Torchwood -- In The Family
Title: In The Family
Date Written: 7/12/09
Rating: PG-13/T
Word Count: 2,254
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Not mine, property of their respective owners
Characters/Pairings: Rhiannon/Johnny, Jack/Ianto, David, Micha
Spoilers: Torchwood up through Children of Earth.
Warnings: AU, mentions of teenage pregnancy, MAJOR ANGST AND TISSUE WARNING.
Author's Notes: Thanks to katestamps for the beta! And this one bit me yesterday and bit me hard. Again, grab the tissues.
ETA: This story got nominated for a Children of Time award for Round 5! It is nominated in both the Children of Earth and Angst category.
Rhiannon Jones is fifteen when it happens.
It's her mother who susses it out first, even before Rhi herself. Queasiness, and occasional vomiting. Sudden strong, strange cravings. Mood swings that made revolving doors jealous of their speed. And the tiniest bit of a tummy on the super-skinny teenager.
The doctor doesn't even bother with a test, he just calls in an ultrasound tech and they do a scan. Five minutes and a stomach covered in cold gel later, and Rhi and her mother are staring at the tiniest little shadow on the screen.
Holy shit.
Her father, of course, rants and raves as a good father with a daughter up the duff should. He blames Rhi, blames her mother, blames God, blames himself. He even throws a few things about for good measure, a decorative vase, a half-glass of water, and a throw pillow go sailing through the air and smash against the wall.
If she hadn't been terrified of what might happen next, she would had laughed at his antics.
They ask who the father is. They beg and plead and threaten and holler, but all Rhi does is shrug and say I dunno, I got drunk at a party. And it's a half-truth, because she had been out of her mind, but they all know whose child it is.
It's Johnny's, the kid from the estate a few miles off. The one she's been seeing behind their backs because good daughters of master tailors don't date estate kids.
And because good daughters of master tailors don't have abortions, she's out of school immediately. Her mother's a nurse, so forging an excuse that she's got mono is no problem. Homebound study is boring, but it gives her something to do in the long hours of the day to fill.
While her mates from school go to parties and to the cinema and date, she's sitting at home, locked away in her room to avoid the disappointed looks of her parents and getting bigger and bigger.
She's just on the other side of sixteen when her water breaks. The same number of hours she's in labor; sixteen hours of sweating and screaming through contractions when the drugs wear off and push, push, good girl! and then an infant wail over all the noise in the room.
Rhi wants to see him now, wants her son, and then he's in her arms. Quiet and wrapped up in a blue blanket with her pitch-black hair and his eyes screwed up tight. The nurse asks for his name, for the records, and she's about to say Nathan when the little bundle shifts and blinks up at her. Looks up at her, all adorably confused at the commotion, with Johnny's pale blue eyes, the little miracle. Suddenly, Nathan sounds too... common.
So Nathan becomes Ianto, just another variation of Johnny's name. He gives her a little baby smile, and she cries and hugs him tight until the nurses take him away for a full proper once-over.
She's still crying when she signs the adoption papers and her parents put their names on Ianto's birth record.
Then it's off home, like nothing ever happened. The neighbors are told that he's a cousin's baby, but the whispers follow her as she goes back to school. She goes through the motions and graduates, but it's a hollow victory to her parents. Dad mentions university, maybe something in London? Fresh start?
Rhi just looks at the baby and feels ill at the very thought of being so far away. She works odd jobs here and there, and ends up married to Johnny and on the estate. Ianto is the cutest ringbearer ever at the wedding at the age of six, looking more at home in his little tux than the groom.
-----
Married life seems to suit Rhi a bit. She gets a job as a shopgirl at Debenhams, and manages to get Johnny a job as a lorry driver for the company. It's good, honest work, although her father sneers at it, and it keeps her occupied.
Ianto comes over just often enough to be a smack in the face, and although he adores his 'sister', he can't stand Johnny. It's her parents' influence on him, she knows, but it still breaks her heart to hear the way Ianto talks to him, to see the way it hurts Johnny and makes him hide behind bluster and feigned indifference. Things just get worse when Ianto breaks his leg when he's ten -- Johnny was trying to get him to be a kid for once, and coaxed him into jumping off the swing set. The boy landed wrong and fractured his fibula in two places, and never forgave Johnny.
-----
After a few years of marriage, Johnny brings up the idea of kids, and Rhi can't even handle the idea at first. It doesn't make any sense, he says; this is what married people do, they have kids. She's never told him about their son and stands as firm as she can. Finally one night, after an all-day row, she breaks down and confesses her sins.
Johnny stays with his parents on their couch for a full week. When he comes back, still angry but a bit more level-headed about it, he demands that Ianto, now twelve, be told the truth, and that he come to live with them. Rhi refuses; taking a child from the only parents he's known, take him from a good life where he'll succeed and break the cycle, how could they do that? Johnny rages again, but they both know she's right.
It's the hard decision, but being a parent isn't about making the easy ones.
Johnny brings up kids obligingly when prodded by friends and family, and it's a show of how Rhi's secret has broken him when he doesn't push her when she tells him no.
Then her mother dies and she realizes that Mrs. Jones never got to experience being a grandmother and the guilt eats away at her like she's fifteen again. She's pregnant a few short months later, but the memories the pregnancy triggers send her blood pressure skyrocketing. She collapses in her fourth month and loses the baby.
She can't decide which is worse -- giving up a baby or losing one. Both weigh heavily on her and she wants a child, one she can keep, hold, love up close and not from afar like she has to with Ianto.
Rhi quits the shopgirl gig when David's born to stay home with the baby. Ianto is sixteen when it happens. It's almost prophetic. David looks so much like Johnny and Ianto throws himself headfirst into the dutiful uncle role, buying little trinkets and taking him to the park and the zoo and all the fun places so Mum and Dad can have a little break time. It's little wonder that he becomes almost as obsessed with James Bond as his unknown older brother when he gets a little older.
Ianto's just shy of twenty when Micha's born, and halfway through university. He goes to Cardiff University and lives in a flat with three other students, but is home every weekend to visit with his niece and nephew. Rhi and Johnny are so proud of him, thrilled that their son will get to do the things they can't do, not anymore.
Rhi's father dies almost immediately following Ianto's graduation ceremony. After the funeral Ianto packs up and moves to London. He calls them daily but talks rarely, mostly uh-huhs and that's nice as she chats away. He gets a job as a civil servant and keeps the strangest hours and visits them only twice while he's there. Once he brings a girl, Lisa, who Rhi immediately takes a shine to. It's obvious that Ianto loves her -- mothers know these things -- so when Ianto comes home abruptly after the terrorist attacks, she's shocked that Lisa isn't with him.
Then she's as heartbroken as he is when she finds out Lisa died.
Cardiff seems to do him good, though. She doesn't see much of him, but after a while she senses that he's come to some sort of peace with whatever happened to him in London. He tries to make it to birthdays and such, but makes vague excuses about work -- civil servants that work on weekends, what is up with that? -- when he misses them. He always remembers presents, though, and sends them money when things get tight at the end of the month, even when no one mentions it to him. David and Micha learn to connect his scrawling letters with pound notes.
-----
Susan On The Corner turns up with her news that her baby brother is gay, can you believe that! Rhi tells her to get stuffed, that he's had girlfriends, and anyway, who cares?
It stings a little bit that he hasn't come clean to her, mind, but she knows her Ianto, knows that he wouldn't be with anyone -- male, female, whatever -- if they didn't treat him right. She has faith in his decisions.
Then the children start talking all in unison and scare the hell out of the entire world. Ianto's on the run for some strange reason, and slips them a note.
Where dad broke my leg, at noon. Bring laptop. I.
She's terrified. Terrified that he's gotten himself into trouble, terrified that he's going to get himself killed.
Terrified because it means that he knows.
Johnny starts a riot, something he's amazingly good at, and Rhi slips out to meet him. He turns up bruised and with a cut on his cheek, and she wants nothing more than to take him into her arms and hold him tight and never let him go, ever, ever again.
"You worked out my little code, then."
Rhi doesn't look at him, just watches the children playing before them. She can't bear to look at him. She knows what she'll see in that baby face. "When did you figure it out?"
"I had suspicions after Micha was born," he replies, looking straight ahead as well. "I mean, kids sometimes look like their uncles, but the resemblance was just too strong." He looks down at his hands, probably trying to worry the fingerprints off his skin. "But I found out after Dad died. He'd left me a letter."
"And you didn't... say anything," Rhi laments.
"What was I supposed to say, Rhi?" Ianto counters. "You're my sister, and my Mum, and... I was just so confused." He shrugs, just like David, a little head tilt to the side. "You're family. I love you no matter who you are to me."
Rhi opens her mouth to say something else, but the kids open their mouths and start announcing the impending arrival of -- of something. Ianto grabs the laptop and the car keys off of her and is about to start running off when he stops. He turns and hugs her close, and she takes a deep breath, memorizing his scent, so different from when he was a baby.
Mothers know when things are about to go very, very wrong.
"I love you," he says softly, kissing her cheek. "Take care of my brother and sister."
She's in tears as she screams after him to be careful, God damn it.
-----
The funeral is one long, agonizing blur. The service is small but tearful. Gwen Cooper and her husband Rhys are there, both crying openly. A pretty black woman named Martha Milligan -- she stumbles over the last name, bless, a newlywed -- and her husband Tom both offer their condolences.
It's the man in the greatcoat at the back of the church that grabs her attention. He looks too grief-stricken to cry when he approaches her and Rhi instantly knows that this is Ianto's boss turned boyfriend. He shakes her hand and introduces himself as Jack Harkness.
"I'm very sorry about your son, ma'am," he says quietly when Johnny's turned away to see to the kids. "He was a very good man."
Rhi's already been crying nonstop, but the words send her into fresh cascades of tears. Jack is -- was -- is Ianto's lover, because that Gwen woman didn't know about her and Johnny. "He said it was only you," she blurts out, and instantly regrets it when she sees the pain the words cause.
"I'm -- I'm so sorry," he repeats. "But I want you to know that I loved him."
"I know," she says, and smiles through her tears, reaching up to touch Jack's cheek.
"He..." Jack hesitates, then pulls away to dive into the inside pocket of his coat. "He wanted you to have this," he manages, his voice as thick as the manila envelope he pulls out. "Ianto saved so many lives, including mine, so many times. And he spoke of you constantly, you and the kids. You were never far from his thoughts."
The envelope contains very Ianto things -- keys to his apartment and various safety deposit boxes, bank account numbers and passcodes, and letters to herself and Johnny and the kids.
And cash. Cash enough to pay for his own funeral twenty times over, huge pound notes she'd only heard of but never seen.
"As long as I'm alive," Jack said, and she looked up at him. "Your family will never want for anything. Ever."
"Thank you," she murmured.
The We'll all want for Ianto went unsaid.
Date Written: 7/12/09
Rating: PG-13/T
Word Count: 2,254
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Not mine, property of their respective owners
Characters/Pairings: Rhiannon/Johnny, Jack/Ianto, David, Micha
Spoilers: Torchwood up through Children of Earth.
Warnings: AU, mentions of teenage pregnancy, MAJOR ANGST AND TISSUE WARNING.
Author's Notes: Thanks to katestamps for the beta! And this one bit me yesterday and bit me hard. Again, grab the tissues.
ETA: This story got nominated for a Children of Time award for Round 5! It is nominated in both the Children of Earth and Angst category.
Rhiannon Jones is fifteen when it happens.
It's her mother who susses it out first, even before Rhi herself. Queasiness, and occasional vomiting. Sudden strong, strange cravings. Mood swings that made revolving doors jealous of their speed. And the tiniest bit of a tummy on the super-skinny teenager.
The doctor doesn't even bother with a test, he just calls in an ultrasound tech and they do a scan. Five minutes and a stomach covered in cold gel later, and Rhi and her mother are staring at the tiniest little shadow on the screen.
Holy shit.
Her father, of course, rants and raves as a good father with a daughter up the duff should. He blames Rhi, blames her mother, blames God, blames himself. He even throws a few things about for good measure, a decorative vase, a half-glass of water, and a throw pillow go sailing through the air and smash against the wall.
If she hadn't been terrified of what might happen next, she would had laughed at his antics.
They ask who the father is. They beg and plead and threaten and holler, but all Rhi does is shrug and say I dunno, I got drunk at a party. And it's a half-truth, because she had been out of her mind, but they all know whose child it is.
It's Johnny's, the kid from the estate a few miles off. The one she's been seeing behind their backs because good daughters of master tailors don't date estate kids.
And because good daughters of master tailors don't have abortions, she's out of school immediately. Her mother's a nurse, so forging an excuse that she's got mono is no problem. Homebound study is boring, but it gives her something to do in the long hours of the day to fill.
While her mates from school go to parties and to the cinema and date, she's sitting at home, locked away in her room to avoid the disappointed looks of her parents and getting bigger and bigger.
She's just on the other side of sixteen when her water breaks. The same number of hours she's in labor; sixteen hours of sweating and screaming through contractions when the drugs wear off and push, push, good girl! and then an infant wail over all the noise in the room.
Rhi wants to see him now, wants her son, and then he's in her arms. Quiet and wrapped up in a blue blanket with her pitch-black hair and his eyes screwed up tight. The nurse asks for his name, for the records, and she's about to say Nathan when the little bundle shifts and blinks up at her. Looks up at her, all adorably confused at the commotion, with Johnny's pale blue eyes, the little miracle. Suddenly, Nathan sounds too... common.
So Nathan becomes Ianto, just another variation of Johnny's name. He gives her a little baby smile, and she cries and hugs him tight until the nurses take him away for a full proper once-over.
She's still crying when she signs the adoption papers and her parents put their names on Ianto's birth record.
Then it's off home, like nothing ever happened. The neighbors are told that he's a cousin's baby, but the whispers follow her as she goes back to school. She goes through the motions and graduates, but it's a hollow victory to her parents. Dad mentions university, maybe something in London? Fresh start?
Rhi just looks at the baby and feels ill at the very thought of being so far away. She works odd jobs here and there, and ends up married to Johnny and on the estate. Ianto is the cutest ringbearer ever at the wedding at the age of six, looking more at home in his little tux than the groom.
-----
Married life seems to suit Rhi a bit. She gets a job as a shopgirl at Debenhams, and manages to get Johnny a job as a lorry driver for the company. It's good, honest work, although her father sneers at it, and it keeps her occupied.
Ianto comes over just often enough to be a smack in the face, and although he adores his 'sister', he can't stand Johnny. It's her parents' influence on him, she knows, but it still breaks her heart to hear the way Ianto talks to him, to see the way it hurts Johnny and makes him hide behind bluster and feigned indifference. Things just get worse when Ianto breaks his leg when he's ten -- Johnny was trying to get him to be a kid for once, and coaxed him into jumping off the swing set. The boy landed wrong and fractured his fibula in two places, and never forgave Johnny.
-----
After a few years of marriage, Johnny brings up the idea of kids, and Rhi can't even handle the idea at first. It doesn't make any sense, he says; this is what married people do, they have kids. She's never told him about their son and stands as firm as she can. Finally one night, after an all-day row, she breaks down and confesses her sins.
Johnny stays with his parents on their couch for a full week. When he comes back, still angry but a bit more level-headed about it, he demands that Ianto, now twelve, be told the truth, and that he come to live with them. Rhi refuses; taking a child from the only parents he's known, take him from a good life where he'll succeed and break the cycle, how could they do that? Johnny rages again, but they both know she's right.
It's the hard decision, but being a parent isn't about making the easy ones.
Johnny brings up kids obligingly when prodded by friends and family, and it's a show of how Rhi's secret has broken him when he doesn't push her when she tells him no.
Then her mother dies and she realizes that Mrs. Jones never got to experience being a grandmother and the guilt eats away at her like she's fifteen again. She's pregnant a few short months later, but the memories the pregnancy triggers send her blood pressure skyrocketing. She collapses in her fourth month and loses the baby.
She can't decide which is worse -- giving up a baby or losing one. Both weigh heavily on her and she wants a child, one she can keep, hold, love up close and not from afar like she has to with Ianto.
Rhi quits the shopgirl gig when David's born to stay home with the baby. Ianto is sixteen when it happens. It's almost prophetic. David looks so much like Johnny and Ianto throws himself headfirst into the dutiful uncle role, buying little trinkets and taking him to the park and the zoo and all the fun places so Mum and Dad can have a little break time. It's little wonder that he becomes almost as obsessed with James Bond as his unknown older brother when he gets a little older.
Ianto's just shy of twenty when Micha's born, and halfway through university. He goes to Cardiff University and lives in a flat with three other students, but is home every weekend to visit with his niece and nephew. Rhi and Johnny are so proud of him, thrilled that their son will get to do the things they can't do, not anymore.
Rhi's father dies almost immediately following Ianto's graduation ceremony. After the funeral Ianto packs up and moves to London. He calls them daily but talks rarely, mostly uh-huhs and that's nice as she chats away. He gets a job as a civil servant and keeps the strangest hours and visits them only twice while he's there. Once he brings a girl, Lisa, who Rhi immediately takes a shine to. It's obvious that Ianto loves her -- mothers know these things -- so when Ianto comes home abruptly after the terrorist attacks, she's shocked that Lisa isn't with him.
Then she's as heartbroken as he is when she finds out Lisa died.
Cardiff seems to do him good, though. She doesn't see much of him, but after a while she senses that he's come to some sort of peace with whatever happened to him in London. He tries to make it to birthdays and such, but makes vague excuses about work -- civil servants that work on weekends, what is up with that? -- when he misses them. He always remembers presents, though, and sends them money when things get tight at the end of the month, even when no one mentions it to him. David and Micha learn to connect his scrawling letters with pound notes.
-----
Susan On The Corner turns up with her news that her baby brother is gay, can you believe that! Rhi tells her to get stuffed, that he's had girlfriends, and anyway, who cares?
It stings a little bit that he hasn't come clean to her, mind, but she knows her Ianto, knows that he wouldn't be with anyone -- male, female, whatever -- if they didn't treat him right. She has faith in his decisions.
Then the children start talking all in unison and scare the hell out of the entire world. Ianto's on the run for some strange reason, and slips them a note.
Where dad broke my leg, at noon. Bring laptop. I.
She's terrified. Terrified that he's gotten himself into trouble, terrified that he's going to get himself killed.
Terrified because it means that he knows.
Johnny starts a riot, something he's amazingly good at, and Rhi slips out to meet him. He turns up bruised and with a cut on his cheek, and she wants nothing more than to take him into her arms and hold him tight and never let him go, ever, ever again.
"You worked out my little code, then."
Rhi doesn't look at him, just watches the children playing before them. She can't bear to look at him. She knows what she'll see in that baby face. "When did you figure it out?"
"I had suspicions after Micha was born," he replies, looking straight ahead as well. "I mean, kids sometimes look like their uncles, but the resemblance was just too strong." He looks down at his hands, probably trying to worry the fingerprints off his skin. "But I found out after Dad died. He'd left me a letter."
"And you didn't... say anything," Rhi laments.
"What was I supposed to say, Rhi?" Ianto counters. "You're my sister, and my Mum, and... I was just so confused." He shrugs, just like David, a little head tilt to the side. "You're family. I love you no matter who you are to me."
Rhi opens her mouth to say something else, but the kids open their mouths and start announcing the impending arrival of -- of something. Ianto grabs the laptop and the car keys off of her and is about to start running off when he stops. He turns and hugs her close, and she takes a deep breath, memorizing his scent, so different from when he was a baby.
Mothers know when things are about to go very, very wrong.
"I love you," he says softly, kissing her cheek. "Take care of my brother and sister."
She's in tears as she screams after him to be careful, God damn it.
-----
The funeral is one long, agonizing blur. The service is small but tearful. Gwen Cooper and her husband Rhys are there, both crying openly. A pretty black woman named Martha Milligan -- she stumbles over the last name, bless, a newlywed -- and her husband Tom both offer their condolences.
It's the man in the greatcoat at the back of the church that grabs her attention. He looks too grief-stricken to cry when he approaches her and Rhi instantly knows that this is Ianto's boss turned boyfriend. He shakes her hand and introduces himself as Jack Harkness.
"I'm very sorry about your son, ma'am," he says quietly when Johnny's turned away to see to the kids. "He was a very good man."
Rhi's already been crying nonstop, but the words send her into fresh cascades of tears. Jack is -- was -- is Ianto's lover, because that Gwen woman didn't know about her and Johnny. "He said it was only you," she blurts out, and instantly regrets it when she sees the pain the words cause.
"I'm -- I'm so sorry," he repeats. "But I want you to know that I loved him."
"I know," she says, and smiles through her tears, reaching up to touch Jack's cheek.
"He..." Jack hesitates, then pulls away to dive into the inside pocket of his coat. "He wanted you to have this," he manages, his voice as thick as the manila envelope he pulls out. "Ianto saved so many lives, including mine, so many times. And he spoke of you constantly, you and the kids. You were never far from his thoughts."
The envelope contains very Ianto things -- keys to his apartment and various safety deposit boxes, bank account numbers and passcodes, and letters to herself and Johnny and the kids.
And cash. Cash enough to pay for his own funeral twenty times over, huge pound notes she'd only heard of but never seen.
"As long as I'm alive," Jack said, and she looked up at him. "Your family will never want for anything. Ever."
"Thank you," she murmured.
The We'll all want for Ianto went unsaid.