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bluecastleTitle: A Gentleman’s Gentleman, Chapter 7/?
Rating: R for some disturbing imagery…
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Un-beta-ed
WARNING -- this dream imagery ended up creeping me out, and I wrote it. If you have a low squick tolerance, skip down past the italics…
Chapter 7 – Contradictions
Cold. Bound. Gagged. Fingers scrabbling. Glass walls and no escape. Metal clanging on and on, over and over, never ending. Drowning in the screams. The smell of burning flesh. Wires hanging, crawling. Seizing. Binding. Thick, sticky blood soaked hallways. Body parts stained with blood. A man’s severed hand grasping a baby picture. The constant claxon of a fire alarm. Sprinklers. Water spraying everywhere. Vomit and tears mixing. The sound of bodies hurtling down elevator shafts. Sudden stillness in empty brick alleyways. Lights flickering. The smell of cold damp earth. Rooms screened by sheets of plastic. Men and women begging, pleading. Glass walls pushing closer and closer. Searching. Squeezing. Slipping on piles of paper and laughing at the wonder of a paper cut gained while the world is lost. The smell of jasmine and bleach and sweat. The gritty circular slow slow grinding of a knife on a whetstone. Running. Falling. Smothering in piles of cotton labcoats. Linoleum and sawdust. The tang of raw meat. Tin cans full of maggots. Body parts. A head in a jar staring wide eyed…
…gasping… falling… clutching… the blessed rescue in the smell of wool … glass cool against his face… soft breaths and whirling heartbeats…
Jack woke suddenly. He lay tense and still as he tried to figure out what had awakened him. He could hear the hiss and clatter of sleet and freezing rain beating against the windows, but he didn’t think that alone would have woken him up. He shivered, and went to pull the covers around him when he realized that he was alone in the bed. Jack looked around trying to figure out where Ianto had gotten to, when he saw him silhouetted in the moonlight filtering in through the French doors, staring out into the winter storm and clutching Jack’s greatcoat around him.
“Hey you, come back to bed, it’s the middle of the night,” Jack called softly.
When he got no response, Jack switched on the small bedside lamp and tried again.
“Ianto, come back to bed love, I’m cold.”
When Ianto still didn’t respond, Jack slid out of bed and crossed to the windows.
“Ianto, what’s wrong?” Jack asked quietly, reaching out to rub the younger man’s shoulder. At the first touch of Jack’s fingers, Ianto snapped out of his reverie, startled to find Jack standing beside him.
“Jack?” he asked, breathlessly.
“Hey. Where were you?” Jack whispered.
Ianto attempted humor. “A galaxy far, far away?”
“I keep telling you…Tatooine is a lousy vacation spot…”
“I like warm sand…”
“Sure, but the lack of any real hospitality industry is a real drag when you’re trying to book a hotel room…”
Both men tended to use humor to deflect emotions, but neither of the men was really finding anything funny just at the moment. This well rehearsed bickering was merely a stopgap measure, and they both knew it.
“Bad dream?” Jack asked tenderly, not really needing the nod from Ianto to confirm his suspicions.
Jack gently tugged on the sleeve of his coat, and led Ianto gently across the room, and sat him in one of the plush armchairs by the fireplace. He threw a couple more logs on the fire and got the flames going. Ianto shivered and pulled his bare feet up under him.
One of the many contradictions about Ianto was that despite his innate reticence over public displays of affection, he was at heart a very tactile person. Unfortunately, Ianto was prone to intense nightmares, and Jack’s natural inclination to wrap himself around Ianto in order to give comfort backfired fairly spectacularly the first few times he’d tried it as Ianto hated to be touched while he worked to calm himself in the wake of his dreams. Jack had learned to avoid touching the younger man as much as possible in these situations. Jack didn’t really understand this. He himself craved touch in the aftermath of his nightmares. Ianto would drape himself over his lover, kissing and stroking Jack, whispering nonsense in Welsh, and generally managed to displace the horrors with the distraction of passion. The first time Jack had tried to reciprocate however, Ianto very nearly choked him to death.
Jack went and got a glass of water from the bathroom. Ianto took it, draining it in one large gulp. Jack refilled the glass and handed it back to Ianto who took a smaller sip this time, and then set it on the small table between the chairs. Jack quickly pulled on his undershirt, boxers, and a pair of trousers. He draped one of the plaid picnic blankets over the back of Ianto’s chair in case it was needed, and then he sat down on the floor in front of Ianto’s chair, leaned his head back on the upholstered arm and started crooning some wordless ballad from the twenties.
Ianto dimly knew that Jack was there in the room, hovering at the periphery. He knew they had had a brief conversation, although he wasn’t exactly clear on what they’d talked about. In his mind he was still weaving through the echoes of his dream. He was trying to pick apart the memories that had been jammed together into one monster nightmare. He could almost watch himself sorting, filing, and re-indexing the images. He found himself wondering if the disorder in his mind would literally drive him insane one day. And so he sat, lost in his thoughts, mentally tidying his messy brain back into some semblance of order. He was familiar with most of the memories, so it didn’t take long to banish them back into their boxes. He pondered the brick alleyway and the hand holding the baby picture for a long time before tossing them in his ‘to be filed’ pile and decided it was time to get out of his own head.
Jack sighed with relief when he felt Ianto’s fingers start to weave themselves through his hair. He shifted so that his head was against Ianto’s knees, and the two men sat silently for a few minutes, Jack content to enjoy the feel of fingertips brushing his scalp.
“Talk, or not talk?” he asked Ianto.
“Dunno,” came the reply.
“I could tell you about the time I was stranded on a space station that was being over-run with cute fuzzy little space gerbils. Come to think of it, the guy selling the squeaky little rats was called Jones. I wonder if he’s some future relative of yours…”
“Jack. How many times have I told you that trying to pass off old Star Trek episodes as ‘The Further Adventures of Jack Harkness’ won’t work.”
“You can’t prove that they didn’t get all that stuff from me. Did I ever tell you about those amazing cocktail waitresses on Rigel Five?”
“Several times…” Ianto huffed.
“Have I mentioned the Isonian Pleasure Palace in the Hobart Cluster?”
“Repeatedly.”
“Really?”
“Would you like the dates and times of the conversations?”
“You could do that?”
“Most assuredly.”
“Where would I be without that memory of yours?”
“Frankly, I could do without it right now.”
Jack smirked, and replied teasingly, “So many memories… so little brain…”
“Sir, are you trying to imply that my brain is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside?”
All was not lost if Ianto’s wit had returned, and Jack found himself laughing himself silly over Ianto’s last quip. Ianto slid out of the chair and onto the floor next to Jack. Jack leaned over and kissed him, just once, gently on the lips and then put his arm around the other man’s shoulder as he launched into another line of inquiry.
“Surely I haven’t told you about the parallel universe Tokyo where Godzilla really DOES exist…”
