[BTR|RP] Without the light of wisdom, what else can be done?

[hey_capn_jack]

{BACKDATED FOREVER; LOCKED TO IANTO. Follows this madness.}As it turns out, Elashte is either not as invested in answering Jack's proverbial phonecalls these days as he could be, or Jack chose a rather poor time to try to get in touch with him. And with Mio being not exactly a mindhealer, and the Vesmier being in a different country and rather

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[hey_capn_jack]

"Well, that depends," Jack says, steadily putting his mental controls in place. He's keeping part of his attention tuned to his own expression, his own tone and posture - both the physical kind and the more sociological definition drilled into him in the Agency. His posture in that sense is easy: torturer.

How much do you trust me? is what he'd like to ask, but that's quickly quashed. That's an emotional question, not a tactical one. His job is to coerce that trust, not scavenge it.

"Do you prefer dread or unpleasant surprises?" he asks, locking his eyes on Ianto's. There's a moment where his entire manner is analyzing - like he's looking at one of Owen's dissected alien corpses, or the guts of one of Toshiko's programs. Ianto's not a person, here, he's a bundle of psychoprogramming and encoded reactions, jammed into a collection of nerve endings and sensory organs

[hey_capn_jack]

Two small tickmarks fill themselves in, in the back of Jack's mind.

One: honesty feeds to intimacy here.

Two: surprise unbalances here.

Both good things to know.

He exhales, then gestures back to the edge of the bed. (Chair might be more comfortable; a more professional spot, less vulnerable. That's exactly why he doesn't indicate it.) "Sit."

It only gets worse from here.

"I'm a compliance officer," he says. "Technically. Eletor-Instagur of the Time Agency, specializing in information extraction and compliance. Call me a torturer emeritus." The corner of his mouth ticks up, but the smile is gone in an instant. "What you have is a set of conditionings which are causing problems I don't want to deal with, so it's my job to either dismantle the impulse you suffer to do that, or set up psychological systems that don't let you follow through on them. Now, there are ways to do all of this that don't factor down to physical pain. But I'm not going to call any of them 'pleasant'."

[hey_capn_jack]

There's a flicker at the corner of Jack's eyes, there - an involuntary reaction, still mostly obscured; a brief brush against raw nerve. Because it's always about him, isn't it? He remembers Suzie, coming to him, asking what he or she or anyone could do about the torturer who got his hands on Sark, afraid for what it could mean if Jack - J, then - let himself go after him.

Of course, to a point, it made sense. On a good day, he walked more cliffs than any of them. And these cliffs? They'd be first in line to get hurt, the instant he fell.

There are things he could say. Can't do anything to me, for one - everything that could happen has already been done, six or ten times over. But this isn't about him, and he's not going to let the conversation stray.

"I'm right here," he says, softening his voice by degrees. Not much - he's steady, official, in a posture of command, but there's just enough give to lend a tinge of Lean on me to his tone. I'm the one you turn to when it hurts. "We'll start shallow. First off, tell me

[hey_capn_jack]

"Okay," Jack says. "Fix on me." And Ianto might not be able to sense anything, not yet - Jack's got every shield he can muster up at full strength, partially because psychics and empaths of almost every variety still make his skin crawl, partly because it's protocol. "Just the quiet." The corner of his mouth ticks up again.

One mote of stability. One channel of communication and influence. It's enough to start with.

"Adam," he says. "Contact psychic. Mnemnomorph, from what you've told me. I want you to go back to the first strong memory you have of him. Not the first memory, but the earliest you have that jumps to the front of your mind

[hey_capn_jack]

Jack watches, taking in the motion of the fine muscles of the hands and face, the pupil dilation when Ianto looks at him again. That's a definite stress line - palpable cognitive dissonance and distress.

He steps closer, reaching out to cover one eye with his palm. "Eyes closed," he says - gentle command. Most people rely on their eyesight more than their other senses. Take that away, and you push them into a more vulnerable state.

Vulnerable is exactly where you want someone you're targeting for compliance.

"Just feel." His hand slips down, cradling the side of Ianto's neck, carefully positioned to track Ianto's heartbeat without being obvious about doing so. This is just contact. Just human contact. That's all.

At the same time, he lets a shield slip, calling up a sense of rock-solid competence and allowing it to seep out. Nothing dramatic, not just yet. Almost subconscious. Look at me. I've got everything in the palm of my hand. I'm in control. Don't you want to fall to that control?

"He made you want something

[hey_capn_jack]

"There was nothing to recall," Jack says. He steps closer, drawing Ianto's head down until his forehead touches his chest. You're listening, right? You're sensing. Quiet competence. "Think back. You can remember the quiet before the crash. The breath of air before the memory."

And this - this is tricky. He closes his own eyes, then; evens out his breathing, takes very baseline he's ever established from Ianto, every scrap of psychological profiling... and then turns it. Steps inside. Replicates it right into his own emotional state, pushing it over his shields.

A dark, quiet loyalty. Carbon-innocuous; carbon-strong. Watching, waiting, learning everything just to be able to be that much more necessary, that much more invisible. It would be heroic, really; and the more palatable sort of heroics, and the aversion to running in with guns blazing was equal elements jealousy and lack of confidence and distaste and dignity. But at the same time, things had to be done. Things were done in accordance to these inner imperatives

[hey_capn_jack]

"Yeah," Jack says, quietly. "And I'm going to lead you back here. Right out of where you are."

His fingers twine in Ianto's hair. Everything is intertwined, here - power and symbolism and suggestion and reminder and recall. Being this close is not a foreign situation to either one of them, even when it's been perverted from both sides - by Adam or Thane, false memories or buried, this side of the Rift or the other.

"But you need to find the way out," he says, and starts letting the emotion he's not shielding... slide. The thrum of loyalty becomes dependence, then yearning; the watching becomes predatory; the love, hunger. For violence, for power. For one thing to change and choke itself out under an action of will.

It's not easy, but it's too easy at the same time. All he has to do is dip back down into his Agency days, remember how it felt to be so poisonous and feral. He can reconstruct a persona from the things Ianto's told him and what he himself has seen. Adam went for the clichés. Jack Harkness, John Thane, Jarec

[hey_capn_jack]

Jack stays steady, focusing on echoing that pain.

Because there was a time, in the Agency, a long time, when he'd been a goddamn border prince. Regents and seneschals would bow or get out of his way. Oh, he was higher than a kite, keener than a knife...

And every day, every moment he paused to know what he was doing, every instant he thought instead of letting inertia carry him, there was a disgust so deep it became a palpable hurt.

he learned to twist it. He learned to convince his experiencing mind that it was the ache of a sore muscle, or the sort of nostalgia people hit when they thought about their own mortality, or a natural apprehension about passing beyond so many rules and lines. He can feel that now, coiling at his diaphragm; the old torturer techniques, the old torturer sickness.

He crouches down in front of the bed edge, drawing Ianto down into a closer embrace. Stay here. It's a comforting gesture, with the added benefit of bringing Ianto solidly into his sphere of control. He can read every tremor of muscle or