cloying sympathy, and Owen a brusque examination of her bruises, but Ianto had seen the same hunger in the Beacons that she had, and if he wanted to watch camp videos to deal with it, as long as he didn't kick her out of his shabby flat, she could deal with it.