Title: Do Something Rash
Author: ardea_herodias
Pairing: very, very, very mild Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Author's Notes: This is what happens when one spends far too much time on a long-haul international flight while entertained by Neil Gaimank novels. Dark, twisted plot bunnies spring forth.
And it's a songfic, too, my first, and although the song is never explicitly named, see if you can guess what it is. There are many references to the song and the musical in which it is sung throughout the story.
Summary: Ianto ignores his best judgment and handles one of the weapons Captain John places on the tea tray, with life-threatening consequences. One-shot coda to, and significant plot, character, and thematic spoilers for, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

***

Ianto wakes up early in the morning.

He is tired. At least that is what he thinks at first. Then he realizes that he is tired, and he is cold, and he is hungry, and his head hurts, and for some bizarre reason when he went to sleep the night before he hadn't seen fit to take off both socks, only the right one.

Tired, cold, and hungry can be fixed with coffee and toast. Head hurts can be fixed with aspirin. As for the sock, well, that is trivial compared to cold and hungry and head hurts, so he ignores it.

Memories of the previous night swirl through his sleep-fogged mind–the blowfish, the Rift, and getting sucked through time–and he realizes that as it is some time before dawn, he is both lying in bed staring at the ceiling and running frantically through an empty container yard searching for Gwen. He had always wondered what time travel felt like as a boy, and he decides the experience was disappointing. He'd imagined bright flashes of light and colour and noise. It is exactly like that, and cold and scary as well.

Since the whole team was sent home with strict instructions to not leave their respective flats until 10am at the earliest (all except Jack who had gone heaven knows where) and that Captain John had gone back through the Rift, Ianto decides he will stay in bed and attempt to go back to sleep.

Eventually, however, the need to eat and pee and take an aspirin and drink something warm or two wins over “tired,” and he hauls himself out of bed. He remembers the tea-tray he held last night, watching as John shed weapons onto it like pulling teeth, needing to have each and every last one prised free of his grasp. He remembers one weapon in particular, a slender blue and silver affair. He thinks he has seen something like it before.

The blue and silver weapon is like John. It is beautiful, alluring and sensuous and crying to be touched, like the rough-smooth skin of a shark. Like a shark, it is dangerous and lethal and entirely unpredictable, and it occurs to Ianto that comparing John to a shark isn't far off from reality. Beautiful, dangerous, mostly asocial, unconcerned by the collateral damage it inflicts as it chases its prey, and we are stupid enough to pour chum in the water and climb in, hoping that a suit of mail or aluminium cage or our faith in our teammates or a big billowing greatcoat will protect us. Then again, those asocial sharks will warn each other away from their feeding grounds with a show of breaching and fin-slapping and parallel swimming. Perhaps that is what Jack was doing in the bar, Ianto muses, remembering the blood and the glass and the smell of whiskey and rum. He is not comforted by the thought of Jack as a shark, even though the man had (after a brief lapse) treated him like an utter gentleman. Ianto snorts with amusement at that memory, which promptly dies when he remembers Jack's smile after he shot the blowfish. Teeth and flashing eyes and swagger and the wonders of modern ballistic rifling. Shark, indeed.

He is halfway through making toast and coffee and about that time it hits him that the aspirin not working quickly enough. He looks at his coffee, opens the freezer, takes out a bottle, and pours at least three fingers of Bailey's into the mug. Better than milk, he decides, thinking of the pile of weapons on the tea-tray when he realizes he is humming an old jazz song to himself. He wonders if he is humming it for Jack or for John, and decides it doesn't matter.

What does matter, however, is the tea-tray full of weapons. He is cold enough now to regret the absence of his other sock.

Forgetting (or perhaps ignoring) everything his mum told him, everything he learned in school, everything he learned at Torchwood (both One and Three), and every bit of better judgment he possesses, Ianto had leaned over and picked up the shiny blue and silver weapon. It had a crystalline knob at one end, and a point like the nib of a pen on the other.

Ianto had touched neither end, nor did he touch the bit in the middle that resembles a button. Even so, the crystal sparkled malevolently at his touch, glittering more and more. Suddenly Ianto's hands begin to shake. With a start and a fright, he realizes what he was holding, and why he was so tired, and why his hands are cold as ice.

In the Archives, buried somewhere in Scotland at the original Torchwood House, lies its twin. It is kept in a lead box that is entirely ensconced in a block of cement, which is further covered by a thick layer of cotton, all of which is contained in a wooden crate. No human skin may directly touch the box, and so it is handled with ropes and forklifts and thick leather gloves. Ianto remembers reading the reports prepared by a horrified Torchwood team in 1953–once handled, the weapon sucks thermal energy out of the handler. The results were almost invariably fatal, thief of heat being a de-facto thief of life.

It is 5:45 in the morning. He knows, somewhere in his mind as his body already has begun to chill, that Jack would know how to counteract the effect. Jack is from John's time (somehow, Jack never explained), Jack would have seen these weapons before, and chances are good that Jack was the one who developed the weapon's present handling procedure. He also knows that if he attempts to call Jack right now, he may get the Jack of his current existence or he may get the Jack who is yet to fall through the Rift. As disastrous as his mistake in picking up the weapon was, Ianto sees no need to add to the mistake by causing a paradox.

His hands and feet are cold, and goose pimples cover his skin.

Ianto doesn't know quite when he disassociated from his body, but he distinctly remembers watching himself put on his heaviest coat, wool hat, and socks from the closet. They look rather silly over his plaid pajama bottoms, but at the moment looking silly is last on his list of concerns. He watches his body gather his electric tea kettle, mobile phone, black plastic bin liners, a bowl and spoon and mug and tea ball, a large quantity of good tea (if he is going to die, he might as well enjoy the good stuff), and several instant soup packets. Then he goes into the bathroom, grateful every second of the short journey that he has an in-line water heater in his flat. He turns on the baseboard heater and shoves a towel as far as he can under the door. His lips and the tip of his nose are cold. He can barely feel his hands and feet. He draws the bath as hot as he can stand, rips open three of the bin liners and somehow manages to secure them across the top of his bathtub, leaving one end open for him to crawl in and a hole in the other end for the water to flow out. Positioning the kettle and tea and mobile phone in easy grabbing range, Ianto climbs into the tub fully clothed. Wool is warm when wet, or so they say.

He doesn't know when he disassociated from his body, but he knows that when he steps into that hot water, he comes slamming back home in a hurry. It hurt. He feels trapped, burned, smothered, sliced by a million needles as each nerve in each goose-pimpled hair on his skin reacts to the steaming hot water. His left arm, head, and face are dry, although they are entirely covered in plastic, trapping the heat from the bath and the heat from the baseboard heater. Blindly he turns on the kettle, and while the water is boiling he puts tea one-handed into the tea ball. Tea ball into mug, soup into bowl. Boiling water into mug and bowl. As soon as it was cool enough to even consider drinking, Ianto downs the tea in one gulp and slurps as much soup as he can. Use his foot to work the lever that will drain some of the cooling water from the tub. Replenish the water quickly, followed by more tea and soup, and he feels somewhat better. He is still very cold, although the twin assaults of hot water on the outside and hot tea and soup on the inside seem to have stopped the hypothermic death spiral. His skin burns as if he were on fire. The bathroom reeks of wet wool.

Now he must wait, and hope.

Idly he remembers some of his courses at uni, especially one related to thermodynamics and heat transfer. He decides that his present weapon-induced Biot number must be greater than one, as under normal circumstances he would be sweating and possibly nearing heatstroke. Instead, he is still cooling, albeit slowly enough that repeated applications of hot water and tea temporarily bring him to some place resembling merely well-chilled. He never thought before that being well-chilled would be comfortable. His bathroom is steamy as a rainforest. The black bin liners are completely covered in condensate. Water droplets like tears slide down his window. Warm water runs down his face, and he knows it couldn't possibly be a tear, because any tear coming from his own eyes would be colder than the steam in the air. It is not a comforting thought.

He thinks of sharks again instead and tries to hum that song. Sharks and thieves are marginally more comforting than cold and death. Images of John spending money (hard earned cash, bollocks) like a sailor, the Rift sending billowing blood-red waves through the air, a proud beauty desired by both a highwayman and a mobster. His mind sings the names Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato, Pretty Gwen Cooper, and Sweet Lucy Brown, and above all, the metronome notes of a stopwatch ticking down. His mobile reads 6:30. Three and a half hours until the safety call. He refills the hot water, and tries to not think of either Jack's deadly, irresistible predator smile or the broken body oozing life left outside the parking garage where John arrived. He decides that Jack's deadly, beautiful, visible pearly white smile is more open and honest than John, where a fatal thing that looks like a child's idea of a Spaceman Spiff gun hides beneath swagger and brash camaraderie.

The heat leads to the cold leads to the fear of the unknown where he knows that the aspirin didn't work and at this point it probably doesn't matter and after all the soup and tea he really needs to pee even though something Owen said about hypothermia sprang to mind and he has to hold it to keep all that heat inside even though it's obnoxious but somewhere in the subliminal back of his mind he thinks he might have dreamed that once not long after Lisa died that he received an SMS from the Captain from a non-Torchwood number telling Ianto to meet him outside the Millenium Centre and he saved that SMS for a very long time because he would check it every day because Jack met him and talked to him and he couldn't believe that he was being suspended and not retconned or killed and that he still had a job even though he had betrayed everybody and everything that he had promised to protect including poor dead Lisa with the torture and pain behind her eyes and he would just have to read it to make sure and oh, fuck, he is panicking and nearly incoherent and so cold he can barely feel his fingers or lips or tongue and grabbing his mobile to see if he still has that SMS.

He finds the non-Torchwood Torchwood number, conspicuous by its lack of identification amidst a series of messages from the Torchwood team, his family, two or three very old ones from Lisa, and odd texts from old friends. Clumsy and ham-handed and shivering violently enough to shake water onto the floor, he tries to type in a message. He is not sure what he is typing, or if what he is typing is coherent. He hits send, or what he thinks is send; it is difficult to tell since the sensation in his hand is almost completely gone, he is exhausted, he is cold beyond imagining and above all desperate only for sleep. He vaguely remembers sinking down into the hot water, trying to get as much of his body as he can into its warmth. He counts backward from 100, muzzily, tries to remember the names of his nieces and nephews, tries to remember just how many things could be done with a stopwatch, anything to stave off the beautiful, lethal, seductive sleep that beckons him. His body is lying still in the water, all pretense of involuntary motion gone.

Just enough hopeless sanity prevails to start the hot water flowing again, to refill the kettle, and to fix more tea. It is very difficult to do when one's hands are as stiff and leaden as Ianto's are now. As the water boils and a blessed trickle of heat swirls around his abdomen, ice jags across Ianto's face and he knows that he is crying. He draws on what courage he has left and thinks of sharks, one a great white with its blue-gray back and one smaller, stockier bull shark.

When he finally nods off, the only thing he can see in his mind are flashing white teeth.

When he wakes up, he is in bed, nude, under dozens of blankets, some of which he is sure he doesn't own, with socks on both feet and hot water bottles packed around him. He is hungry, and tired, and has a headache, and desperately needs to pee, but he is not cold. As sleep-fog drifts lazily through his mind, he becomes horribly aware that there is something very large and ice-cold and terrifyingly still lying next to him.

With a scream and a gasp, Jack comes back to life.

***