Title: I've Seen What Healing Looks Like
By: Amy
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: R
Summary: Tosh watches what she shouldn't.

Toshiko rummages about her desk for the file on Tommy Brockless. She knows it won’t be there, and is sure that Ianto will have discreetly spirited it away to the Archives so its existence won’t shatter her heart any more than it already is.

Toshiko sighs, long and deep, and stands up from her workstation and stretches her tired, sore muscles. She heads quickly and with determination toward the Archives. She needs to add this one last detail to the file so she can close its cover, and shutter her heart, on the matter once and for all. She knows it will hurt, seeing his face staring at her from the photograph. She understands that it will tear her heart out when she can’t help but remember how those eyes had gazed lovingly into hers the night they made love, before he was sent back in time the following day to save the world and die a branded coward.

One wrong step almost ends her journey. A dull snapping sound brings her leg from beneath her, and she stumbles.

“Bloody hell!” she mutters angrily, examining the broken heel on her boot.

“Alright, Tosh?” Owen inquires from the depths of the Autopsy Bay.

“Fine,” she replies between gritted teeth. Owen had been much kinder to her since Tommy was sent back to 1918. It irritates her as much as it touches her. He cares, sure, but where was this concern before she let herself fall for Tommy? Had he just paid attention…

No. Not fair, she chides herself. He didn’t know you felt like that; how could he? It’s not like you ever told him, and this is Owen, for god’s sake - he’s not exactly Mr Sensitivity!

Toshiko studies the heel and decides it’s a lost cause. Resigned, she pulls both boots off her feet and tosses them beneath her workstation. Let someone laugh at her socked feet. Let them.

Silently she ventures into Ianto’s domain, looking around for any sight of him. He hadn’t been in the main part of the Hub in a while. She assumes he’s hiding down here, mulling over his thoughts and enjoying the silence. She wishes she had a hiding place too sometimes.

She moves stealthily down the corridor, the file clutched in her hand. She knows where she’s going; she’s been down to visit Ianto on several occasions. She knows every turn, every earthy scent, every minute sound of the silence.

Toshiko is therefore rather surprised at the sound she does hear.

A low, breathless moan meets her ears and when she rounds the corner, she is immediately rooted to the cold stone floor, eyes wide.

Ianto is sitting on a straight-backed chair, turned around and facing away from his desk, back slouched and legs splayed. His jacket is tossed over the desk, his sleeves rolled halfway up his arms, and his shirt unbuttoned and falling open. His bare hips and legs almost glow in the dim lighting of the subterranean chamber. His head lolls against the back of the chair, and his hands…

…are tangled in Jack’s hair, who is kneeling between Ianto’s thighs, head bobbing into Ianto’s groin. Jack’s shirts are off, slung to the floor, and his braces dangle along his calves. His pants are open and bunched around his knees, bare arse pale against the dark fabric, and he’s stroking his cock furiously with one large hand.

A flush of heat blazes through Toshiko’s body, and she grabs onto the wall for support. She can’t move. She’s transfixed, and a part of her brain’s remaining faculties hopes like hell Jack and Ianto don’t see her standing there.

Toshiko watches as Jack sucks Ianto’s cock slowly, withdrawing and teasing its head with his tongue, then pulling it deeper into his mouth. She sees Ianto’s eyelids flutter and his full pink lips part as he exhales shakily, his fingers threading feverishly through Jack’s tousled hair.

Toshiko bites back a sympathetic gasp when Jack cups Ianto’s balls and caresses them and it tears a moan from Ianto’s exposed throat. Her face burns as Jack grins around Ianto’s cock and runs his hand up the length of Ianto’s lightly-furred belly to his chest and down again, where it comes to rest on his hip.

She finds herself smiling softly when Ianto moves one hand from Jack’s hair and entwines his fingers with Jack’s. Their joined hands on Ianto’s hip makes her feel strangely and nicely warm inside, and she hasn’t felt that way since Tommy had to leave her to save the world in some pajamas. She thinks the iceberg in her stomach might stand a chance of melting now.

Ianto whimpers and thrust his hips upward. Jack shifts position slightly and hollows his cheeks as he moves his mouth along Ianto’s cock more quickly. In moments Ianto groans and stiffens, his brow furrowed and eyes squeezed shut and fingers clenching in Jack’s hair.

Then he sags limply into the chair and Jack releases his softening cock from his swollen lips. And Toshiko watches with fascination when Jack licks his lips as he stands and moves between Ianto’s open legs and leans in for a kiss…

…which Ianto returns with enthusiasm, cupping Jack’s face between his graceful hands. Jack cants his head to the side and their mouths open, and Toshiko suddenly has trouble standing when her knees traitorously begin trembling. The thought flashes, bright and hot, that this is quite possibly the most erotic thing she has ever seen.

As Jack and Ianto kiss, Toshiko notices one of Ianto’s hands curl around Jack’s still-hard cock and stroke it rhythmically. It doesn’t take long - maybe half a minute - and then Jack is coming too. Ianto holds Jack’s head in place with one hand behind his neck, their mouths still joined in the deep kiss, as Jack groans hoarsely, body shuddering, and spills on Ianto’s belly, drops of come catching in the fine, wiry hairs there.

She watches, dazed, as Jack sinks to his knees and grabs his tee-shirt off the floor. He carefully wipes Ianto’s stomach with it, and then he rests his head there, pressing his face into the skin and inhaling deeply. His arms encircle Ianto’s waist and hold him close. Eyes closed, his head leant back, Ianto strokes Jack’s shoulder with one hand, drawing his flattened palm over his shoulder blades soothingly. With his other hand he cradles Jack’s head to his belly and scratches his fingernails gently along Jack’s scalp. Toshiko swears she can hear Jack purring into Ianto’s stomach while he presses lazy kisses there.

It’s more than Toshiko can bear to watch now. She reminds herself sharply that she’s invading the privacy of her closest friend and her mentor, observing a moment of intimacy that isn’t hers to see. She wonders how long she’s been staring at them. She checks her watch as she turns silently and ascends into the main Hub.

Ten minutes. Only ten minutes, and all of this to which she’d borne witness convinces her once and for all that Owen has never been more wrong in his life than when he pronounced Ianto “Jack’s part-time shag“. She knows she saw more than simple fucking in the Archives.

Toshiko smiles to herself, and it hurts. She misses Tommy achingly, and the shards of glass lodged in her heart are only just bearable. This is still better than it was yesterday. She thinks about Jack and Ianto, both of whom have lost so much in their lives - and Ianto is younger than she; she remembers their faces, their sounds, their movements just minutes ago. She thinks of the undisguised passion she could almost taste in the very air and the way they revealed themselves to each other in every gesture, every reaction, every whimper and sigh.

She and Tommy had been that way during their last night together.

With all both men had suffered, she wonders briefly if she will ever find the happiness with another that Jack and Ianto had obviously found in each other. She’d watched Ianto, hurt and confused, when Jack left after Abaddon; she had observed the mixture of hurt and hope color his features when Jack said he’d come back for Ianto. She’d watched through the CCTV as Ianto cared for Jack after he died when the sleeper agent ran him through with the blade; Ianto had held Jack in his arms until he’d gasped back to life. She’d seen their relationship progress from lust to betrayal to hate to guarded affection to trust to betrayal (again) to the uncertain dance of desire mingled with mistrust upon Jack’s homecoming. At some point after they dealt with the sleeper agents, the trust had returned, along with the affection, and she knew something had happened in that short span of time to deepen it and to transform it from what it was to what it is. Toshiko is glad - really, truly happy - Jack and Ianto are together again. They deserve to be happy more than almost anyone she knows.

“Oi! Tosh - seen Captain America and Teaboy lately? I could do with a coffee, and I have this autopsy report Jack’s been bitching at me about for the last two days ready for him, and he’s gone and buggered off somewhere. Figures,” Owen calls from the Bay.

Toshiko stops, turns, and deliberately walks down the stairs into Autopsy. She moves, cat-like, into Owen’s space until he unconsciously backs against the wall.

“What?” he says, eyeing her suspiciously.

“Owen, shut up,” she hisses. “What are you - five? Jack and Ianto are around somewhere, probably doing their jobs. Show some respect.” She pins him with her glare until he shifts uncomfortably.

“Sorry,” he mutters, and she knows he isn’t sorry at all but is trying to placate her. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter. She still loves Owen, and always has, but he doesn’t matter like he once did. She had known love. She had just seen it.

Toshiko turns and leaves Owen agape.

“Tosh…did I miss something?” Owen squints at her, studying her. Paying attention to her, she notes, only she doesn’t care at the moment.

Toshiko stops and scrutinizes Owen for a few long, silent moments, then she replies in barely a whisper.

“You’ve missed so much, Owen. It’s right in front of you, every bit of it, and you’re blind.” She feels her features soften. “And I’m truly sorry about that.”

Toshiko leaves Jack a note on his desk, telling him she’s going home early but will have her mobile if he needs her. He would be expecting this; she knows he hadn’t wanted her back at work for at least three days after losing Tommy, but she had returned a day early. Boredom is not her forte.

Jack will assume she is grieving for Tommy still - and she is, and she knows she will grieve his loss and love for her until the day she draws her final breath - but that isn’t why she is leaving work early.

Toshiko saw something she never expected to witness when she ventured into the Archives. She saw need, and desire, and love. And she feels hope nudge her shattered heart. She is going home to nurse it into fullness in her place of safety and comfort and memories. It’s going to hurt, but it won’t hurt forever.

Toshiko knows Jack is right when he tells her she will be all right and that things will get better. She knows, and now she believes.