Don't Ever Leave Me - part 1
Don’t Ever Leave Me
By Sammy Girl
Genre: H&C, slush-slash.
Disclaimer: Not mine, never were, never will be.
Note: This is my first Torchwood fic, written fairly fast for me. It’s set just after Exit Wounds and contains references for past episodes. Betaed by the wonderful Kerry. If some of this story conflicts with screen canon, it’s unintentional, just a mistake; if some of it conflicts with canon from the Dr Who and Torchwood books, which I haven’t had the opportunity to read, I apologise. But hey the joy of fan fic is the freedom to play - right.
<><><><><><><>
Part 1
Jack cursed silently as the traffic ground to a halt. Somewhere ahead of him he could see blue lights flashing. Glancing at his sleeping passenger, he flipped open his phone and called the police. The chances were that whatever was holding things up had nothing to do with them, but it didn’t hurt to check. As he had thought, it was a simple traffic accident, all be it a bad one - a drunk driver had run a red light, smashed into a much smaller car and sent it spinning into a whole bunch of revellers on the pavement, themselves probably too drunk to react in time to get out of the way. As the officer in the control room he’d spoken to had said, it was basically carnage. All in all it just made a bad weekend even worse.
Losing Tosh and Owen had been bad, right there, right then, but what came after was somehow worse. The clean up, the paper work, the personal possessions, dealing with that side of things drained all of them to the point of exhaustion. Gwen had held it together for a while, Jack had talked her out of quitting, but in the end she just broke down. Rhys took some time off work and - with Jack’s blessing and encouragement - had taken her away for a short break in the sun. That left Jack and Ianto to keep an eye on the rift. They could have done with a quiet time of it, but it was not to be. First a whole cluster of Cheklin mines fell though the rift and began exploding randomly, causing small, localised, electromagnetic pulses, which knocked out anything with an electrical power supply. They had managed to locate the last four and disarmed them, including - with seconds to spare - one just 500 yards from the hospital. It had been a frantic day and night in which neither of them got much sleep. Then, only hours after they had deactivated the last one and placed it in the vault - Ianto found it hard to believe a thing the size of a Mars bar could be so powerful - they picked up reports that indicated unusual weevil activity in an industrial park on the city’s north east boundary. Since it was the weekend the park was all but deserted, nonetheless it took all day and well into Saturday night to discover that the damn things had followed the scent from a meat packing plant that was illegally discharging its waste into the public sewers. So, along with the weevils, there were also rats, in what Ianto termed ‘Biblical quantities’. All in all a fun time was had by all!
Jack had offered to drive, not because he was the team leader, but just because Ianto looked so very tired, so tired that Jack was actually worried about him. For this reason he had taken a slightly longer route home so that he could drop Ianto off at his house before heading for the Hub. It was close enough to the Hub for Ianto to walk to work in good weather, as he had on Thursday. He hadn’t been home since then and had expressed his desire, even need, for a long hot bath and his own bed.
Now they were stuck in traffic and Jack wished he’d taken the direct route, through the infamous Splott. The sudden thunderous thwack of rotor blades announced the arrival of the air ambulance; they didn’t call that into the city unless things were really, really bad.
As far as he could tell they were planning to land in the middle of the junction up ahead. He was glad it wasn’t him, bringing a chopper down in the middle of a built up area was no job for the faint hearted.
“Was’ that?” Ianto suddenly asked, sitting up rather too quickly.
“Air ambulance, up ahead, we’re stuck.”
Jack watched as Ianto forced himself to come fully awake. “Oh, right, damn.”
“Yeah,” Jack sympathised. He’d thought about turning around, but they were in a one way street and there just wasn’t any room.
“How are you?” Jack asked.
Ianto didn’t answer instantly, but seemed to consider his replay. “Better for some sleep.”
“Half an hour in the car isn’t sleep; it’s barely a cat nap.”
“Mmm, true, maybe I’ll go back to sleep, what kind of pillow do you make?” With that he leaned over and rested his head on Jack’s lap. “Nice, not too bony.”
“You saying I’m fat?”
“No, just…” he yawned, “comfy.”
Jack smiled, letting his hand come to rest on the head now resting on him. He fondly ran his fingers though the soft, slightly wavy hair. God, he was beginning to have real feelings for Ianto, feelings that were more than just friendship and lust, and that could only mean one thing, pain, so much pain. Ianto was going to die, some time in the next eighty or so years, he’d die and Jack would be alone and grieving - again. The Doctor had warned him, though it was about a hundred years too late, ‘They can live the rest of their lives with you, you can’t live the rest of your life with them. You have to keep a distance.’ ‘Like you did with Rose?’ Jack had countered, the hurt and loss he saw in the Doctor’s eyes made him regret his words as soon as he’d spoken them. His hand had been absently stroking Ianto’s hair while he mused on all this, now it came to rest on his lover’s forehead. He frowned and, lifting his hand away, turned it over and placed the back of his hand against Ianto’s head, too warm, much too warm!
He was just considering putting on the blue lights and taking the car onto the pavement when a uniformed policewoman appeared at the diver’s window. For a second it was Gwen, the first day they’d met. The police officer would never know that Jack’s sudden look of panic and shock had nothing to do with being caught with another man’s head on his lap. Once he had the window down, she looked pointedly at Ianto.
“He’s very tired and sick,” Jack explained
.
“Of course he is,” she responded sarcastically.
“Can I help you constable?”
“We’re going to clear the road and divert you. You should be able to turn around very soon, so you better wake up sleeping beauty.” With that she was on her way to the next car.
By the time he was executing a three point turn, Ianto was wide wake again. Following the car in front of them they turned down the side road, just as they were about to turn the corner into the main shopping street, Ianto suddenly sat up and peered around Jack at the dark shops they were passing.
“Pull over,” he suddenly instructed.
“What?”
“Jack, please, just up here, pull over!”
Thinking the clearly sick man was about to throw up, Jack did as requested. As soon as the car was stopped Ianto was out, and not bothering to wait for Jack, ran across the street, almost getting hit by the next car. Cursing, but taking the time to lock the car, Jack followed catching up to him outside a shop, a rather unremarkable branch of a well known coffee shop company.
“This is it,” Ianto told him some what cryptically.
“This is what?”
“My dad’s shop, this used to be ‘Jones and Son Tailors’, this was it.”
Jack took another look at the shop, it was - or appeared to be - Victorian, rather unremarkable, two stories above the shop, both with three windows.
“And son?” he asked.
“My great granddad, it was his father started the company, he’d been working over at some other place before that.” Ianto turned to him. “Have you ever seen Hobson’s Choice?”
“Can’t say I have, or if I have I don’t remember it.”
“Oh, well it was a lot like that, except Willy Mossop was a cobbler not a tailor.”
“I though it was Hobson’s choice?”
“It was.” Jack was beginning to think Ianto was a lot sicker than he’d thought. “I started working here Saturday afternoons and school holidays when I was eleven, sweeping up in the cutting room, started ironing when I was thirteen, cut my first cloth when I was fourteen.” He spun around and grinned. “Made my first sale when I was fifteen, it was a silk tie, navy blue with royal blue diamonds on it.”
Now Jack understood why Ianto had underachieved at school, why he had drifted until he got the job at Torchwood London, he’d expected to follow his father into the family business, the fifth generation of Jones’ to be master tailors, so he hadn’t planned or studied for anything else.
“So what happened?” Jack asked.
Ianto spun around to face him and seemed to sway slightly. “No call for bespoke tailoring, not here, not these days and we couldn’t compete on retail, not with the big chains.” He shrugged. “Dad got a very generous offer on the building; it seemed too good to turn down.”
Jack glanced at the building; it didn’t look like much to him. “You owned it?”
He nodded. “Even the freehold, all of it, it goes way back. Cutting room, sewing room, up until the fifties we used to make shirts too, storage rooms, fitting rooms, a full laundry - it was a big operation and there was a flat at the top, Mam and Dad lived there for a while when they were first married when my granddad was alive. Course when he died they moved into the big house with Gran.”
“The big house?”
“On Cathedral Road.”
Jack whistled in admiration, Cathedral Road was a good address, lots of big old Victorian houses. He tried to run his mind over Ianto’s security file; he didn’t remember his parents being mentioned as living in Cardiff.
“But they don’t live there now?” he asked, just to be sure.
“No, well with the business gone, there was no point keeping such a big house in the city and Mam-gu had just died.”
“What’s a Mam-gu?” Jack asked.
“I though you’d been living here for years?”
“Yeah, so, what is it?”
“Mam-gu is grandmother, my mam’s mam, she died when I was sixteen, Tad-cu died long before I was born, he was a miner.”
“Dad-key is grandfather?” Ianto nodded. “So where do your parents live now?”
“Spain, just outside Alicante. They’ve got a villa, sea view, pool, the lot, there’s even a separate little apartment for Gran.”
“That’s your father’s mother?”
He nodded. “She’s in her eighties but very independent - she rescues cats.” He gave Jack a knowing look, as if he would understand the significance of this statement. “Mam teaches English, Dad mostly plays golf.”
Ianto suddenly stepped out into the road to get a better look at the building, forcing Jack to grab his sleeve and pull him back, before he got run down.
“Come on; time to get you home to bed.”
“I don’t think I’m up to it.” Ianto rubbed his temple. “Got a bit of a headache.”
“I know, which is way you need to go to bed and get some sleep. I might even get…”
“Get what?” Ianto let Jack guide him back to the SUV.
**Get Owen to look you over,** Jack completed the sentence in his head. The whole weight of their loss came crashing back on to him. **Your fault Jack, it’s all your fault, Tosh and Owen are dead, Gwen’s on the edge and now Ianto’s sick and it’s all your fault!**
“Get what?” Ianto persisted, bringing Jack back to the here and now.
“Get you an aspirin. Come on, time to go home.”
<><><><><><><>
Part 2
By Sammy Girl
Genre: H&C, slush-slash.
Disclaimer: Not mine, never were, never will be.
Note: This is my first Torchwood fic, written fairly fast for me. It’s set just after Exit Wounds and contains references for past episodes. Betaed by the wonderful Kerry. If some of this story conflicts with screen canon, it’s unintentional, just a mistake; if some of it conflicts with canon from the Dr Who and Torchwood books, which I haven’t had the opportunity to read, I apologise. But hey the joy of fan fic is the freedom to play - right.
<><><><><><><>
Part 1
Jack cursed silently as the traffic ground to a halt. Somewhere ahead of him he could see blue lights flashing. Glancing at his sleeping passenger, he flipped open his phone and called the police. The chances were that whatever was holding things up had nothing to do with them, but it didn’t hurt to check. As he had thought, it was a simple traffic accident, all be it a bad one - a drunk driver had run a red light, smashed into a much smaller car and sent it spinning into a whole bunch of revellers on the pavement, themselves probably too drunk to react in time to get out of the way. As the officer in the control room he’d spoken to had said, it was basically carnage. All in all it just made a bad weekend even worse.
Losing Tosh and Owen had been bad, right there, right then, but what came after was somehow worse. The clean up, the paper work, the personal possessions, dealing with that side of things drained all of them to the point of exhaustion. Gwen had held it together for a while, Jack had talked her out of quitting, but in the end she just broke down. Rhys took some time off work and - with Jack’s blessing and encouragement - had taken her away for a short break in the sun. That left Jack and Ianto to keep an eye on the rift. They could have done with a quiet time of it, but it was not to be. First a whole cluster of Cheklin mines fell though the rift and began exploding randomly, causing small, localised, electromagnetic pulses, which knocked out anything with an electrical power supply. They had managed to locate the last four and disarmed them, including - with seconds to spare - one just 500 yards from the hospital. It had been a frantic day and night in which neither of them got much sleep. Then, only hours after they had deactivated the last one and placed it in the vault - Ianto found it hard to believe a thing the size of a Mars bar could be so powerful - they picked up reports that indicated unusual weevil activity in an industrial park on the city’s north east boundary. Since it was the weekend the park was all but deserted, nonetheless it took all day and well into Saturday night to discover that the damn things had followed the scent from a meat packing plant that was illegally discharging its waste into the public sewers. So, along with the weevils, there were also rats, in what Ianto termed ‘Biblical quantities’. All in all a fun time was had by all!
Jack had offered to drive, not because he was the team leader, but just because Ianto looked so very tired, so tired that Jack was actually worried about him. For this reason he had taken a slightly longer route home so that he could drop Ianto off at his house before heading for the Hub. It was close enough to the Hub for Ianto to walk to work in good weather, as he had on Thursday. He hadn’t been home since then and had expressed his desire, even need, for a long hot bath and his own bed.
Now they were stuck in traffic and Jack wished he’d taken the direct route, through the infamous Splott. The sudden thunderous thwack of rotor blades announced the arrival of the air ambulance; they didn’t call that into the city unless things were really, really bad.
As far as he could tell they were planning to land in the middle of the junction up ahead. He was glad it wasn’t him, bringing a chopper down in the middle of a built up area was no job for the faint hearted.
“Was’ that?” Ianto suddenly asked, sitting up rather too quickly.
“Air ambulance, up ahead, we’re stuck.”
Jack watched as Ianto forced himself to come fully awake. “Oh, right, damn.”
“Yeah,” Jack sympathised. He’d thought about turning around, but they were in a one way street and there just wasn’t any room.
“How are you?” Jack asked.
Ianto didn’t answer instantly, but seemed to consider his replay. “Better for some sleep.”
“Half an hour in the car isn’t sleep; it’s barely a cat nap.”
“Mmm, true, maybe I’ll go back to sleep, what kind of pillow do you make?” With that he leaned over and rested his head on Jack’s lap. “Nice, not too bony.”
“You saying I’m fat?”
“No, just…” he yawned, “comfy.”
Jack smiled, letting his hand come to rest on the head now resting on him. He fondly ran his fingers though the soft, slightly wavy hair. God, he was beginning to have real feelings for Ianto, feelings that were more than just friendship and lust, and that could only mean one thing, pain, so much pain. Ianto was going to die, some time in the next eighty or so years, he’d die and Jack would be alone and grieving - again. The Doctor had warned him, though it was about a hundred years too late, ‘They can live the rest of their lives with you, you can’t live the rest of your life with them. You have to keep a distance.’ ‘Like you did with Rose?’ Jack had countered, the hurt and loss he saw in the Doctor’s eyes made him regret his words as soon as he’d spoken them. His hand had been absently stroking Ianto’s hair while he mused on all this, now it came to rest on his lover’s forehead. He frowned and, lifting his hand away, turned it over and placed the back of his hand against Ianto’s head, too warm, much too warm!
He was just considering putting on the blue lights and taking the car onto the pavement when a uniformed policewoman appeared at the diver’s window. For a second it was Gwen, the first day they’d met. The police officer would never know that Jack’s sudden look of panic and shock had nothing to do with being caught with another man’s head on his lap. Once he had the window down, she looked pointedly at Ianto.
“He’s very tired and sick,” Jack explained
.
“Of course he is,” she responded sarcastically.
“Can I help you constable?”
“We’re going to clear the road and divert you. You should be able to turn around very soon, so you better wake up sleeping beauty.” With that she was on her way to the next car.
By the time he was executing a three point turn, Ianto was wide wake again. Following the car in front of them they turned down the side road, just as they were about to turn the corner into the main shopping street, Ianto suddenly sat up and peered around Jack at the dark shops they were passing.
“Pull over,” he suddenly instructed.
“What?”
“Jack, please, just up here, pull over!”
Thinking the clearly sick man was about to throw up, Jack did as requested. As soon as the car was stopped Ianto was out, and not bothering to wait for Jack, ran across the street, almost getting hit by the next car. Cursing, but taking the time to lock the car, Jack followed catching up to him outside a shop, a rather unremarkable branch of a well known coffee shop company.
“This is it,” Ianto told him some what cryptically.
“This is what?”
“My dad’s shop, this used to be ‘Jones and Son Tailors’, this was it.”
Jack took another look at the shop, it was - or appeared to be - Victorian, rather unremarkable, two stories above the shop, both with three windows.
“And son?” he asked.
“My great granddad, it was his father started the company, he’d been working over at some other place before that.” Ianto turned to him. “Have you ever seen Hobson’s Choice?”
“Can’t say I have, or if I have I don’t remember it.”
“Oh, well it was a lot like that, except Willy Mossop was a cobbler not a tailor.”
“I though it was Hobson’s choice?”
“It was.” Jack was beginning to think Ianto was a lot sicker than he’d thought. “I started working here Saturday afternoons and school holidays when I was eleven, sweeping up in the cutting room, started ironing when I was thirteen, cut my first cloth when I was fourteen.” He spun around and grinned. “Made my first sale when I was fifteen, it was a silk tie, navy blue with royal blue diamonds on it.”
Now Jack understood why Ianto had underachieved at school, why he had drifted until he got the job at Torchwood London, he’d expected to follow his father into the family business, the fifth generation of Jones’ to be master tailors, so he hadn’t planned or studied for anything else.
“So what happened?” Jack asked.
Ianto spun around to face him and seemed to sway slightly. “No call for bespoke tailoring, not here, not these days and we couldn’t compete on retail, not with the big chains.” He shrugged. “Dad got a very generous offer on the building; it seemed too good to turn down.”
Jack glanced at the building; it didn’t look like much to him. “You owned it?”
He nodded. “Even the freehold, all of it, it goes way back. Cutting room, sewing room, up until the fifties we used to make shirts too, storage rooms, fitting rooms, a full laundry - it was a big operation and there was a flat at the top, Mam and Dad lived there for a while when they were first married when my granddad was alive. Course when he died they moved into the big house with Gran.”
“The big house?”
“On Cathedral Road.”
Jack whistled in admiration, Cathedral Road was a good address, lots of big old Victorian houses. He tried to run his mind over Ianto’s security file; he didn’t remember his parents being mentioned as living in Cardiff.
“But they don’t live there now?” he asked, just to be sure.
“No, well with the business gone, there was no point keeping such a big house in the city and Mam-gu had just died.”
“What’s a Mam-gu?” Jack asked.
“I though you’d been living here for years?”
“Yeah, so, what is it?”
“Mam-gu is grandmother, my mam’s mam, she died when I was sixteen, Tad-cu died long before I was born, he was a miner.”
“Dad-key is grandfather?” Ianto nodded. “So where do your parents live now?”
“Spain, just outside Alicante. They’ve got a villa, sea view, pool, the lot, there’s even a separate little apartment for Gran.”
“That’s your father’s mother?”
He nodded. “She’s in her eighties but very independent - she rescues cats.” He gave Jack a knowing look, as if he would understand the significance of this statement. “Mam teaches English, Dad mostly plays golf.”
Ianto suddenly stepped out into the road to get a better look at the building, forcing Jack to grab his sleeve and pull him back, before he got run down.
“Come on; time to get you home to bed.”
“I don’t think I’m up to it.” Ianto rubbed his temple. “Got a bit of a headache.”
“I know, which is way you need to go to bed and get some sleep. I might even get…”
“Get what?” Ianto let Jack guide him back to the SUV.
**Get Owen to look you over,** Jack completed the sentence in his head. The whole weight of their loss came crashing back on to him. **Your fault Jack, it’s all your fault, Tosh and Owen are dead, Gwen’s on the edge and now Ianto’s sick and it’s all your fault!**
“Get what?” Ianto persisted, bringing Jack back to the here and now.
“Get you an aspirin. Come on, time to go home.”
<><><><><><><>
Part 2