m_findlow

Title: Blown away
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 860 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for m_findlow's prompt "Any, any, ripping through like a hurricane " at fic_promptly
Summary: Ianto is blown away by the mess left in the hub

Ianto came to a dead stop just inside the cogwheel door.

'No,' he muttered. No, no, no. They couldn't have. Just, no.

The place looked like a bomb had gone off. No, it was worse than that. It was like a cyclone had ripped through the entire hub, upending everything in sight. There was rubbish and papers strewn everywhere, items knocked off desks and on to the floor, or half turned over and just abandoned right where they lay. There also seemed to be patches of water here and there, from sources unknown. It was completely, utterly beyond belief.

He'd only been out for a few hours running errands. The place had been spic and span before he'd left, he'd made sure of it. He'd thought it would be nice for the team to come back to a neat and tidy workspace from their rift retrieval. All that would be left to do would be to pick them up some lunch and leave them to it for the rest of the afternoon whilst he attended to other projects.

Staring at the vista, he moved quickly from despondent to downright mad. He knew they relied on him to keep things tidy, being less busy than them when it came to the "saving the world" stuff, but that didn't mean they could just throw it back in his face. He did have other things to do, important things. Who else would feed their residents, clean out their cells, make sure everyone had exactly what resources and supplies they needed before they even knew they needed them or had run out?

And that was to say nothing of his work in the archives. It wasn't all dusty files and paperwork. There were whole rooms full of specimens, living and dead, being preserved for future research. They needed regular attention, ensuring light and temperature conditions were controlled, that jars and containers weren't leaking or broken. More rooms housed technology, kept in specific areas so as not to interfere with one another. Who else was keeping an eye on that? Making sure that one device didn't start randomly emitting a frequency that would set off another one capable of vaporising anything within ten square miles? Him, that's who. And now, here he was, faced with hours and hours of cleaning up all because his so called team couldn't pick up after themselves. How they'd even gotten the hub in such a state so quickly was beyond comprehension, and to add insult to injury, they weren't even here now!

Ianto growled under his breath, repeating twelve kinds of expletives in various permutations with each of their names. No one around here would be getting proper coffee for weeks. In fact, he decided they wouldn't be getting any sort of coffee at all. Decaf was far too good for such a shameless disregard for their fellow coworker.

He stomped all the way to the kitchen, angrily thrusting open the cupboard before screaming out his frustration that there wasn't so much as one bin liner left.

'Sodding hell! How am I expected to clean up all this mess now?'

He grabbed his car keys from the desk and stormed back out the way he came. He knew he shouldn't drive when he was this angry, but the cleaning supplies clearly weren't going to buy themselves.

The elevator pinged and he surged forward, barely waiting for the doors to fully open, colliding straight into Jack on the opposite side.

'Woah, careful there,' Jack said.

'You!' Ianto growled. It didn't matter that the whole team were responsible for the mess. Jack was here right now and he was their leader, which made him ultimately to blame.

'Ianto, I'm so sorry,' Jack apologised. 'I meant to warn you.'

'What? That you decided to destroy the hub while I was out? Well, thank you very much.'

'It was an accident,' Jack replied.

'It always is with you,' he grumbled.

'A little bit of alien technology gone wrong which created a mini cyclone,' Jack explained. 'It's fixed now, though. We were trying to clean everything up before you got back but we ran out of supplies.'

'You were?' he replied, sounding skeptical.

'You shoulda seen this place before we started. Complete war zone. Took us two hours just to right the furniture and get the computers back online.'

Ianto looked down and saw both of Jack's hands full of shopping bags, filled with bin liners, detergent and gloves, cleaning cloths, brush and pan.

'I didn't want you thinking we couldn't keep the place clean while you were gone.'

'Oh,' Ianto said, feeling his rage drop away, replaced by sheepish awkwardness. 'Well, these things happen, I suppose.'

Jack laughed. 'You didn't think we'd run off and left you to deal with it all, did you? What do you take us for?'

What indeed? 'Nope,' Ianto lied. 'I was just popping out to buy more supplies.'

'Well, pop no more, Ianto Jones. Owen and Tosh and waiting upstairs with umpteen more bags of stuff in the car. I tell you what we could use, though. Coffee. Cleaning is exhausting work.'

'Isn't it just?' Ianto replied.