We held gold dust in our hands (7/7, Torchwood, Jack/Ianto/Lisa/Gwen/Rhys)
Title: We held gold dust in our hands (7/7)
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.
IANTO
Jack is standing out in front of the building when Ianto gets there.
He is still fully dressed, though his shirt has blood on it; Gwen had sent him home first because they hadn't wanted to look at it, at the bullet holes that had blossomed on the fabric like flowers when Jack had died. Every time he does it, takes the bullet or the lightning, or the knife, Ianto frets, not because he is worried that Jack won't come back, but because every time Jack dies he draws back a little more, for a day, for a week, sometimes, draws into himself. Ianto cannot ask him what it feels like, because he's been shot; he knows what that feels like. And he doesn't want to know what dying feels like.
Well, actually, he does, he really does, but he doesn't want Jack to know that he does, because that will just make him sad.
Ianto palms his keys and shoulders the messenger bag that is full of a few things that he wants to shuffle about this evening and hadn't felt like doing at the Hub. He is thinking that he might have just enough time to tuck Evan into bed, read him The Littlest Rugby Player or whatever his favorite is this week, and then he might slouch at the table with a bottle and play with the plans that Gwen has drawn up.
'What are you doing?' he asks, because Jack doesn't move when he sees Ianto. Just blinks a few times as if he is surprised to see him.
Jack smiles wanly. 'She threw me out,' he says, laughing, but his smile is weak. 'I was going to go back to the Hub, but then I thought I might go to the clubs, and then I thought-' he stops. 'So I'm standing here,' he finishes. His hands clench and unclench, residual anger from the remembered argument undoubtedly tightening his jaw.
Ianto sighs and grabs his hand, pulling him to the doors. 'Come on, then,' he says, because he needs to make this better, and he will. And they will let him.
Jack leans against the wall of the lift. 'She threw dishes at me,' he tells Ianto, eyes wide. Ianto smiles to himself, and at Jack, to show him that it is all right.
'Congratulations. You must have really stropped her. Last time she threw dishes at me was, hrm. London.'
Jack sighs then, his hand in Ianto's is limp and uncrushing, not like normal. Ianto examines his face for lines, his hair for gray. A little at the temples. He stares at their reflection in the mirror wall of the lift: his own hair is a little lighter than it used to be, not gray at all, but unmistakably lighter. Sometimes Ianto wonders if he will some day wake up blond.
When the doors to the lift open, Jack exits first, though with a little of that naughty schoolboy shuffle in his step, and Ianto follows him, his finger running across the penthouse's 'LOVE SHACK' label, now five years worn.
The broken dishes are still on the floor, probably right where they had fallen when they had hit the wall. Lisa being a dish thrower had been somewhat of a surprise when it had first happened to him, years ago. He understands the action somewhat, but resents the clean up.
Jack walks past the sofa, where Lisa is snoring and Evan is curled inward in front of her. Ianto hears him turn off the telly and then wait, as if the cessation of noise will rouse them both. Ianto waits for it with him, but nothing happens. Lisa can be a heavy sleeper, and Evan has inherited that from her, which is good, because there is a lot of movement in the house after he goes to bed.
There is a squeak as Jack accidentally kicks something vaguely Thomas the Tank Engine related, and Ianto shakes his head as he gets the juice pitcher from the fridge and pours them glasses. It's flu season again, and he doesn't want to be ill. Besides, after this ministration, he's having a beer. Maybe three. He hasn't decided. By the time Jack joins him, he's halfway through his glass.
'I'd ask what happened, but I'm not sure I want to know,' he says softly.
Jack takes the glass from him and shrugs. 'She thinks I threw her birth control away.'
Ianto cocks his head then. Jack is looking at the glass with mistrust. 'Did you?'
'Maybe.'
Ianto sighs. 'You did not.'
'You're right, I didn't.' Jack sips from the glass and shrugs. 'But then I said, "Well, would that really be so bad, anyway?"' and when Ianto winces and starts to shake his head, he gives him a weak smile. 'Yeah, my brain was on auto pilot.' His fingers come to rest on his chest, one of them poking through a hole ringed with dried blood. 'I wasn't thinking.' He chugs his juice and makes a face. 'Grapefruit is nasty.'
Ianto takes the glass from him. 'Change the shirt,' he says, because he doesn't want Jack to dwell. He'll turn it over and over and over, and before Ianto and Lisa know it, he's made some decision without them, and that always goes over well. 'Just throw it away.'
When he says that, Jack understands that what he means is everything attached to that shirt must go, because nothing good is attached to it. Ianto cannot repair bullet holes, nor would he want to. The holes that had been the most critical are gone.
Jack blinks at him and pulls the hole in the shirt so that it rips a few inches, and Ianto wonders if he's going to try to tear it off like some sort of wrestling character, perhaps the Incredible Hulk. Instead, Jack smiles and fires a finger gun at him before looking shocked that he's just fired a finger gun, and then pads away, down the hallway in his sock-clad feet.
The fridge hums when he opens it, pulling out three bottles, two for him, one for Jack, and he tiptoes past the sofa, only to stand at one end of it and watch Lisa's and Evan's quiet breathing.
Evan is going to be a tall boy, Ianto thinks when he looks at his lean figure curled into Lisa. Three years have seen him shoot up like a rocket, gangly limbs and a mop of brown curls on his head and brown skin that tans even darker in the sun. He likes running and stealing biscuits and laughing and going down the slides backwards. Ianto thinks it's odd that Evan even has likes and dislikes, that he can and does tell them things. Lisa had told him that three-year-olds (according to the book; they need the book, as they are both hopeless. Lisa doesn't remember being a child, and Ianto doesn't want to even consider his own childhood as a template for raising his son. Jack rattles off what he knows, but then reminds them that he's going off seventies knowledge here) are usually capable of sentences, of completing narratives, or interacting and asking and apparently, screaming and in general being bratty.
Ianto has already caught himself several times thinking of putting Evan over his knee. They had agreed that they wouldn't do that, and the urge makes his fingers twitch. When he admits it one evening, Jack smiles and tells him that the fact that he hadn't is evidence enough that he's learning. Then Jack had played the, "the last time I was a parent, they had dinosaurs for real and we ate the bark off trees" game.
Ianto smiles at the sleeping figures on the sofa, and he's lost in thought when Jack comes from behind and rests his chin on Ianto's shoulder.
'You never warned me that she was a dish thrower,' he says. Ianto turns so that he can wrap one arm around Jack's waist, the hand with the bottles. He presses their coldness against the small of Jack's back, and the man jumps before shaking his head. 'Bastard.'
'I never actually thought you would give her cause to throw-' he squints at the broken crockery-' is that the fondue pot?'
Jack smirks. 'If we had a fondue pot, don't you think we would have used it by now?'
Ianto cannot argue with that. They do like things that slather and are easily licked off skin. Add heat to it and well, there is a reason they have Evan. And that Lisa is on the pill. 'Good point. My point is that you are the good one. I am the bad one. Justice, it seems for being the good cop at work, I suppose,' he sighs.
Jack's eyes dance over the figures on the sofa; whatever is moving through his head is not good. More bullet fragments maybe, slow and heavy psychological sludge. Ianto reaches out with his other hand and taps Jack's forehead. 'Let it out.'
Jack sighs into Ianto's hand when it drags down the side of his face, and it is wistful. 'It always feels as if I'm waiting for an axe to fall,' he says, his eyes riveted to Lisa and Evan. 'Does it feel like that to you?'
Ianto's stomach coils a little, because that's it. That's been it since Evan had been born, since Lisa had got pregnant, actually, since the Doctor had taken them away. He isn't even sure now if he can say that, not out loud. Or if that will be the thing that drives Jack away. Or maybe it will be age. Or boredom, or one too many nights of temper tantrums. Or maybe it just won't be fun enough anymore. Jack will see Ianto and his gray hair, and Lisa's sagging breasts and think, I can do so much better.
Obviously Ianto knows what shape the other shoe looks like, the one he's waiting to drop: Jack's boot heel as he goes out the door. Huh.
He must have taken too long to react, because Jack reaches up to grab that hand and press it to his mouth. 'You know, there are a species of aliens, in the system of Nak.'
Ianto figures that this is going to be an object lesson of some kind and takes it in stride.
'To them, an individual becomes more attractive the older he or she gets.'
Ianto rolls his eyes and gestures to the sliding door, because if they are going to talk this long, they should do it outside. He thinks about the work he told Gwen he'd do, and then he realises that he's not quite that interested in it. Something about Torchwood isn't as fascinating.
He's not ready to do something else, not quite, and he has no idea what he might do, but Lisa has already quit UNIT, and her job at the florists', whilst not as financially or intellectually stimulating as what she used to do, allows her to manage Evan, to see him grow up, she says. Jack thinks that the florists' suits her, Lovely Lily Lisa, bringing home bundles of chrysanthemums and daylilies to run across their skin in the dead of night, blindfolded, or trussed, waiting for her hands and the kiss of a few petals along their legs and cocks.
Ianto settles in the wire chair and opens the first beer with his churchkey, flipping the cap into a coffee can that they have for that purpose. It rings hollow, to remind him of how little he does this these days. Jack follows suit and sips from his beer with a grimace. Ianto wonders if he could just put the paperwork away for the night and get drunk. He could have a few too many and blow Jack out here in the crisp autumn air.
But first, 'So, today's little incident with firearms has bothered you,' he says, 'because you don't normally make a habit of bear-baiting.'
Jack rubs the bottle across his forehead, then glances out at the lights of the air tower that had been built last year to ward off low flying planes, the tower whose lights flicker red, on and off. Red for danger. 'Sometimes I want to forget,' he says, apropos of nothing, or something. 'When it happens, I wake up and I think, "I would really like to not remember that".' He smiles at Ianto. 'I've lost count with it all, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. When did I stop counting?'
'I don't know. Memories are important,' Ianto says, 'but maybe some things are made to be forgotten.'
Jack frowns at his bottle then, turning it on the table. 'It's funny, all the memories I erase for other people, and I can't even manage to hold onto the ones I want to remember.'
Ianto makes a concerted effort to drink a large portion of his beer before asking the next obvious question. 'Why would you want to remember them, then? All those deaths?'
Jack glances at him. He opens his mouth as if he is about to speak, but he doesn't. His one arm rests on the tabletop, and he slouches in his chair, petulant. Ianto likes Jack petulant, because it usually means that he has lost his argument. On the other hand, they hadn't been arguing, had they?
The gulls they have never managed to scare away dance on the railing. Ianto sighs for all the shite he's going to have to clean up over the weekend. At least he can just hose the area down. He finishes his beer and desperately waits for the warm glow of it to suffuse him, but it is slow going. He opens the second and amends his plans from earlier: he's going to get drunk and fuck Jack over the balcony. He recalls that at one time he had refused to even come out here without clothes on, and now he's going to pound Jack into the terrace.
Well, maybe.
'They're all I have,' Jack says.
Now he does have to roll his eyes. 'Oh, please, bullshite,' he moans, and makes a wanking gesture with his hand. 'Tell me more, Captain Jack Melodrama.'
Jack's mouth quirks a little, but he doesn't look at Ianto. 'That wasn't what I meant. They're the only constant.'
'Ah.'
Jack looks at him. 'Don't you ever worry about not remembering things?'
Ianto cannot answer that, because he has a whole swath of memories that he would like to forget. Or maybe those memories make him what he is. They are painful, and he realises upon thinking about them-Lisa's legs and the attack and more than several panicking moments in between then and now, coupled with his near-death by alien flu and the slow decline he'd made-that he couldn't trade them because they make him who he is in some ways. He cannot and will not forget, even though UNIT had asked him and Lisa if they wanted to, way back, so far back in the whole story of his life with Torchwood that Jack hadn't been more than a footnote.
That is capitulating, then. 'I suppose then, that yes…' he says to Jack, fading away when he realises what Jack is driving at. 'In some way yes, memory is identity-forming.' He has yet to understand what this has to do with Jack being upset that he cannot remember how many times he's been electrocuted or drowned like a kitten. Or they could just be speaking hypothetically. He looks at his second beer with doubt; they aren't that strong.
'It's all we have,' Jack says then, his eyes looking at the sky, almost dancing across the stars as if he is counting them, making sure they are all there. 'Even me. I might live forever, right?' Ianto hears the edge in his voice, it's almost like a laugh. 'But how long can I hold a memory? When I don't remember it might as well have not happened.'
Ianto rests his chin on his hand and stares at the lights out on the horizon: red, red, red, red. 'That's comforting.'
Jack snorts. 'I'm terrified.' He sits forward and turns the bottle in his hand. 'There. I said it. I'm fucking terrified.' The cuss lands like a slap, because Jack doesn't use them.
Ianto drinks the first half of the second beer and wishes that he had a fortifying shot. 'I'm afraid that some day you're going to remember that you are young and fit and gorgeous, and we'll see your back for the last time,' he blurts out. Just saying it makes him queasy and relieved, not unlike being the one lone voice of reason at the conference table at work, when Gwen and Jack are shouting at each other and Ravi is asleep and Claire, their new medic, is looking at everyone as if they are insane.
'Left field, Ianto,' Jack says, gritting his teeth.
Ianto grinds his own jaw. The night had so much potential, and now. 'Pertinent, whilst we speak of things that fucking terrify us.'
Jack sits back. 'You have seriously been worrying about this.'
Ianto finishes his beer, and his stomach feels too full. He should have gone for harder spirits instead-more intoxication, less liquid. He slams the bottle back down a little too forcefully, and the caps rattle in the can. 'Jesus Christ, Jack, how can you not think about it? How can you watch us get older and just, not, and not think about it? Or think that I wouldn't? That Lisa wouldn't?' He slouches further and winces when his belt catches on the wire in the back of the chair.
Jack runs his palms up and down the arms of his chair.
Ianto tilts his head back and looks at the stars. In the distance there is the blaring of a horn. He feels better for having said all of it, but now he wants to tie things together. 'I'm just being realistic,' he says. 'What, are you going to take care of all of us in our old age, masquerading as our son, our grandson?' He rights his head and whoosh, the alcohol hits his bloodstream like a piledriver, and it's nice, just soothing enough that he knows it's there, just strong enough to unmoor the rest of what he wants to say. 'How old will I have to be before you won't look at me anymore? Before you won't want to fuck me anymore?'
Jack closes his eyes and smiles. Then he laughs, and Ianto narrows his eyes to focus on him. Jack rubs his face with his fingers, leaning forward, massaging his temples before scrubbing his cheeks with his palms and snorting, no, laughing, really laughing.
'It wasn't meant to be funny.' Ianto realises that now he's the petulant one. Maybe Jack will be fucking him over the terrace. That's not such a bad idea, either, now that he stops to think about it.
'That you think,' Jack says into his hands, 'with all you know about what I find attractive, beautiful, sexy, even, that I would stop wanting you, or her or Gwen, or Estelle or anyone, because of age.' He snorts and turns his head to look Ianto in the eye. 'It's ridiculous.'
Ianto still has doubts, but it's not worth arguing. Only time will solve this riddle, right? He looks instead at Jack, with his gray hairs and his v-neck vest and his massive hands. Jack, with his braces down and his sock feet out here on the patio, not caring that the bottoms will be black when he goes in. Jack who had taken him in, even when he hadn't wanted to, when UNIT had called, who had taken him on, when Lisa had insisted, who had given him away for one moment, one week, when he had thought that he might never get him back, even if it had saved his life.
Jack, who had stayed for nine months of vomit and bitching and midnight runs to Tesco Express for frozen yogurt; Jack, who before that had taken Ianto's fragile ego and taught him how to be a husband in some ways, how to ask for things that he wanted.
Jack, who no longer even bothers with his own room. Jack who-
Ianto sighs. 'All right then. But don't throw Lisa's pills away,'
'Gah, she can't stay mad at this face.' He points to his jaw, and Ianto silently prays that he doesn't do the "always yearned for" line. Jack's eyes light up for a split second. Mischievous. Old Jack. 'The Feltians of Banaz 5 have wrinkles like a sharpei. They use the folds to-'
Ianto lifts a hand. 'Fine. No seriously, don't go there.'
Jack doesn't. Instead he laughs, and it is fine.
*~*~*~*~*~*
GWEN
It's rare that she gets a moment to herself in the Hub. Usually someone else is here: Claire, or Jamil, the man they'd hired after Ravi had, well, imploded would have been too kind. Gwen doesn't like to dwell. It doesn't do. And she has that new one, Lois Habiba coming in. Lois is a little old for a field agent, but then again, so is Gwen, really (Not that thirty-nine is old, but action takes its toll, and she clicks at the knees when she climbs the stairs to her office.). And she's actually interviewing for Ianto's job, and Gwen is fairly sure that she can do that, minus the fieldwork. What they really need is Ianto's masterful organisational eye.
Gwen settles in the chair and adjusts the lamp. She doesn't quite like it, the green glass shade, but it is part of the room, and she hasn't the balls to replace anything, not yet, not whilst Jack is still here and right now sitting across from her at the front end of what used to be his desk, but is now hers. She wonders how many blowjobs the chair her arse is currently in has supported. Legion, perhaps.
Jack sits back in the chair and smiles. His eyes wrinkle in the corners. It's been a little less than ten years, really, since she first met him, but the signs of age are there, just a little. Gwen wonders if in three hundred years Jack will be wizened and old and have to live the rest of eternity like that. Not appealing at all. She never asks, because she wouldn't want to talk about it either.
He reaches out for an apple on her desk and takes it. 'Someone has the hots for teacher,' he sings.
Gwen gestures that he can have it, and he huffs his breath on the red skin. 'It was in my lunch. Rhys packed it.'
Jack polishes the apple on the front of his shirt, as if it needs it. 'So, here we are, Gwen Cooper, ma'am.' He bites the apple, a deep, gluttonous bite, really, and uses the fruit itself to catch the juice that comes from it, scraping the hollow of it up his chin before twisting it away and chewing. For one second she catches a glimpse of the tip of his tongue and he raises his eyebrows.
'Are you doing the right thing?' she asks him, searching his face for a sign that he isn't sure, but he just winks and swallows before speaking. Lisa has finally pressed table manners on him. Somewhat-he gestures with the apple and juice flings from it onto her papers on her desk.
'I'm definitely not sure I'm doing the right thing. Are you doing the right thing? Is Ianto? Lisa? Was Ravi doing the right thing?' He pauses and considers. 'Owen did the right thing. Suzie-well, okay, sometimes we strike out.'
Gwen shakes her head and rests it on her folded hands. 'I will miss you. It'll be like all my best friends left at once.'
There is a long stretch of time in which Jack turns the apple in his hands, revolving and red and temptation itself. Gwen has always loved Jack's hands. 'You know, we had mentioned.' His eyes flit up to hers.
Gwen sighs. 'Oh, no. We had our misspent youth,' she says, and his eyes brighten as he sets the apple on her desk, one perfect bite taken from it. 'Rhys and I are happy with our twenty-first century ways.'
Some part of her is dying to go with them, some small part of her that is still thirty inside, that is still adventurous and free and unbound. That person lives inside her heart and wants her old friends forever. That person wants many things. Another part of her wants to pack up her whole family and move with them. They could buy a commune up north. Make cheese. Everyone loves cheese.
But her real self knows that Torchwood is something she wants, something she does, and that she couldn't give it up. She's been blessedly lucky in her life, in her career, and she wants to keep it that way, stay alive for her kids, but she can't bring herself to turn away yet. Maybe some day. There's still more for her to do here.
Jack needs to go. She's more than eager to push him out the door, because he shouldn't be here anymore. Someday he'll be back; she'll set it up, and in sixty years, maybe more or less, Jack will stroll back in the door and say, 'I'm Captain Jack Harkness. Put me to work.' Because he will, he always will. Constant as the Northern…well.
That grandfather clock rings, quarter to three, and Jack smiles at her. They have named the phantom clock, which had graduated from ticking to ringing a few years ago, Myfanwy, in her honor. Ianto's only comment had been that at least a phantom clock wouldn't leave piles of guano everywhere.
Jack runs his hand through his hair and sighs. 'I wasn't looking for it, you know. When it all fell into my lap. I was waiting for the Doctor.' He snorts and rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, uncrosses and re-crosses his legs. Shifts his weight from one side of the chair to the other. 'They just-' He waves his hands.
Gwen is the last person in the world he needs to explain Ianto and Lisa to.
'I know,' she says, 'so go. Give them my love and I'll see you on holidays.'
Jack jumps to his feet, as if he has been waiting for this sign the whole conversation, and she realises that he has. It's not his office anymore, he's not in charge anymore, and hasn't been for a while. A gift he gave to her, albeit a dubious one. Gwen stands with him, and he rounds the desk to crush her in an embrace and give her a kiss that stirs more than a few memories, and then he's gone, his coral tucked under his arm, off to where Ianto and Lisa and the kids are probably packing up the last of the house. Ianto had said his good-byes at the dinner party Thursday night, but Jack has held out for a few more days, cataloging as much of the alien tech as he could before it is time to simply step back, set it all down, and walk away.
She doesn't know exactly what they plan on doing, though Ianto has said that they'll be in touch, and of course, Gwen could follow them by multiple means. And maybe she will, just so that she doesn't feel so lonely.
She pushes away from her desk and thinks about calling Rhys, telling him that she wants to go out to dinner, but then she thinks about the mess kids make in restaurants and realises that all she wants is a night in front of the telly with them all, watching something inane and funny. Maybe they'll make popcorn and let the kids stay up late.
But for now she has an interview, and soon Jamil will be along to read her the latest budgetary figures, and if she wants to leave at any good time, she had better get a move on.
Jack shrugs on his coat and stands in the centre of the Hub, looking at everything once, as if his eyes are scanning the place into memory. Maybe they are. Gwen smiles at him from the upper railing, and he salutes her, turns, and opens the door for Lois Habiba.
'Oh!' Lois says, holding her hand out to Jack, 'I'm Lois Habiba! Am I late? They said fifteen hundred-'
Jack laughs, kisses her hand, and glances at Gwen. 'Lois, you are right on time. I'm on my way out.' One more look then, like he can't help himself. 'Gwen Cooper, you be good.'
'If not, I'll be better,' she whispers as she comes down the steps, and the door closes behind him before her feet hit the ground level.
'Oh, I'm Lois Habiba.' Gwen already likes her handshake. Lois may be thirty-five, but she comes highly recommended from Mister Frobisher. She trained under Bridget Spears, the old battleaxe. Gwen likes her and her smart suit on sight. She knows that she's going to hire Ms. Habiba, but even as they greet each other and exchange pleasantries, she can't help but look away, to the window in the metal door, and Jack's back through the glass as he moves farther and farther away from Torchwood, and towards the things that have saved him from it.
***
'How did it go so fast?' we'll say as we are looking back.
And then we'll understand, we hold gold dust in our hands.
--(Tori Amos, 'Gold Dust')
END
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.
IANTO
Jack is standing out in front of the building when Ianto gets there.
He is still fully dressed, though his shirt has blood on it; Gwen had sent him home first because they hadn't wanted to look at it, at the bullet holes that had blossomed on the fabric like flowers when Jack had died. Every time he does it, takes the bullet or the lightning, or the knife, Ianto frets, not because he is worried that Jack won't come back, but because every time Jack dies he draws back a little more, for a day, for a week, sometimes, draws into himself. Ianto cannot ask him what it feels like, because he's been shot; he knows what that feels like. And he doesn't want to know what dying feels like.
Well, actually, he does, he really does, but he doesn't want Jack to know that he does, because that will just make him sad.
Ianto palms his keys and shoulders the messenger bag that is full of a few things that he wants to shuffle about this evening and hadn't felt like doing at the Hub. He is thinking that he might have just enough time to tuck Evan into bed, read him The Littlest Rugby Player or whatever his favorite is this week, and then he might slouch at the table with a bottle and play with the plans that Gwen has drawn up.
'What are you doing?' he asks, because Jack doesn't move when he sees Ianto. Just blinks a few times as if he is surprised to see him.
Jack smiles wanly. 'She threw me out,' he says, laughing, but his smile is weak. 'I was going to go back to the Hub, but then I thought I might go to the clubs, and then I thought-' he stops. 'So I'm standing here,' he finishes. His hands clench and unclench, residual anger from the remembered argument undoubtedly tightening his jaw.
Ianto sighs and grabs his hand, pulling him to the doors. 'Come on, then,' he says, because he needs to make this better, and he will. And they will let him.
Jack leans against the wall of the lift. 'She threw dishes at me,' he tells Ianto, eyes wide. Ianto smiles to himself, and at Jack, to show him that it is all right.
'Congratulations. You must have really stropped her. Last time she threw dishes at me was, hrm. London.'
Jack sighs then, his hand in Ianto's is limp and uncrushing, not like normal. Ianto examines his face for lines, his hair for gray. A little at the temples. He stares at their reflection in the mirror wall of the lift: his own hair is a little lighter than it used to be, not gray at all, but unmistakably lighter. Sometimes Ianto wonders if he will some day wake up blond.
When the doors to the lift open, Jack exits first, though with a little of that naughty schoolboy shuffle in his step, and Ianto follows him, his finger running across the penthouse's 'LOVE SHACK' label, now five years worn.
The broken dishes are still on the floor, probably right where they had fallen when they had hit the wall. Lisa being a dish thrower had been somewhat of a surprise when it had first happened to him, years ago. He understands the action somewhat, but resents the clean up.
Jack walks past the sofa, where Lisa is snoring and Evan is curled inward in front of her. Ianto hears him turn off the telly and then wait, as if the cessation of noise will rouse them both. Ianto waits for it with him, but nothing happens. Lisa can be a heavy sleeper, and Evan has inherited that from her, which is good, because there is a lot of movement in the house after he goes to bed.
There is a squeak as Jack accidentally kicks something vaguely Thomas the Tank Engine related, and Ianto shakes his head as he gets the juice pitcher from the fridge and pours them glasses. It's flu season again, and he doesn't want to be ill. Besides, after this ministration, he's having a beer. Maybe three. He hasn't decided. By the time Jack joins him, he's halfway through his glass.
'I'd ask what happened, but I'm not sure I want to know,' he says softly.
Jack takes the glass from him and shrugs. 'She thinks I threw her birth control away.'
Ianto cocks his head then. Jack is looking at the glass with mistrust. 'Did you?'
'Maybe.'
Ianto sighs. 'You did not.'
'You're right, I didn't.' Jack sips from the glass and shrugs. 'But then I said, "Well, would that really be so bad, anyway?"' and when Ianto winces and starts to shake his head, he gives him a weak smile. 'Yeah, my brain was on auto pilot.' His fingers come to rest on his chest, one of them poking through a hole ringed with dried blood. 'I wasn't thinking.' He chugs his juice and makes a face. 'Grapefruit is nasty.'
Ianto takes the glass from him. 'Change the shirt,' he says, because he doesn't want Jack to dwell. He'll turn it over and over and over, and before Ianto and Lisa know it, he's made some decision without them, and that always goes over well. 'Just throw it away.'
When he says that, Jack understands that what he means is everything attached to that shirt must go, because nothing good is attached to it. Ianto cannot repair bullet holes, nor would he want to. The holes that had been the most critical are gone.
Jack blinks at him and pulls the hole in the shirt so that it rips a few inches, and Ianto wonders if he's going to try to tear it off like some sort of wrestling character, perhaps the Incredible Hulk. Instead, Jack smiles and fires a finger gun at him before looking shocked that he's just fired a finger gun, and then pads away, down the hallway in his sock-clad feet.
The fridge hums when he opens it, pulling out three bottles, two for him, one for Jack, and he tiptoes past the sofa, only to stand at one end of it and watch Lisa's and Evan's quiet breathing.
Evan is going to be a tall boy, Ianto thinks when he looks at his lean figure curled into Lisa. Three years have seen him shoot up like a rocket, gangly limbs and a mop of brown curls on his head and brown skin that tans even darker in the sun. He likes running and stealing biscuits and laughing and going down the slides backwards. Ianto thinks it's odd that Evan even has likes and dislikes, that he can and does tell them things. Lisa had told him that three-year-olds (according to the book; they need the book, as they are both hopeless. Lisa doesn't remember being a child, and Ianto doesn't want to even consider his own childhood as a template for raising his son. Jack rattles off what he knows, but then reminds them that he's going off seventies knowledge here) are usually capable of sentences, of completing narratives, or interacting and asking and apparently, screaming and in general being bratty.
Ianto has already caught himself several times thinking of putting Evan over his knee. They had agreed that they wouldn't do that, and the urge makes his fingers twitch. When he admits it one evening, Jack smiles and tells him that the fact that he hadn't is evidence enough that he's learning. Then Jack had played the, "the last time I was a parent, they had dinosaurs for real and we ate the bark off trees" game.
Ianto smiles at the sleeping figures on the sofa, and he's lost in thought when Jack comes from behind and rests his chin on Ianto's shoulder.
'You never warned me that she was a dish thrower,' he says. Ianto turns so that he can wrap one arm around Jack's waist, the hand with the bottles. He presses their coldness against the small of Jack's back, and the man jumps before shaking his head. 'Bastard.'
'I never actually thought you would give her cause to throw-' he squints at the broken crockery-' is that the fondue pot?'
Jack smirks. 'If we had a fondue pot, don't you think we would have used it by now?'
Ianto cannot argue with that. They do like things that slather and are easily licked off skin. Add heat to it and well, there is a reason they have Evan. And that Lisa is on the pill. 'Good point. My point is that you are the good one. I am the bad one. Justice, it seems for being the good cop at work, I suppose,' he sighs.
Jack's eyes dance over the figures on the sofa; whatever is moving through his head is not good. More bullet fragments maybe, slow and heavy psychological sludge. Ianto reaches out with his other hand and taps Jack's forehead. 'Let it out.'
Jack sighs into Ianto's hand when it drags down the side of his face, and it is wistful. 'It always feels as if I'm waiting for an axe to fall,' he says, his eyes riveted to Lisa and Evan. 'Does it feel like that to you?'
Ianto's stomach coils a little, because that's it. That's been it since Evan had been born, since Lisa had got pregnant, actually, since the Doctor had taken them away. He isn't even sure now if he can say that, not out loud. Or if that will be the thing that drives Jack away. Or maybe it will be age. Or boredom, or one too many nights of temper tantrums. Or maybe it just won't be fun enough anymore. Jack will see Ianto and his gray hair, and Lisa's sagging breasts and think, I can do so much better.
Obviously Ianto knows what shape the other shoe looks like, the one he's waiting to drop: Jack's boot heel as he goes out the door. Huh.
He must have taken too long to react, because Jack reaches up to grab that hand and press it to his mouth. 'You know, there are a species of aliens, in the system of Nak.'
Ianto figures that this is going to be an object lesson of some kind and takes it in stride.
'To them, an individual becomes more attractive the older he or she gets.'
Ianto rolls his eyes and gestures to the sliding door, because if they are going to talk this long, they should do it outside. He thinks about the work he told Gwen he'd do, and then he realises that he's not quite that interested in it. Something about Torchwood isn't as fascinating.
He's not ready to do something else, not quite, and he has no idea what he might do, but Lisa has already quit UNIT, and her job at the florists', whilst not as financially or intellectually stimulating as what she used to do, allows her to manage Evan, to see him grow up, she says. Jack thinks that the florists' suits her, Lovely Lily Lisa, bringing home bundles of chrysanthemums and daylilies to run across their skin in the dead of night, blindfolded, or trussed, waiting for her hands and the kiss of a few petals along their legs and cocks.
Ianto settles in the wire chair and opens the first beer with his churchkey, flipping the cap into a coffee can that they have for that purpose. It rings hollow, to remind him of how little he does this these days. Jack follows suit and sips from his beer with a grimace. Ianto wonders if he could just put the paperwork away for the night and get drunk. He could have a few too many and blow Jack out here in the crisp autumn air.
But first, 'So, today's little incident with firearms has bothered you,' he says, 'because you don't normally make a habit of bear-baiting.'
Jack rubs the bottle across his forehead, then glances out at the lights of the air tower that had been built last year to ward off low flying planes, the tower whose lights flicker red, on and off. Red for danger. 'Sometimes I want to forget,' he says, apropos of nothing, or something. 'When it happens, I wake up and I think, "I would really like to not remember that".' He smiles at Ianto. 'I've lost count with it all, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. When did I stop counting?'
'I don't know. Memories are important,' Ianto says, 'but maybe some things are made to be forgotten.'
Jack frowns at his bottle then, turning it on the table. 'It's funny, all the memories I erase for other people, and I can't even manage to hold onto the ones I want to remember.'
Ianto makes a concerted effort to drink a large portion of his beer before asking the next obvious question. 'Why would you want to remember them, then? All those deaths?'
Jack glances at him. He opens his mouth as if he is about to speak, but he doesn't. His one arm rests on the tabletop, and he slouches in his chair, petulant. Ianto likes Jack petulant, because it usually means that he has lost his argument. On the other hand, they hadn't been arguing, had they?
The gulls they have never managed to scare away dance on the railing. Ianto sighs for all the shite he's going to have to clean up over the weekend. At least he can just hose the area down. He finishes his beer and desperately waits for the warm glow of it to suffuse him, but it is slow going. He opens the second and amends his plans from earlier: he's going to get drunk and fuck Jack over the balcony. He recalls that at one time he had refused to even come out here without clothes on, and now he's going to pound Jack into the terrace.
Well, maybe.
'They're all I have,' Jack says.
Now he does have to roll his eyes. 'Oh, please, bullshite,' he moans, and makes a wanking gesture with his hand. 'Tell me more, Captain Jack Melodrama.'
Jack's mouth quirks a little, but he doesn't look at Ianto. 'That wasn't what I meant. They're the only constant.'
'Ah.'
Jack looks at him. 'Don't you ever worry about not remembering things?'
Ianto cannot answer that, because he has a whole swath of memories that he would like to forget. Or maybe those memories make him what he is. They are painful, and he realises upon thinking about them-Lisa's legs and the attack and more than several panicking moments in between then and now, coupled with his near-death by alien flu and the slow decline he'd made-that he couldn't trade them because they make him who he is in some ways. He cannot and will not forget, even though UNIT had asked him and Lisa if they wanted to, way back, so far back in the whole story of his life with Torchwood that Jack hadn't been more than a footnote.
That is capitulating, then. 'I suppose then, that yes…' he says to Jack, fading away when he realises what Jack is driving at. 'In some way yes, memory is identity-forming.' He has yet to understand what this has to do with Jack being upset that he cannot remember how many times he's been electrocuted or drowned like a kitten. Or they could just be speaking hypothetically. He looks at his second beer with doubt; they aren't that strong.
'It's all we have,' Jack says then, his eyes looking at the sky, almost dancing across the stars as if he is counting them, making sure they are all there. 'Even me. I might live forever, right?' Ianto hears the edge in his voice, it's almost like a laugh. 'But how long can I hold a memory? When I don't remember it might as well have not happened.'
Ianto rests his chin on his hand and stares at the lights out on the horizon: red, red, red, red. 'That's comforting.'
Jack snorts. 'I'm terrified.' He sits forward and turns the bottle in his hand. 'There. I said it. I'm fucking terrified.' The cuss lands like a slap, because Jack doesn't use them.
Ianto drinks the first half of the second beer and wishes that he had a fortifying shot. 'I'm afraid that some day you're going to remember that you are young and fit and gorgeous, and we'll see your back for the last time,' he blurts out. Just saying it makes him queasy and relieved, not unlike being the one lone voice of reason at the conference table at work, when Gwen and Jack are shouting at each other and Ravi is asleep and Claire, their new medic, is looking at everyone as if they are insane.
'Left field, Ianto,' Jack says, gritting his teeth.
Ianto grinds his own jaw. The night had so much potential, and now. 'Pertinent, whilst we speak of things that fucking terrify us.'
Jack sits back. 'You have seriously been worrying about this.'
Ianto finishes his beer, and his stomach feels too full. He should have gone for harder spirits instead-more intoxication, less liquid. He slams the bottle back down a little too forcefully, and the caps rattle in the can. 'Jesus Christ, Jack, how can you not think about it? How can you watch us get older and just, not, and not think about it? Or think that I wouldn't? That Lisa wouldn't?' He slouches further and winces when his belt catches on the wire in the back of the chair.
Jack runs his palms up and down the arms of his chair.
Ianto tilts his head back and looks at the stars. In the distance there is the blaring of a horn. He feels better for having said all of it, but now he wants to tie things together. 'I'm just being realistic,' he says. 'What, are you going to take care of all of us in our old age, masquerading as our son, our grandson?' He rights his head and whoosh, the alcohol hits his bloodstream like a piledriver, and it's nice, just soothing enough that he knows it's there, just strong enough to unmoor the rest of what he wants to say. 'How old will I have to be before you won't look at me anymore? Before you won't want to fuck me anymore?'
Jack closes his eyes and smiles. Then he laughs, and Ianto narrows his eyes to focus on him. Jack rubs his face with his fingers, leaning forward, massaging his temples before scrubbing his cheeks with his palms and snorting, no, laughing, really laughing.
'It wasn't meant to be funny.' Ianto realises that now he's the petulant one. Maybe Jack will be fucking him over the terrace. That's not such a bad idea, either, now that he stops to think about it.
'That you think,' Jack says into his hands, 'with all you know about what I find attractive, beautiful, sexy, even, that I would stop wanting you, or her or Gwen, or Estelle or anyone, because of age.' He snorts and turns his head to look Ianto in the eye. 'It's ridiculous.'
Ianto still has doubts, but it's not worth arguing. Only time will solve this riddle, right? He looks instead at Jack, with his gray hairs and his v-neck vest and his massive hands. Jack, with his braces down and his sock feet out here on the patio, not caring that the bottoms will be black when he goes in. Jack who had taken him in, even when he hadn't wanted to, when UNIT had called, who had taken him on, when Lisa had insisted, who had given him away for one moment, one week, when he had thought that he might never get him back, even if it had saved his life.
Jack, who had stayed for nine months of vomit and bitching and midnight runs to Tesco Express for frozen yogurt; Jack, who before that had taken Ianto's fragile ego and taught him how to be a husband in some ways, how to ask for things that he wanted.
Jack, who no longer even bothers with his own room. Jack who-
Ianto sighs. 'All right then. But don't throw Lisa's pills away,'
'Gah, she can't stay mad at this face.' He points to his jaw, and Ianto silently prays that he doesn't do the "always yearned for" line. Jack's eyes light up for a split second. Mischievous. Old Jack. 'The Feltians of Banaz 5 have wrinkles like a sharpei. They use the folds to-'
Ianto lifts a hand. 'Fine. No seriously, don't go there.'
Jack doesn't. Instead he laughs, and it is fine.
*~*~*~*~*~*
GWEN
It's rare that she gets a moment to herself in the Hub. Usually someone else is here: Claire, or Jamil, the man they'd hired after Ravi had, well, imploded would have been too kind. Gwen doesn't like to dwell. It doesn't do. And she has that new one, Lois Habiba coming in. Lois is a little old for a field agent, but then again, so is Gwen, really (Not that thirty-nine is old, but action takes its toll, and she clicks at the knees when she climbs the stairs to her office.). And she's actually interviewing for Ianto's job, and Gwen is fairly sure that she can do that, minus the fieldwork. What they really need is Ianto's masterful organisational eye.
Gwen settles in the chair and adjusts the lamp. She doesn't quite like it, the green glass shade, but it is part of the room, and she hasn't the balls to replace anything, not yet, not whilst Jack is still here and right now sitting across from her at the front end of what used to be his desk, but is now hers. She wonders how many blowjobs the chair her arse is currently in has supported. Legion, perhaps.
Jack sits back in the chair and smiles. His eyes wrinkle in the corners. It's been a little less than ten years, really, since she first met him, but the signs of age are there, just a little. Gwen wonders if in three hundred years Jack will be wizened and old and have to live the rest of eternity like that. Not appealing at all. She never asks, because she wouldn't want to talk about it either.
He reaches out for an apple on her desk and takes it. 'Someone has the hots for teacher,' he sings.
Gwen gestures that he can have it, and he huffs his breath on the red skin. 'It was in my lunch. Rhys packed it.'
Jack polishes the apple on the front of his shirt, as if it needs it. 'So, here we are, Gwen Cooper, ma'am.' He bites the apple, a deep, gluttonous bite, really, and uses the fruit itself to catch the juice that comes from it, scraping the hollow of it up his chin before twisting it away and chewing. For one second she catches a glimpse of the tip of his tongue and he raises his eyebrows.
'Are you doing the right thing?' she asks him, searching his face for a sign that he isn't sure, but he just winks and swallows before speaking. Lisa has finally pressed table manners on him. Somewhat-he gestures with the apple and juice flings from it onto her papers on her desk.
'I'm definitely not sure I'm doing the right thing. Are you doing the right thing? Is Ianto? Lisa? Was Ravi doing the right thing?' He pauses and considers. 'Owen did the right thing. Suzie-well, okay, sometimes we strike out.'
Gwen shakes her head and rests it on her folded hands. 'I will miss you. It'll be like all my best friends left at once.'
There is a long stretch of time in which Jack turns the apple in his hands, revolving and red and temptation itself. Gwen has always loved Jack's hands. 'You know, we had mentioned.' His eyes flit up to hers.
Gwen sighs. 'Oh, no. We had our misspent youth,' she says, and his eyes brighten as he sets the apple on her desk, one perfect bite taken from it. 'Rhys and I are happy with our twenty-first century ways.'
Some part of her is dying to go with them, some small part of her that is still thirty inside, that is still adventurous and free and unbound. That person lives inside her heart and wants her old friends forever. That person wants many things. Another part of her wants to pack up her whole family and move with them. They could buy a commune up north. Make cheese. Everyone loves cheese.
But her real self knows that Torchwood is something she wants, something she does, and that she couldn't give it up. She's been blessedly lucky in her life, in her career, and she wants to keep it that way, stay alive for her kids, but she can't bring herself to turn away yet. Maybe some day. There's still more for her to do here.
Jack needs to go. She's more than eager to push him out the door, because he shouldn't be here anymore. Someday he'll be back; she'll set it up, and in sixty years, maybe more or less, Jack will stroll back in the door and say, 'I'm Captain Jack Harkness. Put me to work.' Because he will, he always will. Constant as the Northern…well.
That grandfather clock rings, quarter to three, and Jack smiles at her. They have named the phantom clock, which had graduated from ticking to ringing a few years ago, Myfanwy, in her honor. Ianto's only comment had been that at least a phantom clock wouldn't leave piles of guano everywhere.
Jack runs his hand through his hair and sighs. 'I wasn't looking for it, you know. When it all fell into my lap. I was waiting for the Doctor.' He snorts and rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, uncrosses and re-crosses his legs. Shifts his weight from one side of the chair to the other. 'They just-' He waves his hands.
Gwen is the last person in the world he needs to explain Ianto and Lisa to.
'I know,' she says, 'so go. Give them my love and I'll see you on holidays.'
Jack jumps to his feet, as if he has been waiting for this sign the whole conversation, and she realises that he has. It's not his office anymore, he's not in charge anymore, and hasn't been for a while. A gift he gave to her, albeit a dubious one. Gwen stands with him, and he rounds the desk to crush her in an embrace and give her a kiss that stirs more than a few memories, and then he's gone, his coral tucked under his arm, off to where Ianto and Lisa and the kids are probably packing up the last of the house. Ianto had said his good-byes at the dinner party Thursday night, but Jack has held out for a few more days, cataloging as much of the alien tech as he could before it is time to simply step back, set it all down, and walk away.
She doesn't know exactly what they plan on doing, though Ianto has said that they'll be in touch, and of course, Gwen could follow them by multiple means. And maybe she will, just so that she doesn't feel so lonely.
She pushes away from her desk and thinks about calling Rhys, telling him that she wants to go out to dinner, but then she thinks about the mess kids make in restaurants and realises that all she wants is a night in front of the telly with them all, watching something inane and funny. Maybe they'll make popcorn and let the kids stay up late.
But for now she has an interview, and soon Jamil will be along to read her the latest budgetary figures, and if she wants to leave at any good time, she had better get a move on.
Jack shrugs on his coat and stands in the centre of the Hub, looking at everything once, as if his eyes are scanning the place into memory. Maybe they are. Gwen smiles at him from the upper railing, and he salutes her, turns, and opens the door for Lois Habiba.
'Oh!' Lois says, holding her hand out to Jack, 'I'm Lois Habiba! Am I late? They said fifteen hundred-'
Jack laughs, kisses her hand, and glances at Gwen. 'Lois, you are right on time. I'm on my way out.' One more look then, like he can't help himself. 'Gwen Cooper, you be good.'
'If not, I'll be better,' she whispers as she comes down the steps, and the door closes behind him before her feet hit the ground level.
'Oh, I'm Lois Habiba.' Gwen already likes her handshake. Lois may be thirty-five, but she comes highly recommended from Mister Frobisher. She trained under Bridget Spears, the old battleaxe. Gwen likes her and her smart suit on sight. She knows that she's going to hire Ms. Habiba, but even as they greet each other and exchange pleasantries, she can't help but look away, to the window in the metal door, and Jack's back through the glass as he moves farther and farther away from Torchwood, and towards the things that have saved him from it.
***
'How did it go so fast?' we'll say as we are looking back.
And then we'll understand, we hold gold dust in our hands.
--(Tori Amos, 'Gold Dust')
END
Master List