Renewal: Chapter 41 - Contentment

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Renewal: Chapter 41 - Contentment
AUTHOR: Aviv_b
RATING: Chapter 41 - PG - mild sexual references
CHARACTERS:  Ianto, Jack, Owen, Tosh, Gwen, Rhys
DISCLAIMER:  Not mine; Aunty B's and RTD's
WORDS: ~ 1485
SUMMARY:  Ianto begins his work for Torchwood Three.  Despite some difficulties, he becomes accepted by the team and begins to enjoy a 'normal' (by Torchwood's standards) life.

The story title is from the following quote: Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.  Socrates


 

Ianto’s work relationships with the rest of the team also quickly solidified. He began working at Torchwood Three the Monday following his return to Cardiff and everyone accepted him without reservation. They were surprised at how funny and sarcastic he could be while still being a focused and dedicated archivist. He often brought in breakfast for everyone, started keeping track of ordering supplies; he even got Myfanwy on a regular meal schedule so she didn’t try to steal everyone’s lunches quite so often.

 Owen tried to get Ianto to pick up after them, but Ianto refused, ‘I’m not your Mum, you are perfectly capable of cleaning up your own messes. However, I will volunteer to make the coffee; I don’t understand how you can take perfectly good beans, water and a beautiful coffee maker and produce that shite you call coffee.’ Nobody was going to argue with him on that one.

 He spent about half of his time in the archives, starting to catalogue everything from scratch. (He still shook his head every time he thought about the dozens of unidentified items dumped into drawers labeled ‘alien artifacts.’) Jack set up a second work station for him there so he could work with the Torchwood One software carefully entering information on the items in the files. He would man the tourist office for a few hours a day and used the time to begin to rebuild the elaborate cross-referencing architecture for linking reports, artifacts, and other data.

Tosh had generally been in charge of tracking aliens from the Hub when the other team members went into the field, but Ianto was anxious to be more involved with the day-to-day operations, so those duties were transferred to Ianto as well. He really had wanted to go into the field, but Owen forbade it. “Oi, Dr. Mason told you no rugby; do you think that weevil or hoix chasing is any less physical?”

Ianto knew he was right, but he hated feeling that he wasn’t pulling his weight. The rest of the team, especially Tosh scoffed at the notion. “What, are you saying that I was a slacker when I was doing it,” she queried. Ianto looked embarrassed. ‘No, of course not, I just would like to be able to do something that got me out of the Hub once in a while.’

“Well you could go and pick up Jack’s dry cleaning,” Owen teased.   

“Oh no you don’t,” Jack interjected, “that’s your job for the next month as payback for exploding that blowfish all over my coat.” 

As Ianto had predicted there were a few rough spots those first few months. He still tired easily and sometimes (especially following a wild night with Jack) he would find himself nodding off in the afternoon. He realized that Jack must be keeping an eye on him through the CCTV cameras, because Jack always located and woke him before anyone else was aware. He went to physical therapy twice a week on his way into work; he hated taking time away from the job, but Jack and Owen made it clear that they expected him to keep his appointments.

Jack was concerned about all the boxes from Torchwood One, so Ianto decided to spend an hour of his day trying to sort through some of them. He quickly realized that he was out of his depths. There were all sorts of records relating to the running of Torchwood One and he didn’t know what to do with them. Budgets, schedules, personnel records, he didn’t know if they should be destroyed, but they really didn’t belong in their archives.

They set up some conference calls with Archie at Torchwood Two and decided that his staff would go through those types of records. Jack thought it should all be destroyed, but Archie had a more long-term view of the records. “Aye, it’s tempting just to toss them, but they are part of the historical record of Torchwood itself. We’ll probably just keep a sampling of them, but I’ll have my team go through them and see what makes sense. In a hundred years, people may be interested in this information.” They also agreed that Jack would receive copies of any records involving Yvonne Hartmann’s Ghost Shift experiments.

Ianto began to regain the weight he had lost, and after two months, he and Jack went over to Clifton’s one morning and had his second suit fitted as well as some adjustments made to the first suit. Everyone noticed on how much better he was looking. And since Jack was spending most nights at Ianto’s flat, he was pleased to see that Ianto’s nightmares had subsided and he was sleeping through most nights.

Ianto still had moments when the loss of Canary Wharf hit him hard. He had been in the archives one morning and didn’t respond when Gwen called him to let him know that lunch had arrived. She reckoned he had his cell phone turned off, or perhaps the batteries were dead. She went down to look for him and found him in the room with the Torchwood One boxes.

He was holding a single sheet of paper and was staring off into space looking utterly despondent. While he wasn’t crying, he had clearly done so; the tear tracks were obvious and his eyes were red and swollen. She sat down quietly next to him. “What have you got there, love,” she asked gently. He handed her the paper, ‘it’s an employee birthday list for June. Almost two hundred names and I don’t think anyone on the list got out alive.’ Gwen felt tears welling in her eyes as well. She had joined Torchwood after One had been destroyed and it was easy to forget how much horror Ianto had been through.

“Sweetheart, I’m going to have Owen come down, OK?” Ianto shook his head ‘no,’ but didn’t say anything. She called Owen who came running down to the storage room, Jack right on his heals. Owen was giving Ianto a quick look over, much to Ianto’s dismay.

‘I’m OK, really I am. It just took me by surprise, seeing all those names.’ Jack had been very diligent about keeping his promise to Ianto about physical contact when the others were around, but Jack could feel Ianto’s mental turmoil and knew he needed to provide an anchor for him.

He motioned to Gwen and Owen to step back a bit. Sitting next to Ianto, he spoke to him so softly that they couldn’t hear what he was saying. Jack took Ianto’s face in his hands and turned him to look at Jack. As he continued to speak to Ianto, Owen and Gwen could see Ianto’s body language relaxing and he even smiled a bit. Jack kissed him chastely on the forehead and helped Ianto to his feet.

“I think we’ll just leave those boxes aside for now; maybe the rest of us can take a first look as time permits and separate out what Ianto needs to catalogue and what should go to Torchwood House.” At a later meeting they agreed that each of them would do a quick inspection of two boxes a week and pull out anything that wasn’t related to aliens. The rest would go to Ianto and he could catalogue the information without having to worry about finding anything that would trigger a flashback.

While much of his free time was spent with Jack, there were also times when they both needed their own space. Sometimes if the rift was acting up, Jack would stay at the Hub overnight, but insist that Ianto go home. It wasn’t that Jack didn’t want him around; he just knew that he wouldn’t sleep and that his tossing and turning would keep Ianto awake as well. 

Jack also wanted Ianto to have some down time with the others on the team as well as visit his sister’s family. Sometimes he would join Ianto for these activities, mostly he didn’t. He worried about Ianto not being able to cope if/when he left with The Doctor, and wanted to make sure that he had strong relationships with others as well. 

And truthfully, one of Gwen and Rhys and Ianto’s favorite activities was to go to the local pub and watching rugby, an activity that Jack thoroughly disliked. It was too noisy, too smoky, too much drinking for his taste. So he was perfectly happy to stay at Ianto’s flat and listen to Big Band music or read a bit. He was always amused when Ianto returned from the pub, usually fairly drunk and would try to text to Jack what happened during that evening’s match. His coordination was piss-poor when he drank and the voice synthesizer ended up sounding remarkably like an intoxicated person. Jack would tease him unmercifully about it and they would usually end up having playful sex, unless of course, Ianto passed out first.

For the first time since the fall of Torchwood One, Ianto could honestly say that he felt happy. It wasn’t the life he had planned for, but he had been able to make a satisfying life out of what he had now. He had regained most of his physical health, had re-established relationships with his family, made new friends and found a wonderful lover.

So when Jack told him that an old friend, Captain John was in town, Ianto wasn’t at all concerned.

Chapte 42 is here:  http://aviv-b.livejournal.com/15913.html