Past Imperfect (4/7)
Title: Past Imperfect. (4/7)
Pairing/Characters: Jack/Ianto, team.
Rating: R
Warnings: Torture/interrogation scene in later part. (No sexual elements to torture.)
Summary: Waking up injured and with no memory of the past few days is only the start of Jack's problems as part of his forgotten past comes back to haunt him.
A/N: Set during in series two after Meat but before Adam.
Story starts here.
Part four:
“So where's this house then?” Owen asks, digging his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket.
Standing next to the phone box where Ianto and Owen had found him the previous day, Jack looks around. The landscape is bleak, and apart from the drystone walls that criss-cross the valley's lower slopes, featureless. It's hard, Jack finds, to recall just how he'd managed to get there from the house, the memories are hazy and disjointed. Jack knows he'd walked downhill, and that some of it had been on a farm track. The memory of the freezing mud and gravel between his toes is surprisingly vivid, and he shivers.
“It's this way,” Jack says, before any of them can comment on it, and points further along the road, knowing that it's the only direction that he could have approached the phone box from that would fit with the little that he remembers.
Getting back in to the SUV, Jack waits until the rest of them team have got in, before putting it into gear, and driving away. He knows that all of them must have questions, but after he'd snapped at Gwen about being being fine, none of them have asked him about anything other than directions or technical information on teleportation devices.
It takes only a couple of minutes to reach where the farm track meets the narrow country road. Manoeuvring the SUV between the drystone walls that run either side of the track takes a little longer, but eventually they stop outside the derelict farmhouse.
The house, if possible, looks even more cold and desolate, now that Jack is fully aware of his surroundings. The path up to the cottage, and what would once have been its garden, are overgrown, filled with straggling, frost wilted weeds. There's no sign that the place has been used for years.
Getting out of the SUV, Jack looks around then says, “Gwen, Owen, I want you to check the outside of this place, find out if there's any sign of anybody using this place. Ianto help Tosh unload the scanning equipment.”
“What will you do?” Gwen asks, zipping up her coat against the rain that has started to fall.
Drawing his gun, Jack walks over to the door. “I'll find out if anyone is home.”
* * *
Half an hour later, with the house checked, and gun holstered once more, Jack stands at the bedroom window, looking out at the grey, rain-washed valley, trying to make sense of the situation.
Only the more he about it the less sense it makes that he was left there. If it was the place where he'd been kept why had there been nobody there to make sure he didn't escape? And if it wasn't the place where he'd been kept during that missing week, then why had the people who'd taken him chosen to leave him there? Had they thought he was dead? And this was an attempt to conceal his body? But that makes no sense either, as with teleport techology they could have just tied a rock to him and dropped his body a couple of miles off shore or a different continent. But given the house's location it makes no sense that they'd left him there so that he'd be found. Teleporting him into the centre of Cardiff would have been far better choice.
Jack's not sure how long he's been standing there when he sees a flicker of movement, of somebody in dark clothing behind him, reflected in a fragment of glass still clinging to the corner of the frame.
But I escaped. The memory of stumbling forward and grabbing a teleport device from one of his captors thought flashes through Jack's mind. Closely followed by the thought, I'm not letting them take me again.
There's no time to draw his gun, and Jack turns fast, swinging a fist into the face of his would be attacker. It connects with a satisfying thud, the man staggering back from the force of the blow.
Or it would have been satisfying, were he not looking at Ianto.
“What the hell was that for?” Ianto sounds a little shaken, but otherwise ready to fight back if necessary.
“I didn't know it was you,” Jack says, looking as shaken as Ianto sounds, as he notices the cut on Ianto's lip, and blood smeared across his chin where Ianto has touched it.
“I came to tell you that Tosh has finished running the scans,” Ianto says, getting a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and holding it to his cut lip. “I suppose I aught to be grateful that it was me.”
“I wouldn't have hit Tosh.” Jack hopes it sounds convincing, hopes that he can convince himself that that would have been the case, and that it's not just that his nerves are so shot that he'd have hit anybody.
“Really?” Ianto sounds unconvinced.
“No. She wouldn't have snuck up on me.”
“Neither did I,” Ianto says calmly.
“You move too damn quietly. What if I'd had time to draw my gun?” Fear comes out as anger as the thought that he could be looking at so much more blood, at a body, hits him. “I could have killed you.”
“You didn't.”
“But I could have.” Jack turns away, closing his eyes, but the image of Ianto dead because of him stays burning behind the lids.
“I'm all right.” Ianto smiles, then winces, at it tugs on his injured lip. “Just don't expect me to do anything too strenuous with my mouth for a few days.”
“What?” Jack asks turning back round.
“This is really getting to you, isn't it?” Ianto puts a hand on Jack's arm.
“That obvious, huh?” Jack keeps his eyes on Ianto's hand, not wanting to see the injury that he's caused.
“Only to those who know you.” Ianto gives Jack's arm a squeeze. “Come on, Tosh wants to tell you what she's found.”
Jack nods, feeling suddenly exhausted by everything. With Ianto's hand still on his arm, Jack allows himself to be lead from the room.
“Apparently I walk too quietly,” Ianto says as Tosh looks at his lip, as they walk in to the bathroom where the scanning equipment is set up. Turning to Jack he says lightly, “Maybe you should get me a collar with a bell on it, let you know when I coming.”
“Ianto, I always know that.” Jack manages a smile. It feels like an effort, but he knows that he needs to if he's going to follow Ianto lead to defuse what could have been an awkward moment.
“Okay,” Tosh says. “I probably didn't want to know that.”
“Ianto says you've got something for me.” Jack crouches down beside the scanning equipment. “Let me guess, there's two signals, right? One a little stronger than the other.”
“How did you know that?” Tosh sounds surprised. She looks at Ianto. “Did you tell him?”
Ianto shakes his head.
“I remembered,” Jack says, trying to recall exactly what he'd seen in the brief flash of memory that had come back to him. “I escaped, I took one of their teleporters.”
“So the second signal was them coming here to retrieve it?” Tosh asks.
“Yeah,” Jack replies a little absently. The realisation that had he been too hurt to leave the house or had taken too long to do so that they would have found him, would have taken him away again, continued to torture him, sits cold and hard in his chest. His mouth feels dry as he says, “We should get back to the Hub.”
Picking up one of the energy scanners, Tosh says, “With this data I'll be able to reconfigure the Rift sensor network to pick up electro-spatial energy.” Tosh smiles. “As soon as they use that teleporter we'll have them.”
* * *
The Hub is quiet as Jack removes the mind probe from storage. With no alerts of any kind it had been easy to persuade them to take the evening off, all of them happy to take the rare opportunity while the Rift is quiet. Well almost easy. Ianto had only agreed to leave after Jack had suggested that they meet up later for a meal.
It’s not like it’s a lie, Jack thinks as he carries the mind probe and its chair over to his office, he’s got every intention of meeting Ianto at the restaurant after he’s finished with this. The promise of a hot meal and hotter sex is something that Jack rarely turns down.
The mind probe has been a temptation since it washed through the Rift decades ago. It has only been the knowledge that not even the Doctor had been able to access the years that the Time Agency stole from him that has kept Jack from using it. That and the fact that it hurts like hell to use, something that the whole team had been witness to when they’d used it to question Beth Halloran about being a sleeper agent.
This is different though, Jack tells himself, these are resent memories, information lurking only just out of reach of his conscious mind. The benefits far outweigh any temporary discomfort, although he doubts that he’d ever be able to convince his team of that.
But Jack knows he's got to do something. It has been four days since the teleporter detection system went on line and it has so far only gone off once. Even that though hadn't provided him with any answers as it had taken too long to reach the area of waste ground where it had activated, and by the time that they'd finally fought their way through rush hour traffic whoever had been there was long gone.
The mind probe is his best chance as getting this solved, Jack decides. The only real disadvantage to the plan, as he sees, it is the mind probe's less than targeted approach to getting at hidden memories. It’s the not knowing what it will reveal, combined with the near certainty that some of it will be disturbing, that had made him decide that he’d have to wait until he was alone before attempting to use it. There are things that he’s done, and has had done to him, that he's got no intention of ever sharing with anyone.
Glancing at the clock, Jack smiles, two hours is plenty of time to get everything done and get to the restaurant. It’s easy to set up a program to control the probe, allowing it to cycle up through the settings automatically.
Setting a two minute delay for the program to start, Jack sits down and puts the metal cap on his head. Slipping one of his hands through the wrist restraints, he tightens it, knowing that once the pain starts the desire to take the probe off his head is likely to be intense.
Tightening the strap about his other wrist is harder, but Jack knows it doesn’t need to be something too secure, after all he doesn’t want to be tied to a chair all night.
There's nothing at first, just the cold weight of metal against his skin, then gradually there's the feeling of something pushing at the edge of his mind. It's not exactly painful, not yet anyway, but it takes a lot of concentration not to fight it, not to put up the shields that he'd been taught to use in just such a situation when he was at the Time Agency.
The intensity of the pressure increases faster than Jack finds he's able to comfortably deal with, but there's no backing out now. Gripping the arms of the chair and gritting his teeth, Jack lets the probe into his mind.
There are flashes of memories, random and jumbled together, all are familiar, even if sometimes they are of people and places he's not thought about in years.
As the intensity settings increase so does the rate of the images, until they are blurring one on top of another, all too fast and disjointed to understand. Not that Jack feels he has any ability to understand anything right now, pain seems to fill up every part of his skull, white and blinding.
There's no sense of how far through the probe’s cycle he is, thinking hurts too much. The desire to escape is too much and Jack starts to struggle against the restraints, panicking as they refuse to give way, fragmented memories of torture rising up heightening his fear.
Eventually the chair topples over, falling on its side and Jack’s head connecting hard with the floor, and with a cry of pain Jack blacks out.
* * *
Opening his eyes, Jack tries to focus, the Hub blurring around him. Although hazy it's enough though to tell him that he's no longer in his office or tied to the chair, rather that he’s been moved and placed on the sofa, his coat folded up to support his head.
“I could say I told you so, but that would mean you’d have had to actually say something in the first place.”
Jack groans and closes his eyes again, uncertain as to whether Ianto finding him is the best or worst of the possibilities of which team member it could have been.
“Jack?” Ianto sits down on the edge of the sofa next to Jack, his hand brushing gently against Jack’s forehead. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah.” Jack doesn’t open his eyes, the residual headache from the mind probe still throbbing dully through his skull.
“What were you thinking?” Ianto asks, sounding angry and scared in equal measure. “Anything could have happened. You know how dangerous that thing can be.”
“It didn't.”
“That's not the point.” Ianto stands up. “You don't know what it could do to you. Just because it can't kill you doesn't mean it's safe.
“I'm all right.” Jack opens his eyes, glad that this time the room doesn't seem to spin.
“I'm always all right.”
“If you expect me to believe that you're an idiot,” Ianto snaps.
“That’s no way to talk to your boss,” Jack says, trying to defuse the anger starting to show in Ianto’s voice.
“If you think that’s all you are to me then you’re an even bigger idiot than I thought.” Ianto turns away, hands clenched into fists at his side.
Getting up is dizzying, but Jack walks the few steps to where Ianto has his back to him and puts a hand on his shoulder. “You weren’t supposed to know. ”
“And that makes it okay, does it?” Ianto turns around fast, pushing Jack back against the wall.
“Ianto, I…”
“No, I came in and found you tied to a chair, unconscious, and shaking like you were having a fit.” Ianto rests his forehead against Jack’s, hands gripping tight at Jack’s waist. “How could you do that to yourself?”
“Didn’t think it would be that bad,” Jack says, still feeling wrung out and shaky, he really hadn’t expected it to be as bad as it had been. “Must have got the settings wrong or something.”
“You really didn’t know?” Ianto’s grip relaxes, the brief burst of anger fast fading away.
Jack shakes his head, wondering how Ianto could think that he’d willingly put himself through something like that.
“Was it worth it?”
“I don’t know.” Everything is still a little jumbled up in his mind, and Jack’s fairly sure that it’ll take a few hours to reorder itself into anything that he’s got a chance of making sense of.
Ianto looks conflicted for a moment, then says, “If you do decided to do it again, let me be there, let me help you.”
“Not doing that again, believe me.”
“When you didn’t show up I waited, then I phoned you.” Ianto looks slightly embarrassed. “When you didn’t answer I thought maybe…”
“I’d left again?” Jack says quietly, wondering how many times has to tell Ianto that before he accepts it as true. “You know that I won’t, not without telling you first.”
“No. I mean I know.” Ianto runs a hand distractedly through his hair. “I was worried somebody had taken you again. That you were hurt, and I wouldn’t be able to find you.” He sighs. “Stupid, right?”
“Not at all.” It hadn't been what Jack had expected Ianto to say, but it makes sense.
They stand there, silence stretching out between them, until Ianto says, “Come home with me. You shouldn't be alone tonight.”
Jack knows that spending the night together it is as much for Ianto's reassurance as it is for his own. Slipping a hand into one of the back pockets of Ianto's trousers, Jack says, “Now that's the best idea I've heard all day.”
“I thought you'd say that.” Ianto runs his fingers down Jack's braces.
Jack doesn't reply, he just pulls Ianto forward and kisses him, knowing that this is the distraction that they both want. There's little else he can do tonight except wait for the memories to start to resurface, and waiting alone holds little appeal. Jack just hopes that by morning he'll have some of the answers that he needs.
part five
Pairing/Characters: Jack/Ianto, team.
Rating: R
Warnings: Torture/interrogation scene in later part. (No sexual elements to torture.)
Summary: Waking up injured and with no memory of the past few days is only the start of Jack's problems as part of his forgotten past comes back to haunt him.
A/N: Set during in series two after Meat but before Adam.
Story starts here.
Part four:
“So where's this house then?” Owen asks, digging his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket.
Standing next to the phone box where Ianto and Owen had found him the previous day, Jack looks around. The landscape is bleak, and apart from the drystone walls that criss-cross the valley's lower slopes, featureless. It's hard, Jack finds, to recall just how he'd managed to get there from the house, the memories are hazy and disjointed. Jack knows he'd walked downhill, and that some of it had been on a farm track. The memory of the freezing mud and gravel between his toes is surprisingly vivid, and he shivers.
“It's this way,” Jack says, before any of them can comment on it, and points further along the road, knowing that it's the only direction that he could have approached the phone box from that would fit with the little that he remembers.
Getting back in to the SUV, Jack waits until the rest of them team have got in, before putting it into gear, and driving away. He knows that all of them must have questions, but after he'd snapped at Gwen about being being fine, none of them have asked him about anything other than directions or technical information on teleportation devices.
It takes only a couple of minutes to reach where the farm track meets the narrow country road. Manoeuvring the SUV between the drystone walls that run either side of the track takes a little longer, but eventually they stop outside the derelict farmhouse.
The house, if possible, looks even more cold and desolate, now that Jack is fully aware of his surroundings. The path up to the cottage, and what would once have been its garden, are overgrown, filled with straggling, frost wilted weeds. There's no sign that the place has been used for years.
Getting out of the SUV, Jack looks around then says, “Gwen, Owen, I want you to check the outside of this place, find out if there's any sign of anybody using this place. Ianto help Tosh unload the scanning equipment.”
“What will you do?” Gwen asks, zipping up her coat against the rain that has started to fall.
Drawing his gun, Jack walks over to the door. “I'll find out if anyone is home.”
* * *
Half an hour later, with the house checked, and gun holstered once more, Jack stands at the bedroom window, looking out at the grey, rain-washed valley, trying to make sense of the situation.
Only the more he about it the less sense it makes that he was left there. If it was the place where he'd been kept why had there been nobody there to make sure he didn't escape? And if it wasn't the place where he'd been kept during that missing week, then why had the people who'd taken him chosen to leave him there? Had they thought he was dead? And this was an attempt to conceal his body? But that makes no sense either, as with teleport techology they could have just tied a rock to him and dropped his body a couple of miles off shore or a different continent. But given the house's location it makes no sense that they'd left him there so that he'd be found. Teleporting him into the centre of Cardiff would have been far better choice.
Jack's not sure how long he's been standing there when he sees a flicker of movement, of somebody in dark clothing behind him, reflected in a fragment of glass still clinging to the corner of the frame.
But I escaped. The memory of stumbling forward and grabbing a teleport device from one of his captors thought flashes through Jack's mind. Closely followed by the thought, I'm not letting them take me again.
There's no time to draw his gun, and Jack turns fast, swinging a fist into the face of his would be attacker. It connects with a satisfying thud, the man staggering back from the force of the blow.
Or it would have been satisfying, were he not looking at Ianto.
“What the hell was that for?” Ianto sounds a little shaken, but otherwise ready to fight back if necessary.
“I didn't know it was you,” Jack says, looking as shaken as Ianto sounds, as he notices the cut on Ianto's lip, and blood smeared across his chin where Ianto has touched it.
“I came to tell you that Tosh has finished running the scans,” Ianto says, getting a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and holding it to his cut lip. “I suppose I aught to be grateful that it was me.”
“I wouldn't have hit Tosh.” Jack hopes it sounds convincing, hopes that he can convince himself that that would have been the case, and that it's not just that his nerves are so shot that he'd have hit anybody.
“Really?” Ianto sounds unconvinced.
“No. She wouldn't have snuck up on me.”
“Neither did I,” Ianto says calmly.
“You move too damn quietly. What if I'd had time to draw my gun?” Fear comes out as anger as the thought that he could be looking at so much more blood, at a body, hits him. “I could have killed you.”
“You didn't.”
“But I could have.” Jack turns away, closing his eyes, but the image of Ianto dead because of him stays burning behind the lids.
“I'm all right.” Ianto smiles, then winces, at it tugs on his injured lip. “Just don't expect me to do anything too strenuous with my mouth for a few days.”
“What?” Jack asks turning back round.
“This is really getting to you, isn't it?” Ianto puts a hand on Jack's arm.
“That obvious, huh?” Jack keeps his eyes on Ianto's hand, not wanting to see the injury that he's caused.
“Only to those who know you.” Ianto gives Jack's arm a squeeze. “Come on, Tosh wants to tell you what she's found.”
Jack nods, feeling suddenly exhausted by everything. With Ianto's hand still on his arm, Jack allows himself to be lead from the room.
“Apparently I walk too quietly,” Ianto says as Tosh looks at his lip, as they walk in to the bathroom where the scanning equipment is set up. Turning to Jack he says lightly, “Maybe you should get me a collar with a bell on it, let you know when I coming.”
“Ianto, I always know that.” Jack manages a smile. It feels like an effort, but he knows that he needs to if he's going to follow Ianto lead to defuse what could have been an awkward moment.
“Okay,” Tosh says. “I probably didn't want to know that.”
“Ianto says you've got something for me.” Jack crouches down beside the scanning equipment. “Let me guess, there's two signals, right? One a little stronger than the other.”
“How did you know that?” Tosh sounds surprised. She looks at Ianto. “Did you tell him?”
Ianto shakes his head.
“I remembered,” Jack says, trying to recall exactly what he'd seen in the brief flash of memory that had come back to him. “I escaped, I took one of their teleporters.”
“So the second signal was them coming here to retrieve it?” Tosh asks.
“Yeah,” Jack replies a little absently. The realisation that had he been too hurt to leave the house or had taken too long to do so that they would have found him, would have taken him away again, continued to torture him, sits cold and hard in his chest. His mouth feels dry as he says, “We should get back to the Hub.”
Picking up one of the energy scanners, Tosh says, “With this data I'll be able to reconfigure the Rift sensor network to pick up electro-spatial energy.” Tosh smiles. “As soon as they use that teleporter we'll have them.”
* * *
The Hub is quiet as Jack removes the mind probe from storage. With no alerts of any kind it had been easy to persuade them to take the evening off, all of them happy to take the rare opportunity while the Rift is quiet. Well almost easy. Ianto had only agreed to leave after Jack had suggested that they meet up later for a meal.
It’s not like it’s a lie, Jack thinks as he carries the mind probe and its chair over to his office, he’s got every intention of meeting Ianto at the restaurant after he’s finished with this. The promise of a hot meal and hotter sex is something that Jack rarely turns down.
The mind probe has been a temptation since it washed through the Rift decades ago. It has only been the knowledge that not even the Doctor had been able to access the years that the Time Agency stole from him that has kept Jack from using it. That and the fact that it hurts like hell to use, something that the whole team had been witness to when they’d used it to question Beth Halloran about being a sleeper agent.
This is different though, Jack tells himself, these are resent memories, information lurking only just out of reach of his conscious mind. The benefits far outweigh any temporary discomfort, although he doubts that he’d ever be able to convince his team of that.
But Jack knows he's got to do something. It has been four days since the teleporter detection system went on line and it has so far only gone off once. Even that though hadn't provided him with any answers as it had taken too long to reach the area of waste ground where it had activated, and by the time that they'd finally fought their way through rush hour traffic whoever had been there was long gone.
The mind probe is his best chance as getting this solved, Jack decides. The only real disadvantage to the plan, as he sees, it is the mind probe's less than targeted approach to getting at hidden memories. It’s the not knowing what it will reveal, combined with the near certainty that some of it will be disturbing, that had made him decide that he’d have to wait until he was alone before attempting to use it. There are things that he’s done, and has had done to him, that he's got no intention of ever sharing with anyone.
Glancing at the clock, Jack smiles, two hours is plenty of time to get everything done and get to the restaurant. It’s easy to set up a program to control the probe, allowing it to cycle up through the settings automatically.
Setting a two minute delay for the program to start, Jack sits down and puts the metal cap on his head. Slipping one of his hands through the wrist restraints, he tightens it, knowing that once the pain starts the desire to take the probe off his head is likely to be intense.
Tightening the strap about his other wrist is harder, but Jack knows it doesn’t need to be something too secure, after all he doesn’t want to be tied to a chair all night.
There's nothing at first, just the cold weight of metal against his skin, then gradually there's the feeling of something pushing at the edge of his mind. It's not exactly painful, not yet anyway, but it takes a lot of concentration not to fight it, not to put up the shields that he'd been taught to use in just such a situation when he was at the Time Agency.
The intensity of the pressure increases faster than Jack finds he's able to comfortably deal with, but there's no backing out now. Gripping the arms of the chair and gritting his teeth, Jack lets the probe into his mind.
There are flashes of memories, random and jumbled together, all are familiar, even if sometimes they are of people and places he's not thought about in years.
As the intensity settings increase so does the rate of the images, until they are blurring one on top of another, all too fast and disjointed to understand. Not that Jack feels he has any ability to understand anything right now, pain seems to fill up every part of his skull, white and blinding.
There's no sense of how far through the probe’s cycle he is, thinking hurts too much. The desire to escape is too much and Jack starts to struggle against the restraints, panicking as they refuse to give way, fragmented memories of torture rising up heightening his fear.
Eventually the chair topples over, falling on its side and Jack’s head connecting hard with the floor, and with a cry of pain Jack blacks out.
* * *
Opening his eyes, Jack tries to focus, the Hub blurring around him. Although hazy it's enough though to tell him that he's no longer in his office or tied to the chair, rather that he’s been moved and placed on the sofa, his coat folded up to support his head.
“I could say I told you so, but that would mean you’d have had to actually say something in the first place.”
Jack groans and closes his eyes again, uncertain as to whether Ianto finding him is the best or worst of the possibilities of which team member it could have been.
“Jack?” Ianto sits down on the edge of the sofa next to Jack, his hand brushing gently against Jack’s forehead. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah.” Jack doesn’t open his eyes, the residual headache from the mind probe still throbbing dully through his skull.
“What were you thinking?” Ianto asks, sounding angry and scared in equal measure. “Anything could have happened. You know how dangerous that thing can be.”
“It didn't.”
“That's not the point.” Ianto stands up. “You don't know what it could do to you. Just because it can't kill you doesn't mean it's safe.
“I'm all right.” Jack opens his eyes, glad that this time the room doesn't seem to spin.
“I'm always all right.”
“If you expect me to believe that you're an idiot,” Ianto snaps.
“That’s no way to talk to your boss,” Jack says, trying to defuse the anger starting to show in Ianto’s voice.
“If you think that’s all you are to me then you’re an even bigger idiot than I thought.” Ianto turns away, hands clenched into fists at his side.
Getting up is dizzying, but Jack walks the few steps to where Ianto has his back to him and puts a hand on his shoulder. “You weren’t supposed to know. ”
“And that makes it okay, does it?” Ianto turns around fast, pushing Jack back against the wall.
“Ianto, I…”
“No, I came in and found you tied to a chair, unconscious, and shaking like you were having a fit.” Ianto rests his forehead against Jack’s, hands gripping tight at Jack’s waist. “How could you do that to yourself?”
“Didn’t think it would be that bad,” Jack says, still feeling wrung out and shaky, he really hadn’t expected it to be as bad as it had been. “Must have got the settings wrong or something.”
“You really didn’t know?” Ianto’s grip relaxes, the brief burst of anger fast fading away.
Jack shakes his head, wondering how Ianto could think that he’d willingly put himself through something like that.
“Was it worth it?”
“I don’t know.” Everything is still a little jumbled up in his mind, and Jack’s fairly sure that it’ll take a few hours to reorder itself into anything that he’s got a chance of making sense of.
Ianto looks conflicted for a moment, then says, “If you do decided to do it again, let me be there, let me help you.”
“Not doing that again, believe me.”
“When you didn’t show up I waited, then I phoned you.” Ianto looks slightly embarrassed. “When you didn’t answer I thought maybe…”
“I’d left again?” Jack says quietly, wondering how many times has to tell Ianto that before he accepts it as true. “You know that I won’t, not without telling you first.”
“No. I mean I know.” Ianto runs a hand distractedly through his hair. “I was worried somebody had taken you again. That you were hurt, and I wouldn’t be able to find you.” He sighs. “Stupid, right?”
“Not at all.” It hadn't been what Jack had expected Ianto to say, but it makes sense.
They stand there, silence stretching out between them, until Ianto says, “Come home with me. You shouldn't be alone tonight.”
Jack knows that spending the night together it is as much for Ianto's reassurance as it is for his own. Slipping a hand into one of the back pockets of Ianto's trousers, Jack says, “Now that's the best idea I've heard all day.”
“I thought you'd say that.” Ianto runs his fingers down Jack's braces.
Jack doesn't reply, he just pulls Ianto forward and kisses him, knowing that this is the distraction that they both want. There's little else he can do tonight except wait for the memories to start to resurface, and waiting alone holds little appeal. Jack just hopes that by morning he'll have some of the answers that he needs.
part five