i feel my vision slipping in and out of focus ; narrative
so i ran with the devil, left a trail of excuses
Across Roald Dahl Plass, it could be any other day; it could be his world, the lift stone in front of the water tower could lead down into his Torchwood. He could find his Jack sitting down there in shirtsleeves and trouser braces, greatcoat draped casually on a chair, waiting to greet him with an effusive grin. Waiting to ask him what’s taken him so long, where did he wander off to?
It could be his world - except that it isn’t.
Ianto wills the hands that aren’t his own not to shake as he opens the boot of the car and retrieves the earlier-packed bag. Inside are the trappings of a simple life: jeans and a jumper and a well-worn pair of Chuck Taylors. When he finds a public washroom and begins to change out of the suit, he feels as if he’s giving himself away again, accepting the domestic life of his alternate.
He feels like - he is - a stranger in this skin.
--
like a stone on the water, the elements decide my fate
Hours have passed and he still can’t wash the bitter taste from his mouth.
Ianto finds the basement at two in the morning. He can’t sleep, lying stiffly in bed with the wife he didn’t marry half-curled around him. His mind is swimming, guilt and determination, self-loathing and justification warring for a place at the forefront of his thoughts. He descends the narrow stairs, lit by the lonely buzz of a solitary swinging bulb.
Below is a makeshift study, walls pasted with posters and photographs, and bookshelves lining the walls. Ianto finds many of the same titles that are on his shelves at home, classic to contemporary and bland to eclectic. He reaches the desk piled with more books, un-graded term papers (he supposes he’ll have to read those), and finds loose scattered sheets with handwriting similar to his own, bolder and more cramped. Used to fitting in margins.
The thought hits Ianto all of a sudden and he bounds back up the stairs, running quietly into the kitchen to pick up the discarded volume Gwyndolyn had given him before he went to see the other Jack. Leaves of Grass, a compendium of Walt Whitman.
Ianto opens the book and thumbs through it. The pages part easily, landing on a heavily dog-eared one with neatly-penned notes in the unprinted space, the ‘sea’ surrounding the poem that’s shaped like a ship.
O Captain! My Captain!
--
it's hard enough to live
There's a secret to it all, Ianto discovers after days spent poring over the poem, holed up in the basement study. He finds the wife does not count this as unusual behavior from her 'husband' - apparently he did this quite often, before. There's a code within the verses that, once deciphered, leads him to one of Chandler's Marlowe novels, The Long Goodbye. The paper binding on the back cover is thick, as if it has an extra layer of glue. When he pries it up and pulls it away, a key falls from the spine of the book, but with little indication of what it belongs to.
Weeks pass in this fashion, one clue after another bringing him closer to a solution that seems to keep moving further away. Ianto goes through the motions of this life he didn't forge: gets up in the morning and has toast and eggs, kisses the wife, hugs the daughter, and goes to work. No one at the school notices he's different, from the other faculty to the students, and he gleans enough of his counterpart's teaching style from records and an old syllabus to guess what direction to use.
He's careful to keep suspicions at a minimum, even though Gwyndolyn shoots him curious glances when he leaves the house to meet the Jack who isn't his own. She says things that strike him as odd, sometimes, comments that make him want to ask more, but he doesn't. Ianto carefully learns to gauge her moods, goes for ice cream and pickles at two in the morning, makes love to her when warm, soft hands wake him beneath the covers. He makes a mistake, once, almost refusing to eat a steak, then reminds himself there's no reason for his counterpart to be a vegetarian and manages to choke half of it down.
The domesticity is stifling, and the double life layered upon the one he's already leading leaves him feeling dirtier and more ashamed after each subsequent encounter. Ianto begins to press on day-to-day simply for the rare telephone conversation with Jack, his own Jack. Those moments are the only ones that leave him feeling remotely connected to the world he left behind, that convince him that he hasn't, truly, gone mad.
Then one day, exactly one month since he ended up here, Ianto finds the device in question: small, innocuous, and only vaguely alien, secreted away in a false panel of the desk. And the exact twin to one he'd archived in his own universe, on New Year's Eve.