Life's a Beach (Except When It's Not)

[aviv_b_artwork]

A Schmoop Bingo Story
Author: Aviv_b
Fandom:  Torchwood
Schmoop:  "Day at the Beach"
Title: Life's a Beach (Except When It's Not)
Words: 4020
Rating: G/PG
Characters:  Jack/Ianto, Team
Disclaimer: Not mine; Aunty B's and RTD's
Summary: Life can be hard, but not always.

A/N:  This follows directly on from the schmoop story Silent Love  http://aviv-b.livejournal.com/69198.html but you don't have to have read it to understand this story.

It was Wednesday night. ‘Ianto’s night’ as Jack called it. Rift activity permitting, everyone knew that they were expected to leave the Hub no later than 6 PM.

Jack had anticipated some grumbling about favoritism from Gwen or perhaps a few snide remarks about what they did after everyone left from Owen, but to his surprise the team totally supported his idea of him spending some one-on-one time with Ianto.

As hard as it had been, the team had finally forgiven Ianto for the Cyberwoman in the basement and Ianto had begun to come out of his shell a bit. He would occasionally make a joke or a well placed retort to Owen that surprised and delighted them. Then a little day in the countryside had gone from bad to worse when they got captured and almost killed by a group of cannibals.

Ianto unfortunately had gotten the worst of the worst. He’d been beaten senseless with a baseball bat and nearly had his throat cut. Not something that one would get over easily. Especially when one most likely already had PTSD from an alien attack less than six months earlier compounded with seeing his girlfriend killed less than ninety days prior.

They all knew that Ianto had been badly hurt at Beacon Brecons, and not just physically. Owen told Jack that he was surprised that Ianto hadn’t had a complete nervous breakdown. When Jack learned that Ianto thought he had botched his first field mission and was afraid of being fired and retconned he realized that he had failed Ianto for the second time. Once again, Jack missed the signs that Ianto was hurting. Hurting from his physical injuries, his psychological trauma as well as his belief that Jack hated him.

And so ‘Ianto night’ began. Jack had introduced the idea as playing cards, asking embarrassing questions, and drinking a scotch or two together. But it turned into more than that.

Jack used the time to give Ianto some basic weapons training and worked with him on self-defense maneuvers to help him perform in the field. Sometimes they would have a drink or two and play a few hands of cards afterwards in Jack’s office but most of the time Ianto was too tired to do anything but grab a quick shower and go home.

Ianto was gaining skills and he carried himself with more confidence, Jack could see that. He had started eating lunch with the team and occasionally joined in the conversation, everyone noticed that. But Jack still thought Ianto was too thin and looked tired. The whole team concurred with Jack’s assessment.

“Well his physical injuries have healed, and he seems a bit less shut down, but he still works longer hours than any of us.” Owen pointed out. “He never comes in late or leaves early, never takes any time off, I wonder if he thinks he’s still on probation or something.”

“I can’t just order him to take time off, he wouldn’t understand. He’d start thinking that he’d done something wrong and that would just make things worse.”

Owen had to agree. One of Ianto’s least endearing traits was that he was that he was a chronic worrier. Was the Hub clean, did everyone have what they wanted for lunch, did anyone want more coffee, did I feed Janet, are cannibals coming to kill me? It didn’t matter if the issue was big or small, real or imagined, Ianto would inspect it, dissect it, ruminate over it, and worry it to death.

“Well, he’s going to end up in bad shape if he doesn’t take some down time and learn to relax a bit. You’ve got to get him out of the Hub Jack. Resort to trickery if you must, invent a mission, but the lad needs some serious R&R.”

Jack nodded, understanding what Owen was saying but had no idea how to go about it. “Listen,” Owen continued, “Tosh and I were talking and we had a thought…” Jack smiled as Owen went on to explain what he and Tosh had come up with a few nights before while having a few beers.

“Perfect, Owen, that’s perfect.”

***

At nine AM a few mornings later, Ianto was passing out the coffees when Tosh called over to Jack.

“Jack, come look at this, I’m picking up some strange readings from the rift predictor.”

Jack came out of his office and looked at the display with Tosh. They continued to speak about spatial anomalies, temporal distortion until Jack concluded that it warranted further investigation. In actuality it was one of numerous signals they got each week that Tosh ignored as the signature was a series of tiny blips indicating that a few pebbles or some harmless bit of junk came through the rift.

“So who’s with me for a little adventure to Barafundle Bay?”

“Not me,” Owen spoke up quickly, “got a dead weevil to dissect, and I’m allergic to the out of doors.”

“What about you Gwen?”

“Sorry, I have to leave early today; my Uncle’s birthday dinner is tonight. Couldn’t Ianto go, instead?”

Jack pretended to hesitate in asking Ianto to join them.

“I’ll go,” Ianto said, “that is if you’ll have me.”

“Well…ok, shouldn’t be too dangerous. Looks like something small, probably a non-sentient object fell through. We’ll just drive out there, pick it up and come back.”

Ianto nodded and went to find his coat.

“Ok Tosh,” Jack said winking at her, “you’ll have to guide us once we get close to Pembrokeshire.”

Tosh motioned Jack over to her work station and whispered to him that she was going to improvise a bit so that the whole thing didn’t look like a set-up. “So just go along with the show, I have a few things arranged that should allow Ianto to feel a bit heroic before you get to your down-time with him, Ok?”

Jack looked up to see Ianto re-entering the work area.

“Ok kids, we’re off. Don’t wait up for us. Big bad aliens to catch. Tosh, keep your com on standby; we’ll contact you in about an hour.”

As they drove out of town, Jack made a quick stop at a gourmet food mart. “Just wait here, I’ll just grab us something for lunch.”

Ianto was too nervous and excited to question why Jack had stopped at this fancy store rather than at the local sandwich shop. Jack came back a few minutes later and they headed west toward Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.

***

 Once they got to Pembrokeshire, Tosh guided them to a deserted beach just outside the National Park boundaries. The day was unusually warm and sunny for early October though there was a light breeze blowing in from the shore.

Jack and Ianto left the SUV on the dirt access road leading up to the beach. They radioed Tosh who told them she had lost the signal. “Probably just a satellite glitch, give me about a half an hour to reboot and see if I can’t pick it up again.”

Jack sighed dramatically. “Why don’t you look around Ianto, I’ll go back to the SUV and get lunch. Might as well make use of the time.” Jack stumbled back to the beach a few minutes later carrying a cooler and a large blanket.

As Ianto spread the blanket out on the sand Jack began to unpack the lunch. Ianto’s eyes widened as he looked at the spread that Jack was laying out on the blanket. “Always pays to be prepared.”

“Jack, there’s enough food to feed the whole team.”

“Well, yeah, I got a little carried away in the store.”

“A little?”

Jack shrugged. There was a whole cold roast chicken and a green salad and a cold pasta salad as well. Some crusty rolls and butter as well as a bottle of wine. And a couple of giant oatmeal cookies for dessert. And plates, cutlery and a wine opener as well.

Ianto may have been a little distracted as they started the mission, but he wasn’t a fool. “How did you get all of this packed up so quickly?” he asked suspiciously.

Jack, having spent a fair part of his younger years as a conman, also wasn’t a fool.

“I went to order sandwiches and the clerk was just getting off a phone call. Seems someone had just cancelled their order for a picnic lunch for two. She was pretty upset because the lunch was already made up. So I thought, you, me, beach, we need a lunch, why not? And just so you know, Mr. Expense Account Expert, I negotiated a very good price for us to take it off her hands.”

Ianto snorted. He wasn’t sure he believed Jack, but what the heck. It was a beautiful day, the weather was perfect and he couldn’t remember the last time he had been to a beach, any beach let alone a quiet, pristine stretch of shore.

They talked while they ate, Ianto relating a funny story about a visit to the beach as a child. “I was about four or five,” Ianto began. He continued telling Jack about the excitement of the family packing up for an afternoon at the shore, their old car getting a flat on the way, his father grumbling as he changed the tire and finally, after what seemed like ages, finally arriving at this overcrowded, dirty, horrible beach. 

“Then Rhiannon hit me in the head with her plastic pail, and I started to fuss. Tad said if I didn’t stop we would go home. So I did. And then Rhi stuck her tongue out at me. I was so mad; I filled my bucket with wet sand and dumped it over her head. She screamed like she was being murdered. And true to his word, my tad packed us all back into the car and drove home. I got a pretty good hiding for that, but it was worth it,” Ianto said laughing. Jack chuckled as he pictured Ianto with an indignant expression on his face plotting revenge on his sister.

Jack told Ianto about Boeshane, the hot wind, the hot sand, the blazing sun, and how the children would wait impatiently for the day to end so it would cool off enough to play outside. “Water was a rare and precious commodity. We had to dig deep wells to get even a little brackish water. I never imagined things like a beach existed, or rain, or snow.”

Tosh still hadn’t contacted them by the time they finished lunch. The heat and the wine made both men a little light-headed; Ianto took his jacket off and flopped down on the blanket. Jack lay down next to him and they both fell into a light sleep.

Ianto woke up. The sun had moved a bit across the sky, it had to be at least an hour since they finished lunch. He tapped on his com but he couldn’t get any signal.

“Jack, wake up. I can’t reach Tosh.” Ianto wasn’t particularly worried; he just thought it odd that they were having communication difficulties. After all, they were only about an hour past Swansea, surely they had some type of mobile service. But no, his mobile couldn’t pick up a signal either.

Jack groaned and sat up on the blanket. “What no signal at all?” Jack wondered how Tosh had been able to block phone signals, but he wasn’t surprised that she had thought of something like that. “Ok, let’s have a look around and see if we can find anything.”

The two men searched the strip of beach and found nothing. Ianto thought perhaps whatever had landed was right on shore, so they began to stroll north along the beach path looking at the water on one side and then the grassy slope on the other for anything that seemed out of place. After a half hour they had found nothing. They turned around and headed back.

As they approached their starting point, Jack turned toward the water and scanned the horizon. Ianto turned to look at their blanket.

“Jack we’ve got ants.”

“Well, Ianto,” Jack said not taking his eyes off the water, “it’s a beach, and we had a picnic, so a few ants wouldn’t be a surprise.”

Ianto snorted. “Oh, I think these ants are.”



Jack turned. “Hell, are those ants?”

“Looks like it to me. But no, I’m not aware that Wales has ants that are 15 centimeters* long.”

Ianto pulled out his stun gun while Jack got his Webley ready. There were a total of ten ants all together, all busy eating the remains of their lunch.

“Be careful, creatures that size could probably take a pretty good chunk out of you if they bite. Or they might be poisonous.”

They approached the ants which seemed totally oblivious to their presence. “These are amazing,” Jack thought. “I wonder how Tosh did this.”

Ianto was fascinated by the ants. They appeared to be using their front feelers to pick up the food; they even passed items between each other. They still appeared unaware of Jack and Ianto’s approach.

“Excuse me,” Ianto said politely, “but you seem to be eating our lunch.”

The ants turned as a group to look at the men. Ianto thought they looked a bit embarrassed.

“Lunch. Ours,” Jack repeated sternly.

The ants began to quickly move across the sand. Jack thought they were running away, but no, they seemed to be forming a pattern of some sort.

 Ianto watched the ants as they moved around their patterns and smiled. He began to back up and once he was about three meters** away he saw what they were doing.

“Jack! They’re forming words with their bodies. Come and look.”

Jack moved back to where Ianto was standing and began to laugh. “Ianto, you’re a genius.” “And Tosh you are the real genius here. Ianto is going to have a great time with this.”

“Ok, so how are we going to communicate back to them?”

Ianto smiled and grabbed the bottle of salad dressing in the picnic basket. “Thank goodness, it’s Ranch.” He began to slowly write out words in large letters in the sand.

 

The ants excitedly traced the letters in a single-file line and then seemed to confer as a group. They began to move once more forming several words at a time, scrambling into a group and then forming the next few words.

“We are known as the Myrmekes. We were traveling through the Formax Dwarf Galaxy near our home planet Formic on an exploratory mission to nearby planets when we got caught in an asteroid storm. Suddenly a crack in space seemed to appear in front of us and sucked us in.”

It took several minutes for the ants to spell out their reply. Ianto pointed to himself and wrote out his name, Jack’s name (actually Captain Jack) and pointed at Jack, drew a circle with the word ‘Earth’ and pointed to everything around him. Jack added the location coordinates for Earth using Early Standard conventions. The ants seemed to understand and were visibly upset. They were a long, long way from home.

Jack beamed as Ianto continued his patient conversation with the ants. About an hour later Jack and Ianto felt they had a pretty good handle on the problem. The Myrmekes had been minding their own business when they had fallen through a rift in their galaxy.

When they asked to see the ant’s spaceship, they weren’t surprised that it looked like a huge ant hill turned sideways. It was about two meters*** in diameter and had landed so that it was hidden in some deep grass. Jack realized that the ship was a fairly primitive piece of technology by 52^nd Century standards and with some tools from the SUV and a little ingenuity he and Ianto were able to fix a broken fuel cell with some duct tape and crazy glue and replace the burned out navigation system with the SAT-NAV from the SUV. 

The only problem left was finding fuel for the craft. The ants had no name for the fuel but formed the formula HOCH₂CH₂OH  in the sand.

Jack stood staring at the formula.

“That’s the formula for ethylene glycol, Jack. You know, the main component of antifreeze.”

“And I’m betting that you have an extra container in the boot, don’t you?”

“Just put a fresh liter in last week,” Ianto said preening just a bit.

The ants sniffed the antifreeze carefully and one of them even tasted a drop before pronouncing it fit for use as their fuel. They helped the Myrmekes upright their ship and fill their fuel cells. 

Ianto thoughtfully offered the Ants the remainder of the antifreeze which they gratefully accepted. Then in a moment of empathy, Jack also offered them the remainder of their picnic.

“Oh no, we couldn’t possibly accept such a gift. That could feed us for weeks.”

Ianto gave the ants his sternest look. “To refuse a gift from an Earth Captain would be a great insult. So you must take it in order to preserve good relations between our species.”

Reluctantly, the ants accepted embarrassed that they had no gift in return. “That’s quite alright,” Ianto told them. “Meeting you was our privilege." 

The ants boarded their spaceship and started up their engines. They were going to have to take the long way home. These ants would be long gone by the time they reached their planet, but given their communal cooperation, their descendants would no doubt have an interesting story to tell about meeting Captain Jack, King of the Torchwoods. (Somewhere along the way, the translation got a bit muddled and Ianto hadn’t wanted to take valuable time to clarify what was really an unimportant detail).

Just then, Jack’s com crackled. “Tosh, is that you?” Tosh was shouting something but the transmission was a bit fuzzy. He moved away from the ship to hear better. “I have to tell you Tosh that was really inspired. What? You’re kidding. Ok. I’ll call back in a moment.”

Jack ran back to the ship just as Ianto was saying good bye to the last of the ants getting on board. “Quick Ianto, tell them that there is going to be another opening of the rift about 20 meters off shore due south of here. Tosh says we need to get out of the way since she doesn’t know how big the opening is going to be.”

Ianto quickly scratched this out for the ants who ran inside their ship and closed the hatch. Jack grabbed Ianto by the hand and ran with him away from the beach. They ducked down behind a small hill just in time to see the craft take off and pilot offshore when a small slit seemed to open in the sky. The ship flew toward the opening and suddenly was sucked in, disappearing from sight. The slit in the sky had disappeared as well.

Jack’s com started to work again. As Ianto strolled down to the water’s edge, Jack complimented Tosh about her brilliant plan, how realistic it all was as well as telling her that Ianto had performed superbly.

“But Jack, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. The giant mechanical pelican is one beach east of where you are. I had nothing to do with the com and mobile phone not working.”

“What? You mean you had nothing to do with the Myrmekes or the writing formations or the spacecraft?”

“You know Jack, if we didn’t work for Torchwood, I’d be calling the men in white coats to come and get you about right now.”

Jack got a bit distracted as he watched Ianto take off his shoes and socks and roll up the legs of his trousers. He began to put a foot in the water and jumped back at the cold.

“Listen, I’ll explain the whole story later. I’ve got a barefooted Welshman to ambush.” Jack quickly got his shoes and socks off and not caring about his slacks he ran down to the water grabbed Ianto by the hand and dragged him into the surf.

“Oi, its cold Jack.”

“Its refreshing and brilliant, and you were brilliant, and I am so proud of you Ianto Jones,” Jack shouted in joy. Ianto bit his lower lip nervously. “You are the most amazing man,” Jack said and forgetting himself for a moment he grabbed Ianto and kissed him. “Sorry…sorry, I didn’t mean…”

Ianto pulled Jack into another kiss which lasted quite a bit longer. “Did I really do OK today?” Ianto asked nervously.

“Oh you did way more than just OK,” Jack replied holding him tightly as a larger wave came in almost knocking them off their feet.

Ianto relaxed into Jack’s embrace. He had done well today. He could tell that Jack’s enthusiasm was genuine and he finally felt like he just might turn out to be a half way decent field agent. They stood together for a while at the shoreline just looking at the sea.

“It’s so peaceful here.”

“We can come again, and I promise no aliens next time.” A few more minutes passed as they watched the sun move down in the western sky. “Sun’s going down,” Jack noticed. “It’ll get cold quickly out here tonight. Time to be getting back." 

"I can’t believe you gave away the rest of our lunch to the ants.”

“You really weren’t planning on eating...” Jack started when he saw the smile on Ianto's face. "I can't imagine what they could have given us as a gift in return.”

“A giant dung ball?”

“Mr. Jones, you are disgusting,” Jack said laughing.

They quickly gathered up the blanket and the rest of the picnic leftovers and headed back to the SUV.

“Can I ask you something, Jack?”

“Sure, fire away.”

“Did you somehow set this whole thing up today?”

Jack took a moment to think. He didn’t want to lie to Ianto, just maybe not tell him everything. “Honestly, yeah, I had the picnic planned. Those little blips come through almost daily and usually we don’t bother to check them out. I thought it would be nice for you to have a quiet relaxing day at the beach. But we got lucky today. No really we did. Things could have turned out quite differently if those ants had been left on their own. And no I had nothing to do with them landing on the beach.”

Ianto nodded in satisfaction. They packed up the SUV and started on the drive back to Cardiff. Ianto turned on the radio to get the local news.

“This just in. Giant mechanical pelican terrorizes tourists on Pembrokeshire Beach today. Police are investigating the incident calling it a very sophisticated prank.”

Jack began to laugh hysterically. Ianto looked over at him with his most penetrating stare. “Ok, now that I was involved in. I’ll explain it to you when we stop for dinner on the way back. I know a great little seafood place just outside of Swansea.”

Ianto had a pretty good idea what Jack was going to tell him. “You’re paying,” he said trying to look serious.

“Yes, of course.”

“Mechanical pelican,” Ianto muttered. “That was my big test? Really Jack. And here I was giving you and Tosh credit for such an innovative exercise.”

Jack looked over trying to look chastened. Both men burst into more laughter at the same time.

“Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad an idea.”

“Next time, go for a monster with tentacles. That would at least be more in keeping with the Torchwood spirit.”

“Speaking of tentacles, have I ever told you about the time…?”

“Jack, I’m planning on having calamari for dinner, so please, just don’t.”

“How about a story about a blowfish?”

Ianto shook his head ‘no.’

Jack sulked.

Ianto reached over and took Jack's hand. “Let’s just stick with you, me, a few embarassing questions and dinner on the road tonight."

“Works for me.”

 ---

And for us Yanks:
*15 cm = ~ ½ foot
** 3 meters = ~ 10 feet
*** 2 meters = ~ 6 ½ feet