Title: Prevention better than cure
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,905 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 431 - Cream
Summary: Owen has been waiting for someone to test out his latest creation.


‘Why do I have to be the guinea pig?’ Ianto moaned, wishing that Owen’s autopsy table wasn't so hard as he perched on it.

‘Because testing this thing on someone with no injuries whatsoever would be pretty bloody pointless,’ Owen snarked, scooping a slightly off white substance into a small jar. It was Owen’s latest creation and he’d been talking about it for days now, itching to get a chance to test it out in real world application. It was just a pity that he had Ianto in his sights. The promise of accelerated healing didn’t have as much appeal when he was the one to first try it out.

‘That’s what lab rats are for isn't it?’

‘I thought you were against testing on animals,’ came the reply.

‘Says the man who blew up a rat in a box, grinned and called it rat jam.’ He sighed, feeling like a cornered animal himself. ‘Why not Jack? Last I checked, he still had cuts and burns.’

‘Yeah, but he’s not normal is he? He’ll have patched himself up in a few days. Bloody creepy how he does that if you ask me.’

‘It's not his fault,’ Ianto said, defending his lover. ‘He still feels pain just like the rest of us.’

‘Thank god,’ Owen muttered, but quietly so as not to earn any further wrath. ‘Can you imagine how insufferable he'd be if he didn’t? He'd be flying into every situation hell for leather without any regards for getting maimed.’

Didn't Jack do that already, Ianto thought. He peered down at his hand, studying the red raw patches on the back of it and a few smaller spots further up his wrist and forearm. The burns were only first degree according to Owen, but they still hurt. It could have been a lot worse, he supposed. The exploding canisters in the illegal lab could have burned the whole place down around their ears. Instead Jack had borne the brunt of the exploding glass and metal shards, and Ianto had only chemical burns on one hand and part of his arm where he’d thrown it up instinctively to shield his face. He'd gotten off lightly, only adding a few more small scars to a growing collection. Even so, having the bandages removed revealed just how close he’d come to something far worse.

‘I still say you should have used a lab rat.’ Ianto said, still wary.

‘I am, and some of them make the coffee and pop down the shops for milk and biscuits,’ he replied, grinning in a way that didn’t fill Ianto with confidence. Sometimes, it was possible Owen loved his job a little bit too much. He twisted the lid on the jar and slapped it down on the table beside Ianto, before grabbing the still half full beaker of goo and dipping two gloved fingers into it, scooping out some. ‘Hand.’

Ianto rolled his eyes and begrudgingly stuck it out as Owen began working the cream into the burns. He hissed at the stinging pain, even though Owen was being surprisingly gentle about it. ‘Don't be such a baby,’ Owen chided.

‘Don't be such an arse,’ came Ianto’s reply before he could stop it escaping his mouth. He knew he should be grateful that someone cared enough to want to treat his wounds and put him back on the road to recovery, but he couldn't help but feel he was also a convenient experiment. Fortunately it only lasted a few minutes before Owen was wrapping fresh bandages back over them.

‘Once a day after showering, and again before bed,’ came the curt order.

He groaned audibly. ‘Yes, Mum.’

‘I'm not your mum.’

‘No, you're uglier.’

Owen actually smirked at their banter. ‘Yeah, now go get me a coffee like a good little boy.’



It didn't take long for Ianto to feel annoyed towards Owen. His new healing cream was doing something, Ianto was sure, because he could feel it. It was like there were a whole lot of ants crawling under his skin and irritating what was already a painful burn. Why did things that were supposed to be good for you always end up being so unpleasant? Going for a run was hot and sweaty and riddled with cramping and stitches; healthy food was always bland, or went to the other extreme and taste like the worst thing ever – he was never drinking one of Tosh’s green kale smoothies ever again, no matter how much she insisted they’d do him good; and wounds always seemed to hurt more before they got better.

He wouldn’t whinge, he vowed, glaring down at the reddish, mottled skin. It would only annoy Owen and make Ianto appear ungrateful. He gently scratched the back of his hand, feeling a brief moment of relief. This was the price you paid for working at Torchwood and keeping the city safe. The high moral ground however was doing nothing to ease his discomfort.



He should have been relaxing at the end of the day, slumping on the hub’s sofa with Jack next to him in a brief moment lacking any of the usual chaos or urgency that their jobs offered them. Instead, Ianto was restless as the irritation of his injured hand made him squirm beside Jack, trying to find a way to stop it from driving him mad.

‘How’s the hand?’ Jack asked, unable to ignore the way Ianto was fidgeting and trying to be subtle about scratching at it. His own wounds were almost gone now, his regenerative abilities having done all the hard work whilst his lesser mortal companions continued to heal at a far slower pace.

‘It’s itchy,’ Ianto complained, rubbing a hand over it in a quasi scratching way.

‘That’s probably a good thing,’ Jack replied. ‘Means the skin is healing over under the scarring surface tissue.’

‘Like, really, really itchy,’ Ianto said, scratching the back of his hand properly now, and glad that the bandages had come off yesterday so he could tend to the itch in earnest.

‘Don’t scratch,’ Jack said, giving him that captain-esque tone of voice.

Ianto growled, stopped for a few seconds in compliance with the instruction, but then went back to scratching it even harder than before. God, it was so damn itchy!

‘Stop that! You’ll hurt yourself.’ Jack's words were harsh but it was too late for them in any event. Ianto felt the warm stickiness beneath his fingernails and looked down to find he’d broken the skin, not just a little bit but rather deeply. Bright red blood spilled from the fresh wounds. He hadn’t even known he’d scratched it that hard.

Jack scrambled to find something to staunch the bleeding, giving up on finding someone makeshift and rushing to a first aid kit, pulling out a plastic covered wad of gauze, ripping the sterile packaging open with his teeth before pressing it to the wound and going back for a second bandage to wrap around the first wad of padding.

‘What did I tell you?’ he chastised, sounding just like Ianto usually did when he was berating Jack in a similar fashion.

Ianto should have been focused on keeping his hand elevated and adding pressure to the wound, but he moved to scratching the uncovered part of his wrist and arm further up, adding long red streaks before his fingernails dug into the skin there as well, trying to strip the skin away. The itching was maddening.

‘Ianto, stop! For god's sake, just stop!’ Jack pleaded.

‘It's so itchy I can't help it! God, I just need to scratch it!’

‘There's nothing left to scratch!’

‘It still itches.’ Now he was going back to his hand trying to rub through the gauze to ease the irritation. Jack's fist wrapped tightly around his uninjured hand, pulling it away and keeping it there with a strength that surprised him. He dropped to his knees, leaving Jack standing there holding his wrist. ‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Make it stop.’

Jack’s face creased in confusion and irritation. ‘What’s gotten into you?’

There were tears blurring his vision, but not so much that he couldn't see the way Jack's expression quickly softened before he dropped to his haunches to meet Ianto eye to eye, still clutching his wrist firmly, but cupping his other hand to Ianto’s cheek. ‘You know I'd do anything to ease your suffering,’ he said. ‘Please, just stop,’ and then all the fight, if not the itch, went out of Ianto, slumping on the floor where Jack hugged him before releasing him so that he could clean and bandage the fresh scratches on his arm.

‘I want Owen to check over your hand,’ he said. ‘You did a fair bit of damage to it. And I'm clipping your nails so you can't do it again.’

Ianto whimpered but let Jack have his way. It was maddening to not be able to touch it, but he used every last shred of willpower he had not to go near it. He knew he’d set his recovery back by weeks now and that was incentive enough not to make things worse.



Jack sighed as they waited for Owen to arrive back at the hub. ‘I don't get it,’ Jack finally said over mugs of tea on the desk between them. ‘Why didn't you stop?’

‘It's…’Ianto squirmed in his chair. ‘Argh, even now, you don't understand just how much it itches.’

‘Ianto, there's hardly anything left to itch.’ Which was probably true. Jack had spent longer trying to scrub the blood and skin out from under Ianto's fingernails than he had cleaning and dressing the even more ravaged wounds from before.

‘I didn't say it had to make sense! God,’ he said, moving to scratch his arm and stopping himself at the last second. ‘You’ll have to cuff my arms to the wall down in the cells, or sedate me or something. God, if this is how bad it is with Owen’s stupid cream, imagine how much worse it would be without it.’

Jack blinked and then sat bolt upright. ‘Ianto, the cream!’

‘Oh…sugar,’ he said, realising what Jack was implying. ‘You mean it's been making things worse?’

‘Or just some kind of delayed allergic reaction. I supervised the formula. We tested it several times.it should have been totally safe.’

‘Maybe I'm just really sensitive.’ He meant it as a joke but Jack's crestfallen look made him feel guilty. ‘Just tell me that if we stop using it it’ll stop itching. Not sure how long my willpower can hold out.’

Jack reached across the desk taking his uninjured hand and squeezed it. ‘No more fancy experimental creams, I promise,’ Jack said. ‘Just good old fashioned antiseptic cream and a week on light duties until that hand heals itself in its own time. Owen and I will keep working on that formula until we get it right, and next time you won't be the first one to try it out.’

Ianto’s head dropped. He hated light duties. But, he hated wanting to claw away his skin all the way down to the bone even more. He’d be needing his hand so there was no point wishing someone would just hack it off for a few minutes of relief. ‘I’m going to order Owen a whole cage full of lab rats tomorrow,’ he vowed. ‘I’m suddenly no longer opposed to testing on animals.’