i wouldn't be here if you could have said no ; narrative
"Want to run away with me?"
"I'd run anywhere with you, Jack."
walk by the sea/forgive me all my sins
sift through my memory/find where i begin
"I'm yours, for the rest of the night, or as long as you'll have me."
"Always. You're mine, always. And I'm yours."
lie in the warm sand/dig in my heels
cry for my dead child/forget how that feels
"This isn't working, Ianto. We both know it."
closer to home/he cuts you/close to the bone
he won't leave you/it's too far to crawl/and everyone knows
He never wanted to come home to a cold, empty bed.
("Will you be home tonight?" "No.")
It's exactly what he gets.
--
The armor of a suit and the excuse of coffee aren't a good enough defense against the silence. Ianto has always stressed the importance of separating their lives, a clear-cut line between work and home. Respecting his own standards (for once?), he stops trying to hold conversations with Jack beyond necessary verbal exchange.
Going to bed alone starts to become habit.
--
Each subsequent day threatens to drive Ianto mad. He wears his guilt like a badge of dishonor, and his relationships with Gwen, Owen, and even Tosh become strained.
Eventually, it becomes easier to say 'sir' and 'Jack' leaves his vocabulary entirely.
--
Gwen and Jack are arguing above his head in the greenhouse when Ianto places the envelope with the GPS unit on Gwen's desk and leaves silently for the night. It's not passive aggression that leads him to do it, but Ianto knows that if he and Jack were still together, he would've taken the secret of Flat Holm to his grave.
The two-week suspension that follows is just the latest in a long string of consequences he deserves for his poor choices.
--
Ianto realizes it's probably over the day he brings home the boxes without thinking too much about what it means. He packs his clothes and books and personal belongings, finds the first available, furnished one-bedroom flat that's convenient to the Hub that he can easily afford, and leaves his house key on the table by the door.
He figures the address change he puts in the Hub computer will serve as more notification than his lack of presence in the house.
--
Rhiannon gives him hell over the phone when he tells her. It's been enough weeks that Ianto knows there's no hope left and his family deserves to know. He doesn't spare her the truth; it's all his fault. She lets up when he breaks down into sobs for the first time since this all began (since it all ended), but it doesn't ease the ache in his chest at all.
--
Learning to live alone again is one of the hardest parts. With Jack haunting the Hub, Ianto no longer feels comfortable going to work early and leaving late. He arrives at work on time but not first, and while not the first to leave at night, he makes sure he isn't the last, either. He tries to deliver Jack's morning coffee while someone else - usually Gwen - is in the office with Jack, and steadily breaks himself of the habit of checking on the other man before he goes home in the evenings.
Ianto becomes so afraid of being caught staring at Jack with love and longing in his eyes that he stops looking at all.
--
Jack startles him one night in the Hub. Hope leaps and falls away again. A set of papers, a matter of formality, will make it official. Ianto doesn't have the right to protest it, so he doesn't even try. He sits in his flat and pores over them for hours later, and tries to figure out when his will to fight went out.
--
He goes to the Doctor with more questions than he should. The Time Lord refuses to answer most of them. What he doesn't say tells Ianto everything he needed to know.
"Your universe deviated from ours months ago in your relative timeline."
"And the Ianto Jones and Jack Harkness in your universe?"
"Nothing that's occurred to you lately ever happened to them. They were together until the day Ianto died."
"At least I got it right in some timeline."
When Ianto goes home, he signs the papers and is left feeling oddly numb.
--
Ianto swears it will be his last journey by PINpoint. When he gets back, he'll drop the damn thing in the bottom of a drawer and forget about the Nexus, the future, and alternate universes entirely. But for now, the alien beach thousands of years in the future is more peaceful to him than Cardiff, and if he buries his face in the collar of the greatcoat that belongs to a dead man, he can still smell the lingering traces of fifty-first century pheromones.
He clutches the worn down platinum band until it leaves a circular mark on his palm. Ianto knows that he's clinging on to pieces, that he has to stop this. He wants to fling it into the sea, but in the end can only bring himself to sit and turn the ring over in his hands while he watches unfamiliar star patterns begin to dot the sky.
They're fate, destiny, kismet. Written in the stars, he would've said not so long ago. Unfortunately, fate doesn't work around the missteps of foolish humans, and Ianto can't even find the energy to blame it.