Fic: The Spaces In Between - Part three.
Part two.
Part three
With Ianto in the shower Jack takes the opportunity to get a better look at the vortex manipulator that Ianto had been wearing. The design is a little different from his own, but the basic functions are the same. The main difference being in how it has been retro-fitted to allow it to be connected directly to an external energy source.
Ianto's suit jacket and shirt are still lying on the bed, the rain soaking out of them and into the sheets. As Jack picks up the suit jacket, a small, and currently rather damp, leather-bound book falls out of the inside pocket.
Hoping that it will give him some idea of how Ianto is managing to travel between worlds, Jack opens the book and starts to read.
It isn't an instruction manual, as Jack had hoped, but a diary. The handwriting is small, neat and rather old-fashioned.
I dreamt of Jack again last night. I don't know any more whether it's blessing or a curse that I see him almost every time I close my eyes.
Being without him hurts, knowing that he gave his life for us, to try to save us. It's like a weight on my chest that makes it hard to breathe sometimes.
Rationally, I know that is because the oxygen filters are failing again, and me and Tosh need to try another repair. Irrationally, when I am alone in the late hours of the night, knowing that I am one of few people left alive on this dying planet, I have to wonder if it is not a broken heart.
"Oh, Ianto," Jack says quietly.
"Give it here!" Ianto says angrily, voice hoarse with emotion, as he snatches the book out of Jack's hands. Soaking wet from the shower, and wearing only a towel, he glares at Jack. "You had no right, that's private."
Startled by Ianto sudden reappearance, Jack can't think of any excuses; none that are particularly plausible anyway, so he apologises. “I'm sorry, I wanted to know about you, where you come from.”
“Next time just ask,” Ianto snaps, putting the diary back into his suit pocket. “Like normal people do.”
“So if I ask you'll just tell me?” Jack asks, a little sceptically.
“Why wouldn't I?” Ianto replies, obviously still annoyed. “You've helped me even though you had no reason to even trust me.”
“I told you, you're Ianto Jones, and that all that matters.”
Ianto seems like he's about to correct Jack about this, but sighs instead, and says, “All right, ask.”
“You said the Earth, your Earth, was left out of place.”
Ianto nods, although he doesn't look happy about talking about it. Jack suspects that's more because of the subject rather than the fact that he's being asked about it.
“Have you come here to try to find a way of getting it back where it should be?” Jack is sure that the Doctor would be able to do it, providing of course it's not one of those fixed events that even he can't change.
“No,” Ianto says sadly. “It's too late for that. It's been months, the Earth is dead. Everybody thought the lack of sunlight would be the worse thing.” He looks at Jack, his expression bleak. “We were wrong.”
Abruptly, Ianto gets up, asking, “Have you got anything to drink?”
“Yeah.” Jack retrieves a half-empty bottle of spirits that has rolled under the bed. “But I don't think it's a good idea.”
“Probably not,” Ianto replies, but takes the bottle from Jack anyway. Pouring a generous measure into a glass left on the table, he looks around for another for Jack.
Jack shakes his head. “I've had enough for tonight.”
Sitting back down, glass in hand, Ianto says, with an enforced calm, “It was about two weeks after it happened that the magnetic field started to fail, and the Earth stopped spinning on it's axis.” He drinks some of the alien spirits barely acknowledging the unfamiliar burn.
“It wasn't long after that that the atmosphere began to fail as well. There wasn't much time to do anything other than form a few safe havens. It didn't last. One by one all the havens died, their power running out, their atmosphere venting into space. People suffocated where they stood.” The horror of the memories is clear in his eyes as he looks at Jack.
“Then how-” Jack begins.
“Did I survive?” Ianto finishes for him, his voice no longer entirely steady. “It was Jack. He saved us, he tried -” Ianto stops, fighting to keep control of his emotions. Putting the mostly full glass down on the floor, he takes a deep breath, then continues. “There was a device, it came through the Rift years ago, it was for transferring energy. Jack...Jack used it on himself, he said he had life to spare. He was convinced that if he could just buy us some more time the Doctor would come, that he'd fix everything.”
Jack doesn't ask if he had; Ianto's earlier bitterness towards the Doctor has already answered that question.
“He linked it to the shield and time lock on the Hub, extended it out over Cardiff.”
“So Cardiff is safe?” Jack asks, hope flaring. “I don't suppose...my grandson.”
“You, he, couldn't have children, not in my world.” Ianto puts his hand on Jack's knee. “But if he had, I know he'd have done everything he could to keep them safe.”
“Then he's a better man than I am.” Lifting Ianto's hand off his leg, Jack gets up, not feeling able to accept any comfort, not about this. Causing Stephen's death is the worse thing he's done, even if it saved the lives of countless other children across the world, he's sure he should have found another way. The fact that he's not sure it would have affected him so badly if it had been a different child, if it had been a stranger pleading with him to stop, only serves to heighten his current feeling of self-loathing.
“Don't know you well enough to say.” Ianto follows Jack to where he's standing at the window, looking out at the night sky.
“I'm not a good person, the things I've done...” Jack closes his eyes, feeling sick and ashamed, tears hot and wet running down his cheeks. “If you knew, you'd get as far away from me as you can.”
“I don't know, and I don't expect you to tell me.” Ianto stands shoulder to shoulder with him. “But the fact that you're this unhappy about it means you wouldn't have done whatever it was lightly. Only good people worry they're not good enough, bad people just don't care.”
Jack laughs humourlessly, not wanting Ianto to try an offer him forgiveness. “Where did you get that pearl of wisdom? A take-out fortune cookie?”
“My father, actually.” There's no animosity in Ianto's voice, although the tone dares Jack to contradict him.
He doesn't, knowing that all it will cause is bad feelings between them. Instead he asks, “So what's the plan for saving Cardiff?” Moving everybody two or three people at a time using the vortex manipulator is going to be nearly impossible both in terms of power and time needed.
“There isn't. There's not a Cardiff left to save. The shields started to fail a few hours before Jack...” Ianto stops, trying to gain composure, but failing. “I think he knew what would happen. He'd sealed the door, so that it would only unlock when the energy transfer was complete. He knew we'd try to stop him.”
“I couldn't even be with him when...” Ianto stops, wiping his eyes. “He shouldn't have been alone, not then. No one should be. I just wanted to be able to tell him how I felt.” He looks at Jack red-eyed. “You understand that, don't you?”
“Yeah. I understand.” Jack puts an arm round him, although whether it's to comfort Ianto or himself, he's not entirely sure.
“It was all for nothing, the shields failed anyway,” Ianto continues, angry and upset. “We managed to get the shields back up, but we lost Cardiff, they barely cover the Hub. There's only me, Tosh and Owen left.”
“I'm sorry.” It seems so inadequate, but he doesn't know what else to say. The death of a whole planet is loss on a scale that thankfully even he hasn't witnessed.
Ianto nods, turning his face towards Jack's shoulder.
The way his breath catches leaves Jack in little doubt that Ianto is crying, although it's an otherwise silent outpouring of grief.
“Ianto?” Jack asks quietly, after Ianto's breathing has evened out, and he's started to lean a little more heavily against him.
“Sorry, I can't seem to stay awake.” Still leaning against Jack, Ianto gestures vaguely at the vortex manipulator lying on the table. “Does travelling with that thing do this?”
“It can do.” Although Jack suspects that it's more to do with the fact that Ianto looks like he's been running on empty for some time. Too much stress, too little food and sleep combined with the dimensional jump and the electrical shock lead his body to decide that enough is enough and force him to rest.
“You take the bed,” Jack says, letting go of Ianto.
“What about you?” Ianto looks at the bed, then at Jack.
“I don't need much sleep.”
Ianto gives him a curious look, but anything he was going ask is lost in a yawn.
Lying down on the bed, Ianto is asleep almost straight away.
Despite what he's just said, Jack knows that he should try to get some rest himself. He knows that before they can think about travelling to Ianto's world to get Tosh and Owen they'll need to check all the power cells for damage caused by the burst of escaping energy.
Walking over to where his greatcoat is hanging on the back of the door, Jack takes a small bottle out of the pocket. He'd bought it from a black market trader who'd specialised in medical supplies. He'd been desperate when he'd bought it, soon after he'd left Earth, not having managed more than a couple of hours of nightmare-filled sleep in the previous month.
A sleeping draft that would keep him out for four or five hours with no nightmares had been exactly what he'd needed. And while Jack knows that he doesn't physically need to sleep any more, mentally the human brain can only take so much wakefulness before it starts to protest. So while nightmares are a fairly frequent unpleasant side effect of sleeping, the certainty of hallucinations caused by extreme sleep deprivation mean that he does on occasion force himself to rest.
Turning the bottle over in his hands a few times, Jack eventually replaces it in the pocket, not wanting to use it unless it's a last resort, as he knows that once he's taken it he'll be so deeply asleep that Ianto will not be able to wake him, even in an emergency. It's one of the reasons that he's only used it twice in the five months that he's been away from Earth.
The chair isn't the easiest place to sleep, and after several minutes of trying and failing to get even remotely comfortable, Jack decides that the floor is probably the best option.
Folding up his coat to use as a pillow, Jack is about to lie down, when Ianto starts mumbling in his sleep.
Ianto moves restlessly, covers tangling about him, until a few moments later, he gasps, eyes opening wide and fearful. He lays there for a moment, breath hitching as he slowly calms down.
"Nightmare?" Jack asks, when he's sure that Ianto is awake enough not to be startled by his presence. He knows how bad dreams can sometimes be, how painfully vivid and real they seem.
"No worse than usual." Ianto replies, sounding exhausted. The haunted look in his eyes suggests that the usual, whatever it is, is pretty awful. Getting out of bed, Ianto says, "You might as well use it. I'm not going to be getting any more sleep tonight."
“You've not even had an hour,” Jack points out, knowing that the brief and troubled sleep that Ianto got can't be anywhere near enough to make him feel any more alert.
Dragging on his still damp shirt, Ianto walks over to the where the power cells have been left on the table. "I should start work on this anyway. I've wasted enough time as it is."
Jack watches Ianto unsuccessfully try to fasten the button on his shirt before saying, "You really think it's a good idea to try and a fix power cell that could blow up half the city, when you can't even do up a button because your hands are shaking?"
"They are?” Ianto looks down at his hands, concerned. He flexes his fingers, wincing as the movement causes the burn on his injured hand pull and ache.
"You're exhausted, you try doing anything with those cells right now and you're going to break them, or blow them up. And that's not going to help anyone."
Ianto nods, looking defeated.
“You should try to get some more sleep.”
“So should you,” Ianto says sitting back down on the bed. “You look as tired as I feel. When did you last sleep?”
“A few days ago,” Jack says, more as a guess than anything else. He's fairly sure it hasn't been as much as a week yet.
“You're like him, aren't you?” Ianto asks, looking at Jack with an expression that is as much sad as it is curious. “Something happened to you, changed you.”
“The man who can't die,” Jack says with bitter amusement.
“My Jack said that too,” Ianto replies sadly. “Tosh will be pleased though.”
“That I'm a freak?”
“That her theory was right.” He looks at Jack, sounding a little annoyed as he adds, “And don't call yourself that.”
“Her theory?”
“Dimensional resonance. That as Jack was a fixed point in our world other Jacks were therefore significantly more likely to also be a fixed point in other worlds,” Ianto explains. “It's why we used your vortex manipulator as a known point. It was a safeguard as well, the stronger the correlation we got between the two known points the greater the similarities between our worlds were likely to be.”
“That's brilliant,” Jack says, impressed. It makes him miss Toshiko even more, knowing that she would have found her parallel world counterpart's theory fascinating.
“Yes, she is,” Ianto says fondly, lying back down, and pulling the covers over himself. Looking at Jack's coat folded on the floor he says, “You don't have to sleep on the floor, the bed is big enough for us both.”
“You don't mind?”
“I'm too tired to mind.” He rolls over, eyes already closing.
After removing his boots, Jack turns out the light, then lays down fully dressed on top of the covers. With Ianto sleeping beside him, Jack lies still not wanting to disturb him. Looking up at the darkened ceiling, the night slowly passing, until eventually he also falls asleep.
Part four.