Work Text:
The sun will still rise
by Lilithangel
http://
www.livejournal.com/users/lilithbint
The sun will still rise in the morning even if it will never rise on some again. Ianto stared at the ceiling knowing he should get up and head to the Hub, but he couldn't.
He didn't know when he started agreeing with Owen, he didn't know when he even started to like Owen. He didn't know when he started to worry about the other man, or when the small touches started.
All he knew was that he did and they had.
It must have started when Jack was gone, when the undeclared competition between them had to be put aside for the team to survive.
It wasn't the feeling that he got with Jack. The hot need he had felt even when he was trying to convince Jack to let him join Torchwood Three so he could hide his Lisa and try to heal her with the equipment they had taken from Torchwood One.
Jack was like a summer holiday. Intoxicating, wild and hot, where you barely slept and didn't care because everything felt wonderful. Sometimes he didn't know how to breathe around Jack and he didn't care until it was over and he was cleaning up the mess again.
Owen was like a winter morning prickling at your skin, keeping you moving so you didn't freeze. It was frustrating and just as likely to leave him yelling. Yet somehow Owen's passion swept him along just as easily as Jack's did.
Ianto often wondered if he had shot Owen because the other man wanted him to, needed him to be the adversary the focus for a fear that threatened to consume them both.
He knew Owen loved Jack and he was sometimes jealous of their history together just like he knew Owen was sometimes jealous of the intimacy he shared with Jack.
He also knew that Jack took the full burden for Owen's situation on his own shoulders for reasons Ianto didn't know completely. They were why Ianto had kept Owen's gun, knowing Jack was just waiting for the right reason to bring the doctor back onto the team.
Memories of his own attempts to get Jack to recruit him had returned in force as he lay trapped in the rubble but it was Owen he had worried about. Owen who had worried about him too if the quick touch to shoulder and chest were any indication.
He knew Owen couldn't feel those touches, only made them out of a habit neither of them realised had formed, and it was nice that Owen had needed that from him.
Owen's world had narrowed. A colourless, tasteless existence for a man who had tried to live in technicolour and then couldn't even cry his anger and grief out.
Now Owen would never need him again and that felt wrong. The first death had been so fast, so wrong he hadn't known what to say. When they had said goodbye the second, abortive time, it had been with a touch and nothing more, because nothing more was needed.
This time Owen had been alone and that was the worst of it. There was nothing to bring back, nothing but memories.
END