Rec: Pavlov's Bell

[visionshadows.livejournal.com]

Title: Pavlov's Bell
Author: smirnoffmule
Genre:Slight Angst, Smut
Rating:NC-17
Summary: Training a pterodactyl isn't so easy for Ianto. Neither is caring for Lisa.
Status: Complete
Warnings: None
Comment or Excerpt from fic: This fic is set before Cyberwoman and sometime after Ianto joins, bringing Myfanway along with him. It's a look at Ianto's mind and what he will and won't focus on. It's an outsiders look at Jack and his seeming obliviousness. It's also a really hot, awkward first time. Sometimes those are the best.




Close to, Myfanwy was not unlike a jet plane, or maybe a bat, or maybe what might happen if you crossed the two, a technique Ianto had no doubt there was technology for buried in the archives. As he rolled up his shirt sleeves and slipped on a rubber glove, she started to buzz him, clapping her beak and crying aloud. She passed him, and banked, and passed again, watching him out of each bright amber eye in turn. He removed his whistle from his pocket and dropped the string around his neck, then picked up the bottle of protein sauce and doused the fish heads liberally with it. Pteranodons, according to everything he googled, were meant to be fish eaters, but Myfanwy still needed coaxing. He watched her for a few minutes until her fly-bys got alarmingly close, and then he popped the whistle in his mouth and started to blast on it at intervals. With every blast he threw a fish head, hurling it as hard as he could out into the open space. He was a bad throw, and Myfanwy was a bad catch, and he frequently sent her diving like a gannet into the lower reaches of the hub, but they got into a rhythm, and he caught himself grinning, unguarded. He was so unused to it, his face muscles were aching. He caught himself laughing even, as she rushed close past him, her wings blowing warm, dry air over his upturned face. When she cried out, the echoes made his heart ache. Trapped in the hub, she was oversized and cumbersome; she was made for open oceans and warm air currents, cruising forever against the blessed silence of a prehistoric sky. He wondered if she missed it, or even knew it was gone, and that the cars and the people and the houses weren’t just clumsy terrestrial beasts no stranger than the ones she’d grown up with.