TW: Living Afterwards [T]
Living Afterwards
Fandom:
Torchwood
Title:
Living Afterwards
In which Jack and Ianto clear up a few loose ends.
Author:
lt_indigo
Pairing(s):
Jack/Ianto
Warning(s):
acutally none
Disclamer:
Still not mine. Still belongs to people who don't deserve them.
Word count:
1,518
Author's note:
Set sometime between 'Countrycide' and 'Greeks Bearing Gifts'. Dear God, I am posting this before I tweak it to death. It's an epilogue of sorts to ' It Isn't Cheating'.
Ianto shut the door firmly behind him. Jack was puzzled; of all of them, Ianto knew best what happened behind a closed door with Jack, and they had been very clear about boundaries recently. And yet, here he was, with a serious expression, closing a door.
“Why were you so good to me?” he asked bluntly, stood before Jack’s desk.
“Huh?” It wasn’t the most intelligent response he had ever come out with, granted, but it was all his brain could muster at such short notice.
“After Lis… the Cyberman.”
Oh, that. And the slip told Jack that both he and Ianto had been right: he hadn’t yet completely accepted that the ‘being’ Ianto had kept in the basement for months had not been his late girlfriend. Perhaps in his heart he never would; would always blame Jack for her death. Jack hoped otherwise.
“I fucked up. Big time,” Ianto pointed out. “I could have gotten everyone killed, but you’ve been so good to me. I don’t deserve it.”
Jack scrubbed his face with his hands. He had been hoping that Ianto wouldn’t ask. He had wanted to sweep the entire incident under the rug, forget about it all so as not to bring up memories best left in the past. Although, this might give him the opportunity to get something off his chest from those first few days, the night Ianto had seduced him once again, the first night Ianto had taken him. The last time they had had sex.
He got up, glanced down into the main Hub. Tosh was still hard at work, buried in whatever it was she was up to with the computer. Gwen and Owen were flirting outrageously, leaving Jack with no doubt about where she would end up spending the night.
He opened the door, leaned over his little balcony and told them in no uncertain terms to take it elsewhere.
Gwen blinked up at him in shock, apparently scandalised that he would suggest such a thing. He really didn’t know why she was surprised as subtlety was not exactly a trait anyone could ascribe to her. Her affair with Owen was blatantly obvious (to him at least. He wasn’t sure Tosh had noticed). Nevertheless, she gathered up her handbag and darted for the exit, Owen trying not to be obviously hot on her heels. Tosh hadn’t even noticed, but he wasn’t worried about her. Tosh would take anything to the grave. If nothing else, she would keep her nose out of places it didn’t belong.
He closed the door again and poured two glasses of his Armagnac, handed one of them to Ianto, who had moved to the sofa, and took a gulp from the other. Ianto seemed somewhat surprised at this; Jack hardly ever drank, even when the team went out specifically for that purpose Jack stuck to water. In all honesty, getting blind drunk had lost its appeal after a few attempts of death by alcohol poisoning. He might heal quickly, but it was a bitch of a death to recover from.
He sighed and sat down heavily in his desk chair, contemplating the brandy. “A very good friend of mine died at Canary Wharf,” he admitted. “She wasn’t with Torchwood, she was just there.”
“With the Doctor?” Ianto asked, surprisingly astutely.
Jack hesitated, and Ianto continued: “I was there too, remember? The whole building knew he was there. His ship was in my archive. She’s something else, isn’t she?”
He couldn’t help himself; he laughed. “She is that.”
If he was inclined to be more honest, he thought that said a lot more about Ianto than Ianto would ever realise: the TARDIS didn’t exactly touch every mind she encountered, nor could most contemporary humans even begin to perceive her beyond her physical presence. Ianto’s psychic abilities clearly needed some reassessing.
“Just so it’s out there, I also know you’ve been working for Torchwood for over a hundred years. You’re looking good on it.”
Jack was genuinely speechless at that. There had always been a danger that having a proper archivist would lead to Jack’s handwriting being spotted in old reports, but Ianto had never mentioned anything until now, and they had never had anyone as good as him since well before the millennium, the time Jack had started keeping his secret from his staff.
“How… how long…?”
Ianto’s eyes were kind, completely non-judgemental. “I found out about a week after I started here.” He shrugged, looked away and down at his drink. “I thought I might be able to hold it over you if I needed to. But the things you’ve lived through, I can’t even imagine.”
Jack shrugged. “Not much choice there.”
Ianto did meet his eyes again at that point. “I did wonder. Blood on your shirts, but never a mark on you. I’ve got myself a real-life Captain Scarlet.”
Jack couldn’t help himself; it was a reflex by now. He grinned lasciviously. “You know, I knew Gerry Anderson, back in the sixties.”
“I think you might just have ruined my childhood,” Ianto responded, blinking rapidly. “But, getting back to my question, your friend died?”
Jack nodded. He contemplated his brandy before speaking again. “She was only maybe twenty; it gets hard to tell with time travel. I saw some of the recovered CCTV footage, and she was fighting. Daleks and Cybermen and she wasn’t trying to run, she was trying to help. I thought that maybe if just one survivor carried on surviving, her death wouldn’t be meaningless.”
His voice was thick by the end and he could feel the tears welling in his eyes. He hadn’t cried when he found her name on the list, merely assumed it was because she was off with the Doctor; missing, presumed dead. That Jackie Tyler was also listed did give him pause, and he hastily reviewed the CCTV from outside their building, then in Torchwood Tower itself. Some of the data was corrupted and even Tosh had not been able to recreate it, but other sections were gloriously intact, including seeing Rose and Mickey-the-idiot-ex face down four Daleks without blinking. Then he had cried, tears of both pride and sorrow. He had torn the tower apart looking for her body, and had come to the hideous conclusion that she must have been converted. She would have fought all the way, too. She was the first woman he had ever truly loved, and she was gone before truly having a chance to live. Fate was a cruel, twisted bitch, to give a conman like Jack an eternity and Rose Tyler just twenty years.
Ianto drew him back to the present, his voice laden with emotion, weighed down with the words he had dared not speak until now. “It’s not enough just to survive, Jack. You have to live afterwards. That’s what we’re finding impossible. That’s why the survivors are a dying breed, literally.”
Jack’s heart was breaking for Ianto, the tears finally tricking down his cheeks, until that last word. There was an echo of Ianto's trademark dry humour, something that gave Jack hope that he might actually succeed in finding life after Canary Wharf, something that would give Rose’s sacrifice meaning.
“I think I understand, though. Thank you.”
“So.” Jack didn’t want to dwell. Dwelling lead to brooding about his apparently eternal life, and brought up his abandonment issues. Particularly when Rose and the Doctor were on his mind anyway. He wiped his eyes. “What was all that about me having power over you?”
Ianto choked and flushed guiltily. “Shit. I was hoping you might have forgotten that.”
“You used me, and then practically accused me of the same thing!”
“Yeah.” It was Ianto’s turn to take a thoughtful drink before continuing. “At first, that was how I justified it to myself; that you enjoyed harassing and corrupting virginal young men and having your wicked way. I told myself that I hadn’t led you on at all, that I definitely didn’t enjoy our time together. But it was all bullshit, and I’d realised that even before you found Lisa. That night I was hurting and desperate, and I don’t really know why I said that. I think somehow I still needed to justify the fact that I wanted you, and convinced myself that you had been the one in the wrong, not me.
“I was saying all sorts of crazy things that night, and you pulled me up on the only one I was truly ashamed of.” Ianto gave him a small, guilty smile. “Well, that and punching you and calling you a murderer the day before. That wasn’t fair either.”
Jack finished off his glass. “I was letting that one slide. So, is there life after Canary Wharf?”
Ianto met his eyes levelly. “I think there might be. Care to help me find it?”
It was a blatant invitation if ever he had heard one. He grinned back. “Are you propositioning me, Mr Jones?”
Ianto was on his feet and pulling Jack into his arms before Jack had even finished the sentence. “Absolutely, Captain Harkness.”