A Strange and Beautiful Flower

A Strange and Beautiful Flower

What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you
dreamed, and what if in your dreams you went to
heaven and there you plucked a strange and
beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you
had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)

~*~

Everyone should wake up so pleasantly, he thinks as he sighs into the dream he’s sure he’s having.

Ianto is kissing him, he realizes as he pushes sleep away. He opens his eyes and appreciates the sight of his sleep-disheveled Ianto, gazing down at him with concern and something else he knows he can name, but won’t yet. There’s time for that later.

“You were having another nightmare. A really bad one.” Ianto whispers this against his cheek before he kisses it.

Jack hums, and pulls Ianto against him. Ianto stretches out, long and lean, beside him. He pillows his head beside Jack’s, noses bumping in the close proximity of their entangling bodies. He cups Jack’s cheek in one graceful hand and brushes away the dampness there with his thumb, and Jack realizes he has been crying in his sleep. Again.

Ianto is kissing him, lightly nipping along the ridge of tendon that rises when Jack arches his neck. Jack relaxes and releases a pent-up breath into Ianto’s hair.

And then Ianto’s hands are sliding over his body, stroking and caressing all those places, obvious and obscure alike, that immediately soothe yet arouse him. Ianto knows him, and the truth of him, so well; surprisingly, that knowledge doesn’t frighten him as it once did. If anything it makes him wonder at the certainty and peaceful acceptance of it. No one has known Jack this well in…well, ever, really. Not even the Doctor, after whom he pined for over a century, had cared to understand him as Ianto did.

But then, Ianto had made the effort.

“What did you dream?” The question is muffled by the mouth that asked it being pressed firmly to his skin, sucking gently on his collarbone. Jack writhes at the light swipe of Ianto’s tongue along its length.

Jack considers not answering. Why ruin Ianto’s mood? he thinks. It was just a dream, after all. Ianto is here, and alive, and warm, and he’s slowly, deliberately making love to him.

“I don’t remember now. Best just to leave it.” He gasps when Ianto draws one of his nipples between his teeth. “And keep doing that…”

He feels Ianto chuckle against his solar plexus and realizes he is making his way lower along his belly. He arches into Ianto’s body, suddenly needing – desperately craving – as much physical, skin-to-skin contact with him as possible.

Ianto’s mouth on his hipbone makes him release a low, soft moan. He feels Ianto’s arms slip around him; feels his hands smooth over the skin of his back. Of all the things those talented hands could do, Jack thinks this is the best. Ianto’s hands have been a gift to him so often, and he wonders, in a moment of painful clarity, if he should tell him that, while there’s time.

Jack pushes the thought away. There’s time. There will be time.

He immerses himself in the sensations, the feelings, of this here-and-now.

He surrenders himself to Ianto.

Ianto’s mouth is on him, and he can only writhe on the sheets and gasp his pleasure into the dappled-moonlit room’s dimness. He can’t see Ianto – he doesn’t understand why, and doesn’t waste more than a second wondering about it – but he can feel him. Every nerve in his body is singing with the electricity of Ianto surging through him. His synapses spark with something at once alien and familiar, and Ianto is fully with him like never before. He loves it and hates it and wants it to never end and to stop now.

He reaches down for Ianto and pulls him up to lie on top of him and kisses him deeply.

“I’ve really, really missed you,” he whispers when the kiss ends at last and too soon, and he wonders why he said it. Ianto was right there, as he had been so often for the last year and a half.

Ianto smiles softly and a little sadly. His smoky blue eyes shine too brightly, but he doesn’t immediately reply. He lowers his head to Jack’s shoulder and kisses it, and then rests his forehead against Jack’s temple. His weight settles reassuringly onto Jack’s body, and Jack wraps his arms tightly around him.

Jack holds him as close as he can. He inhales Ianto’s unique scent and absorbs the warmth of the body draped over him. He concentrates on the soft hair tickling his cheek. His hands trace the familiar landscape of Ianto’s body; his fingers dance along the protuberances of his spine and smooth along the planes of his shoulder blades.

After a while, he feels Ianto’s lips brush his skin when he whispers, “Me too.”

Ianto is moving inside him, their ubiquitous slow-burning passion blended inextricably with fierce tenderness. Their eyes are fixed on each other, and Jack can’t look away. He won’t look away.

He knows he’s a fixed point in time. A question occurs to him – if he holds onto Ianto tightly enough, and blatantly shouts his refusal to give him up in the universe’s face, will that will fix Ianto in time with him? Can his extemporal arms and legs and body and soul encircle Ianto strongly enough to keep him segregated from time’s inexorable flow?

Jack comes back to himself, and Ianto’s lips are pressed lightly to his, not quite kissing. They inhale and exhale in tandem. Their breaths mingle and they sigh into each other’s mouths and swallow each other’s moans.

He’s inside Ianto, and he’s transfixed by the beautiful young man straddling him, drinking him in greedily like water to a dying man.

Ianto is riding him, thighs tightened around his hips and knees pressing into his sides. His head is thrown back, his lips are parted and Jack’s name is tumbling from them on a shaky whisper.

Jack slides his hands up Ianto’s chest, through the sparse, dark hair furring it, over his pectorals to his shoulders and smoothing down across his ribs. Ianto’s head falls forward, and he’s looking at Jack with piercing intensity through a smudge of thick eyelashes.

Jack drops his hands to Ianto’s hips as he moves, guiding him, thrusting upward as Ianto pushes down in a well-established cadence. There’s safety and comfort in this, Jack thinks. They know how to do this dance; it allows them to communicate the most needful things without the clumsiness of words disturbing their natural rhythm.

When Jack feels the heat pooling at the base of his spine, he digs his nails into Ianto’s arse and throws his head back into his pillow. Ianto attacks his open throat with lips and teeth and tongue, biting down just there, and Jack bucks and spills between their slick, frantically-moving bodies.

“Ianto,” he breathes into Ianto’s neck, and he almost can’t speak. He tastes the salty tang of sweat on his lips as he presses them against the damp shoulder nudging his cheek.

At the moment his orgasm crashes over him, he sees all of time and a superfluity of stars bursting behind his eyelids. He thinks he might be dying, and it’s never been so sweet.

When Jack recovers enough to get his bearings, he tugs Ianto down to him and kisses him, languorous and deep. He tastes urgency in the swipe of Ianto’s tongue along his, and in the way he probes and explores Jack’s mouth with careful, exquisite intention, like he’s enjoying his last meal.

Jack circles his fingers around Ianto’s cock and strokes him deliberately. He knows how to touch Ianto. He knows, intimately, every nuance of Ianto’s body language when they’re together like this. They understand each other perfectly when they speak without words. The flutter of Ianto’s eyelids and the delicious sounds spilling from his full lips tells Jack how close he is to finding his own release.

Ianto comes hard, sighing and trembling above him and kneading Jack’s shoulders. He collapses forward into Jack’s arms and the sticky mess painting his stomach.

They’ll clean up later, Jack muses, maneuvering Ianto onto the bed and burrowing close into his side. There’s always later.

Wrapped around each other like drowning men clinging to life-preservers, they sleep.

~*~

Jack gasped awake, eyes darting around the room wildly. It was a familiar darkness, but the vague shapes that should have calmed him left him unsettled instead.

His cheeks were wet. He lay still for a moment, his eyes squeezed closed, and waited for Ianto to brush the tears away as he often did when Jack inadvertently woke him.

Ianto didn’t, and he remembered.

I love you…It was good, yeah?

He rolled his head and gazed at the other side of the bed. The sheets lay smooth and undisturbed. Nothing was any different to how it was when he went to bed.

Except…

…Ianto’s stopwatch lay in the center of the pillow, cradled in the indention made by his head when it wasn’t resting somewhere on Jack.

He’d packed it away with the rest of Ianto’s belongings.

Don’t go…Don’t leave me. Stay. Please stay.

Jack turned over and clutched Ianto’s pillow to his chest, palming the stopwatch as he did. It still smelt of him. Strands of short, curling hairs were woven into the fabric of the pillowcase and they tickled against his skin. He pulled one hair free and stared at it for eternity-in-a-moment before his face crumpled.

Why had he ever thought there would be enough time?

In his hand, the stopwatch still ticked.