Fic: Get Loved, Make More, Try to Stay Alive (3/8)
part 2
The crisis wound down with what Ianto had come to recognize as the usual relaxing of focus. The first step was from survive survive survive to where's Jack?
Having been reunited with Jack and Gwen simultaneously, and assured that neither Hart nor Gray constituted a continuing threat, it didn't take long for his focus to widen again, to Tosh and Owen and the power station.
Ianto stood behind Jack now, watching numbly, helplessly, as Jack cradled Tosh in his arms, as Gwen kept stroking her hair and calling to her long after it was obvious that Tosh would never respond. Nor Owen, though between them they had saved the city, stopped the overload.
Ianto had done this before, though. Ianto had stood in the wreckage at Canary Wharf and kept going. The latest sharp shock was only that, only the latest. His mind ticked on inexorably, clicking over to the next concern down the line. Gwen was here--she would be worried about Rhys when it occurred to her to be--where had he been seen last? The police station? But he would go home now that the excitement had died down. Gwen would find him there, if their flat hadn't been destroyed in one of the explosions--him and the hamster, of course. Sally, she'd named it.
Sally--and Sally's little ones. The last members of the litter Ianto hadn't yet managed to give away were living in a cage upstairs in the tourist office; he'd put them away beneath the desk, under a towel, sometime before all the excitement began. They ought to be there still, safe, but he should go and check on them. They probably needed water.
He'd actually shifted his weight backward when he caught sight of Hart in his peripheral vision, and the thought crashed down on him all at once.
Jack's brother, out to destroy all Jack loved.
Jack's child, hidden not thirty meters from this spot.
Ianto gasped as if he'd been struck; he saw Hart turn toward him at the sound, but Jack was lost in his grief, and didn't look up until Ianto choked out, "Jack."
Jack looked at him over his shoulder, wide-eyed, his gaze sweeping quickly over Ianto as if checking him for injury.
Ianto shook his head, dazed. "Jack. The Amphora."
Jack frowned, as if he didn't know what Ianto meant, and then he went very still, his face going blank. He was still holding Tosh--Tosh's body--but his voice was steady, reassuring, as he said, "Gray couldn't have hurt it. He didn't even know it was there."
Ianto nodded, trying to feel reassured.
"Go check," Jack said gently, and Ianto broke and turned, nearly running to Jack's office, only half-aware of being followed.
Ianto was already past Jack's desk when he spotted Hart. Ianto froze, and Hart stopped inside the doorway and put his hands on his hips. "What is it? What are we looking for?"
"You're not looking for anything," Ianto said.
"Something precious to Jack, something Jack thinks Gray couldn't hurt, something you call an amphora but obviously isn't an actual amphora because there isn't one here," Hart recited, looking around and walking closer. "Something Jack's sure Gray didn't know about, which means it's probably new since I was here last, isn't it? And you're worried about it, so check on it."
Ianto stood his ground, and Hart sighed hugely, spreading his hands. "Look, it's either follow you, or stand out there while they..."
He waved one arm back through the doorway, and Ianto flinched at the thought. Sooner or later, practicality would take over, and Jack and Gwen would move, would clean up Tosh's body and put her--it--her away. Maybe it was just as well to keep Hart clear of that, for all their sakes.
"Fine," Ianto said--Hart couldn't actually harm the Amphora any more than Gray could--and knelt down behind Jack's desk. There were files stacked precariously atop the Amphora, and it had acquired a blanket wrapping at some point; Ianto had no idea when. Typical of Jack, somehow, whether he was being protective or hiding it from himself, or both at once in the same economical gesture.
Ianto unwrapped the covering, and from above him came a low, admiring whistle. Hart was leaning all the way across the desk, but when Ianto looked up at him he swung himself over to perch on top. Ianto jerked back, but Hart's booted feet never quite passed through the spot where his head had been.
Hart leaned forward further and said, "Sprog pod. Years since I've seen one of those."
Ianto gritted his teeth and touched the control area, bringing the display to life.
"A sprog pod that knows its daddy," Hart added, sounding faintly impressed. "Brought Jack a cuckoo's egg to sit on, have you? I'll bet he loves that."
Ianto couldn't resist turning to glare at him again, and Hart's eyebrows went up. "No, I mean that, he's mad about babies--hasn't he told you about his little girl, then?"
Ianto looked down, something going tight and painful in his chest. Jack had lied to him--or Hart was lying, looking to stir up trouble, now of all times. Either way it was up to Ianto to sort it out, to keep Hart occupied and away from the others. He took his hand away from the control panel, running his knuckles across the sealed-smooth surface of the Amphora.
"He said Time Agents can't have children."
"Not our own, genetically, no," Hart said blithely, as though it were self-evident. "And that'd be the end of it for you or me, but Jack's from the Boeshane Peninsula--started out as a human colony, you know, and the colonies are all obsessed with getting their numbers up. Boeshane did it by making everybody capable of bearing children. Jack's a walking sprog pod and he's got the maternal instincts to go with it--they all do, they're all certifiable when it comes to kids. Theirs, anybody's, makes no difference. If Jack's parents had had about eight like proper colonials, maybe Gray--"
Ianto flinched, and Hart stopped short.
"Anyhow," Hart redirected, "last time I saw a sprog pod was when Jack and I were working together--ran across a distress signal out in the middle of utterly bloody nowhere, reeled it in and it turned out to be one of these. Battery had almost run out and the baby wasn't done cooking, so it'd gone into an emergency protocol--it's set to reverse the process, get the sprog into the nearest suitable bit of real estate, mechanical or otherwise. Happened to be a human in there, and the pod decided Jack was suitable."
Ianto looked up, drawn into the story despite himself. "Did Jack get any say in the matter?"
Hart rolled his eyes theatrically. "We figured out what it was doing, yeah, and I was all for putting the thing straight back out the airlock, but Jack's Boeshane, like I said. Maternal instincts. He all but threatened to--well, no. He did threaten to put me out the airlock instead if I didn't let it go. And then there he was, Jack Harkness with a baby on board for the next hundred and seven days, and he spent seventy-nine of them moaning about his sore back and swollen ankles while I manfully restrained the urge to strangle him."
"Well done you," Ianto said, very nearly sincerely, trying desperately not to picture it. And then, because he couldn't help wondering, "What about the other twenty-eight days?"
Hart grinned wolfishly. "Libido surge."
Ianto's eyes went wide; he couldn't help picturing it, and it was...
"Terrifying, honestly." Hart shook his head. "Couldn't stop him, just had to hold on and hope to survive the experience."
Ianto looked back down at the pod--the Amphora--and touched the controls again. "What happened to her? His little girl?"
"Oh, well, once she was born we had a pretty good idea where she came from--not many places out that way where purple hair and spinal data ports come standard--so we got her back to her own world, handed her over to the authorities to find her a family, and went on our way. I think Jack checked up on her after, I don't--"
Ianto had called up the image of the child, and Hart fell sharply silent when it appeared. Ianto glanced up again, just in time to see Hart sliding down to crouch on the floor beside him, scowling.
"Are you running this thing in idiot mode?"
"Jack set it that way," Ianto said, bristling at Hart's unspoken--unknowing--criticism of Tosh--Tosh, who was dead outside.
Hart, heedless, shook his head and rolled his eyes again. "And that, boys and girls, is why we study actually alien alien languages instead of passing our comps with Earth Neo-Revived Classical Latin and then getting by on the gloss. Here."
Hart caught Ianto's hand, and Ianto jerked away automatically. Hart gave him a mildly irritated look and caught his hand again in a harder grip.
"Just fixing the interface, eye candy," he muttered. "Honestly, I'm not sociopath enough to hurt your baby just for kicks, and I'm not stupid enough to think Jack wouldn't kill me slowly and painfully for doing it--I know exactly what he can do, believe me."
It was Hart's matter-of-fact tone that Ianto found convincing, more than what he said; he relaxed and let Hart manipulate his fingers over the keys. It took a few moments, long enough for Ianto to watch the way Hart frowned in concentration and then smiled, open-mouthed, when he'd worked it out. Long enough to become acutely conscious of the warmth and pressure of Hart's fingers over his.
The display snapped into English, and strings of incomprehensible symbols resolved into STASIS MODE and BATTERY LIFE: 621 YEARS and SEX CHROMOSOMES: XY.
Ianto kept staring until Hart jerked his hand away, clearing his throat. "There you go, then. I expect to be named godfather for that, when you get round to thawing him out."
Ianto got to his feet, and the Amphora went dark and still, keeping its secrets again. Him. "Not likely, Hart."
But Hart just raised his eyebrows and smiled, as if he knew Ianto's opinion had nothing to do with it.
A couple of days later, when it didn't seem too much like kicking Jack when both of them were down, Ianto leaned against his desk and said in his best absent tone of inquiry, "Were you planning on ever telling me that I'd got your internal organs?"
Jack looked up from his report to Ianto, and then made a show of patting himself down. "Mine are still right here. I'm pretty sure you have your internal organs."
Ianto waited, and Jack looked back down, putting on his frown of pretending-to-read-this. "Which are now modeled on mine, yes. I was going to tell you, but you said you didn't need me to explain it to you."
Ianto tried to work out how Jack might have almost wiped out humanity by making them all like himself--the answers to that question started out uncomfortable and went rapidly downhill--and finally gave up and asked. "Apart from being a walking sprog pod, is there anything else I should know about?"
Jack winced a little at the term, but he must have known Ianto had got the information from Hart, even if he hadn't bothered to just watch the CCTV footage of their conversation.
Jack reached out and touched Ianto's right hip. "You know how you had your appendix out when you were a kid?"
Ianto nodded. The memory was fairly vivid, one of the most terrifying of his life before Torchwood.
"You should have a new one now. An Appendix B, actually. Time Agency standard issue, allows you to digest the fourteen most common types of non-Earth-descended proteins and three classes of processed hydrocarbons."
Ianto stared at him. "I can eat petrol?"
Jack wrinkled his nose. "I don't recommend it unless you're starving. There's not a condiment selection in the galaxy that makes it taste like anything but petrol. Polystyrene's not bad, though, as long as you have a toothpick."
Ianto shook his head.
"And you're really well equipped for a future career in smuggling," Jack added. "But you should let me show you how to use that, if you intend to. There's a trick to it, and it's pretty easy to hurt yourself if you do it wrong."
Ianto covered his eyes with one hand.
"I spent a few years living on this ship that was equipped with nanogenes," Jack said quickly, and Ianto warily lowered his hand.
Jack was looking at the surface of his desk, speaking matter-of-factly, but fast enough to betray his unease.
"They're atom-sized machines, designed for medical repair and maintenance, and species-adaptable, just like the Amphora. There were millions of them on the ship, uncountable, and I was there long enough that they got pretty used to me. I never realized it, but when I had to jump ship, some of them must have come with me--stowed away inside my body. It's probably why I heal so quickly and age so slowly, in between not dying."
Ianto nodded slowly. "So that's--that's something else, then. I'm not like you that way. I can still die."
Jack suddenly looked every day of his age, two thousand looped years and all, and he met Ianto's eyes like it was an effort just to look up. "Yes. I managed to pass them to you once, and they repaired you wrong, using me as a template. That's all. They're not why I survive."
Ianto thought back--he hadn't, actually, been genuinely badly hurt many times since coming to Cardiff. "Lisa?"
Jack looked down.
"I woke up and you'd been kissing me. That whole night is just flashes, in my head, but I know I tried to talk to her, and I know you were kissing me when you'd just been threatening to shoot me, and I didn't know what had been happening. She hurt me. Badly. And you saved me, even if it did go a bit... unexpectedly."
"She killed you," Jack said, and then looked up and met Ianto's eyes.
Ianto stared back. It was hardly a shock at all, by now. Maybe he'd always known that that blank spot was blanker than the others; maybe this wasn't even a surprise.
It didn't change anything, knowing she'd killed him, not really; it only reiterated what he'd realized when he saw what she'd done to Annie. She was so lost by then that it was a mercy to kill her--a harsh and angry mercy, coming from Jack, but one Ianto hadn't been able to dispense at all, in the end. He didn't even think knowing she'd killed him would have made a difference. He still couldn't have pulled the trigger.
"She killed me a couple of times, too," Jack added off-handedly. "Electrocuted, more or less, which hasn't happened to me often."
That would have done it. Ianto clenched a fist and released it. It hurt to know it, scared him a little to think of what he'd do for Jack, but--he was no different to Jack, maybe, for all he'd had less practice at it. Ianto was pretty sure he'd threatened to kill Jack that night, just as Jack had threatened to kill Ianto, but if someone else had done it for him... he'd have done just what Jack did, or at least he bloody hoped so. He would now, for certain, though Gwen was about the only person left he'd have to be persuaded to pull the trigger on. A measure of his life: there were two people in the world he'd think twice about killing if they threatened him or his.
Jack was still talking, his voice almost calm. "I think energy weapons must drive the nanogenes a little crazy, because I felt different to what I usually do when I wake up--I could feel them working. I felt so alive, fizzing with life. I thought it was just a feeling. But you were lying there, and it must have been at least six minutes since she... you hadn't moved at all. You weren't breathing. I knew you were dead, and I just--I couldn't let you go, not like that."
You're Ianto Jones and I love you and I couldn't, that was what Jack had said the first time he tried to explain why. Couldn't let Ianto go. Hadn't, the first time he died.
He hadn't lasted six months in Cardiff without dying, Ianto realized. He just hadn't known it. He was going to have to put an asterisk in the mortality figures for that year.
"I didn't tell you at the time because I thought it would only make things harder for you, knowing I'd saved your life like that." Jack smiled a little and leaned back into an elaborately casual slouch that just happened to put him out of Ianto's reach. "Well, and I was angry with you."
Ianto snorted. Understatements all round, there. "Raised me from the dead, you mean. And you were homicidal. Literally. I was there, I do remember that."
Jack shrugged, obviously ill at ease. If Ianto hadn't questioned him on it--if Ianto hadn't questioned him already knowing--Jack would never have told him. Even when Ianto had only owed Jack for the lack of a summary execution and the continuance of his employment, he'd known Jack didn't want to see him try to be grateful enough to cover it all. Thanking him at this point would be somewhere between pointless and excruciating for both of them, to say nothing of a year and a half out of time. What Jack wanted from him now, Ianto knew, was a sharp change of subject.
It was lucky for both of them that he had one more difficult question to ask, then.
Ianto reached out the easiest way he could, settling one booted toe on the edge of Jack's chair, beside his thigh. Looking down at his own hand gripping the edge of Jack's desk, Ianto said, "Hart told me about your little girl, but he said he didn't know what happened to her, after."
"Oh!"
Ianto looked up sharply, his foot dislodged as Jack popped up to stand, nothing but delight in his voice and on his face. He tapped something on his wriststrap, aiming it at the open space on the other side of his desk, and suddenly there was a group of people standing there, frozen--hologram, of course, but full color and depth, nothing like Hart's flickering blue Princess Leia recording.
Several of them had purple hair, from the little girl leaning against someone's knee with her finger in her mouth and her hair in bunches, right up to the beautiful woman of indeterminate age around whom the rest seemed to be arranged. They were a family, obviously. Hart had said they'd sent the baby girl to people who would find her a family.
"I can't actually pronounce her name--I just butcher it when I try--so I always called her Circuit," Jack said. "It's something my dad called me when I was little, even before I was born--I don't know why, I never asked him, but the first time I felt her move it just popped out of my mouth. Hello, Circuit."
He addressed the floating image as much as quoted himself, Ianto thought. "That's her, there, with her wife--third spouse, but she married every time for love, she wouldn't have traded any of 'em--and the ones behind her are her older kids, and the one between them with the green hair is her youngest, and the rest are grandkids. The littlest one there, with the pigtails, they named her Jack. I was something of a family legend by then, I guess."
Ianto looked from Jack to the family portrait and back. Of course it had been ages for Jack by now, but not nearly enough years for Hart since this happened. "She grew up."
Jack nodded, looked down and punched another button, calling up a picture of a younger woman grinning and about to do something terribly dangerous, judging by the protective gear. A little purple hair escaped the helmet, and below the goggles her smile looked familiar.
"Yeah," Jack said. "Kids mostly do, unless something goes really wrong. I just visited her every five years or so. Took me three or four days, but I wanted to see how everything turned out for her, help her out if she needed me for anything big. She never did. She grew up smart and beautiful and totally fearless, lived a good long life. I wasn't much of a fairy godmother, but she liked me anyway."
Well, of course; he'd been an active Time Agent then, so why should the linear progression of time have anything to do with it? Ianto raised his eyebrows. "Do you read the last pages of books first, too?"
"No! I went in order. This was more like... staying up all night so I wouldn't have to put the book down."
"For three or four days." Ianto looked again, and it was a little girl now, doing a headstand, bare feet in the air and tongue sticking out, her purple hair hanging nearly to the ground.
"Well, it was a good long book," Jack said fondly, and Ianto had to kiss him or the slide show of family photos was going to last all night. It was nothing at all to do with his easy smile, or the fact that this was the first time since Gray that Ianto had seen him so purely happy about anything.
It was the pictures that Ianto kept thinking of, afterward--the delight Jack took in those pieces of his little girl's life, even though he'd missed nearly all of it. At quiet moments, Ianto would slip into Jack's office and look at the Amphora. He'd noticed that the stack of files had found another home, though the Amphora kept its blanket. Ianto would sit on the floor sometimes--sometimes with the static hologram for company, more often not.
He would never see the child grow any older than this, and that was all right. It didn't mean terribly much to him, honestly, except when he forced himself to try to think about it. But he couldn't fathom himself as a father, raising a child. It didn't trouble him much to know he wouldn't.
But the child--his son, their son--he would grow up missing one of his parents, and that, Ianto knew something about. His father had kept plenty of pictures of his mother, even a few home movies, but those had all been his father's things, his father's memories, his father's wife. She hadn't belonged to Ianto, not really. Ianto had been all that was left of her, a piece of her, but she'd never been his, not that he could ever remember.
Maybe it wouldn't be like that for Jack's son--Jack was surely presence enough for two parents. Maybe he wouldn't raise the child alone; maybe he'd wait until he had someone else, maybe a whole harem of someones, to help out.
Ianto knew Jack, though, at least a little bit. He knew enough to know that there were pieces of Jack that stayed solitary, no matter how much Jack shared his body and his time and his work. He might keep this to himself, too, his child. He hadn’t told Hart about going to see Circuit; they'd been partners, together all through the pregnancy, and Hart had had no idea what happened to her.
So maybe Jack's son would grow up knowing something--someone--was missing. Jack would probably tell him as much as he could, but that Ianto who Jack talked about would always be the one who belonged to Jack, sometime in a distant past. There wasn't any Ianto who had ever belonged to his child, even when the thing was still inside him. He didn't even want to, not properly. But maybe--maybe for the sake of a child like he'd been, his child growing up somewhere down through time, maybe he could leave something that would belong just to the boy.
Pictures were too easy--Jack would find all the pictures of Ianto anyone could possibly have any use for, between going through his physical possessions and clearing out his files after he died. Ianto owed his child something more, something specific.
Ianto chose his materials carefully. It would have to last a long time--there was no way of knowing how long, but six hundred years was a distinct possibility, for starters, and there was no particular reason to think that by the end of six hundred years Jack wouldn't have found a battery recharger or a wall outlet where he could plug in the Amphora.
So: archival quality anti-acidic paper, and non-degrading ink. Sturdy, protective covers. By the time he'd assembled all that, it was easier to hand-write it than to work out any method of getting it all safely through a printer, but Ianto didn't mind. There was a certain perversely anachronistic delight in working like a mediaeval monk, writing out a chronicle that would survive centuries after he died if the place weren't sacked by Visigoths from another dimension first.
Of course there was a distinct possibility of Visigoths from another dimension, so Ianto also bought a small, sturdy fireproof box to keep it in.
When he had everything ready, and the prospect of a few quiet hours minding the tourist office, Ianto sat down with the blank book and a couple of his old diaries, and considered the first page.
Then, carefully, deliberately, he began to write.
The Way Things Really Happened
by
Ianto Jones
Torchwood Cardiff
For my son.
Ianto had filled up half the book with stories about his work, sprinkled with asides about his own childhood with his father, helping out in the tailor shop. He included some bits about Cardiff, too, because it would probably be a bit of a curiosity by then.
Most of his Torchwood stories wound up being more about Jack than about himself, but he supposed there was no harm in that. Jack was the only thing he and his child would have in common, the touchstone through which they might communicate.
Without quite planning it--the relevant entries in his own diary were elliptical nearly to the point of incoherence--he found himself writing about the recent past. He navigated carefully through the story of how they'd found out Ianto was pregnant, about the transfer and after, and inevitably, about Owen and Toshiko's deaths. He stayed silent about Gray, only vaguely alluding to the man who had caused all the trouble--that was Jack's story to tell or not, and Ianto still had no idea what the end of the story might eventually be.
After the first few sessions, when he'd insisted upon sitting at a proper desk, the tourist office his scriptorium, Ianto had got used to working on the book whenever he had a little time alone. He could sit anywhere, balancing the book on his knees. He often worked on it while sitting with the Amphora, hidden like a child on the floor behind Jack's desk.
This morning, while Jack was up on the roof watching the sun rise and letting Myfanwy stretch her wings before the morning rush of tourists in the Plass, Ianto was trying his hand at a bit of illustration. He was sketching what he could see from that spot, the Amphora's-eye-view. It was the first place the child had lived, in a way, a home he'd never remember. He ought to have a picture.
There wasn't much to see from this angle, of course--mostly Jack's desk--but Ianto was taking his time with that, trying to get down the little details--the stacks of files and odd random objects, the 3-D glasses hanging from the lamp. If he cheated the angle a little, he could include the coat rack, and Jack's greatcoat hanging there...
Ianto froze, and then turned his head very, very slowly toward the door. Where Jack was standing, watching him, having quietly come in and hung up his coat sometime in the ten minutes since Ianto last looked up that far.
Ianto did not slam the book shut. He wasn't entirely sure the ink was dry. "Jack. Good morning."
"You're going to ruin your eyes, writing in the dark," Jack replied, and switched on the overhead light. The lamp had been quite adequate, really, and Ianto liked the private, nighttime feel it gave Jack's office.
"Well, I haven't yet," Ianto said, and gently but firmly closed the book as he got to his feet. "Just lost track of time. Do you want coffee?"
He came round the desk as he spoke, and had nearly managed to brush past Jack and through the doorway when Jack reached out and stopped him with two fingers on the back of the hand holding the book. "Diary?"
"Yes," Ianto said, without pause for thought. "Private."
Jack dropped his hand, shifting his weight backward. "Of course."
Ianto stood a second longer, looking at Jack and scarcely seeing him, because that was a ridiculous reaction--of course it wasn't private. He was writing the whole thing to be read, and obviously Jack would see it, would be the one to hold on to it for their child, perhaps read it to him when he was small, choosing the stories he could understand.
Still, Ianto realized as he stood there, he couldn't bear the thought of Jack actually seeing what he'd written. He wasn't ready for that, might never be--Jack was supposed to see this after Ianto was safely dead, and not before.
Ianto didn't bother trying to force a smile, only said, "Don't worry. I think you're coming off pretty well on paper."
Jack's eyebrows rose, but so did the corners of his mouth--he was permitting himself to be teased, and that would be enough to get them past the awkward moment. "On paper?"
"Well," Ianto said, and looked Jack up and down--someday, someday he'd manage to do that without giving away how much he enjoyed the view, but today was likely not that day. Still, he did keep a straight face as he said, "One allows oneself a little poetic license."
They thought it was fog, at first. For a stupidly long time, actually--but then Jack called up to say that it looked like people were starting to gather in the Plass for some reason, and would Ianto just step outside the tourist office and see what was going on?
Before he'd even got to the door it opened, and a handful of people fell inside, bringing the fog with them, choking on it--and then Ianto was choking too, because it wasn't fog, it was gas.
Jack was there, faster than Ianto thought he could possibly have got there from the Hub. Ianto helped him herd their handful of refugees downstairs to safety, and stayed with them at the bottom of the emergency stairs, outside the Hub proper, while Jack went inside.
They tried to explain what was going on to Ianto--something about cars, exhaust going mad, those bloody ATMOS systems that talked to you while you were trying to drive. It was a bit hard to make out, because they all kept coughing and coughing, and so did Ianto.
Jack came back with Gwen and three gas masks. Gwen was on the phone with somebody--Cardiff police, likely, as she was snapping out questions about positions and evacuation routes. Jack was failing to be on the phone with anyone, and looking so irritated that it had to mean he was really, really worried.
"UNIT's not answering their phones," he said, the words clipped, his gaze directed at the civilians. He wasn't meeting Ianto's eyes, nor Gwen's; there was more to it than that, but Jack clearly wasn't going to say what. "We're on our own. Come on."
Ianto nodded, getting to his feet and reaching for the mask. Jack jerked it back a couple of inches from his fingers, and Ianto held his breath to keep from coughing as he met Jack's eyes.
"First rule of gas mask drill," Jack said firmly. "You don't take your mask off once it's on, and you don't give it away, not for babies or puppies, not for your own grandmother, not for any reason. Got it?"
Ianto thought of pointing out that his gran wouldn't actually have much use for a gas mask at this late date, but he didn't know if he could get that all out without starting to cough again.
He shrugged, instead. "Doesn't seem like a drill, does it?"
"All right," Gwen announced, pocketing her phone. "People are walking toward the water to get away from the gas. We're going to evacuate as many as we can to Flat Holm Island--Jack, do not argue with me, the facility is underground, they won't see anything--there aren't any cars on the island and the prevailing winds come in off the sea, so it should be clearer there. We've got to try for crowd control and triage. It's vital to prevent a panic."
"Not a drill," Jack agreed, and let Ianto take the mask from his hand.
It seemed to go on for hours; they couldn't see the sun through the gas, and Ianto couldn't spare the seconds to consult his watch. It was just lines of frantic people, screaming when they had the breath for it, appearing and disappearing in the deadly fog. Ianto wouldn't have taken his mask off for anything--he could still feel the residual burn in his lungs as he carried children down the docks to the boats, shouting reassurances to their frantic parents from behind glass and rubber.
He saw Jack and Gwen at times, heard their muffled voices. There were others in masks too--he thought he recognized Gwen's Andy and his fluorescent PC's jacket, and there were other police around as well. The boats kept going away full and coming back empty, their captains coughing over the controls as they waited at the docks. It was getting darker, and shafts of torchlight turned the fog more confusing, not less.
Ianto stopped dead in the middle of a trip between the dock and triage line, when he realized he didn't remember whether he was coming or going--there wasn't an evacuee with him, which suggested that he was going back for another one, but which way was the end of the line?
There was a sudden, blinding light in the sky, and Jack's voice cutting across the furor, yelling, "DOWN."
Ianto dropped flat, and felt everyone around him doing the same, to escape the sudden blazing heat and light, or in response to the inescapable command of that voice.
When he lifted his head, the sky was clear and blue, and Jack was not two yards away, holding his mask in one hand and smiling.
Ianto struggled up to his knees and pulled his own mask off, as all around him people began getting to their feet, looking around dazed, like they'd just woken from a nightmare. It was all over, suddenly, just like that. He could hear Gwen shouting at people to please return to their homes unless they were responsible for people already evacuated to the island. He could hear other police taking up the call. He knew he should himself, but his breath hitched on the inhale and caught in his chest.
Jack was just standing there, looking up at the sky and smiling. Ianto joined him just in time to see another bright flare of light--smaller, further off, like...
Well, in his not wholly uninformed opinion, it looked like a pretty sizeable ship exploding in orbit.
"Ha!" Jack vented a single syllable of vicious satisfaction. "I think somebody just got a taste of their own medicine."
Medicine. It wasn't a phrase Jack used often, and it hadn't any obvious connection to the events they'd just witnessed, except...
Ianto mentally filed another of Jack's not-as-oblique-as-he-thought references to the Doctor, and then a woman was tugging at his sleeve, asking where he'd taken her daughter, and it was time to get back to work.
It was a day and a half later that Jack walked up behind Ianto, twisted one of his arms up behind his back, and said, "Okay, the A&E departments are pretty much back to normal operation now, so either you're going under your own power or I'm frog-marching you."
"I don't--"
Jack's other hand landed in the middle of his chest and pushed, and Ianto started coughing again. Jack let go of his wrist immediately, wrapping his arms around Ianto's ribs, which made the coughing hurt less but didn't stop it, of course. Nothing seemed to stop it, and it was beginning to be annoying, but it was just a cough. The gas hadn't killed him, and they said on the news there could be aftereffects. His wasn't much of anything, considering.
"Yes, you do," Jack said. "You need to see a doctor about that. You did keep your mask on, didn't you?"
Ianto nodded quickly, thinking even as he did how funny it was that you could hear the lower-case in Jack's voice, over and above the indefinite article.
Jack squeezed him a bit, a hint of anxiety creeping into his voice. "You weren't exposed that badly. You ought to be better by now."
"Sorry," Ianto said. "Really, I hardly noticed."
"Spare me. Go."
Pretty much back to normal operation did not preclude spending hours and hours sitting in triage, when all you'd got was a cough. By the time he got out, Jack was loitering in the car park, waiting for him. Ianto rolled his eyes and waved the packet he'd been issued at the dispensary.
"Post-gas bronchitis, loads of people have it. I'm to take antibiotics for five days. It's nothing."
Jack straightened up and came over to peer suspiciously at the packet. "It's not nothing, Ianto. You're ill, and you didn't take any notice. You're going to run yourself right into the ground if you're not careful."
Ianto turned a suspicious look on Jack, just in time for Jack to look away and announce, "I think you should take a couple of days' holiday."
"Oh, you do," Ianto said, starting a mental list of everything that would inevitably go horribly wrong if he was away from the Hub for forty-eight hours. He had just done the shopping, though, so they had enough coffee, bog roll, office supplies, and ammunition to last through the end of the week.
Jack nodded firmly, still not looking at him. "Somewhere outside Cardiff, so you won't just come in to work by force of habit."
Ianto thought for half a second about arguing with him, which he could already see would be an exercise in bloody-minded futility, and then he thought about two days of not being anywhere near work.
Well, if Jack wanted to start it, Ianto would finish it. "I'm going to need an extra day just to travel back and forth. If you actually want me to get a proper rest, I mean."
Jack looked at him sideways, like he was waiting for the catch. "A day each way? Where are you planning on going?"
Ianto waved his hand impatiently and headed for the SUV, parked entirely illegally in the fire lane. "A half day each way, and two days while I'm there. Three altogether. And if I tell you, what's to stop you coming round and bringing me back early?"
"Well, it would sort of defeat the purpose. Sending you on holiday is my idea, after all."
"And I'm running with it," Ianto agreed. "Give me a lift back to the Hub, please. I need to pick up some things, and then I'll see you Thursday."
Jack looked entirely nonplussed, but he went round and got into the car, so Ianto reckoned he'd won that skirmish.
Ianto thought he'd go to London--he'd lived there for years, there were things he missed, places he had liked to go and wouldn't mind going again. Most of them were likely rebuilt and refurbished now, the Battle of Canary Wharf just a memory, even in the streets where Torchwood employees had once lived. Ianto picked up the fireproof box that housed the book and dropped it into his rucksack. He'd have some time to work on it, and another strange story to tell, and he definitely couldn't leave it behind where Jack might run across it...
It all caught up with him at once.
Their own medicine--UNIT not answering their phones--he didn't want Jack to read the book--he needed to see a...
The Doctor.
And Jack wasn't the only person Ianto knew who knew him, or who might have seen him recently.
So definitely London, then, and definitely not saying a word to Jack about where he was going or who he'd be seeing there.
Ianto spent most of his time on the train writing. He took a break of an hour or so to check into a really unnecessarily nice hotel under a false name, about three blocks from what UNIT had on record as the home address of Doctor Martha Jones. He took a long hot shower, and ordered a meal from room service, and then he was right back to working on the book until his traveling alarm clock informed him that it was time for his next dose of antibiotics.
He got some sleep after that--in a very clean, very empty bed, so that he kept waking up and wondering where Jack had gone and why it was so quiet. The third time he had that thought, Ianto concluded that he'd been sleeping over at the Hub far more often than he ought. The fourth time, he wondered whether Jack was even bothering to pretend to sleep, in his absence. The fifth time, he gave it up for a bad job, and got back to his writing.
It was London stories, mostly, at this point--a few about the work he'd done with Torchwood here, and more of them about the years before Torchwood found him, when he'd been knocking about on his own. He'd hesitated to include those stories before, though he wasn't sure whether he was glossing over them for the sake of impressionable youth or the idea of what Jack would think of his nineteen-year-old self's fumbling.
Now, though... if this worked, there would definitely be no danger of Jack seeing the book until Ianto was nothing but a fond memory, and even odds that the child wouldn't see it either until he was old enough to sort through such tales. If any child of Jack's would ever be too young for stories of parental misadventure, that was.
There were only a few blank pages left when a decent hour of the morning rolled around, and Ianto phoned Martha and hesitantly identified himself.
"Ianto!" Her voice neatly split the difference between lovely to hear from you and whatever's wrong, you probably can't tell me on the phone. "It's been ages, how've you been?"
"Very well, thank you," Ianto automatically replied, reflecting even as he did that that was really quite a bit further than usual from accurate just now. "I'm on holiday, actually, in town, so I thought I'd ring and say hello."
"And so you have," Martha agreed. "But, tell you what, let's do one better and have a cup of tea, shall we? I don't have anything pressing at work this morning--why don't you come round my flat, we can get all caught up."
"Oh, that would be lovely," Ianto said, and tactfully did not recite her address along with her when she gave it to him.
part 4
The crisis wound down with what Ianto had come to recognize as the usual relaxing of focus. The first step was from survive survive survive to where's Jack?
Having been reunited with Jack and Gwen simultaneously, and assured that neither Hart nor Gray constituted a continuing threat, it didn't take long for his focus to widen again, to Tosh and Owen and the power station.
Ianto stood behind Jack now, watching numbly, helplessly, as Jack cradled Tosh in his arms, as Gwen kept stroking her hair and calling to her long after it was obvious that Tosh would never respond. Nor Owen, though between them they had saved the city, stopped the overload.
Ianto had done this before, though. Ianto had stood in the wreckage at Canary Wharf and kept going. The latest sharp shock was only that, only the latest. His mind ticked on inexorably, clicking over to the next concern down the line. Gwen was here--she would be worried about Rhys when it occurred to her to be--where had he been seen last? The police station? But he would go home now that the excitement had died down. Gwen would find him there, if their flat hadn't been destroyed in one of the explosions--him and the hamster, of course. Sally, she'd named it.
Sally--and Sally's little ones. The last members of the litter Ianto hadn't yet managed to give away were living in a cage upstairs in the tourist office; he'd put them away beneath the desk, under a towel, sometime before all the excitement began. They ought to be there still, safe, but he should go and check on them. They probably needed water.
He'd actually shifted his weight backward when he caught sight of Hart in his peripheral vision, and the thought crashed down on him all at once.
Jack's brother, out to destroy all Jack loved.
Jack's child, hidden not thirty meters from this spot.
Ianto gasped as if he'd been struck; he saw Hart turn toward him at the sound, but Jack was lost in his grief, and didn't look up until Ianto choked out, "Jack."
Jack looked at him over his shoulder, wide-eyed, his gaze sweeping quickly over Ianto as if checking him for injury.
Ianto shook his head, dazed. "Jack. The Amphora."
Jack frowned, as if he didn't know what Ianto meant, and then he went very still, his face going blank. He was still holding Tosh--Tosh's body--but his voice was steady, reassuring, as he said, "Gray couldn't have hurt it. He didn't even know it was there."
Ianto nodded, trying to feel reassured.
"Go check," Jack said gently, and Ianto broke and turned, nearly running to Jack's office, only half-aware of being followed.
Ianto was already past Jack's desk when he spotted Hart. Ianto froze, and Hart stopped inside the doorway and put his hands on his hips. "What is it? What are we looking for?"
"You're not looking for anything," Ianto said.
"Something precious to Jack, something Jack thinks Gray couldn't hurt, something you call an amphora but obviously isn't an actual amphora because there isn't one here," Hart recited, looking around and walking closer. "Something Jack's sure Gray didn't know about, which means it's probably new since I was here last, isn't it? And you're worried about it, so check on it."
Ianto stood his ground, and Hart sighed hugely, spreading his hands. "Look, it's either follow you, or stand out there while they..."
He waved one arm back through the doorway, and Ianto flinched at the thought. Sooner or later, practicality would take over, and Jack and Gwen would move, would clean up Tosh's body and put her--it--her away. Maybe it was just as well to keep Hart clear of that, for all their sakes.
"Fine," Ianto said--Hart couldn't actually harm the Amphora any more than Gray could--and knelt down behind Jack's desk. There were files stacked precariously atop the Amphora, and it had acquired a blanket wrapping at some point; Ianto had no idea when. Typical of Jack, somehow, whether he was being protective or hiding it from himself, or both at once in the same economical gesture.
Ianto unwrapped the covering, and from above him came a low, admiring whistle. Hart was leaning all the way across the desk, but when Ianto looked up at him he swung himself over to perch on top. Ianto jerked back, but Hart's booted feet never quite passed through the spot where his head had been.
Hart leaned forward further and said, "Sprog pod. Years since I've seen one of those."
Ianto gritted his teeth and touched the control area, bringing the display to life.
"A sprog pod that knows its daddy," Hart added, sounding faintly impressed. "Brought Jack a cuckoo's egg to sit on, have you? I'll bet he loves that."
Ianto couldn't resist turning to glare at him again, and Hart's eyebrows went up. "No, I mean that, he's mad about babies--hasn't he told you about his little girl, then?"
Ianto looked down, something going tight and painful in his chest. Jack had lied to him--or Hart was lying, looking to stir up trouble, now of all times. Either way it was up to Ianto to sort it out, to keep Hart occupied and away from the others. He took his hand away from the control panel, running his knuckles across the sealed-smooth surface of the Amphora.
"He said Time Agents can't have children."
"Not our own, genetically, no," Hart said blithely, as though it were self-evident. "And that'd be the end of it for you or me, but Jack's from the Boeshane Peninsula--started out as a human colony, you know, and the colonies are all obsessed with getting their numbers up. Boeshane did it by making everybody capable of bearing children. Jack's a walking sprog pod and he's got the maternal instincts to go with it--they all do, they're all certifiable when it comes to kids. Theirs, anybody's, makes no difference. If Jack's parents had had about eight like proper colonials, maybe Gray--"
Ianto flinched, and Hart stopped short.
"Anyhow," Hart redirected, "last time I saw a sprog pod was when Jack and I were working together--ran across a distress signal out in the middle of utterly bloody nowhere, reeled it in and it turned out to be one of these. Battery had almost run out and the baby wasn't done cooking, so it'd gone into an emergency protocol--it's set to reverse the process, get the sprog into the nearest suitable bit of real estate, mechanical or otherwise. Happened to be a human in there, and the pod decided Jack was suitable."
Ianto looked up, drawn into the story despite himself. "Did Jack get any say in the matter?"
Hart rolled his eyes theatrically. "We figured out what it was doing, yeah, and I was all for putting the thing straight back out the airlock, but Jack's Boeshane, like I said. Maternal instincts. He all but threatened to--well, no. He did threaten to put me out the airlock instead if I didn't let it go. And then there he was, Jack Harkness with a baby on board for the next hundred and seven days, and he spent seventy-nine of them moaning about his sore back and swollen ankles while I manfully restrained the urge to strangle him."
"Well done you," Ianto said, very nearly sincerely, trying desperately not to picture it. And then, because he couldn't help wondering, "What about the other twenty-eight days?"
Hart grinned wolfishly. "Libido surge."
Ianto's eyes went wide; he couldn't help picturing it, and it was...
"Terrifying, honestly." Hart shook his head. "Couldn't stop him, just had to hold on and hope to survive the experience."
Ianto looked back down at the pod--the Amphora--and touched the controls again. "What happened to her? His little girl?"
"Oh, well, once she was born we had a pretty good idea where she came from--not many places out that way where purple hair and spinal data ports come standard--so we got her back to her own world, handed her over to the authorities to find her a family, and went on our way. I think Jack checked up on her after, I don't--"
Ianto had called up the image of the child, and Hart fell sharply silent when it appeared. Ianto glanced up again, just in time to see Hart sliding down to crouch on the floor beside him, scowling.
"Are you running this thing in idiot mode?"
"Jack set it that way," Ianto said, bristling at Hart's unspoken--unknowing--criticism of Tosh--Tosh, who was dead outside.
Hart, heedless, shook his head and rolled his eyes again. "And that, boys and girls, is why we study actually alien alien languages instead of passing our comps with Earth Neo-Revived Classical Latin and then getting by on the gloss. Here."
Hart caught Ianto's hand, and Ianto jerked away automatically. Hart gave him a mildly irritated look and caught his hand again in a harder grip.
"Just fixing the interface, eye candy," he muttered. "Honestly, I'm not sociopath enough to hurt your baby just for kicks, and I'm not stupid enough to think Jack wouldn't kill me slowly and painfully for doing it--I know exactly what he can do, believe me."
It was Hart's matter-of-fact tone that Ianto found convincing, more than what he said; he relaxed and let Hart manipulate his fingers over the keys. It took a few moments, long enough for Ianto to watch the way Hart frowned in concentration and then smiled, open-mouthed, when he'd worked it out. Long enough to become acutely conscious of the warmth and pressure of Hart's fingers over his.
The display snapped into English, and strings of incomprehensible symbols resolved into STASIS MODE and BATTERY LIFE: 621 YEARS and SEX CHROMOSOMES: XY.
Ianto kept staring until Hart jerked his hand away, clearing his throat. "There you go, then. I expect to be named godfather for that, when you get round to thawing him out."
Ianto got to his feet, and the Amphora went dark and still, keeping its secrets again. Him. "Not likely, Hart."
But Hart just raised his eyebrows and smiled, as if he knew Ianto's opinion had nothing to do with it.
A couple of days later, when it didn't seem too much like kicking Jack when both of them were down, Ianto leaned against his desk and said in his best absent tone of inquiry, "Were you planning on ever telling me that I'd got your internal organs?"
Jack looked up from his report to Ianto, and then made a show of patting himself down. "Mine are still right here. I'm pretty sure you have your internal organs."
Ianto waited, and Jack looked back down, putting on his frown of pretending-to-read-this. "Which are now modeled on mine, yes. I was going to tell you, but you said you didn't need me to explain it to you."
Ianto tried to work out how Jack might have almost wiped out humanity by making them all like himself--the answers to that question started out uncomfortable and went rapidly downhill--and finally gave up and asked. "Apart from being a walking sprog pod, is there anything else I should know about?"
Jack winced a little at the term, but he must have known Ianto had got the information from Hart, even if he hadn't bothered to just watch the CCTV footage of their conversation.
Jack reached out and touched Ianto's right hip. "You know how you had your appendix out when you were a kid?"
Ianto nodded. The memory was fairly vivid, one of the most terrifying of his life before Torchwood.
"You should have a new one now. An Appendix B, actually. Time Agency standard issue, allows you to digest the fourteen most common types of non-Earth-descended proteins and three classes of processed hydrocarbons."
Ianto stared at him. "I can eat petrol?"
Jack wrinkled his nose. "I don't recommend it unless you're starving. There's not a condiment selection in the galaxy that makes it taste like anything but petrol. Polystyrene's not bad, though, as long as you have a toothpick."
Ianto shook his head.
"And you're really well equipped for a future career in smuggling," Jack added. "But you should let me show you how to use that, if you intend to. There's a trick to it, and it's pretty easy to hurt yourself if you do it wrong."
Ianto covered his eyes with one hand.
"I spent a few years living on this ship that was equipped with nanogenes," Jack said quickly, and Ianto warily lowered his hand.
Jack was looking at the surface of his desk, speaking matter-of-factly, but fast enough to betray his unease.
"They're atom-sized machines, designed for medical repair and maintenance, and species-adaptable, just like the Amphora. There were millions of them on the ship, uncountable, and I was there long enough that they got pretty used to me. I never realized it, but when I had to jump ship, some of them must have come with me--stowed away inside my body. It's probably why I heal so quickly and age so slowly, in between not dying."
Ianto nodded slowly. "So that's--that's something else, then. I'm not like you that way. I can still die."
Jack suddenly looked every day of his age, two thousand looped years and all, and he met Ianto's eyes like it was an effort just to look up. "Yes. I managed to pass them to you once, and they repaired you wrong, using me as a template. That's all. They're not why I survive."
Ianto thought back--he hadn't, actually, been genuinely badly hurt many times since coming to Cardiff. "Lisa?"
Jack looked down.
"I woke up and you'd been kissing me. That whole night is just flashes, in my head, but I know I tried to talk to her, and I know you were kissing me when you'd just been threatening to shoot me, and I didn't know what had been happening. She hurt me. Badly. And you saved me, even if it did go a bit... unexpectedly."
"She killed you," Jack said, and then looked up and met Ianto's eyes.
Ianto stared back. It was hardly a shock at all, by now. Maybe he'd always known that that blank spot was blanker than the others; maybe this wasn't even a surprise.
It didn't change anything, knowing she'd killed him, not really; it only reiterated what he'd realized when he saw what she'd done to Annie. She was so lost by then that it was a mercy to kill her--a harsh and angry mercy, coming from Jack, but one Ianto hadn't been able to dispense at all, in the end. He didn't even think knowing she'd killed him would have made a difference. He still couldn't have pulled the trigger.
"She killed me a couple of times, too," Jack added off-handedly. "Electrocuted, more or less, which hasn't happened to me often."
That would have done it. Ianto clenched a fist and released it. It hurt to know it, scared him a little to think of what he'd do for Jack, but--he was no different to Jack, maybe, for all he'd had less practice at it. Ianto was pretty sure he'd threatened to kill Jack that night, just as Jack had threatened to kill Ianto, but if someone else had done it for him... he'd have done just what Jack did, or at least he bloody hoped so. He would now, for certain, though Gwen was about the only person left he'd have to be persuaded to pull the trigger on. A measure of his life: there were two people in the world he'd think twice about killing if they threatened him or his.
Jack was still talking, his voice almost calm. "I think energy weapons must drive the nanogenes a little crazy, because I felt different to what I usually do when I wake up--I could feel them working. I felt so alive, fizzing with life. I thought it was just a feeling. But you were lying there, and it must have been at least six minutes since she... you hadn't moved at all. You weren't breathing. I knew you were dead, and I just--I couldn't let you go, not like that."
You're Ianto Jones and I love you and I couldn't, that was what Jack had said the first time he tried to explain why. Couldn't let Ianto go. Hadn't, the first time he died.
He hadn't lasted six months in Cardiff without dying, Ianto realized. He just hadn't known it. He was going to have to put an asterisk in the mortality figures for that year.
"I didn't tell you at the time because I thought it would only make things harder for you, knowing I'd saved your life like that." Jack smiled a little and leaned back into an elaborately casual slouch that just happened to put him out of Ianto's reach. "Well, and I was angry with you."
Ianto snorted. Understatements all round, there. "Raised me from the dead, you mean. And you were homicidal. Literally. I was there, I do remember that."
Jack shrugged, obviously ill at ease. If Ianto hadn't questioned him on it--if Ianto hadn't questioned him already knowing--Jack would never have told him. Even when Ianto had only owed Jack for the lack of a summary execution and the continuance of his employment, he'd known Jack didn't want to see him try to be grateful enough to cover it all. Thanking him at this point would be somewhere between pointless and excruciating for both of them, to say nothing of a year and a half out of time. What Jack wanted from him now, Ianto knew, was a sharp change of subject.
It was lucky for both of them that he had one more difficult question to ask, then.
Ianto reached out the easiest way he could, settling one booted toe on the edge of Jack's chair, beside his thigh. Looking down at his own hand gripping the edge of Jack's desk, Ianto said, "Hart told me about your little girl, but he said he didn't know what happened to her, after."
"Oh!"
Ianto looked up sharply, his foot dislodged as Jack popped up to stand, nothing but delight in his voice and on his face. He tapped something on his wriststrap, aiming it at the open space on the other side of his desk, and suddenly there was a group of people standing there, frozen--hologram, of course, but full color and depth, nothing like Hart's flickering blue Princess Leia recording.
Several of them had purple hair, from the little girl leaning against someone's knee with her finger in her mouth and her hair in bunches, right up to the beautiful woman of indeterminate age around whom the rest seemed to be arranged. They were a family, obviously. Hart had said they'd sent the baby girl to people who would find her a family.
"I can't actually pronounce her name--I just butcher it when I try--so I always called her Circuit," Jack said. "It's something my dad called me when I was little, even before I was born--I don't know why, I never asked him, but the first time I felt her move it just popped out of my mouth. Hello, Circuit."
He addressed the floating image as much as quoted himself, Ianto thought. "That's her, there, with her wife--third spouse, but she married every time for love, she wouldn't have traded any of 'em--and the ones behind her are her older kids, and the one between them with the green hair is her youngest, and the rest are grandkids. The littlest one there, with the pigtails, they named her Jack. I was something of a family legend by then, I guess."
Ianto looked from Jack to the family portrait and back. Of course it had been ages for Jack by now, but not nearly enough years for Hart since this happened. "She grew up."
Jack nodded, looked down and punched another button, calling up a picture of a younger woman grinning and about to do something terribly dangerous, judging by the protective gear. A little purple hair escaped the helmet, and below the goggles her smile looked familiar.
"Yeah," Jack said. "Kids mostly do, unless something goes really wrong. I just visited her every five years or so. Took me three or four days, but I wanted to see how everything turned out for her, help her out if she needed me for anything big. She never did. She grew up smart and beautiful and totally fearless, lived a good long life. I wasn't much of a fairy godmother, but she liked me anyway."
Well, of course; he'd been an active Time Agent then, so why should the linear progression of time have anything to do with it? Ianto raised his eyebrows. "Do you read the last pages of books first, too?"
"No! I went in order. This was more like... staying up all night so I wouldn't have to put the book down."
"For three or four days." Ianto looked again, and it was a little girl now, doing a headstand, bare feet in the air and tongue sticking out, her purple hair hanging nearly to the ground.
"Well, it was a good long book," Jack said fondly, and Ianto had to kiss him or the slide show of family photos was going to last all night. It was nothing at all to do with his easy smile, or the fact that this was the first time since Gray that Ianto had seen him so purely happy about anything.
It was the pictures that Ianto kept thinking of, afterward--the delight Jack took in those pieces of his little girl's life, even though he'd missed nearly all of it. At quiet moments, Ianto would slip into Jack's office and look at the Amphora. He'd noticed that the stack of files had found another home, though the Amphora kept its blanket. Ianto would sit on the floor sometimes--sometimes with the static hologram for company, more often not.
He would never see the child grow any older than this, and that was all right. It didn't mean terribly much to him, honestly, except when he forced himself to try to think about it. But he couldn't fathom himself as a father, raising a child. It didn't trouble him much to know he wouldn't.
But the child--his son, their son--he would grow up missing one of his parents, and that, Ianto knew something about. His father had kept plenty of pictures of his mother, even a few home movies, but those had all been his father's things, his father's memories, his father's wife. She hadn't belonged to Ianto, not really. Ianto had been all that was left of her, a piece of her, but she'd never been his, not that he could ever remember.
Maybe it wouldn't be like that for Jack's son--Jack was surely presence enough for two parents. Maybe he wouldn't raise the child alone; maybe he'd wait until he had someone else, maybe a whole harem of someones, to help out.
Ianto knew Jack, though, at least a little bit. He knew enough to know that there were pieces of Jack that stayed solitary, no matter how much Jack shared his body and his time and his work. He might keep this to himself, too, his child. He hadn’t told Hart about going to see Circuit; they'd been partners, together all through the pregnancy, and Hart had had no idea what happened to her.
So maybe Jack's son would grow up knowing something--someone--was missing. Jack would probably tell him as much as he could, but that Ianto who Jack talked about would always be the one who belonged to Jack, sometime in a distant past. There wasn't any Ianto who had ever belonged to his child, even when the thing was still inside him. He didn't even want to, not properly. But maybe--maybe for the sake of a child like he'd been, his child growing up somewhere down through time, maybe he could leave something that would belong just to the boy.
Pictures were too easy--Jack would find all the pictures of Ianto anyone could possibly have any use for, between going through his physical possessions and clearing out his files after he died. Ianto owed his child something more, something specific.
Ianto chose his materials carefully. It would have to last a long time--there was no way of knowing how long, but six hundred years was a distinct possibility, for starters, and there was no particular reason to think that by the end of six hundred years Jack wouldn't have found a battery recharger or a wall outlet where he could plug in the Amphora.
So: archival quality anti-acidic paper, and non-degrading ink. Sturdy, protective covers. By the time he'd assembled all that, it was easier to hand-write it than to work out any method of getting it all safely through a printer, but Ianto didn't mind. There was a certain perversely anachronistic delight in working like a mediaeval monk, writing out a chronicle that would survive centuries after he died if the place weren't sacked by Visigoths from another dimension first.
Of course there was a distinct possibility of Visigoths from another dimension, so Ianto also bought a small, sturdy fireproof box to keep it in.
When he had everything ready, and the prospect of a few quiet hours minding the tourist office, Ianto sat down with the blank book and a couple of his old diaries, and considered the first page.
Then, carefully, deliberately, he began to write.
The Way Things Really Happened
by
Ianto Jones
Torchwood Cardiff
For my son.
Ianto had filled up half the book with stories about his work, sprinkled with asides about his own childhood with his father, helping out in the tailor shop. He included some bits about Cardiff, too, because it would probably be a bit of a curiosity by then.
Most of his Torchwood stories wound up being more about Jack than about himself, but he supposed there was no harm in that. Jack was the only thing he and his child would have in common, the touchstone through which they might communicate.
Without quite planning it--the relevant entries in his own diary were elliptical nearly to the point of incoherence--he found himself writing about the recent past. He navigated carefully through the story of how they'd found out Ianto was pregnant, about the transfer and after, and inevitably, about Owen and Toshiko's deaths. He stayed silent about Gray, only vaguely alluding to the man who had caused all the trouble--that was Jack's story to tell or not, and Ianto still had no idea what the end of the story might eventually be.
After the first few sessions, when he'd insisted upon sitting at a proper desk, the tourist office his scriptorium, Ianto had got used to working on the book whenever he had a little time alone. He could sit anywhere, balancing the book on his knees. He often worked on it while sitting with the Amphora, hidden like a child on the floor behind Jack's desk.
This morning, while Jack was up on the roof watching the sun rise and letting Myfanwy stretch her wings before the morning rush of tourists in the Plass, Ianto was trying his hand at a bit of illustration. He was sketching what he could see from that spot, the Amphora's-eye-view. It was the first place the child had lived, in a way, a home he'd never remember. He ought to have a picture.
There wasn't much to see from this angle, of course--mostly Jack's desk--but Ianto was taking his time with that, trying to get down the little details--the stacks of files and odd random objects, the 3-D glasses hanging from the lamp. If he cheated the angle a little, he could include the coat rack, and Jack's greatcoat hanging there...
Ianto froze, and then turned his head very, very slowly toward the door. Where Jack was standing, watching him, having quietly come in and hung up his coat sometime in the ten minutes since Ianto last looked up that far.
Ianto did not slam the book shut. He wasn't entirely sure the ink was dry. "Jack. Good morning."
"You're going to ruin your eyes, writing in the dark," Jack replied, and switched on the overhead light. The lamp had been quite adequate, really, and Ianto liked the private, nighttime feel it gave Jack's office.
"Well, I haven't yet," Ianto said, and gently but firmly closed the book as he got to his feet. "Just lost track of time. Do you want coffee?"
He came round the desk as he spoke, and had nearly managed to brush past Jack and through the doorway when Jack reached out and stopped him with two fingers on the back of the hand holding the book. "Diary?"
"Yes," Ianto said, without pause for thought. "Private."
Jack dropped his hand, shifting his weight backward. "Of course."
Ianto stood a second longer, looking at Jack and scarcely seeing him, because that was a ridiculous reaction--of course it wasn't private. He was writing the whole thing to be read, and obviously Jack would see it, would be the one to hold on to it for their child, perhaps read it to him when he was small, choosing the stories he could understand.
Still, Ianto realized as he stood there, he couldn't bear the thought of Jack actually seeing what he'd written. He wasn't ready for that, might never be--Jack was supposed to see this after Ianto was safely dead, and not before.
Ianto didn't bother trying to force a smile, only said, "Don't worry. I think you're coming off pretty well on paper."
Jack's eyebrows rose, but so did the corners of his mouth--he was permitting himself to be teased, and that would be enough to get them past the awkward moment. "On paper?"
"Well," Ianto said, and looked Jack up and down--someday, someday he'd manage to do that without giving away how much he enjoyed the view, but today was likely not that day. Still, he did keep a straight face as he said, "One allows oneself a little poetic license."
They thought it was fog, at first. For a stupidly long time, actually--but then Jack called up to say that it looked like people were starting to gather in the Plass for some reason, and would Ianto just step outside the tourist office and see what was going on?
Before he'd even got to the door it opened, and a handful of people fell inside, bringing the fog with them, choking on it--and then Ianto was choking too, because it wasn't fog, it was gas.
Jack was there, faster than Ianto thought he could possibly have got there from the Hub. Ianto helped him herd their handful of refugees downstairs to safety, and stayed with them at the bottom of the emergency stairs, outside the Hub proper, while Jack went inside.
They tried to explain what was going on to Ianto--something about cars, exhaust going mad, those bloody ATMOS systems that talked to you while you were trying to drive. It was a bit hard to make out, because they all kept coughing and coughing, and so did Ianto.
Jack came back with Gwen and three gas masks. Gwen was on the phone with somebody--Cardiff police, likely, as she was snapping out questions about positions and evacuation routes. Jack was failing to be on the phone with anyone, and looking so irritated that it had to mean he was really, really worried.
"UNIT's not answering their phones," he said, the words clipped, his gaze directed at the civilians. He wasn't meeting Ianto's eyes, nor Gwen's; there was more to it than that, but Jack clearly wasn't going to say what. "We're on our own. Come on."
Ianto nodded, getting to his feet and reaching for the mask. Jack jerked it back a couple of inches from his fingers, and Ianto held his breath to keep from coughing as he met Jack's eyes.
"First rule of gas mask drill," Jack said firmly. "You don't take your mask off once it's on, and you don't give it away, not for babies or puppies, not for your own grandmother, not for any reason. Got it?"
Ianto thought of pointing out that his gran wouldn't actually have much use for a gas mask at this late date, but he didn't know if he could get that all out without starting to cough again.
He shrugged, instead. "Doesn't seem like a drill, does it?"
"All right," Gwen announced, pocketing her phone. "People are walking toward the water to get away from the gas. We're going to evacuate as many as we can to Flat Holm Island--Jack, do not argue with me, the facility is underground, they won't see anything--there aren't any cars on the island and the prevailing winds come in off the sea, so it should be clearer there. We've got to try for crowd control and triage. It's vital to prevent a panic."
"Not a drill," Jack agreed, and let Ianto take the mask from his hand.
It seemed to go on for hours; they couldn't see the sun through the gas, and Ianto couldn't spare the seconds to consult his watch. It was just lines of frantic people, screaming when they had the breath for it, appearing and disappearing in the deadly fog. Ianto wouldn't have taken his mask off for anything--he could still feel the residual burn in his lungs as he carried children down the docks to the boats, shouting reassurances to their frantic parents from behind glass and rubber.
He saw Jack and Gwen at times, heard their muffled voices. There were others in masks too--he thought he recognized Gwen's Andy and his fluorescent PC's jacket, and there were other police around as well. The boats kept going away full and coming back empty, their captains coughing over the controls as they waited at the docks. It was getting darker, and shafts of torchlight turned the fog more confusing, not less.
Ianto stopped dead in the middle of a trip between the dock and triage line, when he realized he didn't remember whether he was coming or going--there wasn't an evacuee with him, which suggested that he was going back for another one, but which way was the end of the line?
There was a sudden, blinding light in the sky, and Jack's voice cutting across the furor, yelling, "DOWN."
Ianto dropped flat, and felt everyone around him doing the same, to escape the sudden blazing heat and light, or in response to the inescapable command of that voice.
When he lifted his head, the sky was clear and blue, and Jack was not two yards away, holding his mask in one hand and smiling.
Ianto struggled up to his knees and pulled his own mask off, as all around him people began getting to their feet, looking around dazed, like they'd just woken from a nightmare. It was all over, suddenly, just like that. He could hear Gwen shouting at people to please return to their homes unless they were responsible for people already evacuated to the island. He could hear other police taking up the call. He knew he should himself, but his breath hitched on the inhale and caught in his chest.
Jack was just standing there, looking up at the sky and smiling. Ianto joined him just in time to see another bright flare of light--smaller, further off, like...
Well, in his not wholly uninformed opinion, it looked like a pretty sizeable ship exploding in orbit.
"Ha!" Jack vented a single syllable of vicious satisfaction. "I think somebody just got a taste of their own medicine."
Medicine. It wasn't a phrase Jack used often, and it hadn't any obvious connection to the events they'd just witnessed, except...
Ianto mentally filed another of Jack's not-as-oblique-as-he-thought references to the Doctor, and then a woman was tugging at his sleeve, asking where he'd taken her daughter, and it was time to get back to work.
It was a day and a half later that Jack walked up behind Ianto, twisted one of his arms up behind his back, and said, "Okay, the A&E departments are pretty much back to normal operation now, so either you're going under your own power or I'm frog-marching you."
"I don't--"
Jack's other hand landed in the middle of his chest and pushed, and Ianto started coughing again. Jack let go of his wrist immediately, wrapping his arms around Ianto's ribs, which made the coughing hurt less but didn't stop it, of course. Nothing seemed to stop it, and it was beginning to be annoying, but it was just a cough. The gas hadn't killed him, and they said on the news there could be aftereffects. His wasn't much of anything, considering.
"Yes, you do," Jack said. "You need to see a doctor about that. You did keep your mask on, didn't you?"
Ianto nodded quickly, thinking even as he did how funny it was that you could hear the lower-case in Jack's voice, over and above the indefinite article.
Jack squeezed him a bit, a hint of anxiety creeping into his voice. "You weren't exposed that badly. You ought to be better by now."
"Sorry," Ianto said. "Really, I hardly noticed."
"Spare me. Go."
Pretty much back to normal operation did not preclude spending hours and hours sitting in triage, when all you'd got was a cough. By the time he got out, Jack was loitering in the car park, waiting for him. Ianto rolled his eyes and waved the packet he'd been issued at the dispensary.
"Post-gas bronchitis, loads of people have it. I'm to take antibiotics for five days. It's nothing."
Jack straightened up and came over to peer suspiciously at the packet. "It's not nothing, Ianto. You're ill, and you didn't take any notice. You're going to run yourself right into the ground if you're not careful."
Ianto turned a suspicious look on Jack, just in time for Jack to look away and announce, "I think you should take a couple of days' holiday."
"Oh, you do," Ianto said, starting a mental list of everything that would inevitably go horribly wrong if he was away from the Hub for forty-eight hours. He had just done the shopping, though, so they had enough coffee, bog roll, office supplies, and ammunition to last through the end of the week.
Jack nodded firmly, still not looking at him. "Somewhere outside Cardiff, so you won't just come in to work by force of habit."
Ianto thought for half a second about arguing with him, which he could already see would be an exercise in bloody-minded futility, and then he thought about two days of not being anywhere near work.
Well, if Jack wanted to start it, Ianto would finish it. "I'm going to need an extra day just to travel back and forth. If you actually want me to get a proper rest, I mean."
Jack looked at him sideways, like he was waiting for the catch. "A day each way? Where are you planning on going?"
Ianto waved his hand impatiently and headed for the SUV, parked entirely illegally in the fire lane. "A half day each way, and two days while I'm there. Three altogether. And if I tell you, what's to stop you coming round and bringing me back early?"
"Well, it would sort of defeat the purpose. Sending you on holiday is my idea, after all."
"And I'm running with it," Ianto agreed. "Give me a lift back to the Hub, please. I need to pick up some things, and then I'll see you Thursday."
Jack looked entirely nonplussed, but he went round and got into the car, so Ianto reckoned he'd won that skirmish.
Ianto thought he'd go to London--he'd lived there for years, there were things he missed, places he had liked to go and wouldn't mind going again. Most of them were likely rebuilt and refurbished now, the Battle of Canary Wharf just a memory, even in the streets where Torchwood employees had once lived. Ianto picked up the fireproof box that housed the book and dropped it into his rucksack. He'd have some time to work on it, and another strange story to tell, and he definitely couldn't leave it behind where Jack might run across it...
It all caught up with him at once.
Their own medicine--UNIT not answering their phones--he didn't want Jack to read the book--he needed to see a...
The Doctor.
And Jack wasn't the only person Ianto knew who knew him, or who might have seen him recently.
So definitely London, then, and definitely not saying a word to Jack about where he was going or who he'd be seeing there.
Ianto spent most of his time on the train writing. He took a break of an hour or so to check into a really unnecessarily nice hotel under a false name, about three blocks from what UNIT had on record as the home address of Doctor Martha Jones. He took a long hot shower, and ordered a meal from room service, and then he was right back to working on the book until his traveling alarm clock informed him that it was time for his next dose of antibiotics.
He got some sleep after that--in a very clean, very empty bed, so that he kept waking up and wondering where Jack had gone and why it was so quiet. The third time he had that thought, Ianto concluded that he'd been sleeping over at the Hub far more often than he ought. The fourth time, he wondered whether Jack was even bothering to pretend to sleep, in his absence. The fifth time, he gave it up for a bad job, and got back to his writing.
It was London stories, mostly, at this point--a few about the work he'd done with Torchwood here, and more of them about the years before Torchwood found him, when he'd been knocking about on his own. He'd hesitated to include those stories before, though he wasn't sure whether he was glossing over them for the sake of impressionable youth or the idea of what Jack would think of his nineteen-year-old self's fumbling.
Now, though... if this worked, there would definitely be no danger of Jack seeing the book until Ianto was nothing but a fond memory, and even odds that the child wouldn't see it either until he was old enough to sort through such tales. If any child of Jack's would ever be too young for stories of parental misadventure, that was.
There were only a few blank pages left when a decent hour of the morning rolled around, and Ianto phoned Martha and hesitantly identified himself.
"Ianto!" Her voice neatly split the difference between lovely to hear from you and whatever's wrong, you probably can't tell me on the phone. "It's been ages, how've you been?"
"Very well, thank you," Ianto automatically replied, reflecting even as he did that that was really quite a bit further than usual from accurate just now. "I'm on holiday, actually, in town, so I thought I'd ring and say hello."
"And so you have," Martha agreed. "But, tell you what, let's do one better and have a cup of tea, shall we? I don't have anything pressing at work this morning--why don't you come round my flat, we can get all caught up."
"Oh, that would be lovely," Ianto said, and tactfully did not recite her address along with her when she gave it to him.
part 4