FIC: When the Bough Breaks 1/3 (Jack/Ianto)
Title: When the Bough Breaks 1/3
Characters: Jack/Ianto (with Owen, Gwen and Tosh)
Rating: PG-13
Words: 4671 (this part)
Spoilers: Torchwood Season 1 and Doctor Who Season 3 (specifically "End of Days" and "Utopia", "Sound of Drums" and "Last of the Time Lords")
Notes: Fabulous beta done by kensieg. Much information - both medical and geographical - garnered from Google, so take with a large grain of salt, yeah?
Summary: What if The Year That Never Was never was, but the wild goose hunt in the Himalayas was. And what if Jack were to come home to find that there's a much bigger issue to deal with than the fact that he left?
When the Bough Breaks Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
The one thing Jack hadn’t expected to find when he got back was an empty Hub. A Hub that was actually shut down and collecting dust. Ianto’d have a fit when he saw the mess. He looked up and saw that Myfanwy’s hatch was open so she could come and go as she pleased. That explained some of the mess. The pteredactyl had apparently over turned a few chairs and either she or the wind had scattered some papers and files on the floor.
Jack tilted his head and surveyed the scene. The team wasn’t out on a run. They were just… gone. But they’d left knowing they weren’t coming back for a time. Jack wandered up to his office where he found the answer phone blinking. Absently he hit play, even though he expected it to be the pizza place calling to see if they were ever getting paid or Owen’s mother calling to complain that he never called. Why she couldn’t do that on Owen’s mobile or home phone, Jack never understood.
“Jack, on the off chance you come back before we do; call the NHNN in London.” It was Owen’s voice and Jack whipped around to stare at the machine as if it was somehow responsible for the news it was imparting. “Ask for me - I’m on a visiting physician’s license - or Ianto’s room. I’ll explain more when you call.” Owen proceeded to leave the numbers and extensions before he hung up.
Jack dropped into his chair, his stomach full of lead. The only NHNN he knew of was the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and apparently Ianto was a patient. Fuck. He replayed the message, punching the number into his mobile as Owen read it off. He had to go through three electronic switchboards and two humans before he finally got connected to a ringing phone.
“Hello?”
“Tosh?!” Jack asked excitedly, thrilled to hear her voice.
“Who is this?” she asked nervously. Jack knew she knew damn well who it was, but was either not ready to have her hopes dashed on the off chance she was wrong or she was really pissed at him.
“Tosh, it’s me, Jack.” He heard a click and then a scuffle of feet and voices and presumed he’d been put on speakerphone. “Hello?”
“Harkness?” Owen asked sharply. “That you?”
“Yeah, Owen it’s me. What the hell is going on?”
“Hell of a lot of nerve you have asking us that,” Owen replied.
Jack checked his temper. All of them being pissed at each other for not being where they were supposed to be wouldn’t solve anything. “I know,” he said softly, “And I will explain, just… tell me why you’re in London.”
There was a long pause before a voice Jack recognized as Gwen’s finally answered, “Ianto got hurt, Jack.”
“I surmised that much from the phone message. Where is he? Can I talk to him?” His heart was pounding; the non-answers were starting to piss him off. How bad was it?
“He’s not here,” Gwen said.
Jack’s frayed temper snapped. “Where is he? You just said he-“
“He’s in surgery, Jack. He’s hit his head and they can’t keep the swelling down. They’re doing a cranionomy to try and take the pressure off his brain.” Owen’s voice had come down a notch apparently aware that this news would be tough on Jack. There was a pause as he let Jack take in the information.
“And it’s so bad they couldn’t treat him here in Cardiff?” Jack asked quietly.
“We weren’t in Cardiff when it happened. It’s a long story, but we were in fucking India. I was only able to get a medical transport back to civilization a few days ago. Look, the really, really short version is that he fell off a goddamned mountain and now we’re having some problems keeping the swelling in his head down. I can tell you that if you could see your way clear to getting your arse out here, he’d be pretty fucking happy to see you when he gets out of recovery.” Jack could hear Owen take a deep breath. His voice was softer, kinder when he added, “He was pretty confused the first few days … he kept asking for you.”
Jack took in Owen’s words. They’d been in the Himalayas. He’d hoped that when the Year That Never Was had been erased The Master’s decoy trip for his team would have never happened as well. So much for that. Ianto had been asking for him when he’d been hurt. He didn’t envy whoever had to tell him that he wasn’t there. He buried his head in his hands for a second. He should have been there. “I don’t suppose the SUV is still here,” Jack said at last.
“Yeah,” Tosh answered for them. “We haven’t been home since, so…”
Jack clicked on his own speakerphone and dropped the mobile into his shirt pocket so he could talk while he shoved a few shirts and pairs of socks into a bag. He looked through the things Ianto had started leaving in the hub as their relationship had progressed. He grabbed his toothbrush and razor as well as a few t-shirts and some underwear. He found one pair of Ianto’s jeans in his locker and figured they’d get him whatever else he needed in London. He grabbed the spare SUV key from his desk and headed out.
“I’m on my way. I’m going to hit the lights when I get to the M4, even so It’ll probably take me over two hours to get there… tell me what happened while I drive,” he ordered.
The SUV was made to handle well at high speeds and Jack was hell-bent on putting those capabilities to the test. He listened as Gwen and Owen took turns filling him in on the call from the Prime Minister about a Rift that had supposedly opened up somewhere in the mountains between India and China. And how, when the wild goose chase had led them up a steep mountainside in search of some kind of crashed alien ship, Ianto had lost his grip on the rope and crashed down over twenty meters. They explained how it had taken search and rescue most of a day to reach them and get them back to the nearest medical facility which Owen had scoffed at and insisted on making transport plans to get Ianto back to the U.K. Plans that had taken over a week to materialize. He’d been road-blocked at every turn, every diplomatic channel turning him down until… suddenly they hadn’t been able to do enough to help. Jack realized that that must have been the exact point where everything reset. When The Master no longer had influence to keep them stuck somewhere in the Asian subcontinent.
Jack put the SUV into a spot marked off for the police and ran for the door. He stopped and took several deep breaths before approaching the reception desk and asking for Ianto’s room number. He barely heard the polite young lady as she gave him a sticker with his name and Ianto’s room number written on it. He dashed for the lift and tapped his foot impatiently as it rose to the fourth floor.
Gwen was waiting near the nurse’s station as he exited the lift and tackled him as soon as he emerged. He hugged her back and then stepped back to give her a once over. “You’re okay? God, I’m sorry, I never even asked… is everyone else okay?”
Gwen nodded. “Tosh has a sprained wrist, but other than that… it’s just Ianto.”
Jack nodded. “Where is he? Where’re the others?”
Gwen hugged him again, just because she could. “Ianto’s still in surgery. Owen says it’ll probably be another half hour or more. We’ve all been waiting in his room. They’re going to page Owen when they get done.” She took his hand and led him down the hall. “What about you? What happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’ll explain to everyone at once… it’ll take a while,” Jack hedged as they made their way to a room about half way down the short corridor.
When Gwen pushed open the door, Tosh and Owen both jumped to their feet. Tosh virtually shoved Gwen aside in her attempts to get at Jack. She gave him a one-armed hug and a huge smile. Jack hugged her back carefully, dropping a soft kiss into her hair. “Hey. How are you?” He gently lifted her left wrist and examined the black elastic and Velcro brace.
“It’s nothing, really. Just slipped on some ice. I’m fine,” she assured him.
Owen hung back, studying Jack. “So you’re back.”
“Yeah,” Jack answered simply, one arm still around Tosh who seemed to think apparently the key to keeping Jack nearby was to literally hang on to him. “And I will explain. I promise. But I’d like to see Ianto.”
Owen looked like he was torn between chewing Jack out for being gone in the first place and being glad he was there now. He glanced at his watch. “Come on. They should be done soon if there weren’t any complications. We can sit in the waiting room.”
“What happened?” Jack asked before they could leave. “You said he fell a week ago. Why are they just doing surgery now?”
Owen blew out a breath. There was no good way to present this. “He’s bleeding in his skull. It’s causing pressure on his brain. They thought they’d gotten it under control, but this morning his blood pressure went through the roof and he wasn’t breathing right. They did an MRI and found a bleed, they’ve gone in to stop it.” He made sure Jack met his eyes as he added. “He has one of the best neurosurgeons in the country working on him. As much as this kind of trauma can be ‘textbook’, his case is. He was tracking conversations and his memory has been intact for the past couple days. Of course it’s not good, but it really could be a hell of a lot worse.”
Jack nodded. He strongly suspected that in the timeline he’d followed, Ianto had died on a mountainside in India. He’d tried to get confirmation of Torchwood’s continued existence during that time and failing that he’d tried to at least find out if any of the four of them had survived. The lack of information had pretty much confirmed what he’d believed in his gut as soon as The Master mentioned his little snipe hunt in the Himalayas. He tried to shove down his guilt over everything that had happened and tried to be glad that at least things had reset back far enough that Owen had been able to get Ianto to a proper medical facility. “You said they should be done soon?”
“Yeah, come on,” Owen said, turning back to the door and heading out.
Tosh remained plastered to Jack’s side as they followed Owen to the stairs and down two flights to the surgery. Gwen took up the other side and Jack began to feel like a prisoner under guard who was expected to try and flee without a moment’s notice. Not that he blamed them for wanting to be sure they knew right where he was.
Owen pointed them into a room decorated in soft greens and cream and said he’d go to the observation room and see how far along they were. The girls remained on either side of Jack as he flopped onto a mint green sofa.
Owen came back in five minutes later. “They’re putting in the sutures now. Once they get him bandaged up and off all the monitors they’ll move him into recovery.” He looked Jack in the eye as he said, “It’s still going to be a while before he’s awake. He hasn’t been conscious over-much since he got hurt in the first place, but now with all the anesthesia…”
Jack let his hands hang between his knees. “That’s okay. I just… Can I sit with him for a few minutes? I don’t care if he can’t talk to me, I just want to see him.”
Owen’s face grew soft at Jack’s quiet, pleading words. “I’ll arrange it,” he said before slipping out again.
Tosh reached for Jack’s hand with her good one. He knew she thought she was offering him support, but as clingy as she’d been since she’d seen him, he knew that it was more for her comfort than his. He put an arm around her shoulders and let her lean his head on his chest.
“He’ll be okay,” Gwen said for lack of anything else to say.
Jack nodded. “I just want to see him to be sure.”
He thought through what Owen had said. Ianto had fallen over a week ago and was still having problems staying awake. Now they were drilling holes in his skull to try and take the pressure off his swelling brain. None of that sounded good. Jack wondered if he’d be able to breathe life into Ianto a second time if it came to that.
They sat silently for another thirty minutes before Owen came back.
Gwen popped up and ran to Owen. “What’s happened?”
Owen nodded her back to the sofa and then sat on the coffee table to address everyone. “They’re done and getting him set up in recovery now. I managed to catch the surgeon on his way out.” He smiled as everyone let out a collective sigh. “The good news is that once they got in there, they not only found the bleed they saw on the scan this morning, but another smaller one. They were able to stop them both and his ICP looks good now.”
“ICP?” Tosh asked.
“Intracranial pressure. His brain isn’t being squished anymore,” Owen explained somewhat indelicately, but he knew that if he started pussy-footing around it too much, they’d all jump to all kinds of horrid conclusions.
“You said that’s the good news. What’s the bad?” Jack asked softly.
“They’re starting to see a few signs of something called an abducens palsy. It’s nothing major and it may resolve itself as he heals.”
“What, like cerebral palsy?” Gwen asked. “I have a nephew with that.”
“Something like, but not as … encompassing,” Owen explained. “A palsy is a condition where the brain and the muscles aren’t exactly on speaking terms. In cerebral palsy it can affect the arms and legs and other voluntary muscles. In this case, an abducens palsy means he can’t shift his eyes in the socket. If it doesn’t resolve, he’ll have trouble focusing at a distance and he’ll turn his head to see things on the periphery instead of just looking over like this,” Owen proceeded to demonstrate, looking at the walls on both sides of the room.
“That doesn’t sound… so bad?” Tosh asked, more looking for confirmation than anything.
“It’s not, all said,” Owen said. “Believe me when his blood pressure and respiration spiked this morning I thought we’d be looking at much bigger problems.”
Jack hung his head. He found himself actively wishing the Master hadn’t allowed himself to die. Jack wanted to find him and beat him into his next six regenerations. And then let him die.
“Jack,” Owen said, breaking the silence that had descended. “They should have him situated by now. I can get you in for about five minutes.” He looked at Gwen and Tosh, “If the nurses are feeling sweet tonight, I might be able to get them to let you two in for a minute or two after that.”
They smiled and nodded at him as Jack got up and followed Owen out of the waiting room.
() () () () () ()
Jack wouldn’t have recognized Ianto if Owen hadn’t pointed him out. There were two other guys in the recovery room, all of who had bandages over at least half their head. Owen pulled a chair over to the side of Ianto’s bed and nodded to Jack, leaving them alone.
Jack stared for a long moment before moving to the chair. Ianto was on a ton of monitoring equipment. All the wires and tubes connected to both arms and his head made him look small and fragile. All the white gauze around his head combined with the bruises on his face and the extremely pale complexion made him damn near unrecognizable. Jack traced one finger along the edge of the bandages and around the back of Ianto’s ear. He noticed ruefully that there weren’t any stray dark hairs poking out from under the white. “They shaved your head?” Jack asked the unconscious form. “That’s going to go over well when you wake up.”
Ianto’s eyes crinkled and he turned his head just a fraction of an inch towards Jack’s voice. Jack slid his hand down and wove his fingers through Ianto’s carefully. “It’s okay, Ianto. You don’t have to wake up yet. You’ve had a rough day. I’m back now, and I’m not going anywhere, so just get some sleep,” Jack soothed, not entirely sure if Ianto was hearing anything he said. He told himself that Ianto had heard him and understood when Ianto seemed to relax and settle a little more. He needed to believe that.
Ianto grimaced again and brought one shoulder up to his ear. Jack reached over and gently coaxed him to relax. “Come on, Ianto, it’s okay. Just rest,” he said. For all that Jack wanted to talk to him, he wasn’t sure he was ready to face him. Not like this, not when there were bandages with pink edges showing and there was no way Ianto would be able to really understand much more than the fact that they’d just removed and later replaced a part of his skull and that he was in pain.
Jack wondered if he was simply sympathizing with Ianto or if there was some way that he was actually feeling Ianto’s pain. He blinked as an odd memory skittered across his mind. He remembered meeting Rose and the little faux pas with the psychic paper. He sqeezed his eyes shut, trying to think of why he was remembering that particular incident with Ianto laying in a hospital bed having just had brain surgery.
Rose. Psychic paper. Rose laughing because he had inadvertently made a pass at her. Not that he’d regretted it, but he really hadn’t meant to. At least not at that particular time. He remembered a night when he’d been with Martha and the Doctor in his newest incarnation and he and the doctor had been teasing Martha about the fact that humans wouldn’t develop reliable psychic abilities until at least the twenty-ninth century and how it wouldn’t be mainstream and commonplace until after the thirty-fifth. They’d then proceeded to have a conversation half out-loud and half psychically, just to pull her chain.
“Well, there’s always that odd group Rose met,” the Doctor had said.
“Odd group?” Martha asked.
“Mm,” the Doctor had answered in that inimitable way this regeneration so favored. “We ended up at Torchwood in London,” he shot Jack an unreadable look. “They told her they’d all had psychic training. Enough to fool psychic paper, but it wasn’t like they’d gone about talking to each other like that or anything.”
Jack shook himself out of the memory. ”They told her they’d all had psychic training.”
Jack had all but shut down his own psychic abilities - not that he’d ever been a star pupil in his school classes for developing psychic abilities (or any other) - but he’d stopped using what he had learned when he’d gotten stuck in 1869 since it tended to freak contemporary people out.
Jack took a deep breath and cleared his mind. Ianto, I have no idea if you can hear me.
Ianto shifted. Jack wasn’t sure if it was a response or just coincidence.
I’m home, he sent feeling lame for not having anything better to say. You’re doped to the gills. You just had surgery; so don’t wake up just yet. But you know, I thought maybe… maybe you’d hear me this way. Jack focused his emotions sending waves of comfort and calm.
Ianto settled against his pillows and the lines in his face softened.
Jack smiled. That wasn’t coincidence. There was no way. If there was, Jack didn’t want to know about it. I’m going to stay for a while. Just rest. You’ll probably think you dreamed this when you wake up. But that’s okay, because I’ll still be here when you open those gorgeous eyes of yours. He cut off thoughts of that palsy thing Owen had mentioned and how Ianto’s eyes may not ever work quite right again. No point in freaking the poor guy out.
Jack carefully tugged the sheet up around Ianto, noticing for the first time how cold the hand in his was. When the nurse came by to record the information from the machines Jack asked if she could get Ianto a blanket. She came back a few minutes later with a white cotton blanket and she handed it to Jack, letting him tuck Ianto in. It made him feel better to have done something for the battered man. Such a little thing after all this, but it was something and Jack needed that. Better?
He swore there was just the faintest echo of a positive response.
After Ianto was tucked in, Jack took his hand again and sat on the edge of the bed near Ianto’s knee and just watched him, grateful to see each rise and fall of his chest. He had no idea how long he’d been sitting there when he felt Owen’s hand on his shoulder. “He doing okay?”
Jack’s first reaction was to tell him that he was reasonably sure that Ianto was sleeping peacefully; that he knew Jack was back and was just biding his time before he woke up to talk to them. That would entail explaining how he knew that and he wasn’t sure Ianto would want anyone to know that. A small smile quirked up the corner of Jack’s mouth. It would explain how Ianto always seemed to know just what people needed when they needed it. He’d always thought him just observant, but the more he thought about it… It also explained how he could move in and out of the hub taking are of a Cyberwoman without being noticed. The smile faded. Perhaps there was yet another talent of Ianto’s that Jack had been sadly underutilizing.
“Jack?” Owen asked when there was no answer to his earlier query. “How is he?”
Jack nodded at all the equipment. “You tell me; you’re the doc.”
Owen took Ianto’s chart from the end of the bed and flipped through several pages. “His blood pressure is much better than it was this morning. They’ll keep him on oxygen for a while because that’s standard treatment for high ICP, but his O2 looks good and his reflexes are good. Yeah, so long as there are no other bleeds, he’s going to be okay.”
Jack nodded, trying to shunt all thoughts of psychic communication and training back into the back of his mind. In retrospect, it may not have been the world’s smartest idea to go poking into a sick brain. Trained or not, Ianto could have had a pretty strong reaction to someone else in his head. They already knew there were some symptoms of things being less than good between the swelling and the vision issues. “Except for that eye thing?” Jack asked.
“No one’s sure on that yet. They saw it this morning when he was awake, but it’s hard to test for in someone unconscious, and like I said, it could resolve now that the bleeding’s stopped and the pressure’s down. And even so, it’s something he can totally learn to live with.” Owen hung the chart back up.
“He couldn’t go into the field though, right? No peripheral vision?” Jack was gently stroking the back of Ianto’s hand with his thumb.
“You’re putting the cart way before the horse, Jack. We have no idea at this point if he’s going to have any permanent residual effects from this. On the other hand, it could be weeks or months before he’s even up for so much as making coffee and filing things. So far when he’s been awake his memory and processing have all tested all right. He may need a little physio, but only because he’s been in bed for a week and probably will be for a few weeks more. He’s going to get pretty stiff and weak from not moving. We were all amazed that he didn’t break a single bone in that fall. He has a good number of bruises, but I don’t reckon it’s anything worse than what happened at Hotel Hell in Brecon Beacons. Now that the bleeding is under control, he’s doing really well. A lot better than we ever figured on up on that damn mountain. Anyway, even if the vision issues don’t clear completely up, I don’t think it’ll affect his job. He’s not a field officer anyway.”
“Then what was he doing out there?” Jack snapped suddenly turning to face Owen.
Owen raised a finger in Jack’s face. “Whoa there, mate; you want to have an argument with me, we can do it out there,” he jerked a thumb at the door. The look on his face told Jack that Owen would be perfectly okay if Jack took him out in the hall. He had a few things to say too.
Jack knew they all did, but for the moment they were, thankfully, putting those things aside in deference to Ianto’s condition.
Jack took in a deep breath and turned back to Ianto. “I don’t want to have an argument with you,” he said simply. Owen wasn’t sure if it was because he simply didn’t feel up to having an argument or if it was because getting to have it would mean having to leave Ianto’s side.
Owen’s hand came back down on Jack’s shoulder. “He insisted on going. We had about twelve hours between the time we got the call from the Prime Minister and the time our plane left for Kashmir. I talked to the girls. Turns out that in that time we all pulled him aside separately and tried to convince him to wait in Cardiff in case you came back. He was having none of it.”
Jack nodded. That sounded like Ianto. Brave to a fault. They stayed that way for another few minutes. Jack was sure Owen’s promised five minutes had come and gone a long time ago, but he wasn’t going to be the first to bring it up.
Almost as though he was reading Jack’s mind though, Owen squeezed his shoulder and said, “Tosh and Gwen want a minute. Why don’t we let them step in for a bit and then we can all get dinner. As long as everything stays this good, they’ll move him up to his room around seven and you can stay as long as you like.”
Jack nodded without moving for a long moment. “Yeah. Just give me one more minute, okay?”
Owen squeezed his shoulder. “Sure.”
When Jack heard the door close behind Owen, Jack stood and walked to the head of the bed. He leaned over and pressed a soft kiss to one of the few unbruised patches of skin on Ianto’s cheek. “Get some rest,” he instructed softly. “Because I expect you to wake up and talk to me for a bit tonight, okay? Give me hell for going away… whatever.” Of course there was no answer, even as much as Jack tried to will one from the very, very still form. He kissed him one more time before heading out so that Tosh and Gwen could stop in for a bit.
On to Part 2/3