Hatful of Hollow - 13/13
Title: Hatful of Hollow (Part 13/13)
Disclaimer: Being a bloke who likes to slash pretty men doesn't make me RTD, I don't work for the BBC, and as much as I might like to, I don't own Jack or Ianto or any part of Torchwood. I do, however, order pizza under that name on principle.
Pairings: Jack/Ianto, almost-but-not-quite Ianto/Owen.
Rating: R for profanity, canonical character death, off-screen character death during the year that wasn't.
Notes/Summary: Takes place during "End of Days" through "Last of the Timelords" and utilizes some material from the eps, but mostly this one lives in the gaps and fills in the blanks that I thought deserved a lot more attention. This is definitely a closure piece. Yay, closure! (Now if only the BBC would air Series Two. Is it January yet?)
Part One - PG
Part Two - R
Part Three - NC-17
Part Four - PG
Part Five - PG-13
Part Six - NC-17
Part Seven - NC-17
Part Eight - R
Part Nine - NC-17
Part Ten - R
Part Eleven - NC-17
Part Twelve - R
Behind him, onscreen, Rhys paces and sits. In front of him, Jack is promising Gwen that her boyfriend will be safe here. Ianto turns away. He can’t watch or think about this because he is afraid that this is the way the world ends.
They don’t ask him to clean up the blood when it happens. He does that on his own because it’s his job, and because he knows what it is to lose. Torchwood took him and did this to him, and now all there is that’s left of him is Torchwood, and one day Gwen Cooper will be like him.
Ianto has never felt particularly close to Gwen. She’s pleasant enough, if perhaps a little bad at boundaries. She oscillates wildly between forgetting he exists and paying him an unnerving amount of attention. When he finally joins the rest of them in the autopsy bay, Jack is washing her clean, wiping away the blood from her hands as she sits and smiles at what could be a sleeping man were it not for the way his shirt’s gone red and the way his chest is so very still.
“I’ll have to tell his family,” she says softly. Gwen has always been the one to tell families, he knows. They’ve always let it fall to her. Ever since she arrived, that’s what she does, just like he makes the coffee and clears away the shit.
“We’ll deal with it.”
“The way you dealt with that porter the first time I met you? No. You won’t deal with him Ianto.”
And she’s right. She’s right to turn him and Tosh and anyone else away. Right to claw at hope and right to rage and scream at Jack because it isn’t fair. It’s never fucking fair.
She sobs against Jack’s chest, her hair a dark tangle in his hands. Ianto feels a pang of resentment at her being allowed to mourn openly like this. He remembers suffering alone after Lisa, how he was watched but never allowed comfort until after Brynblaidd. He remembers the loneliness after Canary Wharf. For a moment he hates her - truly hates Gwen fucking Cooper - and then Owen appears out of nowhere.
“I’m opening the Rift,” Owen tells them.
Ianto’s eyes meet Jack’s for a second, and then he’s following Owen up the stairs. There is fear in the other man’s eyes when Ianto defies him openly and without fear. Tosh follows, and for a moment he feels so very right.
And then Jack Harkness is dead. His face is a mask of surprise, and blood is draining from the hole in the back of his skull, pooling around him, and Ianto realizes it’s too late to take back what he’s done.
# # #
The Hub is coming apart around them and somehow Ianto remembers to pick up his coat.
Jack would laugh if he wasn’t in complete agony right now.
They’re on foot, racing toward the alternate entrance to the garage. Ianto and Gwen are basically carrying him up and onto the street.
“Nice to see us all working together again,” Jack chuckles weakly. “Though promise me that next time I get to pick the team building activity. ‘Shoot the Boss in the Face and Then Blow Up the Building’ tends to strike me as being indicative of a hostile work environment.”
He grimaces as his feet go out from under him. They pull him upright and shuffle on.
“Keep moving!” Owen shouts, leading them.
“It’s alright, Jack! Everything is going to go back to normal!’ The words are barely out of her mouth when they see Bilis Manger blocking their path. Gwen passes him to Ianto. They forget themselves and cling to one another as the Devourer rises from the Rift.
# # #
Ianto is the only one with the presence of mind to find them. He leads the team using the GPS software on his handheld. Gwen is rocking Jack’s lifeless body in her arms, sobbing and wailing. He watches Owen gently pry him out of her hands to examine him.
Owen pronounces him on the scene, and then they stand in a semi-circle for fifteen minutes waiting for him to wake up.
“We should take him home,” Owen says finally.
They lay Jack down on the passenger seat of the SUV and belt him in.
# # #
They’ve laid Jack on the autopsy table because they’re not sure. They’re taking it in shifts to wait, but --
Gwen’s gone home to check on Rhys again.
Owen checks for Jack’s vitals, feels his joints, touches his face, lifts one of his eyelids and shines a penlight in. There is no response. Jack’s skin is pale, nearly grey. Owen makes a strangled noise in his throat.
“I’ll do it.” Ianto whispers.
“You’re sure?”
“It’s my job, Owen.” Since his arrival, he has always handled the dead. Owen nods, turns, and leaves them.
Ianto is slow and gentle, unlacing his lover’s boots and pulling them off one at a time, setting them next to one another on the chair beside him. He slips each sock away, remembering the way Jack would sometimes kick and squeal at being tickled. He runs a finger up the arch of Jack’s left foot and lets a tear fall down his cheek. He rolls each sock and slips them into their respective boots.
He slides away Jack’s braces, then undoes the buttons of his shirt. His hands can do this by memory, but he is careful not to let his mind wander. This is all that’s left. The last moment like this he will ever have. He mustn’t waste it.
Ianto reaches around his lover’s body and eases it into a sitting position. He holds one hand firmly just below the back of Jack’s neck as he slips the blue overshirt away. He lays Jack down again, and then folds it, smiling at the little silver airplane-shaped cufflinks. Ianto’d teased him about them once. Jack had simply grinned and puffed up and insisted that he liked airplanes. Ianto runs a finger over them and wonders if he could ever bring himself to wear such a thing. He laughs through the tears at that, imagining it for a second, then shakes his head.
He repeats the action with Jack’s bloodied t-shirt.
Getting Jack’s trousers off presents a challenge - a problem Ianto never thought he’d have to consider in his lifetime - but he is careful and rolls the body onto its side and eases the waistband down over each hip. After that, he can slip them off easily. He unfastens the braces and slips the belt free of its loops.
He stands for a moment and looks at Jack’s naked corpse before taking a sponge and beginning to wash away the blood and grime. This is what shatters him, finally. He sobs loudly and openly and is only dimly aware of the way Owen turns Tosh away at the autopsy bay entrance.
“Leave him be, Tosh. Let him mourn.”
This is Ianto’s final gift to Jack: a clean shroud. And because he’s never been able to bring himself to say it, he whispers it in English into Jack’s unhearing ear.
“I love you.”
# # #
He drifts in the Dark, at peace.
“Will it last?” he says to Nothing. He’s content when there is no response. Frankly, he’d worry if there was.
There’s no time or point of reference for him anymore, but that’s par for the course. He’s seen and done all this before. He waits, half-interested and curious for the Something that always comes for him to arrive. He has to remind himself that maybe this time, it won’t.
“If you’re out there, I could do with a martini. Dry, but not too dry. Shaken, with one big, beautiful olive. I did my job. You owe me.”
Somewhere, in the Dark, he feels a tingle.
# # #
It’s Owen, of all people, that sees Ianto home safely. He half wonders if the doctor is angling for a sympathy fuck, but instead they stand together on the balcony, and Ianto smokes one of Owen’s cigarettes, and then Owen falls asleep in a chair. Ianto goes to bed, lets him rest, wakes up to him making them breakfast.
“I didn’t know you could cook.”
“You never asked.”
When they arrive at the Hub, Gwen is still keeping vigil.
They don’t tell U.N.I.T. or the PM or anyone yet. Ianto volunteers to make those calls since he’s always been so good at navigating organizational politics, and in the meantime busies himself deflecting questions and helping with the aftermath. With any luck, they’ll be able to promote from within and hire independently the way Jack did.
The boardroom is a near total loss. They’ve lost a lot of equipment, but everything crucial seems to be intact. He’s got more cuts on his hands from broken glass than he ever has in his entire life.
Gwen does not emerge.
Ianto tidies Jack’s office out of habit, and because he misses him terribly. He weeps into Jack’s greatcoat because he’ll never have another chance to pass it to him on the way out. He straightens papers over and over. He takes Jack’s stopwatch out of the drawer and carries it with him.
They take it in turns to check on her. He brings her coffee, though she doesn’t always drink it. He wants to shout at her for being selfish. She’s shutting them out and making it hard for them to let go all at once.
He and Owen start planning an intervention.
Tosh is helping him prepare the hand for storage when they hear footsteps coming up from the morgue. He’d look up, except this particular tangle of wire is really quite delicate, and he can’t bring himself to damage it.
She bolts past him suddenly, and he glances up to see Jack - living, breathing, impossible Jack - squeezing Toshiko.
Ianto is tentative, but Jack is having none of it. Instead, Jack embraces him, and then kisses him full on the mouth in front of everyone. There will be questions after, he knows, but he’d have traded a million questions for this.
He watches as Jack comforts Owen. Their doctor sobs, lets himself be held, and is forgiven.
And then, after about twenty minutes of shock, they go back to work.
# # #
Ianto taps on Jack’s office door.
“I’ve brought you some grapes.” He smiles a little lamely at the saucer in his hand. “I figured, ah, since we’re always taking them to people in hospital --”
Jack’s laughter is all the invitation he needs. He comes around the corner of the desk and sets the saucer next to the coral and the lamp base. Jack draws him in for a kiss - their second since his resurrection - and Ianto complies willingly without glancing up to see if anyone is watching.
“So did you know?”
“Hm?”
“That you’d come back. Did you know?”
He watched Jack’s eyes flicker for a second. “No. I didn’t. I thought maybe that Abaddon was the reason I couldn’t die.”
Ianto nods. “Does it hurt?” They’re holding hands now.
“Every single time.”
# # #
Trillions of years in the future, a dead man in a blue military coat sucks a ragged, painful first breath into his lungs. He wants answers. He wants closure. He wants…well, he wants to quit waking up like this, though the pretty girl in the tight jacket is a nice touch.
In any case, he’s playing his old self again, all impulse and seduction. It’s not until he’s in manacles that he really gets a chance to think it all over and by then it’s too late. All of our actions have consequences. That realization hurts more than anything Harold Saxon could possibly do to him.
And yet, each time they show him video feed - torture him with it - there is hope. Under the fear and agony and rage in Ianto’s thin, scarred face there is a stubborn refusal to accept this loss and to fight it for all he’s worth. Ianto Jones goes to his grave with that. Jack is proud of him and makes a vow not to let that death have been in vain, even when it’s all unwritten in the end.
Jack never thought he’d turn the Doctor down, but here he is doing it. He salutes them both and darts across the Plass.
The twenty first century is when Jack Harkness changes. And he has never been so ready in his life.
===
Prev. Ep: 12/13
Disclaimer: Being a bloke who likes to slash pretty men doesn't make me RTD, I don't work for the BBC, and as much as I might like to, I don't own Jack or Ianto or any part of Torchwood. I do, however, order pizza under that name on principle.
Pairings: Jack/Ianto, almost-but-not-quite Ianto/Owen.
Rating: R for profanity, canonical character death, off-screen character death during the year that wasn't.
Notes/Summary: Takes place during "End of Days" through "Last of the Timelords" and utilizes some material from the eps, but mostly this one lives in the gaps and fills in the blanks that I thought deserved a lot more attention. This is definitely a closure piece. Yay, closure! (Now if only the BBC would air Series Two. Is it January yet?)
Part One - PG
Part Two - R
Part Three - NC-17
Part Four - PG
Part Five - PG-13
Part Six - NC-17
Part Seven - NC-17
Part Eight - R
Part Nine - NC-17
Part Ten - R
Part Eleven - NC-17
Part Twelve - R
Behind him, onscreen, Rhys paces and sits. In front of him, Jack is promising Gwen that her boyfriend will be safe here. Ianto turns away. He can’t watch or think about this because he is afraid that this is the way the world ends.
They don’t ask him to clean up the blood when it happens. He does that on his own because it’s his job, and because he knows what it is to lose. Torchwood took him and did this to him, and now all there is that’s left of him is Torchwood, and one day Gwen Cooper will be like him.
Ianto has never felt particularly close to Gwen. She’s pleasant enough, if perhaps a little bad at boundaries. She oscillates wildly between forgetting he exists and paying him an unnerving amount of attention. When he finally joins the rest of them in the autopsy bay, Jack is washing her clean, wiping away the blood from her hands as she sits and smiles at what could be a sleeping man were it not for the way his shirt’s gone red and the way his chest is so very still.
“I’ll have to tell his family,” she says softly. Gwen has always been the one to tell families, he knows. They’ve always let it fall to her. Ever since she arrived, that’s what she does, just like he makes the coffee and clears away the shit.
“We’ll deal with it.”
“The way you dealt with that porter the first time I met you? No. You won’t deal with him Ianto.”
And she’s right. She’s right to turn him and Tosh and anyone else away. Right to claw at hope and right to rage and scream at Jack because it isn’t fair. It’s never fucking fair.
She sobs against Jack’s chest, her hair a dark tangle in his hands. Ianto feels a pang of resentment at her being allowed to mourn openly like this. He remembers suffering alone after Lisa, how he was watched but never allowed comfort until after Brynblaidd. He remembers the loneliness after Canary Wharf. For a moment he hates her - truly hates Gwen fucking Cooper - and then Owen appears out of nowhere.
“I’m opening the Rift,” Owen tells them.
Ianto’s eyes meet Jack’s for a second, and then he’s following Owen up the stairs. There is fear in the other man’s eyes when Ianto defies him openly and without fear. Tosh follows, and for a moment he feels so very right.
And then Jack Harkness is dead. His face is a mask of surprise, and blood is draining from the hole in the back of his skull, pooling around him, and Ianto realizes it’s too late to take back what he’s done.
# # #
The Hub is coming apart around them and somehow Ianto remembers to pick up his coat.
Jack would laugh if he wasn’t in complete agony right now.
They’re on foot, racing toward the alternate entrance to the garage. Ianto and Gwen are basically carrying him up and onto the street.
“Nice to see us all working together again,” Jack chuckles weakly. “Though promise me that next time I get to pick the team building activity. ‘Shoot the Boss in the Face and Then Blow Up the Building’ tends to strike me as being indicative of a hostile work environment.”
He grimaces as his feet go out from under him. They pull him upright and shuffle on.
“Keep moving!” Owen shouts, leading them.
“It’s alright, Jack! Everything is going to go back to normal!’ The words are barely out of her mouth when they see Bilis Manger blocking their path. Gwen passes him to Ianto. They forget themselves and cling to one another as the Devourer rises from the Rift.
# # #
Ianto is the only one with the presence of mind to find them. He leads the team using the GPS software on his handheld. Gwen is rocking Jack’s lifeless body in her arms, sobbing and wailing. He watches Owen gently pry him out of her hands to examine him.
Owen pronounces him on the scene, and then they stand in a semi-circle for fifteen minutes waiting for him to wake up.
“We should take him home,” Owen says finally.
They lay Jack down on the passenger seat of the SUV and belt him in.
# # #
They’ve laid Jack on the autopsy table because they’re not sure. They’re taking it in shifts to wait, but --
Gwen’s gone home to check on Rhys again.
Owen checks for Jack’s vitals, feels his joints, touches his face, lifts one of his eyelids and shines a penlight in. There is no response. Jack’s skin is pale, nearly grey. Owen makes a strangled noise in his throat.
“I’ll do it.” Ianto whispers.
“You’re sure?”
“It’s my job, Owen.” Since his arrival, he has always handled the dead. Owen nods, turns, and leaves them.
Ianto is slow and gentle, unlacing his lover’s boots and pulling them off one at a time, setting them next to one another on the chair beside him. He slips each sock away, remembering the way Jack would sometimes kick and squeal at being tickled. He runs a finger up the arch of Jack’s left foot and lets a tear fall down his cheek. He rolls each sock and slips them into their respective boots.
He slides away Jack’s braces, then undoes the buttons of his shirt. His hands can do this by memory, but he is careful not to let his mind wander. This is all that’s left. The last moment like this he will ever have. He mustn’t waste it.
Ianto reaches around his lover’s body and eases it into a sitting position. He holds one hand firmly just below the back of Jack’s neck as he slips the blue overshirt away. He lays Jack down again, and then folds it, smiling at the little silver airplane-shaped cufflinks. Ianto’d teased him about them once. Jack had simply grinned and puffed up and insisted that he liked airplanes. Ianto runs a finger over them and wonders if he could ever bring himself to wear such a thing. He laughs through the tears at that, imagining it for a second, then shakes his head.
He repeats the action with Jack’s bloodied t-shirt.
Getting Jack’s trousers off presents a challenge - a problem Ianto never thought he’d have to consider in his lifetime - but he is careful and rolls the body onto its side and eases the waistband down over each hip. After that, he can slip them off easily. He unfastens the braces and slips the belt free of its loops.
He stands for a moment and looks at Jack’s naked corpse before taking a sponge and beginning to wash away the blood and grime. This is what shatters him, finally. He sobs loudly and openly and is only dimly aware of the way Owen turns Tosh away at the autopsy bay entrance.
“Leave him be, Tosh. Let him mourn.”
This is Ianto’s final gift to Jack: a clean shroud. And because he’s never been able to bring himself to say it, he whispers it in English into Jack’s unhearing ear.
“I love you.”
# # #
He drifts in the Dark, at peace.
“Will it last?” he says to Nothing. He’s content when there is no response. Frankly, he’d worry if there was.
There’s no time or point of reference for him anymore, but that’s par for the course. He’s seen and done all this before. He waits, half-interested and curious for the Something that always comes for him to arrive. He has to remind himself that maybe this time, it won’t.
“If you’re out there, I could do with a martini. Dry, but not too dry. Shaken, with one big, beautiful olive. I did my job. You owe me.”
Somewhere, in the Dark, he feels a tingle.
# # #
It’s Owen, of all people, that sees Ianto home safely. He half wonders if the doctor is angling for a sympathy fuck, but instead they stand together on the balcony, and Ianto smokes one of Owen’s cigarettes, and then Owen falls asleep in a chair. Ianto goes to bed, lets him rest, wakes up to him making them breakfast.
“I didn’t know you could cook.”
“You never asked.”
When they arrive at the Hub, Gwen is still keeping vigil.
They don’t tell U.N.I.T. or the PM or anyone yet. Ianto volunteers to make those calls since he’s always been so good at navigating organizational politics, and in the meantime busies himself deflecting questions and helping with the aftermath. With any luck, they’ll be able to promote from within and hire independently the way Jack did.
The boardroom is a near total loss. They’ve lost a lot of equipment, but everything crucial seems to be intact. He’s got more cuts on his hands from broken glass than he ever has in his entire life.
Gwen does not emerge.
Ianto tidies Jack’s office out of habit, and because he misses him terribly. He weeps into Jack’s greatcoat because he’ll never have another chance to pass it to him on the way out. He straightens papers over and over. He takes Jack’s stopwatch out of the drawer and carries it with him.
They take it in turns to check on her. He brings her coffee, though she doesn’t always drink it. He wants to shout at her for being selfish. She’s shutting them out and making it hard for them to let go all at once.
He and Owen start planning an intervention.
Tosh is helping him prepare the hand for storage when they hear footsteps coming up from the morgue. He’d look up, except this particular tangle of wire is really quite delicate, and he can’t bring himself to damage it.
She bolts past him suddenly, and he glances up to see Jack - living, breathing, impossible Jack - squeezing Toshiko.
Ianto is tentative, but Jack is having none of it. Instead, Jack embraces him, and then kisses him full on the mouth in front of everyone. There will be questions after, he knows, but he’d have traded a million questions for this.
He watches as Jack comforts Owen. Their doctor sobs, lets himself be held, and is forgiven.
And then, after about twenty minutes of shock, they go back to work.
# # #
Ianto taps on Jack’s office door.
“I’ve brought you some grapes.” He smiles a little lamely at the saucer in his hand. “I figured, ah, since we’re always taking them to people in hospital --”
Jack’s laughter is all the invitation he needs. He comes around the corner of the desk and sets the saucer next to the coral and the lamp base. Jack draws him in for a kiss - their second since his resurrection - and Ianto complies willingly without glancing up to see if anyone is watching.
“So did you know?”
“Hm?”
“That you’d come back. Did you know?”
He watched Jack’s eyes flicker for a second. “No. I didn’t. I thought maybe that Abaddon was the reason I couldn’t die.”
Ianto nods. “Does it hurt?” They’re holding hands now.
“Every single time.”
# # #
Trillions of years in the future, a dead man in a blue military coat sucks a ragged, painful first breath into his lungs. He wants answers. He wants closure. He wants…well, he wants to quit waking up like this, though the pretty girl in the tight jacket is a nice touch.
In any case, he’s playing his old self again, all impulse and seduction. It’s not until he’s in manacles that he really gets a chance to think it all over and by then it’s too late. All of our actions have consequences. That realization hurts more than anything Harold Saxon could possibly do to him.
And yet, each time they show him video feed - torture him with it - there is hope. Under the fear and agony and rage in Ianto’s thin, scarred face there is a stubborn refusal to accept this loss and to fight it for all he’s worth. Ianto Jones goes to his grave with that. Jack is proud of him and makes a vow not to let that death have been in vain, even when it’s all unwritten in the end.
Jack never thought he’d turn the Doctor down, but here he is doing it. He salutes them both and darts across the Plass.
The twenty first century is when Jack Harkness changes. And he has never been so ready in his life.
===
Prev. Ep: 12/13