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John woke up at the sound of the door to his room down in the bowels of the Hub creaking open. He watched the silhouette of a very familiar man form in the doorway and smiled.
“Good morning, Love,” he said, but received no reply.
Ianto placed a steaming cup of coffee on the small desk, turning so his face was partially bathed in the light streaming through the open door. His face was blank, expressionless, and his eyes were distant.
Ah, John thought. Must be one of those days.
He’d been with Torchwood, and with Ianto specifically, long enough to recognise Ianto’s moods. He doubted the rest of the team noticed when Ianto faded into the background just a little more than usual, but he always did. He always kept an eye out, to see if Ianto would let him help. Sometimes he did. Today he seemed a little too far gone, but John wasn’t going to stop trying.
He got dressed quickly, enjoying the aroma of the coffee filling the room, but decided against drinking it. Despite Everyone claiming Ianto made the best coffee in the universe, John still hadn’t gotten the taste for it.
He got to the main Hub just as the cogwheel door was turning open to admit Gwen.
“Good morning!” he called over the blaring alarm.
“Good morning!” Gwen called back.
“Morning!” Toshiko and Owen replied at the same time.
Gwen took the stairs two at a time, then looked around. “No Jack yet?”
“Still locked in his office,” Owen said.
“How’s he holding up?”
“As well as you’d expect,” Tosh said.
“And Ianto?”
“Down in the Archives again.”
“I do know what he spends all his time down there doing,” Owen said, “now that Jack’s locked in his office and John is, well….”
“What? Now that I’m still here?” John joked. Owen dutifully ignored him. “Actually, I remember this one time–”
Gwen cleared her throat loudly and John rolled his eyes. For people who had as much sex as they did, the rest of the team were severe prudes. “So, what’s on the agenda for today?”
John blocked out the rest of the conversation, turning towards Jack’s office. The blinds were drawn, which could either mean Jack was masturbating in there or he really, really didn’t want to be disturbed. Even by his partner. Especially by his partner.
John decided not to take the risk and go find Ianto in the Archives instead.
It took him a while, but he enjoyed the hunt. Ianto was all the way down in the 1901 retrieval section, taking inventory. John leaned against one of the shelving units, popping his hip in the way he knew always drew Ianto’s eyes directly to his crotch.
“Hello, Eye Candy,” John purred, but instead of stopping to appreciate him, Ianto simply continued his cataloguing, walking past as though John wasn’t even there.
That was okay. John knew better than to let one of Ianto’s moods hurt his ego, even if he did wish it were a little easier sometimes.
“Need some help?”
Usually, Ianto would either drop something in his arms or shove him away. Now he continued ignoring him. It really was a bad one.
“Alright, you know how to find me if you need me.” John smirked. “Or want me.”
He’d come back to pester Ianto later. He was no fun in this state. John would get better results bothering the others. Maybe they had a Rift alert or something. They’d call him if it was something big, but he was down to help with something smaller at the moment. Maybe he could convince Jack to go weevil hunting.
Except Jack’s blinds were still drawn, and John wasn’t desperate enough to bother him quite yet. Instead, he leaned over Toshkio’s shoulder and watched the code running across her screens.
“What’cha working on?” he asked, but Tosh was too engrossed in her work to respond. She got like that sometimes, forgot the world existed.
He looked around and saw Gwen at her station, staring at nothing, clearly lost in thought.
“What about you, Doe Eyes?” He sauntered over. “Anything interesting in that mind of yours?”
Gwen blinked, coming back to herself, and quickly turned her chair to face her desk again.
John sighed. Had he done something to offend her? It was possible; it took him a while to earn her trust after nearly killing her with paralysing lipgloss, and she still seemed to go off at him at the smallest things. She hadn’t given him the silent treatment before, was actually quite vocal about her displeasure with him usually, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. The people in this century were awful at communicating when something was wrong.
So that left only one person to pester, and since he wasn’t at his desk, he was most likely in the autopsy bay.
So John leaned over the balcony, watching Owen’s lab coat-clad back as he leaned over the body on the table, considering the best way to annoy him.
“When’d you bag this one?” he settled on. “Gone out fighting without me?”
Owen was getting surprisingly good at ignoring him.
“You could have at least invited me if you were going to kill something.” Still nothing. “You could invite me to rummage in that thing’s guts, too, if you want.”
Owen didn’t even seem to hear him. When John turned around, neither of the girls were looking the least bit amused, even though they usually enjoyed watching him annoy Owen. The blinds of Jack’s office were still closed, and Ianto still hadn’t come up from the Archives.
“I swear, what did I do wrong? Why are you acting like I don’t exist?”
Nobody reacted, which meant either he really fucked up, or there was something else going on. Was it possible he had a perception filter slipped on him without his knowledge? He checked all his pockets and the hidden compartments of his clothes, but all his weapons were where they belonged and he found nothing he didn’t place there himself. (Except for a packet of lube Ianto must have slipped him, but that didn’t count.) He checked his vortex manipulator to see if it could pick up any strange readings, but everything seemed normal – or as normal as you could get so close to a rift in space-time.
But he really couldn’t remember having fucked up, and Jack or Ianto would have told him if he had. But they hadn’t, so he mustn’t have. Which meant something else was wrong.
He turned back to Owen in the autopsy bay just as the doctor was moving away from the head of the corpse, and finally understood.
Because right there, on the metal slab, laid his very own body.