[fic] torchwood - a vision too removed to mention - pg13 - ianto gen
WHOA. Look at me, accidentally writing a 14k word story two days before d*con!
Title: A Vision Too Removed To Mention
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Ianto-centric with Jack/Ianto and Ianto+Gwen friendship
Rating: PG13
Length: ~14000
Summary: In which Ianto is stuck in a time loop that feels more like hell.
Notes: In exchange for getting me a fez for d*con, dremiel requested a fic based on the Iron and Wine song "The Trapeze Swinger." It... sort of got away from me. So this is for her, because I heart her. SO MUCH THANKS to solsticezero, who is a beta rockstar, as always. (I should also thank mcwonthelottery for not suffocating me, making too much fun of me, or drinking all the gin.)
***
On the eighth loop, Ianto decides to take a break.
He's been working for Torchwood since he was nineteen years old. He's lived through Canary Wharf and Lisa's death and Jack's execution and disappearance. He thought he could live through anything, but he underestimated how efficient Torchwood could be at breaking his heart.
He doesn't go to Torchwood the morning of the eighth loop. He goes to a coffee shop instead. He orders a coffee and a breakfast sandwich and he sits staring out the window at the bustling streets, at the morning shoppers, at the suits on their way to work. He swallows past the sharp ache in his chest, the sudden painful realization that he's not a part of that world, that he's not a part of this world at all, that if Torchwood won't have him and the world at large won't have him, he's truly an outsider, a distant ghost.
He swallows the pain with a mouthful of tasteless eggs and soggy bacon.
He orders coffees all day and occupies the same corner table. He doesn't even make a show of reading or working--it's no use when no one will remember his odd behavior the next morning. He just rests his head on the table and tries to block out the world, stares out the windows at the people walking by, tries to desensitize himself to the despair of having Jack and Gwen, Tosh and Owen look straight through him as if he's not there at all.
He doesn't plan on seeing Torchwood at all for this loop, but of course they ruin his plans by coming into the coffee shop around supper, looking worn out and windswept and beautiful. The four of them gather around a table on the other side of the shop. Ianto knows he should leave for his own sake, but instead he stays and watches them, watches the way they laugh together and smile at each other and tries to remember if his Torchwood ever does those things. He scours his brain for the last time he saw Tosh smile like that, for the last time he saw Owen smile at all, but he can't come up with anything and he's not sure if that's out of panic or because those moments don't exist in his Torchwood.
Maybe they're better off without him.
It takes Jack twenty minutes to acknowledge his staring. He knows he should leave, then, but Jack gets to his feet and Ianto lets himself hope, for just a moment, that he's somehow fixed it, that Jack is coming to invite him over to the table, to ask where he's been.
"Do I know you?" Jack asks.
No, you don't. Sorry to trouble you. I was just staring into space.
He should say that. This was going to be his Torchwood-free loop. This was going to be the loop that didn't end with him in a cell or retconed or in the mindprobe or dead.
"Yes," he says, so quietly he doesn't know if Jack can hear it. "Yes, you know me. You hired me after Canary Wharf. I came from London and begged you for a job but you wouldn't give me one until I found you a pteranodon and helped you catch it. I've worked for you for almost two years, general support at first, archives and admin and coffee and cleaning up, but then as a field agent, as your assistant, and--"
Jack's eyes are cold and calculating and surprised. "I think you've got the wrong--"
Ianto keeps talking, his voice louder, tinged just slightly with the hysteria he's trying to keep clamped down. "We were shagging, too, at first and then it was something more, something we didn't have a name for, which was my fault, which is my fault because I'm bloody awful at these things, but you put up with it, you indulged me because you understood and because you knew, even if I didn't say it, that I loved you, and I don't know what this is, Jack, I touched something, I'm in some sort of time loop and none of the team remembers--"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Jack says sharply, harshly, and when Ianto tries to grab his wrist, he pulls it back. "You've got the wrong guy, kid." The tone is sharp in a way that Ianto hadn't heard in months before this catastrophe. It makes something slick and wet get stuck in Ianto's throat. He's too tired to be rational, too tired to be sensible, and he knows that panic isn't going to get him anywhere, but, dammit, this was supposed to be his loop off.
"You have to remember, Jack, please," Ianto begs, his voice nothing more than a whisper, each word trembling more than he'd like. "Jack, please. Please remember."
Jack's eyes move to the side, almost imperceptibly, to where the team has gotten to their feet.
Ianto knows this is another failure.
"I'm sorry," he says, stepping back and away from Jack. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
He leaves quickly, even as Jack shouts after him, probably trying to figure out a way to administer a retcon pill, if not pull him in for questioning. I'm sorry, please, I'm sorry runs through Ianto's mind on repeat. He's sorry he's not smart enough, not quick enough, not important enough to fix this. He's sorry he's gotten them into this mess. He's sorry they'll be stuck like this forever, trapped in a time loop because he doesn't have the strength to discover the solution.
He lets himself think those things over and over, right up until he reaches the door of his flat. When he's inside, he presses his back against the wood and breathes in and out until his heart stops racing, until his lungs stop burning, until he no longer feels like he wants to scream and scream and scream.
Ianto looks at his watch. There are six hours left until the loop resets itself. Six hours until his next attempt to fix things.
Each loop starts with him feeling as rested and energized as he did on that first morning, but he buries himself under his duvet anyway, praying that this time, when he wakes up, Jack will be beside him and it will all have been a bad dream.
***
Ianto knows better than anyone why the precautions for handling unknown artifacts are in effect. He's read dozens, hundreds of reports in the archives about what happens to people who misuse or mishandle alien or future tech. He's the one who updated the protocols a year ago to make them safer. He's not the one who needed this lesson.
But the universe has a warped sense of humor and he should have known that. He should have known, when the moldy, ancient cardboard box in his arms started to crumble, that it would have been safer to let it fall and run from the room. He should have known not to try and grab anything, not with his bare hands, but his reflexes kicked in and his fingers closed around the smooth oblong object before it could hit the floor.
It started flashing immediately. He ran for his desk, still clutching it, and in the fifteen seconds it took him to reach his abandoned comm unit, the flashing stopped and the world went black.
When he woke up in his bed, he assumed he'd been knocked out and Jack had taken him home. It wasn't until he was washing his face to get ready that he noticed Jack's toothbrush and styling wax were no longer on his sink. Curiously, he wandered back into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe. Jack's clothes were missing, too.
The panic started low in his belly but built swiftly as he tore through his apartment looking for any sign of Jack. No marmalade in the fridge, where he also noticed the photo of he and Gwen that was normally clipped to the door had disappeared as well.
He didn't know what he had touched the day before, but he couldn't imagine whatever it was could be worse than his betrayal with Lisa. He couldn't imagine it was a retconable offense, especially given it was an accident.
Still, everything else was pointing that way.
In his desperation to find Jack's coffee mug, he knocked over the stainless steel canister he normally stored coffee beans in. The top fell off and beans rolled across the counter.
Except, that wasn't right. He finished the last of the whole beans yesterday. He meant to pick up more on the way home. He'd made a note of it.
He closed the cabinet and slowly picked up a handful of beans, holding them in a loose fist. On a whim, he went into the living room and turned on the television. He flipped to a morning newscast and stared in confusion as the anchors talked about a traffic accident that had definitely happened yesterday. In fact, the anchors kept saying it was Thursday. It wasn't Thursday. It was Friday. It had to be Friday.
He didn't have his ID or swipe card anymore. He didn't have his keys. But, shit, something was wrong and there was only one place Ianto knew he could go to figure out what it was.
He finished getting dressed and took off, on foot, for Torchwood.
***
On the fifteenth loop, Owen shoots him.
Ianto doesn't blame him, really. The fourteenth loop had been particularly bad and he hadn't quite regained his equilibrium when the fifteenth started. He needs to take more breaks, to take more loops off, especially as the numbers begin to climb, because he’s losing his tenuous grip on what he knows, wavering in his convictions of what’s real and what’s this constructed reality.
It doesn't help him in the fifteenth, though. He's shouting at Jack and Gwen, throwing everything he can think of at them while he's handcuffed to a chair, and the fact that he can get himself out of Jack's handcuffs should be enough of a sign that he's telling the truth, but they take it as a threat, of course, and Owen shoots.
Once Ianto feels the bullet, realizes what's happened, he can't help but laugh. No one asks him what's so funny, not that they would have remembered Ianto's shot at Owen even if they did.
They take him to autopsy, trying to staunch the wound, but Owen's a damn good shot and Ianto is bleeding out fast. His laughter just gets more hysterical as Owen works on him, as Gwen and Tosh try to lend a hand and Jack just watches from the stairs, his face unmoved.
Ianto always expected to die in the Hub, but not like this. As his blood soaks through gauze and bandages and Jack stares on, emotionless, Ianto almost wishes that this time, he'll stay dead.
***
When he got to the tourist office on that first loop, it looked grimier than he remembered. It wasn’t much better on the inside once he picked the lock and closed the door firmly behind him, but even in the murky yellow light from the dirty windows, he could see the button for the false wall was still behind the desk. He was about to push it when he remembered that he didn't have a key or a swipecard to get into the lift. He sat on the edge of the desk to wait.
Gwen arrived not long after, and Ianto had never been happier to see her.
"Gwen," he said urgently, "something's happened."
Gwen turned to him, eyebrows raised in surprise.
"Oh!" she said. "Hello. Um, do I know you?"
Ianto's stomach turned. He should have known it wouldn't be that easy.
"Yes," he said quickly. "It's me. It's Ianto. Ianto Jones. I work here, with you, for Torchwood. Have done for almost two years."
Gwen's face was carefully blank.
"I'm sorry, love, I think you've got the wrong place. I'm sure I've never met you and I don't know what Torchwood is."
Gwen was a shit liar, and Ianto could always tell when she was attempting it. She was obviously not telling the truth about Torchwood, but she really seemed to....
It didn't make sense. If Jack had just retconed him, the team would still recognize him, would still know him and the day definitely wouldn't have repeated. It had to have something to do with the artifact he touched the night before.
"Gwen, you need to listen to me," Ianto said swiftly, "I swear, I work here. I'm the archivist. My name is Ianto Jones and last night I touched something--"
The door to the tourist office banged open and Owen came inside. He stopped short when he saw Ianto.
"What's this, then? Picking up more strays, PC Cooper?" he asked.
"This is Ianto Jones," Gwen said, stepping back warily and resting her hand over her gun. "He says he works here. For 'Torchwood' if you know what that is." She looked at Owen imploringly and Owen rolled his eyes.
"Another Eugene Jones, eh? What are you, his brother? There's nothing to see here, kid. There's no such thing as aliens."
Ianto wanted to scream. He took a long breath instead.
"Owen," he said quietly, and that got Owen's attention. "Please, get Jack. I swear, I'm supposed to be here. Something went wrong. Jack will be able to fix it."
Jack could fix anything. At least, Ianto hoped.
***
The mid-twenties are where he cracks. He loses count around twenty-five, but it's about there that Jack tries to talk him up at the local.
He follows Jack and Owen to the pub, where Owen sits and mopes and Jack orders a pint and starts to tell stories. At first, he's just annoyed that Jack is chatting up a girl at the bar. He has to remind himself that it's not his place, that this Jack isn't betraying him because this Jack doesn't know he exists. He feels a little bit better, but nothing can fully ease the twisting in his stomach at watching Jack brush back someone else's hair, so he makes sure he's sitting on the far side of the bar, leaving Jack and the woman out of his line of sight.
Jack finds him anyway. He doesn't know how or why, he just feels a familiar weight on his shoulder and turns into it instinctively.
"I don't mean to barge in," Jack says, "but you're looking a little down. I'll trade you a drink for a smile."
Jack offers his own smile when he says it, the one that's flashy and too wide, the one he uses when he wants something from someone. The one that never works on Ianto.
"No thank you," Ianto says, lifting his glass. "I have one." He tries to turn his back, but Jack doesn't get the picture. Jack never gets the picture.
"Not even a smile?" Jack says. "That's a shame. What's keeping a gorgeous guy like you so glum?"
Ianto bites the inside of his cheek to keep from screaming.
"As it turns out, my boyfriend's an arse and my life is in shambles," he snaps. "Now if you don't mind--"
Jack holds up his hands innocently. "All you had to do was say so. But if you ask me, anyone who treats you--"
Ianto slams his hands down on the bar. He can take Jack yelling at him and interrogating him and retconing him, but he can't bloody take Jack hitting on him like he's nothing more than a one-night stand.
"Stop it!" he shouts. "Just stop. Stop with the lines and the cheesy smile. Stop... all of it!" Jack's staring at him. So is half the bar. "You're a bastard, Jack Harkness, and you don't even bloody know why, so I can't even get any enjoyment out of telling you!"
Then, because he can, because half the bar is watching, because Jack can be an arse even when he actually knows who Ianto is, because all Ianto wants is to fuck Jack and go to sleep, because it feels like it's been weeks when it's only been the same day over and over and over, Ianto empties his glass over Jack's head.
It actually feels rather good. He puts the glass back on the bar and pushes past a stunned Jack Harkness and leaves the pub. His hands are shaking and he has to stop halfway to his flat to throw up on the side of the road.
When he gets back home, he decides he needs a vacation.
***
They took him downstairs to Jack in handcuffs.
He expected as much--it was Torchwood protocol. But it still hurt. Tosh watched from her desk with cautious interest. Jack was nowhere to be found.
There were protocols for having your memory wiped, for dealing with the temporary amnesia of a superior, and even for time-loops, but all of those protocols required Torchwood login codes or, at the very least, a Torchwood ID. Ianto has a feeling that his codes had probably gone the way of his keys and swipecard and his teammates’ memories.
Gwen and Owen settled him in a chair in the interrogation room and cuffed him to it securely. Ianto could tell they weren’t faking; if this had been some elaborate farce, they wouldn’t have used standard handcuffs. Ianto could get out of them in three minutes flat. Jack had timed him.
He didn’t think anyone would take well to his springing himself before the interrogation, though, so he left them. Better to play this straight, to explain everything to Jack and the rest of the team and let them find a way to fix it.
He knew they were probably talking about him upstairs, on the other side of the glass, so he kept quiet. He tried not to fidget, not to look around, not to get nervous, but it was difficult. The longer he waited, the more anxious he became. He knew it was an interrogation technique, but it was a bloody good one. He wanted someone familiar, someone to hold on to, to tell him that everything was okay, that things could be fixed. He wanted Jack or Gwen to be sitting down here with him, assuring him they’d solve the case, they’d get to the bottom of it.
He couldn’t panic. He absolutely couldn’t panic.
He didn’t know how much time passed or how long it took Jack to appear at the top of the stairs, but it wasn’t until he did that Ianto realized that there was something worse than being stuck in his own interrogation room without the aid of his friends.
And that, of course, was being stuck in his own interrogation room with a friend who was looking at Ianto like he’d never seen him before in his life.
***
Ianto takes five consecutive vacation loops.
It’s too difficult to fly anywhere without planning or ID and after the mess of getting to the airport, getting to his destination, and getting out of the airport, he imagines he wouldn’t have much time to sight-see. Train schedules present a similar problem, so he decides to drive.
He gets up, gets dressed, and drives his car as far as he can go. He drives until he runs out of petrol. He drives until he’s past the city and deep in the countryside. He drives until he’s as alone in the world as he feels. It’s beautiful and awful. He doesn’t have to worry about refilling the car, about getting home, about getting hurt or lost. He drives paying little heed to where he’s going and stops when the grief gets to be so much that he can’t stand to be stuck in the car anymore.
Somehow, it feels more manageable to be alone with his thoughts. When he’s staring at the sunset, lying on his back on a hill, the loneliness isn’t so suffocating. Without people around, he finds he doesn’t miss connection as much as he does while stuck in the city. He’s morbidly fascinated by the idea that he could jump off a cliff and have it mean nothing in the morning. He doesn’t want to jump off a cliff, but the option is there. A million options are there, things he’s never considered, risks he’s never taken, challenges he’s been too scared to face. Even abject failure will be erased in the morning. The possibilities are endless.
Except, as soon as he starts thinking about possibilities, he starts thinking about the people he’d like to share them with. Sure, he can walk into a shop and take what he wants without paying, but to what end? He has no one to share his bounty with. Drugs, sex, thrill rides, material possessions--none of that means anything when he’s just going to lose it in a few hours, when he’s entirely alone.
So he drives as far as his car will take him and waits for nightfall. He watches the stars come out and tries not to think about Jack. He lets his stopwatch tick over to the magic number--11:53pm--and when he opens his eyes again, he’s back in bed on Thursday morning.
He goes a different direction each day. He sees the sunset from a cliff overlooking the water, from the middle of a forest, from a rolling green hill. He buys lunch from roadside stands and avoids talking to people. He tries to forget that there’s no one missing him in Cardiff because there’s no one in Cardiff who knows who he is.
On the sixth morning, he wakes up and puts on a suit. He goes to find Torchwood. He thinks, not for the first time, that it’s entirely possible he’s in hell.
***
Jack’s smile was affable enough when he sat down across from Ianto, but Ianto saw the steel underneath it. Nothing sent Jack’s defenses up faster than someone knowing more than he did, than being confronted with something new and foreign and possibly dangerous. It was going to be hard, but Ianto had faith. He had to.
"So," Jack said, leaning forward on his elbows. "Ianto Jones. Apparently that name is supposed to mean something to me."
It’s not his fault, it’s not his fault, it’s not his fault. Ianto hoped the mantra would remind him not to react to Jack, remind him that Jack didn’t know any better, that it wasn’t a personal slight.
It wasn’t really working.
"Yes," Ianto said, forcing a smile. "You hired me just under two years ago. I’m a survivor of Canary Wharf. I had to beg you to let me on, but once I proved my mettle you let me start doing general admin and fixing up the archives."
"Torchwood 3 hasn’t had an Archivist since 1999," Jack said.
"And that was true until you hired me. I impressed Suzie on my first day after the two of you brought me down there and I wasted no time in chewing you out for letting the archives fall into such disrepair. She said--she said she assumed you hired me because of my arse, but now that she saw I had no problem sticking it to you in other ways, I was welcome." Ianto had blushed when Suzie had said it that first day. He blushed again now, because this wasn’t his Jack and without the easy familiarity of their relationship, he once again felt like he was being hit on by a stranger.
"That’s a nice story," Jack said, scrutinizing him. "You’ve even got all the names right, so points for effort. But there’s never been a Ianto Jones employed here. There was never a Ianto Jones employed in London. The building may have burned, but we still have records. It was easy enough to check."
"That’s what I’m saying!" Ianto said quickly. "Something--Jack, I was in the archives last night, sorting through the last of the boxes in the storage room. I--I touched something. I didn’t mean to--I know the protocols. I wrote half the protocols. But it was falling and I caught it and I woke up and it was Thursday again!"
"It’s Thursday today," Jack said.
"I know!" Ianto insisted, leaning as far forward as he could. "But it was Thursday yesterday, too!"
He swallowed and sat back again. Crazy. Jack was looking at him like he was unhinged. Crazy wasn’t going to appeal to Jack, to any of them. He had to keep himself under control. He couldn’t panic.
"I’m sorry," he said quietly. "This is just a little odd."
"I’m sure it is," Jack said. "Would you like to start again? Maybe try a more believable story this time? Or maybe you could just cut the crap and tell me right now who you work for."
"I told you," Ianto said, "I work for you!"
It was going to be a long day.
***
He’s long lost count of the loops. He’s up to thirty or maybe forty, as far as he can tell. He does know he’s died eight times and been retconed twelve. Each times he dies, he wakes up on Thursday morning. Same as when he passes out from the retcon.
He’s also discovered it’s not just Torchwood that’s affected. His credit cards and license are gone. All of his photos, all of his correspondence. Mrs. Taylor next door has introduced herself to him three times. The barista at his preferred coffee shop, the hostess at the Thai restaurant he frequents with Jack... no one knows him. He hasn’t tried to call Rhiannon yet, but he assumes he’d get the same reaction.
He doesn’t know what it is he touched or how to fix it. He doesn’t know how he still has his apartment, his impersonal things, when everything with his name or photo has been erased. He doesn’t know why it’s just him. He doesn’t know if he can turn it off. He doesn’t even know if the artifact will still be there if he can even get as far as the archives. So far, his three attempts to escape the cells and break for the archives have ended once in retcon and twice in death.
And then he feels completely, all-encompassingly stupid.
He blames it on the exhaustion and despair. He blames it on the way his stomach hurts when Jack and Gwen look at him with blank eyes, the way he has no one, the way he can’t even end this all, because a bullet to the brain just leaves him waking up in bed on another endless Thursday morning. He knows, logically, that he’s been under a lot of stress since this cycle started, but none of that makes him feel any less stupid.
There are eight exits and entrances to the Hub. Of those eight, there are three that do not require a swipecard, key, or fingerprint scan. One is the invisible lift, which is obviously out. One is a tunnel leading to Jack’s rooms under his office--also out.
But one, oh god, one of them leads straight into the sub-basements.
It starts in a storage warehouse that was used by Torchwood One and twists and turns for a mile before ending in the deep recesses of the Hub. It’s how he got Lisa into the complex in the first place, and he can’t believe it’s taken him this long to remember it. After the disaster with Lisa, they installed a security door, but, theoretically, if there was no Ianto in this world, there was no disaster with Lisa.
He has to try it. It’s the best chance he’s had so far.
He drives to the warehouse, wishing his sidearm wasn’t another casualty of whatever technology is manipulating this reality. Instead, he arms himself with a crowbar once he arrives and hesitantly tries the door to the tunnel.
It opens easily. Step one.
In his haste, he hadn’t remembered a proper torch, but he likes to think of himself as always prepared. There’s a penlight in his pocket that casts just enough light for him to see his next step and he keeps it aimed steadily at the ground as he wanders through underground Cardiff. The dark and silence give him too much time to think. He hadn’t realized how much of his life is tied up in other people until this started. He kept a close circle--there was the team, of course, and an occasional drink with Rhys and his friends or dinner with his sister and her family, but that was it. His entire life revolved around seven or eight other people and, really, a disproportionate amount of his time belonged to only two of them.
If someone had told him he’d be stuck in this predicament, he thinks he may have assumed it would be easy. For the months before Lisa was discovered, he kept to himself. For the weeks between Lisa’s death and Jack’s disappearance, he still kept the world at arm’s length. It’s really only been a few months that he’s had these connections--less than a year that he’s had Jack and Gwen and all the complications that come with relationships and friendships.
He supposes he got used to the companionship faster than he anticipated.
The further he walks, the more unsettled he gets. He hasn’t been noticeably aging. When he wakes up each Thursday morning, his stubble is exactly the same, the scratch on his arm is still only half healed, the old lovebite on his clavicle is still the same shade. If he doesn’t figure out a way to fix this, he doesn’t know how long he’ll be stuck this way. Until the end of time, quite possibly, if time can ever end in this constant loop.
His head hurts and his hands shake just thinking about it.
Ianto’s heart begins to beat faster when he finally spies the end of the tunnel in the distance. His footsteps are quicker and more sure. He’s walked this route before, dozens of times, and now he knows where he is. He’s close, he’s so close, and that’s definitely not a security door ahead of him.
He listens at the door for any noise, but, as expected, there’s nothing but silence and the clanks and hisses of the Hub. The only thing down this far is the archives, and without an Archivist, he can’t imagine anyone spends their time in the basements.
He brought his lock-picking tools, but he doesn’t even need them. The door swings open and Ianto spends a moment just staring into the hallway. He can hardly believe it. He knows he has to move quickly; the CCTV in the basements is spotty, but it’s still there and he runs the risk of being discovered at any moment.
He takes a deep breath and takes off for the archives at a run.
The artifact had been in a cardboard box, one of many that had piled up between 1999 when the last Archivist died and 2006 when he was hired. He’d been sorting through them for months, moving them to a storage room off of the main archives so he could turn his attention on straightening what was already in order in preparation to add the rest.
He pushes open the door to the archives--and thank god it hadn’t been in the secure archives, there was no way he could get in there without a card or a key--and freezes.
"Fuck!" he shouts.
Boxes. Dozens and dozens of them, only vaguely labeled. He had forgotten just how bad the archives were when he started, and now they seem even worse.
He lets the door close behind him and closes his eyes, forcing himself to remember what the box looked like. It was old. Nearly falling apart. Greyish, rather than brown. He opens his eyes again and begins to tear through the boxes, looking for one of them, any of them that looks familiar. He leaves the crowbar on the floor, hoping it will be enough to destroy the device. He’s close, he’s so fucking close!
He doesn’t hear the door open behind him. No, that’s not right, he does hear it, but he’s too intent on his task to care. If he can just get his hands on the bloody thing he can destroy it or turn it off or something. He can turn around and present it as proof. Here. See. Look! This is what I’m talking about. This is who I am. You need to help me.
"Stop where you are!" Jack’s voice is booming and furious. Ianto can’t help but flinch, but he doesn’t stop looking.
"If I find it you’ll understand!" Ianto shouts. "This will stop!"
"I don’t know who the fuck you are, but if you don’t stop what you’re doing, I will shoot you!" Jack shouts back.
"Because you don’t remember! God, Jack, if you remembered... I can make you remember, I can fix it, I just need to--"
Arms around his midsection, pulling him away from the mountain of boxes, just as he catches a glimpse of one that’s greyer than the others. He lunges for it, but he’s yanked back, violently, and ends up on his back staring up at Owen.
"Where the fuck did you come from?" Owen asks, pointing a gun at Ianto’s head.
"Owen, shit, you need to trust me! I’m your--your friend, sort of. Just get that box, just bring it over and I can prove it to you!"
"You’re not getting anything but a nice stay in our cells," Jack says, marching over and grabbing one of Ianto’s arms roughly, pulling him to his feet. He nearly yanks the arm right out of its socket and Ianto has to swallow back tears. It hurts. In more ways than one.
Gwen runs over holding a pair of handcuffs and Ianto can’t help himself. He pulls away from Jack, twists out of his grip and grabs Gwen by her shoulders.
"Gwen, please, please, I know you’re in there! I know I’m in there, and you have to help me, you have to--"
He should be used to the feeling of getting shot, but it surprises him every time.
Jack, this time, he sees as he crumbles to the ground, his eyes passing over Jack with his gun drawn as they roll into the back of his head.
"...knew my name..."
"...don’t know...check...CCTV...Tosh..."
"...crazy fucker...box..."
He tries to open his eyes, to protest, to explain, but the fight’s gone out of him.
He breathes out deeply and lets himself die.
***
Jack didn’t interrogate him for much more than an hour. He didn’t need to. Ianto repeated the same story over and over again, until his throat was sore and he could feel a headache blooming behind his eyes. After an hour, Jack stood up.
"We’re done for now," Jack said. "I’ll be back later. I know you’re holding back."
"Brilliant," Ianto croaked. Jack stared at him for another moment, and then retreated back up the stairs and out of the room.
Ianto slumped forward and rested his head on the table.
Jack wasn’t entirely off the mark. Ianto was holding back. He was holding back a few key things as bargaining chips. The entire time he’d been explaining himself, Ianto had stuck to that--himself. He’d shared stories about his interactions with the team, explained how he worked with each of them, but he’d never told them about themselves. He hadn’t talked about Gwen’s friends, her favorite books, her favorite films. He hadn’t shared the few stories that Jack had told him about his home planet, his childhood, his travels with the Doctor.
He hadn’t mentioned Jack’s immortality.
He knew from experience that the fastest way to put someone on the defensive in a conversation was to tell them things about themselves you couldn’t possibly know. He didn’t want a room filled with people with guns who suddenly looked at him as some kind of threat--well, more of a threat. But he was getting desperate. It was getting later and later, and he didn’t know at what point this switch might become permanent.
The cool metal of the table was soothing his headache, though his throat still burned. This was supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be fixed by now. By lunchtime, he had hoped things would be back to normal. He imagined taking a long lunch with Jack, imagined how thrilled Jack would be that Ianto was breaking his usual touching-during-office-hours rule. He planned on spending the rest of the afternoon working next to Gwen, listening to stories about Rhys and Rhys’ ridiculous friends, maybe making plans to have a drink to unwind after the day from hell.
But the day from hell was still going on. His wrists chafed from the handcuffs. His back was sore from the metal chair. He just wanted someone to bloody listen to him for five seconds.
The door to the interrogation room opened and Gwen appeared at the top of the stairs, carrying a tray of sandwiches and water bottles. She gave him the bright, fake smile that she gave to strangers and victims and Ianto reluctantly pulled his head off of the table and sat up.
"Hello there, Mr. Jones," Gwen said with false cheer. "I thought you might like some lunch."
Ianto didn’t think he could eat without vomiting, but the water was welcome.
"I’m not very hungry, thanks," he said. "But water would be lovely."
Gwen flashed him that vague smile again and screwed the top off of one of the bottles of water before sliding it across the table to him. "There’s more if you want it," she said. "You’ve been talking for a bit and it looked like you needed it."
Ianto smiled gratefully, not a real smile, not that this Gwen would notice. He drank half the bottle in nearly one gulp and then replaced it on the table, closing his eyes.
"It’s okay if you’re confused," Gwen said. Ianto held back a groan. Of course this Gwen was going to care him to death. His own Gwen did that even knowing how much he hated it. "We’ve all been watching, and you’re obviously tired. You don’t have to worry about it, sweetheart, honestly. Just tell Jack what he wants to know and we’ll protect you."
He flinched at "sweetheart." He couldn’t help it. Gwen used pet names for everyone--sweetheart, love, pet, darling--but she really hadn’t started with him until their friendship began to bloom. He knew it was just filler for her, that it didn’t necessarily mean anything significant, but... well, it meant something to him.
It meant a lot to him.
"Gwen," he said quietly, brokenly, "I swear on my life that I’m telling the truth. Gwen, I know you. You’re my best friend. You and Rhys, you had a fight right before he proposed. There was a sum of money missing from the joint account that you had agreed would be a nest egg. You wanted to know what he thought was so important that he could subtract it from your future. He wouldn’t tell you and the two of you shouted at each other until he admitted it was for a ring. He showed you the ring and you felt like a prat and started to cry."
Gwen stared at him, her eyes wide, her mouth hanging open. "How do you--how could you know that?" she whispered. "I didn’t tell anyone that."
"You told me," Ianto said. "Jack had fucked off with the Doctor and someone reminded me of him or someone said something to me or I found something in the archives... I don’t remember what it was, but I was miserable, so you brought a bottle of wine down to my office at five o’clock and you told me. We stayed down there all night. Tosh found us asleep on the couch in the morning. She thought we slept together. Even though we told her otherwise I think... I think a part of her still believes it."
Ianto wanted to wipe the tears from his eyes, but that would mean breaking eye contact with Gwen and he was sure he was getting through to her. He had to be.
"You... oh christ, um, you take your coffee with cream and two sugars and your favorite type of scone is cinnamon. Rhys does all the cooking because you burn water, and even though you always offer to cook, he got a really nice set of pots from your parents for Christmas last year, so he always finds excuses not to teach you. You took in Emma-Louise Cowell last year at Christmas and you hated seeing her go because there was finally someone who understood Torchwood and understood your real life, but neither of those things were enough for her to stay and you wonder sometimes why they’re enough for you. The first time Rhys’ mum ever met you, she said you were dressed like a tramp. When Rhys introduced you as his girlfriend, she said you were still dressed like a tramp, but at least you were better than the last one. You didn’t understand it because you were wearing nice trousers and a blouse, but Rhys said his mum said that about all his girlfriends and you felt marginally better, but you still think she hates you."
Gwen got to her feet, pushing her chair backwards as she did so. Ianto winced at the whine of metal on concrete.
"You can’t know those things!" Gwen said, backing away. "How do you know those things? Who are you?"
"I’m Ianto!" he shouted. "I’m the closest thing you have to a brother! I’m the one you invite over for tea and introduced to Rhys! Gwen, how can I know all this if I’m not telling the truth? Please, believe me, remember me! Just go look for that artifact and you’ll know this is all real! Please!"
Gwen turned and fled, taking the stairs two at a time and leaving the tray of sandwiches and water behind her.
Part Two
Title: A Vision Too Removed To Mention
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Ianto-centric with Jack/Ianto and Ianto+Gwen friendship
Rating: PG13
Length: ~14000
Summary: In which Ianto is stuck in a time loop that feels more like hell.
Notes: In exchange for getting me a fez for d*con, dremiel requested a fic based on the Iron and Wine song "The Trapeze Swinger." It... sort of got away from me. So this is for her, because I heart her. SO MUCH THANKS to solsticezero, who is a beta rockstar, as always. (I should also thank mcwonthelottery for not suffocating me, making too much fun of me, or drinking all the gin.)
***
On the eighth loop, Ianto decides to take a break.
He's been working for Torchwood since he was nineteen years old. He's lived through Canary Wharf and Lisa's death and Jack's execution and disappearance. He thought he could live through anything, but he underestimated how efficient Torchwood could be at breaking his heart.
He doesn't go to Torchwood the morning of the eighth loop. He goes to a coffee shop instead. He orders a coffee and a breakfast sandwich and he sits staring out the window at the bustling streets, at the morning shoppers, at the suits on their way to work. He swallows past the sharp ache in his chest, the sudden painful realization that he's not a part of that world, that he's not a part of this world at all, that if Torchwood won't have him and the world at large won't have him, he's truly an outsider, a distant ghost.
He swallows the pain with a mouthful of tasteless eggs and soggy bacon.
He orders coffees all day and occupies the same corner table. He doesn't even make a show of reading or working--it's no use when no one will remember his odd behavior the next morning. He just rests his head on the table and tries to block out the world, stares out the windows at the people walking by, tries to desensitize himself to the despair of having Jack and Gwen, Tosh and Owen look straight through him as if he's not there at all.
He doesn't plan on seeing Torchwood at all for this loop, but of course they ruin his plans by coming into the coffee shop around supper, looking worn out and windswept and beautiful. The four of them gather around a table on the other side of the shop. Ianto knows he should leave for his own sake, but instead he stays and watches them, watches the way they laugh together and smile at each other and tries to remember if his Torchwood ever does those things. He scours his brain for the last time he saw Tosh smile like that, for the last time he saw Owen smile at all, but he can't come up with anything and he's not sure if that's out of panic or because those moments don't exist in his Torchwood.
Maybe they're better off without him.
It takes Jack twenty minutes to acknowledge his staring. He knows he should leave, then, but Jack gets to his feet and Ianto lets himself hope, for just a moment, that he's somehow fixed it, that Jack is coming to invite him over to the table, to ask where he's been.
"Do I know you?" Jack asks.
No, you don't. Sorry to trouble you. I was just staring into space.
He should say that. This was going to be his Torchwood-free loop. This was going to be the loop that didn't end with him in a cell or retconed or in the mindprobe or dead.
"Yes," he says, so quietly he doesn't know if Jack can hear it. "Yes, you know me. You hired me after Canary Wharf. I came from London and begged you for a job but you wouldn't give me one until I found you a pteranodon and helped you catch it. I've worked for you for almost two years, general support at first, archives and admin and coffee and cleaning up, but then as a field agent, as your assistant, and--"
Jack's eyes are cold and calculating and surprised. "I think you've got the wrong--"
Ianto keeps talking, his voice louder, tinged just slightly with the hysteria he's trying to keep clamped down. "We were shagging, too, at first and then it was something more, something we didn't have a name for, which was my fault, which is my fault because I'm bloody awful at these things, but you put up with it, you indulged me because you understood and because you knew, even if I didn't say it, that I loved you, and I don't know what this is, Jack, I touched something, I'm in some sort of time loop and none of the team remembers--"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Jack says sharply, harshly, and when Ianto tries to grab his wrist, he pulls it back. "You've got the wrong guy, kid." The tone is sharp in a way that Ianto hadn't heard in months before this catastrophe. It makes something slick and wet get stuck in Ianto's throat. He's too tired to be rational, too tired to be sensible, and he knows that panic isn't going to get him anywhere, but, dammit, this was supposed to be his loop off.
"You have to remember, Jack, please," Ianto begs, his voice nothing more than a whisper, each word trembling more than he'd like. "Jack, please. Please remember."
Jack's eyes move to the side, almost imperceptibly, to where the team has gotten to their feet.
Ianto knows this is another failure.
"I'm sorry," he says, stepping back and away from Jack. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
He leaves quickly, even as Jack shouts after him, probably trying to figure out a way to administer a retcon pill, if not pull him in for questioning. I'm sorry, please, I'm sorry runs through Ianto's mind on repeat. He's sorry he's not smart enough, not quick enough, not important enough to fix this. He's sorry he's gotten them into this mess. He's sorry they'll be stuck like this forever, trapped in a time loop because he doesn't have the strength to discover the solution.
He lets himself think those things over and over, right up until he reaches the door of his flat. When he's inside, he presses his back against the wood and breathes in and out until his heart stops racing, until his lungs stop burning, until he no longer feels like he wants to scream and scream and scream.
Ianto looks at his watch. There are six hours left until the loop resets itself. Six hours until his next attempt to fix things.
Each loop starts with him feeling as rested and energized as he did on that first morning, but he buries himself under his duvet anyway, praying that this time, when he wakes up, Jack will be beside him and it will all have been a bad dream.
***
Ianto knows better than anyone why the precautions for handling unknown artifacts are in effect. He's read dozens, hundreds of reports in the archives about what happens to people who misuse or mishandle alien or future tech. He's the one who updated the protocols a year ago to make them safer. He's not the one who needed this lesson.
But the universe has a warped sense of humor and he should have known that. He should have known, when the moldy, ancient cardboard box in his arms started to crumble, that it would have been safer to let it fall and run from the room. He should have known not to try and grab anything, not with his bare hands, but his reflexes kicked in and his fingers closed around the smooth oblong object before it could hit the floor.
It started flashing immediately. He ran for his desk, still clutching it, and in the fifteen seconds it took him to reach his abandoned comm unit, the flashing stopped and the world went black.
When he woke up in his bed, he assumed he'd been knocked out and Jack had taken him home. It wasn't until he was washing his face to get ready that he noticed Jack's toothbrush and styling wax were no longer on his sink. Curiously, he wandered back into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe. Jack's clothes were missing, too.
The panic started low in his belly but built swiftly as he tore through his apartment looking for any sign of Jack. No marmalade in the fridge, where he also noticed the photo of he and Gwen that was normally clipped to the door had disappeared as well.
He didn't know what he had touched the day before, but he couldn't imagine whatever it was could be worse than his betrayal with Lisa. He couldn't imagine it was a retconable offense, especially given it was an accident.
Still, everything else was pointing that way.
In his desperation to find Jack's coffee mug, he knocked over the stainless steel canister he normally stored coffee beans in. The top fell off and beans rolled across the counter.
Except, that wasn't right. He finished the last of the whole beans yesterday. He meant to pick up more on the way home. He'd made a note of it.
He closed the cabinet and slowly picked up a handful of beans, holding them in a loose fist. On a whim, he went into the living room and turned on the television. He flipped to a morning newscast and stared in confusion as the anchors talked about a traffic accident that had definitely happened yesterday. In fact, the anchors kept saying it was Thursday. It wasn't Thursday. It was Friday. It had to be Friday.
He didn't have his ID or swipe card anymore. He didn't have his keys. But, shit, something was wrong and there was only one place Ianto knew he could go to figure out what it was.
He finished getting dressed and took off, on foot, for Torchwood.
***
On the fifteenth loop, Owen shoots him.
Ianto doesn't blame him, really. The fourteenth loop had been particularly bad and he hadn't quite regained his equilibrium when the fifteenth started. He needs to take more breaks, to take more loops off, especially as the numbers begin to climb, because he’s losing his tenuous grip on what he knows, wavering in his convictions of what’s real and what’s this constructed reality.
It doesn't help him in the fifteenth, though. He's shouting at Jack and Gwen, throwing everything he can think of at them while he's handcuffed to a chair, and the fact that he can get himself out of Jack's handcuffs should be enough of a sign that he's telling the truth, but they take it as a threat, of course, and Owen shoots.
Once Ianto feels the bullet, realizes what's happened, he can't help but laugh. No one asks him what's so funny, not that they would have remembered Ianto's shot at Owen even if they did.
They take him to autopsy, trying to staunch the wound, but Owen's a damn good shot and Ianto is bleeding out fast. His laughter just gets more hysterical as Owen works on him, as Gwen and Tosh try to lend a hand and Jack just watches from the stairs, his face unmoved.
Ianto always expected to die in the Hub, but not like this. As his blood soaks through gauze and bandages and Jack stares on, emotionless, Ianto almost wishes that this time, he'll stay dead.
***
When he got to the tourist office on that first loop, it looked grimier than he remembered. It wasn’t much better on the inside once he picked the lock and closed the door firmly behind him, but even in the murky yellow light from the dirty windows, he could see the button for the false wall was still behind the desk. He was about to push it when he remembered that he didn't have a key or a swipecard to get into the lift. He sat on the edge of the desk to wait.
Gwen arrived not long after, and Ianto had never been happier to see her.
"Gwen," he said urgently, "something's happened."
Gwen turned to him, eyebrows raised in surprise.
"Oh!" she said. "Hello. Um, do I know you?"
Ianto's stomach turned. He should have known it wouldn't be that easy.
"Yes," he said quickly. "It's me. It's Ianto. Ianto Jones. I work here, with you, for Torchwood. Have done for almost two years."
Gwen's face was carefully blank.
"I'm sorry, love, I think you've got the wrong place. I'm sure I've never met you and I don't know what Torchwood is."
Gwen was a shit liar, and Ianto could always tell when she was attempting it. She was obviously not telling the truth about Torchwood, but she really seemed to....
It didn't make sense. If Jack had just retconed him, the team would still recognize him, would still know him and the day definitely wouldn't have repeated. It had to have something to do with the artifact he touched the night before.
"Gwen, you need to listen to me," Ianto said swiftly, "I swear, I work here. I'm the archivist. My name is Ianto Jones and last night I touched something--"
The door to the tourist office banged open and Owen came inside. He stopped short when he saw Ianto.
"What's this, then? Picking up more strays, PC Cooper?" he asked.
"This is Ianto Jones," Gwen said, stepping back warily and resting her hand over her gun. "He says he works here. For 'Torchwood' if you know what that is." She looked at Owen imploringly and Owen rolled his eyes.
"Another Eugene Jones, eh? What are you, his brother? There's nothing to see here, kid. There's no such thing as aliens."
Ianto wanted to scream. He took a long breath instead.
"Owen," he said quietly, and that got Owen's attention. "Please, get Jack. I swear, I'm supposed to be here. Something went wrong. Jack will be able to fix it."
Jack could fix anything. At least, Ianto hoped.
***
The mid-twenties are where he cracks. He loses count around twenty-five, but it's about there that Jack tries to talk him up at the local.
He follows Jack and Owen to the pub, where Owen sits and mopes and Jack orders a pint and starts to tell stories. At first, he's just annoyed that Jack is chatting up a girl at the bar. He has to remind himself that it's not his place, that this Jack isn't betraying him because this Jack doesn't know he exists. He feels a little bit better, but nothing can fully ease the twisting in his stomach at watching Jack brush back someone else's hair, so he makes sure he's sitting on the far side of the bar, leaving Jack and the woman out of his line of sight.
Jack finds him anyway. He doesn't know how or why, he just feels a familiar weight on his shoulder and turns into it instinctively.
"I don't mean to barge in," Jack says, "but you're looking a little down. I'll trade you a drink for a smile."
Jack offers his own smile when he says it, the one that's flashy and too wide, the one he uses when he wants something from someone. The one that never works on Ianto.
"No thank you," Ianto says, lifting his glass. "I have one." He tries to turn his back, but Jack doesn't get the picture. Jack never gets the picture.
"Not even a smile?" Jack says. "That's a shame. What's keeping a gorgeous guy like you so glum?"
Ianto bites the inside of his cheek to keep from screaming.
"As it turns out, my boyfriend's an arse and my life is in shambles," he snaps. "Now if you don't mind--"
Jack holds up his hands innocently. "All you had to do was say so. But if you ask me, anyone who treats you--"
Ianto slams his hands down on the bar. He can take Jack yelling at him and interrogating him and retconing him, but he can't bloody take Jack hitting on him like he's nothing more than a one-night stand.
"Stop it!" he shouts. "Just stop. Stop with the lines and the cheesy smile. Stop... all of it!" Jack's staring at him. So is half the bar. "You're a bastard, Jack Harkness, and you don't even bloody know why, so I can't even get any enjoyment out of telling you!"
Then, because he can, because half the bar is watching, because Jack can be an arse even when he actually knows who Ianto is, because all Ianto wants is to fuck Jack and go to sleep, because it feels like it's been weeks when it's only been the same day over and over and over, Ianto empties his glass over Jack's head.
It actually feels rather good. He puts the glass back on the bar and pushes past a stunned Jack Harkness and leaves the pub. His hands are shaking and he has to stop halfway to his flat to throw up on the side of the road.
When he gets back home, he decides he needs a vacation.
***
They took him downstairs to Jack in handcuffs.
He expected as much--it was Torchwood protocol. But it still hurt. Tosh watched from her desk with cautious interest. Jack was nowhere to be found.
There were protocols for having your memory wiped, for dealing with the temporary amnesia of a superior, and even for time-loops, but all of those protocols required Torchwood login codes or, at the very least, a Torchwood ID. Ianto has a feeling that his codes had probably gone the way of his keys and swipecard and his teammates’ memories.
Gwen and Owen settled him in a chair in the interrogation room and cuffed him to it securely. Ianto could tell they weren’t faking; if this had been some elaborate farce, they wouldn’t have used standard handcuffs. Ianto could get out of them in three minutes flat. Jack had timed him.
He didn’t think anyone would take well to his springing himself before the interrogation, though, so he left them. Better to play this straight, to explain everything to Jack and the rest of the team and let them find a way to fix it.
He knew they were probably talking about him upstairs, on the other side of the glass, so he kept quiet. He tried not to fidget, not to look around, not to get nervous, but it was difficult. The longer he waited, the more anxious he became. He knew it was an interrogation technique, but it was a bloody good one. He wanted someone familiar, someone to hold on to, to tell him that everything was okay, that things could be fixed. He wanted Jack or Gwen to be sitting down here with him, assuring him they’d solve the case, they’d get to the bottom of it.
He couldn’t panic. He absolutely couldn’t panic.
He didn’t know how much time passed or how long it took Jack to appear at the top of the stairs, but it wasn’t until he did that Ianto realized that there was something worse than being stuck in his own interrogation room without the aid of his friends.
And that, of course, was being stuck in his own interrogation room with a friend who was looking at Ianto like he’d never seen him before in his life.
***
Ianto takes five consecutive vacation loops.
It’s too difficult to fly anywhere without planning or ID and after the mess of getting to the airport, getting to his destination, and getting out of the airport, he imagines he wouldn’t have much time to sight-see. Train schedules present a similar problem, so he decides to drive.
He gets up, gets dressed, and drives his car as far as he can go. He drives until he runs out of petrol. He drives until he’s past the city and deep in the countryside. He drives until he’s as alone in the world as he feels. It’s beautiful and awful. He doesn’t have to worry about refilling the car, about getting home, about getting hurt or lost. He drives paying little heed to where he’s going and stops when the grief gets to be so much that he can’t stand to be stuck in the car anymore.
Somehow, it feels more manageable to be alone with his thoughts. When he’s staring at the sunset, lying on his back on a hill, the loneliness isn’t so suffocating. Without people around, he finds he doesn’t miss connection as much as he does while stuck in the city. He’s morbidly fascinated by the idea that he could jump off a cliff and have it mean nothing in the morning. He doesn’t want to jump off a cliff, but the option is there. A million options are there, things he’s never considered, risks he’s never taken, challenges he’s been too scared to face. Even abject failure will be erased in the morning. The possibilities are endless.
Except, as soon as he starts thinking about possibilities, he starts thinking about the people he’d like to share them with. Sure, he can walk into a shop and take what he wants without paying, but to what end? He has no one to share his bounty with. Drugs, sex, thrill rides, material possessions--none of that means anything when he’s just going to lose it in a few hours, when he’s entirely alone.
So he drives as far as his car will take him and waits for nightfall. He watches the stars come out and tries not to think about Jack. He lets his stopwatch tick over to the magic number--11:53pm--and when he opens his eyes again, he’s back in bed on Thursday morning.
He goes a different direction each day. He sees the sunset from a cliff overlooking the water, from the middle of a forest, from a rolling green hill. He buys lunch from roadside stands and avoids talking to people. He tries to forget that there’s no one missing him in Cardiff because there’s no one in Cardiff who knows who he is.
On the sixth morning, he wakes up and puts on a suit. He goes to find Torchwood. He thinks, not for the first time, that it’s entirely possible he’s in hell.
***
Jack’s smile was affable enough when he sat down across from Ianto, but Ianto saw the steel underneath it. Nothing sent Jack’s defenses up faster than someone knowing more than he did, than being confronted with something new and foreign and possibly dangerous. It was going to be hard, but Ianto had faith. He had to.
"So," Jack said, leaning forward on his elbows. "Ianto Jones. Apparently that name is supposed to mean something to me."
It’s not his fault, it’s not his fault, it’s not his fault. Ianto hoped the mantra would remind him not to react to Jack, remind him that Jack didn’t know any better, that it wasn’t a personal slight.
It wasn’t really working.
"Yes," Ianto said, forcing a smile. "You hired me just under two years ago. I’m a survivor of Canary Wharf. I had to beg you to let me on, but once I proved my mettle you let me start doing general admin and fixing up the archives."
"Torchwood 3 hasn’t had an Archivist since 1999," Jack said.
"And that was true until you hired me. I impressed Suzie on my first day after the two of you brought me down there and I wasted no time in chewing you out for letting the archives fall into such disrepair. She said--she said she assumed you hired me because of my arse, but now that she saw I had no problem sticking it to you in other ways, I was welcome." Ianto had blushed when Suzie had said it that first day. He blushed again now, because this wasn’t his Jack and without the easy familiarity of their relationship, he once again felt like he was being hit on by a stranger.
"That’s a nice story," Jack said, scrutinizing him. "You’ve even got all the names right, so points for effort. But there’s never been a Ianto Jones employed here. There was never a Ianto Jones employed in London. The building may have burned, but we still have records. It was easy enough to check."
"That’s what I’m saying!" Ianto said quickly. "Something--Jack, I was in the archives last night, sorting through the last of the boxes in the storage room. I--I touched something. I didn’t mean to--I know the protocols. I wrote half the protocols. But it was falling and I caught it and I woke up and it was Thursday again!"
"It’s Thursday today," Jack said.
"I know!" Ianto insisted, leaning as far forward as he could. "But it was Thursday yesterday, too!"
He swallowed and sat back again. Crazy. Jack was looking at him like he was unhinged. Crazy wasn’t going to appeal to Jack, to any of them. He had to keep himself under control. He couldn’t panic.
"I’m sorry," he said quietly. "This is just a little odd."
"I’m sure it is," Jack said. "Would you like to start again? Maybe try a more believable story this time? Or maybe you could just cut the crap and tell me right now who you work for."
"I told you," Ianto said, "I work for you!"
It was going to be a long day.
***
He’s long lost count of the loops. He’s up to thirty or maybe forty, as far as he can tell. He does know he’s died eight times and been retconed twelve. Each times he dies, he wakes up on Thursday morning. Same as when he passes out from the retcon.
He’s also discovered it’s not just Torchwood that’s affected. His credit cards and license are gone. All of his photos, all of his correspondence. Mrs. Taylor next door has introduced herself to him three times. The barista at his preferred coffee shop, the hostess at the Thai restaurant he frequents with Jack... no one knows him. He hasn’t tried to call Rhiannon yet, but he assumes he’d get the same reaction.
He doesn’t know what it is he touched or how to fix it. He doesn’t know how he still has his apartment, his impersonal things, when everything with his name or photo has been erased. He doesn’t know why it’s just him. He doesn’t know if he can turn it off. He doesn’t even know if the artifact will still be there if he can even get as far as the archives. So far, his three attempts to escape the cells and break for the archives have ended once in retcon and twice in death.
And then he feels completely, all-encompassingly stupid.
He blames it on the exhaustion and despair. He blames it on the way his stomach hurts when Jack and Gwen look at him with blank eyes, the way he has no one, the way he can’t even end this all, because a bullet to the brain just leaves him waking up in bed on another endless Thursday morning. He knows, logically, that he’s been under a lot of stress since this cycle started, but none of that makes him feel any less stupid.
There are eight exits and entrances to the Hub. Of those eight, there are three that do not require a swipecard, key, or fingerprint scan. One is the invisible lift, which is obviously out. One is a tunnel leading to Jack’s rooms under his office--also out.
But one, oh god, one of them leads straight into the sub-basements.
It starts in a storage warehouse that was used by Torchwood One and twists and turns for a mile before ending in the deep recesses of the Hub. It’s how he got Lisa into the complex in the first place, and he can’t believe it’s taken him this long to remember it. After the disaster with Lisa, they installed a security door, but, theoretically, if there was no Ianto in this world, there was no disaster with Lisa.
He has to try it. It’s the best chance he’s had so far.
He drives to the warehouse, wishing his sidearm wasn’t another casualty of whatever technology is manipulating this reality. Instead, he arms himself with a crowbar once he arrives and hesitantly tries the door to the tunnel.
It opens easily. Step one.
In his haste, he hadn’t remembered a proper torch, but he likes to think of himself as always prepared. There’s a penlight in his pocket that casts just enough light for him to see his next step and he keeps it aimed steadily at the ground as he wanders through underground Cardiff. The dark and silence give him too much time to think. He hadn’t realized how much of his life is tied up in other people until this started. He kept a close circle--there was the team, of course, and an occasional drink with Rhys and his friends or dinner with his sister and her family, but that was it. His entire life revolved around seven or eight other people and, really, a disproportionate amount of his time belonged to only two of them.
If someone had told him he’d be stuck in this predicament, he thinks he may have assumed it would be easy. For the months before Lisa was discovered, he kept to himself. For the weeks between Lisa’s death and Jack’s disappearance, he still kept the world at arm’s length. It’s really only been a few months that he’s had these connections--less than a year that he’s had Jack and Gwen and all the complications that come with relationships and friendships.
He supposes he got used to the companionship faster than he anticipated.
The further he walks, the more unsettled he gets. He hasn’t been noticeably aging. When he wakes up each Thursday morning, his stubble is exactly the same, the scratch on his arm is still only half healed, the old lovebite on his clavicle is still the same shade. If he doesn’t figure out a way to fix this, he doesn’t know how long he’ll be stuck this way. Until the end of time, quite possibly, if time can ever end in this constant loop.
His head hurts and his hands shake just thinking about it.
Ianto’s heart begins to beat faster when he finally spies the end of the tunnel in the distance. His footsteps are quicker and more sure. He’s walked this route before, dozens of times, and now he knows where he is. He’s close, he’s so close, and that’s definitely not a security door ahead of him.
He listens at the door for any noise, but, as expected, there’s nothing but silence and the clanks and hisses of the Hub. The only thing down this far is the archives, and without an Archivist, he can’t imagine anyone spends their time in the basements.
He brought his lock-picking tools, but he doesn’t even need them. The door swings open and Ianto spends a moment just staring into the hallway. He can hardly believe it. He knows he has to move quickly; the CCTV in the basements is spotty, but it’s still there and he runs the risk of being discovered at any moment.
He takes a deep breath and takes off for the archives at a run.
The artifact had been in a cardboard box, one of many that had piled up between 1999 when the last Archivist died and 2006 when he was hired. He’d been sorting through them for months, moving them to a storage room off of the main archives so he could turn his attention on straightening what was already in order in preparation to add the rest.
He pushes open the door to the archives--and thank god it hadn’t been in the secure archives, there was no way he could get in there without a card or a key--and freezes.
"Fuck!" he shouts.
Boxes. Dozens and dozens of them, only vaguely labeled. He had forgotten just how bad the archives were when he started, and now they seem even worse.
He lets the door close behind him and closes his eyes, forcing himself to remember what the box looked like. It was old. Nearly falling apart. Greyish, rather than brown. He opens his eyes again and begins to tear through the boxes, looking for one of them, any of them that looks familiar. He leaves the crowbar on the floor, hoping it will be enough to destroy the device. He’s close, he’s so fucking close!
He doesn’t hear the door open behind him. No, that’s not right, he does hear it, but he’s too intent on his task to care. If he can just get his hands on the bloody thing he can destroy it or turn it off or something. He can turn around and present it as proof. Here. See. Look! This is what I’m talking about. This is who I am. You need to help me.
"Stop where you are!" Jack’s voice is booming and furious. Ianto can’t help but flinch, but he doesn’t stop looking.
"If I find it you’ll understand!" Ianto shouts. "This will stop!"
"I don’t know who the fuck you are, but if you don’t stop what you’re doing, I will shoot you!" Jack shouts back.
"Because you don’t remember! God, Jack, if you remembered... I can make you remember, I can fix it, I just need to--"
Arms around his midsection, pulling him away from the mountain of boxes, just as he catches a glimpse of one that’s greyer than the others. He lunges for it, but he’s yanked back, violently, and ends up on his back staring up at Owen.
"Where the fuck did you come from?" Owen asks, pointing a gun at Ianto’s head.
"Owen, shit, you need to trust me! I’m your--your friend, sort of. Just get that box, just bring it over and I can prove it to you!"
"You’re not getting anything but a nice stay in our cells," Jack says, marching over and grabbing one of Ianto’s arms roughly, pulling him to his feet. He nearly yanks the arm right out of its socket and Ianto has to swallow back tears. It hurts. In more ways than one.
Gwen runs over holding a pair of handcuffs and Ianto can’t help himself. He pulls away from Jack, twists out of his grip and grabs Gwen by her shoulders.
"Gwen, please, please, I know you’re in there! I know I’m in there, and you have to help me, you have to--"
He should be used to the feeling of getting shot, but it surprises him every time.
Jack, this time, he sees as he crumbles to the ground, his eyes passing over Jack with his gun drawn as they roll into the back of his head.
"...knew my name..."
"...don’t know...check...CCTV...Tosh..."
"...crazy fucker...box..."
He tries to open his eyes, to protest, to explain, but the fight’s gone out of him.
He breathes out deeply and lets himself die.
***
Jack didn’t interrogate him for much more than an hour. He didn’t need to. Ianto repeated the same story over and over again, until his throat was sore and he could feel a headache blooming behind his eyes. After an hour, Jack stood up.
"We’re done for now," Jack said. "I’ll be back later. I know you’re holding back."
"Brilliant," Ianto croaked. Jack stared at him for another moment, and then retreated back up the stairs and out of the room.
Ianto slumped forward and rested his head on the table.
Jack wasn’t entirely off the mark. Ianto was holding back. He was holding back a few key things as bargaining chips. The entire time he’d been explaining himself, Ianto had stuck to that--himself. He’d shared stories about his interactions with the team, explained how he worked with each of them, but he’d never told them about themselves. He hadn’t talked about Gwen’s friends, her favorite books, her favorite films. He hadn’t shared the few stories that Jack had told him about his home planet, his childhood, his travels with the Doctor.
He hadn’t mentioned Jack’s immortality.
He knew from experience that the fastest way to put someone on the defensive in a conversation was to tell them things about themselves you couldn’t possibly know. He didn’t want a room filled with people with guns who suddenly looked at him as some kind of threat--well, more of a threat. But he was getting desperate. It was getting later and later, and he didn’t know at what point this switch might become permanent.
The cool metal of the table was soothing his headache, though his throat still burned. This was supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be fixed by now. By lunchtime, he had hoped things would be back to normal. He imagined taking a long lunch with Jack, imagined how thrilled Jack would be that Ianto was breaking his usual touching-during-office-hours rule. He planned on spending the rest of the afternoon working next to Gwen, listening to stories about Rhys and Rhys’ ridiculous friends, maybe making plans to have a drink to unwind after the day from hell.
But the day from hell was still going on. His wrists chafed from the handcuffs. His back was sore from the metal chair. He just wanted someone to bloody listen to him for five seconds.
The door to the interrogation room opened and Gwen appeared at the top of the stairs, carrying a tray of sandwiches and water bottles. She gave him the bright, fake smile that she gave to strangers and victims and Ianto reluctantly pulled his head off of the table and sat up.
"Hello there, Mr. Jones," Gwen said with false cheer. "I thought you might like some lunch."
Ianto didn’t think he could eat without vomiting, but the water was welcome.
"I’m not very hungry, thanks," he said. "But water would be lovely."
Gwen flashed him that vague smile again and screwed the top off of one of the bottles of water before sliding it across the table to him. "There’s more if you want it," she said. "You’ve been talking for a bit and it looked like you needed it."
Ianto smiled gratefully, not a real smile, not that this Gwen would notice. He drank half the bottle in nearly one gulp and then replaced it on the table, closing his eyes.
"It’s okay if you’re confused," Gwen said. Ianto held back a groan. Of course this Gwen was going to care him to death. His own Gwen did that even knowing how much he hated it. "We’ve all been watching, and you’re obviously tired. You don’t have to worry about it, sweetheart, honestly. Just tell Jack what he wants to know and we’ll protect you."
He flinched at "sweetheart." He couldn’t help it. Gwen used pet names for everyone--sweetheart, love, pet, darling--but she really hadn’t started with him until their friendship began to bloom. He knew it was just filler for her, that it didn’t necessarily mean anything significant, but... well, it meant something to him.
It meant a lot to him.
"Gwen," he said quietly, brokenly, "I swear on my life that I’m telling the truth. Gwen, I know you. You’re my best friend. You and Rhys, you had a fight right before he proposed. There was a sum of money missing from the joint account that you had agreed would be a nest egg. You wanted to know what he thought was so important that he could subtract it from your future. He wouldn’t tell you and the two of you shouted at each other until he admitted it was for a ring. He showed you the ring and you felt like a prat and started to cry."
Gwen stared at him, her eyes wide, her mouth hanging open. "How do you--how could you know that?" she whispered. "I didn’t tell anyone that."
"You told me," Ianto said. "Jack had fucked off with the Doctor and someone reminded me of him or someone said something to me or I found something in the archives... I don’t remember what it was, but I was miserable, so you brought a bottle of wine down to my office at five o’clock and you told me. We stayed down there all night. Tosh found us asleep on the couch in the morning. She thought we slept together. Even though we told her otherwise I think... I think a part of her still believes it."
Ianto wanted to wipe the tears from his eyes, but that would mean breaking eye contact with Gwen and he was sure he was getting through to her. He had to be.
"You... oh christ, um, you take your coffee with cream and two sugars and your favorite type of scone is cinnamon. Rhys does all the cooking because you burn water, and even though you always offer to cook, he got a really nice set of pots from your parents for Christmas last year, so he always finds excuses not to teach you. You took in Emma-Louise Cowell last year at Christmas and you hated seeing her go because there was finally someone who understood Torchwood and understood your real life, but neither of those things were enough for her to stay and you wonder sometimes why they’re enough for you. The first time Rhys’ mum ever met you, she said you were dressed like a tramp. When Rhys introduced you as his girlfriend, she said you were still dressed like a tramp, but at least you were better than the last one. You didn’t understand it because you were wearing nice trousers and a blouse, but Rhys said his mum said that about all his girlfriends and you felt marginally better, but you still think she hates you."
Gwen got to her feet, pushing her chair backwards as she did so. Ianto winced at the whine of metal on concrete.
"You can’t know those things!" Gwen said, backing away. "How do you know those things? Who are you?"
"I’m Ianto!" he shouted. "I’m the closest thing you have to a brother! I’m the one you invite over for tea and introduced to Rhys! Gwen, how can I know all this if I’m not telling the truth? Please, believe me, remember me! Just go look for that artifact and you’ll know this is all real! Please!"
Gwen turned and fled, taking the stairs two at a time and leaving the tray of sandwiches and water behind her.
Part Two