A Torchwood anti-story.
Anti-story because I am never going to actually write it, you see. This is just, like--
(does a word count)
Well, shit.
This is nine thousand fucking words worth of a post-Children of Earth Torchwood story outline, where I try to fix the whole Ianto thing without retconning the world. It's an epistolary stream-of-conscious blathery outline thing, people. Nine thousand words of this shit! What the hell was I thinking? And it has been staring angrily at me from my Google docs for, like, almost two years.
I think it is time for me to release it out into the wild, and let it roam free. (And hopefully it will not return and bite me on the ass.)
So I give you:
Anti-story for Torchwood, possibly called "There is a solitude of sky."
by SomeInstant's involuntary fannish instinct to fix the ending of Children of Earth
Rating: R, because I swear a lot. Also, because I didn't write many actual scenes, but one I did write is a sex scene. I have no idea how that happened.
Pairing: Jack/Ianto. DEATH CANNOT STOP IT.
Word Count: 9,000. I wrote 9k words about how I was going to write a story. Am moron.
Summary: This is how I plot out stories. It is ridiculously inefficient, and I am ashamed. Also, there's something about Ianto being stuck in a wrist strap.
Apologies for the stream-of-consciousness style and ridiculously long outline-- this is pretty much how I plan out any story. I'm not very good with a short little synopsis, because I need to babble to figure out plot points. Anyway. The title of this one is going to come from an Emily Dickinson poem, which I found to be remarkably apt:
XXV.
There is a solitude of space,
A solitude of sea,
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to itself:
Finite Infinity.
I'm thinking it's either There is a solitude of space or That profounder site. I'm leaning towards the first, but I'll reevaluate once the damn thing's actually written.
Basically, this is a story about each member of Torchwood in the aftermath of CoE. If it's a little more about Ianto at the end than anyone else, that's because he's going to be the bridge. So if you want to be metaphorical about it, each person gets their own particular solitude: Jack's is space, and Ianto's is death, and Gwen's is sea. (Sea's a stretch, because it really should be Earth-- but. Cardiff's near the sea, so that'll work for me.) Each individual story line breaks up into roughly three parts....
Anyway. Here's how the first bit goes.
Ianto I
Actually, I've got this pretty much written, so here's the rough draft:
***
"That," Jack panted, his mouth hot against Ianto's ear, "was not half bad."
Ianto rolled his eyes and moved with some reluctance to unstick himself from where he had collapsed on Jack's chest. "Glad you thought so, sir," he said. Attempting to sound as though the top of his head hadn't been blown off, he added, "Not exactly inventive, but with a bit more practice I think we might achieve satisfactory levels."
"Hey, now, don't knock the basics," Jack said, propping himself up on his elbows to survey the damage. There was a pillow on top of Ianto's dresser and the fitted sheet was ripped down the middle where Jack's wrist strap had caught. God only knew where the rest of the bedclothes were, but Ianto's waistcoat had somehow ended up dangling from the curtain rod. "I like the basics. The advanced stuff is good, too, don't get me wrong, bells and whistles can be fun--"
"I hope those are figurative bells and whistles," Ianto interrupted. "Mrs. Beades already has me on her black list."
Jack narrowed his eyes. "Stop being so Welsh when I'm talking about sex," he said.
"I'll try, sir." Ianto didn't bother pointing out that he might as well be English if he followed Jack's instructions to the letter.
"Like I said," Jack continued, letting his head fall back onto the remaining pillow, "while I like the bells and whistles, a thorough understanding of the basics is downright critical if we plan to progress."
Ianto raised a hand in concession. "Right you are," he agreed. "Foundational studies can be very beneficial. Like scales on the piano."
"Exactly," Jack said, poking Ianto's shoulder. "I'm glad you understand. We'd have to be pretty dedicated about practicing, though. We wouldn't want to plateau off at not half bad."
Ianto shook his head, mute. It was sometimes difficult to think of anything to say that wasn't appallingly sentimental while looking over the long naked stretch of Jack spread across his mattress: all that dizzying warmth directed at him. It was possible, Ianto reflected, even probable, that more there were more gorgeous individuals out in some nebulous and unexplored part of the universe. Ianto was relatively confident, however, he was unlikely to discover said individuals conveniently sprawled over his partially denuded bed. And even if he did, Ianto was absolutely certain they couldn't make his heart clench in the same way Jack Harkness did.
Jack was-- singular. He was the exception to every rule, and Ianto could not imagine wanting anything else.
He cleared his throat. "I don't think," Ianto said in a low voice, "that dedication will be a problem for me."
"Good," Jack said, and reached out to pull him down.
Ianto let himself drift for a moment, and then put a hand against Jack's chest. "Take the damn wrist strap off first, sir," he said. "I'm not having you tear the mattress, too. It's got sentimental value."
"Does it?" Jack asked, fiddling with the clasp. He frowned down at the leather band once it was off, poking at the sharp exposed end of a dial. "I should fix that one of these days."
"I'd appreciate it," Ianto said. "It's been scratching at inopportune moments." Jack leered and tossed the band onto Ianto's bedside table.
"So tell me about this mattress," Jack said, settling a hand on Ianto's hip and tugging. "What's so special about it?"
This time, Ianto let himself fall into Jack's gravitational field without protest. "Well," he said, looking thoughtful, "I had a foursome on it, once."
"You have no idea how much I wish that were true," Jack laughed. "It's not, though. But I can pretend to believe you if you wanted to make something up. Go right ahead."
"I can't lie to you about sex, can I," Ianto complained. "You always know. It's very annoying."
"Sorry." Jack licked his ear in apology. "Lying and sex-- I've been doing both for a very long time. They're sort of areas of expertise at this point. But back to that sentimental value thing?"
Ianto let his hand slide along Jack's thigh. "I've slept well in this bed, I suppose," he said blandly. "Good sleep is important."
"Ianto."
He bit Jack's shoulder. "I shagged my first time-traveler from the fifty-first century on this mattress," he said, feeling Jack arch up against him. "The sex was good, but the arsehole kept fishing for compliments after."
Jack laughed, and suddenly the world was upside down. "You're a such a liar, Ianto Jones," he said, and settled between his legs.
"I'm fairly certain you were present for the occasion, sir," Ianto murmured deferentially, resting his hands just above the curve of Jack's arse. Jack hummed, contented. "There was a significant amount of yelling, and it did sound like your voice."
"First of all," Jack said, and kissed him. "Sorry," he said, coming up for air. "Got distracted. Your mouth is inconvenient that way. First of all," Jack tried again, "I do not fish for compliments." Ianto opened his mouth to protest. "I don't fish," Jack repeated. "I ask outright."
"Fair enough," Ianto conceded.
"Second point." Jack braced his arms on either side of Ianto's head and leaned in close. "I object to your choice of descriptors. I'm not your first time-traveler from the fifty-first century," he said, his lips brushing Ianto's cheek. "I'm your only. I'm going to be your only."
Ianto stilled. "Bit presumptuous," he offered, trying to gauge the expression behind Jack's eyes.
"Yeah," agreed Jack. "It is." He licked his lips. "Is that all right with you?"
Ianto nodded. "Yeah," he said, thickly. "Yeah, okay. Presume away."
***
Okay. Things that I was going for in that section: (1) Ianto and Jack's weird little emotional dynamic, In spades, and in character too. (2) OH HAI IMPLICATIONS OF SECKS (because that's going to be hard to come by later on), (3) a relatively non-fraught tone (again, for contrast with the rest of the story), (4) HEY DID YOU NOTICE THAT JACK TOOK OFF THE WRIST STRAP? Because that's, like, important. Sneaky Ianto is sneaky. I had to come up with a way for Ianto to get a hold of it, somehow, and I thought: Jack never takes the damn thing off. It's not like he leaves it on the bedside table or something while... he... sleeps... oh!
Anyway. There's that brief little Ianto POV section, and it's meant to feel inconsequential. If I've done the thing right, hopefully the wrist strap won't be too memorable-- until later on in the story.
(Honestly, the way I think about this scene is like-- that little opening bit in a movie, just the first minute and a half before the title appears on screen. If I were going to be a complete douche about it, I wouldn't actually put the title of the story up until after this little blurb. But that seems like a ridiculous thing to do. So.)
Gwen I
Gwen's really where this thing starts, and she's basically the anchor for the whole story. I've got bits and pieces of this section written, but it's going to take a while to get it all hammered out, I think-- there's lots of explaining to do and I hate big long sections of exposition. So this is really where I have to come up with ways to show the explanation, rather than tell it. Anyway, here's what Gwen's up to:
She's on her own to deal with the aftermath of the 456: has to figure out what the fuck to do about the footage she has, how to manage a government that's so badly betrayed pretty much everyone on Earth, has to figure out if Torchwood 3 even exists anymore-- and, if it does exist, what to do about (a) securing the Hub, (b) staffing the place, and (c) Jack disappearing again (at least he sends an email this time?).
And also, she's pregnant and morning sickness is even less fun than the telly makes it sound. And Ianto's dead, so there's no one who really gets where she's coming from. Rhys is a love, and he understands more now than he did before the 456, but Ianto would have brought her a mug of coffee with a good slug of whiskey and she would have tried to sound upbeat and sure that Jack would come back, and Ianto would have pretended that he was just fine, thanks, and that he wasn't pining away, and somehow not-talking about it would have helped. But she's pregnant, so the whiskey's out, and Ianto's dead, so the not-talking's not going to happen either. And. Fuck. Gwen hates funerals.
Here's what I think: I think this is where Gwen grows up a little. She's been in command before, yeah-- but that was with a team, and she still got to be the human side, the forgiving side of Torchwood while Jack was gone. Ianto was efficient, Tosh was clinical, Owen was a bastard, and Gwen got to be the heart. But this time, there's not really anyone else to do the hard stuff, to be suspicious and uncompromising. There's Agent Johnson, but Gwen's unsure of her-- given that she blew up the fucking Hub and encased Jack in cement. That's... a rather hard thing to overcome. Andy might be useful in the short-term, but Gwen keeps looking at him and thinking, this can only end in Retcon. And Lois is wonderful-- she's smart and she's competent and at any other time, she'd be hired on in half a second, but. She's just so young and so wide-eyed (and her efficiency reminds Gwen of Ianto and that hurts). Gwen has no doubts about her bravery, but she's not sure that Lois has got the necessary initiative for Torchwood: that stupid jump first, think about the cliff later attitude that Torchwood seems to require.
Anyway. Gwen grows up.
She spends the first thirteen hours after the 456 disappear alternately (a) yelling at most of London over the phone, (b) waiting for Jack to show up and make things right, (c) crashed out asleep against Rhys' shoulder, (d) promising Rhiannon and Johnny that she can make all this right and being absolutely certain that she never can, (e) pulling seventeen separate strings to get Lois released from confinement, (f) forcing the gov. to fucking unfreeze her account so that she can fucking buy a sandwich because she is pregnant and hungry, (g) feeling sick because she keeps looking around for Ianto, and (h) sending Jack a royally pissed off email after she checks one of her dummy accounts and finds that the bastard has run away because he needs some bloody TIME, (i) crying and blaming it on hormones because Jack left her to deal with all of this, and (j) sucking it all up and going back to London to debrief Johnson and Dekker, since they seem to know what the hell happened.
Decker's an ass and disturbing and Gwen is revolted by the way his eyes light up when he tells about Jack realizing that he had no choice but to use Steven to hack into the frequency. She wants to open her purse and slit the liner and pull out her emergency Retcon and give Decker a large enough dose to send him back to primary school. Instead, she simply lets him know that she could and encourages him to go somewhere far, far away and to never try to contact anyone he knows ever again.
Agent Johnson is calm. Her report is detailed and accurate. She doesn't deny that she kept Steven's mother from the room, that she insisted Jack make the call to use him. Gwen... doesn't like her. Can't like her, really. She reports how the government followed Torchwood's movements, how she had planned for Patanjali to infiltrate the Hub, how and when her orders were altered. She explains that the government believes that Jack's immortality is tied to the Hub, somehow, and how that influenced their decision to destroy it. But Johnson, I think, is not someone to hide behind the idea that she was 'just following orders.' She has enough guts to change direction when she understands what's at stake-- CoE proves that-- so I have to think that she also has enough guts to take full responsibility for her actions, regardless or whether or not she was acting with unrestricted and accurate information.
So no, Gwen doesn't like her. But there's part of Gwen that admires her, because she can see some of the same uncompromising aspects of Jack in Johnson-- the things that make Jack an utter bastard, but also a bit of a hero. There is a type morality there: it's not an easy morality, but it's not likely to fold under pressure, either. So Gwen takes a deep breath and lets Torchwood settle around her, and tells Johnson there's a place for her, if she wants it.
(For the record, I don't think Johnson has a first name. Like, at all. So the debriefing starts like this:
"First name?" Gwen asks, her voice even.
"Johnson," she says.
"Of course," says Gwen. "I feel like I need to make a Madonna joke right about now.")
Johnson accepts the offer, and they get down to the business of rebuilding the world. Within twenty-four hours, Gwen's got Lois handling the research and legwork-- she's not Ianto, Gwen thinks, but she might be better on the phone than he was because she knows how to sound deferential and overwhelmed in a way that Ianto didn't. Andy's back in Cardiff, keeping an eye on the remnants of the Hub (gas leak! too dangerous to send in clean up crews just yet!) and the Rift (Gwen gives in and tells Andy just what's what, and he's kinda terrified and a lot excited that he gets to play with the cool kids), although what they're supposed to do if there's Rift activity just now, Gwen has no idea. Gwen and Rhys and Johnson and Lois spend a long night planning what to do with the footage, how to deal with the government, etc. They decide-- or rather, Gwen decides-- that they won't leak the footage.
Politically speaking, they don't need to: the media might spend six weeks covering the death of a pop star (breaking news: six weeks later, he's still dead!), but even they can't miss connecting the dots. 10% of the world's children -> kids from poorer/bad neighborhoods being dragged off by the military? There is no way that TPTB will be in P much longer. But that's not enough. Gwen won't let them spin the story and fade out under clouds of suspicious but no real accusations, so she and Johnson go to visit the Secretary of Defense. They inform her that she will give a statement to the press.
"We're giving you a sword," says Gwen. "You are going to fall on it, and be glad of the chance."
The S of D goes on television (Johnson glares at various PAs and Gwen threatens cabinet members with a released transcript of the meetings-- with names-- in order to ensure that the press conference gets air time), and gives a fifteen minute statement which Lois drafted and Gwen approved. She explains the basics: that the aliens were called the 456, and had been to Earth on one prior occasion-- and that they threatened to release a plague unless they got what they wanted. She explains that what they wanted was the children.
(And I've got this bit pretty much how I want it, although I need to go back and fiddle with tenses.)
"Ten percent," she says. "We were aware that the 456's request was... not benign. We were aware that their desire for our children was unpardonable and insupportable. We were also aware that, should we refuse compliance, the 456 would not hesitate to release a virus capable of eliminating the whole of the human race. Given the [some number here] deaths at Thames House, we had no choice but to believe them.
"We did, however, have a choice in the way we could have dealt with this information. We could have rejected the idea of sacrificing our children out of hand and shared our intelligence, hoping that someone could find a way to fight the 456. Someone eventually did, but without our help or support, and there is no possible manner in which we can ever hope to thank them, or to apologize for creating a situation in which such sacrifice was necessary. But instead of sharing our information, we surrendered. We planned for the worst instead of working to avoid it, and we lied to you about it. We did not mislead, or encourage misinterpretation: we did nothing so nuanced. We lied. We were elected to office to serve you, and we did not. We knowingly abused your trust, and we cannot ask for your forgiveness because such a thing is beyond forgiveness.
"But worst of all, we thought ourselves fit judges. We sat in a room, and we came up with lists of children who could be taken at the least expense to the nation. We were scientific and objective. We looked at demographics and poverty and education levels, and we identified ten percent of Britain's child population that would be... acceptable. We told ourselves that we had no choice, that it was the sacrifice of millions for the good of billions. But we lied even then, because we did not choose to put our own children or grandchildren on those lists.
"That your children were not ultimately taken by the 456 is of no matter. What matters is that we thought to make your choices for you, to take your very future and lie about it afterward. Don't forgive us for this. Don't forget this. And don't trust us again until we have earned it." The Secretary closes her eyes for a moment, and then adds, going off-script, "Personally, I don't see how we ever can."
(I like the way this flows, but I might need your help on this one. S of D is an appointed position, right? It is over here, anyway. Which means that her use of 'we' in reference to being elected to office is... rather more universal than strictly true. But then there's that bit in CoE where they pick the fall guy on the basis of his unelected status as a civil servant. Hmm.)
So that's how Gwen deals with the gov. She doesn't leak anything; she makes them leak it themselves. She doesn't organize a coup; she lets the public do that. Gwen's got other things to do now, and she's going home to Cardiff.
And that's how Gwen's first bit ends.
Moving on.
Jack I
This is going to be a lot of character analysis, I think. I don't intend for this section to be terribly long, in all honesty, because what I want to get across is (1) Jack's fucked up. (2) Jack has good reason to be fucked up. And (3) Jack doesn't need that fucking wrist strap to get off planet. (Did that bother you in CoE? It bugged me. What, he was relying on Gwen finding the strap amidst all the rubble of the Hub and bringing it to him just as the ship was overhead? I do not think so. I think Jack had another way to hail the ship. The strap was just a bonus.)
It won't be a very long section in part because I don't intend to have Jack interact with many people during it-- I get the feeling that Jack just can't handle the idea of any sort of emotional tie at the moment (he'll only fuck everything up, right?). I think this bit starts out like this,
***
Jack spent the first three months as alone and as far from Britain as Earth's geography allowed. He avoided cities all together, skirted towns whenever he could, and only stopped in villages long enough to check that his voice still worked. He didn't think about where he would go next; picking a destination implied desire, and Jack was too tired for that. He left his route up to strangers, sliding a bundle of water-stained maps across tables.
"If you could go anywhere," he said, "where would it be?"
Sometimes they willfully misunderstood, pointing him in the direction of the local sights: a backpacking trail to the waterfalls which was always good for a day-trip, they would tell him, or maybe the ruins at the base of the cliff face. But occassionally Jack found someone to take a long look at the stack of maps, unfold one, and look up.
"I'd go here," said a woman with braids. She slid her finger over the Himalayas and tapped one blue fingernail in the middle of the Taklamakan. "I'd like to see a proper desert, someday."
"Not a whole lot there," said Jack.
"It's a desert," she replied. "I think that's the point."
***
Anyway. Jack spends about three months in the far off corners, dying occasionally in mudslides and cholera epidemics. He misses Ianto's funeral, and doesn't let himself think about it. He's sure he's missed Steven's as well, but the thought makes him so sick he can't move. He stays away from television and radio and newspapers and doesn't check his email. He was telling the truth when he said he couldn't look at Gwen anymore: she was too much of everything he wanted, and he'd proven (over and over and over) that he couldn't be trusted with it. So he spends about two weeks in the Northwest Territories, repeatedly dying of hypothermia before some old guy finds him pulls him into a cabin, telling him that if he's going to be an inconsiderate bastard determined to kill himself, he can at least do it where it won't bother anyone else.
"Yeah," says Jack. "Yeah. I can do that."
He's got a plan now. He's going to get the fuck off Earth before he does any more damage (before it does any more damage to him, more like), and he needs transport. Jack decides his best bet is to hail a passing ship-- the only functional spaceships on Earth he can think of off the top of his head belong to the Americans, and he hasn't got enough pull to get his hands on one. And he's not counting on the Doctor saving his ass anytime soon. So. Jack needs (a) tech that will let him find a passing ship, (b) tech that will let him hail said ship, and (c) something valuable enough to act as payment for transport. He'd give up pretty much anything for his wrist strap right about now, but even if it wasn't incinerated in the blast (and it might not have been; those things were damn well made), Jack just doesn't have it in him to go back to Cardiff. He can't see the Hub in rubble, he can't see Gwen and know that he's responsible for fucking up her life, and he can't-- he can't go back there and not expect to see Ianto on every damn corner.
So he'll make do without the strap. He'll find something else. He was Torchwood for-- for a very long time, after all. And if it's alien, it's ours, right? Jack knows where to look for alien salvage.
Here's my take on the extent of Jack's grief: had it just been Ianto who died, he could have stayed. It would have been awful, but he probably could have made himself go back to Cardiff and at least say goodbye properly, maybe even start living his life again. After all, Jack's an expert on grief by this point-- he's had more lovers and friends and coworkers die than anyone ever should, and he's managed to move on before. But there was Ianto and then Steven-- and Jack simply cannot fathom what he was able to do. He gave away twelve children in the 60s, and he would do it again. And that horrifies him. Because now he knows that not only would he do it again, he can-- because he did. It wasn't just murder; it was self-mutilation. He did it to his own grandson, with his daughter looking on, and while part of him feels like it's hemorrhaging, the rest of him looks at the math and thinks, that was the right decision, and he cannot take it.
And Ianto-- he would have been angry at him for making that decision, he knows. He was appalled by the first sacrifice. Ashamed. Disappointed that Jack couldn't find another way. But what kills Jack-- or, rather, doesn't-- is that he knows that Ianto would have forgiven him, and understood, and still called him Captain and meant it. And that is unbearable, because that means that either (a) Ianto was a fool to trust him, or (b) Jack was meant to make such decisions. And Jack knows that Ianto was many things, but never a fool. Which means that Jack seems to be made to make the decisions that other people cannot bear to acknowledge.
Jack is immortal, yes, and a soldier. But he is unquestionably, ridiculously human. And he just doesn't want to be the Captain anymore.
Anyway. Jack finds what he needs, and heads back to Cardiff. Because he promised someone once that if he were going to leave Earth again, he could at least tell Torchwood, face to face.
Gwen II
If Jack doesn't want to be the Captain any more, Gwen is finding that she can force herself into his role-- not easily, perhaps, but she can do it.
This section starts out with Ianto's funeral-- Gwen thinks it's strange: Ianto was Torchwood, and he's getting a proper funeral. But the only reason that's happening is because there's really no Torchwood to take the body, now, and nowhere to store it. (I'd like to play a little with the idea of this being the funeral that Tosh and Owen never got, sort of a burial for Torchwood at large-- haven't worked out exactly how it'll play, yet.)
Ianto had very specific instructions regarding the treatment of his body-- Gwen thinks the papers were probably incinerated, but it doesn't matter because she was the co-signer on Ianto's updated file. He wanted cold storage at Torchwood and absolutely no cremation (although he specified that if Torchwood felt moved to provide some dummy ashes for his sister, he would appreciate it). But the Hub's in shambles, so there's no chance of giving him what he wanted, and Gwen feels awful about that.
(Side note: god. I'm going to have to find some way to address all the bodies in cold storage that'll be in the Hub's wreckage. Because otherwise it's going to look like Cardiff's had a nasty, nasty serial killer for, like, the past hundred and twenty years. Maybe the cold storage bit wasn't damaged? Just blocked off. Maybe it has a separate power source so that all those bodies don't start to decay.... I'm kinda thinking that maybe the lower levels of the Hub weren't as damaged, and that maybe they'll rebuild on the same site. What do you think? Or is Gwen the type to want something new and uncorrupted when she takes over?)
Anyway. Ianto's funeral is awkward, because Gwen has no idea who they're all talking about-- whoever it is, it isn't Ianto. She doesn't know the kid who got into fights during class breaks, and the bloke watching rugby down at the pub is a complete stranger. But she goes up to Rhiannon after, not sure whether to apologize or thank her or what.
(Ignore the tenses on this-- this is so rough I haven't transferred it to my other file yet.)
"It was all bollocks, wasn't it," Rhiannon doesn't ask. "My brother's fucking funeral, and I keep thinking, I didn't even know him."
Gwen doesn't say anything.
"This morning," Rhiannon continues, dull, "I thought, this is stupid. Ianto's boring. The most exciting thing about him is that he's shagging his boss, so how can he be dead? Fucking bastard told me he worked in an office and shuffled papers. But he had this whole secret life going on, and never told any of us. Torchwood," she says, and she sounds tired and annoyed and incredibly hurt and Gwen can't stand it.
"He wasn't lying, exactly." Gwen meets Rhiannon's incredulous look. "All right, yes. Yeah. He lied, but-- Ianto was general support, at first. Before I got there, even. He did shuffle papers. He did the archiving and logistics-- kept us on time and supplied. I think Jack had him work up the budget, even. He-- made the coffee. Things like that," she finished.
Rhiannon snorted, but she looked less betrayed. Maybe she recognized the Ianto who worked for a secret organization and made coffee.
"It was very good coffee," Gwen said fondly. "And after-- Ianto moved up to containment and field work after a while. He was good at it."
"Containment of what?" Rhiannon asked. "Or shouldn't I ask."
Gwen shrugged. "Bit stupid to pretend you couldn't guess at this point. Aliens. Information. Whatever needed to be contained."
Rhiannon closed her eyes, and Gwen thought, Fuck, that's it, that's the bit that's going to make her cry. But after a moment, Rhiannon's shoulders started to shake, and a laugh bubbled out of her.
"Shit," she said, laughing almost uncontrollably. "He got to be James Bond. With fucking aliens." She sniffed, and Gwen can see that she is crying, just a little. But they're the good sort of tears, the ones that leave you tired but somehow clean. "Well," she says, using her hand to wipe at her eyes, "that explains the suits, at least."
"He liked James Bond?" Gwen smiles. That's not something she knew about Ianto, but it's something that fits. That's good-- that her Ianto might have been Rhiannon's Ianto, too.
Rhiannon rolls her eyes, and for a moment Gwen can see Ianto in her face. "Dad liked James Bond. Ianto wanted to be him," she says. And then she sort of laughs a little and adds,"Or maybe shag him, god, I don't know."
Gwen snorts. "He got to do both, then."
Which of course leads to a really awkward conversation about Jack, and where the hell is he? Very tasteless to miss out on your boyfriend's funeral, Rhiannon thinks. And Gwen doesn't have a lot to say to defend him, mainly because any further explanations are Very Complicated and Jackish, and would require Jack's permission to tell. But the end result of all this talky stuff is that (a) Gwen gets to close a book properly for once, and (b) feels like she can start to take on the rest of her job.
So then we move on to clean up: working on setting up a semi-permanent base, calling in some favors with UNIT (also, blackmail/Martha's help) to get the Hub secured and begin reconstruction, looking for techs and medics and figuring how to handle the Rift without (a) the Mainframe or (b) Jack. This is going to be a kind of transition section-- I'll pick up the pace here and maybe miss a few months. Gwen finds the metal remains of Jack's wrist strap during this period, and has Rhys find her a shop to make a new leather cuff. They find out the baby's a girl, and buy the house Rhys had been looking at the day the 456 showed up. Life moves on, and Gwen is getting used to Jack not being there-- although she's very quietly certain that, one day, when she goes in to work, Jack'll just be waiting for her.
So when she gets Jack's email, she does a silly little dance around the living room. (That's not what they call it in the UK, is it. Shit. Salon? Something like that. Must look it up.) Jack's email is as follows:
Gwen:
Need to see you. Tomorrow night at eleven, at the place where Tosh found the puzzle box. You should bring Rhys with you.
Jack
Gwen's not stupid. She knows that Jack's email isn't precisely-- upbeat. But she really thinks that she can convince him to come back. She wants to show him the temporary Hub, wants Lois to meet him. (She's not as sure that she wants to see Jack's face when he realizes she's hired Johnson, but. She'll cross that bridge when she comes to it.) She doesn't like the idea of Jack alone, because Jack broods like no one's business. And she wants Jack to see the baby, for some bizarre reason. She wants Jack to know that they all go on, after a fashion. It might even be good for Jack to go see-- where Ianto's buried. That might not be a bad thing.
Of course, nothing works out the way Gwen would like it to.
Jack II
This picks up maybe five minutes after the end of CoE, with Jack on the ship. And this is also where things get a bit tricky, so I'm not quite sure what I'm doing here, yet. Basically, this is a continuation of the Jack Is Fucked Up thesis, with a side dish of Jack Is Alienated (ah ha ha ha literally) for flavor. I think Jack's aware that he's pretty fucked up (this would be the impetus for leaving Earth), and he's trying to fix himself. Unfortunately, he's trying to fix himself by ignoring everything that's wrong, which is only compounding matters.
Plotwise: Jack's onboard ship for about three weeks, working for his passage and trying to figure out where to go next. Since losing himself in big empty spaces didn't really work on Earth, he decides maybe he needs to submerge himself in noise instead. So he disembarks on a hive trading planet (insectoid-ish aliens as dominant species, haven't really figured out their physiology or society yet)-- something enormous and buzzing and completely unrecognizable from Earth. Jack pulls a couple cons to set himself up in a comfortable cell, sells off the last of the of his salvage, and goes out on the town. After all, this planet's got a nice alcohol equivalent and plenty of bodies to fight and fuck. Why the hell not.
(Jack's regressing. Just a leetle bit.)
But it's not really helping. In fact, Jack-- if Jack were capable of looking at himself objectively, he'd say he was doing worse than he had been on Earth. Jack doesn't need to sleep all that often, but he does need to sleep at some point. And every time he manages to drift off, he has these dreams. They're not nightmares, but he almost wishes they were. They're-- sweet. Mainly, he dreams about someone reaching out and grabbing hold of his wrist. Their hand is warm and solid and Jack feels anchored in a way he hasn't for-- a very long time. And they're trying to talk to him. Jack can see his-- their-- Ianto's mouth moving, and his face looks serious and concerned, but Jack just can't hear him. But in the dream, Jack doesn't even care. He just looks and looks and tries to keep from waking up, because as long as he's asleep, he's got Ianto beside him. And Ianto knows who he is, and loves him anyway.
Jack doesn't usually remember his dreams, but these-- he remembers. And they're driving him mad, because he left Earth to forget and these ridiculous dreams won't let him. After a particularly bad night (don't know what the catalyst is, just yet), Jack comes back to his cell and thinks, right, so maybe I can't die. I can still kill off Captain Jack Harkness. And he takes his coat and balls it up and throws it into the cell's wall-mounted incinerator. He stands there and watches it burn for a few moments, and then starts stripping off his shirt and braces and trousers and underwear-- he'd still been wearing his Earth-style clothing-- and throws them in after.
So he's standing in his cell, naked except for his wrist strap, and he's-- not precisely sober or rational, and he unclasps the strap. And he's not sure why he does it (except that the strap wraps around his wrist in the same spot that Ianto's hand does in his dream), but he turns and hurls it towards the open incinerator from across the room. He misses. The strap glances off the lip of the incinerator, and falls to the floor. But as it hits, it must jar something loose, or depress a button, or something-- because the strap beeps.
Jack has a voicemail. And while he doesn't really give a damn about checking his voicemails right now, Jack walks across the room and picks up the wrist strap and pushes a button.
"Oh, thank christ," says a voice. Jack drops the strap like it bit him and backs away.
"Oh fuck," he says, and sits down on the pallet in the corner. "Please tell me that's not you," he says. "Please tell me I'm just going crazy."
There's a humming noise, and then a faint bluish light begins to emanate from the strap. The resulting image is blurry, but there's no mistaking who the figure is-- it's Ianto Jones, suit and all.
Jack is sickly pale. "Oh fuck," he says again, and he sounds like he might be sick. "Oh fuck, Ianto, what did you do?"
And then we go off to Ianto's POV!
(FWIW, I'm fairly convinced that Jack's going to be horrified by Ianto's little cheating death manuver for a while. After all, he's not had good experiences with people hiding their consciousness inside inanimate objects.)
Ianto I
Okay, this first bit is basically just a bunch of notes on (a) how Ianto winds up in Jack's wrist strap, and (b) why he does it. So only a little bit of this will actually be explained fully in the final text, but I just need to make sure that my rationale isn't completely looney.
This relies on some plot and characterization from Adam to the End of Days, and then skips to the end of CoE Day Four. A lot of the internal motivation and such that I've sketched out here won't necessarily live in this part-- it'll show up later. But I need to get it down so that the plot makes sense while I'm figuring stuff out.
Ianto's still dead at the end of CoE-- I'm not messing with that. But I do think that he had a trick or two up his sleeve. I think Ianto was puzzled by death-- not in any especially creepy suicidal sort of way, but-- I think he viewed it as a problem to be solved. Death was... inconvenient. I think it bothered him that he had ample evidence that there was nothing afterward-- he was clearly reluctant to give Lisa over into that nothing.
Part of that was love, I think. But I think another part of that was a reflection of self: Lisa was important. She was special. She was everything, I think, that Ianto Jones felt he wasn't. And so for her to slip into nothing could only mean that he would, too. Thus, the girlfriend in the coma-slash-cyberconversion unit routine. I think Ianto stabilizes a little after her death-- he's a little more awesome, and he knows it. And Jack clearly fancies him, so there must be something good in him.
But again, I think it also bothered him more than he was able to explain that Jack had to go into that nothing over and over again-- and come back alone. Ianto can't imagine anything worse. Well, maybe spending the rest of forever locked up in Torchwood's cold storage might be worse. So he thinks about it-- ways to avoid that forever nothing. But after Lisa and Suzie (and Owen, the first time), Ianto would know better than to try to come up with some way to physically cheat death.
So I think Ianto starts to think of other ways to work around death: he starts keeping a journal and plans to leave it somewhere for Jack to find after he dies. Nothing terribly morbid, just some sort of permanent personal record to prove his existence. After all, if Jack remembers him, Ianto won't be completely gone, which is a comfortable thought. But then there's Adam, and Ianto has a mostly blank page in his journal with the words, "Don't try to remember this," written on it, and it seems they've all lost two days. And Ianto isn't going to push-- that would be stupidity beyond belief-- but he finally realizes that he can't count on Jack's memory as his means of immortality. Jack can't die, but he is human, and with a human memory. Retcon could wipe Ianto away in a blink, and even without it, a few hundred years would be more than enough to blur the memory, even with a journal for reference.
It's the aftermath of End of Days. Tosh and Owen die, for real. And Ianto takes on the task of going through their personal effects and cataloging them. It's... unpleasant to look at the boxes of detritus and realize that this is it, this is the sum total of two people. And Ianto's hardly a fool. He understands that he's unlikely to ever collect a pension, and he's-- well, he's not okay with it, but he can't imagine doing anything else with his life, which must mean that he is okay with it. So he catalogs the bits of Tosh and Owen's lives, and works on compiling their notes into the Hub's database. Tosh's language algorithm isn't finished, but it's beautiful, and Ianto wishes she could have published her work and got the credit she deserved. Owen's work is blunt and fragmented and brilliant, and he'd been messing with a tiny bronze square a little smaller than a postage stamp. It's in a little black case, and there's a tag on the front: L-MEM 965. Underneath, Owen had scribbled Consciousness transfer?
Turns out Owen had been looking into a way of possibly moving his consciousness from his (dead) body into-- well. He hadn't got that far, evidently. Either moving his consciousness to the Mainframe or to another (living) body, is what Ianto thinks were the two options. But Owen hadn't really pursued either, possibly because his notes on the bronze square indicate that it has to be implanted into living tissue, which would leave Owen out of the running. (Also, I'm going to assume that Owen would have had Great Big Doctor Issues with the idea of placing his consciousness into someone else's living body. First do no harm and all. And I think Owen was too-- earthy sounds strange, but I'm sticking with it-- to seriously consider tech as a substitute for flesh. Ianto, on the other hand, is not.)
I'm thinking that the square is first synced with a given receptacle-- a body, hard drive, whatever. Not really sure how the sync is achieved, but whatever. Then it is implanted subcutaneously at the base of the skull, eventually breaking down into something like nanogenes which then proceed to map out neural processes. While the subject is alive, the nanogenes register the brain's electrical impulses, learning to mimic the thought processes and, eventually, the consciousness of the subject. When the subject dies, however, the electrical impulses feeding the nanogenes cease, and the nanogenes begin to broadcast a transmission signal. The learned consciousness then settles into the chosen receptacle and remains until (a) the new body dies without transferring the consciousness or (b) the consciousness is wiped from whatever hard drive it's residing in.
Anyway. That's my work-around. I don't plan to get that technical in this section, honestly. I'll make reference to it, but only to set it up for Jack II. Ianto's still dead. He's just... transferred himself.
To Jack's wrist strap.
Dun dun DUNNNNNNN.
Ianto steals it and syncs the transfer while Jack's conked out after sex, and Jack doesn't cotton on. (See first section!)
He thought for a while about using the Mainframe (or rather, I had to come up with some reason why he didn't use the Mainframe, because it's a lot more obvious and sensible), but I'm going to go with the idea that Ianto's ultimate loyalty isn't to Torchwood: it's to Jack. And Ianto's bright enough to understand that while Jack might stick around on Earth for a few centuries more because he feels a duty to protect the place and people he cares about-- he's not going to be there forever. So if Jack is Ianto's form of immortality, and if Ianto can be of use to Jack (tangent: I know it's played out, but I really think Ianto can't stand the idea of Jack being alone, because Ianto can't stand the idea of being alone forever), then some sort of tech that Ianto knows Jack will likely always have is what he's going to choose to be the recepticle. Thus, wrist strap.
Which is lucky! Because Johnson and her crew blow up the Hub and destroy the Mainframe! But Ianto is pretty sure that Jack's wrist strap is history, because-- dude. Jack's in pieces, the Hub's a crater, and it would really be his luck to have all his hard work destroyed while the government's trying to hunt him down and kill him. So when Ianto dies in Thames House, he's pretty sure that's it-- game over. So he breaks fandom's collective heart and asks Jack to remember him, etc. Let the sobbing commence.
But! The wrist strap seems to be, like, completely indestructible-- except for when the batteries crap out like they did to leave Jack stranded in the 1890s?-- ignoring that-- and Ianto's transfer is successful. He's just-- turned off until Jack accesses the strap's memory again. (For the record: Data!Ianto is living in Jack's voice mail system. So he can do tasteless Princess Leia-slash-John Hart impressions later on.) But it'll be a while until anyone figures this out, of course, because (a) Gwen has to find the strap in all the rubble and (b) Jack's off brooding for months on end and (c) the stupid explosion knocked a cog loose or something (I like the idea of Jack's uber-futuristic gizmo having little jewel precision gears), and so Ianto is sort of... stuck.
Until Jack throws the strap against the wall, knocking the whatever-it-is loose, which allows Ianto to finally initiate contact.
Which takes us back to the end of the last Jack section. And this is... really as far as I've gotten in terms of explicitly planning things out....
And then, things were evidently going to happen, but I can't remember what.
Maybe you have some ideas? Feel free to share them with me in the comments. :D
(does a word count)
Well, shit.
This is nine thousand fucking words worth of a post-Children of Earth Torchwood story outline, where I try to fix the whole Ianto thing without retconning the world. It's an epistolary stream-of-conscious blathery outline thing, people. Nine thousand words of this shit! What the hell was I thinking? And it has been staring angrily at me from my Google docs for, like, almost two years.
I think it is time for me to release it out into the wild, and let it roam free. (And hopefully it will not return and bite me on the ass.)
So I give you:
Anti-story for Torchwood, possibly called "There is a solitude of sky."
by SomeInstant's involuntary fannish instinct to fix the ending of Children of Earth
Rating: R, because I swear a lot. Also, because I didn't write many actual scenes, but one I did write is a sex scene. I have no idea how that happened.
Pairing: Jack/Ianto. DEATH CANNOT STOP IT.
Word Count: 9,000. I wrote 9k words about how I was going to write a story. Am moron.
Summary: This is how I plot out stories. It is ridiculously inefficient, and I am ashamed. Also, there's something about Ianto being stuck in a wrist strap.
Apologies for the stream-of-consciousness style and ridiculously long outline-- this is pretty much how I plan out any story. I'm not very good with a short little synopsis, because I need to babble to figure out plot points. Anyway. The title of this one is going to come from an Emily Dickinson poem, which I found to be remarkably apt:
XXV.
There is a solitude of space,
A solitude of sea,
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to itself:
Finite Infinity.
I'm thinking it's either There is a solitude of space or That profounder site. I'm leaning towards the first, but I'll reevaluate once the damn thing's actually written.
Basically, this is a story about each member of Torchwood in the aftermath of CoE. If it's a little more about Ianto at the end than anyone else, that's because he's going to be the bridge. So if you want to be metaphorical about it, each person gets their own particular solitude: Jack's is space, and Ianto's is death, and Gwen's is sea. (Sea's a stretch, because it really should be Earth-- but. Cardiff's near the sea, so that'll work for me.) Each individual story line breaks up into roughly three parts....
Anyway. Here's how the first bit goes.
Ianto I
Actually, I've got this pretty much written, so here's the rough draft:
***
"That," Jack panted, his mouth hot against Ianto's ear, "was not half bad."
Ianto rolled his eyes and moved with some reluctance to unstick himself from where he had collapsed on Jack's chest. "Glad you thought so, sir," he said. Attempting to sound as though the top of his head hadn't been blown off, he added, "Not exactly inventive, but with a bit more practice I think we might achieve satisfactory levels."
"Hey, now, don't knock the basics," Jack said, propping himself up on his elbows to survey the damage. There was a pillow on top of Ianto's dresser and the fitted sheet was ripped down the middle where Jack's wrist strap had caught. God only knew where the rest of the bedclothes were, but Ianto's waistcoat had somehow ended up dangling from the curtain rod. "I like the basics. The advanced stuff is good, too, don't get me wrong, bells and whistles can be fun--"
"I hope those are figurative bells and whistles," Ianto interrupted. "Mrs. Beades already has me on her black list."
Jack narrowed his eyes. "Stop being so Welsh when I'm talking about sex," he said.
"I'll try, sir." Ianto didn't bother pointing out that he might as well be English if he followed Jack's instructions to the letter.
"Like I said," Jack continued, letting his head fall back onto the remaining pillow, "while I like the bells and whistles, a thorough understanding of the basics is downright critical if we plan to progress."
Ianto raised a hand in concession. "Right you are," he agreed. "Foundational studies can be very beneficial. Like scales on the piano."
"Exactly," Jack said, poking Ianto's shoulder. "I'm glad you understand. We'd have to be pretty dedicated about practicing, though. We wouldn't want to plateau off at not half bad."
Ianto shook his head, mute. It was sometimes difficult to think of anything to say that wasn't appallingly sentimental while looking over the long naked stretch of Jack spread across his mattress: all that dizzying warmth directed at him. It was possible, Ianto reflected, even probable, that more there were more gorgeous individuals out in some nebulous and unexplored part of the universe. Ianto was relatively confident, however, he was unlikely to discover said individuals conveniently sprawled over his partially denuded bed. And even if he did, Ianto was absolutely certain they couldn't make his heart clench in the same way Jack Harkness did.
Jack was-- singular. He was the exception to every rule, and Ianto could not imagine wanting anything else.
He cleared his throat. "I don't think," Ianto said in a low voice, "that dedication will be a problem for me."
"Good," Jack said, and reached out to pull him down.
Ianto let himself drift for a moment, and then put a hand against Jack's chest. "Take the damn wrist strap off first, sir," he said. "I'm not having you tear the mattress, too. It's got sentimental value."
"Does it?" Jack asked, fiddling with the clasp. He frowned down at the leather band once it was off, poking at the sharp exposed end of a dial. "I should fix that one of these days."
"I'd appreciate it," Ianto said. "It's been scratching at inopportune moments." Jack leered and tossed the band onto Ianto's bedside table.
"So tell me about this mattress," Jack said, settling a hand on Ianto's hip and tugging. "What's so special about it?"
This time, Ianto let himself fall into Jack's gravitational field without protest. "Well," he said, looking thoughtful, "I had a foursome on it, once."
"You have no idea how much I wish that were true," Jack laughed. "It's not, though. But I can pretend to believe you if you wanted to make something up. Go right ahead."
"I can't lie to you about sex, can I," Ianto complained. "You always know. It's very annoying."
"Sorry." Jack licked his ear in apology. "Lying and sex-- I've been doing both for a very long time. They're sort of areas of expertise at this point. But back to that sentimental value thing?"
Ianto let his hand slide along Jack's thigh. "I've slept well in this bed, I suppose," he said blandly. "Good sleep is important."
"Ianto."
He bit Jack's shoulder. "I shagged my first time-traveler from the fifty-first century on this mattress," he said, feeling Jack arch up against him. "The sex was good, but the arsehole kept fishing for compliments after."
Jack laughed, and suddenly the world was upside down. "You're a such a liar, Ianto Jones," he said, and settled between his legs.
"I'm fairly certain you were present for the occasion, sir," Ianto murmured deferentially, resting his hands just above the curve of Jack's arse. Jack hummed, contented. "There was a significant amount of yelling, and it did sound like your voice."
"First of all," Jack said, and kissed him. "Sorry," he said, coming up for air. "Got distracted. Your mouth is inconvenient that way. First of all," Jack tried again, "I do not fish for compliments." Ianto opened his mouth to protest. "I don't fish," Jack repeated. "I ask outright."
"Fair enough," Ianto conceded.
"Second point." Jack braced his arms on either side of Ianto's head and leaned in close. "I object to your choice of descriptors. I'm not your first time-traveler from the fifty-first century," he said, his lips brushing Ianto's cheek. "I'm your only. I'm going to be your only."
Ianto stilled. "Bit presumptuous," he offered, trying to gauge the expression behind Jack's eyes.
"Yeah," agreed Jack. "It is." He licked his lips. "Is that all right with you?"
Ianto nodded. "Yeah," he said, thickly. "Yeah, okay. Presume away."
***
Okay. Things that I was going for in that section: (1) Ianto and Jack's weird little emotional dynamic, In spades, and in character too. (2) OH HAI IMPLICATIONS OF SECKS (because that's going to be hard to come by later on), (3) a relatively non-fraught tone (again, for contrast with the rest of the story), (4) HEY DID YOU NOTICE THAT JACK TOOK OFF THE WRIST STRAP? Because that's, like, important. Sneaky Ianto is sneaky. I had to come up with a way for Ianto to get a hold of it, somehow, and I thought: Jack never takes the damn thing off. It's not like he leaves it on the bedside table or something while... he... sleeps... oh!
Anyway. There's that brief little Ianto POV section, and it's meant to feel inconsequential. If I've done the thing right, hopefully the wrist strap won't be too memorable-- until later on in the story.
(Honestly, the way I think about this scene is like-- that little opening bit in a movie, just the first minute and a half before the title appears on screen. If I were going to be a complete douche about it, I wouldn't actually put the title of the story up until after this little blurb. But that seems like a ridiculous thing to do. So.)
Gwen I
Gwen's really where this thing starts, and she's basically the anchor for the whole story. I've got bits and pieces of this section written, but it's going to take a while to get it all hammered out, I think-- there's lots of explaining to do and I hate big long sections of exposition. So this is really where I have to come up with ways to show the explanation, rather than tell it. Anyway, here's what Gwen's up to:
She's on her own to deal with the aftermath of the 456: has to figure out what the fuck to do about the footage she has, how to manage a government that's so badly betrayed pretty much everyone on Earth, has to figure out if Torchwood 3 even exists anymore-- and, if it does exist, what to do about (a) securing the Hub, (b) staffing the place, and (c) Jack disappearing again (at least he sends an email this time?).
And also, she's pregnant and morning sickness is even less fun than the telly makes it sound. And Ianto's dead, so there's no one who really gets where she's coming from. Rhys is a love, and he understands more now than he did before the 456, but Ianto would have brought her a mug of coffee with a good slug of whiskey and she would have tried to sound upbeat and sure that Jack would come back, and Ianto would have pretended that he was just fine, thanks, and that he wasn't pining away, and somehow not-talking about it would have helped. But she's pregnant, so the whiskey's out, and Ianto's dead, so the not-talking's not going to happen either. And. Fuck. Gwen hates funerals.
Here's what I think: I think this is where Gwen grows up a little. She's been in command before, yeah-- but that was with a team, and she still got to be the human side, the forgiving side of Torchwood while Jack was gone. Ianto was efficient, Tosh was clinical, Owen was a bastard, and Gwen got to be the heart. But this time, there's not really anyone else to do the hard stuff, to be suspicious and uncompromising. There's Agent Johnson, but Gwen's unsure of her-- given that she blew up the fucking Hub and encased Jack in cement. That's... a rather hard thing to overcome. Andy might be useful in the short-term, but Gwen keeps looking at him and thinking, this can only end in Retcon. And Lois is wonderful-- she's smart and she's competent and at any other time, she'd be hired on in half a second, but. She's just so young and so wide-eyed (and her efficiency reminds Gwen of Ianto and that hurts). Gwen has no doubts about her bravery, but she's not sure that Lois has got the necessary initiative for Torchwood: that stupid jump first, think about the cliff later attitude that Torchwood seems to require.
Anyway. Gwen grows up.
She spends the first thirteen hours after the 456 disappear alternately (a) yelling at most of London over the phone, (b) waiting for Jack to show up and make things right, (c) crashed out asleep against Rhys' shoulder, (d) promising Rhiannon and Johnny that she can make all this right and being absolutely certain that she never can, (e) pulling seventeen separate strings to get Lois released from confinement, (f) forcing the gov. to fucking unfreeze her account so that she can fucking buy a sandwich because she is pregnant and hungry, (g) feeling sick because she keeps looking around for Ianto, and (h) sending Jack a royally pissed off email after she checks one of her dummy accounts and finds that the bastard has run away because he needs some bloody TIME, (i) crying and blaming it on hormones because Jack left her to deal with all of this, and (j) sucking it all up and going back to London to debrief Johnson and Dekker, since they seem to know what the hell happened.
Decker's an ass and disturbing and Gwen is revolted by the way his eyes light up when he tells about Jack realizing that he had no choice but to use Steven to hack into the frequency. She wants to open her purse and slit the liner and pull out her emergency Retcon and give Decker a large enough dose to send him back to primary school. Instead, she simply lets him know that she could and encourages him to go somewhere far, far away and to never try to contact anyone he knows ever again.
Agent Johnson is calm. Her report is detailed and accurate. She doesn't deny that she kept Steven's mother from the room, that she insisted Jack make the call to use him. Gwen... doesn't like her. Can't like her, really. She reports how the government followed Torchwood's movements, how she had planned for Patanjali to infiltrate the Hub, how and when her orders were altered. She explains that the government believes that Jack's immortality is tied to the Hub, somehow, and how that influenced their decision to destroy it. But Johnson, I think, is not someone to hide behind the idea that she was 'just following orders.' She has enough guts to change direction when she understands what's at stake-- CoE proves that-- so I have to think that she also has enough guts to take full responsibility for her actions, regardless or whether or not she was acting with unrestricted and accurate information.
So no, Gwen doesn't like her. But there's part of Gwen that admires her, because she can see some of the same uncompromising aspects of Jack in Johnson-- the things that make Jack an utter bastard, but also a bit of a hero. There is a type morality there: it's not an easy morality, but it's not likely to fold under pressure, either. So Gwen takes a deep breath and lets Torchwood settle around her, and tells Johnson there's a place for her, if she wants it.
(For the record, I don't think Johnson has a first name. Like, at all. So the debriefing starts like this:
"First name?" Gwen asks, her voice even.
"Johnson," she says.
"Of course," says Gwen. "I feel like I need to make a Madonna joke right about now.")
Johnson accepts the offer, and they get down to the business of rebuilding the world. Within twenty-four hours, Gwen's got Lois handling the research and legwork-- she's not Ianto, Gwen thinks, but she might be better on the phone than he was because she knows how to sound deferential and overwhelmed in a way that Ianto didn't. Andy's back in Cardiff, keeping an eye on the remnants of the Hub (gas leak! too dangerous to send in clean up crews just yet!) and the Rift (Gwen gives in and tells Andy just what's what, and he's kinda terrified and a lot excited that he gets to play with the cool kids), although what they're supposed to do if there's Rift activity just now, Gwen has no idea. Gwen and Rhys and Johnson and Lois spend a long night planning what to do with the footage, how to deal with the government, etc. They decide-- or rather, Gwen decides-- that they won't leak the footage.
Politically speaking, they don't need to: the media might spend six weeks covering the death of a pop star (breaking news: six weeks later, he's still dead!), but even they can't miss connecting the dots. 10% of the world's children -> kids from poorer/bad neighborhoods being dragged off by the military? There is no way that TPTB will be in P much longer. But that's not enough. Gwen won't let them spin the story and fade out under clouds of suspicious but no real accusations, so she and Johnson go to visit the Secretary of Defense. They inform her that she will give a statement to the press.
"We're giving you a sword," says Gwen. "You are going to fall on it, and be glad of the chance."
The S of D goes on television (Johnson glares at various PAs and Gwen threatens cabinet members with a released transcript of the meetings-- with names-- in order to ensure that the press conference gets air time), and gives a fifteen minute statement which Lois drafted and Gwen approved. She explains the basics: that the aliens were called the 456, and had been to Earth on one prior occasion-- and that they threatened to release a plague unless they got what they wanted. She explains that what they wanted was the children.
(And I've got this bit pretty much how I want it, although I need to go back and fiddle with tenses.)
"Ten percent," she says. "We were aware that the 456's request was... not benign. We were aware that their desire for our children was unpardonable and insupportable. We were also aware that, should we refuse compliance, the 456 would not hesitate to release a virus capable of eliminating the whole of the human race. Given the [some number here] deaths at Thames House, we had no choice but to believe them.
"We did, however, have a choice in the way we could have dealt with this information. We could have rejected the idea of sacrificing our children out of hand and shared our intelligence, hoping that someone could find a way to fight the 456. Someone eventually did, but without our help or support, and there is no possible manner in which we can ever hope to thank them, or to apologize for creating a situation in which such sacrifice was necessary. But instead of sharing our information, we surrendered. We planned for the worst instead of working to avoid it, and we lied to you about it. We did not mislead, or encourage misinterpretation: we did nothing so nuanced. We lied. We were elected to office to serve you, and we did not. We knowingly abused your trust, and we cannot ask for your forgiveness because such a thing is beyond forgiveness.
"But worst of all, we thought ourselves fit judges. We sat in a room, and we came up with lists of children who could be taken at the least expense to the nation. We were scientific and objective. We looked at demographics and poverty and education levels, and we identified ten percent of Britain's child population that would be... acceptable. We told ourselves that we had no choice, that it was the sacrifice of millions for the good of billions. But we lied even then, because we did not choose to put our own children or grandchildren on those lists.
"That your children were not ultimately taken by the 456 is of no matter. What matters is that we thought to make your choices for you, to take your very future and lie about it afterward. Don't forgive us for this. Don't forget this. And don't trust us again until we have earned it." The Secretary closes her eyes for a moment, and then adds, going off-script, "Personally, I don't see how we ever can."
(I like the way this flows, but I might need your help on this one. S of D is an appointed position, right? It is over here, anyway. Which means that her use of 'we' in reference to being elected to office is... rather more universal than strictly true. But then there's that bit in CoE where they pick the fall guy on the basis of his unelected status as a civil servant. Hmm.)
So that's how Gwen deals with the gov. She doesn't leak anything; she makes them leak it themselves. She doesn't organize a coup; she lets the public do that. Gwen's got other things to do now, and she's going home to Cardiff.
And that's how Gwen's first bit ends.
Moving on.
Jack I
This is going to be a lot of character analysis, I think. I don't intend for this section to be terribly long, in all honesty, because what I want to get across is (1) Jack's fucked up. (2) Jack has good reason to be fucked up. And (3) Jack doesn't need that fucking wrist strap to get off planet. (Did that bother you in CoE? It bugged me. What, he was relying on Gwen finding the strap amidst all the rubble of the Hub and bringing it to him just as the ship was overhead? I do not think so. I think Jack had another way to hail the ship. The strap was just a bonus.)
It won't be a very long section in part because I don't intend to have Jack interact with many people during it-- I get the feeling that Jack just can't handle the idea of any sort of emotional tie at the moment (he'll only fuck everything up, right?). I think this bit starts out like this,
***
Jack spent the first three months as alone and as far from Britain as Earth's geography allowed. He avoided cities all together, skirted towns whenever he could, and only stopped in villages long enough to check that his voice still worked. He didn't think about where he would go next; picking a destination implied desire, and Jack was too tired for that. He left his route up to strangers, sliding a bundle of water-stained maps across tables.
"If you could go anywhere," he said, "where would it be?"
Sometimes they willfully misunderstood, pointing him in the direction of the local sights: a backpacking trail to the waterfalls which was always good for a day-trip, they would tell him, or maybe the ruins at the base of the cliff face. But occassionally Jack found someone to take a long look at the stack of maps, unfold one, and look up.
"I'd go here," said a woman with braids. She slid her finger over the Himalayas and tapped one blue fingernail in the middle of the Taklamakan. "I'd like to see a proper desert, someday."
"Not a whole lot there," said Jack.
"It's a desert," she replied. "I think that's the point."
***
Anyway. Jack spends about three months in the far off corners, dying occasionally in mudslides and cholera epidemics. He misses Ianto's funeral, and doesn't let himself think about it. He's sure he's missed Steven's as well, but the thought makes him so sick he can't move. He stays away from television and radio and newspapers and doesn't check his email. He was telling the truth when he said he couldn't look at Gwen anymore: she was too much of everything he wanted, and he'd proven (over and over and over) that he couldn't be trusted with it. So he spends about two weeks in the Northwest Territories, repeatedly dying of hypothermia before some old guy finds him pulls him into a cabin, telling him that if he's going to be an inconsiderate bastard determined to kill himself, he can at least do it where it won't bother anyone else.
"Yeah," says Jack. "Yeah. I can do that."
He's got a plan now. He's going to get the fuck off Earth before he does any more damage (before it does any more damage to him, more like), and he needs transport. Jack decides his best bet is to hail a passing ship-- the only functional spaceships on Earth he can think of off the top of his head belong to the Americans, and he hasn't got enough pull to get his hands on one. And he's not counting on the Doctor saving his ass anytime soon. So. Jack needs (a) tech that will let him find a passing ship, (b) tech that will let him hail said ship, and (c) something valuable enough to act as payment for transport. He'd give up pretty much anything for his wrist strap right about now, but even if it wasn't incinerated in the blast (and it might not have been; those things were damn well made), Jack just doesn't have it in him to go back to Cardiff. He can't see the Hub in rubble, he can't see Gwen and know that he's responsible for fucking up her life, and he can't-- he can't go back there and not expect to see Ianto on every damn corner.
So he'll make do without the strap. He'll find something else. He was Torchwood for-- for a very long time, after all. And if it's alien, it's ours, right? Jack knows where to look for alien salvage.
Here's my take on the extent of Jack's grief: had it just been Ianto who died, he could have stayed. It would have been awful, but he probably could have made himself go back to Cardiff and at least say goodbye properly, maybe even start living his life again. After all, Jack's an expert on grief by this point-- he's had more lovers and friends and coworkers die than anyone ever should, and he's managed to move on before. But there was Ianto and then Steven-- and Jack simply cannot fathom what he was able to do. He gave away twelve children in the 60s, and he would do it again. And that horrifies him. Because now he knows that not only would he do it again, he can-- because he did. It wasn't just murder; it was self-mutilation. He did it to his own grandson, with his daughter looking on, and while part of him feels like it's hemorrhaging, the rest of him looks at the math and thinks, that was the right decision, and he cannot take it.
And Ianto-- he would have been angry at him for making that decision, he knows. He was appalled by the first sacrifice. Ashamed. Disappointed that Jack couldn't find another way. But what kills Jack-- or, rather, doesn't-- is that he knows that Ianto would have forgiven him, and understood, and still called him Captain and meant it. And that is unbearable, because that means that either (a) Ianto was a fool to trust him, or (b) Jack was meant to make such decisions. And Jack knows that Ianto was many things, but never a fool. Which means that Jack seems to be made to make the decisions that other people cannot bear to acknowledge.
Jack is immortal, yes, and a soldier. But he is unquestionably, ridiculously human. And he just doesn't want to be the Captain anymore.
Anyway. Jack finds what he needs, and heads back to Cardiff. Because he promised someone once that if he were going to leave Earth again, he could at least tell Torchwood, face to face.
Gwen II
If Jack doesn't want to be the Captain any more, Gwen is finding that she can force herself into his role-- not easily, perhaps, but she can do it.
This section starts out with Ianto's funeral-- Gwen thinks it's strange: Ianto was Torchwood, and he's getting a proper funeral. But the only reason that's happening is because there's really no Torchwood to take the body, now, and nowhere to store it. (I'd like to play a little with the idea of this being the funeral that Tosh and Owen never got, sort of a burial for Torchwood at large-- haven't worked out exactly how it'll play, yet.)
Ianto had very specific instructions regarding the treatment of his body-- Gwen thinks the papers were probably incinerated, but it doesn't matter because she was the co-signer on Ianto's updated file. He wanted cold storage at Torchwood and absolutely no cremation (although he specified that if Torchwood felt moved to provide some dummy ashes for his sister, he would appreciate it). But the Hub's in shambles, so there's no chance of giving him what he wanted, and Gwen feels awful about that.
(Side note: god. I'm going to have to find some way to address all the bodies in cold storage that'll be in the Hub's wreckage. Because otherwise it's going to look like Cardiff's had a nasty, nasty serial killer for, like, the past hundred and twenty years. Maybe the cold storage bit wasn't damaged? Just blocked off. Maybe it has a separate power source so that all those bodies don't start to decay.... I'm kinda thinking that maybe the lower levels of the Hub weren't as damaged, and that maybe they'll rebuild on the same site. What do you think? Or is Gwen the type to want something new and uncorrupted when she takes over?)
Anyway. Ianto's funeral is awkward, because Gwen has no idea who they're all talking about-- whoever it is, it isn't Ianto. She doesn't know the kid who got into fights during class breaks, and the bloke watching rugby down at the pub is a complete stranger. But she goes up to Rhiannon after, not sure whether to apologize or thank her or what.
(Ignore the tenses on this-- this is so rough I haven't transferred it to my other file yet.)
"It was all bollocks, wasn't it," Rhiannon doesn't ask. "My brother's fucking funeral, and I keep thinking, I didn't even know him."
Gwen doesn't say anything.
"This morning," Rhiannon continues, dull, "I thought, this is stupid. Ianto's boring. The most exciting thing about him is that he's shagging his boss, so how can he be dead? Fucking bastard told me he worked in an office and shuffled papers. But he had this whole secret life going on, and never told any of us. Torchwood," she says, and she sounds tired and annoyed and incredibly hurt and Gwen can't stand it.
"He wasn't lying, exactly." Gwen meets Rhiannon's incredulous look. "All right, yes. Yeah. He lied, but-- Ianto was general support, at first. Before I got there, even. He did shuffle papers. He did the archiving and logistics-- kept us on time and supplied. I think Jack had him work up the budget, even. He-- made the coffee. Things like that," she finished.
Rhiannon snorted, but she looked less betrayed. Maybe she recognized the Ianto who worked for a secret organization and made coffee.
"It was very good coffee," Gwen said fondly. "And after-- Ianto moved up to containment and field work after a while. He was good at it."
"Containment of what?" Rhiannon asked. "Or shouldn't I ask."
Gwen shrugged. "Bit stupid to pretend you couldn't guess at this point. Aliens. Information. Whatever needed to be contained."
Rhiannon closed her eyes, and Gwen thought, Fuck, that's it, that's the bit that's going to make her cry. But after a moment, Rhiannon's shoulders started to shake, and a laugh bubbled out of her.
"Shit," she said, laughing almost uncontrollably. "He got to be James Bond. With fucking aliens." She sniffed, and Gwen can see that she is crying, just a little. But they're the good sort of tears, the ones that leave you tired but somehow clean. "Well," she says, using her hand to wipe at her eyes, "that explains the suits, at least."
"He liked James Bond?" Gwen smiles. That's not something she knew about Ianto, but it's something that fits. That's good-- that her Ianto might have been Rhiannon's Ianto, too.
Rhiannon rolls her eyes, and for a moment Gwen can see Ianto in her face. "Dad liked James Bond. Ianto wanted to be him," she says. And then she sort of laughs a little and adds,"Or maybe shag him, god, I don't know."
Gwen snorts. "He got to do both, then."
Which of course leads to a really awkward conversation about Jack, and where the hell is he? Very tasteless to miss out on your boyfriend's funeral, Rhiannon thinks. And Gwen doesn't have a lot to say to defend him, mainly because any further explanations are Very Complicated and Jackish, and would require Jack's permission to tell. But the end result of all this talky stuff is that (a) Gwen gets to close a book properly for once, and (b) feels like she can start to take on the rest of her job.
So then we move on to clean up: working on setting up a semi-permanent base, calling in some favors with UNIT (also, blackmail/Martha's help) to get the Hub secured and begin reconstruction, looking for techs and medics and figuring how to handle the Rift without (a) the Mainframe or (b) Jack. This is going to be a kind of transition section-- I'll pick up the pace here and maybe miss a few months. Gwen finds the metal remains of Jack's wrist strap during this period, and has Rhys find her a shop to make a new leather cuff. They find out the baby's a girl, and buy the house Rhys had been looking at the day the 456 showed up. Life moves on, and Gwen is getting used to Jack not being there-- although she's very quietly certain that, one day, when she goes in to work, Jack'll just be waiting for her.
So when she gets Jack's email, she does a silly little dance around the living room. (That's not what they call it in the UK, is it. Shit. Salon? Something like that. Must look it up.) Jack's email is as follows:
Gwen:
Need to see you. Tomorrow night at eleven, at the place where Tosh found the puzzle box. You should bring Rhys with you.
Jack
Gwen's not stupid. She knows that Jack's email isn't precisely-- upbeat. But she really thinks that she can convince him to come back. She wants to show him the temporary Hub, wants Lois to meet him. (She's not as sure that she wants to see Jack's face when he realizes she's hired Johnson, but. She'll cross that bridge when she comes to it.) She doesn't like the idea of Jack alone, because Jack broods like no one's business. And she wants Jack to see the baby, for some bizarre reason. She wants Jack to know that they all go on, after a fashion. It might even be good for Jack to go see-- where Ianto's buried. That might not be a bad thing.
Of course, nothing works out the way Gwen would like it to.
Jack II
This picks up maybe five minutes after the end of CoE, with Jack on the ship. And this is also where things get a bit tricky, so I'm not quite sure what I'm doing here, yet. Basically, this is a continuation of the Jack Is Fucked Up thesis, with a side dish of Jack Is Alienated (ah ha ha ha literally) for flavor. I think Jack's aware that he's pretty fucked up (this would be the impetus for leaving Earth), and he's trying to fix himself. Unfortunately, he's trying to fix himself by ignoring everything that's wrong, which is only compounding matters.
Plotwise: Jack's onboard ship for about three weeks, working for his passage and trying to figure out where to go next. Since losing himself in big empty spaces didn't really work on Earth, he decides maybe he needs to submerge himself in noise instead. So he disembarks on a hive trading planet (insectoid-ish aliens as dominant species, haven't really figured out their physiology or society yet)-- something enormous and buzzing and completely unrecognizable from Earth. Jack pulls a couple cons to set himself up in a comfortable cell, sells off the last of the of his salvage, and goes out on the town. After all, this planet's got a nice alcohol equivalent and plenty of bodies to fight and fuck. Why the hell not.
(Jack's regressing. Just a leetle bit.)
But it's not really helping. In fact, Jack-- if Jack were capable of looking at himself objectively, he'd say he was doing worse than he had been on Earth. Jack doesn't need to sleep all that often, but he does need to sleep at some point. And every time he manages to drift off, he has these dreams. They're not nightmares, but he almost wishes they were. They're-- sweet. Mainly, he dreams about someone reaching out and grabbing hold of his wrist. Their hand is warm and solid and Jack feels anchored in a way he hasn't for-- a very long time. And they're trying to talk to him. Jack can see his-- their-- Ianto's mouth moving, and his face looks serious and concerned, but Jack just can't hear him. But in the dream, Jack doesn't even care. He just looks and looks and tries to keep from waking up, because as long as he's asleep, he's got Ianto beside him. And Ianto knows who he is, and loves him anyway.
Jack doesn't usually remember his dreams, but these-- he remembers. And they're driving him mad, because he left Earth to forget and these ridiculous dreams won't let him. After a particularly bad night (don't know what the catalyst is, just yet), Jack comes back to his cell and thinks, right, so maybe I can't die. I can still kill off Captain Jack Harkness. And he takes his coat and balls it up and throws it into the cell's wall-mounted incinerator. He stands there and watches it burn for a few moments, and then starts stripping off his shirt and braces and trousers and underwear-- he'd still been wearing his Earth-style clothing-- and throws them in after.
So he's standing in his cell, naked except for his wrist strap, and he's-- not precisely sober or rational, and he unclasps the strap. And he's not sure why he does it (except that the strap wraps around his wrist in the same spot that Ianto's hand does in his dream), but he turns and hurls it towards the open incinerator from across the room. He misses. The strap glances off the lip of the incinerator, and falls to the floor. But as it hits, it must jar something loose, or depress a button, or something-- because the strap beeps.
Jack has a voicemail. And while he doesn't really give a damn about checking his voicemails right now, Jack walks across the room and picks up the wrist strap and pushes a button.
"Oh, thank christ," says a voice. Jack drops the strap like it bit him and backs away.
"Oh fuck," he says, and sits down on the pallet in the corner. "Please tell me that's not you," he says. "Please tell me I'm just going crazy."
There's a humming noise, and then a faint bluish light begins to emanate from the strap. The resulting image is blurry, but there's no mistaking who the figure is-- it's Ianto Jones, suit and all.
Jack is sickly pale. "Oh fuck," he says again, and he sounds like he might be sick. "Oh fuck, Ianto, what did you do?"
And then we go off to Ianto's POV!
(FWIW, I'm fairly convinced that Jack's going to be horrified by Ianto's little cheating death manuver for a while. After all, he's not had good experiences with people hiding their consciousness inside inanimate objects.)
Ianto I
Okay, this first bit is basically just a bunch of notes on (a) how Ianto winds up in Jack's wrist strap, and (b) why he does it. So only a little bit of this will actually be explained fully in the final text, but I just need to make sure that my rationale isn't completely looney.
This relies on some plot and characterization from Adam to the End of Days, and then skips to the end of CoE Day Four. A lot of the internal motivation and such that I've sketched out here won't necessarily live in this part-- it'll show up later. But I need to get it down so that the plot makes sense while I'm figuring stuff out.
Ianto's still dead at the end of CoE-- I'm not messing with that. But I do think that he had a trick or two up his sleeve. I think Ianto was puzzled by death-- not in any especially creepy suicidal sort of way, but-- I think he viewed it as a problem to be solved. Death was... inconvenient. I think it bothered him that he had ample evidence that there was nothing afterward-- he was clearly reluctant to give Lisa over into that nothing.
Part of that was love, I think. But I think another part of that was a reflection of self: Lisa was important. She was special. She was everything, I think, that Ianto Jones felt he wasn't. And so for her to slip into nothing could only mean that he would, too. Thus, the girlfriend in the coma-slash-cyberconversion unit routine. I think Ianto stabilizes a little after her death-- he's a little more awesome, and he knows it. And Jack clearly fancies him, so there must be something good in him.
But again, I think it also bothered him more than he was able to explain that Jack had to go into that nothing over and over again-- and come back alone. Ianto can't imagine anything worse. Well, maybe spending the rest of forever locked up in Torchwood's cold storage might be worse. So he thinks about it-- ways to avoid that forever nothing. But after Lisa and Suzie (and Owen, the first time), Ianto would know better than to try to come up with some way to physically cheat death.
So I think Ianto starts to think of other ways to work around death: he starts keeping a journal and plans to leave it somewhere for Jack to find after he dies. Nothing terribly morbid, just some sort of permanent personal record to prove his existence. After all, if Jack remembers him, Ianto won't be completely gone, which is a comfortable thought. But then there's Adam, and Ianto has a mostly blank page in his journal with the words, "Don't try to remember this," written on it, and it seems they've all lost two days. And Ianto isn't going to push-- that would be stupidity beyond belief-- but he finally realizes that he can't count on Jack's memory as his means of immortality. Jack can't die, but he is human, and with a human memory. Retcon could wipe Ianto away in a blink, and even without it, a few hundred years would be more than enough to blur the memory, even with a journal for reference.
It's the aftermath of End of Days. Tosh and Owen die, for real. And Ianto takes on the task of going through their personal effects and cataloging them. It's... unpleasant to look at the boxes of detritus and realize that this is it, this is the sum total of two people. And Ianto's hardly a fool. He understands that he's unlikely to ever collect a pension, and he's-- well, he's not okay with it, but he can't imagine doing anything else with his life, which must mean that he is okay with it. So he catalogs the bits of Tosh and Owen's lives, and works on compiling their notes into the Hub's database. Tosh's language algorithm isn't finished, but it's beautiful, and Ianto wishes she could have published her work and got the credit she deserved. Owen's work is blunt and fragmented and brilliant, and he'd been messing with a tiny bronze square a little smaller than a postage stamp. It's in a little black case, and there's a tag on the front: L-MEM 965. Underneath, Owen had scribbled Consciousness transfer?
Turns out Owen had been looking into a way of possibly moving his consciousness from his (dead) body into-- well. He hadn't got that far, evidently. Either moving his consciousness to the Mainframe or to another (living) body, is what Ianto thinks were the two options. But Owen hadn't really pursued either, possibly because his notes on the bronze square indicate that it has to be implanted into living tissue, which would leave Owen out of the running. (Also, I'm going to assume that Owen would have had Great Big Doctor Issues with the idea of placing his consciousness into someone else's living body. First do no harm and all. And I think Owen was too-- earthy sounds strange, but I'm sticking with it-- to seriously consider tech as a substitute for flesh. Ianto, on the other hand, is not.)
I'm thinking that the square is first synced with a given receptacle-- a body, hard drive, whatever. Not really sure how the sync is achieved, but whatever. Then it is implanted subcutaneously at the base of the skull, eventually breaking down into something like nanogenes which then proceed to map out neural processes. While the subject is alive, the nanogenes register the brain's electrical impulses, learning to mimic the thought processes and, eventually, the consciousness of the subject. When the subject dies, however, the electrical impulses feeding the nanogenes cease, and the nanogenes begin to broadcast a transmission signal. The learned consciousness then settles into the chosen receptacle and remains until (a) the new body dies without transferring the consciousness or (b) the consciousness is wiped from whatever hard drive it's residing in.
Anyway. That's my work-around. I don't plan to get that technical in this section, honestly. I'll make reference to it, but only to set it up for Jack II. Ianto's still dead. He's just... transferred himself.
To Jack's wrist strap.
Dun dun DUNNNNNNN.
Ianto steals it and syncs the transfer while Jack's conked out after sex, and Jack doesn't cotton on. (See first section!)
He thought for a while about using the Mainframe (or rather, I had to come up with some reason why he didn't use the Mainframe, because it's a lot more obvious and sensible), but I'm going to go with the idea that Ianto's ultimate loyalty isn't to Torchwood: it's to Jack. And Ianto's bright enough to understand that while Jack might stick around on Earth for a few centuries more because he feels a duty to protect the place and people he cares about-- he's not going to be there forever. So if Jack is Ianto's form of immortality, and if Ianto can be of use to Jack (tangent: I know it's played out, but I really think Ianto can't stand the idea of Jack being alone, because Ianto can't stand the idea of being alone forever), then some sort of tech that Ianto knows Jack will likely always have is what he's going to choose to be the recepticle. Thus, wrist strap.
Which is lucky! Because Johnson and her crew blow up the Hub and destroy the Mainframe! But Ianto is pretty sure that Jack's wrist strap is history, because-- dude. Jack's in pieces, the Hub's a crater, and it would really be his luck to have all his hard work destroyed while the government's trying to hunt him down and kill him. So when Ianto dies in Thames House, he's pretty sure that's it-- game over. So he breaks fandom's collective heart and asks Jack to remember him, etc. Let the sobbing commence.
But! The wrist strap seems to be, like, completely indestructible-- except for when the batteries crap out like they did to leave Jack stranded in the 1890s?-- ignoring that-- and Ianto's transfer is successful. He's just-- turned off until Jack accesses the strap's memory again. (For the record: Data!Ianto is living in Jack's voice mail system. So he can do tasteless Princess Leia-slash-John Hart impressions later on.) But it'll be a while until anyone figures this out, of course, because (a) Gwen has to find the strap in all the rubble and (b) Jack's off brooding for months on end and (c) the stupid explosion knocked a cog loose or something (I like the idea of Jack's uber-futuristic gizmo having little jewel precision gears), and so Ianto is sort of... stuck.
Until Jack throws the strap against the wall, knocking the whatever-it-is loose, which allows Ianto to finally initiate contact.
Which takes us back to the end of the last Jack section. And this is... really as far as I've gotten in terms of explicitly planning things out....
And then, things were evidently going to happen, but I can't remember what.
Maybe you have some ideas? Feel free to share them with me in the comments. :D