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amand_rTitle: Beggars would ride
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team
Rating: PG-13
Timeline: Threads through from Ghost Machine past Exit Wounds
Author's Notes: After that last sentimental one I wrote about the fucking blanket (and don't get me wrong, I LURV that fic to death), I am afraid that if I write the others in my head I'll be branded with some sort of sentimentality brush or something, but I just couldn't get rid of the idea in this one. Gah. I guess I have to work out all the craptastic tropes as I go along. Possibly…cracky.
Summary: The bloody birthday machine.
"If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride." (James Kelly, Scottish Proverbs, Collected and Arranged)
"If wishes were horses we'd all be eating steak." (Jayne, Firefly, 'Objects In Space')
Gwen has been at Torchwood for three weeks when her birthday rolls along. Rhys, true to form, wakes her up with his mouth, working her with his tongue and fingers until she orgasms once, and then twice before they hit the shower. Then it's a cuppa and cheese toasties and she's tumbling out the door, laughing, because there can't be a better way to start the day.
Ianto is smiling from behind the tourist centre desk when she gets there, a mug of coffee halfway to his mouth; Gwen is in such a good mood that she tells him that she loves how he always looks distractedly amused, and that it is charming. He does exactly that—looks distractedly amused, and then she pats his cheek and all but skips downstairs.
Owen isn't there yet when she steps into the Hub, but Tosh waves cheerfully at her from her station, and Jack's office lights are on, so she can guess that if he isn't up there at the moment, he's about somewhere. She tosses her things on her desk and turns her chair a few times, because hey, she's the birthday girl, and spinning about is fun.
She's in the middle of her third rotation when the Cog door alarm goes off and Owen stumbles in, looking worse for wear, actually, possibly wearing the same shirt as the day before. Gwen tries not to notice those kinds of things. Sometimes she has to stand close to him in meetings (or what passes for meetings in Torchwood—they involve food and beverages and they occur wherever the person with the food and drink manages to get to before he or she is beset upon by the others) and he smells like sex and scotch; on those days, she notices that Jack likes to rub his hands on Owen's shoulders, as if sex and scotch are pheromones that he cannot resist.
But it's her birthday, and she won't let anything ruin it, not Owen and his sarcasm or a Weevil, or an alien projectile vomiting on her chest or anything. Rhys will get her something fantastic for pudding, and he'll pretend that he forgot to get her a present, but actually it will be something small and expensive and she'll find it under her pillow (a new mp3 player) or in the fridge (garnet earrings), or, like last year, hanging from the showerhead by a ribbon (two tickets to Mallorca) .
She is thinking about that, watching Tosh watch Owen fling his coat on his chair and stomp down to the autopsy bay, when Ianto comes out of hiding with a tray of coffee and Jack sets foot on the lower level with them and suddenly lights begin to twinkle out of nowhere, like sparkles in the air, fireworks, and a hail of confetti bursts into being above Gwen and her chair, and Pink's 'Get the Party Started' blares from the Hub's internal overhead speakers. Jack looks up, Gwen falls out of her chair, and Tosh ducks a few streamers that whiz past her face. Ianto moves off to the side and covers the coffee tray with a few papers to stave off the mountains of chopped paper that spew out of the air for a full thirty seconds.
Owen thunders up from the medical bay and glances about wildly, and seeing Gwen on the floor, looks at her desk. Jack follows his eyes, and whatever they see there must not alarm them, because they both laugh, and Tosh covers her face with her hand. Ianto kicks a growing pile of confetti on the floor, but he is smirking.
Jack holds out an arm for Gwen, and when she is on her feet again, he pulls her close and turns her about; this is not the kind of dancing one does with one's boss. Gwen is passed off from Jack to Owen, who places his hands in areas that she isn't quite sure she doesn't like, and then she's handed off to Tosh, who awkwardly turns her in another circle in front of her workstation, her little hands in Gwen's and her smile wide and generous.
By the time Tosh hands Gwen off to Ianto, who manages to foxtrot her to her workstation and back into Jack's arms, she feels like the one sober person in a room full of drunks. Jack takes one her hands in his, puts his other on her waist, and presses his forehead to hers when he turns her about.
"Happy Birthday Gwen," he says loudly, and everyone seems to echo it at varying volumes and speeds. Over his shoulder, she can see her desk, suddenly festooned with streamers and balloons and some sort of cake, the exact cake that her mother used to buy her when she was little, complete with the pink candles and sugared flowers. The Swansea sweets shop that used to make them has been out of business for at least ten years.
Gwen lets go of Jack's hands and rather gapes at the mess on her desk, the sparklers and the music and the cake, all so overwhelming that she's surprised at the speed in which it occurred. She glances up at the ceiling and tries to see the rigging for the confetti, for how they worked the crackers. Pink is still blaring from the speakers, just a little too loudly for her taste, but it's the cake that has her attention. How could they have got one, and got it so perfect, and even known to get that cake at all?
The surprise must have shown on her face, because Jack grins at her and takes her hands, folding them once into Owen's before he snags Tosh by the waist and jitterbugs her out on the grating across the tower reservoir. Pink is not made for the Jitterbug, but Gwen finds it charming. Owen is smiling into her cheek and she thinks to herself that sex and scotch isn't such a bad smell.
Ianto lifts the cake from her desk as the song winds down, holding it out to her, his eyebrows up in expectant (but distractedly amused) questioning. Gwen sucks in a huge breath and blows every single candle out.
"How did you do all of that?" she asks when they are all crashed on and around Jack's desk with plates of cake and mugs of coffee; it is nine in the morning and they are going to be bouncing off the walls for hours. Their only hope now is probably some sort of meteor crashing to earth, or a wayward spaceship, or a flock of weevils to get them out of the Hub like releasing children outside at recess.
Jack licks his fork pornographically. "Birthday machine."
Gwen sets down her plate. "No. What?"
Owen puts his feet up on Jack's desk and presses his hot mug to his temple. "Birthday machine."
Tosh nods in agreement. "It's true."
Ianto just shrugs at her, eyes saying something to the effect of, Birthday machine.
Gwen looks down at her slice of cake –Ianto has given her one of the largest flowers—and wonders how it even tastes exactly like she remembers. "How's this, then? This is the cake that my mum used to get for me when I was little—"
"Birrrrrrrthday machiiiiine," Jack drawls, running a finger through the icing on the rim of his plate and licking it off. Gwen stares a little bit before Ianto throws a serviette at Jack and it flutters down over his head to drape across his face.
Tosh sets her plate down, sighing happily. "It came through the rift about two years ago," she says, her eyes wide and earnest. "Technically it's a wish machine, after a fashion."
Gwen glances about, as if she could identify it on sight. Nothing is blinking or looks remotely like an oil lamp, which had been the first thought to cross her mind. Something abut a Disney film that she saw years ago, as a kid, and then once on a VCR, something Rhys had picked unthinkingly and they'd ignored once it started because they were too busy on the sofa. Just the thought of Rhys and his mouth brings a smile to her face, and she has to shake her head a bit before listening to Owen describe the Fynlynyan wish machine that they had fished out of the Bay a few years ago.
"We were going to chuck it in the Archives and forget about it. Wish machines are rather hit and miss," Owen says, as if he is the voice of experience.
Jack rolls his eyes. "Still bitter?"
Owen smiles. "Yeah. What good is a wish machine if it can't magically produce an orgy?"
Jack scoops a bit of cake on his fork and flings it at Owen mockingly. "You don't need a wish machine for an orgy, Owen. You have to go out and make it happen." Owen flips him the V.
Tosh grins slyly. "Suzie and I wanted to program it to deliver chocolate during our menstrual cycles, but Jack said it had to be something Owen could participate in too." She smirks at Jack, who shovels cake into his mouth in the manner of a piece of construction equipment.
Ianto leans against the desk and dumps his empty plate in the bin next to Jack's desk. "The wish machine is harmless, actually. It can't do anything drastic, like change time or mess about with human emotion. It's more like an automated celebration machine."
Tosh giggles and stretches in her chair, and Gwen can't help but notice that her shirt gapes a little. It's adorable and a little inadvertently sexy. "That's it in one. A party on a timer. So Suzie entered all our birthdays and the machine does the rest."
"Everyone gets a cake and a gift and a dance," Jack says, eyebrows wiggling. "Mind you, I like the dance quite a bit." Gwen flushes when she recalls his hands on her waist.
Ianto smiles into the distance. "And it cleans up after itself."
Gwen glances out over the Hub, to her workstation, still festooned in banners and silver streamers, but she notices that the confetti is gone. "It always is a let down, the cleaning up bit," she says faintly. Sometimes, Torchwood is bloody brilliant.
Tosh sets the small box on her knee. "And plus! Gifts! Happy birthday from Torchwood and its alien tech!"
Jack laughs at that. "We aim to please."
"And shoot things in the face," Owen adds. "Just, not right now." Jack rolls his eyes and Ianto refills Owen's mug with a smirk.
Gwen eases the ribbon off, lifts the lid, and stares at the small box; the bracelet nestled inside is extravagant and beautiful, a twisting strand of blue stones that must be sapphires or something valuable, not cut-glass or coloured zirconium. The metal is silver or platinum. It is something that she'd never get herself but wouldn't say no to if it had been given her. Though if Rhys would ever try to give her something like this, she's fairly sure that she'd start to worry that he had a side job dealing drugs.
"Something you want," Jack says with a wink, "but not necessarily anything you need."
"I didn't even know that I wanted this," she replies faintly. And it's true. She's never seen the bracelet before now. She takes it out of the box and holds it up to the light. It must be worth thousands of pounds. How will she explain something like this to Rhys?
"Hence the miracle that is the birthday machine." Owen smiles at her and closes his eyes. "Last year it was a mountain of vintage Hustlers."
Tosh flicks cake at Owen's face. "I got a book of classic works of the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Belief Functions and a crate of really good wine," she says breathlessly.
Gwen fastens the clasp of the bracelet on her wrist and wonders how she feels about this. It has all happened so quickly—Torchwood, aliens, Weevils, Suzie, Jack Harkness, the man who cannot die, snogging another woman, for god's sake, and now a magical birthday machine that is apparently completely safe and gives out valuable presents —and cake, mustn't forget the delicious cake-- like candy.
Ianto smiles when they all look at him, and he ducks his head. "A vacuum siphon coffee maker," he says, eyes wide and face amused, Gwen thinks, distractedly amused. "It lives at my flat where none of you shall ever get the chance to break it."
Gwen laughs, because it's true. In the time she's been here, Owen has broken three mugs and Tosh has been responsible for the demise of at least that many plates; the Hub is often filled with a great deal of frantic movement followed by lulls of downtime. And of course, haphazard basketball.
"And you, Jack?" she asks, holding out her wrist so that Tosh can grasp her fingers and turn it, making the gems sparkle.
"That depends," Jack says, tapping his fork on his plate in rapid-time. "Is this conversation rated R or NC-17?"
Ianto plucks Jack's plate from his hands and dumps it in the bin. "You are cut off, sir."
***
Owen is working with some sensitive materials and measuring toxins very carefully, so of course it is at the most crucial moment of the operation in which Gwen arrives, making their attendance complete; there's a record scratch noise and a roman bloody candle goes off in the center of the Hub. Owen's toxins spill across the countertop and begin eating a hole in the metal.
He curses and is in the middle of dousing his lab with retardant powder when 'Yesterday' begins playing out of the speakers, and the area where Suzie used to work explodes in a shower of glitter. Gwen looks shocked, eyes like saucers. Tosh dashes out of the conference room, her hands and mouth full of cable wires. Jack jumps up from behind his desk and glances about suspiciously before frowning. Ianto turns the coffee machine off in mid-brew.
The bloody birthday machine.
Owen drags himself over to that part of the Hub. He tries not to go over there anymore because shagging Suzie on her desk had been a thing for the two of them for a while before Ianto had walked in on them once and they had relocated to the communal showers and later the Weevil cells (he should have sensed it then, that she would do it with him down there, that she would want to). But Jack has beat him there, and they both stand there and watch the sparklers in Suzie's pie shower all over her empty workspace, the orange glint of them seeming like her arc welder; the welding mask still standing on the edge of the desk could have her face behind it even now.
But Suzie is dead (again and again and again. He should know, he did the autopsies. Both of them), and the machine doesn't know that, because her birthday is still in there. Owen wonders idly if this is enough to make Jack want to dismantle the machine.
He hates The Beatles sometimes. Not all the time, but this time, he hates them a shiteload.
Tosh joins them, sans cables, and she leans into Ianto's shoulder a little bit as they all watch the sparklers wink out slowly, leaving scraggles of smoke in the air like Suzie's greasy psychic fingertips, back again, back a third time, to remind them of her, of what she did. Gwen's left hand grasps her chest a bit, as if she is trying to hold something in her, keep something from spilling out. Owen shoves his hands in his pockets and doesn't try to touch her; he owes Suzie that much, on her birthday, after all. Suzie, whose betrayal bothers him because he understands just what she was thinking the whole time, and he cannot, to this day, say that he entirely disagrees.
No one moves when the music dies away, the smoke clears, and Jack bows his head. Owen rolls his eyes and wonders if they're going to eulogise her for a second and please god, can they not do that, but instead, no one says anything, though Tosh's face is a little crumpled, as if she wants to make herself cry, but just can't force it to the surface.
"Hey," Owen mutters, snagging the pastry from Suzie's desk. "Free pie."
Jack looks up at him and smiles a bit at that, hands shoved in pockets. Owen bumps his shoulder on purpose as he makes his way to the conference room. Ianto has already beaten him there, armed with plates and utensils. The coffee machine is once again chugging merrily in the kitchenette.
They all eat in silence for a few minutes, and then Tosh sits back, picking at her plate with her fork. "It is good pie."
***
Tosh is tired. She has been stuck in the Hub all night with the rest of the team out in the field. Her eyes burn and Ianto isn't there to refill her coffee. She has tried to make it herself, but alas, there's a bunch of dials and buttons that she doesn't have time to decipher, and then she almost burns her hand on the steam wand before she admits defeat.
The invisible lift lets in Owen and Gwen, and a few minutes later Ianto comes in from the garage passage. As soon as his feet hit the grating, something in Jack's office seems to explode and a blast of bubbles bursts out into the Hub, falling down onto them like a soapy rainbow. Tosh thinks to protect her keyboards, but there isn't much to protect them from, and for a second she is a little afraid of what might be there until Glenn Miller's 'In the Mood' blares from her speakers and she realises the date.
Ianto jerks a bit next to her, and Gwen races towards the steps to Jack's office before it seems to hit her. The Birthday Machine. She stops where she is and frowns.
"He's not here," she says to them all, and Tosh wants to shake her and scream, Yes, we bloody well know that, Captain Obvious, but that's just her low caffeine levels talking. Well, mostly.
Owen flicks a bubble away from him in disgust. "Bubbles. Bubbles. Fucking Harkness."
Tosh looks at them all helplessly. "Should we…do we dance now?"
Owen groans. "I hate Glenn Miller." But he grabs her hips anyway and sways her a bit. "But hey--The Lambada," he says in an atrocious accent, 'the forbidden dance."
She might have let him get away with it, except that she's tired and Gwen is staring, and Ianto is rubbing the bridge of his nose in between a finger and a thumb and she isn't in the mood to be Owen's sexless and yet female joke tonight, so she shoves him off. "You smell like Weevil," she snaps.
Owen smiles and raises a hand to his nose, sniffing. "Oh yeah, Janet was getting frisky," he says before Ianto rolls his eyes at them all and ventures up into Jack's office. Tosh sees the lights go on up there before moving to follow Owen and Gwen to the metal stairs. Glenn Miller continues to crescendo and decrescendo ineffectively; they're none of them in the mood to celebrate, and the persistence of the party machine further punctuates that with another wash of bubbles that only serve to make the tower reservoir froth at the edges.
They fight their way through the bubbles, several of which pop in front of her face, sending soap into her eyes. She waves her hands in front of her face and stands in front of Jack's desk, where Ianto is frowning at a bowl of round glistening sweets in place of a cake or pie.
"This is…this is Jack's birthday?" Gwen asks, her hands on her hips and her eyes wide.
Tosh shrugs. "I think Suzie just picked a date spaced out between our birthdays," she says. It's true. Suzie and she had thought about asking Jack when Suzie had been working with the interface, but Tosh hadn't been able to find it in his unclassified personnel file, so they'd just rolled their eyes at what Suzie used to call 'Ooooh The Secrecy,' when they referred to Jack. She is too interested in what dessert Jack has got this year. Last year it was a key lime pie. Occasionally she dreams about that pie.
It is like no dessert she has ever seen, and she's seen plenty. They are round doughy looking balls, like the Chinese jian dwei without the sesame seeds, and they are all shiny with something that looks sticky. The tops of them are dusted with metallic powder. Tosh faintly wonders if they are even edible, but then she understands that the machine follows very strict perimeters about what it is to offer: food, gift, music. The wrapped present on the side of the desk, a small box adorned with a red ribbon made of actual cloth is the dead giveaway that they are all gawking at Jack's secret edible desire. At least this year.
"What do you think they are?" Gwen says, rounding the desk to look at the bowl as the last of the Glenn Miller dies away, and they are left in silence, the ticking of the clock in Jack's office loud, almost too loud.
Ianto picks up the bowl, and they all edge back minutely. "Something from Jack's childhood?" he muses aloud, brow knitted.
Owen rolls his eyes. "I bet they're some alien sex drug," he says.
Gwen stuffs her hands in her pockets then. "We can't eat them," she tells them, and Tosh almost rolls her eyes. Of course they can't eat them. They're Jack's. And also they might be…poisonous. Well, no, but Jack's sense of humour is well documented in the Torchwood files in many many accumulated sexual harassment slips filed by former (and temporary) co-workers who had a very different idea of how an office dynamic is supposed to work.
Owen stabs one with a pencil and steps out onto the catwalk, whistling. "Myfanwy! Here, girl."
Ianto grabs Owen's raised hand. "You might make her sick." He stops. "Or randy."
Tosh and Gwen exchange glances. Tosh isn't sure what a randy pterodon looks or acts like, but she knows that it can't be good. Owen must agree with them, because he licks the sweet and makes a face.
"It's honey," he says. "I hate honey." Tosh thinks that Owen hates everything that Jack ever loved, or maybe he just hates the things that don't quite matter. Or he says he hates them because that's the best way he can think of to be mad at Jack for leaving. Tosh knows that she expresses her anger at Jack by hacking into his private files and deleting his pornography, one image a day; hitting the delete key has never given her so much satisfaction.
"Oh come on then," Owen says, stuffing the ball into his mouth. His eyes widen, and he stares at Ianto as he chews. Ianto backs away, just a little bit, like a reverse of what they had all done earlier. Owen's hand snakes out and rubs against Ianto's arm, up to his shoulder and the side of his neck, and he leans closer, his other hand coming to rest at Ianto's waist, until Owen swallows and pulls them flush together with his belt.
"Jones," he purrs, "you're still a git." And then he laughs, pushing away.
For one second, Toshiko loves Gwen, who dumps the bowl over his head.
She never sees where Jack's gift goes, but months later, Ianto blushes when Jack tucks the red ribbon into his waistcoat pocket.
***
Gwen is still tired. They're all tired. Ever since they had opened the Rift (twice!) and Jack had gone on walkabout, the Rift seemed to be paying them back in vengeful kind—wave after wave of alien activity, some of it right bothersome, a great deal of it potentially deadly. Owen is down in the autopsy theatre, where he has been for the last three hours, swearing and banging things about, and Tosh is planted in front of her computers, her arms often the only moving parts of her. Gwen stares out over the Hub from Jack's oft-used perch, watching Myfanwy toss bits and bobs of animal bones out of her nest to land in the tower reservoir, where Ianto will inevitably have to fish them out later.
It is nearly midnight, and none of them have any intentions of leaving. Gwen and Ianto had been on Rift Monitor duty tonight, but the reappearance of the Hoix and the gambling ring had given Owen a few more bodies he wanted to dismantle, and Tosh had sworn at seven that night that she wasn't leaving until she'd cross catalogued all the currency they'd retrieved from the payment pit of the underground casino. Most of it was made of organic matter not of earth origin and had been deteriorating quickly.
She has already called Rhys, and they'd had a little bit of a terse row over the phone while the others had tried not to listen. But it was hard, and everything echoed in the Hub, and anyway, Gwen doesn't care if they hear anymore. Some days they're less like co-workers and more like family. And on other days they're less like family and more like extensions of each other.
She wonders what Jack would make of that.
It is a minute to midnight when Ianto steps into the Hub, his watch in his hand. He stares at the face of it, and then raises one hand in expectation, finger pointing in the air. He gestures with it at the conference room just when the atomic clock face flips over, and looks up at her, his face amused, though no longer distracted. Then he starts up the stairs.
As if on cue, the speakers screech a bit and there is an explosion in the conference room, but it sounds like a very loud 'pffffft' sound and blue and pink smoke spirals out of the room. The speakers start to play a rather heated and dark version of 'Paint It Black,' and Gwen leaves Jack's perch to run down to their conference room, past the coffee machine, where, over the light table there is a silver banner that proclaims, 'PENBLWYDD HAPUS IANTO.' She had expected to see Ianto there, but he has bypassed the room and is up in Jack's office. By the time they all get up to the darkened room, its lamps unlit (they have been for weeks), they all stand in the doorway and watch Ianto turn Jack's desk inside out.
"Ianto?" Gwen says. When he stares at her, she knows what he is looking for. "Ianto, the machine can't bring him back."
Ianto bends a bit over the desk, his hands splayed on its surface, his head down, and then he raises his face to them, and she sees something in him that makes her reconsider allowing him to use firearms so freely. Just for a second.
"I know," he says softly. "I just thought, maybe a note, something, something we missed might surface…."
"If the machine made a note like that, we'd know it's a lie," Tosh says, her voice tired and sad. "The machine fabricates things. It can't affect relative space and –"
"Jesus Tosh," Owen says, finally joining them whilst wiping his wet hands on a towel. "Let the man have a few seconds of false hope, will you?"
Gwen glares at him, and Tosh recoils. Gwen can't disagree with Owen, though she wouldn't have phrased it that way. It's not as if Ianto has ever done or said anything about Jack's disappearance that might indicate that he misses him any more or less than they do, but the kiss in the Hub before Jack had left had been a sight more intimate than any of the rest of them had got, and she wonders sometimes, really, what the two of them had or said or did.
She's never asked. She wonders if she should.
Ianto just straightens and brushes past them to the conference room. The song is over now, and Gwen smiles when she sees Ianto run his hands over the case of beer, adorned with metallic stickers that say things like, 'Happy Birthday' and 'One to Grow On!' It's almost hard to see the Wye Valley logo.
Ianto opens the case dully, his eyes not quite seeing them as he sets out half the bottles and pulls the church key from his pocketknife.
"Birthday beer," Owen says, grinning. "What, no coffee cake?"
Ianto shakes a beer before handing it to Owen unopened. Owen just looks at the label, says, 'Hullo Dorothy," and snaps off the cap on the table edge, shooting beer into the air.
Ianto opens beers for Tosh and Gwen and they all sit about the table, sipping and consigning themselves to the sedative nature of it all. They haven't stopped working for weeks, and if Gwen had to actually put a finger on it, she thinks that they invent reasons to be here. Tosh and Owen could have gone home hours ago, and as soon as they arrived in the morning, she and Ianto would have lit out for changes of clothes and some sleep, but she could have bet that they would have been back, milling about, making work, well before they would have had to come in, barring any disasters.
She doesn't think they are waiting for Jack, per se. She tries to tell herself that she's not. The ring on her finger tells her that she's resolutely not.
They drink in silence for a good ten minutes before Tosh and Owen start telling stories about Jack and Suzie and the time Jack had been turned into a parrot for about three days and the only things he could say were 'Hey there sexy lady,' and 'Not in the face! Not in the face!' Then there had been the time that Jack had taken them all out for a morning scramble and the waiter had tried to eat Suzie's handbag before they'd realised that the antique snuffbox she'd purchased at an antique shop the day before as a gift to her father had actually been a Haxxian death urn; the Haxxian waiter had been understandably upset at what he believed to be massive desecration.
"Do you ever think he does these things on purpose?" Tosh asks into the silence, her head on her arms. The beer isn't too strong, but Tosh probably hasn't eaten since supper, and apparently Ianto's beer is his birthday pudding, not his gift. She wonders what the machine has given him, but she decides not to ask.
Owen pats Tosh's head. He's on his second bottle. "Those Time Gypsies with the triple joints," he says.
"Operation Goldenrod," Tosh answers.
"Welsh cannibals," Gwen adds.
"This room is irritating," Ianto says, ignoring their litany. "Cobbled together." He waves his third beer at the plastic walls and the small, serviceable, but somewhat unsturdy underlit table. "Unprofessional."
Owen sets his pint down and kicks at the table legs with his feet. Everything wobbles, and Gwen catches her bottle to keep it from tumbling over. "You're right."
"We should have a conference room," Tosh says, eyes darting to them all in turn. "Maybe down a level. Bigger. Better furniture. Better everything."
Gwen looks at them all in turn. This is a big decision. Ianto shrugs and kicks back in Jack's chair, perilously tilted on the back two legs, but he manages to stay balanced while reaching for another bottle and the church key in the same hand. Gwen wants to say something about it being his fourth drink, but it's his birthday and dear god, if anyone deserves a fucking drink it is Ianto.
"So, alright," she says, "Are you all sure though? I mean, Jack—"
"Fuck Jack," Owen says, leaning forward to rest his chin on his fists.
Ianto's head falls back, and Gwen can't see his face when he echoes Owen's sentiment vehemently. "Fuck Jack."
Gwen and Tosh look at each other. Tosh raises one of her eyebrows, almost in an I will if you will gesture, and they both smirk a little as they say it, as if they are indulging in filthy words. "Fuck Jack."
Ianto rights himself and they all lean together over the flimsy table, clinking their bottles in a toast. "Fuck Jack."
"Just not literally," Owen adds thoughtfully. And Gwen just chuffs him on the ear as Ianto starts to draw up blueprints on the surface of the light table with a permanent marker, Tosh already waving her hands and babbling about coaxial cables and MEMS.
***
Jack loves birthdays. He doesn't really remember when his is on the Earth calendar, and he's more of the mind that birthdays are a mental thing, you're only as old as you look, yadda yadda insert platitude here, but he loves birthdays, especially Tosh's, because Tosh, he has found, has the best taste in dessert ever.
And if anyone deserves a damn party, even one of their little wish machine's pitiful excuses, it's Tosh. He almost feels badly that he hadn't remembered on his own, but then, that had been why they'd set up the machine in the first place, because they all never remembered. Except for Ianto. But Ianto is many things already, and birthday fairy had not been in his official job description.
Jack considers that many things Ianto does are not in his job description.
But today is about Tosh, and her gorgeous new dress and her bajillion layer chocolate death cake that might double as a mild aphrodisiac and the sole reason that obesity is an epidemic in the UK. The streamers are rolling out into the Hub, and Ianto is dancing with Gwen, and Owen is doing a horrible mime with a standing skeleton that he has been constructing from Weevil bones on the side.
Jack has only been back for a little over a month, and in that time he has tried to be a better boss, a better leader, a better communicator. He's tried to be open with them, He hadn't even really felt the extent of the weight that keeping immortality a secret had been on him until it had been lifted, and he finds now that he doesn't mind letting other little things slip out now and then. He doesn't have to explain how he knew Salvador Dali because they all just roll their eyes at him. He doesn't even care if they believe him (but they should totally believe that one).
He's just tickled that they all still like the Birthday Machine. Sometimes he thinks that Suzie was a genius in more than one way. Then he feels rather ill, and a little bit like a failure.
But not today-- Toshiko's desk is a mess of silly string and confetti, and Jack is sure the only reason she's not mad about that is that she knows it will disappear on its own. Tosh's gift is obvious; the machine apparently didn't see the need to wrap her new chair. It simply spun around a little bit when they bumped it with their bodies. It is spiffy and squishy in the right places and it has long arms and braces and clips and slots and places for all kinds of modifications. And a drink holder. Jack is a little bit jealous, though he can't decide whether his first urge is to make a motorized go cart from it or have sex on it. Either option is equally delightful and also two things that Jack mentally swears that he will never do with Tosh's Special Birthday Chair. Unless she ever gets rid of it, and then it is so his.
Owen dips the skeleton, and the head falls off, rolling into the tower reservoir. Gwen and Ianto do some sort of headbanging dance move that he can only shake his head at until Gwen dissolves into giggles. Ianto just does the most sedate version of the Frug that Jack has ever seen; it's actually rather endearing. Owen and the headless Weevil skeleton start a tango. Jack isn't sure when Owen lightened up. It must have been while he was gone.
Ianto picks up Tosh's cake and, his face set in distracted amusement, half-waltzes it into the new conference room, one of several things Jack has had to get used to, but secretly thinks is fabulous and inventive. Ianto twirls the cake once, and sets it down with a flourish; he, like Jack, takes Tosh's birthday dances very seriously.
"My god, I can't keep this up," Gwen pants, her hands on her knees as she bends over, "How long is this song?"
Tosh blushes, and probably wants to stammer something about not actively choosing the song, or to apologize for her music selection, which, as far as Jack is concerned, no one should ever have to apologize for. Except when it's completely unexpected, because then an explanation is required. Possibly with pictures. Naughty pictures.
"Really, Toshiko, the Grateful Dead?" Jack cocks his head and listens to the music as he twirls Tosh a bit out on the grate. She smiles and laughs back into his arms. "Please tell me that you followed them about in a summer of drug-hazed sex."
Tosh blushes prettily. "Ex-girlfriend from Math camp when I was fourteen," she says. "My first kiss. Does that count?"
He can't help it—he laughs, and it feels very good. "Yeah, that totally counts."
***
Ianto watches as Jack turns his office upside down, looking for the machine, no doubt. He can hear Gwen coming up the grate from the cog door, the alarm of her arrival only minutely louder than the music blaring from the speakers.
It's the Buzzcocks, so that can only mean one thing, and Ianto glances wearily over at Owen's desk, where there are Catherine wheels and a huge ice cream cake in the shape of an Orca perched atop what he assumes is a pile of vintage pornography.
Jack hasn't slept in days, not that he would ever say that he sleeps (he does, Ianto has seen it. It is not fitful or what Ianto would classify as sleep-sleep, but he does lay down and close his eyes and it does seem to do him some good every now and then to indulge in it.). It's wearing on him, but there's so very much to do, to clean up. Jack feels so responsible for the ruination of Cardiff that Ianto imagines that he'd volunteer to go out into the city armed with Ianto's cleaning supplies if he thought of it. He spends his days chasing aliens and weevils and the other space junk they get on a regular basis, and the rest of it railing at UNIT about provisions and rebuilding materials. Something about using alien tech to patch brickwork.
Martha has called Ianto to tell him that UNIT is pretty sure Jack is officially mad.
Gwen has told Ianto that they just have to get through the first two weeks. If they get through the first two weeks, then things in the city will calm down, and Jack will be able to walk through the streets without seeing rubble and grunge from explosions that were set by someone he locked in a cryo vault downstairs.
Ianto doesn't tell her that he's had to stop Jack from pulling the plug on Gray twice already. He's found Jack down there, standing in front of the door, his wrist strap open, finger just resting on the buttons. Both times, Ianto has lifted his hand away and shaken his head, even though what he had secretly wanted to say had been do it, do it.
It feels familiar then, not unlike the sensation of deja-vu, that Jack finds the Birthday Machine in a far filing cabinet, tucked away, whizzing machinery inside it's shiny metal casing, lights on the display flashing. Jack whirls and sets the machine down on the desk, the desk with its mess of papers and half full coffee mugs that Ianto has simply been too busy to clean up. His fingernails are still a little black underneath, even though Ianto knows that he has scrubbed them several times a day for the past few days.
He mumbles something under his breath about 'fucking wishes,' and he pries open the machine with a letter opener. The tiny metal door opens with a pop, exposing wiring and all kinds of alien delights. To Ianto it looks like the inside of a cathode ray telly.
He doesn't know why he reaches out and grabs Jack's wrist, except that he has done it twice already in the past week, and it seems right to do it now. He clenches his hand on the wrist hard enough to still Jack's arm, enough to immobilise it above the machine.
His hand slackens a little, but not enough to let Jack wrench his hand away. Jack's eyes are glassy with tears when he glances up from the glowing interface.
"Leave it," he says. "Just leave it."
Jack stares at the dancing lights of the Birthday Machine, reds and blues and greens winking frantically with the rhythm of 'Orgasm Addict,' and back to Ianto, and Gwen, who leans against the frame of the office door, eyes wide and red-rimmed. She nods to him, and Jack drops the machine, letting it clatter to the desk.
Later, after the paper has disappeared, and the acrid smell of fireworks lingers in the air (Myfanwy is irritated and chattering in her nest), They set the cake on the table and dig in, forgoing plates and knives and just scrape at the cetaceaous shape with spoons, eating mouthful after mouthful of ice cream; Gwen is crying softly as she swallows, and Jack flips his spoon over to lick the underside, his eyes staring off into the distance, almost asleep, almost at rest.
Ianto digs in again, shoving a bite that is too big into his mouth, indulgent and childish, he knows, but something of which Owen would have approved. It is sweet and strange, this thing that grants wishes. Somehow, more often than not, nothing they want, but rather something they need.
END
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team
Rating: PG-13
Timeline: Threads through from Ghost Machine past Exit Wounds
Author's Notes: After that last sentimental one I wrote about the fucking blanket (and don't get me wrong, I LURV that fic to death), I am afraid that if I write the others in my head I'll be branded with some sort of sentimentality brush or something, but I just couldn't get rid of the idea in this one. Gah. I guess I have to work out all the craptastic tropes as I go along. Possibly…cracky.
Summary: The bloody birthday machine.
"If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride." (James Kelly, Scottish Proverbs, Collected and Arranged)
"If wishes were horses we'd all be eating steak." (Jayne, Firefly, 'Objects In Space')
Gwen has been at Torchwood for three weeks when her birthday rolls along. Rhys, true to form, wakes her up with his mouth, working her with his tongue and fingers until she orgasms once, and then twice before they hit the shower. Then it's a cuppa and cheese toasties and she's tumbling out the door, laughing, because there can't be a better way to start the day.
Ianto is smiling from behind the tourist centre desk when she gets there, a mug of coffee halfway to his mouth; Gwen is in such a good mood that she tells him that she loves how he always looks distractedly amused, and that it is charming. He does exactly that—looks distractedly amused, and then she pats his cheek and all but skips downstairs.
Owen isn't there yet when she steps into the Hub, but Tosh waves cheerfully at her from her station, and Jack's office lights are on, so she can guess that if he isn't up there at the moment, he's about somewhere. She tosses her things on her desk and turns her chair a few times, because hey, she's the birthday girl, and spinning about is fun.
She's in the middle of her third rotation when the Cog door alarm goes off and Owen stumbles in, looking worse for wear, actually, possibly wearing the same shirt as the day before. Gwen tries not to notice those kinds of things. Sometimes she has to stand close to him in meetings (or what passes for meetings in Torchwood—they involve food and beverages and they occur wherever the person with the food and drink manages to get to before he or she is beset upon by the others) and he smells like sex and scotch; on those days, she notices that Jack likes to rub his hands on Owen's shoulders, as if sex and scotch are pheromones that he cannot resist.
But it's her birthday, and she won't let anything ruin it, not Owen and his sarcasm or a Weevil, or an alien projectile vomiting on her chest or anything. Rhys will get her something fantastic for pudding, and he'll pretend that he forgot to get her a present, but actually it will be something small and expensive and she'll find it under her pillow (a new mp3 player) or in the fridge (garnet earrings), or, like last year, hanging from the showerhead by a ribbon (two tickets to Mallorca) .
She is thinking about that, watching Tosh watch Owen fling his coat on his chair and stomp down to the autopsy bay, when Ianto comes out of hiding with a tray of coffee and Jack sets foot on the lower level with them and suddenly lights begin to twinkle out of nowhere, like sparkles in the air, fireworks, and a hail of confetti bursts into being above Gwen and her chair, and Pink's 'Get the Party Started' blares from the Hub's internal overhead speakers. Jack looks up, Gwen falls out of her chair, and Tosh ducks a few streamers that whiz past her face. Ianto moves off to the side and covers the coffee tray with a few papers to stave off the mountains of chopped paper that spew out of the air for a full thirty seconds.
Owen thunders up from the medical bay and glances about wildly, and seeing Gwen on the floor, looks at her desk. Jack follows his eyes, and whatever they see there must not alarm them, because they both laugh, and Tosh covers her face with her hand. Ianto kicks a growing pile of confetti on the floor, but he is smirking.
Jack holds out an arm for Gwen, and when she is on her feet again, he pulls her close and turns her about; this is not the kind of dancing one does with one's boss. Gwen is passed off from Jack to Owen, who places his hands in areas that she isn't quite sure she doesn't like, and then she's handed off to Tosh, who awkwardly turns her in another circle in front of her workstation, her little hands in Gwen's and her smile wide and generous.
By the time Tosh hands Gwen off to Ianto, who manages to foxtrot her to her workstation and back into Jack's arms, she feels like the one sober person in a room full of drunks. Jack takes one her hands in his, puts his other on her waist, and presses his forehead to hers when he turns her about.
"Happy Birthday Gwen," he says loudly, and everyone seems to echo it at varying volumes and speeds. Over his shoulder, she can see her desk, suddenly festooned with streamers and balloons and some sort of cake, the exact cake that her mother used to buy her when she was little, complete with the pink candles and sugared flowers. The Swansea sweets shop that used to make them has been out of business for at least ten years.
Gwen lets go of Jack's hands and rather gapes at the mess on her desk, the sparklers and the music and the cake, all so overwhelming that she's surprised at the speed in which it occurred. She glances up at the ceiling and tries to see the rigging for the confetti, for how they worked the crackers. Pink is still blaring from the speakers, just a little too loudly for her taste, but it's the cake that has her attention. How could they have got one, and got it so perfect, and even known to get that cake at all?
The surprise must have shown on her face, because Jack grins at her and takes her hands, folding them once into Owen's before he snags Tosh by the waist and jitterbugs her out on the grating across the tower reservoir. Pink is not made for the Jitterbug, but Gwen finds it charming. Owen is smiling into her cheek and she thinks to herself that sex and scotch isn't such a bad smell.
Ianto lifts the cake from her desk as the song winds down, holding it out to her, his eyebrows up in expectant (but distractedly amused) questioning. Gwen sucks in a huge breath and blows every single candle out.
"How did you do all of that?" she asks when they are all crashed on and around Jack's desk with plates of cake and mugs of coffee; it is nine in the morning and they are going to be bouncing off the walls for hours. Their only hope now is probably some sort of meteor crashing to earth, or a wayward spaceship, or a flock of weevils to get them out of the Hub like releasing children outside at recess.
Jack licks his fork pornographically. "Birthday machine."
Gwen sets down her plate. "No. What?"
Owen puts his feet up on Jack's desk and presses his hot mug to his temple. "Birthday machine."
Tosh nods in agreement. "It's true."
Ianto just shrugs at her, eyes saying something to the effect of, Birthday machine.
Gwen looks down at her slice of cake –Ianto has given her one of the largest flowers—and wonders how it even tastes exactly like she remembers. "How's this, then? This is the cake that my mum used to get for me when I was little—"
"Birrrrrrrthday machiiiiine," Jack drawls, running a finger through the icing on the rim of his plate and licking it off. Gwen stares a little bit before Ianto throws a serviette at Jack and it flutters down over his head to drape across his face.
Tosh sets her plate down, sighing happily. "It came through the rift about two years ago," she says, her eyes wide and earnest. "Technically it's a wish machine, after a fashion."
Gwen glances about, as if she could identify it on sight. Nothing is blinking or looks remotely like an oil lamp, which had been the first thought to cross her mind. Something abut a Disney film that she saw years ago, as a kid, and then once on a VCR, something Rhys had picked unthinkingly and they'd ignored once it started because they were too busy on the sofa. Just the thought of Rhys and his mouth brings a smile to her face, and she has to shake her head a bit before listening to Owen describe the Fynlynyan wish machine that they had fished out of the Bay a few years ago.
"We were going to chuck it in the Archives and forget about it. Wish machines are rather hit and miss," Owen says, as if he is the voice of experience.
Jack rolls his eyes. "Still bitter?"
Owen smiles. "Yeah. What good is a wish machine if it can't magically produce an orgy?"
Jack scoops a bit of cake on his fork and flings it at Owen mockingly. "You don't need a wish machine for an orgy, Owen. You have to go out and make it happen." Owen flips him the V.
Tosh grins slyly. "Suzie and I wanted to program it to deliver chocolate during our menstrual cycles, but Jack said it had to be something Owen could participate in too." She smirks at Jack, who shovels cake into his mouth in the manner of a piece of construction equipment.
Ianto leans against the desk and dumps his empty plate in the bin next to Jack's desk. "The wish machine is harmless, actually. It can't do anything drastic, like change time or mess about with human emotion. It's more like an automated celebration machine."
Tosh giggles and stretches in her chair, and Gwen can't help but notice that her shirt gapes a little. It's adorable and a little inadvertently sexy. "That's it in one. A party on a timer. So Suzie entered all our birthdays and the machine does the rest."
"Everyone gets a cake and a gift and a dance," Jack says, eyebrows wiggling. "Mind you, I like the dance quite a bit." Gwen flushes when she recalls his hands on her waist.
Ianto smiles into the distance. "And it cleans up after itself."
Gwen glances out over the Hub, to her workstation, still festooned in banners and silver streamers, but she notices that the confetti is gone. "It always is a let down, the cleaning up bit," she says faintly. Sometimes, Torchwood is bloody brilliant.
Tosh sets the small box on her knee. "And plus! Gifts! Happy birthday from Torchwood and its alien tech!"
Jack laughs at that. "We aim to please."
"And shoot things in the face," Owen adds. "Just, not right now." Jack rolls his eyes and Ianto refills Owen's mug with a smirk.
Gwen eases the ribbon off, lifts the lid, and stares at the small box; the bracelet nestled inside is extravagant and beautiful, a twisting strand of blue stones that must be sapphires or something valuable, not cut-glass or coloured zirconium. The metal is silver or platinum. It is something that she'd never get herself but wouldn't say no to if it had been given her. Though if Rhys would ever try to give her something like this, she's fairly sure that she'd start to worry that he had a side job dealing drugs.
"Something you want," Jack says with a wink, "but not necessarily anything you need."
"I didn't even know that I wanted this," she replies faintly. And it's true. She's never seen the bracelet before now. She takes it out of the box and holds it up to the light. It must be worth thousands of pounds. How will she explain something like this to Rhys?
"Hence the miracle that is the birthday machine." Owen smiles at her and closes his eyes. "Last year it was a mountain of vintage Hustlers."
Tosh flicks cake at Owen's face. "I got a book of classic works of the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Belief Functions and a crate of really good wine," she says breathlessly.
Gwen fastens the clasp of the bracelet on her wrist and wonders how she feels about this. It has all happened so quickly—Torchwood, aliens, Weevils, Suzie, Jack Harkness, the man who cannot die, snogging another woman, for god's sake, and now a magical birthday machine that is apparently completely safe and gives out valuable presents —and cake, mustn't forget the delicious cake-- like candy.
Ianto smiles when they all look at him, and he ducks his head. "A vacuum siphon coffee maker," he says, eyes wide and face amused, Gwen thinks, distractedly amused. "It lives at my flat where none of you shall ever get the chance to break it."
Gwen laughs, because it's true. In the time she's been here, Owen has broken three mugs and Tosh has been responsible for the demise of at least that many plates; the Hub is often filled with a great deal of frantic movement followed by lulls of downtime. And of course, haphazard basketball.
"And you, Jack?" she asks, holding out her wrist so that Tosh can grasp her fingers and turn it, making the gems sparkle.
"That depends," Jack says, tapping his fork on his plate in rapid-time. "Is this conversation rated R or NC-17?"
Ianto plucks Jack's plate from his hands and dumps it in the bin. "You are cut off, sir."
***
Owen is working with some sensitive materials and measuring toxins very carefully, so of course it is at the most crucial moment of the operation in which Gwen arrives, making their attendance complete; there's a record scratch noise and a roman bloody candle goes off in the center of the Hub. Owen's toxins spill across the countertop and begin eating a hole in the metal.
He curses and is in the middle of dousing his lab with retardant powder when 'Yesterday' begins playing out of the speakers, and the area where Suzie used to work explodes in a shower of glitter. Gwen looks shocked, eyes like saucers. Tosh dashes out of the conference room, her hands and mouth full of cable wires. Jack jumps up from behind his desk and glances about suspiciously before frowning. Ianto turns the coffee machine off in mid-brew.
The bloody birthday machine.
Owen drags himself over to that part of the Hub. He tries not to go over there anymore because shagging Suzie on her desk had been a thing for the two of them for a while before Ianto had walked in on them once and they had relocated to the communal showers and later the Weevil cells (he should have sensed it then, that she would do it with him down there, that she would want to). But Jack has beat him there, and they both stand there and watch the sparklers in Suzie's pie shower all over her empty workspace, the orange glint of them seeming like her arc welder; the welding mask still standing on the edge of the desk could have her face behind it even now.
But Suzie is dead (again and again and again. He should know, he did the autopsies. Both of them), and the machine doesn't know that, because her birthday is still in there. Owen wonders idly if this is enough to make Jack want to dismantle the machine.
He hates The Beatles sometimes. Not all the time, but this time, he hates them a shiteload.
Tosh joins them, sans cables, and she leans into Ianto's shoulder a little bit as they all watch the sparklers wink out slowly, leaving scraggles of smoke in the air like Suzie's greasy psychic fingertips, back again, back a third time, to remind them of her, of what she did. Gwen's left hand grasps her chest a bit, as if she is trying to hold something in her, keep something from spilling out. Owen shoves his hands in his pockets and doesn't try to touch her; he owes Suzie that much, on her birthday, after all. Suzie, whose betrayal bothers him because he understands just what she was thinking the whole time, and he cannot, to this day, say that he entirely disagrees.
No one moves when the music dies away, the smoke clears, and Jack bows his head. Owen rolls his eyes and wonders if they're going to eulogise her for a second and please god, can they not do that, but instead, no one says anything, though Tosh's face is a little crumpled, as if she wants to make herself cry, but just can't force it to the surface.
"Hey," Owen mutters, snagging the pastry from Suzie's desk. "Free pie."
Jack looks up at him and smiles a bit at that, hands shoved in pockets. Owen bumps his shoulder on purpose as he makes his way to the conference room. Ianto has already beaten him there, armed with plates and utensils. The coffee machine is once again chugging merrily in the kitchenette.
They all eat in silence for a few minutes, and then Tosh sits back, picking at her plate with her fork. "It is good pie."
***
Tosh is tired. She has been stuck in the Hub all night with the rest of the team out in the field. Her eyes burn and Ianto isn't there to refill her coffee. She has tried to make it herself, but alas, there's a bunch of dials and buttons that she doesn't have time to decipher, and then she almost burns her hand on the steam wand before she admits defeat.
The invisible lift lets in Owen and Gwen, and a few minutes later Ianto comes in from the garage passage. As soon as his feet hit the grating, something in Jack's office seems to explode and a blast of bubbles bursts out into the Hub, falling down onto them like a soapy rainbow. Tosh thinks to protect her keyboards, but there isn't much to protect them from, and for a second she is a little afraid of what might be there until Glenn Miller's 'In the Mood' blares from her speakers and she realises the date.
Ianto jerks a bit next to her, and Gwen races towards the steps to Jack's office before it seems to hit her. The Birthday Machine. She stops where she is and frowns.
"He's not here," she says to them all, and Tosh wants to shake her and scream, Yes, we bloody well know that, Captain Obvious, but that's just her low caffeine levels talking. Well, mostly.
Owen flicks a bubble away from him in disgust. "Bubbles. Bubbles. Fucking Harkness."
Tosh looks at them all helplessly. "Should we…do we dance now?"
Owen groans. "I hate Glenn Miller." But he grabs her hips anyway and sways her a bit. "But hey--The Lambada," he says in an atrocious accent, 'the forbidden dance."
She might have let him get away with it, except that she's tired and Gwen is staring, and Ianto is rubbing the bridge of his nose in between a finger and a thumb and she isn't in the mood to be Owen's sexless and yet female joke tonight, so she shoves him off. "You smell like Weevil," she snaps.
Owen smiles and raises a hand to his nose, sniffing. "Oh yeah, Janet was getting frisky," he says before Ianto rolls his eyes at them all and ventures up into Jack's office. Tosh sees the lights go on up there before moving to follow Owen and Gwen to the metal stairs. Glenn Miller continues to crescendo and decrescendo ineffectively; they're none of them in the mood to celebrate, and the persistence of the party machine further punctuates that with another wash of bubbles that only serve to make the tower reservoir froth at the edges.
They fight their way through the bubbles, several of which pop in front of her face, sending soap into her eyes. She waves her hands in front of her face and stands in front of Jack's desk, where Ianto is frowning at a bowl of round glistening sweets in place of a cake or pie.
"This is…this is Jack's birthday?" Gwen asks, her hands on her hips and her eyes wide.
Tosh shrugs. "I think Suzie just picked a date spaced out between our birthdays," she says. It's true. Suzie and she had thought about asking Jack when Suzie had been working with the interface, but Tosh hadn't been able to find it in his unclassified personnel file, so they'd just rolled their eyes at what Suzie used to call 'Ooooh The Secrecy,' when they referred to Jack. She is too interested in what dessert Jack has got this year. Last year it was a key lime pie. Occasionally she dreams about that pie.
It is like no dessert she has ever seen, and she's seen plenty. They are round doughy looking balls, like the Chinese jian dwei without the sesame seeds, and they are all shiny with something that looks sticky. The tops of them are dusted with metallic powder. Tosh faintly wonders if they are even edible, but then she understands that the machine follows very strict perimeters about what it is to offer: food, gift, music. The wrapped present on the side of the desk, a small box adorned with a red ribbon made of actual cloth is the dead giveaway that they are all gawking at Jack's secret edible desire. At least this year.
"What do you think they are?" Gwen says, rounding the desk to look at the bowl as the last of the Glenn Miller dies away, and they are left in silence, the ticking of the clock in Jack's office loud, almost too loud.
Ianto picks up the bowl, and they all edge back minutely. "Something from Jack's childhood?" he muses aloud, brow knitted.
Owen rolls his eyes. "I bet they're some alien sex drug," he says.
Gwen stuffs her hands in her pockets then. "We can't eat them," she tells them, and Tosh almost rolls her eyes. Of course they can't eat them. They're Jack's. And also they might be…poisonous. Well, no, but Jack's sense of humour is well documented in the Torchwood files in many many accumulated sexual harassment slips filed by former (and temporary) co-workers who had a very different idea of how an office dynamic is supposed to work.
Owen stabs one with a pencil and steps out onto the catwalk, whistling. "Myfanwy! Here, girl."
Ianto grabs Owen's raised hand. "You might make her sick." He stops. "Or randy."
Tosh and Gwen exchange glances. Tosh isn't sure what a randy pterodon looks or acts like, but she knows that it can't be good. Owen must agree with them, because he licks the sweet and makes a face.
"It's honey," he says. "I hate honey." Tosh thinks that Owen hates everything that Jack ever loved, or maybe he just hates the things that don't quite matter. Or he says he hates them because that's the best way he can think of to be mad at Jack for leaving. Tosh knows that she expresses her anger at Jack by hacking into his private files and deleting his pornography, one image a day; hitting the delete key has never given her so much satisfaction.
"Oh come on then," Owen says, stuffing the ball into his mouth. His eyes widen, and he stares at Ianto as he chews. Ianto backs away, just a little bit, like a reverse of what they had all done earlier. Owen's hand snakes out and rubs against Ianto's arm, up to his shoulder and the side of his neck, and he leans closer, his other hand coming to rest at Ianto's waist, until Owen swallows and pulls them flush together with his belt.
"Jones," he purrs, "you're still a git." And then he laughs, pushing away.
For one second, Toshiko loves Gwen, who dumps the bowl over his head.
She never sees where Jack's gift goes, but months later, Ianto blushes when Jack tucks the red ribbon into his waistcoat pocket.
***
Gwen is still tired. They're all tired. Ever since they had opened the Rift (twice!) and Jack had gone on walkabout, the Rift seemed to be paying them back in vengeful kind—wave after wave of alien activity, some of it right bothersome, a great deal of it potentially deadly. Owen is down in the autopsy theatre, where he has been for the last three hours, swearing and banging things about, and Tosh is planted in front of her computers, her arms often the only moving parts of her. Gwen stares out over the Hub from Jack's oft-used perch, watching Myfanwy toss bits and bobs of animal bones out of her nest to land in the tower reservoir, where Ianto will inevitably have to fish them out later.
It is nearly midnight, and none of them have any intentions of leaving. Gwen and Ianto had been on Rift Monitor duty tonight, but the reappearance of the Hoix and the gambling ring had given Owen a few more bodies he wanted to dismantle, and Tosh had sworn at seven that night that she wasn't leaving until she'd cross catalogued all the currency they'd retrieved from the payment pit of the underground casino. Most of it was made of organic matter not of earth origin and had been deteriorating quickly.
She has already called Rhys, and they'd had a little bit of a terse row over the phone while the others had tried not to listen. But it was hard, and everything echoed in the Hub, and anyway, Gwen doesn't care if they hear anymore. Some days they're less like co-workers and more like family. And on other days they're less like family and more like extensions of each other.
She wonders what Jack would make of that.
It is a minute to midnight when Ianto steps into the Hub, his watch in his hand. He stares at the face of it, and then raises one hand in expectation, finger pointing in the air. He gestures with it at the conference room just when the atomic clock face flips over, and looks up at her, his face amused, though no longer distracted. Then he starts up the stairs.
As if on cue, the speakers screech a bit and there is an explosion in the conference room, but it sounds like a very loud 'pffffft' sound and blue and pink smoke spirals out of the room. The speakers start to play a rather heated and dark version of 'Paint It Black,' and Gwen leaves Jack's perch to run down to their conference room, past the coffee machine, where, over the light table there is a silver banner that proclaims, 'PENBLWYDD HAPUS IANTO.' She had expected to see Ianto there, but he has bypassed the room and is up in Jack's office. By the time they all get up to the darkened room, its lamps unlit (they have been for weeks), they all stand in the doorway and watch Ianto turn Jack's desk inside out.
"Ianto?" Gwen says. When he stares at her, she knows what he is looking for. "Ianto, the machine can't bring him back."
Ianto bends a bit over the desk, his hands splayed on its surface, his head down, and then he raises his face to them, and she sees something in him that makes her reconsider allowing him to use firearms so freely. Just for a second.
"I know," he says softly. "I just thought, maybe a note, something, something we missed might surface…."
"If the machine made a note like that, we'd know it's a lie," Tosh says, her voice tired and sad. "The machine fabricates things. It can't affect relative space and –"
"Jesus Tosh," Owen says, finally joining them whilst wiping his wet hands on a towel. "Let the man have a few seconds of false hope, will you?"
Gwen glares at him, and Tosh recoils. Gwen can't disagree with Owen, though she wouldn't have phrased it that way. It's not as if Ianto has ever done or said anything about Jack's disappearance that might indicate that he misses him any more or less than they do, but the kiss in the Hub before Jack had left had been a sight more intimate than any of the rest of them had got, and she wonders sometimes, really, what the two of them had or said or did.
She's never asked. She wonders if she should.
Ianto just straightens and brushes past them to the conference room. The song is over now, and Gwen smiles when she sees Ianto run his hands over the case of beer, adorned with metallic stickers that say things like, 'Happy Birthday' and 'One to Grow On!' It's almost hard to see the Wye Valley logo.
Ianto opens the case dully, his eyes not quite seeing them as he sets out half the bottles and pulls the church key from his pocketknife.
"Birthday beer," Owen says, grinning. "What, no coffee cake?"
Ianto shakes a beer before handing it to Owen unopened. Owen just looks at the label, says, 'Hullo Dorothy," and snaps off the cap on the table edge, shooting beer into the air.
Ianto opens beers for Tosh and Gwen and they all sit about the table, sipping and consigning themselves to the sedative nature of it all. They haven't stopped working for weeks, and if Gwen had to actually put a finger on it, she thinks that they invent reasons to be here. Tosh and Owen could have gone home hours ago, and as soon as they arrived in the morning, she and Ianto would have lit out for changes of clothes and some sleep, but she could have bet that they would have been back, milling about, making work, well before they would have had to come in, barring any disasters.
She doesn't think they are waiting for Jack, per se. She tries to tell herself that she's not. The ring on her finger tells her that she's resolutely not.
They drink in silence for a good ten minutes before Tosh and Owen start telling stories about Jack and Suzie and the time Jack had been turned into a parrot for about three days and the only things he could say were 'Hey there sexy lady,' and 'Not in the face! Not in the face!' Then there had been the time that Jack had taken them all out for a morning scramble and the waiter had tried to eat Suzie's handbag before they'd realised that the antique snuffbox she'd purchased at an antique shop the day before as a gift to her father had actually been a Haxxian death urn; the Haxxian waiter had been understandably upset at what he believed to be massive desecration.
"Do you ever think he does these things on purpose?" Tosh asks into the silence, her head on her arms. The beer isn't too strong, but Tosh probably hasn't eaten since supper, and apparently Ianto's beer is his birthday pudding, not his gift. She wonders what the machine has given him, but she decides not to ask.
Owen pats Tosh's head. He's on his second bottle. "Those Time Gypsies with the triple joints," he says.
"Operation Goldenrod," Tosh answers.
"Welsh cannibals," Gwen adds.
"This room is irritating," Ianto says, ignoring their litany. "Cobbled together." He waves his third beer at the plastic walls and the small, serviceable, but somewhat unsturdy underlit table. "Unprofessional."
Owen sets his pint down and kicks at the table legs with his feet. Everything wobbles, and Gwen catches her bottle to keep it from tumbling over. "You're right."
"We should have a conference room," Tosh says, eyes darting to them all in turn. "Maybe down a level. Bigger. Better furniture. Better everything."
Gwen looks at them all in turn. This is a big decision. Ianto shrugs and kicks back in Jack's chair, perilously tilted on the back two legs, but he manages to stay balanced while reaching for another bottle and the church key in the same hand. Gwen wants to say something about it being his fourth drink, but it's his birthday and dear god, if anyone deserves a fucking drink it is Ianto.
"So, alright," she says, "Are you all sure though? I mean, Jack—"
"Fuck Jack," Owen says, leaning forward to rest his chin on his fists.
Ianto's head falls back, and Gwen can't see his face when he echoes Owen's sentiment vehemently. "Fuck Jack."
Gwen and Tosh look at each other. Tosh raises one of her eyebrows, almost in an I will if you will gesture, and they both smirk a little as they say it, as if they are indulging in filthy words. "Fuck Jack."
Ianto rights himself and they all lean together over the flimsy table, clinking their bottles in a toast. "Fuck Jack."
"Just not literally," Owen adds thoughtfully. And Gwen just chuffs him on the ear as Ianto starts to draw up blueprints on the surface of the light table with a permanent marker, Tosh already waving her hands and babbling about coaxial cables and MEMS.
***
Jack loves birthdays. He doesn't really remember when his is on the Earth calendar, and he's more of the mind that birthdays are a mental thing, you're only as old as you look, yadda yadda insert platitude here, but he loves birthdays, especially Tosh's, because Tosh, he has found, has the best taste in dessert ever.
And if anyone deserves a damn party, even one of their little wish machine's pitiful excuses, it's Tosh. He almost feels badly that he hadn't remembered on his own, but then, that had been why they'd set up the machine in the first place, because they all never remembered. Except for Ianto. But Ianto is many things already, and birthday fairy had not been in his official job description.
Jack considers that many things Ianto does are not in his job description.
But today is about Tosh, and her gorgeous new dress and her bajillion layer chocolate death cake that might double as a mild aphrodisiac and the sole reason that obesity is an epidemic in the UK. The streamers are rolling out into the Hub, and Ianto is dancing with Gwen, and Owen is doing a horrible mime with a standing skeleton that he has been constructing from Weevil bones on the side.
Jack has only been back for a little over a month, and in that time he has tried to be a better boss, a better leader, a better communicator. He's tried to be open with them, He hadn't even really felt the extent of the weight that keeping immortality a secret had been on him until it had been lifted, and he finds now that he doesn't mind letting other little things slip out now and then. He doesn't have to explain how he knew Salvador Dali because they all just roll their eyes at him. He doesn't even care if they believe him (but they should totally believe that one).
He's just tickled that they all still like the Birthday Machine. Sometimes he thinks that Suzie was a genius in more than one way. Then he feels rather ill, and a little bit like a failure.
But not today-- Toshiko's desk is a mess of silly string and confetti, and Jack is sure the only reason she's not mad about that is that she knows it will disappear on its own. Tosh's gift is obvious; the machine apparently didn't see the need to wrap her new chair. It simply spun around a little bit when they bumped it with their bodies. It is spiffy and squishy in the right places and it has long arms and braces and clips and slots and places for all kinds of modifications. And a drink holder. Jack is a little bit jealous, though he can't decide whether his first urge is to make a motorized go cart from it or have sex on it. Either option is equally delightful and also two things that Jack mentally swears that he will never do with Tosh's Special Birthday Chair. Unless she ever gets rid of it, and then it is so his.
Owen dips the skeleton, and the head falls off, rolling into the tower reservoir. Gwen and Ianto do some sort of headbanging dance move that he can only shake his head at until Gwen dissolves into giggles. Ianto just does the most sedate version of the Frug that Jack has ever seen; it's actually rather endearing. Owen and the headless Weevil skeleton start a tango. Jack isn't sure when Owen lightened up. It must have been while he was gone.
Ianto picks up Tosh's cake and, his face set in distracted amusement, half-waltzes it into the new conference room, one of several things Jack has had to get used to, but secretly thinks is fabulous and inventive. Ianto twirls the cake once, and sets it down with a flourish; he, like Jack, takes Tosh's birthday dances very seriously.
"My god, I can't keep this up," Gwen pants, her hands on her knees as she bends over, "How long is this song?"
Tosh blushes, and probably wants to stammer something about not actively choosing the song, or to apologize for her music selection, which, as far as Jack is concerned, no one should ever have to apologize for. Except when it's completely unexpected, because then an explanation is required. Possibly with pictures. Naughty pictures.
"Really, Toshiko, the Grateful Dead?" Jack cocks his head and listens to the music as he twirls Tosh a bit out on the grate. She smiles and laughs back into his arms. "Please tell me that you followed them about in a summer of drug-hazed sex."
Tosh blushes prettily. "Ex-girlfriend from Math camp when I was fourteen," she says. "My first kiss. Does that count?"
He can't help it—he laughs, and it feels very good. "Yeah, that totally counts."
***
Ianto watches as Jack turns his office upside down, looking for the machine, no doubt. He can hear Gwen coming up the grate from the cog door, the alarm of her arrival only minutely louder than the music blaring from the speakers.
It's the Buzzcocks, so that can only mean one thing, and Ianto glances wearily over at Owen's desk, where there are Catherine wheels and a huge ice cream cake in the shape of an Orca perched atop what he assumes is a pile of vintage pornography.
Jack hasn't slept in days, not that he would ever say that he sleeps (he does, Ianto has seen it. It is not fitful or what Ianto would classify as sleep-sleep, but he does lay down and close his eyes and it does seem to do him some good every now and then to indulge in it.). It's wearing on him, but there's so very much to do, to clean up. Jack feels so responsible for the ruination of Cardiff that Ianto imagines that he'd volunteer to go out into the city armed with Ianto's cleaning supplies if he thought of it. He spends his days chasing aliens and weevils and the other space junk they get on a regular basis, and the rest of it railing at UNIT about provisions and rebuilding materials. Something about using alien tech to patch brickwork.
Martha has called Ianto to tell him that UNIT is pretty sure Jack is officially mad.
Gwen has told Ianto that they just have to get through the first two weeks. If they get through the first two weeks, then things in the city will calm down, and Jack will be able to walk through the streets without seeing rubble and grunge from explosions that were set by someone he locked in a cryo vault downstairs.
Ianto doesn't tell her that he's had to stop Jack from pulling the plug on Gray twice already. He's found Jack down there, standing in front of the door, his wrist strap open, finger just resting on the buttons. Both times, Ianto has lifted his hand away and shaken his head, even though what he had secretly wanted to say had been do it, do it.
It feels familiar then, not unlike the sensation of deja-vu, that Jack finds the Birthday Machine in a far filing cabinet, tucked away, whizzing machinery inside it's shiny metal casing, lights on the display flashing. Jack whirls and sets the machine down on the desk, the desk with its mess of papers and half full coffee mugs that Ianto has simply been too busy to clean up. His fingernails are still a little black underneath, even though Ianto knows that he has scrubbed them several times a day for the past few days.
He mumbles something under his breath about 'fucking wishes,' and he pries open the machine with a letter opener. The tiny metal door opens with a pop, exposing wiring and all kinds of alien delights. To Ianto it looks like the inside of a cathode ray telly.
He doesn't know why he reaches out and grabs Jack's wrist, except that he has done it twice already in the past week, and it seems right to do it now. He clenches his hand on the wrist hard enough to still Jack's arm, enough to immobilise it above the machine.
His hand slackens a little, but not enough to let Jack wrench his hand away. Jack's eyes are glassy with tears when he glances up from the glowing interface.
"Leave it," he says. "Just leave it."
Jack stares at the dancing lights of the Birthday Machine, reds and blues and greens winking frantically with the rhythm of 'Orgasm Addict,' and back to Ianto, and Gwen, who leans against the frame of the office door, eyes wide and red-rimmed. She nods to him, and Jack drops the machine, letting it clatter to the desk.
Later, after the paper has disappeared, and the acrid smell of fireworks lingers in the air (Myfanwy is irritated and chattering in her nest), They set the cake on the table and dig in, forgoing plates and knives and just scrape at the cetaceaous shape with spoons, eating mouthful after mouthful of ice cream; Gwen is crying softly as she swallows, and Jack flips his spoon over to lick the underside, his eyes staring off into the distance, almost asleep, almost at rest.
Ianto digs in again, shoving a bite that is too big into his mouth, indulgent and childish, he knows, but something of which Owen would have approved. It is sweet and strange, this thing that grants wishes. Somehow, more often than not, nothing they want, but rather something they need.
END
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 05:48 am (UTC)You're brilliant and dangerous.
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Date: 2009-05-06 05:50 am (UTC)Aw, thank you! I was actually starting to go insane from this one, so I had to release it into the wild...like salmon or something. Torchwood salmon.
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Date: 2009-05-06 06:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 06:11 am (UTC)Thanks for reading! I am glad that you liked it! Woot!
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Date: 2009-05-06 06:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 06:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 09:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 02:23 pm (UTC)Thanks for reading, lady! I am glad that you liked it!
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Date: 2009-05-06 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 02:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 07:08 pm (UTC)Believe it or not, this all started from the Ianto one, except in the original, he was actually going to be expecting Jack to have returned. After I limited the wish machine's capabilities, I didn't think he'd be dumb enough to really believe that. Poor Ianto. But hey! Birthday beer!
Thanks so much for reading. I am glad that you liked it!
(no subject)
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Date: 2009-05-06 07:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 07:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 10:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 12:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 10:39 pm (UTC)~
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Date: 2009-05-07 12:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2009-05-07 01:57 am (UTC)This isn't crack at all. It's curtains!fic of the highest order, with all the endearing domestic detail a TW junkie could ever ask for. Well done, you!
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Date: 2009-05-07 02:14 am (UTC)Yeah, I just decided to start with a bang and move from there. It was a little insane. Funny you should pick out the Dali, because I picked that name at random, but really, Jack/Dali? Pretty freaking funny especially where all the time and clocks are concerned.
Thanks for reading. I'm still reeling a bit from what you posted yesterday.
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Date: 2009-05-07 04:08 am (UTC)I kept going through while reading and highlighting lines I liked to comment on... but there were just too many things in the end, and I would have reposted half of the story here. :)
Funny and sad and happy and dark, all in one. Fantastic!
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Date: 2009-05-07 04:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 04:58 am (UTC)But aside from all of that, it deals very well with the everyday deathness of Torchwood without letting all the death become every day.
But also, I love the slow windup of it...it's nice to see something that spans past Exit Wounds that doesn't get all maudlin about it...you hold each moment in it's own time very firmly and never wink at what's to come. And each birthday is about as unsentimental as all work birthday celebrations are, which is quite touching in the end.
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Date: 2009-05-07 05:21 pm (UTC)Thank you for reading! And thanks for the comments!
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Date: 2009-05-07 02:26 pm (UTC)wow
sad and funny and miserable and fucking hilarious
this was fantastic! :D
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Date: 2009-05-07 05:22 pm (UTC)Srsly, thanks so much.
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Date: 2009-05-07 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 05:24 pm (UTC)Thanks so much for reading and commenting. I always appreciate hearing from people!
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Date: 2009-05-07 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 07:48 pm (UTC)Thanks so much for reading, and for your comments!
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Date: 2009-05-07 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 07:50 pm (UTC)I made you late? I'm sorry! I hope you got where you were going. Hee. Thanks for your comments, and I'm glad that you liked it!
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Date: 2009-05-07 09:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 09:09 pm (UTC)Also-- LOL at your appropriate icon!
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-05-07 11:37 pm (UTC)There are so many lines I'd love to pull out, but I especially liked this: Tosh knows that she expresses her anger at Jack by hacking into his private files and deleting his pornography, one image a day; hitting the delete key has never given her so much satisfaction. I can see just what she'd look like hitting that key; it's the perfect combination of vindictiveness and disappointment.
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Date: 2009-05-08 12:47 am (UTC)I'm glad that Tosh and her bits worked for you, because I had never written her POV, and in a lot of ways, I find it quite difficult. I don't want to make her too geeky, or too OOC, which is apparently quite easy to do, but I really think her twisted little brain would have done that to Jack (assuming that Jack keeps porn in his computer, which really, I'm not convinced he would ever do. It's a fanon thing, I guess.)
Thanks so much for reading, and for your lovely comments! I am tickled pink. :D
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Date: 2009-05-08 12:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-08 12:48 am (UTC)I am so glad that you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading and commenting! ;D
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Date: 2009-05-08 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-08 01:45 am (UTC)I am so glad that you liked it! Thank you for reading and for your comments!
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Date: 2009-05-08 01:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-08 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-08 07:09 am (UTC)How sad, and how wonderful for you to show what each character's songs and dances are. Everyone should have a birthday machine. Lovely insight to everyone's thoughts and feelings.
This was one of many lines that made me chuckle.
He doesn't have to explain how he knew Salvador Dali because they all just roll their eyes at him. He doesn't even care if they believe him (but they should totally believe that one).
The kicker was Owen's birthday and he was no longer around. Deader than he was dead. That was sad, and lovely at the same time.
A fabulous story.
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Date: 2009-05-08 03:03 pm (UTC)Everyone seems to like the Dali line!
Thank you for reading and commenting!