Short: "Wired"

[cyus]

Title: Wired
Characters/Pairing: Ianto/Lisa, Jack
Rating: R
Length: 677
Summary: Lisa is Ianto's girlfriend, encased in metal or not.
Notes: set pre-series

Harkness crossed the main floor of the Hub. His soles squeaked on the metal walkway. "Well-"

Ianto glanced at Harkness' boots, froze in mid-movement. Suzie cleared her throat, and he looked up at her. He swallowed, tried to say something, but she stared him down, so he kept his mouth shut and continued to sort the papers into folders.

"That time of the year, is it?" Owen leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. The chair creaked with every shift of his weight, springs cranky.

"Snowdon is calling," Harkness replied.

"Yeah, it's screaming 'get away from me, Harkness, oh no, not you again'." Owen rolled his eyes and turned back to his workstation with a long screech of metal on metal.

Ianto's cock hardened.

He would watch her at night when she was asleep, balls and cock pressed to cold metal, just warming it with his own heat. He'd walk in, and she'd already have her eyes closed, painkillers dripping into her and shutting down her system.

He missed her.

Harkness took the steps to the main area at an easy jog. He stood, surveyed them, and Ianto watched from the corner of his eyes when he came closer, stood right beside him. Suzie glanced over, then turned back to her computer screen.

"Do you enjoy the work here then?" Harkness asked. He fingered one of the folders, looked at it, then dropped it back on the desk. "Fancy a trip up Snowdon?"

"Snowdon?"

Owen got up, metal springs screamed with the bounce, and Ianto pressed his crotch against the edge of the table, hidden from view by the sheets of paper in his hand. Arousal caught in his stomach, muscles in his thighs tense, and the edge of the desk didn't yield.

Harkness raised an eyebrow at him.

She'd shift, a screech of metal and metal, and all it meant was that she was still alive and still there. Hand between her legs, he'd push his cock against one of the metal plates, then she'd open her eyes and gasp. His fingers would slip into her. She didn't get wet anymore, not for him or anything, so it'd be his precome that would ease the way for a moment of heat, but even inside wires would grip him, and reality brought the fantasy crashing down. He'd jerk off against the metal and stain it with come while she was watching.

"Bit of excitement, hunting dead alien sheep, that kind of thing," Harkness went on.

Owen dropped onto his chair again. Metal screeched. Ianto pushed his crotch against the edge of the desk. His hips jerked once, twice before he stopped, face heating. The coffee in the cup rippled with the movement.

Harkness looked pointedly from the cup to Ianto's hips. "Not that exciting," he said after a pause, light tone. "Boys." He laughed, then leaned close. "You can still come. There'll be guns and ropes and all other kinds of entertaining things." He drew his hand down Ianto's back, then clapped him on the shoulder. "And me, of course. What do you say?" Jack brushed his thumb along the back of Ianto's neck.

Ianto nodded, his trousers tight.

"Finish up and be ready in thirty, then, Ianto," Harkness called as he pushed away and crossed the Hub again.

Ianto stared after Harkness. Suzie caught him, laughed and shook her head.

"I'll just carry this down to the archives," he told no-one in particular and held up the folders. They didn't even look up.

He took the stairs down to the lower levels of the Hub, walked past the archives.

She'd be asleep, but she usually was, at least at first. She'd say, 'thank you for making me feel alive', and he'd feel the part of the rapist anyway and flee. He always came back when she was asleep again and cleaned her, whispered he'd never do it again. But then he would, because she was the only thing he still had. He told himself that she never said 'no' and that that was enough.

Comments

[valancy-joy.livejournal.com]

Disturbing in a wonderful sort of way...

And it immediately made me think that if take this as true/cannon... and assume that bits of this memory are floating around in Ianto's brain, it gives Adam some fodder for his planted rape memories...

[electro-club.livejournal.com]

(Oh, how much do I hate LJ? It ate my big comment. Damn.)

So, I was saying... This story was good on the most disturbing way. It makes a weird, almost wrong kind of sense. Ianto was so screwed up around that time I can imagine him doing something like that (and it also seems very clear that he'd be terribly sorry afterwards, ashamed even). It's not that the situation's turned him into some kind of freak, it's the consequences of being that desperate and destroyed.

I liked it very much. It's also different. It's always about how tempted Ianto was to give in to Jack's charms. For once it wasn't Jack making hard.

[wiredblowfish.livejournal.com]

Wow. This is the most interesting TW fanfic I have read. True to the weirdness of the series. Such a great detail you have come up with--that metal against metal makes him hard.

And the partial rape/necrophilia of his relationship with Lisa.

Well Done. Bravo!

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

Um... interesting. Not being sarcastic, I mean, it's very different and strange and I'm still not quite sure what I think, which as a writer I know is a good reaction, it means you've got the neurons to fire in a way that they weren't before. Um... yeah. Not coherent, that, but I suppose it's a Good Review. :)

[antelope-writes.livejournal.com]

JEEBUS.

That is both hot and fucking disturbing. Go you.

Jeez.

[hanuueshe.livejournal.com]

Ow. This is kind of... ow.

(And also? I kind of want to know what the Cybermen wired Lisa's vagina for.)

[frakkin-addict.livejournal.com]

wow, powerfully sad. Well done.

[alba17.livejournal.com]

Wow, very creative and interesting. And it makes sense.

[temporal-tech.livejournal.com]

This is strangely kinky, but really well done. It makes sense!

[invisible-lift.livejournal.com]

I know we've chatted about this a fair bit, but I think the angle that makes this interesting to me (and makes all the questions difficult to answer) is the ambiguity of the whole situation. There's no clear path for Ianto, and that's brilliant.

[athaari.livejournal.com]

The first time I read it, two days ago, I wasn't impressed, mainly because I don't think the metal exoskeleton would make penetration, between her legs, possible. That pulled me out of the story, so I just skimmed through the rest.

I reread it; ignored my thoughts on anatomical details, which turned out to be a good decision, and focused on Ianto's inner conflict, that you conveyed in a few sentences. Is he (ab)using her or does she really want it?

Normally authors use metal (its sounds, smells, etc.) as a metaphor for Ianto's emotional state to emphasise how sick it makes him, seeing Lisa like this. If he touches her at all, they'll let him search for the parts of her that still feel organic. I like how you twisted this into an equally disturbing and kinky scenario. While metal kink is one of my favourite kinks, it is, by default, difficult to pull off in the Torchwood fandom, for obvious reasons. You make it work.
So, in a nutshell: dark, hot and Ianto's controversial/uncomfortable characterisation make for very good fic.

[bassair.livejournal.com]

Disturbingly good...

I don't know what else to say but that... o.o

Very good, though. Note the 'very good'....

[hab318princess.livejournal.com]

very interesting way of looking at that, thanks for sharing

[blue-fjords.livejournal.com]

Huh.

Metal.

Ianto is seriously hurting. I've been debating in my head since I read this an hour ago if this was really a case of dubious consent or not. I tend to go w/ the "Lisa died at Canary Wharf" view b/c I cannot bear to think of her lying there, completely immobile, seeing what Ianto is doing for her, and unable to do anything about it. That's what I'd like to think. However, it's not how I actually think things were. I think there was a piece of her that was still her, trapped inside and experiencing everything. Would that part of her had wanted Ianto to have even this version of sex with her robotic body? I don't know. I do think she would have been fed up w/ his guilt over it, though, b/c a person can only handle so much of someone else's guilt. So maybe she would have lied and said "thank you for making me feel alive." (I say lied b/c I don't think it made her feel alive at all -- frustrated and heartsick, perhaps, which you have to be alive to feel, but not what you would call 'alive.')

One thing I've noticed about your Ianto fics is the central importance of Lisa and really, Ianto's life outside of Jack/Torchwood. (I tend to see Lisa as a kind of idealized love, and who knows if it would have survived much longer, if Ianto's survivor's guilt wouldn't have ultimately crushed them. Jack is the warts and all kind of love, in my opinion. He's rather warty.) But I like to see the other side of the coin, as it's certainly legitimate.

Anyhow, very interesting piece. Food for thought-y. Well, all of your stories are food for thought, but this one touches on even more issues than usual.

[azriona.livejournal.com]

Hi! I'm here from the cot_reviews community. First of all, congratulations on your nomination for Round Three of the Children of Time Awards (http://childrenoftime.creative-musings.com/awards/index.htm).

We at CoT Reviews try to review all of the nominated stories in each round, and in today's post we've featured your story (http://community.livejournal.com/cot_reviews/20735.html). Please feel free to stop by and look.

This was such an incredibly moving story - for all that it seems like a comedy of errors at the start. I liked how you made the comparisons between the squeaks of the metal chairs, to Lisa down below. And Ianto's kink, to Jack's. (Because if Jack thinks kink is appropriate, then there's a very good chance it's not.)

Congratulations again, and good luck!

[nancybrown.livejournal.com]

I cannot possibly add to anything the previous commenters have said, but I wanted to say that this was disturbing and thought-provoking and very very good.