![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silver_sunIanto woke slowly, with the growing awareness that he ached all over, muscles protesting at the cold, cramped and heavy work of the previous day.
The blanket stuck to him as he rolled over, trying to find a more comfortable position, memories of the previous night rushing back. Owen leading him to a small house, just to the side of the one where Jack and Cisca-Mar were, and pulling him towards the bed. Clothes being shed and intimate kisses and touches given. Them moving together in the soft lamp light until the breathless heat had driven out the cold and they'd fallen asleep together. It hadn't been the best sex he'd ever had, they had both been exhausted, but it had been real and all the better for it.
The space in the bed where Owen had slept was empty, the sheets already grown cold and reluctantly Ianto decided that it was probably time he got up as well.
After managing to find most of his clothes, there was only one of his socks and one of Owen's, Ianto got dressed.
He blinked as he walked out into bright sunlight. The sun was already high in the sky, the village busy with people working outside, enjoying the sunshine after the wet and cold weather of the past few days.
“You're awake then,” Owen said as Ianto let himself into the house. “I was beginning to think you were going to sleep all day.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?” Ianto asked, concerned that perhaps Jack had got worse in the night and there hadn't been time for anyone to come and wake him.
“Because you were knackered, you've barely slept since we got here.” Owen got up and walked over to him. “So I wasn't going to wake you up if there was a chance you'd actually get a good night’s sleep.”
“Thank you,” Ianto replied, surprised that Owen had thought to be that considerate, it wasn't something he was used to. “How's Jack?”
“No worse.” Owen looked over at were Jack was muttering quietly in his sleep. “But not any better either.”
Ianto's heart sank. “So it didn't work?”
“It's too early to say, but it's the first night he'd not got any worse, so that's got to count for something.” Owen pushed him towards the table. “You need to eat something and then we'll work out what we're going to do.”
“About us or about Jack?” Ianto said sitting down, unsure if he was ready for either conversation.
“About living here,” Owen said, filling up the bowl he'd placed in front of Ianto with porridge from the pot over the fire. “We haven't got any way of getting home and there doesn't seem to be anywhere else to go on this planet, so we're stuck here. So we've got to think about...” He gestured vaguely. “Stuff.”
"Stuff?”
“Yeah. Like where are we going to live and what we can do for them?” Owen sounded embarrassed as he added, “We can't live on their charity forever.”
Ianto was all too aware of why that sat so badly with him, while he didn’t know all the details, Owen been rather sketchy about some of it when they'd ended up talking about their childhoods while travelling back from the Himalayas. He knew enough though to understand it hadn’t been good, growing up on the poverty line on a sink estate in South London with a distant and disinterested mother. Living on hand outs and the charity of neighbours had shaped Owen's outlook on life far more than he was willing to admit. Without thinking about Ianto put his hand over Owen’s as a gesture of support. “We’ll find something. You're already helping Cisca-Mar and I could volunteer to go out foraging with Pon-Pel. Or there's fishing or helping with the boats.”
Owen looked at their hands, appearing more uncomfortable than reassured at the gesture, but didn't move his hand. "If I'd known you'd be this positive after getting laid I'd have done it days ago.”
“You do know it's more likely to be the fact I slept for more than three hours, don't you?”
“You go on thinking that,” Owen said dismissively.
“Oh, and this was amongst the stuff in the crate,” Owen said putting a small case on the table. “I think it was probably meant for shaving off bits of fur so they could see what they were doing if they had stitch up an injury, but I reckon you could use it to have a shave if you wanted. Cisca-Mar didn't seem to want it.”
Ianto looked at the device doubtfully. “Is there a reason you didn't try it first?”
“Haven't had time. Any way, you need it more than I do,” Owen said with a grin. “It was just like kissing a yeti like night.”
Ianto rubbed his hand across several days’ worth of stubble, getting rid of it would be nice. “All right, but I don't look like a yeti.”
“Nah, your back isn't hairy enough.”
"I do not have a hairy back,” Ianto said indignantly.
Owen laughed. “You're too easy to wind up, it just not fun anymore. Just eat your breakfast and go and get sorted out.”
A shave, a full night's sleep and a warm meal inside him, Ianto had to admit, did make him feel more like himself again and more able to cope with the day ahead. Leaving Owen with the instruction to send somebody to find him if anything changed with Jack, he went to find Pon-Pel.
He found her working by her raft. She turned and smiled at him as he approached. “You and Owen,” she said wiggling her thumbs a knowing look in her eyes.
It wasn't the start to the conversation that Ianto had hoped and he felt his face flush.
Pon-Pel stared at him. “I did not know your species changed colour. Is it something that happens after...”
“No,” Ianto said quickly. “We don't do it on purpose. Heat, cold, embarrassment.”
“You are embarrassed? Why?” She climbed off her boat and onto the jetty. “Owen is a healer. He should be a good mate.” She looked across to where Rila-Bek was helping unload some bundles of plants from a boat a few jetties over. “Healers have good hands.”
It was more information than Ianto had wanted to know and he looked down at the wooden planking beneath his feet, the water just visible through the gaps, until he hoped he looked less red in the face.
“Have you come for advice?” Pon-Pel asked as she gathered up an untidy bundle of nets and began to untangle them.
“Not about Owen,” he said hoping that she didn't pursue that line of conversation. “Actually I've been thinking, you’ve been very kind to us, but we can't live on charity, so we'd like to help with things around the village.”
“I will see what needs doing,” Pon-Pel said handing him the edge of a net so that he could help her fold it neatly. “But until you can speak to all of us, what you can do will be limited. There are few who speak the trade language and they grow less with passing years.” She smiled sadly. “But perhaps your arrival will change that, the children will see there is a point to it after all.”
“Why did you choose to learn it?”
Pon-Pel shrugged. “A sense of adventure I suppose, and my great grandmother spoke it. She'd been something to do with trade in the time before we came here.” She put the net down, then paused before starting on the next one. “I think she always hoped that we'd find our way back to the stars or that more of us would find our way here.”
Cisca-Mar's Mother and Grandmother, and now Pon-Pel's great Grandmother, had all the passengers on the ship that had crashed been women? Ianto wondered. Pon-Pel had seemed so far to be very open to answer questions, so he asked her.
“Mostly they were,” she replied, sitting down on the stack of nets. “We didn't always live as we live now. Once we were a warlike people. The boys went very young to train as soldiers, or so my Grandmother told me. The women did everything else that was not killing.”
Ianto looked at the small, peaceful village. Smoke curled from the vents in the thatched roofs, people talked and worked, children ran and laughed and played, while the water lapped softly about the thick wooden timbers supporting the platform the village was built on. It didn't seem possible.
“Our destruction and why we fled were self-made.” She sighed. “I don't know how much Cisca-Mar told you, but what we fled was civil war. Colony against colony, brothers fighting brothers, over nothing that mattered. Whole planets were laid to waste, Quillasal was just one of dozens. It is not a history to be proud of.”
“I'm sorry.” It felt inadequate, but Ianto said it anyway.
Pon-Pel stood. “We live well now though. It is a simpler life, with no rules but the four ancestors made for us.”
Hoping that he hadn't accidentally broken any of them, Ianto said, “What rules are those?”
“I can show you. They are on the great banner in the community hall.”
Walking through the village, Ianto followed her to the largest of the buildings.
“They made it during their first winter here.” Pon-Pel pointed up at a large oval of cloth fastened to the wall. “Winter here is harsh. The marsh freezes and so does the lake. The days are bitter and short as the snow sweeps down from the mountains. It must have been terrible for them.”
Ianto shivered, knowing that if they had been unlucky enough to arrive during such a winter they most likely wouldn't have survived long enough to be found and taken back to the village.
Words that he couldn't read had been carefully stitched in four parallel arcs, the rest of the fabric decorated with abstract designs that he supposed had some meaning to the Star-Chosen but could just have easily been used just because they thought it looked nice. “What does it say?”
Pon-Pel pointed to the top arc of writing. “The land and sea and sky belong to no one.' Below that it says, 'Take no more than you need and give back when you can.' And below that, 'Harm none by word or deed.' The last line says, 'All are different, all are equal, all are free under the sky.'”
“And these are all the rules you have?” Ianto asked, wondering if it was really true.
“They are all we need. We live or die by cooperation or the lack it.” She shook her head. “It is too nice a day to be inside and to spend talking of such things. And I've got to finish getting the nets ready.”
“I should get back to Owen and Jack,” Ianto said, and with one last look at the banner, he followed her back outside.
She walked with him most of the way back to the house, pausing only once they got to where the narrow paths between the houses split off to the jetties. “I'm glad you asked about working,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because it means you are at home here even if you still miss your own world. Just remember you can only learn from the past, you can't live in it or recreate it in the present. Time moves on like the flow of water.” She put a hand on his arm. “Do not try to hold its passage back, because like the flood water when a dam breaks it will so much worse.”
Ianto nodded, knowing only too well what she meant.
“Good. I will come by later and let you know if there is a job to do.”
Standing at the edge of the village, looking out at the distant tree lined shore, Ianto took a deep breath. Digging his hands into his pockets he turned and walked back to the house. This was their life now and for Owen and Jack's sakes he would live it the best he could.
X0X0X0X
There was no sudden break in Jack's fever, rather a slow decrease over the course of another day and night, until it was low enough for him to be aware of what was going on around him.
His voice was weak and scratchy as he tried to catch hold of Ianto's hand as he brought him a drink. “Hey, you stayed.”
Surprised and relieved, Ianto nearly dropped the beaker of water. Putting it down on the floor, Ianto crouched down next to the bed. “You’re awake.”
Jack groaned as he tried to sit up and failed. “Not seeing an upside to that.”
“Don’t say that.” He felt more emotional than he thought he would, the relief that Jack was awake making him feel shaky. “Just try to drink a little.”
With Ianto supporting his shoulders, Jack drank slowly until he'd finished half the water. Turning his head away to let Ianto know was done, Jack asked, “How long?”
“Five days,” Ianto replied. Those days had seemed like some of the longest of his life, the hours spent worrying stretching out into eternity. The worry about whether Jack would survive hadn't decreased as it became clear Owen's treatment was working, it had just changed to be about how well he'd recover and how long it would take. How sick and weak Jack looked scared him, fever and nearly a week with minimal food stripping the weight from him faster than he would have thought possible.
“Oh, only remember the first morning or night,” Jack said sounding confused, words starting to slur with tiredness. “It's hazy. Don't like losing time."
“I can tell you all about it, if you'd like, but it's not very interesting.”
“No.” Jack shook his head, eyes closing. “Later. So tired.”
“Then sleep.” Sitting on the floor, his head resting close to Jack's, he stayed with him until he fell asleep.
Lucid but in a substantial amount of pain if he tried to move, Jack was unable to do more that lay in bed for first few days following waking up.
Owen continued to change the dressing twice a day, an activity which Ianto had come to dread. As while he hated to see Jack in pain, he felt he couldn't let him go through it alone.
The wound still looked raw, like something had taken a large bite out of Jack's leg, but it was clean, new healthy skin forming round the edges.
It was exhausting looking after Jack, being responsible for every little thing, especially when it felt like he was being the worse patient imaginable. Uncooperative in just about everything from eating breakfast to trying the exercises that Owen had said would help, he'd snap at them for the slightly thing, saying vicious, hurtful things, that Ianto knew was just the pain and exhaustion talking, but which hurt and played on his mind none the less.
His relationship with Owen, Ianto had soon decided, was the only thing keeping him from going under. As despite their intentions that it wouldn't be anything more than an occasional arrangement, a little comfort when things seemed to be getting too much, it had rapidly changed into something else.
They had just fallen into it, so when Jack finally fell asleep, often in the early hours of the morning once exhaustion had won out over the pain he was still in, they would climb into bed together. Frequently they were too tired to do anything more than sleep, but to Ianto that didn't matter, their relationship was about support in whatever form they were able to give, not just sex. Although he had to admit when they did, Owen certainly knew what he was doing.
Life was far from perfect and sometimes he missed Gwen and Tosh and Cardiff so much it was an almost physical ache, but knowing that he had Owen and Jack made it bearable and with each passing day it became a little more so.
Link to part eight
The blanket stuck to him as he rolled over, trying to find a more comfortable position, memories of the previous night rushing back. Owen leading him to a small house, just to the side of the one where Jack and Cisca-Mar were, and pulling him towards the bed. Clothes being shed and intimate kisses and touches given. Them moving together in the soft lamp light until the breathless heat had driven out the cold and they'd fallen asleep together. It hadn't been the best sex he'd ever had, they had both been exhausted, but it had been real and all the better for it.
The space in the bed where Owen had slept was empty, the sheets already grown cold and reluctantly Ianto decided that it was probably time he got up as well.
After managing to find most of his clothes, there was only one of his socks and one of Owen's, Ianto got dressed.
He blinked as he walked out into bright sunlight. The sun was already high in the sky, the village busy with people working outside, enjoying the sunshine after the wet and cold weather of the past few days.
“You're awake then,” Owen said as Ianto let himself into the house. “I was beginning to think you were going to sleep all day.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?” Ianto asked, concerned that perhaps Jack had got worse in the night and there hadn't been time for anyone to come and wake him.
“Because you were knackered, you've barely slept since we got here.” Owen got up and walked over to him. “So I wasn't going to wake you up if there was a chance you'd actually get a good night’s sleep.”
“Thank you,” Ianto replied, surprised that Owen had thought to be that considerate, it wasn't something he was used to. “How's Jack?”
“No worse.” Owen looked over at were Jack was muttering quietly in his sleep. “But not any better either.”
Ianto's heart sank. “So it didn't work?”
“It's too early to say, but it's the first night he'd not got any worse, so that's got to count for something.” Owen pushed him towards the table. “You need to eat something and then we'll work out what we're going to do.”
“About us or about Jack?” Ianto said sitting down, unsure if he was ready for either conversation.
“About living here,” Owen said, filling up the bowl he'd placed in front of Ianto with porridge from the pot over the fire. “We haven't got any way of getting home and there doesn't seem to be anywhere else to go on this planet, so we're stuck here. So we've got to think about...” He gestured vaguely. “Stuff.”
"Stuff?”
“Yeah. Like where are we going to live and what we can do for them?” Owen sounded embarrassed as he added, “We can't live on their charity forever.”
Ianto was all too aware of why that sat so badly with him, while he didn’t know all the details, Owen been rather sketchy about some of it when they'd ended up talking about their childhoods while travelling back from the Himalayas. He knew enough though to understand it hadn’t been good, growing up on the poverty line on a sink estate in South London with a distant and disinterested mother. Living on hand outs and the charity of neighbours had shaped Owen's outlook on life far more than he was willing to admit. Without thinking about Ianto put his hand over Owen’s as a gesture of support. “We’ll find something. You're already helping Cisca-Mar and I could volunteer to go out foraging with Pon-Pel. Or there's fishing or helping with the boats.”
Owen looked at their hands, appearing more uncomfortable than reassured at the gesture, but didn't move his hand. "If I'd known you'd be this positive after getting laid I'd have done it days ago.”
“You do know it's more likely to be the fact I slept for more than three hours, don't you?”
“You go on thinking that,” Owen said dismissively.
“Oh, and this was amongst the stuff in the crate,” Owen said putting a small case on the table. “I think it was probably meant for shaving off bits of fur so they could see what they were doing if they had stitch up an injury, but I reckon you could use it to have a shave if you wanted. Cisca-Mar didn't seem to want it.”
Ianto looked at the device doubtfully. “Is there a reason you didn't try it first?”
“Haven't had time. Any way, you need it more than I do,” Owen said with a grin. “It was just like kissing a yeti like night.”
Ianto rubbed his hand across several days’ worth of stubble, getting rid of it would be nice. “All right, but I don't look like a yeti.”
“Nah, your back isn't hairy enough.”
"I do not have a hairy back,” Ianto said indignantly.
Owen laughed. “You're too easy to wind up, it just not fun anymore. Just eat your breakfast and go and get sorted out.”
A shave, a full night's sleep and a warm meal inside him, Ianto had to admit, did make him feel more like himself again and more able to cope with the day ahead. Leaving Owen with the instruction to send somebody to find him if anything changed with Jack, he went to find Pon-Pel.
He found her working by her raft. She turned and smiled at him as he approached. “You and Owen,” she said wiggling her thumbs a knowing look in her eyes.
It wasn't the start to the conversation that Ianto had hoped and he felt his face flush.
Pon-Pel stared at him. “I did not know your species changed colour. Is it something that happens after...”
“No,” Ianto said quickly. “We don't do it on purpose. Heat, cold, embarrassment.”
“You are embarrassed? Why?” She climbed off her boat and onto the jetty. “Owen is a healer. He should be a good mate.” She looked across to where Rila-Bek was helping unload some bundles of plants from a boat a few jetties over. “Healers have good hands.”
It was more information than Ianto had wanted to know and he looked down at the wooden planking beneath his feet, the water just visible through the gaps, until he hoped he looked less red in the face.
“Have you come for advice?” Pon-Pel asked as she gathered up an untidy bundle of nets and began to untangle them.
“Not about Owen,” he said hoping that she didn't pursue that line of conversation. “Actually I've been thinking, you’ve been very kind to us, but we can't live on charity, so we'd like to help with things around the village.”
“I will see what needs doing,” Pon-Pel said handing him the edge of a net so that he could help her fold it neatly. “But until you can speak to all of us, what you can do will be limited. There are few who speak the trade language and they grow less with passing years.” She smiled sadly. “But perhaps your arrival will change that, the children will see there is a point to it after all.”
“Why did you choose to learn it?”
Pon-Pel shrugged. “A sense of adventure I suppose, and my great grandmother spoke it. She'd been something to do with trade in the time before we came here.” She put the net down, then paused before starting on the next one. “I think she always hoped that we'd find our way back to the stars or that more of us would find our way here.”
Cisca-Mar's Mother and Grandmother, and now Pon-Pel's great Grandmother, had all the passengers on the ship that had crashed been women? Ianto wondered. Pon-Pel had seemed so far to be very open to answer questions, so he asked her.
“Mostly they were,” she replied, sitting down on the stack of nets. “We didn't always live as we live now. Once we were a warlike people. The boys went very young to train as soldiers, or so my Grandmother told me. The women did everything else that was not killing.”
Ianto looked at the small, peaceful village. Smoke curled from the vents in the thatched roofs, people talked and worked, children ran and laughed and played, while the water lapped softly about the thick wooden timbers supporting the platform the village was built on. It didn't seem possible.
“Our destruction and why we fled were self-made.” She sighed. “I don't know how much Cisca-Mar told you, but what we fled was civil war. Colony against colony, brothers fighting brothers, over nothing that mattered. Whole planets were laid to waste, Quillasal was just one of dozens. It is not a history to be proud of.”
“I'm sorry.” It felt inadequate, but Ianto said it anyway.
Pon-Pel stood. “We live well now though. It is a simpler life, with no rules but the four ancestors made for us.”
Hoping that he hadn't accidentally broken any of them, Ianto said, “What rules are those?”
“I can show you. They are on the great banner in the community hall.”
Walking through the village, Ianto followed her to the largest of the buildings.
“They made it during their first winter here.” Pon-Pel pointed up at a large oval of cloth fastened to the wall. “Winter here is harsh. The marsh freezes and so does the lake. The days are bitter and short as the snow sweeps down from the mountains. It must have been terrible for them.”
Ianto shivered, knowing that if they had been unlucky enough to arrive during such a winter they most likely wouldn't have survived long enough to be found and taken back to the village.
Words that he couldn't read had been carefully stitched in four parallel arcs, the rest of the fabric decorated with abstract designs that he supposed had some meaning to the Star-Chosen but could just have easily been used just because they thought it looked nice. “What does it say?”
Pon-Pel pointed to the top arc of writing. “The land and sea and sky belong to no one.' Below that it says, 'Take no more than you need and give back when you can.' And below that, 'Harm none by word or deed.' The last line says, 'All are different, all are equal, all are free under the sky.'”
“And these are all the rules you have?” Ianto asked, wondering if it was really true.
“They are all we need. We live or die by cooperation or the lack it.” She shook her head. “It is too nice a day to be inside and to spend talking of such things. And I've got to finish getting the nets ready.”
“I should get back to Owen and Jack,” Ianto said, and with one last look at the banner, he followed her back outside.
She walked with him most of the way back to the house, pausing only once they got to where the narrow paths between the houses split off to the jetties. “I'm glad you asked about working,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because it means you are at home here even if you still miss your own world. Just remember you can only learn from the past, you can't live in it or recreate it in the present. Time moves on like the flow of water.” She put a hand on his arm. “Do not try to hold its passage back, because like the flood water when a dam breaks it will so much worse.”
Ianto nodded, knowing only too well what she meant.
“Good. I will come by later and let you know if there is a job to do.”
Standing at the edge of the village, looking out at the distant tree lined shore, Ianto took a deep breath. Digging his hands into his pockets he turned and walked back to the house. This was their life now and for Owen and Jack's sakes he would live it the best he could.
X0X0X0X
There was no sudden break in Jack's fever, rather a slow decrease over the course of another day and night, until it was low enough for him to be aware of what was going on around him.
His voice was weak and scratchy as he tried to catch hold of Ianto's hand as he brought him a drink. “Hey, you stayed.”
Surprised and relieved, Ianto nearly dropped the beaker of water. Putting it down on the floor, Ianto crouched down next to the bed. “You’re awake.”
Jack groaned as he tried to sit up and failed. “Not seeing an upside to that.”
“Don’t say that.” He felt more emotional than he thought he would, the relief that Jack was awake making him feel shaky. “Just try to drink a little.”
With Ianto supporting his shoulders, Jack drank slowly until he'd finished half the water. Turning his head away to let Ianto know was done, Jack asked, “How long?”
“Five days,” Ianto replied. Those days had seemed like some of the longest of his life, the hours spent worrying stretching out into eternity. The worry about whether Jack would survive hadn't decreased as it became clear Owen's treatment was working, it had just changed to be about how well he'd recover and how long it would take. How sick and weak Jack looked scared him, fever and nearly a week with minimal food stripping the weight from him faster than he would have thought possible.
“Oh, only remember the first morning or night,” Jack said sounding confused, words starting to slur with tiredness. “It's hazy. Don't like losing time."
“I can tell you all about it, if you'd like, but it's not very interesting.”
“No.” Jack shook his head, eyes closing. “Later. So tired.”
“Then sleep.” Sitting on the floor, his head resting close to Jack's, he stayed with him until he fell asleep.
Lucid but in a substantial amount of pain if he tried to move, Jack was unable to do more that lay in bed for first few days following waking up.
Owen continued to change the dressing twice a day, an activity which Ianto had come to dread. As while he hated to see Jack in pain, he felt he couldn't let him go through it alone.
The wound still looked raw, like something had taken a large bite out of Jack's leg, but it was clean, new healthy skin forming round the edges.
It was exhausting looking after Jack, being responsible for every little thing, especially when it felt like he was being the worse patient imaginable. Uncooperative in just about everything from eating breakfast to trying the exercises that Owen had said would help, he'd snap at them for the slightly thing, saying vicious, hurtful things, that Ianto knew was just the pain and exhaustion talking, but which hurt and played on his mind none the less.
His relationship with Owen, Ianto had soon decided, was the only thing keeping him from going under. As despite their intentions that it wouldn't be anything more than an occasional arrangement, a little comfort when things seemed to be getting too much, it had rapidly changed into something else.
They had just fallen into it, so when Jack finally fell asleep, often in the early hours of the morning once exhaustion had won out over the pain he was still in, they would climb into bed together. Frequently they were too tired to do anything more than sleep, but to Ianto that didn't matter, their relationship was about support in whatever form they were able to give, not just sex. Although he had to admit when they did, Owen certainly knew what he was doing.
Life was far from perfect and sometimes he missed Gwen and Tosh and Cardiff so much it was an almost physical ache, but knowing that he had Owen and Jack made it bearable and with each passing day it became a little more so.
Link to part eight