[BTR|RP] Without the light of wisdom, what else can be done?

[hey_capn_jack]

{BACKDATED FOREVER; LOCKED TO IANTO. Follows this madness.}As it turns out, Elashte is either not as invested in answering Jack's proverbial phonecalls these days as he could be, or Jack chose a rather poor time to try to get in touch with him. And with Mio being not exactly a mindhealer, and the Vesmier being in a different country and rather

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[hey_capn_jack]

"Ianto."

Jack recognizes the moment he starts to slip - hard not to, when it comes with that sort of a struggle. His voice is sharp.

"Where do you want to be, right now? Think." Is it in an alley somewhere? Is it at my side in Torchwood? He's not letting go. You have to go through this. There's no running away. "You can think."

It's a terribly crude, half-hour assisted break he's looking for, here; the kind of break you can only force when you're working with an entire history. Even so, he's got to prepare himself for the ways this could go. If Ianto breaks down, that's one thing. If he attacks him...

Well, he's made a wrong choice, and that's what Jack gets to break him from.

Come on. His own heart is beginning to speed up, and he almost tries to biofeedback that back down. Come ON. You've got to hate something. What's it going to be?

[hey_capn_jack]

Here.

One long process of Jack's hindbrain wends down, begins to settle. A quiet tension in his fingertips goes away.

(Soft break.)

He preses his lips to the crown of Ianto's head. It's not quite a kiss - one would be hard-pressed to say exactly what it was.

"When I was in the Agency," he says, "this was normal." And lets that hunger, that resentment, that anger beat up in intensity like a heart before calling it back down. And how he got out of the Agency doesn't bear repeating, but there was a time, after that...

Just follow.

It's painful, thinking of the Doctor while excising all of the nightmares from his conscious recall. Just the Doctor, just that first patch on the TARDIS, before abandonment and Thane and a little dark hallway and a hand slicked with blood...

(Focus.)

There. He can feel it, and shoves that out beyond his shields, hard enough that he'd be projecting it if he had any psi powers at all. One point of reference, one north star: there, in the dark, he'd been dragging all his evils around his neck like

[hey_capn_jack]

{{OOC: My Riftpower seems to be thread necromancy. But I've had this, unfinished, sitting in drafts for FOREVER, so I figured I might as well finish it and toss it out.}}

Jack shifts his weight, moving into Ianto's grip, noting and pushing aside the pain from his fingertips. It's not as though the arm will bruise, after all; and if it does, that just means it's not serious. He keeps his focus on what he's projecting.

One north star. And he reaches back to the beginning to the exercise, the feel of Ianto he's constructed, to the part that puts the lie to (predator - killer). That predatory need and this feeling can't exist together, or not well, not without a schism in Ianto's mind.

Ianto's mind, unlike his own, shouldn't have that schism. It should have false memories masking the true ones, and if he can bolster those true ones, he will.

He murmurs something nonlingual and slips a hand behind Ianto's ear, cradling the screams, not yielding to them. Acute point, breaking point - fair enough.

The trick is to push beyond that

[hey_capn_jack]

Jack's eyes aren't closed, but his attention isn't on the visual data. He can feel the changes in Ianto's breathing, his heartrate, the palpitation of the muscles of his jaw; they tell him more than just watching would. He's not quite close enough to suss out the chemical cues, not with this human nose, and he's not about to shift just to sniff for distress pheromones, but that's ancillary data, if anything.

For a bit, he just lets all that even out. Lets them come back down toward an equilibrium, feels for tenseness, waits until they're steady. Then, firmly, tilts Ianto's head back to look at him.

There's where the eyes come in.

Faint, or not-so-faint, flecks of expression, the faint muscles around the eyes and corner of the mouth, pupil dilation or lack of same - it's an old vocabulary. Jack's face is carefully masked. He tilts his head to one side, taking it all in.

"You know exactly where you are and what's happened," he says. It's implied to be a question. It's an instruction.