Thirteen Bad Habits.

[quigonejinn]

1. Slouching.

2. Not drinking enough water.

3. Putting junk mail into the dustbin without reading it.

4. When Ianto was moving Lisa into the chamber under the Plass, there was one night he couldn't quite endure it anymore. She was resting comfortably, but there was weeks worth of work still to be done, including redundancy mechanisms and auto-editing of the video. He ought to have stayed and worked and maybe scavenged some more parts from excess inventory, but he couldn't breathe down in the tunnels. He did everything that he could think of to calm himself, including look at Lisa, asleep under a blanket, but it didn't work, so he went back upstairs, changed into casual clothes that he kept in the locker, and went out and tried to get drunk.

5. He was a little more successful at finding someone willing to have sex with him. Every time after that first panic, too.

6. Sometimes, Ianto doesn't do the wiping-out-with-bicarbonate part of descaling the kettle.

7. Sometimes, if it's late and there isn't anybody around, he'll leave using the invisible lift just because he can. Even if he's had a horrible day, it makes him suddenly, bizarrely happy to come out of the recycled air underground and into the middle of the Plass. He can smell the Bay. He can see people. In spite of himself, he feels free. In spite of himself, he likes it.

8. Ianto's parents in Swansea still thinks that he's working in London. Yes, he has parents. Both of them are still alive. And happily married to each other. They still think he has a job with the Office for National Statistics, and it's not exactly difficult to use the Torchwood's facilities to make it look, each Sunday, like he's calling from a London mobile.

9. Lisa got shot on a Thursday. Ianto came into work on Friday and Saturday, same as usual, but on Saturday afternoon, he couldn't take it anymore, but Tosh and Owen were working on Saturday too, and doing it near the door, so he couldn't leave. Instead, he got his mobile out of his desk, went into the men's bathroom, locked the door, turned on the vents, and called home.

His mother had been gardening; his father called her in, but Ianto could hear him lurking around, worried and banging into things to give him a reason to stay around, and once his mother asked him what was wrong, Ianto started crying. He was so sorry, but he and Lisa broken up. He had dumped her. He hadn't been good enough, but he had to. Everything had gone to shit, no matter what anybody said, and the hardest part was that it had been the right thing to do. It was the only decent thing.

"My boy, my dear boy," his mother said, and then she comforted him.

He cried until his throat hurt.

Later, just to cover his tracks, he told them that he was in Cardiff for the weekend for work. He was leaving for London again by the end of the afternoon, so he wouldn't have a chance to visit.

10. Sometimes, Ianto is more than a little maudlin. At university, he was a terribly emotional drunk, and on Sunday night, he went down to the tunnel where all of those things had been. Tosh and Owen and Gwen and Jack had cleared away just about everything, but there was some debris on the floor. A few bloodstains, and the stand lamp that he'd taken down there to use was still working. He turned it on, then stood and looked at the tunnel for an hour or two.

It turned out that Jack hadn't gone to what passed for bed. At the end of it, he came up behind Ianto and put his hand on Ianto's shoulder.

11. Quite certainly a bad habit: sometimes, when he's in a bad way, Ianto doesn't remember having had sex with people. For example, one of those times when he was panicking over Lisa, he ended up doing it with the girl who works in the closest coffee shop. He met her in a club, and he didn't recognize her when he went back on Tuesday for the weekly Torchwood bag.

He doesn't think that anything happened with Jack that night, but he's not sure. Jack's hand on his shoulder. Jack's coat, hanging around both their knees, and the collar in the corner of Ianto's eye.

It's a bad habit.

12. Lisa.

13. Torchwood. And see 7.