Fic: It's A Wonderful Ianto
A/N: This must have been done before but I haven't seen one, so hopefully I haven't unknowingly copied someone else's story!
TITLE: IT’S A WONDERFUL IANTO
Characters: Ianto. Female OC, mention of rest of team and Jack.
Pairing: Inferred Jack/Ianto
Rating: Mild PG for violence, implication of M/M relationships
Disclaimer: Not mine; they belong to the BBC
Spoilers: General, for series. Specific for what happened to Jack at the end of S1.
Prompt: Christmas
Summary: Ianto has reached his breaking point but someone isn’t willing to let him kill himself.
It was just bloody typical, Ianto reflected crossly. He’d finally come to the end of his rope and decided to end it all and some lunatic had to turn up and complicate things. Other people managed to kill themselves without anyone noticing but no sooner had he found himself a high building to jump from than he had been accosted by a frazzled looking woman labouring under the delusion that she was supposed to save Ianto from himself.
“Look, I don’t want to be bloody saved!” Ianto shouted as he tried to work out if he should go ahead and jump despite the fact that she was refusing to budge. He really didn’t need this complication.
“Doesn’t change the fact that I’m supposed to do just that,” the woman shot back.
“But why?” Ianto demanded. “This isn’t a cry for help, all right? I’ve thought about it and I really don’t want to live any more. I want…” He paused and drew in a shaky breath. “I just want it all to stop and I have it on the very best authority that that is what will happen. No afterlife, no choirs of heavenly angels; just darkness and silence. You have no idea how attractive that sounds.”
“I don’t doubt that it does, especially with the last couple of years that you’ve had,” the woman said.
“How-” Ianto stopped in mid-question and shook his head. “What am I saying? It’s obvious I’m at the end of my tether otherwise I wouldn’t be wanting to kill myself. You’re just making educated guesses like the fake mediums.” He glowered at the small smile she gave him, wishing she would just go and find someone else to save who would be more appreciative of her efforts.
“Ianto, I know you don’t appreciate what I’m doing right now but I can assure you that it is very important to you find a reason to continue living.”
Ianto made a scoffing noise as he turned away from her impatiently. “I should have died long ago. Everyone would have been better off if I’d died in Canary Wharf.”
“That isn’t true!”
“Isn’t it? Dr Tanizaki and Annie Williams would still be alive and I wouldn’t have betrayed Lisa and Jack and the others. I don’t deserve to live when so many other, better people have died,” Ianto said bitterly. “I’ve made so many mistakes and others have always paid the price. It’s time I paid it instead.”
He turned and started to run towards the edge, only to find himself rugby-tackled before he had got more than half a dozen paces. He went down hard enough to wind himself and by the time he had gathered his wits about him again she was sitting on him and she was a hell of a lot heavier than she looked because he couldn’t seem to shift out from under her.
“What the hell-?” he gasped when he eventually gave up and subsided on to the ground.
“I’m carrying the weight on your soul, Ianto. You can never lift me unless you put that to one side.”
“What? That makes no sense, you know that, don’t you?” Ianto protested, twisting around to peer up at her. He felt more than a little ridiculous to be pinned down by someone who looked like she could be picked up and tossed to one side by Tosh.
“It makes perfect sense,” she sighed, “but unless you’re willing to listen you’ll never understand the words. Look, how about we make a deal? If I can prove to you that more people have lived because you were alive than have died, will you think again about killing yourself?”
Ianto gave a harsh bark of laughter. “The last thing I’ve been able to do is save lives. Everyone and everything I touch withers and dies. I doubt you’ll be able to come up with platitudes to offset what’s already happened.”
“No, but I wasn’t planning on using words,” the woman said with a sad smile. She got up abruptly and reached down to help Ianto to his feet. “I was thinking something along the lines of showing you.”
Ianto had taken her hand without thinking and found himself being pulled up onto his feet far quicker than he’d expected as she displayed inhuman strength. He felt a wave of dizziness pass over him and staggered, leaning on her without thinking as he struggled to regain his sense of balance. He felt a brief wash of warmth and when he opened his eyes he was bewildered to see that he was standing in an unfamiliar living room. He looked around in confusion, knowing that he had never seen this room before.
“Where…” He broke off as the door to the room swung open to let in a woman in a wheelchair. “Sonia?” he exclaimed in utter shock. He started forward but felt his arm being seized. He glanced down at the woman who had apparently accompanied him to this place. “You don’t understand; I know this woman.”
He realised that Sonia hadn’t reacted to his sudden appearance and hadn’t even turned her head in his direction. Instead she was looking back over her shoulder and Ianto got the shock of his life when Jack Harkness strode in, large as life and twice as irresistible. The fact that Jack also ignored him told Ianto that he hadn’t just been transported to some other location.
“This is the past,” his companion said, confirming his suspicions. “We are observers only, here to bear witness to a life you saved.”
Ianto blinked. “I lost touch with Sonia after Canary Wharf,” he protested. “I was too caught up with Lisa to think about anyone else and afterwards I couldn’t find her. I assumed she had died.”
“Listen and you will find out what happened,” she said.
“I have to admit that I never expected to find you at my door, Captain Harkness,” Sonia was saying. “Your opinion of London and what we represented was pretty widely known.”
“That hasn’t changed,” Jack said as he settled in the chair she indicated. “That isn’t why I’m here.”
“Then why are you here?” Sonia challenged, her chin lifting defiantly as she faced him. “I was crippled in the attack and the PTSD means I’m not much use as an ordinary civilian. There are days when I wish I never survived. Sometimes I think the dead were the lucky ones.”
“I’m here because someone has reminded me that no matter what I might have thought about the policies and methods of Torchwood One, I still have a duty of care towards the survivors of the Battle.” He paused and smiled faintly, a far cry from his usual brash grin. “It was pointed out that the troops have no say over how a battle is fought. Theirs is but to do or die.”
Ianto felt the colour flood across his cheeks as he realised what was happening. “I… never realised. He never said…”
“His bitterness and anger had blinded him, his grief and terror over what might have happened dulled his empathy,” his companion said. “He needed someone to make him stop and think and help him make the connection. If you hadn’t come along it would never have occurred to him to consider the survivors.”
“He helped them all?” Ianto asked in surprise.
“He helped all those who wanted to be helped. Some, like Sonia, he retconned and created new lives for. She woke up believing she had been in a car crash and after therapy she has gone on to become a teacher for the disabled. She’s courting a very nice young man. Others he found new jobs for. None in Torchwood but some in UNIT and a couple in special research projects. Two he couldn’t find at all but their tales are yet to be told and must wait for another day. In total sixteen people had their lives given back to them because you, Ianto Jones, forced yourself into the life of Jack Harkness and made him see you. That’s not so bad a total to start off with, is it?”
Ianto was only partly listening to her, watching Jack as he spoke with Sonia. It had been weeks after he had started at Cardiff before he had seen that same gentle look on Jack’s face when the Captain spoke to him and the feelings he had experienced when he had come away afterwards had left him seriously conflicted. He had known his goal was the safe recovery of Lisa, after which they could run away together and forget Torchwood had ever existed, but the longer he had stayed in Jack’s company, the less he had thought of that. He had never wavered in his determination to give Lisa back her life but towards the end he had often wondered if perhaps they would part after that. Lisa had become so different during the year after the Battle; understandably so, of course, given all the pain and anguish she had had to endure, but it had driven a wedge between her and Ianto that Ianto had been all too guiltily aware of.
“Why does he make it so difficult for others to see how much he cares?” he wondered out loud. “Gwen would never say the things she does if she saw him like this.”
“It is not my place to judge others, but people often see what they expect to see and seeing Jack the way she does might be more about how Gwen views herself and her role in Jack’s life than in the reality of what actually is. And Jack is too afraid to let people see him as he truly is and that is because he has come to think that anyone who truly knows him would want to leave him.”
“That’s ridiculous! Knowing him means you have to love him!” Ianto said without thinking, then shut his mouth again and blushed furiously. Could he have sounded any more like a lovestruck idiot, he wondered despairingly?
“You don’t have to tell me,” the woman snorted. “At least I’m not the one given charge of him! Last I heard that poor sod was banging his head against any available hard surface and cursing a certain Gallifreyan with considerable verve and gusto.”
Ianto eyed her in fascination. “Should any part of that make sense to me?” he asked. He got a flashing smile by way of a response.
“Not really. I tend to ramble sometimes. Now, is this enough to make you think again? Nineteen lives gained because you lived instead of died. Surely that has to count for something?”
Ianto looked back to where Sonia was blushing faintly over something Jack had said and hesitated before he shook his head. “There’s no guarantee that Jack wouldn’t have thought about the survivors and done something about them even if I hadn’t come along. And I’ve only your assumption that their lives would have been so much worse if Jack hadn’t come along. No, I don’t think this is enough.”
She sighed. “Rats, I was hoping this would have been but I forgot how stubborn you can be.”
He looked down at her, perversely pleased that he wasn’t the easy pushover she had assumed. He seemed to have so little control over his life that it felt good that he could at least control the fact that it would soon end. He was still a little stunned to discover that his arrival in Jack’s life had apparently prompted Jack to seek out the other survivors and help them out but he told the truth when he said that he believed it would have been something that Jack would have got around to once he had got over his initial fury over the Canary Wharf debacle.
“This was your idea,” he pointed out.
“Yes, I know,” she sighed, “but I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do more than this. Watching the shadows of the past is one thing; seeking out the shadows of what might have been is quite another.” He twitched at the expression in her eyes when she looked at him. “Brace yourself, Ianto Jones. You want to know how your existence has saved lives? We are going to travel to a place where you never existed and you will see exactly how great a difference you have made.”
The warm daylight-filled living room vanished in a blink of an eye, to be replaced by darkness pierced by harsh beams of artificial light. Ianto blinked the afterimages away, then tensed as he looked around and recognised his surroundings. He was never going to forget this place: Brynblaidd, where his grieving apathy had been pierced by a sudden desire to live when faced with an unspeakable death. There was something different about the place, though, which jarred with his recall of it. Granted, he had been concussed out of his tiny mind for most of that afternoon and evening but every moment of that ghastly time was firmly etched onto his retentive memory.
He looked around and saw Gwen sitting in the back of an ambulance being treated for a shoulder wound. He frowned in confusion. Gwen had been shot in the side, not the shoulder. He couldn’t see Jack, Tosh or Owen at first and he dodged around the police and paramedics who were milling around looking for them, vaguely aware that his female shadow was following after him in silence.
Ianto eventually saw Jack in the distance and felt the tension inside him ease fractionally, as if some constant had been restored to the centre of his world. He moved towards the Captain and realised that Jack was walking away from Owen, who was staring after him as if his world had ended. Confused, Ianto really looked at Jack and saw that the other man had tears running down his face and that his expression was flint-hard and unrelenting. Ianto had seen that look before; it was the mask Jack adopted whenever something unbearable had happened. He still couldn’t see Tosh and panic hit home as Jack swept by without so much as a flicker of an eyelash in his direction.
“She’s dead.”
Ianto spun around so quickly he nearly fell over, staring at the woman in horror. “No, you’re lying! She lived! I remember that she lived!”
She shook her head, her eyes dark with sadness. “You weren’t here in this reality. Tosh was sent off with Owen while Jack went with Gwen. Owen is a good soul but he did not have the level of self-sacrifice that you showed. Without the distraction that you provided, Tosh was captured and killed before Jack could stop them.”
“Oh God, no,” Ianto sobbed. “Not Tosh, not her.”
Reality shimmered and they were inside the bar of the village pub. There was a body shrouded by a sheet lying on one of the tables. Jack was standing in front of it, the lights from outside spilling through the small windows to outline him in blue-white light. He was gazing down at the body, his body shuddering slightly with silent sobs. Ianto’s heart ached with sympathetic grief as he watched Jack mourn someone else he had lost, but this time Ianto knew that this was definitely his fault because this time he hadn’t been there. He had been so obsessed with all the ways he thought he had gone wrong that he had never really appreciated the one thing he had done really well.
“Oh God, oh God, I’m sorry, Jack. I’m so, so sorry,” he whispered. He knew how deeply Jack cared about Tosh and he knew that losing her would cripple him emotionally.
“Come,” the woman said.
Ianto started to protest that he didn’t want to do this any more, but reality had blurred around him again before stabilising again to reveal the familiar surroundings of the Hub, Ianto blinked and took a deep breath as he looked around, then frowned as he took in the state of the place. His heart sank as he realised that he was at another point where he was going to get some lesson. At least he knew that it wouldn’t be Jack. There was a twisted kind of comfort to that.
There was a harsh clatter of sound from the direction of the morgue. With a soft moan of distress, Ianto glanced around and saw his nemesis standing a short distance away, her face impassive. “Which one?” he asked.
“Owen never really recovered from Brynblaidd,” she said quietly as she stepped down to join him and then led the way to the morgue. “He felt guilty that he had survived and Tosh had died. He was vulnerable and Mary found him.”
“Mary? But she was… oh,” Ianto suddenly realised what had happened. “But Jack stopped her. He stopped her and she was the one who died.”
“Jack realised something was wrong because Tosh acted so wildly out of character. And you were there. You were there to notice and observe. Had you been here, you would have known that something was wrong with Owen. Gwen was distracted by her attempts to help Jack come to terms with his grief for Tosh and his unwillingness to replace her. By the time they knew Mary existed, she was already in the Hub and she killed Owen before she left with her transport device.”
The world shuddered and reformed to become the morgue. Ianto watched Jack lean against the drawer he had just closed, his eyes closed and his face showing nothing but exhaustion and sadness. Ianto’s gut twisted as he watched, feeling the guilt rise to overwhelming levels.
“You can’t lay this on me,” he protested, turning to look at his nemesis. “Owen was killed by Mary and I didn’t have a lot to do with how things turned out.”
“Your absence led to Tosh’s death and that led to this one. If, however, you want a death that happened directly as a result of your not being here…”
Ianto swallowed and closed his eyes against the vertigo that threatened as the world twisted, dissolved and reformed once again. He blinked as he found himself in a landscape flooded with moonlight. He swallowed when he realised he was standing in a graveyard. He was standing, he then saw, in front of a fresh grave and he took a step back just as part of the darkness moved and became Jack as he came to stand in front of the grave, his face carved with deep lines of distress. He had a single rose in his hand and he bent down to lay it on the freshly turned soil.
“Who is it?” Ianto asked, even though he had a horrible feeling that he knew.
“Here lies Gwen Cooper,” the woman said softly. “Who never saw the treasure right in front of her because she was too fixated on reaching for a star meant for another’s sky.”
“Jack would never let anything happen to Gwen,” Ianto snapped. “He cared too much-” He paused as he remembered and groaned. “Suzie.”
“Suzie Costello,” she confirmed. “Everything happened just as you remember, but you weren’t there so the team never worked out how to contact the outside world. By the time they got out of the Hub it was too late and they didn’t find Gwen in time. Jack will abandon the team to hunt down Suzie Costello and while he is away, Bilis will make his move and the new team will open the Rift and Abaddon will walk the land….”
In a blink of an eye they were surrounded by buildings and Ianto recognised the streets of Cardiff. They were streets shrouded with shadows and strewn with corpses and high above the buildings moved the immense bulk of Abaddon, formed out of despair and death. Ianto stared up in appalled horror as Abaddon gazed out over his death-filled kingdom and screamed his triumph.
“Where’s Jack?” Ianto demanded. “He can stop Abaddon. He did last time.”
The world shuddered and then they were standing on the Plass as a storm raged overhead and Abaddon moved towards them. A helicopter swept in over a wind-torn Bay to land and disgorge Jack Harkness, his face a white blaze in the growing darkness as he looked up towards Abaddon.
“Hey!” he yelled, waving his arms as he moved away from the helicopter, which immediately took off and sped back the way it had come, taking care to keep away from Abaddon’s looming shadow. “Over here! Think you can eat from this buffet? It‘s all-you-can-eat, you fucking bastard!”
Ianto gave a moan of utter dismay as he watched Abaddon’s horned head turn in Jack’s direction and the demon shift direction to head towards when Jack was waiting for it. Ianto had witnessed the last occasion from a distance but now he had the front seat and choked on sobs as he watched Abaddon suck the life out of Jack. Even though he knew it was no use, Ianto ran forward as Abaddon screamed and overdosed on the river of life that Jack had forcefed it, fading back into the pocket of space-time it had been bound to untold ages before. Ianto reached out to grab for Jack’s body as it fell to the ground, but his lover passed through his hands like so much smoke to land on the ground, limp and lifeless in a way he had never been on previous occasions.
The pain was unbelievable and as he knelt down beside Jack, a truly horrendous thought struck Ianto and he twisted around to stare up at the woman as she came to stand beside him. “Gwen’s not here,” he realised. “Gwen’s not here and neither am I. None of the original team are. Does that mean-”
“No-one knows of his immortality. He gets sealed inside the vaults since there is no-one to believe in him and watch over him. He remains there for 750 years until an attack on the Hub breaks him free of his stasis but by that time he has lost his connection with this place and his memory of the Doctor. There is a price to waiting in the darkness. He leaves this world and wanders space and time, a cold wraith, harbinger of doom and despair. He eventually stands on an ancient world and witnesses the Doctor standing against his most terrible enemy but he refuses to become involved and the Doctor falls. Jack doesn’t care. He never remembers how to care. He becomes something too terrible to name.”
“Jack does care. He cares so much it tears him apart,” Ianto protested. “I’ve seen him-”
“Yes! You have seen him! You!” the woman said, pouncing. She came to kneel beside Ianto. “Do not underestimate what you are to Jack Harkness, Ianto Jones. Do not turn your back on what you can become to him in the future, if you can only find it in your heart to keep living now. You have an immense capacity for love, Ianto. You have barely touched the surface and already so many people owe their lives to you. I have shown you what this world would have been like if you had died at Canary Wharf the way you said you wish you had. Think what might happen if you choose to die now instead of holding on and letting the future run its course.”
Ianto gazed around himself dazedly. Just as the last time, Abaddon’s disappearance had led to most of the damage he had caused being reversed but the people who were walking around had a dazed look to them that would take a while to fade. Two unfamiliar people appeared on the invisible lift and started towards where Jack was lying and Ianto felt a wild urge to stand between them and Jack and deny them the right to touch him. He knew he couldn’t stop them because in this reality he had given up any right he might have had to Jack. Jack had never known him, never kissed him, never teased him about his suits and his coffee. They had never danced on the roof of the Millennium Centre, drank coffee while watching an alien ship burn up in Earth’s atmosphere or lain curled up together in the warm darkness of the Hub after the others had all gone home.
“Give me one ray of hope,” he begged the woman. “Tell me he comes back. He doesn’t have to come back and love me. He doesn’t even have to come back and want me. I just want him back. That would be enough. We need him. I need him. He’s my North Star.”
“Your fixed point,” the woman said with a strange smile. She reached out to touch Ianto’s face gently. “He comes back, Ianto. He comes back and he will be different but he will be the better for it. Be here waiting for him, Ianto. The world will be a better place if you are, I promise.”
Ianto watched as Jack’s body was picked up and taken back to the Hub with scant regard. He was furious with these people and made a mental note that there was no chance of their being recruited while he was around to cast a vote. He realised he had made his decision about the same time as he heard the woman laugh joyously. The next thing he knew they were back on the rooftop he had originally chosen to jump from and the woman was grinning up at him.
“Thank you,” she said.
Ianto blinked. “Technically, I should be thanking you,” he pointed out. “You’re the one who has saved my life, after all.”
“I helped you come to a decision, that’s all. You needed someone to make you realise just how important you are in the grand scheme of things.” She looked pensive. “I wish I could tell you just how important you are going to be, but that would ruin some of the nicer surprises that are waiting for you along the way.”
“I could do with some nice surprises,” Ianto said cautiously.
“That’s good,” she said with an impish smile. “Because you have a doozy or two coming up in the near future!” She gave herself a little shake and suddenly she wasn’t quite so frazzled or put-upon any more. In fact she was starting to look more than a little elegant and beautiful.
“I… didn’t catch your name,” Ianto realised.
This time the grin he got was one of pure mischief. “That’s probably because I didn’t give you one. We don’t generally go in for names. Call me what you like inside your own head but just remember what we did tonight and what you decided. Hold on to that, Ianto, and you’ll make me very happy.”
She vanished suddenly, without so much as a flash of light, leaving Ianto blinking and wondering if he had just suffered some kind of massive hallucination. Maybe he was having that breakdown that Owen was always anticipating. After a moment he shrugged. Hallucination or no, he had come to a decision and he was holding to it. For better or for worse, he would wait and see if Jack did return to them and if he did, whether he and Ianto would have a future together.
OOOO
TITLE: IT’S A WONDERFUL IANTO
Characters: Ianto. Female OC, mention of rest of team and Jack.
Pairing: Inferred Jack/Ianto
Rating: Mild PG for violence, implication of M/M relationships
Disclaimer: Not mine; they belong to the BBC
Spoilers: General, for series. Specific for what happened to Jack at the end of S1.
Prompt: Christmas
Summary: Ianto has reached his breaking point but someone isn’t willing to let him kill himself.
It was just bloody typical, Ianto reflected crossly. He’d finally come to the end of his rope and decided to end it all and some lunatic had to turn up and complicate things. Other people managed to kill themselves without anyone noticing but no sooner had he found himself a high building to jump from than he had been accosted by a frazzled looking woman labouring under the delusion that she was supposed to save Ianto from himself.
“Look, I don’t want to be bloody saved!” Ianto shouted as he tried to work out if he should go ahead and jump despite the fact that she was refusing to budge. He really didn’t need this complication.
“Doesn’t change the fact that I’m supposed to do just that,” the woman shot back.
“But why?” Ianto demanded. “This isn’t a cry for help, all right? I’ve thought about it and I really don’t want to live any more. I want…” He paused and drew in a shaky breath. “I just want it all to stop and I have it on the very best authority that that is what will happen. No afterlife, no choirs of heavenly angels; just darkness and silence. You have no idea how attractive that sounds.”
“I don’t doubt that it does, especially with the last couple of years that you’ve had,” the woman said.
“How-” Ianto stopped in mid-question and shook his head. “What am I saying? It’s obvious I’m at the end of my tether otherwise I wouldn’t be wanting to kill myself. You’re just making educated guesses like the fake mediums.” He glowered at the small smile she gave him, wishing she would just go and find someone else to save who would be more appreciative of her efforts.
“Ianto, I know you don’t appreciate what I’m doing right now but I can assure you that it is very important to you find a reason to continue living.”
Ianto made a scoffing noise as he turned away from her impatiently. “I should have died long ago. Everyone would have been better off if I’d died in Canary Wharf.”
“That isn’t true!”
“Isn’t it? Dr Tanizaki and Annie Williams would still be alive and I wouldn’t have betrayed Lisa and Jack and the others. I don’t deserve to live when so many other, better people have died,” Ianto said bitterly. “I’ve made so many mistakes and others have always paid the price. It’s time I paid it instead.”
He turned and started to run towards the edge, only to find himself rugby-tackled before he had got more than half a dozen paces. He went down hard enough to wind himself and by the time he had gathered his wits about him again she was sitting on him and she was a hell of a lot heavier than she looked because he couldn’t seem to shift out from under her.
“What the hell-?” he gasped when he eventually gave up and subsided on to the ground.
“I’m carrying the weight on your soul, Ianto. You can never lift me unless you put that to one side.”
“What? That makes no sense, you know that, don’t you?” Ianto protested, twisting around to peer up at her. He felt more than a little ridiculous to be pinned down by someone who looked like she could be picked up and tossed to one side by Tosh.
“It makes perfect sense,” she sighed, “but unless you’re willing to listen you’ll never understand the words. Look, how about we make a deal? If I can prove to you that more people have lived because you were alive than have died, will you think again about killing yourself?”
Ianto gave a harsh bark of laughter. “The last thing I’ve been able to do is save lives. Everyone and everything I touch withers and dies. I doubt you’ll be able to come up with platitudes to offset what’s already happened.”
“No, but I wasn’t planning on using words,” the woman said with a sad smile. She got up abruptly and reached down to help Ianto to his feet. “I was thinking something along the lines of showing you.”
Ianto had taken her hand without thinking and found himself being pulled up onto his feet far quicker than he’d expected as she displayed inhuman strength. He felt a wave of dizziness pass over him and staggered, leaning on her without thinking as he struggled to regain his sense of balance. He felt a brief wash of warmth and when he opened his eyes he was bewildered to see that he was standing in an unfamiliar living room. He looked around in confusion, knowing that he had never seen this room before.
“Where…” He broke off as the door to the room swung open to let in a woman in a wheelchair. “Sonia?” he exclaimed in utter shock. He started forward but felt his arm being seized. He glanced down at the woman who had apparently accompanied him to this place. “You don’t understand; I know this woman.”
He realised that Sonia hadn’t reacted to his sudden appearance and hadn’t even turned her head in his direction. Instead she was looking back over her shoulder and Ianto got the shock of his life when Jack Harkness strode in, large as life and twice as irresistible. The fact that Jack also ignored him told Ianto that he hadn’t just been transported to some other location.
“This is the past,” his companion said, confirming his suspicions. “We are observers only, here to bear witness to a life you saved.”
Ianto blinked. “I lost touch with Sonia after Canary Wharf,” he protested. “I was too caught up with Lisa to think about anyone else and afterwards I couldn’t find her. I assumed she had died.”
“Listen and you will find out what happened,” she said.
“I have to admit that I never expected to find you at my door, Captain Harkness,” Sonia was saying. “Your opinion of London and what we represented was pretty widely known.”
“That hasn’t changed,” Jack said as he settled in the chair she indicated. “That isn’t why I’m here.”
“Then why are you here?” Sonia challenged, her chin lifting defiantly as she faced him. “I was crippled in the attack and the PTSD means I’m not much use as an ordinary civilian. There are days when I wish I never survived. Sometimes I think the dead were the lucky ones.”
“I’m here because someone has reminded me that no matter what I might have thought about the policies and methods of Torchwood One, I still have a duty of care towards the survivors of the Battle.” He paused and smiled faintly, a far cry from his usual brash grin. “It was pointed out that the troops have no say over how a battle is fought. Theirs is but to do or die.”
Ianto felt the colour flood across his cheeks as he realised what was happening. “I… never realised. He never said…”
“His bitterness and anger had blinded him, his grief and terror over what might have happened dulled his empathy,” his companion said. “He needed someone to make him stop and think and help him make the connection. If you hadn’t come along it would never have occurred to him to consider the survivors.”
“He helped them all?” Ianto asked in surprise.
“He helped all those who wanted to be helped. Some, like Sonia, he retconned and created new lives for. She woke up believing she had been in a car crash and after therapy she has gone on to become a teacher for the disabled. She’s courting a very nice young man. Others he found new jobs for. None in Torchwood but some in UNIT and a couple in special research projects. Two he couldn’t find at all but their tales are yet to be told and must wait for another day. In total sixteen people had their lives given back to them because you, Ianto Jones, forced yourself into the life of Jack Harkness and made him see you. That’s not so bad a total to start off with, is it?”
Ianto was only partly listening to her, watching Jack as he spoke with Sonia. It had been weeks after he had started at Cardiff before he had seen that same gentle look on Jack’s face when the Captain spoke to him and the feelings he had experienced when he had come away afterwards had left him seriously conflicted. He had known his goal was the safe recovery of Lisa, after which they could run away together and forget Torchwood had ever existed, but the longer he had stayed in Jack’s company, the less he had thought of that. He had never wavered in his determination to give Lisa back her life but towards the end he had often wondered if perhaps they would part after that. Lisa had become so different during the year after the Battle; understandably so, of course, given all the pain and anguish she had had to endure, but it had driven a wedge between her and Ianto that Ianto had been all too guiltily aware of.
“Why does he make it so difficult for others to see how much he cares?” he wondered out loud. “Gwen would never say the things she does if she saw him like this.”
“It is not my place to judge others, but people often see what they expect to see and seeing Jack the way she does might be more about how Gwen views herself and her role in Jack’s life than in the reality of what actually is. And Jack is too afraid to let people see him as he truly is and that is because he has come to think that anyone who truly knows him would want to leave him.”
“That’s ridiculous! Knowing him means you have to love him!” Ianto said without thinking, then shut his mouth again and blushed furiously. Could he have sounded any more like a lovestruck idiot, he wondered despairingly?
“You don’t have to tell me,” the woman snorted. “At least I’m not the one given charge of him! Last I heard that poor sod was banging his head against any available hard surface and cursing a certain Gallifreyan with considerable verve and gusto.”
Ianto eyed her in fascination. “Should any part of that make sense to me?” he asked. He got a flashing smile by way of a response.
“Not really. I tend to ramble sometimes. Now, is this enough to make you think again? Nineteen lives gained because you lived instead of died. Surely that has to count for something?”
Ianto looked back to where Sonia was blushing faintly over something Jack had said and hesitated before he shook his head. “There’s no guarantee that Jack wouldn’t have thought about the survivors and done something about them even if I hadn’t come along. And I’ve only your assumption that their lives would have been so much worse if Jack hadn’t come along. No, I don’t think this is enough.”
She sighed. “Rats, I was hoping this would have been but I forgot how stubborn you can be.”
He looked down at her, perversely pleased that he wasn’t the easy pushover she had assumed. He seemed to have so little control over his life that it felt good that he could at least control the fact that it would soon end. He was still a little stunned to discover that his arrival in Jack’s life had apparently prompted Jack to seek out the other survivors and help them out but he told the truth when he said that he believed it would have been something that Jack would have got around to once he had got over his initial fury over the Canary Wharf debacle.
“This was your idea,” he pointed out.
“Yes, I know,” she sighed, “but I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do more than this. Watching the shadows of the past is one thing; seeking out the shadows of what might have been is quite another.” He twitched at the expression in her eyes when she looked at him. “Brace yourself, Ianto Jones. You want to know how your existence has saved lives? We are going to travel to a place where you never existed and you will see exactly how great a difference you have made.”
The warm daylight-filled living room vanished in a blink of an eye, to be replaced by darkness pierced by harsh beams of artificial light. Ianto blinked the afterimages away, then tensed as he looked around and recognised his surroundings. He was never going to forget this place: Brynblaidd, where his grieving apathy had been pierced by a sudden desire to live when faced with an unspeakable death. There was something different about the place, though, which jarred with his recall of it. Granted, he had been concussed out of his tiny mind for most of that afternoon and evening but every moment of that ghastly time was firmly etched onto his retentive memory.
He looked around and saw Gwen sitting in the back of an ambulance being treated for a shoulder wound. He frowned in confusion. Gwen had been shot in the side, not the shoulder. He couldn’t see Jack, Tosh or Owen at first and he dodged around the police and paramedics who were milling around looking for them, vaguely aware that his female shadow was following after him in silence.
Ianto eventually saw Jack in the distance and felt the tension inside him ease fractionally, as if some constant had been restored to the centre of his world. He moved towards the Captain and realised that Jack was walking away from Owen, who was staring after him as if his world had ended. Confused, Ianto really looked at Jack and saw that the other man had tears running down his face and that his expression was flint-hard and unrelenting. Ianto had seen that look before; it was the mask Jack adopted whenever something unbearable had happened. He still couldn’t see Tosh and panic hit home as Jack swept by without so much as a flicker of an eyelash in his direction.
“She’s dead.”
Ianto spun around so quickly he nearly fell over, staring at the woman in horror. “No, you’re lying! She lived! I remember that she lived!”
She shook her head, her eyes dark with sadness. “You weren’t here in this reality. Tosh was sent off with Owen while Jack went with Gwen. Owen is a good soul but he did not have the level of self-sacrifice that you showed. Without the distraction that you provided, Tosh was captured and killed before Jack could stop them.”
“Oh God, no,” Ianto sobbed. “Not Tosh, not her.”
Reality shimmered and they were inside the bar of the village pub. There was a body shrouded by a sheet lying on one of the tables. Jack was standing in front of it, the lights from outside spilling through the small windows to outline him in blue-white light. He was gazing down at the body, his body shuddering slightly with silent sobs. Ianto’s heart ached with sympathetic grief as he watched Jack mourn someone else he had lost, but this time Ianto knew that this was definitely his fault because this time he hadn’t been there. He had been so obsessed with all the ways he thought he had gone wrong that he had never really appreciated the one thing he had done really well.
“Oh God, oh God, I’m sorry, Jack. I’m so, so sorry,” he whispered. He knew how deeply Jack cared about Tosh and he knew that losing her would cripple him emotionally.
“Come,” the woman said.
Ianto started to protest that he didn’t want to do this any more, but reality had blurred around him again before stabilising again to reveal the familiar surroundings of the Hub, Ianto blinked and took a deep breath as he looked around, then frowned as he took in the state of the place. His heart sank as he realised that he was at another point where he was going to get some lesson. At least he knew that it wouldn’t be Jack. There was a twisted kind of comfort to that.
There was a harsh clatter of sound from the direction of the morgue. With a soft moan of distress, Ianto glanced around and saw his nemesis standing a short distance away, her face impassive. “Which one?” he asked.
“Owen never really recovered from Brynblaidd,” she said quietly as she stepped down to join him and then led the way to the morgue. “He felt guilty that he had survived and Tosh had died. He was vulnerable and Mary found him.”
“Mary? But she was… oh,” Ianto suddenly realised what had happened. “But Jack stopped her. He stopped her and she was the one who died.”
“Jack realised something was wrong because Tosh acted so wildly out of character. And you were there. You were there to notice and observe. Had you been here, you would have known that something was wrong with Owen. Gwen was distracted by her attempts to help Jack come to terms with his grief for Tosh and his unwillingness to replace her. By the time they knew Mary existed, she was already in the Hub and she killed Owen before she left with her transport device.”
The world shuddered and reformed to become the morgue. Ianto watched Jack lean against the drawer he had just closed, his eyes closed and his face showing nothing but exhaustion and sadness. Ianto’s gut twisted as he watched, feeling the guilt rise to overwhelming levels.
“You can’t lay this on me,” he protested, turning to look at his nemesis. “Owen was killed by Mary and I didn’t have a lot to do with how things turned out.”
“Your absence led to Tosh’s death and that led to this one. If, however, you want a death that happened directly as a result of your not being here…”
Ianto swallowed and closed his eyes against the vertigo that threatened as the world twisted, dissolved and reformed once again. He blinked as he found himself in a landscape flooded with moonlight. He swallowed when he realised he was standing in a graveyard. He was standing, he then saw, in front of a fresh grave and he took a step back just as part of the darkness moved and became Jack as he came to stand in front of the grave, his face carved with deep lines of distress. He had a single rose in his hand and he bent down to lay it on the freshly turned soil.
“Who is it?” Ianto asked, even though he had a horrible feeling that he knew.
“Here lies Gwen Cooper,” the woman said softly. “Who never saw the treasure right in front of her because she was too fixated on reaching for a star meant for another’s sky.”
“Jack would never let anything happen to Gwen,” Ianto snapped. “He cared too much-” He paused as he remembered and groaned. “Suzie.”
“Suzie Costello,” she confirmed. “Everything happened just as you remember, but you weren’t there so the team never worked out how to contact the outside world. By the time they got out of the Hub it was too late and they didn’t find Gwen in time. Jack will abandon the team to hunt down Suzie Costello and while he is away, Bilis will make his move and the new team will open the Rift and Abaddon will walk the land….”
In a blink of an eye they were surrounded by buildings and Ianto recognised the streets of Cardiff. They were streets shrouded with shadows and strewn with corpses and high above the buildings moved the immense bulk of Abaddon, formed out of despair and death. Ianto stared up in appalled horror as Abaddon gazed out over his death-filled kingdom and screamed his triumph.
“Where’s Jack?” Ianto demanded. “He can stop Abaddon. He did last time.”
The world shuddered and then they were standing on the Plass as a storm raged overhead and Abaddon moved towards them. A helicopter swept in over a wind-torn Bay to land and disgorge Jack Harkness, his face a white blaze in the growing darkness as he looked up towards Abaddon.
“Hey!” he yelled, waving his arms as he moved away from the helicopter, which immediately took off and sped back the way it had come, taking care to keep away from Abaddon’s looming shadow. “Over here! Think you can eat from this buffet? It‘s all-you-can-eat, you fucking bastard!”
Ianto gave a moan of utter dismay as he watched Abaddon’s horned head turn in Jack’s direction and the demon shift direction to head towards when Jack was waiting for it. Ianto had witnessed the last occasion from a distance but now he had the front seat and choked on sobs as he watched Abaddon suck the life out of Jack. Even though he knew it was no use, Ianto ran forward as Abaddon screamed and overdosed on the river of life that Jack had forcefed it, fading back into the pocket of space-time it had been bound to untold ages before. Ianto reached out to grab for Jack’s body as it fell to the ground, but his lover passed through his hands like so much smoke to land on the ground, limp and lifeless in a way he had never been on previous occasions.
The pain was unbelievable and as he knelt down beside Jack, a truly horrendous thought struck Ianto and he twisted around to stare up at the woman as she came to stand beside him. “Gwen’s not here,” he realised. “Gwen’s not here and neither am I. None of the original team are. Does that mean-”
“No-one knows of his immortality. He gets sealed inside the vaults since there is no-one to believe in him and watch over him. He remains there for 750 years until an attack on the Hub breaks him free of his stasis but by that time he has lost his connection with this place and his memory of the Doctor. There is a price to waiting in the darkness. He leaves this world and wanders space and time, a cold wraith, harbinger of doom and despair. He eventually stands on an ancient world and witnesses the Doctor standing against his most terrible enemy but he refuses to become involved and the Doctor falls. Jack doesn’t care. He never remembers how to care. He becomes something too terrible to name.”
“Jack does care. He cares so much it tears him apart,” Ianto protested. “I’ve seen him-”
“Yes! You have seen him! You!” the woman said, pouncing. She came to kneel beside Ianto. “Do not underestimate what you are to Jack Harkness, Ianto Jones. Do not turn your back on what you can become to him in the future, if you can only find it in your heart to keep living now. You have an immense capacity for love, Ianto. You have barely touched the surface and already so many people owe their lives to you. I have shown you what this world would have been like if you had died at Canary Wharf the way you said you wish you had. Think what might happen if you choose to die now instead of holding on and letting the future run its course.”
Ianto gazed around himself dazedly. Just as the last time, Abaddon’s disappearance had led to most of the damage he had caused being reversed but the people who were walking around had a dazed look to them that would take a while to fade. Two unfamiliar people appeared on the invisible lift and started towards where Jack was lying and Ianto felt a wild urge to stand between them and Jack and deny them the right to touch him. He knew he couldn’t stop them because in this reality he had given up any right he might have had to Jack. Jack had never known him, never kissed him, never teased him about his suits and his coffee. They had never danced on the roof of the Millennium Centre, drank coffee while watching an alien ship burn up in Earth’s atmosphere or lain curled up together in the warm darkness of the Hub after the others had all gone home.
“Give me one ray of hope,” he begged the woman. “Tell me he comes back. He doesn’t have to come back and love me. He doesn’t even have to come back and want me. I just want him back. That would be enough. We need him. I need him. He’s my North Star.”
“Your fixed point,” the woman said with a strange smile. She reached out to touch Ianto’s face gently. “He comes back, Ianto. He comes back and he will be different but he will be the better for it. Be here waiting for him, Ianto. The world will be a better place if you are, I promise.”
Ianto watched as Jack’s body was picked up and taken back to the Hub with scant regard. He was furious with these people and made a mental note that there was no chance of their being recruited while he was around to cast a vote. He realised he had made his decision about the same time as he heard the woman laugh joyously. The next thing he knew they were back on the rooftop he had originally chosen to jump from and the woman was grinning up at him.
“Thank you,” she said.
Ianto blinked. “Technically, I should be thanking you,” he pointed out. “You’re the one who has saved my life, after all.”
“I helped you come to a decision, that’s all. You needed someone to make you realise just how important you are in the grand scheme of things.” She looked pensive. “I wish I could tell you just how important you are going to be, but that would ruin some of the nicer surprises that are waiting for you along the way.”
“I could do with some nice surprises,” Ianto said cautiously.
“That’s good,” she said with an impish smile. “Because you have a doozy or two coming up in the near future!” She gave herself a little shake and suddenly she wasn’t quite so frazzled or put-upon any more. In fact she was starting to look more than a little elegant and beautiful.
“I… didn’t catch your name,” Ianto realised.
This time the grin he got was one of pure mischief. “That’s probably because I didn’t give you one. We don’t generally go in for names. Call me what you like inside your own head but just remember what we did tonight and what you decided. Hold on to that, Ianto, and you’ll make me very happy.”
She vanished suddenly, without so much as a flash of light, leaving Ianto blinking and wondering if he had just suffered some kind of massive hallucination. Maybe he was having that breakdown that Owen was always anticipating. After a moment he shrugged. Hallucination or no, he had come to a decision and he was holding to it. For better or for worse, he would wait and see if Jack did return to them and if he did, whether he and Ianto would have a future together.
OOOO