Ficlet: Bringing Lies To Light
Title: Bringing Lies To Light
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack, mentions Ianto and Lisa
Rating: G
Spoilers: Cyberwoman, Fragments.
Summary: Ianto’s lies have been discovered; Jack is not happy.
Word Count: 404
Written For: juliet316’s prompt ‘Author's choice, author's choice, uncovering lies,’ at
fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.
In retrospect, Jack realised he should have paid more attention to what Ianto Jones was up to in the lower levels of the Hub and rather less to how good he looked in a suit. Then maybe this whole situation could have been avoided.
It had been a very long time since Jack had been so consummately and skilfully played, and never had it been done by someone so young. Ianto was a natural, not that that was any consolation whatsoever.
Right from their second meeting, when Ianto had informed him that his girlfriend had died in the battle of Canary Wharf, Jones had been lying through his teeth, the truth concealed behind a bland, polite mask of calm efficiency. Turned out not only was she not dead, she was a half-converted Cyberman concealed in his own home, and she’d been there for months. It was a chilling thought; a ticking time bomb had been practically under his nose and he’d never suspected a thing. He wasn’t sure what that said about him.
The worst part was that Jack had trusted Ianto, come to rely on him to handle much of the day-to-day running of the Hub, including general maintenance. He’d handed over all the Hub’s passwords without a moment’s hesitation. After all, Ianto was already Torchwood, and even though Jack had despised everything One had stood for, once it had fallen, Three was essentially in charge of what was left, so why shouldn’t he allow his general support officer full access? What harm could it do?
It could have allowed a Cyberman to get loose and convert the whole world, that’s what. Ianto had foolishly risked the entire planet in an attempt to save someone who was already long dead.
He’d lied to get a job, lied to protect a monster, lied in order to get an unauthorised person into the Torchwood base to help said monster, and only now, after the Cyberman nearly succeeded in escaping and destroying humanity, were the lies coming to light.
Had any of what Ianto had said or done been the truth? Had anything that had happened between them been real? Or was it all lies, designed to keep Jack from looking too closely at things the other man didn’t want him to see? He’d probably never know for sure, and what hurt even more than the betrayal was the loss of everything that might have been.
The End