Fffc Bingo Card - Stairway to hell

[m_findlow]

Title: Stairway to hell 
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Owen 
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,000 words
Content notes: none 
Author notes: Written for Bingo Card Prompt 93 - Stairs at fffc
Summary: Ianto is learning to despise all the hub's many steps. 

Ianto was making slow progress up the spiral staircase. Their briefing wasn't due to start for another twenty minutes, but it was his job to make sure that the coffee was ready on the table to be served, along with the requisite plate of biscuits, or something a little more fancy if he was in a good mood. Today was not a good mood day, and as much as he might liked to have had a pain au chocolate to go with his mid-morning coffee, just the thought of having to walk all the way to the cafe and back made him stiffen up in pain. 

How was it that he'd never noticed just how many stairs there were around the hub and the immediate bay area? Everywhere he went he was confronted by them. Probably because he was young and fit and never gave a second through to marching up and down them all day long as he went about his work. Ever since making it back from Turkey, head bowed as he faced the team like a dog with its tail between its legs, he'd been suffering from those wretched stairs multiple times a day. It wasn't the stairs that were offensive per se but the fact that his leg protested its displeasure at every last one of them. 

When he'd been aboard the Sky Puncher and things had first started to go wrong, sending the ship into a temporary tailspin as its pilots and passengers alike all went crazy - all thanks to him and his bloody coffee, he reminded himself, even if he hadn't been the one who'd drugged it - he'd been flung from one end of the ship to the other. When he'd woken from the slight concussion, his leg was in a bad way with a very deep gash in it. He had no idea what he'd slammed into that could have caused that kind of damage but it was bleeding a lot and quite possibly going to make him woozy enough that he wouldn't notice after awhile and simply end up lying on the floor bleeding to death in a lovely pain free way. That might have been nice. Instead he was conscious, still had most of his faculties, and had been the only one left aboard with any hope of preventing the ship crashing back to earth and killing a whole lot more people. 

He'd managed it with a little help from Torchwood's mainframe and a Turkish call centre girl who was obsessed with video games. His thanks for all that very fine work had been a jarring ejector seat and a disoriented stagger across a local children's park until the pain, lack of adrenaline and the blood loss finally took their toll on him. He'd dropped into a dead faint right then and there, and had been collected and carried off to the nearest hospital for treatment. 

His leg had been stitched up, painkillers administered and life was good again whilst they lasted. Now two weeks on and safely back in Cardiff, he was beginning to regret ever having left the safety of that hub in the first place. The stitches were healed, so Owen reported to him, but the muscles in his leg that had been damaged would take longer to heal. They twinged at random intervals or when he tried to work them by going up and down all the stairs that confronted him. Owen had given him a walking stick in case he wanted to take some of the weight off it but he hated it. He felt like an invalid carrying that thing around. Now as he gripped the railing of the staircase, he wished he hadn't left it down in the archives. He was only halfway up the stairs but his leg was screaming out in pain and he couldn't go any further up. He couldn't go down either. That hurt just as much, so instead he just slumped down and sat there, head in his hands as he tried to breathe through the worst of the throbbing. 

'Oi,' Owen called out spotting him just sitting there. 'You alright?' 

'No,' he replied, feeling angry and upset. This sort of thing didn't happen to the others when they went off on missions. Why was he being punished? 

Owen moved up the stairs with an ease that Ianto despised. Once upon a time that would have been him. Owen went through his doctorly motions, gently prodding and massaging the upper thigh that had given Ianto so much trouble. 'Where's your cane?' 

'Archives.' 

'And have you been doing those rehab exercises we talked about?' 

'In between all the other walking and hauling myself up and down every bloody step in this place.' 

'What about your meds? When did you take the last one?' 

'Couple of days ago.' 

Owen frowned at him. 'You're meant to take them daily, and when the pain gets too much.' 

'They make my head go all floaty and weird,' Ianto complained. 

'That's what they're supposed to do. It's called pain management. You can't expect to be able to just walk this off. It's going to take time to heal and it's going to hurt. There's no shame in taking things easy for a bit. In fact, I insist on it.' 

'Can you insist we install a few more lifts and ramps around here? I never realised how un-ambulant friendly this place is, and half the lifts are so old I'm worried someone is going to get stuck in one and die of old age.' 

'So just say something and stop trying to be a martyr. We're perfectly capable of holding a briefing down here. And use that bloody cane I gave you or you'll be spending twice as long getting back to full fitness. Doctors orders. It's my balls Jack will have in a vice when he comes back and finds you still hobbling around. If you won't do it for me, do it for him.'