cyus | Fic: "Buttering Toast"

Title: Buttering Toast
Characters: Jack
Rating: PG
Length: 1000 words
Summary: Jack's still hanging out in Cardiff years and years later, but it's time to move on soon enough.
Notes: Originally written for

writerinadrawer 4.08 until I realized, after reading the prompt again, that it didn't work for that. Beta'd by

amand_r and

paragraphs

Jack was buttering toast. It still came with crumbs after being toasted, and butter still came with fat when it was left out too long and ran over the kitchen counter in the summer. Cardiff didn't get hot summers, but they still made everyone melt into self-pity.

He'd got himself a dog and named it Ianto, and a cat he'd named Owen, because he'd anticipated the fights they would get into.

Ianto the dog was dozing on the sofa he wasn't supposed to be on, Owen was hiding in some dark corner getting pretty, and his system was blaring a broadcast, 6am in Cardiff. The weather would be sunny, cue the joke about global warming. He'd had a fish called Tosh, but Tosh had swum belly-up the other day. Oops.

A right menagerie, his neighbours from a few years ago had said, with his rabbits and lizards and the collection of spiders (Emily and Alice and Daniel and Tobias... a lot of them. Many spiders.)

Jack leaned against the counter, eating his buttered toast, and got his fingers oily with fat, so he rubbed them on his trousers.

He grinned at the fridge as he bit into his toast, lips stretched around the edges as he crammed the whole slice into his mouth and chewed.

A note was pinned to the fridge door with one smiley-face magnet

Forgot the bread, can you get it tonight? Love you, Gwen

PS. If you play Wonderwall again at 5 in the morning I'll kill you.

It had been their Gwen's and Rhys's flat twenty years ago, it was Jack's flat now. Not an underground kind of place, but the kind of place he could invite people to for some tea or a shag and Ianto would bark at every bird that flew past the window because that's what dogs did.

He didn't bring many people home because most of them were too puzzled by the notes on vases, shelves, picture frames, the walls, the desk to still be a good time in bed. Jack didn't feel like explaining liveaction mnemonics either.

Call the PM was pinned to the top of Jack's home connection system. The letters were faded to nothing in Ianto's godawful handwriting (Ianto the man he had loved not the dog that pissed on the carpet too often), but Jack could still read it with the power of his imagination and fond exasperation. It was crumpled, the last note Ianto had ever passed him between cups of coffee in the warehouse, brushes of his hands to Jack's coat and hair and crotch because Ianto had been Welsh and naughty.

Jack pretended to speak the accent sometimes now, then he stopped because it sullied something inside him.

Cardiff didn't know him anymore, maybe because he'd lived among the stars, had gone back to the Doctor for a stint of world saving here, a stint of rejection there, and had travelled. He used to walk into a bar (Man walks into a bar and...), and people stopped and fell for his looks and his command and his reputation. He'd owned Cardiff for a while there. Jack from the Northern Shores of the Boeshane Peninsula ('You will never leave,' his mother had told him when he'd clung to her clothes and she had dragged him across the floor, laughing, as she'd tossed him outside to go play so she could work) had been at home starsystems and times away for a while.

He didn't feel homesick, and it had only been a fifty years since Ianto and Owen and Gwen and Tosh and Rhys and Andy and Alice and Alex and Suzie as the last of Torchwood as he'd known it. The 456 were a vague memory, only still there because, well, Steven. Ianto. And he remembered "John" had shown up sometime around then because: Grey. Tosh. Owen.

Ianto the dog rolled off the sofa and snuffled closer to Jack, nosing at his crotch.

Faint memories were scratching the back of Jack's brain, and every now and then something twinged behind his ribs, but it had been too long to still feel bone-shattering grief or endless remorse, yet too early to pack up and walk away. It was the strange state of inbetween where the notes he still had meant something but the call to move on (because there was nothing left anymore to suck the life and love out of here) grew more seductive.

Jack had been back to Boeshane three times after he'd escaped from the creatures and the tidal wave of guilt. He had seen the house destroyed, the graves built by soldiers, then had seen new flowers and children playing sand ball and counting sand colours (fourteen shades of beige, he'd spent a few minutes explaining them all to a wide-eyed girl), and at last for a brief stint with the Doctor behind him that only showed him that he still recalled all the details but that his heart didn't flutter in the same way, that his guts didn't draw tight in the same manner anymore.

When he closed his eyes, ignored the stink of the Bay and imagined sand Cardiff was a lot like Boeshane.

"Want to go for a walk?" Jack asked Ianto the dog and cocked his head as the dog did.

At the door, in his own handwriting from hundreds of years ago, Love and underneath
Love
and Love
Love
Love
Love
Love
Love
LOVE
Love
Love

in all colours, in slanted, blocked, in languages he couldn't remember anymore.

He touched his fingers to it as Ianto the dog was nosing at his hand. "Few more years, huh?" Jack asked the door and the dog and the flat and the small reminders of a past it was easy to forget.

He wasn't ready to leave yet. Ianto the dog licked at his buttery fingers, getting himself a treat.

The name on the door read Jack Harkness, and he scratched at it a little every day with the promise to leave as soon as it was all gone. It read Ja now, the familes next door called him James half the time.

Home, or as it good as it got for a while.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

blue-fjords.livejournal.com

Awwww. Ianto the dog. I bet he's a cuddle muffin. And Jack living in Gwen & Rhys's flat -- sweet. But best of all, of course, is Gwen's note. If I passed that note everyday, I would be singing that maybe, you're going to be the one to save me, cause after all, you're my wonderwall on a nonstop loop.

Love the loves.

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Fic: "Buttering Toast"

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