Another Path Chapter 3
Dec. 11th, 2012 11:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
galadriel1010Title: Another Path
Chapter Title: Chapter 1
Challenge/Fest: LongLiveIanto Bingo
Prompt: Fork in the Road AU
Rating: T
Dedication:
Summary: One decision, two possible outcomes. Taking the wrong path leads Ianto down a life he thought he'd lost.
Characters: Jack/Ianto, team, others.
Contains:
Disclaimer: Torchwood and its environs, occurrences and persons belong to the BBC. The original characters have disowned me.
Ianto flipped his notebook shut and dropped it into his bag with his pen and phone. Next to him, Mark stretched and yawned, nudging Hetty in the head as he did so. “Sorry Hetty. Did I miss much?”
“You weren’t asleep,” she muttered, still shutting her laptop down. “Oh come on, stupid machine. There, thank you, was that so hard?”
Mark and Ianto shared looks and shrugged. “Finished, dear one?”
She glared at him past Mark, shoving her computer in her bag as she did so. “You know, I think you could be a bit more sarcastic, if you tried really, really hard.”
“Can’t be bothered.” Their lecturer was waiting to be able to lock the room up, so they hurried down and out onto the corridor. Ianto straightened his bag and checked his watch. “Two hours until seminar. Coffee?”
“God yes.”
The SU was packed out with people avoiding the weather and first years who still thought that drinking between lectures was a good idea - and third years who still thought that drinking between lectures was a good idea - but they managed to find a table in a corner where they could steal an extra stool and keep out of the way of the pool tables. Hetty, Mark and Ianto had gravitated together in their first week, when they’d been the mature, ‘sensible’ students in a room full of hyperactive drunks, and they’d stuck together in all their classes. Mark was an HR man taking a few years out to get a degree in his field, who did two afternoons a week at his company to keep his hand in, and Hetty was a former climbing instructor looking to change careers after a bad fall put her in a wheelchair.
She nudged Ianto and raised her voice to be heard over the din. “Have you started the assignment yet?”
“Nah. Thought I’d do it the night before, same as everyone else.” He grinned. “I’ve looked at it, but don’t really know where to start. Steve’s going to go over it today, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, but I wanted to get a bit ahead.” She looked over at Mark, who just rolled his eyes at the suggestion, and leaned forwards with her elbows on the table. “I don’t know what to do...”
“I have a suggestion!” Mark pushed her mug towards her. “Drink your coffee and remember you’re in the first year.”
“You’re all so funny now, but you’ll regret it in third year,” she warned him. “God the coffee’s awful here.”
“I told you, stick to tea unless you know what you’re getting,” Ianto told her. “You can’t go wrong with a teabag.”
“I bet they could,” Mark muttered.
They finished their coffees and left because it was too loud and too crowded, and found another corner - this one between the Faculty of Art and the library - where they could sit and go over the lecture. It was still picking up steam, going over the basics, but Ianto still felt the need to take detailed notes. There was always that nagging fear that it would happen again, that he’d wake up and not know who he was.
Hetty eventually threw down her pen in despair and slumped back in her chair. “Okay, even I don’t care. Where are we going this weekend?”
“Lynton,” Mark suggested, as he always did.
“We did Lynton the first time you suggested it,” Hetty growled. “Oxford.”
“Too far.”
“It’s not that far,” Ianto put in. “We could probably do it in a couple of hours.”
They looked at each other and shrugged. “You’re driving.”
“Yep, and I get the deciding vote.” He looked over at Hetty. “Hotel or camper?”
“I’ll hotel. You can camper if you want, but it’s just too...” She shrugged. “You know.”
“Yeah, I know.” He rolled his shoulder, which had been injured in a way he couldn’t remember and was still stiff if he kept it still for too long. “Besides, it’s Oxford - who wants to find a campsite in Oxford? Do you want to look into places during the seminar?”
“Can do. Email you the options?”
“I’ll go with what you two decide,” Mark told them. “I find it’s safer that way.”
Ianto nodded sagely. “I have a boss like that.”
Hetty grinned. “You back in the library tomorrow?”
“Oh yes.” He groaned and flopped back in his chair. The library was better paid than the Ely one - in that it paid - but not nearly as much fun. It might get better, but the head librarian was a bit odd, and the students were worse. “All day, so you’d better come and visit me.”
“I’ll need a book from a high shelf,” Hetty promised. “If I can be bothered to drag myself away from Top Gear and leave the house.”
“I love you too.” He looked at his watch again and groaned. “Come on, time for the joys of Introduction to Business.”
Mark unfolded himself from the chair and grabbed their bags. “Cheer up, kids. There’s only two years, a semester and a half left!”
# # #
Three weeks later, November treated them to a day of random, watery sunshine in the middle of reading week. The library was packed by the time it rolled around to Wednesday and Ianto’s turn, although a lot of the first years had taken the opportunity to dash home or to the sunshine. They kept him busy checking books in and out, taking the books back up to the shelves, and answering a seemingly endless stream of inane questions.
He was trying to request an inter-library loan for a Masters student when the head librarian, who had been showing him how to do it, disappeared suddenly. He looked up for her, and found her talking to a man in an RAF coat, who was staring at Ianto. For a moment he seemed familiar, but then it passed and he seemed to realise that he was staring and dragged his attention back to Dr. Firth. She answered a couple of questions in the affirmative, and then darted back over to the counter.
“Sorry, Ianto, I’ve just got to take Mr. Harkness up to floor 3 and show him where the books he needs are. Are you going to be alright here?”
“I think so. Could you just...” He turned the screen around and she finished off the loan request quickly, then hurried off with the stranger again.
The Masters student shrugged at him and picked up the books he’d checked out. “Researcher, I guess. Odd that he’s not a Doctor.”
“Ours not to reason why.” Ianto grinned. “Enjoy the textbooks.”
“Oh, I won’t.”
He went back to the mindless rhythm of checking in and out, and got away to take a trolley of books back to their shelves when Dr. Firth came back. There was no sign of her visitor, although he could have been in one of the meeting rooms, and Ianto tried to put him from his mind. He couldn’t get past the look that Harkness had given him, though. He’d seemed shocked, like he hadn’t expected to see Ianto, and not like it was a good shock. Ianto couldn’t deny that he was a bit shaken by it, and he kept looking out for the stranger for the rest of the day.
# # #
The weather had turned disgusting again by the weekend, with heavy sleet blown by driving winds. They had hoped to take the campervan out for a last bit of sunshine on the Pembrokeshire coast, but with that plan thwarted they descended on Hetty’s flat to marathon ‘Yes, Minister’. Ianto brought his coffee machine, Hetty roasted a chicken, and Mark bought more bags of doughnuts than was truly sensible, and they sprawled in the living room in front of the TV.
Ianto licked the sugar off his fingers and stared at the blank TV screen. “There was this guy in the library the other day,” he blurted. “It was a bit weird.”
“Was he hot?”
“Sort of, I guess.” He thought back on it. “Sort of Hollywood hot - looked a bit like Tom Cruise.”
Hetty perked up. “I’ll have him if you don’t want him.”
“Why do you think that every story ends like that?” He rolled his eyes and carried on, “He’d arranged it, I think - Firth didn’t say anything about it, but she seemed to be expecting him. He was doing some research, apparently, but the way he looked at me... It was like he knew me.”
“Maybe he did.” Mark looked up at him seriously. They knew about his memory loss, and the sanitised version of his life story; he was very open about it, because it put them off asking awkward questions he couldn’t answer. “You should have asked him. He might be the only person in Cardiff who knows who you are.”
Ianto shrugged. “The way he looked at me, I don’t think I want to know who I am. It was like... like I was the last person he wanted to see. He seemed...”
“Angry?”
“No,” he said quickly. “More... afraid, maybe? I don’t know.”
They waited for him, but he shrugged helplessly and turned his attention to another doughnut. Mark broke the silence with a grunt. “You probably just lamped him one when you were drunk. I bet you were a right vicious one.”
“Probably opened bottles with other people’s teeth,” Hetty agreed sagely. “So just don’t do it to him again, and everything will be fine.”
“Well as I’m probably not going to see him again, that should be easy enough.” He reached for another doughnut and glared when she took them out of his reach. “No fair!”
“Save room for dinner,” she chided. “And go fetch my DVDs, minion.”
“I don’t know,” Mark commented, draped over a bean bag. “Fetch you DVDs, fetch you hot men. You’ll have to put a collar on him if you’re going to keep having him do your bidding like that.”
Ianto threw a cushion at him and stole the doughnuts back on his way to the DVD player. “You couldn’t afford me, and you know it.”
# # #
Ianto pushed his tinsel-draped cart past the end of the row and paused. Contrary to his expectations, Harkness had been back every time he’d worked there, and several times he’d just been in studying, for five weeks. It was nearly the end of term, and with no way of knowing whether he’d be there in the New Year, Ianto was sorely tempted to get to the bottom of the mystery. He knew by now that Harkness was reading up on the Cold War, particularly Soviet Russia, and that it was probably something to do with the military.
He also seemed to have a keen interest in Ianto, because he just kept staring. Well, not staring, exactly. Watching him whenever he was in the area, hovering around the ground floor when Ianto was working on the desks, but always avoiding any opportunity to speak to him. Even when Ianto had stood next to him and stacked textbooks, Harkness had kept his head down and pretended not to notice him.
It was really getting on his nerves.
He sighed and turned his trolley up the aisle, towards Harkness, and grabbed the book off the top to push it back into its place. Another couple of steps brought him up to Harkness, and then he had to speak to him to ask him to move. “Excuse me?”
Harkness looked up and visibly panicked. “Oh! Sorry, do you need me to...” He moved his bag aside so Ianto could get past and shifted his chair in a bit. “Sorry.”
“You keep staring at me,” Ianto stated, channeling Dodgeball. “Why is that?”
It was the best impression of a rabbit in the headlights he’d ever seen, and he wished he’d got a camera to record it. “I...”
“Look, have you got a problem with me or something?”
“No, nothing like that.” He got over the rabbit look and looked utterly ashamed of himself. “Sorry, I’m Jack. I was just trying to pluck up the courage to... ask you for your number?”
He blinked. That was not what he’d been expecting, not after that first day. “That’s a bit creepy.”
Harkness looked utterly crushed. He looked away hurriedly, and started rummaging at his bag. “Sorry, I know, I should just...”
“The Maltsters,” Ianto said quickly, cursing his soft side. It would probably be a disaster, but at least he would have tried, and it wouldn’t be his fault that Jack looked so bloody miserable. “It’s out in Llandaff, on the main road. Do you know it?”
“I know Llandaff, so I should be able to find it.”
“Good. Saturday at five.” He scribbled it on a post-it and stuck it to the top of Jack’s notebook. “See you there.”
He made to push the trolley on, past Jack, but Jack stopped him. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Ianto,” he smiled again, as warmly as he could, and set off again. “See you on Saturday, Jack.”
“Bye, Ianto.”
# # #
They piled off the bus, Hetty in the lead and Mark bringing up the rear, and hovered in front of the pub for a moment before parting ways. Hetty kept looking back over her should at him, her dark eyes worried, but he waved her off casually and headed up the stairs into the pub through the front door. When he’d told them about his date with Jack, they’d insisted on coming along to keep an eye on him - just in case - and he’d readily accepted. They’d go in the back entrance by the car park, and he’d go in the front and get Jack to sit in the restaurant. That way he’d have an escape if Jack turned out to be more weird than he already suspected.
The pub was low-ceilinged and decorated tastefully for Christmas. They had the music on slightly too loud, but it was a classical Christmas CD rather than pan pipes or Cliff Richard, so he was willing to let them off. Troika was jingling as he walked in, and it brought a reluctant smile to his face that brightened, inexplicably, when he saw Jack waiting by the bar.
“Hi,” he dodged tables to join him and propped one elbow on the wooden bar top next to him. “Sorry I’m a bit late. One of the perils of getting the bus, you know.”
Jack nodded. “You don’t drive?”
“I have a campervan, but they’re threatening snow and she’d never get out of the car park,” he laughed. “What about you, did you drive?”
“No, got a bus. An earlier bus,” he added pointedly, grinning when Ianto laughed again. “I was trying to cut down on excuses to chicken out. Anyway, can I get you a drink?”
Ianto blinked at him, but nodded. “Thanks. J2O, please, don’t care what flavour.”
Jack looked at him curiously. “You’re not drinking?”
“I’m teetotal. Recovering alcoholic,” he said bluntly. “Woke up one morning with nearly two years missing, haven’t touched a drop since.”
Jack clearly fumbled for something to say, and settled on, “I’m sorry. That must have been terrifying.” He pushed Ianto’s drink across to him when it was delivered and paid for it in the silence. It dragged on a bit too long, and he cleared his throat awkwardly. “Do you want to get a table?”
“Yeah, sure.” He gestured up the stairs to the restaurant area, and Jack followed him willingly. Hetty and Mark were by the window looking through the menu when they got up there, and a waitress led them to a table on the far side of the room and left them with a pair of menus.
Ianto flicked through it and felt his eyebrows rising, as they always did when he came here. Jack looked somewhat taken-aback, and he sniggered. “You’ve not been here before?”
“I don’t get out this end of town often,” Jack confirmed. He shook his head and gestured at the menu, which was thick card in a pretentious wooden frame. “Really, guinea fowl?”
“Anything you recognise is good,” Ianto told him with a laugh. “Just enjoy it.”
“I bow to your superior wisdom.” They smiled across at each other and Jack cleared his throat. “So...”
“Are you ready to order, sir?” Their waitress appeared and hovered by them, and Jack sat back quickly. “Or should I give you more time?”
“I’m ready,” Ianto said, and Jack nodded agreement. “I’d like the steak in peppercorn sauce, medium rare. Jack?”
“The chicken with potatoes gratin, thanks.” They passed the menus back and he added, “And another two J2Os, please, any flavour.”
She left them alone again and Ianto dropped his gaze to the table. “You were saying?”
“I was?” Jack sounded confused.
“Well, you got as far as ‘so’,” he admitted. “I have no idea what was supposed to follow it.”
“Me neither.” Jack gave him a crooked smile when he laughed. “You laugh a lot.”
“I have a lot to laugh about.” Ianto shrugged lightly and rested his cheek on his hand. “I’m getting the impression that you’re not from around here,” he commented in a terrible approximation of Jack’s American drawl. “What brings you to Cardiff?”
Jack shifted and leaned back in his chair. “I’ve lived here for years, actually. Didn’t mean to, just never got around to leaving.”
“And what’s your fascination with Soviet history?”
That earned him a raised eyebrow. “What is this, an interrogation?”
“I’m very perceptive, Mr. Harkness,” he teased in a low purr. “We librarians have our ways.”
Jack laughed, seeming surprised by it. “Well, I’m working for the government and there’s a thing... I’m sorry, I can’t say much.”
“Official secrets act?” he guessed. “Got, I hated working with that.”
“You were under the official secrets act?” Jack asked, surprised. “Past life or something?”
He sighed and nodded, then gave Jack the sanitised version. “Before the drink. I was working in London in government records. I was caught up in the terrorist attack on Canary Wharf.”
“I’m sorry. I lost a friend in the attacks.”
“Really?” He raised his head and found Jack giving him a confused, searching look that he tried to hide. Ianto shuddered at the memories, but he’d brought it up himself. “I lost a lot, but maybe I knew her?”
“I... no, I don’t think you would.” Jack dropped his gaze and shrugged. “She was a tourist in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“We were all in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Ianto commented. He clasped his hands together between his knees and looked out of the window. “Look, they were right.”
Jack followed his gaze and huffed a laugh. “So they were.” Snow was falling gently, visible in the orange streetlight above the window. It was only light at the moment, tiny flakes that wouldn’t settle, but it was a promise of things to come. “I love seeing the Cathedral in the snow.”
“I’ve never seen it,” Ianto admitted. “The kids will be pleased, though. The schools break up next week.”
The waitress brought them their meal and drinks, and they tucked in. Jack seemed surprised and pleased by his chicken, and Ianto always liked the steak. They dropped into silence to eat whilst it was still hot, save for the occasional comment on the food and the weather.
He got up to go to the toilet when he’d finished, and gave Mark and Hetty a thumbs up. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he realised that they’d stopped paying attention to them a while back. They’d moved on to dessert and nearly finished that, and he guessed that they’d be moving on soon. He and Jack had got totally caught up in each other to be that far behind them.
When he got back to the table, Jack had got the dessert menu and was back to looking nervous. “I didn’t know if you’d want to...” he started.
Ianto cut him off. “I’d love to. No point heading out into the cold winter night, is there?”
Jack smiled at him and passed the menu across. They stayed there for over an hour, with Jack gradually brightening up, and had an argument over who was going to pay that was settled with Ianto saying that Jack could pay next time. It was snowing harder when they got outside, just in time for the bus and they sat together on the back row, right over the engines.
Ianto’s stop came up first, halfway back to the city, and he kissed Jack gently as they pulled up to it. “You’ve got my number,” he told him, having scribbled it on one of the pub’s business cards when he paid. “Call me.”
“I will.” He looked startled, in a happy sort of way. “I’ll see you soon?”
“I hope so.”
He swung himself down the bus and off, and waved to Jack as it pulled away again, then picked his way through the puddles to his flat. It shouldn’t work; Jack was going on for twice his age, more than a little awkward, shy and probably a bit heartbroken. Despite all that, Ianto really felt like the one thing that hadn’t fallen into place in his life was about to do so.
Chapter Title: Chapter 1
Challenge/Fest: LongLiveIanto Bingo
Prompt: Fork in the Road AU
Rating: T
Dedication:
Summary: One decision, two possible outcomes. Taking the wrong path leads Ianto down a life he thought he'd lost.
Characters: Jack/Ianto, team, others.
Contains:
Disclaimer: Torchwood and its environs, occurrences and persons belong to the BBC. The original characters have disowned me.
Ianto flipped his notebook shut and dropped it into his bag with his pen and phone. Next to him, Mark stretched and yawned, nudging Hetty in the head as he did so. “Sorry Hetty. Did I miss much?”
“You weren’t asleep,” she muttered, still shutting her laptop down. “Oh come on, stupid machine. There, thank you, was that so hard?”
Mark and Ianto shared looks and shrugged. “Finished, dear one?”
She glared at him past Mark, shoving her computer in her bag as she did so. “You know, I think you could be a bit more sarcastic, if you tried really, really hard.”
“Can’t be bothered.” Their lecturer was waiting to be able to lock the room up, so they hurried down and out onto the corridor. Ianto straightened his bag and checked his watch. “Two hours until seminar. Coffee?”
“God yes.”
The SU was packed out with people avoiding the weather and first years who still thought that drinking between lectures was a good idea - and third years who still thought that drinking between lectures was a good idea - but they managed to find a table in a corner where they could steal an extra stool and keep out of the way of the pool tables. Hetty, Mark and Ianto had gravitated together in their first week, when they’d been the mature, ‘sensible’ students in a room full of hyperactive drunks, and they’d stuck together in all their classes. Mark was an HR man taking a few years out to get a degree in his field, who did two afternoons a week at his company to keep his hand in, and Hetty was a former climbing instructor looking to change careers after a bad fall put her in a wheelchair.
She nudged Ianto and raised her voice to be heard over the din. “Have you started the assignment yet?”
“Nah. Thought I’d do it the night before, same as everyone else.” He grinned. “I’ve looked at it, but don’t really know where to start. Steve’s going to go over it today, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, but I wanted to get a bit ahead.” She looked over at Mark, who just rolled his eyes at the suggestion, and leaned forwards with her elbows on the table. “I don’t know what to do...”
“I have a suggestion!” Mark pushed her mug towards her. “Drink your coffee and remember you’re in the first year.”
“You’re all so funny now, but you’ll regret it in third year,” she warned him. “God the coffee’s awful here.”
“I told you, stick to tea unless you know what you’re getting,” Ianto told her. “You can’t go wrong with a teabag.”
“I bet they could,” Mark muttered.
They finished their coffees and left because it was too loud and too crowded, and found another corner - this one between the Faculty of Art and the library - where they could sit and go over the lecture. It was still picking up steam, going over the basics, but Ianto still felt the need to take detailed notes. There was always that nagging fear that it would happen again, that he’d wake up and not know who he was.
Hetty eventually threw down her pen in despair and slumped back in her chair. “Okay, even I don’t care. Where are we going this weekend?”
“Lynton,” Mark suggested, as he always did.
“We did Lynton the first time you suggested it,” Hetty growled. “Oxford.”
“Too far.”
“It’s not that far,” Ianto put in. “We could probably do it in a couple of hours.”
They looked at each other and shrugged. “You’re driving.”
“Yep, and I get the deciding vote.” He looked over at Hetty. “Hotel or camper?”
“I’ll hotel. You can camper if you want, but it’s just too...” She shrugged. “You know.”
“Yeah, I know.” He rolled his shoulder, which had been injured in a way he couldn’t remember and was still stiff if he kept it still for too long. “Besides, it’s Oxford - who wants to find a campsite in Oxford? Do you want to look into places during the seminar?”
“Can do. Email you the options?”
“I’ll go with what you two decide,” Mark told them. “I find it’s safer that way.”
Ianto nodded sagely. “I have a boss like that.”
Hetty grinned. “You back in the library tomorrow?”
“Oh yes.” He groaned and flopped back in his chair. The library was better paid than the Ely one - in that it paid - but not nearly as much fun. It might get better, but the head librarian was a bit odd, and the students were worse. “All day, so you’d better come and visit me.”
“I’ll need a book from a high shelf,” Hetty promised. “If I can be bothered to drag myself away from Top Gear and leave the house.”
“I love you too.” He looked at his watch again and groaned. “Come on, time for the joys of Introduction to Business.”
Mark unfolded himself from the chair and grabbed their bags. “Cheer up, kids. There’s only two years, a semester and a half left!”
# # #
Three weeks later, November treated them to a day of random, watery sunshine in the middle of reading week. The library was packed by the time it rolled around to Wednesday and Ianto’s turn, although a lot of the first years had taken the opportunity to dash home or to the sunshine. They kept him busy checking books in and out, taking the books back up to the shelves, and answering a seemingly endless stream of inane questions.
He was trying to request an inter-library loan for a Masters student when the head librarian, who had been showing him how to do it, disappeared suddenly. He looked up for her, and found her talking to a man in an RAF coat, who was staring at Ianto. For a moment he seemed familiar, but then it passed and he seemed to realise that he was staring and dragged his attention back to Dr. Firth. She answered a couple of questions in the affirmative, and then darted back over to the counter.
“Sorry, Ianto, I’ve just got to take Mr. Harkness up to floor 3 and show him where the books he needs are. Are you going to be alright here?”
“I think so. Could you just...” He turned the screen around and she finished off the loan request quickly, then hurried off with the stranger again.
The Masters student shrugged at him and picked up the books he’d checked out. “Researcher, I guess. Odd that he’s not a Doctor.”
“Ours not to reason why.” Ianto grinned. “Enjoy the textbooks.”
“Oh, I won’t.”
He went back to the mindless rhythm of checking in and out, and got away to take a trolley of books back to their shelves when Dr. Firth came back. There was no sign of her visitor, although he could have been in one of the meeting rooms, and Ianto tried to put him from his mind. He couldn’t get past the look that Harkness had given him, though. He’d seemed shocked, like he hadn’t expected to see Ianto, and not like it was a good shock. Ianto couldn’t deny that he was a bit shaken by it, and he kept looking out for the stranger for the rest of the day.
# # #
The weather had turned disgusting again by the weekend, with heavy sleet blown by driving winds. They had hoped to take the campervan out for a last bit of sunshine on the Pembrokeshire coast, but with that plan thwarted they descended on Hetty’s flat to marathon ‘Yes, Minister’. Ianto brought his coffee machine, Hetty roasted a chicken, and Mark bought more bags of doughnuts than was truly sensible, and they sprawled in the living room in front of the TV.
Ianto licked the sugar off his fingers and stared at the blank TV screen. “There was this guy in the library the other day,” he blurted. “It was a bit weird.”
“Was he hot?”
“Sort of, I guess.” He thought back on it. “Sort of Hollywood hot - looked a bit like Tom Cruise.”
Hetty perked up. “I’ll have him if you don’t want him.”
“Why do you think that every story ends like that?” He rolled his eyes and carried on, “He’d arranged it, I think - Firth didn’t say anything about it, but she seemed to be expecting him. He was doing some research, apparently, but the way he looked at me... It was like he knew me.”
“Maybe he did.” Mark looked up at him seriously. They knew about his memory loss, and the sanitised version of his life story; he was very open about it, because it put them off asking awkward questions he couldn’t answer. “You should have asked him. He might be the only person in Cardiff who knows who you are.”
Ianto shrugged. “The way he looked at me, I don’t think I want to know who I am. It was like... like I was the last person he wanted to see. He seemed...”
“Angry?”
“No,” he said quickly. “More... afraid, maybe? I don’t know.”
They waited for him, but he shrugged helplessly and turned his attention to another doughnut. Mark broke the silence with a grunt. “You probably just lamped him one when you were drunk. I bet you were a right vicious one.”
“Probably opened bottles with other people’s teeth,” Hetty agreed sagely. “So just don’t do it to him again, and everything will be fine.”
“Well as I’m probably not going to see him again, that should be easy enough.” He reached for another doughnut and glared when she took them out of his reach. “No fair!”
“Save room for dinner,” she chided. “And go fetch my DVDs, minion.”
“I don’t know,” Mark commented, draped over a bean bag. “Fetch you DVDs, fetch you hot men. You’ll have to put a collar on him if you’re going to keep having him do your bidding like that.”
Ianto threw a cushion at him and stole the doughnuts back on his way to the DVD player. “You couldn’t afford me, and you know it.”
# # #
Ianto pushed his tinsel-draped cart past the end of the row and paused. Contrary to his expectations, Harkness had been back every time he’d worked there, and several times he’d just been in studying, for five weeks. It was nearly the end of term, and with no way of knowing whether he’d be there in the New Year, Ianto was sorely tempted to get to the bottom of the mystery. He knew by now that Harkness was reading up on the Cold War, particularly Soviet Russia, and that it was probably something to do with the military.
He also seemed to have a keen interest in Ianto, because he just kept staring. Well, not staring, exactly. Watching him whenever he was in the area, hovering around the ground floor when Ianto was working on the desks, but always avoiding any opportunity to speak to him. Even when Ianto had stood next to him and stacked textbooks, Harkness had kept his head down and pretended not to notice him.
It was really getting on his nerves.
He sighed and turned his trolley up the aisle, towards Harkness, and grabbed the book off the top to push it back into its place. Another couple of steps brought him up to Harkness, and then he had to speak to him to ask him to move. “Excuse me?”
Harkness looked up and visibly panicked. “Oh! Sorry, do you need me to...” He moved his bag aside so Ianto could get past and shifted his chair in a bit. “Sorry.”
“You keep staring at me,” Ianto stated, channeling Dodgeball. “Why is that?”
It was the best impression of a rabbit in the headlights he’d ever seen, and he wished he’d got a camera to record it. “I...”
“Look, have you got a problem with me or something?”
“No, nothing like that.” He got over the rabbit look and looked utterly ashamed of himself. “Sorry, I’m Jack. I was just trying to pluck up the courage to... ask you for your number?”
He blinked. That was not what he’d been expecting, not after that first day. “That’s a bit creepy.”
Harkness looked utterly crushed. He looked away hurriedly, and started rummaging at his bag. “Sorry, I know, I should just...”
“The Maltsters,” Ianto said quickly, cursing his soft side. It would probably be a disaster, but at least he would have tried, and it wouldn’t be his fault that Jack looked so bloody miserable. “It’s out in Llandaff, on the main road. Do you know it?”
“I know Llandaff, so I should be able to find it.”
“Good. Saturday at five.” He scribbled it on a post-it and stuck it to the top of Jack’s notebook. “See you there.”
He made to push the trolley on, past Jack, but Jack stopped him. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Ianto,” he smiled again, as warmly as he could, and set off again. “See you on Saturday, Jack.”
“Bye, Ianto.”
# # #
They piled off the bus, Hetty in the lead and Mark bringing up the rear, and hovered in front of the pub for a moment before parting ways. Hetty kept looking back over her should at him, her dark eyes worried, but he waved her off casually and headed up the stairs into the pub through the front door. When he’d told them about his date with Jack, they’d insisted on coming along to keep an eye on him - just in case - and he’d readily accepted. They’d go in the back entrance by the car park, and he’d go in the front and get Jack to sit in the restaurant. That way he’d have an escape if Jack turned out to be more weird than he already suspected.
The pub was low-ceilinged and decorated tastefully for Christmas. They had the music on slightly too loud, but it was a classical Christmas CD rather than pan pipes or Cliff Richard, so he was willing to let them off. Troika was jingling as he walked in, and it brought a reluctant smile to his face that brightened, inexplicably, when he saw Jack waiting by the bar.
“Hi,” he dodged tables to join him and propped one elbow on the wooden bar top next to him. “Sorry I’m a bit late. One of the perils of getting the bus, you know.”
Jack nodded. “You don’t drive?”
“I have a campervan, but they’re threatening snow and she’d never get out of the car park,” he laughed. “What about you, did you drive?”
“No, got a bus. An earlier bus,” he added pointedly, grinning when Ianto laughed again. “I was trying to cut down on excuses to chicken out. Anyway, can I get you a drink?”
Ianto blinked at him, but nodded. “Thanks. J2O, please, don’t care what flavour.”
Jack looked at him curiously. “You’re not drinking?”
“I’m teetotal. Recovering alcoholic,” he said bluntly. “Woke up one morning with nearly two years missing, haven’t touched a drop since.”
Jack clearly fumbled for something to say, and settled on, “I’m sorry. That must have been terrifying.” He pushed Ianto’s drink across to him when it was delivered and paid for it in the silence. It dragged on a bit too long, and he cleared his throat awkwardly. “Do you want to get a table?”
“Yeah, sure.” He gestured up the stairs to the restaurant area, and Jack followed him willingly. Hetty and Mark were by the window looking through the menu when they got up there, and a waitress led them to a table on the far side of the room and left them with a pair of menus.
Ianto flicked through it and felt his eyebrows rising, as they always did when he came here. Jack looked somewhat taken-aback, and he sniggered. “You’ve not been here before?”
“I don’t get out this end of town often,” Jack confirmed. He shook his head and gestured at the menu, which was thick card in a pretentious wooden frame. “Really, guinea fowl?”
“Anything you recognise is good,” Ianto told him with a laugh. “Just enjoy it.”
“I bow to your superior wisdom.” They smiled across at each other and Jack cleared his throat. “So...”
“Are you ready to order, sir?” Their waitress appeared and hovered by them, and Jack sat back quickly. “Or should I give you more time?”
“I’m ready,” Ianto said, and Jack nodded agreement. “I’d like the steak in peppercorn sauce, medium rare. Jack?”
“The chicken with potatoes gratin, thanks.” They passed the menus back and he added, “And another two J2Os, please, any flavour.”
She left them alone again and Ianto dropped his gaze to the table. “You were saying?”
“I was?” Jack sounded confused.
“Well, you got as far as ‘so’,” he admitted. “I have no idea what was supposed to follow it.”
“Me neither.” Jack gave him a crooked smile when he laughed. “You laugh a lot.”
“I have a lot to laugh about.” Ianto shrugged lightly and rested his cheek on his hand. “I’m getting the impression that you’re not from around here,” he commented in a terrible approximation of Jack’s American drawl. “What brings you to Cardiff?”
Jack shifted and leaned back in his chair. “I’ve lived here for years, actually. Didn’t mean to, just never got around to leaving.”
“And what’s your fascination with Soviet history?”
That earned him a raised eyebrow. “What is this, an interrogation?”
“I’m very perceptive, Mr. Harkness,” he teased in a low purr. “We librarians have our ways.”
Jack laughed, seeming surprised by it. “Well, I’m working for the government and there’s a thing... I’m sorry, I can’t say much.”
“Official secrets act?” he guessed. “Got, I hated working with that.”
“You were under the official secrets act?” Jack asked, surprised. “Past life or something?”
He sighed and nodded, then gave Jack the sanitised version. “Before the drink. I was working in London in government records. I was caught up in the terrorist attack on Canary Wharf.”
“I’m sorry. I lost a friend in the attacks.”
“Really?” He raised his head and found Jack giving him a confused, searching look that he tried to hide. Ianto shuddered at the memories, but he’d brought it up himself. “I lost a lot, but maybe I knew her?”
“I... no, I don’t think you would.” Jack dropped his gaze and shrugged. “She was a tourist in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“We were all in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Ianto commented. He clasped his hands together between his knees and looked out of the window. “Look, they were right.”
Jack followed his gaze and huffed a laugh. “So they were.” Snow was falling gently, visible in the orange streetlight above the window. It was only light at the moment, tiny flakes that wouldn’t settle, but it was a promise of things to come. “I love seeing the Cathedral in the snow.”
“I’ve never seen it,” Ianto admitted. “The kids will be pleased, though. The schools break up next week.”
The waitress brought them their meal and drinks, and they tucked in. Jack seemed surprised and pleased by his chicken, and Ianto always liked the steak. They dropped into silence to eat whilst it was still hot, save for the occasional comment on the food and the weather.
He got up to go to the toilet when he’d finished, and gave Mark and Hetty a thumbs up. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he realised that they’d stopped paying attention to them a while back. They’d moved on to dessert and nearly finished that, and he guessed that they’d be moving on soon. He and Jack had got totally caught up in each other to be that far behind them.
When he got back to the table, Jack had got the dessert menu and was back to looking nervous. “I didn’t know if you’d want to...” he started.
Ianto cut him off. “I’d love to. No point heading out into the cold winter night, is there?”
Jack smiled at him and passed the menu across. They stayed there for over an hour, with Jack gradually brightening up, and had an argument over who was going to pay that was settled with Ianto saying that Jack could pay next time. It was snowing harder when they got outside, just in time for the bus and they sat together on the back row, right over the engines.
Ianto’s stop came up first, halfway back to the city, and he kissed Jack gently as they pulled up to it. “You’ve got my number,” he told him, having scribbled it on one of the pub’s business cards when he paid. “Call me.”
“I will.” He looked startled, in a happy sort of way. “I’ll see you soon?”
“I hope so.”
He swung himself down the bus and off, and waved to Jack as it pulled away again, then picked his way through the puddles to his flat. It shouldn’t work; Jack was going on for twice his age, more than a little awkward, shy and probably a bit heartbroken. Despite all that, Ianto really felt like the one thing that hadn’t fallen into place in his life was about to do so.
