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antigwenallies Mar. 27th, 2008 05:10 pm)
adia313.livejournal.com posting in antigwenallies Mar. 27th, 2008 05:10 pm)Title: A Quiet Night with Friends
Pairings: Rhys/Gwen, Jack/Ianto (unrequited Jack/Gwen)
Spoilers: There are vague spoilers for 2.01, 2.04, and 2.12.
Warnings: There's a bit of language. Two men are portrayed in a romantic relationship.
Rating: PG
Summary: Gwen reacts to Rhys's including Jack and Ianto in his plans for the evening.
Word Count: 2196
Gwen trudged up the last flight of stairs to her flat. Water sloshed through the seams of her boots with each step. Some days, she hated Torchwood. When she’d been with the police, she had never been ordered into a sewer in the middle of a thunderstorm. The weevils hadn’t even been there. They’d been halfway across town! With the most sophisticated tracking equipment on this side of the Rift, they couldn’t pinpoint a nest of weevils. Civilians who had never seen technology more advanced than an IPod Nano could stumble upon weevils, but ask computer geniuses to guide her to a stationary group of weevils, and wind up knee-deep in sewage.
God help Jack Harkness if he called her in that night.
She practically kicked the door of the flat open and tossed her purse on the low bench beneath the coat hooks. For a moment, she considered hanging up her coat, too, but it would have to be dry-cleaned. She tossed it on the floor, toed off her shoes, and made her way into the flat to search for Rhys.
She found him almost immediately. He was in the sitting room, arranging the two sofas in a V opposite the television. Across the coffee table, Rhys had spread finger foods and stacked three boxes of pizza. A cooler sat on a towel next to the table, probably filled with cheap beer. “Hey, lovely,” Rhys said cheerfully when Gwen walked into the sitting room. He abandoned his work to give her a hug and kiss. “You look like you had a rough day.”
“You could say that,” Gwen said. Indicating the food and the sofas, she asked, “What’s going on here?”
Rhys pulled back. Gwen knew right away that she’d asked a stupid question, that she should have known without asking. “Some of the boys are coming round to watch the match. We talked about it this morning, remember?”
The last thing she wanted that evening was to spend the night with Rhys’s obnoxious friends and to watch a rugby match. They would needle her and ask stupid questions about the wedding, or work, and they wouldn’t take any hints to stop. Rolling her eyes, she said, “I don’t really think I’m up to hostess duty tonight. I might call it an early night and go to bed.”
“It’s not even seven o’clock,” Rhys protested. “Come on, Gwen. It’s not going to be a big group. Just Chuck and Banana—oh, and I invited Jack and that bloke he’s seeing.”
“Ianto,” Gwen supplied. Then, as she processed what Rhys had said, she started to slowly shake her head. She couldn’t have Jack and Rhys in the same room. Without the disorder that always accompanied a case, Rhys would surely notice the sexual tension between her and Jack. It was so obvious that not even Rhys could miss it! “Oh, Rhys, I’m not sure that was a good idea.”
“Why? Now that I know a little bit more about what you do, there’s no reason I shouldn’t get to know your co-workers better. You know Ruth and everyone at the office.”
Gwen cast about for a good excuse. “But… Jack is… Jack…”
Rhys adopted his stock “conciliatory tone” and said, “I warned Banana about the gay thing and told him I’d shove his nuts down his throat if he made a big deal out of it.”
Torchwood was staging an incursion in her home, Gwen thought giddily. She could care less about Banana hurting Jack’s feelings. Knowing Jack, he’d probably have seduced Rhys’s stupid friend by the end of the match. But Rhys had effectively destroyed her quiet evening at home.
A quiet evening at home! Of course! Jack wouldn’t be able to put up with Ianto for an entire evening, doing nothing but watching a rugby match. They didn’t have a relationship based on affection and common interests like Gwen and Jack, or even Gwen and Rhys. There was no way this would last more than an hour. Jack would drag Ianto back to the hub within the first hour of the match. Men running around in short shorts, climbing all over each other? There was no way that Jack wouldn’t get hot and bothered. Once they left, she could slip away and spend a quiet evening reading her bridal magazines.
Fixing her cheeriest smile on her face, Gwen said, “Let me just pop in the shower and change into some clean clothes, then.”
“Great,” Rhys beamed.
Gwen had planned to take a luxuriously long shower, but she only had time to scour the gunk off her skin and out of her hair. By the time she’d changed into the jeans and blouse she’d laid out, their guests had arrived. Chuck managed a Tesco, and it seemed that he’d taken advantage of his authority. There were piles of Tesco brand snacks on top of the pizza boxes. Next to him, Banana was stretched across the sofa, wearing a tracksuit. He had a beer in one hand and greasy Tesco crisps in the other. Rhys was on the other side of Banana, already staring at the screen like he was hypnotized.
Jack and Ianto were on the other sofa. Jack hadn’t changed from what he’d worn that day, but Ianto had fitted jeans. He was wearing the same dress shirt he’d worn that day at work, but it was partially unbuttoned over a t-shirt that looked like something Owen would wear, not Ianto. He looked so comfortable that Gwen had to look twice to verify that it was Ianto. It was, and he was sitting just a little too close to Jack, watching the match like he actually cared about the outcome.
“Hey, Gwen,” Jack said.
Gwen glanced at Rhys, but he didn’t seem to have noticed the tension that crackled through the room with Jack’s greeting.
Jack patted Ianto’s arm and elicited a distracted, “Evening.”
“About time!” Chuck exclaimed. “They’ve already started!”
There was only room next to Ianto, so Gwen fell against the back of the sofa. Almost as soon as she sat down, a time-out was called.
“So, how’d you two meet, then?” Banana asked. They must have been talking while she was still in the shower and stopped when the game started. The question was posed at the air between Jack and Ianto, not really too anyone. Gwen knew that it was worthless to try to get Jack to talk about Ianto while Gwen was in the room, but there was no way that Banana would have known that.
Jack laughed outright, but Ianto rushed to answer before Jack could embarrass himself. Ianto had a good sense of self-preservation, Gwen had to give him that. “We worked together to stop a terrorist threat about a year and a half ago.”
“He was wearing these jeans, right, these skintight—”
Ianto shifted and accidentally-on-purpose elbowed Jack.
“Well, you were,” Jack grumbled.
“My trousers are hardly relevant to the conversation,” Ianto retorted. Who talked like that?
“Then we should change the subject.”
Ianto pressed another handful of chocolates at Jack. Like he was speaking to an incorrigible child, he said, “Have some candy and watch the match.”
She would have preferred for Jack to just leave, not to rip Ianto apart verbally beforehand, but as long as it ended with her and her bridal magazines she would take whatever she got. Pretending to be entranced by the announcer’s explanation of a certain player’s injury, she waited for the explosion.
Instead, she heard Ianto settle against Jack’s side and the crinkling candy wrapper. Around a mouthful of off-brand chocolate, Jack asked, “Are you seeing someone?”
“Not at the moment,” Banana said. “I like to keep my options open, yeah? Not a one-woman sort of guy. Chuck, on the other hand…”
“I’ll be taking Rhys’s example pretty soon,” Chuck answered.
As Chuck waxed poetic about his cow of a girlfriend, Gwen turned her attention back to her co-workers. Jack, who it seemed could care less about rugby, was fiddling with the cuff of Ianto’s dress shirt and with Ianto’s slender wrist. Absent-mindedly, Ianto was twining his fingers through those on Jack’s free hand, running his fingers over Jack’s knuckles. They didn’t even seem to be aware that they were touching each other.
Ianto leaned forward and snagged a slice of pizza from the nearest box. “That’s sausage,” Jack murmured. “We could call for a cheese.”
Jack was looking more closely at the slice of pizza that Ianto held than he was looking at Gwen. In her mind, she knew that it was because Jack didn’t want to hurt Rhys’s feelings anymore than she did. He was such a good man. He didn’t want to reveal their love to her fiancé. She couldn’t help feeling hurt, though. She’d had an awful day. Jack’s attention really would have helped her feel better.
“I manage Owen’s disgusting pizzas; this is nowhere near as bad,” Ianto reassured Jack.
“You eat your mom’s cooking, too. That doesn’t mean you enjoy it.”
“Are you a vegetarian?” Rhys asked. “No one mentioned. Let me nip into the kitchen, and I’ll get you some cheese and tomato sandwiches.”
If Ianto was a vegetarian, it was news to Gwen. He ate whatever they ate. Okay, when Owen insisted that they get Meat Feast pizzas, he didn’t eat as much as they did. That was just because he liked disgusting stuff like the fried vegetables and brown rice from the Chinese restaurant. Trying to look like a health nut, she assumed.
Jack said, “That’d be great, Rhys. Thanks.”
“It’s not necessary—” Ianto started, but glares from Jack and Rhys silenced him. He rolled his eyes and said, “Thank you. Could I give you a hand?”
Rhys said, “No, Gwen will help me.”
It would be better than watching the rugby match. Jumping up, Gwen followed Rhys into the kitchen. As soon as they were out of the line of sight of their guests, Rhys whirled on her. “Could you have made me look like any more of a wanker?”
“What?” Leave it to Rhys to overreact.
“He doesn’t like to eat meat, Gwen, and after what happened last week, I can’t say I don’t understand the sentiment. And there I go, plopping a freaking enormous meat pizza in front of him!” As he spoke, Rhys took the two sandwiches he’d made out of his paper lunch bag. He put them on a plate.
Gwen grabbed his arm to force him to look at her. He had to understand that this wasn’t her fault. “Well, I didn’t know, did I? He eats meat at work… Just not a lot.” She squared her shoulders and glared at Rhys. He had no right to blame her for the fact that Ianto wasn’t being catered to. Ianto got her lunch, not the other way around. She was second-in-command of Torchwood Cardiff. She had more important things to think about than what people ate.
A loud explosion of curses drifted in from the kitchen, and in the flat above, people stomped their feet.
“Scotland’s winning,” Banana called. “Move your ass!”
To Gwen, Rhys said, “You spend so much time with them, Gwen. More time than you spend with me. How can you not have noticed?” He grabbed the sandwiches and returned to the living room.
Gwen watched Ianto stand to take the plate from Rhys. When Rhys returned to his seat, everyone’s attention returned to the match. She didn’t care if it seemed rude; Gwen wasn’t going back into the living room. She didn’t have to sit in her own flat and put up with this. Her own fiancé was ordering her around, yelling at her after she’d had to run through crap all day. Jack was doting on Ianto like he didn’t even notice that Gwen was in the room! She wasn’t going to sit around and let them treat her like a minor annoyance. Without turning to look at the men in the sitting room, Gwen went into the master bedroom and slammed the door.
“…Long day,” she heard Ianto saying from the sitting room.
“We had… and running… can’t blame her,” Jack added.
Even Rhys tacked on, “…the wedding… work… stress.”
She never found out how Chuck and Banana wanted to diminish the persecutions that had been heaped upon her because suddenly, they began screaming: “Go! GO!” Then, all the men started to cheer. Apparently Wales had caught up.
Gwen took her IPod and a stack of bridal magazines. Stretching out across her unmade bed, she got to work ignoring everyone like Jack was ignoring her. He would notice that she was missing soon. He would come and look for her, and apologize for doting on Ianto. They would have a lovely, heartfelt conversation, the sort of conversation that Jack could only have with her.
She was sure that she heard Jack coming to her room. Delighted that she had decided not to change into her pajamas, Gwen hurried to open the door. As she opened it, she saw Chuck letting himself into the bathroom. Slamming the door behind herself, Gwen stomped back over to her bed.
TBC
*
Thank you for reading! I would appreciate any feedback you have time to offer.
Pairings: Rhys/Gwen, Jack/Ianto (unrequited Jack/Gwen)
Spoilers: There are vague spoilers for 2.01, 2.04, and 2.12.
Warnings: There's a bit of language. Two men are portrayed in a romantic relationship.
Rating: PG
Summary: Gwen reacts to Rhys's including Jack and Ianto in his plans for the evening.
Word Count: 2196
Gwen trudged up the last flight of stairs to her flat. Water sloshed through the seams of her boots with each step. Some days, she hated Torchwood. When she’d been with the police, she had never been ordered into a sewer in the middle of a thunderstorm. The weevils hadn’t even been there. They’d been halfway across town! With the most sophisticated tracking equipment on this side of the Rift, they couldn’t pinpoint a nest of weevils. Civilians who had never seen technology more advanced than an IPod Nano could stumble upon weevils, but ask computer geniuses to guide her to a stationary group of weevils, and wind up knee-deep in sewage.
God help Jack Harkness if he called her in that night.
She practically kicked the door of the flat open and tossed her purse on the low bench beneath the coat hooks. For a moment, she considered hanging up her coat, too, but it would have to be dry-cleaned. She tossed it on the floor, toed off her shoes, and made her way into the flat to search for Rhys.
She found him almost immediately. He was in the sitting room, arranging the two sofas in a V opposite the television. Across the coffee table, Rhys had spread finger foods and stacked three boxes of pizza. A cooler sat on a towel next to the table, probably filled with cheap beer. “Hey, lovely,” Rhys said cheerfully when Gwen walked into the sitting room. He abandoned his work to give her a hug and kiss. “You look like you had a rough day.”
“You could say that,” Gwen said. Indicating the food and the sofas, she asked, “What’s going on here?”
Rhys pulled back. Gwen knew right away that she’d asked a stupid question, that she should have known without asking. “Some of the boys are coming round to watch the match. We talked about it this morning, remember?”
The last thing she wanted that evening was to spend the night with Rhys’s obnoxious friends and to watch a rugby match. They would needle her and ask stupid questions about the wedding, or work, and they wouldn’t take any hints to stop. Rolling her eyes, she said, “I don’t really think I’m up to hostess duty tonight. I might call it an early night and go to bed.”
“It’s not even seven o’clock,” Rhys protested. “Come on, Gwen. It’s not going to be a big group. Just Chuck and Banana—oh, and I invited Jack and that bloke he’s seeing.”
“Ianto,” Gwen supplied. Then, as she processed what Rhys had said, she started to slowly shake her head. She couldn’t have Jack and Rhys in the same room. Without the disorder that always accompanied a case, Rhys would surely notice the sexual tension between her and Jack. It was so obvious that not even Rhys could miss it! “Oh, Rhys, I’m not sure that was a good idea.”
“Why? Now that I know a little bit more about what you do, there’s no reason I shouldn’t get to know your co-workers better. You know Ruth and everyone at the office.”
Gwen cast about for a good excuse. “But… Jack is… Jack…”
Rhys adopted his stock “conciliatory tone” and said, “I warned Banana about the gay thing and told him I’d shove his nuts down his throat if he made a big deal out of it.”
Torchwood was staging an incursion in her home, Gwen thought giddily. She could care less about Banana hurting Jack’s feelings. Knowing Jack, he’d probably have seduced Rhys’s stupid friend by the end of the match. But Rhys had effectively destroyed her quiet evening at home.
A quiet evening at home! Of course! Jack wouldn’t be able to put up with Ianto for an entire evening, doing nothing but watching a rugby match. They didn’t have a relationship based on affection and common interests like Gwen and Jack, or even Gwen and Rhys. There was no way this would last more than an hour. Jack would drag Ianto back to the hub within the first hour of the match. Men running around in short shorts, climbing all over each other? There was no way that Jack wouldn’t get hot and bothered. Once they left, she could slip away and spend a quiet evening reading her bridal magazines.
Fixing her cheeriest smile on her face, Gwen said, “Let me just pop in the shower and change into some clean clothes, then.”
“Great,” Rhys beamed.
Gwen had planned to take a luxuriously long shower, but she only had time to scour the gunk off her skin and out of her hair. By the time she’d changed into the jeans and blouse she’d laid out, their guests had arrived. Chuck managed a Tesco, and it seemed that he’d taken advantage of his authority. There were piles of Tesco brand snacks on top of the pizza boxes. Next to him, Banana was stretched across the sofa, wearing a tracksuit. He had a beer in one hand and greasy Tesco crisps in the other. Rhys was on the other side of Banana, already staring at the screen like he was hypnotized.
Jack and Ianto were on the other sofa. Jack hadn’t changed from what he’d worn that day, but Ianto had fitted jeans. He was wearing the same dress shirt he’d worn that day at work, but it was partially unbuttoned over a t-shirt that looked like something Owen would wear, not Ianto. He looked so comfortable that Gwen had to look twice to verify that it was Ianto. It was, and he was sitting just a little too close to Jack, watching the match like he actually cared about the outcome.
“Hey, Gwen,” Jack said.
Gwen glanced at Rhys, but he didn’t seem to have noticed the tension that crackled through the room with Jack’s greeting.
Jack patted Ianto’s arm and elicited a distracted, “Evening.”
“About time!” Chuck exclaimed. “They’ve already started!”
There was only room next to Ianto, so Gwen fell against the back of the sofa. Almost as soon as she sat down, a time-out was called.
“So, how’d you two meet, then?” Banana asked. They must have been talking while she was still in the shower and stopped when the game started. The question was posed at the air between Jack and Ianto, not really too anyone. Gwen knew that it was worthless to try to get Jack to talk about Ianto while Gwen was in the room, but there was no way that Banana would have known that.
Jack laughed outright, but Ianto rushed to answer before Jack could embarrass himself. Ianto had a good sense of self-preservation, Gwen had to give him that. “We worked together to stop a terrorist threat about a year and a half ago.”
“He was wearing these jeans, right, these skintight—”
Ianto shifted and accidentally-on-purpose elbowed Jack.
“Well, you were,” Jack grumbled.
“My trousers are hardly relevant to the conversation,” Ianto retorted. Who talked like that?
“Then we should change the subject.”
Ianto pressed another handful of chocolates at Jack. Like he was speaking to an incorrigible child, he said, “Have some candy and watch the match.”
She would have preferred for Jack to just leave, not to rip Ianto apart verbally beforehand, but as long as it ended with her and her bridal magazines she would take whatever she got. Pretending to be entranced by the announcer’s explanation of a certain player’s injury, she waited for the explosion.
Instead, she heard Ianto settle against Jack’s side and the crinkling candy wrapper. Around a mouthful of off-brand chocolate, Jack asked, “Are you seeing someone?”
“Not at the moment,” Banana said. “I like to keep my options open, yeah? Not a one-woman sort of guy. Chuck, on the other hand…”
“I’ll be taking Rhys’s example pretty soon,” Chuck answered.
As Chuck waxed poetic about his cow of a girlfriend, Gwen turned her attention back to her co-workers. Jack, who it seemed could care less about rugby, was fiddling with the cuff of Ianto’s dress shirt and with Ianto’s slender wrist. Absent-mindedly, Ianto was twining his fingers through those on Jack’s free hand, running his fingers over Jack’s knuckles. They didn’t even seem to be aware that they were touching each other.
Ianto leaned forward and snagged a slice of pizza from the nearest box. “That’s sausage,” Jack murmured. “We could call for a cheese.”
Jack was looking more closely at the slice of pizza that Ianto held than he was looking at Gwen. In her mind, she knew that it was because Jack didn’t want to hurt Rhys’s feelings anymore than she did. He was such a good man. He didn’t want to reveal their love to her fiancé. She couldn’t help feeling hurt, though. She’d had an awful day. Jack’s attention really would have helped her feel better.
“I manage Owen’s disgusting pizzas; this is nowhere near as bad,” Ianto reassured Jack.
“You eat your mom’s cooking, too. That doesn’t mean you enjoy it.”
“Are you a vegetarian?” Rhys asked. “No one mentioned. Let me nip into the kitchen, and I’ll get you some cheese and tomato sandwiches.”
If Ianto was a vegetarian, it was news to Gwen. He ate whatever they ate. Okay, when Owen insisted that they get Meat Feast pizzas, he didn’t eat as much as they did. That was just because he liked disgusting stuff like the fried vegetables and brown rice from the Chinese restaurant. Trying to look like a health nut, she assumed.
Jack said, “That’d be great, Rhys. Thanks.”
“It’s not necessary—” Ianto started, but glares from Jack and Rhys silenced him. He rolled his eyes and said, “Thank you. Could I give you a hand?”
Rhys said, “No, Gwen will help me.”
It would be better than watching the rugby match. Jumping up, Gwen followed Rhys into the kitchen. As soon as they were out of the line of sight of their guests, Rhys whirled on her. “Could you have made me look like any more of a wanker?”
“What?” Leave it to Rhys to overreact.
“He doesn’t like to eat meat, Gwen, and after what happened last week, I can’t say I don’t understand the sentiment. And there I go, plopping a freaking enormous meat pizza in front of him!” As he spoke, Rhys took the two sandwiches he’d made out of his paper lunch bag. He put them on a plate.
Gwen grabbed his arm to force him to look at her. He had to understand that this wasn’t her fault. “Well, I didn’t know, did I? He eats meat at work… Just not a lot.” She squared her shoulders and glared at Rhys. He had no right to blame her for the fact that Ianto wasn’t being catered to. Ianto got her lunch, not the other way around. She was second-in-command of Torchwood Cardiff. She had more important things to think about than what people ate.
A loud explosion of curses drifted in from the kitchen, and in the flat above, people stomped their feet.
“Scotland’s winning,” Banana called. “Move your ass!”
To Gwen, Rhys said, “You spend so much time with them, Gwen. More time than you spend with me. How can you not have noticed?” He grabbed the sandwiches and returned to the living room.
Gwen watched Ianto stand to take the plate from Rhys. When Rhys returned to his seat, everyone’s attention returned to the match. She didn’t care if it seemed rude; Gwen wasn’t going back into the living room. She didn’t have to sit in her own flat and put up with this. Her own fiancé was ordering her around, yelling at her after she’d had to run through crap all day. Jack was doting on Ianto like he didn’t even notice that Gwen was in the room! She wasn’t going to sit around and let them treat her like a minor annoyance. Without turning to look at the men in the sitting room, Gwen went into the master bedroom and slammed the door.
“…Long day,” she heard Ianto saying from the sitting room.
“We had… and running… can’t blame her,” Jack added.
Even Rhys tacked on, “…the wedding… work… stress.”
She never found out how Chuck and Banana wanted to diminish the persecutions that had been heaped upon her because suddenly, they began screaming: “Go! GO!” Then, all the men started to cheer. Apparently Wales had caught up.
Gwen took her IPod and a stack of bridal magazines. Stretching out across her unmade bed, she got to work ignoring everyone like Jack was ignoring her. He would notice that she was missing soon. He would come and look for her, and apologize for doting on Ianto. They would have a lovely, heartfelt conversation, the sort of conversation that Jack could only have with her.
She was sure that she heard Jack coming to her room. Delighted that she had decided not to change into her pajamas, Gwen hurried to open the door. As she opened it, she saw Chuck letting himself into the bathroom. Slamming the door behind herself, Gwen stomped back over to her bed.
TBC
*
Thank you for reading! I would appreciate any feedback you have time to offer.
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Love it
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Thanks, I'm really enjoying this.
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I'm always late to the party so I'm going off to join the community now so I don't miss out on any more good stuff.
Thank you.
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Oh, and obviously the Gwen bashing was fun as well!
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Like, sometimes reading a bashing fic from the bashee's POV can be irritating just because of having to read all the stupidity but when it's done like this is just amusing.
10/10