Fic: Killing Me Softly [Torchwood] Ianto/Jack (R)
Title: Killing Me Softly
Author: flatlanddan
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Spoilers: Season One
Rating: R (for a bit of swearing)
Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own Torchwood or any of the characters. Equally as sad is the fact that I don't make any money doing this. Such is life.
Notes: This has been a labour for the last six months. Rather depressing considering that it's not exactly an epic ;) Thanks to my cheerleader randommagic who's put up with this fic for months and to lonelybrit for going above and beyond in the betaing bit. The first rum and cokes are on my girls! Extra thanks to unfeathered for being a grammar guru! Now we even more grammar edits thanks to Anon!
The letters showed up in a plastic Royal Mail bag. The bag itself was between a flyer for a new Indian restaurant, the local rag and an envelope addressed to Jack from the DMV (probably about parking fines).
He recognised the handwriting instantly. The spidery nature of it, the way the letter S almost took on a life of its own, the angle slightly to the right that made it look like it was written with a fountain pen even if it hadn't been. Each envelope was different and there seemed no consistency with the pen used. But they were all addressed to him.
Unsurprisingly, Torchwood had set rules for what to do if you received mail from a missing person. Ianto Jones ignored them all. The most senior member of staff was to read them but in the absence of Jack, Ianto was about two silent and very private nervous breakdowns away from suggesting he leave and they phone him when they had decided that. Besides, Jack would have addressed them to Torchwood if he had wanted everyone to read them. Sandwiched between his desk and the wall he carefully opened the outer bag and, because he wasn't entirely against at least trying to do this right, read the enclosed letter from the poster master.
To: Ianto Jones (Torchwood)
Re: Enclosed letters
Dear Sir,
Please find enclosed twenty (20) letters that recently showed up in our office. Although we cannot identify the postage used to mail them, as per our agreement of June 27th, 2006 I have debited the postage from the Torchwood account (#144762) in the amount of £22.65.
We've never heard of "The Master's Mail" and can't find a record of it on our system. If thisis someone you regularly correspond with, it would be in your best interest to ask them to use a recognised postage system as we have had to add a handling fee to this transaction.
Respectfully,
Andrew Brownfield
Royal Mail Cardiff
It all seemed so familiar in his mind. The Master's Mail meant nothing to him. Yet, as he flicked through the letters looking at the postmarks, starting a week from now and to near enough a year in the future it meant something. He gently tore the end of the first letter and pulled out the single sheet inside.
--
The sound of Gwen screaming Jack’s name bounced down the hall to the archives less then a week later. He didn't have to go upstairs to picture the scene. Gwen and Tosh would have their arms around him and he'd probably be kissing heads and wiping away tears. Owen would have some sort of a semi-smug smile on his face. In a couple of minutes, Jack would ask why they had a Welcome Back Jack ice cream cake and possibly where his receptionist was. Ianto didn't want to be around for any of the questions. For once, someone else could deal with the mess. At least to start with.
He had told them, in the end, about the letters. Shown them a few pages and answered some questions. By silent consensus they didn't pry too much and he was grateful to them for that. He had spent most of his time trying to figure out the hidden meaning on the pages. That Jack was living a different time line was obvious. The Master, The Doctor, Martha Jones. Ianto, promise me you'll believe. Promise you'll believe. He wasn't sure what to believe in anymore.
Gwen had sent an e-mail around suggesting the ice cream cake a little less then a week before and had taken the complete lack of response from him that it would be ok. It was. He knew enough not to begrudge Jack any joy that he could get out of life.
He mixed the Retcon with diet coke a scant two days before Jack made his return. The first rule of pre-mixing was to make sure it was with something you didn't drink and aspartame gave him a headache. The second rule was to make sure you did enough to take away all the memories. The third was to make sure you made enough to take anyone with you who might want to come. It had been tempting to mix both to cover a year’s worth of memories. He had been offered Retcon twice before, once after Canary Warf and once by Jack himself after the night Lisa’s body had died. He rationalized that if the pain hadn’t been bad enough to do it then, it wasn’t bad enough to do it now. Instead he mixed enough for a year and enough for two weeks. Every night before he went back to his flat he carefully adjusted the mixture .
It surprised him that his first reaction to Jack being back wasn’t relief that the man had somehow made his way back (death not really being an option for Jack), but more that the hellish two weeks without an official head was over. Torchwood Three had ground to a halt while Gwen searched for any possible clues in the Hub, her eyes and hands trailing over every metre in desperation. Owen lurked in the archives hell-bent that the solution was there, despite Ianto’s assurances that every file on The Doctor had been found and put on his desk. To say the two of them fought for control was an understatement. The situation would come to a head every day, predictably in the mid afternoon just before coffee, when both of them would be starved for stimulants to keep them going.
It was Tosh who found the solution, in the end. He had come in one morning the week before to find an old filter coffee machine.
“I’ve set it on a timer,” she had told him after watching him stare at it for a full minute.
“Are my coffee skills slipping?” he replied in a desperate attempt to find some humour in the day.
“No, Ianto. I just thought it would be best if we went out for coffee.” Ianto had smiled, and she had smiled back. From then on between they went to a little outdoor café just around the corner every day and things had gotten better. He had felt guilty at first, for both abandoning his co-workers to each other and missing the chance of being there when Jack returned. But the talking helped take his mind off everything else and for a few hours every day he could almost believe it was going to be ok.
The footsteps came down the hall, jolting him back to the present. They moved far softer than he remembered. The door to the archive he was working in was open so he had no need to draw attention to himself. He had pictured the moment he would turn around and see Jack there since the moment Jack had left. Truthfully, he had pictured about a hundred different versions of it.
"I hear you got mail." Jack's voice was as soft as his footsteps.
"A few letters, sir." And now that he had the chance he couldn't bring himself to turn around. The paperwork in his hands distracted him.
"Ianto."
"Sir."
"Are you planning on turning around, or would you rather I went away?" There was no anger in Jack's voice. Just a vague acceptance that he knew the answer. Ianto felt himself deflate.
"You aren't missing an arm or anything?" He heard the sigh move across the room and felt two very real arms circle around his shoulders. Suddenly it was all real, all very painfully real and the only two things that reassured him were the arms around him and the knowledge that he could make all the memories go away. He turned around, avoiding the eyes and burrowing his face between Jack's neck and the greatcoat. "You shouldn't have…" he began and Jack shushed him.
"We can talk about it later."
"We should…"
"Talk about it later." Ianto had to smile at that. He risked looking up and caught Jack with his eyes closed. The rocking was barely perceptible, but as Ianto leaned into the exposed neck he knew. Everything changes, and neither of them were ready.
---
Two weeks later Ianto was reduced to sending an e-mail to Jack.
To: Captain
From: Teaboy
Re: Definitions of Late
Late- -adjective
1 occurring, coming, or being after the usual or proper time: late frosts; a late spring; a late conversation; a late explanation.
We need to talk.
-I
The thing was, Jack hadn't even been avoiding him. They had even spent time alone together. But every time Ianto had pushed for the conversation Jack had simply said later, his tone practically pleading. They had gone out as a group often, Jack dragging them to pubs, markets, bowling alleys and restaurants. He threw himself back into work, back into them. No problem was too petty or small for him to deal with except for the fact that Ianto had twenty letters in a box at his flat that were from a future too horrible to Ianto to dream. He watched Jack's reply come into his mail box, a bit too quick for it to be an actual answer.
To: Teaboy
From: Captain
Re: Re: Definitions of Late
10 pm. Roof. Bring your bottles of diet coke.
---
They were both early, out of habit more then anything else. Ianto prided himself in being the second there although he suspected Jack of lurking up on the roof for most of the evening. Jack was sitting on the edge, his eyes following bits of Cardiff traffic and Ianto settled in beside him without a word.
"I wasn't going to come back."
"I know sir." Jack looked at him, startled."The rucksack missing was a dead give away." Jack snorted and looked back towards the centre of town.
"I thought I'd travelled down the road I was heading on before, that I knew all the steps to the dance. But the dance has changed. There are new partners now and I think they felt the same as I did."
"Did you bring me up here to ask me to dance?"
"No. No, I brought you up here because I owe you that much. Ask your questions Ianto and then you can decide what to do with that retcon."
"If everything from that year is gone then how do these letters exist?"
"They shouldn't. Everything in that year should have been erased. The only thing I can think of is that they must have been at ground zero when everything went back. Someone must have mailed them afterwards."
"Do you expect me to believe they just let you write letters?" For a minute, Ianto thought he would never get an answer. He knew Jack had been chained, thought he had been tortured, assumed he hadn't seen sunlight for a year that would never exist for him. The idea that he had just been given pen and paper and told to write to whomever he wanted was impossible.
"The guards liked killing things. I didn't mind using that to my advantage."
Ianto paled. "You let them kill you in exchange for writing me letters?"
"It was a small price."
"You didn't even know if I would get them, or if I was alive, or…"
"You were alive." The harshness of Jack's interruption startled him. "I saw you, once, on the security monitors."
"Is that when you stopped writing?"
"There wasn't any point after that." The silence that lingered after Jack's reply was heartbreaking. "I wrote to you because I thought the most selfish thing I had done for a long time was to leave you without an explanation to go gallivanting around the universe. My actions helped the cause that year to happen, caused everyone so much pain and I started to think that maybe the biggest mistake I'd made was to take what my life was before I left for granted. I took it all for granted. Immortality, coffee, warm blankets, fresh air. You. And where did it get me? Locked up in the hull of a ship getting stabbed so I could write you a letter and try to keep everything going so there was a chance that none if it would happen."
"Do you want to forget?" Ianto asked softly. Jack reached over and grabbed his hand, nothing tentative in his motions.
"Why would I want to forget something that makes me realise how good I have it now? No, you're welcome to retcon the whole thing away if you want but I need to remember."
"I never much liked the taste of retcon myself, sir."
"It doesn't taste like anything."
Ianto shook his head and shimmied closer to Jack. "Vanilla. That's why it works best in cola, ales and puddings. They can hide the flavour." Jack laughed, one short bark into the night sky and the pigeons that been wandering on the ledge across from them flew away.
"So, we've established we're not going to retcon ourselves. Where does that leave us then?"
"With me still having a few questions that need answering, sir."
"Oh Ianto," Jack sighed. "I've learned that some questions don't need answering."
"But this one needs asking, at least. Why was it so important that you write me those letters? I looked for the clues, I looked for the meaning, I looked for weeks for anything." Jack smiled sadly and pulled Ianto in closer. It was a crisp autumn night and Jack knew Ianto chose his suits for looks rather then warmth.
"If you don't know the answer, then I should have mailed another letter."
--
Normality was an elusive thing at Torchwood Three, but the month following Jack's return was almost quiet. The highlight was when someone reported that the Loch Ness monster was swimming in the river near Carmarthen. It turned out to be a float that had become un-tied, but that hadn't stopped Owen and Jack from pumping it full of bullets when it "attacked" them (or the rest of the team taking the piss out of them). It wasn't difficult, between him and Jack, it was just different.
"Is it because he's happier?" Tosh asked one afternoon as they sat together at their café on the boardwalk, nursing cappuccinos. The afternoons the two of them spent out of the Hub had continued, as much as it was practical, though now they could both usually be found with laptops.
"No, he deserves that." Ianto fixed his eyes glumly on the screen in front of him.
"Is it because you feel like you've missed a part of his life?" Ianto snorted and carefully put a cube into his coffee, watching as it slowly fell through the crust of cinnamon he was so fond of.
"I'm a blip in his life. One little tiny blip. I've known that since we started this. That he doesn't sleep with anyone else on this planet at during this particular stage of our relationship is the most fidelity I can expect."
"You're sure of that, are you?" she replied, leaning back with small smile on her face. Ianto narrowed his eyes.
"You know something I don't."
"I suspect something that you probably haven't even thought of yet."
"And what's that."
"I think he loves you."
Ianto waited patiently for the punch line of the joke or for her to burst into giggles. Tosh's gaze didn't waver. "I think that during that year, he was willing to love anything that wasn't a part of that reality."
Tosh shrugged. "If you aren't willing to accept that he can change then it's your loss Ianto."
“But what if he hasn’t? What if this is just some guilt driven sympathy fucking that’s going to last forever because he won’t forgive himself?”
Tosh actually laughed then.
“If you really thought that you wouldn't be with him. The problem isn’t with Jack. You like that he’s happier, you don’t mind that he didn’t retcon himself and you seem to at least still have feelings for him otherwise we’d be talking about that sighting near Tenby. The problem is with you, Ianto.”
“So what am I supposed to do about it? I’m stuck at this point until I get a sign from above. ”
“I very much doubt that any aliens care about what you and Jack get up to.” Tosh muttered, her gaze returning to the readouts she was analyzing.
“I’m not going to get a sign, am I.” Ianto replied while carefully skimmed the top of his cappuccino, removing all the cinnamon before putting the spoon in his mouth.
“No, I think you will. It just won’t be a sign from above.”
--
The letter was between a Western Powers bill and a request to drop off donations for a car boot sale at the local church. There was no postage on it.
He recognised the handwriting instantly.
It was early, no one else about, so he allowed himself to sit on the desk and perch his coffee on top of the monitor. He opened it carefully, pulling out the one sheet of paper and wondering what exactly was so important that Jack had to write down and mail.
You know, I think I love you.
-J
Ianto stared at the words for a long moment, and carefully re-read them. Then, very neatly, he folded the letter in half and put it in his jacket pocket. Three months ago he would have laughed at the idea of Jack even knowing the definition of love. Three days ago he was tempted to do the same thing in Tosh's face when she suggested it. He took another sip of coffee and smiled before starting to head downstairs. Today he wasn't going to turn the tourist information sign to open. He wasn’t going to take his laptop with him and pretend to do work at the cafe, he was going to bring a newspaper instead. He wasn’t going to take out that letter again to reread it, he didn’t need to. Everything had changed, and if he accepted that then they might be ready.
Author: flatlanddan
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Spoilers: Season One
Rating: R (for a bit of swearing)
Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own Torchwood or any of the characters. Equally as sad is the fact that I don't make any money doing this. Such is life.
Notes: This has been a labour for the last six months. Rather depressing considering that it's not exactly an epic ;) Thanks to my cheerleader randommagic who's put up with this fic for months and to lonelybrit for going above and beyond in the betaing bit. The first rum and cokes are on my girls! Extra thanks to unfeathered for being a grammar guru! Now we even more grammar edits thanks to Anon!
The letters showed up in a plastic Royal Mail bag. The bag itself was between a flyer for a new Indian restaurant, the local rag and an envelope addressed to Jack from the DMV (probably about parking fines).
He recognised the handwriting instantly. The spidery nature of it, the way the letter S almost took on a life of its own, the angle slightly to the right that made it look like it was written with a fountain pen even if it hadn't been. Each envelope was different and there seemed no consistency with the pen used. But they were all addressed to him.
Unsurprisingly, Torchwood had set rules for what to do if you received mail from a missing person. Ianto Jones ignored them all. The most senior member of staff was to read them but in the absence of Jack, Ianto was about two silent and very private nervous breakdowns away from suggesting he leave and they phone him when they had decided that. Besides, Jack would have addressed them to Torchwood if he had wanted everyone to read them. Sandwiched between his desk and the wall he carefully opened the outer bag and, because he wasn't entirely against at least trying to do this right, read the enclosed letter from the poster master.
To: Ianto Jones (Torchwood)
Re: Enclosed letters
Dear Sir,
Please find enclosed twenty (20) letters that recently showed up in our office. Although we cannot identify the postage used to mail them, as per our agreement of June 27th, 2006 I have debited the postage from the Torchwood account (#144762) in the amount of £22.65.
We've never heard of "The Master's Mail" and can't find a record of it on our system. If thisis someone you regularly correspond with, it would be in your best interest to ask them to use a recognised postage system as we have had to add a handling fee to this transaction.
Respectfully,
Andrew Brownfield
Royal Mail Cardiff
It all seemed so familiar in his mind. The Master's Mail meant nothing to him. Yet, as he flicked through the letters looking at the postmarks, starting a week from now and to near enough a year in the future it meant something. He gently tore the end of the first letter and pulled out the single sheet inside.
--
The sound of Gwen screaming Jack’s name bounced down the hall to the archives less then a week later. He didn't have to go upstairs to picture the scene. Gwen and Tosh would have their arms around him and he'd probably be kissing heads and wiping away tears. Owen would have some sort of a semi-smug smile on his face. In a couple of minutes, Jack would ask why they had a Welcome Back Jack ice cream cake and possibly where his receptionist was. Ianto didn't want to be around for any of the questions. For once, someone else could deal with the mess. At least to start with.
He had told them, in the end, about the letters. Shown them a few pages and answered some questions. By silent consensus they didn't pry too much and he was grateful to them for that. He had spent most of his time trying to figure out the hidden meaning on the pages. That Jack was living a different time line was obvious. The Master, The Doctor, Martha Jones. Ianto, promise me you'll believe. Promise you'll believe. He wasn't sure what to believe in anymore.
Gwen had sent an e-mail around suggesting the ice cream cake a little less then a week before and had taken the complete lack of response from him that it would be ok. It was. He knew enough not to begrudge Jack any joy that he could get out of life.
He mixed the Retcon with diet coke a scant two days before Jack made his return. The first rule of pre-mixing was to make sure it was with something you didn't drink and aspartame gave him a headache. The second rule was to make sure you did enough to take away all the memories. The third was to make sure you made enough to take anyone with you who might want to come. It had been tempting to mix both to cover a year’s worth of memories. He had been offered Retcon twice before, once after Canary Warf and once by Jack himself after the night Lisa’s body had died. He rationalized that if the pain hadn’t been bad enough to do it then, it wasn’t bad enough to do it now. Instead he mixed enough for a year and enough for two weeks. Every night before he went back to his flat he carefully adjusted the mixture .
It surprised him that his first reaction to Jack being back wasn’t relief that the man had somehow made his way back (death not really being an option for Jack), but more that the hellish two weeks without an official head was over. Torchwood Three had ground to a halt while Gwen searched for any possible clues in the Hub, her eyes and hands trailing over every metre in desperation. Owen lurked in the archives hell-bent that the solution was there, despite Ianto’s assurances that every file on The Doctor had been found and put on his desk. To say the two of them fought for control was an understatement. The situation would come to a head every day, predictably in the mid afternoon just before coffee, when both of them would be starved for stimulants to keep them going.
It was Tosh who found the solution, in the end. He had come in one morning the week before to find an old filter coffee machine.
“I’ve set it on a timer,” she had told him after watching him stare at it for a full minute.
“Are my coffee skills slipping?” he replied in a desperate attempt to find some humour in the day.
“No, Ianto. I just thought it would be best if we went out for coffee.” Ianto had smiled, and she had smiled back. From then on between they went to a little outdoor café just around the corner every day and things had gotten better. He had felt guilty at first, for both abandoning his co-workers to each other and missing the chance of being there when Jack returned. But the talking helped take his mind off everything else and for a few hours every day he could almost believe it was going to be ok.
The footsteps came down the hall, jolting him back to the present. They moved far softer than he remembered. The door to the archive he was working in was open so he had no need to draw attention to himself. He had pictured the moment he would turn around and see Jack there since the moment Jack had left. Truthfully, he had pictured about a hundred different versions of it.
"I hear you got mail." Jack's voice was as soft as his footsteps.
"A few letters, sir." And now that he had the chance he couldn't bring himself to turn around. The paperwork in his hands distracted him.
"Ianto."
"Sir."
"Are you planning on turning around, or would you rather I went away?" There was no anger in Jack's voice. Just a vague acceptance that he knew the answer. Ianto felt himself deflate.
"You aren't missing an arm or anything?" He heard the sigh move across the room and felt two very real arms circle around his shoulders. Suddenly it was all real, all very painfully real and the only two things that reassured him were the arms around him and the knowledge that he could make all the memories go away. He turned around, avoiding the eyes and burrowing his face between Jack's neck and the greatcoat. "You shouldn't have…" he began and Jack shushed him.
"We can talk about it later."
"We should…"
"Talk about it later." Ianto had to smile at that. He risked looking up and caught Jack with his eyes closed. The rocking was barely perceptible, but as Ianto leaned into the exposed neck he knew. Everything changes, and neither of them were ready.
---
Two weeks later Ianto was reduced to sending an e-mail to Jack.
To: Captain
From: Teaboy
Re: Definitions of Late
Late- -adjective
1 occurring, coming, or being after the usual or proper time: late frosts; a late spring; a late conversation; a late explanation.
We need to talk.
-I
The thing was, Jack hadn't even been avoiding him. They had even spent time alone together. But every time Ianto had pushed for the conversation Jack had simply said later, his tone practically pleading. They had gone out as a group often, Jack dragging them to pubs, markets, bowling alleys and restaurants. He threw himself back into work, back into them. No problem was too petty or small for him to deal with except for the fact that Ianto had twenty letters in a box at his flat that were from a future too horrible to Ianto to dream. He watched Jack's reply come into his mail box, a bit too quick for it to be an actual answer.
To: Teaboy
From: Captain
Re: Re: Definitions of Late
10 pm. Roof. Bring your bottles of diet coke.
---
They were both early, out of habit more then anything else. Ianto prided himself in being the second there although he suspected Jack of lurking up on the roof for most of the evening. Jack was sitting on the edge, his eyes following bits of Cardiff traffic and Ianto settled in beside him without a word.
"I wasn't going to come back."
"I know sir." Jack looked at him, startled."The rucksack missing was a dead give away." Jack snorted and looked back towards the centre of town.
"I thought I'd travelled down the road I was heading on before, that I knew all the steps to the dance. But the dance has changed. There are new partners now and I think they felt the same as I did."
"Did you bring me up here to ask me to dance?"
"No. No, I brought you up here because I owe you that much. Ask your questions Ianto and then you can decide what to do with that retcon."
"If everything from that year is gone then how do these letters exist?"
"They shouldn't. Everything in that year should have been erased. The only thing I can think of is that they must have been at ground zero when everything went back. Someone must have mailed them afterwards."
"Do you expect me to believe they just let you write letters?" For a minute, Ianto thought he would never get an answer. He knew Jack had been chained, thought he had been tortured, assumed he hadn't seen sunlight for a year that would never exist for him. The idea that he had just been given pen and paper and told to write to whomever he wanted was impossible.
"The guards liked killing things. I didn't mind using that to my advantage."
Ianto paled. "You let them kill you in exchange for writing me letters?"
"It was a small price."
"You didn't even know if I would get them, or if I was alive, or…"
"You were alive." The harshness of Jack's interruption startled him. "I saw you, once, on the security monitors."
"Is that when you stopped writing?"
"There wasn't any point after that." The silence that lingered after Jack's reply was heartbreaking. "I wrote to you because I thought the most selfish thing I had done for a long time was to leave you without an explanation to go gallivanting around the universe. My actions helped the cause that year to happen, caused everyone so much pain and I started to think that maybe the biggest mistake I'd made was to take what my life was before I left for granted. I took it all for granted. Immortality, coffee, warm blankets, fresh air. You. And where did it get me? Locked up in the hull of a ship getting stabbed so I could write you a letter and try to keep everything going so there was a chance that none if it would happen."
"Do you want to forget?" Ianto asked softly. Jack reached over and grabbed his hand, nothing tentative in his motions.
"Why would I want to forget something that makes me realise how good I have it now? No, you're welcome to retcon the whole thing away if you want but I need to remember."
"I never much liked the taste of retcon myself, sir."
"It doesn't taste like anything."
Ianto shook his head and shimmied closer to Jack. "Vanilla. That's why it works best in cola, ales and puddings. They can hide the flavour." Jack laughed, one short bark into the night sky and the pigeons that been wandering on the ledge across from them flew away.
"So, we've established we're not going to retcon ourselves. Where does that leave us then?"
"With me still having a few questions that need answering, sir."
"Oh Ianto," Jack sighed. "I've learned that some questions don't need answering."
"But this one needs asking, at least. Why was it so important that you write me those letters? I looked for the clues, I looked for the meaning, I looked for weeks for anything." Jack smiled sadly and pulled Ianto in closer. It was a crisp autumn night and Jack knew Ianto chose his suits for looks rather then warmth.
"If you don't know the answer, then I should have mailed another letter."
--
Normality was an elusive thing at Torchwood Three, but the month following Jack's return was almost quiet. The highlight was when someone reported that the Loch Ness monster was swimming in the river near Carmarthen. It turned out to be a float that had become un-tied, but that hadn't stopped Owen and Jack from pumping it full of bullets when it "attacked" them (or the rest of the team taking the piss out of them). It wasn't difficult, between him and Jack, it was just different.
"Is it because he's happier?" Tosh asked one afternoon as they sat together at their café on the boardwalk, nursing cappuccinos. The afternoons the two of them spent out of the Hub had continued, as much as it was practical, though now they could both usually be found with laptops.
"No, he deserves that." Ianto fixed his eyes glumly on the screen in front of him.
"Is it because you feel like you've missed a part of his life?" Ianto snorted and carefully put a cube into his coffee, watching as it slowly fell through the crust of cinnamon he was so fond of.
"I'm a blip in his life. One little tiny blip. I've known that since we started this. That he doesn't sleep with anyone else on this planet at during this particular stage of our relationship is the most fidelity I can expect."
"You're sure of that, are you?" she replied, leaning back with small smile on her face. Ianto narrowed his eyes.
"You know something I don't."
"I suspect something that you probably haven't even thought of yet."
"And what's that."
"I think he loves you."
Ianto waited patiently for the punch line of the joke or for her to burst into giggles. Tosh's gaze didn't waver. "I think that during that year, he was willing to love anything that wasn't a part of that reality."
Tosh shrugged. "If you aren't willing to accept that he can change then it's your loss Ianto."
“But what if he hasn’t? What if this is just some guilt driven sympathy fucking that’s going to last forever because he won’t forgive himself?”
Tosh actually laughed then.
“If you really thought that you wouldn't be with him. The problem isn’t with Jack. You like that he’s happier, you don’t mind that he didn’t retcon himself and you seem to at least still have feelings for him otherwise we’d be talking about that sighting near Tenby. The problem is with you, Ianto.”
“So what am I supposed to do about it? I’m stuck at this point until I get a sign from above. ”
“I very much doubt that any aliens care about what you and Jack get up to.” Tosh muttered, her gaze returning to the readouts she was analyzing.
“I’m not going to get a sign, am I.” Ianto replied while carefully skimmed the top of his cappuccino, removing all the cinnamon before putting the spoon in his mouth.
“No, I think you will. It just won’t be a sign from above.”
--
The letter was between a Western Powers bill and a request to drop off donations for a car boot sale at the local church. There was no postage on it.
He recognised the handwriting instantly.
It was early, no one else about, so he allowed himself to sit on the desk and perch his coffee on top of the monitor. He opened it carefully, pulling out the one sheet of paper and wondering what exactly was so important that Jack had to write down and mail.
You know, I think I love you.
-J
Ianto stared at the words for a long moment, and carefully re-read them. Then, very neatly, he folded the letter in half and put it in his jacket pocket. Three months ago he would have laughed at the idea of Jack even knowing the definition of love. Three days ago he was tempted to do the same thing in Tosh's face when she suggested it. He took another sip of coffee and smiled before starting to head downstairs. Today he wasn't going to turn the tourist information sign to open. He wasn’t going to take his laptop with him and pretend to do work at the cafe, he was going to bring a newspaper instead. He wasn’t going to take out that letter again to reread it, he didn’t need to. Everything had changed, and if he accepted that then they might be ready.