We held gold dust in our hands (5/7, Torchwood, Jack/Ianto/Lisa/Gwen/Rhys)
Title: We held gold dust in our hands (5/7)
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team, etc (Jack/Lisa/Ianto/Gwen/Rhys and all permutations thereof with a heavy dose of the first three), Rhys, Rhiannon, Alice, Ten, Lisa (basically everyone!)
Ratings: NC-17 for sexual content (also mild watersports and lactation sex).
Timeline: AU from pre S1 and threads through both seasons, part of CoE and into THE FUTURE. Enjoy the ride.
Wordcount: 63,000 words
Author's Notes: See the master post for notes and credits and fanmixes.
Summary: You don't pick your family. They pick you.
JACK
When Gwen tells them that she is pregnant, Rhys and Lisa explode with delight. Lisa is off to the races, and Rhys is a rollercoaster of Welsh vowels and kisses on Gwen's face and hands and stomach.
Ianto and Jack catch each other's eyes over the din.
Because this is how it happens, really, what Jack has often come to call the natural order of the twenty-first century, because while it might have also happened in his time, he likes to blame the faulty workings of humans in this century on the time period and not the species, because he has high hopes that they will some day conform to his tastes. He's going to have to live with them forever, after all.
That's petulant and demanding, he is aware. And he takes his ungrateful self out to the balcony, where he can stand with his hands on the railing and listen to the tinkle of their glasses as they drink to Gwen's baby's health.
It couldn't have come at a better time, actually, what with the Hub in ruins and them sifting through the wreckage under the giant tarps that seem to draw larger crowds than when it had just been them digging about with wheelbarrows and shovels. But UNIT had brought the tarps at the Crown's request, and now that it is getting colder and the rain freezes sometimes on the site in the overnight, Jack is grateful for them.
Ravi is still reeling from the loss of Karen, who they'd brought in with him shortly before the Hub had exploded. He's a brilliant tech, but he's no Toshiko Sato. Jack shoves his hands in his pockets and encounters objects that he has salvaged from the Hub and cannot seem to let go of; they weigh down his pockets and probably make it look like he has three cocks. Normally, that is something that he'd find amusing enough to use it as a recurring gag about the house.
The loss of the Hub has rattled him, though he likes to pretend that it hasn't. He can live without the things, he tells himself. He was never a collector of debris, flotsam and jetsam, really. He likes to joke that you don't own anything that you can't carry at a dead run, but that's more a remnant of his older lives, lives spent on ships in the stars, where everything he'd owned could fit in a duffel, or later when all he really wanted to remember was what was in his kit, what he could carry from trench to trench crawling on his belly.
But there are things he would have liked to have held on to, simply because he's had them so long-a box of photographs and a few letters, a few special shell casings, some bullets that he'd dug out of people or things and tucked into his pocket, collecting them in a discarded cloth bag (A body, a live one, lies frozen in the bowels of the rubble, waiting to be discovered, Jack knows. He is slow going through where the morgue should be, because he isn't sure if he wants to be the one to deal with Gray's body, or if he wants to delegate it, shuffle it off, never see it again. If he doesn't see it, then it never happened, a falsehood that lies heavier than the wool about his shoulders.).
Jack watches the gulls dive off the railing to catch the updraft and sail, and he wonders what it's like to defy gravity without anything but the body one is born with. He'd once had a brief fling with a winged Tervali, and in their afterglow, while she was grooming her feathers (and him, oh yeah, that beak against his skin), he'd asked her what it was like to fly. She had sat back and asked him, 'Can you drink the sunlight? Can you eat a rainbow? It's those and not those.'
So, no, actually, he cannot imagine flying like that, but someday he decides he'll try it. He certainly has the time to explore the idea.
The loss of the Hub, however, does mean that his space is gone, and he doesn't like to think about that. It's not like he had slept there often, but that the option was there had been comforting. With Gwen and Rhys in the house, he doesn't have a bedroom of his own, and while that doesn't usually bother him (Lisa has offered to move her office into the living area, and he just couldn't do that to her), sometimes he wants to lie down in the quiet and just think. Ianto had bought ear plugs, actually, passed them out to everyone and made a statement about how when someone was wearing the earplugs that meant they were off limits. Jack hasn't used his, but he finds them adorable (And he never pays attention when anyone has them in, so he figures there's no point in his using them.).
Salvaging is hard work, Jack thinks as he rocks from one foot to another and sniffs the air. There's an acrid burnt smell and he realises that it's him. He'd been out on the fringes of the blast crater today, digging near where the tower had been. He'd changed his clothes and washed his hands, but he needs a good soak. The hot tub has been refilled. He glances at it and wonders if he mightn't use his earplugs for the first time.
The others haven't taken the loss of the Hub well either. Gwen associates the location, the space, with Owen and Toshiko, and just looking at it seems to cause her physical pain (though, he thinks, in retrospect, that might have just been the morning sickness).
Ianto doesn't say anything for hours at a time when he works, just trudges from bin to bin, plastic bag after plastic bag, sorting with what Jack has decided is the eagle eye of a Torchwood scholar. Ianto might doubt his own critical judgement skills when he stops to think about it, but in action he is never hesitant. He pulls things from Jack's hands and bins or saves them without the slightest doubt. Jack trusts him enough to never argue.
Ianto is bothered by the loss of knowledge. Yeah, he says, the servers are remote and they have the whole Torchwood system, but the documents, the files, the artefacts they used to have, they are gone or mangled or buried under the rubble. Jack is fairly sure that if he didn't monitor him, Ianto might go down there in the middle of the night and search in the dark with a torch.
Jack knows how it is. Ianto's too young to understand that knowledge can't be saved, just passed on for a while. They never quite have anything they can't carry at a dead run, whether talking about Jack or society as a whole.
And some things they just borrow from other times. When they had found one slender claw in the wreckage, chitin scorched and hardened to a point, rotting meat still clinging to one end, Ianto had burst into tears. Jack had cleaned it off and tucked it into a pocket. It's still there in his trousers, and he turns it over now with one hand, reminding himself of how this is the way of things. This is the way of Torchwood, not the maternity party in the other room.
Jack sighs. He would have liked to have saved his coral. He'd had plans for that.
The party noises get louder when the sliding glass door opens and someone slips out, closing it behind them so that everyone sounds so far away again. Ianto finds him at the far railing, and they look out over the city, dazzling and shiny and full of promise. It's as taunting right now as a newborn child, stretched out and drawing its breath to mewl
Ianto coughs a few times, hacking a little, and Jack worries. He's been at the site too long; too much dust and alien crap in the air. Jack is occasionally concerned that all that alien tech dust will get sucked into the clouds and come down on Newport in a rain shower, and all the school children will grow tentacles or something. Ianto just takes a few seconds to breathe-he can hear it not a foot away from him.
He lets Ianto wrap around him from behind, and then his lips ghost against Jack's ear.
'It's not over, you know,' Ianto says, 'Not by a long shot.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
GWEN
Her belly is discomfortingly round, she thinks, as she rubs it and stands to get more tea.
Jack comes into the main building and jogs up to his office upstairs. Her gaze drifts to the door when it shuts. This new Hub. She’ll never get used to it. Sure, the last one had been underground, and dirty and dim and had had dinosaur shite everywhere, but it had been their little maverick place.
The new place is still shiny. It's lost the new building smell, but that had been inevitable, especially with the things they bring in. And it has windows, which never cease to amaze her. Gwen had never seen Torchwood One, but Ianto has told her that the windows had been the one thing he'd missed.
And it isn't as if they'd had any choice; the Crown had been most conciliatory when they'd discovered that the Hub had been, well, demolished by the Home Office during the 456 affair, and they had lavished funds on the restructuring of a new location, this time farther from the Bay, but still close enough that Gwen can see gulls winging their way past her window (window!).
She does like the layout though, very much like the old Hub, with a main floor and three upper levels that circle it. It is circular still, like the old Hub, with spokes that jut out like spider legs. The security is just as complicated, though to the outside world the Hub looks like a large industrial complex. They need retinal scans to get in, along with a few keycards. Jack suggests that they get implants so they don't have to carry the sensors on them, but Ianto nixes it with a reminder about how Jack would lose his if he exploded or lost a body part. Leave it to Ianto to use the overly macabre to illustrate his point.
She rounds the huge tech area that they had constructed based on plans that Tosh had drawn up, part of her "rainy day projects" folder. Jack had found them when sifting through the Mainframe for ideas on how to build from under the ground up, and Ianto had said something about how a rainy day projects folder was rather like a joke in Cardiff. Then Ravi had looked at their plans, since they thought the current Tech should at least have a say, and he had waved his hands and said, not for the first time, that if Toshiko Sato were still alive he would put a ring on her finger and take her home to meet his mother.
Gwen doubts that, but then again, she has a hard time seeing Tosh with anyone anymore, since her futures have run out. Jack had told Ravi that Tosh would have eaten him alive, to which Ianto had hastily and needlessly added, 'Not literally.'
But Ravi is a clever albeit clumsy and somewhat cocksure lad, and she loves him a bit for that. He had been devastated by Karen's death, like they all had been to some degree, but Ravi especially because they had started Torchwood at the same time, been each other's Secret Keepers as it were.
She reaches the large kitchenette with its cheery yellow border that Ianto had grumbled over but allowed, and bypasses the coffee machine with regret. Ianto has left the kettle on for her, warming the water, and when she pours it, her eyes catch the little basket of biscuit packets and specialty teabags he has selected just for her, decorating the basket with a small sign: 'Gwen's. Touch & Despair.'
Ianto thinks of everything. She notices that the basket is suspiciously picked over and glances at Jack's office, two flights up. His light is on, even in the daytime (no windows for Jack's office, please). And she is missing all of her Jaffa Cakes.
That's a good enough excuse to go up there, though Gwen tells herself firmly that she doesn't need an excuse to visit Jack in his office, ever. She abandons her mug and waves to Melissa in the new medical bay as she mounts the stairs, one hand under her belly. Just putting it under there and lifting makes her feel better. It's not as if she thinks the kid will just fall out, and she can't move her stomach out of the way, but she isn't immune to impractical gestures. She wonders if she'll become one of those mothers who slings an ineffectual arm across her child in the front seat when they have to hard stop in traffic.
Jack is at the window of his office, surveying the Hub just like he used to do. His eyes slide over her, as if he doesn't want to see her, like she is clothed in a perception filter, but she knows that he does. His hands are in his pockets and he watches Ravi do something inadvisable with a bit of tech that they'd brought in earlier. Gwen is sure that it is a gun, but Ravi thinks it's a communication device. She just hopes that it doesn't "communicate" through his skull.
Ianto steps into her line of vision below, and she sees him manhandle the tech from Ravi, point it at an empty coffee mug, and quick as you please, the mug explodes into fragments. Jack barks a laugh and turns from the window, retreating into the recesses of his office, his Batcave, where he keeps the lights dim and incandescent, a throwback to something, perhaps; maybe he wants to scare Melissa, the new recruit.
She doesn't knock on the frame of his door, just saunters in and sits with a grunt in the padded chair in front of his desk. Jack is cradling his coral in his hands, peering at it, as if there's something in it that he wants to move. Maybe he's trying to will it to grow faster.
Gwen doesn't know what the coral is to him, but she does know that when they had found it in the rubble, intact, almost black, broken around the edges-she had almost missed it-Jack had crushed it to his chest and left the site, walking down the ruined Plass in the rain, both hands cradling it. When she and Ianto had got home that night he had been soaking it in the bathtub for hours, sitting on the floor and reading Agatha Christie's Death On the Nile to it until his voice was hoarse. Ianto had brought him tea and then closed the door on the two of them, only emerging later with a suspiciously damp shoulder.
Gwen thinks that the coral has something to do with the Doctor, but she doesn't ask, because there are things that she knows she will never get a straight answer on, especially when they involve the Doctor. Two years ago she might have pressed the issue. Now, it's just another missing piece that isn't necessary to know, and Gwen likes to think that she has a better instinct for that now.
Her eyes light on the Jaffa Cake wrapper on his desk. Hah.
'Gwen, looking good,' Jack says, glancing up. 'Living la-'
'If you say "large", so help me God,' she tells him. Jack thinks her pregnancy is hysterically funny sometimes. He likes to talk to the kid in her stomach, tell it things like, "When you turn five, I'm going to take you to the circus and show you alllllllllll the acrobats", and "When you get older, your parents will try to feed you laverbread. Don't. Just don't."
Jack blows gently on the coral, distracted, mock-distracted, they're both the same. 'I was going to say "lasciviously",' he counters. Then he winks. Mock-distracted, then.
'I start leave on Friday,' she says, as if he doesn't know. He's been joking about it all week, something about how now they can stop ordering so much takeaway.
She knows why he's doing it, but it's getting old. She and Rhys had moved into the house two months ago, and she's ready for it to be over with. Now is as good a time as any. She gives up on any hope of crossing her legs and instead thinks about putting her feet up on Jack's desk.
'Let's have a chat,' she says, 'like in the old days.'
Jack grins, but it's one of his patented I'll-be-disarmingly-cheerful-to-avoid-issues faces. 'What shall we chat about? Pushchairs? Nappies? Do your tits hurt?'
'You're an ass.'
Jack shrugs. 'Fine then. Guns? Weevils? That flaying monster last month that almost gave you a Caesarian right here in the Hub?' He sets the coral back into the stand. 'That was good times.'
Gwen shrugs. 'The cells are temperamental. That was a mistake.' And it's true, the new cell locks are mechanised and computer locked, with a deadlock seal, but they keep opening at bad times when people clap their hands. Ravi swears up and down that he didn't do it, but they suspect that he might have mixed in a sensor for Jack's old "Clapper" lighting system in there somewhere. They just have to find the right circuit.
Jack smiles, but it's wan, strained. 'Fine.'
'You can't treat me this way forever,' she says, lightly, because with Jack it is best to use a light touch, a trick she has learnt from Ianto. When he frowns, she knows he recognises the technique and is going to fight being "handled". That's fine; she has techniques for that, as well. After all, she's worked and lived with the man. She knows how this goes.
'I don't treat you any way, Gwen,' he says. His hands toy with the edges of an old book.
'Hmn,' she says. Her hand comes to rest on her stomach and his eyes follow it. As if on cue, something falls downstairs with a metallic clang and they both whip their heads around to the glass wall of Jack's new office.
'HE STARTED IT!' comes the shout from below, Ravi it sounds like. Ianto would never shout, well, not that.
Jack puts his head on his desk then. 'I have to go Weevil hunting with him later,' he groans. Ravi is like a ferret, which is why almost a year after his recruitment, he still has yet to clear firearms training. Owen at his worst had been a better marksman without his contacts in.
'Melissa calls you Batman,' Gwen says lightheartedly, because it feels as if something has shifted, and not just in her belly. She rubs her palm on the spot where a foot is pressing out, because if she isn't fast enough she misses it, and she senses that these little moments are the ones she'll want to remember vividly, oh-until that foot jostles her lung.
His eyes track her hand, face a mask of something, but he must feel the shift also, because the smile he offers is genuine. He could never stay angry with her; it's a gift. 'Encourage that. Someone on this team has to respect me.' He shrugs. 'Or at least think I hang out on rooftops and fight crime. Without the tights.' He waves a hand towards the lower levels. 'Ianto gets to wear the tights.'
'Well, he does have the bum for them,' she replies without thinking, and Jack's face darkens again. 'It was never meant to be permanent,' she says suddenly, and this is the crux of it, really. 'You know that, right?'
Time stretches out. That phantom grandfather clock that used to tick in the Hub, the one they'd never found, has followed them here, and they'd spent a few hours scanning for it before just deciding not to question it. It ticks now, for them, counting the seconds, the minutes in which they watch each other. Because he's not staring, and he's not glaring. He's thoughtful. Gwen just waits, because he has to process what all this means to him, and she has to wait for it to come out before she can respond.
These things, Lisa had said one day at lunch, these things are worth it, the waiting, because Jack comes to conclusions fairly when given enough time to simply be, to exist himself into the decision, the right thing to do. It is a shame, really, that most of Jack's decisions must be made on the fly, because if he had all the time in the world, he could always make the right choice.
Good thing he does have all the time in the world. Too bad the rest of reality doesn't.
'I bet on the day you were born, your dad took one look at those big eyes of yours and knew that he was a goner,' Jack says, sighing and leaning conspiratorially over the desk.
Gwen stands then, because she hurts, and she will be happy when the sprog gets his eviction notice and decides to clear out, though she's not precisely looking forward to that part. Rhys is trying to prepare her, with the Lamaze and the occasional book, but just the word episiotomy is enough to make her want to clench her muscles and ask Jack if they don't have some alien tech that can just…transport the baby into the cot.
'I have my moments,' she says. That's all there is then. She wants to put all this to rest, to fold it into their relationship and smooth it over, like evening out the frosting on a cake. She and Rhys had talked about it the other night, about what they had been doing at the penthouse in the first place, what they had taken from it. Rhys had told her that he'd never fancied himself a swinger, but that it had been good, yeah, while it had lasted. She'd had to agree.
If there is anyone in the world who she could have lived with in such a manner, it had been those three. She is fairly sure that even if she and Rhys moved right back in, the dynamics would be different. In retrospect, it had been a perfect conflux of events, all cascading and collapsing in on themselves until the five of them had been impacted, imploded into the centre of this living, loving arrangement. She wants to tell this to Jack, but it sounds as if she is trying too hard to defend it, as if the nine months they had spent together had been something bad. She is sure that she wouldn't have made it out the other side of the rollercoaster without them.
The nine-month timing is not something that she can symbolically ignore either.
'So now that you're out of here for a while, I suppose I've lost my chance to tempt you into trying out those stirrups in the med bay?' He waggles his eyebrows. 'They have faux fur padding.'
'Careful, Harkness, I'm very pregnant,' she laughs. 'Well past the sex window.'
Jack grins when she rounds the desk, turning his chair so that he can hug her sitting down. 'There are so many things you can do that don't require displacing the little person in there,' he says, and then he wraps his arms about her, a much more Herculean task than previously.
'I don't think so,' she whispers. 'Pretty thought, though.'
Jack presses his cheek to her stomach. 'Pregnant women are hot.'
'Everyone is hot.'
'Well, yeah. Sort of. Not Margaret Thatcher-well…'
She smacks his shoulder. Everything is sorted now. Everything is golden. She can go home to her lovely house and lovely husband and take a lovely bath. In less than a month they will have a lovely child, and if that is sentimental and cloying, then Jesus, sign her up.
'You be good,' she says to him, as he presses his lips to her belly. She wants to feel them through the material, but even Jack isn't that magical.
He smiles against the hardness, and then looks up at her. 'If not, I'll be better.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
JACK
Ravi brings him the chair personally, after hours, when he knows that Ianto is gone. He and Melissa had retrieved it out in Splott earlier in the day. Ravi had made some jokes over the comm about space wheelchairs and ha ha, wouldn't it be cracker if it just took off, or was a hover chair or something. Jack jokes and starts to tell Ravi that if he wants a hoverchair he can dig around in the Archives before he realises that they don't have Archives anymore. Well, not those ones.
But on a secure line, Ravi says, 'Jack, your name is on it.'
Jack smiles. 'My name is on a lot of things floating out there in the cosmos, Rav. In fact-'
'No Jack, your name is on a wheelchair,' Ravi says, as if that's supposed to make a diff-
Oh.
Jack sends everyone home and meets Ravi at the SUV, and there they stand in their long coats and if they weren't Torchwood he would make a joke about looking like members of some secret organisation, with their shiny black car and coats and earpieces. Ravi is a funny bloke, but he thinks Jack is cheesy (twentieth century for bad, thanks Mickey), one of the many reasons Jack keeps him. Ravi follows orders even when he doesn't agree with them, and Jesus, between Gwen and Ianto, it's refreshing to have one good soldier in the bunch.
Even if the good soldier couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
Ravi unloads the chair from the back of the SUV while he walks over. There's no worry, actually, the new Hub has a private secure car park for all their cars (After the Torsk had put sugar in Owen's gas tank Jack had really wished they'd had a secure car park.).
The car park reminds him of the Torchwood One facility they had used for a while after the Hub had exploded. It doesn't have a sofa, or trash barrels, but it is hollow and sterile and dusty all at the same time. It feels as antiquated as it isn't, and that makes him wonder if his insides aren't just the same, hollow and dated and built to look like old when they're new.
'I'm not an expert, but I got a feeling about this,' Ravi says as he fights with the brakes. Jack steadies the thing and gives it the once over, his breath fast, his heart doing that flippety-flip it does when the back of his brain has made a connection and is uploading it to the front of his skull. It just takes a minute to get there.
The chair looks just like the one he left that morning, the one cradling Lisa's frame as she griped about being late for work. There are a few scuffs, and if he looks at the back of it, a little burn/sticker/marking/thing that displays the New New York Sisters of Plenitude Hospital. Jack stands up straight and lays a hand on one of the push handles. He tells himself that the zing he feels upon making contact with it is just his imagination working overtime.
Ravi sighs. 'Yeah,' he says, as if he can tell what Jack is thinking, though he couldn't ever, not quite, or maybe Jack is that transparent. He has a hard time remembering that on Earth, this Earth, sometimes, he lucks into hiring people who can see right through him (Is 'unlucks' a word? That one.).
'Here, right here,' Ravi says, pointing and then dancing back in a nervous gesture, like turning the shower on and then stepping out of the way for that first split second of cold water in the pipes. Jack turns the chair to see what he has pointed at.
Carved onto the left armrest is a message: "Jack, we love you. All times. I&L."
Jack calls them at home. Ianto answers, puzzled, and Jack knows that he has to play the conversation light, fast and loose, or Ianto will pick up the scent of worry like a bloodhound and he'll have to prevaricate. It's easier and harder to lie on the phone really, easier because he doesn't have to worry about his face, but harder, because Ianto is listening for his facial expressions, so he has to worry about his face.
'Are you sure you're quite all right?' Ianto asks. In the background, Jack can hear Lisa screaming something to the effect of, 'The flambé is on fire!' and he knows they have tried to make that whiskey thing without him, which is just as well. At least it means that Ianto will be distracted.
'Yeah, yeah,' he says absently, looking at the curve of what is unmistakably Ianto's 'J' in his name scrolled across the chair arm. Ravi stuffs his hands in his pockets and pretends that he's not standing there. 'I just wanted to see if you were okay.' He hits his forehead and Ravi makes a "What the fuck?" face at him. Jack never asks those kinds of questions. Jack kicks the chair in front of him and watches it roll across the floor a few feet.
Ianto is quite distracted, is what he is, because he sighs. 'I think I'm catching something,' he replies. 'I can't wait up for you.'
Jack snorts then, and turns away from Ravi to round the car. He usually doesn't care if anyone overhears his sex talk, but this domestic stuff is a touchier subject, and Ravi should still feel free to think of him as the Intergalactic Gigolo; that lasts for a split second as he remembers that Ravi had watched him feed Gwen and Lisa sticky toffee pudding with his fingers three weeks ago at Rhys's birthday party. Hrm.
'Go to bed. Drink fluids. Take some of that psychosomatic over the counter stuff that was developed by a teacher blasted into space by NASA,' he says jovially. 'I know you like that fake stuff.'
It is Ianto's turn to snort. 'When you treat them as if they're real and they work, they might as well be real,' he says then. 'Wait, wait, hold on-'
There is that jostling phone noise and Lisa whispers into his ear. 'Ianto looks like death warmed over. Did you unearth something?'
Jack knows what she's asking. As nonchalant as she pretends to be, Lisa lives in fear of alien viruses, has ever since Thames House. Jack cannot blame her. It had been his fault that they hadn't the foresight to bring gas masks, and it had only been through a little bit of quick-witted wet towelery and the like that they had managed to get Ianto out of there, though he had been in an intensive care unit for a week. Ever since then, Lisa dreads metal canisters and phantom sniffles.
And they seem to come, and not in single spies, but in battalions: the sniffles, the coughs, the fevers, negligible at first, the Cardiff winter, Ianto says. And then deepening, settling like clockwork, as if whatever Ianto had sucked in had bypassed his coal-mining hard-knock genetics and grafted itself to his lungs. Karen might have been able to help him, but…and Melissa is too new, Jack doesn't know if he's keeping her yet.
Jack keeps telling himself that if he doesn't call Martha for help, then it might just go away. Yeah that tactic has always served him well, he thinks as he looks at the walls of the new car park, still pastel blue and spatter-free.
'He's fine. Nothing that I can see.' Of course it's not always the things they can see, but that is not something he wants to mention this time, no matter how apropos.
Lisa sighs into the phone, then she mentions a few things that she would like to do to his anatomy that are promising, and then she hangs up, the smoke alarm going off in the background.
Jack tucks his Bluetooth away in a pocket, tells Ravi thanks, and to shove off. He'll take care of this. Then, once he hears the door click shut, he rounds the chair and stands in front of it.
He can see it now: the dent in the left wheel rim from when Ianto had hit it with a cast iron skillet three months ago; the long white skid mark across the right panel when she had drunkenly turned too soon on the way to the loo and scraped the doorjamb. He crouches in front of it and lifts it up, tilting it back-there, the front edge of the underseat, smears of nailpolish, because Lisa wipes excess off on the underside of any surface. These are her colours, too: filigree, sterling, fire engine red.
He lowers the chair back down and leans forward, resting his arms and head on the seat, running scenarios in his head. None of them work. None of them make sense. Actually they all make sense, and his imagination is vivid; it's just that none of them bode well.
His mobile beeps and he ignores it. He knows it's Gwen, calling, as she does every Thursday night at eight, to gossip about Torchwood and everything. The baby is only two months old, and he has told her to come back when she is ready, if she is ever ready (Sometimes he wants her to just quit, for her sake, for his sake, for Ioan and Rhys's sake. Other times he wants her back so badly it aches to go on missions. Contrary, man, contrary.).
The chair rolls a little as he places more weight on it, so he stands and turns, and then sits down, rolling the chair backwards with his feet. It's too small for him, too narrow. It doesn't accommodate his legs and their length. He wonders if Lisa's muscles cramp, or if that's not something they do anymore. He watches her exercise her legs, which is a strange ritual of levering and the like, and wonders not for the first time what it would be like to have parts of him that don’t move, no matter how stubborn he is, no matter how singularly devoted he is to their functioning. To have to care for something that is useless, because not having it is worse than dragging it around.
He uses the wheels to tip the front back and balance in the air, mostly because he's always wanted to try it, and it seemed disrespectful to do it in front of Lisa. The chair isn't very tolerant of this-it groans and lists in general disapproval. He lands back down with a thud and stares at the arm of the chair again.
…love you. All times…
Time.
Jack gets out of the chair and wheels it to the SUV, loads it in and drives to the storage unit. He fumbles for the key on his ring, opens the door and wheels the chair in, tucking it neatly between Owen's Bowflex (never used) and Toshiko's carefully wrapped and boxed koto (also never used). When he shuts the door again, he has to open it three more times to check, to make sure that Lisa isn't trapped in there. She's not, of course, but he looks anyway, like a dog circling three times before it lies down.
Three days later, Jack finds himself at the chemist's with a bottle of Beechams and a box of tissues, standing in line and resisting the urge to really flirt with the cashier. She's not even that attractive, in the end, but he likes to make small talk that he finds entertaining. What's more entertaining than sex or kissing? Well, guns maybe. And really, Jack's philosophy is that if you have to make small talk, make small talk that makes someone feel better, feel good about themselves. It's like a small gift; it doesn't cost him anything and makes up for all manner of sins, maybe.
Still, when he unloads the bag back at the penthouse, her mobile number is written on the back of the receipt. He bins it, grinning. Still magic, Harkness.
The sun has set hours ago, and he normally wouldn't be here at this time of night, but Ianto has the flu, the real flu, not a bad cold or something alien, the honest to gods flu, and he has stopped by to drop off some things for Lisa, so that she doesn't have to fight the lift and the car and the everything to get out and pick up some juice. She doesn't look very well herself.
So Jack has tucked them both into bed, brought Lisa's equipment to the bedside so that she doesn't have to get in the chair for her normal ablutions. Ianto does look like death warmed over, actually, when he pulls the covers up to his chin and murmurs something, smiles at the blast of acrid breath that greets him when he bends down to briefly kiss his lips. Lisa throws her arm over Ianto a little and smiles.
'Go away,' she says. But it's a smiley "go away". Jack has been released for recess.
He pours himself a glass of the juice and wanders out onto the balcony, staring at the bay, farther off. The Plass is barely visible from here, but he remembers when he could see the shining lights that illuminated the water tower. He knows that he should be going back to work, that Melissa is waiting for him with an autopsy and that Ravi is stroppy because Ianto is ill so he has to stay late, doing Tech inventory no less, but Jack just wants to stand there and stuff one hand in his pocket, jangle the change that seems to have magically accumulated there (he has no idea what he has purchased to generate the change. Maybe these are magic alien space trousers, ah wait-the chemist's.).
The last thing he ever thinks he will hear starts to grind around him, and he turns, eyes rapidly scanning the patio. There, over by the terraced garden that Lisa works at tirelessly, the TARDIS is materialising, its rotor light blinking. Jack sets his glass on the edge of the balcony, and it topples over the railing and down, all the way to the ground. Jack tears his eyes away from the blue box long enough to make sure that he hasn't killed anyone or anything, and then he saunters to the TARDIS, crossing his arms and trying, for once, to look like the disapproving one.
The door opens and the Doctor all but stumbles out, sheepish smile, cautious, looking about with the general curious aloofness that comes with this model. The suit, as ever, is charming, the shoes, ha ha, still Chucks. Jack is grateful that this is still a Doctor that he knows. Well, even if he hadn't known the body, he does know the Doctor, at least, he hopes he does. He hopes to know the Doctor forever, actually.
'Jack!' The Doctor says, as if he is surprised, but he is never surprised, not about these things. It's his way of diffusing issues, Jack thinks, and he has a lot of practice at it. 'This is different,' the man murmurs. Already Jack is opening his arms for a hug that won't come before refolding them against his chest. The Doctor almost trips then, but it's not a trip. It's part of his charm.
'However did you find me?' he says, because flirting with this man is something he can't avoid. It's like breathing, walking, or in Jack's case, surviving.
The Doctor just walks a few feet to the balcony railing with him and turns. 'Oh the old girl can find you wherever you are, Jack. You know that.' He does that hand wavey thing before he shoves them in his trouser pockets, leaning against the railing and staring at the glass windows of the penthouse. 'That's posh. You really live here?'
Jack shrugs. 'My last place blew up.'
The Doctor glances at him, and then his face muddles. 'Oh yeah, meant to ask about that. That place was convenient, that. Have to go all the way out to…Splott? Is that it?'
Jack laughs. 'I believe estate agents pronounce it "Splow".'
A roll of the eyes. 'The Welsh. Give them something easy and they make it difficult.' He pauses. 'Or maybe they're doing it right and we're all doing it wrong. Minority, majority, meeeeeh,' one hand pulls out of the trousers and waves back and forth. 'Nothing is where it should be these days.'
Jack stares at him then, trying to see the man he'd first met under the glasses and the suit. Because that's the kind of thing the Doctor might have said to him years ago. This Doctor has never confided in him. It's the kind of thing he tells Rose, or Martha.
The gulls have woken up a bit with the arrival of the TARDIS, and a few of them fly down to rest on the top of the Police Box. Jack thinks that it would be just his luck if they shit all over it and Ianto would be mortified-
He thinks about Ianto and Lisa in the other room. They had to have heard the TARDIS. Or maybe the vaporiser that they had bought a few months ago to run on the nights when Ianto is ill (and that has been every other night for the past few weeks) is making enough white noise to drown it out. Maybe Lisa has taken some of the Beechams and they are drugged out. Either way, Jack is sure they will be disappointed that they have missed it.
Which brings him back to the matter at hand, actually. Jack cocks his head at the box, running his eyes over it as familiarly as using his hands, and possibly as lasciviously. He does love that ship. He wants to crawl inside and through her undercarriage, just to see how she works.
Mostly because that information will be relevant in another nine hundred years.
'Why are you here?' he finally asks. 'I mean, I know you can't refuel up here.' He gestures to the penthouse, the general area.
'Oh, that,' the Doctor chirps, frowning off into the distance as if he's thinking. His hair is particularly fantastic today, and Jack's busy looking at the man's Adam's apple and wondering if Ianto and Lisa would think Time Lords were outside the fidelity law-and there is one, he can tell, they just never wrote it out-so he doesn't quite register the Doctor's answer right away. 'I'm here to take Miss Lisa for a ride.' Pause. 'Both of them actually, your Ianto Jones and-'
'He's not my Ianto-'
'Oh hush up.'
Jack starts to wonder then, really wonder. Tumblers are clicking in his head. 'Why?'
'You told me to. Well, you will, someday, and I can say that, you told me, because you watched the Bill and Ted movie. In fact, I'm supposed to remind you to watch it aaaaaand-' he raises a finger and his eyes go off center as if he is listening to something that only he can hear. 'There. It's all set. Playing with your timeline is like working with indelible ink, Jack.'
Jack isn't convinced. There's something about the casual way that the Doctor isn't looking directly at him. He's been trained well enough in the ways of Time Travel and Time Lords that he doesn't ask the obvious questions: How did I know to ask? When do I ask you? Where were we? What are you going to do? but he can ask the other one. 'I didn't think I could ever convince you to do anything.' That's so open-ended that it doesn't need an answer.
The Doctor's mouth quirks in one corner as he looks out over the bay. Skypoint is indeed situated in a wonderful spot; that is one of the reasons the owners can demand so much money for the spaces there. Jack knows that Ianto doesn't care about the view as much as he cares about the space, and that Lisa just likes to be up high. He can't blame her-she spends enough time looking up at everyone else.
'You can be very persuasive, Jack,' the Doctor says, deciding to rest his wrists on the railing and lean. 'That said, I think you would know by now. You found it, didn't you?'
All times. Jack does one of those yoga breaths that Lisa has taught him: four counts in, eight counts out.
'You can't have them,' he says, trying to sound chipper.
The Doctor polishes his glasses on his coat. 'I don’t want them, Jack, well, not for long.' Here he pauses. 'You do.'
Jack knows that he can't ask much. He cannot ask anything, because he has seen the chair, and all those improbable scenarios are falling away, like shucking corn. The golden grain underneath is coming up, its only mar the silk that still clings to it in places. 'I thought you didn't do this,' he says casually, trying to maintain the complete and utter façade. Who is he kidding? The Doctor knows, he always knows.
'Oh you know, some things are fixed and some things oughtn't to be meddled with.' Then he sighs. 'And sometimes, things are so miniscule that they don't matter. Ripples in a pond.' Casual slip of a smile. 'Are you going to get them, or shall I?' One trainer kicks out in front of him, as if he is booting a football.
Jack removes his hands from his pockets. It's just clicked in his head, like cocking a gun. 'Ianto is dying.' Saying it increases his heartbeat twofold.
The Doctor makes a face. 'Oh dear. Well then.'
Jack shoves off from the wall. 'Just one trip then? That's what I asked you for?'
The Doctor holds up one pointed finger, all the more poignant for his sharp insistence. 'Just one. No side trips. I promise.' He pauses. 'Then again, how would you know if-oh there it goes again.' He sighs, head tilted again as if listening to something silent. The deadlock seal that is Jack's timeline, maybe. 'This is why I have trouble with you Jack.'
Jack doesn't ask. He has the feeling he understands. He backs away from the Doctor, holding up his hands. 'Just. Give me a minute then,' he pleads, as if he is afraid that he'll go inside and when he returns, the TARDIS and its passenger will be gone, phantoms, as if they had never been here at all. For a second Jack entertains the idea that he is talking to a mirage. But nah, if he was going to dream up this scenario, it would have gone so differently. Would be going so very differently.
He moves through the flat quietly, though why he bothers is a mystery, since he's about to wake everyone up. He flips the hallway lights on and opens the bedroom door.
The vaporiser belches out mist from the bedstead, and it reminds Jack of the fog that clogs the roads in the mornings. Jack waves a hand to clear it and turns the machine off. Lisa raises her head and stares at him blearily.
'Back already?' Her hand draws around Ianto's chest, peculiarly possessive.
He smiles and sits on the edge of the bed, running a hand down her warm skin. 'Never left.' He slides his hand from her arm down to Ianto's chest, trying to listen with his fingers. Is it there, in the upper lungs? Or has it taken hold somewhere else? In Ianto's heart, maybe? This alien virus choking his immune system, it will pull and drain and leech until one day Ianto will pick up something in a grocery store, or god help them, something will fall through the Rift that will shred every white blood cell his body can weakly churn out.
The clock ticks next to them, as Jack tries to find Lisa's eyes in the dimness from the hallway light. Now that he understands that Ianto's life is rather literally like sands falling through his fingers, every click of every second feels like a race. It's not, Ianto isn't dying, not quite, not yet, but he wants to drag them both inside the TARDIS and tell the Doctor to take off, to go, to do this thing, whatever that thing is, the thing that had come through the Rift three days ago. The thing that ends with Lisa's wheelchair in the storage closet.
'How much do you trust me?' Jack whispers, 'It's important.'
Lisa doesn't say anything. Her hand finds his and squeezes once, then rests there, fingers curled together over Ianto's chest. It's at that moment that Ianto cracks an eye open and says, 'Infallibly and unwisely,' before coughing a few times. Lisa lifts her hand away, as if she thinks the pressure of it resting on his chest is going to make a difference. Jack splays his palm and can almost feel the clicking of congestion, the raggedy slurry of mucus sluicing inside Ianto's alveoli.
'Okay then, I need you to do that.' He stands and rounds the bed to scoop up Lisa and set her in her chair, and the action itself is doing all the work for him, he hopes, because her eyes are wide. Ianto sits up, grabs a box of tissues and shoves his feet into the slippers on his side of the bed.
'Is this about Wife Swap again?' he asks Jack, but it's a weak joke.
Jack wheels Lisa's chair to the door and gestures for Ianto to go first, that way he can keep an eye on him, as if something might happen to him on the brief trip to the patio. 'Just go outside, smart ass.'
Ianto doesn't argue with him, but Lisa rests her hands on the arm of her chair while Jack pushes her, and she tips her head all the way back so that she can look him in the eye. He's vaguely reminded of the time when he and Gray had drawn faces on their chins and done an upside down puppet show for their parents. He shakes his head to clear it and bites his lip. One of Lisa's hands comes up and she taps his chin.
Ianto almost runs into the sliding glass door, but he manages to stop himself, wrestling with the runner and the handle, almost falling into the half-closed blinds. Jack is ready to follow him out there, but Ianto takes three steps before stopping, and Jack doesn't have to ask why. He just bumps him with Lisa's chair from behind and mumbles something like, 'Beep'.
The doctor has apparently been examining their gardening with interest, and when he hears them he looks up, staring over his glasses, his hands full of petunias. His face lights up a little; Jack knows it's the delight of a new outing in the offing. That's reassuring. If the Doctor isn't worried, then he shouldn't be, either. Right? Jack rounds Ianto's stock-still form and parks Lisa close to the TARDIS, by one of the garden boxes.
'Ms. Hallet-Jones! Lovely! And Mister Jones! Nice to see you again well, sort of see you in person.' The Doctor doesn't offer to shake hands, in fact, he shoves them in his pockets. Good to see that some things don't change with the body.
Ianto's eyes widen and he staggers, but that could be from the shock, or the fact that he's wearing slippers, or the fact that he's running a fever. He has the wry wit to turn to Jack and frown.
'Was there codeine in that cough syrup?'
'Ianto is ill,' Lisa says, her eyes not leaving the TARDIS. Her fingers twitch on her wheels, and Jack wonders if she has ever seen the box before, maybe at Canary Wharf. Maybe he should have given her a heads up about that. Live and learn.
The Doctor peers into Ianto's eyes, and then looks at Jack. 'You aren't well,' he says to Ianto.
Ianto has to sit down then, dropping the box of tissues and holding his head in his hands. Lisa runs her hand on his back in a circle. Jack realises that he has to get them in the TARDIS, that he has to be the one to do it, because the Doctor is just standing there and the Doctor has never had to wrangle, cajole or persuade. It's not what he does. He's a carrot dangler, a carrot dangler in a world full of horses.
'I'm so glad everyone has noticed that,' Ianto groans
Jack crouches down in front of Ianto and looks at Lisa. He will say it to her in his head, and she will get it, because that is the way they have. Telepathy in all things Ianto. And all things pastry-related. He wants to make sure that she understands that this isn't an option, now that he has it sussed, and she gets that, because she wheels away towards the box and its master.
'You're going away,' Ianto says dully.
Jack squeezes one of his hands. 'No, I'm staying here. You're just going for a ride. For fun, you know.' He shrugs. 'Time machine, eh?' He tries to make it seem like a joke, a fun idea, even though Ianto will see right through it. When all he gets is a watered down version of the raised eyebrow, he shrugs and glances at the TARDIS. 'Hey, I need you to trust me on this,' he says, sliding his hand up Ianto's shoulder.
'Are you sending us away?' Ianto whispers, mostly because he is sick, and partly because he is afraid. Ianto is the one horse who will never eat from anyone's hand, Jack thinks.
Oh, and that's a beautiful thing, his eyes widening when Jack takes his face in his hands and kisses him, sick, pukey breath and all, because that's okay, that's human. He presses his forehead to Ianto's and smiles at the sound of Ianto's congested mouthbreathing.
'Not sending. Offering.' He snorts. 'Encouraging. I'll be here when you get back. Promise.' He blinks a little bit longer than he had intended. 'I need you to go.'
Ianto sighs. 'This is about me, isn't it?' He kicks the tissue box. 'I'm not stupid.'
Jack smiles. 'Never said you were. Ever.'
'I'm sick.'
'You are.'
'And this is going to make it better.'
Jack can't say anything, because he's not sure if that’s the case. For all he knows, the Doctor is lying to him, and he takes the two of them off and they start a whole new life in the colony of Thrakis 4 where the valleys are lush and there is no disease at all. Or maybe he takes them and Ianto is cured and they decide to travel with the Doctor until one of them is irrevocably broken. Because that is what happens, really, there's always heartbreak. But you can't blame a light bulb when a moth hits it. You can't blame the moth either.
Ianto coughs into his hand, and something rattles in his throat. Jack hands him a wad of tissues to wheeze into and they come away bloody. Ianto stares at them dully, as if he is not surprised, as if this is not something new, and Jack resists the urge to shake him and ask him how long that has been going on, because shaking Ianto while he's sick isn't right (and also because shaking Ianto is just never done).
'Okay then,' Ianto says, 'I suppose that's that.' He wads the tissues up and shoves them in his pajama pocket, patting it down so that it lies flatter. Jack resists the urge to pull them out and shove them in his own pocket to throw away later. Humans like to deal with their own bio-waste.
Ianto clearly isn't sold on the idea, and Jack has no idea how he managed to convince him, except that maybe it is the Beechams and the flu, and Lisa, who is busily and animatedly talking to the Doctor about something, machinery, ballet, The Master and Margarita maybe. His legs are shaky when he stands, but he leans heavily on Jack and that allows them both to embrace without it seeming like one or the other is too needy. Over Ianto's shoulder, Lisa's eyes are afire, and whatever the Doctor has said to her in their little chat has steeled her resolve, calmed her apprehension about what is to happen. Jack wishes that someone would calm his apprehension; why is doing the right thing, as convoluted and unsure as it feels, always so very difficult?
When Ianto pulls away, Jack brushes something invisible from his shoulder. 'Remember to tell him how much bigger it is on the inside,' he whispers. 'He loves that.'
Ianto nods then and shuffles towards the open door, stopping once to peer inside, just like he does when he is about to clear a room with his firearm or get into the shower that Jack has turned on (Okay, he'd turned on the cold just once, and it had been funny.). Jack rolls his eyes at Lisa when she smacks Ianto's bum and tells him to hustle. Jack feels reminiscently like he used to when he'd drop Alice off at camp for the summer. The Doctor follows them and mumbles a few things as they walk further into the TARDIS, but then he backs out and turns to Jack, hands in pockets again.
'Well then, you can't say that I have never done-'
Jack waves a hand. 'Spoilers,' he reminds him, and the Doctor smiles.
The Doctor tilts his head, nodding backwards at the open door. 'You know he has-'
Jack stops him. 'Yeah, I thought so. Fix it.' He sits down on the cement block retaining wall for the garden.
Those sharp eyes gleam, and the mouth quirks when the Doctor steps into the doorway of the TARDIS, his hand running up and down the jamb absently. 'I'd ask how he got it, but it doesn't matter.'
Jack sighs. 'They came here for the children,' he whispers. He's tired of talking about it, about what he'd done in 1965.
The Doctor's face sours. 'They're gone, I gather.'
Jack smiles. 'The Shadow Proclamation ain't got nothing on me,' he sings, and it's true. The Doctor is the Earth's sometimes hero. Jack is the steady caretaker, at least for now, and that's good by him.
They stand there in awkward silence, and then Jack hears Ianto's hacking and coughing coming from inside the ship and he understands that what he had been ignoring, hoping that it would go away, is reaching critical mass inside Ianto's body, and that they hadn't saved him at Thames House, but rather just delayed, perhaps for this moment. Now, time is of the essence, and the man in front of him has nothing but that to dole out.
He starts scheming now for ways to make the Doctor owe him enough to grant him this later, whenever that is.
The Doctor raises a hand and smiles. 'We'll meet at the old place, or well, somewhere near the old place. A week at the most. I promise.'
Time promises from a time traveller should be set in stone, but no, that just makes them more fluid. And the TARDIS will land where and when she lands. Jack simply waves a hand. 'Go on, go. See you on the flip side.'
He doesn't get an answer. The door shuts and he closes his eyes through the whole thing, because one of the worst sights in the universe, in his rather extended experience, has been watching this ship disappear.
When they are gone, he finds Lisa's bottle of Maker's Mark and plays the "woe is me" game until he falls asleep in the bathtub, the shower on full tilt. He wakes to Ravi shaking his shoulder and demanding to know what has happened. Oh that's right, he has a job that he does here in this time. He feebly fields their questions later, finally laying down the law: Lisa and Ianto are gone on holiday and they will be back, he doesn't know when, yes they are fine.
The next day, on the way to work, Jack stops to stand on the Plass and watch the gulls virtually attack a small woman who has a pasty. He observes the workers filling in the holes where the lower levels used to be. He calculates how much retcon they'll have to dole out when the effort is all over. He shrugs, retreats to his office, and sits at his desk, watching Ravi and Melissa argue about some sort of alien button. He fiddles with the Internet and pirates a few things.
When they have left for the evening, he orders Chinese and calls up the film and watches it. He doesn't laugh when he knows he is supposed to (although, okay, Ghengis Khan wrecking a sporting goods store is kinda funny), and he cackles at inappropriate moments when he is sure that anyone else probably wouldn't. And when he gets to the end (thank god it's over), he understands why he did it that way. He programs a note to himself in his wrist strap that says, "Bill and Ted and Lisa and Ianto." And then leaves it at that.
It feels as if time has sealed itself, though one day he wants to hear a hermetic seal noise, just for kicks.
He waits on the Plass every day for a few minutes at noon, but they don't return until Tuesday. Five days. He almost is afraid for the door to open. And then it does.
*~*~*~*~*~*
Master List
Author: amand_r
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team, etc (Jack/Lisa/Ianto/Gwen/Rhys and all permutations thereof with a heavy dose of the first three), Rhys, Rhiannon, Alice, Ten, Lisa (basically everyone!)
Ratings: NC-17 for sexual content (also mild watersports and lactation sex).
Timeline: AU from pre S1 and threads through both seasons, part of CoE and into THE FUTURE. Enjoy the ride.
Wordcount: 63,000 words
Author's Notes: See the master post for notes and credits and fanmixes.
Summary: You don't pick your family. They pick you.
JACK
When Gwen tells them that she is pregnant, Rhys and Lisa explode with delight. Lisa is off to the races, and Rhys is a rollercoaster of Welsh vowels and kisses on Gwen's face and hands and stomach.
Ianto and Jack catch each other's eyes over the din.
Because this is how it happens, really, what Jack has often come to call the natural order of the twenty-first century, because while it might have also happened in his time, he likes to blame the faulty workings of humans in this century on the time period and not the species, because he has high hopes that they will some day conform to his tastes. He's going to have to live with them forever, after all.
That's petulant and demanding, he is aware. And he takes his ungrateful self out to the balcony, where he can stand with his hands on the railing and listen to the tinkle of their glasses as they drink to Gwen's baby's health.
It couldn't have come at a better time, actually, what with the Hub in ruins and them sifting through the wreckage under the giant tarps that seem to draw larger crowds than when it had just been them digging about with wheelbarrows and shovels. But UNIT had brought the tarps at the Crown's request, and now that it is getting colder and the rain freezes sometimes on the site in the overnight, Jack is grateful for them.
Ravi is still reeling from the loss of Karen, who they'd brought in with him shortly before the Hub had exploded. He's a brilliant tech, but he's no Toshiko Sato. Jack shoves his hands in his pockets and encounters objects that he has salvaged from the Hub and cannot seem to let go of; they weigh down his pockets and probably make it look like he has three cocks. Normally, that is something that he'd find amusing enough to use it as a recurring gag about the house.
The loss of the Hub has rattled him, though he likes to pretend that it hasn't. He can live without the things, he tells himself. He was never a collector of debris, flotsam and jetsam, really. He likes to joke that you don't own anything that you can't carry at a dead run, but that's more a remnant of his older lives, lives spent on ships in the stars, where everything he'd owned could fit in a duffel, or later when all he really wanted to remember was what was in his kit, what he could carry from trench to trench crawling on his belly.
But there are things he would have liked to have held on to, simply because he's had them so long-a box of photographs and a few letters, a few special shell casings, some bullets that he'd dug out of people or things and tucked into his pocket, collecting them in a discarded cloth bag (A body, a live one, lies frozen in the bowels of the rubble, waiting to be discovered, Jack knows. He is slow going through where the morgue should be, because he isn't sure if he wants to be the one to deal with Gray's body, or if he wants to delegate it, shuffle it off, never see it again. If he doesn't see it, then it never happened, a falsehood that lies heavier than the wool about his shoulders.).
Jack watches the gulls dive off the railing to catch the updraft and sail, and he wonders what it's like to defy gravity without anything but the body one is born with. He'd once had a brief fling with a winged Tervali, and in their afterglow, while she was grooming her feathers (and him, oh yeah, that beak against his skin), he'd asked her what it was like to fly. She had sat back and asked him, 'Can you drink the sunlight? Can you eat a rainbow? It's those and not those.'
So, no, actually, he cannot imagine flying like that, but someday he decides he'll try it. He certainly has the time to explore the idea.
The loss of the Hub, however, does mean that his space is gone, and he doesn't like to think about that. It's not like he had slept there often, but that the option was there had been comforting. With Gwen and Rhys in the house, he doesn't have a bedroom of his own, and while that doesn't usually bother him (Lisa has offered to move her office into the living area, and he just couldn't do that to her), sometimes he wants to lie down in the quiet and just think. Ianto had bought ear plugs, actually, passed them out to everyone and made a statement about how when someone was wearing the earplugs that meant they were off limits. Jack hasn't used his, but he finds them adorable (And he never pays attention when anyone has them in, so he figures there's no point in his using them.).
Salvaging is hard work, Jack thinks as he rocks from one foot to another and sniffs the air. There's an acrid burnt smell and he realises that it's him. He'd been out on the fringes of the blast crater today, digging near where the tower had been. He'd changed his clothes and washed his hands, but he needs a good soak. The hot tub has been refilled. He glances at it and wonders if he mightn't use his earplugs for the first time.
The others haven't taken the loss of the Hub well either. Gwen associates the location, the space, with Owen and Toshiko, and just looking at it seems to cause her physical pain (though, he thinks, in retrospect, that might have just been the morning sickness).
Ianto doesn't say anything for hours at a time when he works, just trudges from bin to bin, plastic bag after plastic bag, sorting with what Jack has decided is the eagle eye of a Torchwood scholar. Ianto might doubt his own critical judgement skills when he stops to think about it, but in action he is never hesitant. He pulls things from Jack's hands and bins or saves them without the slightest doubt. Jack trusts him enough to never argue.
Ianto is bothered by the loss of knowledge. Yeah, he says, the servers are remote and they have the whole Torchwood system, but the documents, the files, the artefacts they used to have, they are gone or mangled or buried under the rubble. Jack is fairly sure that if he didn't monitor him, Ianto might go down there in the middle of the night and search in the dark with a torch.
Jack knows how it is. Ianto's too young to understand that knowledge can't be saved, just passed on for a while. They never quite have anything they can't carry at a dead run, whether talking about Jack or society as a whole.
And some things they just borrow from other times. When they had found one slender claw in the wreckage, chitin scorched and hardened to a point, rotting meat still clinging to one end, Ianto had burst into tears. Jack had cleaned it off and tucked it into a pocket. It's still there in his trousers, and he turns it over now with one hand, reminding himself of how this is the way of things. This is the way of Torchwood, not the maternity party in the other room.
Jack sighs. He would have liked to have saved his coral. He'd had plans for that.
The party noises get louder when the sliding glass door opens and someone slips out, closing it behind them so that everyone sounds so far away again. Ianto finds him at the far railing, and they look out over the city, dazzling and shiny and full of promise. It's as taunting right now as a newborn child, stretched out and drawing its breath to mewl
Ianto coughs a few times, hacking a little, and Jack worries. He's been at the site too long; too much dust and alien crap in the air. Jack is occasionally concerned that all that alien tech dust will get sucked into the clouds and come down on Newport in a rain shower, and all the school children will grow tentacles or something. Ianto just takes a few seconds to breathe-he can hear it not a foot away from him.
He lets Ianto wrap around him from behind, and then his lips ghost against Jack's ear.
'It's not over, you know,' Ianto says, 'Not by a long shot.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
GWEN
Her belly is discomfortingly round, she thinks, as she rubs it and stands to get more tea.
Jack comes into the main building and jogs up to his office upstairs. Her gaze drifts to the door when it shuts. This new Hub. She’ll never get used to it. Sure, the last one had been underground, and dirty and dim and had had dinosaur shite everywhere, but it had been their little maverick place.
The new place is still shiny. It's lost the new building smell, but that had been inevitable, especially with the things they bring in. And it has windows, which never cease to amaze her. Gwen had never seen Torchwood One, but Ianto has told her that the windows had been the one thing he'd missed.
And it isn't as if they'd had any choice; the Crown had been most conciliatory when they'd discovered that the Hub had been, well, demolished by the Home Office during the 456 affair, and they had lavished funds on the restructuring of a new location, this time farther from the Bay, but still close enough that Gwen can see gulls winging their way past her window (window!).
She does like the layout though, very much like the old Hub, with a main floor and three upper levels that circle it. It is circular still, like the old Hub, with spokes that jut out like spider legs. The security is just as complicated, though to the outside world the Hub looks like a large industrial complex. They need retinal scans to get in, along with a few keycards. Jack suggests that they get implants so they don't have to carry the sensors on them, but Ianto nixes it with a reminder about how Jack would lose his if he exploded or lost a body part. Leave it to Ianto to use the overly macabre to illustrate his point.
She rounds the huge tech area that they had constructed based on plans that Tosh had drawn up, part of her "rainy day projects" folder. Jack had found them when sifting through the Mainframe for ideas on how to build from under the ground up, and Ianto had said something about how a rainy day projects folder was rather like a joke in Cardiff. Then Ravi had looked at their plans, since they thought the current Tech should at least have a say, and he had waved his hands and said, not for the first time, that if Toshiko Sato were still alive he would put a ring on her finger and take her home to meet his mother.
Gwen doubts that, but then again, she has a hard time seeing Tosh with anyone anymore, since her futures have run out. Jack had told Ravi that Tosh would have eaten him alive, to which Ianto had hastily and needlessly added, 'Not literally.'
But Ravi is a clever albeit clumsy and somewhat cocksure lad, and she loves him a bit for that. He had been devastated by Karen's death, like they all had been to some degree, but Ravi especially because they had started Torchwood at the same time, been each other's Secret Keepers as it were.
She reaches the large kitchenette with its cheery yellow border that Ianto had grumbled over but allowed, and bypasses the coffee machine with regret. Ianto has left the kettle on for her, warming the water, and when she pours it, her eyes catch the little basket of biscuit packets and specialty teabags he has selected just for her, decorating the basket with a small sign: 'Gwen's. Touch & Despair.'
Ianto thinks of everything. She notices that the basket is suspiciously picked over and glances at Jack's office, two flights up. His light is on, even in the daytime (no windows for Jack's office, please). And she is missing all of her Jaffa Cakes.
That's a good enough excuse to go up there, though Gwen tells herself firmly that she doesn't need an excuse to visit Jack in his office, ever. She abandons her mug and waves to Melissa in the new medical bay as she mounts the stairs, one hand under her belly. Just putting it under there and lifting makes her feel better. It's not as if she thinks the kid will just fall out, and she can't move her stomach out of the way, but she isn't immune to impractical gestures. She wonders if she'll become one of those mothers who slings an ineffectual arm across her child in the front seat when they have to hard stop in traffic.
Jack is at the window of his office, surveying the Hub just like he used to do. His eyes slide over her, as if he doesn't want to see her, like she is clothed in a perception filter, but she knows that he does. His hands are in his pockets and he watches Ravi do something inadvisable with a bit of tech that they'd brought in earlier. Gwen is sure that it is a gun, but Ravi thinks it's a communication device. She just hopes that it doesn't "communicate" through his skull.
Ianto steps into her line of vision below, and she sees him manhandle the tech from Ravi, point it at an empty coffee mug, and quick as you please, the mug explodes into fragments. Jack barks a laugh and turns from the window, retreating into the recesses of his office, his Batcave, where he keeps the lights dim and incandescent, a throwback to something, perhaps; maybe he wants to scare Melissa, the new recruit.
She doesn't knock on the frame of his door, just saunters in and sits with a grunt in the padded chair in front of his desk. Jack is cradling his coral in his hands, peering at it, as if there's something in it that he wants to move. Maybe he's trying to will it to grow faster.
Gwen doesn't know what the coral is to him, but she does know that when they had found it in the rubble, intact, almost black, broken around the edges-she had almost missed it-Jack had crushed it to his chest and left the site, walking down the ruined Plass in the rain, both hands cradling it. When she and Ianto had got home that night he had been soaking it in the bathtub for hours, sitting on the floor and reading Agatha Christie's Death On the Nile to it until his voice was hoarse. Ianto had brought him tea and then closed the door on the two of them, only emerging later with a suspiciously damp shoulder.
Gwen thinks that the coral has something to do with the Doctor, but she doesn't ask, because there are things that she knows she will never get a straight answer on, especially when they involve the Doctor. Two years ago she might have pressed the issue. Now, it's just another missing piece that isn't necessary to know, and Gwen likes to think that she has a better instinct for that now.
Her eyes light on the Jaffa Cake wrapper on his desk. Hah.
'Gwen, looking good,' Jack says, glancing up. 'Living la-'
'If you say "large", so help me God,' she tells him. Jack thinks her pregnancy is hysterically funny sometimes. He likes to talk to the kid in her stomach, tell it things like, "When you turn five, I'm going to take you to the circus and show you alllllllllll the acrobats", and "When you get older, your parents will try to feed you laverbread. Don't. Just don't."
Jack blows gently on the coral, distracted, mock-distracted, they're both the same. 'I was going to say "lasciviously",' he counters. Then he winks. Mock-distracted, then.
'I start leave on Friday,' she says, as if he doesn't know. He's been joking about it all week, something about how now they can stop ordering so much takeaway.
She knows why he's doing it, but it's getting old. She and Rhys had moved into the house two months ago, and she's ready for it to be over with. Now is as good a time as any. She gives up on any hope of crossing her legs and instead thinks about putting her feet up on Jack's desk.
'Let's have a chat,' she says, 'like in the old days.'
Jack grins, but it's one of his patented I'll-be-disarmingly-cheerful-to-avoid-issues faces. 'What shall we chat about? Pushchairs? Nappies? Do your tits hurt?'
'You're an ass.'
Jack shrugs. 'Fine then. Guns? Weevils? That flaying monster last month that almost gave you a Caesarian right here in the Hub?' He sets the coral back into the stand. 'That was good times.'
Gwen shrugs. 'The cells are temperamental. That was a mistake.' And it's true, the new cell locks are mechanised and computer locked, with a deadlock seal, but they keep opening at bad times when people clap their hands. Ravi swears up and down that he didn't do it, but they suspect that he might have mixed in a sensor for Jack's old "Clapper" lighting system in there somewhere. They just have to find the right circuit.
Jack smiles, but it's wan, strained. 'Fine.'
'You can't treat me this way forever,' she says, lightly, because with Jack it is best to use a light touch, a trick she has learnt from Ianto. When he frowns, she knows he recognises the technique and is going to fight being "handled". That's fine; she has techniques for that, as well. After all, she's worked and lived with the man. She knows how this goes.
'I don't treat you any way, Gwen,' he says. His hands toy with the edges of an old book.
'Hmn,' she says. Her hand comes to rest on her stomach and his eyes follow it. As if on cue, something falls downstairs with a metallic clang and they both whip their heads around to the glass wall of Jack's new office.
'HE STARTED IT!' comes the shout from below, Ravi it sounds like. Ianto would never shout, well, not that.
Jack puts his head on his desk then. 'I have to go Weevil hunting with him later,' he groans. Ravi is like a ferret, which is why almost a year after his recruitment, he still has yet to clear firearms training. Owen at his worst had been a better marksman without his contacts in.
'Melissa calls you Batman,' Gwen says lightheartedly, because it feels as if something has shifted, and not just in her belly. She rubs her palm on the spot where a foot is pressing out, because if she isn't fast enough she misses it, and she senses that these little moments are the ones she'll want to remember vividly, oh-until that foot jostles her lung.
His eyes track her hand, face a mask of something, but he must feel the shift also, because the smile he offers is genuine. He could never stay angry with her; it's a gift. 'Encourage that. Someone on this team has to respect me.' He shrugs. 'Or at least think I hang out on rooftops and fight crime. Without the tights.' He waves a hand towards the lower levels. 'Ianto gets to wear the tights.'
'Well, he does have the bum for them,' she replies without thinking, and Jack's face darkens again. 'It was never meant to be permanent,' she says suddenly, and this is the crux of it, really. 'You know that, right?'
Time stretches out. That phantom grandfather clock that used to tick in the Hub, the one they'd never found, has followed them here, and they'd spent a few hours scanning for it before just deciding not to question it. It ticks now, for them, counting the seconds, the minutes in which they watch each other. Because he's not staring, and he's not glaring. He's thoughtful. Gwen just waits, because he has to process what all this means to him, and she has to wait for it to come out before she can respond.
These things, Lisa had said one day at lunch, these things are worth it, the waiting, because Jack comes to conclusions fairly when given enough time to simply be, to exist himself into the decision, the right thing to do. It is a shame, really, that most of Jack's decisions must be made on the fly, because if he had all the time in the world, he could always make the right choice.
Good thing he does have all the time in the world. Too bad the rest of reality doesn't.
'I bet on the day you were born, your dad took one look at those big eyes of yours and knew that he was a goner,' Jack says, sighing and leaning conspiratorially over the desk.
Gwen stands then, because she hurts, and she will be happy when the sprog gets his eviction notice and decides to clear out, though she's not precisely looking forward to that part. Rhys is trying to prepare her, with the Lamaze and the occasional book, but just the word episiotomy is enough to make her want to clench her muscles and ask Jack if they don't have some alien tech that can just…transport the baby into the cot.
'I have my moments,' she says. That's all there is then. She wants to put all this to rest, to fold it into their relationship and smooth it over, like evening out the frosting on a cake. She and Rhys had talked about it the other night, about what they had been doing at the penthouse in the first place, what they had taken from it. Rhys had told her that he'd never fancied himself a swinger, but that it had been good, yeah, while it had lasted. She'd had to agree.
If there is anyone in the world who she could have lived with in such a manner, it had been those three. She is fairly sure that even if she and Rhys moved right back in, the dynamics would be different. In retrospect, it had been a perfect conflux of events, all cascading and collapsing in on themselves until the five of them had been impacted, imploded into the centre of this living, loving arrangement. She wants to tell this to Jack, but it sounds as if she is trying too hard to defend it, as if the nine months they had spent together had been something bad. She is sure that she wouldn't have made it out the other side of the rollercoaster without them.
The nine-month timing is not something that she can symbolically ignore either.
'So now that you're out of here for a while, I suppose I've lost my chance to tempt you into trying out those stirrups in the med bay?' He waggles his eyebrows. 'They have faux fur padding.'
'Careful, Harkness, I'm very pregnant,' she laughs. 'Well past the sex window.'
Jack grins when she rounds the desk, turning his chair so that he can hug her sitting down. 'There are so many things you can do that don't require displacing the little person in there,' he says, and then he wraps his arms about her, a much more Herculean task than previously.
'I don't think so,' she whispers. 'Pretty thought, though.'
Jack presses his cheek to her stomach. 'Pregnant women are hot.'
'Everyone is hot.'
'Well, yeah. Sort of. Not Margaret Thatcher-well…'
She smacks his shoulder. Everything is sorted now. Everything is golden. She can go home to her lovely house and lovely husband and take a lovely bath. In less than a month they will have a lovely child, and if that is sentimental and cloying, then Jesus, sign her up.
'You be good,' she says to him, as he presses his lips to her belly. She wants to feel them through the material, but even Jack isn't that magical.
He smiles against the hardness, and then looks up at her. 'If not, I'll be better.'
*~*~*~*~*~*
JACK
Ravi brings him the chair personally, after hours, when he knows that Ianto is gone. He and Melissa had retrieved it out in Splott earlier in the day. Ravi had made some jokes over the comm about space wheelchairs and ha ha, wouldn't it be cracker if it just took off, or was a hover chair or something. Jack jokes and starts to tell Ravi that if he wants a hoverchair he can dig around in the Archives before he realises that they don't have Archives anymore. Well, not those ones.
But on a secure line, Ravi says, 'Jack, your name is on it.'
Jack smiles. 'My name is on a lot of things floating out there in the cosmos, Rav. In fact-'
'No Jack, your name is on a wheelchair,' Ravi says, as if that's supposed to make a diff-
Oh.
Jack sends everyone home and meets Ravi at the SUV, and there they stand in their long coats and if they weren't Torchwood he would make a joke about looking like members of some secret organisation, with their shiny black car and coats and earpieces. Ravi is a funny bloke, but he thinks Jack is cheesy (twentieth century for bad, thanks Mickey), one of the many reasons Jack keeps him. Ravi follows orders even when he doesn't agree with them, and Jesus, between Gwen and Ianto, it's refreshing to have one good soldier in the bunch.
Even if the good soldier couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
Ravi unloads the chair from the back of the SUV while he walks over. There's no worry, actually, the new Hub has a private secure car park for all their cars (After the Torsk had put sugar in Owen's gas tank Jack had really wished they'd had a secure car park.).
The car park reminds him of the Torchwood One facility they had used for a while after the Hub had exploded. It doesn't have a sofa, or trash barrels, but it is hollow and sterile and dusty all at the same time. It feels as antiquated as it isn't, and that makes him wonder if his insides aren't just the same, hollow and dated and built to look like old when they're new.
'I'm not an expert, but I got a feeling about this,' Ravi says as he fights with the brakes. Jack steadies the thing and gives it the once over, his breath fast, his heart doing that flippety-flip it does when the back of his brain has made a connection and is uploading it to the front of his skull. It just takes a minute to get there.
The chair looks just like the one he left that morning, the one cradling Lisa's frame as she griped about being late for work. There are a few scuffs, and if he looks at the back of it, a little burn/sticker/marking/thing that displays the New New York Sisters of Plenitude Hospital. Jack stands up straight and lays a hand on one of the push handles. He tells himself that the zing he feels upon making contact with it is just his imagination working overtime.
Ravi sighs. 'Yeah,' he says, as if he can tell what Jack is thinking, though he couldn't ever, not quite, or maybe Jack is that transparent. He has a hard time remembering that on Earth, this Earth, sometimes, he lucks into hiring people who can see right through him (Is 'unlucks' a word? That one.).
'Here, right here,' Ravi says, pointing and then dancing back in a nervous gesture, like turning the shower on and then stepping out of the way for that first split second of cold water in the pipes. Jack turns the chair to see what he has pointed at.
Carved onto the left armrest is a message: "Jack, we love you. All times. I&L."
Jack calls them at home. Ianto answers, puzzled, and Jack knows that he has to play the conversation light, fast and loose, or Ianto will pick up the scent of worry like a bloodhound and he'll have to prevaricate. It's easier and harder to lie on the phone really, easier because he doesn't have to worry about his face, but harder, because Ianto is listening for his facial expressions, so he has to worry about his face.
'Are you sure you're quite all right?' Ianto asks. In the background, Jack can hear Lisa screaming something to the effect of, 'The flambé is on fire!' and he knows they have tried to make that whiskey thing without him, which is just as well. At least it means that Ianto will be distracted.
'Yeah, yeah,' he says absently, looking at the curve of what is unmistakably Ianto's 'J' in his name scrolled across the chair arm. Ravi stuffs his hands in his pockets and pretends that he's not standing there. 'I just wanted to see if you were okay.' He hits his forehead and Ravi makes a "What the fuck?" face at him. Jack never asks those kinds of questions. Jack kicks the chair in front of him and watches it roll across the floor a few feet.
Ianto is quite distracted, is what he is, because he sighs. 'I think I'm catching something,' he replies. 'I can't wait up for you.'
Jack snorts then, and turns away from Ravi to round the car. He usually doesn't care if anyone overhears his sex talk, but this domestic stuff is a touchier subject, and Ravi should still feel free to think of him as the Intergalactic Gigolo; that lasts for a split second as he remembers that Ravi had watched him feed Gwen and Lisa sticky toffee pudding with his fingers three weeks ago at Rhys's birthday party. Hrm.
'Go to bed. Drink fluids. Take some of that psychosomatic over the counter stuff that was developed by a teacher blasted into space by NASA,' he says jovially. 'I know you like that fake stuff.'
It is Ianto's turn to snort. 'When you treat them as if they're real and they work, they might as well be real,' he says then. 'Wait, wait, hold on-'
There is that jostling phone noise and Lisa whispers into his ear. 'Ianto looks like death warmed over. Did you unearth something?'
Jack knows what she's asking. As nonchalant as she pretends to be, Lisa lives in fear of alien viruses, has ever since Thames House. Jack cannot blame her. It had been his fault that they hadn't the foresight to bring gas masks, and it had only been through a little bit of quick-witted wet towelery and the like that they had managed to get Ianto out of there, though he had been in an intensive care unit for a week. Ever since then, Lisa dreads metal canisters and phantom sniffles.
And they seem to come, and not in single spies, but in battalions: the sniffles, the coughs, the fevers, negligible at first, the Cardiff winter, Ianto says. And then deepening, settling like clockwork, as if whatever Ianto had sucked in had bypassed his coal-mining hard-knock genetics and grafted itself to his lungs. Karen might have been able to help him, but…and Melissa is too new, Jack doesn't know if he's keeping her yet.
Jack keeps telling himself that if he doesn't call Martha for help, then it might just go away. Yeah that tactic has always served him well, he thinks as he looks at the walls of the new car park, still pastel blue and spatter-free.
'He's fine. Nothing that I can see.' Of course it's not always the things they can see, but that is not something he wants to mention this time, no matter how apropos.
Lisa sighs into the phone, then she mentions a few things that she would like to do to his anatomy that are promising, and then she hangs up, the smoke alarm going off in the background.
Jack tucks his Bluetooth away in a pocket, tells Ravi thanks, and to shove off. He'll take care of this. Then, once he hears the door click shut, he rounds the chair and stands in front of it.
He can see it now: the dent in the left wheel rim from when Ianto had hit it with a cast iron skillet three months ago; the long white skid mark across the right panel when she had drunkenly turned too soon on the way to the loo and scraped the doorjamb. He crouches in front of it and lifts it up, tilting it back-there, the front edge of the underseat, smears of nailpolish, because Lisa wipes excess off on the underside of any surface. These are her colours, too: filigree, sterling, fire engine red.
He lowers the chair back down and leans forward, resting his arms and head on the seat, running scenarios in his head. None of them work. None of them make sense. Actually they all make sense, and his imagination is vivid; it's just that none of them bode well.
His mobile beeps and he ignores it. He knows it's Gwen, calling, as she does every Thursday night at eight, to gossip about Torchwood and everything. The baby is only two months old, and he has told her to come back when she is ready, if she is ever ready (Sometimes he wants her to just quit, for her sake, for his sake, for Ioan and Rhys's sake. Other times he wants her back so badly it aches to go on missions. Contrary, man, contrary.).
The chair rolls a little as he places more weight on it, so he stands and turns, and then sits down, rolling the chair backwards with his feet. It's too small for him, too narrow. It doesn't accommodate his legs and their length. He wonders if Lisa's muscles cramp, or if that's not something they do anymore. He watches her exercise her legs, which is a strange ritual of levering and the like, and wonders not for the first time what it would be like to have parts of him that don’t move, no matter how stubborn he is, no matter how singularly devoted he is to their functioning. To have to care for something that is useless, because not having it is worse than dragging it around.
He uses the wheels to tip the front back and balance in the air, mostly because he's always wanted to try it, and it seemed disrespectful to do it in front of Lisa. The chair isn't very tolerant of this-it groans and lists in general disapproval. He lands back down with a thud and stares at the arm of the chair again.
…love you. All times…
Time.
Jack gets out of the chair and wheels it to the SUV, loads it in and drives to the storage unit. He fumbles for the key on his ring, opens the door and wheels the chair in, tucking it neatly between Owen's Bowflex (never used) and Toshiko's carefully wrapped and boxed koto (also never used). When he shuts the door again, he has to open it three more times to check, to make sure that Lisa isn't trapped in there. She's not, of course, but he looks anyway, like a dog circling three times before it lies down.
Three days later, Jack finds himself at the chemist's with a bottle of Beechams and a box of tissues, standing in line and resisting the urge to really flirt with the cashier. She's not even that attractive, in the end, but he likes to make small talk that he finds entertaining. What's more entertaining than sex or kissing? Well, guns maybe. And really, Jack's philosophy is that if you have to make small talk, make small talk that makes someone feel better, feel good about themselves. It's like a small gift; it doesn't cost him anything and makes up for all manner of sins, maybe.
Still, when he unloads the bag back at the penthouse, her mobile number is written on the back of the receipt. He bins it, grinning. Still magic, Harkness.
The sun has set hours ago, and he normally wouldn't be here at this time of night, but Ianto has the flu, the real flu, not a bad cold or something alien, the honest to gods flu, and he has stopped by to drop off some things for Lisa, so that she doesn't have to fight the lift and the car and the everything to get out and pick up some juice. She doesn't look very well herself.
So Jack has tucked them both into bed, brought Lisa's equipment to the bedside so that she doesn't have to get in the chair for her normal ablutions. Ianto does look like death warmed over, actually, when he pulls the covers up to his chin and murmurs something, smiles at the blast of acrid breath that greets him when he bends down to briefly kiss his lips. Lisa throws her arm over Ianto a little and smiles.
'Go away,' she says. But it's a smiley "go away". Jack has been released for recess.
He pours himself a glass of the juice and wanders out onto the balcony, staring at the bay, farther off. The Plass is barely visible from here, but he remembers when he could see the shining lights that illuminated the water tower. He knows that he should be going back to work, that Melissa is waiting for him with an autopsy and that Ravi is stroppy because Ianto is ill so he has to stay late, doing Tech inventory no less, but Jack just wants to stand there and stuff one hand in his pocket, jangle the change that seems to have magically accumulated there (he has no idea what he has purchased to generate the change. Maybe these are magic alien space trousers, ah wait-the chemist's.).
The last thing he ever thinks he will hear starts to grind around him, and he turns, eyes rapidly scanning the patio. There, over by the terraced garden that Lisa works at tirelessly, the TARDIS is materialising, its rotor light blinking. Jack sets his glass on the edge of the balcony, and it topples over the railing and down, all the way to the ground. Jack tears his eyes away from the blue box long enough to make sure that he hasn't killed anyone or anything, and then he saunters to the TARDIS, crossing his arms and trying, for once, to look like the disapproving one.
The door opens and the Doctor all but stumbles out, sheepish smile, cautious, looking about with the general curious aloofness that comes with this model. The suit, as ever, is charming, the shoes, ha ha, still Chucks. Jack is grateful that this is still a Doctor that he knows. Well, even if he hadn't known the body, he does know the Doctor, at least, he hopes he does. He hopes to know the Doctor forever, actually.
'Jack!' The Doctor says, as if he is surprised, but he is never surprised, not about these things. It's his way of diffusing issues, Jack thinks, and he has a lot of practice at it. 'This is different,' the man murmurs. Already Jack is opening his arms for a hug that won't come before refolding them against his chest. The Doctor almost trips then, but it's not a trip. It's part of his charm.
'However did you find me?' he says, because flirting with this man is something he can't avoid. It's like breathing, walking, or in Jack's case, surviving.
The Doctor just walks a few feet to the balcony railing with him and turns. 'Oh the old girl can find you wherever you are, Jack. You know that.' He does that hand wavey thing before he shoves them in his trouser pockets, leaning against the railing and staring at the glass windows of the penthouse. 'That's posh. You really live here?'
Jack shrugs. 'My last place blew up.'
The Doctor glances at him, and then his face muddles. 'Oh yeah, meant to ask about that. That place was convenient, that. Have to go all the way out to…Splott? Is that it?'
Jack laughs. 'I believe estate agents pronounce it "Splow".'
A roll of the eyes. 'The Welsh. Give them something easy and they make it difficult.' He pauses. 'Or maybe they're doing it right and we're all doing it wrong. Minority, majority, meeeeeh,' one hand pulls out of the trousers and waves back and forth. 'Nothing is where it should be these days.'
Jack stares at him then, trying to see the man he'd first met under the glasses and the suit. Because that's the kind of thing the Doctor might have said to him years ago. This Doctor has never confided in him. It's the kind of thing he tells Rose, or Martha.
The gulls have woken up a bit with the arrival of the TARDIS, and a few of them fly down to rest on the top of the Police Box. Jack thinks that it would be just his luck if they shit all over it and Ianto would be mortified-
He thinks about Ianto and Lisa in the other room. They had to have heard the TARDIS. Or maybe the vaporiser that they had bought a few months ago to run on the nights when Ianto is ill (and that has been every other night for the past few weeks) is making enough white noise to drown it out. Maybe Lisa has taken some of the Beechams and they are drugged out. Either way, Jack is sure they will be disappointed that they have missed it.
Which brings him back to the matter at hand, actually. Jack cocks his head at the box, running his eyes over it as familiarly as using his hands, and possibly as lasciviously. He does love that ship. He wants to crawl inside and through her undercarriage, just to see how she works.
Mostly because that information will be relevant in another nine hundred years.
'Why are you here?' he finally asks. 'I mean, I know you can't refuel up here.' He gestures to the penthouse, the general area.
'Oh, that,' the Doctor chirps, frowning off into the distance as if he's thinking. His hair is particularly fantastic today, and Jack's busy looking at the man's Adam's apple and wondering if Ianto and Lisa would think Time Lords were outside the fidelity law-and there is one, he can tell, they just never wrote it out-so he doesn't quite register the Doctor's answer right away. 'I'm here to take Miss Lisa for a ride.' Pause. 'Both of them actually, your Ianto Jones and-'
'He's not my Ianto-'
'Oh hush up.'
Jack starts to wonder then, really wonder. Tumblers are clicking in his head. 'Why?'
'You told me to. Well, you will, someday, and I can say that, you told me, because you watched the Bill and Ted movie. In fact, I'm supposed to remind you to watch it aaaaaand-' he raises a finger and his eyes go off center as if he is listening to something that only he can hear. 'There. It's all set. Playing with your timeline is like working with indelible ink, Jack.'
Jack isn't convinced. There's something about the casual way that the Doctor isn't looking directly at him. He's been trained well enough in the ways of Time Travel and Time Lords that he doesn't ask the obvious questions: How did I know to ask? When do I ask you? Where were we? What are you going to do? but he can ask the other one. 'I didn't think I could ever convince you to do anything.' That's so open-ended that it doesn't need an answer.
The Doctor's mouth quirks in one corner as he looks out over the bay. Skypoint is indeed situated in a wonderful spot; that is one of the reasons the owners can demand so much money for the spaces there. Jack knows that Ianto doesn't care about the view as much as he cares about the space, and that Lisa just likes to be up high. He can't blame her-she spends enough time looking up at everyone else.
'You can be very persuasive, Jack,' the Doctor says, deciding to rest his wrists on the railing and lean. 'That said, I think you would know by now. You found it, didn't you?'
All times. Jack does one of those yoga breaths that Lisa has taught him: four counts in, eight counts out.
'You can't have them,' he says, trying to sound chipper.
The Doctor polishes his glasses on his coat. 'I don’t want them, Jack, well, not for long.' Here he pauses. 'You do.'
Jack knows that he can't ask much. He cannot ask anything, because he has seen the chair, and all those improbable scenarios are falling away, like shucking corn. The golden grain underneath is coming up, its only mar the silk that still clings to it in places. 'I thought you didn't do this,' he says casually, trying to maintain the complete and utter façade. Who is he kidding? The Doctor knows, he always knows.
'Oh you know, some things are fixed and some things oughtn't to be meddled with.' Then he sighs. 'And sometimes, things are so miniscule that they don't matter. Ripples in a pond.' Casual slip of a smile. 'Are you going to get them, or shall I?' One trainer kicks out in front of him, as if he is booting a football.
Jack removes his hands from his pockets. It's just clicked in his head, like cocking a gun. 'Ianto is dying.' Saying it increases his heartbeat twofold.
The Doctor makes a face. 'Oh dear. Well then.'
Jack shoves off from the wall. 'Just one trip then? That's what I asked you for?'
The Doctor holds up one pointed finger, all the more poignant for his sharp insistence. 'Just one. No side trips. I promise.' He pauses. 'Then again, how would you know if-oh there it goes again.' He sighs, head tilted again as if listening to something silent. The deadlock seal that is Jack's timeline, maybe. 'This is why I have trouble with you Jack.'
Jack doesn't ask. He has the feeling he understands. He backs away from the Doctor, holding up his hands. 'Just. Give me a minute then,' he pleads, as if he is afraid that he'll go inside and when he returns, the TARDIS and its passenger will be gone, phantoms, as if they had never been here at all. For a second Jack entertains the idea that he is talking to a mirage. But nah, if he was going to dream up this scenario, it would have gone so differently. Would be going so very differently.
He moves through the flat quietly, though why he bothers is a mystery, since he's about to wake everyone up. He flips the hallway lights on and opens the bedroom door.
The vaporiser belches out mist from the bedstead, and it reminds Jack of the fog that clogs the roads in the mornings. Jack waves a hand to clear it and turns the machine off. Lisa raises her head and stares at him blearily.
'Back already?' Her hand draws around Ianto's chest, peculiarly possessive.
He smiles and sits on the edge of the bed, running a hand down her warm skin. 'Never left.' He slides his hand from her arm down to Ianto's chest, trying to listen with his fingers. Is it there, in the upper lungs? Or has it taken hold somewhere else? In Ianto's heart, maybe? This alien virus choking his immune system, it will pull and drain and leech until one day Ianto will pick up something in a grocery store, or god help them, something will fall through the Rift that will shred every white blood cell his body can weakly churn out.
The clock ticks next to them, as Jack tries to find Lisa's eyes in the dimness from the hallway light. Now that he understands that Ianto's life is rather literally like sands falling through his fingers, every click of every second feels like a race. It's not, Ianto isn't dying, not quite, not yet, but he wants to drag them both inside the TARDIS and tell the Doctor to take off, to go, to do this thing, whatever that thing is, the thing that had come through the Rift three days ago. The thing that ends with Lisa's wheelchair in the storage closet.
'How much do you trust me?' Jack whispers, 'It's important.'
Lisa doesn't say anything. Her hand finds his and squeezes once, then rests there, fingers curled together over Ianto's chest. It's at that moment that Ianto cracks an eye open and says, 'Infallibly and unwisely,' before coughing a few times. Lisa lifts her hand away, as if she thinks the pressure of it resting on his chest is going to make a difference. Jack splays his palm and can almost feel the clicking of congestion, the raggedy slurry of mucus sluicing inside Ianto's alveoli.
'Okay then, I need you to do that.' He stands and rounds the bed to scoop up Lisa and set her in her chair, and the action itself is doing all the work for him, he hopes, because her eyes are wide. Ianto sits up, grabs a box of tissues and shoves his feet into the slippers on his side of the bed.
'Is this about Wife Swap again?' he asks Jack, but it's a weak joke.
Jack wheels Lisa's chair to the door and gestures for Ianto to go first, that way he can keep an eye on him, as if something might happen to him on the brief trip to the patio. 'Just go outside, smart ass.'
Ianto doesn't argue with him, but Lisa rests her hands on the arm of her chair while Jack pushes her, and she tips her head all the way back so that she can look him in the eye. He's vaguely reminded of the time when he and Gray had drawn faces on their chins and done an upside down puppet show for their parents. He shakes his head to clear it and bites his lip. One of Lisa's hands comes up and she taps his chin.
Ianto almost runs into the sliding glass door, but he manages to stop himself, wrestling with the runner and the handle, almost falling into the half-closed blinds. Jack is ready to follow him out there, but Ianto takes three steps before stopping, and Jack doesn't have to ask why. He just bumps him with Lisa's chair from behind and mumbles something like, 'Beep'.
The doctor has apparently been examining their gardening with interest, and when he hears them he looks up, staring over his glasses, his hands full of petunias. His face lights up a little; Jack knows it's the delight of a new outing in the offing. That's reassuring. If the Doctor isn't worried, then he shouldn't be, either. Right? Jack rounds Ianto's stock-still form and parks Lisa close to the TARDIS, by one of the garden boxes.
'Ms. Hallet-Jones! Lovely! And Mister Jones! Nice to see you again well, sort of see you in person.' The Doctor doesn't offer to shake hands, in fact, he shoves them in his pockets. Good to see that some things don't change with the body.
Ianto's eyes widen and he staggers, but that could be from the shock, or the fact that he's wearing slippers, or the fact that he's running a fever. He has the wry wit to turn to Jack and frown.
'Was there codeine in that cough syrup?'
'Ianto is ill,' Lisa says, her eyes not leaving the TARDIS. Her fingers twitch on her wheels, and Jack wonders if she has ever seen the box before, maybe at Canary Wharf. Maybe he should have given her a heads up about that. Live and learn.
The Doctor peers into Ianto's eyes, and then looks at Jack. 'You aren't well,' he says to Ianto.
Ianto has to sit down then, dropping the box of tissues and holding his head in his hands. Lisa runs her hand on his back in a circle. Jack realises that he has to get them in the TARDIS, that he has to be the one to do it, because the Doctor is just standing there and the Doctor has never had to wrangle, cajole or persuade. It's not what he does. He's a carrot dangler, a carrot dangler in a world full of horses.
'I'm so glad everyone has noticed that,' Ianto groans
Jack crouches down in front of Ianto and looks at Lisa. He will say it to her in his head, and she will get it, because that is the way they have. Telepathy in all things Ianto. And all things pastry-related. He wants to make sure that she understands that this isn't an option, now that he has it sussed, and she gets that, because she wheels away towards the box and its master.
'You're going away,' Ianto says dully.
Jack squeezes one of his hands. 'No, I'm staying here. You're just going for a ride. For fun, you know.' He shrugs. 'Time machine, eh?' He tries to make it seem like a joke, a fun idea, even though Ianto will see right through it. When all he gets is a watered down version of the raised eyebrow, he shrugs and glances at the TARDIS. 'Hey, I need you to trust me on this,' he says, sliding his hand up Ianto's shoulder.
'Are you sending us away?' Ianto whispers, mostly because he is sick, and partly because he is afraid. Ianto is the one horse who will never eat from anyone's hand, Jack thinks.
Oh, and that's a beautiful thing, his eyes widening when Jack takes his face in his hands and kisses him, sick, pukey breath and all, because that's okay, that's human. He presses his forehead to Ianto's and smiles at the sound of Ianto's congested mouthbreathing.
'Not sending. Offering.' He snorts. 'Encouraging. I'll be here when you get back. Promise.' He blinks a little bit longer than he had intended. 'I need you to go.'
Ianto sighs. 'This is about me, isn't it?' He kicks the tissue box. 'I'm not stupid.'
Jack smiles. 'Never said you were. Ever.'
'I'm sick.'
'You are.'
'And this is going to make it better.'
Jack can't say anything, because he's not sure if that’s the case. For all he knows, the Doctor is lying to him, and he takes the two of them off and they start a whole new life in the colony of Thrakis 4 where the valleys are lush and there is no disease at all. Or maybe he takes them and Ianto is cured and they decide to travel with the Doctor until one of them is irrevocably broken. Because that is what happens, really, there's always heartbreak. But you can't blame a light bulb when a moth hits it. You can't blame the moth either.
Ianto coughs into his hand, and something rattles in his throat. Jack hands him a wad of tissues to wheeze into and they come away bloody. Ianto stares at them dully, as if he is not surprised, as if this is not something new, and Jack resists the urge to shake him and ask him how long that has been going on, because shaking Ianto while he's sick isn't right (and also because shaking Ianto is just never done).
'Okay then,' Ianto says, 'I suppose that's that.' He wads the tissues up and shoves them in his pajama pocket, patting it down so that it lies flatter. Jack resists the urge to pull them out and shove them in his own pocket to throw away later. Humans like to deal with their own bio-waste.
Ianto clearly isn't sold on the idea, and Jack has no idea how he managed to convince him, except that maybe it is the Beechams and the flu, and Lisa, who is busily and animatedly talking to the Doctor about something, machinery, ballet, The Master and Margarita maybe. His legs are shaky when he stands, but he leans heavily on Jack and that allows them both to embrace without it seeming like one or the other is too needy. Over Ianto's shoulder, Lisa's eyes are afire, and whatever the Doctor has said to her in their little chat has steeled her resolve, calmed her apprehension about what is to happen. Jack wishes that someone would calm his apprehension; why is doing the right thing, as convoluted and unsure as it feels, always so very difficult?
When Ianto pulls away, Jack brushes something invisible from his shoulder. 'Remember to tell him how much bigger it is on the inside,' he whispers. 'He loves that.'
Ianto nods then and shuffles towards the open door, stopping once to peer inside, just like he does when he is about to clear a room with his firearm or get into the shower that Jack has turned on (Okay, he'd turned on the cold just once, and it had been funny.). Jack rolls his eyes at Lisa when she smacks Ianto's bum and tells him to hustle. Jack feels reminiscently like he used to when he'd drop Alice off at camp for the summer. The Doctor follows them and mumbles a few things as they walk further into the TARDIS, but then he backs out and turns to Jack, hands in pockets again.
'Well then, you can't say that I have never done-'
Jack waves a hand. 'Spoilers,' he reminds him, and the Doctor smiles.
The Doctor tilts his head, nodding backwards at the open door. 'You know he has-'
Jack stops him. 'Yeah, I thought so. Fix it.' He sits down on the cement block retaining wall for the garden.
Those sharp eyes gleam, and the mouth quirks when the Doctor steps into the doorway of the TARDIS, his hand running up and down the jamb absently. 'I'd ask how he got it, but it doesn't matter.'
Jack sighs. 'They came here for the children,' he whispers. He's tired of talking about it, about what he'd done in 1965.
The Doctor's face sours. 'They're gone, I gather.'
Jack smiles. 'The Shadow Proclamation ain't got nothing on me,' he sings, and it's true. The Doctor is the Earth's sometimes hero. Jack is the steady caretaker, at least for now, and that's good by him.
They stand there in awkward silence, and then Jack hears Ianto's hacking and coughing coming from inside the ship and he understands that what he had been ignoring, hoping that it would go away, is reaching critical mass inside Ianto's body, and that they hadn't saved him at Thames House, but rather just delayed, perhaps for this moment. Now, time is of the essence, and the man in front of him has nothing but that to dole out.
He starts scheming now for ways to make the Doctor owe him enough to grant him this later, whenever that is.
The Doctor raises a hand and smiles. 'We'll meet at the old place, or well, somewhere near the old place. A week at the most. I promise.'
Time promises from a time traveller should be set in stone, but no, that just makes them more fluid. And the TARDIS will land where and when she lands. Jack simply waves a hand. 'Go on, go. See you on the flip side.'
He doesn't get an answer. The door shuts and he closes his eyes through the whole thing, because one of the worst sights in the universe, in his rather extended experience, has been watching this ship disappear.
When they are gone, he finds Lisa's bottle of Maker's Mark and plays the "woe is me" game until he falls asleep in the bathtub, the shower on full tilt. He wakes to Ravi shaking his shoulder and demanding to know what has happened. Oh that's right, he has a job that he does here in this time. He feebly fields their questions later, finally laying down the law: Lisa and Ianto are gone on holiday and they will be back, he doesn't know when, yes they are fine.
The next day, on the way to work, Jack stops to stand on the Plass and watch the gulls virtually attack a small woman who has a pasty. He observes the workers filling in the holes where the lower levels used to be. He calculates how much retcon they'll have to dole out when the effort is all over. He shrugs, retreats to his office, and sits at his desk, watching Ravi and Melissa argue about some sort of alien button. He fiddles with the Internet and pirates a few things.
When they have left for the evening, he orders Chinese and calls up the film and watches it. He doesn't laugh when he knows he is supposed to (although, okay, Ghengis Khan wrecking a sporting goods store is kinda funny), and he cackles at inappropriate moments when he is sure that anyone else probably wouldn't. And when he gets to the end (thank god it's over), he understands why he did it that way. He programs a note to himself in his wrist strap that says, "Bill and Ted and Lisa and Ianto." And then leaves it at that.
It feels as if time has sealed itself, though one day he wants to hear a hermetic seal noise, just for kicks.
He waits on the Plass every day for a few minutes at noon, but they don't return until Tuesday. Five days. He almost is afraid for the door to open. And then it does.
*~*~*~*~*~*
Master List