TW Fic: Holding On, Letting Go (Jack/Ianto)
Title: Holding On, Letting Go
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Words: 791
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through Children of Earth.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Jack made a promise that he couldn’t keep.
A/N: No, I don’t know why I’m writing Jack/Ianto either, but this prompt hit me and I had to do it. Written for crickets impromptu multi fandom imPromptathon to satisfy the prompt Jack/Ianto, memory.
Ianto told Jack he would forget him. Jack swore he wouldn’t, but time doesn’t care about the promises of men.
A week after Jack takes to the stars he finds himself in a bar on some planet where the sky runs orange and the clientele tends towards the blue and scaly. There’s a man there though, a human just like him and from the back…from the back it’s Ianto. Sturdy shoulders, perfect hair---but then he turns and the nose is too big and the laugh too loud and Jack feels like an idiot.
Two months later he’s in Paris and it’s 1894. He orders a cup of tea at a café, but he can’t bring himself to drink it. He sits there, his back pressed against the hard wood of the chair and lets the sharp smell tickle his nose and watches as the steam curls towards the sky.
Six months pass and he returns to Cardiff, only it’s 1982 and Ianto’s eight years old. Jack finds him in a park, sitting under a tree with his nose buried in a book. He thinks about crossing the distance between them and telling the little boy to steer clear of a Captain Jack Harkness, but he knows it would do no good. Some things have to happen.
One year to the day and Jack takes a trip to England on the night of the blitz. He finds a scared, young soldier cowering in an alley and presses his lips roughly against the other man’s.
“It’s the end of the world, friend. What do you say we go out in style?”
He takes the boy to an abandoned hotel and they spend the night in bed while bombs rain down around them.
The next morning he takes the boy’s coat and leaves his own in its place. He can’t stand the sight of it anymore.
Two days later he wants it back, but he’s six hundred years and two galaxies away. He tilts his head up to stare into the harsh light of two suns and knows he’ll never see it again.
Five years and he returns to Torchwood to get his job back. Gwen is long gone by now and he wants to think that’s for the best. He has a new team, all young and eager. He imagines each of them dying and broken. He knows it won’t make the inevitable any easier, but it’s worth a shot.
Eight years and five months later he’s having a perfectly good day. He just saved the world (again) and he’s rewarding himself with a pair of crazy kids from Bristol. He’s just poured himself a drink when it hits him. It’s Ianto’s birthday.
He tries to conjure an image of the man in his mind, the way his lips would curl into a hesitant smile, the droll sound his voice would make when he was frustrated, the way his fingers felt trailing down Jack’s rib cage. The picture is fuzzy. His eyes were blue, weren’t they? His voice wasn’t that rough…that was Owen, wasn’t it?
He hears one of his companions calling from the bedroom and pushes the thought to the back of his mind.
Twenty years and Jack drinks a cup of tea with his granddaughter and laughs and doesn’t think of Ianto at all.
Thirty-two years and twelve days and he’s slipping into his coat when a memory comes floating back. He can almost feel someone behind him, warm breath on the back of his neck, gentle hands straightening his collar.
Sixty-seven years and he’s running past a suit shop in London when the sight of a mannequin in an immaculately tailored suit makes him pause.
Ninety-eight years and he hears someone calling “Ianto!” on the street. He turns and watches as two men embrace. He says the name under his breath and the letters feel awkward on his tongue.
Thousands of years later, he’s not even a man anymore, but he still persists. He tries to hold onto his life (his lives) and all of the people that made them up, but there are too many faces and too many names and they all run together in his mind now. There’s a girl who sounded like a flower who gave him this curse. Another girl, this one with a crooked smile that was never his. A man who gave him a jacket and a name (but which name?). A brother, didn’t he have one of those once?
And someone who asked him to hold on to him. Or maybe he told him to let him go.
But there’s a doctor. He still comes by sometimes. That one he always remembers.
But the rest…
The rest he forgets.