She believes that life is made up of all that you're used to
In the Kashtta Tower's lounge, Suzie Costello is sipping an unholy concoction made mostly of hot cocoa, with some coffee and whiskey added for flavour. It has whipped cream on the top. She's frowning down at a small device, probably alien in origin, which is rattling in a regular repeating pattern, and poking at it
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Those happen to be hands he hasn't felt since Jack Harkness left the Conrad to avoid bringing the wrath of Romana Angelos down on his team, back when Ianto was still human. For all the time between then and now, for all the shock of contact, it's far too familiar. For a moment, it's like nothing's changed.
He stops breathing for a moment, heart pounding in his chest, and then he remembers, albeit unwillingly, that nothing good is going to come of this.
He tries to think of Winter's hands down his spine, long and graceful and completely unlike J's; of tracing the curve of Anna's hip while she favoured him with a lazy smile; but even as those recollections hit, even as his chest tightens and aches because he hasn't seen them in far too long, none of it even touches the overwhelming awareness of Jack -- no, J, just J -- of J's hands on his his shoulders, of the space he occupies in the room, of the way he smells and the pauses for breath between curses in a language Ianto's never learnt.
And then J lets go, and Ianto tries desperately to keep the sudden sense of loss out of his eyes. There was nothing there to lose, was there?
It's the offer that really catches him by surprise, though, and he has to grope for words. "I... ah. There's... Well. You could... The filtration system." He waves his pen in its general direction.
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"Filtration." There's an odd tinge to his voice - half fond remembrance, half dry commentary. Sooner or later, it does all come back to the sea. "Got it."
He walks over to the machinery, crouching down to inspect it, familiarize himself with it. He's good with machines because he's had cause to be - more now than before he got those seven years back in all their searing glory - and he can read a few extra specifics from things he saw in his sister's labs, basic-basic systems like a plane mechanic's interest in simple gears. He can pull himself down into the moment, anchor himself to feeling these things out, testing their configuration against his hands, but he catches himself and stops because that, too, has been polluted.
He does his best to ignore the tension being pushed back into his shoulders from every broken reaction, every approach-disengage. It doesn't matter, because if they can just pretend to have some equilibrium, that's enough, isn't it? And so long as he's not torturing anyone or betraying anyone or betraying anyone's memory, and so long as Ianto isn't bringing him coffee as though nothing substantial has changed or accusing him against a wall...
He's calm. Really. He can be.
He's just going to... work on this.
For a while.
...
...he does glance over, once, furtively, just to see what Ianto is doing. There's a moment where he considers saying something, but nothing materializes. Apologies mean very little, he can't help but feel; questions aren't his place, and smalltalk presumes altogether too much ease with each other.
He'll just keep working.
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"I'm sure you've worked out why this is here," he finally says, since there's really no getting around that. "Of course, now that it's been built, it's never going to see use, but if it hadn't been, you'd randomly be stuck as a dolphin for a week." He shrugs. "Same reason I bought bicycles for everyone in Torchwood, myself excluded."
He frowns a little at the readings he's getting on the water itself, then makes another quick note. "We couldn't get seawater out here, though. But it's a fair approximation."
And then, apropos of nothing: "...I'm sorry."
He's not talking about the water.
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That's not entirely true. He hasn't been at zero since he got down here - probably not for a while since then. Possibly not since the Master's entry showed up on the journal network, though he's doing a good job of not thinking about that given the state the rest of his mind is. And he's already written off fighting and fleeing. Still, there's a visible hitch when it feels like his entire body grits, from his teeth right down through to his bones.
"...I seriously doubt anyone in this Tower has cause to apologize to me," he says, wresting his attention back onto the filtration system and popping off a casing to give its inner workings more direct attention than they probably need.
His voice is almost even.
If anything, he almost says, but he can't make the words move up through his throat with his breath. If anything, I still haven't made my own apologies, and I feel like I should apologize for giving up trying.
In the mean time he's just going to keep his hands moving, slowly, methodically putting together one more system either meant to keep him well or keep him contained.
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"Surprising as it may seem," he says, focusing intently on his notebook, "I tend to think that the sort of loss of control that leads to me flinging accusations about is cause for an apology. Really, if I'm going to be causing a scene, I'd rather the accusations in question be ones that I can back up in some significant way. Not just a... a need to believe the worst for my own comfort."
He's not going to say he didn't mean it -- at the time, he did. Of course, at the time, he was hardly rational.
Of course, he's still not looking at J. That would make this... harder.
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And what would be the point, he's too far down to ask aloud, apologizing to someone like me? I've survived everything. I'll survive everything to come. And if I don't, I'll know it ceased to matter.
"When it comes to Torchwood, 'the worst' is usually a safe thing to believe," he says. When it comes to him, him like this, ready to become any sort of atrocity at the drop of a hat, perhaps it's the safest. "Just - don't apologize."
Or he'll rip his own throat out to keep himself from screaming. He doesn't understand it, this trait of decent people to apologize for the mess he's made of his life. It feels like he did once, but not any more; these are the rules, this is how things go, you get hurt and you hurt everyone around you and you fit yourselves in where you can savor the bits where you're kiting on endorphins and brag about your myriad of scars, and attempts to subvert that as the dominant paradigm of the world just speak to a conception of reality unlike what he has. This may not be the Agency, but the Agency touched every era, every time. The Agency has a specific rank that means Left service, but never left the purview - Instagur, the rank even deserters still carry.
Old torturers never die.
He turns back to the machinery.
"No one ever said you were wrong."
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The emptiness in J's expression hurts, deep and raw, and before he can think too hard about it, he's flipped his journal open and is jotting a quick note. After he's scrawled a few lines, he shuts the journal with a snap, grabs some sea salt mix, and goes back up the ladder -- tricky with the hooves, but he's got the knack for it now.
He'll just be measuring that into the tank now. Quietly.
He'd deny that his hands are shaking.
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Eventually, though, the last bits fall into their proper configuration, the last diagnostics he can do with nothing but eyes, hands, ears, and the machine in front of him come back clean, and he pulls away.
"There." The machinery sounds healthy, looks heathy. He presses his fingers into the tank wall, watching the displacement of fine particles in the water.
It doesn't smell like the sea. That would be too much to ask for.
After a moment he closes his eyes, leans forward to rest his forehead against the wall, and listens. Until Chicago he spent his entire planetbound life by one ocean or another, and here... no. There's Lake Michigan, but aside from that it's just land, all land, too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, crowded except where it stretches out into industrial parks and farmland and plains. The sea is very far away.
He opens his eyes again, staring through to a small, waving plant of some sort. It looks uneasily transplanted, there, waving quietly under the glow of the florescent lights.
"My sister worked in hydroponics," he says. From how softly he says it and the way he's looking, one would think he was talking to the plant.
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...He's leaving soon anyway. And he's going to see Winter, and that'll help. He might as well.
"I never knew you had a sister," he says, just as softly. There's no reproach in his voice. Even with Jack, even when it seemed like they had... something, he never pried, and never really expected to be told much. Jack had his secrets, and that was just how things were.
He wonders if Jack knew about Rhiannon. He wonders if Jack would have cared. He was just the part-time shag, after all. Owen was right, and for all that he'd insisted otherwise at the time -- He needs me! -- it hadn't really come to anything in the end, had it?
He'll see Winter soon.
He finishes the note in his journal, and looks at the tank. At this point, he's done everything he can think of to get it running properly. Anything else he could do is just decorative.
He'll see Winter soon. And then... he'll decide from there. There's a decision forming in the back of his mind, but this latest comment from J's disrupted his neat chain of logic.
It may take some time to put it back together. Or maybe it'll just take seeing them again.
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He has to reach for the number, but he doesn't have to do the conversion again. He remembers. Isn't that the bitch of things now? He remembers.
"...seven years younger than I was."
They're gone, now.
He looks back to the filtration system, but there's nothing left to do with it. Nothing left to distract himself with. He stands up, staring through the water again.
"She was a biologist," he says. "Pari was an engineer. They were good."
And now they're gone.
"Anyway."
He exhales, turning back to look at the door and wondering if it'll let him leave now. It's far past time for him to disengage.
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But this is more of J -- or Jack, or whoever he was or is, and however that's relevant -- than he's ever had the chance to see, and he can't help asking.
He forces himself to stillness, to quiet. Perhaps J will just leave. Perhaps J will tell him. He's not certain which is the worse option.
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His gaze slips away, onto absolutely nothing present in this room or any extant timeline. "There was a war," he says, backing up against the tank, pushing his shoulderblades into the wall and his heels into the ground. "The last great Time War between the Time Lords and the Dalek race." He's quoting - old records scavenged from one place or another, one time or another, one clue or another he'd followed once long ago. "The weapons they used were terrible. They tore apart entire timelines, great swashes of causality... and that planet ended up collateral damage."
He exhales, eyes resting at some indistinct point on the floor.
"It ceased to be. It didn't just cease to be, it had never been. They never lived." They certainly didn't die. "...I survived because I was in the Time Agency at the time; their technology blocked the ripple effect."
I make a habit of being an impossible thing, he doesn't say. For one reason or another, he just keeps surviving.
...maybe not forever.
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Oh.
"And that was why..." It's not hard to remember Lisa, to remember swearing to Jack that one day, Jack would be the one who needed saving, and he'd be the one to watch him suffer and die. He'd gone a bit mad, after she died, and he still can't be certain when that was: after Canary Wharf, or after Jack led the rest of Torchwood in shooting her down. Maybe it was neither, but some moment in between, some unnoticed moment when all that was human in Lisa slipped away.
He may not be certain when she could've been pronounced dead, anyway, but he knows that he'd most likely been a bit mad since it started. It only got worse over time, but at the end of it... Jack had done what he couldn't, and Jack put him back together.
Somehow, he doubts there was anyone who could've done as much for Thane.
"I'm--" sorry, he almost says, and catches it at the last minute "--not going to say it. Even if you hadn't said... It doesn't change anything." And he knows that, at least, all too well. A thousand repetitions of the same meaningless words, and too-earnest inquiries as to how he was feeling, as if there was any way he could feel other than empty. He'd been nothing, until Jack made him something again, and Thane's existence takes on a whole new aspect in the light of that revelation.
Thane, he supposes, could well have been that same nothing, multiplied by an entire world, and he looks at J with something that's emphatically not pity. A shadow of understanding, perhaps, that contains within it the knowledge of just how far it falls short, somewhere in the hazy gray area between sympathy and empathy.
Someone should've been there for you, he thinks, and then, But would that have been enough? Could anything have been enough?
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"Nothing changes anything." He breathes out. "Time doesn't work like that." His gaze drifts up, losing itself in the ceiling. "No going back."
And as late as he's gone, the people working on time travel all say the same thing: maybe someday, science will figure it out.
His jaw works for a moment. He just needs to shunt off that emotion - no, it's not the sort of thing that's going to make it go away, it's no sort of long-term solution, but he so long as he keeps all this under the threshold of what would trigger a visit from his guardian angel...
Some things are easier with no one watching.
"...anyway."
He hadn't meant to come making excuses for anything. And that was why...
There's reasoning to be untangled there, motive and motivation, but what good would it do?
Nothing changes anything.
He eyes the door. "Think it'll let me out this time?"
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Maybe it's time to go on, then. A certain chain of reasoning mends itself, drawing closer to a conclusion that would have been unthinkable a year ago.
A lot can change in a year.
"No harm in trying, I suppose," he says, his voice just on the aching side of the pleasant neutrality he's cultivated over the years. The tells are subtle, but there... The slightest roughness in his voice, the way he can't quite look at J when he says it.
There's a Don't go buried somewhere under that statement, if you know how to look.
Of course, that's stupid of him. Nothing changes anything, J said it himself. And whatever he had with Jack is one more thing they can't go back to. If anything this... that familiar expression, but darker and drier, the way he can't quite keep his voice as neutral as he'd like... this is a sick parody of what things were. Pretty enough if one doesn't look too closely, but nothing about this is right.
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He glances at Ianto from the corner of his eye, but he can't respond to what he knows he's feeling.
"Yeah," he agrees instead. "No harm there."
(Don't go.)
He doesn't have a choice.
He stops looking when he realizes that's not true. I have a choice. There's always a choice. But the other options I can reach are a hell of a lot worse than going. ...every last one of you saw who I am. And the person you want back is the one who would have to make this decision.
Time to go, then.
He steps forward, approaching the door with a wary eye. It seems perfectly mundane and doorlike, not that that particular quality seemed to mean much with the other ones.
With a decisive inhale, he steps forward.
...nothing happens.
He turns, looking back up at the threshold he just crossed - one which notably didn't spit him out anywhere it shouldn't have - and spreads his hands in demonstration. Well. Look at that.
He should... really, really go, now.
"Thanks for the tank," he says, letting his hands drop back against his thighs. "Even if it doesn't ever see use."
A pause.
"...take care of yourself," he says, and to hear his tone it's almost more of a request or suggestion than a directive. Because I won't be able to is the natural end to that sentence, the one he can't let himself say. There's not enough time to mend everything and then take care of what needs to be done. All he can do is what little he can, and hope for the best after that.
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