Title: Five Conversations About Ianto and Jack
By: kennedy-unknown
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto/Jack, Tosh, Gwen, Owen
Rating: R
Warnings: Spoilers throughout whole of Season One
Summary: It seems that everyone has an opinion about Ianto and Jack.

***


1. Owen and Tosh

"You're his best mate, you tell me."

Tosh glared at Owen over her specs. "Hardly. Ianto doesn't open up to anyone."

It was a lie, and Owen knew it. Tosh wasn't good at hiding anything. Well, if you were paying attention to her at least, as the whole sexy alien with telephathic device fiasco had proven. Her hands sped over her keyboard, the graphics on her screen whispered to her, as she tried to drown out the nasal tones of Owen's voice.

"Come on," he goaded her. "I know after the whole almost-eaten-in-the-countryside ordeal you two managed to bond a little. He heroically sacrificed himself to stop you from being a meal, you bought him a beer to say thank you, that kind of thing."

"That just shows how little you know," Tosh replied coolly. "Don't you have work to do?"

"Nope. I'm free."

"Free to annoy me. I'm busy. Go and play Solitaire or something. At least try to look like you're achieving something." She looked up to see Jack watching them from the floor above. She hoped he couldn't read lips. Lord only knew the talents that man had.

"Are they doing the dirty or not?"

She slammed her hands down, and the screen squealed in protest. "I don't know!"

Silence fell between them, and Tosh thought it was finally over.

"Okay," Owen drawled. "So do you think they're doing the dirty?"

She twirled around on her chair to face him, her cheeks flushed. "You're the one who knows about screwing your colleague on the sly… so why don't you tell me?"

Owen jumped up as if scalded. "Righto. I have work to do." He scurried away to his desk, and tilted his screen so that Tosh couldn't see his face.

She felt as if she had been scalded herself, shocked at the inappropriateness of her question. She took a deep breath, and turned back to her monitor and tried to work again.




2. Tosh/Gwen

"Do you ever think about it?" Gwen suddenly asked.

She and Tosh were knee-deep in rubbish, looking for an alien device that had suddenly activated itself and shown up on Torchwood's censors. They had drawn the short straw, and they were beginning to stink as they moved piles of debris aside, a small wand Tosh held beeping methodically as it continued to register the alien technology.

"Think about what?" Tosh asked.

"You know…" Gwen bit her lip, the gap between her front teeth giving her an endearingly childish look. "Them."

"Them who?" Tosh was exasperated, and it was beginning to show.

"You know…" Gwen repeated herself, unable to go any further.

"Gwen…" Tosh protested.

Gwen leaned in, as if she thought they would be overheard in the middle of the Cardiff Waste Facility. The cries of the seagulls alone would have ensured privacy. "Jack and Ianto."

Tosh wiped a sweaty strand of hair out of her eyes. "I think about them all the time."

"You do?" Gwen was astonished.

"Yes. It's part of my job to think about all of you many times during the day."

Gwen groaned. "You know what I mean!"

Tosh played dumb. "I'm afraid I don't." The beeping on the wand began to increase its cadence, and she knelt down to dig through the rubbish to a deeper level.

Gwen, of course, fell for the need to state the obvious. "You know, doing it."

Her soft Welsh tones made her sound so apologetic for having to bring it up, that Tosh had to hide her smile. "Oh. No, I don't think about that."

"Not at all?"

"No." Realisation struck Tosh belatedly. "…do you?"

Gwen giggled, as if caught in the act herself. "Sometimes."

"I don't fantasise about my co-workers," Tosh said weakly. The wand was going crazy in her white-knuckled grip.

They both knew that was a lie, but luckily for Tosh, Gwen decided not to call her on it.

Tosh's cheeks grew crimson, and the flush deepened even further as her thoughts of Owen suddenly turned to Jack and Ianto. Together. Naked. Writhing, their heads thrown back in lust and abandonment.

"It's hot, yeah?" Gwen remarked, an innocent statement about the weather fraught with a double entendre.

Luckily at that moment, Tosh uncovered the alien device, and handed it over to Gwen. "Let's get back to the Hub," she announced, snapping the sensor wand shut and stuffing it in her coat pocket.

Gwen smiled, and followed the retreating Tosh back to the car.




3. Jack/Ianto

"What are we doing, sir?"

Jack stretched himself like a cat. He looked so satisfied that Ianto wouldn't have been surprised if he started purring. "It's way past the time for you to be calling me sir, Ianto."

"If I get into the habit, I'll slip up at work."

Jack leaned in and licked his way from Ianto's shoulder, up his neck, and entered Ianto's mouth. Ianto shuddered beside him. "And would that be such a bad thing? If you called me Jack at work?"

"It would look strange, sir."

"I used to think you would look strange without your suit, but now I think you look much better out of it."

Jack smiled, rewarded as Ianto's resulting blush from the compliment coloured the entire length of his body. "Everybody else at the Hub calls me Jack," he continued.

"But I never have."

"Why not?"

Ianto fell silent.

"Tell me, Ianto," Jack urged him.

Ianto looked away, unable to meet his eyes as he revealed a truth about himself. "Too much to keep hidden from you."

"So it was easier to distance yourself if you didn't call me by my real name?"

Ianto groaned. "Don't psychoanalyse me."

Jack kissed the inside of his wrist. "But it's so much fun."

Ianto jerked his hand away. "No, it's not."

Jack looked chastened, but decided to turn on the charm. He drew Ianto closer to him, and stroked his unkempt bed hair. Sometimes he wished Ianto would let it grow a little wild. "You shot a man to save me. That says a lot."

"It was also to save Tosh."

"Go on, say it."

"Say what, sir?"

"My name."

"I can't."

"Yes you can."

"No."

"It's one syllable. It's one of the easiest names to say in the English language. Unlike your bloody Welsh tongue-twister."

This brought out a natural smile, finally. "Insulting the name my parents gave me is not going to make me acquiesce, sir."

"J-a-c-k. Say it with me. Come on."

"Fine… Jack."

He was rewarded with a passionate kiss, and Jack's hands began exploring his body again. Ianto groaned. "You're insatiable, si—Jack."

Jack laughed against his chest, his breath warm and human. "That's what I like to hear."

But still that nagging voice echoed inside Ianto, spurred into action by Jack's mention of shooting Owen – and Owen's triumphant accusation of Ianto being nothing but a part-time shag to Jack. He grabbed Jack's head, and tilted him up to face him. "Jack, what am I to you?"

"You're my Ianto," Jack replied.

As if it were that simple. But nothing ever is.




4. Ianto/Tosh

"I really don't know what we are."

Tosh leaned in conspiratorially, making sure Owen was out of hearing range. "What, you don't know if you're… boyfriends?" She stumbled over the last word, and repressed the urge to giggle. It sounded like too immature a word to use in conjunction with Captain Jack Harkness.

Ianto blushed, and she could tell he thought it was a bit of a naff word as well.

"But he kissed you… in front of everybody. That has to mean something."

The barista called out the details of their order, and Ianto collected the tray of take-away coffees. Owen bounded over and snatched his flat white, and Tosh took her latte more politely, giving Owen a grimace. He was still sullen and withdrawn, his betrayal of Jack eating away at him despite the other man's apparent forgiveness.

Ianto waited until Owen disappeared through the doors of the café before he answered. "It's just a lot to take in… I thought he was dead. I'm still trying to digest the fact that he's alive, and back with us."

Tosh nodded, and held the door open for him. They made their way across Roald Dahl Plass, Owen a mere blur in the distance as he headed for the tourist information centre that served as a front for the Hub.

As if it had suddenly sunk in, Ianto whispered, "He's alive."

"Yes!" Tosh grinned.

They caught up with Owen in the stairwell. He was standing still, his ear cocked as if he were a puppy. "Do you hear that?"

It was a sound that they couldn't describe when they tried to talk about it later. It was the sound of motion, but mixed with grinding and a muted alarm. And alien. But nothing out of the ordinary for Torchwood. So when they entered the Hub, they were still in good spirits, only to find Gwen standing dumbfounded at the base of the water tower.

Before she even said a word, Ianto knew that they had only gotten Jack back in order to lose him again.




5. Gwen/Owen/Tosh

"Have you seen him eat anything today?" Gwen asked.

Tosh looked up from her monitor to watch Ianto milling about on the level above them. "He ate lunch with us when he brought in Chinese."

Gwen pulled her chair over to Tosh's station, and sat down heavily. "No. He picked, but he didn't eat."

"He looks skinnier than usual."

"I'm skinny, and no one gives a crap about me," Owen said as he passed by.

"And your point is?" Gwen asked tartly.

Owen glowered, and wheeled his own chair over to join them, digging his heels into the carpet to pull himself along. "I would have waited for my invitation, but you know what the post's like."

"I didn't think this would be a subject you'd be interested in." Tosh raised an eyebrow,

"I'm not really. But it's not like anybody's discussing the latest episode of Neighbours, so I have to have something to talk about." Owen swung his feet onto Tosh's desk. "So, Teaboy's angsty, what else is new?"

Tosh shoved his feet off her desk, and he almost fell off his chair.

"Don't be a wanker," Gwen hissed.

"He wasn't the only one Jack abandoned," Owen spat, and stormed off back to his own desk.

Gwen and Tosh exchanged looks. They knew that. But it was easier to concentrate on Ianto.

Tosh also knew how much deeper Ianto's pain went. He'd managed to prise more information out of Tosh than she had wanted to reveal about her time with Jack in the temporal rift. How Jack had discovered the real Jack Harkness. It burned Ianto to think of Jack falling for somebody so quickly, and that if his sense of honour weren't so strong he may have been tempted to forget about Ianto and become stuck in time just to stay with the other man.

Tosh had seen the hurt on Ianto's face, and knew that she had made things so much worse. Now Ianto had to deal with losing Jack, combined with the fact that everything he had thought about their relationship was thrown into doubt.

"I'm worried about him," Tosh whispered.

Gwen nodded. "Me too. But what are we going to do?"

On the balcony, Ianto was cradling a mug of coffee in his cold hands, and staring at nothing in particular.

"I think the only thing we can do is ride it out." Tosh felt that her words were empty. She was advocating inertia.

But it felt like it was all any of them could do. Jack had been the sun to them, and their orbits were suspended until they could find him. There was nothing left to say.

***