FIC: Spaceships Sailing In (On Christmas Day In The Morning)

I trust everyone is enjoying their end of year festivities! This is a terrible time to be posting a story, but it is finished and might as well be brought into the world. Happy holidays, fandom, you bunch of mad people, I love you far more than is reasonable.

Spaceships Sailing In (On Christmas Day In The Morning)
Torchwood ; Gwen/Rhys with a side of Jack/Ianto ; PG-13 ; 5000 words ; title adapted from the carol
In which Gwen sleeps, Jack has a run-in with emotional honesty, Ianto is kidnapped by a wall, and Rhys meets his first alien tentacles. A Christmas tale.

( Rhys capped the lid on his pen triumphantly. )

And the call went out across the land: "Yuletiiiide!"

I like this new tradition where Yuletide's the first present I open in the morning. And lo, I have three stories! \o/!

Extra treats by some very kind souls:

celestial alphabets (His Dark Materials, Mary & Serafina)
Gorgeous, utterly gorgeous. We are the symbols. ♥

we stared for hours in our makers' face (David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas, Sonmi~451)
Someone took a half-baked notion in my Yuletide letter and made the perfect drabble out of it. Glee!

And my story proper, which I love beyond all telling:

Book Of Work (David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas, Frobiser & Sixsmith)

I asked for backstory, and oh but this delivers, and so much more besides! The style is just perfect, amazingly in keeping with the tone of Frobisher's part of the novel, which is hard to reproduce, and there are outside POVs and diaries and dreams and a host of moments that are so perfectly realised. This is the sort of story that I desperately wanted to read but knew I couldn't write. Magnificent work, I'm a very lucky little Yuletider!

An extract:

I return. Train's whistle a despairing shriek as I left the Aged Ps, all hope abandoned, only to be conveyed in a brisk rattle over endless dreary fens until the coldly lucid spires tore through my last remnants of illusion and left me gasping on the platform. No porter, either. S. met me outside college and we repaired to Paton's in mutual commiseration. Like the rest of Rutherford's boys he's been back a week already, firing atoms into gold or transmuting lead into swans, am vague on details.