TW: Ghost Story (PG-13) 18/18
Title: Ghost Story 18/18
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.
Ghost Story
by Mad Maudlin
18. our mortal world enough
This is where we started from: no base, no equipment, one agent MIA and one planning to go on restricted duty (but not, emphatically, maternity leave) in a few months. Martha was in charge of UNIT's operations at the Hub site, but she was still traveling elsewhere at least two days out of any week on other business. Rhys was good for many things, but hunting Weevils wasn't among them. The police were not on speaking terms with us, except for Andy Davidson, who was in so much trouble over his participation in the estate riot that he hardly counted.
So things had been better. But we still had a job to do. So we did it.
-\-\-\-\-\-
In the interest of getting Roald Dahl Plass cleared for rebuilding as quickly as possible, UNIT simply scooped much of the debris of the Hub into skips and hauled it away to an industrial park on the edge of town. This was where we did "processing," which largely involved picking through gravel and twisted bits of metal for anything that was both recognizable and still worth keeping. Everything else was checked for hazards-biological, radiological, chemical, psychic, anything they had a sensor for-and then disposed of according to obscure UNIT protocols for such things.
We gave Myfanwy a proper funeral, though. Some protocols are made to be broken.
And at one point, Captain Price, the officer in charge of the operation when Martha wasn't around, brought me something in an evidence bag. It looked from a distance like a lump of coal, but then I realized there were blackened bits dangling off it, scraps of something shredded and soft. "Technological," Price said. "Didn't match anything in your records. Could it be bomb debris?"
"Unlikely," I said. "Let me look at it."
She handed me the bag and I turned it over a few times. Something glittered at me under the filthy surface; it had been battered and blackened, but the thing still held its shape. I very carefully felt over the sides, and when I found a particular button I pressed it. The thing in the bag gave a shrill protesting beep, and Price jumped. "What was that?" she demanded
"Just checking the battery," I said, and opened the bag. The actual band had been mostly sheered away, but it was definitely Jack's wrist strap, and though it stank of old blood and chemical explosives it was still operational. Thank god for fifty-first century quality control. "This is personal property of Captain Harkness. I'll take custody of it for now."
"It still needs to be documented," Price protested.
"I'll take care of it," I said. "After all, it's not like UNIT is preparing your own database of our inventory without our permission, are you?"
Price was a very blonde woman, almost translucent in her paleness, which meant she blushed very easily. "Of course not," she muttered, and fled the room.
I didn't need much sleep anymore, which allowed me to terrorize the soldiers by staying late and arriving early with good spirits and coffee that I didn't share, but that evening I left at a reasonable hour, and I took the strap with me. The band was clearly a lost cause, but with a little patience and many different products, I was able to clean the actual mechanisms until they gleamed, until I could almost forget how it had been damaged. Jack himself hadn't put so much effort into it in years; the days of pride in the Agency and their emblems were long gone. All diagnostic tests said it was in perfect working order, too, the exact sort of technology Torchwood was supposed to harvest for our purposes.
I put it away, very carefully, in a box. For when he came back. If he came back. For now.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Rebuilding meant recruiting; Gwen's growing belly didn't give us much of a choice in that. The first person she tracked down was Lois Habiba, though she didn't see fit to warn me about it, which meant our initial conversation went something like this:
I found her at my desk at the warehouse, going through my inbox, and didn't recognize her immediately. Since I knew she wasn't with UNIT, I attempted a polite, "Hello?"
She looked up and me and blurted, "Oh, my god."
"Er...Lois, right?" I remembered her face now, even though I'd only seen it a time or two through the contact lenses. Oddly enough, she still looked just as terrified as she had been at the time.
In fact, her answer to my question was, "Oh god. Oh god."
"I don't mean to be rude, but aren't you meant to be in prison right now?" I asked her. Gwen had said Lois was arrested, so it seemed the logical outcome.
She just pointed a finger at me and declared, "You're dead."
I flinched. Of course, before being arrested she'd been with COBRA, watching our ill-fated stand. "Did Gwen bring you here?" I asked her, hoping for some kind of coherent reply.
But Lois was still gibbering. "I saw you-on the screen-you went to Thames House with Captain Harkness!"
"Yes. Right. Wait here a moment." I left the room that served as our de facto back-up Hub and shut the door firmly behind me. "Gwen!"
Lois did eventually calm down, but only as long as I wasn't talking or looking at her; Gwen insisted that this was a perfectly logical first new hire. "We owe her," she told me quietly when Lois was out of the room. "She risked a lot to help us. And we know she's brave, and God knows we need the help."
"Yes, she'll be tremendous help when we need to staple a Weevil to death," I said.
"I've already given her the contract," Gwen said. "It's done. Unless you're planning to pull seniority on me?"
With just the two of us, chain of command had seemed irrelevant, not to mention a forgone conclusion. "Two months is hardly a relevant difference," I pointed out, wondering why we were revisiting an old argument.
"And the hundred years before that?" she asked.
I hadn't exactly thought of it that way, and something in her voice made me realize we weren't talking about Lois anymore. "You think I'm going to try to take over for Jack?"
"Of course not," Gwen said, but she was looking too hard into my eyes. "Just wondering how to calculate your pension plan now."
"Trust me, I've no interest in leading Torchwood," I said. Jack hadn't, either, I wanted to add, but it didn't seem like the time for telling such secrets. Gwen just nodded, and I wondered how long she'd actually sat up worrying about that. "Back on the subject of Lois, what are we supposed to tell her about me?"
"The truth," Gwen said. "If I'm in command, I'm making that an order."
"Can we trust her with it?" I asked.
"We're going to have to, Ianto," she said, and when I failed to muster proper enthusiasm, she sighed. "Think of it this way: If anything should happen to you in the field, do you want to be explaining yourself while you're bleeding green and purple all over the A&E, or beforehand?" she asked.
"I do not bleed green or purple," I said. "And for future reference, I still make the coffee around here."
For some reason, that brought Gwen out laughing until tears rolled down her face.
-\-\-\-\-\-
The conversation with Lois did raise some pertinent questions, and after her next business trip Martha brought me a copy of the Sullivan Papers-really just a loose collection of trivia and educated guesses about Time Lord physiology based on UNIT's previous encounters with the Doctor. Still, it was good information to have, since left to my own devices I probably would've poisoned myself on aspirin or something equally ridiculous.
"And if you want to know more," she added, with no small arch of the eyebrow, "I still have the Doctor's number. He won't exactly turn away questions."
Of course not. As far as he knew, he was the only Time Lord in existence; he might overlook me entirely if I didn't seek him out. The same way he'd overlooked me every time before. Not that I held a grudge; not that I could honestly wish for different, from where I stood. That wasn't even a considerations as I told Martha, "No." When she raised that eyebrow even higher, I added, "Not right now, at least."
"Can I ask why?" Martha asked, and more than a little pointedly.
Which is why I looked at my hands, not at her, while I groped for words. "It's not that I don't want to see him," I said slowly. "But I'm still...I've been living human lives for so long. Maybe too long. I'm not sure what it even means to call myself a Time Lord, and I certainly don't know if I can live up to the Doctor's expectations. I mean, he and I constitute and endangered species, for god's sake."
Martha nodded. "All right. I understand that. But I also think you should tell him sooner, rather than later."
"What, that I've been hiding in plain sight all this time?" I asked. "He's not going to like that."
"He doesn't like being alone, either," she shot back.
I looked her in the eye. "I'm not going to leave Torchwood for him, though. And you know he's going to ask."
"And you can say no to him," Martha said. "I mean, I have."
"No offense, but it's hardly the same situation," I pointed out.
She sighed. "All right, all right, you win. Just...don't put it off, okay? It's not going to get any easier."
"I hardly think a few weeks will make a difference in the grand scale of things," I said, and she made a face at me while I finished signing everything.
It was only later that I realized that we weren't only talking about the Doctor.
-\-\-\-\-\-
I did look for Jack. From our room in the warehouse, I checked up on his bank accounts, searched for his usual aliases. I read up on old friends he might've gone to ground with, checked newspapers and police blotters from some of his old non-Cardiff haunts. I turned our shiny new facial-recognition software loose on news footage and blog photographs in case he was in the background. I even tried the GPS chip in his mobile, even though he'd stopped answering it.
But Jack was being even more paranoid than usual, it seemed. Hardly surprising, given recent events. And just because I had known him so long and so very well, it didn't mean I knew the first thing about anticipating him. Not when there was an endless loop of second-guessing involved, all that "they know that I know that they know that I know" nonsense. After a while it made even my head hurt. And it was a little terrifying, really, to see from the outside how Jack could just melt away like that without a trace when he didn't even have his wrist strap handy.
I explained it all to Gwen when my frustrations peaked. I may have even wandered into a full-blown rant. She just rolled her desk chair over to me and put her hand on my shoulder and said, "I miss him, too."
"That is entirely ancilliary to my point," I told her.
"No, it's not." She gave me a gentle squeeze. "He'll come back, Ianto."
I thought of all the lives Jack could be leading, all the long years spread out before him, and all he'd lost. His wrist strap was still in my desk. There was that. "Yeah," I said. "He'll be back."
-\-\-\-\-\-
Time, as it has a troubling tendency to do, passed.
We taught Lois how not to drop her gun or get eaten by Weevils, and she helped us track down a pediatric oncologist who'd been hounded out of a job for trying to study the 456's broadcasts. Martha found us a lance corporal who'd tried to lead a mutiny somewhere in Northern Ireland rather than round up kids. They weren't perfect people, but they were the kind of people we needed-brilliant and good and just a little bit damaged. Also, they didn't go into hysterics when a pack of Hoixes attacked their first day in town, which was perhaps the best job interview we could've conducted.
We finished cleaning up the blast site and celebrated the pouring of the new walls and ceilings-a rush job so that the council could finally start putting the Plass back together on top of it. We were still working out of the warehouse until we could find a few spare minutes for major reconstruction, but Gwen smashed a bottle of champagne over the damp concrete anyway, and there was cake.
I celebrated Christmas at Rhiannon's, and it was almost normal-no sleepwalking, no attacks on London-except for Mica's crayon drawing titled "Uncle Yanto Saves the World." It seemed to involve me wielding a cross between a broadsword and a hoover. There was another small figure in the corner, surrounded by stars. "Who's that?" I asked her.
"That's Steven," she said. "He's saving the world, too."
We rebuilt. We did our jobs. Gwen brought in ultrasound photos and then organized a series of secret weapons drops all over the country in case we ever had to go on the run again. I found myself doing much of Tosh's old job-not that I was actually qualified, but I was by far the best educated guesser when it came to radioactive things with unlabeled buttons, and more durable in the event I guessed wrong. Lois proved that she had either grown as a person or totally snapped by holding a Thlanarian at bay for over twenty-four hours with naught but a stapler, a pen light and a few stern words.
You know. Torchwood.
I went home alone at night, slept to the extent I needed it, volunteered to work extra shifts or go out solo. Once I tried to climb on the roof of the Pierhead Building, to look over the bay and the construction and the city lights, but it was cold and I felt like such a fool that I climbed right back down. After that, when the time got to be too much, I walked the waterfront, staring out over the little waves at the invisible point where the Rift was inexplicably tethered. It was almost as good at delivering people as it was at stealing them, and we'd used it before to amplify a signal into the stars. I wasn't the praying sort-not for any value of the pronoun-but if there had been anything worth praying to, I might have done it there.
I was an old hand, though, at waiting around this city for a mysterious traveler to return. I just hoped that this time it wouldn't take a hundred years.
-\-\-\-\-\-
And then one morning I woke up, and something was different. It was something in the slant of the light and the smell of the breeze, as if I were seeing everything-this cup of coffee, this jar of marmalade, this pigeon-for the first time. It nagged at me like a muscle ache. I tried all the way to work to put it into words, but the only thing that came out when I walked through the office door was, "Jack's here."
Gwen was on the phone, and looked up at me with wide eyes. "Hold on just a minute, okay?" She covered it partly with her hand. "You mean he's here?"
"Not here-here, just," I waved my hand. "Close. Don't ask me how I know, I can't explain it."
Gwen raised the phone to her ear again. "Ianto says he's close to Cardiff. I don't know, Spidey sense or something, you're the expert.... All right. All right, we'll keep in touch." She set the phone on the table and sighed. "That was Martha. She says Jack showed up at her sister's place in London last night. Scared the poor woman half to death, but they just had a nice chat and a cup of tea and then he was gone again. Her dad thinks he saw Jack recently, too, but he wasn't sure. Any idea what he's up to?"
An unannounced visit to Tish Jones? And Clive? "I don't know," I admitted. "I mean, unless he was..." I stopped. Surely not.
"You finish your sentences, Ianto Jones," Gwen said direly.
"Did Martha mention any traffic in the solar system recently?" I asked hesitantly. "Not necessarily close to Earth, but nearby?"
That provoked a small, wide-eyed laugh. "You think he's leaving?" she asked. "You think he's just going to stick out his electronic thumb and hitch a ride?"
"If anyone could do, it'd be him," I said. "He might be hoping to use the Rift to amplify some kind of signal. He might just be here to say goodbye."
"Can you find him?" she asked me, thought I was fairly certain she meant, can you stop him?
And the answer to that question was no, but that wasn't something I was ready to admit, and certainly not what she needed to hear. "I can try," I said. "Give me a couple of hours."
He was somewhere in Cardiff, but there was no way we could search every CCTV camera in the city, every minute of the day. I set up the computers to focus on places I thought he might linger, like the Plass, but of course Jack knew better than anyone about how to avoid the cameras in his favorite spots. I checked passenger lists of all the planes and trains that had recently arrived, but none of the names pinged me as a likely alias. I tried the GPS on his mobile again, but of course, that was still a dead end.
I took his wrist strap out of my desk and went to a half-dozen shops before I found a new band for it. It was one thing he could be coming back for, a specific thing, a simple thing. I didn't think it was the only thing. There was also Gwen; Jack would want to find out how she was getting on, and to say goodbye. If Leo Jones merited a visit, then he'd certainly stop and talk to Gwen.
And I had an idea-one that may have been colored by vanity, but only just-that she wasn't the only one, either.
-\-\-\-\-\-
The cemetery was surprisingly green for March, half the trees showing signs of life while the others were still garlanded with last year's brown leaves. I'll admit it had been years since I'd been there, but I could hardly forget the location. There weren't any headstones, just the flat plaques that the groundskeepers could easily mow over, and when I found the right one I had to brush some clumps of dried grass clippings away before the names came clear. Hugh David Jones 1949 - 2001 Devoted Father, one side said; the other was Josephine Llewelyn Jones 1956-1987 Taken Too Soon.
The lot to the left of them was empty. The lot to the left might always be empty. But Jack didn't know that. I walked a little way off into a stand of trees to watch and wait.
I can categorically say it was among the worst afternoons of my life.
-\-\-\-\-\-
He came at dusk. The clouds were letting through only small bursts of color, streaks of orange or gold or salmon, and under the yews the cemetery was already mostly dark. I watched him approach, trying to tell myself it wasn't him, even though I could feel him coming-not just the dissonance of the Vortex energy, but something else, too, something that drew my attention in, the way a steel pin will align with a magnetic field. Also, he was still wearing the coat. He walked with his back straight, but there was something brittle about his posture, like he'd crack if he moved too quickly. I couldn't see his face.
He stopped at the empty lot. Looked for a marker. Checked something from his pocket and then looked again. He studied the other graves, lingered over the one to the right, and returned to the empty lot. His head was bowed.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked towards him over the damp grass. I'd had all afternoon to think of things to say, to have this conversation over and over in my head, to envision all the possible endings and worry them ragged. I saw the set of his shoulders change the moment he heard me approach, but he didn't run away from the empty lot where I should've been buried.
When I was almost close enough to touch him, I stopped, and called out. "Would you like to hear a ghost story?"
For a moment he didn't move, didn't even breathe, and I knew he'd recognized my voice. After a moment he said, flatly, "I don't believe in ghosts."
"Look at me, Jack," I said, and dared come a bit closer. "Do I look like one?"
He turned around slowly. I wasn't sure if I was expecting to see a change in him; of course I knew his face was a fact, frozen in time, but I'd entertained fantasies that perhaps I'd be able to see under the skin, still, at what six months of grief and guilt had wrought.
I couldn't read his mind anymore, though. His thoughts were opaque and his expression was tired and closed. He studied my face, shoulders falling by a degree, almost hunching. "It's impossible," he declared after a minute.
"So are you," I said. "We're surrounded by impossible things every day, to the point that cheating death hardly even rates a day off."
He studied me more carefully, raising his chin a little. "How?" he demanded.
"It's a complicated story," I said, and pulled the watch from my pocket by the chain. "And it starts with 'Long ago and far away.'"
I held out the watch and he caught it without touching my hand. I watched him study it, flip it open to look at the mechanism, and then he closed it and saw the engravings on the casing. Now that it was empty, there was nothing to stop him recognizing it for what it was. "Where did you get this?" he asked tensely.
"Don't you remember, Jack?" I dared to step closer, close enough to just feel the heat radiating off him. "You gave it to me."
The word remember made him flinch, and he closed the watch in his fist. I thought perhaps he was shaking slightly. "This is impossible," he said again, but almost stridently, and he took a step back like he was going to flee.
I stepped as close as I dared, close enough to see how his eyes were shot with blood, and he automatically shifted his posture again, loosening up as if for a fight. "It's not impossible," I said. "You know how the Chameleon Arch works. You've seen watches like this before."
"No," he said, shaking his head. "It can't be true. I'm not --" But he stopped short without finishing the sentence, released a huff of breath that made a mockery of laughter.
"All your life, you've felt like you're missing something, haven't you?" I said quickly. "You've been looking for an answer when you didn't even know what the question was. That's the answer, Jack. I'm the answer." I dared step even closer, and this time he didn't tense up. "I've been hiding in silence for hundreds of years, the ghost in the machine, the silent observer. The same thing that keeps you alive was killing me, so I had to leave. But because I love you, I came back."
His eyes were huge now, so wide and blue. His mouth had fallen open a bit, and he gave a breathy little laugh, almost like a sob. "You've still got a Welsh accent," he said, apropos of nothing.
"That's because I'm still me," I said. "I'm still Ianto. Just...more."
I hadn't dared touch him yet, in case he pulled away, but he suddenly reached out and grabbed my wrist. I let him tug on it, as if he feared I wasn't solid, and let him feel for my pulse-the way my hearts were hammering, I'd have been surprised if he could tell one beat from the next. And when it looked like he was about to let go, I turned my hand and seized his, holding on. "This is insane," he said, which was a bit better than impossible, and he didn't try to break my grip. "You're...Ianto, you died."
"I was there at the time, yes."
"You died and you didn't regenerate," he said firmly. "That's not how it's supposed to happen."
"I wasn't suppose to jump into another body, either," I said, with more authority than I actually felt. "I wasn't supposed to be a separate consciousness from you. You're not supposed to be immortal. The rule book seems to have been chucked out the window a while ago when it comes to us."
"Us," he echoed. "Does that mean me, or Ianto, or...whoever you are?"
"All of the above, really," I said. "The part of me that's Ianto is the same. The part of me that's Eiron remembers being part of you."
Jack started, and that, perhaps, was the moment he really started to believe, when he heard my other name for the first time outside his own head. He was gripping my hand just past the point of pain now, and staring at me in helpless shock. "Christ," he blurted.
"Wrong trinity," I said immediately.
And Jack burst out laughing, and pulled me into his arms.
He was shaking a little; I suppose I was as well. It felt so good to hold him, even if he was a Fact; I'd been used to far worse before, and any amount of Wrongness was outweighed by the feel of his arms, the smell of him, the soft wool of his coat under my hands. For a long time all we did was cling to one another as the last of daylight fled, and I had time to be relieved that I had convinced him, at least for now. That he seemed to understand what I was and had not elected to run away screaming, which even for Jack was always a possibility. I had time to pull him as close as I could and entertain the idea that perhaps this was going to be easier than I thought.
Then Jack whispered hoarsely in my ear. "Come with me."
And even while I stole a few more seconds of his warmth, I said, "No."
He went rigid again, and pulled away like I'd burned him. I held his eyes, and fought the urge to explain, to argue, to beg-it would've all been senseless rambling. "I can't stay here," he finally said. "This whole planet is like a graveyard, I can't--"
"You can," I said. "You can come back with me. We need you, Jack." I need you, I meant, but we'd already had that conversation.
He shook his head. "You don't. You shouldn't-and anyway, I can't. I haven't traveled far enough yet." He looked away, into the cloud-cloaked sunset. "Got a lot of dirt to shake off my shoes."
"You know, I've been waiting for centuries to tell you something." I took a deep breath, and caught his hands again. "It's not all about you, Jack."
His eyes went so wide that in another other situation, I might've laughed at him. "It's all my fault," he said, seemingly shocked at having to explain this. "Steven, you...Owen and Tosh and Suzie and...all of them. Because of me."
"We all made mistakes," I said. "And we live with them. You are going to have to live with them, no matter how far you run. So I fail to see how hurting the people who still love you will atone for all your sins."
He flinched, but didn't put his hands away. "You know, you once called me a bigger monster than anything in the vaults."
"I was wrong," I said quietly.
"I don't know about that." He shut his eyes for a moment. "I began to like it. Being the hero. Saving the day. And look what I became."
"And you think that you can escape that so easily?" I asked. "That if you run far enough, you can outrun yourself?"
He opened his eyes and smiled shakily, a parody of his normal grin. "Impossible things happen all around us. Can't I hope for just one more?"
I left go of his hands and stepped back, clear of his personal space. I reached into my pocket and handed him his wrist strap. "I suppose you'll be needing this, then," I said, as businesslike as I could manage. "We recovered it from the debris. Still in working order, as far as I can tell, though I had to put a new strap on."
He tried to catch my hand again as he took the strap, but I pulled it back. "You could come with me," he said, sounding almost desperate. "There's a cold fusion cruiser surfing the ion reefs at the edge of the solar system. I just need to send a signal."
I did think about it; I couldn't help but conjure up a vision of us, together, new worlds unfolding that really were new to both of us. Of Jack rid of his demons, free and happy and strong like he'd never been. Of world enough and time for anything and everything we might ever want to do.
And then I shook my head. "No," I said again, even though it nearly killed me. "Torchwood needs me. Gwen and Rhiannon need me."
"So do I."
It was barely audible, but Jack's heart was in his eyes, and I suddenly I could see him perfectly. "Then stay," I said, and didn't bother hiding the tremor in my voice. "Live with the messes you've made, and let that be your penance. Live like a mere mortal and maybe you'll remember what it was like to be one. I'm not going to stop you going," and that was more than a tremor, that was all the emotion that I couldn't express piling up in my throat, almost choking, "but I want you to stay. Please. Stay with me."
Jack suddenly surged forward and kissed me. I grabbed his coat and held my breath, tried to memorize this moment-the shape of his hands and the taste of his lips, his body's warmth and his heart's impossible rhythm, all of it-against a dozen lifetimes of doing without. I opened my mouth to his in one last silent plea.
And surprisingly, impossibly, Jack broke the kiss and pulled me close, pressing his face into the side of my neck. "Okay," he murmured thickly, and my hearts leapt, and somewhere above us the clouds began to break apart and reveal the distant stars. "Okay. I'll stay."
-End-
Chapter One
Chapter Seventeen
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.
Ghost Story
by Mad Maudlin
18. our mortal world enough
This is where we started from: no base, no equipment, one agent MIA and one planning to go on restricted duty (but not, emphatically, maternity leave) in a few months. Martha was in charge of UNIT's operations at the Hub site, but she was still traveling elsewhere at least two days out of any week on other business. Rhys was good for many things, but hunting Weevils wasn't among them. The police were not on speaking terms with us, except for Andy Davidson, who was in so much trouble over his participation in the estate riot that he hardly counted.
So things had been better. But we still had a job to do. So we did it.
-\-\-\-\-\-
In the interest of getting Roald Dahl Plass cleared for rebuilding as quickly as possible, UNIT simply scooped much of the debris of the Hub into skips and hauled it away to an industrial park on the edge of town. This was where we did "processing," which largely involved picking through gravel and twisted bits of metal for anything that was both recognizable and still worth keeping. Everything else was checked for hazards-biological, radiological, chemical, psychic, anything they had a sensor for-and then disposed of according to obscure UNIT protocols for such things.
We gave Myfanwy a proper funeral, though. Some protocols are made to be broken.
And at one point, Captain Price, the officer in charge of the operation when Martha wasn't around, brought me something in an evidence bag. It looked from a distance like a lump of coal, but then I realized there were blackened bits dangling off it, scraps of something shredded and soft. "Technological," Price said. "Didn't match anything in your records. Could it be bomb debris?"
"Unlikely," I said. "Let me look at it."
She handed me the bag and I turned it over a few times. Something glittered at me under the filthy surface; it had been battered and blackened, but the thing still held its shape. I very carefully felt over the sides, and when I found a particular button I pressed it. The thing in the bag gave a shrill protesting beep, and Price jumped. "What was that?" she demanded
"Just checking the battery," I said, and opened the bag. The actual band had been mostly sheered away, but it was definitely Jack's wrist strap, and though it stank of old blood and chemical explosives it was still operational. Thank god for fifty-first century quality control. "This is personal property of Captain Harkness. I'll take custody of it for now."
"It still needs to be documented," Price protested.
"I'll take care of it," I said. "After all, it's not like UNIT is preparing your own database of our inventory without our permission, are you?"
Price was a very blonde woman, almost translucent in her paleness, which meant she blushed very easily. "Of course not," she muttered, and fled the room.
I didn't need much sleep anymore, which allowed me to terrorize the soldiers by staying late and arriving early with good spirits and coffee that I didn't share, but that evening I left at a reasonable hour, and I took the strap with me. The band was clearly a lost cause, but with a little patience and many different products, I was able to clean the actual mechanisms until they gleamed, until I could almost forget how it had been damaged. Jack himself hadn't put so much effort into it in years; the days of pride in the Agency and their emblems were long gone. All diagnostic tests said it was in perfect working order, too, the exact sort of technology Torchwood was supposed to harvest for our purposes.
I put it away, very carefully, in a box. For when he came back. If he came back. For now.
-\-\-\-\-\-
Rebuilding meant recruiting; Gwen's growing belly didn't give us much of a choice in that. The first person she tracked down was Lois Habiba, though she didn't see fit to warn me about it, which meant our initial conversation went something like this:
I found her at my desk at the warehouse, going through my inbox, and didn't recognize her immediately. Since I knew she wasn't with UNIT, I attempted a polite, "Hello?"
She looked up and me and blurted, "Oh, my god."
"Er...Lois, right?" I remembered her face now, even though I'd only seen it a time or two through the contact lenses. Oddly enough, she still looked just as terrified as she had been at the time.
In fact, her answer to my question was, "Oh god. Oh god."
"I don't mean to be rude, but aren't you meant to be in prison right now?" I asked her. Gwen had said Lois was arrested, so it seemed the logical outcome.
She just pointed a finger at me and declared, "You're dead."
I flinched. Of course, before being arrested she'd been with COBRA, watching our ill-fated stand. "Did Gwen bring you here?" I asked her, hoping for some kind of coherent reply.
But Lois was still gibbering. "I saw you-on the screen-you went to Thames House with Captain Harkness!"
"Yes. Right. Wait here a moment." I left the room that served as our de facto back-up Hub and shut the door firmly behind me. "Gwen!"
Lois did eventually calm down, but only as long as I wasn't talking or looking at her; Gwen insisted that this was a perfectly logical first new hire. "We owe her," she told me quietly when Lois was out of the room. "She risked a lot to help us. And we know she's brave, and God knows we need the help."
"Yes, she'll be tremendous help when we need to staple a Weevil to death," I said.
"I've already given her the contract," Gwen said. "It's done. Unless you're planning to pull seniority on me?"
With just the two of us, chain of command had seemed irrelevant, not to mention a forgone conclusion. "Two months is hardly a relevant difference," I pointed out, wondering why we were revisiting an old argument.
"And the hundred years before that?" she asked.
I hadn't exactly thought of it that way, and something in her voice made me realize we weren't talking about Lois anymore. "You think I'm going to try to take over for Jack?"
"Of course not," Gwen said, but she was looking too hard into my eyes. "Just wondering how to calculate your pension plan now."
"Trust me, I've no interest in leading Torchwood," I said. Jack hadn't, either, I wanted to add, but it didn't seem like the time for telling such secrets. Gwen just nodded, and I wondered how long she'd actually sat up worrying about that. "Back on the subject of Lois, what are we supposed to tell her about me?"
"The truth," Gwen said. "If I'm in command, I'm making that an order."
"Can we trust her with it?" I asked.
"We're going to have to, Ianto," she said, and when I failed to muster proper enthusiasm, she sighed. "Think of it this way: If anything should happen to you in the field, do you want to be explaining yourself while you're bleeding green and purple all over the A&E, or beforehand?" she asked.
"I do not bleed green or purple," I said. "And for future reference, I still make the coffee around here."
For some reason, that brought Gwen out laughing until tears rolled down her face.
-\-\-\-\-\-
The conversation with Lois did raise some pertinent questions, and after her next business trip Martha brought me a copy of the Sullivan Papers-really just a loose collection of trivia and educated guesses about Time Lord physiology based on UNIT's previous encounters with the Doctor. Still, it was good information to have, since left to my own devices I probably would've poisoned myself on aspirin or something equally ridiculous.
"And if you want to know more," she added, with no small arch of the eyebrow, "I still have the Doctor's number. He won't exactly turn away questions."
Of course not. As far as he knew, he was the only Time Lord in existence; he might overlook me entirely if I didn't seek him out. The same way he'd overlooked me every time before. Not that I held a grudge; not that I could honestly wish for different, from where I stood. That wasn't even a considerations as I told Martha, "No." When she raised that eyebrow even higher, I added, "Not right now, at least."
"Can I ask why?" Martha asked, and more than a little pointedly.
Which is why I looked at my hands, not at her, while I groped for words. "It's not that I don't want to see him," I said slowly. "But I'm still...I've been living human lives for so long. Maybe too long. I'm not sure what it even means to call myself a Time Lord, and I certainly don't know if I can live up to the Doctor's expectations. I mean, he and I constitute and endangered species, for god's sake."
Martha nodded. "All right. I understand that. But I also think you should tell him sooner, rather than later."
"What, that I've been hiding in plain sight all this time?" I asked. "He's not going to like that."
"He doesn't like being alone, either," she shot back.
I looked her in the eye. "I'm not going to leave Torchwood for him, though. And you know he's going to ask."
"And you can say no to him," Martha said. "I mean, I have."
"No offense, but it's hardly the same situation," I pointed out.
She sighed. "All right, all right, you win. Just...don't put it off, okay? It's not going to get any easier."
"I hardly think a few weeks will make a difference in the grand scale of things," I said, and she made a face at me while I finished signing everything.
It was only later that I realized that we weren't only talking about the Doctor.
-\-\-\-\-\-
I did look for Jack. From our room in the warehouse, I checked up on his bank accounts, searched for his usual aliases. I read up on old friends he might've gone to ground with, checked newspapers and police blotters from some of his old non-Cardiff haunts. I turned our shiny new facial-recognition software loose on news footage and blog photographs in case he was in the background. I even tried the GPS chip in his mobile, even though he'd stopped answering it.
But Jack was being even more paranoid than usual, it seemed. Hardly surprising, given recent events. And just because I had known him so long and so very well, it didn't mean I knew the first thing about anticipating him. Not when there was an endless loop of second-guessing involved, all that "they know that I know that they know that I know" nonsense. After a while it made even my head hurt. And it was a little terrifying, really, to see from the outside how Jack could just melt away like that without a trace when he didn't even have his wrist strap handy.
I explained it all to Gwen when my frustrations peaked. I may have even wandered into a full-blown rant. She just rolled her desk chair over to me and put her hand on my shoulder and said, "I miss him, too."
"That is entirely ancilliary to my point," I told her.
"No, it's not." She gave me a gentle squeeze. "He'll come back, Ianto."
I thought of all the lives Jack could be leading, all the long years spread out before him, and all he'd lost. His wrist strap was still in my desk. There was that. "Yeah," I said. "He'll be back."
-\-\-\-\-\-
Time, as it has a troubling tendency to do, passed.
We taught Lois how not to drop her gun or get eaten by Weevils, and she helped us track down a pediatric oncologist who'd been hounded out of a job for trying to study the 456's broadcasts. Martha found us a lance corporal who'd tried to lead a mutiny somewhere in Northern Ireland rather than round up kids. They weren't perfect people, but they were the kind of people we needed-brilliant and good and just a little bit damaged. Also, they didn't go into hysterics when a pack of Hoixes attacked their first day in town, which was perhaps the best job interview we could've conducted.
We finished cleaning up the blast site and celebrated the pouring of the new walls and ceilings-a rush job so that the council could finally start putting the Plass back together on top of it. We were still working out of the warehouse until we could find a few spare minutes for major reconstruction, but Gwen smashed a bottle of champagne over the damp concrete anyway, and there was cake.
I celebrated Christmas at Rhiannon's, and it was almost normal-no sleepwalking, no attacks on London-except for Mica's crayon drawing titled "Uncle Yanto Saves the World." It seemed to involve me wielding a cross between a broadsword and a hoover. There was another small figure in the corner, surrounded by stars. "Who's that?" I asked her.
"That's Steven," she said. "He's saving the world, too."
We rebuilt. We did our jobs. Gwen brought in ultrasound photos and then organized a series of secret weapons drops all over the country in case we ever had to go on the run again. I found myself doing much of Tosh's old job-not that I was actually qualified, but I was by far the best educated guesser when it came to radioactive things with unlabeled buttons, and more durable in the event I guessed wrong. Lois proved that she had either grown as a person or totally snapped by holding a Thlanarian at bay for over twenty-four hours with naught but a stapler, a pen light and a few stern words.
You know. Torchwood.
I went home alone at night, slept to the extent I needed it, volunteered to work extra shifts or go out solo. Once I tried to climb on the roof of the Pierhead Building, to look over the bay and the construction and the city lights, but it was cold and I felt like such a fool that I climbed right back down. After that, when the time got to be too much, I walked the waterfront, staring out over the little waves at the invisible point where the Rift was inexplicably tethered. It was almost as good at delivering people as it was at stealing them, and we'd used it before to amplify a signal into the stars. I wasn't the praying sort-not for any value of the pronoun-but if there had been anything worth praying to, I might have done it there.
I was an old hand, though, at waiting around this city for a mysterious traveler to return. I just hoped that this time it wouldn't take a hundred years.
-\-\-\-\-\-
And then one morning I woke up, and something was different. It was something in the slant of the light and the smell of the breeze, as if I were seeing everything-this cup of coffee, this jar of marmalade, this pigeon-for the first time. It nagged at me like a muscle ache. I tried all the way to work to put it into words, but the only thing that came out when I walked through the office door was, "Jack's here."
Gwen was on the phone, and looked up at me with wide eyes. "Hold on just a minute, okay?" She covered it partly with her hand. "You mean he's here?"
"Not here-here, just," I waved my hand. "Close. Don't ask me how I know, I can't explain it."
Gwen raised the phone to her ear again. "Ianto says he's close to Cardiff. I don't know, Spidey sense or something, you're the expert.... All right. All right, we'll keep in touch." She set the phone on the table and sighed. "That was Martha. She says Jack showed up at her sister's place in London last night. Scared the poor woman half to death, but they just had a nice chat and a cup of tea and then he was gone again. Her dad thinks he saw Jack recently, too, but he wasn't sure. Any idea what he's up to?"
An unannounced visit to Tish Jones? And Clive? "I don't know," I admitted. "I mean, unless he was..." I stopped. Surely not.
"You finish your sentences, Ianto Jones," Gwen said direly.
"Did Martha mention any traffic in the solar system recently?" I asked hesitantly. "Not necessarily close to Earth, but nearby?"
That provoked a small, wide-eyed laugh. "You think he's leaving?" she asked. "You think he's just going to stick out his electronic thumb and hitch a ride?"
"If anyone could do, it'd be him," I said. "He might be hoping to use the Rift to amplify some kind of signal. He might just be here to say goodbye."
"Can you find him?" she asked me, thought I was fairly certain she meant, can you stop him?
And the answer to that question was no, but that wasn't something I was ready to admit, and certainly not what she needed to hear. "I can try," I said. "Give me a couple of hours."
He was somewhere in Cardiff, but there was no way we could search every CCTV camera in the city, every minute of the day. I set up the computers to focus on places I thought he might linger, like the Plass, but of course Jack knew better than anyone about how to avoid the cameras in his favorite spots. I checked passenger lists of all the planes and trains that had recently arrived, but none of the names pinged me as a likely alias. I tried the GPS on his mobile again, but of course, that was still a dead end.
I took his wrist strap out of my desk and went to a half-dozen shops before I found a new band for it. It was one thing he could be coming back for, a specific thing, a simple thing. I didn't think it was the only thing. There was also Gwen; Jack would want to find out how she was getting on, and to say goodbye. If Leo Jones merited a visit, then he'd certainly stop and talk to Gwen.
And I had an idea-one that may have been colored by vanity, but only just-that she wasn't the only one, either.
-\-\-\-\-\-
The cemetery was surprisingly green for March, half the trees showing signs of life while the others were still garlanded with last year's brown leaves. I'll admit it had been years since I'd been there, but I could hardly forget the location. There weren't any headstones, just the flat plaques that the groundskeepers could easily mow over, and when I found the right one I had to brush some clumps of dried grass clippings away before the names came clear. Hugh David Jones 1949 - 2001 Devoted Father, one side said; the other was Josephine Llewelyn Jones 1956-1987 Taken Too Soon.
The lot to the left of them was empty. The lot to the left might always be empty. But Jack didn't know that. I walked a little way off into a stand of trees to watch and wait.
I can categorically say it was among the worst afternoons of my life.
-\-\-\-\-\-
He came at dusk. The clouds were letting through only small bursts of color, streaks of orange or gold or salmon, and under the yews the cemetery was already mostly dark. I watched him approach, trying to tell myself it wasn't him, even though I could feel him coming-not just the dissonance of the Vortex energy, but something else, too, something that drew my attention in, the way a steel pin will align with a magnetic field. Also, he was still wearing the coat. He walked with his back straight, but there was something brittle about his posture, like he'd crack if he moved too quickly. I couldn't see his face.
He stopped at the empty lot. Looked for a marker. Checked something from his pocket and then looked again. He studied the other graves, lingered over the one to the right, and returned to the empty lot. His head was bowed.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked towards him over the damp grass. I'd had all afternoon to think of things to say, to have this conversation over and over in my head, to envision all the possible endings and worry them ragged. I saw the set of his shoulders change the moment he heard me approach, but he didn't run away from the empty lot where I should've been buried.
When I was almost close enough to touch him, I stopped, and called out. "Would you like to hear a ghost story?"
For a moment he didn't move, didn't even breathe, and I knew he'd recognized my voice. After a moment he said, flatly, "I don't believe in ghosts."
"Look at me, Jack," I said, and dared come a bit closer. "Do I look like one?"
He turned around slowly. I wasn't sure if I was expecting to see a change in him; of course I knew his face was a fact, frozen in time, but I'd entertained fantasies that perhaps I'd be able to see under the skin, still, at what six months of grief and guilt had wrought.
I couldn't read his mind anymore, though. His thoughts were opaque and his expression was tired and closed. He studied my face, shoulders falling by a degree, almost hunching. "It's impossible," he declared after a minute.
"So are you," I said. "We're surrounded by impossible things every day, to the point that cheating death hardly even rates a day off."
He studied me more carefully, raising his chin a little. "How?" he demanded.
"It's a complicated story," I said, and pulled the watch from my pocket by the chain. "And it starts with 'Long ago and far away.'"
I held out the watch and he caught it without touching my hand. I watched him study it, flip it open to look at the mechanism, and then he closed it and saw the engravings on the casing. Now that it was empty, there was nothing to stop him recognizing it for what it was. "Where did you get this?" he asked tensely.
"Don't you remember, Jack?" I dared to step closer, close enough to just feel the heat radiating off him. "You gave it to me."
The word remember made him flinch, and he closed the watch in his fist. I thought perhaps he was shaking slightly. "This is impossible," he said again, but almost stridently, and he took a step back like he was going to flee.
I stepped as close as I dared, close enough to see how his eyes were shot with blood, and he automatically shifted his posture again, loosening up as if for a fight. "It's not impossible," I said. "You know how the Chameleon Arch works. You've seen watches like this before."
"No," he said, shaking his head. "It can't be true. I'm not --" But he stopped short without finishing the sentence, released a huff of breath that made a mockery of laughter.
"All your life, you've felt like you're missing something, haven't you?" I said quickly. "You've been looking for an answer when you didn't even know what the question was. That's the answer, Jack. I'm the answer." I dared step even closer, and this time he didn't tense up. "I've been hiding in silence for hundreds of years, the ghost in the machine, the silent observer. The same thing that keeps you alive was killing me, so I had to leave. But because I love you, I came back."
His eyes were huge now, so wide and blue. His mouth had fallen open a bit, and he gave a breathy little laugh, almost like a sob. "You've still got a Welsh accent," he said, apropos of nothing.
"That's because I'm still me," I said. "I'm still Ianto. Just...more."
I hadn't dared touch him yet, in case he pulled away, but he suddenly reached out and grabbed my wrist. I let him tug on it, as if he feared I wasn't solid, and let him feel for my pulse-the way my hearts were hammering, I'd have been surprised if he could tell one beat from the next. And when it looked like he was about to let go, I turned my hand and seized his, holding on. "This is insane," he said, which was a bit better than impossible, and he didn't try to break my grip. "You're...Ianto, you died."
"I was there at the time, yes."
"You died and you didn't regenerate," he said firmly. "That's not how it's supposed to happen."
"I wasn't suppose to jump into another body, either," I said, with more authority than I actually felt. "I wasn't supposed to be a separate consciousness from you. You're not supposed to be immortal. The rule book seems to have been chucked out the window a while ago when it comes to us."
"Us," he echoed. "Does that mean me, or Ianto, or...whoever you are?"
"All of the above, really," I said. "The part of me that's Ianto is the same. The part of me that's Eiron remembers being part of you."
Jack started, and that, perhaps, was the moment he really started to believe, when he heard my other name for the first time outside his own head. He was gripping my hand just past the point of pain now, and staring at me in helpless shock. "Christ," he blurted.
"Wrong trinity," I said immediately.
And Jack burst out laughing, and pulled me into his arms.
He was shaking a little; I suppose I was as well. It felt so good to hold him, even if he was a Fact; I'd been used to far worse before, and any amount of Wrongness was outweighed by the feel of his arms, the smell of him, the soft wool of his coat under my hands. For a long time all we did was cling to one another as the last of daylight fled, and I had time to be relieved that I had convinced him, at least for now. That he seemed to understand what I was and had not elected to run away screaming, which even for Jack was always a possibility. I had time to pull him as close as I could and entertain the idea that perhaps this was going to be easier than I thought.
Then Jack whispered hoarsely in my ear. "Come with me."
And even while I stole a few more seconds of his warmth, I said, "No."
He went rigid again, and pulled away like I'd burned him. I held his eyes, and fought the urge to explain, to argue, to beg-it would've all been senseless rambling. "I can't stay here," he finally said. "This whole planet is like a graveyard, I can't--"
"You can," I said. "You can come back with me. We need you, Jack." I need you, I meant, but we'd already had that conversation.
He shook his head. "You don't. You shouldn't-and anyway, I can't. I haven't traveled far enough yet." He looked away, into the cloud-cloaked sunset. "Got a lot of dirt to shake off my shoes."
"You know, I've been waiting for centuries to tell you something." I took a deep breath, and caught his hands again. "It's not all about you, Jack."
His eyes went so wide that in another other situation, I might've laughed at him. "It's all my fault," he said, seemingly shocked at having to explain this. "Steven, you...Owen and Tosh and Suzie and...all of them. Because of me."
"We all made mistakes," I said. "And we live with them. You are going to have to live with them, no matter how far you run. So I fail to see how hurting the people who still love you will atone for all your sins."
He flinched, but didn't put his hands away. "You know, you once called me a bigger monster than anything in the vaults."
"I was wrong," I said quietly.
"I don't know about that." He shut his eyes for a moment. "I began to like it. Being the hero. Saving the day. And look what I became."
"And you think that you can escape that so easily?" I asked. "That if you run far enough, you can outrun yourself?"
He opened his eyes and smiled shakily, a parody of his normal grin. "Impossible things happen all around us. Can't I hope for just one more?"
I left go of his hands and stepped back, clear of his personal space. I reached into my pocket and handed him his wrist strap. "I suppose you'll be needing this, then," I said, as businesslike as I could manage. "We recovered it from the debris. Still in working order, as far as I can tell, though I had to put a new strap on."
He tried to catch my hand again as he took the strap, but I pulled it back. "You could come with me," he said, sounding almost desperate. "There's a cold fusion cruiser surfing the ion reefs at the edge of the solar system. I just need to send a signal."
I did think about it; I couldn't help but conjure up a vision of us, together, new worlds unfolding that really were new to both of us. Of Jack rid of his demons, free and happy and strong like he'd never been. Of world enough and time for anything and everything we might ever want to do.
And then I shook my head. "No," I said again, even though it nearly killed me. "Torchwood needs me. Gwen and Rhiannon need me."
"So do I."
It was barely audible, but Jack's heart was in his eyes, and I suddenly I could see him perfectly. "Then stay," I said, and didn't bother hiding the tremor in my voice. "Live with the messes you've made, and let that be your penance. Live like a mere mortal and maybe you'll remember what it was like to be one. I'm not going to stop you going," and that was more than a tremor, that was all the emotion that I couldn't express piling up in my throat, almost choking, "but I want you to stay. Please. Stay with me."
Jack suddenly surged forward and kissed me. I grabbed his coat and held my breath, tried to memorize this moment-the shape of his hands and the taste of his lips, his body's warmth and his heart's impossible rhythm, all of it-against a dozen lifetimes of doing without. I opened my mouth to his in one last silent plea.
And surprisingly, impossibly, Jack broke the kiss and pulled me close, pressing his face into the side of my neck. "Okay," he murmured thickly, and my hearts leapt, and somewhere above us the clouds began to break apart and reveal the distant stars. "Okay. I'll stay."
-End-
Chapter One
Chapter Seventeen