TW: Ghost Story (PG-13) 14/18
Title: Ghost Story 14/18
Author:
mad_maudlin
Rating: PG-13
Pairing and Characters: Jack/Ianto, The Doctor, Torchwood, the other Torchwood, OCs, A THOUSAND ELEPHANTS, et cetera.
Length: 70,000
Spoilers: Oh, let's say the whole Rusty era of DW+TW, just to be safe.
A/N: Just to clarify, this chapter contains references to the four Torchwood radio plays, "Lost Souls," "Asylum," "The Golden Age" and "The Dead Line." If you aren't familiar with these, I can highly recommend at least one of them.
Ghost Story
by Mad Maudlin
14. on my faithless arm
We had been buried alive for two thousand years, lost in pain and silence, and frozen for a hundred more before we came to life. We had saved what we could. We mourned what we couldn't.
We were alive, but we...I...we weren't exactly well.
It's hard to describe: weakness, mainly. Our body was intact, suffused with the drums of the Vortex, and we remembered everything, had not gone mad. But we were so tired...tired of thinking, remembering, waiting. Cogitamus, ergo sumus, of course, but after so many years dead, we needed to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream...
But there would be no dreams this time. There would be no time this time. That sleep of death would be a death, a loss, evaporation. Too weak, too tired, too fragile; had to leave, to escape, to change. There was no longer a choice in the matter.
Still one chance, though. Still one hope.
Ianto. We needed Ianto.
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Ianto found him, eventually, back at the SUV, sitting in the front passenger seat with the door still open. It was bad weather for a funeral, with a wind that snatched at hats and scarves and threw moldy remnants of leaves in people's faces; Ianto doubted that had anything to do with why Jack had retreated from the graveside service. "It's almost over up there," he informed him, for lack of anything better to say.
"Good," Jack said vaguely. "You want to hang around for...are they doing anything after?"
"Don't think so," Ianto said. "And even if they were...no."
Jack nodded, and drummed his fingers on top of his hat. Ianto and Gwen and Rhys had all splashed out on new clothes, but Jack had bested all of them by coming out of the Hub in the full dress uniform of an RAF group captain, circa 1945. On anyone else it would've looked eccentric at best, but not a single guest at the funeral had said a word; one look at his face made it was obvious that the clothes were anything but a joke. They couldn't convey even a fraction of what Tosh had done for them, for the world, but they did what they could. Even when it broke every employee death policy ever written.
Or maybe it wasn't just about Tosh. Maybe because they needed this, too, the rituals and the collective expression of loss. They were Torchwood, not monsters. Most of the time.
"I want to tell them," Jack blurted, staring at his hands. "I want to make sure they know how much we cared. That we saw how extraordinary she was."
"Yeah," Ianto said lamely, leaning against the side of the car. "Just saying we worked together...it doesn't seem like enough." He'd tried to contact Owen's family and come up with a number for his mother, but the woman who had answered had said blankly I have no son and hung up. He hadn't been able to locate a father at all. And of course, there hadn't been anything left to bury.
They did what they could for Tosh, at least, and that had to be enough.
"I don't usually do this," Jack continued softly. "Funerals, I mean. I've been to too many."
But he'd still come; they had all come to stand among Tosh's family, listen to the small talk in a mixture of English and Japanese, nod while some cousin delivered the eulogy. Gwen had volunteered to say a few words as well, inadequate though they had to be, and nobody seemed to understand why the three of them were taking it almost as hard as Tosh's mother, why Jack was walking around like he'd been shot in the gut as well.
"Funerals are for the benefit the living, not the dead," Ianto said.
Jack's mouth twitched. "True. Wonder what that says about me."
The mourners were coming over the hill now; Jack glanced up at the sky and quickly looked down again, drawing a breath. Ianto had noticed ticks like that recently, and while he didn't want to say agoraphobia out loud, it seemed like a reasonable reaction to what Jack had endured, a sort of spatial Stockholm Syndrome. It was also deeply wrong, especially for someone Ianto so strongly associated with rooftops and stars, but he didn't dare bring it up. Jack had made it clear he didn't want to talk about Gray or anything related to him, saying I'll handle it myself while toying with his watch fob, and Ianto didn't know what to say to that except Okay.
"We can drop Martha and Tom at their hotel," Jack declared suddenly, putting his hat back on. "And then..."
"Your place or mine?" Ianto asked, tried to smile a little.
Jack snorted through his nose. "Maybe later. I'm not real good company right now."
"How is that different from usual, exactly?" Ianto asked, and Jack gave him a full-sized, tired smile. Maybe it wasn't all so bad. Maybe time hadn't changed him as much as Ianto had feared.
Jack clambered over the central console instead of just getting out and walking around to the driver's side, but Ianto didn't comment. Just climbed into the vacated passenger seat, which was still warm, and looked out over the cemetery grounds and the shadows that passed across them. On impulse, he reached out and squeezed Jack's hand; he couldn't say if it was for Jack's comfort or his own. But Jack looked at him and smiled again, and didn't let go until Martha and Tom were safely buckled in the back.
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Ianto was born in 1983 blah blah blah; his first memory was of his mother dying. Because you don't say things like ovarian cancer in front of a four-year-old, the nurses all told him that Mum's tummy hurt, and she needed to sleep now, and would he like a sweet? His dad brought sweets, too, chocolate and lollies and jelly babies, spoiling his and Rhiannon's appetites out of distraction or guilt while they waited the long hours in the not-quite-white hospice rooms. When Ianto asked too many questions or made too much of a bother, nine-year-old Rhi would give him a superior look at say, "Just shut up and eat your sweets, yeah?" It gave him a lifelong suspicion of overly nice people, and a taste for black coffee and other bitter things.
His mother slept a lot when they visited, and had a blue scarf instead of hair, though he knows from pictures that it used to be a dishwater blonde. Sometimes he was allowed to climb up on the bed and sit with her, and she sang him songs and held him close to her side; but at the first sign of pain or fatigue he'd be snatched away, handed off to Rhiannon or Dad or, later, one of the bevy of aunts who descended on the hospice for the end. Sometimes he was just set aside entirely, left to wait and watch until somebody had a moment to spare him.
He sat in his dad's lap all through the funeral, and his relatives all remarked on how brave he was not to cry (when they weren't murmuring about how unlucky he was, how she didn't get sick until she got pregnant). Dad and Rhiannon cried a lot that day, and Rhiannon wouldn't talk for days afterwards; Dad let the aunts hang around to help with the cooking and the wash and things while he stared off into space or looked at old pictures and cried some more.
Ianto never cried, though. He couldn't lose something he'd never actually had.
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Gwen and Martha both seemed to accept that Ianto didn't remember anything that happened in the LHC's tunnel; all the victims were reporting amnesia, after all, and one can't expect brain cells to be firing at optimum efficiency when they're missing large fractions of atomic mass. Both Gwen and Martha filled him in on the details of his rescue and recovery, and they both suggested he take a few days off when they got back to Cardiff, even when he said he felt fine.
Jack, on the other hand, insisted on driving him home. "You car, Ambassador," he said, waving at the SUV with a flourish that made his watch fob jingle.
"Thank you, my good man," Ianto said about as imperiously as he could manage, but he thought for a moment about turning him down. I'm fine, I can drive myself, I don't want to leave my car in airport parking any longer than necessary. The words flitted through his head and right back out again. He got in the front. "Straight home, now, and don't dally."
"Yes, sir."
Jack drove more slowly than usual, which is to say only slightly over the speed limit, and didn't say much at first; Ianto would've thought he'd be in a better mood, considering that they'd saved the day and all the victims had recovered. The LHC was shut down until they could figure out how not to tear any more holes in reality. Martha had promised to owe them an unspecified favor, though she'd quickly added that it would have to be something that didn't threaten her position within UNIT. All things Ianto was inclined to describe as optimal outcomes.
"You okay?" he finally asked Jack, after he actually used a signal before changing lanes.
"Yeah, fine." Jack drummed his fingers on the wheel a bit. "Just thinking."
"Should I be preparing a back-up plan?" Ianto asked, without much feeling.
"Only if you're lucky," Jack said, but his heart clearly wasn't in it either.
They continued in silence for a while. Street lights flashed overhead, revealing Jack's face in orange-tinted still frames. His jaw was tight, his eyebrows low. Ianto tried not to stare.
"I don't know what you saw down there--" Jack said, then suddenly backtracked. "I do, actually. You told me on the radio right before it happened. Remember?"
"I don't remember much of anything after Gwen and I split up," Ianto said yet again, though he was now positive that Jack didn't believe that at all. But admitting he'd been lying all along opened up too many conversations he didn't want to have, at least not so soon. (Perhaps all the angel patients had told the same lie; perhaps they'd all had the same reasons.)
"I know what you saw," Jack continued, "even if I don't know what it was like. But I can imagine. If I thought for one second that they were still within reach, Tosh or Owen or..." His hand went briefly to the watch. "Or other people..."
"They were just the alien, though." Ianto had known they were just illusions of the alien, pulled out of his mind, and there had been moments of lucidity when he'd been able to ignore them; other times, though, they'd been more real than the bite of Gwen's shoulder under his arm or the frigid air of the tunnel, a haze of brilliant dead faces calling him into the dark.
"Still," Jack said. "I just want to say...I'm glad you're still here."
Ianto turned that wording over in his mind. "That's more Gwen's doing than mine," he reminded Jack, unsure what they were really talking about.
"You fought it, though," Jack said. "You didn't give up, even when you were losing consciousness. Gwen says you were being your snarky self almost the whole time."
Ianto looked down at his hands, resting awkwardly in his lap. "Almost," he repeated. There had been moments, when, if he'd had the strength to break Gwen's grip...
"And you're here now," Jack said, as if he hadn't heard Ianto. "Which, I admit, is mostly due to my extreme brilliance, but if Gwen and Martha hadn't gotten you out of the tunnel..."
"And Harrington," Ianto said, because it seemed important to remember that at least one of their enemies had been all too human.
Jack scowled slightly, another orange frame revealing the lines on his face. "My point is," he said firmly, though Ianto wasn't sure if he was irritated at the interruptions or at himself for talking so uncharacteristically around the subject. "My point is...thank you. For choosing life."
He glanced over at Ianto for a moment, and all the words he wasn't saying flitted over his face...really, for a man of so many secrets Jack could be shockingly transparent at times. Ianto reached across the central console and placed his hand on Jack's knee, where Jack swiftly covered it with his own. "'Regret is dead, but love is more than in the summers that are flown; for I myself with these have grown to something greater than before,'" he quoted softly.
Jack let out a hoarse laugh. "Again with the Tennyson. Is that just because you missed out on the whole emo movement?"
"I did have a bunch of The Smiths on vinyl," Ianto offered.
"And that explains so much," Jack said, and tightened his grip on Ianto's hand with a smile.
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School seemed to like Ianto: he was polite to his teachers, well-behaved, and if he seemed a bit quiet, well, the poor boy had missed the whole first month with a broken leg, and with no mother and that father-what could be done? His spelling and penmanship had people muttering dyslexia all through grammar school, but he made up for it with a facility for maths that bordered on the supernatural, and he managed to muddle through on all his work one way or another.
Ianto did not like school: he didn't talk during lessons because he had few people to talk to, and he didn't like the teachers who treated him with overbearing sympathy because they'd known about his mother or thought his dad was a bit daft. He knew he was better at maths than anyone else in the school, but his favorite subject was history, and while the rest of his class squabbled over the latest Goosebumps book Ianto was dragging home hardbound tomes about Rome and Egypt, King Arthur and Queen Elizabeth I, Calcutta and Crimea. The hard part, actually, was getting him to pay attention to anything that had happened the last fifty years, up to and including his homework.
Not that his dad didn't try. Hugh Jones' solution to his son's school problems was to nag him, all try harder and put yourself out there and no pain, no gain. Hugh tried hard, putting in extra shifts at Debenham's to make ends meet, studying cookbooks in his spare time, keeping the garden trim and the floors mopped and both kids up to date on their jabs. Hugh sewed all the clothes Ianto wore until 1994, the only dad Ianto knew to bring home thimbles and patterns, the only one who spent evenings hunched over an aged Singer with the news in the background, griping alternately about the bobbin feed and the football results. Worse, he told people about this, lecturing anyone who would listen about how as soon as he'd saved up a bit of money he was going to go into business for himself, open up a tailor's shop. Something I can pass on to the kids, yeah? Always need tailors in the world. After all, clothes make the man.
Ianto wished that Dad wouldn't talk about the tailor's or hard work or Ianto's inability to apply himself. He much preferred it when they were quiet together, like at the cinema, or just walking somewhere, or-when it didn't end in broken legs-playing the park. And while later years would color over his memories with anger and shame, he did love his father in the helpless way all little boys do. Perhaps that was why he never quite forgave him.
(The worst day of Ianto's life between the ages of six and thirteen was the day Johnny Davies pushed him down the front steps of the school; Ianto got in trouble with his dad for tearing his trousers, and Rhiannon got in trouble with the school for punching Johnny in the nose.)
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"The first time I died, it was a Dalek," Jack said, his breastbone buzzing under Ianto's ear.
They had chased Gwen home, had cleaned up the Hub, had verified that the sky would not fall in if left unattended for a couple of hours. Then Ianto had welcomed Jack home. Thoroughly.
"I was on a space station, in the far future from now," Jack continued, so low and calm that Ianto wondered if he realized he had an audience. Surely if he knew Ianto was still awake, he wouldn't tell his secrets, even though Ianto was already in on so many others. "The Dalek Emperor was trying to take over the Earth. The Doctor was trying to stop him. I was just trying to buy him a little time.
"Owen and Suzie both said they remembered what it was like to be dead, when they came back. That first death...the real one...I still don't remember anything about it. Maybe I just made myself forget, or maybe Rose...this friend of mine, one who honestly meant well, she brought me back. Apparently she didn't mean to make it stick, though."
Ianto decided to take a gamble and ask a question; he'd been wondering too intensely and for too long to hold it in. "How do you accidentally make someone immortal?"
Jack laughed slightly; so he had meant to tell this story. "Kind of complicated. Like I said, she meant well, but from the sound of things she wasn't...exactly herself. She also saved the world, in the balance, so I can't blame her for anything."
Ianto shifted so instead of laying across Jack he was on his side, facing him. "Is that why you were so scared of them?" he dared ask. "Because they'd killed you before?"
"I'm scared of the damn things because they're powerful, evil, and almost indestructible," Jack said. "They've attacked humanity before...and by 'before' I mean the absolute past as well as my relative one. It usually takes a miracle to stop them."
"The Doctor seems to travel with a steady supply, from what I understand," Ianto said.
Jack grinned fondly. "Sometimes. Sometimes the miracles find him." He turned that smile on Ianto. "I should introduce you someday. Properly, I mean, not on a video screen. If I can get him to sit still long enough."
"Would the universe survive it?" Ianto asked. "The Doctor and Torchwood all trying to relax at the same time?"
"True. Wouldn't want to tempt fate."
Jack rolled over so he was facing Ianto, their bodies aligned without quite touching. Ianto wanted to blurt out, I was afraid you wouldn't come back, and maybe also I can't blame this Rose either, and possibly, just possibly, I love you. But the words got all tangled up behind his teeth, so instead of saying anything he leaned forward and kissed Jack, one hand on Jack's hip for balance. Jack tried to open his mouth and make it dirty, but Ianto kept his lips together, just pressing gently, and eventually Jack cottoned on and returned the gesture, curling his hand around Ianto's nape.
It probably said something worrisome about them that such a chaste and simple kiss meant more than all the sexual aerobics in the world. He wasn't sure if it meant the same thing to Jack as it did to him, but they'd saved the world today, and for once Ianto was willing to hope. He broke the kiss but didn't move away, stayed close enough that his eyes threatened to cross. "Yeah," Jack said, apropos of nothing, and ran his thumb along the side of Ianto's face. "Yeah."
They fell asleep just like that, but when Ianto woke up, his head was on Jack's shoulder again. Jack didn't seem to mind.
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Ianto survived into secondary school, and he even had friends for a while, furtive boys in hooded sweatshirts who weren't rebellious enough to smoke in the toilets but too jaded to hand in their homework. He stayed out of trouble because he couldn't afford it-even when Rhiannon started earning (and for some reason, dating Johnny Davies) they didn't have two pence to rub together at home, and his pocket money barely covered bus fare, much less beer or pot. He couldn't even manage to shoplift correctly, getting caught red-handed with a box of condoms under his jacket on a dare from Pete Wallace.
(Ianto doesn't even remember why either of them wanted the condoms, except for the illicit thrill of having them. No one in his circle of friends had ever gotten a finger on a girl at that point, and while they were all more or less aware that homosexuals existed, none of them would've ever admitted to being one. In Ianto's mental world at the time, there wasn't a great deal of room on the spectrum between Elton John and the old man over the road who stared at children, and certainly no place for himself, even if he would've done just about anything to make Pete Wallace smile.)
His dad was furious about it, of course; his dad, who worked harder than ever just to stay afloat, who'd gone gray at some point when Ianto wasn't looking, who kept talking about the fucking tailor's even though he'd boxed up the sewing machine years ago. They'd had a fight about it, and then he'd dragged Ianto to a hearing and prodded him through his apologies, and afterwards they'd fought again. Clean your act up had been said, along with the usual try harder and for god's sake, show some initiative, only Ianto had fired back with shit town and shit life and no point and working at fucking Debenham's.
Officially Hugh's first heart attack was nearly twenty-four-hours later, but everyone knew what caused it, and if Ianto somehow hadn't noticed, Rhiannon and half the neighbors would've reminded him.
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It had been nearly a week and Jack still hadn't returned the motorcycle. "You've officially gone from 'commandeering' to 'theft' at this point," Ianto reminded him.
"It's a great bike," Jack protested.
"Which does not belong to you."
Gwen had gone to check in on Freda and then ask a few questions about an iridium-clad waffle iron that had turned up on eBay that morning; Jack, under the guise of tuning up the computers, had stripped down his vest and started crawling around under desks. Ianto suspected it was at least fifty percent real work, fifty percent ploy to distract him. In revenge, he loosed his tie. "You like the bike, too," Jack said with a bit of a pout. "Admit it."
"Given the proper safety equipment, I think it could be tolerable," Ianto told him loftily.
Jack gave him a long-suffering look that faded into a definite leer when his eyes dropped to the exposed hollow of Ianto's throat. "You like it," Jack purred, using what Ianto could only call his Sex Voice. "I can tell. The way your thighs tighten up when we take a turn..."
"That would be an attempt not to fall off," Ianto said, but couldn't reach the intended dry sarcasm; by this point his response to the Sex Voice was practically Pavlovian.
"You hold on like you're trying to climb inside me," Jack carried on, easing out from under the desk and propping himself up on his elbows. "Pressed so close I can feel your heartbeat against my back."
Ianto said, "You know that's impossible with your coat on," but he also couldn't just sit there with Jack spread out on the floor like that, knees bent and ever so slightly spread, his vest clinging just so. Ianto shrugged off his jacket and, in a calculated gesture, unbuttoned his waistcoat. "And you seem to be missing the part where I'm usually chanting, 'Please, God, don't.'"
Jack's eyes, which had followed the line of Ianto's shirt buttons down to his belt, snapped back up. He smirked. "Well, considering what we're usually doing when you call me God..."
"You need to mind your ego, Jack," Ianto shot back, and very carefully unbuttoned his cuffs. "People will think you're compensating for something."
"I'm sure you'll be quick to correct them." Jack was now watching Ianto's wrists, eyes tracking for any glimpse of bare skin. It was really absurd how easy this was sometimes. "But we were talking about the bike."
"I think the bike and your ego are intimately connected," Ianto pointed out, lacing his fingers behind his head.
Jack quirked his eyebrow. "And speaking of intimate connections--"
That was when Gwen came back. She stepped through the blast doors, looked at Jack displayed on the floor and Ianto's lack of buttons, and immediately covered her eyes. "Don't mind me, just here to pick up the bear traps, carry on with whatever you're doing," she said brightly.
"Bear traps?" Jack asked, shifting gears quickly enough.
"The waffle iron is sapient, growing, and hungry," Gwen said breezily. "Be back in an hour or so."
She disappeared into the armory. "Bear traps?" Ianto said softly.
Jack shrugged. "If she needed our help, she'd have yelled as us for fooling around on the clock."
This was true. "So..." Ianto said. "The motorbike situation."
"You like the motorbike," Jack insisted with another slow smile.
"You like the motorbike," Ianto said.
Jack stood up and came to stand in front of Ianto, nearly in his lap, hands heavy on his shoulders. "I like you on the motorbike."
Ianto hooked a finger into Jack's dangling braces and gently tugged. "Then perhaps we should give it a proper farewell before you finally return it to the rightful owner."
"A proper farewell and a thorough cleaning," Jack suggested.
"When," Ianto asked, "am I anything but thorough?"
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Half of Ianto's friends dropped out of school after their GCSEs, but Dad told him put yourself out there, so Ianto started joining clubs and making eye contact and looking up words before he tried to spell them. His marks went up a bit and his old friends drifted away, and he even managed to date a few times, bossy girls who complained about how serious he was. He still didn't have the money for trouble-even less than before, because heart attacks turned out to be complicated things, and one day the sewing machine was back on the table because Dad didn't have anything else to do.
(Ianto joined clubs and got a part-time job and even went in for sports he was fantastically bad at, and when he had to be at home he stayed shut up in his room doing homework, or "homework," or reading history books from the school library. Dad nodded and encouraged him and didn't follow, which was the general idea.)
Rhiannon went and got married to Johnny Davies, which Ianto thought was totally uncalled for, even if David was already two years old and prone to throwing grape juice on Ianto's homework. One of the aunts, down for the wedding, paid for the gown and for Ianto's tuxedo with an airy comment about looking respectable; but it was his dad who helped him with the bow tie and the waistcoat, nattering under his breath about the cut and the quality. And then they stood in front of a mirror, side by side, Ianto half a head taller, Hugh grayer than ever.
"Look at you," Hugh said. "You're a man now, Ianto. You and your sister went and grew up on me."
Ianto didn't know what to say to that, exactly.
"And you'll be off to university soon, no doubt," Hugh continued. "Keep your head down like you have been, you'll be at the top of your class, just you see. My boy," and then he started sniffling, and wrapped his arm around Ianto's shoulders so Ianto couldn't get away. "You'll do us proud, yeah?" Hugh warbled. "Me and your mother?"
"Yeah," Ianto mumbled, and looked away from the mirror and Dad's tears. "Course I will."
Hugh walked Rhiannon down the aisle. She got back from the honeymoon in time to tell him goodbye.
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New Delhi in August was miserably hot, but in the tradition of hot places everywhere, the hotels were air conditioned to the verge of refrigeration. Ianto toweled off as quickly as he could before pulling on his pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. Air conditioning like that in a city this hot was a menace to the environment...even the villains were carbon-neutral these days...
No, bad line of thought, and he wasn't pursuing it. He stepped out of the bathroom, shivering in a gust of even cooler air from a vent directly overhead. In defiance of both climate control and climate change, Jack was lurking out on the little balcony with the doors hanging wide open. Ianto watched his bent silhouette in the fading sunset for a little while, wondering if he should interrupt this brood. At least he hadn't climbed on the roof; that was a positive sign.
He avoided the issue for a few moments by picking up the clothes Jack had strewn around the room and folding them up on the foot of the spare bed. (Another positive sign, in a different sense, was that Jack hadn't gone out on the balcony naked: he'd stripped to the waist, but his trousers were firmly in place.) Ianto could feel the humid outdoor air seeping in, and the sounds of the city beyond them, a metropolis so dense that a thousand people could go missing in a day and nobody would notice. He'd always thought that India was a loud country, probably from too many films, stock scenes of the crowded bazaar and gridlocked traffic. But they'd splurged on a good hotel, the kind that could afford to air condition people to death, and the street noises outside were little different than London or Cardiff.
Jack must've heard Ianto moving around the room, because he suddenly turned around, leaning against the balcony rail. The doorway framed him perfectly, in a way that made Ianto wonder, just a little bit, if Jack was constantly on the lookout for potential dramatic poses. "I'm trying to tell myself that she was wrong," he declared, as if Ianto had asked the question.
"She killed thousands of people, Jack," Ianto said.
He sighed. "Okay, yeah, so that was wrong, obviously. But her reasons...she just wanted control over her life, Ianto. She wanted to fix her mistakes."
"Most of those 'mistakes' weren't hers to fix," Ianto pointed out. "Presuming we even accept that they were mistakes."
Jack's head fell back, eyes skyward, though from here it was unlikely he saw any stars. "That's the problem with time travel," he said quietly. "The urge to do everything over, and do it better...but of course, you can't ever really fix anything. You can't step in the same river twice."
"Because it's not the same river, and you're not the same man," Ianto finished quietly.
Jack looked at him sharply, and there was a beat of silence. "I've got a lot of regrets," he suddenly confessed. "A lot of things I'd change if I could. And I can't blame Nelly for wanting a second chance."
Ianto suddenly found he couldn't look Jack in the eye, even as he allowed himself to ask. "And if you got a second chance? What would you do with it?"
Jack left the balcony door hanging open, crossing to the bed and pulling Ianto down on top of him; Ianto came precariously close to planting a knee in Jack's crotch, but managed to catch himself at the last minute. "Here and now are the only things that matter," he said quietly. "Not who I was, but who I am. There are no second chances. And it's better to forget about the things I can't change."
"They say those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it," Ianto said.
"Hell, I've already started," Jack said, lacing his fingers together over the small of Ianto's back. "I've done the twentieth century twice, haven't I?"
"You were in a freezer the second time," Ianto pointed out.
"Technicality."
Jack kissed him then, gently at first and then with more vigor, and Ianto gave in after a token resistance. There were so many other questions he could ask about Jack and his past and his regrets, but he knew that right now there was no chance of a straight answer. And perhaps it didn't really matter, as Jack seemed to think. Perhaps if Ianto kept telling himself that, he'd even believe it.
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Ianto did go to university: read economics even though he preferred history, took computer classes because they were easy, held down odd jobs so he could afford to get into trouble. He didn't talk about home if he could help it and he called Rhiannon less and less, as it became clear they didn't have much of anything to say to one another.
Instead he concentrated on talking and dressing like he was cooler than he actually was, listening to the right music and having the right sort of phone. He did well enough academically, but only just, because there was always something better to be doing: something to read, something to watch, some place to go where he was a bright young uni student and not the poor boy with the daft dad. He was still too serious and too shy, but girls seemed to be into that, said it meant he had depth. Other guys called him an old man, but in jest, and relied on him to get them home from the pub on weekends.
And six months after graduation, he was still tending bars on the weekends and mopping floors at night and arguing with his flatmates about whether a barista counted as a skilled profession. He'd moved to London because that was what you did when you'd read economics, he'd checked the spelling on his CV and bought an interview suit (clothes make the man, it would never leave him) but despite all the talk of a booming economy he couldn't seem to get his foot in the door anywhere that didn't require a name tag and a urine test.
Christmas came and his flatmates all went home. Ianto got blind drunk, and possibly chlamydia, and rolled into bed in the small hours after the Lord's birth. The last thing he thought before falling asleep in his underwear was, I am going to end up working at Debenham's and I will never make my father proud.
The next thing he remembered, he was standing on the edge of the roof, along with one-third of his neighbors, blinking at the spaceship that was hovering over London.
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He'd pulled himself together by the time Professor Courtney came back, but from the look on her face she wasn't fooled. "I've ordered another round of tests, but it'll be a while before the results are in," she said softly, sitting down next to him.
"There's been no word from Gwen," he said, toying with his now-empty coffee cup. "She should be in Swansea by now."
"Give it time," Courtney said vaguely, and there wasn't much for Ianto to say to that, so they both stared at Jack.
He was terrifyingly still, as still as death, even as his heart and lungs pumped cruelly on, steady as a ticking watch. Aside from a little redness where the EEG leads attached to his temples, he looked no different than he had when they first got him admitted. He didn't even blink; a nurse came around periodically to give him eye drops instead. The monitors sang their atonal song, steady as a Gregorian chant.
Ianto had sat more than a few bedside vigils-for his parents, for Lisa-but at least those had always had an end in sight. He couldn't quite square himself to the thought that Jack could be like this forever.
"I never thought I'd see him like this," Courtney said suddenly, softly, and that was another thing Ianto had a little trouble thinking about sensibly-sitting next to one of Jack's exes, a woman with more gray hairs than brown and deep-cut lines on her face, and knowing that thirty-five years ago she'd been young and gorgeous and Jack had looked the same. It was one thing to know these things in his head, but it was another to know it, to talk to her and have the sudden irrational thought that she was old enough to be his mother but they'd both seen Jack naked. They'd both watched him while he slept.
Ianto cleared his throat. "You knew that he...about him, I mean."
She nodded. "Saw it happen the day I met him. He was run over by a car and chasing after it on foot about thirty seconds later."
That made him laugh, though it sounded horribly wrong in the stark white hospital ward. "That sounds about right."
"He wanted me to work full-time for Torchwood," Courtney said quietly after a few moments. "He said I'd never see such advanced science, not in my lifetime. When I said no, we saw each other a few more times, but...well, you know Jack."
Not really. Not well enough. Ianto nodded anyway. "Why did you turn him down?"
"A lot of reasons," she said. "I suppose fear was a large part of it-fear of Torchwood, of monsters in the dark. That, and I never wanted my work to become my life, and Jack had no life but his work. Is he still like that?"
"I suppose he is," Ianto said. He had questions, like did Jack always live at the Hub? and did he always wear the coat? and did he ever say he loved you? But that felt intrusive, almost dishonest, talking about Jack like he wasn't even there.
And maybe, technically, he wasn't, but there was a principle to the thing.
Courtney seemed to sense the awkwardness, because she fell silent for a while, nursing her own cup of coffee. When she did speak, it was to say, "I know it's a bit grisly to think about, but I have to wonder..."
"Wonder what?" Ianto asked.
She looked at Jack, watched his chest rise and fall. "He can shrug off a bullet or a bite wound or a speeding 1971 Vauxhall Victor," she said slowly. "But this...whatever it is...it isn't fatal. As long as it's not terminal him, he reacts physically just like any other patient."
All in a flash, Ianto understood what she was saying, and it pulled out a short and irrational laugh. Courtney raised an eyebrow at him. "I told him once that I was going to kill him," Ianto said, knowing it was sort of a non sequitur.
"Oh?" Courtney said warily.
Ianto nodded. "I told him I'd make him suffer if I had the chance. I called him a monster."
"Sounds like it was a very emotional situation," Courtney said diplomatically.
"I meant it," Ianto said, looking at his hands. "Or I didn't. I don't know anymore. But either way, I suppose I'm keeping my promise."
Because he'd watched Jack die too many times. He'd watched Jack die without knowing he was coming back. And even if it was mercy killing-Ianto knew he couldn't be the one to pull the trigger. Maybe Gwen could, or the professor, but not him. Never him.
"We're hardly at the point of desperate measures yet, anyway," Courtney said firmly, and set her coffee aside. She squeezed Ianto's hand gently, her fingers still warm from the cup. "I'm certainly not giving up yet."
"Thank you," Ianto said, and watched Jack's chest rise and fall.
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They called it the Christmas Incident, said it was something in the water, redacted the word alien from every story in print. It was used as proof that Harriet Jones was coming apart at the seams, because honestly, what sort of PM believes in aliens? Ianto's flatmates came back and thought it was a laugh, and make sleepwalking jokes for the rest of the week. "You need to be locked in tonight? Not gonna go roof-walking, are you? Maybe we ought to tie you to the bed..."
Ianto remembered the cold wind in his face, though, cutting through his underwear and raising gooseflesh in unusual places. He remembered the other people on the roof and their expressions: confused, nervous, recoiling from the steep drop into frantic, crying arms. An old lady looking lost. Two little children who didn't seem to understand why their mother clung to them and trembled. People saying zombies and horrible and why wouldn't you stop? We tried to make you stop.
"They were just playing," Rhiannon said when Ianto asked her about. "You know Johnny, he thinks that sort of thing is funny."
"Mica's barely walking, Rhi," Ianto said. "I was asleep. How can you think this is a joke?"
"Oh, Ianto, you've walked in your sleep before--"
He turned to the Internet, slogging through the nonsense about stars and projectors and lizard men. Followed trails of reasonable thinking to people who were asking the same questions he was. Some people had taken pictures of the spaceship, of the "jumpers" with lights flashing about their heads. Some people, like Ianto, insisted they weren't drugged, weren't faking anything. Some people had theories, talked about telepathy or post-hypnotic suggestion or spiritual possession.
Ianto collected facts, contacting other jumpers by email, looking for patterns. He bothered the other people in his building and asked personal questions and combed news reports and photographs. He pretended to be from the NHS. He made spreadsheets.
This is going to sound crazy, he wrote, but I think it's genetic. Jumpers are more likely to have another jumper in the family than non-jumpers. In particular, if one parent was a jumper there's a 3/4 chance at least one kid was, too, and almost 100% if both parents were jumpers; only about 15% of jumpers in my sample said neither parent jumped. Given a worldwide average of 1/3 of the population on the roofs, that's a pretty significant spread! I'll upload my numbers if you don't believe me. Didn't Guinevere 1 have a blood sample on board???
He posted online about it, but the forums were C&Ded almost immediately, so he never got any answers. He told Rhiannon about it and she called him daft. He told one of his flatmates about it, and he said Ianto needed to get laid. And he told a girl about it, a tall, beautiful girl who came into the coffee shop one morning and started flirting with him, and she believed him, asked to see his data, was impressed by the logic. She said she could get him an interview at her firm, if he was interested. She said he had depth. She said her name was Lisa Hallett.
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Ianto didn't want to do anything special on his birthday, and they didn't; too busy clearing out a nest of Weevils before a new construction project broke into their territory. (Though Gwen did get him a card.) The week after his birthday, though, he got a mysterious text message from Jack, directing him to a restaurant in town. No weapons, it said, so Ianto didn't think it was an emergency, but he thought it was work related right up to the moment the greeter directed him to a table.
Because Jack was waiting for him, and he was wearing a suit.
"You're speechless," Jack observed while Ianto stared at him. "Speechless is good." It was a gray suit with a blue shirt and tie, exactly the colors that suited him best. Ianto hadn't been aware that Jack even owned anything that hadn't come from a military memorabilia shop. Single-breasted jacket with a slightly suppressed waist, gold cufflinks, the gold chain of his fob watch just visible against his waistcoat when he stood. "Do I need to pull your chair out for you?" Jack asked.
"You don't own a suit," Ianto said stupidly, but sat down before he caused a scene. "I do your dry cleaning, and in two years you've never owned a suit.
"It's a special occasion," Jack said lightly. "Thought it was worth the expense. I ordered an appetizer, by the way."
Special occasion and birthday didn't join up in his mind until much later, because Jack didn't say anything specific about it. In fact, he was doing his best to act as if it were no big deal, even though Jack in contemporary clothes was a bit like Jack in a proper office building-out of place, exotic, alien. The jacket sleeves were just generous enough to conceal his wrist strap, but Ianto caught him feeling for it a few times during the meal, as if to remind himself it was still there.
It was a really good suit, and Ianto could hardly wait to get Jack out of it.
"I said I didn't want to do anything for my birthday," Ianto reminded Jack much later, when they were back at his flat and both their suits had been scattered across the room.
"This isn't a thing," Jack said drowsily. "It's dinner and sex. We do dinner and sex all the time."
"The suit is a thing," Ianto insisted.
Jack shrugged at him and rolled over on his face. "You like suits," he said, as if that was a perfectly reasonable answer.
So Ianto hooked on his pants and started picking up, saying firmly, "They'll wrinkle," when Jack started to whine about it. He put his own clothes in the hamper and folded Jack's neatly on a chair. When he found the waistcoat, the watch was missing; he had to fish it out from under the bureau. "Where did you get this, anyway?" Ianto asked, studying the intricate engravings on the back.
Jack chuckled. "That is a long and problematic story. You like it?"
"It's...it's beautiful, actually." Always warm to the touch, he'd noticed, and lighter than it looked; perhaps it came from the future, or another world, or both. He couldn't quite hear the mechanism, but he could feel it, steady as a heartbeat.
Jack sat partway up and studied Ianto for a while. Then, quietly, he said, "Keep it."
Ianto blinked at him. "Jack, I couldn't possibly--"
"Think of it as a birthday present," Jack said, and reached out to close Ianto's fingers around the warm metal. "It's something I've been carrying around too long. And I know you've got a thing for watches."
Ianto studied his face, but Jack wasn't kidding-quite the opposite, really. "You're totally serious," he said, just to be sure.
"Like a heart attack," Jack said, and withdrew his hand. "It reminds me of...stuff. Some of it not so good anymore. Hopefully you'll make some better memories for it."
Ianto studied the watch again, tested the winding mechanism, and tried to open it. "It's stuck."
"Has been for years." Jack stretched thoroughly and then pulled up a sheet to cover himself. "Now, you coming to bed, or what?"
Chapter One
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fifteen
Author:
mad_maudlin
Rating: PG-13
Pairing and Characters: Jack/Ianto, The Doctor, Torchwood, the other Torchwood, OCs, A THOUSAND ELEPHANTS, et cetera.
Length: 70,000
Spoilers: Oh, let's say the whole Rusty era of DW+TW, just to be safe.
A/N: Just to clarify, this chapter contains references to the four Torchwood radio plays, "Lost Souls," "Asylum," "The Golden Age" and "The Dead Line." If you aren't familiar with these, I can highly recommend at least one of them.
Ghost Story
by Mad Maudlin
14. on my faithless arm
We had been buried alive for two thousand years, lost in pain and silence, and frozen for a hundred more before we came to life. We had saved what we could. We mourned what we couldn't.
We were alive, but we...I...we weren't exactly well.
It's hard to describe: weakness, mainly. Our body was intact, suffused with the drums of the Vortex, and we remembered everything, had not gone mad. But we were so tired...tired of thinking, remembering, waiting. Cogitamus, ergo sumus, of course, but after so many years dead, we needed to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream...
But there would be no dreams this time. There would be no time this time. That sleep of death would be a death, a loss, evaporation. Too weak, too tired, too fragile; had to leave, to escape, to change. There was no longer a choice in the matter.
Still one chance, though. Still one hope.
Ianto. We needed Ianto.
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Ianto found him, eventually, back at the SUV, sitting in the front passenger seat with the door still open. It was bad weather for a funeral, with a wind that snatched at hats and scarves and threw moldy remnants of leaves in people's faces; Ianto doubted that had anything to do with why Jack had retreated from the graveside service. "It's almost over up there," he informed him, for lack of anything better to say.
"Good," Jack said vaguely. "You want to hang around for...are they doing anything after?"
"Don't think so," Ianto said. "And even if they were...no."
Jack nodded, and drummed his fingers on top of his hat. Ianto and Gwen and Rhys had all splashed out on new clothes, but Jack had bested all of them by coming out of the Hub in the full dress uniform of an RAF group captain, circa 1945. On anyone else it would've looked eccentric at best, but not a single guest at the funeral had said a word; one look at his face made it was obvious that the clothes were anything but a joke. They couldn't convey even a fraction of what Tosh had done for them, for the world, but they did what they could. Even when it broke every employee death policy ever written.
Or maybe it wasn't just about Tosh. Maybe because they needed this, too, the rituals and the collective expression of loss. They were Torchwood, not monsters. Most of the time.
"I want to tell them," Jack blurted, staring at his hands. "I want to make sure they know how much we cared. That we saw how extraordinary she was."
"Yeah," Ianto said lamely, leaning against the side of the car. "Just saying we worked together...it doesn't seem like enough." He'd tried to contact Owen's family and come up with a number for his mother, but the woman who had answered had said blankly I have no son and hung up. He hadn't been able to locate a father at all. And of course, there hadn't been anything left to bury.
They did what they could for Tosh, at least, and that had to be enough.
"I don't usually do this," Jack continued softly. "Funerals, I mean. I've been to too many."
But he'd still come; they had all come to stand among Tosh's family, listen to the small talk in a mixture of English and Japanese, nod while some cousin delivered the eulogy. Gwen had volunteered to say a few words as well, inadequate though they had to be, and nobody seemed to understand why the three of them were taking it almost as hard as Tosh's mother, why Jack was walking around like he'd been shot in the gut as well.
"Funerals are for the benefit the living, not the dead," Ianto said.
Jack's mouth twitched. "True. Wonder what that says about me."
The mourners were coming over the hill now; Jack glanced up at the sky and quickly looked down again, drawing a breath. Ianto had noticed ticks like that recently, and while he didn't want to say agoraphobia out loud, it seemed like a reasonable reaction to what Jack had endured, a sort of spatial Stockholm Syndrome. It was also deeply wrong, especially for someone Ianto so strongly associated with rooftops and stars, but he didn't dare bring it up. Jack had made it clear he didn't want to talk about Gray or anything related to him, saying I'll handle it myself while toying with his watch fob, and Ianto didn't know what to say to that except Okay.
"We can drop Martha and Tom at their hotel," Jack declared suddenly, putting his hat back on. "And then..."
"Your place or mine?" Ianto asked, tried to smile a little.
Jack snorted through his nose. "Maybe later. I'm not real good company right now."
"How is that different from usual, exactly?" Ianto asked, and Jack gave him a full-sized, tired smile. Maybe it wasn't all so bad. Maybe time hadn't changed him as much as Ianto had feared.
Jack clambered over the central console instead of just getting out and walking around to the driver's side, but Ianto didn't comment. Just climbed into the vacated passenger seat, which was still warm, and looked out over the cemetery grounds and the shadows that passed across them. On impulse, he reached out and squeezed Jack's hand; he couldn't say if it was for Jack's comfort or his own. But Jack looked at him and smiled again, and didn't let go until Martha and Tom were safely buckled in the back.
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Ianto was born in 1983 blah blah blah; his first memory was of his mother dying. Because you don't say things like ovarian cancer in front of a four-year-old, the nurses all told him that Mum's tummy hurt, and she needed to sleep now, and would he like a sweet? His dad brought sweets, too, chocolate and lollies and jelly babies, spoiling his and Rhiannon's appetites out of distraction or guilt while they waited the long hours in the not-quite-white hospice rooms. When Ianto asked too many questions or made too much of a bother, nine-year-old Rhi would give him a superior look at say, "Just shut up and eat your sweets, yeah?" It gave him a lifelong suspicion of overly nice people, and a taste for black coffee and other bitter things.
His mother slept a lot when they visited, and had a blue scarf instead of hair, though he knows from pictures that it used to be a dishwater blonde. Sometimes he was allowed to climb up on the bed and sit with her, and she sang him songs and held him close to her side; but at the first sign of pain or fatigue he'd be snatched away, handed off to Rhiannon or Dad or, later, one of the bevy of aunts who descended on the hospice for the end. Sometimes he was just set aside entirely, left to wait and watch until somebody had a moment to spare him.
He sat in his dad's lap all through the funeral, and his relatives all remarked on how brave he was not to cry (when they weren't murmuring about how unlucky he was, how she didn't get sick until she got pregnant). Dad and Rhiannon cried a lot that day, and Rhiannon wouldn't talk for days afterwards; Dad let the aunts hang around to help with the cooking and the wash and things while he stared off into space or looked at old pictures and cried some more.
Ianto never cried, though. He couldn't lose something he'd never actually had.
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Gwen and Martha both seemed to accept that Ianto didn't remember anything that happened in the LHC's tunnel; all the victims were reporting amnesia, after all, and one can't expect brain cells to be firing at optimum efficiency when they're missing large fractions of atomic mass. Both Gwen and Martha filled him in on the details of his rescue and recovery, and they both suggested he take a few days off when they got back to Cardiff, even when he said he felt fine.
Jack, on the other hand, insisted on driving him home. "You car, Ambassador," he said, waving at the SUV with a flourish that made his watch fob jingle.
"Thank you, my good man," Ianto said about as imperiously as he could manage, but he thought for a moment about turning him down. I'm fine, I can drive myself, I don't want to leave my car in airport parking any longer than necessary. The words flitted through his head and right back out again. He got in the front. "Straight home, now, and don't dally."
"Yes, sir."
Jack drove more slowly than usual, which is to say only slightly over the speed limit, and didn't say much at first; Ianto would've thought he'd be in a better mood, considering that they'd saved the day and all the victims had recovered. The LHC was shut down until they could figure out how not to tear any more holes in reality. Martha had promised to owe them an unspecified favor, though she'd quickly added that it would have to be something that didn't threaten her position within UNIT. All things Ianto was inclined to describe as optimal outcomes.
"You okay?" he finally asked Jack, after he actually used a signal before changing lanes.
"Yeah, fine." Jack drummed his fingers on the wheel a bit. "Just thinking."
"Should I be preparing a back-up plan?" Ianto asked, without much feeling.
"Only if you're lucky," Jack said, but his heart clearly wasn't in it either.
They continued in silence for a while. Street lights flashed overhead, revealing Jack's face in orange-tinted still frames. His jaw was tight, his eyebrows low. Ianto tried not to stare.
"I don't know what you saw down there--" Jack said, then suddenly backtracked. "I do, actually. You told me on the radio right before it happened. Remember?"
"I don't remember much of anything after Gwen and I split up," Ianto said yet again, though he was now positive that Jack didn't believe that at all. But admitting he'd been lying all along opened up too many conversations he didn't want to have, at least not so soon. (Perhaps all the angel patients had told the same lie; perhaps they'd all had the same reasons.)
"I know what you saw," Jack continued, "even if I don't know what it was like. But I can imagine. If I thought for one second that they were still within reach, Tosh or Owen or..." His hand went briefly to the watch. "Or other people..."
"They were just the alien, though." Ianto had known they were just illusions of the alien, pulled out of his mind, and there had been moments of lucidity when he'd been able to ignore them; other times, though, they'd been more real than the bite of Gwen's shoulder under his arm or the frigid air of the tunnel, a haze of brilliant dead faces calling him into the dark.
"Still," Jack said. "I just want to say...I'm glad you're still here."
Ianto turned that wording over in his mind. "That's more Gwen's doing than mine," he reminded Jack, unsure what they were really talking about.
"You fought it, though," Jack said. "You didn't give up, even when you were losing consciousness. Gwen says you were being your snarky self almost the whole time."
Ianto looked down at his hands, resting awkwardly in his lap. "Almost," he repeated. There had been moments, when, if he'd had the strength to break Gwen's grip...
"And you're here now," Jack said, as if he hadn't heard Ianto. "Which, I admit, is mostly due to my extreme brilliance, but if Gwen and Martha hadn't gotten you out of the tunnel..."
"And Harrington," Ianto said, because it seemed important to remember that at least one of their enemies had been all too human.
Jack scowled slightly, another orange frame revealing the lines on his face. "My point is," he said firmly, though Ianto wasn't sure if he was irritated at the interruptions or at himself for talking so uncharacteristically around the subject. "My point is...thank you. For choosing life."
He glanced over at Ianto for a moment, and all the words he wasn't saying flitted over his face...really, for a man of so many secrets Jack could be shockingly transparent at times. Ianto reached across the central console and placed his hand on Jack's knee, where Jack swiftly covered it with his own. "'Regret is dead, but love is more than in the summers that are flown; for I myself with these have grown to something greater than before,'" he quoted softly.
Jack let out a hoarse laugh. "Again with the Tennyson. Is that just because you missed out on the whole emo movement?"
"I did have a bunch of The Smiths on vinyl," Ianto offered.
"And that explains so much," Jack said, and tightened his grip on Ianto's hand with a smile.
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School seemed to like Ianto: he was polite to his teachers, well-behaved, and if he seemed a bit quiet, well, the poor boy had missed the whole first month with a broken leg, and with no mother and that father-what could be done? His spelling and penmanship had people muttering dyslexia all through grammar school, but he made up for it with a facility for maths that bordered on the supernatural, and he managed to muddle through on all his work one way or another.
Ianto did not like school: he didn't talk during lessons because he had few people to talk to, and he didn't like the teachers who treated him with overbearing sympathy because they'd known about his mother or thought his dad was a bit daft. He knew he was better at maths than anyone else in the school, but his favorite subject was history, and while the rest of his class squabbled over the latest Goosebumps book Ianto was dragging home hardbound tomes about Rome and Egypt, King Arthur and Queen Elizabeth I, Calcutta and Crimea. The hard part, actually, was getting him to pay attention to anything that had happened the last fifty years, up to and including his homework.
Not that his dad didn't try. Hugh Jones' solution to his son's school problems was to nag him, all try harder and put yourself out there and no pain, no gain. Hugh tried hard, putting in extra shifts at Debenham's to make ends meet, studying cookbooks in his spare time, keeping the garden trim and the floors mopped and both kids up to date on their jabs. Hugh sewed all the clothes Ianto wore until 1994, the only dad Ianto knew to bring home thimbles and patterns, the only one who spent evenings hunched over an aged Singer with the news in the background, griping alternately about the bobbin feed and the football results. Worse, he told people about this, lecturing anyone who would listen about how as soon as he'd saved up a bit of money he was going to go into business for himself, open up a tailor's shop. Something I can pass on to the kids, yeah? Always need tailors in the world. After all, clothes make the man.
Ianto wished that Dad wouldn't talk about the tailor's or hard work or Ianto's inability to apply himself. He much preferred it when they were quiet together, like at the cinema, or just walking somewhere, or-when it didn't end in broken legs-playing the park. And while later years would color over his memories with anger and shame, he did love his father in the helpless way all little boys do. Perhaps that was why he never quite forgave him.
(The worst day of Ianto's life between the ages of six and thirteen was the day Johnny Davies pushed him down the front steps of the school; Ianto got in trouble with his dad for tearing his trousers, and Rhiannon got in trouble with the school for punching Johnny in the nose.)
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"The first time I died, it was a Dalek," Jack said, his breastbone buzzing under Ianto's ear.
They had chased Gwen home, had cleaned up the Hub, had verified that the sky would not fall in if left unattended for a couple of hours. Then Ianto had welcomed Jack home. Thoroughly.
"I was on a space station, in the far future from now," Jack continued, so low and calm that Ianto wondered if he realized he had an audience. Surely if he knew Ianto was still awake, he wouldn't tell his secrets, even though Ianto was already in on so many others. "The Dalek Emperor was trying to take over the Earth. The Doctor was trying to stop him. I was just trying to buy him a little time.
"Owen and Suzie both said they remembered what it was like to be dead, when they came back. That first death...the real one...I still don't remember anything about it. Maybe I just made myself forget, or maybe Rose...this friend of mine, one who honestly meant well, she brought me back. Apparently she didn't mean to make it stick, though."
Ianto decided to take a gamble and ask a question; he'd been wondering too intensely and for too long to hold it in. "How do you accidentally make someone immortal?"
Jack laughed slightly; so he had meant to tell this story. "Kind of complicated. Like I said, she meant well, but from the sound of things she wasn't...exactly herself. She also saved the world, in the balance, so I can't blame her for anything."
Ianto shifted so instead of laying across Jack he was on his side, facing him. "Is that why you were so scared of them?" he dared ask. "Because they'd killed you before?"
"I'm scared of the damn things because they're powerful, evil, and almost indestructible," Jack said. "They've attacked humanity before...and by 'before' I mean the absolute past as well as my relative one. It usually takes a miracle to stop them."
"The Doctor seems to travel with a steady supply, from what I understand," Ianto said.
Jack grinned fondly. "Sometimes. Sometimes the miracles find him." He turned that smile on Ianto. "I should introduce you someday. Properly, I mean, not on a video screen. If I can get him to sit still long enough."
"Would the universe survive it?" Ianto asked. "The Doctor and Torchwood all trying to relax at the same time?"
"True. Wouldn't want to tempt fate."
Jack rolled over so he was facing Ianto, their bodies aligned without quite touching. Ianto wanted to blurt out, I was afraid you wouldn't come back, and maybe also I can't blame this Rose either, and possibly, just possibly, I love you. But the words got all tangled up behind his teeth, so instead of saying anything he leaned forward and kissed Jack, one hand on Jack's hip for balance. Jack tried to open his mouth and make it dirty, but Ianto kept his lips together, just pressing gently, and eventually Jack cottoned on and returned the gesture, curling his hand around Ianto's nape.
It probably said something worrisome about them that such a chaste and simple kiss meant more than all the sexual aerobics in the world. He wasn't sure if it meant the same thing to Jack as it did to him, but they'd saved the world today, and for once Ianto was willing to hope. He broke the kiss but didn't move away, stayed close enough that his eyes threatened to cross. "Yeah," Jack said, apropos of nothing, and ran his thumb along the side of Ianto's face. "Yeah."
They fell asleep just like that, but when Ianto woke up, his head was on Jack's shoulder again. Jack didn't seem to mind.
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Ianto survived into secondary school, and he even had friends for a while, furtive boys in hooded sweatshirts who weren't rebellious enough to smoke in the toilets but too jaded to hand in their homework. He stayed out of trouble because he couldn't afford it-even when Rhiannon started earning (and for some reason, dating Johnny Davies) they didn't have two pence to rub together at home, and his pocket money barely covered bus fare, much less beer or pot. He couldn't even manage to shoplift correctly, getting caught red-handed with a box of condoms under his jacket on a dare from Pete Wallace.
(Ianto doesn't even remember why either of them wanted the condoms, except for the illicit thrill of having them. No one in his circle of friends had ever gotten a finger on a girl at that point, and while they were all more or less aware that homosexuals existed, none of them would've ever admitted to being one. In Ianto's mental world at the time, there wasn't a great deal of room on the spectrum between Elton John and the old man over the road who stared at children, and certainly no place for himself, even if he would've done just about anything to make Pete Wallace smile.)
His dad was furious about it, of course; his dad, who worked harder than ever just to stay afloat, who'd gone gray at some point when Ianto wasn't looking, who kept talking about the fucking tailor's even though he'd boxed up the sewing machine years ago. They'd had a fight about it, and then he'd dragged Ianto to a hearing and prodded him through his apologies, and afterwards they'd fought again. Clean your act up had been said, along with the usual try harder and for god's sake, show some initiative, only Ianto had fired back with shit town and shit life and no point and working at fucking Debenham's.
Officially Hugh's first heart attack was nearly twenty-four-hours later, but everyone knew what caused it, and if Ianto somehow hadn't noticed, Rhiannon and half the neighbors would've reminded him.
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It had been nearly a week and Jack still hadn't returned the motorcycle. "You've officially gone from 'commandeering' to 'theft' at this point," Ianto reminded him.
"It's a great bike," Jack protested.
"Which does not belong to you."
Gwen had gone to check in on Freda and then ask a few questions about an iridium-clad waffle iron that had turned up on eBay that morning; Jack, under the guise of tuning up the computers, had stripped down his vest and started crawling around under desks. Ianto suspected it was at least fifty percent real work, fifty percent ploy to distract him. In revenge, he loosed his tie. "You like the bike, too," Jack said with a bit of a pout. "Admit it."
"Given the proper safety equipment, I think it could be tolerable," Ianto told him loftily.
Jack gave him a long-suffering look that faded into a definite leer when his eyes dropped to the exposed hollow of Ianto's throat. "You like it," Jack purred, using what Ianto could only call his Sex Voice. "I can tell. The way your thighs tighten up when we take a turn..."
"That would be an attempt not to fall off," Ianto said, but couldn't reach the intended dry sarcasm; by this point his response to the Sex Voice was practically Pavlovian.
"You hold on like you're trying to climb inside me," Jack carried on, easing out from under the desk and propping himself up on his elbows. "Pressed so close I can feel your heartbeat against my back."
Ianto said, "You know that's impossible with your coat on," but he also couldn't just sit there with Jack spread out on the floor like that, knees bent and ever so slightly spread, his vest clinging just so. Ianto shrugged off his jacket and, in a calculated gesture, unbuttoned his waistcoat. "And you seem to be missing the part where I'm usually chanting, 'Please, God, don't.'"
Jack's eyes, which had followed the line of Ianto's shirt buttons down to his belt, snapped back up. He smirked. "Well, considering what we're usually doing when you call me God..."
"You need to mind your ego, Jack," Ianto shot back, and very carefully unbuttoned his cuffs. "People will think you're compensating for something."
"I'm sure you'll be quick to correct them." Jack was now watching Ianto's wrists, eyes tracking for any glimpse of bare skin. It was really absurd how easy this was sometimes. "But we were talking about the bike."
"I think the bike and your ego are intimately connected," Ianto pointed out, lacing his fingers behind his head.
Jack quirked his eyebrow. "And speaking of intimate connections--"
That was when Gwen came back. She stepped through the blast doors, looked at Jack displayed on the floor and Ianto's lack of buttons, and immediately covered her eyes. "Don't mind me, just here to pick up the bear traps, carry on with whatever you're doing," she said brightly.
"Bear traps?" Jack asked, shifting gears quickly enough.
"The waffle iron is sapient, growing, and hungry," Gwen said breezily. "Be back in an hour or so."
She disappeared into the armory. "Bear traps?" Ianto said softly.
Jack shrugged. "If she needed our help, she'd have yelled as us for fooling around on the clock."
This was true. "So..." Ianto said. "The motorbike situation."
"You like the motorbike," Jack insisted with another slow smile.
"You like the motorbike," Ianto said.
Jack stood up and came to stand in front of Ianto, nearly in his lap, hands heavy on his shoulders. "I like you on the motorbike."
Ianto hooked a finger into Jack's dangling braces and gently tugged. "Then perhaps we should give it a proper farewell before you finally return it to the rightful owner."
"A proper farewell and a thorough cleaning," Jack suggested.
"When," Ianto asked, "am I anything but thorough?"
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Half of Ianto's friends dropped out of school after their GCSEs, but Dad told him put yourself out there, so Ianto started joining clubs and making eye contact and looking up words before he tried to spell them. His marks went up a bit and his old friends drifted away, and he even managed to date a few times, bossy girls who complained about how serious he was. He still didn't have the money for trouble-even less than before, because heart attacks turned out to be complicated things, and one day the sewing machine was back on the table because Dad didn't have anything else to do.
(Ianto joined clubs and got a part-time job and even went in for sports he was fantastically bad at, and when he had to be at home he stayed shut up in his room doing homework, or "homework," or reading history books from the school library. Dad nodded and encouraged him and didn't follow, which was the general idea.)
Rhiannon went and got married to Johnny Davies, which Ianto thought was totally uncalled for, even if David was already two years old and prone to throwing grape juice on Ianto's homework. One of the aunts, down for the wedding, paid for the gown and for Ianto's tuxedo with an airy comment about looking respectable; but it was his dad who helped him with the bow tie and the waistcoat, nattering under his breath about the cut and the quality. And then they stood in front of a mirror, side by side, Ianto half a head taller, Hugh grayer than ever.
"Look at you," Hugh said. "You're a man now, Ianto. You and your sister went and grew up on me."
Ianto didn't know what to say to that, exactly.
"And you'll be off to university soon, no doubt," Hugh continued. "Keep your head down like you have been, you'll be at the top of your class, just you see. My boy," and then he started sniffling, and wrapped his arm around Ianto's shoulders so Ianto couldn't get away. "You'll do us proud, yeah?" Hugh warbled. "Me and your mother?"
"Yeah," Ianto mumbled, and looked away from the mirror and Dad's tears. "Course I will."
Hugh walked Rhiannon down the aisle. She got back from the honeymoon in time to tell him goodbye.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
New Delhi in August was miserably hot, but in the tradition of hot places everywhere, the hotels were air conditioned to the verge of refrigeration. Ianto toweled off as quickly as he could before pulling on his pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. Air conditioning like that in a city this hot was a menace to the environment...even the villains were carbon-neutral these days...
No, bad line of thought, and he wasn't pursuing it. He stepped out of the bathroom, shivering in a gust of even cooler air from a vent directly overhead. In defiance of both climate control and climate change, Jack was lurking out on the little balcony with the doors hanging wide open. Ianto watched his bent silhouette in the fading sunset for a little while, wondering if he should interrupt this brood. At least he hadn't climbed on the roof; that was a positive sign.
He avoided the issue for a few moments by picking up the clothes Jack had strewn around the room and folding them up on the foot of the spare bed. (Another positive sign, in a different sense, was that Jack hadn't gone out on the balcony naked: he'd stripped to the waist, but his trousers were firmly in place.) Ianto could feel the humid outdoor air seeping in, and the sounds of the city beyond them, a metropolis so dense that a thousand people could go missing in a day and nobody would notice. He'd always thought that India was a loud country, probably from too many films, stock scenes of the crowded bazaar and gridlocked traffic. But they'd splurged on a good hotel, the kind that could afford to air condition people to death, and the street noises outside were little different than London or Cardiff.
Jack must've heard Ianto moving around the room, because he suddenly turned around, leaning against the balcony rail. The doorway framed him perfectly, in a way that made Ianto wonder, just a little bit, if Jack was constantly on the lookout for potential dramatic poses. "I'm trying to tell myself that she was wrong," he declared, as if Ianto had asked the question.
"She killed thousands of people, Jack," Ianto said.
He sighed. "Okay, yeah, so that was wrong, obviously. But her reasons...she just wanted control over her life, Ianto. She wanted to fix her mistakes."
"Most of those 'mistakes' weren't hers to fix," Ianto pointed out. "Presuming we even accept that they were mistakes."
Jack's head fell back, eyes skyward, though from here it was unlikely he saw any stars. "That's the problem with time travel," he said quietly. "The urge to do everything over, and do it better...but of course, you can't ever really fix anything. You can't step in the same river twice."
"Because it's not the same river, and you're not the same man," Ianto finished quietly.
Jack looked at him sharply, and there was a beat of silence. "I've got a lot of regrets," he suddenly confessed. "A lot of things I'd change if I could. And I can't blame Nelly for wanting a second chance."
Ianto suddenly found he couldn't look Jack in the eye, even as he allowed himself to ask. "And if you got a second chance? What would you do with it?"
Jack left the balcony door hanging open, crossing to the bed and pulling Ianto down on top of him; Ianto came precariously close to planting a knee in Jack's crotch, but managed to catch himself at the last minute. "Here and now are the only things that matter," he said quietly. "Not who I was, but who I am. There are no second chances. And it's better to forget about the things I can't change."
"They say those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it," Ianto said.
"Hell, I've already started," Jack said, lacing his fingers together over the small of Ianto's back. "I've done the twentieth century twice, haven't I?"
"You were in a freezer the second time," Ianto pointed out.
"Technicality."
Jack kissed him then, gently at first and then with more vigor, and Ianto gave in after a token resistance. There were so many other questions he could ask about Jack and his past and his regrets, but he knew that right now there was no chance of a straight answer. And perhaps it didn't really matter, as Jack seemed to think. Perhaps if Ianto kept telling himself that, he'd even believe it.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Ianto did go to university: read economics even though he preferred history, took computer classes because they were easy, held down odd jobs so he could afford to get into trouble. He didn't talk about home if he could help it and he called Rhiannon less and less, as it became clear they didn't have much of anything to say to one another.
Instead he concentrated on talking and dressing like he was cooler than he actually was, listening to the right music and having the right sort of phone. He did well enough academically, but only just, because there was always something better to be doing: something to read, something to watch, some place to go where he was a bright young uni student and not the poor boy with the daft dad. He was still too serious and too shy, but girls seemed to be into that, said it meant he had depth. Other guys called him an old man, but in jest, and relied on him to get them home from the pub on weekends.
And six months after graduation, he was still tending bars on the weekends and mopping floors at night and arguing with his flatmates about whether a barista counted as a skilled profession. He'd moved to London because that was what you did when you'd read economics, he'd checked the spelling on his CV and bought an interview suit (clothes make the man, it would never leave him) but despite all the talk of a booming economy he couldn't seem to get his foot in the door anywhere that didn't require a name tag and a urine test.
Christmas came and his flatmates all went home. Ianto got blind drunk, and possibly chlamydia, and rolled into bed in the small hours after the Lord's birth. The last thing he thought before falling asleep in his underwear was, I am going to end up working at Debenham's and I will never make my father proud.
The next thing he remembered, he was standing on the edge of the roof, along with one-third of his neighbors, blinking at the spaceship that was hovering over London.
-\-\-\-\-\-
He'd pulled himself together by the time Professor Courtney came back, but from the look on her face she wasn't fooled. "I've ordered another round of tests, but it'll be a while before the results are in," she said softly, sitting down next to him.
"There's been no word from Gwen," he said, toying with his now-empty coffee cup. "She should be in Swansea by now."
"Give it time," Courtney said vaguely, and there wasn't much for Ianto to say to that, so they both stared at Jack.
He was terrifyingly still, as still as death, even as his heart and lungs pumped cruelly on, steady as a ticking watch. Aside from a little redness where the EEG leads attached to his temples, he looked no different than he had when they first got him admitted. He didn't even blink; a nurse came around periodically to give him eye drops instead. The monitors sang their atonal song, steady as a Gregorian chant.
Ianto had sat more than a few bedside vigils-for his parents, for Lisa-but at least those had always had an end in sight. He couldn't quite square himself to the thought that Jack could be like this forever.
"I never thought I'd see him like this," Courtney said suddenly, softly, and that was another thing Ianto had a little trouble thinking about sensibly-sitting next to one of Jack's exes, a woman with more gray hairs than brown and deep-cut lines on her face, and knowing that thirty-five years ago she'd been young and gorgeous and Jack had looked the same. It was one thing to know these things in his head, but it was another to know it, to talk to her and have the sudden irrational thought that she was old enough to be his mother but they'd both seen Jack naked. They'd both watched him while he slept.
Ianto cleared his throat. "You knew that he...about him, I mean."
She nodded. "Saw it happen the day I met him. He was run over by a car and chasing after it on foot about thirty seconds later."
That made him laugh, though it sounded horribly wrong in the stark white hospital ward. "That sounds about right."
"He wanted me to work full-time for Torchwood," Courtney said quietly after a few moments. "He said I'd never see such advanced science, not in my lifetime. When I said no, we saw each other a few more times, but...well, you know Jack."
Not really. Not well enough. Ianto nodded anyway. "Why did you turn him down?"
"A lot of reasons," she said. "I suppose fear was a large part of it-fear of Torchwood, of monsters in the dark. That, and I never wanted my work to become my life, and Jack had no life but his work. Is he still like that?"
"I suppose he is," Ianto said. He had questions, like did Jack always live at the Hub? and did he always wear the coat? and did he ever say he loved you? But that felt intrusive, almost dishonest, talking about Jack like he wasn't even there.
And maybe, technically, he wasn't, but there was a principle to the thing.
Courtney seemed to sense the awkwardness, because she fell silent for a while, nursing her own cup of coffee. When she did speak, it was to say, "I know it's a bit grisly to think about, but I have to wonder..."
"Wonder what?" Ianto asked.
She looked at Jack, watched his chest rise and fall. "He can shrug off a bullet or a bite wound or a speeding 1971 Vauxhall Victor," she said slowly. "But this...whatever it is...it isn't fatal. As long as it's not terminal him, he reacts physically just like any other patient."
All in a flash, Ianto understood what she was saying, and it pulled out a short and irrational laugh. Courtney raised an eyebrow at him. "I told him once that I was going to kill him," Ianto said, knowing it was sort of a non sequitur.
"Oh?" Courtney said warily.
Ianto nodded. "I told him I'd make him suffer if I had the chance. I called him a monster."
"Sounds like it was a very emotional situation," Courtney said diplomatically.
"I meant it," Ianto said, looking at his hands. "Or I didn't. I don't know anymore. But either way, I suppose I'm keeping my promise."
Because he'd watched Jack die too many times. He'd watched Jack die without knowing he was coming back. And even if it was mercy killing-Ianto knew he couldn't be the one to pull the trigger. Maybe Gwen could, or the professor, but not him. Never him.
"We're hardly at the point of desperate measures yet, anyway," Courtney said firmly, and set her coffee aside. She squeezed Ianto's hand gently, her fingers still warm from the cup. "I'm certainly not giving up yet."
"Thank you," Ianto said, and watched Jack's chest rise and fall.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
They called it the Christmas Incident, said it was something in the water, redacted the word alien from every story in print. It was used as proof that Harriet Jones was coming apart at the seams, because honestly, what sort of PM believes in aliens? Ianto's flatmates came back and thought it was a laugh, and make sleepwalking jokes for the rest of the week. "You need to be locked in tonight? Not gonna go roof-walking, are you? Maybe we ought to tie you to the bed..."
Ianto remembered the cold wind in his face, though, cutting through his underwear and raising gooseflesh in unusual places. He remembered the other people on the roof and their expressions: confused, nervous, recoiling from the steep drop into frantic, crying arms. An old lady looking lost. Two little children who didn't seem to understand why their mother clung to them and trembled. People saying zombies and horrible and why wouldn't you stop? We tried to make you stop.
"They were just playing," Rhiannon said when Ianto asked her about. "You know Johnny, he thinks that sort of thing is funny."
"Mica's barely walking, Rhi," Ianto said. "I was asleep. How can you think this is a joke?"
"Oh, Ianto, you've walked in your sleep before--"
He turned to the Internet, slogging through the nonsense about stars and projectors and lizard men. Followed trails of reasonable thinking to people who were asking the same questions he was. Some people had taken pictures of the spaceship, of the "jumpers" with lights flashing about their heads. Some people, like Ianto, insisted they weren't drugged, weren't faking anything. Some people had theories, talked about telepathy or post-hypnotic suggestion or spiritual possession.
Ianto collected facts, contacting other jumpers by email, looking for patterns. He bothered the other people in his building and asked personal questions and combed news reports and photographs. He pretended to be from the NHS. He made spreadsheets.
This is going to sound crazy, he wrote, but I think it's genetic. Jumpers are more likely to have another jumper in the family than non-jumpers. In particular, if one parent was a jumper there's a 3/4 chance at least one kid was, too, and almost 100% if both parents were jumpers; only about 15% of jumpers in my sample said neither parent jumped. Given a worldwide average of 1/3 of the population on the roofs, that's a pretty significant spread! I'll upload my numbers if you don't believe me. Didn't Guinevere 1 have a blood sample on board???
He posted online about it, but the forums were C&Ded almost immediately, so he never got any answers. He told Rhiannon about it and she called him daft. He told one of his flatmates about it, and he said Ianto needed to get laid. And he told a girl about it, a tall, beautiful girl who came into the coffee shop one morning and started flirting with him, and she believed him, asked to see his data, was impressed by the logic. She said she could get him an interview at her firm, if he was interested. She said he had depth. She said her name was Lisa Hallett.
-\-\-\-\-\-\-
Ianto didn't want to do anything special on his birthday, and they didn't; too busy clearing out a nest of Weevils before a new construction project broke into their territory. (Though Gwen did get him a card.) The week after his birthday, though, he got a mysterious text message from Jack, directing him to a restaurant in town. No weapons, it said, so Ianto didn't think it was an emergency, but he thought it was work related right up to the moment the greeter directed him to a table.
Because Jack was waiting for him, and he was wearing a suit.
"You're speechless," Jack observed while Ianto stared at him. "Speechless is good." It was a gray suit with a blue shirt and tie, exactly the colors that suited him best. Ianto hadn't been aware that Jack even owned anything that hadn't come from a military memorabilia shop. Single-breasted jacket with a slightly suppressed waist, gold cufflinks, the gold chain of his fob watch just visible against his waistcoat when he stood. "Do I need to pull your chair out for you?" Jack asked.
"You don't own a suit," Ianto said stupidly, but sat down before he caused a scene. "I do your dry cleaning, and in two years you've never owned a suit.
"It's a special occasion," Jack said lightly. "Thought it was worth the expense. I ordered an appetizer, by the way."
Special occasion and birthday didn't join up in his mind until much later, because Jack didn't say anything specific about it. In fact, he was doing his best to act as if it were no big deal, even though Jack in contemporary clothes was a bit like Jack in a proper office building-out of place, exotic, alien. The jacket sleeves were just generous enough to conceal his wrist strap, but Ianto caught him feeling for it a few times during the meal, as if to remind himself it was still there.
It was a really good suit, and Ianto could hardly wait to get Jack out of it.
"I said I didn't want to do anything for my birthday," Ianto reminded Jack much later, when they were back at his flat and both their suits had been scattered across the room.
"This isn't a thing," Jack said drowsily. "It's dinner and sex. We do dinner and sex all the time."
"The suit is a thing," Ianto insisted.
Jack shrugged at him and rolled over on his face. "You like suits," he said, as if that was a perfectly reasonable answer.
So Ianto hooked on his pants and started picking up, saying firmly, "They'll wrinkle," when Jack started to whine about it. He put his own clothes in the hamper and folded Jack's neatly on a chair. When he found the waistcoat, the watch was missing; he had to fish it out from under the bureau. "Where did you get this, anyway?" Ianto asked, studying the intricate engravings on the back.
Jack chuckled. "That is a long and problematic story. You like it?"
"It's...it's beautiful, actually." Always warm to the touch, he'd noticed, and lighter than it looked; perhaps it came from the future, or another world, or both. He couldn't quite hear the mechanism, but he could feel it, steady as a heartbeat.
Jack sat partway up and studied Ianto for a while. Then, quietly, he said, "Keep it."
Ianto blinked at him. "Jack, I couldn't possibly--"
"Think of it as a birthday present," Jack said, and reached out to close Ianto's fingers around the warm metal. "It's something I've been carrying around too long. And I know you've got a thing for watches."
Ianto studied his face, but Jack wasn't kidding-quite the opposite, really. "You're totally serious," he said, just to be sure.
"Like a heart attack," Jack said, and withdrew his hand. "It reminds me of...stuff. Some of it not so good anymore. Hopefully you'll make some better memories for it."
Ianto studied the watch again, tested the winding mechanism, and tried to open it. "It's stuck."
"Has been for years." Jack stretched thoroughly and then pulled up a sheet to cover himself. "Now, you coming to bed, or what?"
Chapter One
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fifteen