Torchwood: Fanfic: Indelible stains

[m_findlow]

Title: Indelible stains
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 858 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for m_findlow's prompt "Torchwood, any, it's not clean until Ianto says it's clean" at fic_promptly
Summary: Ianto is left to clean up their mess, again

Ianto surveyed the scene with despair. He was accustomed to cleaning up their messes, but that didn't mean he had to enjoy it. He enjoyed the end result, just not the bits in between, despite what everyone else seemed to think. He did it because it needed doing, but he was beginning to wonder if they hadn't started going out of their way to do a proper job of it, worried that he might be left feeling dissatisfied by the amount of work involved.

Mud was easy, and water no trouble. Grass stains took a little bit of elbow grease, but nothing he couldn't handle. Alien substances were always a treat, and he was forever discovering new ways to tackle them. The secret was to know your viscosity. Once you had that down pat, the right solvent was easy to chose. He couldn't do much for the residual glowing, but that always faded after a few days, and the others seemed to quite like it when the SUV's interior glowed in the dark.

No, there was only one stain he really abhorred, and that was blood. Oddly, there was always more blood than everything else put together, but when your boss died for a living, there wasn't much you could do about it. Blood was a nightmare to get out of fabric. Jack's shirts never came out of the wash quite the same after they'd been bloodied, which was why most times they simply ended up binned. If he wore white, Ianto could have shoved them all in some industrial strength bleach, but asking Jack to wear white would be like a red rag to a bull. The lighter the colour of the shirt, the more likely it was that Jack would make a mess.

Ianto had lost count of how many afternoons had been spent hunched over the seats in the SUV, scrubbing out the blood from the upholstery. The leather never quite came up to his level of satisfaction, and the more he scrubbed, the more he could taste the metallic tang in his mouth. It made him feel ill and angry at the same time, thinking about Jack bleeding out in the SUV. It wasn't always Jack of course. He'd had to clean up all of their blood at one point or another, and several times his own. It never seemed fair that he should be the one to clean up his own blood. True that in most cases he believed that if you make a mess, you should clean it up, but being banged up in hospital for a few days recuperating should at least cut you some slack.

Staring at the back seat, the blood still glistened, fresh but cold. Two hours ago that had been him sat in the back, with Jack's head in his lap, gaping wound in his side oozing blood onto his pants and the seat beneath, whilst Owen frantically drove them back to the hub. He'd half expected Jack to die before they got there. His face had been so pale, his skin clammy and cold, and it was all Ianto could do not to cry at the obvious pain his lover was in. Seeing the stains now made him want to cry again. Jack was upstairs, resting. In a few hours he'd be back to fighting fit, his injuries a distant memory. The only reminder would be the mess in the SUV - the one Ianto was determined to remove.

The first dozen paper towels came away sodden and bright red, pressed down, soaking up as much of the blood as possible. Once the towels came back with mere patches of red, Ianto squeezed out a damp flannel and began the task of cleaning away the rest. The stitching between the seats was always the trickiest, and the blood liked to congeal in the narrow crevices. Ianto scrubbed at it angrily, taking out his turbulent emotions on the upholstery. Some people drank, some people liked to go for a run, others liked to hit a punching bag. Ianto scrubbed until his hands were chafed and red raw, his cloth coming back clean.

He soaked a second cloth in leather polish, running it over the seats, breathing in the strong scent to mask the smell of death and tragedy, until he was finally satisfied that the SUV was free of any reminders of the day's events.

Crawling back out of the car, slamming the door and locking it he turned and saw Jack standing there, freshly dressed and looking no worse for wear. It was hard to imagine that just a few hours ago, he'd been bleeding to death in Ianto's arms. Would that they could all heal the way Jack did.

'Sorry about the mess,' he apologised.

For once Ianto couldn't be angry about the team making a mess. They had just been doing their job. He'd much rather spend every day picking up their discarded coffee cups and empty pizza boxes, than having to clean up their blood. He didn't want to see any of them with more than a paper cut. The rest was unimportant.

Comments

[bk_forever]

Poor Ianto, he really does get the worst parts of the job.