![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fictionalTitle: Many of My Favorite Things Are Broken
Pairing/Characters: Jack/Ianto, Gwen
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rm & kalichan
Rating/Warning: NC-17, mostly plot, some porn.
Summary: The effect of being buried alive on a relationship: two steps forward, one step back. Takes place after 2x13: Exit Wounds.
Wordcount: ~20,250 [posted in 2 parts]
Authors' Notes: This is the sixth installment of our series, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. Next up, post-Journey's End.
Previous installments:
1. A Strange Fashion of Forsaking
2. Dear Captain, Last Night I Slept in Mutiny
3. To Learn This Holding and the Holding Back
4. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
5. I Imagine You Now in That Other City
The Hub was quiet, and Ianto thought that the sound of water running through it sounded like tears. He'd been thinking that a lot lately; also that it was easy to hear voices in the hum of the computers and the whoosh of air as Myfanwy swooped through, flapping her wings. The strangest things would bring a lump to his throat. Even the weevils in their cages seemed mournful.
Ianto was getting pretty tired of this aching feeling. It'd been a week, and everything still hurt. He didn't understand how pain could keep surprising him; he'd thought after Lisa there was no more to learn about it. After the worst possible thing, he'd figured, what more could really touch him? Stupid, he told himself. He almost wanted to go back in time and kick his old self for being such an arse. It wasn't the most terrible thing. It was just the first of them.
He wasn't one of those types who pretended to assert their manliness by holding back tears; in school, he'd always been ready enough with his fists that no one really messed him about too much, and he thought he'd feel better if he could just burst into sobs, get some of this out of him, but somehow he couldn't.
Anyway, Gwen was crying enough for both of them. She couldn't even eat a biscuit without it getting soggy these days, and he couldn't figure out if the fact that she was still tough and business-like through the tears made it more or less alarming.
And Jack. Just looking at him -- how guilty and sad he was while still trying to put on a brave face, so obviously for their benefit -- was like knives and sandpaper all rolled into one.
It was a bit like Canary Wharf all over again, except now instead of his lover, it was his family -- the only one he had left -- ripped apart. Half of it gone. And nothing was ever going to bring them back. There were only the pale shadows of their voices in the machinery, the water and the little snarky post-it notes that Owen had left around the Hub. Wherever he looked, it seemed there was another jab of memory: the books Tosh liked to read on her lunch break, her commentary in the margins, and voice recordings of Owen's autopsies (Ianto hoped he wasn't going to ever be reduced to listening to these for comfort, but you never knew) as well as Tosh's video tutorials for his archives – hollow, unsatisfying reminders of everything else that had vanished. And they'd never be reunited as he'd been taught in church either, because he knew what was in the dark now. Nothing. Even if it was apparently moving and he really, really didn't want to think about that.
He knew Gwen felt the same way, knew it in the moments when they'd come across something Owen or Tosh had left, and her hand would creep into his, or he'd pull her into his arms and hide his face in her hair. That was new. They'd been friends of course, but never quite so close before; now, he could feel them drawing together to make up for the gaps. But she had Rhys to go home to at the end of it all as well, a husband to comfort and be comforted by as they all watched the city try to rebuild itself and realized that for all their bold talk Torchwood really wasn't equipped to help -- not with only three people and the Rift to monitor. So Gwen had left for the day, and Ianto was here in the Hub at night again, staring at the computer, unable to face the idea of going back to his flat.
And, if he were honest, not wanting to leave Jack. They weren't talking to each other much, not like Gwen and Rhys were, but Ianto knew that the sheer physical presence had to be a comfort after everything that had happened. They'd all held tightly onto each other in the wake of the deaths, and Ianto really didn't want Jack to have to be alone.
So he stayed at Tosh's workstation (he couldn't imagine ever calling it anything else) until he judged it was time to bring Jack -- who seemed to be trying to work himself to death, going over file after file with a fine tooth comb -- a cup of coffee and a small smile. It was the least he could do.
Jack looked up at him as he entered his office with the coffee, as if he'd forgotten where he was for an instant. Ianto hoped so anyway. Maybe burying himself in work was helping. He handed Jack the cup, and Jack smiled reflexively at him. Ianto put a hand on his shoulder, trying to communicate comfort through the pressure, and Jack didn't move.
They stayed there for a moment, with Ianto thinking about maybe leaning down to give him a kiss, when Jack's wrist comm beeped.
"Rift monitor," Jack said. "I tied it into this."
"You did?" Ianto asked, a bit surprised -- Jack had usually left all the technical stuff to Tosh, and Ianto hadn't known that he could do it even if he wanted to.
"Yeah," Jack said. "We should probably go down and see what's up."
"Of course," Ianto said, but Jack was already standing up and heading out of the room.
***
"I'm on the shore now," Gwen said breathlessly over the comm-link.
"Great," Ianto responded, zeroing in on the appropriate quadrant with the computer scanner. "I'm getting the energy from... looks like the water?"
"... Yeah," Gwen said, sounding choked.
"Gwen, what is it? What's wrong?"
"It's a... cow."
"A what?"
"A swimming cow. With... um... fins."
There was silence as Ianto tried to process this information.
"Different evolutionary path," Jack said finally. "Could have happened here too. Like... uh... --"
"Dolphins?" Ianto supplied, as Jack fumbled for the word.
"It's rainbow coloured," Gwen informed them solemnly. "Maybe you two should adopt it."
"Now you're having me on," Ianto said.
"No, really. What should we do?"
"Does it seem dangerous?" Jack asked, seeming faintly amused and annoyed by that fact.
"No, can't say it does," Gwen replied. "It seems to be ignoring the bathers. Although maybe it shouldn't. Nutters, they are. Who goes swimming in the sea in April?"
"Maybe a shark will eat it. Or them, you know, whatever works," Ianto offered, and at the sound of Gwen's giggle, turned his head to look at Jack who was standing behind him, wanting to exchange a celebratory glance. It was the first time he'd heard Gwen laugh since it all happened -- and if it took a swimming cow-alien and a lame joke on his part -- he'd produce them all day if he had to.
"Come on back," Jack said to her. "Let it go bother the Irish. Maybe they'll get off their asses and form their very own Torchwood to deal with it."
"You know," Gwen said wistfully, "I remember when I thought this job was going to be glamourous."
Ianto chuckled into the speaker. Things were, ever so slowly, getting back to normal; Jack even sounded like himself there again, and he was just so relieved. He disconnected and turned to take Jack in his arms -- it'd take Gwen some time to get back, and they could... but Jack had already gone.
***
Two weeks since everything had changed. Ianto thought about going home. Having a shower. Sleeping in a real bed. Stretching out. But he knew he was only thinking about it like a story that might happen to someone else. There was no possibility of him leaving, not yet.
Both he and Gwen found themselves working longer and longer days. Not wanting to go home. You couldn't leave. Who knew what might happen? Unlike him, she always did go eventually; Rhys was like a beacon, calling her out of the Hub and back into the world. But him? There was nothing in his flat that was alive. He hadn't even kept plants after Lisa.
It was around 3 am when he poked his head into Jack's office and found him staring at one of his old Victorian strong boxes. It was open, and he had a slew of daguerreotypes spread out in front of him.
Ianto cleared his throat, and Jack looked up.
"What are you still doing here?" Jack asked.
"Well, I had work," Ianto said and then trailed off.
"Okay," Jack said. "It's really late though, isn't it? You should get some rest."
"Yeah," Ianto said. "I'll just catch a kip here, I think."
"You can sleep down there if you want," Jack offered, nodding to the trap door that led to his cubbyhole under the office.
Ianto felt his heart contract and expand.
"Lovely," he said. "Thank you."
There was a pause as Jack looked down at his pictures again.
Ianto pulled up the trapdoor and then looked back at Jack. "Will you be joining me?" he said as neutrally as he could.
Jack looked straight at him with an unreadable expression, but it was gone quickly and replaced with a smile. "Not tonight, okay?" Jack said. "Too restless. And I've got this stuff I need to do."
"Okay," Ianto said, puzzled.
"Raincheck?" Jack asked.
"Sure," Ianto said. "Of course." Always.
***
They were in the SUV -- so much emptier now than it used to be -- Jack and Ianto up front, Gwen in back, all of them covered from head to toe in unmentionable filth from chasing a rogue Proganochelys that had wandered through the rift, its snapping head and armored, lumbering body disguising surprising amounts of speed.
The new, higher tech version of the GPS beeped [Jack had installed it a few days ago, when they started using the SUV again, and was clearly over fascinated with testing it out], and Jack turned the corner to pull up near Gwen's flat, and she hopped out, waving at them distractedly, obviously looking forward to stripping off and getting in the shower.
Ianto looked at Jack, who pressed a new button on the GPS thingy, smiled at him, and said, "I'll drop you at home, shall I? You can throw your clothes in the wash, take a shower."
"Wash?" Ianto said. "I was more thinking of burning them. But yeah, home sounds good."
"Great," Jack said, turning the wheel, and pulling them back into traffic.
After a while, Ianto suggested, "Why don't you come too? The new rift monitoring software's working well. You've got the wrist com, we have the SUV. We're ready for whatever."
For several minutes, Jack didn't reply, as he dealt with traffic, and the GPS beeped at every corner. Ianto was beginning to find the constant sound quite irritating, when they arrived in his neighborhood, and Jack finally said, "Okay. Sounds fine."
Ianto smiled to himself.
Jack parked the car in front of the house, instead of the wasteground they'd always used before, and Ianto thought he must want to be able to see it from the window of his flat if he had too. They were all still so jumpy.
They climbed the stairs up to the flat, Jack letting Ianto take the lead for once, and then they were inside, and Ianto immediately went to the kitchen to locate plastic bags so they wouldn't drip more filth on the floor.
Jack stood in the foyer, stock still. Ianto handed him a bag.
"Put your clothes in that, Jack," he said.
Jack nodded.
"I've got to get in the shower," Ianto said. "You could...uh...join me, if you want?" He wasn't sure where all the tentativeness had come from, but somehow he couldn't help himself.
"Okay," Jack said, and gave him a version of one of his grins.
Ianto felt a small bubble of happiness in his chest, and he smiled back, before quickly stripping off his clothes, and shoving them in the back.
"Hurry up, Jack," he added, as he skidded for the bathroom. He'd turned the water on, and was standing underneath the spray, wondering what was taking Jack so long, when the curtain parted, and Jack poked his head in, still fully dressed.
"Listen," Jack said, waving his wrist. "The rift did something else. My wrist link's beeping again."
Ianto groaned.
"I know," Jack said. "I'm going to take the SUV back to the Hub, and see what the hell's going on. You stay here and shower, okay? I'll call you if I need help."
"Are you sure?" Ianto said.
"Positive."
Ianto leaned forward to kiss Jack, and Jack let their lips touch for a second before stepping back quickly.
"I don't want to get you dirty again," he said. "Be a shame to mess up all that gorgeous nakedness."
And then he slipped out the door, leaving Ianto under the spray, hard from even that brief moment of contact.
***
"Are you okay?" Gwen asked, touching Ianto lightly on the arm. It was, she knew, probably a stupid question -- after all, none of them were okay -- but after a brief period of time in which it seemed like they were all getting better, Ianto had gone quiet. It was, in some way, a mirror image of what she assumed was Jack's own strange mourning process. There were these moments from both men of just nothingness, and Gwen found that it was this that unsettled her more than anything else.
He nodded his head, but it was, she thought, like he hadn't even heard her.
"Really?" she tried again.
"No, of course not," Ianto said softly, his eyes still trained on Jack's office.
"What's --?" She started to ask the question and then stopped herself. It wasn't really any of her business. Certainly, there was a time when Ianto would have taken the inquiry wrong, and in truth, looking back, it was hard for her to blame him. But now? Maybe it sort of was her business. They were all that was left, and there was no Owen to antagonize them into admissions or Tosh for Ianto to conspire and confess with.
Ianto frowned for a second. "Not sure," he said, finally tearing his gaze away from Jack's office. "Grief, you know?"
Gwen nodded. "Yeah. Fourth time this week he's been through those photos," Gwen said, still looking up at Jack's silhouette through the glass.
At least, Ianto thought. And that was weird, because Jack had the luxury of keeping his nostalgia and melancholy to the moments when the world slept. But since... well, everything, he hadn't been bothering.
Ianto walked into Jack's office without knocking and sat down on the sofa. Jack glanced at him, but said nothing, returning his gaze to the photos laid out on his desk like a device of fortune tellers or a map of the world.
In a way, Ianto was gratified by this. Certainly, Jack's lack of objection made it easy to believe his presence was welcome and possibly even a comfort. On the other hand, now that Ianto was there he felt like he had to say something; the only problem was that he had no idea what.
"Secret for you," Jack said, not looking up.
Ianto made an interrogative noise, distracted as he was by his own thoughts.
"It doesn't get better. You just get used to it."
"You don't seem used to it, sir," Ianto said quietly.
"Well, I'm working with a few more traumas than you are this week, aren't I?" Jack said casually, looking up with a smirk. It almost could have been a joke, and Ianto considered that it might be best to treat it as such.
"I --" he started and stopped.
"If you're not ready to ask, I'm definitely not ready to answer," Jack said, sweeping the pictures into a pile and replacing them in the tin he kept them in.
"Come on," he said, going for his coat. "We'll grab Gwen. Go to the pub. Pretend everything's normal. That's what you want, isn't it?"
Ianto shook his head. "Not really."
"Well," Jack said, good-naturedly, slipping his hands in his pockets and rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, "we're doing it anyway. Don't know about you, but I could certainly use the illusion of a drink."
They'd been drinking in silence for a few minutes, and Gwen was wondering what she ought to do to relieve the strain. She looked around at the people, hoping to garner inspiration from somewhere, while at the back of her mind being slightly taken aback by the fortitude of her home town. Only a couple weeks after the devastation, all was back to normal for frequenters of Cardiff's pubs; here they were, drinking their pints, having a crack and a laugh. It was familiar, and the familiarity was almost offensive. Only two weeks; she wasn't ready for it not to be strange. And yet all these people, they'd never know. For them, it had slipped by as if it had never happened, as if Owen and Tosh had never fought and never died.
I will not cry, she thought, forcing the tears back and trying to distract herself.
She'd been to this pub before, of course, most notably when she'd first met Jack and he'd dosed her drink -- such a long time ago, it seemed. And now, here she was, sitting across the table from him, and here was Ianto, next to her, arm slung companionably over the back of the booth so she could lean her head back and feel him there, warm and reassuring.
Ianto drained his first pint and then got up to get another. He looked questioningly at Gwen, and she nodded at him, tagging a "please" on the end of the motion. He smiled and didn't bother to look at Jack who hadn't even worked his way through half his own glass.
As Ianto made his way to the bar, Gwen looked straight at Jack and felt herself overflow with love and worry. Rhys would never need to concern himself, not now; the overwhelming tenderness she felt for Jack didn't have anything to do with her life. It was just there, a fact. It didn't change anything, just made her want to hold him, give him ease, make it all okay somehow.
But she couldn't, and she knew it, and it was tearing her apart.
"Are you all right, Jack?" she asked finally. "Can't you talk to us about it?"
Jack stared into his beer. "I don't know," he said softly.
"We're all hurting," Gwen said. "We all miss them."
"Yeah," Jack said.
"D'you feel guilty?" Gwen asked. "Is that it? Because it wasn't your fault."
Jack didn't say anything.
"Jack?" she prodded, wanting him to open up and let it out, whatever it was, because god knew, it wasn't doing him any good festering inside.
Jack shook his head as Ianto slipped back into the booth with his and Gwen's pints.
"What did I miss?" Ianto asked.
"Not much," Jack said brusquely.
Gwen thought about letting him get away with it and then decided that she didn't want to play these games anymore.
"Jack? Tell me. Tell us. What is it? Is it Owen and Tosh? Is it your brother? You have to talk to us. Please," she said, her voice pleading.
"Gwen," Ianto said, horrified. "What are you doing?"
"She's allowed to ask," Jack said to Ianto, adding, with a sharp look at Gwen, "but I really wish she wouldn't."
"But it's like you're not even here," Gwen said to him.
"I really can't do this right now," Ianto said, hoping to stop them.
Jack pointed at him. "Not about you."
"I didn't --" Ianto held up his hands protesting, but thought the better of actually finishing the sentence, because if he were honest, he knew that he really, really wished that he were the only one in pain and that it was just all about him, because that way someone else could do something about it. Presumably.
Jack and Gwen both stared at him as if waiting for him to say something else.
"What?" he finally asked, lowering his hands back to his pint.
Jack shook his head and went returned to staring at his drink; Gwen, in turn, resumed fidgeting with her cocktail napkin.
"Can you both please try to remember," Jack said, clearly trying and failing to keep the exasperation out of his voice despite how quietly, how mournfully, he spoke, "that we're working on different time scales here?"
"You can't think you're going to get used to loss like this," Gwen said.
"I don't think that's what he means, Gwen," Ianto said darkly.
Jack looked up at him and almost seemed grateful.
"Well, what do you mean?" Gwen said, her voice ragged. "There's not enough left of us to hide behind anymore, Jack."
"I was gone a long time," he said. "A very long time."
Ianto held his breath, but Jack fell silent again.
Gwen took a long swallow of her drink.
"Look," Jack said, finally. "We're not all in the same boat here."
"We are, Jack," Gwen rushed in. "You're wrong. We have to stick together to make it through."
"Sure," Jack said, his tone dismissive and cold. "Of course. And yeah, you're grieving, and I'm grieving, and Ianto's grieving, and we're all just fucking sad, all right? Is that enough for you?"
Gwen kept looking at Jack, but Ianto could see there were tears forming in her eyes, though they didn't start to fall.
"Jack," Ianto said softly, trying to recall him back from whatever dark, ugly place he was careening off into.
"Sorry," Jack said flatly. "I don't mean to hurt you, you know that."
"Yeah," Gwen said, her voice husky. "We know."
"It's not about loss. I know loss, like the back of my hand,” he said, grinning cruelly into the cliché. “What do you think living forever means? You think I've never had to lose people before? Lose family?"
Gwen gulped. And then it was Ianto's turn to swallow half his pint in one go, knowing he was going to need a buffer for whatever was about to come spilling out.
"It's the first time for you, Gwen, right? Second time for Ianto? Or third maybe? I wish I could do something to help you both, but I can't, and it's happened to me more times than I can remember." Jack spat out that last word like it was coated with something vile and he had to get it out of his mouth.
"Luckily," he added, voice dripping with irony, and Ianto flinched at the pain in it, "I kept notes on it all."
"Gwen, please stop," Ianto said quietly.
"Why are you always protecting him?" Gwen demanded, turning to Ianto. "It doesn't actually help, you know!"
"Gwen --" Jack's voice was warning.
"I know," Ianto said softly to her, and then looked at Jack apologetically before continuing. "How many times? How long?"
Jack fidgeted with the condensation on his glass. "Don't know. It was too hard to keep track. Sometimes it took a while. I don't know how. Or why. People regress, in the dark, I think." Jack said, looking at the ceiling because he really didn't want to have to describe what it was like to want his mother while tasting the sort of soil they had never had at home.
"Wait --" Gwen said, and Ianto saw her start to realize what they were being told, what they should have already known.
Jack gave her a weary look. "If being buried alive was an off-switch, don't you think I would have signed up for it a long time ago? Really?"
Gwen covered her mouth. "Oh my god."
"Stop gaping," Jack snapped at her.
"Jack, I'm so sorry," she said.
"Well that makes two of us," he said, still agitated.
"Three," Ianto offered softly in a moment of inappropriate humor that, once it was said, he found himself hoping no one else would notice.
"I was here the whole time," Jack went on venomously. "’Til they dug me up. 27 AD to 1901. Bastards they were about it too. God, I hate Torchwood."
"But you are Torchwood, Jack," Gwen said irrelevantly, clearly still reeling from the information.
"No one said I was exempt," Jack said tonelessly.
They didn't say anything.
Jack took another pull at his drink as Ianto and Gwen looked at each other.
"This life... it doesn't seem like mine anymore. It's like a story that you read once, a long time ago, and it only stays with you in flashes."
"You forgot us?" Gwen said, her voice breaking.
"How could I? How could anyone forget the most important things in the world?" Jack said, disgusted, his voice laden with pain and irony, and Ianto thought his eyes looked a thousand years old, before he realized that they were actually even older than that now.
He also realised that Jack hadn't answered the question. But of course, he didn't need to. They'd begun to know the depth of his loss now, and Ianto had a feeling they'd barely plumbed the surface as he mentally listed off all the changes he hadn't even known he was noticing, things that should have told him how much Jack was fighting to stay here, stay with them, re-learn things that should never have had to be forgotten.
Jack set his drink down on the table with finality, and Ianto was sure he was about to get up from the table and try to leave, probably prefacing it with some sort of soothing remark.
"Listen, kids," Jack started, and Ianto nodded to himself. At least he still knew Jack that well. At least he hadn't changed that much. "Don't worry too much about it, okay?"
"How can we not?" Gwen asked, almost shrill.
"Easy," Jack said. "You can't actually imagine it, and you certainly can't fix it. For what it's worth, I never, ever wanted to know it was going to be like this so soon. But there it is. I'm sorry," he said, and rose from the table. He grabbed his coat as he walked out, but didn't put it on.
Ianto put his face in his hands. "Should have seen it," he mumbled.
"What?" Gwen asked, really having not understood him, muffled as his voice was.
"The GPS, the thing with the pictures," Ianto said, explaining, still half mumbling into his hands.
"Oh god."
"Yeah," Ianto said, finally looking up. "He can't remember, and he's mourning himself."
"I --"
"Please don't apologize, Gwen. Please?" Ianto didn't think he could take it right now, because this was a problem, and all he had to do was think through it, and maybe, maybe that would be enough to solve it, if not for Jack, then for himself.
Gwen swallowed and nodded. "What are you going to do?" she whispered.
"Why's it always down to me with him?"
Gwen made a gesture like Ianto was being ridiculous. "Because it's not down to me," she said.
"And aren't you glad?" he said, embarrassed by the abrasiveness of his response.
"I-- you -- All right," she said, finding her composure. "I should go home. You should. God, I don't even know what you should do, Ianto."
"I should go home. But, you know...." He trailed off, shrugging.
"Good luck?" she offered dubiously.
He quirked his mouth at her in acknowledgment.
"Call if you need anything," she added
And he bit down on the impulse to say 'retcon.'
Jack thought about going back to the Hub, but the glory of the recent mods on the Rift monitor was that technically he didn't have to. Besides, it was the first place Gwen and Ianto would surely look for him, and he absolutely couldn't deal with them right now. For one thing, he didn't even remember how.
It wasn't that he had forgotten them. Not really. Not entirely. He remembered their names because he'd chanted them, the whole team's, like a litany in the dark. It was the only plan he'd had down there, under the city. Every time he gasped into being, he recited their names and what he had to do when he got back. It was survival, and it was simple enough. It became so much of a habit, Jack could only assume he would do it the next time he died and who knew how many times thereafter, lest two for four become zero for four should he forget. The idea of it rattled him, because while he could no longer remember how he had come to the feeling of it, he knew that such a resurrection was something he didn't want Ianto to have to see.
So he didn't return to the Hub. He walked to the harbor-front instead and stared out at the waves. He felt the wind blowing off the ocean whip around him and it reminded him that he was outside and alive. He could breathe here as the salt stung his eyes.
Ianto. Gwen. Tosh. Owen. Torchwood.
It was boring, under the earth. The soil had tasted bad, except somehow when it rained, although the weight of the water always crushed blood into his chest and sometimes that killed him before he drowned or suffocated. When it didn't, it was the water that made him think of home, and packed tight in the earth he tried to imagine he was floating as he fought for air that would never come. It wasn't something he had much choice about. He couldn't move a muscle, couldn't curl up fetal, and could do absolutely nothing to create the illusion of shelter except to say the ground was water and pray it would sweep him out to sea.
Ianto. Gwen. Tosh. Owen. Torchwood. Keep it simple, he thought on a rising tide of panic, no time. Just names. And sometimes other names. Names of fondness and pleasure. Names of refuge. Names living and dying above him. Like the Doctor and Rose. Annie. Jamie. Estelle. Boys in the war, boys in a lot of wars. Alex. And always Gray.
Names of the living, names of the lost. Names to find.
Ianto. Gwen. Tosh. Owen. Torchwood.
Jack.
***
Ianto hadn't been able to find Jack anywhere that night. He'd scoured the Hub from top to bottom and driven to all Jack's usual haunts, but he wasn't in any of them, assuming, Ianto thought, that Jack could even remember where they were. So he'd ended up back at his own flat, hoping futilely that Jack would have gone to ground there, but knowing that wouldn't be the case. Not now and probably not ever.
Ianto had slept poorly, tossing and turning, before getting up at the crack of dawn and driving back to the Hub. He poked his head into Jack's office and found him sitting at his desk as usual. He was going over the files again, his lips moving as if he were either reading them aloud to himself or -- and Ianto cringed at the thought of it – memorizing their contents.
"Jack?" he tried tentatively.
"Good morning," Jack said.
"I looked for you last night."
"Sorry about that."
"Don't apologize. You don't need to worry about us," Ianto said reflexively, knowing he was lying but wanting very badly for Jack to believe it.
"I didn't mean to upset you guys. I'm taking care of it."
"...Taking care of it?" For some reason, Ianto didn't like the sound of that at all, Jack's faux reassurance sending little alarm bells chiming up and down his spine.
"It's under control."
"Really?" Ianto said quizzically.
"I wasn't kidding about the notes thing. The archivists at Torchwood are...well, you should know. There's all the old cctv footage. And I've kept pretty good logs too. It's fine."
"Sir," Ianto started.
"Don't you have anything you need to do?" Jack suggested, almost visibly shying away from what had come to be a term of endearment between them.
"I'll get your coffee," Ianto said and headed for the kitchen area. Maybe the trick wasn't to keep pushing at Jack but to be so normal as to be unavoidably familiar. Ianto cursed himself under his breath. Vanity. This was all vanity. And a horrible, horrible mash of need and want and Ianto was struggling, really struggling to be clear on the difference.
He was all cheer when Gwen came in, and he found he resented her a little for not even trying to look as if she hadn't been crying all night, but he was going to try his best not to fight or cry with her. That wasn't normal either.
Twelve hours later Ianto ducked his head into Jack's office. "Dinner?" he asked.
"Ianto --" Jack said, his voice weary and clearly ready to let Ianto down easy. Again.
"Just dinner. No intent. Your life here's more than just files. Like going to the pub yesterday. Well, hopefully not like going to the pub yesterday, but you know?" Ianto asked hopefully.
"Somehow I don't remember you being this cheery," Jack said.
"You'd be right," Ianto said. "I'll be down in the archives. Let me know, yeah?"
"Yeah," Jack said, and the smile, while sad, also at least seemed genuine.
If Jack thought about it at all, and it was rather unavoidable, the idea of dinner terrified him. Because whether Ianto meant it to be or not, everything would be a test. What he ordered, how he ate it, whether he remembered the waitstaff or his favorite table. That was the price of having told them: they'd now be looking and covering and trying to fix him all the time because that's what his team was like. He knew that. Had known that. In the earth.
He shuddered and tried to think of a middle ground on dinner, only to be distracted by the utter horror of English idioms.
Jack shook himself, looked at his watch and realized he'd lost ten minutes. He kept doing that. Before being underground he had rarely slept, but now he felt like he was dreaming all the time. It unnerved him, this inability to be in the present, because it wasn't like he particularly had a lot of past left right now.
"Ianto," he said, calling the man on the comms.
"Sir?" Ianto responded reflexively.
"Takeaway?" he offered, stopping himself from providing an explanation of his reasoning.
"Certainly, sir," Ianto said, glad for something. "Curry or pizza?"
"Thai," Jack said, suddenly remembering glass noodles and a spicy fruit sauce. "Can we do Thai?"
Ianto smiled at a specificity that wasn't flipping a coin. "I'll see what I can do," he said, knowing he'd probably have to go out to pick it up and not caring in the goddamn least.
When he'd collected the food, he brought it back, took it upstairs, and spread out the cartons on a table up in the greenhouse.
They'd never done this, but he thought that might be good. Living plants, flower-scented air, a ceiling that didn't quite look like concrete. It was different. And not claustrophobic or dark. Now that he was watching for it, he could see Jack's resistance to enclosed areas. Not surprising considering, he thought with a shudder.
When Jack walked in and saw the set up, he was rewarded by something resembling one of Jack's real smiles.
"This is nice," Jack said.
"I thought we could do with the change," Ianto replied.
"Haven't we had enough of that around here?" Jack asked, lifting an eyebrow.
"An innocuous change," Ianto clarified. "Besides I've always wanted to have a picnic up here."
"Fair enough," Jack said. "Fair enough."
"Someday we should take a blanket down to the beach."
"Not in April," Jack said. "Not in Wales."
"Perish the thought. We might be crazy, but there are limits."
"Some of us are crazier than others," Jack said ruefully.
"Some of us have better excuses than others."
"Excuses are bullshit," Jack said, helping himself to noodles. "Don't you think?"
"Forgiveness isn't," Ianto said, leaving the question of excuses alone.
"That's true," Jack replied. "It took me a while to learn, but I guess it must've stuck. Amazingly, I still know where I got it. I remember that. Where did you pick it up from?"
"You," Ianto said simply.
"Ah. Lisa?" Jack asked.
"Not just that," Ianto said.
"It didn't take long for that part to come back either, actually. Checked the file to be sure. But, you know...,” Jack said apologetically.
"Well, it would stand out," Ianto said, trying not to feel miserable that Jack recalled his betrayal but probably nothing else.
"Hey, don't look like that. You fared pretty well. We... we were difficult, right? And good. I... I have a lot of pieces of things, with you. But it's pictures. Like a flip book now. Not a story."
Ianto nodded. "It's weird. Us using two different tenses. I mean. It's still all now for me," Ianto said, hating himself for somehow getting them to the ‘are we still together?’ conversation when they had never, not really, not explicitly, ever discussed the fact that they were becoming more or less a couple, even though the plausible deniability had been getting a lot harder lately.
"You get why I can't just start reassuring you about that, right?" Jack asked.
"Sure. No intentions, remember? Thai food and a garden. That's it. You can ask me things if you want. If it'll help."
"Did we have sex in here once?" Jack asked with his mouth full.
Ianto laughed. "Yeah. More than once. Gwen walked in on us."
"More than once?" Jack asked.
Ianto shook his head, smiling. That was the old Jack. "No. Just once for that. Owen was furious."
"Why?"
"We were corrupting his precious plants."
Jack frowned and looked around at the plants.
"I have no idea," Ianto answered preemptively.
Jack chuckled. "I missed you," he said after a long silence.
"What?" Ianto was startled.
"I couldn't remember what you looked like, and I still missed you."
"Jack, you don't have to --"
"No. It's true. No con. I know that's how I'm covering this as well as I am. But that's true."
"Covering how?" Ianto asked, perplexed.
Jack frowned. "I was a con man. Between here and the Time Agency. Did I never tell you that?"
Ianto shook his head.
"Shit. Sorry."
Ianto shrugged. "Comes in handy, I'd guess."
"It does."
Ianto rested his chin in his hand and stared off into the strange flora and fauna they had collected. It was easier to ask certain things without actually looking at Jack. "What else did you remember? Down there?" Ianto asked.
"Names mostly. Impressions of people. My wife. A lover I had in the 50s. The Doctor. Religion in my childhood. Water. My mother's hair. Books. I tried to retell myself pieces of books when I got bored, but it was hard to concentrate. I always read at war. It's slow, suffocating, but not that slow. I'd come back with a lungful of air every time, and it takes oh... about a couple of minutes to asphyxiate. I think. Do you choke to death first? Or is it the pressure crushing your chest? I don't know. It varied. War. Sleep. Which was strange," Jack said distractedly and frowned. "I want to ask what you were doing, but I guess I know."
"It was just a day," Ianto said apologetically.
"Ah no," Jack said. "There were cells and lives arranging themselves so that Ianto Jones would be here to fetch me takeaway when I came back."
"I do what I can, sir."
"Why do you always say that?"
"Say what?"
"Call me sir."
"You are the captain."
"The others don't, didn't call me that, did they?"
"It's just a thing I do," Ianto said and shrugged. "Sir."
"Are you flirting with me?" Jack asked.
"Sorry," Ianto said.
"No. It's okay. It's good. I need the practice, right?"
Ianto laughed, even if his heart was breaking just a little. "You do have a reputation, sir."
"Yeah," Jack said. "The archives are pretty clear on that. What are you thinking? You look pensive."
"Actually, I was thinking how unfair it is that you look spectacular even with your mouth full," Ianto said. It was true, but he was also lying.
"Don't you like me with my mouth full?" Jack said with a suggestive leer.
Ianto rolled his eyes. "Like riding a bicycle. Some things you never forget."
***
"I think it's working," Jack said, perched on the railing, watching as Ianto squirted Myfanwy's special sauce on a haunch of goat.
As soon as Ianto had figured out, to the extent possible, what was going on with Jack, he'd known this whole process would be difficult, but he was realizing that he'd actually had no concept of how fucked up it was going to be. Looking at Jack still caused the exact same riot of feelings to well up inside him, still made his stomach do flips, and knowing that Jack had not only basically forgotten him, but had eventually forgotten even how to miss him, forgotten everything but the bare syllables of his name, made him want to crumple up and cry like a child.
But he knew he couldn't, although he was beginning to wonder if anything he was doing would have any meaningful effect. Mostly Jack seemed as distant as ever, and he'd slip away and disappear to do god knows what as soon as he felt threatened or enclosed.
He supposed they did continue to talk some over the meals that Ianto had to force him to eat, and he was learning more about Jack's past than he'd ever been able to before, though even that hurt, because now Jack couldn't even seem to remember which parts he'd, for reasons unknown, had always wanted to keep close to the vest. And Ianto couldn't decide if he felt more sorry that Jack couldn't remember or angry that Jack had never shared these things with him when sharing had been a choice.
"What's working?" he said gently.
"Things are coming back," Jack said. "Slowly. But they are. Being here, looking at the pictures. They're beginning to thread themselves together. Feelings. It's like they're starting to move -- the pictures, I mean."
"Not lost forever then," Ianto said.
"Just going around the long way, I guess," Jack said. "If I have to live forever, I wish I could be one of the people who don't have to do it in a straight line."
"Are there lots of those people?" Ianto asked, laughing.
"Just one left now, actually. As far as I know. And it’s not really forever, forever, it just seems that way, ‘cause of the time thing."
"Oh," Ianto said, realizing that Jack was referring to the Doctor and feeling the accustomed swell of something that felt almost like jealousy except that it was ridiculous.
"You look sad," Jack said, staring at him closely.
"No," Ianto said, forcing a smile. "Not sad. That's fantastic news."
"Yeah," Jack said, clearly picking up on Ianto's uneasiness. "Gwen and I are going to investigate the disturbance out by the Taff. You'll be okay here?"
"Of course," Ianto said. "I'm always okay."
Jack looked at him oddly, but didn't say anything. Ianto wished he could believe that the line had struck a chord. But it was probably just his imagination.
***
"Ianto! Dinner!" Jack hollered as Gwen packed up for the day.
"Curry or pizza?" Ianto asked, as he always did, although the returned Jack seemed to delight in always coming up with a third choice. Ianto wondered if it was because he couldn't remember what he liked or what even seemed familiar of this time and place's food.
"Nope. Going out," he said.
"Where?" Ianto asked, even though he knew it was an entirely loaded question.
Jack grinned, obviously entirely pleased with himself, and Ianto had to fight the impulse to think that there was something really worth celebrating in it.
"Italian," he said.
"Do you need me to --"
"Nope," Jack cut him off. "Know just the place."
Ianto bit his lip, knowing it was stupid, but reached in his pocket for his car keys and tossed them at Jack, who caught them and looked at them a bit puzzled.
"I like your car, don't I?" he asked.
"A little too much," Ianto said, trying not to be disappointed at what was just an obvious deduction.
"How many times have you punched me?" Jack asked, abruptly.
"Only once. At times to my continued regret," Ianto said dryly.
Jack barked with laughter.
"Why are you so... giddy?" Ianto asked.
Jack spread his arms. "Maybe I've remembered how," he said, turning to exit the Hub, and Ianto was left wondering at not just how Jack's mind worked, but that it worked at all.
"You still speed. That's good," Ianto remarked, once they were in the car and driving.
"You sound like a doctor when you do that. Always diagnosing me."
"Sorry. I don't mean to."
"Sure you do," Jack said.
"Well, I shouldn't," Ianto corrected.
"Probably not," Jack agreed, but didn't really sound annoyed.
"Thing is. I like it when you speed."
"We used to go driving, didn't we?" Jack asked.
"For fun, you mean? A few times, yeah." Ianto answered, knowing the nostalgia was flavoring his voice, but unable to help it.
"I think I remember," Jack mused. "Driving around mountain curves especially. Feeling the jolt and the sway. This car handles better than I thought, though."
Ianto wondered what exactly Jack was remembering. It wasn't like there were a lot of winding mountain roads in Cardiff proper. He decided not to mention it, saying simply instead, "I loved it."
"Maybe you can love it again," Jack said, pressing down the accelerator smoothly so the car purred beneath them.
"Maybe so," Ianto said and felt his hopes rising. Perhaps it really was going to be all right.
Ianto was almost unsurprised when they pulled up in a very familiar neighborhood. When they'd strolled a little way and Jack finally stopped them in front of La Lupa, before looking at Ianto questioningly, sort of like a puppy who'd successfully brought his master the paper and was waiting for a pat, Ianto couldn't help but smile.
"God, Jack," he said.
"First date, again?" Jack offered, his smile a bit sheepish.
"Well, it worked the first time," Ianto said, and Jack beamed.
Jack was trying so hard to please him, and almost without volition, Ianto leaned forward, took Jack's face between his hands, and kissed him -- not chastely, either, but trying to communicate all the things that he was apparently incapable of saying to Jack out loud with the pressure of his mouth against Jack's lips. Jack kissed him back, and for a brief moment, Ianto felt like screaming out his happiness from the rooftops, but then Jack was pulling away and sucking air into his lungs.
"Sorry," Ianto said, cursing himself.
"No," Jack said, reassuringly. "Nothing for you to be sorry about. Shall we go in?"
"Sure."
The restaurant was exactly the same, and Ianto wasn't sure why he'd expected it to be different. It had only a couple of months since they'd last been here, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. Maybe Jack was contagious.
Ianto thought the little cracks between who Jack was now and who Jack had once been so recently for everyone else showed almost immediately. They were small, but still hard not to wince at, and he thought Jack noticed them too, even before reading them on Ianto's face. It was everything in his power not to do all the things Jack would have once done for them and more: choose a wine, order the food, banter with the staff, but that wasn't the point, wasn't any help, if Jack was to find his way back to the here and now.
When the food came, and Jack looked at it like it was far more foreign than he had expected, Ianto couldn't help but ask him if he was really remembering things or just collecting enough pieces of information to string stories together, even if they didn't yet feel like his own.
"I keep having to look up if certain foods exist here. It's really aggravating," Jack noted, still staring at his plate and ignoring the question.
The only thing that stopped Ianto from getting angry was that it didn't seem particularly willful or intentionally avoidant. This was just one of the things Jack did now. His attention span, always erratic, had become completely unreliable. His relearning the world had turned him into something of a toddler, but one who was always startled and sad and desirous of things he couldn't even name.
"You know, you didn't have to do this, Jack," Ianto said, figuring that if Jack was going to randomly go off-topic he could do the same.
Jack looked up from his plate. "But I wanted to."
"But it's silly," Ianto persisted. "I'm not the one who needs impressing here. Or wooing."
"Is that what you think this is?" Jack said. "More to the point, is that what you're trying to do?"
Ianto gritted his teeth. "Since there's no possible good answer to that question, I'm afraid I'll have to decline to answer. Sir."
They stared at each other across the table, ignoring the food now. Ianto watched Jack's body language; the restaurant, he was noticing with alarm, was dark and low lit, the timbered ceiling seemed oppressively low. He couldn't tell if he were imagining it, or if Jack's internal thoughts were just being broadcast to anyone with even the slightest bit of psychic sensitivity.
Jack was sitting up straight, like he always did except when ostentatiously lounging, but Ianto could see the tension in his shoulders. He made Ianto think of Atlas trying to hold up the sky.
"Jack," he started, trying to make his voice as soothing as possible.
"Just don't," Jack said, cutting him off and beginning to cut at his meat savagely.
"But --"
"No!" Jack said flatly. "We're here, we're eating. And while I'm on the subject, stop handling me with kid gloves. I'm not made of glass. I won't break."
"I know that," Ianto said. "I wasn't --"
"You know, at least one thing I can certainly remember is that I really hate when you lie to me," Jack said conversationally. "Please don't."
Ianto took a sip of water, afraid he might actually start to cry if his throat didn't spontaneously close and choke him to death first.
Luckily, Ianto thought bitterly, when in doubt his anger was usually enough to bail him out of one awful situation and dump him into another.
"Just so we're clear, Jack, I lie all the time. For you. Because that's my fucking job. And to think it used to just be cleaning up the corpses and stalling UNIT and the Prime Minister's office on the paperwork you can't be fucked to do and the meetings you never want to take. But now I've got to keep myself together and Gwen together and you together and I have to make sure no one notices that this is what I fucking do now and that takes lying, all the goddamn time, especially when Gwen can't stop asking questions about how we are while you keep retrieving these halves of memory that I don't know what to do with other than smile and nod and pray they'll eventually make some sort of sense to one of us, because we never, ever went driving in the goddamn mountains."
Jack was clearly about to snap back when his face got that distracted look again. He frowned. "Oh. That was Jamie," he said.
Ianto bit his lip.
"Come on, say it," Jack challenged, back in the fight.
"I refuse to be jealous of your past, Jack."
"Seems like a struggle," Jack said, intentionally trying to hurt.
"Jesus Christ, Jack, you've practically got me jealous of the bloody ground now," Ianto said, feeling slightly poetic and also rather close to completely hysterical.
"Sorry," Jack said, but not like he meant it or was remotely happy about saying it.
"Not your fault," Ianto said, hardly conciliatory himself.
"Well, you sure keep acting like it is."
"Tell me what you want me to do, Jack. Do you want to remember? Do you want to try to fight for this thing we had, which let me tell you, was pretty spectacularly fucked up? Start over? Just bin the whole thing? 'Cause I'm real good at following orders, but I'm complete and utter rubbish at trying to read a mind that I can't even understand anymore."
"I think... I think it's important that you understand we're strangers for now, just with a history. I don't know if I was ever what you thought I was, but it doesn't matter now because I'm not any more."
"Yes, you are," Ianto said stubbornly.
"I can't be."
"This is the second really awful conversation we've had in this restaurant," Ianto noted, somehow, distantly and oddly amused. Even the bleakness was starting to look like hope, and that couldn't be good.
"Really?" Jack asked.
Ianto nodded and turned his attention to his food, since the situation, while no better, was at least diffused for the moment.
"You liked it last time," Ianto said, putting a piece of prawn on Jack's plate. "Now, tell me about Jamie."
Jack looked at Ianto suspiciously, because somehow, this still felt like he was being wooed, which seemed odd. Things weren't supposed to happen in the dark.
Not anymore, anyway.
He ate the shrimp, and it was good. If you could draw a line from point a to point b, if they connected, then they were part of the same thing. Which meant somehow that if he liked the shrimp then and he liked it now, two thousand years later, then maybe Ianto was right. Maybe he was the same person. Or maybe two people -- both who just happened to like shrimp? He couldn't be sure.
"Even the shrimp is existential," he said ruefully.
"I think that's just you," Ianto said. "Are you going to tell me about Jamie?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"I like to know things about you. Just think -- if this ever happens again, the more you tell me now, the less time you'll have to spend pouring over moldy old archives. Assuming I'm still alive, of course."
Jack winced.
"That was a joke, Jack," Ianto said.
"Did you think it was a funny one?" Jack inquired.
"Not really. None of my jokes seem to be, these days."
"He used to drive for Rolls Royce before World War I. A Silver Ghost. It was gorgeous."
"You remember this?"
"Some of it," Jack said. "Images, like everything. Impressions. Stories. But I'm putting it back together. I told you. And I have pictures. Some letters."
"You used to ride with him?"
"Yeah. And once he realized I could handle it, he let me take over a few times. But you know, passenger in a rally race's not just sitting. You gotta have your weight in the car just right, where it'll do the driver the most good. People used to throw snow on the road so the car would spin out. They like a good crash. He thought I was brave. I don't think I ever told him that I wasn't. Maybe I did though. I hope so anyway. Can't remember. Different set of standards when you can't die, right? He didn't have anything like that, but he did it all anyway. We'd bet him he couldn't do something and he'd turn right around and do it -- stay up all night drinking and then head out and break another record. He lived hard. Used to give the top-brass fits. You could always count on him to show up in the crunch, but 'til then...."
"Sounds like you," Ianto said.
Jack laughed a little. "Yeah, I guess. Birds of a feather, or something."
"Don't know how you could confuse us though," Ianto added. "Doesn't sound anything at all like me."
"No," Jack said. "Just the driving. You looked so happy in the car."
"I was," Ianto said.
"It'll come back eventually," Jack said
Ianto looked puzzled, although he thought he shouldn't have. It was like Jack to will the world to suit his own demands. "How do you know?" he asked.
Jack shrugged. "I get shot, and I heal. I think it's the same. Feels the same. Just slower."
"How does it feel?" Ianto asked, curiously.
"Itchy," Jack said and frowned.
Ianto laughed. "Really?
"Really," Jack said. "Headaches too."
Ianto made a face, suspecting that Jack was probably understating the degree of pain involved.
"Hey, that's a lot of death by oxygen deprivation," Jack said, as if to justify the complaint.
Ianto nodded, not really sure what to say. "How's the claustrophobia?" he finally asked.
Jack looked at the ceiling. "We work in an underground bunker."
"And you haven't run screaming yet."
"But I want to, Ianto. I really do," he replied, and Ianto didn't think that was about claustrophobia at all.
Jack handed him the keys back when they left, and Ianto took them without remark. Jack seemed sad, and Ianto wasn't sure if it was because dinner hadn't gone however Jack had originally planned it to be (not that Ianto had the slightest idea what that was -- how could Jack take him somewhere like that and know what it was and then be angry when the state of them came up?) or if it was because Jack was brooding over Jamie and a hundred year old car.
"Do you want company?" Ianto asked as they pulled up to the Plass.
Jack shook his head. "Not tonight. Go home. Sleep."
Ianto nodded, and Jack leaned forward to give him a small, chaste kiss. "And don't feel like you have to wait on me. Please."
"I'm just as stubborn as you are, Jack," Ianto said, his voice hard.
"Yeah," Jack said, his characteristic grin back in place. "And you scare the hell out of me."
Ianto smirked, but it wasn't entirely unkind. "Good."
Jack got out of the car and bounded up to the slab that would take him down into the Hub. As Ianto's eyes unavoidably slid away from him, he hit the gas and tried to imagine what Jack wanted of him. Was he really supposed to, in the midst of this life, go to a bar and pick up some bird and feel better? Well, Owen had done that sort of thing constantly, he mused. But then, it clearly never seemed to make Owen feel better at all.
But maybe without it, he'd have been even worse? Ianto didn't know, and Owen was no longer here to ask. He felt something sting in the back of his throat and could almost hear his friend swearing at him for being such a wet end.
"God, I'm pathetic," he said to himself as he turned a corner. It didn't matter, either way. He wasn't going to do it, even if he knew he should. Jack had ruined him, he thought in what was probably another fit of bitter childishness. It was him or nothing. All he could do was wait.
He wondered if he'd be able to get any sleep at all tonight, or if it'd be another broken night of feverish tossing and turning, nightmares and sweaty sheets.
Jack stood out on a rooftop, overlooking Cardiff. He was spending a lot of time up here lately, especially in the middle of the night. Climbing down into the cot under his office was manifestly out of the question at this point if he wanted to stay on the safe side of sane. Whatever that meant these days.
The lights of the city sparkled, and the breeze blew out his coat. He could breathe here. Nothing closing in, just him alone on top of the world.
If he closed his eyes and listened, he could almost hear a faint clicking somewhere in the back of his skull, as if new pathways were being laid, neurons falling over like a long chain of dominos, growing space for the enormous influx of memories to unspool. It hurt.
"What's happening to me?" he whispered into the dark. It didn't answer.
The tingle of his skin dissolving the first time he jumped through time, his mother's voice, the day his brother was born, his father's hands, the feel of coarse linen against his back, restraints chafing against his wrists, sand grasses, gunpowder, the brackish smell of the bay, explosions, dancing, music, licking the cleft of a thigh, blood and pearlescent tissue, kisses, the cool burn of alcohol, the buzz of a sonic weapon; sharp, painful, isolated touches without context, that kept expanding into the recesses of his brain.
"How does this end?"
***
Ianto answered the phone with a grunt before he could even get both his eyes open. Well, he thought bitterly, he'd managed to sleep then.
"Did you kill me?" he heard Jack's voice ask incredulously.
"What?" Ianto asked, feeling both annoyed and confused.
"Did. You. Kill. Me?" Jack asked again, spelling it out for him very slowly.
"Er." Ianto was stalling. Making words seemed hard, and if he'd been more awake, making these words would have been horrifying besides.
"In my office. Over the desk?"
"Um. Yeah."
"Well, I've remembered that then," Jack said, sounding understandably a bit startled, and clicked off.
Ianto stared at his mobile for a moment before letting it slip from his hand into the bed as he drifted back to sleep. If the nature of time as Jack presented it meant everything had already happened and was, in fact, happening all at once, maybe it also meant that none of this had ever happened. Ianto found the idea oddly comforting.
Continue to next part
Pairing/Characters: Jack/Ianto, Gwen
Authors:
rm & kalichan Rating/Warning: NC-17, mostly plot, some porn.
Summary: The effect of being buried alive on a relationship: two steps forward, one step back. Takes place after 2x13: Exit Wounds.
Wordcount: ~20,250 [posted in 2 parts]
Authors' Notes: This is the sixth installment of our series, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. Next up, post-Journey's End.
Previous installments:
1. A Strange Fashion of Forsaking
2. Dear Captain, Last Night I Slept in Mutiny
3. To Learn This Holding and the Holding Back
4. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
5. I Imagine You Now in That Other City
The Hub was quiet, and Ianto thought that the sound of water running through it sounded like tears. He'd been thinking that a lot lately; also that it was easy to hear voices in the hum of the computers and the whoosh of air as Myfanwy swooped through, flapping her wings. The strangest things would bring a lump to his throat. Even the weevils in their cages seemed mournful.
Ianto was getting pretty tired of this aching feeling. It'd been a week, and everything still hurt. He didn't understand how pain could keep surprising him; he'd thought after Lisa there was no more to learn about it. After the worst possible thing, he'd figured, what more could really touch him? Stupid, he told himself. He almost wanted to go back in time and kick his old self for being such an arse. It wasn't the most terrible thing. It was just the first of them.
He wasn't one of those types who pretended to assert their manliness by holding back tears; in school, he'd always been ready enough with his fists that no one really messed him about too much, and he thought he'd feel better if he could just burst into sobs, get some of this out of him, but somehow he couldn't.
Anyway, Gwen was crying enough for both of them. She couldn't even eat a biscuit without it getting soggy these days, and he couldn't figure out if the fact that she was still tough and business-like through the tears made it more or less alarming.
And Jack. Just looking at him -- how guilty and sad he was while still trying to put on a brave face, so obviously for their benefit -- was like knives and sandpaper all rolled into one.
It was a bit like Canary Wharf all over again, except now instead of his lover, it was his family -- the only one he had left -- ripped apart. Half of it gone. And nothing was ever going to bring them back. There were only the pale shadows of their voices in the machinery, the water and the little snarky post-it notes that Owen had left around the Hub. Wherever he looked, it seemed there was another jab of memory: the books Tosh liked to read on her lunch break, her commentary in the margins, and voice recordings of Owen's autopsies (Ianto hoped he wasn't going to ever be reduced to listening to these for comfort, but you never knew) as well as Tosh's video tutorials for his archives – hollow, unsatisfying reminders of everything else that had vanished. And they'd never be reunited as he'd been taught in church either, because he knew what was in the dark now. Nothing. Even if it was apparently moving and he really, really didn't want to think about that.
He knew Gwen felt the same way, knew it in the moments when they'd come across something Owen or Tosh had left, and her hand would creep into his, or he'd pull her into his arms and hide his face in her hair. That was new. They'd been friends of course, but never quite so close before; now, he could feel them drawing together to make up for the gaps. But she had Rhys to go home to at the end of it all as well, a husband to comfort and be comforted by as they all watched the city try to rebuild itself and realized that for all their bold talk Torchwood really wasn't equipped to help -- not with only three people and the Rift to monitor. So Gwen had left for the day, and Ianto was here in the Hub at night again, staring at the computer, unable to face the idea of going back to his flat.
And, if he were honest, not wanting to leave Jack. They weren't talking to each other much, not like Gwen and Rhys were, but Ianto knew that the sheer physical presence had to be a comfort after everything that had happened. They'd all held tightly onto each other in the wake of the deaths, and Ianto really didn't want Jack to have to be alone.
So he stayed at Tosh's workstation (he couldn't imagine ever calling it anything else) until he judged it was time to bring Jack -- who seemed to be trying to work himself to death, going over file after file with a fine tooth comb -- a cup of coffee and a small smile. It was the least he could do.
Jack looked up at him as he entered his office with the coffee, as if he'd forgotten where he was for an instant. Ianto hoped so anyway. Maybe burying himself in work was helping. He handed Jack the cup, and Jack smiled reflexively at him. Ianto put a hand on his shoulder, trying to communicate comfort through the pressure, and Jack didn't move.
They stayed there for a moment, with Ianto thinking about maybe leaning down to give him a kiss, when Jack's wrist comm beeped.
"Rift monitor," Jack said. "I tied it into this."
"You did?" Ianto asked, a bit surprised -- Jack had usually left all the technical stuff to Tosh, and Ianto hadn't known that he could do it even if he wanted to.
"Yeah," Jack said. "We should probably go down and see what's up."
"Of course," Ianto said, but Jack was already standing up and heading out of the room.
"I'm on the shore now," Gwen said breathlessly over the comm-link.
"Great," Ianto responded, zeroing in on the appropriate quadrant with the computer scanner. "I'm getting the energy from... looks like the water?"
"... Yeah," Gwen said, sounding choked.
"Gwen, what is it? What's wrong?"
"It's a... cow."
"A what?"
"A swimming cow. With... um... fins."
There was silence as Ianto tried to process this information.
"Different evolutionary path," Jack said finally. "Could have happened here too. Like... uh... --"
"Dolphins?" Ianto supplied, as Jack fumbled for the word.
"It's rainbow coloured," Gwen informed them solemnly. "Maybe you two should adopt it."
"Now you're having me on," Ianto said.
"No, really. What should we do?"
"Does it seem dangerous?" Jack asked, seeming faintly amused and annoyed by that fact.
"No, can't say it does," Gwen replied. "It seems to be ignoring the bathers. Although maybe it shouldn't. Nutters, they are. Who goes swimming in the sea in April?"
"Maybe a shark will eat it. Or them, you know, whatever works," Ianto offered, and at the sound of Gwen's giggle, turned his head to look at Jack who was standing behind him, wanting to exchange a celebratory glance. It was the first time he'd heard Gwen laugh since it all happened -- and if it took a swimming cow-alien and a lame joke on his part -- he'd produce them all day if he had to.
"Come on back," Jack said to her. "Let it go bother the Irish. Maybe they'll get off their asses and form their very own Torchwood to deal with it."
"You know," Gwen said wistfully, "I remember when I thought this job was going to be glamourous."
Ianto chuckled into the speaker. Things were, ever so slowly, getting back to normal; Jack even sounded like himself there again, and he was just so relieved. He disconnected and turned to take Jack in his arms -- it'd take Gwen some time to get back, and they could... but Jack had already gone.
Two weeks since everything had changed. Ianto thought about going home. Having a shower. Sleeping in a real bed. Stretching out. But he knew he was only thinking about it like a story that might happen to someone else. There was no possibility of him leaving, not yet.
Both he and Gwen found themselves working longer and longer days. Not wanting to go home. You couldn't leave. Who knew what might happen? Unlike him, she always did go eventually; Rhys was like a beacon, calling her out of the Hub and back into the world. But him? There was nothing in his flat that was alive. He hadn't even kept plants after Lisa.
It was around 3 am when he poked his head into Jack's office and found him staring at one of his old Victorian strong boxes. It was open, and he had a slew of daguerreotypes spread out in front of him.
Ianto cleared his throat, and Jack looked up.
"What are you still doing here?" Jack asked.
"Well, I had work," Ianto said and then trailed off.
"Okay," Jack said. "It's really late though, isn't it? You should get some rest."
"Yeah," Ianto said. "I'll just catch a kip here, I think."
"You can sleep down there if you want," Jack offered, nodding to the trap door that led to his cubbyhole under the office.
Ianto felt his heart contract and expand.
"Lovely," he said. "Thank you."
There was a pause as Jack looked down at his pictures again.
Ianto pulled up the trapdoor and then looked back at Jack. "Will you be joining me?" he said as neutrally as he could.
Jack looked straight at him with an unreadable expression, but it was gone quickly and replaced with a smile. "Not tonight, okay?" Jack said. "Too restless. And I've got this stuff I need to do."
"Okay," Ianto said, puzzled.
"Raincheck?" Jack asked.
"Sure," Ianto said. "Of course." Always.
They were in the SUV -- so much emptier now than it used to be -- Jack and Ianto up front, Gwen in back, all of them covered from head to toe in unmentionable filth from chasing a rogue Proganochelys that had wandered through the rift, its snapping head and armored, lumbering body disguising surprising amounts of speed.
The new, higher tech version of the GPS beeped [Jack had installed it a few days ago, when they started using the SUV again, and was clearly over fascinated with testing it out], and Jack turned the corner to pull up near Gwen's flat, and she hopped out, waving at them distractedly, obviously looking forward to stripping off and getting in the shower.
Ianto looked at Jack, who pressed a new button on the GPS thingy, smiled at him, and said, "I'll drop you at home, shall I? You can throw your clothes in the wash, take a shower."
"Wash?" Ianto said. "I was more thinking of burning them. But yeah, home sounds good."
"Great," Jack said, turning the wheel, and pulling them back into traffic.
After a while, Ianto suggested, "Why don't you come too? The new rift monitoring software's working well. You've got the wrist com, we have the SUV. We're ready for whatever."
For several minutes, Jack didn't reply, as he dealt with traffic, and the GPS beeped at every corner. Ianto was beginning to find the constant sound quite irritating, when they arrived in his neighborhood, and Jack finally said, "Okay. Sounds fine."
Ianto smiled to himself.
Jack parked the car in front of the house, instead of the wasteground they'd always used before, and Ianto thought he must want to be able to see it from the window of his flat if he had too. They were all still so jumpy.
They climbed the stairs up to the flat, Jack letting Ianto take the lead for once, and then they were inside, and Ianto immediately went to the kitchen to locate plastic bags so they wouldn't drip more filth on the floor.
Jack stood in the foyer, stock still. Ianto handed him a bag.
"Put your clothes in that, Jack," he said.
Jack nodded.
"I've got to get in the shower," Ianto said. "You could...uh...join me, if you want?" He wasn't sure where all the tentativeness had come from, but somehow he couldn't help himself.
"Okay," Jack said, and gave him a version of one of his grins.
Ianto felt a small bubble of happiness in his chest, and he smiled back, before quickly stripping off his clothes, and shoving them in the back.
"Hurry up, Jack," he added, as he skidded for the bathroom. He'd turned the water on, and was standing underneath the spray, wondering what was taking Jack so long, when the curtain parted, and Jack poked his head in, still fully dressed.
"Listen," Jack said, waving his wrist. "The rift did something else. My wrist link's beeping again."
Ianto groaned.
"I know," Jack said. "I'm going to take the SUV back to the Hub, and see what the hell's going on. You stay here and shower, okay? I'll call you if I need help."
"Are you sure?" Ianto said.
"Positive."
Ianto leaned forward to kiss Jack, and Jack let their lips touch for a second before stepping back quickly.
"I don't want to get you dirty again," he said. "Be a shame to mess up all that gorgeous nakedness."
And then he slipped out the door, leaving Ianto under the spray, hard from even that brief moment of contact.
"Are you okay?" Gwen asked, touching Ianto lightly on the arm. It was, she knew, probably a stupid question -- after all, none of them were okay -- but after a brief period of time in which it seemed like they were all getting better, Ianto had gone quiet. It was, in some way, a mirror image of what she assumed was Jack's own strange mourning process. There were these moments from both men of just nothingness, and Gwen found that it was this that unsettled her more than anything else.
He nodded his head, but it was, she thought, like he hadn't even heard her.
"Really?" she tried again.
"No, of course not," Ianto said softly, his eyes still trained on Jack's office.
"What's --?" She started to ask the question and then stopped herself. It wasn't really any of her business. Certainly, there was a time when Ianto would have taken the inquiry wrong, and in truth, looking back, it was hard for her to blame him. But now? Maybe it sort of was her business. They were all that was left, and there was no Owen to antagonize them into admissions or Tosh for Ianto to conspire and confess with.
Ianto frowned for a second. "Not sure," he said, finally tearing his gaze away from Jack's office. "Grief, you know?"
Gwen nodded. "Yeah. Fourth time this week he's been through those photos," Gwen said, still looking up at Jack's silhouette through the glass.
At least, Ianto thought. And that was weird, because Jack had the luxury of keeping his nostalgia and melancholy to the moments when the world slept. But since... well, everything, he hadn't been bothering.
Ianto walked into Jack's office without knocking and sat down on the sofa. Jack glanced at him, but said nothing, returning his gaze to the photos laid out on his desk like a device of fortune tellers or a map of the world.
In a way, Ianto was gratified by this. Certainly, Jack's lack of objection made it easy to believe his presence was welcome and possibly even a comfort. On the other hand, now that Ianto was there he felt like he had to say something; the only problem was that he had no idea what.
"Secret for you," Jack said, not looking up.
Ianto made an interrogative noise, distracted as he was by his own thoughts.
"It doesn't get better. You just get used to it."
"You don't seem used to it, sir," Ianto said quietly.
"Well, I'm working with a few more traumas than you are this week, aren't I?" Jack said casually, looking up with a smirk. It almost could have been a joke, and Ianto considered that it might be best to treat it as such.
"I --" he started and stopped.
"If you're not ready to ask, I'm definitely not ready to answer," Jack said, sweeping the pictures into a pile and replacing them in the tin he kept them in.
"Come on," he said, going for his coat. "We'll grab Gwen. Go to the pub. Pretend everything's normal. That's what you want, isn't it?"
Ianto shook his head. "Not really."
"Well," Jack said, good-naturedly, slipping his hands in his pockets and rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, "we're doing it anyway. Don't know about you, but I could certainly use the illusion of a drink."
They'd been drinking in silence for a few minutes, and Gwen was wondering what she ought to do to relieve the strain. She looked around at the people, hoping to garner inspiration from somewhere, while at the back of her mind being slightly taken aback by the fortitude of her home town. Only a couple weeks after the devastation, all was back to normal for frequenters of Cardiff's pubs; here they were, drinking their pints, having a crack and a laugh. It was familiar, and the familiarity was almost offensive. Only two weeks; she wasn't ready for it not to be strange. And yet all these people, they'd never know. For them, it had slipped by as if it had never happened, as if Owen and Tosh had never fought and never died.
I will not cry, she thought, forcing the tears back and trying to distract herself.
She'd been to this pub before, of course, most notably when she'd first met Jack and he'd dosed her drink -- such a long time ago, it seemed. And now, here she was, sitting across the table from him, and here was Ianto, next to her, arm slung companionably over the back of the booth so she could lean her head back and feel him there, warm and reassuring.
Ianto drained his first pint and then got up to get another. He looked questioningly at Gwen, and she nodded at him, tagging a "please" on the end of the motion. He smiled and didn't bother to look at Jack who hadn't even worked his way through half his own glass.
As Ianto made his way to the bar, Gwen looked straight at Jack and felt herself overflow with love and worry. Rhys would never need to concern himself, not now; the overwhelming tenderness she felt for Jack didn't have anything to do with her life. It was just there, a fact. It didn't change anything, just made her want to hold him, give him ease, make it all okay somehow.
But she couldn't, and she knew it, and it was tearing her apart.
"Are you all right, Jack?" she asked finally. "Can't you talk to us about it?"
Jack stared into his beer. "I don't know," he said softly.
"We're all hurting," Gwen said. "We all miss them."
"Yeah," Jack said.
"D'you feel guilty?" Gwen asked. "Is that it? Because it wasn't your fault."
Jack didn't say anything.
"Jack?" she prodded, wanting him to open up and let it out, whatever it was, because god knew, it wasn't doing him any good festering inside.
Jack shook his head as Ianto slipped back into the booth with his and Gwen's pints.
"What did I miss?" Ianto asked.
"Not much," Jack said brusquely.
Gwen thought about letting him get away with it and then decided that she didn't want to play these games anymore.
"Jack? Tell me. Tell us. What is it? Is it Owen and Tosh? Is it your brother? You have to talk to us. Please," she said, her voice pleading.
"Gwen," Ianto said, horrified. "What are you doing?"
"She's allowed to ask," Jack said to Ianto, adding, with a sharp look at Gwen, "but I really wish she wouldn't."
"But it's like you're not even here," Gwen said to him.
"I really can't do this right now," Ianto said, hoping to stop them.
Jack pointed at him. "Not about you."
"I didn't --" Ianto held up his hands protesting, but thought the better of actually finishing the sentence, because if he were honest, he knew that he really, really wished that he were the only one in pain and that it was just all about him, because that way someone else could do something about it. Presumably.
Jack and Gwen both stared at him as if waiting for him to say something else.
"What?" he finally asked, lowering his hands back to his pint.
Jack shook his head and went returned to staring at his drink; Gwen, in turn, resumed fidgeting with her cocktail napkin.
"Can you both please try to remember," Jack said, clearly trying and failing to keep the exasperation out of his voice despite how quietly, how mournfully, he spoke, "that we're working on different time scales here?"
"You can't think you're going to get used to loss like this," Gwen said.
"I don't think that's what he means, Gwen," Ianto said darkly.
Jack looked up at him and almost seemed grateful.
"Well, what do you mean?" Gwen said, her voice ragged. "There's not enough left of us to hide behind anymore, Jack."
"I was gone a long time," he said. "A very long time."
Ianto held his breath, but Jack fell silent again.
Gwen took a long swallow of her drink.
"Look," Jack said, finally. "We're not all in the same boat here."
"We are, Jack," Gwen rushed in. "You're wrong. We have to stick together to make it through."
"Sure," Jack said, his tone dismissive and cold. "Of course. And yeah, you're grieving, and I'm grieving, and Ianto's grieving, and we're all just fucking sad, all right? Is that enough for you?"
Gwen kept looking at Jack, but Ianto could see there were tears forming in her eyes, though they didn't start to fall.
"Jack," Ianto said softly, trying to recall him back from whatever dark, ugly place he was careening off into.
"Sorry," Jack said flatly. "I don't mean to hurt you, you know that."
"Yeah," Gwen said, her voice husky. "We know."
"It's not about loss. I know loss, like the back of my hand,” he said, grinning cruelly into the cliché. “What do you think living forever means? You think I've never had to lose people before? Lose family?"
Gwen gulped. And then it was Ianto's turn to swallow half his pint in one go, knowing he was going to need a buffer for whatever was about to come spilling out.
"It's the first time for you, Gwen, right? Second time for Ianto? Or third maybe? I wish I could do something to help you both, but I can't, and it's happened to me more times than I can remember." Jack spat out that last word like it was coated with something vile and he had to get it out of his mouth.
"Luckily," he added, voice dripping with irony, and Ianto flinched at the pain in it, "I kept notes on it all."
"Gwen, please stop," Ianto said quietly.
"Why are you always protecting him?" Gwen demanded, turning to Ianto. "It doesn't actually help, you know!"
"Gwen --" Jack's voice was warning.
"I know," Ianto said softly to her, and then looked at Jack apologetically before continuing. "How many times? How long?"
Jack fidgeted with the condensation on his glass. "Don't know. It was too hard to keep track. Sometimes it took a while. I don't know how. Or why. People regress, in the dark, I think." Jack said, looking at the ceiling because he really didn't want to have to describe what it was like to want his mother while tasting the sort of soil they had never had at home.
"Wait --" Gwen said, and Ianto saw her start to realize what they were being told, what they should have already known.
Jack gave her a weary look. "If being buried alive was an off-switch, don't you think I would have signed up for it a long time ago? Really?"
Gwen covered her mouth. "Oh my god."
"Stop gaping," Jack snapped at her.
"Jack, I'm so sorry," she said.
"Well that makes two of us," he said, still agitated.
"Three," Ianto offered softly in a moment of inappropriate humor that, once it was said, he found himself hoping no one else would notice.
"I was here the whole time," Jack went on venomously. "’Til they dug me up. 27 AD to 1901. Bastards they were about it too. God, I hate Torchwood."
"But you are Torchwood, Jack," Gwen said irrelevantly, clearly still reeling from the information.
"No one said I was exempt," Jack said tonelessly.
They didn't say anything.
Jack took another pull at his drink as Ianto and Gwen looked at each other.
"This life... it doesn't seem like mine anymore. It's like a story that you read once, a long time ago, and it only stays with you in flashes."
"You forgot us?" Gwen said, her voice breaking.
"How could I? How could anyone forget the most important things in the world?" Jack said, disgusted, his voice laden with pain and irony, and Ianto thought his eyes looked a thousand years old, before he realized that they were actually even older than that now.
He also realised that Jack hadn't answered the question. But of course, he didn't need to. They'd begun to know the depth of his loss now, and Ianto had a feeling they'd barely plumbed the surface as he mentally listed off all the changes he hadn't even known he was noticing, things that should have told him how much Jack was fighting to stay here, stay with them, re-learn things that should never have had to be forgotten.
Jack set his drink down on the table with finality, and Ianto was sure he was about to get up from the table and try to leave, probably prefacing it with some sort of soothing remark.
"Listen, kids," Jack started, and Ianto nodded to himself. At least he still knew Jack that well. At least he hadn't changed that much. "Don't worry too much about it, okay?"
"How can we not?" Gwen asked, almost shrill.
"Easy," Jack said. "You can't actually imagine it, and you certainly can't fix it. For what it's worth, I never, ever wanted to know it was going to be like this so soon. But there it is. I'm sorry," he said, and rose from the table. He grabbed his coat as he walked out, but didn't put it on.
Ianto put his face in his hands. "Should have seen it," he mumbled.
"What?" Gwen asked, really having not understood him, muffled as his voice was.
"The GPS, the thing with the pictures," Ianto said, explaining, still half mumbling into his hands.
"Oh god."
"Yeah," Ianto said, finally looking up. "He can't remember, and he's mourning himself."
"I --"
"Please don't apologize, Gwen. Please?" Ianto didn't think he could take it right now, because this was a problem, and all he had to do was think through it, and maybe, maybe that would be enough to solve it, if not for Jack, then for himself.
Gwen swallowed and nodded. "What are you going to do?" she whispered.
"Why's it always down to me with him?"
Gwen made a gesture like Ianto was being ridiculous. "Because it's not down to me," she said.
"And aren't you glad?" he said, embarrassed by the abrasiveness of his response.
"I-- you -- All right," she said, finding her composure. "I should go home. You should. God, I don't even know what you should do, Ianto."
"I should go home. But, you know...." He trailed off, shrugging.
"Good luck?" she offered dubiously.
He quirked his mouth at her in acknowledgment.
"Call if you need anything," she added
And he bit down on the impulse to say 'retcon.'
Jack thought about going back to the Hub, but the glory of the recent mods on the Rift monitor was that technically he didn't have to. Besides, it was the first place Gwen and Ianto would surely look for him, and he absolutely couldn't deal with them right now. For one thing, he didn't even remember how.
It wasn't that he had forgotten them. Not really. Not entirely. He remembered their names because he'd chanted them, the whole team's, like a litany in the dark. It was the only plan he'd had down there, under the city. Every time he gasped into being, he recited their names and what he had to do when he got back. It was survival, and it was simple enough. It became so much of a habit, Jack could only assume he would do it the next time he died and who knew how many times thereafter, lest two for four become zero for four should he forget. The idea of it rattled him, because while he could no longer remember how he had come to the feeling of it, he knew that such a resurrection was something he didn't want Ianto to have to see.
So he didn't return to the Hub. He walked to the harbor-front instead and stared out at the waves. He felt the wind blowing off the ocean whip around him and it reminded him that he was outside and alive. He could breathe here as the salt stung his eyes.
Ianto. Gwen. Tosh. Owen. Torchwood.
It was boring, under the earth. The soil had tasted bad, except somehow when it rained, although the weight of the water always crushed blood into his chest and sometimes that killed him before he drowned or suffocated. When it didn't, it was the water that made him think of home, and packed tight in the earth he tried to imagine he was floating as he fought for air that would never come. It wasn't something he had much choice about. He couldn't move a muscle, couldn't curl up fetal, and could do absolutely nothing to create the illusion of shelter except to say the ground was water and pray it would sweep him out to sea.
Ianto. Gwen. Tosh. Owen. Torchwood. Keep it simple, he thought on a rising tide of panic, no time. Just names. And sometimes other names. Names of fondness and pleasure. Names of refuge. Names living and dying above him. Like the Doctor and Rose. Annie. Jamie. Estelle. Boys in the war, boys in a lot of wars. Alex. And always Gray.
Names of the living, names of the lost. Names to find.
Ianto. Gwen. Tosh. Owen. Torchwood.
Jack.
Ianto hadn't been able to find Jack anywhere that night. He'd scoured the Hub from top to bottom and driven to all Jack's usual haunts, but he wasn't in any of them, assuming, Ianto thought, that Jack could even remember where they were. So he'd ended up back at his own flat, hoping futilely that Jack would have gone to ground there, but knowing that wouldn't be the case. Not now and probably not ever.
Ianto had slept poorly, tossing and turning, before getting up at the crack of dawn and driving back to the Hub. He poked his head into Jack's office and found him sitting at his desk as usual. He was going over the files again, his lips moving as if he were either reading them aloud to himself or -- and Ianto cringed at the thought of it – memorizing their contents.
"Jack?" he tried tentatively.
"Good morning," Jack said.
"I looked for you last night."
"Sorry about that."
"Don't apologize. You don't need to worry about us," Ianto said reflexively, knowing he was lying but wanting very badly for Jack to believe it.
"I didn't mean to upset you guys. I'm taking care of it."
"...Taking care of it?" For some reason, Ianto didn't like the sound of that at all, Jack's faux reassurance sending little alarm bells chiming up and down his spine.
"It's under control."
"Really?" Ianto said quizzically.
"I wasn't kidding about the notes thing. The archivists at Torchwood are...well, you should know. There's all the old cctv footage. And I've kept pretty good logs too. It's fine."
"Sir," Ianto started.
"Don't you have anything you need to do?" Jack suggested, almost visibly shying away from what had come to be a term of endearment between them.
"I'll get your coffee," Ianto said and headed for the kitchen area. Maybe the trick wasn't to keep pushing at Jack but to be so normal as to be unavoidably familiar. Ianto cursed himself under his breath. Vanity. This was all vanity. And a horrible, horrible mash of need and want and Ianto was struggling, really struggling to be clear on the difference.
He was all cheer when Gwen came in, and he found he resented her a little for not even trying to look as if she hadn't been crying all night, but he was going to try his best not to fight or cry with her. That wasn't normal either.
Twelve hours later Ianto ducked his head into Jack's office. "Dinner?" he asked.
"Ianto --" Jack said, his voice weary and clearly ready to let Ianto down easy. Again.
"Just dinner. No intent. Your life here's more than just files. Like going to the pub yesterday. Well, hopefully not like going to the pub yesterday, but you know?" Ianto asked hopefully.
"Somehow I don't remember you being this cheery," Jack said.
"You'd be right," Ianto said. "I'll be down in the archives. Let me know, yeah?"
"Yeah," Jack said, and the smile, while sad, also at least seemed genuine.
If Jack thought about it at all, and it was rather unavoidable, the idea of dinner terrified him. Because whether Ianto meant it to be or not, everything would be a test. What he ordered, how he ate it, whether he remembered the waitstaff or his favorite table. That was the price of having told them: they'd now be looking and covering and trying to fix him all the time because that's what his team was like. He knew that. Had known that. In the earth.
He shuddered and tried to think of a middle ground on dinner, only to be distracted by the utter horror of English idioms.
Jack shook himself, looked at his watch and realized he'd lost ten minutes. He kept doing that. Before being underground he had rarely slept, but now he felt like he was dreaming all the time. It unnerved him, this inability to be in the present, because it wasn't like he particularly had a lot of past left right now.
"Ianto," he said, calling the man on the comms.
"Sir?" Ianto responded reflexively.
"Takeaway?" he offered, stopping himself from providing an explanation of his reasoning.
"Certainly, sir," Ianto said, glad for something. "Curry or pizza?"
"Thai," Jack said, suddenly remembering glass noodles and a spicy fruit sauce. "Can we do Thai?"
Ianto smiled at a specificity that wasn't flipping a coin. "I'll see what I can do," he said, knowing he'd probably have to go out to pick it up and not caring in the goddamn least.
When he'd collected the food, he brought it back, took it upstairs, and spread out the cartons on a table up in the greenhouse.
They'd never done this, but he thought that might be good. Living plants, flower-scented air, a ceiling that didn't quite look like concrete. It was different. And not claustrophobic or dark. Now that he was watching for it, he could see Jack's resistance to enclosed areas. Not surprising considering, he thought with a shudder.
When Jack walked in and saw the set up, he was rewarded by something resembling one of Jack's real smiles.
"This is nice," Jack said.
"I thought we could do with the change," Ianto replied.
"Haven't we had enough of that around here?" Jack asked, lifting an eyebrow.
"An innocuous change," Ianto clarified. "Besides I've always wanted to have a picnic up here."
"Fair enough," Jack said. "Fair enough."
"Someday we should take a blanket down to the beach."
"Not in April," Jack said. "Not in Wales."
"Perish the thought. We might be crazy, but there are limits."
"Some of us are crazier than others," Jack said ruefully.
"Some of us have better excuses than others."
"Excuses are bullshit," Jack said, helping himself to noodles. "Don't you think?"
"Forgiveness isn't," Ianto said, leaving the question of excuses alone.
"That's true," Jack replied. "It took me a while to learn, but I guess it must've stuck. Amazingly, I still know where I got it. I remember that. Where did you pick it up from?"
"You," Ianto said simply.
"Ah. Lisa?" Jack asked.
"Not just that," Ianto said.
"It didn't take long for that part to come back either, actually. Checked the file to be sure. But, you know...,” Jack said apologetically.
"Well, it would stand out," Ianto said, trying not to feel miserable that Jack recalled his betrayal but probably nothing else.
"Hey, don't look like that. You fared pretty well. We... we were difficult, right? And good. I... I have a lot of pieces of things, with you. But it's pictures. Like a flip book now. Not a story."
Ianto nodded. "It's weird. Us using two different tenses. I mean. It's still all now for me," Ianto said, hating himself for somehow getting them to the ‘are we still together?’ conversation when they had never, not really, not explicitly, ever discussed the fact that they were becoming more or less a couple, even though the plausible deniability had been getting a lot harder lately.
"You get why I can't just start reassuring you about that, right?" Jack asked.
"Sure. No intentions, remember? Thai food and a garden. That's it. You can ask me things if you want. If it'll help."
"Did we have sex in here once?" Jack asked with his mouth full.
Ianto laughed. "Yeah. More than once. Gwen walked in on us."
"More than once?" Jack asked.
Ianto shook his head, smiling. That was the old Jack. "No. Just once for that. Owen was furious."
"Why?"
"We were corrupting his precious plants."
Jack frowned and looked around at the plants.
"I have no idea," Ianto answered preemptively.
Jack chuckled. "I missed you," he said after a long silence.
"What?" Ianto was startled.
"I couldn't remember what you looked like, and I still missed you."
"Jack, you don't have to --"
"No. It's true. No con. I know that's how I'm covering this as well as I am. But that's true."
"Covering how?" Ianto asked, perplexed.
Jack frowned. "I was a con man. Between here and the Time Agency. Did I never tell you that?"
Ianto shook his head.
"Shit. Sorry."
Ianto shrugged. "Comes in handy, I'd guess."
"It does."
Ianto rested his chin in his hand and stared off into the strange flora and fauna they had collected. It was easier to ask certain things without actually looking at Jack. "What else did you remember? Down there?" Ianto asked.
"Names mostly. Impressions of people. My wife. A lover I had in the 50s. The Doctor. Religion in my childhood. Water. My mother's hair. Books. I tried to retell myself pieces of books when I got bored, but it was hard to concentrate. I always read at war. It's slow, suffocating, but not that slow. I'd come back with a lungful of air every time, and it takes oh... about a couple of minutes to asphyxiate. I think. Do you choke to death first? Or is it the pressure crushing your chest? I don't know. It varied. War. Sleep. Which was strange," Jack said distractedly and frowned. "I want to ask what you were doing, but I guess I know."
"It was just a day," Ianto said apologetically.
"Ah no," Jack said. "There were cells and lives arranging themselves so that Ianto Jones would be here to fetch me takeaway when I came back."
"I do what I can, sir."
"Why do you always say that?"
"Say what?"
"Call me sir."
"You are the captain."
"The others don't, didn't call me that, did they?"
"It's just a thing I do," Ianto said and shrugged. "Sir."
"Are you flirting with me?" Jack asked.
"Sorry," Ianto said.
"No. It's okay. It's good. I need the practice, right?"
Ianto laughed, even if his heart was breaking just a little. "You do have a reputation, sir."
"Yeah," Jack said. "The archives are pretty clear on that. What are you thinking? You look pensive."
"Actually, I was thinking how unfair it is that you look spectacular even with your mouth full," Ianto said. It was true, but he was also lying.
"Don't you like me with my mouth full?" Jack said with a suggestive leer.
Ianto rolled his eyes. "Like riding a bicycle. Some things you never forget."
"I think it's working," Jack said, perched on the railing, watching as Ianto squirted Myfanwy's special sauce on a haunch of goat.
As soon as Ianto had figured out, to the extent possible, what was going on with Jack, he'd known this whole process would be difficult, but he was realizing that he'd actually had no concept of how fucked up it was going to be. Looking at Jack still caused the exact same riot of feelings to well up inside him, still made his stomach do flips, and knowing that Jack had not only basically forgotten him, but had eventually forgotten even how to miss him, forgotten everything but the bare syllables of his name, made him want to crumple up and cry like a child.
But he knew he couldn't, although he was beginning to wonder if anything he was doing would have any meaningful effect. Mostly Jack seemed as distant as ever, and he'd slip away and disappear to do god knows what as soon as he felt threatened or enclosed.
He supposed they did continue to talk some over the meals that Ianto had to force him to eat, and he was learning more about Jack's past than he'd ever been able to before, though even that hurt, because now Jack couldn't even seem to remember which parts he'd, for reasons unknown, had always wanted to keep close to the vest. And Ianto couldn't decide if he felt more sorry that Jack couldn't remember or angry that Jack had never shared these things with him when sharing had been a choice.
"What's working?" he said gently.
"Things are coming back," Jack said. "Slowly. But they are. Being here, looking at the pictures. They're beginning to thread themselves together. Feelings. It's like they're starting to move -- the pictures, I mean."
"Not lost forever then," Ianto said.
"Just going around the long way, I guess," Jack said. "If I have to live forever, I wish I could be one of the people who don't have to do it in a straight line."
"Are there lots of those people?" Ianto asked, laughing.
"Just one left now, actually. As far as I know. And it’s not really forever, forever, it just seems that way, ‘cause of the time thing."
"Oh," Ianto said, realizing that Jack was referring to the Doctor and feeling the accustomed swell of something that felt almost like jealousy except that it was ridiculous.
"You look sad," Jack said, staring at him closely.
"No," Ianto said, forcing a smile. "Not sad. That's fantastic news."
"Yeah," Jack said, clearly picking up on Ianto's uneasiness. "Gwen and I are going to investigate the disturbance out by the Taff. You'll be okay here?"
"Of course," Ianto said. "I'm always okay."
Jack looked at him oddly, but didn't say anything. Ianto wished he could believe that the line had struck a chord. But it was probably just his imagination.
"Ianto! Dinner!" Jack hollered as Gwen packed up for the day.
"Curry or pizza?" Ianto asked, as he always did, although the returned Jack seemed to delight in always coming up with a third choice. Ianto wondered if it was because he couldn't remember what he liked or what even seemed familiar of this time and place's food.
"Nope. Going out," he said.
"Where?" Ianto asked, even though he knew it was an entirely loaded question.
Jack grinned, obviously entirely pleased with himself, and Ianto had to fight the impulse to think that there was something really worth celebrating in it.
"Italian," he said.
"Do you need me to --"
"Nope," Jack cut him off. "Know just the place."
Ianto bit his lip, knowing it was stupid, but reached in his pocket for his car keys and tossed them at Jack, who caught them and looked at them a bit puzzled.
"I like your car, don't I?" he asked.
"A little too much," Ianto said, trying not to be disappointed at what was just an obvious deduction.
"How many times have you punched me?" Jack asked, abruptly.
"Only once. At times to my continued regret," Ianto said dryly.
Jack barked with laughter.
"Why are you so... giddy?" Ianto asked.
Jack spread his arms. "Maybe I've remembered how," he said, turning to exit the Hub, and Ianto was left wondering at not just how Jack's mind worked, but that it worked at all.
"You still speed. That's good," Ianto remarked, once they were in the car and driving.
"You sound like a doctor when you do that. Always diagnosing me."
"Sorry. I don't mean to."
"Sure you do," Jack said.
"Well, I shouldn't," Ianto corrected.
"Probably not," Jack agreed, but didn't really sound annoyed.
"Thing is. I like it when you speed."
"We used to go driving, didn't we?" Jack asked.
"For fun, you mean? A few times, yeah." Ianto answered, knowing the nostalgia was flavoring his voice, but unable to help it.
"I think I remember," Jack mused. "Driving around mountain curves especially. Feeling the jolt and the sway. This car handles better than I thought, though."
Ianto wondered what exactly Jack was remembering. It wasn't like there were a lot of winding mountain roads in Cardiff proper. He decided not to mention it, saying simply instead, "I loved it."
"Maybe you can love it again," Jack said, pressing down the accelerator smoothly so the car purred beneath them.
"Maybe so," Ianto said and felt his hopes rising. Perhaps it really was going to be all right.
Ianto was almost unsurprised when they pulled up in a very familiar neighborhood. When they'd strolled a little way and Jack finally stopped them in front of La Lupa, before looking at Ianto questioningly, sort of like a puppy who'd successfully brought his master the paper and was waiting for a pat, Ianto couldn't help but smile.
"God, Jack," he said.
"First date, again?" Jack offered, his smile a bit sheepish.
"Well, it worked the first time," Ianto said, and Jack beamed.
Jack was trying so hard to please him, and almost without volition, Ianto leaned forward, took Jack's face between his hands, and kissed him -- not chastely, either, but trying to communicate all the things that he was apparently incapable of saying to Jack out loud with the pressure of his mouth against Jack's lips. Jack kissed him back, and for a brief moment, Ianto felt like screaming out his happiness from the rooftops, but then Jack was pulling away and sucking air into his lungs.
"Sorry," Ianto said, cursing himself.
"No," Jack said, reassuringly. "Nothing for you to be sorry about. Shall we go in?"
"Sure."
The restaurant was exactly the same, and Ianto wasn't sure why he'd expected it to be different. It had only a couple of months since they'd last been here, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. Maybe Jack was contagious.
Ianto thought the little cracks between who Jack was now and who Jack had once been so recently for everyone else showed almost immediately. They were small, but still hard not to wince at, and he thought Jack noticed them too, even before reading them on Ianto's face. It was everything in his power not to do all the things Jack would have once done for them and more: choose a wine, order the food, banter with the staff, but that wasn't the point, wasn't any help, if Jack was to find his way back to the here and now.
When the food came, and Jack looked at it like it was far more foreign than he had expected, Ianto couldn't help but ask him if he was really remembering things or just collecting enough pieces of information to string stories together, even if they didn't yet feel like his own.
"I keep having to look up if certain foods exist here. It's really aggravating," Jack noted, still staring at his plate and ignoring the question.
The only thing that stopped Ianto from getting angry was that it didn't seem particularly willful or intentionally avoidant. This was just one of the things Jack did now. His attention span, always erratic, had become completely unreliable. His relearning the world had turned him into something of a toddler, but one who was always startled and sad and desirous of things he couldn't even name.
"You know, you didn't have to do this, Jack," Ianto said, figuring that if Jack was going to randomly go off-topic he could do the same.
Jack looked up from his plate. "But I wanted to."
"But it's silly," Ianto persisted. "I'm not the one who needs impressing here. Or wooing."
"Is that what you think this is?" Jack said. "More to the point, is that what you're trying to do?"
Ianto gritted his teeth. "Since there's no possible good answer to that question, I'm afraid I'll have to decline to answer. Sir."
They stared at each other across the table, ignoring the food now. Ianto watched Jack's body language; the restaurant, he was noticing with alarm, was dark and low lit, the timbered ceiling seemed oppressively low. He couldn't tell if he were imagining it, or if Jack's internal thoughts were just being broadcast to anyone with even the slightest bit of psychic sensitivity.
Jack was sitting up straight, like he always did except when ostentatiously lounging, but Ianto could see the tension in his shoulders. He made Ianto think of Atlas trying to hold up the sky.
"Jack," he started, trying to make his voice as soothing as possible.
"Just don't," Jack said, cutting him off and beginning to cut at his meat savagely.
"But --"
"No!" Jack said flatly. "We're here, we're eating. And while I'm on the subject, stop handling me with kid gloves. I'm not made of glass. I won't break."
"I know that," Ianto said. "I wasn't --"
"You know, at least one thing I can certainly remember is that I really hate when you lie to me," Jack said conversationally. "Please don't."
Ianto took a sip of water, afraid he might actually start to cry if his throat didn't spontaneously close and choke him to death first.
Luckily, Ianto thought bitterly, when in doubt his anger was usually enough to bail him out of one awful situation and dump him into another.
"Just so we're clear, Jack, I lie all the time. For you. Because that's my fucking job. And to think it used to just be cleaning up the corpses and stalling UNIT and the Prime Minister's office on the paperwork you can't be fucked to do and the meetings you never want to take. But now I've got to keep myself together and Gwen together and you together and I have to make sure no one notices that this is what I fucking do now and that takes lying, all the goddamn time, especially when Gwen can't stop asking questions about how we are while you keep retrieving these halves of memory that I don't know what to do with other than smile and nod and pray they'll eventually make some sort of sense to one of us, because we never, ever went driving in the goddamn mountains."
Jack was clearly about to snap back when his face got that distracted look again. He frowned. "Oh. That was Jamie," he said.
Ianto bit his lip.
"Come on, say it," Jack challenged, back in the fight.
"I refuse to be jealous of your past, Jack."
"Seems like a struggle," Jack said, intentionally trying to hurt.
"Jesus Christ, Jack, you've practically got me jealous of the bloody ground now," Ianto said, feeling slightly poetic and also rather close to completely hysterical.
"Sorry," Jack said, but not like he meant it or was remotely happy about saying it.
"Not your fault," Ianto said, hardly conciliatory himself.
"Well, you sure keep acting like it is."
"Tell me what you want me to do, Jack. Do you want to remember? Do you want to try to fight for this thing we had, which let me tell you, was pretty spectacularly fucked up? Start over? Just bin the whole thing? 'Cause I'm real good at following orders, but I'm complete and utter rubbish at trying to read a mind that I can't even understand anymore."
"I think... I think it's important that you understand we're strangers for now, just with a history. I don't know if I was ever what you thought I was, but it doesn't matter now because I'm not any more."
"Yes, you are," Ianto said stubbornly.
"I can't be."
"This is the second really awful conversation we've had in this restaurant," Ianto noted, somehow, distantly and oddly amused. Even the bleakness was starting to look like hope, and that couldn't be good.
"Really?" Jack asked.
Ianto nodded and turned his attention to his food, since the situation, while no better, was at least diffused for the moment.
"You liked it last time," Ianto said, putting a piece of prawn on Jack's plate. "Now, tell me about Jamie."
Jack looked at Ianto suspiciously, because somehow, this still felt like he was being wooed, which seemed odd. Things weren't supposed to happen in the dark.
Not anymore, anyway.
He ate the shrimp, and it was good. If you could draw a line from point a to point b, if they connected, then they were part of the same thing. Which meant somehow that if he liked the shrimp then and he liked it now, two thousand years later, then maybe Ianto was right. Maybe he was the same person. Or maybe two people -- both who just happened to like shrimp? He couldn't be sure.
"Even the shrimp is existential," he said ruefully.
"I think that's just you," Ianto said. "Are you going to tell me about Jamie?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"I like to know things about you. Just think -- if this ever happens again, the more you tell me now, the less time you'll have to spend pouring over moldy old archives. Assuming I'm still alive, of course."
Jack winced.
"That was a joke, Jack," Ianto said.
"Did you think it was a funny one?" Jack inquired.
"Not really. None of my jokes seem to be, these days."
"He used to drive for Rolls Royce before World War I. A Silver Ghost. It was gorgeous."
"You remember this?"
"Some of it," Jack said. "Images, like everything. Impressions. Stories. But I'm putting it back together. I told you. And I have pictures. Some letters."
"You used to ride with him?"
"Yeah. And once he realized I could handle it, he let me take over a few times. But you know, passenger in a rally race's not just sitting. You gotta have your weight in the car just right, where it'll do the driver the most good. People used to throw snow on the road so the car would spin out. They like a good crash. He thought I was brave. I don't think I ever told him that I wasn't. Maybe I did though. I hope so anyway. Can't remember. Different set of standards when you can't die, right? He didn't have anything like that, but he did it all anyway. We'd bet him he couldn't do something and he'd turn right around and do it -- stay up all night drinking and then head out and break another record. He lived hard. Used to give the top-brass fits. You could always count on him to show up in the crunch, but 'til then...."
"Sounds like you," Ianto said.
Jack laughed a little. "Yeah, I guess. Birds of a feather, or something."
"Don't know how you could confuse us though," Ianto added. "Doesn't sound anything at all like me."
"No," Jack said. "Just the driving. You looked so happy in the car."
"I was," Ianto said.
"It'll come back eventually," Jack said
Ianto looked puzzled, although he thought he shouldn't have. It was like Jack to will the world to suit his own demands. "How do you know?" he asked.
Jack shrugged. "I get shot, and I heal. I think it's the same. Feels the same. Just slower."
"How does it feel?" Ianto asked, curiously.
"Itchy," Jack said and frowned.
Ianto laughed. "Really?
"Really," Jack said. "Headaches too."
Ianto made a face, suspecting that Jack was probably understating the degree of pain involved.
"Hey, that's a lot of death by oxygen deprivation," Jack said, as if to justify the complaint.
Ianto nodded, not really sure what to say. "How's the claustrophobia?" he finally asked.
Jack looked at the ceiling. "We work in an underground bunker."
"And you haven't run screaming yet."
"But I want to, Ianto. I really do," he replied, and Ianto didn't think that was about claustrophobia at all.
Jack handed him the keys back when they left, and Ianto took them without remark. Jack seemed sad, and Ianto wasn't sure if it was because dinner hadn't gone however Jack had originally planned it to be (not that Ianto had the slightest idea what that was -- how could Jack take him somewhere like that and know what it was and then be angry when the state of them came up?) or if it was because Jack was brooding over Jamie and a hundred year old car.
"Do you want company?" Ianto asked as they pulled up to the Plass.
Jack shook his head. "Not tonight. Go home. Sleep."
Ianto nodded, and Jack leaned forward to give him a small, chaste kiss. "And don't feel like you have to wait on me. Please."
"I'm just as stubborn as you are, Jack," Ianto said, his voice hard.
"Yeah," Jack said, his characteristic grin back in place. "And you scare the hell out of me."
Ianto smirked, but it wasn't entirely unkind. "Good."
Jack got out of the car and bounded up to the slab that would take him down into the Hub. As Ianto's eyes unavoidably slid away from him, he hit the gas and tried to imagine what Jack wanted of him. Was he really supposed to, in the midst of this life, go to a bar and pick up some bird and feel better? Well, Owen had done that sort of thing constantly, he mused. But then, it clearly never seemed to make Owen feel better at all.
But maybe without it, he'd have been even worse? Ianto didn't know, and Owen was no longer here to ask. He felt something sting in the back of his throat and could almost hear his friend swearing at him for being such a wet end.
"God, I'm pathetic," he said to himself as he turned a corner. It didn't matter, either way. He wasn't going to do it, even if he knew he should. Jack had ruined him, he thought in what was probably another fit of bitter childishness. It was him or nothing. All he could do was wait.
He wondered if he'd be able to get any sleep at all tonight, or if it'd be another broken night of feverish tossing and turning, nightmares and sweaty sheets.
Jack stood out on a rooftop, overlooking Cardiff. He was spending a lot of time up here lately, especially in the middle of the night. Climbing down into the cot under his office was manifestly out of the question at this point if he wanted to stay on the safe side of sane. Whatever that meant these days.
The lights of the city sparkled, and the breeze blew out his coat. He could breathe here. Nothing closing in, just him alone on top of the world.
If he closed his eyes and listened, he could almost hear a faint clicking somewhere in the back of his skull, as if new pathways were being laid, neurons falling over like a long chain of dominos, growing space for the enormous influx of memories to unspool. It hurt.
"What's happening to me?" he whispered into the dark. It didn't answer.
The tingle of his skin dissolving the first time he jumped through time, his mother's voice, the day his brother was born, his father's hands, the feel of coarse linen against his back, restraints chafing against his wrists, sand grasses, gunpowder, the brackish smell of the bay, explosions, dancing, music, licking the cleft of a thigh, blood and pearlescent tissue, kisses, the cool burn of alcohol, the buzz of a sonic weapon; sharp, painful, isolated touches without context, that kept expanding into the recesses of his brain.
"How does this end?"
Ianto answered the phone with a grunt before he could even get both his eyes open. Well, he thought bitterly, he'd managed to sleep then.
"Did you kill me?" he heard Jack's voice ask incredulously.
"What?" Ianto asked, feeling both annoyed and confused.
"Did. You. Kill. Me?" Jack asked again, spelling it out for him very slowly.
"Er." Ianto was stalling. Making words seemed hard, and if he'd been more awake, making these words would have been horrifying besides.
"In my office. Over the desk?"
"Um. Yeah."
"Well, I've remembered that then," Jack said, sounding understandably a bit startled, and clicked off.
Ianto stared at his mobile for a moment before letting it slip from his hand into the bed as he drifted back to sleep. If the nature of time as Jack presented it meant everything had already happened and was, in fact, happening all at once, maybe it also meant that none of this had ever happened. Ianto found the idea oddly comforting.
Continue to next part
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-21 04:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-21 04:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-21 04:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-21 04:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-22 09:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-22 12:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-22 03:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-21 05:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-21 05:18 pm (UTC)We're actually post Exit Wounds here -- so it's more the years that never were -- at least for the rest of the (surviving) team.
We will be visiting the matter of Jack's time on the Valiant later on in the series, however (due to the circular nature of the DW/TW timeline, our order for story posting is also somewhat circular).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-22 05:52 am (UTC)And now you've ripped my heart out by the roots.
Right now, I think this is the best Jack/Ianto fic I've ever read. (and I've read 'em all) *wipes tears and goes to read the next part* If you guys stop writing this, ever, I'll send my friend Guido to have a talk with you about kneecaps.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-22 12:52 pm (UTC)We'll be busy for a while (3 more pieces forward in time from here, 2 Jack/Nine/Rose pre-quel pieces, a Ianto pre-quel piece and two side pieces: on on Jack's childhood and one on the Valiant) are planned. They won't be posted in that order at all, as there's a plan that wraps them all together, but there all coming!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-22 03:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-22 09:25 am (UTC)The most I feel for Ianto though. He is given nothing. Jack barely gives him anything and he is working so hard. Anytime Jack gives him a moment, Jack destroys it because he's... broken and seemingly feels safer being as such. I guess in a way this is like dealing with Alzheimer in a loved one. They have better moments and they have terrible moments and Ianto's a fucking trooper for being so patient.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-22 12:53 pm (UTC)Ianto's a trooper, but Ianto is also CRAZY, hence Jack's little dig bout Lisa. A sane man couldn't have done this. It's only Ianto obsessiveness and his desire (no matter how indenial about it he is) to possewss people through his care for them that makes this shit even start to sort out. Jack is damn lucky.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-22 08:38 pm (UTC)This is definitely the variation on what happened to Jack when he was buried for so long - repeated death and resurrection, and after so long, memory fades. The true horror post-EW (for Jack, at least) is not the deaths of Tosh and Owen. People die on Jack all the time. It's that loss of memory, of self.
Had to go to bed before reading the second half last night. Heading there now.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-22 08:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-24 01:29 pm (UTC)OMG!
translation i love your work:)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-24 01:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-27 04:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-27 02:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-26 04:25 am (UTC)This may be the best line in the history of the world.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-26 04:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-26 12:02 pm (UTC)Thank you for commenting. I'd forgotten about this.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-27 05:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-24 08:25 pm (UTC)I have so many comments for you both-but I'll save them for in person! I mean, I'm printing this stuff out and reading it on my trips home it's that good!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-24 08:37 pm (UTC)We're thinking of getting some webspace to put these stories up! I'm getting real tired of LJ's stupid post-length restrictions.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-10 01:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-10 06:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-05 06:42 pm (UTC)This was heart-breaking. I suppose a lot of us can relate a little to what's happened to Jack and therefore Ianto; my grandmother is painfully forgetful these days.
I never thought of Jack enduring 2000 years underground this way; it's just too horrific to contemplate. But there you did it. It weirdly dredged up the memory of my daughter having hip surgery at 18 months old. She was in a hip spica afterwards (plaster from waist to ankles) and for 24 hours after the surgery her muscles spasmed in her legs because she couldn't move them. It kept jerking her awake. It was the worst thing I have ever had to witness. So imagining that happening over and over Jack's whole body, as well as suffocating, it's just utterly horrible.
My heart breaks for Ianto, because he's mourning the person who's right there in front of him.
You two really know how to write sad.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-05 08:32 pm (UTC)This is, I know, one of Kali's favorites, but I haven't looked at it in a long time. It's much tighter than I remember it being (so thank you for being new to the party, you've made me reread a lot of old stuff with fresh eyes). I don't want to say anything else since you've not go through it yet, but this is one of the hardest/most exhausting ones. There are moments in the others, but this is a grind of misery.
Kali and I aren't so much fans of hurt/comfort as we both have different but very significant relationships with sorrow, with the beauty of sadness, with ideas of aloneness (we're both only kids), so yeah, it's kinda what we do, although the broader arc is not intended as a tragedy.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-05 09:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 07:54 pm (UTC)I feel completely heartbroken for Jack. Off to part 2!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 12:08 pm (UTC)I however find much more of interest in your idea. :-}
On to part two.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-24 06:44 am (UTC)