galadriel1010 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
galadriel1010) wrote2011-01-17 01:54 pm
galadriel1010) wrote2011-01-17 01:54 pm
Entry tags:
Oneshot: On Dark Ice
Title: On Dark Ice
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: T
Summary: Returning from North Wales, Jack and Ianto get caught in a blizzard and have to seek refuge with an old 'friend'.
Warnings: Extreme cold
Era: Post Exit Wounds, pre Children of Earth
Author's Note: Written during a sub-tropical spring. It did not make me miss snow at all. I wrote this for the TW_fest Christmas exchange for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jolinarjackson and just remembered to crosspost it. Hopefully I'll be back into the swing of writing soon, although not as madly as I was during schmoop_bingo.
Jack checked the Sat Nav again and smiled for the first time since the blizzard descended. They were hours from Cardiff and stood no chance of getting there in this weather, but Ianto couldn't stay in the SUV until the thaw; up on these roads it could be weeks, and even shared body warmth wasn't going to be enough to keep him alive. Fighting back the images that assaulted him at that thought, Jack focussed on pushing the SUV forwards at a creep. “We're nearly there,” he assured Ianto, squeezing his leg. “Not long to go, and then we can get you into bed.”
Ianto gave him a flash of a smile before it was wiped away by the ongoing concern. “We should call your friend before...”
“Good thinking,” Jack snapped. “Why don't you get Tosh's phone out and do so, seing as your battery's flat and mine has no signal.”
In an instant, Ianto was as cold as the world outside. He turned his face to the window, fogging up the glass with his breath, and shifted his leg out of reach. “Sorry,” he said, without an ounce of sincerity.
Jack clenched his fist and rested it on top of the steering wheel for a second before he wrapped it around the wheel. “Just because Gwen isn't here, doesn't mean you have to fill her place.”
“And why isn't Gwen here, again?” Ianto asked, voice dripping with sarcasm and bitterness. “Oh yeah, because you always get me to come with you on anything out of the city, and she always gets the day on alert only.”
“I just prefer having you along...” Jack tried to disarm the situation.
Ianto was having none of it. “You prefer having me along because I don't ask questions of you, because I'll come along without protest and you think that the occasional dinner we grab when we're out makes up for it.”
“Now, really, Ianto?” he spat, hurt piling on top of the fear at their situation. “I've been living with you for eight months and you decide to tell me that you don't like being with me whilst we're in the middle of a blizzard?”
“At least I know you won't walk away from it.”
The air seemed to vanish from the car. It was a cruel and unfounded accusation, and Ianto knew it, but it was too late to take it back now. Jack gritted his jaw and blinked back tears, trying to persuade himself that Ianto didn't mean any of the argument, it was just because they were scared and cold and tired. He jumped when Ianto touched his hand, having not anticipated it, and the world dropped into slow motion. The steering wheel lurched under his hands, swinging towards the stone wall on their side of the road, and he stamped on the brakes automatically, which made the wheels lock. From there it was a slow, inexorable drift that ended up in a soft thump as the SUV's nose buried in the snowdrift at the side of the road, just touching the wall beneath it.
He couldn't breathe for a moment, just stared at the snow piling halfway up the windscreen and tried to pry his hands off the steering wheel whilst he fought down blind panic. Then he was unfastening his safety belt and turning to Ianto, who was ahead of him and leaning across the central console to hug him and cling to him. “I'm so sorry, Jack,” he whispered, voice hitching on a sob when Jack's hands gripped his shoulders and crushed him closer, pulling him across the car and into his lap fully. “I didn't mean any of it. I was just scared ad it's no excuse...”
“It's okay,” Jack pressed one hand on the middle of Ianto's back, feeling the racing of his pulse, and pressed his lips against the pulse point in his neck. “You're okay, it's fine.”
Ianto shuddered and huddled closer, clutching on to the material of Jack's coat as he tried to control his breathing. “I wasn't scared about me...”
“I was.”
“I know,” he kissed Jack's neck where it poked above his scarf and pulled back a bit. “But we were doing, what, three miles an hour?”
Jack chuckled and kept hold of him. “Something like that. You're okay?”
“I'm okay,” he confirmed. He rested one gloved hand on Jack's cheek, biting his chapped bottom lip and trying to meet his eyes. “Are we okay?”
“Yeah,” Jack squeezed Ianto's shoulders and pulled him closer again. “We're okay.”
“I really am sorry,” Ianto muttered into his shoulder. “And I love having you living with me, and going on these trips with you, as long as the weather doesn't try to kill us.”
Jack smiled and pulled Ianto back a bit again. “We need to start walking. We won't get the car out of this drift, and we can't wait it out. At least we've got a few hours of daylight left and the Sat Nav.”
“Okay.” Ianto scrambled over into the back and started collecting things he thought they'd need. “How far off are we?”
“Half a mile,” he replied, studying the map readout. “Have we got a compass in the car?”
“Yeah, I've got it.” He passed it between the seats and Jack checked it. “At least with this snow, we'll be able to tell if we're walking in a straight line.”
“This is true.” He focussed on checking and memorising the details of their route whilst Ianto thumped around in the back. Before long, Ianto had returned to the front with a rucksack for each of them. “What are we taking?”
“The thermal blankets out of the boot, torches, a couple of flares, all the chocolate I could find, and a tracker.” He looked up at Jack and put on a smile. “We'll be fine.”
Jack wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and pulled him in to kiss him.”I know we will. I won't let anything happen to you.”
Ianto kissed his cheek once more, then started tugging his own scarf up and held out two pairs of protective goggles. His voice was muffled by the scarf. “No ski goggles, but they'll do.”
Sliding them into place, Jack unwrapped his own scarf and replaced it so that it covered everything between the bottom of the goggles and the top of his jumper, then tugged his hat down to meet his goggles and cover his ear. When Ianto was similarly wrapped, Jack pulled one of the rucksacks on and tugged on Ianto's hand, pulling him out of the same door.
The world outside the car was bitterly cold, the biting wind aided and abetted by the snowflakes which it had whipped into a frenzy of icy knifeblades. The wind was behind them, fortunately, but the snow came nearly up to their knees and found its way into their boots, freezing them and slowing them down. Jack clung to Ianto with one hand, and Ianto held on with both of his own, whilst Jack held the Sat Nav in his other hand, having to hold it mere inches from his face to be able to see it through the swirling snow. Step by frozen step they fought through the bitter weather, away from the SUV and towards the house of a former Torchwood employee who had made her home in this remote location.
Jack lost track of time, focussed only on the arrow on the screen in front of him and Ianto's solid warmth next to him. The weather had worsened, heavier snow and larger flakes, and was bringing darkness early when the message 'you have reached your destination' flashed up on the screen. He raised his head and peered through the snow, aware of Ianto pressing against him and holding him tight whilst reading the display over his shoulder. A moment's drop in the wind speed revealed a darker shape in the night, and they stumbled towards it, finding stone wall that they followed around until they reached a door.
Their hammering brought someone to the door quickly, and Jack found himself looking down into the worried face of Cecilia Thompson, one of Torchwood's finest physicians to date. She took one look at them, and a shorter one at the weather beyond them, and dragged them into the hall, leaning her weight against the door to shut it behind them. “Jack Harkness...” she trailed off and got a good look at them. “Kitchen now.”
He followed her and tugged Ianto along behind him when he paused to take his boots off. In the kitchen, Cecilia had pulled the small kitchen table away from the Aga and gestured to the space where it had been. “Stand there and get your kit off. It's nothing I've never seen before for you, Jack, but you'll have to cope, laddie. I want you down to the first dry layer by the time I get back down with duvets.”
Jack started to do as he was told immediately and Ianto followed soon after, removing waterlogged and frozen gloves first and massaging feeling back into their fingers before they forced them into bending to attack buttons and zips. They were wearing so many layers on their top halves that the bottom one was actually nearly dry, but their legs were soaked through to the skin and flushed pink with the cold. Ianto pulled the thermal blankets out of his bag, along with the chocolate, and Jack helped him to unfold one, then bundled him up in it despite his protests, which he silenced with a brief, chaste kiss. “I'll get one,” he promised. “You need one first.”
“Not a girl,” Ianto protested, teeth chattering, but held onto the blanket wrapped around himself.
“Oh I know,” Jack assured him with a leer. “Sit in front of the fire.”
Cecilia returned and nodded approvingly, nudging their pile of wet clothes out of the way with her foot and hurrying in to spread a duvet out on the floor before Ianto sat down. “Now. You two get warmed up so you can talk, and then you can tell me what on God's earth brought you out here, tonight of all nights. Shared body warmth remember, Jack. Not that you'll need the encouragement.”
Jack had collected the other duvets together and draped them over Ianto, dropping the chocolate in after him, and now laid down next to him and snuggled his way under the pile of duvets and thermal blanket to wrap his arms around the shivering form, which reciprocated and snuggled tighter against him. “Thank you, Cecí,” he smiled at her before he tugged the duvet up over his head.
In their cocoon it was warm and comfortable, and only fear of what might happen if Ianto fell asleep kept Jack from drifting off himself. Ianto showed no inclination to sleep, though; he had his arms tight around Jack and was giving as good as he got in the worried clinging. As their shivering receded, and nibbles of chocolate worked through their system, their hands started roaming, brushing against curves and planes, reassuring and warming until Ianto yelped suddenly and froze. Jack's worry evaporated when Cecilia laughed. “Sorry darling, I was aiming for Jack. Still, it takes two to tango, and don't think that I don't know what you were doing under there.”
Jack pulled the duvet back to glare out at her. “We were snuggling for warmth and rubbing the life back into each other's frozen limbs.”
“And then some,” she added knowingly. “Or if you weren't, you would have been doing by now. Anyway, I made soup. And by 'made', I mean 'opened a tin'. I wasn't expecting guests.”
Ianto poked his head out as well, looking rumpled and adorable, and Jack kissed his cheek, eyes fixed on Cecilia for her reaction. “Thank you. We weren't expecting to pay more than a dashing visit as we fled the snow on our way back to Cardiff, but we got caught in it.”
“Aye, it did descend fast,” she demurred, blowing smoke out and tapping her cigarette on the edge of her ashtray. “And you always did cut it fine, Jacqueline. So, you going to eat this soup?”
Jack extracted himself from the pile of duvets and Ianto and tugged Ianto up, wrapping an arm around his waist. “Ianto, this is Cecilia Thompson. Cecí, Ianto is Torchwood's archivist and my partner.”
“Partner, eh?” she pushed the bowls towards them and waved a hand, which they took as an instruction to sit. “Has he got a ring on your finger yet?”
“He's not going to risk calling all hell down on us like that by setting a date,” Ianto replied before Jack could. “We know what we are, our families know what we are, and the legal side doesn't exactly matter.”
“Rules and Jack, they never went together well,” Cecilia agreed. She took another long drag on her cigarette and nodded to herself. “You'll probably be holed up here a couple of days, judging by this weather. Maybe to the end of the week. You can have the spare bedroom, and you can cook, Jack. I'm still not much better than I used to be. And then you can go back to pretending I never existed.”
Jack smiled at her. “Thanks Cecí. You know I wouldn't have stopped by if I had a choice.”
She snorted and nodded, stubbing out her cigarette and pushing herself up. “I'll go and make the bed up for you. It's a single, but I don't think you'll mind. No sex under my roof, by the way. Not if I'm not getting any of it.”
Ianto waited until her footsteps had gone all the way upstairs before he spoke. “When you said 'friend'...”
“Former colleague who hates me.” He shrugged. “She was one of the medical officers who wanted to find the secret of my immortality, and blamed me when she couldn't.”
“That's awful.”
“That's a scientist,” he corrected. “She wanted to explain the world, and I defy explanations. Besides,” he added softly, reaching out to squeeze Ianto's hand, “she saved your life today.”
Ianto returned his nervous smile and turned his hand over so that their fingers could lace together. “We could really annoy her.”
“No you don't,” Cecilia warned him from the doorway, and Ianto put up his most angelic face. “Or you can sleep in the barn, if you can find it. Although I can see why you like him, Jack.”
Jack squeezed Ianto's hand again and smiled back at her. “Oh, you have no idea.”
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: T
Summary: Returning from North Wales, Jack and Ianto get caught in a blizzard and have to seek refuge with an old 'friend'.
Warnings: Extreme cold
Era: Post Exit Wounds, pre Children of Earth
Author's Note: Written during a sub-tropical spring. It did not make me miss snow at all. I wrote this for the TW_fest Christmas exchange for
jolinarjackson and just remembered to crosspost it. Hopefully I'll be back into the swing of writing soon, although not as madly as I was during schmoop_bingo.Jack checked the Sat Nav again and smiled for the first time since the blizzard descended. They were hours from Cardiff and stood no chance of getting there in this weather, but Ianto couldn't stay in the SUV until the thaw; up on these roads it could be weeks, and even shared body warmth wasn't going to be enough to keep him alive. Fighting back the images that assaulted him at that thought, Jack focussed on pushing the SUV forwards at a creep. “We're nearly there,” he assured Ianto, squeezing his leg. “Not long to go, and then we can get you into bed.”
Ianto gave him a flash of a smile before it was wiped away by the ongoing concern. “We should call your friend before...”
“Good thinking,” Jack snapped. “Why don't you get Tosh's phone out and do so, seing as your battery's flat and mine has no signal.”
In an instant, Ianto was as cold as the world outside. He turned his face to the window, fogging up the glass with his breath, and shifted his leg out of reach. “Sorry,” he said, without an ounce of sincerity.
Jack clenched his fist and rested it on top of the steering wheel for a second before he wrapped it around the wheel. “Just because Gwen isn't here, doesn't mean you have to fill her place.”
“And why isn't Gwen here, again?” Ianto asked, voice dripping with sarcasm and bitterness. “Oh yeah, because you always get me to come with you on anything out of the city, and she always gets the day on alert only.”
“I just prefer having you along...” Jack tried to disarm the situation.
Ianto was having none of it. “You prefer having me along because I don't ask questions of you, because I'll come along without protest and you think that the occasional dinner we grab when we're out makes up for it.”
“Now, really, Ianto?” he spat, hurt piling on top of the fear at their situation. “I've been living with you for eight months and you decide to tell me that you don't like being with me whilst we're in the middle of a blizzard?”
“At least I know you won't walk away from it.”
The air seemed to vanish from the car. It was a cruel and unfounded accusation, and Ianto knew it, but it was too late to take it back now. Jack gritted his jaw and blinked back tears, trying to persuade himself that Ianto didn't mean any of the argument, it was just because they were scared and cold and tired. He jumped when Ianto touched his hand, having not anticipated it, and the world dropped into slow motion. The steering wheel lurched under his hands, swinging towards the stone wall on their side of the road, and he stamped on the brakes automatically, which made the wheels lock. From there it was a slow, inexorable drift that ended up in a soft thump as the SUV's nose buried in the snowdrift at the side of the road, just touching the wall beneath it.
He couldn't breathe for a moment, just stared at the snow piling halfway up the windscreen and tried to pry his hands off the steering wheel whilst he fought down blind panic. Then he was unfastening his safety belt and turning to Ianto, who was ahead of him and leaning across the central console to hug him and cling to him. “I'm so sorry, Jack,” he whispered, voice hitching on a sob when Jack's hands gripped his shoulders and crushed him closer, pulling him across the car and into his lap fully. “I didn't mean any of it. I was just scared ad it's no excuse...”
“It's okay,” Jack pressed one hand on the middle of Ianto's back, feeling the racing of his pulse, and pressed his lips against the pulse point in his neck. “You're okay, it's fine.”
Ianto shuddered and huddled closer, clutching on to the material of Jack's coat as he tried to control his breathing. “I wasn't scared about me...”
“I was.”
“I know,” he kissed Jack's neck where it poked above his scarf and pulled back a bit. “But we were doing, what, three miles an hour?”
Jack chuckled and kept hold of him. “Something like that. You're okay?”
“I'm okay,” he confirmed. He rested one gloved hand on Jack's cheek, biting his chapped bottom lip and trying to meet his eyes. “Are we okay?”
“Yeah,” Jack squeezed Ianto's shoulders and pulled him closer again. “We're okay.”
“I really am sorry,” Ianto muttered into his shoulder. “And I love having you living with me, and going on these trips with you, as long as the weather doesn't try to kill us.”
Jack smiled and pulled Ianto back a bit again. “We need to start walking. We won't get the car out of this drift, and we can't wait it out. At least we've got a few hours of daylight left and the Sat Nav.”
“Okay.” Ianto scrambled over into the back and started collecting things he thought they'd need. “How far off are we?”
“Half a mile,” he replied, studying the map readout. “Have we got a compass in the car?”
“Yeah, I've got it.” He passed it between the seats and Jack checked it. “At least with this snow, we'll be able to tell if we're walking in a straight line.”
“This is true.” He focussed on checking and memorising the details of their route whilst Ianto thumped around in the back. Before long, Ianto had returned to the front with a rucksack for each of them. “What are we taking?”
“The thermal blankets out of the boot, torches, a couple of flares, all the chocolate I could find, and a tracker.” He looked up at Jack and put on a smile. “We'll be fine.”
Jack wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and pulled him in to kiss him.”I know we will. I won't let anything happen to you.”
Ianto kissed his cheek once more, then started tugging his own scarf up and held out two pairs of protective goggles. His voice was muffled by the scarf. “No ski goggles, but they'll do.”
Sliding them into place, Jack unwrapped his own scarf and replaced it so that it covered everything between the bottom of the goggles and the top of his jumper, then tugged his hat down to meet his goggles and cover his ear. When Ianto was similarly wrapped, Jack pulled one of the rucksacks on and tugged on Ianto's hand, pulling him out of the same door.
The world outside the car was bitterly cold, the biting wind aided and abetted by the snowflakes which it had whipped into a frenzy of icy knifeblades. The wind was behind them, fortunately, but the snow came nearly up to their knees and found its way into their boots, freezing them and slowing them down. Jack clung to Ianto with one hand, and Ianto held on with both of his own, whilst Jack held the Sat Nav in his other hand, having to hold it mere inches from his face to be able to see it through the swirling snow. Step by frozen step they fought through the bitter weather, away from the SUV and towards the house of a former Torchwood employee who had made her home in this remote location.
Jack lost track of time, focussed only on the arrow on the screen in front of him and Ianto's solid warmth next to him. The weather had worsened, heavier snow and larger flakes, and was bringing darkness early when the message 'you have reached your destination' flashed up on the screen. He raised his head and peered through the snow, aware of Ianto pressing against him and holding him tight whilst reading the display over his shoulder. A moment's drop in the wind speed revealed a darker shape in the night, and they stumbled towards it, finding stone wall that they followed around until they reached a door.
Their hammering brought someone to the door quickly, and Jack found himself looking down into the worried face of Cecilia Thompson, one of Torchwood's finest physicians to date. She took one look at them, and a shorter one at the weather beyond them, and dragged them into the hall, leaning her weight against the door to shut it behind them. “Jack Harkness...” she trailed off and got a good look at them. “Kitchen now.”
He followed her and tugged Ianto along behind him when he paused to take his boots off. In the kitchen, Cecilia had pulled the small kitchen table away from the Aga and gestured to the space where it had been. “Stand there and get your kit off. It's nothing I've never seen before for you, Jack, but you'll have to cope, laddie. I want you down to the first dry layer by the time I get back down with duvets.”
Jack started to do as he was told immediately and Ianto followed soon after, removing waterlogged and frozen gloves first and massaging feeling back into their fingers before they forced them into bending to attack buttons and zips. They were wearing so many layers on their top halves that the bottom one was actually nearly dry, but their legs were soaked through to the skin and flushed pink with the cold. Ianto pulled the thermal blankets out of his bag, along with the chocolate, and Jack helped him to unfold one, then bundled him up in it despite his protests, which he silenced with a brief, chaste kiss. “I'll get one,” he promised. “You need one first.”
“Not a girl,” Ianto protested, teeth chattering, but held onto the blanket wrapped around himself.
“Oh I know,” Jack assured him with a leer. “Sit in front of the fire.”
Cecilia returned and nodded approvingly, nudging their pile of wet clothes out of the way with her foot and hurrying in to spread a duvet out on the floor before Ianto sat down. “Now. You two get warmed up so you can talk, and then you can tell me what on God's earth brought you out here, tonight of all nights. Shared body warmth remember, Jack. Not that you'll need the encouragement.”
Jack had collected the other duvets together and draped them over Ianto, dropping the chocolate in after him, and now laid down next to him and snuggled his way under the pile of duvets and thermal blanket to wrap his arms around the shivering form, which reciprocated and snuggled tighter against him. “Thank you, Cecí,” he smiled at her before he tugged the duvet up over his head.
In their cocoon it was warm and comfortable, and only fear of what might happen if Ianto fell asleep kept Jack from drifting off himself. Ianto showed no inclination to sleep, though; he had his arms tight around Jack and was giving as good as he got in the worried clinging. As their shivering receded, and nibbles of chocolate worked through their system, their hands started roaming, brushing against curves and planes, reassuring and warming until Ianto yelped suddenly and froze. Jack's worry evaporated when Cecilia laughed. “Sorry darling, I was aiming for Jack. Still, it takes two to tango, and don't think that I don't know what you were doing under there.”
Jack pulled the duvet back to glare out at her. “We were snuggling for warmth and rubbing the life back into each other's frozen limbs.”
“And then some,” she added knowingly. “Or if you weren't, you would have been doing by now. Anyway, I made soup. And by 'made', I mean 'opened a tin'. I wasn't expecting guests.”
Ianto poked his head out as well, looking rumpled and adorable, and Jack kissed his cheek, eyes fixed on Cecilia for her reaction. “Thank you. We weren't expecting to pay more than a dashing visit as we fled the snow on our way back to Cardiff, but we got caught in it.”
“Aye, it did descend fast,” she demurred, blowing smoke out and tapping her cigarette on the edge of her ashtray. “And you always did cut it fine, Jacqueline. So, you going to eat this soup?”
Jack extracted himself from the pile of duvets and Ianto and tugged Ianto up, wrapping an arm around his waist. “Ianto, this is Cecilia Thompson. Cecí, Ianto is Torchwood's archivist and my partner.”
“Partner, eh?” she pushed the bowls towards them and waved a hand, which they took as an instruction to sit. “Has he got a ring on your finger yet?”
“He's not going to risk calling all hell down on us like that by setting a date,” Ianto replied before Jack could. “We know what we are, our families know what we are, and the legal side doesn't exactly matter.”
“Rules and Jack, they never went together well,” Cecilia agreed. She took another long drag on her cigarette and nodded to herself. “You'll probably be holed up here a couple of days, judging by this weather. Maybe to the end of the week. You can have the spare bedroom, and you can cook, Jack. I'm still not much better than I used to be. And then you can go back to pretending I never existed.”
Jack smiled at her. “Thanks Cecí. You know I wouldn't have stopped by if I had a choice.”
She snorted and nodded, stubbing out her cigarette and pushing herself up. “I'll go and make the bed up for you. It's a single, but I don't think you'll mind. No sex under my roof, by the way. Not if I'm not getting any of it.”
Ianto waited until her footsteps had gone all the way upstairs before he spoke. “When you said 'friend'...”
“Former colleague who hates me.” He shrugged. “She was one of the medical officers who wanted to find the secret of my immortality, and blamed me when she couldn't.”
“That's awful.”
“That's a scientist,” he corrected. “She wanted to explain the world, and I defy explanations. Besides,” he added softly, reaching out to squeeze Ianto's hand, “she saved your life today.”
Ianto returned his nervous smile and turned his hand over so that their fingers could lace together. “We could really annoy her.”
“No you don't,” Cecilia warned him from the doorway, and Ianto put up his most angelic face. “Or you can sleep in the barn, if you can find it. Although I can see why you like him, Jack.”
Jack squeezed Ianto's hand again and smiled back at her. “Oh, you have no idea.”
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*hugs*
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Glad that all that travelling hasn't stopped your story writing brain from working.
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I'll join the line now for Jack & Ianto cuddles.