Come Walk The Hub With Me
Fandom: Torchwood (shock horror!)
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Jack/Ianto
Word Count: 6350
Summary: Ianto's seeing things in the archives - but Jack's explanation doesn't go down well...
Prompt: Jantolution Challenge #8, all prompts
A/N: Self-referencing to three of my fanfic100 fics: Jack's Fear, Jack's Team, and Jack's Flowers in that order, though it will make sense without reading them. :)
(And there's a brief reference to Pomegranate Seeds, another of my Jantolutions, actually. Forgot about that. Likewise, reading is not necessarily necessary. ;) Damn me and my self-referencing.)
Come Walk The Hub With Me
Ianto saw the ghost when he was putting a device away properly in the archives. There was a gasp from behind him, and when he whirled around, wishing he’d decided to carry a gun at all times, he caught a fleeting glimpse of one fleeing figure dashing down the nearest tunnel. He raced over to the entrance and looked down the corridor, seeing for one moment the fading silhouette of a running man, before that dissipated and vanished.
Ianto hesitated for a few moments, then headed upstairs to speak to Jack.
~*~
“Did you see who the ghost was?” Jack asked him, taking Ianto’s revelation surprisingly calmly.
Ianto shook his head, saying, “He was running away from me. I’d say he was wearing a black suit except that he faded away, so it’s difficult to tell.”
“Black hair?” Jack asked, watching him carefully.
“I don’t know,” Ianto said, blinking in surprise. “I think so.”
“Just one man?” Jack said, sitting back and folding his hands on his stomach, something unreadable in his eyes.
Ianto nodded, frowning now, and asked, “What are you not telling me, sir?”
Jack paused for a moment, then got up and went to the secure archives. He opened the safe door, and then keyed in a code Ianto didn’t know. Before he opened the secondary door to fetch whatever he’d called up, he looked back at Ianto.
“You’re gonna want to sit down for this,” he said quietly.
“That bad?” asked Ianto, and when Jack didn’t respond he paused, then sat down. When he had, Jack turned around and threw a folder onto the desk in front of him. Ianto picked it up cautiously, glancing at Jack for confirmation, and opened it when he nodded.
The first thing he saw was a photo of himself clipped to the inside cover.
“What is this?” he asked Jack quickly, but Jack just waved at the folder and sat down opposite him, elbows on the desk, fists together in front of his lips as he watched Ianto look through the report.
A little more nervously, Ianto picked up the top page of the report (the most recent) and started reading. It was dated two days after he’d first come to Torchwood Three, signed by Jack, and stated that he and Doctor Toshiko Sato had agreed on a positive identification of one of the apparitions that appeared in the lower archives at irregular intervals. They named him. They also stated that he appeared utterly unaware of the fact that they’d seen him before, and showed no signs of recognition of his surroundings at any point in the Hub.
And then he read the notes about him from Jack - file unusually stark and basic, sections locked beyond even Toshiko’s considerable hacking skills, but additional notes in said file detailing express orders from Torchwood One’s superiors to keep Mr Jones within Torchwood at all times, to prevent him from progressing to any level of power, and to immediately inform any one of ten people listed in the event of his removal from Torchwood One itself. Another note from Jack added that these ten had all been killed in the battle of Canary Wharf.
Ianto looked back up after a moment of staring blankly at the paper. Jack was still watching him expressionlessly.
“They blocked me,” he said flatly. “They deliberately held me back. Why? And what does all that have to do with the ghost I just saw? You and Tosh can’t have seen me in the archives before I joined here. I’d never been here before! What does it mean?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Jack said, holding his hand out for the file.
Ianto ignored his hand, and leafed through the other papers instead, reading snatches of the reports, which started off recently and then began to date back through decades of Torchwood’s history, all the way back to the start of the twentieth century, each one detailing a sighting of one or two men, both with black hair and blue eyes, one wearing a long coat. In the earliest reports, the man wearing the long coat was being carried by the other, apparently unconscious.
“This is…” Ianto couldn’t work out how to finish the sentence. He looked up at Jack, who’d withdrawn his hand and was watching him blankly again, whatever emotions he was feeling hidden behind a carefully neutral expression.
“You knew about this,” he said accusingly. “You’ve known ever since I got here, and you never told me.”
Jack didn’t answer.
“And this,” Ianto continued, gesturing at the descriptions in one of the older reports, “this is you. What the hell is going on?”
“Time travel,” Jack said quietly, and Ianto fell silent.
“At some point in the future,” Jack sighed, “we’re going to travel back in time. We can’t avoid it, because it’s already happened. And just now, down in the archives, you’ve made it more sure than ever. You saw yourself, Ianto.”
“That’s a paradox,” Ianto protested. “It can’t happen.”
Jack smiled wryly, and told him, “It can. It has. And it will.”
“No,” Ianto said flatly, and closed the file and put it back on the desk, standing up. “There is no way I’m time travelling. Never.”
Jack blinked at him, startled by the strength of his reaction. He looked down at the file, then back up at Ianto, saying, “Ianto, there isn’t any way out of this. If you’ve seen it, it has to happen, or that’s even more paradoxical.”
“No!” Ianto snapped. “Never, Jack. Do you understand? Not. Happening.”
Open-mouthed, Jack watched Ianto storm out of the office. For a few seconds he stayed exactly where he was, blinking in surprise, and then he leapt to his feet, grabbed his coat, and chased after Ianto.
He’d gone back to the archives, of course, down in the lower levels where things were freezing cold (so Jack was glad of his coat) and still nowhere near straightened out. He’d been working in this area for the past week, trying to sort out the mess that had been made in Jack’s absence, when he’d had to go out on missions with the others and had, on occasion, had to trust the filing to the others - which was, inevitably, a bad move.
“Ianto,” Jack said simply, stepping into the room in which Ianto was working. Ianto barely turned his head to acknowledge his presence.
Jack sighed dramatically, and said, “Whatever I did to upset you, I’m sorry. I was stupid, I shouldn’t have done it. Or said it. Tell me what it was and I’ll try and avoid it from now on.”
There was a pause, and then Ianto looked back at him, evidently trying not to smile. At that Jack grinned and went over to hug him from behind, kissing his neck and then saying, “So what’s wrong? Something I should know about you and time travel?”
Ianto relaxed into his arms, and said, “It’s nothing. Just… the whole concept of it. I just don’t like it.”
“Most people go wild with delight when they get the chance to go anywhen they want,” Jack mused. “Varying degrees of wild, of course, but the principle’s the same…”
“I’m not most people,” Ianto said stiffly, pulling away from him again and pointedly returning to his work.
Jack was about to apologise when he saw the device Ianto had just extracted from one drawer, and was in the process of adding to a group on top of the filing cabinets. It was viciously angular - an eight sided metal block, like two pyramids joined at the base, with symbols he recognised on each side.
“Where did you get that?” he asked, and Ianto glanced back at him, then said, “It turned up while you were away. I don’t know what exactly happened with it, because I was busy dealing with the Weevil outbreak at the time -” and Jack winced, because the sheer inconvenience of his disappearance was well-trodden ground between them “- but judging by the others’ reports they couldn’t get it to do anything, so Owen filed it under U, for Useless Junk.”
“Let me see it,” Jack said, reaching out for it as Ianto picked it up to hand it to him. The instant Jack touched it they both jerked away from a mild electric shock, and left the device hanging in mid-air.
“Shit,” Jack said, and grabbed it again, stroking four of the symbols in sequence and then swearing again when the device faded out of his hands before he could get to a fifth.
Ianto cursed him for an idiot and took off back towards the upper archives and the Hub to find the report on the device, ignoring Jack’s shouts for him to wait.
He rounded three corners (with Jack not far behind) and then came to an abrupt halt, gasping despite himself when he saw another Ianto putting a device he recognised safely away in one of the cabinets ahead. Frantically, he ducked down the nearest tunnel and kept running, panting, “No, no, no,” with increasing desperation until he turned another corner and ran straight into Jack.
“Whoa!” Jack exclaimed, catching him and just managing to keep his balance. “What’s the rush, Yan? That desperate to see me?”
Ianto stared at him for a moment, then looked back over his shoulder, then back at Jack.
“You… You were behind me. How did you…?”
Jack blinked at him for a second, then realisation dawned in his eyes and he held Ianto at arm’s length, looking him up and down.
“When does it happen?” he asked. “You don’t look any different, so I’m guessing it’s this year at least. Unless something happens to you between now and whenever you are? Give me something to work with here, Ianto.”
“You’re the past,” Ianto said hopelessly, knocking Jack’s hands away and stepping back. “I can’t tell you anything, you know that.”
“I’ve time travelled before, Ianto,” this Jack told him dryly. “I’m well aware of the problems.”
Ianto backed away further, shaking his head and saying, “No. Everything’s gone wrong enough already. I have to get back!”
Then there were hands on his arms, steadying him, and he looked back to find that his Jack had caught up with him, and was looking past him at the other Jack.
“He doesn’t tell you anything,” he said quietly. “Just let it go and take my word that it’s not long, and so far nothing dreadful’s happened.”
Ianto turned to stare at him, snapping, “Nothing dreadful? We’re lost in time and you think this isn’t a problem?” and not noticing that the other Jack had faded away.
“It’s not a problem,” Jack told him calmly. “There are plenty of ways back. The conversation you just had happened about a month ago. That means we’re slipping further back in time. There are devices in the archives we can use to get home again, and people we can try to find, but we know we’re going to end up at least as far back as 1911.”
“How can you just accept this?” Ianto asked in disbelief. “We have to get back!”
“There’s nothing we can do until we’ve got past the first time we were seen,” Jack said, shrugging. “If we try to get back to the present before then we’ll really be in trouble.”
“You don’t even know if we do get back,” cried Ianto. “You talk like this is unavoidable, but you don’t have any guarantee that we even survive!”
Saying, “Right now you need to calm down, okay?” Jack reached out to put his hands on Ianto’s shoulders, but Ianto knocked his hands aside, telling him furiously, “You have no idea what this means, Jack! For once in your life will you just accept that you don’t know what to do and that we’re in serious trouble!”
Startled, Jack was on the verge of making some inane reply when their surroundings changed. The lights grew dimmer, the walls went even darker with years of accumulated dirt and grime, and Ianto gasped, “No! This has to stop!” and bolted again.
He made it to the stairs up to the higher archives before coming to an abrupt halt at the sound of a click behind him, and Tosh asking, “Who are you and how did you get in here?”
He turned. She had a gun aimed at him, frowning a little. A few feet behind her, unnoticed, Jack stood watching.
“Well, who are you?” Tosh asked again, and Ianto started, “I’m not -” but then trailed off as Tosh faded from view, looking suddenly startled.
Jack didn’t say anything - he didn’t need to. The “I told you so” was written all over his face.
“This isn’t fair,” Ianto whispered, looking down at his shaking hands. “You don’t understand. I can’t.”
“Can’t what?” Jack asked, but Ianto just stared at him for a moment before saying quietly, “I don’t know.”
Jack moved forwards and took hold of Ianto’s hands to still them, considering for a moment before telling him, “You know we’ll get through this. How much else have we survived, huh? Time travel’s a piece of cake.”
“What about the reports that had you unconscious?” Ianto asked, blinking rapidly and fighting to stay in control of himself. “What about the fact that we’re already so far back the device that started this is out of our reach? What about the possibility that we’re going to die?”
When Jack said nothing, Ianto stopped, and then amended, “That I’m going to die.” He pulled his hands out of Jack’s, shaking again, and spat, “This is all fun and games for you. You can afford to sit around and live your way back if you have to.”
Jack kept his silence, waiting until Ianto’s anger wavered again and he seemed on the point of crumbling. Then Jack went back to him, drawing him close and murmuring soothing platitudes, worried by the fact that Ianto didn’t resist, just buried his face in Jack’s shoulder and let himself be held.
The walls flickered again, and Jack felt Ianto flinch.
“How far back now?” Ianto asked hoarsely.
“I don’t know,” Jack told him. “How did you know we’d jumped again?”
At that Ianto raised his head, looking anxious. “You can’t feel it?” he asked, and Jack shook his head, saying, “You’re time-sensitive. Is that it? Is that why you don’t like time travel?”
“Time-sensitive?” Ianto repeated uncomprehendingly, and Jack sighed.
“You wouldn’t know the term,” he said. “It isn’t coined until about twelve centuries after your time. Basically it means you can tell when you drop out of linear time.”
“I’ve felt it before,” Ianto told him cautiously. “When you came back, just after the President was killed on the Valiant. I passed out.”
Jack nodded thoughtfully.
“That fits,” he said. “Bit extreme, but then so was the trigger.”
Ianto gave him a confused look, and was on the point of asking something more when he flinched again, with a hiss of pain. When Jack anxiously asked if he was alright, hands cupping his face, Ianto closed his eyes and backed away, gasping, “It hurts. We jumped further back.”
“We need to get moving,” Jack told him, taking his hand despite his flinch. “If we don’t fetch our ticket home quick enough, we’ll still be here and it won’t.”
At Jack’s urging they broke into a jog, Ianto following him through the archives to the older sections, and finally to a corridor that Jack had told him not to touch when he was reorganising.
“It’s down here,” Jack told him reassuringly. “If I can remember where I put it -”
Ianto gave a cry of pain and doubled over. Immediately, Jack stopped to go back to him, crouching beside him and putting supporting hands on his shoulders, saying, “Ianto, is it getting worse? Are you okay?”
Ianto shoved him away, and when he returned again he struggled to gasp, “Get the device before we jump again!”
“Shit,” Jack agreed, and bolted down the corridor. Ianto gave it a moment, then firmly stamped down the pain and pulled himself together. He straightened up, just in time for another jolt of agony to slam into him. This one was worse than the others, covering his eyes with black spots and dragging a hoarse scream from him as he reeled back against the wall. After a few moments, the shock of the agony had faded enough for him to see again, and he saw Jack returning down the corridor, slowing from a run to a walk.
“Where is it?” he croaked, and Jack shook his head.
“We jumped again,” he said softly. “It’s not here any more. I’m sorry.”
Ianto gave him a despairing look, then pulled himself together and said, “We should head for the lower levels, then. Some of the corridors up here were altered relatively recently. If we’re not careful we’ll end up in the middle of a wall.”
With a nod, Jack took hold of his arm to help him along the corridor, but Ianto shook him off silently, and set off alone. Jack kept pace, and for a few minutes they walked on in silence.
Ianto did his best to hide how much pain he was in, but with each jump further back in time it increased. He was only glad that Jack wasn’t holding his hand or his arm anymore - he didn’t think he could have hidden the growing agony if he’d had the chance to clutch at anything. Instead he shivered a little as they entered the older, colder sections of the archives, and limped along as best he could, without complaint.
“You okay?” Jack asked him, when they jumped again and he paused to clutch at his side, biting his lip hard to hold in a gasp of pain.
“I’m fine,” he managed to respond after a moment. “It just feels like my ribs are broken, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”
Jack went to support him, trying to put an arm around his waist and take Ianto’s arm over his shoulders, but Ianto shook him off again, snapping, “I can walk. Save your strength.”
Jack backed off, but edged anxiously closer as they went on, as if afraid Ianto was going to collapse any second, without warning.
And then they rounded a corner and jumped again, and another Jack faded into view right in front of them, this time slumped with his back to the wall and his eyes closed. He didn’t even look around on hearing their footsteps, simply saying, “Go away,” and waiting for them to obey.
“I can’t,” Jack replied, and they watched him look up in pure shock. Then a desperate hope entered his eyes as he glanced between his future self and Ianto, and said, “Time travel? Doctor?”
“No,” Ianto told him gently, hating the way this Jack’s shoulders slumped as he said it. Squashing the voice in the back of his mind telling him that saying anything more to this Jack could destroy the timeline, he added, “But you have found him again.”
Jack stared for a moment, then a slow smile spread across his face, and he asked, “When? Tell me it’s soon. Please.”
Ianto glanced at his Jack, who shrugged and gestured for him to do as he pleased. He asked the other Jack, “What year is it?”
“Eighty four,” Jack told him, face falling again. “It takes that long? I can’t do that.”
“You can,” Ianto said. “You have, and you will. You find the Doctor after you meet me, and I don’t know how long you stay away, but you come back happy.”
“And you care about that,” Jack murmured, a certain amount of steady hope in his eyes now, and Ianto stepped forwards to draw him into an embrace, telling him, “Yes, I care.”
Jack hugged him back tightly, burying his face in Ianto’s shoulder and practically clinging to him for the sake of what little comfort he could offer. For a few moments they stayed like that, in silence, and then Ianto glanced back at the later version of Jack, and the one he was holding faded out of existence, to the accompaniment of a kick of pain to his stomach. He gritted his teeth until it passed, and then met Jack’s gaze again.
“I always wanted to thank you for that,” Jack told him quietly. “That kept me sane.”
“Good to know I didn’t just screw up the timeline,” Ianto responded. “Though I’m not too sure how happy I am that you knew that -”
He stopped, cut off by his own gasp of pain, and black spots danced in front of his eyes for a few agonising seconds. When he could see again, he found Jack holding his arms, looking nothing short of terrified.
“This shouldn’t be happening,” Jack told him desperately. “If you’re time-sensitive you should be able to feel when it changes, but it shouldn’t hurt that much.”
“Time-sick,” Ianto said hoarsely. “Not time-sensitive.”
Jack stared at him.
“How the hell do you know that?” he asked, but Ianto gave a moan of pain and shook his head, half-sobbing, “I don’t know,” and closing his eyes as Jack pulled him closer and wrapped both arms around him.
“Tell me you saw us again,” Ianto managed to get out after a few moments. “Tell me we survive further back.”
Jack said nothing, and Ianto clung to him just as tightly as he’d had the other Jack holding onto him moments beforehand. He fought desperately to override the pain and the cold assailing him, but it was little use. When Jack gently disentangled them and started saying, “We should keep going. The older sightings were even further down - we might be able to get help from someone,” Ianto shivered and flinched.
“How bad is it?” Jack asked, but Ianto refused to meet his eyes. Jack hesitated, then slowly told him, “The thing with time-sickness is it’s not exactly natural. It’s kinda complicated, but -”
“It’s induced,” Ianto supplied weakly, and looked up at Jack, who stared back at him, something more than fear in his eyes now.
“How do you know that?” he asked Ianto flatly. “Time-sickness isn’t even developed for another fifteen hundred years.”
Ianto shook his head again, closing his eyes and swaying on his feet as they faded out and in again. When he’d swallowed down the pain enough and managed to open his eyes again, he found himself staring at a stranger, who was in turn staring at Jack.
“I thought you were out with the others?” the man asked Jack, and Jack flashed him a disarming (though distracted) grin, saying, “Forgot something. My friend here and I’ll be out of your way just as soon as I find it again. You needn’t bother telling the others.”
The man glanced at Ianto, and started to protest, but Jack grabbed Ianto’s arm and hauled him down the nearest corridor. They rounded a few corners until the man’s voice had faded behind them, and then Jack was forced to stop as Ianto collapsed back against the wall, panting and shaking.
“Getting worse?” Jack asked, hanging back from reaching out to him again.
“Cold,” Ianto gasped simply.
At that Jack did reach out, and took hold of his hand. He swore, and pulled away again, but only to shrug out of his coat and put it around Ianto’s shoulders instead. Ianto was shivering too hard to be much help, but Jack managed to get his arms into the sleeves and fastened it up for him, pulling the belt tight and turning the collar up around Ianto’s neck.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he assured Ianto, cradling his face with one hand.
“You don’t really think that,” Ianto gasped, and, when Jack looked confused, he forced a smile and said, “You didn’t make any jokes about putting more clothes on me.”
Jack looked away, then said, “Ianto, what’s going on? How do you know about time-sickness? And how the hell have you got it?”
“I don’t know, I swear,” Ianto sighed, head falling back against the wall. “But it’s… I… Torchwood One. I felt it there. Before I knew Lisa. I…”
He trailed off, and they jumped again, causing him to give a cry of pain and double over, clutching at his sides. Jack gathered him into his arms, insistently asking, “What happened at Torchwood One? Ianto, what is this?”
“Where the hell did you come from?” someone else snapped, and they both looked at the woman pointing a gun at them.
“What year is it?” Jack asked her pleasantly. “It’s always easier to know where you’re coming from if you have some idea where you are.”
The woman glared, and said sharply, “You’re both under arrest. Get moving.”
“Whatever you say,” Jack said, with a shrug, as she faded out of view.
Ianto collapsed against him.
Swearing, Jack staggered backwards to the wall and slid down awkwardly, gathering Ianto to him and patting his face frantically.
“Ianto, come on, you’re not gonna die on me. You can’t do that to me.”
To his vast relief, Ianto stirred, groaning in pain and twisting in Jack’s hold. He forced his eyes open as much as he could, muttering, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t. I couldn’t help it.”
“Couldn’t help what?” Jack asked, but Ianto seemed barely able to hear him, rambling on, “They caught me. They forced me. Trapped me. I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not going to,” Jack told him firmly. “I promise. I’m gonna get you home somehow, Ianto, just you wait and see.”
Desperately, he dug through the pockets of the greatcoat, finally finding the tool he was looking for.
“This’ll help,” he told Ianto, with utterly false cheer. “The Doctor even has something like this. Gets him out of all sorts of trouble. Into plenty more, of course, but that’s not the point. Point is, I should be able to fix this.”
He reached around Ianto to bring the tool to his Vortex Manipulator, neglecting to mention that he’d tried to fix the device at least a dozen times before and after he’d met up with the Doctor again, with no success, and spent the next few minutes trying in vain to undo what the Doctor had done.
“Bastard,” he spat eventually, slumping back against the wall. “Fucking interfering know-it-all fucking bastard.”
Ianto didn’t move.
Jack shook him quickly, gasping, “Ianto, don’t you dare,” and was rewarded with a weak moan.
Then Ianto muttered, “Don’t kill me.”
“What?” Jack asked, and Ianto struggled to open his eyes and look up at him, repeating, “Don’t kill me. Jack. Please.”
Jack stared at him. After another few moments, Ianto closed his eyes and let his head fall against Jack’s chest, unresponsive when Jack shook him again, but shivering and occasionally jerking with a whimper of pain.
Helplessly, Jack held him close and tried to think of a way out. Nothing came to mind.
Ianto arched up with a sudden scream, and Jack was busy trying to soothe him again when he heard footsteps. Looking up, he watched the other man come to a startled halt. For a few seconds they stared at each other, and then Jack was asked, “What’s going on? I heard a scream.”
“You always would run towards the screams,” Jack said softly, looking away as Dai repeated, “I would? What do you mean?”
“I’m so sorry,” Jack told him, “I can’t…” He stopped, and then said instead, “I need your help. Is there anything in the archives that can get us to the future?”
Dai stared at him, with Ianto in his lap, wrapped up in his coat, and swallowed hard.
“You always ask that about everything we find,” he said. “You know we haven’t found anything that even has a possibility of being for time travel.”
Jack stared back for a few seconds, then said, “I forgot I did that. I’m sorry.”
“You forget us that quickly?” Dai asked, and Jack shook his head, protesting, “Dai, no. I loved you both. It’s been years for me and I haven’t forgotten you, and I never will. You have to believe me on that. But I need your help.”
Dai hesitated, then moved nearer and knelt in front of him, taking a look at Ianto.
“What caused it?” he asked Jack. “Poison? Some kind of device?”
“Time travel,” Jack told him. “Torchwood One did something to him so he wouldn’t be able to survive being out of his time.”
“Then there’s nothing I can do,” said Dai quietly.
“There has to be something,” Jack pleaded. “I can’t lose him too.”
“I’m sorry,” Dai told him, and Jack clutched Ianto closer, closing his eyes for a moment. Ianto convulsed again, with a far weaker cry of pain, and Jack looked up just as Dai faded out of view.
He stared at the empty corridor for a few seconds, then gritted his teeth and got up, heaving Ianto into his arms and starting down the passageway.
They jumped another four times in the next hour, and scared the life out of some of Jack’s old colleagues by fading into and out of sight suddenly. None of them could help him, and the further back they jumped the fewer items were available in the archives. Jack kept wondering what would have happened if he’d only been a little quicker back at the beginning. How much pain could he have saved Ianto? And what if he really had lost the only way of saving Ianto’s life? He’d never forgive himself.
Then they jumped again, and the man walking down the corridor towards them stopped in his tracks, staring.
“What year is it?” Jack asked him desperately, all too aware that Ianto had barely twitched with the last transition.
“1911,” the other man told him. “What the devil -”
But he was already fading out. Ianto didn’t even twitch this time.
Frantically, Jack laid him down and tried desperately to find a pulse.
“Who is he?”
He looked up swiftly, and found himself looking back.
“You can’t be here,” he gasped. “I don’t remember this. I would remember this.”
“31st October 1904,” his past self told him. “At the moment, the others are celebrating the fact that nothing’s happened this week. That help any?”
Jack shook his head slowly, then looked back down at Ianto, one hand still wrapped around his wrist.
“Who is he?” his other self asked again.
“He’s the man you leave the Doctor for,” Jack said softly, and heard the sharp intake of breath that provoked.
His past self came to kneel opposite him, on the other side of Ianto’s still body. He checked for a pulse himself, pulled back Ianto’s eyelids briefly, then glanced up at Jack.
“Time-sick?” he asked disbelievingly. “Christ, how far in the future were you?”
“That doesn’t matter. We just have to get back,” Jack told him, and was halfway through adding, “I just don’t know how,” when something occurred to him. He paused, staring at his other self, then dug the tool out of his pocket again, and said, “Give me your Vortex Manipulator.”
The other Jack pulled back a little, warily, and asked, “Why?”
“I think I can fix it,” Jack told him. “It’s only burnt out, so this should be able to sort that out no problem. It’s only because of what the Doctor did to mine that I can’t get it working again.”
“You never tried to fix yours before the Doctor got to it?” his past self asked him.
“Of course I did,” Jack said. “But if I’m right I wouldn’t have stood a chance anyway.”
When the other Jack still hesitated, he sighed, and took off his own Manipulator, throwing it over to him.
“Swap,” he said simply.
“Wait a minute,” the other Jack protested. “When does that thing come through the Rift? If I keep mine I can fix it as soon as I get it, cut decades off the waiting. You want me to sit through I don’t know how much more linear time just so you can get yourself back there after you left him? Why the hell should I?”
“Am I always this stupid?” Jack asked himself. “Listen, one day it’s gonna be you asking this, and you that left the Doctor, and you that’s in love with him, and I don’t know how much longer it’s gonna be before I jump so far back you’re not even gonna be here, so just shut up and do as I tell you.”
His past self stared for a moment, then whispered, “You’re in love with him?”
Jack paused, then said, “Yeah. Get used to it. In a hundred years or so it’ll be your turn.”
The other Jack took off his Manipulator and handed it over, careful to avoid touching his future self, and then sat back and stared at Ianto while Jack got to work on the Manipulator.
“Yes,” he hissed after a few moments, and fastened the wristband around Ianto’s arm, glancing back up at his past self and saying quickly, “Thank you. But I don’t remember this. Halloween 1904. I thought I got drunk.”
“Okay,” the other Jack sighed. “I get what you mean.”
“Wish me luck,” Jack said, with a grin, and pushed the button.
~*~
The first thing Ianto saw when he opened his eyes was Owen.
“That’s new,” he said weakly, and Owen asked, “What? Something wrong with your eyes? Pain anywhere? Missing memory? Anything like that? What’s new?”
“Oh no,” Ianto assured him. “I’m fine. It’s just good to see you, that’s all.”
There was a pause while Owen processed that, then realised he’d been insulted and turned away with a snort of disgust, raising one hand to his headset and saying, “Jack, he’s awake and there’s nothing wrong with him, but there bloody well will be soon unless I can go off duty now.”
Judging from the way he then proceeded to declare, “Thank Christ for that,” and stormed out of the room, Ianto guessed Jack had given him permission to leave.
Only a few moments later, Jack entered the room, making his way over to the chair by the bed. He sat down, watching Ianto, but didn’t say anything. In turn, Ianto found himself an interesting section of ceiling to stare at until the silence became unbearable.
“Well?” he asked, and Jack shot back, “Well what?”
“What are you going to do with me?” Ianto asked quietly.
Jack laughed slightly, and told him, “You should know better than to give me lines like that.”
“Please, Jack,” Ianto said, but went no further. There was silence again for a little while.
“Apparently we missed about six weeks,” Jack said idly at last. “The others were going frantic without us.”
Ianto said nothing.
“They got invaded on Halloween,” Jack continued, sitting back in his chair and examining the ceiling for himself. “Those aliens with the stone circles came through to visit. Tosh says they were trying to get me back. Nice to know I’m so much in demand. And they had an alien virus in the water supply the other week. A few devices nearly blew up Cardiff. Myfanwy escaped for a few days.”
Ianto turned his attention to the wall instead of the ceiling.
“Owen was bitching about the filing, by the way,” Jack said. “No doubt the archives aren’t entirely safe any more. And Tosh has changed the codes for the armoury to stop Gwen from losing her temper and shooting Owen, so she says. You set a bad example there. I should really be angry with you about that.”
“Stop it,” Ianto said quietly. “If you’re going to retcon me, just get on with it.”
“Why do you think I’m going to retcon you?” Jack asked, and Ianto turned to look at him at last.
“Are you telling me you haven’t figured it out?”
Jack sighed, and said, “I’m assuming you mean the fact that you’re a Time Agent. Does it change anything?”
“It changes everything,” Ianto told him. “Everything I thought I knew was a lie.”
“But are you going to try and kill all of us, sabotage every mission and snatch me back to the fifty-first century?” Jack asked casually.
“Of course not,” Ianto snapped, struggling to sit up and glare at him. “How can you think that of me?”
“I don’t,” Jack told him. “But that’s about the only thing that could persuade me to retcon you.”
Ianto stared, then looked away again, saying, “But I’ve betrayed you again. I -”
“You said yourself you didn’t know,” Jack pointed out. “How have you betrayed me? Were you sent to bring me back to the Agency?”
“I think I’m before your time,” Ianto admitted. “My Vortex Manipulator was practically the length of my arm and it didn’t do nearly as much as yours does. That and it kept breaking.”
“Tell me about it,” Jack laughed. “Good for one emergency only.”
Ianto smiled slightly, and Jack leaned forward, hands clasped in front of him.
“So what was your mission?” he asked. “And how come nobody’s been sent to pick you up?”
Ianto hesitated for a few long moments, then said, “I was meant to destroy Torchwood One. They caught me first, but that seems to have led to the Battle. I think the Agency may have set me up.”
“Join the club,” Jack muttered, and then said decisively, “So you won’t be going back.”
“I can’t,” Ianto reminded him. “I’ll die if I try to go home.”
“So stay,” Jack said, reaching out to take hold of Ianto’s hand. “I kinda like having you around anyway.”
Ianto paused, and then smiled.
“I kind of like being here,” he admitted, and was rewarded by a more-than-fond smile in return. Almost embarrassed, Ianto looked away again, then frowned and glanced back.
“What was that you said about Owen and the archives?”
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Jack/Ianto
Word Count: 6350
Summary: Ianto's seeing things in the archives - but Jack's explanation doesn't go down well...
Prompt: Jantolution Challenge #8, all prompts
A/N: Self-referencing to three of my fanfic100 fics: Jack's Fear, Jack's Team, and Jack's Flowers in that order, though it will make sense without reading them. :)
(And there's a brief reference to Pomegranate Seeds, another of my Jantolutions, actually. Forgot about that. Likewise, reading is not necessarily necessary. ;) Damn me and my self-referencing.)
Come Walk The Hub With Me
Ianto saw the ghost when he was putting a device away properly in the archives. There was a gasp from behind him, and when he whirled around, wishing he’d decided to carry a gun at all times, he caught a fleeting glimpse of one fleeing figure dashing down the nearest tunnel. He raced over to the entrance and looked down the corridor, seeing for one moment the fading silhouette of a running man, before that dissipated and vanished.
Ianto hesitated for a few moments, then headed upstairs to speak to Jack.
~*~
“Did you see who the ghost was?” Jack asked him, taking Ianto’s revelation surprisingly calmly.
Ianto shook his head, saying, “He was running away from me. I’d say he was wearing a black suit except that he faded away, so it’s difficult to tell.”
“Black hair?” Jack asked, watching him carefully.
“I don’t know,” Ianto said, blinking in surprise. “I think so.”
“Just one man?” Jack said, sitting back and folding his hands on his stomach, something unreadable in his eyes.
Ianto nodded, frowning now, and asked, “What are you not telling me, sir?”
Jack paused for a moment, then got up and went to the secure archives. He opened the safe door, and then keyed in a code Ianto didn’t know. Before he opened the secondary door to fetch whatever he’d called up, he looked back at Ianto.
“You’re gonna want to sit down for this,” he said quietly.
“That bad?” asked Ianto, and when Jack didn’t respond he paused, then sat down. When he had, Jack turned around and threw a folder onto the desk in front of him. Ianto picked it up cautiously, glancing at Jack for confirmation, and opened it when he nodded.
The first thing he saw was a photo of himself clipped to the inside cover.
“What is this?” he asked Jack quickly, but Jack just waved at the folder and sat down opposite him, elbows on the desk, fists together in front of his lips as he watched Ianto look through the report.
A little more nervously, Ianto picked up the top page of the report (the most recent) and started reading. It was dated two days after he’d first come to Torchwood Three, signed by Jack, and stated that he and Doctor Toshiko Sato had agreed on a positive identification of one of the apparitions that appeared in the lower archives at irregular intervals. They named him. They also stated that he appeared utterly unaware of the fact that they’d seen him before, and showed no signs of recognition of his surroundings at any point in the Hub.
And then he read the notes about him from Jack - file unusually stark and basic, sections locked beyond even Toshiko’s considerable hacking skills, but additional notes in said file detailing express orders from Torchwood One’s superiors to keep Mr Jones within Torchwood at all times, to prevent him from progressing to any level of power, and to immediately inform any one of ten people listed in the event of his removal from Torchwood One itself. Another note from Jack added that these ten had all been killed in the battle of Canary Wharf.
Ianto looked back up after a moment of staring blankly at the paper. Jack was still watching him expressionlessly.
“They blocked me,” he said flatly. “They deliberately held me back. Why? And what does all that have to do with the ghost I just saw? You and Tosh can’t have seen me in the archives before I joined here. I’d never been here before! What does it mean?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Jack said, holding his hand out for the file.
Ianto ignored his hand, and leafed through the other papers instead, reading snatches of the reports, which started off recently and then began to date back through decades of Torchwood’s history, all the way back to the start of the twentieth century, each one detailing a sighting of one or two men, both with black hair and blue eyes, one wearing a long coat. In the earliest reports, the man wearing the long coat was being carried by the other, apparently unconscious.
“This is…” Ianto couldn’t work out how to finish the sentence. He looked up at Jack, who’d withdrawn his hand and was watching him blankly again, whatever emotions he was feeling hidden behind a carefully neutral expression.
“You knew about this,” he said accusingly. “You’ve known ever since I got here, and you never told me.”
Jack didn’t answer.
“And this,” Ianto continued, gesturing at the descriptions in one of the older reports, “this is you. What the hell is going on?”
“Time travel,” Jack said quietly, and Ianto fell silent.
“At some point in the future,” Jack sighed, “we’re going to travel back in time. We can’t avoid it, because it’s already happened. And just now, down in the archives, you’ve made it more sure than ever. You saw yourself, Ianto.”
“That’s a paradox,” Ianto protested. “It can’t happen.”
Jack smiled wryly, and told him, “It can. It has. And it will.”
“No,” Ianto said flatly, and closed the file and put it back on the desk, standing up. “There is no way I’m time travelling. Never.”
Jack blinked at him, startled by the strength of his reaction. He looked down at the file, then back up at Ianto, saying, “Ianto, there isn’t any way out of this. If you’ve seen it, it has to happen, or that’s even more paradoxical.”
“No!” Ianto snapped. “Never, Jack. Do you understand? Not. Happening.”
Open-mouthed, Jack watched Ianto storm out of the office. For a few seconds he stayed exactly where he was, blinking in surprise, and then he leapt to his feet, grabbed his coat, and chased after Ianto.
He’d gone back to the archives, of course, down in the lower levels where things were freezing cold (so Jack was glad of his coat) and still nowhere near straightened out. He’d been working in this area for the past week, trying to sort out the mess that had been made in Jack’s absence, when he’d had to go out on missions with the others and had, on occasion, had to trust the filing to the others - which was, inevitably, a bad move.
“Ianto,” Jack said simply, stepping into the room in which Ianto was working. Ianto barely turned his head to acknowledge his presence.
Jack sighed dramatically, and said, “Whatever I did to upset you, I’m sorry. I was stupid, I shouldn’t have done it. Or said it. Tell me what it was and I’ll try and avoid it from now on.”
There was a pause, and then Ianto looked back at him, evidently trying not to smile. At that Jack grinned and went over to hug him from behind, kissing his neck and then saying, “So what’s wrong? Something I should know about you and time travel?”
Ianto relaxed into his arms, and said, “It’s nothing. Just… the whole concept of it. I just don’t like it.”
“Most people go wild with delight when they get the chance to go anywhen they want,” Jack mused. “Varying degrees of wild, of course, but the principle’s the same…”
“I’m not most people,” Ianto said stiffly, pulling away from him again and pointedly returning to his work.
Jack was about to apologise when he saw the device Ianto had just extracted from one drawer, and was in the process of adding to a group on top of the filing cabinets. It was viciously angular - an eight sided metal block, like two pyramids joined at the base, with symbols he recognised on each side.
“Where did you get that?” he asked, and Ianto glanced back at him, then said, “It turned up while you were away. I don’t know what exactly happened with it, because I was busy dealing with the Weevil outbreak at the time -” and Jack winced, because the sheer inconvenience of his disappearance was well-trodden ground between them “- but judging by the others’ reports they couldn’t get it to do anything, so Owen filed it under U, for Useless Junk.”
“Let me see it,” Jack said, reaching out for it as Ianto picked it up to hand it to him. The instant Jack touched it they both jerked away from a mild electric shock, and left the device hanging in mid-air.
“Shit,” Jack said, and grabbed it again, stroking four of the symbols in sequence and then swearing again when the device faded out of his hands before he could get to a fifth.
Ianto cursed him for an idiot and took off back towards the upper archives and the Hub to find the report on the device, ignoring Jack’s shouts for him to wait.
He rounded three corners (with Jack not far behind) and then came to an abrupt halt, gasping despite himself when he saw another Ianto putting a device he recognised safely away in one of the cabinets ahead. Frantically, he ducked down the nearest tunnel and kept running, panting, “No, no, no,” with increasing desperation until he turned another corner and ran straight into Jack.
“Whoa!” Jack exclaimed, catching him and just managing to keep his balance. “What’s the rush, Yan? That desperate to see me?”
Ianto stared at him for a moment, then looked back over his shoulder, then back at Jack.
“You… You were behind me. How did you…?”
Jack blinked at him for a second, then realisation dawned in his eyes and he held Ianto at arm’s length, looking him up and down.
“When does it happen?” he asked. “You don’t look any different, so I’m guessing it’s this year at least. Unless something happens to you between now and whenever you are? Give me something to work with here, Ianto.”
“You’re the past,” Ianto said hopelessly, knocking Jack’s hands away and stepping back. “I can’t tell you anything, you know that.”
“I’ve time travelled before, Ianto,” this Jack told him dryly. “I’m well aware of the problems.”
Ianto backed away further, shaking his head and saying, “No. Everything’s gone wrong enough already. I have to get back!”
Then there were hands on his arms, steadying him, and he looked back to find that his Jack had caught up with him, and was looking past him at the other Jack.
“He doesn’t tell you anything,” he said quietly. “Just let it go and take my word that it’s not long, and so far nothing dreadful’s happened.”
Ianto turned to stare at him, snapping, “Nothing dreadful? We’re lost in time and you think this isn’t a problem?” and not noticing that the other Jack had faded away.
“It’s not a problem,” Jack told him calmly. “There are plenty of ways back. The conversation you just had happened about a month ago. That means we’re slipping further back in time. There are devices in the archives we can use to get home again, and people we can try to find, but we know we’re going to end up at least as far back as 1911.”
“How can you just accept this?” Ianto asked in disbelief. “We have to get back!”
“There’s nothing we can do until we’ve got past the first time we were seen,” Jack said, shrugging. “If we try to get back to the present before then we’ll really be in trouble.”
“You don’t even know if we do get back,” cried Ianto. “You talk like this is unavoidable, but you don’t have any guarantee that we even survive!”
Saying, “Right now you need to calm down, okay?” Jack reached out to put his hands on Ianto’s shoulders, but Ianto knocked his hands aside, telling him furiously, “You have no idea what this means, Jack! For once in your life will you just accept that you don’t know what to do and that we’re in serious trouble!”
Startled, Jack was on the verge of making some inane reply when their surroundings changed. The lights grew dimmer, the walls went even darker with years of accumulated dirt and grime, and Ianto gasped, “No! This has to stop!” and bolted again.
He made it to the stairs up to the higher archives before coming to an abrupt halt at the sound of a click behind him, and Tosh asking, “Who are you and how did you get in here?”
He turned. She had a gun aimed at him, frowning a little. A few feet behind her, unnoticed, Jack stood watching.
“Well, who are you?” Tosh asked again, and Ianto started, “I’m not -” but then trailed off as Tosh faded from view, looking suddenly startled.
Jack didn’t say anything - he didn’t need to. The “I told you so” was written all over his face.
“This isn’t fair,” Ianto whispered, looking down at his shaking hands. “You don’t understand. I can’t.”
“Can’t what?” Jack asked, but Ianto just stared at him for a moment before saying quietly, “I don’t know.”
Jack moved forwards and took hold of Ianto’s hands to still them, considering for a moment before telling him, “You know we’ll get through this. How much else have we survived, huh? Time travel’s a piece of cake.”
“What about the reports that had you unconscious?” Ianto asked, blinking rapidly and fighting to stay in control of himself. “What about the fact that we’re already so far back the device that started this is out of our reach? What about the possibility that we’re going to die?”
When Jack said nothing, Ianto stopped, and then amended, “That I’m going to die.” He pulled his hands out of Jack’s, shaking again, and spat, “This is all fun and games for you. You can afford to sit around and live your way back if you have to.”
Jack kept his silence, waiting until Ianto’s anger wavered again and he seemed on the point of crumbling. Then Jack went back to him, drawing him close and murmuring soothing platitudes, worried by the fact that Ianto didn’t resist, just buried his face in Jack’s shoulder and let himself be held.
The walls flickered again, and Jack felt Ianto flinch.
“How far back now?” Ianto asked hoarsely.
“I don’t know,” Jack told him. “How did you know we’d jumped again?”
At that Ianto raised his head, looking anxious. “You can’t feel it?” he asked, and Jack shook his head, saying, “You’re time-sensitive. Is that it? Is that why you don’t like time travel?”
“Time-sensitive?” Ianto repeated uncomprehendingly, and Jack sighed.
“You wouldn’t know the term,” he said. “It isn’t coined until about twelve centuries after your time. Basically it means you can tell when you drop out of linear time.”
“I’ve felt it before,” Ianto told him cautiously. “When you came back, just after the President was killed on the Valiant. I passed out.”
Jack nodded thoughtfully.
“That fits,” he said. “Bit extreme, but then so was the trigger.”
Ianto gave him a confused look, and was on the point of asking something more when he flinched again, with a hiss of pain. When Jack anxiously asked if he was alright, hands cupping his face, Ianto closed his eyes and backed away, gasping, “It hurts. We jumped further back.”
“We need to get moving,” Jack told him, taking his hand despite his flinch. “If we don’t fetch our ticket home quick enough, we’ll still be here and it won’t.”
At Jack’s urging they broke into a jog, Ianto following him through the archives to the older sections, and finally to a corridor that Jack had told him not to touch when he was reorganising.
“It’s down here,” Jack told him reassuringly. “If I can remember where I put it -”
Ianto gave a cry of pain and doubled over. Immediately, Jack stopped to go back to him, crouching beside him and putting supporting hands on his shoulders, saying, “Ianto, is it getting worse? Are you okay?”
Ianto shoved him away, and when he returned again he struggled to gasp, “Get the device before we jump again!”
“Shit,” Jack agreed, and bolted down the corridor. Ianto gave it a moment, then firmly stamped down the pain and pulled himself together. He straightened up, just in time for another jolt of agony to slam into him. This one was worse than the others, covering his eyes with black spots and dragging a hoarse scream from him as he reeled back against the wall. After a few moments, the shock of the agony had faded enough for him to see again, and he saw Jack returning down the corridor, slowing from a run to a walk.
“Where is it?” he croaked, and Jack shook his head.
“We jumped again,” he said softly. “It’s not here any more. I’m sorry.”
Ianto gave him a despairing look, then pulled himself together and said, “We should head for the lower levels, then. Some of the corridors up here were altered relatively recently. If we’re not careful we’ll end up in the middle of a wall.”
With a nod, Jack took hold of his arm to help him along the corridor, but Ianto shook him off silently, and set off alone. Jack kept pace, and for a few minutes they walked on in silence.
Ianto did his best to hide how much pain he was in, but with each jump further back in time it increased. He was only glad that Jack wasn’t holding his hand or his arm anymore - he didn’t think he could have hidden the growing agony if he’d had the chance to clutch at anything. Instead he shivered a little as they entered the older, colder sections of the archives, and limped along as best he could, without complaint.
“You okay?” Jack asked him, when they jumped again and he paused to clutch at his side, biting his lip hard to hold in a gasp of pain.
“I’m fine,” he managed to respond after a moment. “It just feels like my ribs are broken, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”
Jack went to support him, trying to put an arm around his waist and take Ianto’s arm over his shoulders, but Ianto shook him off again, snapping, “I can walk. Save your strength.”
Jack backed off, but edged anxiously closer as they went on, as if afraid Ianto was going to collapse any second, without warning.
And then they rounded a corner and jumped again, and another Jack faded into view right in front of them, this time slumped with his back to the wall and his eyes closed. He didn’t even look around on hearing their footsteps, simply saying, “Go away,” and waiting for them to obey.
“I can’t,” Jack replied, and they watched him look up in pure shock. Then a desperate hope entered his eyes as he glanced between his future self and Ianto, and said, “Time travel? Doctor?”
“No,” Ianto told him gently, hating the way this Jack’s shoulders slumped as he said it. Squashing the voice in the back of his mind telling him that saying anything more to this Jack could destroy the timeline, he added, “But you have found him again.”
Jack stared for a moment, then a slow smile spread across his face, and he asked, “When? Tell me it’s soon. Please.”
Ianto glanced at his Jack, who shrugged and gestured for him to do as he pleased. He asked the other Jack, “What year is it?”
“Eighty four,” Jack told him, face falling again. “It takes that long? I can’t do that.”
“You can,” Ianto said. “You have, and you will. You find the Doctor after you meet me, and I don’t know how long you stay away, but you come back happy.”
“And you care about that,” Jack murmured, a certain amount of steady hope in his eyes now, and Ianto stepped forwards to draw him into an embrace, telling him, “Yes, I care.”
Jack hugged him back tightly, burying his face in Ianto’s shoulder and practically clinging to him for the sake of what little comfort he could offer. For a few moments they stayed like that, in silence, and then Ianto glanced back at the later version of Jack, and the one he was holding faded out of existence, to the accompaniment of a kick of pain to his stomach. He gritted his teeth until it passed, and then met Jack’s gaze again.
“I always wanted to thank you for that,” Jack told him quietly. “That kept me sane.”
“Good to know I didn’t just screw up the timeline,” Ianto responded. “Though I’m not too sure how happy I am that you knew that -”
He stopped, cut off by his own gasp of pain, and black spots danced in front of his eyes for a few agonising seconds. When he could see again, he found Jack holding his arms, looking nothing short of terrified.
“This shouldn’t be happening,” Jack told him desperately. “If you’re time-sensitive you should be able to feel when it changes, but it shouldn’t hurt that much.”
“Time-sick,” Ianto said hoarsely. “Not time-sensitive.”
Jack stared at him.
“How the hell do you know that?” he asked, but Ianto gave a moan of pain and shook his head, half-sobbing, “I don’t know,” and closing his eyes as Jack pulled him closer and wrapped both arms around him.
“Tell me you saw us again,” Ianto managed to get out after a few moments. “Tell me we survive further back.”
Jack said nothing, and Ianto clung to him just as tightly as he’d had the other Jack holding onto him moments beforehand. He fought desperately to override the pain and the cold assailing him, but it was little use. When Jack gently disentangled them and started saying, “We should keep going. The older sightings were even further down - we might be able to get help from someone,” Ianto shivered and flinched.
“How bad is it?” Jack asked, but Ianto refused to meet his eyes. Jack hesitated, then slowly told him, “The thing with time-sickness is it’s not exactly natural. It’s kinda complicated, but -”
“It’s induced,” Ianto supplied weakly, and looked up at Jack, who stared back at him, something more than fear in his eyes now.
“How do you know that?” he asked Ianto flatly. “Time-sickness isn’t even developed for another fifteen hundred years.”
Ianto shook his head again, closing his eyes and swaying on his feet as they faded out and in again. When he’d swallowed down the pain enough and managed to open his eyes again, he found himself staring at a stranger, who was in turn staring at Jack.
“I thought you were out with the others?” the man asked Jack, and Jack flashed him a disarming (though distracted) grin, saying, “Forgot something. My friend here and I’ll be out of your way just as soon as I find it again. You needn’t bother telling the others.”
The man glanced at Ianto, and started to protest, but Jack grabbed Ianto’s arm and hauled him down the nearest corridor. They rounded a few corners until the man’s voice had faded behind them, and then Jack was forced to stop as Ianto collapsed back against the wall, panting and shaking.
“Getting worse?” Jack asked, hanging back from reaching out to him again.
“Cold,” Ianto gasped simply.
At that Jack did reach out, and took hold of his hand. He swore, and pulled away again, but only to shrug out of his coat and put it around Ianto’s shoulders instead. Ianto was shivering too hard to be much help, but Jack managed to get his arms into the sleeves and fastened it up for him, pulling the belt tight and turning the collar up around Ianto’s neck.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he assured Ianto, cradling his face with one hand.
“You don’t really think that,” Ianto gasped, and, when Jack looked confused, he forced a smile and said, “You didn’t make any jokes about putting more clothes on me.”
Jack looked away, then said, “Ianto, what’s going on? How do you know about time-sickness? And how the hell have you got it?”
“I don’t know, I swear,” Ianto sighed, head falling back against the wall. “But it’s… I… Torchwood One. I felt it there. Before I knew Lisa. I…”
He trailed off, and they jumped again, causing him to give a cry of pain and double over, clutching at his sides. Jack gathered him into his arms, insistently asking, “What happened at Torchwood One? Ianto, what is this?”
“Where the hell did you come from?” someone else snapped, and they both looked at the woman pointing a gun at them.
“What year is it?” Jack asked her pleasantly. “It’s always easier to know where you’re coming from if you have some idea where you are.”
The woman glared, and said sharply, “You’re both under arrest. Get moving.”
“Whatever you say,” Jack said, with a shrug, as she faded out of view.
Ianto collapsed against him.
Swearing, Jack staggered backwards to the wall and slid down awkwardly, gathering Ianto to him and patting his face frantically.
“Ianto, come on, you’re not gonna die on me. You can’t do that to me.”
To his vast relief, Ianto stirred, groaning in pain and twisting in Jack’s hold. He forced his eyes open as much as he could, muttering, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t. I couldn’t help it.”
“Couldn’t help what?” Jack asked, but Ianto seemed barely able to hear him, rambling on, “They caught me. They forced me. Trapped me. I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not going to,” Jack told him firmly. “I promise. I’m gonna get you home somehow, Ianto, just you wait and see.”
Desperately, he dug through the pockets of the greatcoat, finally finding the tool he was looking for.
“This’ll help,” he told Ianto, with utterly false cheer. “The Doctor even has something like this. Gets him out of all sorts of trouble. Into plenty more, of course, but that’s not the point. Point is, I should be able to fix this.”
He reached around Ianto to bring the tool to his Vortex Manipulator, neglecting to mention that he’d tried to fix the device at least a dozen times before and after he’d met up with the Doctor again, with no success, and spent the next few minutes trying in vain to undo what the Doctor had done.
“Bastard,” he spat eventually, slumping back against the wall. “Fucking interfering know-it-all fucking bastard.”
Ianto didn’t move.
Jack shook him quickly, gasping, “Ianto, don’t you dare,” and was rewarded with a weak moan.
Then Ianto muttered, “Don’t kill me.”
“What?” Jack asked, and Ianto struggled to open his eyes and look up at him, repeating, “Don’t kill me. Jack. Please.”
Jack stared at him. After another few moments, Ianto closed his eyes and let his head fall against Jack’s chest, unresponsive when Jack shook him again, but shivering and occasionally jerking with a whimper of pain.
Helplessly, Jack held him close and tried to think of a way out. Nothing came to mind.
Ianto arched up with a sudden scream, and Jack was busy trying to soothe him again when he heard footsteps. Looking up, he watched the other man come to a startled halt. For a few seconds they stared at each other, and then Jack was asked, “What’s going on? I heard a scream.”
“You always would run towards the screams,” Jack said softly, looking away as Dai repeated, “I would? What do you mean?”
“I’m so sorry,” Jack told him, “I can’t…” He stopped, and then said instead, “I need your help. Is there anything in the archives that can get us to the future?”
Dai stared at him, with Ianto in his lap, wrapped up in his coat, and swallowed hard.
“You always ask that about everything we find,” he said. “You know we haven’t found anything that even has a possibility of being for time travel.”
Jack stared back for a few seconds, then said, “I forgot I did that. I’m sorry.”
“You forget us that quickly?” Dai asked, and Jack shook his head, protesting, “Dai, no. I loved you both. It’s been years for me and I haven’t forgotten you, and I never will. You have to believe me on that. But I need your help.”
Dai hesitated, then moved nearer and knelt in front of him, taking a look at Ianto.
“What caused it?” he asked Jack. “Poison? Some kind of device?”
“Time travel,” Jack told him. “Torchwood One did something to him so he wouldn’t be able to survive being out of his time.”
“Then there’s nothing I can do,” said Dai quietly.
“There has to be something,” Jack pleaded. “I can’t lose him too.”
“I’m sorry,” Dai told him, and Jack clutched Ianto closer, closing his eyes for a moment. Ianto convulsed again, with a far weaker cry of pain, and Jack looked up just as Dai faded out of view.
He stared at the empty corridor for a few seconds, then gritted his teeth and got up, heaving Ianto into his arms and starting down the passageway.
They jumped another four times in the next hour, and scared the life out of some of Jack’s old colleagues by fading into and out of sight suddenly. None of them could help him, and the further back they jumped the fewer items were available in the archives. Jack kept wondering what would have happened if he’d only been a little quicker back at the beginning. How much pain could he have saved Ianto? And what if he really had lost the only way of saving Ianto’s life? He’d never forgive himself.
Then they jumped again, and the man walking down the corridor towards them stopped in his tracks, staring.
“What year is it?” Jack asked him desperately, all too aware that Ianto had barely twitched with the last transition.
“1911,” the other man told him. “What the devil -”
But he was already fading out. Ianto didn’t even twitch this time.
Frantically, Jack laid him down and tried desperately to find a pulse.
“Who is he?”
He looked up swiftly, and found himself looking back.
“You can’t be here,” he gasped. “I don’t remember this. I would remember this.”
“31st October 1904,” his past self told him. “At the moment, the others are celebrating the fact that nothing’s happened this week. That help any?”
Jack shook his head slowly, then looked back down at Ianto, one hand still wrapped around his wrist.
“Who is he?” his other self asked again.
“He’s the man you leave the Doctor for,” Jack said softly, and heard the sharp intake of breath that provoked.
His past self came to kneel opposite him, on the other side of Ianto’s still body. He checked for a pulse himself, pulled back Ianto’s eyelids briefly, then glanced up at Jack.
“Time-sick?” he asked disbelievingly. “Christ, how far in the future were you?”
“That doesn’t matter. We just have to get back,” Jack told him, and was halfway through adding, “I just don’t know how,” when something occurred to him. He paused, staring at his other self, then dug the tool out of his pocket again, and said, “Give me your Vortex Manipulator.”
The other Jack pulled back a little, warily, and asked, “Why?”
“I think I can fix it,” Jack told him. “It’s only burnt out, so this should be able to sort that out no problem. It’s only because of what the Doctor did to mine that I can’t get it working again.”
“You never tried to fix yours before the Doctor got to it?” his past self asked him.
“Of course I did,” Jack said. “But if I’m right I wouldn’t have stood a chance anyway.”
When the other Jack still hesitated, he sighed, and took off his own Manipulator, throwing it over to him.
“Swap,” he said simply.
“Wait a minute,” the other Jack protested. “When does that thing come through the Rift? If I keep mine I can fix it as soon as I get it, cut decades off the waiting. You want me to sit through I don’t know how much more linear time just so you can get yourself back there after you left him? Why the hell should I?”
“Am I always this stupid?” Jack asked himself. “Listen, one day it’s gonna be you asking this, and you that left the Doctor, and you that’s in love with him, and I don’t know how much longer it’s gonna be before I jump so far back you’re not even gonna be here, so just shut up and do as I tell you.”
His past self stared for a moment, then whispered, “You’re in love with him?”
Jack paused, then said, “Yeah. Get used to it. In a hundred years or so it’ll be your turn.”
The other Jack took off his Manipulator and handed it over, careful to avoid touching his future self, and then sat back and stared at Ianto while Jack got to work on the Manipulator.
“Yes,” he hissed after a few moments, and fastened the wristband around Ianto’s arm, glancing back up at his past self and saying quickly, “Thank you. But I don’t remember this. Halloween 1904. I thought I got drunk.”
“Okay,” the other Jack sighed. “I get what you mean.”
“Wish me luck,” Jack said, with a grin, and pushed the button.
~*~
The first thing Ianto saw when he opened his eyes was Owen.
“That’s new,” he said weakly, and Owen asked, “What? Something wrong with your eyes? Pain anywhere? Missing memory? Anything like that? What’s new?”
“Oh no,” Ianto assured him. “I’m fine. It’s just good to see you, that’s all.”
There was a pause while Owen processed that, then realised he’d been insulted and turned away with a snort of disgust, raising one hand to his headset and saying, “Jack, he’s awake and there’s nothing wrong with him, but there bloody well will be soon unless I can go off duty now.”
Judging from the way he then proceeded to declare, “Thank Christ for that,” and stormed out of the room, Ianto guessed Jack had given him permission to leave.
Only a few moments later, Jack entered the room, making his way over to the chair by the bed. He sat down, watching Ianto, but didn’t say anything. In turn, Ianto found himself an interesting section of ceiling to stare at until the silence became unbearable.
“Well?” he asked, and Jack shot back, “Well what?”
“What are you going to do with me?” Ianto asked quietly.
Jack laughed slightly, and told him, “You should know better than to give me lines like that.”
“Please, Jack,” Ianto said, but went no further. There was silence again for a little while.
“Apparently we missed about six weeks,” Jack said idly at last. “The others were going frantic without us.”
Ianto said nothing.
“They got invaded on Halloween,” Jack continued, sitting back in his chair and examining the ceiling for himself. “Those aliens with the stone circles came through to visit. Tosh says they were trying to get me back. Nice to know I’m so much in demand. And they had an alien virus in the water supply the other week. A few devices nearly blew up Cardiff. Myfanwy escaped for a few days.”
Ianto turned his attention to the wall instead of the ceiling.
“Owen was bitching about the filing, by the way,” Jack said. “No doubt the archives aren’t entirely safe any more. And Tosh has changed the codes for the armoury to stop Gwen from losing her temper and shooting Owen, so she says. You set a bad example there. I should really be angry with you about that.”
“Stop it,” Ianto said quietly. “If you’re going to retcon me, just get on with it.”
“Why do you think I’m going to retcon you?” Jack asked, and Ianto turned to look at him at last.
“Are you telling me you haven’t figured it out?”
Jack sighed, and said, “I’m assuming you mean the fact that you’re a Time Agent. Does it change anything?”
“It changes everything,” Ianto told him. “Everything I thought I knew was a lie.”
“But are you going to try and kill all of us, sabotage every mission and snatch me back to the fifty-first century?” Jack asked casually.
“Of course not,” Ianto snapped, struggling to sit up and glare at him. “How can you think that of me?”
“I don’t,” Jack told him. “But that’s about the only thing that could persuade me to retcon you.”
Ianto stared, then looked away again, saying, “But I’ve betrayed you again. I -”
“You said yourself you didn’t know,” Jack pointed out. “How have you betrayed me? Were you sent to bring me back to the Agency?”
“I think I’m before your time,” Ianto admitted. “My Vortex Manipulator was practically the length of my arm and it didn’t do nearly as much as yours does. That and it kept breaking.”
“Tell me about it,” Jack laughed. “Good for one emergency only.”
Ianto smiled slightly, and Jack leaned forward, hands clasped in front of him.
“So what was your mission?” he asked. “And how come nobody’s been sent to pick you up?”
Ianto hesitated for a few long moments, then said, “I was meant to destroy Torchwood One. They caught me first, but that seems to have led to the Battle. I think the Agency may have set me up.”
“Join the club,” Jack muttered, and then said decisively, “So you won’t be going back.”
“I can’t,” Ianto reminded him. “I’ll die if I try to go home.”
“So stay,” Jack said, reaching out to take hold of Ianto’s hand. “I kinda like having you around anyway.”
Ianto paused, and then smiled.
“I kind of like being here,” he admitted, and was rewarded by a more-than-fond smile in return. Almost embarrassed, Ianto looked away again, then frowned and glanced back.
“What was that you said about Owen and the archives?”