Title: Tear And Repair
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack, mentions Lisa.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 4076
Spoilers: Fragments, maybe. Set pre-series.
Summary: After joining Torchwood Three, Ianto becomes the team’s general handyman and fixer of anything that gets damaged; much to his surprise, this turns out to include care of a certain coat.
Content Notes: None needed.
Written For: Challenge #185: Mending. Also for my genprompt_bingo square ‘Butcher / Baker / Candlestickmaker: Tradesman’.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.



It had proved a lot harder than he’d expected it to be, but eventually Ianto had succeeded in persuading Captain Harkness to give him a job at Torchwood Three. Once he was in though, he found the Cardiff branch was worlds apart from anything he’d known at Torchwood One. It didn’t take him long at all to realise it was a very good thing that he could turn his hand to most kinds of maintenance and repair work; one of the things the team badly needed was a handyman slash janitor. Well, Ianto knew he could be that, and more. He was sure he’d soon prove his worth.

The Torchwood Hub was old, built over a century ago, so things were always breaking down and needing to be fixed; calling in plumbers, electricians, plasterers, carpenters, and other tradesmen to do the necessary work would have meant Retconning them afterwards. Even Harkness himself had to admit that having someone on site who already had the requisite skills was going to be a big help, and so it proved almost immediately.

In his first week alone, Ianto found himself dealing with a couple of leaking pipes, a dripping tap, and some minor re-wiring, doing a spot of plastering in the tourist office to make the place look more presentable, and replacing tiles in one of the bathrooms. Whenever he didn’t know how to do something, or wasn’t sure of the best method to use, he simply went on the internet, read up of the subject, and watched tutorials until he was confident he could handle the job.

The internet was an amazing resource; you could learn pretty much anything online, it was simply a case of locating the relevant information. Of course, when it came to more specialised skills, like repairing and maintaining the sub-etheric resonator, finding helpful information was bound to prove a bit more difficult, but Ianto was positive that between him and Tosh, given time they’d be able to create what would quite possibly be the first ever manual on the subject. That would be something they could both be justifiably proud of.

Research took time, but fortunately Ianto didn’t need to look everything up; there were a good many skills he was already quite well versed in, things he’d learned from his parents, and in wood- and metalworking classes at school. Rewiring plugs, changing washers in leaky taps, fixing wobbly chairs and desks… It was surprising what you picked up without even realising. He could even handle a bit of welding, although that only proved necessary when it came to fixing the plumbing since all other welding jobs were dealt with by Suzie, the resident expert with a blowtorch.

As Torchwood Three’s new General Support Officer, a fancy title for general dogsbody, Ianto’s tasks around the Hub were many and varied, with new ones being added practically every week; one thing he couldn’t complain about was being bored. Even when all maintenance and cleaning was finished, filing was up to date, everybody was fed and watered, or in the team’s case, caffeinated, and Lisa’s needs had been seen to, he still had several years’ worth of work to do sorting out the archives. He didn’t intend or expect to be around long enough to finish that job, but it was interesting and absorbing, and he found he enjoyed going through the rooms full of boxes and filing cabinets, identifying and cataloguing items, and putting everything in order. It was one of the most satisfying parts of his new job, and while he was there he was determined to do every task he was assigned to the best of his ability. It was a matter of pride.

Ianto had been working at Torchwood for about a month when Captain Harkness first came to him, coat bundled up in his arms, and looking like he might cry.

“Ianto, I tore my coat,” he said mournfully, a tragic expression n his face.

“How’d you manage that?” As far as Ianto knew, the coat and its owner had both been fine following the team’s last field mission, if the use of such an impressive term could be justified for what had essentially been nothing more than a jaunt to collect unidentified junk that had fallen through the Rift.

“Caught it on a rusty nail.” A grown man really shouldn’t have been able to pout so effectively. On anyone else, the expression would have looked silly.

“Seriously?” In a place like Torchwood, an accident with a rusty nail sounded positively anticlimactic.

“I was chasing a Weevil last night, followed it down an alley behind a row of terraced houses. It went through a broken gate, and when I went after it…” Harkness made a ripping sound.

Ianto winced. “Ouch. Good thing it was only your coat.”

“Only my coat?” Surely only Jack Harkness could sound so offended on behalf of a piece of clothing.

Ianto sighed, defeated. “Give it here, Sir; I’ll see what I can do.”

Harkness frowned. “I’m not sure I trust you with it if you think of it as ‘only’ a coat.” He eyed Ianto suspiciously. “I’ll have you know this coat is an antique, genuine World War Two era. I’ve had it a very long time, and I don’t trust just anybody with its care.”

Okay… Clearly his new boss was seriously attached to his coat. “If you don’t mind my asking, Sir, why don’t you just take it to whoever usually repairs it when it gets damaged?”

The Captain’s shoulders slumped. “I would, but… I used to take it to a tailor in Roath, Gwilym Lewis; he could work miracles with a needle and thread, been going to him for years, but he passed away a few months ago. Since then I’ve been patching it up as best I can myself. This one’s a bit beyond me though,” he admitted. “I just thought, you wear those sharp suits all the time, so surely you have to know a good, reliable tailor. You do, don’t you?”

“I’ve known a few, both here and in London, but I’m fairly skilled with a needle and thread myself. My tad was a master tailor and I learned a lot from him as I was growing up.” Ianto told himself that wasn’t a complete lie, more a sort of twisting of the truth. Harkness need never know.

“You don’t say? I never knew that!” The Captain’s reaction was almost comical; a pair of eyebrows shot upwards, burying themselves beneath the thatch of unruly hair that flopped casually across his forehead.

“You never asked,” Ianto replied dryly. Not that he really wanted people to pry into his personal life, he’d been going to great pains to dissuade his new colleagues from getting too chatty with him. It was just… It might have been nice if someone had ever actually asked him something, anything, about himself. All they ever spoke to him about was work. Sometimes it was hard to remember that was what he wanted, not to get personally involved with anyone; he just couldn’t help the way the lack of interaction made him feel, isolated and lonely, more like a thing than a person. He ruthlessly pushed those feelings aside and reached for the coat again.

Harkness hesitated a moment longer before handing it over, but then seemed to make up his mind and thrust it quickly into Ianto’s arms. “Please be gentle with it.” He looked so worried that Ianto had to force himself not to laugh. Making light of the captain’s obvious concern for his favourite piece of clothing probably wouldn’t be a wise move.

“I will, don’t worry. I’ll take it up to the boardroom, the light’s better in there and I can spread it out on the table, get a good look at what I’m dealing with.”

Harkness nodded, and without another word, scuttled back to his office. Ianto shook his head, amused by his boss’s eccentric behaviour. All this drama over a coat! It was a very nice coat though; it made Jack look suitably dashing. Hastily he shoved that thought back down. No good could come of thinking things like that.

Making his way to the boardroom, Ianto flicked the lights on and laid the coat on the table, examining it carefully, looking for any signs of damage. The rip wasn’t hard to find, being several inches long, but to Ianto’s eyes, it looked more like it had been made by slashing claws rather than a nail, and the stains around it resembled blood more than rust. Why would Jack lie to him about that?

Maybe he’d been injured and didn’t want anyone to know. For all his outgoing personality, Ianto had noticed that Torchwood’s leader was actually quite a reserved and private person. He told outlandish, unbelievable stories in order to distract people and prevent them from asking him anything too personal. Well, if Jack wanted to keep himself to himself, Ianto could accept that. After all, he was doing much the same thing himself. He’d respect the captain’s privacy if his own was respected in return. That seemed fair.

Fingering the jagged tear, Ianto made a mental list of what he’d need in order to mend it, and then went downstairs to fetch the sewing kit he kept in his locker for making running repairs to own clothes. He was glad now that he’d made such a comprehensive study of the art of mending tears almost invisibly; it looked like that was going to prove a valuable skill, not only for extending the lives of his suits but also for keeping a certain coat from falling apart. It was in his own best interests to keep the boss happy. A happy Captain was an unsuspecting Captain.

Miraculously, the coat’s lining seemed to have escaped undamaged by the rusty nail, or Weevil claws, or whatever. There was a faint, paler line down it in approximately the right place, where perhaps a sharp point had scored the fabric slightly, but it wasn’t torn. That was good news; the silky fabric would have been much more difficult to repair, and there would have been no way to do in invisibly. Thankfully, on these old coats, the lining was almost like a separate garment, attached to the coat at the shoulders, armholes, and the vent in the back, but not at the hem, meaning it was loose enough to move out of the way so Ianto could mend the tear from the inside, where his careful stitches wouldn’t be seen.

Before fetching his sewing kit, Ianto had meticulously matched up the edges of the tear to make sure nothing was missing. On his return, he set the kit on the table beside the coat and went trough his threads, selecting the closest match to the blue-grey woollen fabric the coat was made of. Cutting a manageable length, he threaded his needle, found the end of the tear, and made a few tiny stitches just below it to anchor the thread. He frowned slightly; the rip didn’t seem quite as long as he remembered, a little kink at the end of the jagged tear seemed to have vanished, but he shrugged it off as an optical illusion and set to work.

It took over half an hour, because he wanted to do the best job possible, but by the time he was done the tear was barely discernible on the inside, and completely invisible from the outside. He checked the coat over thoroughly for any trace of other damage, but found nothing, not even the usual signs of wear and tear that might be expected on such an old garment. It made Ianto wonder if the Captain’s tailor, unbeknownst to him, had replaced the original coat at some point with a more recent replica. Well, it was really none of his business, so he decided not to mention it.

Ianto carried the coat with him to the locker room when he went to put his sewing kit away. Laying it on the counter between two of the sinks, he carefully swabbed the area around the mended tear with a clean, damp cloth, over and over, until any stains, whether from rust or from blood, were as invisible to the naked eye as his repair work was. Job done, he placed the coat on a hanger and carried it back up to Jack’s office, where he hoped the damp patch would soon dry out in the circulating air from the ventilation system.

“Here you go, Sir. Almost as good as new,” he announced, stepping through the door. Harkness leapt to his feet, hurrying to take the coat from Ianto and scrutinise it.

A huge smile spread across Harkness’s face. “I can’t even see where the tear was!” he exclaimed. “Excellent work, Ianto. Thank you.” Reverently, he hung the coat on the coat stand, running his hands over it lovingly as he straightened its folds.

“I’ll leave the two of you to get reacquainted, shall I?” Ianto asked, amused. “Unless there’s something else you need me to do?”

“Coffee?” Harkness sounded slightly hesitant but hopeful, as if he wasn’t sure he should ask for more after everything Ianto had already done for him.

“Of course, Sir. Right away.” Ianto left the office, heading for the coffee machine. He could do with a mug himself before getting on with the rest of his chores for the day.


OoOoOoO


It was a little over a week after Operation Coat, and Jack and the team had just arrived back at the Hub, liberally splattered with something that looked like mud. Ianto winced; he could only imagine what sort of state the interior of the SUV must be in, and he’d no doubt be expected to clean it. Most of the clothes the team were wearing would no doubt be taken home with them and slung in their own washing machines. Everyone kept at least one change of clothing in the Hub in case of incidents such as this; working for Torchwood was frequently a messy business. Jack’s outfit though…

“You should get changed too, Sir,” Ianto said firmly, staring at his employer with an expression of mild distaste on his face. “You’re dripping mud everywhere, and if you don’t mind me saying, you smell a bit whiffy.” The rest of the team had already taken themselves down to the showers to clean up. “I can take your trousers and coat to the dry cleaners; if I get them there by four thirty they should be ready to be collected first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you, Ianto.” The Captain shrugged out of his coat and passed it to Ianto, who took it gingerly, deciding he’d better find a black trash bag to put it in for transportation. He’d bung Jack’s trousers in with it as soon as the other man was out of them…

‘Stop it,’ he told himself when an image popped into his mind of the man in question peeling himself out of his wet, muddy trousers. Damn him for being so attractive and exuding that tantalising aroma he claimed was pheromones! Ianto was forever having to remind himself to refer to his boss as ‘Harkness’ or ‘The Captain’ in his head. Using the man’s given name seemed like several steps too far towards familiarity for comfort, and yet he was painfully aware that he kept slipping up; it was getting more and more difficult every day to maintain a professional distance in the face of someone who usually smelled good enough to eat. Although not right now; as he’d already politely mentioned to his Captain, the mud, if that was what it was, stank to high heaven.

Draping the coat carefully over a nearby railing, Ianto emptied its pockets of the assorted junk Jack, Captain Harkness, always seemed to accumulate; loose change, keys to the SUV, mints, a flat black stone, a single, slightly sticky sherbet lemon, three acorns, a conker, a length of string with several knots in it, a crumpled leaf, the stub of a pencil, a beer mat with a phone number scrawled on it, a screwed up fiver, several rubber bands… Sometimes he behaved more like a small boy than a grown man. The last item was a tube of lip balm. No wonder his lips always looked so soft and supple…

Ianto had to forcibly stop himself thinking about his Captain’s lips, and instead quickly checked the coat for damage, hoping the repair he’d made just over a week ago would have held. When he couldn’t find it, his heart skipped several beats and his knees seemed to turn to jelly. It had definitely been on the left front panel, about ten inches above the hem, he remembered that clearly, but he checked the right front and then the back, just in case he was mistaken, then went back to the left front again. There was no sign of any tear, except for a short length of thread left dangling, which looked very much like the thread he’d used to make the repair. He was still staring at the coat in disbelief when Jack appeared at his elbow, damp from the shower, and dressed in clean clothes, his mucky trousers in one hand.

“Everything alright?”

Ianto almost jumped, but managed to keep it to a slight twitch instead. “Yes, of course it is, why wouldn’t it be?”

“You were just standing there, staring at my coat with a weird expression on your face.” Jack was giving him a funny look.

“Of course I was, and that weird expression, as you call it, would be disgust! I thought you liked your coat! Look at the state you’ve got it into! I hardly even know how to pick it up without getting smothered in muck! Look, just leave your trousers with it, I think I’d best put the whole lot in a plastic bag because there’s no way it’s going in my car as it is. Bad enough I’ll have to clean the SUV inside and out, without giving myself more work. Oh, and I emptied your coat pockets; you’d better take whatever you want and throw the rest away.” He gestured to the pile of miscellany. “Hope you didn’t leave anything in your trousers because I’m not checking those, you can do that yourself.” With that, Ianto headed for where he kept his cleaning supplies. His mind was racing though. This was the same coat, the loose, trailing thread proved it, and yet the tear he’d mended was gone as if it had never existed.

“Coats don’t heal themselves,” he muttered to himself angrily, wrenching open the cupboard door with more force than was strictly necessary and pulling out the roll of black bags, tearing one off and putting the rest back. Then again, this was Torchwood, where weird things happened on a daily basis. He already knew from the work he was doing sorting out the archives that Captain Harkess, or someone who looked identical to him and went by the same name, had been working for Torchwood for over a century, without ever looking any older. If he was immortal, as was beginning to seem increasingly likely going by some of the things Ianto had seen, then why couldn’t his coat be self-healing? Maybe it was even sort of alive, which would explain Jack’s excessive concern over its well-being.

Returning with the trash bag, he was relieved to find Jack had gone. Opening the bag, he dumped the trousers unceremoniously inside, and then carefully folded the coat. “Don’t worry,” he whispered to it. “Just taking you to the cleaners. You’ll feel much better after a good clean. I’ll come and collect you in the morning.” Great, now he was talking to a coat. But was it his imagination, or did the coat really seem to relax in his hands at his reassuring words? He shrugged and tucked it carefully into the bag on top of the trousers, loosely tying the top for easy carrying, but leaving a gap to let air in. He had no idea if it required air, but best to err on the side of caution; he wouldn’t want to accidentally suffocate it. How would he explain that to Jack? ‘Sorry, I killed your coat…’ No, he’d probably be executed on the spot for coaticide. He lugged the bag to his car, put it in the passenger seat foot well, and drove to the dry cleaner’s where he took his suits, handing everything to the woman behind the counter.

“Can you get these done for tomorrow morning, please? My boss wants his coat back as soon as possible.”

“Certainly, Mr Jones, we’ll have them ready for you by nine.”

“Thank you.” Folding the receipt and tucking it in his wallet, Ianto left the shop, still pondering the mystery of the coat. Did Jack know it wasn’t the genuine World War Two garment it pretended to be? Was it an alien disguised as a coat, or perhaps some sort of creature existing in symbiosis with its owner? Maybe it used nanotechnology to repair itself. Torchwood One had been experimenting with nanites, if the rumours that used to fly around the tower had any basis in fact. Then again, maybe it was just made of futuristic self-repairing fabric. Whatever the case might be, Ianto decided he’d better be respectful towards it and take good care of it; keeping on its good side wouldn’t hurt, and it might keep the Captain happy too.


OoOoOoO


The following day, Ianto arrived at the dry cleaner’s at nine sharp to collect the cleaned items. Both coat and trousers were now on separate hangers, and sheathed in plastic, looking like new. He paid the bill, took the garments to his car, and laid them flat on the back seat, making sure the coat in particular would be comfortable, before driving back to the Hub.

“Here you are, Sir, trousers and coat, all nice and clean.” Ianto handed over the trousers, but removed the plastic from the coat himself before hanging it in its usual place on the coat rack and adjusting it on its hanger so it looked comfy. “My dry cleaner does excellent work.”

“So I see.” Harkness had come to stand beside him without Ianto noticing, he’d been so intent on getting the coat settled. “Thanks.”

“Couldn’t have them stinking up the Hub, could we? Here’s the bill.” Ianto pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to his boss, who promptly handed it back.

“Take it out of petty cash; I trust you.”

“Very well, Sir.”

As Ianto turned away to do as he’d been told, the Captain spoke again. “You know, I was right about you.”

“Excuse me?” Turning back, Ianto raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“You understand the importance of being well turned out, and you know quality when you see it. I think I can rely on you to keep my coat looking as good as it does right now.” From the tone of his voice, as far as Jack was concerned, the matter was settled. Ianto was now officially responsible for coat care, along with his other duties.

“I’ll do my best, Sir, but it would help if you’d try to avoid rolling in muck while wearing it. Some kinds of mud may be beneficial for softening human skin, but they do nothing to enhance the condition of a good wool blend.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” Jack replied solemnly, accepting the mild rebuke, but his lips twitched as if he was trying not to smile, and Ianto had a bit of trouble tearing his eyes away from them.

“Right, well, lots to do today so I should get on.” Ianto turned back to check on the coat, giving it a quick, surreptitious pat, then spun on his heel and left the office, running over his to-do list in his head. He hadn’t been lying when he said he had a lot to do; there were light bulbs to change, cleaning and filing to do, more things waiting to be mended, and he needed to check on Lisa as soon as possible, but above all, there was the mystery of the coat. Perhaps there would be information on it somewhere in the archives. He was determined to find out the truth about it, no matter how long it took.


The End