m_findlow

Title: The cold shoulder
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 571 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for badly_knitted's prompt "Torchwood, Jack/Ianto, not speaking to each other" at fic_promptly
Summary: Loud arguments are not as bad as it get.

Perhas it's incredibly juvenile for two fully grown adults, but when things get really bad and there's no more words left to be parried between them - hateful, truthful, hurtful or otherwise - their fight isn't over. If anything it's just begun.

The team know that things are at their worst, not when Jack and Ianto are at each others throats, their voices barely concealed even though Jack's door is firmly closed, or when they've stepped into another room to continue the argument, but when the silence falls. It's like a death knell. There's only one of two options when it all goes terribly quiet like that. Either they've made up and are silent on account of the fact that they've got their tongues so far down each other's throats that there's no air left for making a sound, or they've decided that the argument has escalated to a whole other level.

Yep, it's the silent treatment. When there's no reconciling, it's better to hold your ground and simply stop talking to the other party. They clearly haven't listened to reason thus far, so what's the point in bandying about more words? The looks and the body language say more than any words could possibly say, anyway.

Worse for the rest of them is not the fact that they themselves are no longer spoken to. If anything both men make a point of being overly friendly and helpful to a fault towards their colleagues. It's just one more way that they can try to cling to the moral high ground. It says "I'm a team player, why can't you be?" No, it's when the other one comes within earshot of them, that they fall silent and sullen again, quickly cutting off whatever conversation they were having, not wanting to give the other the satisfaction of hearing them happy about anything. It's downright cold, the icy reception they give one another, and it can go on for days and occasionally even weeks, like a nuclear winter has come to settle over the hub.

There's no overtime when the pair of them are at loggerheads. Neither one really wants to be in the presence of the other any longer than they have to be. They do whatever they can to arrange fieldwork so that they can team up without having to team up. When they are forced to work together, it's awkward for everyone else. Terse one word replies are given to questions that simply have to be asked and answered, and you can tell that it irks them just to have to say the words. If they could have their own way, they'd never speak again. If one of them is too stubborn to give in, then that's their problem, but the other won't concede an inch. That's just what happens when you you put two opposite personalities together. They find ways of clashing, yet behaving in the most spectacularly identical way.

It never goes on forever, though. There's always some world ending crisis that throws everything back into perspective. Normally it starts with something along the lines of "Are you okay?" followed by "I thought I'd lost you," and then all is suddenly forgiven as they realise that they mean more to one another that anything else in the whole universe. All the petty arguments in the world don't matter so long as they have each other.

Until the next petty argument, anyway...