Moving On - 07/18
Title: Moving On
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairings: Jack/Ianto, references to past Ianto/Lisa
Rating: R
Disclaimer: If I was the one who owned Torchwood, you think I'd admit it now?
Spoilers: Some information and events from s1,2. None for s3.
Summary: Lisa is gone, and Ianto is starting to move on with his life, but it isn't always as easy as it sounds.
Author's Note: Sequel to Guilt and Turning Point.
Thanks to: My sister angelzbabe1989 for stepping in as beta, morbid_sparks for all of her support and idea bouncing through the writing of this, and pinkfairy727 for cheerleading even when she doesn't know what happens.
For previous chapters see Master list for this fic
Chapter Seven
“Jack.”
Jack lifted his head from his paperwork to find Ianto hovering in his office, looking a little nervous.
“Yes?” He tried not to get his hopes up too far about the fact that Ianto appeared to be speaking to him voluntarily again; there could very well be a work-related reason he had been sought out. He couldn’t help but hope just a little, however.
Ianto appeared to waver for a second. “Jack, I…”
There was a wailing noise from outside. Dammit, the Rift alarm.
Of course.
“Can we pick this up later?” Jack asked Ianto as he got to his feet.
Ianto nodded, turning to lead Jack out of his office. “Of course.”
“Right, guys, what do we have?” Jack said authoritatively as he strode to the centre of the cluster of desks.
Tosh wrinkled her forehead at him. “I’m not entirely sure; I’ve never seen the readings look like this before.”
Jack frowned. “Like what?”
She shook her head. “They’re not in the normal ranges at all.” She waved towards the screen, and Jack took a few steps so he could look over her shoulder. “And it’s coming and going. There’s a repeating pattern, but it’s slightly different every time, some variable is changing.”
As Jack watched, another pulse appeared - slightly different but very clearly related to the previous one still visible on the edge of the screen.
“Where is it?” Ianto’s voice said from behind him.
“And more importantly, what effect is it having?” Jack added as Tosh flipped the windows to show a map of Cardiff and its surroundings.
The screen was littered with small red markers. “Oh that is not good,” Owen said, shaking his head as they all leant in enough so they could see the screen. “You’re telling me we’ve got activity in all those places all at once?”
As he spoke, another spot appeared, this one just a few minutes up the road from the Plass, towards the centre of town.
Jack nodded soberly. “It looks like it.” He really hoped that these spikes weren’t bringing anything nasty through with them - there were far too many hotspots for the team to cover, even if he co-opted Ianto into the field team again. And he wasn’t to keen on that idea at all; Ianto had only just recovered from the physical effects of the last time they’d all gone on a field mission together.
“Tosh, how many of these locations are covered by CCTV?” he asked. Usually he hated to leave any incidence of Rift activity uninvestigated, but in the circumstances… “If any of them don’t appear to have been impacted at all by the Rift spike, we may have to ignore them for now. We don’t have the manpower to check them all out.”
Tosh was scrolling through a database of internal and external CCTV cameras they had access to. “Of the points that have appeared so far… we have camera coverage on eight of them… no, nine.”
Jack did a quick count of the red dots on screen - the 13th had just appeared. That still left four that they had no information on, but four was better than thirteen. Four was manageable, as long as none of those nine showed up something terrible.
“Anything on any of them that looks like it needs attention?”
The work of a few moments had Tosh bringing each of the camera feeds up on screen, scrolling backwards through them in an attempt to catch the point where each had been hit by Rift energy. The first four - all in areas that were relatively quiet at this time of morning - all appeared to be clear. If anything had happened at those locations, it wasn’t something visible.
Of the remaining five, three cameras had experienced some sort of interference in the last quarter of an hour, leaving them with a gap in the coverage of up to five minutes each which Toshiko could do nothing to restore - not with the level of access to the footage that they had, at least. One of them was in a supermarket, so Jack hoped fervently that there was nothing to worry about.
One more didn’t show anything, but one had a worrying shadowy region appear near the bottom of the camera image - it could have been completely innocent, it could have been unrelated, but Jack didn’t want to take that chance.
Which meant eight locations for them to check out, and hopefully no psychopathic aliens to encounter or dangerous technology to extract. If only they were ever that lucky.
He took a breath. “Right.” He straightened and took a step away from the desk so he could look at his team as he made some quick decisions. “Ianto.”
Ianto looked over, his stance showing his readiness to do whatever Jack needed of him; in this arena, at least, there was none of the painful awkwardness that had haunted their relationship since that first misguided kiss after the trip to the Beacons.
Jack indicated the screen with a finger. “Take over for Tosh.” Ianto nodded immediately, swinging into the chair Tosh had just as quickly vacated. “I know you know your way around the CCTV network almost as well as Tosh does by now; just…”
“Keep track of new Rift energy pulses appearing and check any camera footage we can get on the new locations,” Ianto finished for him matter-of-factly. “I got it.” Jack could tell from his tone, even without looking, that Ianto was rolling his eyes slightly.
He nodded. “Okay.” He had every confidence that Ianto knew exactly what was required, but he liked the illusion of giving the commands out loud. “The rest of us are going to check out these Rift locations - If we split up, we’ll get them checked out faster. Gwen, with me. We’ll take these four.” He indicated four of the blinking dots on the screen. “Tosh, Owen, you take the other four. Ianto will keep us posted on any new problem spots.”
Jack was about to dismiss them to gather up anything required and get to the garage when Owen spoke up.
“Uh, and how exactly are we going to get to them, assuming that you’re taking the SUV?” he asked pointedly.
“We’ll…” Jack stopped himself before the rest of that sentence - ‘drop you off there’- could come out as he realised what Owen was actually saying. He’d done his best to split the points geographically, but the time it would take to get between them on foot was too much time to waste, and public transport would be out if they found anything hazardous - or alive.
He frowned to himself, trying to remember what Owen was driving these days - the last car he could remember wouldn’t be any use at all. Tosh probably drove something more suited to the purpose, but it was a nice day; Tosh had almost certainly walked in.
There just wasn’t any way that this was going to work - in the back of his mind, Jack started to think about how much careful budgeting would be required for them to buy another vehicle. He wondered if Ianto would be willing to help him figure out the details; Ianto was so much better at the paperwork side of running Torchwood than he had ever been.
Of course, that relied on Ianto speaking to him again - he hoped that whatever Ianto had been about to say when the alarm went off would have taken them in that direction.
But that was a problem for later, right now, they had to check out these Rift activity spots. “Okay, scratch that, then. Plan B. We’ll all just have to go together, check each one out twice as fast. If we start with the four…”
“Five,” Ianto interrupted. “New point just came in, and we can’t quite see it from the nearest CCTV camera.”
Jack sighed slightly. Despite putting Ianto on the task, he’d hoped - optimistically, and unrealistically, he knew - that no new points would actually come in. “Right, we’ll start with the five places where we don’t have any camera coverage, then the one with the shadow… and go from there. Hopefully we won’t find anything that needs much dealing with.”
Leaving the others to gather up whatever they felt they’d need, Jack checked his holster and went back to his office to grab his coat from its hook. By the time he had it settled comfortably on his shoulders - he wondered idly when he had become so used to Ianto helping him on with it - the others were back and ready to go.
Six and a half hours, fifty-nine bursts of Rift energy that required investigation, fourteen pieces of relatively harmless tech and one slightly less harmless piece of tech later, Jack, Owen and Gwen were finally on their way to stop the Rift flares at their source.
They’d dropped Toshiko back at the Hub nearly an hour and a half before, after Ianto had spotted a possibly traceable signal underneath the pattern of Rift activity. Ianto was no slouch when it came to computers, but his hacking and tracing skills were nothing compared to Tosh.
Between the two of them, they’d drawn out a weak and distorted signal and processed it until they managed to get a location. Jack had no idea what they could expect to find at that location, but they would find out soon.
“We’ve got another mystery spike,” Tosh’s voice said through the comms. “Can’t quite see it from the closest CCTV. I don’t know if you want to…”
“I think we’ll leave it for now,” Jack replied - none of the discoveries they’d made so far had been requiring of truly urgent attention, so he was counting on this one being no different. “We’ll carry on and see if we can find out who - or what - is causing it. We can’t just keep fighting the little fires all day; we’ll never get anywhere.”
There was a pause, in which Jack imagined Tosh nodding sagely. “Keep us posted,” she responded a second later.
Another minute and Jack brought the SUV to a halt in front of an innocent looking residential block. It took him a few seconds to realise that he recognised the building; he’d been here before, several times.
And although he hoped his sudden suspicion was wrong, he had a feeling the cause of the current Rift bursts was also one of the reasons he’d been here so often.
“No chance you could narrow down that location at all, could you?” he said into his comms.
“Why? Is there a problem?” Tosh asked.
“You could say that,” he sighed. “It’s Beech House.”
“Why didn’t I notice that? I should have noticed that.” Ianto sounded frustrated with himself.
Jack was about to attempt to placate him when Tosh spoke.
“What’s Beech House? Why is that important?”
“It’s just a block of flats,” Ianto told her. “But a sizable proportion of our more friendly refugees live there. Jack has a deal with a property developer, or something.”
“Thus why I’d love it if we could narrow this down a bit,” Jack interrupted their conversation. “Despite what I might hope, the chances are high that it’s one of them causing all of this. Intentionally or not. And I don’t want to have to knock on every single door.”
There was a moment of quiet, and if he strained, Jack thought he could just about hear the clacker of fingers on keyboards.
“Sorry,” Tosh said. “We only just managed to get it down to that one building.”
Jack sighed. “All right. Guess we’re doing this the long way.”
Thankfully, the fourth flat they went to bore results. A humanoid alien who had been on Earth for four years now - and was calling himself Allen - had apparently grown tired of the planet and had been determined to find a way to make his way home.
Cobbling together the few small - and supposedly harmless and trivial - pieces of tech they had allowed him to keep when he was integrated into the community, he had managed to create something with the most basic functions of the Rift manipulator.
What he didn’t have were any controls - he could spark a small Rift incident, but not specify the location in Cardiff or where the other end would be. Despite the havoc it had caused, Jack found himself impressed with Allen’s initiative and intelligence. He was almost sorry that he had to confiscate the device.
It didn’t help that Jack felt terribly guilty that he could do nothing of importance for Allen or any of his fellow Rift refugees. Maybe one day Torchwood would have enough knowledge and technology to be able to truly utilise the Rift, but Jack knew he was probably the only one around today who would still be alive to see it.
“I’m really sorry,” he told Allen as they left the flat. “I know you want to go home, and I do wish we could help, but you can’t just mess with the Rift. It’s too dangerous.”
Allen nodded resignedly, and closed the door behind them.
Owen and Gwen were visibly dragging as they made their way back to the SUV, Gwen pointedly looking at her watch and sighing.
Jack glanced at his own - it was approaching five o’clock, and they’d been on the go since shortly after ten; it wasn’t surprising they were lagging a bit.
With his own hope that Ianto would still be looking to talk to him prominent in his mind, they weren’t even halfway back to the Hub before he’d decided to send them home just as soon as everything was unpacked.
Unsurprisingly, not one of Gwen, Owen or Tosh complained at the prospect of getting away at what would be considered by most a ‘normal’ time. Jack could only wait and see if Ianto would leave with them.
He sat at his desk, pushing papers around and attempting to look busy. Ianto appeared a few minutes later, looking as hesitant as Jack felt.
“I…ah… I wanted to talk to you this morning,” Ianto ventured. Jack pushed the papers away and stood up, gesturing towards the sofa where so many of their discussions had taken place in the past.
Ianto sat down, clasping his hands together in his lap. Jack, unsure of his welcome, carefully perched on the other end of the sofa and waited. He really hoped this wasn’t going to be the conversation where Ianto told him he was quitting and asked for the Retcon. He’d imagined that one too often in the last weeks as Ianto pulled further and further away from him.
“I’m sorry,” Ianto said quietly, looking at his hands. Jack forced himself to stay quiet, not to jump to conclusions. I’m sorry could mean almost anything. “I didn’t mean to… get all weird on you.” He looked up, staring at a point behind Jack’s shoulder. “I shouldn’t have kissed you like that last week either. Or the week before.”
Jack felt his heart sink. Of course he knew that Ianto regretted it - why else would he have avoided Jack so much the last few weeks - but hearing Ianto actually say that it was a mistake hurt more than he had expected. “It’s okay,” he said, pushing his emotions aside. “You don’t have to…”
“It wasn’t fair on you to jerk you around,” Ianto continued as if he hadn’t even heard Jack. “No matter how much I wanted to do it, I shouldn’t have kissed you only to push you away immediately afterwards.”
Jack froze. Was… was Ianto saying that it wasn’t the kissing him part he was sorry about?
“My head’s been such a mess, but…”
“Ianto, wait,” Jack interrupted, wrapping his hands around Ianto’s. The younger man’s gaze shifted and focussed on his own, his eyes filled with what looked like apprehension. “You’re rambling. Just tell me yes or no: do you regret kissing me?”
Ianto bit his lip. “Yes… and no.”
Which didn’t help Jack at all, but thankfully Ianto elaborated without prompting.
“I wanted to do it,” he started. “But I didn’t want to want to do it.”
Jack took a few seconds to wrap his head around that sentence, still not entirely sure that he understood what Ianto was trying to say, and definitely not sure of where that left them now.
“And it’s not because you’re, well, a man,” Ianto continued. Jack nodded - he’d figured that much out on his own. “I think you’ve probably figured out that you’re not the first man I’ve ever kissed. It’s…” Ianto’s shoulders heaved. “It’s not anything to do with you, actually. I mean, the… not wanting to want to part. Not the wanting part. That’s pretty much all about you.”
Jack couldn’t do much more than stare at Ianto in mild confusion. He still wasn’t really following.
“I just felt guilty,” Ianto eventually said flatly. And that Jack understood. “It’s only been a couple of months, and… it felt like I was betraying her.”
Jack couldn’t say that the same thought hadn’t crossed his mind more than a few times. Almost every time he’d felt his attraction to Ianto surge, in fact. Especially when they’d still been trying to help Lisa.
“I understand,” he said, knowing as he did so that this was probably the end of anything more he might have with Ianto.
Ianto pulled back and took a deep breath. “But then I talked to Tosh this morning. She… told me about what happened to her, with the pendant.”
Jack was surprised; he hadn’t really expected Tosh to tell any of them about that, although if she was going to tell any of them it would be Ianto. “Oh?”
“Well… I’ve been thinking about… us… quite a lot lately, so it’s not surprising that she overheard me worrying. She told me I needed to stop being so hard on myself. And pointed out a few things that I hadn’t been letting myself realise.” He shuffled slightly closer, and Jack wondered if he hadn’t been a bit premature in giving up hope.
“Such as?”
“Such as the fact that giving myself the chance to be happy again doesn’t mean I’m forgetting Lisa, or that I love her any less,” Ianto said quietly. His eyes turned fierce, earnest. “I will never forget her, and I will always love her, but… Tosh reminded me that that doesn’t mean I have to stay alone forever.”
He shifted closer again, so their knees were pressed together. Jack only just remembered to breathe. Ianto leant forward, and Jack found himself leaning back. He had to be certain. He had to know, before this went any further.
“Are you absolutely sure that this is what you want? That you’re ready for this?” he asked fervently, trying to quell the tremor in his voice.
Ianto’s hand slid across and wrapped around Jack’s own. “I’m sure,” he said intently, his gaze burning into Jack.
And when he leant in again, Jack didn’t pull away.
Chapter Eight
As always, comments and concrit are loved!
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairings: Jack/Ianto, references to past Ianto/Lisa
Rating: R
Disclaimer: If I was the one who owned Torchwood, you think I'd admit it now?
Spoilers: Some information and events from s1,2. None for s3.
Summary: Lisa is gone, and Ianto is starting to move on with his life, but it isn't always as easy as it sounds.
Author's Note: Sequel to Guilt and Turning Point.
Thanks to: My sister angelzbabe1989 for stepping in as beta, morbid_sparks for all of her support and idea bouncing through the writing of this, and pinkfairy727 for cheerleading even when she doesn't know what happens.
For previous chapters see Master list for this fic
Chapter Seven
“Jack.”
Jack lifted his head from his paperwork to find Ianto hovering in his office, looking a little nervous.
“Yes?” He tried not to get his hopes up too far about the fact that Ianto appeared to be speaking to him voluntarily again; there could very well be a work-related reason he had been sought out. He couldn’t help but hope just a little, however.
Ianto appeared to waver for a second. “Jack, I…”
There was a wailing noise from outside. Dammit, the Rift alarm.
Of course.
“Can we pick this up later?” Jack asked Ianto as he got to his feet.
Ianto nodded, turning to lead Jack out of his office. “Of course.”
“Right, guys, what do we have?” Jack said authoritatively as he strode to the centre of the cluster of desks.
Tosh wrinkled her forehead at him. “I’m not entirely sure; I’ve never seen the readings look like this before.”
Jack frowned. “Like what?”
She shook her head. “They’re not in the normal ranges at all.” She waved towards the screen, and Jack took a few steps so he could look over her shoulder. “And it’s coming and going. There’s a repeating pattern, but it’s slightly different every time, some variable is changing.”
As Jack watched, another pulse appeared - slightly different but very clearly related to the previous one still visible on the edge of the screen.
“Where is it?” Ianto’s voice said from behind him.
“And more importantly, what effect is it having?” Jack added as Tosh flipped the windows to show a map of Cardiff and its surroundings.
The screen was littered with small red markers. “Oh that is not good,” Owen said, shaking his head as they all leant in enough so they could see the screen. “You’re telling me we’ve got activity in all those places all at once?”
As he spoke, another spot appeared, this one just a few minutes up the road from the Plass, towards the centre of town.
Jack nodded soberly. “It looks like it.” He really hoped that these spikes weren’t bringing anything nasty through with them - there were far too many hotspots for the team to cover, even if he co-opted Ianto into the field team again. And he wasn’t to keen on that idea at all; Ianto had only just recovered from the physical effects of the last time they’d all gone on a field mission together.
“Tosh, how many of these locations are covered by CCTV?” he asked. Usually he hated to leave any incidence of Rift activity uninvestigated, but in the circumstances… “If any of them don’t appear to have been impacted at all by the Rift spike, we may have to ignore them for now. We don’t have the manpower to check them all out.”
Tosh was scrolling through a database of internal and external CCTV cameras they had access to. “Of the points that have appeared so far… we have camera coverage on eight of them… no, nine.”
Jack did a quick count of the red dots on screen - the 13th had just appeared. That still left four that they had no information on, but four was better than thirteen. Four was manageable, as long as none of those nine showed up something terrible.
“Anything on any of them that looks like it needs attention?”
The work of a few moments had Tosh bringing each of the camera feeds up on screen, scrolling backwards through them in an attempt to catch the point where each had been hit by Rift energy. The first four - all in areas that were relatively quiet at this time of morning - all appeared to be clear. If anything had happened at those locations, it wasn’t something visible.
Of the remaining five, three cameras had experienced some sort of interference in the last quarter of an hour, leaving them with a gap in the coverage of up to five minutes each which Toshiko could do nothing to restore - not with the level of access to the footage that they had, at least. One of them was in a supermarket, so Jack hoped fervently that there was nothing to worry about.
One more didn’t show anything, but one had a worrying shadowy region appear near the bottom of the camera image - it could have been completely innocent, it could have been unrelated, but Jack didn’t want to take that chance.
Which meant eight locations for them to check out, and hopefully no psychopathic aliens to encounter or dangerous technology to extract. If only they were ever that lucky.
He took a breath. “Right.” He straightened and took a step away from the desk so he could look at his team as he made some quick decisions. “Ianto.”
Ianto looked over, his stance showing his readiness to do whatever Jack needed of him; in this arena, at least, there was none of the painful awkwardness that had haunted their relationship since that first misguided kiss after the trip to the Beacons.
Jack indicated the screen with a finger. “Take over for Tosh.” Ianto nodded immediately, swinging into the chair Tosh had just as quickly vacated. “I know you know your way around the CCTV network almost as well as Tosh does by now; just…”
“Keep track of new Rift energy pulses appearing and check any camera footage we can get on the new locations,” Ianto finished for him matter-of-factly. “I got it.” Jack could tell from his tone, even without looking, that Ianto was rolling his eyes slightly.
He nodded. “Okay.” He had every confidence that Ianto knew exactly what was required, but he liked the illusion of giving the commands out loud. “The rest of us are going to check out these Rift locations - If we split up, we’ll get them checked out faster. Gwen, with me. We’ll take these four.” He indicated four of the blinking dots on the screen. “Tosh, Owen, you take the other four. Ianto will keep us posted on any new problem spots.”
Jack was about to dismiss them to gather up anything required and get to the garage when Owen spoke up.
“Uh, and how exactly are we going to get to them, assuming that you’re taking the SUV?” he asked pointedly.
“We’ll…” Jack stopped himself before the rest of that sentence - ‘drop you off there’- could come out as he realised what Owen was actually saying. He’d done his best to split the points geographically, but the time it would take to get between them on foot was too much time to waste, and public transport would be out if they found anything hazardous - or alive.
He frowned to himself, trying to remember what Owen was driving these days - the last car he could remember wouldn’t be any use at all. Tosh probably drove something more suited to the purpose, but it was a nice day; Tosh had almost certainly walked in.
There just wasn’t any way that this was going to work - in the back of his mind, Jack started to think about how much careful budgeting would be required for them to buy another vehicle. He wondered if Ianto would be willing to help him figure out the details; Ianto was so much better at the paperwork side of running Torchwood than he had ever been.
Of course, that relied on Ianto speaking to him again - he hoped that whatever Ianto had been about to say when the alarm went off would have taken them in that direction.
But that was a problem for later, right now, they had to check out these Rift activity spots. “Okay, scratch that, then. Plan B. We’ll all just have to go together, check each one out twice as fast. If we start with the four…”
“Five,” Ianto interrupted. “New point just came in, and we can’t quite see it from the nearest CCTV camera.”
Jack sighed slightly. Despite putting Ianto on the task, he’d hoped - optimistically, and unrealistically, he knew - that no new points would actually come in. “Right, we’ll start with the five places where we don’t have any camera coverage, then the one with the shadow… and go from there. Hopefully we won’t find anything that needs much dealing with.”
Leaving the others to gather up whatever they felt they’d need, Jack checked his holster and went back to his office to grab his coat from its hook. By the time he had it settled comfortably on his shoulders - he wondered idly when he had become so used to Ianto helping him on with it - the others were back and ready to go.
Six and a half hours, fifty-nine bursts of Rift energy that required investigation, fourteen pieces of relatively harmless tech and one slightly less harmless piece of tech later, Jack, Owen and Gwen were finally on their way to stop the Rift flares at their source.
They’d dropped Toshiko back at the Hub nearly an hour and a half before, after Ianto had spotted a possibly traceable signal underneath the pattern of Rift activity. Ianto was no slouch when it came to computers, but his hacking and tracing skills were nothing compared to Tosh.
Between the two of them, they’d drawn out a weak and distorted signal and processed it until they managed to get a location. Jack had no idea what they could expect to find at that location, but they would find out soon.
“We’ve got another mystery spike,” Tosh’s voice said through the comms. “Can’t quite see it from the closest CCTV. I don’t know if you want to…”
“I think we’ll leave it for now,” Jack replied - none of the discoveries they’d made so far had been requiring of truly urgent attention, so he was counting on this one being no different. “We’ll carry on and see if we can find out who - or what - is causing it. We can’t just keep fighting the little fires all day; we’ll never get anywhere.”
There was a pause, in which Jack imagined Tosh nodding sagely. “Keep us posted,” she responded a second later.
Another minute and Jack brought the SUV to a halt in front of an innocent looking residential block. It took him a few seconds to realise that he recognised the building; he’d been here before, several times.
And although he hoped his sudden suspicion was wrong, he had a feeling the cause of the current Rift bursts was also one of the reasons he’d been here so often.
“No chance you could narrow down that location at all, could you?” he said into his comms.
“Why? Is there a problem?” Tosh asked.
“You could say that,” he sighed. “It’s Beech House.”
“Why didn’t I notice that? I should have noticed that.” Ianto sounded frustrated with himself.
Jack was about to attempt to placate him when Tosh spoke.
“What’s Beech House? Why is that important?”
“It’s just a block of flats,” Ianto told her. “But a sizable proportion of our more friendly refugees live there. Jack has a deal with a property developer, or something.”
“Thus why I’d love it if we could narrow this down a bit,” Jack interrupted their conversation. “Despite what I might hope, the chances are high that it’s one of them causing all of this. Intentionally or not. And I don’t want to have to knock on every single door.”
There was a moment of quiet, and if he strained, Jack thought he could just about hear the clacker of fingers on keyboards.
“Sorry,” Tosh said. “We only just managed to get it down to that one building.”
Jack sighed. “All right. Guess we’re doing this the long way.”
Thankfully, the fourth flat they went to bore results. A humanoid alien who had been on Earth for four years now - and was calling himself Allen - had apparently grown tired of the planet and had been determined to find a way to make his way home.
Cobbling together the few small - and supposedly harmless and trivial - pieces of tech they had allowed him to keep when he was integrated into the community, he had managed to create something with the most basic functions of the Rift manipulator.
What he didn’t have were any controls - he could spark a small Rift incident, but not specify the location in Cardiff or where the other end would be. Despite the havoc it had caused, Jack found himself impressed with Allen’s initiative and intelligence. He was almost sorry that he had to confiscate the device.
It didn’t help that Jack felt terribly guilty that he could do nothing of importance for Allen or any of his fellow Rift refugees. Maybe one day Torchwood would have enough knowledge and technology to be able to truly utilise the Rift, but Jack knew he was probably the only one around today who would still be alive to see it.
“I’m really sorry,” he told Allen as they left the flat. “I know you want to go home, and I do wish we could help, but you can’t just mess with the Rift. It’s too dangerous.”
Allen nodded resignedly, and closed the door behind them.
Owen and Gwen were visibly dragging as they made their way back to the SUV, Gwen pointedly looking at her watch and sighing.
Jack glanced at his own - it was approaching five o’clock, and they’d been on the go since shortly after ten; it wasn’t surprising they were lagging a bit.
With his own hope that Ianto would still be looking to talk to him prominent in his mind, they weren’t even halfway back to the Hub before he’d decided to send them home just as soon as everything was unpacked.
Unsurprisingly, not one of Gwen, Owen or Tosh complained at the prospect of getting away at what would be considered by most a ‘normal’ time. Jack could only wait and see if Ianto would leave with them.
He sat at his desk, pushing papers around and attempting to look busy. Ianto appeared a few minutes later, looking as hesitant as Jack felt.
“I…ah… I wanted to talk to you this morning,” Ianto ventured. Jack pushed the papers away and stood up, gesturing towards the sofa where so many of their discussions had taken place in the past.
Ianto sat down, clasping his hands together in his lap. Jack, unsure of his welcome, carefully perched on the other end of the sofa and waited. He really hoped this wasn’t going to be the conversation where Ianto told him he was quitting and asked for the Retcon. He’d imagined that one too often in the last weeks as Ianto pulled further and further away from him.
“I’m sorry,” Ianto said quietly, looking at his hands. Jack forced himself to stay quiet, not to jump to conclusions. I’m sorry could mean almost anything. “I didn’t mean to… get all weird on you.” He looked up, staring at a point behind Jack’s shoulder. “I shouldn’t have kissed you like that last week either. Or the week before.”
Jack felt his heart sink. Of course he knew that Ianto regretted it - why else would he have avoided Jack so much the last few weeks - but hearing Ianto actually say that it was a mistake hurt more than he had expected. “It’s okay,” he said, pushing his emotions aside. “You don’t have to…”
“It wasn’t fair on you to jerk you around,” Ianto continued as if he hadn’t even heard Jack. “No matter how much I wanted to do it, I shouldn’t have kissed you only to push you away immediately afterwards.”
Jack froze. Was… was Ianto saying that it wasn’t the kissing him part he was sorry about?
“My head’s been such a mess, but…”
“Ianto, wait,” Jack interrupted, wrapping his hands around Ianto’s. The younger man’s gaze shifted and focussed on his own, his eyes filled with what looked like apprehension. “You’re rambling. Just tell me yes or no: do you regret kissing me?”
Ianto bit his lip. “Yes… and no.”
Which didn’t help Jack at all, but thankfully Ianto elaborated without prompting.
“I wanted to do it,” he started. “But I didn’t want to want to do it.”
Jack took a few seconds to wrap his head around that sentence, still not entirely sure that he understood what Ianto was trying to say, and definitely not sure of where that left them now.
“And it’s not because you’re, well, a man,” Ianto continued. Jack nodded - he’d figured that much out on his own. “I think you’ve probably figured out that you’re not the first man I’ve ever kissed. It’s…” Ianto’s shoulders heaved. “It’s not anything to do with you, actually. I mean, the… not wanting to want to part. Not the wanting part. That’s pretty much all about you.”
Jack couldn’t do much more than stare at Ianto in mild confusion. He still wasn’t really following.
“I just felt guilty,” Ianto eventually said flatly. And that Jack understood. “It’s only been a couple of months, and… it felt like I was betraying her.”
Jack couldn’t say that the same thought hadn’t crossed his mind more than a few times. Almost every time he’d felt his attraction to Ianto surge, in fact. Especially when they’d still been trying to help Lisa.
“I understand,” he said, knowing as he did so that this was probably the end of anything more he might have with Ianto.
Ianto pulled back and took a deep breath. “But then I talked to Tosh this morning. She… told me about what happened to her, with the pendant.”
Jack was surprised; he hadn’t really expected Tosh to tell any of them about that, although if she was going to tell any of them it would be Ianto. “Oh?”
“Well… I’ve been thinking about… us… quite a lot lately, so it’s not surprising that she overheard me worrying. She told me I needed to stop being so hard on myself. And pointed out a few things that I hadn’t been letting myself realise.” He shuffled slightly closer, and Jack wondered if he hadn’t been a bit premature in giving up hope.
“Such as?”
“Such as the fact that giving myself the chance to be happy again doesn’t mean I’m forgetting Lisa, or that I love her any less,” Ianto said quietly. His eyes turned fierce, earnest. “I will never forget her, and I will always love her, but… Tosh reminded me that that doesn’t mean I have to stay alone forever.”
He shifted closer again, so their knees were pressed together. Jack only just remembered to breathe. Ianto leant forward, and Jack found himself leaning back. He had to be certain. He had to know, before this went any further.
“Are you absolutely sure that this is what you want? That you’re ready for this?” he asked fervently, trying to quell the tremor in his voice.
Ianto’s hand slid across and wrapped around Jack’s own. “I’m sure,” he said intently, his gaze burning into Jack.
And when he leant in again, Jack didn’t pull away.
Chapter Eight
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