cyus | Fic: "Time Has Set Its Maggot"

Title: Time Has Set Its Maggot
Characters: Ianto Jones
Rating: PG-13
Length: 1350 words
Summary: London doesn't give a fuck about Cardiff, but it's the visits home that bring back the things you can never quite leave behind.
Notes: Loosely connected to Prince Of The Apple Towns. Thanks for the beta to

sanginmychains; title taken from a Dylan Thomas poem.

He takes a drag of the fag, the smoke like plucking flowers in winter. The filters on the ground are what's left when the colour is gone. The snow crunches under his feet, his back against the wall, and he stares out at the water still lapping against the planks. The Bristol channel is only frozen in old people's memories and fairytales, back when Welsh meant 'stranger' and had nothing to do with fucking sheep for a pastime. Smoke is rising from somewhere across the Bay, people still at work between the holidays, a ship's horn further out on the sea. A Christmas carol is clanging with bells and children's voices, and the cold is wet when it slides into his coat, forcing recognition and love.

Cardiff isn't London, and the water tower in the middle of the Plass doesn't hold up to Canary Wharf when it comes to skylines or futures.

"Back from the city?" Paul stands with his feet apart, boots planted firm in the muddy snow, hands in his pockets. Chin raised, he glances over his shoulder until Rhod steps up beside him and gives a brief nod. He looks Ianto up and down, the hint of a scowl on his face.

Ianto squints past the cigarette between his thumb and index finger, and familiarity picks at the easy silence.

They are working the docks, leaving lips chapped and knees dirty. The detour by the pub before it is back to the council estate brings the nervous flicker to their eyes and an angry red to their faces. Babies are crying in their cribs, and thin walls pretend privacy, but Rhod's first died or maybe Paul's, and the detours to the pub had got more frequent, as had the bruises on the girls they'd married.

His mam's outrage echoes the street's when Cardiff plunges through the phone line into London. Yet London, with warm light and Lisa's decorations, doesn't give much of a fuck about Cardiff's grimy distress or crying babies and girls and uniform cars in the street.

He turns his head, sucks on the cigarette filter, then flicks it into the snow. It goes out without a fight. Shoulderblades pushing off the wall, he stands, shrugs. "Visiting." He shoves his hands into his pockets.

"Saw your mam yesterday." Paul kicks at the dirty snow. It rains across Ianto's trainers and jeans. The suits are in London along with Lisa and his life.

"Right." Ianto slides a new cigarette out of the pack.

"Too good for this place now, you are?" Paul flattens a small mound of snow until the white is swallowed by mud. The horn on the Channel blares again, and for a moment all three of them look out over the Bay.

Ianto lights the cigarette, offers. They shrug, shake their heads with grimaces and bury their red hands deep in grey trousers. He leans back against the wall. They watch him; he watches no-one except his cigarette. Cardiff's love is one of those aliens that swallows you in cold contempt and expects you to carry its babies.

"I'm here, aren't I?" The warm breath of his words curls with the cigarette smoke and billows between them.

"Standing in the Plass like you own it. Haven't seen you down in the pub in Splott. Haven't seen you down there meeting your mates."

Ianto shrugs. A girl pushes a kid in a pram past them, short skirt, short jacket and high boots. Paul and Rhod look after her. One whistles, and she flips them off. Her kid starts crying, they start laughing, and Ianto spits into the snow. She glances past them, and Ianto squints at a spot above her right shoulder. She's got a black eye, a split lip just healed.

"Your mates?" she asks Ianto when Paul gestures a hard fuck to Rhod's catcalls.

Ianto shrugs.

She shakes her head and moves on.

"Cunt," Rhod hisses.

"Got one of those at home," Paul laughs.

"Cunts," she calls back at them from a safer distance. Her kid is talking at her.

"Looks like the one you got, too." Rhod grabs Paul's chin to turn it the way the girl's gone, laughs.

"Piss off." Paul shoves at Rhod, and they scuffle, harsh breaths as hands grab for lapels and boots slide in the snow, pushing one another about with the adrenaline from cheap thrills. Laughing, they straighten. London doesn't give a fuck about Cardiff's crying babies and beaten girls over phone lines, but it's harder to think of Lisa when the salt leaves white tracks on black boots and a girl calls you a cunt in front of her baby.

Ianto kicks at a small pile of snow, shoving it off the black street underneath.

"You're nothing special, you know. You'll always be one of us." Rhod stares at Ianto, takes a step closer. Ianto slides the cigarette from his lips and flicks off the ash. He taps the filter against his thigh, watching. Rhod shifts until Ianto's cigarette nearly burns a hole through his trousers. He reeks of alcohol and sweat. "Grabbing the cheap beer off the low shelves when no-one's looking."

Ianto shrugs. "Still down in Bute Park?"

Cardiff gives you its babies with a tenner for a blowjob. Cheap alcohol made it easier, and there were always girls to fuck afterwards, eyes rolling with the vodka and the drugs. Numb, in abandoned houses and in cemeteries, they drank and fucked and made Cardiff bearable with something morphing into human interaction at times.

Rhod recoils, lips thin and hard. "Have families now."

Ianto shakes his head, throws away his cigarette, and steps on it. He imagines the sizzle, a bit of spark to resemble life. Girls call the police at three in the morning and go back at five, apologies on their lips and tear tracks down their cheeks while the babies are crying next-door, or die. Families in Splott keep their curtains and mouths shut, even if the whole street knew who you brought home and fucked in the other room.

"Right," Ianto replies and pushes off the wall, turns to walk.

"Splott's not that way," Rhod says.

Paul chuckles. "But Bute Park is. Still just a boy from Splott, Jones?"

The water tower looks a little like Canary Wharf when you crouch and ignore the lack of buildings around it and the Bay behind you, the Centre to the left and the row of houses. The water tower looks exactly like Canary Wharf when you enter from the tourist office front, or so the files say. He'll always choose London over this.

"You're no better than us."

Ianto shrugs and pushes his hands into the pockets of his jeans as he walks across the Plass. His mam is waiting with dinner. They'll turn up the music to drown out the angry sounds from upstairs and the baby's wailing from next door.

"Go suck some cock, Jones."

Something shimmers in the corner of his eye from the water tower, but when he turns to look, nothing is there except for a bit of snow and more rain that is starting to fall. Splott carries Cardiff's babies and deports them to London and Manchester and Glasgow. Stealing beer in cheap shops or filing alien artefacts in Canary Wharf: if you're Welsh you're fucking sheep for a pastime, and if you're from Cardiff, no matter where you go, you'll always come back to the stink of alcohol on people's skin and black-eyed girls.

He tells her the Bristol Channel is frozen past the Bay, when Cardiff is plunging through the phone line into London that night. Fairytales don't mention dead babies and girls' choked screams a thin layer of wall away. Fairytales don't have boys working the docks and having families the only way they know how.

"That's nice," she says.

He nods.

You can wear suits and do your hair, but you'll always be the little cocksucker from Splott: Cardiff's love is a bastard like that, and even London can't kill that baby.