FIC: PTSD: Post Torchwood Stress Disorder (2/7)
Title: PTSD: Post Torchwood Stress Disorder (2/7)
Characters: Jack/Ianto (with Owen, Gwen and Tosh)
Rating: R
Words: 3081 (this part)
Notes: A while back I wrote a story called 'Thursday' Is the Wrong Answer. In it, I posited that there were only 12 survivors of Torchwood One. Someone then pointed me to semi-canon source that listed 27 survivors. A third person then suggested that just because 27 people were alive at the end of the Battle of Canary Wharf, that doesn't mean that a year, two years, whatever, later that all of those people would still be alive. That idea wouldn't leave me alone. I also posit that even though Jack says in the opening narration that Torchwood is 'separate from the government' that there has to be some kind of government oversight committee. Someone's paying to keep their lights on and paying for all that pizza and Chinese food.
kensieg is back and did her usual, wonderful beta on this part.
Summary: It's been two and a half years since Canary Wharf. It's been a year since Lisa. And Jack is just now realizing what the real toll has all been on Ianto and the other survivors of Torchwood One. Now he needs to fix a big thing done badly before anyone else dies.
Part 1 is here.
“Come here,” Jack said, setting his own glass aside. He carefully removed Ianto’s jacket and then his tie. He kicked off his own shoes and encouraged Ianto to do the same. “Let’s get comfortable. I’m getting the impression this could take some time.” When Ianto looked like he was going to apologize or back out, Jack kissed him softly. “I have all night. I just figure we might was well be comfortable while we talk.”
Ianto reached up and unbuttoned his top two buttons. Jack turned to stretch out on the sofa, his back against the arm. Ianto let Jack pull him around until he was lying on the couch, his head on Jack’s chest. Jack’s strong heartbeat under his ear calming him. They both wiggled and shifted until their glasses and the bottle were within reach and they were both comfortable.
“Tell me about the letters,” Jack whispered as they settled.
Ianto found himself fiddling with a button on Jack’s shirt. “Aside from the four who died before we were released, we were all ready - physically anyway - to leave the hospital no more than three weeks after we’d arrived. My hands still hurt a little, but I was able to dress and feed myself without too much difficulty, and aside from Karen, I was the one with the worst actual injuries. Well, not including Lisa, but that’s another very long story. Anyway, they wouldn’t release any of us even after the doctors signed us out. We were kept in what we ended up terming quarantine for ten weeks. We had very little contact with the outside world. Even our access to things like newspapers and television was very strictly monitored and censored. We were told it was because we were all PTSD patients as well as burn victims and whatnot and they didn’t want to risk upsetting us by showing us the news. We never felt comfortable with that explanation.”
He stopped picking at Jack’s shirt and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was starting to get a headache from the stress. He felt Jack’s hand gently passing over the back of his head. Stroking him, petting him, calming him. He squeezed Jack’s ribs in thanks for the support before taking a deep breath and pressing on. He wasn’t sure how much of this he’d be able to go through tonight, but he’d at least get through explaining the Letters if it killed him. “We didn’t talk about it in quarantine, we strongly suspected we were being monitored, but we weren’t really receiving counseling. Not like we expected. It felt … we felt like we were being programmed. What to say when people asked where we’d been during the battle, where we’d been while we were in hospital. I remember Marc and I got really upset one day in the ‘group session’ about how we couldn’t hear anything about how the world was reacting to what had happened - we didn’t know yet about the ‘drugs in the water supply’ white washing of it all. We wanted to hear about how our colleagues who’d died were being remembered - if anyone gave a damn about us.” Ianto took a deep breath trying not to relive the anger as he spoke about it. “We spoke up. As far as I know it was the first and only time in ten weeks that anyone spoke up about it all.”
“The only time?” Jack pressed, worried now that Torchwood HQ had simply added insult to injury - or possibly in this case injury to injury - in which case he’d be having a four-letter-word or several with someone in the government oversight committee. He also saw that shades of that programming were still in place. He could see that they’d been told that their explanations of what had happened at the Torchwood Tower hadn’t made sense. That trying to explain what they’d seen and lived through made them sound insane. They’d been forced to reword and redefine the experience so many times that they’d ended up changing their answers until they were giving the answers Downing Street wanted. Jack wondered how best to go about undoing that leftover damage.
“We were never hurt,” Ianto continued, “but it was… strongly impressed upon us that we needed to cooperate for the good of the Institute. For the good of England.” The loathing dripped from Ianto’s voice. “We learned to play along until we could get released. ‘Lie and think of England’ one of the girls said once we got out. It became something of a joke and a motto.” Ianto took a deep breath. “Somewhere around week six or seven we all started wondering if we were going to be prisoners for the rest of our lives. There were certainly no indications that they had any plans to ever let us go. But we played along.”
He went back to fiddling with the button, twisting it back and forth on the thin strings that held it to Jack’s shirt. Jack’s hands were still in his hair and he closed his eyes and gave himself a few minutes to simply focus on the tingling in his scalp as Jack gently scratched and stroked. He wondered if they’d end up sleeping right there on the couch that night. He felt so damn tired. And it wouldn’t be the first time Jack had failed to wake him in order to move them both to somewhere more comfortable.
“So they let you go?” Jack prompted.
“Finally. And with no warning at all. They just suddenly showed up with a pair of clean jeans and a gray jumper for each of us and told us we could go. Our flats and houses had been maintained in our absence and our back pay was deposited to our accounts with enough extra to keep us going while we decided what to do next.” He let out a short breath. “I was so sure we were going to be retconned on the way out the door… or shot… I didn’t know.”
“So they just … dumped you after ten weeks in a hospital with no contact with the outside world?” Those four-letter-words were multiplying.
“Meaghan said our insurance had run out and NHS wasn’t going to cover in-patient stays for PTSD. I think she meant it as a joke, but it’s as good an explanation as any. Somehow they’d gotten our house keys for us… so we had clothes that weren’t really ours, a bus card and key. And we were on our own.”
Jack squeezed him tight. “God Ianto, that’s horrible. I had no idea.”
Ianto shrugged. “It’s not like we were six-year-olds or abandoned kittens. We each had a place to go.”
“That still… it doesn’t…” Jack couldn’t imagine abandoning his team when things had gone badly. He suddenly gathered Ianto in close, hugging him for all he was worth as he tried valiantly to suppress the tears in his eyes. If Ianto wasn’t going to cry over this he sure as hell wasn’t. But it went so far to explain why Ianto seemed so grateful for any little attention paid him after a bad day or frightening incident. He was glad Ianto didn’t seem too inclined to ask where the sudden surge of emotion had come from.
“We decided to go to Ethan’s place. None of us wanted to go home alone. We wanted to talk. So we went to Ethan’s and, well, first we searched the place high and low for listening devices - not that the whole thing had made us paranoid or anything - but for about a week we camped out on Ethan’s living room floor. Most of us went back to our own places for a bit in a day or two, but for the nights… we felt safer together.”
“You got twenty-seven people in one guy’s flat?” Jack asked. He’d seen places with population control issues. Any one- or two-room flat with more than ten people had made him claustrophobic. And he was okay with rubbing elbows or whatever body parts were available with someone he didn’t know too well, but that kind of rampant crowdedness always made him uneasy.
“Twenty-two. Four died in hospital and Lisa… Lisa was still in hospital under guard.”
“Still…” Jack said, cringing.
“And it wasn’t a flat, it was a nice house actually. Basement, three bedrooms, living room. All we needed was enough space for a pillow and our bodies. We just didn’t fancy being completely alone at first.”
“Makes sense,” Jack said kissing the top of Ianto’s head, encouraging him to go on.
“So anyway, trying to make this ridiculously long story short, we stayed there for a few days while we got our feet under ourselves again. Jacklyn came in one day with diaries for us all. We all wrote our addresses and phone numbers in them as well as messages for each other. Something to hang on to at night when we started staying in our own places. Sometimes we’d call each other and talk until we fell asleep on the line.” Ianto shrugged against Jack, suddenly abashed at having admitted that.
“Sounds like you had good people taking care of you. And I know they had at least one good person taking care of them.” Jack squeezed him again.
Ianto hugged Jack back, but then there was a definite change in him. Jack kissed his head and wove his fingers through Ianto’s in silent encouragement. “Jacklyn and Adam had gotten together while we’d been in hospital and when we got out, he went to stay with her.” Jack could hear Ianto swallow several times before he was able to say, “He was the first.”
Jack didn’t need to ask ‘first what’.
“He seemed to be having a harder time with the stress than the rest of us. We all had hoped that Jacklyn’d be able to help him. To keep him stable. And no matter how much we all tell her that we know she did everything she could for him… She came back from a weekend at her mother’s about a month after we’d been released, to find him hanging from the banister.”
“Aw hell, Ianto. I’m so sorry.”
“Not your fault,” Ianto said with a shrug and such casualness that Jack wondered how many times Ianto had heard those words without any real feeling behind them.
Jack wasn’t a hundred percent sure that it wasn’t his fault. In the aftermath of the Cybermen and the fall of the Tower he had taken over Torchwood; lock, stock and barrel. What he’d never done was follow up on those who didn’t die at Canary Wharf. The Doctor had made him a better man than that. Now he was having a hard time not getting lost in his own guilt, the only thing keeping him from getting caught up in it was the fact that Ianto didn’t need that. He needed solid support and understanding and a way to move forward. Jack kissed the top of his head. “I know, but I’m still sorry that after everything you’d been through, you had to deal with that so soon.”
Ianto just shrugged again, clearly at a loss for how to deal with Jack being upset over the death of someone he’d never met. “Jacklyn couldn’t call us to tell us. Meaghan had called her at some point and Jacklyn told her and then Meaghan ended up calling everyone else. But Jacklyn felt that somehow it was her responsibility to let us know what had happened. Adam had left a note… things he wanted each of us to know… So Jacklyn wrote us all Letters. It started something of a tradition. Whenever one of us… When it gets to be too much… Whoever finds out first or whoever knew them best writes each of the rest of us a Letter to let us know. It’s… kind of funny. Sometimes we’ll hear through some other channels or from someone further up on the check-in tree… if we don’t know if Letters are being written… sometimes we’ll get three or four. No one wants to risk that someone’s Letters…” Ianto suddenly took a deep breath and Jack felt a warm spot developing right under where the corner of Ianto’s eye rested against his shirt. “… won’t get sent,” he finished raggedly.
“Ianto?” Jack brushed his hair back trying to see his face from their awkward position with Ianto’s head almost right under Jack’s chin. He’d been so calm for most of the discussion. “What is it?”
Ianto lurched upright, sitting on the other end of the couch, visibly trying to pull himself together, even as he hid his face behind his hands. “I’m okay,” he mumbled through his fingers.
“You say that so often I never know when to believe you,” Jack said as he moved slowly to get his arm back around Ianto’s shoulders. “What happened there?” he asked again.
“I just… I…” Ianto dropped his hands and raised his eyes to the ceiling trying to force himself to stay calm. Despite his attempts to keep it steady, his voice still broke as he admitted, “I just wonder sometime who will bothered to write Letters for me.”
Jack fervently hoped that wasn’t a thinly veiled reference to some suicide attempt either past or planned. “Oh, Ianto…” He pulled him into a tight hug. “Let’s not need those Letters, okay? Let’s just keep you right here, alive and well. Hm?”
Ianto sniffled and snuggled into Jack’s shoulder. The storm over as quickly as it had come. “Of course. I didn’t mean… It’s just… There’s only eleven of us now, Jack. Eleven from eight hundred twenty-three. Eleven of twenty-seven. No matter how you look at, it’s … horrible. Nine suicides, Jack.”
Jack nodded against Ianto’s head. “Whose Letter did you get today?” he asked quietly.
Ianto tightened his hand around the back of Jack’s braces. “Marc. He always seemed to be the one of us who coped the best.”
“Besides you, huh?” Jack asked softly.
Ianto snorted. “Hardly.” He took a deep breath. “See, even back then, Jack, some of them worried about the level of my devotion to Lisa. Meaghan, Marc, Lee… they all told me I was a little far gone when I explained that I planned to come here, back to Cardiff to work for Torchwood again… if it meant I could get her somewhere safe. They were starting to experiment on her in hospital. They weren’t trying to cure her; they just wanted to… make her a guinea pig. I was convinced that some of them wanted to take their revenge for Canary Wharf out on her, like she’d been out there converting people and destroying…” Ianto trailed off his breathing uneven. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m sorry I brought her here, but I had to get her out of that place. Please understand. Please.”
Now Ianto was in tears the likes of which Jack hadn’t seen since the night they’d been forced to terminate Lisa in the basement. “Shh. Shh.” Jack whispered as he rocked him back and forth.
“They all thought I was crazy, but they helped me anyway. Helped me get her out of hospital… Ethan’s a doctor, he kept her alive until I could get her on the equipment I had here… they helped me get her set up… I’m sorry. I’m sorry…”
Ianto’s words were broken by sobs and hiccupping breaths. Jack was starting to wonder if he’d hyperventilate if he didn’t calm down soon. “Shh. Shh. I just wish you had told me. I have no idea if we could have helped but… I like to think we could have tried.” He ran his hand up and down Ianto’s spine. “But I think I understand why you weren’t trusting Torchwood bureaucracy to support you at that point.”
Ianto was still shaking and whispering, “I’m sorry,” between sobs. Jack realized that he’d taken care to get to know Ianto better after the whole sordid Lisa mess, but that they’d never talked about it. Neither of them had really ever apologized. “I’m sorry too,” he whispered as he continued to rock Ianto whom he hoped was about to cry himself to sleep.
Ianto calmed quickly. Too quickly in Jack’s estimation. He couldn’t imagine how much repressing Ianto had to have done in his endeavor to get himself through quarantine and then get Lisa out of the hospital. And sneak her into Torchwood Three, but they were trying to get past that tonight. Jack kissed the top of his head again. “Come down stairs and go to bed,” he whispered. “If you want to talk more we can get coffee and head down to the docks in the morning. Right now I think you need some sleep.”
Ianto pulled himself up from the sofa and grabbed his suit coat. “I should get home.”
Jack caught his arm before Ianto could actually take a step and pulled him back down to the sofa. “Sleep downstairs tonight,” Jack said softly. “I’m probably only going to sleep for an hour or two. I can sleep up here if you really want to be alone,” he added patting the sofa they were sitting on.
Ianto looked at the floor between his feet. “I really don’t.”
“Good,” Jack squeezed his shoulder. “Go on down. I’ll make sure Myfanwy is in for the night.” He watched as Ianto headed off for his office and the portal to the downstairs bedroom.
After a few steps Ianto turned back. “Meaghan doesn’t believe me that we have a pteradactyl here and that we haven’t dissected it and had it stuffed and mounted.”
“We’ll get you a picture you can give her,” Jack said with a grin.
“Oh yes, because no one at Torchwood knows how to doctor a photograph,” Ianto said with a half-smile that almost reached his eyes.
“Well, you’ll just have to bring her back here so they can meet face to beak.” Jack wasn’t sure if he was glad to see Ianto acting a bit more normally or if it was too normal too fast. Ianto had all but admitted to having untreated PTSD. Not that Jack was entirely sure what to do with that information. It wasn’t as if Torchwood Three kept a psychiatrist on retainer. And Owen’s bedside manner was for crap.
Deciding to muddle through on his own for the time being, Jack set about getting the hub ready for the night.
Characters: Jack/Ianto (with Owen, Gwen and Tosh)
Rating: R
Words: 3081 (this part)
Notes: A while back I wrote a story called 'Thursday' Is the Wrong Answer. In it, I posited that there were only 12 survivors of Torchwood One. Someone then pointed me to semi-canon source that listed 27 survivors. A third person then suggested that just because 27 people were alive at the end of the Battle of Canary Wharf, that doesn't mean that a year, two years, whatever, later that all of those people would still be alive. That idea wouldn't leave me alone. I also posit that even though Jack says in the opening narration that Torchwood is 'separate from the government' that there has to be some kind of government oversight committee. Someone's paying to keep their lights on and paying for all that pizza and Chinese food.
kensieg is back and did her usual, wonderful beta on this part.
Summary: It's been two and a half years since Canary Wharf. It's been a year since Lisa. And Jack is just now realizing what the real toll has all been on Ianto and the other survivors of Torchwood One. Now he needs to fix a big thing done badly before anyone else dies.
Part 1 is here.
“Come here,” Jack said, setting his own glass aside. He carefully removed Ianto’s jacket and then his tie. He kicked off his own shoes and encouraged Ianto to do the same. “Let’s get comfortable. I’m getting the impression this could take some time.” When Ianto looked like he was going to apologize or back out, Jack kissed him softly. “I have all night. I just figure we might was well be comfortable while we talk.”
Ianto reached up and unbuttoned his top two buttons. Jack turned to stretch out on the sofa, his back against the arm. Ianto let Jack pull him around until he was lying on the couch, his head on Jack’s chest. Jack’s strong heartbeat under his ear calming him. They both wiggled and shifted until their glasses and the bottle were within reach and they were both comfortable.
“Tell me about the letters,” Jack whispered as they settled.
Ianto found himself fiddling with a button on Jack’s shirt. “Aside from the four who died before we were released, we were all ready - physically anyway - to leave the hospital no more than three weeks after we’d arrived. My hands still hurt a little, but I was able to dress and feed myself without too much difficulty, and aside from Karen, I was the one with the worst actual injuries. Well, not including Lisa, but that’s another very long story. Anyway, they wouldn’t release any of us even after the doctors signed us out. We were kept in what we ended up terming quarantine for ten weeks. We had very little contact with the outside world. Even our access to things like newspapers and television was very strictly monitored and censored. We were told it was because we were all PTSD patients as well as burn victims and whatnot and they didn’t want to risk upsetting us by showing us the news. We never felt comfortable with that explanation.”
He stopped picking at Jack’s shirt and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was starting to get a headache from the stress. He felt Jack’s hand gently passing over the back of his head. Stroking him, petting him, calming him. He squeezed Jack’s ribs in thanks for the support before taking a deep breath and pressing on. He wasn’t sure how much of this he’d be able to go through tonight, but he’d at least get through explaining the Letters if it killed him. “We didn’t talk about it in quarantine, we strongly suspected we were being monitored, but we weren’t really receiving counseling. Not like we expected. It felt … we felt like we were being programmed. What to say when people asked where we’d been during the battle, where we’d been while we were in hospital. I remember Marc and I got really upset one day in the ‘group session’ about how we couldn’t hear anything about how the world was reacting to what had happened - we didn’t know yet about the ‘drugs in the water supply’ white washing of it all. We wanted to hear about how our colleagues who’d died were being remembered - if anyone gave a damn about us.” Ianto took a deep breath trying not to relive the anger as he spoke about it. “We spoke up. As far as I know it was the first and only time in ten weeks that anyone spoke up about it all.”
“The only time?” Jack pressed, worried now that Torchwood HQ had simply added insult to injury - or possibly in this case injury to injury - in which case he’d be having a four-letter-word or several with someone in the government oversight committee. He also saw that shades of that programming were still in place. He could see that they’d been told that their explanations of what had happened at the Torchwood Tower hadn’t made sense. That trying to explain what they’d seen and lived through made them sound insane. They’d been forced to reword and redefine the experience so many times that they’d ended up changing their answers until they were giving the answers Downing Street wanted. Jack wondered how best to go about undoing that leftover damage.
“We were never hurt,” Ianto continued, “but it was… strongly impressed upon us that we needed to cooperate for the good of the Institute. For the good of England.” The loathing dripped from Ianto’s voice. “We learned to play along until we could get released. ‘Lie and think of England’ one of the girls said once we got out. It became something of a joke and a motto.” Ianto took a deep breath. “Somewhere around week six or seven we all started wondering if we were going to be prisoners for the rest of our lives. There were certainly no indications that they had any plans to ever let us go. But we played along.”
He went back to fiddling with the button, twisting it back and forth on the thin strings that held it to Jack’s shirt. Jack’s hands were still in his hair and he closed his eyes and gave himself a few minutes to simply focus on the tingling in his scalp as Jack gently scratched and stroked. He wondered if they’d end up sleeping right there on the couch that night. He felt so damn tired. And it wouldn’t be the first time Jack had failed to wake him in order to move them both to somewhere more comfortable.
“So they let you go?” Jack prompted.
“Finally. And with no warning at all. They just suddenly showed up with a pair of clean jeans and a gray jumper for each of us and told us we could go. Our flats and houses had been maintained in our absence and our back pay was deposited to our accounts with enough extra to keep us going while we decided what to do next.” He let out a short breath. “I was so sure we were going to be retconned on the way out the door… or shot… I didn’t know.”
“So they just … dumped you after ten weeks in a hospital with no contact with the outside world?” Those four-letter-words were multiplying.
“Meaghan said our insurance had run out and NHS wasn’t going to cover in-patient stays for PTSD. I think she meant it as a joke, but it’s as good an explanation as any. Somehow they’d gotten our house keys for us… so we had clothes that weren’t really ours, a bus card and key. And we were on our own.”
Jack squeezed him tight. “God Ianto, that’s horrible. I had no idea.”
Ianto shrugged. “It’s not like we were six-year-olds or abandoned kittens. We each had a place to go.”
“That still… it doesn’t…” Jack couldn’t imagine abandoning his team when things had gone badly. He suddenly gathered Ianto in close, hugging him for all he was worth as he tried valiantly to suppress the tears in his eyes. If Ianto wasn’t going to cry over this he sure as hell wasn’t. But it went so far to explain why Ianto seemed so grateful for any little attention paid him after a bad day or frightening incident. He was glad Ianto didn’t seem too inclined to ask where the sudden surge of emotion had come from.
“We decided to go to Ethan’s place. None of us wanted to go home alone. We wanted to talk. So we went to Ethan’s and, well, first we searched the place high and low for listening devices - not that the whole thing had made us paranoid or anything - but for about a week we camped out on Ethan’s living room floor. Most of us went back to our own places for a bit in a day or two, but for the nights… we felt safer together.”
“You got twenty-seven people in one guy’s flat?” Jack asked. He’d seen places with population control issues. Any one- or two-room flat with more than ten people had made him claustrophobic. And he was okay with rubbing elbows or whatever body parts were available with someone he didn’t know too well, but that kind of rampant crowdedness always made him uneasy.
“Twenty-two. Four died in hospital and Lisa… Lisa was still in hospital under guard.”
“Still…” Jack said, cringing.
“And it wasn’t a flat, it was a nice house actually. Basement, three bedrooms, living room. All we needed was enough space for a pillow and our bodies. We just didn’t fancy being completely alone at first.”
“Makes sense,” Jack said kissing the top of Ianto’s head, encouraging him to go on.
“So anyway, trying to make this ridiculously long story short, we stayed there for a few days while we got our feet under ourselves again. Jacklyn came in one day with diaries for us all. We all wrote our addresses and phone numbers in them as well as messages for each other. Something to hang on to at night when we started staying in our own places. Sometimes we’d call each other and talk until we fell asleep on the line.” Ianto shrugged against Jack, suddenly abashed at having admitted that.
“Sounds like you had good people taking care of you. And I know they had at least one good person taking care of them.” Jack squeezed him again.
Ianto hugged Jack back, but then there was a definite change in him. Jack kissed his head and wove his fingers through Ianto’s in silent encouragement. “Jacklyn and Adam had gotten together while we’d been in hospital and when we got out, he went to stay with her.” Jack could hear Ianto swallow several times before he was able to say, “He was the first.”
Jack didn’t need to ask ‘first what’.
“He seemed to be having a harder time with the stress than the rest of us. We all had hoped that Jacklyn’d be able to help him. To keep him stable. And no matter how much we all tell her that we know she did everything she could for him… She came back from a weekend at her mother’s about a month after we’d been released, to find him hanging from the banister.”
“Aw hell, Ianto. I’m so sorry.”
“Not your fault,” Ianto said with a shrug and such casualness that Jack wondered how many times Ianto had heard those words without any real feeling behind them.
Jack wasn’t a hundred percent sure that it wasn’t his fault. In the aftermath of the Cybermen and the fall of the Tower he had taken over Torchwood; lock, stock and barrel. What he’d never done was follow up on those who didn’t die at Canary Wharf. The Doctor had made him a better man than that. Now he was having a hard time not getting lost in his own guilt, the only thing keeping him from getting caught up in it was the fact that Ianto didn’t need that. He needed solid support and understanding and a way to move forward. Jack kissed the top of his head. “I know, but I’m still sorry that after everything you’d been through, you had to deal with that so soon.”
Ianto just shrugged again, clearly at a loss for how to deal with Jack being upset over the death of someone he’d never met. “Jacklyn couldn’t call us to tell us. Meaghan had called her at some point and Jacklyn told her and then Meaghan ended up calling everyone else. But Jacklyn felt that somehow it was her responsibility to let us know what had happened. Adam had left a note… things he wanted each of us to know… So Jacklyn wrote us all Letters. It started something of a tradition. Whenever one of us… When it gets to be too much… Whoever finds out first or whoever knew them best writes each of the rest of us a Letter to let us know. It’s… kind of funny. Sometimes we’ll hear through some other channels or from someone further up on the check-in tree… if we don’t know if Letters are being written… sometimes we’ll get three or four. No one wants to risk that someone’s Letters…” Ianto suddenly took a deep breath and Jack felt a warm spot developing right under where the corner of Ianto’s eye rested against his shirt. “… won’t get sent,” he finished raggedly.
“Ianto?” Jack brushed his hair back trying to see his face from their awkward position with Ianto’s head almost right under Jack’s chin. He’d been so calm for most of the discussion. “What is it?”
Ianto lurched upright, sitting on the other end of the couch, visibly trying to pull himself together, even as he hid his face behind his hands. “I’m okay,” he mumbled through his fingers.
“You say that so often I never know when to believe you,” Jack said as he moved slowly to get his arm back around Ianto’s shoulders. “What happened there?” he asked again.
“I just… I…” Ianto dropped his hands and raised his eyes to the ceiling trying to force himself to stay calm. Despite his attempts to keep it steady, his voice still broke as he admitted, “I just wonder sometime who will bothered to write Letters for me.”
Jack fervently hoped that wasn’t a thinly veiled reference to some suicide attempt either past or planned. “Oh, Ianto…” He pulled him into a tight hug. “Let’s not need those Letters, okay? Let’s just keep you right here, alive and well. Hm?”
Ianto sniffled and snuggled into Jack’s shoulder. The storm over as quickly as it had come. “Of course. I didn’t mean… It’s just… There’s only eleven of us now, Jack. Eleven from eight hundred twenty-three. Eleven of twenty-seven. No matter how you look at, it’s … horrible. Nine suicides, Jack.”
Jack nodded against Ianto’s head. “Whose Letter did you get today?” he asked quietly.
Ianto tightened his hand around the back of Jack’s braces. “Marc. He always seemed to be the one of us who coped the best.”
“Besides you, huh?” Jack asked softly.
Ianto snorted. “Hardly.” He took a deep breath. “See, even back then, Jack, some of them worried about the level of my devotion to Lisa. Meaghan, Marc, Lee… they all told me I was a little far gone when I explained that I planned to come here, back to Cardiff to work for Torchwood again… if it meant I could get her somewhere safe. They were starting to experiment on her in hospital. They weren’t trying to cure her; they just wanted to… make her a guinea pig. I was convinced that some of them wanted to take their revenge for Canary Wharf out on her, like she’d been out there converting people and destroying…” Ianto trailed off his breathing uneven. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m sorry I brought her here, but I had to get her out of that place. Please understand. Please.”
Now Ianto was in tears the likes of which Jack hadn’t seen since the night they’d been forced to terminate Lisa in the basement. “Shh. Shh.” Jack whispered as he rocked him back and forth.
“They all thought I was crazy, but they helped me anyway. Helped me get her out of hospital… Ethan’s a doctor, he kept her alive until I could get her on the equipment I had here… they helped me get her set up… I’m sorry. I’m sorry…”
Ianto’s words were broken by sobs and hiccupping breaths. Jack was starting to wonder if he’d hyperventilate if he didn’t calm down soon. “Shh. Shh. I just wish you had told me. I have no idea if we could have helped but… I like to think we could have tried.” He ran his hand up and down Ianto’s spine. “But I think I understand why you weren’t trusting Torchwood bureaucracy to support you at that point.”
Ianto was still shaking and whispering, “I’m sorry,” between sobs. Jack realized that he’d taken care to get to know Ianto better after the whole sordid Lisa mess, but that they’d never talked about it. Neither of them had really ever apologized. “I’m sorry too,” he whispered as he continued to rock Ianto whom he hoped was about to cry himself to sleep.
Ianto calmed quickly. Too quickly in Jack’s estimation. He couldn’t imagine how much repressing Ianto had to have done in his endeavor to get himself through quarantine and then get Lisa out of the hospital. And sneak her into Torchwood Three, but they were trying to get past that tonight. Jack kissed the top of his head again. “Come down stairs and go to bed,” he whispered. “If you want to talk more we can get coffee and head down to the docks in the morning. Right now I think you need some sleep.”
Ianto pulled himself up from the sofa and grabbed his suit coat. “I should get home.”
Jack caught his arm before Ianto could actually take a step and pulled him back down to the sofa. “Sleep downstairs tonight,” Jack said softly. “I’m probably only going to sleep for an hour or two. I can sleep up here if you really want to be alone,” he added patting the sofa they were sitting on.
Ianto looked at the floor between his feet. “I really don’t.”
“Good,” Jack squeezed his shoulder. “Go on down. I’ll make sure Myfanwy is in for the night.” He watched as Ianto headed off for his office and the portal to the downstairs bedroom.
After a few steps Ianto turned back. “Meaghan doesn’t believe me that we have a pteradactyl here and that we haven’t dissected it and had it stuffed and mounted.”
“We’ll get you a picture you can give her,” Jack said with a grin.
“Oh yes, because no one at Torchwood knows how to doctor a photograph,” Ianto said with a half-smile that almost reached his eyes.
“Well, you’ll just have to bring her back here so they can meet face to beak.” Jack wasn’t sure if he was glad to see Ianto acting a bit more normally or if it was too normal too fast. Ianto had all but admitted to having untreated PTSD. Not that Jack was entirely sure what to do with that information. It wasn’t as if Torchwood Three kept a psychiatrist on retainer. And Owen’s bedside manner was for crap.
Deciding to muddle through on his own for the time being, Jack set about getting the hub ready for the night.