Torchwood: Fanfic: Losing your senses

[m_findlow]

Title: Losing your senses
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Owen
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,342 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for doreyg's prompt "any, any, [pronoun] smells like home" at fic_promptly
Summary: Ianto loses something he didn't realise was valuable

It wasn't until he was making the first round of coffee for the morning that he noticed it. He should have been able to smell the beans as the hot water poured through the grindings. Maybe his nose was a bit blocked. Not again he thought glumly. He was over winter, and he didn't want to be coming down with something again. It had been a harsh winter and bouts of cold and flu had done the rounds at least twice in the hub, none of them spared, not even Jack. Once all the mugs were filled with steaming hot coffee and arranged neatly on the tray, he pulled his handkerchief out and blew his nose. It was pretty anticlimactic. Stupid congestion, he thought.

One the boardroom was full of occupants, Tosh began her briefing. He wrapped his hands around the warmth of the mug and sipped. It tasted all wrong. It was bland and bitter, and not in a good way. He waited for the four faces to turn to him with disappointed frowns. If he couldn't be relied on to make decent coffee, then what was the point in having him here? But the onslaught never came. He couldn't understand it. He watched each of them in turn, paying careful attention to the expression on their face as they drank. There was no sign that anything was amiss. He knew two of them were far too polite to say anything, a third would pull faces, and the last would have absolutely no compunction in delivering him an earful.

When the briefing had concluded and he was left alone to clear the table, he collected the mugs and checked them. They were all empty, except his own which had only on few mouthfuls drunk from it. He couldn't bring himself to drink more of that horrible muck, but the others had downed the lot. Curious. Maybe he was coming down with something.

He decided to get it checked out by Owen anyway, even if it was just a cold.

'There's nothing wrong with you,' he confirmed. 'Well, not in the medical sense.'

'What about my blocked nose?'

'You don't have a blocked nose.'

'Are you sure?'

Owen hated it when they argued with him over his diagnosis. Which of them was it that held the medical degree?

'I'll prove it to you.'

He reached down into one of the cupboards and pulled out a small bottle, twisting off the lid and holding it away from himself, already cringing from it. He wafted it under Ianto's nose and waited for him to recoil violently. Instead he sat there calmly, unaffected.

'Okay, you may have a point.'

He inspected Ianto's head wound from yesterday. He'd received a nasty bump on the head when they'd gone weevil hunting in a disused warehouse. It was dark and he hadn't seen the pool of oil on the ground, his foot slipping in it and sending him tumbling to the ground, hitting his head hard on the concrete floor.

'It's possible there's a small amount of intercranial swelling when you whacked yourself out.'

'I didn't whack myself out,' he complained. 'I was awake the whole time.'

'You counted eight fingers.'

'But what does any of that have to do with not being able to smell?'

'The swelling could be pressing on the area of the brain that recognises smell. It should go down in a couple of days and then you'll be back to normal.'

'Lucky me.'

At first he'd reasoned that of all his senses, he'd probably miss smell the least. It didn't really seem to have as big an impact on his life as sight, sound, taste and touch. As the day wore on though, he began to realise just how much his sense of smell changed his perception of things. Walking out of the tourist office and onto the quayside he inhaled the cool air deeply into his lungs, but it didn't have the same refreshing quality without the accompanying salty tang. It was just air.

At the busy local cafe where he went to pick up lunch for the team, he should have had his senses assaulted by the hustle and bustle of the lunch crowd. The noises were all still there, but gone were all the visceral sensations. He should have been able to smell the sugary sweetness of the pastries in the front counter window, the bitterness of the coffee, hot smoky bacon and melting cheese.

It felt like he was in some kind of bubble, and the lack of smells had caused the colour of the world to fade somewhat, like he was experiencing it through an opaque filter that absorbed the very essence of what it felt like to be alive.

Even his morning routine felt wrong. Splashing on a hint of colonge and checking himself one last time in the mirror had always engaged a response in him. The smell that told him he was now ready to face the day, whatever it intended on throwing at him. Then there was the part where he'd nearly burned down his flat, waiting for his toast to cook, and distracted by the article in his newspaper about panther sightings in the Brecon Beacons. It wasn't until the smoke alarm started wailing loudly that he realised his toaster was issuing a black cloud, and his toast was now nothing more than a thin slice of cremated ash. He should have been able to smell burning long before it came to that.

Even feeding the residents in the cells wasn't the same. Normally he found the smell distasteful, since the lower forms were not great on the hygiene front, and he was usually carrying down fresh meat to feed them. But now he realised that even though he hated the stench, it alerted the rest of his senses, reminding him of the danger of complacency. He didn't feel the same tension in his body and it was unsettling.

But the thing he missed most about his sense of smell was Jack. He loved the scent of Jack, that musky, heady scent that pervaded every fibre of his being. And he realised for the first time that it wasn't just when he was close by. The whole hub smelled faintly of Jack, but the man himself was still the strongest source. It was one of the reasons that Jack had never succeeded in sneaking up on him in any capacity. His scent always gave him away before he got within ten yards of Ianto.

Without Jack, it was like his world had gone from full technicolor to black and white overnight. He tried not to let it show, but the team could sense a despondency floating down over him, like a brooding storm settling in for the afternoon. He couldn't help it. The warm, comforting blanket of Jack had been stripped away, leaving him feeling lonely and exposed, even thought Jack was still right there beside him.

He slept poorly, unable to settle. Even three days on, he still couldn't get use to the loss of sensation. When he woke for the umpteenth time he tossed restlessly, and then it hit him. It was like a wave of the purest pleasure and joy. It was back. He inhaled long and deep, letting the scent ripple through his body like a liquid warmth. He felt happier than he had done for days and he snuggled tightly against Jack, wanting to take in every last bit of that luscious scent.

Jack must have sensed him waking and the change in his body language.

'Everything okay?' he asked sleepily.

'Way better than okay. I can smell again.'

'And what can you smell?'

'You.'

Jack chuckled. 'And what do I smell like?'

The question confused him. He thought he would have been able to answer it straight away, but found that the mixture of scents and feelings blurred together so that he couldn't say definitively just was it was.

'Home,' Ianto replied. 'You smell like home.'

Comments

[bk_forever]

Poor Ianto, it's horrible not being able to smell. He's going to spend the next few days sniffing everything, especially Jack! Not that Jack will complain!