[Torchwood Fic] Above The Emerald City
Title: Above The Emerald City
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Gordon Brown
Setting: Post-Greeks Bearing Gifts
Warning: Discussion of suicide
Beta-edit by: solsticezero
Disclaimer: Not mine.
A/N: I have to give solsticezero a lot of credit for this. She did a wonderful job editing this story, it took a lot of her time and she made it 100% better. The title is hers, too, as well as the quote at the beginning of the story. Well, the idea of thw quote anyway. She's also the one who told me this deserved to see the daylight after all, when I wasn't so sure. Thank you very, very much, solsticezero. :)
This is a commonly controversial theme in fanfiction. And one that I wasn't very comfortable writing about. Wasn't even comfortable asking people to help me with, since I know it tops the list of Things This Fandom Can't Stand. So I tried to make it a little different than the usual, tried to make it more light-toned; comic, really, but not too much. I wasn't trying to take away the seriousness of the situation, just wanted to make it absurd. This is, after all, Torchwood. I'm not sure I succeeded, but hopefully this one won't be tossed into the Bad Fic Trash Can.
I'm really torn between how much I want to hear opinions, and how terrified I am of having failed miserably. I don't think this one will receive a lot of attention, but I trust my beta's word. A lot more than I trust my own judgment.
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"As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart! You don't know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable. [...] And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others." - The Wizard of Oz
He paid for a 20 quid taxi drive with a 50 pound note, said keep the change with the kindest smile on his face, and got out of the car. It was the last bill in his wallet, and he figured he should do something at least remotely meaningful with it, rather than let it rot in his trouser pocket. It wasn’t exactly charity, granted; he didn’t have time to find someone whose life he could brighten up with 30 quid. He liked to think he’d made the taxi’s driver night a little merrier, though. Maybe he’d remember the guy who tipped him thirty quid that one time. As far as last taxi rides go, it had been a nice one.
The night air was a bit chilly, but he couldn’t be bothered to pull his coat tighter around him. Once you realized you were in your last moments -last time you rode a cab, last walk down that street, last 50 pound note in your pocket, last time you felt the cold night against your skin, sending bristling shivers down your spine - then everything was suddenly tinged with a different color. Whether it was for better or for worse was purely a matter of perspective.
It would be only half true to say Ianto Jones didn’t have a marked melancholy about him as he took in the last bits of life around him. It was there, lurking behind his eyes, a faint trace of sadness and longing and nostalgia, calculations of lost possibilities and regrets. But it all died on the corner of his lips - on his short little grin of fond satisfaction and calm resignation. He wasn’t fighting it, wasn’t having second thoughts; he was simply saying goodbye.
He strolled into the building, easy steps taken slowly and relished, rather than seen as an arduous trudge. He took the elevator because there were 25 floors between him and the roof, and he reckoned he needed to save his (last) breath and (final) effort for more important things.
The entrance to the rooftop was, as he’d predicted, closed. But you are never caught off-guard when you prepare, as his mother used to say. He couldn’t remember many other coherent expressions that had come out of his mother’s mouth, but he couldn’t help but think about her (too) now, and he was glad that out of all the things that had rubbed off on him, this one had been the one to stick. He was prepared. He was always prepared.
That, right there, was one in a series of crucial instances (all carefully listed, of course), of things standing between him and his goal. If he hadn’t borrowed (stolen was a very strong word, especially considering the loan would be soon returned) a couple of handy artifacts from Torchwood’s storage (something to open the door, something to trick the cameras, something to allow him to pass the turnstiles), he’d be stuck inside the building while his plans waved him goodbye and good life from the other side of that very locked door. Suicide was a series of probations, really, one after the other, ‘till you could make it to the edge of a roof. It wasn’t easy to kill oneself, or not as easy as one would imagine; it took a lot more than being buried under seven kinds of shit. You had to be ready, and he reckoned most people didn’t really understand what being ready to die meant. It was an idea that needed to be ripened before you could go forward. Well, maybe being stinking drunk or completely stoned helped to quicken the process a little. But that wasn’t how he wanted to do this; it was neither a whimsical decision nor a meaningless one. It wasn’t like he could regret it afterwards and take it back, anyway.
The thing was, once you’d said your goodbyes, taken your last looks, given your last smiles, you couldn’t just go back and start over. You’d miss the whole point, as well as the moment - it was all about moment. This was his, and he wasn’t about to let it slip because of a door. He should’ve remembered to leave a thank-you note for Torchwood for providing him such glorious and practical artifacts (and remind them that they were lucky they had a suicidal archivist, not one with a penchant for world-domination).
Two seconds and click. He smiled, a little proud of his little conquest (he’d miss the little conquests, if he could miss things in the afterlife), and put the gizmo safely back in his suitcase.
He only found it a tad ironic that Cardiff had never seemed more beautiful, had never smelled better or shined brighter than it did that night. Perspective, see. He breathed in, felt the icy air penetrate his lungs, and felt good, like he had been holding his breath for too long. He almost wished he’d brought a pen and a piece of paper to write that down and leave a note in his pocket, to let the world know how liberating and perfect this, right here, was. But there was a reason why suicide notes weren’t supposed to be bright and encouraging; this wasn’t the kind of advice you wanted to leave for posterity. It was good for him, to feel light and free and accomplished, for the first time in months; but he didn’t want to be misinterpreted, and end up taking the blame for someone else’s death. Even if he wouldn’t be there anymore to retort the accusations. He was sure of what he was doing, but that wasn’t the kind of certainty you could transmit through a couple of hurried words on a piece of paper. And anyway, he didn’t want to take responsibility for anyone else. For the first time in a long time, it was just him and himself. No one else. The moment he sat on the edge of the rooftop, looked down and saw his feet dangling 80 meters above the street, he was letting go of something, something huge and heavy and not his burden to carry anymore. The elephant-ghost that had been sitting on his shoulders for almost a year saluted him and left. It was just him now.
One could say that if you felt as good as Ianto did, then you didn’t have to top yourself after all. It sounded a bit incongruous, he had to admit. But he’d argue back that no, not when the reason why you felt like that was precisely because you were a couple of minutes away from doing it. It went without saying that his life was no bed of roses. Not that anyone would find the story of his suicide in the papers, but he wasn’t all that disheartened over it. The headlines would be made of half truths, he suspected; survivor of Canary Wharf takes his own life several months after the tragic incident. No lie in that, but people - like his sister - would read and assume he just couldn’t make it past the trauma, which was only partly true.
It had everything to do with Canary Wharf, and losing everything. But it had more to do with not being able to find something else, something new, to lose. You can’t really live when you have nothing to make it worth the while, can you? Well, you can, but what kind of life is that which makes death seem so much more appealing? Ianto was done with surviving through his days, rather than actually living. He was afraid if he continued operating on the auto-pilot and faking his smiles and pretending to be fine when he didn’t give a fucking shit about anything, he’d end up becoming a robot. Becoming that thing he had been for months on a row, back when the only thing that kept him going was the promise he’d made to his half-robotic girlfriend. It was easy to do it then, with Lisa begging for him to save her in between sobs of pain, but now that he was a human being again, the idea of going back to that state, to that nearly cyberized condition, was terrifying. It Made him sick. It was better to take the plunge while he still had a conscience of his own.
He felt sorry for Rhi, though. She’d read about some policeman or maybe a coroner saying he’d taken his own life ‘cause his mind was so disturbed and she’d feel guilty for not having noticed anything the last time he had visited. Ianto knew disturbed; there was no disturbance to his mental balance here. There was before, but not now. Not here. This was the result of serene, objective and sober contemplation. He’d left her a letter and a generous bank account to make sure her kids wouldn’t end up in his place, or in her place. Funny how he’d thought he’d be the one who’d do well in life and go further than the low ambitions and the proletarian future the estate had saved for them. Rhiannon got herself a nice, normal family who loved her very much, and look where ambitions got him.
He hoped she’d get it, get him, better than coroners and policemen ever could, anyway.
He tightened his white-knuckled grip on the edge of the roof, bent forward just a tiny bit more to peek down. Two hundred and sixty two feet of free fall into the darkness until he was no more than a pool of blood and meat and broken bones on the pavement. It took a lot of courage to do something like that, and it was why he’d chosen to top himself. He had a considerable amount of options, even more than the average - surely he could find a weapon that’d turn him into ashes in a snap, hidden in one corner or another in the Hub. Nothing was more equipped for innovative suicide methods than Torchwood. But the idea of going out in a Torchwood-way was repulsive. He’d become just a scratch over a name, another one in the long list of unfortunate casualties in their files. He wasn’t doing this out of spite, or trying to spread a message. But there had to be a meaning in what he did, otherwise dying would be just the same as living, and if that was the case, then why bother?
It took a lot of backbone to go up 25 floors and then jump. It wasn’t quick, because he’d face the longest seconds of his existence as he went down. Not the same as a bullet to the head. But probably a lot more poetic, even though he couldn’t exactly find the poetry here. It wasn’t supposed to be pretty anyway. Death wasn’t pretty. But it could say something, aside from the obvious, if you meant for it to. And his would be saying I jumped because I went as high as I could and there was nowhere else to go other than down. The end. Couldn’t get more straightforward than that.
And it was a very straightforward decision. It had been, to him at least, if the way he got to the conclusion that offing himself was the solution to his misery meant anything.
He woke up one morning, a Wednesday, or a Thursday, didn’t matter, four weeks or so before. He had breakfast, got dressed and left for work. It was a beautiful day, the type you don’t get often these days, so he decided to walk the twenty minutes to work. For some reason (and the believers would’ve named this reason ‘fate’, but Ianto simply didn’t find logic in giving names to accidents and lack of attention) he turned onto the wrong street and ended up at a dead end. Nothing ahead of him but an old battered wall, with what he reckoned were probably once meaningful phrases written in old graffiti and posters ripped apart by time and bored fingers. There was a moment’s pause before he understood that the dead end before him was, in fact, a revelation. If he had been more attentive, if someone had accidentally bumped into him, if some alien emergency had happened in that exact moment, he wouldn’t have turned wrong, and he wouldn’t have ended up there, and this wall would’ve continued to be just another wall, not the book of his existence, his entire life, spread before his eyes, smelling like piss and dirt - quite appropriate, that. But he missed his way, and there he was. And there he would be, forever.
Quite simple.
He was tired of drama. No tears, no regrets - well, maybe a few. Quite a few, actually. But there was nothing he could do about it. No more feeding the expectations, no more waiting for an unexpected turn of events, no more letting himself be talked into belief by sweet nothings and hopeful platitudes; nothing. Just a wall. Old, battered, aching wall, begging to be taken down. Gladly, Ianto replied.
The darkest thought to cross his mind - if he could call it dark, anyway; it was more gory than anything - was whether he’d be able to hear the sound of his bones breaking into a thousand little pieces in that split-second between the moment the first milimetric portion of his body touched the walkway and the moment he died.
But his line of thought was interrupted by a thump, and then the rusty noise of the door being pushed open hurriedly. He turned around, preservation instinct kicking in even when he was about to jump, making him incline his body back and hold tighter on the ledge. He was expecting to see a guard, or a cleaning lady, or someone escaping for a bit of a smoke. Imagine his surprise when instead, he found Captain Jack Harkness, panting and sweating and a little messed up, looking like he had just ran a marathon - if marathons were run by people holding a box of pizza in one hand and a six pack in the other. Jack halted in his tracks, eyes electric and a trifle too desperate. But the minute he focused on Ianto, his apparent unease was gone, morphed into a large Harkness grin. Jack sighed.
“Ah,” Jack said, in-between gasps, holding the pack under his arm to place his free hand on his waist. “Glad to see I made it in time.”
Ianto blinked, taken aback by a sudden sensation of having been sucked in by a black hole and spat in an entirely different dimension. His eyes moved from the pizza, to the lager, to a drop of sweat on Jack’s forehead and finally Jack’s smile, as casual as anything. Ianto frowned. As strange as it seemed, it didn’t feel as improbable as it should. Which meant he should’ve anticipated it. Of course he should have.
Kicking himself Ianto asked “What are you doing here?”
Jack inhaled deeply, still trying to catch his breath, and waved the pizza boxes vaguely in his direction. “I’m here to save you, of course.” He took a very careful step forward. “Hungry? I have pizza.”
“How did you know I’d be here?” Ianto’s eyes flickered momentarily to himself, his feet and legs and arms, searching for the tracker that Jack may have improbably managed to hide in his clothes.
Jack patted his pockets, and fished a crumpled piece of paper from inside his coat. Oh.
“You were very specific,” he said.
Ianto suppressed a curse. “That was meant for my sister.”
Jack’s eyes widened in mock-surprise. “Really?” he said, none too convincingly. “I mustn’t have seen her name on the envelope, then.”
Ianto closed his eyes, turned back to the street, feet still swinging freely above the little walkway he was supposed to have been spilled onto by now. He inhaled, very slowly, then let the air out with an edge of desolation. The world he’d left behind had sped to catch up with him.
“Jack, I - ” when he faced away from the edge again he found Jack nearly at arm’s length away, and flinched, startled.
Jack dropped the pizzas and stretched his hand to him, but Ianto turned his body just enough so that he’d miss. He took a step back, palms in the air in an apology as well as a promise to keep away, and put the lager down on the ground. “Sorry,” he said. “Careful about the sudden movements there.” He moved towards the edge, keeping a considerable distance between the two of them, and peeked down. “That’s quite a fall.” He looked back at Ianto, his smile wavering for just a fraction, and put his hands in his pockets with an overly showy movement of his arms. “You wouldn’t want to fall until you’re ready. Very unpleasant.”
“Why are you here?” Ianto asked, impatience and annoyance biting at his tone.
“To make sure you won’t be ready.”
He bit his lower lip to keep from shouting something very inappropriate, however convenient it might have been. Ianto faced the night ahead again, but his attention remained on Jack, out of the corner of his eye, making sure he wouldn’t play smart with him again. “I mean why were you in my flat?”
Jack shrugged, mindlessly. “I knocked first.”
“And when I didn’t open the door, you broke in. ‘Cause that’s obviously what - ”
“I didn’t break in,” Jack observed. “I have a key, remember?”
Ianto rolled his eyes, turned away from Jack and instantly back again. Jack grinned. He was enjoying this.
“Since when have you been making yourself comfortable uninvited?”
“That was the first time. You can thank me for my manners once your legs are back on this side.” Jack’s eyes cut back to the free-fall under Ianto’s feet. He tried to disguise a deep breath, a line of concern showing on his face for just a second. “So,” he continued, little annoying smile dancing on his lips again. Ianto didn’t know whether to be more irritated by Jack’s presence or by how he made it seem like he was doing it out of some sort of contractual obligation. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
Jack nodded his head towards him. “Obviously.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You sure? ‘Cause you look like you could use some conversation.”
Ianto sighed ruefully, looked down and saw the distance between him and the pavement stretch exponentially. He could feel the moment slipping away, and even though he was still just one little push from the fall, Jack’s hawk eyes on him, for some reason, were keeping him from doing it. “Look, Jack - ” he tried to begin, and turned to look at Jack. “Nothing you do will make me change my mind, ok? So why don’t you save us both the time and the torment of this conversation and just go? I’ll wait until you drive off to do it, if you prefer,” he said, very calmly. It had sounded rather reasonable in his head, but after the words had left his mouth he could see how it wasn’t as good an argument as he had imagined. When Jack started laughing, he was certain it was a lot worse.
“Are you serious?” Jack asked, finding his breath amidst an amused burst of laughter. Ianto stared, dead serious. Or not-yet-dead serious, but almost there. Hopefully, almost there. “You want me to give you my blessing and leave?”
“Yes,” he replied, because there was nothing better to say.
“Ianto…” Jack shook his head, a patronizing grin on his face, like a father watching a son doing something very wrong and also very adorable. “Try again.”
He swallowed down a surprisingly large number of names he wanted to call Jack by, none of them very flattering. It wasn’t fair. People were entitled to a little peace in their last moments, and they surely were entitled the right to off themselves if they felt like doing so. No one could say what was acceptable and bearable and what wasn’t; those were all extremely subjective things. And Ianto was pretty sure that if he could tell his story to a jury of some sort, they’d most likely agree with his decision. If he’d gotten to the point where becoming milk shake on a piece of concrete seemed more fetching than the other the options, there was obviously something wrong. And not wrong in the sense that someone had to fix it either. He wasn’t asking to be fixed, to be shown the beauties of the world and all the things he’d be missing. No one who climbed up 25 floors and didn’t plan on using the stairs or the elevator to get back down was looking to be shown anything. It was highly unlikely that you’d hear about a multimillionaire, married to Miss Venezuela, winner of a Nobel Prize and the FA Cup in the same year, found hanged in his bedroom. There was a reason why people committed suicide, and Ianto wanted nothing more than to have his decision respected. That wasn’t a lot to ask, was it?
Ianto felt a verbose rush of anger forming in the pit of his stomach. His lips quavered, he could feel his face burning. Jack reined in his laughter and tried to pull on a more serious face, perhaps sensing that something in their quaint interaction was about to change. Not by chance; everything Ianto had been working towards for weeks, the plan he had been perfecting for so long, was being destroyed for sheer entertainment by someone who clearly wasn’t even taking him seriously.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he asked, voice grave and dangerous. Jack straightened up, took his hands from his pockets.
“Look, Ianto, I’m - ”
“I don’t care about what you have to say. You weren’t supposed to be here, and if I wanted you to know, I’d have found a way to tell you. I’m not doing this just so that you can play super hero and save the goddamn day. You didn’t have the right to break into my flat, just like you don’t have the right to be here. I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to discuss my pain with you, and I definitely do not want to hear whatever it is that you think you might have to say to me. So just back the fuck off, Jack. I’m done with this. All of it.”
He’d managed to keep this tone relatively low during the whole speech, but the ferocity biting at his words and the authoritative tone of his voice got the message across. Jack stopped, wide-eyed and dumbfounded, and for a second Ianto thought he’d done it. He left Jack speechless, hands-tied. Now he was going to accept his defeat, turn around and leave.
Or he would, if he were anyone but Jack.
“Ok,” he said, slowly. “I get it.” He raised his palms in surrender. “I was just trying to help.”
“I don’t want your - ”
“You don’t want my help, I got it,” Jack cut him off. “If that’s really what you want.”
Ianto narrowed his eyes, looked straight into Jack’s. If he didn’t know better, he’d think Jack was a terrible liar. Clearly he wasn’t about to leave. Either Jack was underestimating his perception, or he was doing it on purpose. Hard to tell which was worse.
“You really don’t take me seriously, do you?”
“Why do you say that?” Jack asked. Ianto wanted to fit his fist right in the spot between the bastard’s arched eyebrows, Jack’s fake curiosity edging on mockery.
He breathed out a heavy gust of air, slackened his grip on the edge for a bit. “You know what? I don’t care. You can stay there and watch if you want to.” Ianto turned to face the city again, inhaled deeply, the cold air cooling his nerves down just a tad. Enough for him to look down and see his destination again.
“You’re going to jump with me standing right here?” Jack had a flat disbelief in his voice, almost daring. He was trying to annoy Ianto out of his idea, which was a very original approach in such a situation. Quite dumb, if you asked him. But it had gained Jack at least 15 minutes so far.
“Yes,” he said, and positively blocked all the voices screaming in his head all the 101 reasons why this was wrong. His moment was becoming a circus show, a sad parody of something that was supposed to be grandiose. It was supposed to be his. It didn’t matter if he wouldn’t have a consciousness to remember any of it afterwards; he’d gone up there because it was the only place where the misery that had swamped his entire life couldn’t reach him. He was chasing that feeling of completeness, of assuredness, the certitude that had led him all the way from his flat to the top of that building. And Jack was doing a fabulous job at ruining it for him.
He heard Jack huff a laugh, short and bitterly sarcastic, but resisted the urge to look. It was time. Almost there now. Just a little push -
“Aren’t you going to at least say goodbye?” Jack asked, probably upon noticing him leaning forward, very carefully, very, very slowly…
He stopped to think about it. Ianto didn’t necessarily care about saying goodbye to Jack, but it would be part of a story that would stay. If Jack ever decided to tell anyone that he had been there, that was. If he were to sit with, say, Gwen, or his sister, to tell them what had happened, he’d say ‘Then he said goodbye and jumped’, or ‘He just told me he was going to do it, and went for it’. The first sounded better, definitely. He had felt a little guilty about not leaving Jack a note. The anger he’d felt hadn’t completely dissipated yet, but the man had forgiven him, given him a second chance - and the fact that it hadn’t worked out well in the end wasn’t really Jack’s fault. He had even made an effort to integrate Ianto into the team - which had nearly killed him, true, but again, not his fault. So all in all, maybe Jack deserved a goodbye.
But this Jack, who laughed behind his back and teased him just to test how far he’d go - this Jack could take his farewells and shove them up his arse.
Ianto took what he presumed would be his last deep breath, and said, “I don’t think s - ” Bang.
Before he could even finish his sentence, he was face down on the floor - on the wrong side of the edge. It took him a couple of seconds to understand what had happened. Jack had sneaked behind him like a feline and snaked his hands around his waist before Ianto had a chance to react, then pulled. Ianto was pinned like a criminal, Jack straddling him as he held Ianto’s hands behind his back, sitting on Ianto’s arse.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” he yelled, trying desperately to get away and not doing so much as making Jack shift from side to side.
“Saving your life.”
“What the bloody hell did I just say - ”
“The crap about not wanting help? Yeah, I wasn’t really listening.”
Ianto struggled some more, flailing like a fish out of water, to no avail. He groaned, loudly, in frustration, every muscle in his body aching with tension, anger boiling his blood.
“You are sitting on me,” he pointed out, between gritted teeth, as if to emphasize to absolute insanity of the situation, the side of his face touching the dirtied floor of the rooftop, grit scratching his cheek.
“Clearly,” Jack said, his tone suddenly free of sarcasm.
“This is ridiculous.”
“It is. But you refused to have it any other way.”
Ianto tried to lift his head, turn it as much as he could, to look back at Jack. He sustained the position for the whole of about three seconds, and then lay back down. So he couldn’t see Jack, but it wasn’t hard to feel his eyes burning on the back of his neck.
“You refused to have it any other way.”
“Your way was not an option.”
“Why not?” he nearly shouted, his voice coming out funny with his cheek glued to the ground and the weight of a large-built man on his back.
There was a moment’s pause, a pregnant silence that filled the space between the two of them with anxiety and fear, things that hadn’t navigated Ianto’s mind yet that night. He could feel Jack strain, tensing up on top of him, suddenly completely immovable. Ianto felt closer to death now than he had since the moment he got out of the taxi, gravity pushing him down in a fall he hadn’t taken.
“You were about to do something very stupid,” Jack said, weighing his words. Ianto wished he could see him. “And I don’t feel like letting you go through with it. You can complain all you want, but I know you’ll thank me one day.”
Ianto sighed, something between submission and absolute frustration. “You don’t get it.”
“What don’t I get, Ianto? That a lot of shit happened to you?” Jack asked, annoyance creeping up in his voice. Ianto wanted to lift his head again and protest; why the hell did the guy sitting on his arse get to be angry with him? But he thought of the effort he’d have to make for that and the pain in his back, and decided instead to shoot Jack a very pointed look, however unidentifiable it might have been from his position. “Welcome to Torchwood,” Jack forged on. “That’s us. We sacrifice a lot to be part of it, and we do it because in the end of the day, it’s not about us.”
“Selfless heroes, are we?” he asked, under his breath, not even meaning for Jack to hear it.
“No. There’s a reason why we, you, me, Tosh, Owen, and even Gwen, ended up doing what we do. The world as we know it cannot offer us enough. Not because we’re meant for bigger things, but because it’s drained everything from us. So whatever’s left here, it isn’t enough. We need more. We need something to keep us going, and that’s exactly what Torchwood is. We save the world, and the world saves us back. That’s the deal.”
“What if I don’t want to keep going? Jack - ” he tried, felt his mouth awfully dry, felt his muscles start to tingle. He tried to move a bit, to shift Jack’s weight from one side to the other, slacken his grip around his wrists, fruitlessly. Every little move sent a sharp wave of pain through him, and so he resumed to staying as frozen as he could. “This is - it’s killing me, Jack. There’s nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. I’m either completely numb or completely desperate, there’s no in-between, no moment of peace. Don’t you understand? I either end this now, or wait ‘till it does me in 50 years. I’m afraid of what happens to me once this thing has finished driving me crazy.”
The charged silence lingered, and he had the impression he could feel Jack’s thumbs rubbing lightly against the back of his hands, soothingly. But it was hard to tell whether he was imagining it, or if he was feeling so little of his hands by now that it was impossible to know if Jack was really doing anything.
“Well,” Jack said, perfectly calm. “You haven’t screwed up things completely, yet.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do. I know what I’m saying. I know jumping isn’t going to make anything better.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“Right now…” He bounced a little on top of Ianto, stealing a painful moan from him. “I kinda do.” He paused, finally loosening his grip a little bit. “You’re too young, Ianto,” he said, an undercurrent of sadness in his voice, like it was a thing to be sorrowful about.
“I’ve seen enough,” Ianto replied.
“It’s not always bad, you know. There are some good things in Torchwood, too. There’s beauty.”
“Our definition of beauty must differ drastically, I’m afraid.”
Jack sighed. “Well, if you’re up here, means you got away with it, right?”
This time he had to make an effort and look back, squinting his eyes in disbelief at Jack. “Did you really just say that?”
“Yes, I did. And I was the one who let you run free, so I can say that.”
“Oh, so you’re the one who’s going to absolve me from my sins, are you?”
“No, you’re gonna have to live with what you’ve done,” Jack said, oddly placid, with a definitive kind of wisdom that implied that he was giving Ianto’s sentence, right there on the roof. Ianto could see the point in living to pay for his mistakes. It was a lot harder to wake up every morning and look up to what he’d done than it was to take a leap into the void. But that wasn’t the point. Well, not all of it, at least.
He was tired. Really tired. His head was spinning a little bit as he tried to work out how how in God’s name he’d gotten from there (one second away from jumping) to here (a grown man sitting on his back, holding him down with his nose touching the disgusting ground) in less than five minutes. Which invariably led to brooding over how he’d managed to get from there (a fairly happy life and a bright future in London) to here (suicide) in less than two years. It was a lot to work out.
They stayed like that for a while; Ianto relaxed his body, set the pain aside, and just breathed. Even breathing was becoming hard at this point, but he abstracted his attention from both the ache and the ridiculousness of the scene, and focused on letting the air in and out. The only thing worse than to be stuck under Jack would be to die that way.
“Now what?” Jack asked, as if he wasn’t sitting on a person to prevent said person from taking his own life - or as if Ianto wasn’t the one on the ground.
“Now what,” he repeated, lazily.
“If I let you go, will you try to jump again?”
“I can’t even feel my legs, Jack.”
“Promise.”
He snorted. “That’s ridic - ”
“Promise.”
Ianto rolled his eyes, but Jack probably didn’t see that. “I promise.”
“Good.”
Very slowly, Jack got up, and then let go of his hands. Ianto groaned, half pain, half relief, and lay motionless, feeling the blood start to course freely through his body again. He turned on his back, and with a loud moan he sat up, moving a little ‘till he could lean his back against the wall.
“God,” he said, and rubbed his face with his hands. Jack was standing in front of him, arms crossed, looking like a bodyguard. “That hurt,” Ianto informed him.
“You think the fall would’ve hurt less?”
“I wouldn’t have been around for too long to feel it, would I?”
“No, but the nanosecond that it would’ve take for you to die would’ve been the longest one of your life.” Ianto regarded him with curiosity, trying to figure out whether he was saying that out of spite or knowledge. Jack said things like that sometimes, things that were impossible for anyone to know and yet he walked around repeating them as if he had empirical proof. Ianto couldn’t find an explanation to half the things he knew about Jack, like, for example, the fact that his record for Torchwood began in the late 19th century. Jack seemed to be the kind of person who liked to stir up curiosity, create a mystery around himself. But for some reason, Ianto didn’t doubt it could be all perfectly true. Jack was strange like that.
“You can’t watch me forever,” Ianto said, bending his legs and resting his arms on his knees. He could still see the mark of Jack’s fingers around his wrists. That would leave a bruise. “What are you going to do when I go home? Sit beside my bed to make sure I don’t escape through the window?”
Jack arched his eyebrows, considering the possibility. “Maybe,” he said, and sat down next to Ianto. “Maybe that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s impractical. What about when you have to go after a weevil?”
“I’ll send Owen.”
“Lots of weevils.”
“I’ll take you with me.”
“What if I run when you’re not looking?”
“Did I ever tell you I used to be the best kid in school in athletics?”
Ianto turned his face to Jack and they looked at each other for two seconds before neither of them could hold their smiles anymore; Jack with a fond short grin on his lips, Ianto with a tiny curve that wasn’t certain whether he was just finding the conversation honestly amusing or helplessly absurd. Both, maybe. He glanced away, shook his head hopelessly. “This has to be the worst suicide attempt ever.”
“Not by far,” Jack said. Ianto arched him an eyebrow, and he continue, changing the subject, “Or,” he said, “I could just lock you up in the vaults. With Janet. She’s a wonderful guard dog.”
Ianto gazed back at him, lips parted in horror. “Like a prisoner?”
Jack nodded. “Exactly like a prisoner.”
Ianto frowned. “For how long?”
Jack shrugged, pursed his lips. “Don’t know. For as long as I have to, I suppose.” He looked at Ianto. “Until I can trust you.”
Ianto leaned his head back against the wall, considering the odds of managing to escape Jack at this point. Highly unlikely. If Jack wanted to take him prisoner, he probably could. He certainly could.
“Can I trust you, Ianto?” Jack asked, a hint of hope in his tone, nearly pleading for him to say yes.
“Probably not,” he said, sincerely, looking down at his own hands, closing them on tight fists and then stretching his fingers out again. “You should’ve just let me go.”
“Maybe,” Jack agreed. “But it doesn’t mean I wanted to.”
Ianto moved his head just enough to see Jack, from the corner of his eye. It was hard to comprehend why his boss, who had put a gun to his head not so long ago, threatening to execute him (with reason, if he had to be honest about it, he probably deserved the bullet back then) was suddenly so worried about his well being. Jack didn’t have to care, like he hadn’t seemed to care much about Suzie. But there was something there… Something lurking behind his eyes, in the way he looked at Ianto with an awkward sadness, almost as if Ianto was the one doing something for him, and not the other way around.
That was when Ianto understood that Jack was feeling guilty.
“What would it take,” Jack started again, leaning forward to pull the six pack and the pizza boxes closer. “What would it take for you to let go of this idea?”
Ianto blinked. “Of committing suicide?”
Jack looked back at him from over his shoulders. “Of course.”
“I - I’m not…” he sighed. “I don’t know.”
“There has to be something.”
“What if there isn’t?”
“There always is.” He opened two lagers with his hands, offered one to Ianto. Ianto took it, but didn’t drink. Jack clicked the tip of their bottles together and took a long a sip of his. “Imagine you could make a deal with someone who could get anything done. Anything you want. He’s sitting on a table, right across from you, and he asks you What do you want? What would you say?”
“What, is he like God?”
“Not God, just - Someone like, like…”
“The Wizard of Oz?” Ianto grinned. Jack laughed.
“I was gonna say the Prime Minister, but I think the Wizard of Oz is more appropriate.”
Ianto couldn’t help but laugh at the prospect of sitting on a table across from Gordon Brown, dressed as the Wizard of Oz, asking him what he’d like to get to stay in this world. There should have been a book about that story.
“What would you tell the Wizard?” Jack pushed, and drank again.
“I… I don’t know.” Ianto rolled the bottle in his hand, watched the liquid moving inside. “I don’t know. I guess… I think I’d ask… I’d like to care, again.”
“Care?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t care about anything, anymore?”
“Not so much, no.”
“You’d be the Tin Woodsman, then?” Jack asked, a smile in his voice.
Ianto shook his head, and didn’t reply. It wasn’t that he needed a new heart. It was just - there was something shut down in his, some piece of it that wasn’t working. The part that used to sparkle with life whenever something amused him, aroused him, when things moved or inspired him, and now it didn’t. Not anymore.
He gulped from the lager; it was Guinness. Jack had bloody bought him Guinness. He looked down at the bottle somewhat stunned, then turned to him and said “You bought me Guinness.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I really like Guinness.”
Jack grinned. “Good.” He gulped again. “What if the Wizard couldn’t make you care, exactly, but could guarantee you that there are people who care about you?”
“I’d say he’s a lousy Wizard,” Ianto said, a wan smile on his face as drank from his bottle.
Jack grinned, and nodded. “Fair. But wouldn’t it be enough? Wouldn’t you care that someone cares for you?”
Ianto regarded Jack very attentively, watched as he blinked, and waited for the answer to his absurd question as if it would change anything. As if there was any sense in what they were saying. They couldn’t get themselves to speak about the serious things, about why Ianto wanted so desperately to jump, or why Jack felt so guilty about it - was it because he thought Lisa was his fault too, or was his ego hurt because Ianto had managed to trick him again? So instead, they spoke about the smaller picture, about Wizards and super powerful Prime Ministers and beer. Goddamn good beer.
“Where are you trying to go with this?” he asked.
Jack blinked, seemed to consider the pertinence of the question, and then shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Ianto stretched his legs, moved his feet from one side to the other, the tips of his shoes making a tomp, tomp sound when they touched. “You know this is all very pointless.”
“Doesn’t hurt to try.”
“Why - ” Ianto started, but stopped, not exactly sure what question he wanted to ask there. He rested the bottle carefully on his thigh, felt the wet coolness of it against the fabric of his trousers, then tried again. “Why did you show up at my flat with Guinness and pizza?”
He lifted his eyes to Jack, and for a moment he seemed to have been caught unprepared. It was an image to keep, the face he made; the way his eyes widened just a little bit, his lips trembling almost imperceptibly. Quickly, Jack took the beer to his lips, pretended to drink it for a moment, kept the liquid in his mouth for longer than he should, thinking, and then swallowed.
“Checking on you,” he said, as if it was obvious. As if he did it every week. Two months before, Ianto could’ve believed that. But since he had been accepted back, Jack had a made a vow of trust. Ianto had been grateful for it, back then. But clearly Jack was regretting it now.
Ianto cocked him an eyebrow, and waited.
“Well,” Jack drank again, his beer almost done. “It’s been a while since we last had, you know… A moment, to talk. I wanted to know how you were. Clearly I should’ve done it sooner.” Ianto’s eyebrow never wavered. “It was a date.”
Ianto tipped his head to the side, obviously disbelieving. Jack sighed. “Ok,” he said, putting the lager down. “You really want to know?” He let the question float, but Ianto didn’t have to answer. “Did you talk to Tosh, after… what happened today?”
“Tosh?” Ianto frowned. “We spoke, briefly. Why?”
“Did you ask her what she heard when she was wearing the necklace?”
Oh. Oh.
Ianto rolled his eyes, and said, “No,” a mute of course right after it.
“She didn’t know you were going to kill yourself, mind you,” Jack said. “But… Let’s say there were strong indications that something wasn’t right.”
Ianto laughed, ruefully. Wasn’t he lucky? On the exact day he’d booked to be his last one on Earth, his co-worker showed up with an alien girlfriend and a mind-reading necklace. He leaned his head back, and looked up at the sky. Maybe there was some cosmic being up there after all. Like a space Gordon Brown, ubiquitously watching over them and deciding that no, Ianto Jones, you don’t get to kill yourself today. Gordon Brown was a sadistic bastard.
“She was worried,” Jack added. “Don’t be mad at her for telling me.”
Ianto shook his head. “Not her fault.” It was Gordon’s.
“Is there anything else you would request from the Wizard?” Jack asked, after a brief pause.
“Still at this, are we?”
“You only get one shot with the Wizard. Have to know what you want.”
“Do you?”
Jack went quiet. Ianto flickered his eyes to him, found him looking up at the sky, too, a large grin on his face that didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“I’m not suicide material,” he said. And for some reason, it stung somewhere in Ianto.
He didn’t know why, considering that was exactly what he was doing. Maybe he just didn’t feel like suicide material, either. So far, everything had been very logical, in his head. It wasn’t like he had always felt this way. He wasn’t depressed, or suicidal. At least, he hadn’t been, before all this. And he reckoned he had had a very good reason to end up where he did. It was a one-time kind of thing, as suicide usually was. He didn’t want to be remembered as a suicidal person, but he guessed it couldn’t be helped. Sometimes you had to be judged by your one-offs, he figured. Especially one-offs that consisted in having no time for explanations afterward.
“I don’t want to kill myself because I hate life, you know,” he said. “I want to do it because once upon a time I had one. And I loved it. I loved living, even when I didn’t. It’s all so fucked for me now… I’m up here because I can’t seem to find a way back into life, it’s like I’ve been forgotten in some sort of limbo and I can’t make it back to the other side, and sometimes that’s too much.”
“We’re all on the same boat here.”
“All so fucked up, are we? We should start a band.”
Jack sighed. “Sometimes it takes some real complicated moments for you to realize that even in the hardest times there’s always something to make you feel alive.”
“Like grown men sitting on your arse?”
Jack laughed, and Ianto couldn’t keep his lips from curving up in response. He’d probably put Jack’s laughter on his list of things that made him feel alive, at this point. If he were ever to make a list. It was incredibly infectious, seemed to make the air around Jack vibrate and find refuge in Ianto’s chest. He really liked that laughter.
“That’s one thing,” Jack said. “There’s also good beer,” he said, lifting his from the ground. “Cold pizza.”
“The Wizard of Oz.”
Jack turned to him, a suggestive eyebrow lifted. “There’s sex.”
Ianto watched him seriously for a moment. “Are you hitting on me?”
“Am I?”
“I hope not.”
“Really?”
“It’s awfully disrespectful to hit on someone who was just trying to kill himself.”
Jack laughed again and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I take it back.” When he looked back at Ianto, he had an expression of placid satisfaction on his face, one of easy contentment and complacency. And Ianto was trying very hard not to be contaminated by his cheap conversation, but maybe, just maybe, there was a little bit of him that found a measure of comfort in that.
They fell quiet once more, but this time it was different. Ianto didn’t find himself calculating his chances of escaping or trying to figure out whether it would be wrong to just jump, right then. When he closed his eyes, the first thing that came to his head was his flat. His bed. He wanted to go back and sleep the exhaustion away. And for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t thinking about ghosts and monsters and rats in his stomach. Maybe it was exhaustion, mental and physical, blocking these things out temporarily. But maybe it wasn’t.
“Now what?” he asked.
He heard a little rustling sound of grit on paper. “I have pepperoni and vegetables.”
Ianto craked one eye open, found Jack poking the pizzas with his index finger. “Now we eat?” he asked, slightly abashed, but not really. After everything that had happened tonight, ending a suicide attempt in pizza didn’t sound half as absurd as it should.
“Aren’t you hungry? I am.” Jack took a slice of the pepperoni one, and then took a generous bite, munched slowly on it, then shook his head in approval. “Humm,” he said. “Very good. A nice little thing on a night like this, don’t you think?” Jack wasn’t Jack if he wasn’t talking with his mouth full.
Into made a little disgusted face. Jack opened his mouth to show him the mass of digested pizza, and Ianto put a finger in his mouth, pretending to vomit. “That’s cold,” he said.
Jack shrugged. “Details.” And took another bite.
If this was a movie, Ianto thought, and it could bloody well be, this would be the moment where something would happen. Something huge and meaningful, like an epiphany that would hit him out of the blue and make him realize that life was worth living after all. Their dull, weird conversation would gain different contours and suddenly they’d be discussing the essence of the being and the secrets of the human mind, some philosophical crap that would be a metaphor of something deeper. He was maybe half expecting something like that to happen. Grandiose, overwhelming, breathtaking. Instead, he got a cold, greasy slice of pizza, and a smile. That was what his life-saving moment consisted of. Of wizards, and beer, and people sitting on his arse and talking with their mouth full. Not very glamorous. But then again, real life rarely ever was.
His life, he had to admit, had enough twists and turns to provide and incredibly rich narrative. He did things and saw things. They just weren’t very pretty. But none of it had ever felt as real as this; two guys sitting out in the cold with sore muscles and good beer. Damn good beer.
Guinness had saved his life.
Ianto stretched his hand out, offered his bottle to Jack in a toast. Jack cut his eyes to the bottle, then to Ianto’s face, and grinned when he understood. He tilted his beer against Ianto’s with a soft clink.
Ianto sat back against the ledge wall and threw his head back to look at the sky.
You win, Gordon, he thought, and he toasted the heavens.
End.
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Gordon Brown
Setting: Post-Greeks Bearing Gifts
Warning: Discussion of suicide
Beta-edit by: solsticezero
Disclaimer: Not mine.
A/N: I have to give solsticezero a lot of credit for this. She did a wonderful job editing this story, it took a lot of her time and she made it 100% better. The title is hers, too, as well as the quote at the beginning of the story. Well, the idea of thw quote anyway. She's also the one who told me this deserved to see the daylight after all, when I wasn't so sure. Thank you very, very much, solsticezero. :)
This is a commonly controversial theme in fanfiction. And one that I wasn't very comfortable writing about. Wasn't even comfortable asking people to help me with, since I know it tops the list of Things This Fandom Can't Stand. So I tried to make it a little different than the usual, tried to make it more light-toned; comic, really, but not too much. I wasn't trying to take away the seriousness of the situation, just wanted to make it absurd. This is, after all, Torchwood. I'm not sure I succeeded, but hopefully this one won't be tossed into the Bad Fic Trash Can.
I'm really torn between how much I want to hear opinions, and how terrified I am of having failed miserably. I don't think this one will receive a lot of attention, but I trust my beta's word. A lot more than I trust my own judgment.
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"As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart! You don't know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable. [...] And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others." - The Wizard of Oz
He paid for a 20 quid taxi drive with a 50 pound note, said keep the change with the kindest smile on his face, and got out of the car. It was the last bill in his wallet, and he figured he should do something at least remotely meaningful with it, rather than let it rot in his trouser pocket. It wasn’t exactly charity, granted; he didn’t have time to find someone whose life he could brighten up with 30 quid. He liked to think he’d made the taxi’s driver night a little merrier, though. Maybe he’d remember the guy who tipped him thirty quid that one time. As far as last taxi rides go, it had been a nice one.
The night air was a bit chilly, but he couldn’t be bothered to pull his coat tighter around him. Once you realized you were in your last moments -last time you rode a cab, last walk down that street, last 50 pound note in your pocket, last time you felt the cold night against your skin, sending bristling shivers down your spine - then everything was suddenly tinged with a different color. Whether it was for better or for worse was purely a matter of perspective.
It would be only half true to say Ianto Jones didn’t have a marked melancholy about him as he took in the last bits of life around him. It was there, lurking behind his eyes, a faint trace of sadness and longing and nostalgia, calculations of lost possibilities and regrets. But it all died on the corner of his lips - on his short little grin of fond satisfaction and calm resignation. He wasn’t fighting it, wasn’t having second thoughts; he was simply saying goodbye.
He strolled into the building, easy steps taken slowly and relished, rather than seen as an arduous trudge. He took the elevator because there were 25 floors between him and the roof, and he reckoned he needed to save his (last) breath and (final) effort for more important things.
The entrance to the rooftop was, as he’d predicted, closed. But you are never caught off-guard when you prepare, as his mother used to say. He couldn’t remember many other coherent expressions that had come out of his mother’s mouth, but he couldn’t help but think about her (too) now, and he was glad that out of all the things that had rubbed off on him, this one had been the one to stick. He was prepared. He was always prepared.
That, right there, was one in a series of crucial instances (all carefully listed, of course), of things standing between him and his goal. If he hadn’t borrowed (stolen was a very strong word, especially considering the loan would be soon returned) a couple of handy artifacts from Torchwood’s storage (something to open the door, something to trick the cameras, something to allow him to pass the turnstiles), he’d be stuck inside the building while his plans waved him goodbye and good life from the other side of that very locked door. Suicide was a series of probations, really, one after the other, ‘till you could make it to the edge of a roof. It wasn’t easy to kill oneself, or not as easy as one would imagine; it took a lot more than being buried under seven kinds of shit. You had to be ready, and he reckoned most people didn’t really understand what being ready to die meant. It was an idea that needed to be ripened before you could go forward. Well, maybe being stinking drunk or completely stoned helped to quicken the process a little. But that wasn’t how he wanted to do this; it was neither a whimsical decision nor a meaningless one. It wasn’t like he could regret it afterwards and take it back, anyway.
The thing was, once you’d said your goodbyes, taken your last looks, given your last smiles, you couldn’t just go back and start over. You’d miss the whole point, as well as the moment - it was all about moment. This was his, and he wasn’t about to let it slip because of a door. He should’ve remembered to leave a thank-you note for Torchwood for providing him such glorious and practical artifacts (and remind them that they were lucky they had a suicidal archivist, not one with a penchant for world-domination).
Two seconds and click. He smiled, a little proud of his little conquest (he’d miss the little conquests, if he could miss things in the afterlife), and put the gizmo safely back in his suitcase.
He only found it a tad ironic that Cardiff had never seemed more beautiful, had never smelled better or shined brighter than it did that night. Perspective, see. He breathed in, felt the icy air penetrate his lungs, and felt good, like he had been holding his breath for too long. He almost wished he’d brought a pen and a piece of paper to write that down and leave a note in his pocket, to let the world know how liberating and perfect this, right here, was. But there was a reason why suicide notes weren’t supposed to be bright and encouraging; this wasn’t the kind of advice you wanted to leave for posterity. It was good for him, to feel light and free and accomplished, for the first time in months; but he didn’t want to be misinterpreted, and end up taking the blame for someone else’s death. Even if he wouldn’t be there anymore to retort the accusations. He was sure of what he was doing, but that wasn’t the kind of certainty you could transmit through a couple of hurried words on a piece of paper. And anyway, he didn’t want to take responsibility for anyone else. For the first time in a long time, it was just him and himself. No one else. The moment he sat on the edge of the rooftop, looked down and saw his feet dangling 80 meters above the street, he was letting go of something, something huge and heavy and not his burden to carry anymore. The elephant-ghost that had been sitting on his shoulders for almost a year saluted him and left. It was just him now.
One could say that if you felt as good as Ianto did, then you didn’t have to top yourself after all. It sounded a bit incongruous, he had to admit. But he’d argue back that no, not when the reason why you felt like that was precisely because you were a couple of minutes away from doing it. It went without saying that his life was no bed of roses. Not that anyone would find the story of his suicide in the papers, but he wasn’t all that disheartened over it. The headlines would be made of half truths, he suspected; survivor of Canary Wharf takes his own life several months after the tragic incident. No lie in that, but people - like his sister - would read and assume he just couldn’t make it past the trauma, which was only partly true.
It had everything to do with Canary Wharf, and losing everything. But it had more to do with not being able to find something else, something new, to lose. You can’t really live when you have nothing to make it worth the while, can you? Well, you can, but what kind of life is that which makes death seem so much more appealing? Ianto was done with surviving through his days, rather than actually living. He was afraid if he continued operating on the auto-pilot and faking his smiles and pretending to be fine when he didn’t give a fucking shit about anything, he’d end up becoming a robot. Becoming that thing he had been for months on a row, back when the only thing that kept him going was the promise he’d made to his half-robotic girlfriend. It was easy to do it then, with Lisa begging for him to save her in between sobs of pain, but now that he was a human being again, the idea of going back to that state, to that nearly cyberized condition, was terrifying. It Made him sick. It was better to take the plunge while he still had a conscience of his own.
He felt sorry for Rhi, though. She’d read about some policeman or maybe a coroner saying he’d taken his own life ‘cause his mind was so disturbed and she’d feel guilty for not having noticed anything the last time he had visited. Ianto knew disturbed; there was no disturbance to his mental balance here. There was before, but not now. Not here. This was the result of serene, objective and sober contemplation. He’d left her a letter and a generous bank account to make sure her kids wouldn’t end up in his place, or in her place. Funny how he’d thought he’d be the one who’d do well in life and go further than the low ambitions and the proletarian future the estate had saved for them. Rhiannon got herself a nice, normal family who loved her very much, and look where ambitions got him.
He hoped she’d get it, get him, better than coroners and policemen ever could, anyway.
He tightened his white-knuckled grip on the edge of the roof, bent forward just a tiny bit more to peek down. Two hundred and sixty two feet of free fall into the darkness until he was no more than a pool of blood and meat and broken bones on the pavement. It took a lot of courage to do something like that, and it was why he’d chosen to top himself. He had a considerable amount of options, even more than the average - surely he could find a weapon that’d turn him into ashes in a snap, hidden in one corner or another in the Hub. Nothing was more equipped for innovative suicide methods than Torchwood. But the idea of going out in a Torchwood-way was repulsive. He’d become just a scratch over a name, another one in the long list of unfortunate casualties in their files. He wasn’t doing this out of spite, or trying to spread a message. But there had to be a meaning in what he did, otherwise dying would be just the same as living, and if that was the case, then why bother?
It took a lot of backbone to go up 25 floors and then jump. It wasn’t quick, because he’d face the longest seconds of his existence as he went down. Not the same as a bullet to the head. But probably a lot more poetic, even though he couldn’t exactly find the poetry here. It wasn’t supposed to be pretty anyway. Death wasn’t pretty. But it could say something, aside from the obvious, if you meant for it to. And his would be saying I jumped because I went as high as I could and there was nowhere else to go other than down. The end. Couldn’t get more straightforward than that.
And it was a very straightforward decision. It had been, to him at least, if the way he got to the conclusion that offing himself was the solution to his misery meant anything.
He woke up one morning, a Wednesday, or a Thursday, didn’t matter, four weeks or so before. He had breakfast, got dressed and left for work. It was a beautiful day, the type you don’t get often these days, so he decided to walk the twenty minutes to work. For some reason (and the believers would’ve named this reason ‘fate’, but Ianto simply didn’t find logic in giving names to accidents and lack of attention) he turned onto the wrong street and ended up at a dead end. Nothing ahead of him but an old battered wall, with what he reckoned were probably once meaningful phrases written in old graffiti and posters ripped apart by time and bored fingers. There was a moment’s pause before he understood that the dead end before him was, in fact, a revelation. If he had been more attentive, if someone had accidentally bumped into him, if some alien emergency had happened in that exact moment, he wouldn’t have turned wrong, and he wouldn’t have ended up there, and this wall would’ve continued to be just another wall, not the book of his existence, his entire life, spread before his eyes, smelling like piss and dirt - quite appropriate, that. But he missed his way, and there he was. And there he would be, forever.
Quite simple.
He was tired of drama. No tears, no regrets - well, maybe a few. Quite a few, actually. But there was nothing he could do about it. No more feeding the expectations, no more waiting for an unexpected turn of events, no more letting himself be talked into belief by sweet nothings and hopeful platitudes; nothing. Just a wall. Old, battered, aching wall, begging to be taken down. Gladly, Ianto replied.
The darkest thought to cross his mind - if he could call it dark, anyway; it was more gory than anything - was whether he’d be able to hear the sound of his bones breaking into a thousand little pieces in that split-second between the moment the first milimetric portion of his body touched the walkway and the moment he died.
But his line of thought was interrupted by a thump, and then the rusty noise of the door being pushed open hurriedly. He turned around, preservation instinct kicking in even when he was about to jump, making him incline his body back and hold tighter on the ledge. He was expecting to see a guard, or a cleaning lady, or someone escaping for a bit of a smoke. Imagine his surprise when instead, he found Captain Jack Harkness, panting and sweating and a little messed up, looking like he had just ran a marathon - if marathons were run by people holding a box of pizza in one hand and a six pack in the other. Jack halted in his tracks, eyes electric and a trifle too desperate. But the minute he focused on Ianto, his apparent unease was gone, morphed into a large Harkness grin. Jack sighed.
“Ah,” Jack said, in-between gasps, holding the pack under his arm to place his free hand on his waist. “Glad to see I made it in time.”
Ianto blinked, taken aback by a sudden sensation of having been sucked in by a black hole and spat in an entirely different dimension. His eyes moved from the pizza, to the lager, to a drop of sweat on Jack’s forehead and finally Jack’s smile, as casual as anything. Ianto frowned. As strange as it seemed, it didn’t feel as improbable as it should. Which meant he should’ve anticipated it. Of course he should have.
Kicking himself Ianto asked “What are you doing here?”
Jack inhaled deeply, still trying to catch his breath, and waved the pizza boxes vaguely in his direction. “I’m here to save you, of course.” He took a very careful step forward. “Hungry? I have pizza.”
“How did you know I’d be here?” Ianto’s eyes flickered momentarily to himself, his feet and legs and arms, searching for the tracker that Jack may have improbably managed to hide in his clothes.
Jack patted his pockets, and fished a crumpled piece of paper from inside his coat. Oh.
“You were very specific,” he said.
Ianto suppressed a curse. “That was meant for my sister.”
Jack’s eyes widened in mock-surprise. “Really?” he said, none too convincingly. “I mustn’t have seen her name on the envelope, then.”
Ianto closed his eyes, turned back to the street, feet still swinging freely above the little walkway he was supposed to have been spilled onto by now. He inhaled, very slowly, then let the air out with an edge of desolation. The world he’d left behind had sped to catch up with him.
“Jack, I - ” when he faced away from the edge again he found Jack nearly at arm’s length away, and flinched, startled.
Jack dropped the pizzas and stretched his hand to him, but Ianto turned his body just enough so that he’d miss. He took a step back, palms in the air in an apology as well as a promise to keep away, and put the lager down on the ground. “Sorry,” he said. “Careful about the sudden movements there.” He moved towards the edge, keeping a considerable distance between the two of them, and peeked down. “That’s quite a fall.” He looked back at Ianto, his smile wavering for just a fraction, and put his hands in his pockets with an overly showy movement of his arms. “You wouldn’t want to fall until you’re ready. Very unpleasant.”
“Why are you here?” Ianto asked, impatience and annoyance biting at his tone.
“To make sure you won’t be ready.”
He bit his lower lip to keep from shouting something very inappropriate, however convenient it might have been. Ianto faced the night ahead again, but his attention remained on Jack, out of the corner of his eye, making sure he wouldn’t play smart with him again. “I mean why were you in my flat?”
Jack shrugged, mindlessly. “I knocked first.”
“And when I didn’t open the door, you broke in. ‘Cause that’s obviously what - ”
“I didn’t break in,” Jack observed. “I have a key, remember?”
Ianto rolled his eyes, turned away from Jack and instantly back again. Jack grinned. He was enjoying this.
“Since when have you been making yourself comfortable uninvited?”
“That was the first time. You can thank me for my manners once your legs are back on this side.” Jack’s eyes cut back to the free-fall under Ianto’s feet. He tried to disguise a deep breath, a line of concern showing on his face for just a second. “So,” he continued, little annoying smile dancing on his lips again. Ianto didn’t know whether to be more irritated by Jack’s presence or by how he made it seem like he was doing it out of some sort of contractual obligation. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
Jack nodded his head towards him. “Obviously.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You sure? ‘Cause you look like you could use some conversation.”
Ianto sighed ruefully, looked down and saw the distance between him and the pavement stretch exponentially. He could feel the moment slipping away, and even though he was still just one little push from the fall, Jack’s hawk eyes on him, for some reason, were keeping him from doing it. “Look, Jack - ” he tried to begin, and turned to look at Jack. “Nothing you do will make me change my mind, ok? So why don’t you save us both the time and the torment of this conversation and just go? I’ll wait until you drive off to do it, if you prefer,” he said, very calmly. It had sounded rather reasonable in his head, but after the words had left his mouth he could see how it wasn’t as good an argument as he had imagined. When Jack started laughing, he was certain it was a lot worse.
“Are you serious?” Jack asked, finding his breath amidst an amused burst of laughter. Ianto stared, dead serious. Or not-yet-dead serious, but almost there. Hopefully, almost there. “You want me to give you my blessing and leave?”
“Yes,” he replied, because there was nothing better to say.
“Ianto…” Jack shook his head, a patronizing grin on his face, like a father watching a son doing something very wrong and also very adorable. “Try again.”
He swallowed down a surprisingly large number of names he wanted to call Jack by, none of them very flattering. It wasn’t fair. People were entitled to a little peace in their last moments, and they surely were entitled the right to off themselves if they felt like doing so. No one could say what was acceptable and bearable and what wasn’t; those were all extremely subjective things. And Ianto was pretty sure that if he could tell his story to a jury of some sort, they’d most likely agree with his decision. If he’d gotten to the point where becoming milk shake on a piece of concrete seemed more fetching than the other the options, there was obviously something wrong. And not wrong in the sense that someone had to fix it either. He wasn’t asking to be fixed, to be shown the beauties of the world and all the things he’d be missing. No one who climbed up 25 floors and didn’t plan on using the stairs or the elevator to get back down was looking to be shown anything. It was highly unlikely that you’d hear about a multimillionaire, married to Miss Venezuela, winner of a Nobel Prize and the FA Cup in the same year, found hanged in his bedroom. There was a reason why people committed suicide, and Ianto wanted nothing more than to have his decision respected. That wasn’t a lot to ask, was it?
Ianto felt a verbose rush of anger forming in the pit of his stomach. His lips quavered, he could feel his face burning. Jack reined in his laughter and tried to pull on a more serious face, perhaps sensing that something in their quaint interaction was about to change. Not by chance; everything Ianto had been working towards for weeks, the plan he had been perfecting for so long, was being destroyed for sheer entertainment by someone who clearly wasn’t even taking him seriously.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he asked, voice grave and dangerous. Jack straightened up, took his hands from his pockets.
“Look, Ianto, I’m - ”
“I don’t care about what you have to say. You weren’t supposed to be here, and if I wanted you to know, I’d have found a way to tell you. I’m not doing this just so that you can play super hero and save the goddamn day. You didn’t have the right to break into my flat, just like you don’t have the right to be here. I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to discuss my pain with you, and I definitely do not want to hear whatever it is that you think you might have to say to me. So just back the fuck off, Jack. I’m done with this. All of it.”
He’d managed to keep this tone relatively low during the whole speech, but the ferocity biting at his words and the authoritative tone of his voice got the message across. Jack stopped, wide-eyed and dumbfounded, and for a second Ianto thought he’d done it. He left Jack speechless, hands-tied. Now he was going to accept his defeat, turn around and leave.
Or he would, if he were anyone but Jack.
“Ok,” he said, slowly. “I get it.” He raised his palms in surrender. “I was just trying to help.”
“I don’t want your - ”
“You don’t want my help, I got it,” Jack cut him off. “If that’s really what you want.”
Ianto narrowed his eyes, looked straight into Jack’s. If he didn’t know better, he’d think Jack was a terrible liar. Clearly he wasn’t about to leave. Either Jack was underestimating his perception, or he was doing it on purpose. Hard to tell which was worse.
“You really don’t take me seriously, do you?”
“Why do you say that?” Jack asked. Ianto wanted to fit his fist right in the spot between the bastard’s arched eyebrows, Jack’s fake curiosity edging on mockery.
He breathed out a heavy gust of air, slackened his grip on the edge for a bit. “You know what? I don’t care. You can stay there and watch if you want to.” Ianto turned to face the city again, inhaled deeply, the cold air cooling his nerves down just a tad. Enough for him to look down and see his destination again.
“You’re going to jump with me standing right here?” Jack had a flat disbelief in his voice, almost daring. He was trying to annoy Ianto out of his idea, which was a very original approach in such a situation. Quite dumb, if you asked him. But it had gained Jack at least 15 minutes so far.
“Yes,” he said, and positively blocked all the voices screaming in his head all the 101 reasons why this was wrong. His moment was becoming a circus show, a sad parody of something that was supposed to be grandiose. It was supposed to be his. It didn’t matter if he wouldn’t have a consciousness to remember any of it afterwards; he’d gone up there because it was the only place where the misery that had swamped his entire life couldn’t reach him. He was chasing that feeling of completeness, of assuredness, the certitude that had led him all the way from his flat to the top of that building. And Jack was doing a fabulous job at ruining it for him.
He heard Jack huff a laugh, short and bitterly sarcastic, but resisted the urge to look. It was time. Almost there now. Just a little push -
“Aren’t you going to at least say goodbye?” Jack asked, probably upon noticing him leaning forward, very carefully, very, very slowly…
He stopped to think about it. Ianto didn’t necessarily care about saying goodbye to Jack, but it would be part of a story that would stay. If Jack ever decided to tell anyone that he had been there, that was. If he were to sit with, say, Gwen, or his sister, to tell them what had happened, he’d say ‘Then he said goodbye and jumped’, or ‘He just told me he was going to do it, and went for it’. The first sounded better, definitely. He had felt a little guilty about not leaving Jack a note. The anger he’d felt hadn’t completely dissipated yet, but the man had forgiven him, given him a second chance - and the fact that it hadn’t worked out well in the end wasn’t really Jack’s fault. He had even made an effort to integrate Ianto into the team - which had nearly killed him, true, but again, not his fault. So all in all, maybe Jack deserved a goodbye.
But this Jack, who laughed behind his back and teased him just to test how far he’d go - this Jack could take his farewells and shove them up his arse.
Ianto took what he presumed would be his last deep breath, and said, “I don’t think s - ” Bang.
Before he could even finish his sentence, he was face down on the floor - on the wrong side of the edge. It took him a couple of seconds to understand what had happened. Jack had sneaked behind him like a feline and snaked his hands around his waist before Ianto had a chance to react, then pulled. Ianto was pinned like a criminal, Jack straddling him as he held Ianto’s hands behind his back, sitting on Ianto’s arse.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” he yelled, trying desperately to get away and not doing so much as making Jack shift from side to side.
“Saving your life.”
“What the bloody hell did I just say - ”
“The crap about not wanting help? Yeah, I wasn’t really listening.”
Ianto struggled some more, flailing like a fish out of water, to no avail. He groaned, loudly, in frustration, every muscle in his body aching with tension, anger boiling his blood.
“You are sitting on me,” he pointed out, between gritted teeth, as if to emphasize to absolute insanity of the situation, the side of his face touching the dirtied floor of the rooftop, grit scratching his cheek.
“Clearly,” Jack said, his tone suddenly free of sarcasm.
“This is ridiculous.”
“It is. But you refused to have it any other way.”
Ianto tried to lift his head, turn it as much as he could, to look back at Jack. He sustained the position for the whole of about three seconds, and then lay back down. So he couldn’t see Jack, but it wasn’t hard to feel his eyes burning on the back of his neck.
“You refused to have it any other way.”
“Your way was not an option.”
“Why not?” he nearly shouted, his voice coming out funny with his cheek glued to the ground and the weight of a large-built man on his back.
There was a moment’s pause, a pregnant silence that filled the space between the two of them with anxiety and fear, things that hadn’t navigated Ianto’s mind yet that night. He could feel Jack strain, tensing up on top of him, suddenly completely immovable. Ianto felt closer to death now than he had since the moment he got out of the taxi, gravity pushing him down in a fall he hadn’t taken.
“You were about to do something very stupid,” Jack said, weighing his words. Ianto wished he could see him. “And I don’t feel like letting you go through with it. You can complain all you want, but I know you’ll thank me one day.”
Ianto sighed, something between submission and absolute frustration. “You don’t get it.”
“What don’t I get, Ianto? That a lot of shit happened to you?” Jack asked, annoyance creeping up in his voice. Ianto wanted to lift his head again and protest; why the hell did the guy sitting on his arse get to be angry with him? But he thought of the effort he’d have to make for that and the pain in his back, and decided instead to shoot Jack a very pointed look, however unidentifiable it might have been from his position. “Welcome to Torchwood,” Jack forged on. “That’s us. We sacrifice a lot to be part of it, and we do it because in the end of the day, it’s not about us.”
“Selfless heroes, are we?” he asked, under his breath, not even meaning for Jack to hear it.
“No. There’s a reason why we, you, me, Tosh, Owen, and even Gwen, ended up doing what we do. The world as we know it cannot offer us enough. Not because we’re meant for bigger things, but because it’s drained everything from us. So whatever’s left here, it isn’t enough. We need more. We need something to keep us going, and that’s exactly what Torchwood is. We save the world, and the world saves us back. That’s the deal.”
“What if I don’t want to keep going? Jack - ” he tried, felt his mouth awfully dry, felt his muscles start to tingle. He tried to move a bit, to shift Jack’s weight from one side to the other, slacken his grip around his wrists, fruitlessly. Every little move sent a sharp wave of pain through him, and so he resumed to staying as frozen as he could. “This is - it’s killing me, Jack. There’s nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. I’m either completely numb or completely desperate, there’s no in-between, no moment of peace. Don’t you understand? I either end this now, or wait ‘till it does me in 50 years. I’m afraid of what happens to me once this thing has finished driving me crazy.”
The charged silence lingered, and he had the impression he could feel Jack’s thumbs rubbing lightly against the back of his hands, soothingly. But it was hard to tell whether he was imagining it, or if he was feeling so little of his hands by now that it was impossible to know if Jack was really doing anything.
“Well,” Jack said, perfectly calm. “You haven’t screwed up things completely, yet.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do. I know what I’m saying. I know jumping isn’t going to make anything better.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“Right now…” He bounced a little on top of Ianto, stealing a painful moan from him. “I kinda do.” He paused, finally loosening his grip a little bit. “You’re too young, Ianto,” he said, an undercurrent of sadness in his voice, like it was a thing to be sorrowful about.
“I’ve seen enough,” Ianto replied.
“It’s not always bad, you know. There are some good things in Torchwood, too. There’s beauty.”
“Our definition of beauty must differ drastically, I’m afraid.”
Jack sighed. “Well, if you’re up here, means you got away with it, right?”
This time he had to make an effort and look back, squinting his eyes in disbelief at Jack. “Did you really just say that?”
“Yes, I did. And I was the one who let you run free, so I can say that.”
“Oh, so you’re the one who’s going to absolve me from my sins, are you?”
“No, you’re gonna have to live with what you’ve done,” Jack said, oddly placid, with a definitive kind of wisdom that implied that he was giving Ianto’s sentence, right there on the roof. Ianto could see the point in living to pay for his mistakes. It was a lot harder to wake up every morning and look up to what he’d done than it was to take a leap into the void. But that wasn’t the point. Well, not all of it, at least.
He was tired. Really tired. His head was spinning a little bit as he tried to work out how how in God’s name he’d gotten from there (one second away from jumping) to here (a grown man sitting on his back, holding him down with his nose touching the disgusting ground) in less than five minutes. Which invariably led to brooding over how he’d managed to get from there (a fairly happy life and a bright future in London) to here (suicide) in less than two years. It was a lot to work out.
They stayed like that for a while; Ianto relaxed his body, set the pain aside, and just breathed. Even breathing was becoming hard at this point, but he abstracted his attention from both the ache and the ridiculousness of the scene, and focused on letting the air in and out. The only thing worse than to be stuck under Jack would be to die that way.
“Now what?” Jack asked, as if he wasn’t sitting on a person to prevent said person from taking his own life - or as if Ianto wasn’t the one on the ground.
“Now what,” he repeated, lazily.
“If I let you go, will you try to jump again?”
“I can’t even feel my legs, Jack.”
“Promise.”
He snorted. “That’s ridic - ”
“Promise.”
Ianto rolled his eyes, but Jack probably didn’t see that. “I promise.”
“Good.”
Very slowly, Jack got up, and then let go of his hands. Ianto groaned, half pain, half relief, and lay motionless, feeling the blood start to course freely through his body again. He turned on his back, and with a loud moan he sat up, moving a little ‘till he could lean his back against the wall.
“God,” he said, and rubbed his face with his hands. Jack was standing in front of him, arms crossed, looking like a bodyguard. “That hurt,” Ianto informed him.
“You think the fall would’ve hurt less?”
“I wouldn’t have been around for too long to feel it, would I?”
“No, but the nanosecond that it would’ve take for you to die would’ve been the longest one of your life.” Ianto regarded him with curiosity, trying to figure out whether he was saying that out of spite or knowledge. Jack said things like that sometimes, things that were impossible for anyone to know and yet he walked around repeating them as if he had empirical proof. Ianto couldn’t find an explanation to half the things he knew about Jack, like, for example, the fact that his record for Torchwood began in the late 19th century. Jack seemed to be the kind of person who liked to stir up curiosity, create a mystery around himself. But for some reason, Ianto didn’t doubt it could be all perfectly true. Jack was strange like that.
“You can’t watch me forever,” Ianto said, bending his legs and resting his arms on his knees. He could still see the mark of Jack’s fingers around his wrists. That would leave a bruise. “What are you going to do when I go home? Sit beside my bed to make sure I don’t escape through the window?”
Jack arched his eyebrows, considering the possibility. “Maybe,” he said, and sat down next to Ianto. “Maybe that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s impractical. What about when you have to go after a weevil?”
“I’ll send Owen.”
“Lots of weevils.”
“I’ll take you with me.”
“What if I run when you’re not looking?”
“Did I ever tell you I used to be the best kid in school in athletics?”
Ianto turned his face to Jack and they looked at each other for two seconds before neither of them could hold their smiles anymore; Jack with a fond short grin on his lips, Ianto with a tiny curve that wasn’t certain whether he was just finding the conversation honestly amusing or helplessly absurd. Both, maybe. He glanced away, shook his head hopelessly. “This has to be the worst suicide attempt ever.”
“Not by far,” Jack said. Ianto arched him an eyebrow, and he continue, changing the subject, “Or,” he said, “I could just lock you up in the vaults. With Janet. She’s a wonderful guard dog.”
Ianto gazed back at him, lips parted in horror. “Like a prisoner?”
Jack nodded. “Exactly like a prisoner.”
Ianto frowned. “For how long?”
Jack shrugged, pursed his lips. “Don’t know. For as long as I have to, I suppose.” He looked at Ianto. “Until I can trust you.”
Ianto leaned his head back against the wall, considering the odds of managing to escape Jack at this point. Highly unlikely. If Jack wanted to take him prisoner, he probably could. He certainly could.
“Can I trust you, Ianto?” Jack asked, a hint of hope in his tone, nearly pleading for him to say yes.
“Probably not,” he said, sincerely, looking down at his own hands, closing them on tight fists and then stretching his fingers out again. “You should’ve just let me go.”
“Maybe,” Jack agreed. “But it doesn’t mean I wanted to.”
Ianto moved his head just enough to see Jack, from the corner of his eye. It was hard to comprehend why his boss, who had put a gun to his head not so long ago, threatening to execute him (with reason, if he had to be honest about it, he probably deserved the bullet back then) was suddenly so worried about his well being. Jack didn’t have to care, like he hadn’t seemed to care much about Suzie. But there was something there… Something lurking behind his eyes, in the way he looked at Ianto with an awkward sadness, almost as if Ianto was the one doing something for him, and not the other way around.
That was when Ianto understood that Jack was feeling guilty.
“What would it take,” Jack started again, leaning forward to pull the six pack and the pizza boxes closer. “What would it take for you to let go of this idea?”
Ianto blinked. “Of committing suicide?”
Jack looked back at him from over his shoulders. “Of course.”
“I - I’m not…” he sighed. “I don’t know.”
“There has to be something.”
“What if there isn’t?”
“There always is.” He opened two lagers with his hands, offered one to Ianto. Ianto took it, but didn’t drink. Jack clicked the tip of their bottles together and took a long a sip of his. “Imagine you could make a deal with someone who could get anything done. Anything you want. He’s sitting on a table, right across from you, and he asks you What do you want? What would you say?”
“What, is he like God?”
“Not God, just - Someone like, like…”
“The Wizard of Oz?” Ianto grinned. Jack laughed.
“I was gonna say the Prime Minister, but I think the Wizard of Oz is more appropriate.”
Ianto couldn’t help but laugh at the prospect of sitting on a table across from Gordon Brown, dressed as the Wizard of Oz, asking him what he’d like to get to stay in this world. There should have been a book about that story.
“What would you tell the Wizard?” Jack pushed, and drank again.
“I… I don’t know.” Ianto rolled the bottle in his hand, watched the liquid moving inside. “I don’t know. I guess… I think I’d ask… I’d like to care, again.”
“Care?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t care about anything, anymore?”
“Not so much, no.”
“You’d be the Tin Woodsman, then?” Jack asked, a smile in his voice.
Ianto shook his head, and didn’t reply. It wasn’t that he needed a new heart. It was just - there was something shut down in his, some piece of it that wasn’t working. The part that used to sparkle with life whenever something amused him, aroused him, when things moved or inspired him, and now it didn’t. Not anymore.
He gulped from the lager; it was Guinness. Jack had bloody bought him Guinness. He looked down at the bottle somewhat stunned, then turned to him and said “You bought me Guinness.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I really like Guinness.”
Jack grinned. “Good.” He gulped again. “What if the Wizard couldn’t make you care, exactly, but could guarantee you that there are people who care about you?”
“I’d say he’s a lousy Wizard,” Ianto said, a wan smile on his face as drank from his bottle.
Jack grinned, and nodded. “Fair. But wouldn’t it be enough? Wouldn’t you care that someone cares for you?”
Ianto regarded Jack very attentively, watched as he blinked, and waited for the answer to his absurd question as if it would change anything. As if there was any sense in what they were saying. They couldn’t get themselves to speak about the serious things, about why Ianto wanted so desperately to jump, or why Jack felt so guilty about it - was it because he thought Lisa was his fault too, or was his ego hurt because Ianto had managed to trick him again? So instead, they spoke about the smaller picture, about Wizards and super powerful Prime Ministers and beer. Goddamn good beer.
“Where are you trying to go with this?” he asked.
Jack blinked, seemed to consider the pertinence of the question, and then shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Ianto stretched his legs, moved his feet from one side to the other, the tips of his shoes making a tomp, tomp sound when they touched. “You know this is all very pointless.”
“Doesn’t hurt to try.”
“Why - ” Ianto started, but stopped, not exactly sure what question he wanted to ask there. He rested the bottle carefully on his thigh, felt the wet coolness of it against the fabric of his trousers, then tried again. “Why did you show up at my flat with Guinness and pizza?”
He lifted his eyes to Jack, and for a moment he seemed to have been caught unprepared. It was an image to keep, the face he made; the way his eyes widened just a little bit, his lips trembling almost imperceptibly. Quickly, Jack took the beer to his lips, pretended to drink it for a moment, kept the liquid in his mouth for longer than he should, thinking, and then swallowed.
“Checking on you,” he said, as if it was obvious. As if he did it every week. Two months before, Ianto could’ve believed that. But since he had been accepted back, Jack had a made a vow of trust. Ianto had been grateful for it, back then. But clearly Jack was regretting it now.
Ianto cocked him an eyebrow, and waited.
“Well,” Jack drank again, his beer almost done. “It’s been a while since we last had, you know… A moment, to talk. I wanted to know how you were. Clearly I should’ve done it sooner.” Ianto’s eyebrow never wavered. “It was a date.”
Ianto tipped his head to the side, obviously disbelieving. Jack sighed. “Ok,” he said, putting the lager down. “You really want to know?” He let the question float, but Ianto didn’t have to answer. “Did you talk to Tosh, after… what happened today?”
“Tosh?” Ianto frowned. “We spoke, briefly. Why?”
“Did you ask her what she heard when she was wearing the necklace?”
Oh. Oh.
Ianto rolled his eyes, and said, “No,” a mute of course right after it.
“She didn’t know you were going to kill yourself, mind you,” Jack said. “But… Let’s say there were strong indications that something wasn’t right.”
Ianto laughed, ruefully. Wasn’t he lucky? On the exact day he’d booked to be his last one on Earth, his co-worker showed up with an alien girlfriend and a mind-reading necklace. He leaned his head back, and looked up at the sky. Maybe there was some cosmic being up there after all. Like a space Gordon Brown, ubiquitously watching over them and deciding that no, Ianto Jones, you don’t get to kill yourself today. Gordon Brown was a sadistic bastard.
“She was worried,” Jack added. “Don’t be mad at her for telling me.”
Ianto shook his head. “Not her fault.” It was Gordon’s.
“Is there anything else you would request from the Wizard?” Jack asked, after a brief pause.
“Still at this, are we?”
“You only get one shot with the Wizard. Have to know what you want.”
“Do you?”
Jack went quiet. Ianto flickered his eyes to him, found him looking up at the sky, too, a large grin on his face that didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“I’m not suicide material,” he said. And for some reason, it stung somewhere in Ianto.
He didn’t know why, considering that was exactly what he was doing. Maybe he just didn’t feel like suicide material, either. So far, everything had been very logical, in his head. It wasn’t like he had always felt this way. He wasn’t depressed, or suicidal. At least, he hadn’t been, before all this. And he reckoned he had had a very good reason to end up where he did. It was a one-time kind of thing, as suicide usually was. He didn’t want to be remembered as a suicidal person, but he guessed it couldn’t be helped. Sometimes you had to be judged by your one-offs, he figured. Especially one-offs that consisted in having no time for explanations afterward.
“I don’t want to kill myself because I hate life, you know,” he said. “I want to do it because once upon a time I had one. And I loved it. I loved living, even when I didn’t. It’s all so fucked for me now… I’m up here because I can’t seem to find a way back into life, it’s like I’ve been forgotten in some sort of limbo and I can’t make it back to the other side, and sometimes that’s too much.”
“We’re all on the same boat here.”
“All so fucked up, are we? We should start a band.”
Jack sighed. “Sometimes it takes some real complicated moments for you to realize that even in the hardest times there’s always something to make you feel alive.”
“Like grown men sitting on your arse?”
Jack laughed, and Ianto couldn’t keep his lips from curving up in response. He’d probably put Jack’s laughter on his list of things that made him feel alive, at this point. If he were ever to make a list. It was incredibly infectious, seemed to make the air around Jack vibrate and find refuge in Ianto’s chest. He really liked that laughter.
“That’s one thing,” Jack said. “There’s also good beer,” he said, lifting his from the ground. “Cold pizza.”
“The Wizard of Oz.”
Jack turned to him, a suggestive eyebrow lifted. “There’s sex.”
Ianto watched him seriously for a moment. “Are you hitting on me?”
“Am I?”
“I hope not.”
“Really?”
“It’s awfully disrespectful to hit on someone who was just trying to kill himself.”
Jack laughed again and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I take it back.” When he looked back at Ianto, he had an expression of placid satisfaction on his face, one of easy contentment and complacency. And Ianto was trying very hard not to be contaminated by his cheap conversation, but maybe, just maybe, there was a little bit of him that found a measure of comfort in that.
They fell quiet once more, but this time it was different. Ianto didn’t find himself calculating his chances of escaping or trying to figure out whether it would be wrong to just jump, right then. When he closed his eyes, the first thing that came to his head was his flat. His bed. He wanted to go back and sleep the exhaustion away. And for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t thinking about ghosts and monsters and rats in his stomach. Maybe it was exhaustion, mental and physical, blocking these things out temporarily. But maybe it wasn’t.
“Now what?” he asked.
He heard a little rustling sound of grit on paper. “I have pepperoni and vegetables.”
Ianto craked one eye open, found Jack poking the pizzas with his index finger. “Now we eat?” he asked, slightly abashed, but not really. After everything that had happened tonight, ending a suicide attempt in pizza didn’t sound half as absurd as it should.
“Aren’t you hungry? I am.” Jack took a slice of the pepperoni one, and then took a generous bite, munched slowly on it, then shook his head in approval. “Humm,” he said. “Very good. A nice little thing on a night like this, don’t you think?” Jack wasn’t Jack if he wasn’t talking with his mouth full.
Into made a little disgusted face. Jack opened his mouth to show him the mass of digested pizza, and Ianto put a finger in his mouth, pretending to vomit. “That’s cold,” he said.
Jack shrugged. “Details.” And took another bite.
If this was a movie, Ianto thought, and it could bloody well be, this would be the moment where something would happen. Something huge and meaningful, like an epiphany that would hit him out of the blue and make him realize that life was worth living after all. Their dull, weird conversation would gain different contours and suddenly they’d be discussing the essence of the being and the secrets of the human mind, some philosophical crap that would be a metaphor of something deeper. He was maybe half expecting something like that to happen. Grandiose, overwhelming, breathtaking. Instead, he got a cold, greasy slice of pizza, and a smile. That was what his life-saving moment consisted of. Of wizards, and beer, and people sitting on his arse and talking with their mouth full. Not very glamorous. But then again, real life rarely ever was.
His life, he had to admit, had enough twists and turns to provide and incredibly rich narrative. He did things and saw things. They just weren’t very pretty. But none of it had ever felt as real as this; two guys sitting out in the cold with sore muscles and good beer. Damn good beer.
Guinness had saved his life.
Ianto stretched his hand out, offered his bottle to Jack in a toast. Jack cut his eyes to the bottle, then to Ianto’s face, and grinned when he understood. He tilted his beer against Ianto’s with a soft clink.
Ianto sat back against the ledge wall and threw his head back to look at the sky.
You win, Gordon, he thought, and he toasted the heavens.
End.