One long process of Jack's hindbrain wends down, begins to settle. A quiet tension in his fingertips goes away.
(Soft break.)
He preses his lips to the crown of Ianto's head. It's not quite a kiss – one would be hard-pressed to say exactly what it was.
"When I was in the Agency," he says, "this was normal." And lets that hunger, that resentment, that anger beat up in intensity like a heart before calling it back down. And how he got out of the Agency doesn't bear repeating, but there was a time, after that...
Just follow.
It's painful, thinking of the Doctor while excising all of the nightmares from his conscious recall. Just the Doctor, just that first patch on the TARDIS, before abandonment and Thane and a little dark hallway and a hand slicked with blood...
(Focus.)
There. He can feel it, and shoves that out beyond his shields, hard enough that he'd be projecting it if he had any psi powers at all. One point of reference, one north star: there, in the dark, he'd been dragging all his evils around his neck like an albatross, and the Doctor had looked at him and implied, There's a way to be good, after this.
He can feel the knot beneath his lungs tightening up, but he keeps that part safely hidden.
no subject
One long process of Jack's hindbrain wends down, begins to settle. A quiet tension in his fingertips goes away.
(Soft break.)
He preses his lips to the crown of Ianto's head. It's not quite a kiss – one would be hard-pressed to say exactly what it was.
"When I was in the Agency," he says, "this was normal." And lets that hunger, that resentment, that anger beat up in intensity like a heart before calling it back down. And how he got out of the Agency doesn't bear repeating, but there was a time, after that...
Just follow.
It's painful, thinking of the Doctor while excising all of the nightmares from his conscious recall. Just the Doctor, just that first patch on the TARDIS, before abandonment and Thane and a little dark hallway and a hand slicked with blood...
(Focus.)
There. He can feel it, and shoves that out beyond his shields, hard enough that he'd be projecting it if he had any psi powers at all. One point of reference, one north star: there, in the dark, he'd been dragging all his evils around his neck like an albatross, and the Doctor had looked at him and implied, There's a way to be good, after this.
He can feel the knot beneath his lungs tightening up, but he keeps that part safely hidden.