Title: Musical Instruments
By: Kilrez
Pairings: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Summary: It's late at night, as these events so frequently seem to transpire. Ianto catches a hidden glimpse of Jack.

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It was late at night, as these events so frequently seemed to transpire. Ianto wasn't sure exactly what he'd define as 'these events,' although pressed to it, he might have said the times when he managed to observe Captain Jack with his guard down.

All was quiet in the hub but for the mellow trickle of water down the central tower. The lights were dimmed; it was the only thing that would get the bloody pterodactyl to sleep. Ianto had been quietly filing papers up in the entrance office, using the time when he knew he wouldn't be interrupted, and the simple job, to centre and anchor himself. Things had been hectic. The darkness and silence of the middle of the night seemed like an almost sacred asylum of peacefulness.

Carrying a stack of papers to be inserted into the filing cabinet in Jack's office, he moved on silent feet down the stairs, and through the portal into the underground hub. He'd been reading the top sheet of paper, and stopped dead as he glanced up. Someone was still here. Of course, he reminded himself. Jack was always here. It was easy to forget sometimes. The man seemed to switch off his presence at times, and could just fade into the background, invisible unless you were looking very carefully.

Breathing shallowly, Ianto stayed rock still, hyper-aware of a sense of wrongness in watching Jack. Like he could get in trouble for this secret voyeurism. The worry wasn't enough to make him announce his presence. He held still, and watched.

Eyes closed and head tilted just slightly to one side, Jack was sitting at his desk chair, his hands delicately cradling a piece of space junk. It was part of the debris that regularly washed through the rift. They were curiosities to analyse on slow days. There had been no slow days for weeks now. The un-archived space junk was piling up down in the vaults, ignored.

Yet for some reason, Jack had picked up this piece in particular, late, when he thought no one else would see. Utterly captivated by the peaceful expression on his leader's face, Ianto watched.

Carefully, Jack caressed the sleek, grey object, and it emitted a long, sad chord. Ianto held his breath, not even blinking. Jack's fingers began to move, stroking in separate, intricate patterns, and a song wove its way into Ianto's ears, a slow and complex. Time seemed to stretch, and it came as a surprise when his lungs desperately signalled him for air. He let the breath in a long, slow, silent exhalation, not wanting to be noticed, and not wanting to miss a second of the haunting music.

Jack was clearly a master of the instrument. He played melodies that reached right into the hind-brain and evoked the deepest swells of emotion. Ianto wasn't sure how long he stood there, utterly hypnotised by the beautiful tunes, and by the expression on Jack's face. Homesickness. Ianto realised in that moment that Jack wasn't just set apart by all the things that made him the leader of Torchwood. He was a long, long way from home, and he missed whatever that distant place may have been. His sad and haunting music gave only a small flicker of understanding into the pain of a world left behind, far back in his personal past.

A numbness in Ianto's fingers caused by the stack of paper digging into his arms alerted him to the fact that he'd been merely staring at Jack for a very long time. Shaking off his trance, he turned and crept silently away, returning to the upper office and leaving the papers on that desk for the night. Jack was obviously reliving memories from a distant past. It could be heard in the music he evoked from an alien instrument from gods-knew-when. He didn't need disturbing.

fin

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