Torchwood-fest - I'll be home for Christmas

[m_findlow]

Title: I'll be home for Christmas
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,120 words
Content notes: Spoilers as below
Author notes: Written for torchwood_fest Week 3 prompt "holidays spirits". Some references post Big Finish audioplays "The Conspiracy" and "Fallen". Set some time between "Fallen" and "Uncanny Valley".
Summary: Gwen is trying to help cheer up Ianto with decorating the hub.

Gwen peered curiously at the stack of boxes piled up beside Ianto's desk. Her automatic assumption was that it was some new case, or maybe an old one, with boxes of files dredged up from the archives.

Once she got closer though, she could see one of the flaps hanging open and the glittery golden tinsel poking out through the gap. It was Christmas decorations, which of course made sense given it was that time of year. It was in fact rather close to the big day now and she'd almost expected that they weren't doing anything around the hub to celebrate the silly season. It was her third Christmas here and both of the previous two had been colourful affairs, with the hub bedecked in all things Christmas. Even the people who'd flown in from 1950 hadn't known what to make of it all, an though Gwen had spent most of that Christmas trying to help them adjust to what must have seemed like a completely mad world in 2006, it had been nice at the end of it all, difficult as it had been, to step back into something that for her felt normal. Christmas lights and decorations were normal to her. Seeing the hub now for what it was, a dull grey drab place, dampened her mood.

‘I was starting to think Christmas had been canceled,’ she said, poking inside the box even as Ianto was unraveling a string of fairy lights and wrapping them carefully around the handrails. ‘Leaving it a little late, aren't you?’

She noticed Ianto chew the inside of his lip as he paused, like he was reconsidering it, halting his hands as they'd been moving round and round the railing. ‘No, you're right. This was a bad idea,’ he said, removing them, unwinding them even more quickly than he'd wrapped them on.

Gwen rushed forward. ‘No, no, no. That's not what I meant. I only meant why didn't you put them up earlier?’

‘Jack loves Christmas,’ he replied, though there was no joy in the statement, no cheeky little grin that said Jack would be pleased by his actions, only that empty half that emphasised his absence.

‘Yeah, I know,’ she said, trying to keep things light. ‘I've never met anyone that gets so excited. No one over the age of fifteen, anyway.’

There was a tiny smirk in response. ‘I kept thinking it was wrong to put these up. You know, given how Jack isn't here and all this business with the Committee and what have you. It doesn't feel right to be celebrating. It's like we've moved on. I must have changed my mind about putting these out six times since this morning when I found the boxes.’

Gwen could see the cogs spinning in Ianto's head. For someone who was often impossible to read, he was suddenly like an open book. He was feeling guilty about celebrating Christmas in any way shape or form simply because Jack wasn't here. Everybody knew they were together, but she hadn't really put much thought into what it would be like to have Christmas without the person you loved right there with you. She had Rhys, and as annoying as her mother in law was, she wouldn't have Christmas any other way. Did Ianto and Jack celebrate Christmas? She wasn't sure. She'd never asked. She didn't even know if Ianto had other family and felt slightly ashamed that she knew so little about the people she worked with.

‘Here, let me help,’ Gwen said, grabbing the tangled wad of lights and trying to loosen the knots as Ianto continued to wrap them around the hub's rails and posts.

‘I never get to do this,’ he said. ‘Jack always insists on doing everything himself.’

‘That's Jack,’ Gwen agreed. ‘Kid in a candy store.’

‘Where do you suppose he is?’

The question caught Gwen off guard. If she knew or even guessed didn't he think she'd say something? ‘I dunno. I wish I did.’

Ianto found the end of the string and taped it off, bending down to plug them in so that they faded in and out in a sea of reds and greens, yellows and blues. As he stood back up his hand absently rubbed his leg. Gwen sensed that the injuries he'd picked up on his misadventures in Turkey were still troubling him, and thinking about Jack probably only made them worse.

‘You should avoid any ladders with that leg,’ she advised. ‘Don't want you falling off and hurting yourself trying to hang the tinsel.’

He rolled his eyes at her. ‘That'd be all I'd need. Strangled by fairy lights. I think I'll stick to decorating spots I can reach from a standing position.’ His gaze fell on the box with its large lettering penned in permanent marker on the side in Jack's hand. ‘I wish he was here. It just doesn't feel like Christmas without him.’

Gwen began tugging everything out of the box before she lost Ianto to a wave of despondent surrender. They'd decorate every last inch if it would bring Jack back, or at least cheer up Ianto. ‘Come on,’ she urged him. ‘If there was ever a time Jack would bend over backwards to make it back to Cardiff, it'll be to get here for Christmas. Can't have him turning up to a hub with no decorations.’

She could tell Ianto was trying to put on a brave face just by the way it scarcely moved a muscle. He didn't think Jack was coming back for Christmas, or perhaps at all. That was rubbish. Of course Jack was coming back. Blasted Committee. Just when the two of them were perhaps making headway in their relationship this had come along and messed up everything. She knew Jack as well as anyone. He wouldn't just keep them and he definitely wouldn't leave Ianto.

‘Do you really think he would?’ His expression couldn't have been more devastated and hopeless.

Gwen snatched one of a dozen sprigs of plastic mistletoe from the box. Jack had them strategically hung all over the hub so that he could use them as the perfect excuse for a kiss. If it wasn't one of his favourite Christmas traditions it wasn't far off. She held it overhead as she leaned in to give Ianto a kiss, right at the corner of his mouth, not on the lips, but not on the cheek either. ‘If Jack can find a way I know he'll come back.’ Not because it was Christmas, and not because of the Committee, but because Ianto was here waiting for him. That would be the best gift she could wish for either of them.