Fic: Get Loved, Make More, Try to Stay Alive (4/8)
part 3
Half an hour later, Ianto stood on Martha's doorstep. He'd dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, because he was on holiday, and this was a completely unofficial visit. Apart from the usual items, his messenger bag held the book and his antibiotics, just in case he wasn't back in his hotel room within a couple of hours, when his next dose was due. Martha opened the door nearly before he'd touched the bell, and whisked him inside only a little faster than courtesy could explain.
She actually did offer him tea, and Ianto could see her sizing up the scale of the crisis as she fixed each of them a cup. By the time they were both sitting down in the lounge, he thought she had it. Her tone was all wry sympathy, no concern for the wellbeing of the planet, as she said, "So, are you going to tell me, or should we play charades?"
Ianto glanced irresistibly toward his bag, on the floor beside his chair, and said, "I want to ask you for a favor, actually. I'm not sure whether it's impossible or trivial or just wildly presumptuous..."
Martha nodded, and then glanced down at her own cup of tea. "Would this have anything to do with the favor Owen was going to ask me for on your behalf, and then called back to say he didn't need after all, a couple of months ago?"
Ianto hadn't even thought of that--but Owen had said he'd get in touch with Martha, ask her when she could do a spot of surgery, and he'd been as good as his word, apparently.
"Tangentially," Ianto said. "And this time it's actually on Jack's behalf, or--on behalf of Jack's future offspring."
Martha's gaze flicked down over him so quickly that he wouldn't have seen it if he weren't watching for it. "Jack's--Jack's future offspring?"
Ianto had to look away, struggling to keep his voice even. "Jack's and--and mine. But it won't be born for a long time, and--the thing is--I know that you know the Doctor."
"Do you."
Ianto looked up sharply at that, but Martha was sitting back, studying him thoughtfully.
"Jack doesn't know you know, does he? Or you'd just have asked Jack."
Ianto shrugged. "If he's thought it through, he doesn't let on. I worked for Torchwood London, I was a researcher, and the Doctor was our foremost topic of research. We had the video, the one from the DVDs, the one recorded in 1969. You said you'd had to get a job in a shop to support him."
Martha covered her mouth with one hand, but the sharp little laugh still escaped. "That! Oh, I'd forgotten that--did you know when we met, then?"
Ianto shook his head. "We never identified you from the video. The name Martha wasn't terribly much to go on, and we'd no idea when you had come from. I didn't recognize you right away when I met you, just thought that you seemed a bit familiar. It didn't click until later--something Jack said about the Doctor. He says things, because he thinks we don't know."
Martha lowered her hand, shaking her head but still smiling. "And so did I. And now--Jack's going to have a baby? That's what the favor is about? Your baby?"
Ianto nodded hesitantly, not quite ready to untangle the transitive verbs involved. "Someday. I don't know when, but--"
Martha waved one hand dismissively and stood. "Just hang on one sec, I need to--"
There was a sound--the sound. Ianto was on his feet at once, though he didn't know whether he wanted to step in front of Martha or behind her. She caught his shoulder, and he held his ground at her side. The sound went on and on, louder and infinitely more immediate than the recordings he'd heard, and before him the blue box shimmered into being in the middle of Martha's flat.
As soon as the box had become fully present, the door opened, and the brown-haired man in the suit (taller than Ianto expected, even though Ianto had seen the CCTV footage of him standing with Yvonne the Terrible), the Doctor, bounded out with a smile on his face.
"Martha! Did you miss--"
"You," Martha said sternly, dropping her hand from Ianto's shoulder to point at the Doctor, nearly jabbing him in the eye, "are early. Not a word."
The Doctor looked baffled, but shut his mouth obediently.
Martha turned ostentatiously toward Ianto. "As I was saying, hang on one sec, I need to make a phone call."
Ianto glanced cautiously toward the Doctor, who looked enlightened and then eyed Ianto with cheerfully open speculation as Martha walked a little way away and dialed her phone.
"This is Martha, of course," she said, and as Ianto watched, the Doctor mouthed the words along with her. "And I've got your voicemail, which means you're either busy or screening my calls. Check the time stamp when you get this--it's not an emergency, just some news about a mutual friend. Take your time, honestly, there's no rush."
Martha rang off, and the Doctor said, "You over-sold it there at the end; it was that no rush business that got me a bit worried."
"So worried you couldn't wait another ninety seconds and avoid interfering with causality?"
The Doctor looked, possibly, slightly sheepish. "That's never happened before, I swear--"
"Yeah," Martha said, with a roll of her eyes. "I'll bet you say that to all the--"
"Anyway!" The Doctor interrupted brightly. "Let's not argue in front of company, Martha, aren't you going to introduce me? Is this your young man? Tom, is it? Getting around to meeting the family at last?"
"Tom has met my family, actually," Martha said, and the Doctor's smile dimmed by some tiny fraction--that dart had hit harder than it had been thrown. "But he could happily meet more of it, if you were interested," Martha added, much more gently. "Anyway, this isn't my young man--this is Jack's. Doctor, meet Ianto Jones. Ianto--"
"Yes," Ianto said, forcing himself to keep calm as the Doctor's focus on him palpably increased. "I'd worked that out, thanks."
"Ianto," the Doctor said, and a smile bloomed slowly across his face. "Jack's Ianto--of course, I should have known--the way he talks you'd think you never saw the sun without a three-piece suit on and a stopwatch in hand, but I suppose you must get the odd bank holiday, hm?"
"He's... a bit fixated on the suits," Ianto said slowly. He was suddenly blindingly conscious of where that might come from.
"Yes, so I gathered," the Doctor said. "Mind, I never heard any of this straight from him--I didn't really get to talk to him directly--but Tish--"
"That's my sister," Martha supplied, which explained precisely nothing.
"Tish repeated it all faithfully. She had quite a way with Jack's distinctive turns of phrase by the end--"
"Oh, God, that explains some things about her dating habits lately," Martha said, sounding somewhere between amused and horrified.
Ianto wasn't sure what his own expression conveyed, but it apparently moved the Doctor to attempt to reassure him. "What I mean is--I've heard loads about you, but I'm sure practically all of it was lies, or at least exaggerations. Captain Jack's Story Hour tended heavily toward the sensational--I mean, I'm sure that the first time you met him, you didn't actually run up behind a Weevil that had attacked him and bash it over the head with a tree branch...?"
Ianto gradually realized that both the Doctor and Martha were waiting for him to say something.
"Well," he managed. "I hadn't thought to bring a weapon to the park, and there was nothing else handy."
"Ha!" The Doctor looked delighted. "An improviser! But--I mean, the part about the pterodactyl--"
"We do have one--"
"Well of course, Jack can't resist a stray--but the chocolate, that was obviously comic relief, God knows we needed comic relief--"
"It's not actually terribly funny when she's worked out that you're the one who brings the chocolate and that you haven't got any."
The Doctor nodded, and then looked suddenly quite serious. "But the important question, Ianto, is this. Did he ever take you on a proper date?"
Ianto dared a sideways glance at Martha, who was beaming at him. The Doctor added quickly, "I mean--Tish got very caught up in that whole storyline, so naturally I heard a lot about it, and one can't help wondering."
"Yes," Ianto said slowly, choosing not to contemplate why his and Jack's relationship--such as it was or had ever been--had constituted a storyline in Captain Jack's Story Hour. "The third day after he got back, actually. But he did ask as soon as he could."
"And it's been a good bit more than a date," Martha supplied. "But you must know that, because I'd been to see them when I saw you last--"
The Doctor rounded on Martha instantly. "You never said a thing! Another way I knew it wasn't you, not a bit of news--"
"But after that," Martha insisted. "I'm sure I must have--"
"If you did, tell me what Donna said when you told us about it. After you'd got through explaining to her who Jack is." The Doctor's tone was triumphant.
Martha frowned. "Yes, where is--" and then she broke off, hesitant and confused.
The Doctor, though, looked merely a bit embarrassed, so Martha's faux pas couldn't have been too great. "She, ah--after our last--she said if she didn't get a bit of 'me time' someplace warm, on Earth, this year, without me around--because she insists something always goes pear-shaped when I'm there, which is obviously not true--"
Martha raised her eyebrows, and Ianto could feel himself making the same face, even on the basis of his considerably less intimate knowledge.
The Doctor looked back and forth between them with a very faint air of a man who knows he's outnumbered. "So what was this news about our mutual friend, then? Not that it isn't lovely to meet you on general principle of course," the Doctor added, "but I'd have thought Jack would be doing the introducing if--he hasn't got himself into trouble, has he?"
That was what they used to call it, wasn't it? Getting a girl in trouble?
"Not... himself," Ianto managed. "Me."
The Doctor raised his eyebrows, looking startled in a way that Martha didn’t, quite, so Ianto suspected he'd parsed that correctly. The Doctor sat down, waving Martha and Ianto back into their seats, and leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
"Why don't you tell me about that," he said. It wasn't a question, and the Doctor's attention on Ianto was like a physical force. His knees bent and his mouth opened.
"A couple of years ago I was hurt badly," he began, because he might as well go in order. "Jack saved me. Apparently these things called nanogenes--"
The Doctor got a very odd look on his face, and his gaze swept over Ianto searchingly. "You're all right now, though?"
Ianto frowned. "Well, yes, mostly. That's what nanogenes do, they heal you--repair you, was how Jack put it. Only he said they got it a bit wrong when they repaired me, because they used him as a template, so I have some internal organs I didn't before."
The Doctor sat back, and Ianto managed to tear his eyes away to look at Martha. She was studying him with almost exactly the same frown of concentration.
Ianto looked back at the Doctor, forcing himself to keep his chin up. "Where Jack comes from, everyone is capable of getting pregnant."
The Doctor looked him over again, his frown easing. His voice was gentle as he said, "You can't be very far along?"
It was a question this time. Ianto looked to Martha again, but he could see her putting it together, just a beat behind the Doctor--the favor, asked for and then declined...
"I'm not at all, anymore," Ianto said carefully.
They seemed to see each other as family, the Doctor and Martha and Jack. Ianto might be a fondly regarded in-law thus far, but that could change in a heartbeat. So far, they were both just staring at him, waiting for further explanation.
Ianto gave in and looked down at his hands, preparing to gloss as fast as he could over the part where he hadn't wanted to have their darling Jack's child. "I couldn't. Torchwood employees can't have children--even if there weren't regulations, we don’t live long enough to father anything but orphans. But Jack found this device--it took the--the child, it will hold it in stasis--"
"Oh, a Samyek Tau Twenty-Seven, that must be. So big?" The Doctor sounded relieved, shaping a rectangle in the air with his hands as he spoke.
Ianto nodded. "Jack didn't know what it was called, or who made it."
"The Samyek," the Doctor repeated, for all that told Ianto. "Excellent biomechanical engineers, miserable namers."
Ianto nodded again, and elected after a half-second's thought not to try to explain that they'd come up with a better one. "So Jack and I agreed, he'll have the child, later. He's got plenty of time."
He thought both of them had heard the parts he left out, the choice he'd made, the choice he'd fought Jack for. They were both studying him, unsmiling and intent. Ianto didn't dare look down again.
Finally, the Doctor turned and looked at Martha.
"I see why you called me," he said. "You know what this means?"
Martha nodded, her mouth a tight line. Ianto restrained the urge to run. They weren't looking at him, he shouldn’t draw their attention by moving.
"It means," Martha said slowly, holding the Doctor's gaze, "that at some point in the future, Captain Jack Harkness--"
"Our Jack," the Doctor said, and but for a cracked octave of pitch he could have been any of the mums or grans in the street where Ianto had grown up, speaking possessively of a favorite lad they'd known since he was in nappies.
Martha grinned suddenly, looking to Ianto and then back to the Doctor. "Our Jack is going to have a baby, tell me you don't want to see that! Jack! And a baby!"
The Doctor was grinning too, enormously, looking delighted as a child. "Oh, it's going to be well worth the price of admission. Jack with a baby, I never thought I'd see the day. You can come now, can't you?"
Martha was already on her feet, and so was the Doctor. Ianto stood automatically, because Martha had, watching them both without comprehension.
"Only I have to be back in a few hours to get to work, so no side trips, I mean it this time," Martha was saying excitedly. "Should I bring a camera, do you think? Mum and Tish would want snaps--Ianto, do you--"
Ianto turned automatically toward the sound of his name. Martha was already standing in the open doorway of the TARDIS, that golden light the nearest witnesses had described visible behind her. She was looking at him expectantly, her smile fading a little as he watched.
"Ianto?"
He turned and looked at the Doctor; it was somehow easier to address him than to say this to Martha, whom he'd seen hugging Jack, who had gossiped with him at work.
"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't intend this. I only wanted Martha to ask you, for me, to take a message to them at your convenience. Nothing more."
They were time travelers, like Jack; rushing to the end, just like Jack, because they couldn't bear the suspense. Because they didn't have to. Ianto just wasn't sure what to do about being in the same room with them as it happened.
The Doctor looked solemn again, holding his gaze steadily. Without looking away from Ianto, he said, "Martha, why don't you go on in. I'll be right behind you."
Ianto was faintly conscious of Martha looking back and forth between them, then disappearing through the door. Leaving him with the Doctor, who took a step forward, closing the distance between them to something almost intimate. His voice was barely above a whisper when he spoke again.
"It's your child, too, Ianto. Of course you're invited."
Ianto licked his lips, and tried to think how to say no to this man.
"There are good reasons why you might turn me down," the Doctor continued, as if he could read every one of Ianto's scattered thoughts.
"For starters, as soon as you go forward and see, that future timeline becomes a part of your own. It becomes fixed. You can walk out of here now, go home to Cardiff, go to Jack and tell him you've changed your mind, you want to raise that baby now and to hell with the rules. I guarantee you Jack's not going to put up much of a fight."
This was both so entirely true and so entirely false that Ianto couldn't have begun to argue with it, even if the Doctor had given him a moment to get a word in edgewise.
"But once you see it, you don't have a choice anymore. Your future won't be yours to control."
This time the Doctor did pause, and Ianto shrugged. "It never has been."
The Doctor's lips twisted. "It always is and will be, actually. But the consequences get much more dire once you start traveling with me."
The Doctor tilted his head, studying Ianto thoughtfully. "But maybe it's that you don't want to meet your child only to have to lose him--because this is a one-time very short visit, Ianto. It has to be, to avoid making a very big mess of all our lives, to say nothing of the fabric of the universe. So perhaps you don't want that kind of pain in your life, meeting your own child just to walk away from him again.
"And if that's what's stopping you, I have to tell you, you're every bit as bright as Jack ever said you were, because nothing hurts like that. Nothing hurts like losing a child."
The Doctor's eyes were dark, and Ianto had the feeling that he spoke from a certain empirical authority. He'd hurt in plenty of ways, to make that statement with such bleak confidence, including the one in question.
"But it's worth it, Ianto, I swear to you it's worth it--even a child you didn't expect, and didn't want, even if you tried to insist it wasn't actually a person, let alone your responsibility--"
Ianto had to look away, though clearly that wouldn't stop the Doctor knowing every bloody thing about him.
"Ianto," the Doctor said. "Even then, even if you only get a little bit of time--it's worth the pain to know them, I promise you that."
Ianto didn't look up, and flinched a little when the Doctor spoke again, his voice in Ianto's ear and his hand on Ianto's shoulder.
"But if you're standing here hesitating because you think you don't deserve the chance to meet your own child, then I am about thirty seconds away from grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and throwing you into the TARDIS, is that understood?"
Ianto jerked back and met the Doctor's eyes; there was a smile there, suddenly, though still nothing like the gleeful look he'd shared with Martha.
He squeezed Ianto's shoulder and smiled a little wider. "I mean that. Even if Jack had never told me a word about you, you'd have earned this just by being clever enough to work out who to ask and how, and brave enough to actually do it."
Ianto thought of protesting that he really hadn't known what he was asking--he hadn't known Martha had the Doctor on speed-dial--but he had a feeling that would be the last thing he said before being flung bodily into the infamous blue box.
There was only one thing he could say now, really. He straightened up to his full height, tipped his chin up and looked the Doctor in the eye.
"Thank you."
The Doctor's smile brightened considerably, and he patted Ianto's shoulder briskly and stepped back. "You're quite welcome. Do come in."
Ianto squared his shoulders and stepped through the open door.
The interior of the TARDIS was a large, circular room, with a lighted central pillar surrounded by a baffling array of controls. The walkways were grating, the railings bare metal--oddly like the Hub, and again he wondered if this was where Jack's aesthetic had its source. Ianto looked back, to see the Doctor hovering just outside the door. He was still standing in the lounge of Martha's flat, which would have fit quite neatly inside this cavernous room. He was beaming.
Ianto looked back into the ship, noting the corridors branching off in different directions, and the fact that Martha was nowhere in sight. He looked back at the Doctor.
"Go on," the Doctor coaxed. "Say it. You have to say it, it's a tradition."
Ianto looked around again. It had to be something about size, but he'd been spending altogether too much time with Jack for the past two years, and the array of possible rude jokes was overwhelming.
"It's bigger on the inside," Martha said, returning from down one of the corridors.
Ianto suppressed a mental that's what he said and turned to the Doctor. "So it is."
"All right, close enough," the Doctor said, looking only mildly put out at this apparent abridgement of custom, and came in, shutting the door behind him. "Now, to find Jack and the little one. Let's see..."
The Doctor brushed past Ianto, going to the center console. He put on a pair of glasses and began to poke and prod at the various levers and dials, occasionally peering into the one recognizable video screen before going back to work on the controls. Martha wandered up to stand at his shoulder, and Ianto crept closer as well, though he gave in to the impulse to stand beside Martha, keeping her between himself and the Doctor.
"How are we going to find him?" Martha inquired. "Ianto, do you have any idea...?"
"Probably sometime in the next six hundred years," Ianto said, and then added, with a sinking feeling, "but I suppose they could be anywhere. Or when, if Jack gets hold of transport..."
The Doctor hummed a few notes and said, "Come on, don't be that way," in a tone of mild annoyance, apparently to the video screen.
Ianto glanced at Martha, who widened her eyes and shrugged. Nothing to do but wait, apparently.
The Doctor looked up a moment later. "Tell me, Ianto, how would you go about finding them?"
Ianto considered the question seriously. It was a research problem, of sorts. "Go further forward," Ianto said. "A thousand years, maybe--to somewhere with good information sources, if you know one. Then search backward for Jack and any sign of a child."
"Oh!" Martha said. "Birth records, of course--maybe even grandchildren! Except--do you think he'll still be called Jack Harkness? He might, you know..."
Martha waved a hand, but the Doctor didn't look up to see whatever she was implying, and Ianto decided not to ask.
"It's Jack, though," Ianto pointed out, the research project becoming increasingly interesting in his mind's eye even as he worked at not contemplating grandchildren. Ianto was starting to see why time travelers weren't meant to have children. "He's bound to turn up in the news somewhere, and then we'd know what name he was using."
"Huh!" The Doctor looked away again, fiddling with a dial. "That would probably work, eventually. Mind you, might have to look at a lot of microfilm."
"There's microfilm a thousand years from now?" Ianto didn't realize he'd intended to ask the question until he'd said it; he certainly hadn't intended to sound that plaintive about it.
The Doctor glanced up and grinned, looking from Ianto to Martha. "There is. Handy stuff, microfilm, only needs a light source and a magnifier, lasts ages once you've got the right materials to start with." The Doctor flipped a couple of switches decisively, and turned to lean against the console, folding his arms. "But I haven't got the patience, so I'm just going to ask the TARDIS to find Jack and the baby, if it's all the same to you two."
Martha smiled. "And how would you and the TARDIS find them, Doctor?"
"Oh, well." The Doctor wrinkled his nose and adjusted his glasses minutely. "The TARDIS always knows where Jack is. She hates him too much not to."
Martha looked enlightened; Ianto glanced around the ship uneasily.
"Well," the Doctor added. "I say hates--more like she's allergic to him, really, or--look at it this way." The Doctor's tone called to mind Ianto's strictest and cleverest teachers; he fixed all his attention on the Doctor, who was shaping a sphere in the air with his hands. "Time isn't linear, like you think, right. It's a ball of--"
"Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff," Ianto recited, and then snapped his mouth shut. This wasn't fag break at the London office, and not time to trade lines from The Doctor's Greatest Hits back and forth.
The Doctor was staring at him.
"I've seen the video," Ianto explained. Altogether too many times, in fact, and it hadn't even been his project for more than three weeks, three years ago--but everyone watched the video, of course.
"The one we made for Sally Sparrow," Martha added. "When we were stuck in 1969."
People had speculated about the recipient; Ianto had never found that line of enquiry especially compelling, but suddenly she had a name. "Is she all right, do you know?"
"Yes," the Doctor said. "All sorted, getting safely on with her life. She has been since before she needed the video, in fact."
Ianto recognized shut up and let me be brilliant when he heard it, and shut up accordingly.
"As I was going to say," the Doctor went on. "Time is like a very messy ball of string. An individual life is just the tiniest fiber making up a part of a thread which has been twisted into the cord, and all an ordinary person ever sees is just the inside of that fiber. That's why time seems linear. Also why you don't really see time; it's dark in there."
Ianto smiled obediently, and saw Martha doing the same, though her sideways look at him held a bit of honest humor.
The Doctor was giving them both a slightly stern look when Ianto returned his attention to him.
"The TARDIS is like a sewing needle, moving in and out through the ball of string, taking my life-thread with it--and yours, now, both of you. When there were enough of us around, we used to keep everything stitched together. But Jack, being what he is, forever, inflexibly--Jack is a..."
The Doctor made a sudden, violent stabbing motion with his right hand.
"Knitting needle?" Martha suggested, and Ianto knew instantly that she'd spent at least as much time and attention learning to parse the Doctor as he'd spent learning Jack.
The Doctor snapped his fingers, pointing at Martha. "Knitting needle. A steel knitting needle, stabbed right through all of time, unbending--made of the same stuff as the TARDIS, with the same magnetic charge. So she's repelled by him, but she's always aware of him, just like a compass needle--that's how you used to make compasses, you know, a sewing needle in a bit of water, or was it oil? Maybe oil--but anyway, she knows exactly where he is, and she can take us to him. We just need to..."
The Doctor looked down at the console, frowned, and flipped another switch.
Ianto couldn't believe he was actually about to say it, but also felt that he could not possibly miss the opportunity when it was handed to him. "Reverse the polarity?"
The Doctor slapped the edge of the console. "Reverse the polarity, exactly!"
Something beeped insistently, and the Doctor grabbed a hammer from somewhere and struck it repeatedly, until it went silent. Ianto edged backward, though Martha didn't actually seem alarmed, and that had to be a good sign.
"Anyway, the baby will help," the Doctor added absently. "Everything goes a bit wibbly-wobbly around babies. Even Jack. Ah!"
A green light in the central column of the ship began to move up and down as the noise returned. It sounded bigger on the inside.
"I'm not sure where we're headed, exactly," the Doctor said, frowning at the video screen again. "This may take--"
The sound stopped.
"...Some time," the Doctor finished, tapping his fingers against the side of the video screen. A smile spread slowly across his face at whatever it was he saw there.
"Why, Jack," he breathed. "I'd no idea you were such a traditionalist."
Ianto looked around the ship. They were here--somewhere, somewhen--and outside was Jack. And their child, their son.
"Where are we?" Martha's voice sounded far away, and Ianto recognized symptoms of shock--had he waited an hour after eating before traveling in time? He took a couple of steps back, ran into a seat and perched on the edge of it, putting his head down and trying to breathe normally.
"We are in the early twenty-third century," the Doctor announced, with great ceremony. "On Earth. In Wales. We are, in fact, about eight miles from the site of Cardiff's Millennium Centre. You have to understand, the twenty-third century--humans are busy establishing what will eventually be known as the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire, but they're doing it out there. Earth during this time is a bit of a backwater, all Imperial glory extremely faded. I don't know if I've ever even been here, and I seriously doubt a Time Agent ever bothered. It's exactly the sort of place people are talking about when they say, 'Well, it's a nice place to raise children.' And Jack is!"
"Shall we go find them, then? Ianto--"
Martha's hand touched his shoulder, and Ianto looked up and nodded, blinking rapidly, even as his grip on the edge of the seat tightened. "Yes, of course, let me just--"
The door banged open. Ianto couldn't actually see it from where he was--the console was in the way, and he couldn't seem to sit up straight. But nothing prevented him hearing the voice that came through, the perfectly familiar voice.
"Doctor! Great to see you! But I hope this is a social call and not an emergency, because I've kind of got my hands full with--"
Footsteps sounded on the grating, light and rapid, following the same path Ianto himself had followed and stopping somewhere on the other side of the console.
Slower, heavier footsteps followed.
"With this guy," Jack said, and Ianto slid down to sit on the floor even as Jack stepped closer, close enough that Ianto could see his face above the console, and the face of the boy he had lifted into his arms. The Doctor stepped around the console, moving nearer to them and keeping their attention away from Ianto. Martha crouched at his side; he could feel her, though he couldn't take his eyes away from Jack and the boy.
The child--his son, their son--had his arm slung easily around Jack's neck. His eyes were pale blue and open wide as he looked around the TARDIS. His hair was dark, curly as Ianto's got when it was allowed to grow out to that length (but not as mortifyingly out of control as Ianto's had been, at that age). Ianto thought his son's nose hinted at an up-turn inherited from generations of Joneses, but his dawning smile was the miniature mirror of Jack's. Tall as he was, he had a mouthful of baby teeth--he couldn't be more than four or five.
"Doctor," Jack said, "allow me to introduce my son, Ianto Jones Junior. Indiana, this is the Doctor--he's a very old friend of mine, I've told you about him."
"Well, hello there, Ianto Jones Junior," the Doctor said, sounding perfectly delighted. He offered his hand, and the boy--Ianto Jones, Junior--shook it solemnly. "Has anyone ever told you you look just like your dad?"
Jack smiled again, and seemed to squeeze the boy closer for a moment. "He doesn't, really. He looks just like Ianto."
"I know," the Doctor said airily, and turned back toward them. "Martha, don't you think he looks just like--"
Ianto's gaze never left Jack; he watched Jack step closer as the Doctor turned, his attention following the Doctor's gaze. His jaw dropped, his eyes went wide, and Ianto thought, I've been dead two hundred years, and that is what Jack looks like when he sees a ghost.
"Ianto!"
"Da-ad," the boy protested instantly, and the flat vowel was all Jack's, though the embarrassment was universal.
Jack shut his eyes, clutched the boy tighter for a moment, and pressed a kiss to his hair. "Sorry, sorry, sweetheart. Not you."
Jack bent, and Ianto let his own eyes slide shut, listening to the sound of small feet striking the grating. "Indy, why don't you tell the Doctor what's important about today, all right? I have to go talk to someone for a few minutes."
"Oh, have we come on an important day?" The Doctor dropped into a crouch--the child was too small to see over the console, so the Doctor would be eye-level with him now.
"My birthday," the boy said, and now Ianto could hear Wales in his voice. "Today is my birthday--I'm five today. Are you going to stay for my party? It isn't for hours."
"Well, I think that depends on your dad. What sort of party have you got planned?"
A hand settled onto Ianto's shoulder, and the touch was so familiar he shivered--Jack. Ianto looked up to find Jack staring over his head, eyes locked with Martha's in silent communication. After a few seconds, Martha nodded, turning away to join the Doctor.
"Oh, hallo, Martha! This is my friend, Martha, she's a friend of your dad's as well. Martha, this is Ianto Jones, Junior."
Jack touched a finger to his own lips, and jerked his chin in the opposite direction. Ianto nodded, got his feet under him, and followed. Jack pushed the door open and slipped through, and Ianto stepped after him into sunshine and warm air.
They were standing in a garden. Ianto caught a brief, dizzy glimpse--a house, green grass, trees and ivy and a few toys scattered about--and then Jack was pressing him up against the side of the blue box, kissing him like his life depended on it, like both their lives depended on it. Like Ianto had been dead and dust for two hundred years and Jack was determined to bring him back, good as new.
It was all familiar, all but the particular pitch of desperation in Jack's touch--it was Jack, still, always, and Ianto couldn't help but respond to him. Ianto had one hand clenched in Jack's shirt, the other in Jack's hair, when Jack finally broke off the kiss, though he kept himself pressed bodily against Ianto, his forehead leaning against Ianto's. They were breathing each other's breath, fast and ragged, Jack's hands flattened on Ianto's chest.
Then Jack pulled back a little further, running his hands over Ianto's body--over his chest, his shoulders, down his arms, then up to stroke over his throat, cupping his face--dipping in for another quick kiss--and running over his hair. At first Ianto thought he was just looking, just taking him in, but when Jack's fingers tugged gently at his hair, Ianto realized Jack was looking for something.
What was I wearing the day I died, Jack? How long had I gone without a haircut?
"Where did you come from?" Jack whispered. "When, I mean. Where are you on your timeline?"
Ianto cleared his throat--he hadn't yet said a single word to Jack, he realized abruptly--and Jack's eyes met his, riveted.
"After the gas," Ianto said. "The gas from the ATMOS systems, the fire in the sky. You made me take a couple of days' holiday, and I didn't tell you where I was going."
"The Sontarans," Jack said softly. "And you--"
Jack looked past Ianto, at the blue box. "You went to London and talked to Martha, and she spoke to the Doctor. Which tells me just about where he is--did either of them mention a woman named Donna?"
"Both," Ianto said. "Martha's met her, since she came to Torchwood." Jack squinted, obviously struggling to remember--it had been two hundred years for him, not just months, not yesterday like it was for Ianto. "That was the Reset--when Owen was shot. When he died, and you brought him back."
"Owen," Jack said. "God, Owen, I haven't thought of him in years. Owen and Tosh, right, and--there was Suzie, but that was before Gwen--and you. My team."
Ianto nodded, helpless to speak. Jack smiled a little, kissed him again like he couldn't resist.
"But Donna's not with you?"
Ianto shook his head. "The Doctor dropped her off. He said she wanted a holiday on Earth."
"Ah," Jack said. "That narrows it down, then."
He looked back at Ianto, frowning, even as he stroked the backs of his fingers across Ianto's cheek. "I remember that, when you went away and didn't tell me where--I remember I made you leave, because I felt like such an idiot for doing it, afterward, but I don't remember why. Do you have any idea what I was thinking?"
Ianto swallowed and nodded, swallowed again--but no, there was that stupid tickle in his throat, his chest going tight. Christ, his bag was still on the floor at Martha's flat, with his antibiotics in it. How was he supposed to count time, when he was traveling in it? He turned away and coughed, and once he started he couldn't stop.
Jack's hands fell away, and Ianto winced and bent double, covering his mouth and feeling like an idiot himself, but he couldn't catch his breath, couldn't stop--
Then there was an arm around him, and Jack murmuring, "Okay, okay, I've got you, here, take a sip of this."
Ianto hauled in a breath and held it long enough to drink--it was cold, sharp and sour-sweet. Fruit juice of some kind, burning and soothing down his throat.
"What is that?" he asked when he'd caught his breath.
Jack sniffed what was left in the glass and wrinkled his nose. "Mango-pomegranate-snozzberry, I think. Indy's always wanting the newest, weirdest kind they've got. We were just eating breakfast when you showed up."
Ianto nodded, glancing toward the house again--there was a little table by the back door with two chairs, two places set. No stepmother for Junior, then.
The door to the TARDIS swung open, and the Doctor emerged along with a pair of feet--he had Ianto Junior slung over his shoulder backwards. "Ahhh, that's better. Fresh air."
The boy giggled and kicked his feet, saying something muffled into the Doctor's back. He was wearing boots with a sort of one-piece jumpsuit, bright orange with blue rings round the knees. Ianto stole a glance at Jack's clothes, but they were slightly more ordinary-looking, though a sharp change in Jack's style from what Ianto remembered--closely-fitting trousers of a rusty red-brown, and a soft blue jumper. Still those same brown boots, though; possibly the same pair. Ianto wondered if the venerable greatcoat was still around somewhere.
Jack stepped forward and grabbed his son by the hips, taking him into his own arms and tipping him upright. The boy was flushed pink with excitement or blood-rush, and beamed dizzily and indiscriminately at his father and the Doctor. "The Doctor says he wants to stay for my party, can he? We could get more cake so there's enough for him and Martha."
Martha, peering around the Doctor at Ianto, grinned and shrugged, and Ianto smiled helplessly back.
"There will be plenty of cake for everyone," Jack said firmly. "There's enough cake for the entire village to come to your party. But first you need to go get dressed--"
Oh, they were pyjamas.
"--and get ready for school."
"But we have guests." Ianto Junior's accent got sharply--almost comically--more like Jack's when he was trying to bargain.
"I think I can manage our guests." Jack set the boy on his feet. "Go on, go get dressed, and if you're quick enough you can visit some more before it's time to go."
"Dad--"
"Hygiene. Clothes. Knapsack. Now, Indiana." Jack turned the boy bodily toward the house--away from Ianto. Jack still hadn't acknowledged Ianto's presence in front of him, let alone introduced them. Facing away from everyone, the boy heaved a melodramatic sigh, throwing his arms up in defeat, and then ran off toward the house.
Ianto watched Jack watching him go. When the door was safely closed behind him, Jack turned back to face the Doctor. He wasn't smiling anymore, and he looked older, and braced for a fight. Ianto took an involuntary half-step backward, wondering just how unwelcome the interruption of breakfast had been.
"Ianto's going to stay for a while," Jack announced calmly. "You can come back and pick him up and return him to his own timeline later."
The Doctor--looking as grim as Jack--flicked a brief glance at Ianto. He assumed that his face conveyed that he had had no idea this was going to happen, because the Doctor wasted no more than a second's attention on him. "Jack, you can't."
"You can," Jack said firmly. "You brought him here, all I'm asking you to do is not take him away. Not yet. I can't tell Indy that his father has stopped by to say hello on his birthday and then go back to being dead two hundred years ago. I'm not going to do that to him, and you are not going to force me to."
"I thought he'd be younger," Ianto heard himself say, catching Jack's attention for the first time. Ianto smiled apologetically. "We thought he'd still be a baby, and then we wouldn't have to explain anything."
"Well, he's mostly over the why why why phase, at least," Jack said softly, smiling. "Count yourself lucky."
The Doctor sighed. "Letting Ianto stay long enough for him to get attached isn't going to help, Jack."
Jack snapped instantly back into belligerence. "Ianto's his father, Doctor. He's already attached."
The Doctor spared another glance at Ianto, and Ianto realized that Ianto Junior wasn't the only him the Doctor might have been talking about. He realized, also, that Jack's statement held true either way; if he went back right now, he would feel the lack for the rest of his life. But it would get worse, the longer he stayed, the more he got to know this child--and this was why Jack hadn't introduced them, of course. Because it would get so much worse for both of them the instant the boy knew who the third stranger in his garden was.
"It isn't going to hurt the timeline, Doctor," Jack said. "He went away on holiday, I remember that--because he was ill, and I thought he should get some rest."
The Doctor gave Ianto another look, a bit dubious this time.
"Post-gas bronchitis," Ianto said with a shrug. "The... Sontarans, was it, Jack?"
The Doctor winced.
"It's epidemic in urban areas," Martha piped up. "Not normally too serious in healthy adults, though there are shortages of antibiotics in some cities."
"The point is," Jack said firmly. "He went away because he was ill, and I remember that he came back looking like he'd got no rest at all, and he never told me where he went or what he did while he was gone. I thought he looked tired, but he didn't. He looked older--just a little bit. Just one year, Doctor. Give him one year."
"Give him a year and then send him back where no one else knows it happened, hm?" The Doctor gave Jack a hard look, and Martha's lips pressed flat, but Jack just smiled.
"I don't think it'll give him too many nightmares he can't talk about."
"Jack--"
"One year, Doctor--can you spot a single year on a human's face, anymore? Most people can't. I doubt I can. Ianto's so young, just give him one year, one more year."
One more year alive, Ianto realized. He'd been dead to this Jack for so long. So young.
"How long did I have?"
Jack and the Doctor both turned to look at him this time. Ianto tried to keep his voice steady, clinical. It was practically a statistical question, and he almost certainly wouldn't get a straight answer anyway.
"After I went away to London and came back looking tired. How long?"
The stern confidence went out of Jack's face, and he gripped Ianto's shoulder firmly. "Not so little that I can tell you how long, exactly. Not hours or days, nothing like that."
Jack turned to look at the Doctor, keeping hold of Ianto. "But not enough. Not nearly enough for it to make a difference, in the scheme of things. Let him stay. Let him have a year with his son."
The Doctor looked tired, too. "Jack--"
"If you could have given Jenny a year between the pull of the trigger and the impact of the bullet, wouldn't you?"
The words seemed to strike him like a blow. The Doctor didn't make a sound, but Martha gasped. Nothing hurts like that, he'd told Ianto. He was staring at Jack now like he'd never seen him before.
"It's been two hundred years for me," Jack said softly. "You'll tell me about her when you're ready, and maybe it'll help to know you already did. But Doctor, wouldn't you?"
The Doctor was shaking his head slowly. "I couldn't, Jack. I couldn't. Because I would never be able to put her back in front of the gun at the end of it."
Jack smiled sadly. "I know. You'd need someone else to come and take her away and do it for you."
The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "You're asking me to do that for you?"
Jack shrugged, squeezing Ianto's shoulder as he did. "You're my oldest friend, Doctor. And there's literally no one else I could ever ask for this kind of favor."
The Doctor gave Ianto another look.
"It's dangerous," he said slowly. "Jack, so many things could go wrong cheating time like this, with such very dire consequences."
The Doctor had said that before--the consequences get much more dire once you start traveling with me. In the same breath he'd told Ianto that the future was his to choose and always would be.
Jack was still arguing, but Ianto hardly heard it. The Doctor looked to him again; there was no particular expression on his face, but Ianto saw it, now. All of Jack's attention was on the Doctor. All Ianto had to do was tell the Doctor no, and the Doctor would refuse Jack for him, so Ianto didn't have to tell Jack that he hadn't asked for this and didn't want it. Then it wouldn't be him who walked away from Jack and their son.
"Jack," Ianto said, perhaps a little sharply. To his credit, Jack turned to look at him at once. "Jack, ask me if I want to stay."
A multitude of emotions washed rapidly over Jack's face--shock at the attack from an unexpected quarter was one, and something like horror, as well. One might optimistically suppose that it was a reaction to realizing that he hadn't asked, but Ianto had a feeling it was at least as much at the thought that Ianto might conceivably say no. Still, a small, contrite smile and a pleading look followed.
Jack dropped his grip on Ianto's shoulder, and turned both his hands palm up. The gesture was unfamiliar, but as unmistakably formal as if he'd dropped to his knees. "Ianto Jones, would you do me the honor of staying here with me, and with our son, for as much time as we are given?"
Ianto looked from Jack--not his own Jack but their son's, two hundred years beyond Ianto's death--to the Doctor, who was watching Jack with an unreadable expression, to Martha, who was giving Ianto a wry smile.
"This really wasn't what I was expecting when I woke up this morning," he said, which was quite true and no answer at all.
He'd woken up this morning missing Jack, wondering how soon he could get back to Cardiff--and here was a Jack who needed him, and a chance to get to know their child. Ianto Junior was old enough to remember it afterward--and Ianto would lose nothing by it, not really. He would go right back to his own life at the end, and find his own Jack waiting.
There were a thousand questions he could ask--what was he going to do for a year, and what would Ianto Junior think of all this, for starters--but those were just details, really.
Ianto nodded, and turned to face the Doctor standing shoulder to shoulder with Jack.
"Doctor, thank you for bringing me. I will be staying, and if you take me back into the TARDIS before the year is up, it will be by force."
"Over my dead body," Jack added, a trifle too cheerfully. "Which means you'll have a lot of explaining to do to the screaming five-year-old. I haven't managed to explain the Captain Jack Harkness Facts of Life to him yet--it's kind of the ultimate in do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do, which is going to need to wait until the age of reason, at least."
Ianto rolled his eyes. "Over both our dead bodies, if it comes to that, which I imagine would make a mess of the timeline."
The Doctor sighed. "No one's killing any--hello, Indiana!"
Ianto looked quickly around--Ianto Junior was running toward them from the house, neatly dressed in red trousers and a brown jacket, both with a crispness that screamed school uniform. He stopped short at the Doctor's greeting, with a suddenly mulish expression.
"Junior." They said it in unison, Junior at a shout, Jack rather wearily.
"My dad calls me Indiana," Junior added, closing the distance and pressing himself to Jack's unoccupied side. "Nobody else." Looking up at the Doctor and his father, he seemed to notice Ianto for the first time. Ianto felt as much as saw Jack noticing the line of his gaze.
Jack laced his fingers through Ianto's, tugging him downward as he dropped into a crouch to look Junior in the eye. "Indy," he said softly. "The Doctor has brought someone to see us. Do you know who this is?"
Junior leaned against Jack's shoulder, not quite hiding behind him as he looked across his father to Ianto. To Ianto's surprise, recognition began to dawn on the boy's face after a few seconds' scrutiny, and he straightened up, all trace of shyness lost.
With the air of being offered one of his birthday gifts early, Junior said, "You called him Ianto!"
Jack nodded, smiling back at the boy as he squeezed Ianto's hand.
"Like on the viddies," Junior added wonderingly. He touched his finger to the end of his nose and then met Ianto's eyes and addressed him directly.
"You're Ianto Jones." He reached out with that same finger, and touched it softly to Ianto's nose. He could barely feel the contact, but it sunk into him, deep as a bullet, a fishhook, an anchor. So much worse. Dire fucking consequences indeed.
"You're my dad who died."
With Ianto--with his dad who died--on the scene, Junior scarcely noticed the Doctor and Martha's departure. He accepted their promises to come back for his next birthday (five minutes for them, a crucial year for Ianto and Jack and Junior) with an absent, "Yeah, okay."
He insisted on both Jack and Ianto walking him to school, which made Jack laugh. When Junior had skipped a few steps ahead, too excited to keep pace with the sauntering adults, Jack murmured, "He hasn't let me walk him further than the garden gate since the second week. Too old for Dad to go with him to school, you know."
Ianto smiled back, even as he realized that that was such a--such a fatherly thing to say, coming out of Jack's mouth. The sensation only intensified when they encountered Junior's teacher outside the school, and Jack made introductions. Ianto was fascinated to learn that he'd been working for Torchwood on a special assignment at a rather primitive field office for the last several years, unfortunately cut off from communication (all true, he supposed, from the vantage point of the 23rd century). He had been granted a long leave to spend with Jack and their son, but would be going away again on duty eventually.
All the while, Jack was friendly, not particularly exerting himself to be charming, though Miss Abernathy was a fairly pretty woman not much older than Ianto. She was also Jack's son's primary school teacher; someone he knew in a perfectly ordinary way, like a perfectly ordinary person.
When they left the school--striking off in a different direction through the village--Ianto watched Jack's face. Knowing it was there, looking for it, he could see it: Jack was older. Different. Really not his Jack at all, when he paid attention. Junior's Jack, not Ianto's.
Jack just raised his eyebrows.
Ianto looked away. The village hardly looked like the future at all, except that it turned out Jack's trousers weren't a particularly unusual color. People nodded and waved to Jack; in the corner of his eye Jack returned the greetings without encouraging anyone to come closer.
"Just--wondering what you've been up to for two hundred years," Ianto said, as lightly as he could. "You've changed."
"Yeah," Jack said easily. "So much for kids keeping you young--Indy's given me at least six grey hairs since he was born, and I'm sure that will take off exponentially once he hits puberty. I'll be looking my age in no time."
Ianto looked back at him, but Jack was staring forward now.
"It's a big house," Jack said idly. "Too big, really--I only bought it because it's been in Wales longer than I have, and that makes it a little easier to take seriously. There aren't a lot of four-hundred-year-old bungalows around."
And next, of course, would follow the polite offer of a separate room. Jack would find some way to tell him that he didn't expect anything, that he wouldn't presume upon Ianto's relationship with him two hundred years ago now that he'd changed into someone Ianto might not like as well as the one he'd left.
Ianto caught Jack's arm and tugged, hoped that the future was futuristic enough for this to pass in the middle of the street in a small Welsh village, and kissed Jack firmly on the mouth.
Jack came up for air with a smile on his face, and Ianto said, "I don't mind a change."
Jack grinned. "Well, I don't mind if you slip and call me by his name. And it saves me the trouble of seducing you all over again."
Ianto snorted. "That issue would only arise if you had ever seduced me in the first place."
Jack raised his eyebrows and said, "Refresh my memory, how did we come by our son, then?"
Ianto shook his head. "There was plenty of shagging, Jack, but you didn't seduce me unless holding still while I got up a running start to throw myself at you counts as seduction."
"Ah," Jack said, looping his arm through Ianto's and tugging him along. "I took the Zen approach."
Ianto gave up. "So what have you been doing for two hundred years?"
"After your time, I stayed on at Torchwood another thirty or forty years, I think." Jack glanced in his direction, and then away again, his voice falsely light. "Even after I stopped really missing you, you were always one of the ones I expected to see when I turned around--I'd been there so long, by then, I'd picked up a few ghosts. Alex, too. I saw Alex die but there were days when I thought..."
Jack shook his head. "Eventually I realized it was time to leave. I knocked around Earth for a while, enjoying a third--well, fourth or fifth--adolescence, and then I got off-planet for a while. Had a lot of sex and even more fun, fought crime, did crime, went to jail but never for anything serious, took other people to jail but only when it was very serious. Fell in love a few times. Spent eighteen years married."
Ianto didn't know whether he'd expected to feel more jealous than he did; it was just more Jack-stories of his past, even if his past was technically in Ianto's future. Still--as always--there was a niggling, stupid thread of envy toward the others. "All at once?"
"All at...? Oh." Jack squinted. "Twenty-three years, then. And six days, but that was for strictly ceremonial purposes and to save the galaxy and didn't count because we're not even the same species anyway."
"Well, naturally."
Jack shot him a smile. "But Elys, yeah, that was eighteen years in one shot. I met her first when she was--God, younger than you. Too young, and I knew it for once. The next time I met her she was married, and a mother, and too smart to have me interfering with her happy home--but we got to be friends, anyway, good friends. She kept me pretty well away from her husband and kids, which worked out fine until twenty years later when he died and the kids thought I was the scandalous younger man hitting on the widow at the funeral."
Ianto raised an eyebrow.
"I wasn't," Jack said, sounding almost genuinely aggrieved. "And we waited six months before we got married, and it was--honestly, it was none of their business, but she'd got used to not being alone."
Ianto considered this all the way to the end of the street. Jack had known this woman thirty-eight years--longer than Ianto had been alive, or was likely to ever be--and he'd spent half that time married to her, but...
"You were the wicked stepfather."
"Oh my God, I have never had people hate me that much without attempting homicide," Jack said. "Mind you, I thought it might come to that at a few family gatherings. I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking Indy's going to turn seventeen and suddenly develop Torre's personality."
Ianto thought of the things he'd said to his own father at that age, and winced. "Well, seventeen's hard on a lot of people."
Jack shook his head, though he didn't seem to be disagreeing; Ianto attempted to imagine Jack at seventeen and gave up almost at once. "It put me off having him, a little, but I kept thinking I could do better with an earlier start. So eventually I came back to Wales and settled down, and here we are."
Jack appeared to mean that last in more than one sense, opening the front door of an ordinary-looking white cottage and gesturing for Ianto to precede him inside.
"Med center," Jack explained as they entered the front room, which looked oddly just like a doctor's office waiting room at home, brightly colored leaflets on the end tables and all. "We need to get your bronchitis taken care of, especially if you started a course of antibiotics for it. You didn't bring them with you, I take it?"
Jack looked Ianto up and down, and Ianto was suddenly acutely aware that he was embarking on a year in a strange place with nothing but the clothes he stood up in. He confined himself to a simple, "No."
Jack nodded, looking idly around; there was no one at the desk at the back of the room, but Jack didn't seem concerned to remedy the situation. "It's a good thing you didn't. The old antibiotics are banned toxic substances these days--they might have had to arrest you."
"Ah." Ianto tried to picture it, and failed abjectly. "That wouldn't have been an auspicious start."
"Not much--ah, Jana!"
A blonde woman--wearing a reassuring white coat over her orange-red trousers--came out and met them at the desk, picking up something shaped like a clipboard that almost certainly wasn't.
"Jana, my partner and co-parent, Ianto Jones. Ianto, Dr. Jana Matthis."
Jana shook Ianto's hand, looking him up and down assessingly. Ianto tried to keep a straight face while he wondered what this woman had ever done to Jack that he immediately went so far as partner and co-parent when introducing him to her.
"Ianto Jones, Senior, then," she said. Her accent was Welsh, but strange to Ianto's ear; it took him an extra second to parse everything she said. "I take it the reports of your death were greatly exaggerated?"
Ianto glanced at Jack, who did not immediately offer an answer. "Premature, at least."
Jana's eyebrows rose, and Jack finally deigned to jump in, explaining again that Ianto worked for Torchwood and had been incommunicado somewhere unspecified, whence he would return in a year or so.
"Might as well take a baseline scan and start a file, then," Jana said, turning to lead them into a back room. "Because of course you've brought him right down for a preventive-care visit, haven't you, Jack, and not paraded him through the village when there was any possibility of spreading an exotic and contagious condition."
Jack smiled at the back of Jana's head; Ianto rolled his eyes.
"It's a touch of bronchitis, I'm afraid," he offered, as Jana let him into what must be an examination room, though it lacked most of the familiar accoutrements. "I've spoken to Junior, and to Miss Abernathy at his school. And Jack, obviously."
"Oh, good, I was afraid it was going to be people who'd have extensive contact with the more immunologically vulnerable members of the population," Jana said, shooting Jack a wry look.
Briefly involved, Ianto decided. Concluded more-or-less amicably and some time ago.
She raised a small device to Ianto's mouth and he blew into it; she examined the readout and then gave him a sharp, thoughtful look. "That's a local strain, but quite old. Practically ancient, in fact."
"You can take care of it, can't you?" Jack's voice was a little sharp, forestalling further speculation.
Jana shook her head, visibly giving up on the question, at least for the moment. "Of course I can. Ianto, if you haven't a registered religious or ethical objection to bacteriophages, I'll give you a run of those as well as an immune system boost. Airborne illness is a public health matter; treatment is compulsory."
Ianto glanced at Jack again, then said, "I don't think I have anything registered at all."
"Yes, I'm noticing that," Jana said, exchanging a look Ianto couldn't quite read with Jack.
Jack lifted his chin a fraction, and Jana shook her head again. "Bloody Torchwood. All right."
part 5
Half an hour later, Ianto stood on Martha's doorstep. He'd dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, because he was on holiday, and this was a completely unofficial visit. Apart from the usual items, his messenger bag held the book and his antibiotics, just in case he wasn't back in his hotel room within a couple of hours, when his next dose was due. Martha opened the door nearly before he'd touched the bell, and whisked him inside only a little faster than courtesy could explain.
She actually did offer him tea, and Ianto could see her sizing up the scale of the crisis as she fixed each of them a cup. By the time they were both sitting down in the lounge, he thought she had it. Her tone was all wry sympathy, no concern for the wellbeing of the planet, as she said, "So, are you going to tell me, or should we play charades?"
Ianto glanced irresistibly toward his bag, on the floor beside his chair, and said, "I want to ask you for a favor, actually. I'm not sure whether it's impossible or trivial or just wildly presumptuous..."
Martha nodded, and then glanced down at her own cup of tea. "Would this have anything to do with the favor Owen was going to ask me for on your behalf, and then called back to say he didn't need after all, a couple of months ago?"
Ianto hadn't even thought of that--but Owen had said he'd get in touch with Martha, ask her when she could do a spot of surgery, and he'd been as good as his word, apparently.
"Tangentially," Ianto said. "And this time it's actually on Jack's behalf, or--on behalf of Jack's future offspring."
Martha's gaze flicked down over him so quickly that he wouldn't have seen it if he weren't watching for it. "Jack's--Jack's future offspring?"
Ianto had to look away, struggling to keep his voice even. "Jack's and--and mine. But it won't be born for a long time, and--the thing is--I know that you know the Doctor."
"Do you."
Ianto looked up sharply at that, but Martha was sitting back, studying him thoughtfully.
"Jack doesn't know you know, does he? Or you'd just have asked Jack."
Ianto shrugged. "If he's thought it through, he doesn't let on. I worked for Torchwood London, I was a researcher, and the Doctor was our foremost topic of research. We had the video, the one from the DVDs, the one recorded in 1969. You said you'd had to get a job in a shop to support him."
Martha covered her mouth with one hand, but the sharp little laugh still escaped. "That! Oh, I'd forgotten that--did you know when we met, then?"
Ianto shook his head. "We never identified you from the video. The name Martha wasn't terribly much to go on, and we'd no idea when you had come from. I didn't recognize you right away when I met you, just thought that you seemed a bit familiar. It didn't click until later--something Jack said about the Doctor. He says things, because he thinks we don't know."
Martha lowered her hand, shaking her head but still smiling. "And so did I. And now--Jack's going to have a baby? That's what the favor is about? Your baby?"
Ianto nodded hesitantly, not quite ready to untangle the transitive verbs involved. "Someday. I don't know when, but--"
Martha waved one hand dismissively and stood. "Just hang on one sec, I need to--"
There was a sound--the sound. Ianto was on his feet at once, though he didn't know whether he wanted to step in front of Martha or behind her. She caught his shoulder, and he held his ground at her side. The sound went on and on, louder and infinitely more immediate than the recordings he'd heard, and before him the blue box shimmered into being in the middle of Martha's flat.
As soon as the box had become fully present, the door opened, and the brown-haired man in the suit (taller than Ianto expected, even though Ianto had seen the CCTV footage of him standing with Yvonne the Terrible), the Doctor, bounded out with a smile on his face.
"Martha! Did you miss--"
"You," Martha said sternly, dropping her hand from Ianto's shoulder to point at the Doctor, nearly jabbing him in the eye, "are early. Not a word."
The Doctor looked baffled, but shut his mouth obediently.
Martha turned ostentatiously toward Ianto. "As I was saying, hang on one sec, I need to make a phone call."
Ianto glanced cautiously toward the Doctor, who looked enlightened and then eyed Ianto with cheerfully open speculation as Martha walked a little way away and dialed her phone.
"This is Martha, of course," she said, and as Ianto watched, the Doctor mouthed the words along with her. "And I've got your voicemail, which means you're either busy or screening my calls. Check the time stamp when you get this--it's not an emergency, just some news about a mutual friend. Take your time, honestly, there's no rush."
Martha rang off, and the Doctor said, "You over-sold it there at the end; it was that no rush business that got me a bit worried."
"So worried you couldn't wait another ninety seconds and avoid interfering with causality?"
The Doctor looked, possibly, slightly sheepish. "That's never happened before, I swear--"
"Yeah," Martha said, with a roll of her eyes. "I'll bet you say that to all the--"
"Anyway!" The Doctor interrupted brightly. "Let's not argue in front of company, Martha, aren't you going to introduce me? Is this your young man? Tom, is it? Getting around to meeting the family at last?"
"Tom has met my family, actually," Martha said, and the Doctor's smile dimmed by some tiny fraction--that dart had hit harder than it had been thrown. "But he could happily meet more of it, if you were interested," Martha added, much more gently. "Anyway, this isn't my young man--this is Jack's. Doctor, meet Ianto Jones. Ianto--"
"Yes," Ianto said, forcing himself to keep calm as the Doctor's focus on him palpably increased. "I'd worked that out, thanks."
"Ianto," the Doctor said, and a smile bloomed slowly across his face. "Jack's Ianto--of course, I should have known--the way he talks you'd think you never saw the sun without a three-piece suit on and a stopwatch in hand, but I suppose you must get the odd bank holiday, hm?"
"He's... a bit fixated on the suits," Ianto said slowly. He was suddenly blindingly conscious of where that might come from.
"Yes, so I gathered," the Doctor said. "Mind, I never heard any of this straight from him--I didn't really get to talk to him directly--but Tish--"
"That's my sister," Martha supplied, which explained precisely nothing.
"Tish repeated it all faithfully. She had quite a way with Jack's distinctive turns of phrase by the end--"
"Oh, God, that explains some things about her dating habits lately," Martha said, sounding somewhere between amused and horrified.
Ianto wasn't sure what his own expression conveyed, but it apparently moved the Doctor to attempt to reassure him. "What I mean is--I've heard loads about you, but I'm sure practically all of it was lies, or at least exaggerations. Captain Jack's Story Hour tended heavily toward the sensational--I mean, I'm sure that the first time you met him, you didn't actually run up behind a Weevil that had attacked him and bash it over the head with a tree branch...?"
Ianto gradually realized that both the Doctor and Martha were waiting for him to say something.
"Well," he managed. "I hadn't thought to bring a weapon to the park, and there was nothing else handy."
"Ha!" The Doctor looked delighted. "An improviser! But--I mean, the part about the pterodactyl--"
"We do have one--"
"Well of course, Jack can't resist a stray--but the chocolate, that was obviously comic relief, God knows we needed comic relief--"
"It's not actually terribly funny when she's worked out that you're the one who brings the chocolate and that you haven't got any."
The Doctor nodded, and then looked suddenly quite serious. "But the important question, Ianto, is this. Did he ever take you on a proper date?"
Ianto dared a sideways glance at Martha, who was beaming at him. The Doctor added quickly, "I mean--Tish got very caught up in that whole storyline, so naturally I heard a lot about it, and one can't help wondering."
"Yes," Ianto said slowly, choosing not to contemplate why his and Jack's relationship--such as it was or had ever been--had constituted a storyline in Captain Jack's Story Hour. "The third day after he got back, actually. But he did ask as soon as he could."
"And it's been a good bit more than a date," Martha supplied. "But you must know that, because I'd been to see them when I saw you last--"
The Doctor rounded on Martha instantly. "You never said a thing! Another way I knew it wasn't you, not a bit of news--"
"But after that," Martha insisted. "I'm sure I must have--"
"If you did, tell me what Donna said when you told us about it. After you'd got through explaining to her who Jack is." The Doctor's tone was triumphant.
Martha frowned. "Yes, where is--" and then she broke off, hesitant and confused.
The Doctor, though, looked merely a bit embarrassed, so Martha's faux pas couldn't have been too great. "She, ah--after our last--she said if she didn't get a bit of 'me time' someplace warm, on Earth, this year, without me around--because she insists something always goes pear-shaped when I'm there, which is obviously not true--"
Martha raised her eyebrows, and Ianto could feel himself making the same face, even on the basis of his considerably less intimate knowledge.
The Doctor looked back and forth between them with a very faint air of a man who knows he's outnumbered. "So what was this news about our mutual friend, then? Not that it isn't lovely to meet you on general principle of course," the Doctor added, "but I'd have thought Jack would be doing the introducing if--he hasn't got himself into trouble, has he?"
That was what they used to call it, wasn't it? Getting a girl in trouble?
"Not... himself," Ianto managed. "Me."
The Doctor raised his eyebrows, looking startled in a way that Martha didn’t, quite, so Ianto suspected he'd parsed that correctly. The Doctor sat down, waving Martha and Ianto back into their seats, and leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
"Why don't you tell me about that," he said. It wasn't a question, and the Doctor's attention on Ianto was like a physical force. His knees bent and his mouth opened.
"A couple of years ago I was hurt badly," he began, because he might as well go in order. "Jack saved me. Apparently these things called nanogenes--"
The Doctor got a very odd look on his face, and his gaze swept over Ianto searchingly. "You're all right now, though?"
Ianto frowned. "Well, yes, mostly. That's what nanogenes do, they heal you--repair you, was how Jack put it. Only he said they got it a bit wrong when they repaired me, because they used him as a template, so I have some internal organs I didn't before."
The Doctor sat back, and Ianto managed to tear his eyes away to look at Martha. She was studying him with almost exactly the same frown of concentration.
Ianto looked back at the Doctor, forcing himself to keep his chin up. "Where Jack comes from, everyone is capable of getting pregnant."
The Doctor looked him over again, his frown easing. His voice was gentle as he said, "You can't be very far along?"
It was a question this time. Ianto looked to Martha again, but he could see her putting it together, just a beat behind the Doctor--the favor, asked for and then declined...
"I'm not at all, anymore," Ianto said carefully.
They seemed to see each other as family, the Doctor and Martha and Jack. Ianto might be a fondly regarded in-law thus far, but that could change in a heartbeat. So far, they were both just staring at him, waiting for further explanation.
Ianto gave in and looked down at his hands, preparing to gloss as fast as he could over the part where he hadn't wanted to have their darling Jack's child. "I couldn't. Torchwood employees can't have children--even if there weren't regulations, we don’t live long enough to father anything but orphans. But Jack found this device--it took the--the child, it will hold it in stasis--"
"Oh, a Samyek Tau Twenty-Seven, that must be. So big?" The Doctor sounded relieved, shaping a rectangle in the air with his hands as he spoke.
Ianto nodded. "Jack didn't know what it was called, or who made it."
"The Samyek," the Doctor repeated, for all that told Ianto. "Excellent biomechanical engineers, miserable namers."
Ianto nodded again, and elected after a half-second's thought not to try to explain that they'd come up with a better one. "So Jack and I agreed, he'll have the child, later. He's got plenty of time."
He thought both of them had heard the parts he left out, the choice he'd made, the choice he'd fought Jack for. They were both studying him, unsmiling and intent. Ianto didn't dare look down again.
Finally, the Doctor turned and looked at Martha.
"I see why you called me," he said. "You know what this means?"
Martha nodded, her mouth a tight line. Ianto restrained the urge to run. They weren't looking at him, he shouldn’t draw their attention by moving.
"It means," Martha said slowly, holding the Doctor's gaze, "that at some point in the future, Captain Jack Harkness--"
"Our Jack," the Doctor said, and but for a cracked octave of pitch he could have been any of the mums or grans in the street where Ianto had grown up, speaking possessively of a favorite lad they'd known since he was in nappies.
Martha grinned suddenly, looking to Ianto and then back to the Doctor. "Our Jack is going to have a baby, tell me you don't want to see that! Jack! And a baby!"
The Doctor was grinning too, enormously, looking delighted as a child. "Oh, it's going to be well worth the price of admission. Jack with a baby, I never thought I'd see the day. You can come now, can't you?"
Martha was already on her feet, and so was the Doctor. Ianto stood automatically, because Martha had, watching them both without comprehension.
"Only I have to be back in a few hours to get to work, so no side trips, I mean it this time," Martha was saying excitedly. "Should I bring a camera, do you think? Mum and Tish would want snaps--Ianto, do you--"
Ianto turned automatically toward the sound of his name. Martha was already standing in the open doorway of the TARDIS, that golden light the nearest witnesses had described visible behind her. She was looking at him expectantly, her smile fading a little as he watched.
"Ianto?"
He turned and looked at the Doctor; it was somehow easier to address him than to say this to Martha, whom he'd seen hugging Jack, who had gossiped with him at work.
"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't intend this. I only wanted Martha to ask you, for me, to take a message to them at your convenience. Nothing more."
They were time travelers, like Jack; rushing to the end, just like Jack, because they couldn't bear the suspense. Because they didn't have to. Ianto just wasn't sure what to do about being in the same room with them as it happened.
The Doctor looked solemn again, holding his gaze steadily. Without looking away from Ianto, he said, "Martha, why don't you go on in. I'll be right behind you."
Ianto was faintly conscious of Martha looking back and forth between them, then disappearing through the door. Leaving him with the Doctor, who took a step forward, closing the distance between them to something almost intimate. His voice was barely above a whisper when he spoke again.
"It's your child, too, Ianto. Of course you're invited."
Ianto licked his lips, and tried to think how to say no to this man.
"There are good reasons why you might turn me down," the Doctor continued, as if he could read every one of Ianto's scattered thoughts.
"For starters, as soon as you go forward and see, that future timeline becomes a part of your own. It becomes fixed. You can walk out of here now, go home to Cardiff, go to Jack and tell him you've changed your mind, you want to raise that baby now and to hell with the rules. I guarantee you Jack's not going to put up much of a fight."
This was both so entirely true and so entirely false that Ianto couldn't have begun to argue with it, even if the Doctor had given him a moment to get a word in edgewise.
"But once you see it, you don't have a choice anymore. Your future won't be yours to control."
This time the Doctor did pause, and Ianto shrugged. "It never has been."
The Doctor's lips twisted. "It always is and will be, actually. But the consequences get much more dire once you start traveling with me."
The Doctor tilted his head, studying Ianto thoughtfully. "But maybe it's that you don't want to meet your child only to have to lose him--because this is a one-time very short visit, Ianto. It has to be, to avoid making a very big mess of all our lives, to say nothing of the fabric of the universe. So perhaps you don't want that kind of pain in your life, meeting your own child just to walk away from him again.
"And if that's what's stopping you, I have to tell you, you're every bit as bright as Jack ever said you were, because nothing hurts like that. Nothing hurts like losing a child."
The Doctor's eyes were dark, and Ianto had the feeling that he spoke from a certain empirical authority. He'd hurt in plenty of ways, to make that statement with such bleak confidence, including the one in question.
"But it's worth it, Ianto, I swear to you it's worth it--even a child you didn't expect, and didn't want, even if you tried to insist it wasn't actually a person, let alone your responsibility--"
Ianto had to look away, though clearly that wouldn't stop the Doctor knowing every bloody thing about him.
"Ianto," the Doctor said. "Even then, even if you only get a little bit of time--it's worth the pain to know them, I promise you that."
Ianto didn't look up, and flinched a little when the Doctor spoke again, his voice in Ianto's ear and his hand on Ianto's shoulder.
"But if you're standing here hesitating because you think you don't deserve the chance to meet your own child, then I am about thirty seconds away from grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and throwing you into the TARDIS, is that understood?"
Ianto jerked back and met the Doctor's eyes; there was a smile there, suddenly, though still nothing like the gleeful look he'd shared with Martha.
He squeezed Ianto's shoulder and smiled a little wider. "I mean that. Even if Jack had never told me a word about you, you'd have earned this just by being clever enough to work out who to ask and how, and brave enough to actually do it."
Ianto thought of protesting that he really hadn't known what he was asking--he hadn't known Martha had the Doctor on speed-dial--but he had a feeling that would be the last thing he said before being flung bodily into the infamous blue box.
There was only one thing he could say now, really. He straightened up to his full height, tipped his chin up and looked the Doctor in the eye.
"Thank you."
The Doctor's smile brightened considerably, and he patted Ianto's shoulder briskly and stepped back. "You're quite welcome. Do come in."
Ianto squared his shoulders and stepped through the open door.
The interior of the TARDIS was a large, circular room, with a lighted central pillar surrounded by a baffling array of controls. The walkways were grating, the railings bare metal--oddly like the Hub, and again he wondered if this was where Jack's aesthetic had its source. Ianto looked back, to see the Doctor hovering just outside the door. He was still standing in the lounge of Martha's flat, which would have fit quite neatly inside this cavernous room. He was beaming.
Ianto looked back into the ship, noting the corridors branching off in different directions, and the fact that Martha was nowhere in sight. He looked back at the Doctor.
"Go on," the Doctor coaxed. "Say it. You have to say it, it's a tradition."
Ianto looked around again. It had to be something about size, but he'd been spending altogether too much time with Jack for the past two years, and the array of possible rude jokes was overwhelming.
"It's bigger on the inside," Martha said, returning from down one of the corridors.
Ianto suppressed a mental that's what he said and turned to the Doctor. "So it is."
"All right, close enough," the Doctor said, looking only mildly put out at this apparent abridgement of custom, and came in, shutting the door behind him. "Now, to find Jack and the little one. Let's see..."
The Doctor brushed past Ianto, going to the center console. He put on a pair of glasses and began to poke and prod at the various levers and dials, occasionally peering into the one recognizable video screen before going back to work on the controls. Martha wandered up to stand at his shoulder, and Ianto crept closer as well, though he gave in to the impulse to stand beside Martha, keeping her between himself and the Doctor.
"How are we going to find him?" Martha inquired. "Ianto, do you have any idea...?"
"Probably sometime in the next six hundred years," Ianto said, and then added, with a sinking feeling, "but I suppose they could be anywhere. Or when, if Jack gets hold of transport..."
The Doctor hummed a few notes and said, "Come on, don't be that way," in a tone of mild annoyance, apparently to the video screen.
Ianto glanced at Martha, who widened her eyes and shrugged. Nothing to do but wait, apparently.
The Doctor looked up a moment later. "Tell me, Ianto, how would you go about finding them?"
Ianto considered the question seriously. It was a research problem, of sorts. "Go further forward," Ianto said. "A thousand years, maybe--to somewhere with good information sources, if you know one. Then search backward for Jack and any sign of a child."
"Oh!" Martha said. "Birth records, of course--maybe even grandchildren! Except--do you think he'll still be called Jack Harkness? He might, you know..."
Martha waved a hand, but the Doctor didn't look up to see whatever she was implying, and Ianto decided not to ask.
"It's Jack, though," Ianto pointed out, the research project becoming increasingly interesting in his mind's eye even as he worked at not contemplating grandchildren. Ianto was starting to see why time travelers weren't meant to have children. "He's bound to turn up in the news somewhere, and then we'd know what name he was using."
"Huh!" The Doctor looked away again, fiddling with a dial. "That would probably work, eventually. Mind you, might have to look at a lot of microfilm."
"There's microfilm a thousand years from now?" Ianto didn't realize he'd intended to ask the question until he'd said it; he certainly hadn't intended to sound that plaintive about it.
The Doctor glanced up and grinned, looking from Ianto to Martha. "There is. Handy stuff, microfilm, only needs a light source and a magnifier, lasts ages once you've got the right materials to start with." The Doctor flipped a couple of switches decisively, and turned to lean against the console, folding his arms. "But I haven't got the patience, so I'm just going to ask the TARDIS to find Jack and the baby, if it's all the same to you two."
Martha smiled. "And how would you and the TARDIS find them, Doctor?"
"Oh, well." The Doctor wrinkled his nose and adjusted his glasses minutely. "The TARDIS always knows where Jack is. She hates him too much not to."
Martha looked enlightened; Ianto glanced around the ship uneasily.
"Well," the Doctor added. "I say hates--more like she's allergic to him, really, or--look at it this way." The Doctor's tone called to mind Ianto's strictest and cleverest teachers; he fixed all his attention on the Doctor, who was shaping a sphere in the air with his hands. "Time isn't linear, like you think, right. It's a ball of--"
"Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff," Ianto recited, and then snapped his mouth shut. This wasn't fag break at the London office, and not time to trade lines from The Doctor's Greatest Hits back and forth.
The Doctor was staring at him.
"I've seen the video," Ianto explained. Altogether too many times, in fact, and it hadn't even been his project for more than three weeks, three years ago--but everyone watched the video, of course.
"The one we made for Sally Sparrow," Martha added. "When we were stuck in 1969."
People had speculated about the recipient; Ianto had never found that line of enquiry especially compelling, but suddenly she had a name. "Is she all right, do you know?"
"Yes," the Doctor said. "All sorted, getting safely on with her life. She has been since before she needed the video, in fact."
Ianto recognized shut up and let me be brilliant when he heard it, and shut up accordingly.
"As I was going to say," the Doctor went on. "Time is like a very messy ball of string. An individual life is just the tiniest fiber making up a part of a thread which has been twisted into the cord, and all an ordinary person ever sees is just the inside of that fiber. That's why time seems linear. Also why you don't really see time; it's dark in there."
Ianto smiled obediently, and saw Martha doing the same, though her sideways look at him held a bit of honest humor.
The Doctor was giving them both a slightly stern look when Ianto returned his attention to him.
"The TARDIS is like a sewing needle, moving in and out through the ball of string, taking my life-thread with it--and yours, now, both of you. When there were enough of us around, we used to keep everything stitched together. But Jack, being what he is, forever, inflexibly--Jack is a..."
The Doctor made a sudden, violent stabbing motion with his right hand.
"Knitting needle?" Martha suggested, and Ianto knew instantly that she'd spent at least as much time and attention learning to parse the Doctor as he'd spent learning Jack.
The Doctor snapped his fingers, pointing at Martha. "Knitting needle. A steel knitting needle, stabbed right through all of time, unbending--made of the same stuff as the TARDIS, with the same magnetic charge. So she's repelled by him, but she's always aware of him, just like a compass needle--that's how you used to make compasses, you know, a sewing needle in a bit of water, or was it oil? Maybe oil--but anyway, she knows exactly where he is, and she can take us to him. We just need to..."
The Doctor looked down at the console, frowned, and flipped another switch.
Ianto couldn't believe he was actually about to say it, but also felt that he could not possibly miss the opportunity when it was handed to him. "Reverse the polarity?"
The Doctor slapped the edge of the console. "Reverse the polarity, exactly!"
Something beeped insistently, and the Doctor grabbed a hammer from somewhere and struck it repeatedly, until it went silent. Ianto edged backward, though Martha didn't actually seem alarmed, and that had to be a good sign.
"Anyway, the baby will help," the Doctor added absently. "Everything goes a bit wibbly-wobbly around babies. Even Jack. Ah!"
A green light in the central column of the ship began to move up and down as the noise returned. It sounded bigger on the inside.
"I'm not sure where we're headed, exactly," the Doctor said, frowning at the video screen again. "This may take--"
The sound stopped.
"...Some time," the Doctor finished, tapping his fingers against the side of the video screen. A smile spread slowly across his face at whatever it was he saw there.
"Why, Jack," he breathed. "I'd no idea you were such a traditionalist."
Ianto looked around the ship. They were here--somewhere, somewhen--and outside was Jack. And their child, their son.
"Where are we?" Martha's voice sounded far away, and Ianto recognized symptoms of shock--had he waited an hour after eating before traveling in time? He took a couple of steps back, ran into a seat and perched on the edge of it, putting his head down and trying to breathe normally.
"We are in the early twenty-third century," the Doctor announced, with great ceremony. "On Earth. In Wales. We are, in fact, about eight miles from the site of Cardiff's Millennium Centre. You have to understand, the twenty-third century--humans are busy establishing what will eventually be known as the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire, but they're doing it out there. Earth during this time is a bit of a backwater, all Imperial glory extremely faded. I don't know if I've ever even been here, and I seriously doubt a Time Agent ever bothered. It's exactly the sort of place people are talking about when they say, 'Well, it's a nice place to raise children.' And Jack is!"
"Shall we go find them, then? Ianto--"
Martha's hand touched his shoulder, and Ianto looked up and nodded, blinking rapidly, even as his grip on the edge of the seat tightened. "Yes, of course, let me just--"
The door banged open. Ianto couldn't actually see it from where he was--the console was in the way, and he couldn't seem to sit up straight. But nothing prevented him hearing the voice that came through, the perfectly familiar voice.
"Doctor! Great to see you! But I hope this is a social call and not an emergency, because I've kind of got my hands full with--"
Footsteps sounded on the grating, light and rapid, following the same path Ianto himself had followed and stopping somewhere on the other side of the console.
Slower, heavier footsteps followed.
"With this guy," Jack said, and Ianto slid down to sit on the floor even as Jack stepped closer, close enough that Ianto could see his face above the console, and the face of the boy he had lifted into his arms. The Doctor stepped around the console, moving nearer to them and keeping their attention away from Ianto. Martha crouched at his side; he could feel her, though he couldn't take his eyes away from Jack and the boy.
The child--his son, their son--had his arm slung easily around Jack's neck. His eyes were pale blue and open wide as he looked around the TARDIS. His hair was dark, curly as Ianto's got when it was allowed to grow out to that length (but not as mortifyingly out of control as Ianto's had been, at that age). Ianto thought his son's nose hinted at an up-turn inherited from generations of Joneses, but his dawning smile was the miniature mirror of Jack's. Tall as he was, he had a mouthful of baby teeth--he couldn't be more than four or five.
"Doctor," Jack said, "allow me to introduce my son, Ianto Jones Junior. Indiana, this is the Doctor--he's a very old friend of mine, I've told you about him."
"Well, hello there, Ianto Jones Junior," the Doctor said, sounding perfectly delighted. He offered his hand, and the boy--Ianto Jones, Junior--shook it solemnly. "Has anyone ever told you you look just like your dad?"
Jack smiled again, and seemed to squeeze the boy closer for a moment. "He doesn't, really. He looks just like Ianto."
"I know," the Doctor said airily, and turned back toward them. "Martha, don't you think he looks just like--"
Ianto's gaze never left Jack; he watched Jack step closer as the Doctor turned, his attention following the Doctor's gaze. His jaw dropped, his eyes went wide, and Ianto thought, I've been dead two hundred years, and that is what Jack looks like when he sees a ghost.
"Ianto!"
"Da-ad," the boy protested instantly, and the flat vowel was all Jack's, though the embarrassment was universal.
Jack shut his eyes, clutched the boy tighter for a moment, and pressed a kiss to his hair. "Sorry, sorry, sweetheart. Not you."
Jack bent, and Ianto let his own eyes slide shut, listening to the sound of small feet striking the grating. "Indy, why don't you tell the Doctor what's important about today, all right? I have to go talk to someone for a few minutes."
"Oh, have we come on an important day?" The Doctor dropped into a crouch--the child was too small to see over the console, so the Doctor would be eye-level with him now.
"My birthday," the boy said, and now Ianto could hear Wales in his voice. "Today is my birthday--I'm five today. Are you going to stay for my party? It isn't for hours."
"Well, I think that depends on your dad. What sort of party have you got planned?"
A hand settled onto Ianto's shoulder, and the touch was so familiar he shivered--Jack. Ianto looked up to find Jack staring over his head, eyes locked with Martha's in silent communication. After a few seconds, Martha nodded, turning away to join the Doctor.
"Oh, hallo, Martha! This is my friend, Martha, she's a friend of your dad's as well. Martha, this is Ianto Jones, Junior."
Jack touched a finger to his own lips, and jerked his chin in the opposite direction. Ianto nodded, got his feet under him, and followed. Jack pushed the door open and slipped through, and Ianto stepped after him into sunshine and warm air.
They were standing in a garden. Ianto caught a brief, dizzy glimpse--a house, green grass, trees and ivy and a few toys scattered about--and then Jack was pressing him up against the side of the blue box, kissing him like his life depended on it, like both their lives depended on it. Like Ianto had been dead and dust for two hundred years and Jack was determined to bring him back, good as new.
It was all familiar, all but the particular pitch of desperation in Jack's touch--it was Jack, still, always, and Ianto couldn't help but respond to him. Ianto had one hand clenched in Jack's shirt, the other in Jack's hair, when Jack finally broke off the kiss, though he kept himself pressed bodily against Ianto, his forehead leaning against Ianto's. They were breathing each other's breath, fast and ragged, Jack's hands flattened on Ianto's chest.
Then Jack pulled back a little further, running his hands over Ianto's body--over his chest, his shoulders, down his arms, then up to stroke over his throat, cupping his face--dipping in for another quick kiss--and running over his hair. At first Ianto thought he was just looking, just taking him in, but when Jack's fingers tugged gently at his hair, Ianto realized Jack was looking for something.
What was I wearing the day I died, Jack? How long had I gone without a haircut?
"Where did you come from?" Jack whispered. "When, I mean. Where are you on your timeline?"
Ianto cleared his throat--he hadn't yet said a single word to Jack, he realized abruptly--and Jack's eyes met his, riveted.
"After the gas," Ianto said. "The gas from the ATMOS systems, the fire in the sky. You made me take a couple of days' holiday, and I didn't tell you where I was going."
"The Sontarans," Jack said softly. "And you--"
Jack looked past Ianto, at the blue box. "You went to London and talked to Martha, and she spoke to the Doctor. Which tells me just about where he is--did either of them mention a woman named Donna?"
"Both," Ianto said. "Martha's met her, since she came to Torchwood." Jack squinted, obviously struggling to remember--it had been two hundred years for him, not just months, not yesterday like it was for Ianto. "That was the Reset--when Owen was shot. When he died, and you brought him back."
"Owen," Jack said. "God, Owen, I haven't thought of him in years. Owen and Tosh, right, and--there was Suzie, but that was before Gwen--and you. My team."
Ianto nodded, helpless to speak. Jack smiled a little, kissed him again like he couldn't resist.
"But Donna's not with you?"
Ianto shook his head. "The Doctor dropped her off. He said she wanted a holiday on Earth."
"Ah," Jack said. "That narrows it down, then."
He looked back at Ianto, frowning, even as he stroked the backs of his fingers across Ianto's cheek. "I remember that, when you went away and didn't tell me where--I remember I made you leave, because I felt like such an idiot for doing it, afterward, but I don't remember why. Do you have any idea what I was thinking?"
Ianto swallowed and nodded, swallowed again--but no, there was that stupid tickle in his throat, his chest going tight. Christ, his bag was still on the floor at Martha's flat, with his antibiotics in it. How was he supposed to count time, when he was traveling in it? He turned away and coughed, and once he started he couldn't stop.
Jack's hands fell away, and Ianto winced and bent double, covering his mouth and feeling like an idiot himself, but he couldn't catch his breath, couldn't stop--
Then there was an arm around him, and Jack murmuring, "Okay, okay, I've got you, here, take a sip of this."
Ianto hauled in a breath and held it long enough to drink--it was cold, sharp and sour-sweet. Fruit juice of some kind, burning and soothing down his throat.
"What is that?" he asked when he'd caught his breath.
Jack sniffed what was left in the glass and wrinkled his nose. "Mango-pomegranate-snozzberry, I think. Indy's always wanting the newest, weirdest kind they've got. We were just eating breakfast when you showed up."
Ianto nodded, glancing toward the house again--there was a little table by the back door with two chairs, two places set. No stepmother for Junior, then.
The door to the TARDIS swung open, and the Doctor emerged along with a pair of feet--he had Ianto Junior slung over his shoulder backwards. "Ahhh, that's better. Fresh air."
The boy giggled and kicked his feet, saying something muffled into the Doctor's back. He was wearing boots with a sort of one-piece jumpsuit, bright orange with blue rings round the knees. Ianto stole a glance at Jack's clothes, but they were slightly more ordinary-looking, though a sharp change in Jack's style from what Ianto remembered--closely-fitting trousers of a rusty red-brown, and a soft blue jumper. Still those same brown boots, though; possibly the same pair. Ianto wondered if the venerable greatcoat was still around somewhere.
Jack stepped forward and grabbed his son by the hips, taking him into his own arms and tipping him upright. The boy was flushed pink with excitement or blood-rush, and beamed dizzily and indiscriminately at his father and the Doctor. "The Doctor says he wants to stay for my party, can he? We could get more cake so there's enough for him and Martha."
Martha, peering around the Doctor at Ianto, grinned and shrugged, and Ianto smiled helplessly back.
"There will be plenty of cake for everyone," Jack said firmly. "There's enough cake for the entire village to come to your party. But first you need to go get dressed--"
Oh, they were pyjamas.
"--and get ready for school."
"But we have guests." Ianto Junior's accent got sharply--almost comically--more like Jack's when he was trying to bargain.
"I think I can manage our guests." Jack set the boy on his feet. "Go on, go get dressed, and if you're quick enough you can visit some more before it's time to go."
"Dad--"
"Hygiene. Clothes. Knapsack. Now, Indiana." Jack turned the boy bodily toward the house--away from Ianto. Jack still hadn't acknowledged Ianto's presence in front of him, let alone introduced them. Facing away from everyone, the boy heaved a melodramatic sigh, throwing his arms up in defeat, and then ran off toward the house.
Ianto watched Jack watching him go. When the door was safely closed behind him, Jack turned back to face the Doctor. He wasn't smiling anymore, and he looked older, and braced for a fight. Ianto took an involuntary half-step backward, wondering just how unwelcome the interruption of breakfast had been.
"Ianto's going to stay for a while," Jack announced calmly. "You can come back and pick him up and return him to his own timeline later."
The Doctor--looking as grim as Jack--flicked a brief glance at Ianto. He assumed that his face conveyed that he had had no idea this was going to happen, because the Doctor wasted no more than a second's attention on him. "Jack, you can't."
"You can," Jack said firmly. "You brought him here, all I'm asking you to do is not take him away. Not yet. I can't tell Indy that his father has stopped by to say hello on his birthday and then go back to being dead two hundred years ago. I'm not going to do that to him, and you are not going to force me to."
"I thought he'd be younger," Ianto heard himself say, catching Jack's attention for the first time. Ianto smiled apologetically. "We thought he'd still be a baby, and then we wouldn't have to explain anything."
"Well, he's mostly over the why why why phase, at least," Jack said softly, smiling. "Count yourself lucky."
The Doctor sighed. "Letting Ianto stay long enough for him to get attached isn't going to help, Jack."
Jack snapped instantly back into belligerence. "Ianto's his father, Doctor. He's already attached."
The Doctor spared another glance at Ianto, and Ianto realized that Ianto Junior wasn't the only him the Doctor might have been talking about. He realized, also, that Jack's statement held true either way; if he went back right now, he would feel the lack for the rest of his life. But it would get worse, the longer he stayed, the more he got to know this child--and this was why Jack hadn't introduced them, of course. Because it would get so much worse for both of them the instant the boy knew who the third stranger in his garden was.
"It isn't going to hurt the timeline, Doctor," Jack said. "He went away on holiday, I remember that--because he was ill, and I thought he should get some rest."
The Doctor gave Ianto another look, a bit dubious this time.
"Post-gas bronchitis," Ianto said with a shrug. "The... Sontarans, was it, Jack?"
The Doctor winced.
"It's epidemic in urban areas," Martha piped up. "Not normally too serious in healthy adults, though there are shortages of antibiotics in some cities."
"The point is," Jack said firmly. "He went away because he was ill, and I remember that he came back looking like he'd got no rest at all, and he never told me where he went or what he did while he was gone. I thought he looked tired, but he didn't. He looked older--just a little bit. Just one year, Doctor. Give him one year."
"Give him a year and then send him back where no one else knows it happened, hm?" The Doctor gave Jack a hard look, and Martha's lips pressed flat, but Jack just smiled.
"I don't think it'll give him too many nightmares he can't talk about."
"Jack--"
"One year, Doctor--can you spot a single year on a human's face, anymore? Most people can't. I doubt I can. Ianto's so young, just give him one year, one more year."
One more year alive, Ianto realized. He'd been dead to this Jack for so long. So young.
"How long did I have?"
Jack and the Doctor both turned to look at him this time. Ianto tried to keep his voice steady, clinical. It was practically a statistical question, and he almost certainly wouldn't get a straight answer anyway.
"After I went away to London and came back looking tired. How long?"
The stern confidence went out of Jack's face, and he gripped Ianto's shoulder firmly. "Not so little that I can tell you how long, exactly. Not hours or days, nothing like that."
Jack turned to look at the Doctor, keeping hold of Ianto. "But not enough. Not nearly enough for it to make a difference, in the scheme of things. Let him stay. Let him have a year with his son."
The Doctor looked tired, too. "Jack--"
"If you could have given Jenny a year between the pull of the trigger and the impact of the bullet, wouldn't you?"
The words seemed to strike him like a blow. The Doctor didn't make a sound, but Martha gasped. Nothing hurts like that, he'd told Ianto. He was staring at Jack now like he'd never seen him before.
"It's been two hundred years for me," Jack said softly. "You'll tell me about her when you're ready, and maybe it'll help to know you already did. But Doctor, wouldn't you?"
The Doctor was shaking his head slowly. "I couldn't, Jack. I couldn't. Because I would never be able to put her back in front of the gun at the end of it."
Jack smiled sadly. "I know. You'd need someone else to come and take her away and do it for you."
The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "You're asking me to do that for you?"
Jack shrugged, squeezing Ianto's shoulder as he did. "You're my oldest friend, Doctor. And there's literally no one else I could ever ask for this kind of favor."
The Doctor gave Ianto another look.
"It's dangerous," he said slowly. "Jack, so many things could go wrong cheating time like this, with such very dire consequences."
The Doctor had said that before--the consequences get much more dire once you start traveling with me. In the same breath he'd told Ianto that the future was his to choose and always would be.
Jack was still arguing, but Ianto hardly heard it. The Doctor looked to him again; there was no particular expression on his face, but Ianto saw it, now. All of Jack's attention was on the Doctor. All Ianto had to do was tell the Doctor no, and the Doctor would refuse Jack for him, so Ianto didn't have to tell Jack that he hadn't asked for this and didn't want it. Then it wouldn't be him who walked away from Jack and their son.
"Jack," Ianto said, perhaps a little sharply. To his credit, Jack turned to look at him at once. "Jack, ask me if I want to stay."
A multitude of emotions washed rapidly over Jack's face--shock at the attack from an unexpected quarter was one, and something like horror, as well. One might optimistically suppose that it was a reaction to realizing that he hadn't asked, but Ianto had a feeling it was at least as much at the thought that Ianto might conceivably say no. Still, a small, contrite smile and a pleading look followed.
Jack dropped his grip on Ianto's shoulder, and turned both his hands palm up. The gesture was unfamiliar, but as unmistakably formal as if he'd dropped to his knees. "Ianto Jones, would you do me the honor of staying here with me, and with our son, for as much time as we are given?"
Ianto looked from Jack--not his own Jack but their son's, two hundred years beyond Ianto's death--to the Doctor, who was watching Jack with an unreadable expression, to Martha, who was giving Ianto a wry smile.
"This really wasn't what I was expecting when I woke up this morning," he said, which was quite true and no answer at all.
He'd woken up this morning missing Jack, wondering how soon he could get back to Cardiff--and here was a Jack who needed him, and a chance to get to know their child. Ianto Junior was old enough to remember it afterward--and Ianto would lose nothing by it, not really. He would go right back to his own life at the end, and find his own Jack waiting.
There were a thousand questions he could ask--what was he going to do for a year, and what would Ianto Junior think of all this, for starters--but those were just details, really.
Ianto nodded, and turned to face the Doctor standing shoulder to shoulder with Jack.
"Doctor, thank you for bringing me. I will be staying, and if you take me back into the TARDIS before the year is up, it will be by force."
"Over my dead body," Jack added, a trifle too cheerfully. "Which means you'll have a lot of explaining to do to the screaming five-year-old. I haven't managed to explain the Captain Jack Harkness Facts of Life to him yet--it's kind of the ultimate in do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do, which is going to need to wait until the age of reason, at least."
Ianto rolled his eyes. "Over both our dead bodies, if it comes to that, which I imagine would make a mess of the timeline."
The Doctor sighed. "No one's killing any--hello, Indiana!"
Ianto looked quickly around--Ianto Junior was running toward them from the house, neatly dressed in red trousers and a brown jacket, both with a crispness that screamed school uniform. He stopped short at the Doctor's greeting, with a suddenly mulish expression.
"Junior." They said it in unison, Junior at a shout, Jack rather wearily.
"My dad calls me Indiana," Junior added, closing the distance and pressing himself to Jack's unoccupied side. "Nobody else." Looking up at the Doctor and his father, he seemed to notice Ianto for the first time. Ianto felt as much as saw Jack noticing the line of his gaze.
Jack laced his fingers through Ianto's, tugging him downward as he dropped into a crouch to look Junior in the eye. "Indy," he said softly. "The Doctor has brought someone to see us. Do you know who this is?"
Junior leaned against Jack's shoulder, not quite hiding behind him as he looked across his father to Ianto. To Ianto's surprise, recognition began to dawn on the boy's face after a few seconds' scrutiny, and he straightened up, all trace of shyness lost.
With the air of being offered one of his birthday gifts early, Junior said, "You called him Ianto!"
Jack nodded, smiling back at the boy as he squeezed Ianto's hand.
"Like on the viddies," Junior added wonderingly. He touched his finger to the end of his nose and then met Ianto's eyes and addressed him directly.
"You're Ianto Jones." He reached out with that same finger, and touched it softly to Ianto's nose. He could barely feel the contact, but it sunk into him, deep as a bullet, a fishhook, an anchor. So much worse. Dire fucking consequences indeed.
"You're my dad who died."
With Ianto--with his dad who died--on the scene, Junior scarcely noticed the Doctor and Martha's departure. He accepted their promises to come back for his next birthday (five minutes for them, a crucial year for Ianto and Jack and Junior) with an absent, "Yeah, okay."
He insisted on both Jack and Ianto walking him to school, which made Jack laugh. When Junior had skipped a few steps ahead, too excited to keep pace with the sauntering adults, Jack murmured, "He hasn't let me walk him further than the garden gate since the second week. Too old for Dad to go with him to school, you know."
Ianto smiled back, even as he realized that that was such a--such a fatherly thing to say, coming out of Jack's mouth. The sensation only intensified when they encountered Junior's teacher outside the school, and Jack made introductions. Ianto was fascinated to learn that he'd been working for Torchwood on a special assignment at a rather primitive field office for the last several years, unfortunately cut off from communication (all true, he supposed, from the vantage point of the 23rd century). He had been granted a long leave to spend with Jack and their son, but would be going away again on duty eventually.
All the while, Jack was friendly, not particularly exerting himself to be charming, though Miss Abernathy was a fairly pretty woman not much older than Ianto. She was also Jack's son's primary school teacher; someone he knew in a perfectly ordinary way, like a perfectly ordinary person.
When they left the school--striking off in a different direction through the village--Ianto watched Jack's face. Knowing it was there, looking for it, he could see it: Jack was older. Different. Really not his Jack at all, when he paid attention. Junior's Jack, not Ianto's.
Jack just raised his eyebrows.
Ianto looked away. The village hardly looked like the future at all, except that it turned out Jack's trousers weren't a particularly unusual color. People nodded and waved to Jack; in the corner of his eye Jack returned the greetings without encouraging anyone to come closer.
"Just--wondering what you've been up to for two hundred years," Ianto said, as lightly as he could. "You've changed."
"Yeah," Jack said easily. "So much for kids keeping you young--Indy's given me at least six grey hairs since he was born, and I'm sure that will take off exponentially once he hits puberty. I'll be looking my age in no time."
Ianto looked back at him, but Jack was staring forward now.
"It's a big house," Jack said idly. "Too big, really--I only bought it because it's been in Wales longer than I have, and that makes it a little easier to take seriously. There aren't a lot of four-hundred-year-old bungalows around."
And next, of course, would follow the polite offer of a separate room. Jack would find some way to tell him that he didn't expect anything, that he wouldn't presume upon Ianto's relationship with him two hundred years ago now that he'd changed into someone Ianto might not like as well as the one he'd left.
Ianto caught Jack's arm and tugged, hoped that the future was futuristic enough for this to pass in the middle of the street in a small Welsh village, and kissed Jack firmly on the mouth.
Jack came up for air with a smile on his face, and Ianto said, "I don't mind a change."
Jack grinned. "Well, I don't mind if you slip and call me by his name. And it saves me the trouble of seducing you all over again."
Ianto snorted. "That issue would only arise if you had ever seduced me in the first place."
Jack raised his eyebrows and said, "Refresh my memory, how did we come by our son, then?"
Ianto shook his head. "There was plenty of shagging, Jack, but you didn't seduce me unless holding still while I got up a running start to throw myself at you counts as seduction."
"Ah," Jack said, looping his arm through Ianto's and tugging him along. "I took the Zen approach."
Ianto gave up. "So what have you been doing for two hundred years?"
"After your time, I stayed on at Torchwood another thirty or forty years, I think." Jack glanced in his direction, and then away again, his voice falsely light. "Even after I stopped really missing you, you were always one of the ones I expected to see when I turned around--I'd been there so long, by then, I'd picked up a few ghosts. Alex, too. I saw Alex die but there were days when I thought..."
Jack shook his head. "Eventually I realized it was time to leave. I knocked around Earth for a while, enjoying a third--well, fourth or fifth--adolescence, and then I got off-planet for a while. Had a lot of sex and even more fun, fought crime, did crime, went to jail but never for anything serious, took other people to jail but only when it was very serious. Fell in love a few times. Spent eighteen years married."
Ianto didn't know whether he'd expected to feel more jealous than he did; it was just more Jack-stories of his past, even if his past was technically in Ianto's future. Still--as always--there was a niggling, stupid thread of envy toward the others. "All at once?"
"All at...? Oh." Jack squinted. "Twenty-three years, then. And six days, but that was for strictly ceremonial purposes and to save the galaxy and didn't count because we're not even the same species anyway."
"Well, naturally."
Jack shot him a smile. "But Elys, yeah, that was eighteen years in one shot. I met her first when she was--God, younger than you. Too young, and I knew it for once. The next time I met her she was married, and a mother, and too smart to have me interfering with her happy home--but we got to be friends, anyway, good friends. She kept me pretty well away from her husband and kids, which worked out fine until twenty years later when he died and the kids thought I was the scandalous younger man hitting on the widow at the funeral."
Ianto raised an eyebrow.
"I wasn't," Jack said, sounding almost genuinely aggrieved. "And we waited six months before we got married, and it was--honestly, it was none of their business, but she'd got used to not being alone."
Ianto considered this all the way to the end of the street. Jack had known this woman thirty-eight years--longer than Ianto had been alive, or was likely to ever be--and he'd spent half that time married to her, but...
"You were the wicked stepfather."
"Oh my God, I have never had people hate me that much without attempting homicide," Jack said. "Mind you, I thought it might come to that at a few family gatherings. I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking Indy's going to turn seventeen and suddenly develop Torre's personality."
Ianto thought of the things he'd said to his own father at that age, and winced. "Well, seventeen's hard on a lot of people."
Jack shook his head, though he didn't seem to be disagreeing; Ianto attempted to imagine Jack at seventeen and gave up almost at once. "It put me off having him, a little, but I kept thinking I could do better with an earlier start. So eventually I came back to Wales and settled down, and here we are."
Jack appeared to mean that last in more than one sense, opening the front door of an ordinary-looking white cottage and gesturing for Ianto to precede him inside.
"Med center," Jack explained as they entered the front room, which looked oddly just like a doctor's office waiting room at home, brightly colored leaflets on the end tables and all. "We need to get your bronchitis taken care of, especially if you started a course of antibiotics for it. You didn't bring them with you, I take it?"
Jack looked Ianto up and down, and Ianto was suddenly acutely aware that he was embarking on a year in a strange place with nothing but the clothes he stood up in. He confined himself to a simple, "No."
Jack nodded, looking idly around; there was no one at the desk at the back of the room, but Jack didn't seem concerned to remedy the situation. "It's a good thing you didn't. The old antibiotics are banned toxic substances these days--they might have had to arrest you."
"Ah." Ianto tried to picture it, and failed abjectly. "That wouldn't have been an auspicious start."
"Not much--ah, Jana!"
A blonde woman--wearing a reassuring white coat over her orange-red trousers--came out and met them at the desk, picking up something shaped like a clipboard that almost certainly wasn't.
"Jana, my partner and co-parent, Ianto Jones. Ianto, Dr. Jana Matthis."
Jana shook Ianto's hand, looking him up and down assessingly. Ianto tried to keep a straight face while he wondered what this woman had ever done to Jack that he immediately went so far as partner and co-parent when introducing him to her.
"Ianto Jones, Senior, then," she said. Her accent was Welsh, but strange to Ianto's ear; it took him an extra second to parse everything she said. "I take it the reports of your death were greatly exaggerated?"
Ianto glanced at Jack, who did not immediately offer an answer. "Premature, at least."
Jana's eyebrows rose, and Jack finally deigned to jump in, explaining again that Ianto worked for Torchwood and had been incommunicado somewhere unspecified, whence he would return in a year or so.
"Might as well take a baseline scan and start a file, then," Jana said, turning to lead them into a back room. "Because of course you've brought him right down for a preventive-care visit, haven't you, Jack, and not paraded him through the village when there was any possibility of spreading an exotic and contagious condition."
Jack smiled at the back of Jana's head; Ianto rolled his eyes.
"It's a touch of bronchitis, I'm afraid," he offered, as Jana let him into what must be an examination room, though it lacked most of the familiar accoutrements. "I've spoken to Junior, and to Miss Abernathy at his school. And Jack, obviously."
"Oh, good, I was afraid it was going to be people who'd have extensive contact with the more immunologically vulnerable members of the population," Jana said, shooting Jack a wry look.
Briefly involved, Ianto decided. Concluded more-or-less amicably and some time ago.
She raised a small device to Ianto's mouth and he blew into it; she examined the readout and then gave him a sharp, thoughtful look. "That's a local strain, but quite old. Practically ancient, in fact."
"You can take care of it, can't you?" Jack's voice was a little sharp, forestalling further speculation.
Jana shook her head, visibly giving up on the question, at least for the moment. "Of course I can. Ianto, if you haven't a registered religious or ethical objection to bacteriophages, I'll give you a run of those as well as an immune system boost. Airborne illness is a public health matter; treatment is compulsory."
Ianto glanced at Jack again, then said, "I don't think I have anything registered at all."
"Yes, I'm noticing that," Jana said, exchanging a look Ianto couldn't quite read with Jack.
Jack lifted his chin a fraction, and Jana shook her head again. "Bloody Torchwood. All right."
part 5