Torchwood: Fanfic: Celebrating with a bang

[m_findlow]

Title: Celebrating with a bang
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Torchwood team
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 2,208 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for my dear friend badly_knitted. Happy birthday hun!
Summary: A birthday surprise for Owen ends up surprising everyone.

When Jack suggested that they all do something nice for Owen's birthday, Ianto should have known that it basically meant he'd have to organise the whole thing.

Balloons. Lots and lots of balloons, had been Jack's basic brief. And food of course.

The food part was easy. Any cafe worth their salt had Ianto's account at the top of their list of most valued customers, happy to put something together at the last minute. Within five minutes worth of phone calls, he had a spread arranged that would feed a small army.

Balloons had proved more of a challenge. He'd rung around the major party supply stores in the city and most of them had huffed and hawed at his request, saying they needed more lead time than he'd given them, less than a day. That and once he'd priced out the cost of getting them to arrange that many balloons, it was thoroughly exorbitant. Plus he'd need to borrow one of Rhys's smaller vans to pick them all up and get them back to the hub.  

'It'd be easier if you just hired a cylinder and did them yourself,' one of the shopkeepers suggested. The packets of balloons themselves cost almost nothing and the hire of the helium tank wasn't all that much more. He couldn't reconcile how it could cost that much more for someone else to full them and tie them off. Bloody capitalism, he bemoaned. Satisfied however that it was the most cost effective way of getting what he wanted, he agreed to the do it yourself approach. Added to the fact that Owen probably wouldn't even appreciate the gesture, and that Jack was just using it as an excuse for a party, made the decision that much easier to accept.

He drove into the city and picked up the tank, which fitted easily into the back of his boot, along with several packets of multicolored balloons, probably more than he needed, but it never hurt to stock up on these sort of things to save a trip the next time around.

Once he was back at the hub, he set himself up in the boardroom and closed the blinds that looked out onto the rest of the hub so that Owen wouldn't see what they were up to.

On the table he arranged several long rows of ribbons, cut to size so that they could be tied to the balloons on one end and to small weights on the other. Those he'd found at the shop, able to keep large bunches of helium filled balloons in one spot, in what equated to nothing more than a colorful paperweight.

He began slowly inflating the balloons, trying them off so that they wouldn't float up to the roof where he couldn't reach them. Once he had thirty or so balloons tied into half a dozen neat little clusters, Jack came to inspect his work.

'Is that all?' he said.

'What do you mean, is that all? The food is still coming.'

'No, I meant the balloons. I thought we agreed to lots of balloons.'

Ianto thought it was plenty, but Jack picked up the extra packets and held them up. 'Keep going,' he said, and then left.

'Thanks a lot,' Ianto replied to the empty room that Jack had been in just moments before. Sighing, he picked up another balloon to start filling it. After about five the tank had run out of helium. Bollocks. Now he'd have to blow up the rest by hand, or by mouth, as it were. They wouldn't float either, which meant they'd pool around his feet.

At first it wasn't so bad, but by the tenth one, he was well and truly out of breath. Any more and he might pass out. Where were the rest of them when he needed help, and Jack especially, since he was full of hot air.

He looked down at the remaining packets, knowing Jack wouldn't be happy until they were all done. He should have just gone out to get another tank, but instead he decided on a different tact. There was a replicator device in the secure archives. That would certainly solve his problem.

He waited until Jack was out of his office to retrieve it, knowing that strictly speaking it wasn't a good idea. Things that went into secure archiving went there for a reason. Then again, it was only a few balloons. What would be the harm? And Jack had said he wanted lots of balloons.

He took the small device back upstairs and checked the settings. Unlike the first replicator they'd picked up, this one actually worked. All he had to do was get the settings correct. He consulted it carefully, calculating how many balloons were in the room already and how many more he needed. Three times what was there ought to satisfy Jack. Directing the device at the room, he activated it.

It didn't take long before there was a faint popping sound, and the room began to fill with more balloons. Pleasingly, some were even setting themselves up in nice little arrangements, complete with little weights to hold them down.

Once the room was full, the roof covered in a sea of colour, he pocketed the device. Job done, he thought, returning the device to the archives and leaving to pick up the food. Even if Owen didn't like it, the rest of them would.

 

He was cradling the platters of food, piled precariously on top of one another as he loaded them into the car when his phone started ringing. He set the last platter down and answered.

'Hey Jack. On my way back now.'

'What the hell did you do?' came the reply.

'What?' He was used to stupid, nonsensical questions from Jack, but when in doubt, "what?" covered most requests for clarification.

'The balloons!' Jack cried. 'They're everywhere!'

Ianto rolled his eyes at Jack's histrionics. 'You said you wanted lots.'

'Not this many!'

Ianto sighed. 'Look, can we just sort this out when I get there? I'm only ten minutes away.' He hung up before Jack could argue with him.

 

He pulled up the car in the underground car park and unloaded the food, carrying it up along the corridor. He set it down in one of the small kitchen areas usually reserved for sorting out food for the residents. First he'd deal with Jack's hysterics, then he'd get him to come and help sort out the food. This had been his idea after all.

When he hit the button for the door to the main hub, it slid open with its usual hiss, followed by a dozen brightly coloured balloons. As he swept them aside, out of his view, he came face to face with Jack's little problem.

Oh no. The whole hub was full of balloons! There were hundreds of them, thousands maybe.

'Jack!' Ianto yelled out, trying to force his way through the jungle of rubber.

'Ianto? Is that you?' he heard Tosh yell out.

'Yeah!' Holy Christ on a bike! But where had they all come from? He had a sickening feeling he knew already.

He forced his way towards what he thought was the door that lead back to the passage and stairs up to the boardroom. He could hear Jack's cursing, and a considerable amount of popping emanating from that general direction. Before he got there, he bumped into something in the corridor.

'Who's there?' came Owen's voice.

'It's me,' Ianto replied.

'Oh, thought you'd have a laugh on my birthday, did you?' he complained. 'Buried alive by sodding balloons. When one balloon went pop right in front of Ianto's face, he came face to face with something even more forbidding, in the form of Owen.

'Boss will want to see you, assuming that's even possible,' he muttered swatting away several more balloons to keep Ianto in his sights.

Oh boy. Yep, there'd be a bollocking from Jack for this, make no mistake, he thought, as he continued to struggle towards the source of the problem.

'Jack?' he called out.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Three more balloons popped sharply and Ianto spotted Jack attacking them with a ballpoint pen like some warped scene out of a Psycho remake.

'Ianto! Why the hell did you hang up on me?'

'I thought you were exaggerating.'

'You think so?' Jack replied, adding a few more bangs, though it didn't seem to be making a dent in the number of balloons. 'What did you do?'

'Okay, so I may have used that replicator device from the secure archive.' There didn't seem to be much point in lying about it.

'What the hell setting did you have it on?'

'Triple,' he replied, remembering setting it very carefully, noting the three slashes on the display.

'Does this look like triple to you?'

Before he could say something witty, Jack grabbed him by the hand and dragged them both out of the room, down towards his office. He was glad Jack knew the way because he could barely see for all the coloured balloons that hovered in their path. Worse was that the strings  dangling down from the loose ones were trying to strangle him on his way through them.

'Show me,' Jack said, opening up the safe as Ianto keyed in the combination.

'Here,' he said, passing the device to Jack. Sure enough there were three long dashes, just as he'd set it.

'Ianto, that's a hundred and eleven times replication!'

'No, it's not!' He knew the difference between three and a hundred and eleven.

'It's set to English numbering,' Jack replied.

'Since when?'

'Since the last time we used it. I reprogrammed it for standard Earth numbering systems so it would be less confusing and less chance of someone getting it wrong.'

'And you didn't think to mention this at the time?' Ianto cried. Thank God he hadn't set it to four or five times!

'I didn't think anyone would use it!'

'Yet another idiotic assumption!'

'Okay, can we argue about this later and just get back to figuring out how to pop all these balloons? If we don't do something soon, I'm worried the whole hub might take off out of the ground!'

He wasn't sure what it was about Jack's comment that sparked the idea, but once it was there he knew it was the only solution.

'Come on,' he said, dragging Jack with him across the hub.

'Where are we going?' Jack asked, getting biffed in the face with a bright green balloon.

'The invisible lift. I need you to use your wrist strap to release the hatch at the top.'

Jack realised what Ianto was suggesting. It would be a slow solution, but a solution nonetheless. He flipped it open and triggered the doorway.

Once it was open, the balloons right at the top of the roof began to slowly filter out through the hatch, and more rose up to replace them, moving ever upwards towards the hatch, before slipping out through the gap.

Up on the Plass it must have been a sight to see, hundreds of balloons slowly appearing by the water tower, floating up into the air, catching in the breeze and drifting along the bay and across the city centre. It took several hours and a lot of additional popping, but finally the hub was beginning to clear of its festive adornments.

'What were you thinking?' Jack said, shoving balloons out from under furniture where they'd become wedged, letting them float upwards and out of the hub.

'You were the one who wanted lots of balloons,' Ianto argued, nearly tripping over one that snuck along behind his feet, before hitting it with an empathic pop of his own pen, picking up the exploded remnants and tossing them in the bin.

'Not that many!'

'Yeah, yeah, I know I shouldn't have used it, but it was that or pass out on the floor trying to inflate the requisite number of balloons.' As he looked around the hub, all he could see now was the mess of little bits of shriveled rubber from all the balloons they'd popped to speed up the process. Instead of making his life easier, he'd just created a whole bunch of work for himself. This would take ages to clean up.

'If you wanted a birthday I wouldn't forget you did a stellar job, Teaboy,' Owen muttered. 'I don't even like balloons.'

'What about when you do this?' Jack said, sucking in a bunch of helium and singing a high pitched version of happy birthday.

'You're so fucking childish,' Owen replied. 'Why couldn't we just have food and booze like normal people?'

'Oh, I totally forgot about the food!' Ianto said. 'It'll be cold be now.'

'I totally forgot about the food!' Jack repeated in his squeaky voice, sucking in a bit more helium.

'Shut up,' Ianto replied.

'Neunundneunzig luftballons auf ihrem weg zum horizont...' Jack sang.

'Yeah, I think I've had enough of birthdays,' Owen said. 'I'm off to the pub. Who's with me?'

'I am,' Gwen said.

'Me too,' Tosh replied.

'Best idea I've heard all day,' Ianto agreed. 'If I never see another balloon it'll be too soon.'

Comments

[bk_forever]

Awww, poor Ianto! Jack's ideas so often go awry, and Owen didn't even appreciate it. I guess Jack gets to clean up the
mess of dead balloons now ;)

Thank you! *hugs*

[m-findlow.livejournal.com]

I think once they've finished celebrating, it'll be a joint effort by both of them to clean it up.
Hope you had a fantastic day! :)

[bk_forever]

I hope so!

Some of it's been good, some not so good, but I did get lovely flowers =)

[m-findlow.livejournal.com]

Aw, yay for flowers! :)

[bk_forever]

Chrysanthemums and Carnations, they're lovely, even if I probably will sneeze a bit because of them!