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fictionalTitle: In Our Bedroom After the War
Pairing/Characters: Jack/Ianto, Gwen, Mickey, Martha & the rest of the Doctor Who Cast.
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rm & kalichan
Rating/Warning: NC-17, bdsm, d/s,
Summary: Homeward bound. Takes place during and after Doctor Who 4x13: Journey's End.
Wordcount: ~31,700 [posted in 4 parts]
Authors' Notes: This is the seventh installment of our series, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. The title is from a song (and the album) by Stars. This is the first piece of this arc we’ve really had to write concurrent to an episode, because of the woeful lack of Torchwood Hub in DW 4x13. This means if you've not watched Journey's End, that the first part of the story might not make as much sense as it could. Here is a link to a brief recap, a full recap, a funny recap (with captioned pictures) or just the transcript -- in case you want to know what, exactly, is going on. Or you could just dive in and hope for the best! Next up, we'll be posting a Jack/Nine/Rose followed by a few other prequels covering the early education and adventures of both Jack and Ianto before returning to where we’ve left off with them in this timeline.
Previous installments:
A Strange Fashion of Forsaking
Dear Captain, Last Night I Slept in Mutiny
To Learn This Holding and the Holding Back
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
I Imagine You Now in That Other City
Many of My Favorite Things Are Broken
IANTO: It's a time-lock. The ultimate defence program. Tosh was working on it. Never thought she'd finished it, but she did. The Hub's sealed in a time-bubble. Nothing can get in.
GWEN: But that means we can't get out.
IANTO: Nope. Not without unlocking that Dalek. We're trapped inside. It's all up to Jack, now.
- Journey's End by Russell T. Davies
Gwen's hand went up to touch her throat, as if she could somehow ease the soreness left from her screams of rage by gently rubbing from the outside. It wasn't working.
"Try the phones," she ordered from where she stood behind Ianto's seat at the console. "Can we ring out? The radio? See anything on the CCTV? We need to know what's going on out there."
"I don't think we can," Ianto said, though he was tapping keys as he spoke, trying to do as she asked. Then he shook his head. "We can't see out. And the comm lines are all dead," he reported. "We're stuck. Trapped out of time. For the duration."
Gwen slammed her hand onto the desk. "Fuck!"
The noise of her outburst echoed through the underground chamber and then just stopped in an odd, muffled reverberation, as if the sound had hit a barrier and been choked off. Ianto swiveled in the chair to look at her, and their eyes met in horror at the stomach churning wrongness of witnessing something that just shouldn't be possible. Then she slumped down to the floor.
"Rhys," she said softly, feeling tears well up in her eyes. "Mum and Dad. Anything could be happening to them."
Ianto didn't say anything but got up from his seat and then sat down on the floor next to her.
"Isn't there anyone you're worried about?" Gwen asked finally, after she'd forced back her tears.
"Just up there," Ianto said, staring up at the ceiling. "And the fate of the human race, of course."
Gwen shook her head. "What if it doesn't work? Up there? Will we run out of air? Just suffocate to death?"
Ianto laughed humourlessly. "At least it could only happen to us once," he pointed out. "Anyway, I don't think it's a worry," he said. "I can work out something. There's air recyclers downstairs. And food stockpiled. No. At this point, we're the safest people on... well, anywhere."
"Fuck," Gwen said again, though more softly this time. "Are you scared?"
"Shitless," Ianto said. "You?"
Gwen leaned her head down on his shoulder. "Yeah," she said softly, "but not for us." There was a pause and then she added, "What do you think Jack's doing right now?"
"Giving the Doctor what for," Ianto said.
"You think that's all he's giving him?" Gwen asked.
Ianto turned to glare at her, and she laughed a little.
"Sorry," she said. "Adrenaline. Still shaking."
She held out her right hand in front of them, the fingers trembling with reaction, and Ianto captured them in his own and squeezed. She could still taste the dead-iron in her mouth, blood and fire and ashes. Then, as if pulled by some irresistible force, they both looked over at the creepy, unsettling bullets hanging in the air and the Dalek, frozen and menacing before them.
"Ugh," Gwen said. "Do you think it's watching us?" she hissed.
"Almost certainly," Ianto said.
"Thanks, that's very comforting."
"It probably just sees us at the moment the lock came down," Ianto offered. "I don't think it can tell what we're doing right now. We could get a sheet or something if you don't want to look at it."
"Are you mad?" Gwen exclaimed. "If it can see us, I want to see it."
"Yes ma'am," Ianto said.
"Are you taking the piss?" Gwen asked suspiciously.
"Not at all," Ianto said, his voice unshaded by irony. "Farthest thing from my mind." He stood up then and went over to the klaxon and the bullet studded time wall.
"What are you doing?" Gwen asked.
"Tidying up," Ianto said, over his shoulder. "And getting the guns."
"Jack took the big one," Gwen said, rising to help him. "Pity. It's probably one of the few that had a real chance against a Dalek."
"We could break out some more of the alien weaponry from the archives," Ianto offered. "I should have thought of that before. Sorry. That was stupid," he added, castigating himself.
"We didn't have time," Gwen reassured him. "It would've had us, and I don't think we wanted it coming after us into the Hub. Who knew what it could've done so close to the Rift?"
"I suppose," Ianto said. "Not that we would've stopped it."
"You never know," Gwen said fiercely. "I've seen stranger things happen."
"I haven't," Ianto replied flatly. "That thing -- Jack was terrified. I've never seen him like that. Not even after... Have you?"
"No," Gwen said. "But you don't give up anyway."
"Jack did," Ianto said, and he looked both anguished and startled at the betrayal of the words leaving his mouth.
Gwen's mind screamed in rebellion even as she shook her head. "No. Not really, he didn't. Not for long--" and she trailed off, realising that the last clause was a tacit agreement.
They collected sheets of paper -- the floor was absolutely littered with them -- for a few minutes in silence. Then he asked hesitantly, "D'you think Jack seemed...? Never mind."
"Seemed what?"
"No. Nothing," Ianto said, cutting her off.
"Just because he can't die, doesn't mean he shouldn't get scared," Gwen said, guessing.
"He usually hates showing it, though," Ianto said, and Gwen thought he was probably thinking of the dives off roofs. "And maybe Daleks are different."
She frowned. "If Daleks could kill him permanently, don't you think he would have chased some down by now? Or looked glad to see them?"
"I don't know anymore, Gwen," he said. And even amidst all this, she noticed that he was unable to stop the small smile that quirked his lips as he said it.
Gwen smiled back. "What a terrible time to be happy for you, yeah?"
"Yeah," Ianto said, "but thank you anyway."
***
If there's one thing Jack truly hates about his tendency to fall for the people he fights beside, it's the utter strategic inability to run to them in the moments he most wants to. With the Doctor, restraint has become almost easy, because it's had to. Besides, so much of their fondness is rooted now in a prickly regret, waiting to touch often feels much the same as actually touching. But Rose....
It's been so long and there's so much he wants to tell her and ask her and forgive her for, even if she doesn't know she needs it, even if she doesn't care to hear it. He thinks of her when the Daleks try to burn him, and he thinks of her when he thinks of Ianto and Gwen and the Hub, because they’re all her fault too, and she doesn't even know about them yet.
Jack wants to tell her everything. It's a strange urge, he thinks, the desire for confession before a woman he was once a child with, but maybe not so strange because he knows that he loves her very much and always has. They're more alike than he ever could have imagined or understood back then, before she saved him with an utter brutality of ill-conceived hope. She is, Jack realizes as he crawls his way through what feels like miles of vents, more frightening than the Doctor. And in battle she seems so far away.
***
Gwen jabbed at the buttons on her mobile yet again.
"Still time-locked," Ianto said, not really having the energy to scold her, but wishing he could stop her from making herself crazy. There was nothing to do other than look askance at the way the Hub occasionally shuddered, dropping some pipe or cement or tile or wire from the ceiling. He wasn't sure if it was stress from the time-lock or just the result of the damage incurred before it came down, but he really, really didn't have a good feeling about it.
"How structurally sound is this place?" Gwen asked in response to his dubiously staring at the ceiling.
"Don't know."
"How can you not know?"
"Er... not an architect?"
"Ianto Jones, you know everything."
"I don't," he said, laughing nervously.
She frowned. "Think there are blueprints anywhere around here?"
"I know where they are," Ianto said with a roll of his eyes. "Just not sure they'll be particularly reassuring."
"Okay," Gwen said. "There are three levels of reassuring: Daleks are going to kill us all. Daleks might not kill us all. Jack telling us everything is, in fact, already fine. Blueprints can't be worse than Daleks."
"Never. Ever. Say never," Ianto said. "Want me to fetch 'em?"
Gwen shook her head. She didn't want to leave their work stations, but she also didn't want to be alone with the Dalek.
***
It's stupid, Jack knows, but he’d almost felt shy of Rose when he first saw her again. While she'd been cowering under his arm, afraid of losing her Doctor a third time, he'd been scared that, like the Doctor, it would hurt her to look at him or, that somehow, he'd have more anger for her than he expected and say something cruel. He's done a lot of that with far too many people these days, and never, ever wants to do it to Rose, who he'd tried to look after more than to seduce, even as he'd somehow managed both once upon a very long time ago.
He wonders what she's like now, what her life has brought her, and what she's kept of the thing that made him this way. He hopes she's still just Rose, really, a girl he'd danced on a stolen ship with, and not some terrible goddess or strange something that sang to him in the dark he thinks he shouldn't be able to remember.
Too, he hopes Ianto is all right, and he feels sad because he's certain that in a world that could contain him and Rose both that they would be friends. There just might not be any world like that, Jack worries, and the thought leaves him feeling sick and full of fear. But if Rose does have to go back to the universe's lost and found, maybe that'll at least mean that his team will be all right -- well, furious and probably injured -- and waiting for him when he gets back.
If he ever gets back; if there's still an Earth to get back to; if this vent ever ends and he isn't being watched by Daleks right now as he climbs around like a rat in a maze for their amusement. But Daleks aren't really that interesting, or interested, so maybe he's safe for now. He hopes.
***
Ianto put a cup of coffee in Gwen's hand, and she looked at it for a second like she didn't know what it was.
"It's been hours," she said. She sounded dazed, and the slight nausea he'd been feeling suddenly grew exponentially in the pit of his stomach. Was this even safe, this temporal lock? How had Tosh even tested it out?
"It's a whole Dalek fleet; not exactly child's play. If it even can be done at all, it's bound to take some time," Ianto began, meaning to sound comforting, but realising as he spoke his words were anything but. Still, he'd started now, so he'd shift to something that would, with any luck, sound more hopeful. "If we open the lock from the inside, maybe it will be like no time passed for us. We'll be back in that second that the bubble closed. Or maybe it's just the bubble wall itself that's out of time, and outside the Hub things are passing normally like they're doing for us in here. I guess we'll find out...."
"Or we'll be trapped here forever," Gwen muttered. "What do you mean, anyway? Can it be opened from the outside? Did Tosh talk to you about it?"
"Only a little," Ianto said. "I was a good sounding board sometimes, but I wasn't on her level, really. She was --"
"A genius," Gwen finished for him.
"She might've talked to Jack, though," Ianto said. "He'd have understood it."
"Really?"
"I've been wondering," Ianto said hesitantly, "if that's why he left us here. If he thought we'd be protected, no matter what happened. To him, I mean."
"If that's true, I'm going to kill him."
"Why?"
"No, really. I'm going to take his neck and then I'm going to--"
"You know, Gwen, that joke would be less disturbing if certain members of our little team hadn't already tried out assassination as a hobby." Or as a sexual quirk, he thought silently, feeling the sickness in his stomach rise again.
"Who says I'm joking?" Gwen said fiercely. "He shouldn't have done that. What does he think? That I'd stay happily locked away in here while Rhys is outside, dealing with god knows what?" She threw her coffee cup onto the floor, and it smashed, the dark brown liquid pooling around the pieces.
Ianto jumped a little in surprise at the crash, and then they just sat there and watched the stain soak into the cement floor.
"Sorry," Gwen said finally. "I'm sorry."
Ianto shook his head. "Rhys would want you to be safe. For once, he and Jack would be of the exact same opinion."
"Well it's not what I want," she cried.
Ianto sighed, before saying softly, "But it's what you've got."
"Here," Gwen said, speaking too quickly. "I'll get a cloth, and we can clean this mess up."
***
Jack is beginning to think he's made a wrong turn somewhere. But is there such a thing as a wrong turn when he's got no idea where the hell he's going? It's dark in the vents, and he has to take a few rapid, shallow breaths to calm himself down. He wonders if he'll ever feel entirely okay with small, dark, enclosed spaces ever again.
He pauses for a moment to look at his wrist strap, grateful for the little light it casts and the blue flash which is telling him that there's signs of life aboard this space station that aren't encased in metal. That'll be Rose, he thinks hopefully, and the Doctor. Their life signs seem steady, and he feels his spirits rise a little.
Until his next, less cheery thought. It could be prisoners from the planet, and with that sudden idea, he grows cold again with fear, even if there's no way Ianto and Gwen can be extracted from the Hub against their will. Probably. If it works.
But why move the whole fucking Earth if you just wanted to transport people off of it? And it doesn't matter anyway, he decides, because if it is just helpless prisoners, he'll have to try to get close and scout the situation out, see if there's any possible way to save them, although he knows he might have to move on for the sake of the bigger picture. Even if he is just blundering around without anything resembling a plan, or even a weapon. But it always seems to work for the Doctor, he reasons, and now Rose is back.
Surely everything, he thinks wistfully as he keeps climbing forward, will be okay. The universe isn't that cruel. Is it? He shakes his head. No. Enough of this. He's the Doctor's ace in the hole, and he always will be, world without end, and no fucking Dalek, or anything else for that matter, is going to stand in his way. He just has to keep climbing.
***
"You know," Ianto said, breaking a long silence. "If Owen were here, he'd suggest that we all shag right now. It is the end of the world, after all."
"Are you making a pass at me?" Gwen joked, but it was clear her heart wasn't even in it.
Ianto smiled slightly as he shook his head.
"Are you and Jack...?" She trailed off.
"Am I and Jack what?"
"You know."
"No, I don't."
"I mean. Is that part of things working again at least?"
"You don't get to ask if you can't even say it."
"Fine. Are you two back to shagging like rabbits?"
"I don't know. Did you ever tell Rhys about Owen?"
"That's unfair!"
"How Gwen? How is your incredibly fucked up affair with Owen less my business than my relationship with Jack is yours?"
"Rhys doesn't work here."
"And fucking Jack isn't part of my job," Ianto snapped.
Gwen was silent, abashed, and Ianto couldn't help but notice a cruel streak in him that enjoyed it. He sighed. That wasn't a very good thing at all.
"I'm sorry," Gwen said after a bit.
Ianto shrugged.
"It's just.... It seems like we talk about these things now."
"But I don't, Gwen, not with anyone."
"But you could. I mean. If you wanted to or needed to or something."
"I did. With Tosh."
"Oh," Gwen said, her voice full of grief and hurt feelings.
"Why do you care about it so much anyway?" Ianto asked after a while.
"Because if you two can find a way, any of us can. I told Rhys. About Owen. And then gave him retcon. He doesn't know."
"That's... that's..." Ianto was flabbergasted. Something like that would have shocked and appalled him from anyone, but from Gwen it was nearly incomprehensible.
"Disgusting, I know," she said.
"I was going to say devious," Ianto said blandly, even though it wasn't true. Gwen was, apparently, as fucked up as the rest of them. He wondered if Jack knew. Or, more accurately in these strange days, had known. He was still remembering things. Which meant there were things once known that were still forgotten.
***
It occurs to Jack that his fondness for war has come from the people he's met there. He wonders absently if he's ever going to find any other way of making friends or if this is something he's not destined to outgrow.
Certainly he'd never expected Mickey Smith to be anything but an irritation, but he'd been a fool with that assumption. They'd fought, if not together, then in each other's general vicinity, and it is hard for Jack to see him as anything but a childhood friend now. And Jackie Tyler might not be a friend or a comrade or anything resembling a soldier, but she is Rose's mother and Jack knows that he owes a debt there, if only because it's the sort of debt he hasn't owed in a very long time. Gwen's parents hate him if they remember him at all. Ianto's are dead.
But it's Sarah Jane who almost makes him stop breathing. She's so ferocious and broken-hearted and unwillingly healed that Jack can practically see himself in her even though they've never met before. Weird, but he guesses that's what happens when you find happiness in exile, which isn't, he suspects, all that different than finding happiness in war.
Let us survive, Jack thinks. Let her survive, because he suddenly wants to know her story from her mouth, the way he once would have wanted to know it from her flesh. Not that she's bad looking. She's anything but. Things are just different now is all.
***
"So why Rhys?" Ianto asked, forcing himself to eat a biscuit. If Gwen was going to ask horrible intrusive questions, he figured that in lieu of anything useful to do, he could at least make the discussion civilised. Which meant biscuits, and a second attempt at coffee and intrusive questions of his own when he didn't even particularly care about the answers beyond their status as information, and the fact that all knowledge was useful.
"I don't have to be more with him," Gwen said. "It sounds terrible, I know. But it's not. Really not. I... he loves me even if I'm not special or brave. And if I were, all the time, he'd wonder who I was really. He's so kind, Ianto. And funny. And, you know, like Jack always says, it's good to have something normal."
Ianto was tempted to ask her what the appeal was when they got together, when Gwen's life was normal, to find out why on earth she would have needed more of the same. But it seemed cruel, and he liked Rhys well enough, and he himself had once been normal or at least closer to it than he was now. And that hadn't been bad, hadn't been wrong, hadn't been weak on his part.
He was so grateful that there was no going back, though. So grateful. Because he'd have hated to have to make a choice, hated to dwell more than he already did on what he would have done if he had known then what he knew now, hated to know all the terrible things he'd have to choose to have happen again and again, just so he could be sitting where he was, terrified and lonely and knowing that all he really wanted was for Jack to come home.
And home, Ianto thought, was such a treacherous word.
"It's something real," Gwen said, her gaze somewhere far away, and Ianto came back from his abstraction with a start, realising she was answering his unspoken question.
"It's bottles of wine, and taking out the rubbish, and cleaning the oven. It's him holding my hair back when I've got a hangover, and me crawling into bed with him after I've got home -- nights on the beat, it used to be before all this, and he'd have been out with the lads and smelling a bit of drink. It's sheets, and books on the floor, and my knickers in the sink; it's ranting at the telly together, and him walking about the flat with his kit out scratching himself, and kisses in the morning before you clean your teeth."
"Ah," Ianto said, suddenly able to see it and, without understanding quite why, was flooded with an enormous quiet melancholy. "Well. That's good. God knows there's nothing real in here."
"It's different," Gwen replied. "It's not that it's fake, Torchwood."
"True," Ianto said. "It's magic, and brilliant, and mad -- but it's not like that. It's not solid."
"It could be?" Gwen said hesitantly, turning it into a question.
"No, it couldn't."
"But Ianto, you could... you and Jack…."
"No," he said firmly, cutting her off. "It's not. It can't be. Even assuming he comes back, I don't get that. I had a shot, and she's dead."
"He's coming back," Gwen said fiercely. "You heard him."
"Even so."
"But why not?" Gwen prodded him.
"It's not.... it's Torchwood. It's a dream. Look," he said, nodding over to the Dalek. "It's this. Guns and blood and work and the stars in the sky alive. How could we ever have anything else?"
"Don't you want it though? Don't you miss it? You were like us once."
"No," Ianto said, hoping if he uttered the lie with enough conviction, it might sound true. "We're all dead here. Some of us just happen to still be walking around. It's not good for us to want more."
"What are you talking about?" she said, anger in her voice now.
"I keep the Torchwood archives," he said curtly.
"So?"
"So, I know the date that everyone has ever entered here. And I know the way they leave and how long it takes. You know how they used to list it in the Navy? Discharged: dead. This isn't a job we grow old in, Gwen. There isn't a nice retirement packet and a summer share in Malta."
Gwen stared at him.
"Yeah, I know. Lovely thought, isn't it? You were thinking something different though. That you'd maybe settle down, have a baby even. Bring it in to the office sometimes, and Jack would make comments about how inappropriate it was for work while he snuck around cooing at it behind everyone's back, and I worried out loud that the pterodactyl was going to have itself a nice snack as you giggled."
Gwen sucked in her breath as if he'd hit her. "You're cruel," she whispered.
"No," Ianto said. "Well. Yeah. Maybe. But honest. I imagined it too, after your wedding. It was a nice fantasy, 'til I realised it was all bollocks."
Tears were leaking out of Gwen's eyes, and Ianto touched her shoulder. She flinched.
"You could still get out," he said. "Of all of us. You should think about it anyway."
"No," she said. "I won't. I couldn't leave--"
"Him," Ianto finished for her.
"Him. This," Gwen said. "It's important. It matters. I matter here. It's bigger than anything else."
"Yeah," Ianto sighed. "It's too late for us all, then."
"You too," she said.
"Well, yes," he replied, puzzled now. "That's what I was trying to tell you."
"I meant," Gwen said, through her teeth, "I'd not leave you either."
"Oh," Ianto said, startled. "That's... I don't know quite what to say."
"Then don't say anything," Gwen answered, the shortness in her voice belied by her hand, reaching out to rest gently on his.
***
Jack's knees feel bruised; they'd folded beneath him almost without volition and hit the ground hard as his hands went behind his head, not when ordered to by the fucking Daleks, but he is apparently incapable of resisting the Doctor's slightest command.
His master's voice, he finds himself thinking bitterly, but he knows he'd never do anything differently. Surrender now, so we can fight later, he tells himself, is surely the Doctor's plan, but actually Jack isn't certain of that at all. In fact, he's afraid and still reeling from the look in the Doctor's eyes, the horror and the shame.
This deeply creepy guy in the chair has told him things, and now the Doctor seems to actually believe that they’re true: that they, his army, had once been ordinary people, and he'd made them into weapons and murderers, into his very own race of Daleks, and Jack kind of wants to vomit at the idea. He'd thought he was inured to this feeling, but the sick sensation in his gut when he realizes the Doctor is monumentally disappointed in him, tells him he was wrong; turns out, it's still there and exactly as heartbreaking, even here at what seems like the end of all things.
He tries to take refuge in bravado, the way he's always done, but it's doing him no good, not inside his head, though he keeps the smile plastered on his face. What does the Doctor want from them? Jack looks at Rose and Martha and the rest out of the corner of his eye; they look brave, they always look brave, and he guesses there are worse things than going out in the best company, with best army he's ever seen or thought of.
He wonders if this thing, this ultimate weapon that this fucking lunatic corpse keeps nattering on about will actually succeed in killing him. Please, he says silently, feeling the dry, greyish despair threatening to wash over him, please, if this ends now, let me go with them. All of them, because he doesn't really think even a temporal lock is going to save Ianto and Gwen.
He looks again at the Doctor; if there's going to be a sign, anything, he needs to be ready. I'm your man, he thinks, 'til the end. Even if that's right now. Don't give up on us, he prays. Don't let it end like this, with that bastard telling you these lies about us. You make us better than we were meant to be, and the things we do in your name are legion, and you are great, and all great things are terrible. C'mon. Something. A sign. Please.
And then he hears the noise, that amazing grinding noise of a door opening in the fabric of space and time.
Yes!!! Jack thinks, with the most blessed feeling of relief he's ever felt in the entire course of his very, very, long existence. Thank you.
***
And Gwen was Gwen, Ianto thought with a sigh. Like Jack, she couldn't let a perfect moment lie. She always, somehow, had to keep talking. He hated it.
"Don't you want to wake up next to him?" she asked.
More than anything. "He doesn't sleep, Gwen. Did you know that? He doesn't need to. He comes over to my flat, we screw, and then he reads a book while I sleep and leaves after a couple of hours because god knows what will happen if we're not on the Rift every single goddamn second."
"But --"
"But what, Gwen? We're blokes and we're broken and he's not even human really. Not anymore. Not like you or I understand it. So playing house is not an option, okay?"
"You two were so happy before Gray."
"All of this was true then too, Gwen," Ianto said, more gently.
"You stay here with him a lot though, right?"
"Yeah," Ianto said with a vaguely amused snort. "Bed only sleeps one, though."
"Well, do something about it," Gwen said as if Ianto was a fool.
"What?"
"Move his stupid cubby. Empty out some storage room or something."
"Don't, Gwen."
"Don't what?"
Don't give me hope, he thought. "Get confused and think I'm some day-dreaming girl."
A slow smile crept over Gwen's face.
"No. Don't even say it!" he said, laughing in a vaguely hysterical way.
"Is it wrong," she asked, "that I almost wish our Dalek could hear us?"
As Ianto paused to formulate an appropriate response to that bit of insanity, the Dalek exploded.
"Bleeding fuck!" Gwen shouted.
Ianto leapt up, quickly going to Tosh's workstation to check what he was already fairly certain of. "Time lock's released."
"Why'd it blow up?" Gwen asked and she hurried to her own station.
"Guess they did what they were trying to do," Ianto said and, in spite of himself, smiled as Gwen took out her mobile and started jabbing at the keypad again.
The system, Ianto thought, would probably be flooded, making it unlikely that her call would go through, but the fact remained that if he had anyone to call who existed in this here and now, he would be doing the same, and so he was oddly glad that Gwen could do so in his stead.
She slammed down the phone with a noise of frustration as a video call came up on her screen.
"It's them!" Gwen exclaimed.
Ianto found himself doing everything in his power not to crowd around the monitor with her. This was a time for work, and whatever he and Jack were or were not going to do they could do it later, without an audience.
Besides, Ianto really didn't want to see him with the Doctor, and so he grit his teeth as the manic, skinny man chatted with Gwen about her bloody family and then shook his head when Gwen tried to beckon him over so that he could talk to Jack. All he could manage was a "Yes sir," when the Doctor gave him an order. That was all any of them were getting for now. That and comehomecomehomecomehome playing in a loop in his mind.
***
The other thing to be said for war, other than the comrades in arms, is the victory parties. The victory parties, assuming you're one of the victors, are always really, really good. Jack has always loved them. Loved them as an enlisted man drinking cheap booze and kissing strange women and loved them as an officer, struggling with reserve and the inappropriate affections of someone else's wife or subordinate. Once, he'd had it off with a waiter in an industrial kitchen rather than waiting to be truly happy. And then, he muses, there are the secret victories, where the only people who will ever know that you're a hero are the people who were there, and that is always sweet in the crazy dark.
This is like that. Except it isn't quite right for him, not without Ianto and Gwen. And he feels crass for not being able to find the words to explain it all to Donna Noble and her truly astounding tits.
***
As the Hub shook with the speed of their passing through the cosmos, Gwen was hanging onto a support with one hand as Ianto clung to another, and they were both shrieking and laughing at the same time, as if the entire Earth had become a giant tilt-a-whirl, and they were children, feeling the swoop of their stomachs in a riot of adrenaline and pure, unadulterated glee.
Gwen wrapped one of her arms more tightly around the column she was clinging to, and fished her mobile out with her now free hand; the Hub was still rocking, the thunderous noise of the Earth traveling at some absurd speed still sounding in their ears, bits of plaster and metal falling all around them.
"D'you really think that's a good idea?" Ianto shouted, still laughing, because he just couldn't stop. "D'you think it'll work?!"
"No," she yelled back, "but I'm doing it anyway.... It's working; it's ringing! ... Pick up. Pick up. Rhys, Rhys, sweetheart, yes, darling... I'm fine, we're all fine, just hold on to something! We're safe!"
As Gwen screamed triumphantly into the mobile, Ianto thought, really, it was enough to make you believe in miracles.
***
Surely such a high pitch of happiness isn't meant to last, Jack thinks, looking around at the Doctor's family, and therefore, by some strange alchemy, his family too. The first, and worst lesson the Doctor and Rose had given him so long ago was that no joy lasts forever, and trying to make it stay means you'll destroy whatever made it so beautiful every time. He has tried to learn this, tried to learn to love with an open hand, but it is hard. So hard.
As he stares at Rose, across the TARDIS controls, Jack is afraid he might actually start to cry. And then, when they've stopped somewhere near Ealing so the Doctor can drop off Sarah Jane, Rose rushes into his arms, and he buries his face in her hair. He doesn't cry, for which he is thankful; instead he whispers quickly, trying to cram the story of a lifetime, of several lifetimes, into the work of a few moments.
Her Torchwood. And his. You saved me, he says. For keeps. And the most important thing: I will love you as long as I live, and I'm going to live forever. He tells her all he can -- leaving out the pain and betrayal, knowing he couldn't bear to send her back to the Doctor with disappointment in her eyes, knowing the Doctor wouldn't survive it -- and listens intently to her in return.
He feels her arms around him tighten and looks over her head to catch the eye of the blue-suited Doctor lounging against the opposite wall, who stares back at him with a strange and oddly familiar smile that he hasn't seen since the Doctor wore a different face.
Spoiled, he teases Rose, two Doctors when we all perish for just the one and she laughs. Take care of them he finishes, knowing she, of all people in the universe, will know instantly what he means. And when she asks, who takes care of you, Jack? he smiles. I wish you could meet them, he says. Maybe someday, she answers, but her voice trembles when she says it, and somewhere deep down they both know it's not to be. And then, the thing they've never had a chance to say aloud. Not to each other. The first time, but somehow, it feels more like it's the last. Goodbye.
When he says his farewells to the new? old? Doctor, it's no less strange. Much more than with the proper Doctor who still hugs him with the awkward enthusiasm of a friend, the slight pause as he braces himself for dealing with Jack's nature still evident although well-hidden -- that's about as he expects.
But it's this other Doctor -- who watched him with challenge and defiance and lust while he talked to Rose -- that seems complicated. He and Jack stare hard at each other for a long moment, even as Jack should be making his way out the Tardis doors.
If I touch you, I might have to have you, the other Doctor eventually says, his voice low, dangerous almost, and completely calculated to make Jack remember things he'd almost, but not quite, forgotten in the ground. You couldn't stand it, Jack says, trying to make it sound casual, and then adds and I wouldn't, anyway, for good measure.
The Doctor gives him a puzzled look and then a grin, much more reminiscent of the current, proper Doctor, who is at the moment standing impatiently by the open Tardis door, practically tapping his foot. Your archivist? the strange Doctor asks, but Jack knows that it's a rhetorical question. Still, he answers anyway, for Ianto, who would want him to. Yeah. Promised him I'd come home. The Doctor nods and tips his head towards the door where his counterpart and Martha are waiting, and Jack goes easily, even if his gaze does linger just a little longer than it should.
***
There was, as ever, Ianto thought, too much to do. Gwen had to see Rhys. The city, the planet needed them. The Hub was a disaster -- and what did you fix first? the wiring? the furniture? the mess they'd made of the armoury? -- and there was a deadly alien without a doctor on hand for dissection that probably needed to be scavenged for parts, which of course explained why he and Gwen were just kicking the crap out of its lifeless shell.
He hated Daleks. Not just because they were evil and scary, which, you know, they were. But because they were irritating (exterminate? really? did they have to talk at that pitch? it had nearly given Ianto a migraine), and they had frightened Jack and taken him away again and played hell on their city. They were wrong and unfair and ugly and stupid and this one had got to listen to him and Gwen fight and cry and talk about playing house, and Ianto didn't care if it was immature. The thing deserved a good kick. Or several. And when would Jack be back or at least call in to tell him he wouldn't be?
The third entirely awesome thing about war, Jack thought, was returning home a conquering hero. Which is why he did what he could to keep his bravado up as he went down through the tourist office into the totally wrecked hub, ineffectually fanning plaster dust out of his face as he went.
"Hey, kids --" he shouted as the cog door rolled back, only to trail off at the sight of a Dalek in the hub and Gwen and Ianto kicking at it.
"Stop right there!" he shouted.
They did, but not because of the command.
"Jack!"
It was Gwen, of course. Ianto just stared at him like he was trying to remember the use of water. Even with a Dalek in the goddamned Hub Jack felt his heart well at it.
"That goes in the incinerator. Now."
"Shouldn't we examine it? Or scavenge for parts?" Ianto asked, and Jack found he missed the ‘sir.’ The bloody Doctor had gotten one earlier. Where was his?
"No. Incinerator. Now. Then my office. Changes around here."
Jack watched as both of them studiously avoided his gaze and each other's. Jack rolled his eyes.
"Just get rid of that thing," he said and then bounded up the now somewhat shaky stairs to his office.
As their eyes finally managed to meet, Gwen said ruefully, "Ouch. My foot hurts."
"Yeah," Ianto replied. "Not, I think, our finest hour."
They both looked at the ground again, embarrassed. Then Gwen tried to deflect it. "Why do you think Jack wants to see us? Debrief maybe?"
"Not his strongest suit," Ianto said dryly.
"And why do you think Jack doesn't want us to scavenge it?" Gwen went on hurriedly. "It could be useful."
"I think Jack is scared of nothing so much as these things, and you guys playing kick the can with one of them is making Jack nervous," Jack's voice came bellowing down from his office. "Also, Jack can hear every word you're saying, and incidentally, didn't I just give both of you an order? Now, kids. Snap to it."
Gwen and Ianto both jumped, and then she tried to bend to help Ianto pick up the Dalek.
"You should go on up," Ianto said, pitching his voice as low as possible. "I can take care of this. He sounds like he's in a hurry."
"It sounds ominous," Gwen hissed as softly as she could. "I don't want to go up there alone."
"Coward," Ianto whispered back at her, and she glared at him. "Go on," he prodded her. "I can do this faster by myself, really. Go keep him pacified."
She gritted her teeth, and went, and Ianto was grateful yet again for his ability to misdirect with the best of them. In truth, he was dreading this conversation as much as she was, if not more, and he wanted a bit of time to catch his breath before facing down the lions, as well as come up with a series of outlandish scenarios to worry about, each one worse than the next. He was beginning to think that coping mechanisms were not his strong suit.
When Ianto, after delaying as much as he realistically could, finally walked into the office, he saw that Gwen was curled in Jack's lap. They weren't speaking, just sitting, with Jack's arms wrapped around her as tightly as they could go.
He cleared his throat, and they both looked up, Gwen's face teary and smiling.
"So, what's going on?" Ianto asked.
Gwen jumped up and stepped back, obviously expecting some sort of display.
"Welcome back, Jack," Ianto said. "Did you tell Gwen whatever it is already?"
"No," Jack said, straight faced, but with a twinkle in his eye. "I was waiting for you."
"Well, let's have it then," Ianto said.
Jack took a deep breath and stood up. Under these circumstances, Ianto didn't think Jack having anything to say that had to be said eye to eye was really a good sign.
"This is all happening sooner than I wanted it to," Jack began. "But the universe is going to do what the universe is going to do, and we can't go on functioning as a three person team. The fact is we're not functioning now. Haven't been... well, for a while. A lot of that is my fault --"
"Jack," Gwen tried to interrupt.
"Let me finish,” he said, holding up a hand. “I wasn't able to lead when you most needed me to. And you kept us going. Both of you," Jack said, glancing between them.
He sighed and ran his hands through his hair, knowing he wanted to give a proper speech for this and realizing he was too weary and shaken to give it the moment it deserved, and with Ianto so clearly holding his breath, it seemed cruel to draw it out.
"Look, I've got this guy Mickey picking up pizzas for us. And Martha will be down as soon as she's seen her family. They're coming on board. Don't know for how long. But at least for the clean-up. I know we're not ready. But we can't afford not to have them. They're good people. You know Martha; Mickey's eager and a fighter and can put up with me, so hopefully we can just fuse this whole thing together and get on with it --"
"So you're staying?" Ianto blurted.
"Yes," Jack said simply, looking pained. "Of course."
"I don't understand you two!"
Ianto and Jack both turned to her.
"Pardon?" Jack asked.
"Have a reunion already. My god, Jack, you were worried sick and Ianto, I know --"
"Gwen, please don't," Ianto said quietly. It was enough to stop her.
Jack looked at him quizzically.
"We don't, because it would get out of hand," he said, addressing her but looking at Jack. "Quickly."
"And you don't want to see that," Jack added, taking Ianto's cue and grinning at her.
"But I do!" she exclaimed, wide-eyed and laughing. "I really, really do."
"Apparently the greenhouse wasn't enough," Jack murmured as he closed on Ianto, meaning to kiss him, but Ianto stopped him with a hand to his collar bone, curving almost, but not quite, around his throat.
"Not now," Ianto said softly, but Jack pressed in against his hand and kissed him anyway, although far more chastely than he would have otherwise.
"Later," Ianto said on the other side of it, and Jack nodded simply and stepped back.
"Satisfied?" Jack asked her.
Gwen nodded, a bit dumbstruck. As much as she knew that Ianto, especially in these last two months, was Jack's memory and hope and compass, she still hadn't expected any display that so absolutely -– albeit firmly and simply and gently -- positioned Ianto as the one with the power.
No one else really ever had power when Jack was in the room, she had always thought, and while Ianto eventually might in some ways grow to be a better leader than she was, Gwen had only ever seen him use his authority when he was angry. Somehow, she had assumed his interactions with Jack were the same, only more so.
"Yeah," she said, even though she knew neither of them had yet managed to feel any true relief in the other's presence.
"Glad someone is," Jack quipped as he looked up at the wall clock.
He sighed when he realized it was broken, although he supposed he shouldn't have been surprised that dragging the Earth out of its place in time and space had fucked up a clock bought on discount from an overstock store.
"Anyway, Dalek burnt?"
"Incinerated, sir," Ianto said.
There it is, Jack thought happily. There we are, and he wasn't sure he had managed to hide his happiness in the slightest.
"Good. Let's see if we can get some work stations cleaned up for them, then it's introductions and a triage list over pizza. Work for you two?"
Once he got their affirmatives he shoo'ed them out of his office with a call to Ianto to put on some coffee. They were going to need it.
***
Ianto was nearly certain that he did not like Mickey Smith. If Jack had to foist this... this... stranger on them, couldn't he at least have made sure that it wasn't someone so... so... like Owen? Only dumber, and Owen's blazing intelligence had really been the only thing that made him worthwhile, he thought vindictively, even though he hadn't actually believed that for a long time.
"Coffee?" he asked politely, hovering over him with the pot.
"Sure," Mickey said, eying him curiously. "Thanks, mate."
Jack looked at them and seemed amused, damn him.
"Seems like you're having some issues with your whole underground lair thing, Captain," Mickey said, nodding to the chains hanging loose from the ceiling.
"Oh yeah," Jack said, with a grin. "About our decor. Didn't I tell you? My people have to be willing to... service me in all ways."
Mickey barked with laughter, but Ianto noticed he also sat back, a little farther away from Jack. Ianto couldn't figure out their relationship. Jack had said they had both traveled with the Doctor, but did he mean they had done that together? And what had he meant by “traveled?”
"Seriously though, Mickey, you're right," Jack said, smoothly switching into a tone that very few people were ever able to challenge. "We need to work on getting this place up to speed, and fast. We're going to have to figure out what using the Rift as a tow-hook did to the damn thing, and when Martha gets here, she's going to want to be out in the field doing a damage assessment. I want us to be ready for her when she gets here. There's going to be a hell of a lot to do. First we'll all do an initial round of the Hub and assess problems. Mickey, you'll be point person on that; I know you've got the experience."
"Yes, sir," Mickey rapped out, suddenly sounding like another person all together, like someone who'd actually been in the trenches of some war. Ianto bristled.
"After we've done that, Gwen, I'd like you to hit the streets and get a preliminary report on what's going on out there. Been home yet?" and when she shook her head, he added, "Better do that too then. Take a few hours."
"Ianto," Jack ordered, "keep the coffee coming. Also, if you don't mind, get a read on the Rift as best you can. When Mickey's done scouting the Hub, he can help you. He's got a knack for computers."
"Whatever you say, sir," Ianto said.
"What are you going to do, Jack?" Gwen asked.
"I'm going to pop back up topside and check the lift and so on. It ought to be me, on account of potential accidents. Then I'll be back to help you guys."
He stood up, and Ianto came forward automatically to seize his coat and help him into it.
"Nice set up for jumpin' Jack flash here," Mickey remarked to no one in particular. And then to Jack, "You didn't tell me your lair came complete with butler and valet."
Ianto glared as Jack just chuckled before saying, "He's not for general use."
"You know," Ianto said, "I happen to be standing right here."
"Yep," said Mickey. "Excellent coffee, mate. Any chance of another cup?"
***
"Yes, sir," Mickey said, as Jack indicated another area of the ceiling that was in desperate need of patch jobs on its wiring.
"Stop calling me sir, Mickey," Jack said, "It's driving Ianto crazy."
"But Ianto calls you sir," Mickey said.
Jack pointed at him and grinned. "Exactly."
And while Ianto felt petty over it, he really couldn't help sharing a small, victorious smile with Gwen, as strange as it was to be in a conspiracy of covetousness with her.
"Ianto!"
"Sir?"
"Stop being smug and go find the blueprints to this place. I'm not even entirely sure what's in all these walls, much less if it's worth our trouble to repair."
Ianto straightened his face and went. When Jack spoke in that tone, it was better to jump first and ask questions later.
***
It was several hours later when Jack finally called a break. Gwen had been out, and returned, her eyes shining with happiness, and Mickey was completely coated with plaster dust. Ianto had not managed to get very far with the Rift monitor, and he missed Tosh more with every second.
Mickey had paused several times to come over and assist, and his good natured obnoxiousness made Ianto want to plant a fist in his face. It didn't help that his suggestions were useful and to the point.
Ianto's eyes were beginning to water from peering so closely at the screen, and when Jack came up behind him to lay a hand on his shoulder, he growled at him.
"You okay?" Jack asked solicitously.
"Of course," Ianto said. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"It's been a hard day for everyone."
"Hardest for you, sir," Ianto said, trying to sound distant and professional. "You did all the work."
"Hardly," Jack said. "Heavy lifting done by others on this one."
Ianto frowned. "Not here."
"You survived."
"That was Tosh."
"You bought her time, you didn't give up, and you were here to do what needed doing when it was all over."
Ianto nodded. "I'm sure it hardly compares to your exploits, sir."
"I'll tell you about it later, but it wasn't a ton of fun," Jack said, feeling guilty for being a liar, because, after all, it had really had its moments. "We could go to dinner tonight?" Jack asked, still feeling like he needed to make something up to Ianto but not sure what.
"Somehow, I suspect that the resiliency of the British people and Jubilee pizza aside, the restaurants probably haven't quite reopened yet," Ianto said.
"Oh. Huh. I'm sure something is."
"Every time you take me out to eat, it's a disaster, Jack."
"Oh. Well. Really?"
"Yes, sir."
"Seems wrong to retract the offer, though."
"I'll counter. A few hours at my flat?"
Jack grinned. "You're on," he said and then leaned over Ianto to whisper in his ear. "Thanks. I could really use a good reason to be on my knees for a change."
As was typical of Jack and such remarks, he was gone before Ianto could respond, which left him stranded between a fantasy ill-suited to work and curiosity as to Jack's sincerity. Because no matter what the man said, he never actually wanted anyone other than him to be in charge.
In truth, there were few things that irritated Ianto more from Jack than the man's pretend acquiescence, even if that bit of bad behavior was what had taken them from something casual and sloppy to whatever they had now -- unclear, yes, but still blinding and fought for.
***
When Ianto tossed him his keys, Jack thought about tossing them back, but he decided he'd rather just get them to Ianto's flat, to his bed, and worry about the rest then. Even on empty roads Ianto was bound to be conscientious, especially driving at night in the rain, and Jack was in no mood, because the fourth thing Jack liked about war was the fucking afterwards.
He couldn't believe he hadn't gotten to it yet, hadn't succumbed to the first willing body determined to make sure they smelled like something other than fear. It could have easily been Donna or the not-quite-Doctor, although pushing that would have been too foolish even for him. Any of them really, but there were a hundred reasons why not, and only the first was that they were all from different places and times than him and less familiar with the nature of war.
"You're terribly quiet, Jack, what're you pondering?"
"That I'm not used to being so patient."
"It's probably good for you," Ianto said.
"Probably. In some amorphous way that defines people's goodness by self-sacrifice and their readiness for afterlives that don't exist, sure."
"Too many assumptions. I just meant being able to wait, on anything, good for strategy, right?"
Jack glanced at him for a moment before returning his eyes to the road. "Sure. What brings that up?"
"Fighting, I guess. Shooting at that thing. Being trapped in the Hub."
"Are you telling me you enjoyed it?" Jack asked.
"Maybe. When Gwen and I weren't upsetting each other. Pretty fucked, yeah?"
Jack shook his head as he swung the car into the wasteground, now that he had remembered where they always used to park.
"Nah. Good to like your work, right?" he said, before hopping out of the car.
Ianto smiled uncertainly but decided not to dwell on it. As he let them into his building he was almost sad that he no longer fumbled with the lock around Jack.
As they raced up the stairs he felt like he should be laughing, because that was what one did with a few hours stolen from Torchwood to screw, but mostly he was tired and relieved and it all felt oddly and uncomfortably domestic as they walked through the flat to the bedroom without turning on any of the lights.
Ianto helped Jack with his coat and slung it over the chair by the window and then paused in loosening his tie as Jack tossed something down on the bed that his eyes couldn't quite make out in the dark.
"There. Now you can make sure I'm not going to go running off."
Handcuffs, Ianto realised, and Jack had spoken without rancor, but there was still a note of discomfort in his voice.
"Pessimists live longer; we're always prepared for the worst," Ianto said, by way of justification for his earlier obvious doubts.
"Keep doing it then," Jack said, pulling out of his own clothes as Ianto picked up the handcuffs.
"You really want me to do this, or is this just one of your strange peace offerings?"
"I wasn't joking earlier."
"About what?"
"My knees."
"Oh," Ianto said with a frown.
"Look," Jack said, closing in on him to unbutton Ianto's shirt. "I'm terrible at giving up control. You know that."
"I do."
"So here's a hint," Jack said, speaking more softly and not meeting Ianto's eyes in a way that didn't seem entirely for show. "Take it."
"How?" Ianto breathed.
Jack cupped Ianto's head and whispered in his ear. "Be kind, but make sure it hurts."
"I --"
"What?" Jack asked, still close to his ear, voice breathy. "Have you never really spanked someone before? Pinched them 'til it bruised, bit 'til you worried after the skin?"
Ianto gasped, and wondered if this was like everything else since Jack had returned from the earth, an accidental confession made only because Jack didn't remember it hadn't been made before.
"Even if you haven't," said Jack, his voice a purr that went straight to Ianto's groin, "haven't you wanted to?"
"I have done, yeah," Ianto said, stuttering a bit. "But--"
Jack, naked now, stepped back and stared at Ianto, the dare obvious in his face even in the dark room, lit only from the electric lights outside on the rain-swept street. Then deliberately, pointedly, he dropped his eyes to look at the floor. Ianto could hear his breathing quicken. After that, he just waited.
Ianto reached up to pull the tie over his head and discard it with his unbuttoned shirt. He left his trousers on, and then slowly walked around Jack in a considering circle. Jack was breathing hard now, but otherwise he was reining himself in, staying as motionless as possible, while Ianto studied him.
Ianto let the tension build as long as he could, his heart beginning to race with nervousness and excitement and even a little bit of anger, because the other man was, once again, managing to make everything seem like a bloody test. But Jack was home, and they were alive, and god, he was beautiful, standing there, waiting for whatever Ianto was going to do with him.
Ianto paused for a second to think how naturally the word came, when he probably wouldn't have ever thought to apply it to a man before, even if he'd wanted to have it off with them. Not 'til Jack had come along, and made mincemeat of everything he'd ever thought or known.
Then he walked over to the bed and picked up the cuffs Jack had tossed there.
"Okay, Jack," he said, finally breaking the silence, but thinking he sounded a bit casual, a bit ridiculous. "Kneel on the bed."
Continue to next part
Pairing/Characters: Jack/Ianto, Gwen, Mickey, Martha & the rest of the Doctor Who Cast.
Authors:
rm & kalichanRating/Warning: NC-17, bdsm, d/s,
Summary: Homeward bound. Takes place during and after Doctor Who 4x13: Journey's End.
Wordcount: ~31,700 [posted in 4 parts]
Authors' Notes: This is the seventh installment of our series, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. The title is from a song (and the album) by Stars. This is the first piece of this arc we’ve really had to write concurrent to an episode, because of the woeful lack of Torchwood Hub in DW 4x13. This means if you've not watched Journey's End, that the first part of the story might not make as much sense as it could. Here is a link to a brief recap, a full recap, a funny recap (with captioned pictures) or just the transcript -- in case you want to know what, exactly, is going on. Or you could just dive in and hope for the best! Next up, we'll be posting a Jack/Nine/Rose followed by a few other prequels covering the early education and adventures of both Jack and Ianto before returning to where we’ve left off with them in this timeline.
Previous installments:
A Strange Fashion of Forsaking
Dear Captain, Last Night I Slept in Mutiny
To Learn This Holding and the Holding Back
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
I Imagine You Now in That Other City
Many of My Favorite Things Are Broken
IANTO: It's a time-lock. The ultimate defence program. Tosh was working on it. Never thought she'd finished it, but she did. The Hub's sealed in a time-bubble. Nothing can get in.
GWEN: But that means we can't get out.
IANTO: Nope. Not without unlocking that Dalek. We're trapped inside. It's all up to Jack, now.
- Journey's End by Russell T. Davies
Gwen's hand went up to touch her throat, as if she could somehow ease the soreness left from her screams of rage by gently rubbing from the outside. It wasn't working.
"Try the phones," she ordered from where she stood behind Ianto's seat at the console. "Can we ring out? The radio? See anything on the CCTV? We need to know what's going on out there."
"I don't think we can," Ianto said, though he was tapping keys as he spoke, trying to do as she asked. Then he shook his head. "We can't see out. And the comm lines are all dead," he reported. "We're stuck. Trapped out of time. For the duration."
Gwen slammed her hand onto the desk. "Fuck!"
The noise of her outburst echoed through the underground chamber and then just stopped in an odd, muffled reverberation, as if the sound had hit a barrier and been choked off. Ianto swiveled in the chair to look at her, and their eyes met in horror at the stomach churning wrongness of witnessing something that just shouldn't be possible. Then she slumped down to the floor.
"Rhys," she said softly, feeling tears well up in her eyes. "Mum and Dad. Anything could be happening to them."
Ianto didn't say anything but got up from his seat and then sat down on the floor next to her.
"Isn't there anyone you're worried about?" Gwen asked finally, after she'd forced back her tears.
"Just up there," Ianto said, staring up at the ceiling. "And the fate of the human race, of course."
Gwen shook her head. "What if it doesn't work? Up there? Will we run out of air? Just suffocate to death?"
Ianto laughed humourlessly. "At least it could only happen to us once," he pointed out. "Anyway, I don't think it's a worry," he said. "I can work out something. There's air recyclers downstairs. And food stockpiled. No. At this point, we're the safest people on... well, anywhere."
"Fuck," Gwen said again, though more softly this time. "Are you scared?"
"Shitless," Ianto said. "You?"
Gwen leaned her head down on his shoulder. "Yeah," she said softly, "but not for us." There was a pause and then she added, "What do you think Jack's doing right now?"
"Giving the Doctor what for," Ianto said.
"You think that's all he's giving him?" Gwen asked.
Ianto turned to glare at her, and she laughed a little.
"Sorry," she said. "Adrenaline. Still shaking."
She held out her right hand in front of them, the fingers trembling with reaction, and Ianto captured them in his own and squeezed. She could still taste the dead-iron in her mouth, blood and fire and ashes. Then, as if pulled by some irresistible force, they both looked over at the creepy, unsettling bullets hanging in the air and the Dalek, frozen and menacing before them.
"Ugh," Gwen said. "Do you think it's watching us?" she hissed.
"Almost certainly," Ianto said.
"Thanks, that's very comforting."
"It probably just sees us at the moment the lock came down," Ianto offered. "I don't think it can tell what we're doing right now. We could get a sheet or something if you don't want to look at it."
"Are you mad?" Gwen exclaimed. "If it can see us, I want to see it."
"Yes ma'am," Ianto said.
"Are you taking the piss?" Gwen asked suspiciously.
"Not at all," Ianto said, his voice unshaded by irony. "Farthest thing from my mind." He stood up then and went over to the klaxon and the bullet studded time wall.
"What are you doing?" Gwen asked.
"Tidying up," Ianto said, over his shoulder. "And getting the guns."
"Jack took the big one," Gwen said, rising to help him. "Pity. It's probably one of the few that had a real chance against a Dalek."
"We could break out some more of the alien weaponry from the archives," Ianto offered. "I should have thought of that before. Sorry. That was stupid," he added, castigating himself.
"We didn't have time," Gwen reassured him. "It would've had us, and I don't think we wanted it coming after us into the Hub. Who knew what it could've done so close to the Rift?"
"I suppose," Ianto said. "Not that we would've stopped it."
"You never know," Gwen said fiercely. "I've seen stranger things happen."
"I haven't," Ianto replied flatly. "That thing -- Jack was terrified. I've never seen him like that. Not even after... Have you?"
"No," Gwen said. "But you don't give up anyway."
"Jack did," Ianto said, and he looked both anguished and startled at the betrayal of the words leaving his mouth.
Gwen's mind screamed in rebellion even as she shook her head. "No. Not really, he didn't. Not for long--" and she trailed off, realising that the last clause was a tacit agreement.
They collected sheets of paper -- the floor was absolutely littered with them -- for a few minutes in silence. Then he asked hesitantly, "D'you think Jack seemed...? Never mind."
"Seemed what?"
"No. Nothing," Ianto said, cutting her off.
"Just because he can't die, doesn't mean he shouldn't get scared," Gwen said, guessing.
"He usually hates showing it, though," Ianto said, and Gwen thought he was probably thinking of the dives off roofs. "And maybe Daleks are different."
She frowned. "If Daleks could kill him permanently, don't you think he would have chased some down by now? Or looked glad to see them?"
"I don't know anymore, Gwen," he said. And even amidst all this, she noticed that he was unable to stop the small smile that quirked his lips as he said it.
Gwen smiled back. "What a terrible time to be happy for you, yeah?"
"Yeah," Ianto said, "but thank you anyway."
If there's one thing Jack truly hates about his tendency to fall for the people he fights beside, it's the utter strategic inability to run to them in the moments he most wants to. With the Doctor, restraint has become almost easy, because it's had to. Besides, so much of their fondness is rooted now in a prickly regret, waiting to touch often feels much the same as actually touching. But Rose....
It's been so long and there's so much he wants to tell her and ask her and forgive her for, even if she doesn't know she needs it, even if she doesn't care to hear it. He thinks of her when the Daleks try to burn him, and he thinks of her when he thinks of Ianto and Gwen and the Hub, because they’re all her fault too, and she doesn't even know about them yet.
Jack wants to tell her everything. It's a strange urge, he thinks, the desire for confession before a woman he was once a child with, but maybe not so strange because he knows that he loves her very much and always has. They're more alike than he ever could have imagined or understood back then, before she saved him with an utter brutality of ill-conceived hope. She is, Jack realizes as he crawls his way through what feels like miles of vents, more frightening than the Doctor. And in battle she seems so far away.
Gwen jabbed at the buttons on her mobile yet again.
"Still time-locked," Ianto said, not really having the energy to scold her, but wishing he could stop her from making herself crazy. There was nothing to do other than look askance at the way the Hub occasionally shuddered, dropping some pipe or cement or tile or wire from the ceiling. He wasn't sure if it was stress from the time-lock or just the result of the damage incurred before it came down, but he really, really didn't have a good feeling about it.
"How structurally sound is this place?" Gwen asked in response to his dubiously staring at the ceiling.
"Don't know."
"How can you not know?"
"Er... not an architect?"
"Ianto Jones, you know everything."
"I don't," he said, laughing nervously.
She frowned. "Think there are blueprints anywhere around here?"
"I know where they are," Ianto said with a roll of his eyes. "Just not sure they'll be particularly reassuring."
"Okay," Gwen said. "There are three levels of reassuring: Daleks are going to kill us all. Daleks might not kill us all. Jack telling us everything is, in fact, already fine. Blueprints can't be worse than Daleks."
"Never. Ever. Say never," Ianto said. "Want me to fetch 'em?"
Gwen shook her head. She didn't want to leave their work stations, but she also didn't want to be alone with the Dalek.
It's stupid, Jack knows, but he’d almost felt shy of Rose when he first saw her again. While she'd been cowering under his arm, afraid of losing her Doctor a third time, he'd been scared that, like the Doctor, it would hurt her to look at him or, that somehow, he'd have more anger for her than he expected and say something cruel. He's done a lot of that with far too many people these days, and never, ever wants to do it to Rose, who he'd tried to look after more than to seduce, even as he'd somehow managed both once upon a very long time ago.
He wonders what she's like now, what her life has brought her, and what she's kept of the thing that made him this way. He hopes she's still just Rose, really, a girl he'd danced on a stolen ship with, and not some terrible goddess or strange something that sang to him in the dark he thinks he shouldn't be able to remember.
Too, he hopes Ianto is all right, and he feels sad because he's certain that in a world that could contain him and Rose both that they would be friends. There just might not be any world like that, Jack worries, and the thought leaves him feeling sick and full of fear. But if Rose does have to go back to the universe's lost and found, maybe that'll at least mean that his team will be all right -- well, furious and probably injured -- and waiting for him when he gets back.
If he ever gets back; if there's still an Earth to get back to; if this vent ever ends and he isn't being watched by Daleks right now as he climbs around like a rat in a maze for their amusement. But Daleks aren't really that interesting, or interested, so maybe he's safe for now. He hopes.
Ianto put a cup of coffee in Gwen's hand, and she looked at it for a second like she didn't know what it was.
"It's been hours," she said. She sounded dazed, and the slight nausea he'd been feeling suddenly grew exponentially in the pit of his stomach. Was this even safe, this temporal lock? How had Tosh even tested it out?
"It's a whole Dalek fleet; not exactly child's play. If it even can be done at all, it's bound to take some time," Ianto began, meaning to sound comforting, but realising as he spoke his words were anything but. Still, he'd started now, so he'd shift to something that would, with any luck, sound more hopeful. "If we open the lock from the inside, maybe it will be like no time passed for us. We'll be back in that second that the bubble closed. Or maybe it's just the bubble wall itself that's out of time, and outside the Hub things are passing normally like they're doing for us in here. I guess we'll find out...."
"Or we'll be trapped here forever," Gwen muttered. "What do you mean, anyway? Can it be opened from the outside? Did Tosh talk to you about it?"
"Only a little," Ianto said. "I was a good sounding board sometimes, but I wasn't on her level, really. She was --"
"A genius," Gwen finished for him.
"She might've talked to Jack, though," Ianto said. "He'd have understood it."
"Really?"
"I've been wondering," Ianto said hesitantly, "if that's why he left us here. If he thought we'd be protected, no matter what happened. To him, I mean."
"If that's true, I'm going to kill him."
"Why?"
"No, really. I'm going to take his neck and then I'm going to--"
"You know, Gwen, that joke would be less disturbing if certain members of our little team hadn't already tried out assassination as a hobby." Or as a sexual quirk, he thought silently, feeling the sickness in his stomach rise again.
"Who says I'm joking?" Gwen said fiercely. "He shouldn't have done that. What does he think? That I'd stay happily locked away in here while Rhys is outside, dealing with god knows what?" She threw her coffee cup onto the floor, and it smashed, the dark brown liquid pooling around the pieces.
Ianto jumped a little in surprise at the crash, and then they just sat there and watched the stain soak into the cement floor.
"Sorry," Gwen said finally. "I'm sorry."
Ianto shook his head. "Rhys would want you to be safe. For once, he and Jack would be of the exact same opinion."
"Well it's not what I want," she cried.
Ianto sighed, before saying softly, "But it's what you've got."
"Here," Gwen said, speaking too quickly. "I'll get a cloth, and we can clean this mess up."
Jack is beginning to think he's made a wrong turn somewhere. But is there such a thing as a wrong turn when he's got no idea where the hell he's going? It's dark in the vents, and he has to take a few rapid, shallow breaths to calm himself down. He wonders if he'll ever feel entirely okay with small, dark, enclosed spaces ever again.
He pauses for a moment to look at his wrist strap, grateful for the little light it casts and the blue flash which is telling him that there's signs of life aboard this space station that aren't encased in metal. That'll be Rose, he thinks hopefully, and the Doctor. Their life signs seem steady, and he feels his spirits rise a little.
Until his next, less cheery thought. It could be prisoners from the planet, and with that sudden idea, he grows cold again with fear, even if there's no way Ianto and Gwen can be extracted from the Hub against their will. Probably. If it works.
But why move the whole fucking Earth if you just wanted to transport people off of it? And it doesn't matter anyway, he decides, because if it is just helpless prisoners, he'll have to try to get close and scout the situation out, see if there's any possible way to save them, although he knows he might have to move on for the sake of the bigger picture. Even if he is just blundering around without anything resembling a plan, or even a weapon. But it always seems to work for the Doctor, he reasons, and now Rose is back.
Surely everything, he thinks wistfully as he keeps climbing forward, will be okay. The universe isn't that cruel. Is it? He shakes his head. No. Enough of this. He's the Doctor's ace in the hole, and he always will be, world without end, and no fucking Dalek, or anything else for that matter, is going to stand in his way. He just has to keep climbing.
"You know," Ianto said, breaking a long silence. "If Owen were here, he'd suggest that we all shag right now. It is the end of the world, after all."
"Are you making a pass at me?" Gwen joked, but it was clear her heart wasn't even in it.
Ianto smiled slightly as he shook his head.
"Are you and Jack...?" She trailed off.
"Am I and Jack what?"
"You know."
"No, I don't."
"I mean. Is that part of things working again at least?"
"You don't get to ask if you can't even say it."
"Fine. Are you two back to shagging like rabbits?"
"I don't know. Did you ever tell Rhys about Owen?"
"That's unfair!"
"How Gwen? How is your incredibly fucked up affair with Owen less my business than my relationship with Jack is yours?"
"Rhys doesn't work here."
"And fucking Jack isn't part of my job," Ianto snapped.
Gwen was silent, abashed, and Ianto couldn't help but notice a cruel streak in him that enjoyed it. He sighed. That wasn't a very good thing at all.
"I'm sorry," Gwen said after a bit.
Ianto shrugged.
"It's just.... It seems like we talk about these things now."
"But I don't, Gwen, not with anyone."
"But you could. I mean. If you wanted to or needed to or something."
"I did. With Tosh."
"Oh," Gwen said, her voice full of grief and hurt feelings.
"Why do you care about it so much anyway?" Ianto asked after a while.
"Because if you two can find a way, any of us can. I told Rhys. About Owen. And then gave him retcon. He doesn't know."
"That's... that's..." Ianto was flabbergasted. Something like that would have shocked and appalled him from anyone, but from Gwen it was nearly incomprehensible.
"Disgusting, I know," she said.
"I was going to say devious," Ianto said blandly, even though it wasn't true. Gwen was, apparently, as fucked up as the rest of them. He wondered if Jack knew. Or, more accurately in these strange days, had known. He was still remembering things. Which meant there were things once known that were still forgotten.
It occurs to Jack that his fondness for war has come from the people he's met there. He wonders absently if he's ever going to find any other way of making friends or if this is something he's not destined to outgrow.
Certainly he'd never expected Mickey Smith to be anything but an irritation, but he'd been a fool with that assumption. They'd fought, if not together, then in each other's general vicinity, and it is hard for Jack to see him as anything but a childhood friend now. And Jackie Tyler might not be a friend or a comrade or anything resembling a soldier, but she is Rose's mother and Jack knows that he owes a debt there, if only because it's the sort of debt he hasn't owed in a very long time. Gwen's parents hate him if they remember him at all. Ianto's are dead.
But it's Sarah Jane who almost makes him stop breathing. She's so ferocious and broken-hearted and unwillingly healed that Jack can practically see himself in her even though they've never met before. Weird, but he guesses that's what happens when you find happiness in exile, which isn't, he suspects, all that different than finding happiness in war.
Let us survive, Jack thinks. Let her survive, because he suddenly wants to know her story from her mouth, the way he once would have wanted to know it from her flesh. Not that she's bad looking. She's anything but. Things are just different now is all.
"So why Rhys?" Ianto asked, forcing himself to eat a biscuit. If Gwen was going to ask horrible intrusive questions, he figured that in lieu of anything useful to do, he could at least make the discussion civilised. Which meant biscuits, and a second attempt at coffee and intrusive questions of his own when he didn't even particularly care about the answers beyond their status as information, and the fact that all knowledge was useful.
"I don't have to be more with him," Gwen said. "It sounds terrible, I know. But it's not. Really not. I... he loves me even if I'm not special or brave. And if I were, all the time, he'd wonder who I was really. He's so kind, Ianto. And funny. And, you know, like Jack always says, it's good to have something normal."
Ianto was tempted to ask her what the appeal was when they got together, when Gwen's life was normal, to find out why on earth she would have needed more of the same. But it seemed cruel, and he liked Rhys well enough, and he himself had once been normal or at least closer to it than he was now. And that hadn't been bad, hadn't been wrong, hadn't been weak on his part.
He was so grateful that there was no going back, though. So grateful. Because he'd have hated to have to make a choice, hated to dwell more than he already did on what he would have done if he had known then what he knew now, hated to know all the terrible things he'd have to choose to have happen again and again, just so he could be sitting where he was, terrified and lonely and knowing that all he really wanted was for Jack to come home.
And home, Ianto thought, was such a treacherous word.
"It's something real," Gwen said, her gaze somewhere far away, and Ianto came back from his abstraction with a start, realising she was answering his unspoken question.
"It's bottles of wine, and taking out the rubbish, and cleaning the oven. It's him holding my hair back when I've got a hangover, and me crawling into bed with him after I've got home -- nights on the beat, it used to be before all this, and he'd have been out with the lads and smelling a bit of drink. It's sheets, and books on the floor, and my knickers in the sink; it's ranting at the telly together, and him walking about the flat with his kit out scratching himself, and kisses in the morning before you clean your teeth."
"Ah," Ianto said, suddenly able to see it and, without understanding quite why, was flooded with an enormous quiet melancholy. "Well. That's good. God knows there's nothing real in here."
"It's different," Gwen replied. "It's not that it's fake, Torchwood."
"True," Ianto said. "It's magic, and brilliant, and mad -- but it's not like that. It's not solid."
"It could be?" Gwen said hesitantly, turning it into a question.
"No, it couldn't."
"But Ianto, you could... you and Jack…."
"No," he said firmly, cutting her off. "It's not. It can't be. Even assuming he comes back, I don't get that. I had a shot, and she's dead."
"He's coming back," Gwen said fiercely. "You heard him."
"Even so."
"But why not?" Gwen prodded him.
"It's not.... it's Torchwood. It's a dream. Look," he said, nodding over to the Dalek. "It's this. Guns and blood and work and the stars in the sky alive. How could we ever have anything else?"
"Don't you want it though? Don't you miss it? You were like us once."
"No," Ianto said, hoping if he uttered the lie with enough conviction, it might sound true. "We're all dead here. Some of us just happen to still be walking around. It's not good for us to want more."
"What are you talking about?" she said, anger in her voice now.
"I keep the Torchwood archives," he said curtly.
"So?"
"So, I know the date that everyone has ever entered here. And I know the way they leave and how long it takes. You know how they used to list it in the Navy? Discharged: dead. This isn't a job we grow old in, Gwen. There isn't a nice retirement packet and a summer share in Malta."
Gwen stared at him.
"Yeah, I know. Lovely thought, isn't it? You were thinking something different though. That you'd maybe settle down, have a baby even. Bring it in to the office sometimes, and Jack would make comments about how inappropriate it was for work while he snuck around cooing at it behind everyone's back, and I worried out loud that the pterodactyl was going to have itself a nice snack as you giggled."
Gwen sucked in her breath as if he'd hit her. "You're cruel," she whispered.
"No," Ianto said. "Well. Yeah. Maybe. But honest. I imagined it too, after your wedding. It was a nice fantasy, 'til I realised it was all bollocks."
Tears were leaking out of Gwen's eyes, and Ianto touched her shoulder. She flinched.
"You could still get out," he said. "Of all of us. You should think about it anyway."
"No," she said. "I won't. I couldn't leave--"
"Him," Ianto finished for her.
"Him. This," Gwen said. "It's important. It matters. I matter here. It's bigger than anything else."
"Yeah," Ianto sighed. "It's too late for us all, then."
"You too," she said.
"Well, yes," he replied, puzzled now. "That's what I was trying to tell you."
"I meant," Gwen said, through her teeth, "I'd not leave you either."
"Oh," Ianto said, startled. "That's... I don't know quite what to say."
"Then don't say anything," Gwen answered, the shortness in her voice belied by her hand, reaching out to rest gently on his.
Jack's knees feel bruised; they'd folded beneath him almost without volition and hit the ground hard as his hands went behind his head, not when ordered to by the fucking Daleks, but he is apparently incapable of resisting the Doctor's slightest command.
His master's voice, he finds himself thinking bitterly, but he knows he'd never do anything differently. Surrender now, so we can fight later, he tells himself, is surely the Doctor's plan, but actually Jack isn't certain of that at all. In fact, he's afraid and still reeling from the look in the Doctor's eyes, the horror and the shame.
This deeply creepy guy in the chair has told him things, and now the Doctor seems to actually believe that they’re true: that they, his army, had once been ordinary people, and he'd made them into weapons and murderers, into his very own race of Daleks, and Jack kind of wants to vomit at the idea. He'd thought he was inured to this feeling, but the sick sensation in his gut when he realizes the Doctor is monumentally disappointed in him, tells him he was wrong; turns out, it's still there and exactly as heartbreaking, even here at what seems like the end of all things.
He tries to take refuge in bravado, the way he's always done, but it's doing him no good, not inside his head, though he keeps the smile plastered on his face. What does the Doctor want from them? Jack looks at Rose and Martha and the rest out of the corner of his eye; they look brave, they always look brave, and he guesses there are worse things than going out in the best company, with best army he's ever seen or thought of.
He wonders if this thing, this ultimate weapon that this fucking lunatic corpse keeps nattering on about will actually succeed in killing him. Please, he says silently, feeling the dry, greyish despair threatening to wash over him, please, if this ends now, let me go with them. All of them, because he doesn't really think even a temporal lock is going to save Ianto and Gwen.
He looks again at the Doctor; if there's going to be a sign, anything, he needs to be ready. I'm your man, he thinks, 'til the end. Even if that's right now. Don't give up on us, he prays. Don't let it end like this, with that bastard telling you these lies about us. You make us better than we were meant to be, and the things we do in your name are legion, and you are great, and all great things are terrible. C'mon. Something. A sign. Please.
And then he hears the noise, that amazing grinding noise of a door opening in the fabric of space and time.
Yes!!! Jack thinks, with the most blessed feeling of relief he's ever felt in the entire course of his very, very, long existence. Thank you.
And Gwen was Gwen, Ianto thought with a sigh. Like Jack, she couldn't let a perfect moment lie. She always, somehow, had to keep talking. He hated it.
"Don't you want to wake up next to him?" she asked.
More than anything. "He doesn't sleep, Gwen. Did you know that? He doesn't need to. He comes over to my flat, we screw, and then he reads a book while I sleep and leaves after a couple of hours because god knows what will happen if we're not on the Rift every single goddamn second."
"But --"
"But what, Gwen? We're blokes and we're broken and he's not even human really. Not anymore. Not like you or I understand it. So playing house is not an option, okay?"
"You two were so happy before Gray."
"All of this was true then too, Gwen," Ianto said, more gently.
"You stay here with him a lot though, right?"
"Yeah," Ianto said with a vaguely amused snort. "Bed only sleeps one, though."
"Well, do something about it," Gwen said as if Ianto was a fool.
"What?"
"Move his stupid cubby. Empty out some storage room or something."
"Don't, Gwen."
"Don't what?"
Don't give me hope, he thought. "Get confused and think I'm some day-dreaming girl."
A slow smile crept over Gwen's face.
"No. Don't even say it!" he said, laughing in a vaguely hysterical way.
"Is it wrong," she asked, "that I almost wish our Dalek could hear us?"
As Ianto paused to formulate an appropriate response to that bit of insanity, the Dalek exploded.
"Bleeding fuck!" Gwen shouted.
Ianto leapt up, quickly going to Tosh's workstation to check what he was already fairly certain of. "Time lock's released."
"Why'd it blow up?" Gwen asked and she hurried to her own station.
"Guess they did what they were trying to do," Ianto said and, in spite of himself, smiled as Gwen took out her mobile and started jabbing at the keypad again.
The system, Ianto thought, would probably be flooded, making it unlikely that her call would go through, but the fact remained that if he had anyone to call who existed in this here and now, he would be doing the same, and so he was oddly glad that Gwen could do so in his stead.
She slammed down the phone with a noise of frustration as a video call came up on her screen.
"It's them!" Gwen exclaimed.
Ianto found himself doing everything in his power not to crowd around the monitor with her. This was a time for work, and whatever he and Jack were or were not going to do they could do it later, without an audience.
Besides, Ianto really didn't want to see him with the Doctor, and so he grit his teeth as the manic, skinny man chatted with Gwen about her bloody family and then shook his head when Gwen tried to beckon him over so that he could talk to Jack. All he could manage was a "Yes sir," when the Doctor gave him an order. That was all any of them were getting for now. That and comehomecomehomecomehome playing in a loop in his mind.
The other thing to be said for war, other than the comrades in arms, is the victory parties. The victory parties, assuming you're one of the victors, are always really, really good. Jack has always loved them. Loved them as an enlisted man drinking cheap booze and kissing strange women and loved them as an officer, struggling with reserve and the inappropriate affections of someone else's wife or subordinate. Once, he'd had it off with a waiter in an industrial kitchen rather than waiting to be truly happy. And then, he muses, there are the secret victories, where the only people who will ever know that you're a hero are the people who were there, and that is always sweet in the crazy dark.
This is like that. Except it isn't quite right for him, not without Ianto and Gwen. And he feels crass for not being able to find the words to explain it all to Donna Noble and her truly astounding tits.
As the Hub shook with the speed of their passing through the cosmos, Gwen was hanging onto a support with one hand as Ianto clung to another, and they were both shrieking and laughing at the same time, as if the entire Earth had become a giant tilt-a-whirl, and they were children, feeling the swoop of their stomachs in a riot of adrenaline and pure, unadulterated glee.
Gwen wrapped one of her arms more tightly around the column she was clinging to, and fished her mobile out with her now free hand; the Hub was still rocking, the thunderous noise of the Earth traveling at some absurd speed still sounding in their ears, bits of plaster and metal falling all around them.
"D'you really think that's a good idea?" Ianto shouted, still laughing, because he just couldn't stop. "D'you think it'll work?!"
"No," she yelled back, "but I'm doing it anyway.... It's working; it's ringing! ... Pick up. Pick up. Rhys, Rhys, sweetheart, yes, darling... I'm fine, we're all fine, just hold on to something! We're safe!"
As Gwen screamed triumphantly into the mobile, Ianto thought, really, it was enough to make you believe in miracles.
Surely such a high pitch of happiness isn't meant to last, Jack thinks, looking around at the Doctor's family, and therefore, by some strange alchemy, his family too. The first, and worst lesson the Doctor and Rose had given him so long ago was that no joy lasts forever, and trying to make it stay means you'll destroy whatever made it so beautiful every time. He has tried to learn this, tried to learn to love with an open hand, but it is hard. So hard.
As he stares at Rose, across the TARDIS controls, Jack is afraid he might actually start to cry. And then, when they've stopped somewhere near Ealing so the Doctor can drop off Sarah Jane, Rose rushes into his arms, and he buries his face in her hair. He doesn't cry, for which he is thankful; instead he whispers quickly, trying to cram the story of a lifetime, of several lifetimes, into the work of a few moments.
Her Torchwood. And his. You saved me, he says. For keeps. And the most important thing: I will love you as long as I live, and I'm going to live forever. He tells her all he can -- leaving out the pain and betrayal, knowing he couldn't bear to send her back to the Doctor with disappointment in her eyes, knowing the Doctor wouldn't survive it -- and listens intently to her in return.
He feels her arms around him tighten and looks over her head to catch the eye of the blue-suited Doctor lounging against the opposite wall, who stares back at him with a strange and oddly familiar smile that he hasn't seen since the Doctor wore a different face.
Spoiled, he teases Rose, two Doctors when we all perish for just the one and she laughs. Take care of them he finishes, knowing she, of all people in the universe, will know instantly what he means. And when she asks, who takes care of you, Jack? he smiles. I wish you could meet them, he says. Maybe someday, she answers, but her voice trembles when she says it, and somewhere deep down they both know it's not to be. And then, the thing they've never had a chance to say aloud. Not to each other. The first time, but somehow, it feels more like it's the last. Goodbye.
When he says his farewells to the new? old? Doctor, it's no less strange. Much more than with the proper Doctor who still hugs him with the awkward enthusiasm of a friend, the slight pause as he braces himself for dealing with Jack's nature still evident although well-hidden -- that's about as he expects.
But it's this other Doctor -- who watched him with challenge and defiance and lust while he talked to Rose -- that seems complicated. He and Jack stare hard at each other for a long moment, even as Jack should be making his way out the Tardis doors.
If I touch you, I might have to have you, the other Doctor eventually says, his voice low, dangerous almost, and completely calculated to make Jack remember things he'd almost, but not quite, forgotten in the ground. You couldn't stand it, Jack says, trying to make it sound casual, and then adds and I wouldn't, anyway, for good measure.
The Doctor gives him a puzzled look and then a grin, much more reminiscent of the current, proper Doctor, who is at the moment standing impatiently by the open Tardis door, practically tapping his foot. Your archivist? the strange Doctor asks, but Jack knows that it's a rhetorical question. Still, he answers anyway, for Ianto, who would want him to. Yeah. Promised him I'd come home. The Doctor nods and tips his head towards the door where his counterpart and Martha are waiting, and Jack goes easily, even if his gaze does linger just a little longer than it should.
There was, as ever, Ianto thought, too much to do. Gwen had to see Rhys. The city, the planet needed them. The Hub was a disaster -- and what did you fix first? the wiring? the furniture? the mess they'd made of the armoury? -- and there was a deadly alien without a doctor on hand for dissection that probably needed to be scavenged for parts, which of course explained why he and Gwen were just kicking the crap out of its lifeless shell.
He hated Daleks. Not just because they were evil and scary, which, you know, they were. But because they were irritating (exterminate? really? did they have to talk at that pitch? it had nearly given Ianto a migraine), and they had frightened Jack and taken him away again and played hell on their city. They were wrong and unfair and ugly and stupid and this one had got to listen to him and Gwen fight and cry and talk about playing house, and Ianto didn't care if it was immature. The thing deserved a good kick. Or several. And when would Jack be back or at least call in to tell him he wouldn't be?
The third entirely awesome thing about war, Jack thought, was returning home a conquering hero. Which is why he did what he could to keep his bravado up as he went down through the tourist office into the totally wrecked hub, ineffectually fanning plaster dust out of his face as he went.
"Hey, kids --" he shouted as the cog door rolled back, only to trail off at the sight of a Dalek in the hub and Gwen and Ianto kicking at it.
"Stop right there!" he shouted.
They did, but not because of the command.
"Jack!"
It was Gwen, of course. Ianto just stared at him like he was trying to remember the use of water. Even with a Dalek in the goddamned Hub Jack felt his heart well at it.
"That goes in the incinerator. Now."
"Shouldn't we examine it? Or scavenge for parts?" Ianto asked, and Jack found he missed the ‘sir.’ The bloody Doctor had gotten one earlier. Where was his?
"No. Incinerator. Now. Then my office. Changes around here."
Jack watched as both of them studiously avoided his gaze and each other's. Jack rolled his eyes.
"Just get rid of that thing," he said and then bounded up the now somewhat shaky stairs to his office.
As their eyes finally managed to meet, Gwen said ruefully, "Ouch. My foot hurts."
"Yeah," Ianto replied. "Not, I think, our finest hour."
They both looked at the ground again, embarrassed. Then Gwen tried to deflect it. "Why do you think Jack wants to see us? Debrief maybe?"
"Not his strongest suit," Ianto said dryly.
"And why do you think Jack doesn't want us to scavenge it?" Gwen went on hurriedly. "It could be useful."
"I think Jack is scared of nothing so much as these things, and you guys playing kick the can with one of them is making Jack nervous," Jack's voice came bellowing down from his office. "Also, Jack can hear every word you're saying, and incidentally, didn't I just give both of you an order? Now, kids. Snap to it."
Gwen and Ianto both jumped, and then she tried to bend to help Ianto pick up the Dalek.
"You should go on up," Ianto said, pitching his voice as low as possible. "I can take care of this. He sounds like he's in a hurry."
"It sounds ominous," Gwen hissed as softly as she could. "I don't want to go up there alone."
"Coward," Ianto whispered back at her, and she glared at him. "Go on," he prodded her. "I can do this faster by myself, really. Go keep him pacified."
She gritted her teeth, and went, and Ianto was grateful yet again for his ability to misdirect with the best of them. In truth, he was dreading this conversation as much as she was, if not more, and he wanted a bit of time to catch his breath before facing down the lions, as well as come up with a series of outlandish scenarios to worry about, each one worse than the next. He was beginning to think that coping mechanisms were not his strong suit.
When Ianto, after delaying as much as he realistically could, finally walked into the office, he saw that Gwen was curled in Jack's lap. They weren't speaking, just sitting, with Jack's arms wrapped around her as tightly as they could go.
He cleared his throat, and they both looked up, Gwen's face teary and smiling.
"So, what's going on?" Ianto asked.
Gwen jumped up and stepped back, obviously expecting some sort of display.
"Welcome back, Jack," Ianto said. "Did you tell Gwen whatever it is already?"
"No," Jack said, straight faced, but with a twinkle in his eye. "I was waiting for you."
"Well, let's have it then," Ianto said.
Jack took a deep breath and stood up. Under these circumstances, Ianto didn't think Jack having anything to say that had to be said eye to eye was really a good sign.
"This is all happening sooner than I wanted it to," Jack began. "But the universe is going to do what the universe is going to do, and we can't go on functioning as a three person team. The fact is we're not functioning now. Haven't been... well, for a while. A lot of that is my fault --"
"Jack," Gwen tried to interrupt.
"Let me finish,” he said, holding up a hand. “I wasn't able to lead when you most needed me to. And you kept us going. Both of you," Jack said, glancing between them.
He sighed and ran his hands through his hair, knowing he wanted to give a proper speech for this and realizing he was too weary and shaken to give it the moment it deserved, and with Ianto so clearly holding his breath, it seemed cruel to draw it out.
"Look, I've got this guy Mickey picking up pizzas for us. And Martha will be down as soon as she's seen her family. They're coming on board. Don't know for how long. But at least for the clean-up. I know we're not ready. But we can't afford not to have them. They're good people. You know Martha; Mickey's eager and a fighter and can put up with me, so hopefully we can just fuse this whole thing together and get on with it --"
"So you're staying?" Ianto blurted.
"Yes," Jack said simply, looking pained. "Of course."
"I don't understand you two!"
Ianto and Jack both turned to her.
"Pardon?" Jack asked.
"Have a reunion already. My god, Jack, you were worried sick and Ianto, I know --"
"Gwen, please don't," Ianto said quietly. It was enough to stop her.
Jack looked at him quizzically.
"We don't, because it would get out of hand," he said, addressing her but looking at Jack. "Quickly."
"And you don't want to see that," Jack added, taking Ianto's cue and grinning at her.
"But I do!" she exclaimed, wide-eyed and laughing. "I really, really do."
"Apparently the greenhouse wasn't enough," Jack murmured as he closed on Ianto, meaning to kiss him, but Ianto stopped him with a hand to his collar bone, curving almost, but not quite, around his throat.
"Not now," Ianto said softly, but Jack pressed in against his hand and kissed him anyway, although far more chastely than he would have otherwise.
"Later," Ianto said on the other side of it, and Jack nodded simply and stepped back.
"Satisfied?" Jack asked her.
Gwen nodded, a bit dumbstruck. As much as she knew that Ianto, especially in these last two months, was Jack's memory and hope and compass, she still hadn't expected any display that so absolutely -– albeit firmly and simply and gently -- positioned Ianto as the one with the power.
No one else really ever had power when Jack was in the room, she had always thought, and while Ianto eventually might in some ways grow to be a better leader than she was, Gwen had only ever seen him use his authority when he was angry. Somehow, she had assumed his interactions with Jack were the same, only more so.
"Yeah," she said, even though she knew neither of them had yet managed to feel any true relief in the other's presence.
"Glad someone is," Jack quipped as he looked up at the wall clock.
He sighed when he realized it was broken, although he supposed he shouldn't have been surprised that dragging the Earth out of its place in time and space had fucked up a clock bought on discount from an overstock store.
"Anyway, Dalek burnt?"
"Incinerated, sir," Ianto said.
There it is, Jack thought happily. There we are, and he wasn't sure he had managed to hide his happiness in the slightest.
"Good. Let's see if we can get some work stations cleaned up for them, then it's introductions and a triage list over pizza. Work for you two?"
Once he got their affirmatives he shoo'ed them out of his office with a call to Ianto to put on some coffee. They were going to need it.
Ianto was nearly certain that he did not like Mickey Smith. If Jack had to foist this... this... stranger on them, couldn't he at least have made sure that it wasn't someone so... so... like Owen? Only dumber, and Owen's blazing intelligence had really been the only thing that made him worthwhile, he thought vindictively, even though he hadn't actually believed that for a long time.
"Coffee?" he asked politely, hovering over him with the pot.
"Sure," Mickey said, eying him curiously. "Thanks, mate."
Jack looked at them and seemed amused, damn him.
"Seems like you're having some issues with your whole underground lair thing, Captain," Mickey said, nodding to the chains hanging loose from the ceiling.
"Oh yeah," Jack said, with a grin. "About our decor. Didn't I tell you? My people have to be willing to... service me in all ways."
Mickey barked with laughter, but Ianto noticed he also sat back, a little farther away from Jack. Ianto couldn't figure out their relationship. Jack had said they had both traveled with the Doctor, but did he mean they had done that together? And what had he meant by “traveled?”
"Seriously though, Mickey, you're right," Jack said, smoothly switching into a tone that very few people were ever able to challenge. "We need to work on getting this place up to speed, and fast. We're going to have to figure out what using the Rift as a tow-hook did to the damn thing, and when Martha gets here, she's going to want to be out in the field doing a damage assessment. I want us to be ready for her when she gets here. There's going to be a hell of a lot to do. First we'll all do an initial round of the Hub and assess problems. Mickey, you'll be point person on that; I know you've got the experience."
"Yes, sir," Mickey rapped out, suddenly sounding like another person all together, like someone who'd actually been in the trenches of some war. Ianto bristled.
"After we've done that, Gwen, I'd like you to hit the streets and get a preliminary report on what's going on out there. Been home yet?" and when she shook her head, he added, "Better do that too then. Take a few hours."
"Ianto," Jack ordered, "keep the coffee coming. Also, if you don't mind, get a read on the Rift as best you can. When Mickey's done scouting the Hub, he can help you. He's got a knack for computers."
"Whatever you say, sir," Ianto said.
"What are you going to do, Jack?" Gwen asked.
"I'm going to pop back up topside and check the lift and so on. It ought to be me, on account of potential accidents. Then I'll be back to help you guys."
He stood up, and Ianto came forward automatically to seize his coat and help him into it.
"Nice set up for jumpin' Jack flash here," Mickey remarked to no one in particular. And then to Jack, "You didn't tell me your lair came complete with butler and valet."
Ianto glared as Jack just chuckled before saying, "He's not for general use."
"You know," Ianto said, "I happen to be standing right here."
"Yep," said Mickey. "Excellent coffee, mate. Any chance of another cup?"
"Yes, sir," Mickey said, as Jack indicated another area of the ceiling that was in desperate need of patch jobs on its wiring.
"Stop calling me sir, Mickey," Jack said, "It's driving Ianto crazy."
"But Ianto calls you sir," Mickey said.
Jack pointed at him and grinned. "Exactly."
And while Ianto felt petty over it, he really couldn't help sharing a small, victorious smile with Gwen, as strange as it was to be in a conspiracy of covetousness with her.
"Ianto!"
"Sir?"
"Stop being smug and go find the blueprints to this place. I'm not even entirely sure what's in all these walls, much less if it's worth our trouble to repair."
Ianto straightened his face and went. When Jack spoke in that tone, it was better to jump first and ask questions later.
It was several hours later when Jack finally called a break. Gwen had been out, and returned, her eyes shining with happiness, and Mickey was completely coated with plaster dust. Ianto had not managed to get very far with the Rift monitor, and he missed Tosh more with every second.
Mickey had paused several times to come over and assist, and his good natured obnoxiousness made Ianto want to plant a fist in his face. It didn't help that his suggestions were useful and to the point.
Ianto's eyes were beginning to water from peering so closely at the screen, and when Jack came up behind him to lay a hand on his shoulder, he growled at him.
"You okay?" Jack asked solicitously.
"Of course," Ianto said. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"It's been a hard day for everyone."
"Hardest for you, sir," Ianto said, trying to sound distant and professional. "You did all the work."
"Hardly," Jack said. "Heavy lifting done by others on this one."
Ianto frowned. "Not here."
"You survived."
"That was Tosh."
"You bought her time, you didn't give up, and you were here to do what needed doing when it was all over."
Ianto nodded. "I'm sure it hardly compares to your exploits, sir."
"I'll tell you about it later, but it wasn't a ton of fun," Jack said, feeling guilty for being a liar, because, after all, it had really had its moments. "We could go to dinner tonight?" Jack asked, still feeling like he needed to make something up to Ianto but not sure what.
"Somehow, I suspect that the resiliency of the British people and Jubilee pizza aside, the restaurants probably haven't quite reopened yet," Ianto said.
"Oh. Huh. I'm sure something is."
"Every time you take me out to eat, it's a disaster, Jack."
"Oh. Well. Really?"
"Yes, sir."
"Seems wrong to retract the offer, though."
"I'll counter. A few hours at my flat?"
Jack grinned. "You're on," he said and then leaned over Ianto to whisper in his ear. "Thanks. I could really use a good reason to be on my knees for a change."
As was typical of Jack and such remarks, he was gone before Ianto could respond, which left him stranded between a fantasy ill-suited to work and curiosity as to Jack's sincerity. Because no matter what the man said, he never actually wanted anyone other than him to be in charge.
In truth, there were few things that irritated Ianto more from Jack than the man's pretend acquiescence, even if that bit of bad behavior was what had taken them from something casual and sloppy to whatever they had now -- unclear, yes, but still blinding and fought for.
When Ianto tossed him his keys, Jack thought about tossing them back, but he decided he'd rather just get them to Ianto's flat, to his bed, and worry about the rest then. Even on empty roads Ianto was bound to be conscientious, especially driving at night in the rain, and Jack was in no mood, because the fourth thing Jack liked about war was the fucking afterwards.
He couldn't believe he hadn't gotten to it yet, hadn't succumbed to the first willing body determined to make sure they smelled like something other than fear. It could have easily been Donna or the not-quite-Doctor, although pushing that would have been too foolish even for him. Any of them really, but there were a hundred reasons why not, and only the first was that they were all from different places and times than him and less familiar with the nature of war.
"You're terribly quiet, Jack, what're you pondering?"
"That I'm not used to being so patient."
"It's probably good for you," Ianto said.
"Probably. In some amorphous way that defines people's goodness by self-sacrifice and their readiness for afterlives that don't exist, sure."
"Too many assumptions. I just meant being able to wait, on anything, good for strategy, right?"
Jack glanced at him for a moment before returning his eyes to the road. "Sure. What brings that up?"
"Fighting, I guess. Shooting at that thing. Being trapped in the Hub."
"Are you telling me you enjoyed it?" Jack asked.
"Maybe. When Gwen and I weren't upsetting each other. Pretty fucked, yeah?"
Jack shook his head as he swung the car into the wasteground, now that he had remembered where they always used to park.
"Nah. Good to like your work, right?" he said, before hopping out of the car.
Ianto smiled uncertainly but decided not to dwell on it. As he let them into his building he was almost sad that he no longer fumbled with the lock around Jack.
As they raced up the stairs he felt like he should be laughing, because that was what one did with a few hours stolen from Torchwood to screw, but mostly he was tired and relieved and it all felt oddly and uncomfortably domestic as they walked through the flat to the bedroom without turning on any of the lights.
Ianto helped Jack with his coat and slung it over the chair by the window and then paused in loosening his tie as Jack tossed something down on the bed that his eyes couldn't quite make out in the dark.
"There. Now you can make sure I'm not going to go running off."
Handcuffs, Ianto realised, and Jack had spoken without rancor, but there was still a note of discomfort in his voice.
"Pessimists live longer; we're always prepared for the worst," Ianto said, by way of justification for his earlier obvious doubts.
"Keep doing it then," Jack said, pulling out of his own clothes as Ianto picked up the handcuffs.
"You really want me to do this, or is this just one of your strange peace offerings?"
"I wasn't joking earlier."
"About what?"
"My knees."
"Oh," Ianto said with a frown.
"Look," Jack said, closing in on him to unbutton Ianto's shirt. "I'm terrible at giving up control. You know that."
"I do."
"So here's a hint," Jack said, speaking more softly and not meeting Ianto's eyes in a way that didn't seem entirely for show. "Take it."
"How?" Ianto breathed.
Jack cupped Ianto's head and whispered in his ear. "Be kind, but make sure it hurts."
"I --"
"What?" Jack asked, still close to his ear, voice breathy. "Have you never really spanked someone before? Pinched them 'til it bruised, bit 'til you worried after the skin?"
Ianto gasped, and wondered if this was like everything else since Jack had returned from the earth, an accidental confession made only because Jack didn't remember it hadn't been made before.
"Even if you haven't," said Jack, his voice a purr that went straight to Ianto's groin, "haven't you wanted to?"
"I have done, yeah," Ianto said, stuttering a bit. "But--"
Jack, naked now, stepped back and stared at Ianto, the dare obvious in his face even in the dark room, lit only from the electric lights outside on the rain-swept street. Then deliberately, pointedly, he dropped his eyes to look at the floor. Ianto could hear his breathing quicken. After that, he just waited.
Ianto reached up to pull the tie over his head and discard it with his unbuttoned shirt. He left his trousers on, and then slowly walked around Jack in a considering circle. Jack was breathing hard now, but otherwise he was reining himself in, staying as motionless as possible, while Ianto studied him.
Ianto let the tension build as long as he could, his heart beginning to race with nervousness and excitement and even a little bit of anger, because the other man was, once again, managing to make everything seem like a bloody test. But Jack was home, and they were alive, and god, he was beautiful, standing there, waiting for whatever Ianto was going to do with him.
Ianto paused for a second to think how naturally the word came, when he probably wouldn't have ever thought to apply it to a man before, even if he'd wanted to have it off with them. Not 'til Jack had come along, and made mincemeat of everything he'd ever thought or known.
Then he walked over to the bed and picked up the cuffs Jack had tossed there.
"Okay, Jack," he said, finally breaking the silence, but thinking he sounded a bit casual, a bit ridiculous. "Kneel on the bed."
Continue to next part
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-09 07:32 pm (UTC)This is great but I'll have to finish it later. Sigh!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-09 07:33 pm (UTC)Thank you for your comments thus far though! Hope you enjoy the rest of it.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-09 11:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-09 11:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-09 11:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 12:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 01:47 am (UTC)great work alway
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 02:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 03:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 01:48 am (UTC)And I love Mickey.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 02:12 am (UTC)And yay -- I think we worry with the supporting cast about whether they turn into actual people when we write them, because we don't want them to just be objects that move the rest of the plot along.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 03:51 am (UTC)Hehehe. Just wait...
And yay for Mickey! I've adored him ever since "tin dog".
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 03:02 am (UTC)First, LOVE the frank look at the prying Gwen.
Second, LOVE the frustrated Ianto, wanting to be discreet and keep his private things private and TELLING Gwen flat out that he and Jack broken, they're blokes and they WILL NEVER have happily ever after.
I'm also completely in love with your shifting power dynamic between the boys.
Off to read part 2!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 03:03 am (UTC)We like Gwen, so we poke at her from a place of love, but still --eugh. If I were a private peson and had to deal with her, I'd go nuts.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 05:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 03:53 am (UTC)Yeah, as Rach said, we're very fond of Gwen - but their relationship (Gwen & Ianto) is... er... complicated. Although we've tried to show their friendship as well.
So glad you're enjoying the shifting power dynamics. They certainly do switch like whoa... at least on the surface ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-10 05:56 am (UTC)Yes, the shift in the power is surface only as Jack is really topping from below.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 04:53 pm (UTC)This is like that. Except it isn't quite right for him, not without Ianto and Gwen. And he feels crass for not being able to find the words to explain it all to Donna Noble and her truly astounding tits.
Brilliant line.
When I watched that episode, Jack felt so out of place once he was out of the Hub. His dialogue was awkward and it looked like he felt awkward too. It might just be my brain overtaking here, but it feels the same in this chapter. Like he said to Rose, he has people to take care of him now, people he belongs to. He's no longer Doctor Who Jack but Torchwood Jack.
Gwen and Ianto have a rather interesting relationship in this chapter. Gwen has an idea about Ianto and Ianto has an idea about Gwen and they realize that what they thought wasn't quite right. Which is great to see because as I have said so many times before: Gwen is a part of the team and their friend rather than the ridiculous caricature that's out to shag Jack.
And yes thank you, Ianto doesn't like Mickey being there either. Nuff said ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 04:09 pm (UTC)He really did feel awkward in the ep, didn't he? Sigh. I loved the idea of getting everyone back for Journey's End - but they needed to find more important stuff for people to do. But yes, I agree. Jack has changed. A lot. Even if I do miss DW Jack sometimes. Then again, I think TW Jack does too.
I'm so glad the Gwen stuff worked for you!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-11 01:30 am (UTC)This last line made me laugh out loud. I feel like "truly astounding tits" ought to have a copyright mark after it. ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 03:13 am (UTC)Plenty of LOL moments; Donna's tits, Ianto and Gwen kicking the Dalek, the bit about the Dalek's voice (there was one in the DW exhibition in London you could get inside and do the voice & little sprog gets in and shouts "If you don't do as I say I will externamate you!" just as a crowd of people are coming round the corner. They jumped out of their skins then laughed their heads off as this little Shirley Temple lookalike jumps out of the Dalek).
All these characters in here and so much in this one! Love the changing dynamic between Jack & Ianto, all these layers. I do think Ianto would evolve this way; in fact I think I see him as more of a leader than Jack in the end.
Rose; I just don't get the Jack and Rose thing. I know he's fond of her but I can't see her as more than a girl (which could be my problem; I still see her as little Billie. A good friend of mine is a band tour manager and he did some tours with her when she was 15/16 and was doing pop). And she is inordinately sweet. Rose is feisty and brave but I still don't see the layers in her that you get with Jack, Ianto, Ten. I will persevere!
Ianto was pretty mean to Gwen! But both were superbly in character. I can't stress enough where you've taken him. Who knows what TW S3 has in store, but yours is my post TW canon for him.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 03:18 am (UTC)*rruns off to clean house*
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 06:26 am (UTC)http://kalichan.livejournal.com/153027.html. We were sort of seeding it here a bit.
Lol. That is funny about Billie. It's funny when you know someone as a child, sometimes that's all you can see. Forever. This happens to me all the time. Have you watched Secret Diary of a Call Girl?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 01:32 pm (UTC)I watched a couple of the Secret Diary, LOL. All grown up!!! I agree about the kid thing; I'm the oldest of a ton of cousins and I still see them all as my little brood. The youngest is now 25!
After I wrote that I saw her as "just a girl" Jack said on the next page to Ianto that she was an ordinary girl, but that it was ordinary people who saved the world (plus some other things), so you did start to address it (as if you were reading my mind!) She also made Jack immortal by saving his life, so I get it's complex.