Work Text:
Chronology Of A Relationship
It started with a kiss.
It started with a kiss that Ianto didn’t quite remember, being as it was one of Jack’s special, but all too-infrequently given ‘Back to life’ kisses and thus coming when Ianto was unconscious.
It started with that kiss, but was kept on pause for a while after the discovery of Lisa. It picked up again after Brecon Beacons.
It started with Jack giving Ianto a ride home. Then Ianto gave Jack a kiss. Then another and another, and Jack started giving them back, both desperate to prove they were still alive.
That time, it ended in a shag. And both of them remembered, but neither of them talked about it. Ianto because he didn’t know what it meant to Jack; Jack because he didn’t know what Ianto wanted it to mean. He’d always been one for giving his sex partners what they wanted, even at the expense of his own heart. Even when what he wanted, but was too afraid to outright look for, was a lover.
It started with a drink, after Suzie’s second death. A melancholy had set in after they met up in Jack’s office. Jack said perhaps they should leave the stopwatch games for another time. Ianto easily agreed; he didn’t really have any ideas of things they could do anyway. Jack had some whisky he didn’t even remember the origin of. He gave Ianto a shot. Then another and another, while uncharacteristically drinking just as many himself.
Suzie was the first to die under his command, but she wasn’t the first teammate he’d lost.
They ended up in bed, again. Jack’s this time. They tumbled down the ladder to land with a bounce on the bed, too busy kissing to care if either of them ended up with a concussion.
After John’s death, Ianto took his car in to be cleaned. He went home to his flat to find Jack there, waiting for him. This time they drank brandy; Jack said it was the drink of choice back during the fifties. The sex that night was slower, if just as desperate as the last time, both of them trying to reassure themselves of the other’s continued presence.
Ianto slept the sleep of the exhausted that night, but Jack was restless for hours. John couldn’t handle trying to start over, and he hadn’t even been immortal. Jack couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ever reach a point where he was so lost that he wished that his death would truly take.
He sometimes felt like that when he was reminded of Ianto’s mortality.
It became a sort of regular thing between them then, mostly when Ianto stayed late at the Hub. Jack only came back to Ianto’s flat one more time before his past came back again, when he and Tosh ended up in the forties. Ianto didn’t let himself worry all the time they were gone. He started to when Tosh told him about Jack meeting the ‘real’ Captain Jack Harkness.
No one had ever been more real to him than Jack.
By the time Jack died facing Abaddon and then left with the Doctor, they had both, albeit unwittingly (and to some extent unwillingly), become so entrenched in each other’s lives that the pangs of loneliness they both felt took them by surprise.
When Jack came back – “For you,” Jack said, looking at Ianto with his heart in his eyes – their lips locked with the knowledge that there was no turning back from this thing they had created between them.
It started with a kiss. It continued along lines of give and take that grew increasingly more mutual. It would undoubtedly end after much more than that. What they had between them, though, was too much to be encompassed in simple things like beginnings and ends.
Besides, the middle was going to stretch on for years.