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DW/TW Fic: There Are Some Men Who Should Have Mountains to Bear Their Names to Time (Part 4)
Title: There Are Some Men Who Should Have Mountains To Bear Their Names To Time
Pairing/Characters: Jack/Ianto, Ten, +TW team, +sundry members of DW Cast
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rm & kalichan
Rating/Warning: NC-17, slash, plot, religion (!!), and porn.
Summary: Some people say goodbye and others say hello.
Wordcount: ~32,000 words, posted in five parts
Authors' Notes: This is the penultimate installment of our series, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. The title is from a poem by Leonard Cohen; summary is, of course, courtesy The Beatles. Next up: the final installment of the main story arc, though we will be returning to the 'verse at some point after that for some digressions and interludes, and a DVD commentary! Just prior to this, we posted two prequels (one for Jack, and one for Ianto) which are fairly important to the conclusion of the series. They are numbered 8 & 9 in the links below if you'd like to catch up.
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 | 6. Many of My Favorite Things Are Broken | 6.5 Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Truth, Beauty: or, A Child's Guide to Modern Physics | 7. In Our Bedroom After the War | 8. And I Cannot Know How Long She Has Dreamed of All of You [Jack/Nine/Rose] | 9. The Spectacular Catastrophe of Your Endless Childhood [Ianto/OFCs, Ianto/Lisa]
There Are Some Men Who Should Have Mountains to Bear Their Names to Time, Part 1
There Are Some Men Who Should Have Mountains to Bear Their Names to Time, Part 2
There Are Some Men Who Should Have Mountains to Bear Their Names to Time, Part 3
When the Face had finally dismissed him, Ianto's guide, still nameless, had come for him again, worried this time that he had missed the midday meal and a little jealous too; Ianto thought Jack-at-home, as it seemed he was thinking of his Jack now, would have been pleased.
"I... can I eat in my room. I just... I need..." Ianto shrugged. People felt like too much and it was too hard to express.
"We don't eat alone here," his guide said kindly. "Ever. If you would like I could take the meal with you, though, even if people will talk."
Ianto thought he sounded bemused, maybe even flirtatious, but grim too. He realized he could ask after the etiquette of the thing, but found he mostly didn't care. The presence of one stranger was less unsettling than that of many, and the quiet, surely a priest could do quiet, would be welcome.
"Yes," he said with relief. "Thank you."
And it was quiet at first, and for that Ianto was extremely grateful. They'd collected their food -- all cold items, more of the bread, some odd fruits, and generous slices of something that looked like chicken or fish to Ianto, but tasted more like beef -- from a sideboard in one of the common areas, which the guide informed him were kept continuously filled for those guests or pilgrims who arrived between meal times.
Despite some odd looks, his guide -- Ianto was still having some trouble thinking of Jack as the focus of a religion, and too, one with priests -- ushered him back to his room, and they sat on the floor and began to eat. It reminded him oddly of picnics by the sea with his parents as a child -- crisps and sausages and cheese and thermoses full of soup, with apples and bars of chocolate for after.
The silence lasted for quite some time, until it was broken by the guide. "You know Him," the man said, and Ianto realised that this conversation was why his desire to eat privately had been acceded to.
Although it wasn't a question, Ianto nodded. "Yes," he said. He wasn't sure that he was meant to be revealing any of this but found he didn't care. The Doctor had deposited him here without without any sort of a roadmap, he thought savagely, so he could either like it or do the next best thing.
"How?" the guide asked.
Ianto laughed humourlessly. "He's quite old, you know. Been kicking around a long time."
"And you are... what do you do for Him?"
"Whatever he needs," Ianto said.
"Like us."
"It's bit different. He was more... human shaped. Before. When I know him."
"Ahh," the guide said delicately. There was a pause, and then he added hesitantly, "you seem angry, Mr. Jones."
"I do?"
"Yes."
"I don't know why. Everything is bigger than I imagined it to be. I should be happy. I didn't want him to be alone. And he's not. Which is good."
"He is, of course. Alone."
"He has you and the rest of his priests."
"We are not of the same... order of magnitude."
"No one is," Ianto said bitterly.
"I do not know if that is so." After a moment of consideration, his guide went on to add, his tone dry, "I think He would say that length is not the only measure of a man."
Ianto laughed. He could just imagine the Face saying something similar, his thought shaded with extravagant innocence, while his tentacles waved suggestively.
The guide winked at him, and Ianto felt the hard knot clenched inside his chest begin to loosen. Just slightly, but it was good -- jealousy, aside -- that Jack had warmth and humour and sarcastic beings who literally worshipped the ground he walked on (even if he couldn't actually walk anymore) to keep him company in the long watches of his endless days.
And the stories. He had those too.
Having finished eating, Ianto stood up, and went to stand by the window. He looked out over a courtyard -- there were plants with little labels posted up by the beds some of which looked very odd, and some of which looked identical to ones he knew from earth; it looked almost like a cloister garden, except with plants from all over the galaxy, or perhaps even all of time and space. Some suit wearing priests were strolling about in groups of two and three; a few children were playing what looked like hide-and-seek.
"I wish the Doctor had let me pack a bag," Ianto said irrelevantly. "I'm not used to wearing the same clothes all the time. The sonic refresher might keep me clean, but it doesn't do much for rumples. And I don't even know how long I'm to be here."
The guide stood. "If you wish, we could give you some of ours."
Ianto blinked. "But aren't they... I don't know, your vestments or something? Is that really appropriate?"
"You are practically wearing them anyway," the man pointed out sensibly. "Unless you had rather we obtained some more... civilian garments for you."
Ianto shook his head, not anxious to feel a fool in one of those robe type things he'd seen a few people wearing.
"I shall have some delivered to your room," the guide said.
"Thank you," Ianto said and then trailed off lamely. "I really don't know how to address you. Are all of you... nameless?"
"Those who wish it. Not all."
"Why did you... never mind, it's not my affair."
After a moment's hesitation, the man said, "I do not mind explaining, but I do not know if I can make you understand." He looked straight at Ianto and seemed to reach some conclusion. "But perhaps you will."
Ianto waited.
"I wanted to give Him everything. So that all that I am would be for His service, a tool to be honed and shaped into something sharp and fine."
"Why?" Ianto asked, thinking of his flat that he would never give up and the small gestures through which he tried to hang on to some remnant of the man he'd been before Jack had come into his life. "Does he need that? Does he want it?"
"No," the nameless man said. "But I do. And for that, one must make sacrifices."
"Oh," Ianto said sadly, letting his eyes flick away out to the cloister garden again. "I keep trying, you know, or trying not to. I'm not sure. It's not... it's not religious. And it's...."
The guide tipped his head to the side and smiled, his mouth closed and eyes bemused. "Whatever it is, where you're from, it's just love and stories, as long as it serves that, I suspect you're doing just fine."
Ianto nodded. "We both are. Were. Something," he said softly, and ran his fingers through his hair with a nervous laugh.
"I should be jealous of you," the man said, simply.
Ianto tried to push away all the fashions in which he found that disturbing. "Why aren't you?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. It deserves examination. You've handed us many mysteries. Maybe I'm jealous of Him."
"I want to go home," Ianto said softly, not caring if it was a rude response to what may or may not have been a clumsy pass.
"You are home, Mr. Jones."
"How's that?"
"I think we can both agree, home is where He is, can't we?"
His guide gave a small bow and backed out of the room, as if Ianto was someone important or the subject of a particularly elaborate joke. Considering what had just become clear between them on the matter of congress with gods, Ianto supposed both were reasonably true and considered the possibility that he ought to resign himself to this place. Just for a bit. Until the Doctor came back. Which had to be soon if it was going to be at all.
It was, after all, really the least he could do for Jack, who if he could ever know about this would have shouted at him for squandering such an opportunity on misery and then asked him if he had fucked the priest.
Ianto laughed, because he knew Jack would be disappointed he hadn't (and he wasn't going to, although he was maybe going to have to concentrate on that a little harder than he would have liked, because comfort and kindness certainly held a certain appeal right now and this nameless man and he seemed to be of the same tribe of loss), but then would no doubt rapidly lose interest -- Jack liked transgression -- when Ianto noted that celibacy didn't seem to be part of the deal.
Clothes came, as he'd been promised, in the arms of a girl and Ianto wasn't sure whether she was shy or mute. While he had hoped for black, the grey would no doubt have to do. He hoped it wouldn't cause too much confusion or that he wouldn't be left alone anywhere where it could. Impersonating a priest was low on his list of things to do, although again, he knew Jack, and maybe even the Face, might appreciate it.
While he had intended to change and explore, and out of some warped sense of duty perhaps seek out the ludicrous idea of Jack's holy book (surely there was one), he found himself unwilling to give up his solitude which seemed as bright and perfect and slightly sad as it did in his flat on solitary Sundays. Certainly, it seemed ordinary if he didn't think too hard, and that was gratitude, deep and thrumming.
He found himself kneeling on the floor of his small room by the bed, but whether it was in some strange experimental attempt to grasp what Jack had become in this time and place to others if not himself, or the recollection of a childhood comfort, Ianto wasn't sure.
Jack was, Ianto knew, going to be angry when he got back. He'd known that from the beginning, from the very second the Doctor had touched his shoulder in Tesco (and wasn't that the start of some horror movie or romance or something else just simply bloody awful?). But what he also knew, now that he was letting himself think on it, was that Jack was going to be angry because he was scared or lonely or felt abandoned or betrayed. Right now, Jack was fucking miserable and probably driving the rest of the team to insanity and there was nothing Ianto could do or could have done to change that.
Except leave a note.
Except break all the rules.
Ianto sighed and wondered if it was the Face of Boe being, well, just a face, that made the absence of Jack's hands so damn palpable to him right now. This wasn't what he had imagined when Jack had once said that maybe he could show him the stars sometime. And it sure as hell wasn't what he had meant when he'd drunkenly offered to share the night sky and the lonely universe.
He sank down onto his hip and crossed his arms under his head on the bed and thought of Tosh. She would have loved the Face easily, Ianto thought and envied her.
***
Temples are cavernous places, but so are minds. Quiet, but made for echoing, and a place for secrets to be kept unhidden. The Face has learned, so long ago that he has forgotten when or how, not to listen widely, lest sense be lost in chaos, but he can't help but feel the rhythms of a place, its moods and the disturbances of joy, the recycling and replacements of people, the studious stride of grief and the shapes of longing. He knows also particularly the approach of those for whom he has specific fondnesses and senses the intent and desire of touch as if it could actually reach his flesh.
One of his priests, one of his favorites, sits on the top step of his platform in the audience hall and curls into himself just slightly, leaning against the Face's glass. The Face observes the man as he silently debates whether he is giving the Face his grief or seeking without merit, his comfort.
The Face would, if he could, stroke the boy's hair but knows it is best he can't. Denial suits this one and the Face humors him as he can, even if it is hard work, even if gods must know a bit of shame in their lies.
This creature is, in some ways, the happiest and easiest among those here, which is why the Face marvels that he has, it seems, connived his way into so strange and arduous a test. It is no way, the Face thinks as quietly, softly, silently as he can, to forget one's own name.
Their young visitor knows better ways, of course. He dreams of them, quiet and easy, rough palms hooked into the crooks of his elbows hoisting him into bed and pinning him before the one thing that is, for a moment, all his world and the Face can't help but purr with a pleasure which is not that of lonely and longing boys, but is the product merely of remembering briefly, the shape of his own hands that languish now surely in atoms.
***
The two days -- which Ianto had identified as approximately 1.27 times longer than the days at home thanks to his trusty stopwatch and a facility for observation and mental arithmetic -- fell into what might be called a pattern: waking, putting on another one of the perennially grey suits offered to him, and then wandering through the temple hallways, trying to imprint the shape of the place on his memory.
He didn't know quite why this seemed so necessary, but it did, and so he obeyed the impulse. This he followed with breakfast, seated at the long low benches, squeezed in between priests and pilgrims and not knowing which one of them he was.
And then the Face would send for him.
He would talk for several hours -- drinking water and wine when his throat felt too parched to continue speaking and when he needed it just to get through some particular episode, and eventually his recital of his and Jack's life together just seemed like another form of prayer, although Ianto did not know to whom.
Each day before sunset, the Face would inevitably dismiss him.
"Why then?" Ianto had asked, on the second day.
"Twilight is the time for revealing secrets and telling stories. Much easier to unburden yourself to those you cannot clearly see," the Face had replied.
"Oh," Ianto had said. "That explains a great deal, actually."
He still found it hard to imagine Jack -- who talked more than he listened, and who hated paperwork with a passion -- as some kind of recording angel, but then he'd remember Jack's lockbox filled with photographs and artifacts, and realize that even after all this time, and all these adventures, he was still in danger of buying Jack's party line.
So Ianto would retreat to the safety of his room or the cloistered garden where he could look up at the alien sky and wish that he could feel wonder instead of regret. And he would stare at the curious alien hazelnut that had in a way brought him here and wonder briefly what it was. But he didn't ask.
Sometimes his guide would catch his eye, and Ianto would feel a slight frisson of tension -- but he couldn't tell if it was the kind you got when there was sexual energy in the offing, or if it was the kind of shiver that his mum used to call someone walking over your grave.
Ianto figured that wasn't possible, unless somewhere, or more likely somewhen, back at Torchwood, someone was leaning against the box into which he'd be shoved when he was done. Which he was -- done, that was -- because at this moment in time, whenever it was, he was dead under what the Doctor had indicated was some sort of great blue pyramid.
Maybe back home, Jack was in the mortuary contemplating which box to shove his corpse into when he got back, Ianto thought, and felt his lips stretch unwillingly into a smile.
On the third day, when he had done with telling how Gwen and Maeve and Andy and Ravi had joined them, grasping for more, he began to tell the Face stories that he had only heard or been only peripherally present for.
First things he had discovered for himself -- stories about Jack that he had stolen for Lisa out of the Torchwood archives to lay at her feet and make her smile. And then later, how Jack had found Owen and Tosh, who they had all lost; about Suzie who had been terrifying; of John Hart and his taste for explosions; and about Gwen, who Ianto was pretty sure his Jack still loved.
Then it was the stories he had been given, tales of traveling shows, car races, and wars, tales of Jamie and Alex and Jack's wife, dead long before Ianto had even been born. It was then that Ianto began to fully grasp the shattering immensity of it all, that his stories would all be finished soon and that his life with Jack was the smallest imaginable fraction, and soon it would be over, and all their memories done.
He cried then, not gulping sobs, but a slow, continuous seep of tears that left his eyes burning and red. The Face courteously pretended not to notice, and let Ianto scrub his sleeve over his eyes, over and over, without commenting on it.
And then, slowly, not knowing if some of this too had been forgotten -- does someone forget the beginning as easily as the middle? -- he began to tell the Face the last stories he had, stories of Jack's childhood, the little pieces that Jack had told him, quietly in the night, never looking at his face.
***
Even with so many millennia behind him, and who knows how many stretching forth in front of him, the nights still feel long to the Face, still feel as if there is something he ought to be doing.
It has been a long time since he has slept.
In his quarters, when the temple is mostly silent save for the vague mental skitterings of dreams and the sounds of people breathing to disturb the quiet, he casts his mind out among the stars, into the black curtain of space, and remembers like a ghost the sensation of falling through the air, and then coming to rest under gentle waves of peaceful, unknowing darkness.
He misses it. And in the missing remembers it. For loss, as the Face has always known, is the threshold of memory.
The Face thinks of destiny, and time, and their great spiraling dance until the first lightening of the sky at dawn.
***
Ianto almost didn't expect to be summoned on the fourth day. And yet, still the call came, exactly in the same way that it had before, delivered by his still nameless guide.
Things proceeded as usual, until he stood in front of the Face, and there was an echoing, expectant silence in the room.
Ianto cleared his throat, the sound harsh against the quiet. "There is nothing more I can tell you," he said as loudly as he could, not wanting to cry again.
"Have you no questions then?" the Face asked. "Nothing I can give you in return?"
Ianto shook his head.
"Truly?" the Face prodded. "For I will answer them."
Walking over to the window, Ianto sat down on the sill and looked out. Many of the priest seems to be there, moving about in various, purposeful ways. His own guide looked to be directing traffic among some of the pilgrims and visitors that had recently come. He looked very organized about the whole thing. Ianto almost wanted to go out there and assist.
"Could you tell me his name?" Ianto asked abruptly, still looking outside.
There was a pause. "I could," the Face admitted slowly. "Do you think that I should? Would it not be betraying a confidence?"
"He told me he'd given it to you so it wouldn't be his anymore," Ianto said. "Doesn't that make it yours to do what you like with?"
The Face seemed to chuckle. "You are quite clever, as I have remarked before."
"That's why you keep me around."
"His name is Dovev," the Face said.
"Why did you let him give it to you?"
"I have no hands with which to speak any longer," the Face said, and watched as Ianto put his own palms up to the glass, and cried.
It was a long time later when Ianto could talk again. "Why did I come here?" he mumbles finally, voice cracked and sore. "Why did I have to come here?"
"You came to bring me back something which I had lost," the Face said, after another long silence.
"What is it?" Ianto asked, needing somehow to know exactly what the truth was, even as he was sure it would not be comforting.
"It is my child," the Face said.
Ianto blinked.
"Or it will be," he continued. "They tell me their stories and I fold them in amongst the rest, within my memory. But even that grows too large for a single mind to encompass. Eventually, some pieces break away, and then, after some time, they grow. To have a life of their own. Short in comparison to mine, it's true. None of my children have lived long. But they live again. And that is what I do here, young Ianto Jones. I am not a god, but as I told you before, I share my gift of life as best I may."
"Oh," Ianto said, somewhat staggered at the precision of the reply. "So I was some sort of... midwife?"
"I suppose that is one way of looking at the matter. Or perhaps--"
"Any other way is a bit too disturbing for me, thanks, and if you don't mind not waggling your tentacles at me suggestively, Jack," Ianto said, before he thought.
The Face laughed, and Ianto was caught again by how easy it was to fall into all this. He almost wanted to say so, but instead said, plaintively, "I thought it was a giant hazelnut."
"An easy mistake to make," the Face said with mock-seriousness, and Ianto laughed with the release of tension. "Any other questions?"
Ianto started to shake his head and then suddenly remembered something. "That mural thing... on the mountain?"
"Yes?" the Face asked.
"You made it," Ianto said slowly, as the pieces came together. The caricatures, Jack's hands.
"Yes," the Face agreed. "So I should not forget."
"You left yourself a note," Ianto said.
"It was very important, to more than just myself. A message I will someday pass on. So that time unfolds in the way that it must."
Ianto nodded.
"I began making it the day I realised I had forgotten someone's name. I do not remember the name, only the feeling of the absence. I was shaped like one of you then still. A long time ago now."
***
The boy puts his hands up to the glass -- possibly the first time anyone has done this to comfort instead of to be comforted.
For the boy, it is also the last time, though he doesn't yet know it.
Because around his neck hangs a piece of metal that the Face recognizes.
And it is glowing.
***
"It's time for you to go."
Ianto opened his eyes and stepped back just fractionally from the Face's tank. It was an odd impulse, he thought, to want to maintain appropriate speaking distance with something that was mostly thinking at him.
"I don't understand."
"The Doctor has come back for you," the Face said.
Ianto looked down at the key, open mouthed. Some part of him, he knew, hadn't believed it would ever glow and that the Doctor would ever come back.
"I'm not ready," he blurted as if any of this had been up to him at any point.
The Face seemed to scoff. "You have no more to tell me and nothing else to ask."
"But --"
"Go home to me. It seems I will have missed you."
"But we don't even know if I do go home. You don't remember and no one's told me --"
Shhhhhhh.
The Face of Boe shushed him as if he were a frightened child, and it was exactly the sensation of comfort he had longed for in every moment of self-hating panic that had graced his life. It was also startlingly erotic. And terribly, terribly unfair.
"Now you know why Dovev gives me his name," the Face said, reading, Ianto assumed, his mind.
"I already knew," he said, somehow full of fierce pride. He might be small and human and young, after all, but he wasn't stupid.
The Face laughed. "Yes, I suppose so. He will escort you back to the cave."
"And where do I leave this?" Ianto asked, indicating the box with the hazelnut, the seed, the child, whatever it was best to call it, again.
"In his care. As you must leave me."
"Now," Ianto replied, meaning for it to be a question and failing.
"Yes, Ianto Jones, now."
"I --" Not knowing what to say, he leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the glass. The Face was silent, and Ianto knew what it was to feel pinned and memorized like perhaps a million dead moths that might not have ever even existed.
It was his guide who pulled him away from the glass, and he was glad of it, because it would have had to have been someone, and Ianto didn't think he could bear a stranger.
He knew he was supposed to have made other friends here, but he hadn't been able to stand the thought of it and smiling at this strange man he was glad of that too, even as his own eyes were watery again, and wasn't that embarrassing? Ianto thought he had never cried so much in his life
"I've brought your things," the other said simply -- Ianto tried not to think of him with his name, it didn't seem right somehow -- and then gestured towards the case Ianto had been dragging about with him all week. "I'll take that from you at the end."
Ianto nodded, grateful to finally have something resembling clear directions in this mad place. He turned to the Face again, but the priest shook his head.
"One cannot say goodbye to memory."
"No, of course not," Ianto muttered as if he didn't believe it at all. Certainly, he had no patience for a rote phrase his guide probably uttered to a thousand pilgrims a day.
When the man slipped an arm around his waist, Ianto wished he felt strong enough to shove it off.
He did, eventually, but not until they were outside, and trudging silently up the mountain they had once strolled down.
When they entered the cave again, Ianto asked that they stop for his eyes to adjust to the light, but Dovev merely took his hand and led on grimly, Ianto thought, as if his going was an insult to them all.
When they found the TARDIS the Doctor was sitting in front of it on a large rock, tossing a small rock up and down in his hands as if it were the most novel and excellent way to spend a bit of free time ever.
"Well, there you are!" he exclaimed bounding up and then pausing to glare at Ianto's hand still linked with the priest's.
Ianto felt his guide try to pull away, but he squeezed his hand instead and merely glared at the Doctor.
"Thought I was going to have to leave without you! You boys certainly took your time," the Doctor said, and Ianto wanted to scowl at the innuendo in it. Surely this was how the man talked to Jack too, and that just wasn't acceptable.
"We had to walk up a mountain," Ianto said sharply.
"And parting takes time," the priest said.
"Yes, well," the Doctor managed, shifting from foot to foot, awkwardly.
"Don't look so uncomfortable," Ianto snapped, "you haven't the right."
"Haven't the right! I'm the one stuck here in a cave!" the Doctor chortled, but there was an edge to it, and Ianto knew enough to be unsettled even if his guide maybe didn't.
"Choose a better landing spot next time!" Ianto said, full of frustration. This wasn't supposed to end like this, not stupid and petty and confused.
"Well, come along then," the Doctor said.
"Are you sure?" Ianto asked.
The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Would I have come back if I were planning to abandon you?"
"I mean," said Ianto through grit teeth, "are you sure I'm supposed to go back?"
"Are you sure you're supposed to...? Don't be ridiculous. Jack would have my hide if I..."
"But Jack's here," Ianto said.
"Your Jack," the Doctor clarified.
"Yes," Ianto said simply.
"Oh for... tell me you did not just get seduced by a giant head in a jar!" the Doctor shouted.
Behind him, he heard the priest chuckle darkly.
Ianto ignored the Doctor's entreaty. "When am I supposed to be, Doctor?"
"Not here," the Doctor said, seriously. "I promise you. And I haven't broken my word to you yet."
Ianto nodded. "Are you planning to later?"
The Doctor looked down at his shoes. "I think that probably depends."
"On what?"
"What promises you force out of me," the Doctor said quietly.
"Trust me, I know better."
Before the Doctor could say anything else, Ianto felt the hand he was holding slip from his.
"You do need to go, Mr. Jones."
Ianto laughed nervously and ran his hand back through his hair. "Couldn't you use my first name by now?"
"You didn't ask," the priest said simply.
Ianto snorted. "This is me asking."
"Goodbye then, Ianto. I'll remember you, as best I can."
Ianto stared at him for a moment and then smiled like a cat. "Goodbye, Dovev."
"He told you?"
"I asked. Cajoled really. Since you gave it to him, I told him he could do as he pleased with it, so he told me. It's nice to say."
"But --"
Ianto shook his head. "You don't get it, either, do you? That's what betrayals are for. Now you can give it to him again."
The priest gaped at him for a moment, and Ianto leaned forward to kiss him chastely on the lips.
"Ianto!" the Doctor said sharply.
Ianto ignored him. "Thank you," he said to the priest, putting as much intensity as he could into the words. "For everything. You'll look after him?"
"As you have done," the priest replied simply.
Ianto looked towards the Doctor, who nodded slightly towards the box. He took a deep breath, and then placed it into the man's hands. "I believe," he said, "this belongs here."
The man who had once been called Dovev took the box and stepped back. Ianto looked over his shoulder and realized that the TARDIS door was open, and the Doctor was standing in the aperture, backlit such that he almost looked as if he were glowing.
"Ianto Jones," the Doctor said. "It's time to go home."
"I have to go," Ianto got out, feeling his voice shake a bit. Before he could disgrace himself again, he stepped back into the TARDIS, and heard the door swing shut behind him, almost of its own volition.
He stood there, feeling his eyes sting and his limbs tremble with the tension of holding them still, wanting nothing more to fly back out the door, maybe even stay here until the span of his life ran out.
"Ianto," he heard from somewhere very far away, "keep this lever pulled." The Doctor was pressing something into his hand. "And hang on to this." The Doctor darted around the console in a frenzy of movement, and Ianto swallowed down all his regret -- he'd been given a task, and he needed to do it. That was his function.
So he hung onto the lever with one hand, and pulled the cord he'd been handed with the other, and for a few minutes, he thought of nothing else at all.
Then finally all the movement came to a stop, and the Doctor was prying his hands loose from the controls. "You can let go now," he said. "Thank you."
Ianto let his hands go limp as he turned to look at the TARDIS door. "Are we here?" he asked, feeling somewhat dazed still. "Am I back?"
"Well, not quite." The Doctor folded his arms across his chest, and lounged easily against the wall, watching him with steady eyes.
"Where...I mean...when are we?"
"Ianto," the Doctor said, and then paused for a second.
"What? Is there something more I need to--"
"No," the Doctor said quickly. "Nothing like that. We're just going to wait here for a bit. Nice, peaceful. A little relaxation. Maybe a nice cuppa? Or a drink? I've got some Arcturan brandy that's got a kick like you wouldn't believe--"
"You said you were going to take me home!"
"And I am," the Doctor assured him. "But not just yet. You look like you've been through a war. Several wars, killed and then brought back, but only half way."
"I'm fine," Ianto said, trying to sound as detached as possible.
The Doctor laughed.
"What?" Ianto said sharply.
"Just finally understood what it might sound like from the other end, that's all. I know someone who would've been proud." He looked a bit distant and sad as he gently stroked one of the TARDIS controls before going on. "You're not fine, Ianto. But you will be. And we're staying right here until that's a bit closer to true."
Ianto stared at the floor, without really seeing it. Images of the Face, the temple, the mountains kept going through his head in a continuous loop. "Why did you do it?" he asked finally. "Was it just for fun? To see us dance like puppets on string?"
"No," the Doctor said. "I don't enjoy that."
"You're lying," Ianto said.
"All right. Sometimes I do enjoy it, but not this time. I did it for you, and for Jack. And because I couldn't."
"Why not?" Ianto said, feeling his voice quiver a bit and hating that it was. "You didn't need me, not really. You could have done this all yourself."
"Did Jack ever explain to you why I don't see him any more than I can help?"
"I thought that was just because you were a bastard."
The Doctor grinned. "Well, a bit, perhaps. But that's not why. Or at least, not the only reason. Jack's become a fixed point, Ianto. A fact. A nail driven through the fabric of time, pinning it down. It wasn't meant to happen like that, but it did. And now we're stuck. When he says something, it has to happen that way. What he remembers, what he sees -- it's all there is. It can't be undone, or rewritten. Not even by me. He kills other choices just by existing."
"That's not his fault," Ianto protested. "He didn't ask for that."
"Of course it's not his fault. But it's the way it is. The Face of Boe told me that I would see him three times, and no more. And that's already happened. There's nothing I can do. I can't change it. And I can't help trying to do that anymore than you lot can stop breathing. Because timelines shift around me. That's what I am. The nature of a Time Lord. If I were to -- well, what happens when you've got a nail driven through a cloth, and then you pull on the cloth?"
Ianto thought for a moment. "It tears?"
"Exactly. Paradox. A rip in space and time."
"So why not just leave it? Why did you need to get this back to him? Why bring me into it? Why leave me there for so long?"
"I thought you should know," the Doctor said simply. "And I thought Jack deserved to have someone who knows. You can't love someone without knowing them. Not really. Not enough."
"But does Jack know?" Ianto asked, horrified.
The Doctor shrugged. "Where's Jack from, Ianto?"
"The future," Ianto said, annoyed that he was being asked to think when it was clear he could just be told. Especially when he had asked a yes or no question.
"Not when. Where."
"The Boeshane peninsula, not that I've the slightest idea wh--"
"It's a bit of a backwater, that peninsula. Far flung part of a far flung planet. Barely a functioning colony in Jack's childhood, only been there for a couple of generations. Huge big deal when our Jack gets himself signed up with Time Agency. Wound up a bit of a poster boy."
"So?"
"Sooooo ... he told me they called him 'the Face of Boe.'"
"That doesn't mean he knows!" Ianto blurted.
"No, it doesn't. Also doesn't mean he's telling the truth. But how could he be Jack and not suspect something by now?"
"Easily," Ianto said. "He's good at denial."
"Not that good."
"No," Ianto said sadly, "I suppose not."
"Have you eaten today?" the Doctor asked brightly and abruptly.
"I don't even know what day it is."
"Oh, well, it's not any day! Not here."
"Great," Ianto muttered. "I'm sorry, Doctor, but I just want to go home."
"Have you decided where that is again, then?" the Doctor asked seriously.
Ianto tried to answer and couldn't. Home didn't exist in a universe that behaved like this, and he wished more than a bit that he could have stayed asleep to it all and never left Cardiff in the first place -- not this time and not any time.
The Doctor sighed and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I'm not very good at taking care of people, Ianto Jones, especially people who don't like me. The TARDIS, she's a little more handy with it though, so I'm going to give you directions and you're going to remember them, and then you're going to go lie down and take a nap. And then you'll wash your face and have some food and I'll take you home. Just like I promised."
"What am I, a child?"
"Yes, Mr. Jones, you are."
Ianto was too exhausted to argue. He wasn't even sure he disagreed enough that arguing would make sense and so he followed the Doctor's instructions, out doors, over ramps, down stairs, lefts and rights and odd turns he had no idea how he remembered except that the ship didn't seem to give him any other options and when he came to the right door he only knew it for what it was because it opened to him before he could even fuss with the mechanism of it.
A bed, a desk, a lamp -- everything that should have made a guest room look utilitarian and only didn't to him, because it was clearly part of the TARDIS and therefore organic and almost pleasing and well lit if nothing else.
Ianto laughed and wrapped his arms around himself. The bed was certainly big enough, not the cot-sized affair that had been his at the temple, but even as the space was clearly impersonal, he felt like he was intruding too much to do anything more than toe his shoes off before lying down, whereas had he been home, he would have promptly dragged his duvet up over his face to muffle the existence of the world.
Of course, out here, Ianto was fairly certain the world didn't exist at all. At least right now.
The TARDIS might have been good at taking care of people, certainly, it seemed it -- she, he corrected himself -- had prevented him from getting lost, and that was good, because whatever his fate was supposed to be he was pretty sure it wasn't wandering lost in the innards of a decrepit time-traveling police callbox.
Even so, he was almost surprised he couldn't sleep, as if he had expected to be drugged, or at least lulled by something strange and alien. Not that the strange or alien was generally proving to be very lulling, but Ianto had to work with what theories he had.
Maybe when Jack was done being furious with him for this terrible secret, he would laugh at his misery about all this. It was something Ianto normally loathed, but right now he couldn't think of anything that sounded more welcome.
He sat up and looked around the room. He was on a fucking spaceship -- timeship, something! -- and he hadn't even looked in the night table drawers to see what the intergalactic time-travel version of a Gideon Bible was.
He reached over and tugged at the drawer, and sure enough it slid open easily and lightly with the unmistakable sound of a book shifting within. If it really was a Gideon Bible he suspected he was either going to be oddly delighted or completely disappointed.
But it wasn't. It was a novel. A Sherlock Holmes novel, old and battered with a cracked leather spine, like those that had belonged to his father and sat in his flat on the bottom shelf of the large bookcase, when Jack didn't have one of them resting beside the bed or left randomly in the kitchen.
While it was in worse condition than the volumes in his house, being clearly just a bit more brittle, still he knew with certainty that it was his, just as this room, utilitarian and, well, awfully blue, was surely, he realized now, Jack's little domain when traveling with the Doctor.
Ianto replaced the book in the drawer, shutting it gently. At least he knew where home was now. At least it seemed happy, even if he wanted to hold that blasted book to his chest and cry.
And he was starting to wonder, how on earth he was ever going to manage to keep all this to himself.
When he finally left Jack's room, face composed again even if the feelings inside didn't match, and made his way back through the maze of hallways to the console room of the TARDIS, he decided to ask the Doctor just that.
"So," the Doctor said, without turning to look at him standing in the doorway, and continuing to fiddle with something, "had a nice kip?"
"That's really disconcerting," Ianto said, thinking that even the line of the Doctor's back looked smug.
"But you aren't disconcerted. So it's not, really, is it?"
"You sent me to Jack's bedroom," Ianto said, flatly.
"Did I? How clever of me."
Ianto shook his head. There was no use in trying to score points with this man. It was bit like trying to play cards with someone who had the deck memorised, could read your mind, and if all that weren't enough, kept bloody smiling the whole time.
The Doctor turned to face him, and grinned at the look on his face. "You look more like yourself now," he remarked, and Ianto thought that he actually seemed genuinely pleased. "We'll have a wander down to the kitchen, get you something to eat, and then it's back to Torchwood for you."
"Doctor," Ianto said. "I have to ask you something. You wanted to keep this a secret from Jack. Why?"
"Because no one should know their own future, Ianto. Not like that. Jack might suspect, but he can't know. Not for sure. That's why we had to get what you stole for me back to where it belongs. Otherwise -- if it had come to life where you were, there would have been a piece of his future, a memory of his future, hanging about in the past, drawn to Jack through the rift. Just got the wrong time frame, that's all. And if it had been born there -- imagine that. A little tentacled baby hanging about in Torchwood. You lot would have probably shot it or something."
"That's not very kind," Ianto protested. "We're not killers."
The Doctor raised an eyebrow at him.
"We're not! We're soldiers. There's a difference."
"Soldiers are killers," the Doctor said. "The reason doesn't make much difference to the people who are dead."
"What do you expect us to do?"
"Find another way," the Doctor said. "Try, at least. Dead things can't change, Ianto. But life -- that's the best of it. It's not set. It alters. It moves. You never know what people can do when they try. Let them surprise you."
"We're not all Time Lords, sir. We don't have that luxury."
The Doctor shook his head. "If you've got a gun in your hand, you have only two choices. Fire? Or not? Weapons are like that. They narrow things down. There are other options, Ianto. A whole world of possibilities in every moment. It's like telling Jack about all this, giving away spoilers. If he knew, he'd be trapped, a prisoner. Down to only two choices every time -- going along with it, or trying desperately not to. Doesn't that seem small to you? Wouldn't it ruin it all?"
"Is that why you took my gun?" Ianto asked.
"Blimey," the Doctor said innocently. "Did I do that? Sure you didn't just drop it somewhere? Bit careless of you."
Ianto shook his head. "You're mad. Utterly, utterly mad."
"I think I've heard that somewhere before," the Doctor said, with another one of his manic grins.
Ianto sat down on the sofa. "So it was just about getting the seed thing out of Torchwood. That was really it."
"Well," the Doctor said. "It's not ever just about one thing, is it?"
There was a pause, and then the Doctor continued. "Jack gave me a very important message once. Perhaps I wanted to return the favour." The Doctor strolled to the doorway that led deeper inside the TARDIS, and nodded for Ianto to follow him. "Come along, let's find you some food."
Ianto waited for him to explain this somewhat cryptic comment, but instead it was a solid metric ton of inconsequential babbling on fruit-bearing trees and garden planets, and the terraforming capabilities of the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, through which Ianto was unable to get in a single word edgewise.
When Ianto had managed to eat a sandwich and drink a bottle of lager (the most aggressively normal food he could find in the Doctor's pantry), the Doctor suddenly stopped mid-flow, looked him up and down, and declared it was time for him to go.
He escorted Ianto, who was still feeling a bit dumbstruck by the mercurial shifts in behaviour, back to the console room. Ianto started to go over to where he'd left the rubbish bags which contained the other two mysterious objects that he had collected from the Archives, but then saw the Doctor shake his head.
“What?” Ianto said.
“Those belong to other people too,” the Doctor pointed out.
“You're going to return them?”
The Doctor shrugged. “Why not?” he said casually. “Since they're already here. You lot weren't using them.”
“Suppose not,” Ianto admitted.
Then he held out his hand, and Ianto lifted the metal pendant and cord that the Doctor had given him over his head and handed it back.
"I'll keep this for you," the Doctor said, shoving it into his pocket. "Might come in handy next time, eh?"
"Next time?" Ianto gasped. "There's not going to be a next --"
"Wait and see," the Doctor said. "Now go on, or Jack really will have my head."
As Ianto began to unlatch the door, he turned back to look at the Doctor. "What was the writing?" he asked baldly. "On the mountain face, under the carvings. That was the message he gave you, wasn't it? What did it say? I never got a chance to look."
The Doctor smiled at him, and if he'd been another man, Ianto would have thought he looked proud of him. "It says, 'you are not alone.'"
Ianto stared at him for a second, nodded, and then walked out of the door.
Continue to Part 5
Pairing/Characters: Jack/Ianto, Ten, +TW team, +sundry members of DW Cast
Authors:
rm & kalichanRating/Warning: NC-17, slash, plot, religion (!!), and porn.
Summary: Some people say goodbye and others say hello.
Wordcount: ~32,000 words, posted in five parts
Authors' Notes: This is the penultimate installment of our series, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. The title is from a poem by Leonard Cohen; summary is, of course, courtesy The Beatles. Next up: the final installment of the main story arc, though we will be returning to the 'verse at some point after that for some digressions and interludes, and a DVD commentary! Just prior to this, we posted two prequels (one for Jack, and one for Ianto) which are fairly important to the conclusion of the series. They are numbered 8 & 9 in the links below if you'd like to catch up.
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 | 6. Many of My Favorite Things Are Broken | 6.5 Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Truth, Beauty: or, A Child's Guide to Modern Physics | 7. In Our Bedroom After the War | 8. And I Cannot Know How Long She Has Dreamed of All of You [Jack/Nine/Rose] | 9. The Spectacular Catastrophe of Your Endless Childhood [Ianto/OFCs, Ianto/Lisa]
There Are Some Men Who Should Have Mountains to Bear Their Names to Time, Part 1
There Are Some Men Who Should Have Mountains to Bear Their Names to Time, Part 2
There Are Some Men Who Should Have Mountains to Bear Their Names to Time, Part 3
When the Face had finally dismissed him, Ianto's guide, still nameless, had come for him again, worried this time that he had missed the midday meal and a little jealous too; Ianto thought Jack-at-home, as it seemed he was thinking of his Jack now, would have been pleased.
"I... can I eat in my room. I just... I need..." Ianto shrugged. People felt like too much and it was too hard to express.
"We don't eat alone here," his guide said kindly. "Ever. If you would like I could take the meal with you, though, even if people will talk."
Ianto thought he sounded bemused, maybe even flirtatious, but grim too. He realized he could ask after the etiquette of the thing, but found he mostly didn't care. The presence of one stranger was less unsettling than that of many, and the quiet, surely a priest could do quiet, would be welcome.
"Yes," he said with relief. "Thank you."
And it was quiet at first, and for that Ianto was extremely grateful. They'd collected their food -- all cold items, more of the bread, some odd fruits, and generous slices of something that looked like chicken or fish to Ianto, but tasted more like beef -- from a sideboard in one of the common areas, which the guide informed him were kept continuously filled for those guests or pilgrims who arrived between meal times.
Despite some odd looks, his guide -- Ianto was still having some trouble thinking of Jack as the focus of a religion, and too, one with priests -- ushered him back to his room, and they sat on the floor and began to eat. It reminded him oddly of picnics by the sea with his parents as a child -- crisps and sausages and cheese and thermoses full of soup, with apples and bars of chocolate for after.
The silence lasted for quite some time, until it was broken by the guide. "You know Him," the man said, and Ianto realised that this conversation was why his desire to eat privately had been acceded to.
Although it wasn't a question, Ianto nodded. "Yes," he said. He wasn't sure that he was meant to be revealing any of this but found he didn't care. The Doctor had deposited him here without without any sort of a roadmap, he thought savagely, so he could either like it or do the next best thing.
"How?" the guide asked.
Ianto laughed humourlessly. "He's quite old, you know. Been kicking around a long time."
"And you are... what do you do for Him?"
"Whatever he needs," Ianto said.
"Like us."
"It's bit different. He was more... human shaped. Before. When I know him."
"Ahh," the guide said delicately. There was a pause, and then he added hesitantly, "you seem angry, Mr. Jones."
"I do?"
"Yes."
"I don't know why. Everything is bigger than I imagined it to be. I should be happy. I didn't want him to be alone. And he's not. Which is good."
"He is, of course. Alone."
"He has you and the rest of his priests."
"We are not of the same... order of magnitude."
"No one is," Ianto said bitterly.
"I do not know if that is so." After a moment of consideration, his guide went on to add, his tone dry, "I think He would say that length is not the only measure of a man."
Ianto laughed. He could just imagine the Face saying something similar, his thought shaded with extravagant innocence, while his tentacles waved suggestively.
The guide winked at him, and Ianto felt the hard knot clenched inside his chest begin to loosen. Just slightly, but it was good -- jealousy, aside -- that Jack had warmth and humour and sarcastic beings who literally worshipped the ground he walked on (even if he couldn't actually walk anymore) to keep him company in the long watches of his endless days.
And the stories. He had those too.
Having finished eating, Ianto stood up, and went to stand by the window. He looked out over a courtyard -- there were plants with little labels posted up by the beds some of which looked very odd, and some of which looked identical to ones he knew from earth; it looked almost like a cloister garden, except with plants from all over the galaxy, or perhaps even all of time and space. Some suit wearing priests were strolling about in groups of two and three; a few children were playing what looked like hide-and-seek.
"I wish the Doctor had let me pack a bag," Ianto said irrelevantly. "I'm not used to wearing the same clothes all the time. The sonic refresher might keep me clean, but it doesn't do much for rumples. And I don't even know how long I'm to be here."
The guide stood. "If you wish, we could give you some of ours."
Ianto blinked. "But aren't they... I don't know, your vestments or something? Is that really appropriate?"
"You are practically wearing them anyway," the man pointed out sensibly. "Unless you had rather we obtained some more... civilian garments for you."
Ianto shook his head, not anxious to feel a fool in one of those robe type things he'd seen a few people wearing.
"I shall have some delivered to your room," the guide said.
"Thank you," Ianto said and then trailed off lamely. "I really don't know how to address you. Are all of you... nameless?"
"Those who wish it. Not all."
"Why did you... never mind, it's not my affair."
After a moment's hesitation, the man said, "I do not mind explaining, but I do not know if I can make you understand." He looked straight at Ianto and seemed to reach some conclusion. "But perhaps you will."
Ianto waited.
"I wanted to give Him everything. So that all that I am would be for His service, a tool to be honed and shaped into something sharp and fine."
"Why?" Ianto asked, thinking of his flat that he would never give up and the small gestures through which he tried to hang on to some remnant of the man he'd been before Jack had come into his life. "Does he need that? Does he want it?"
"No," the nameless man said. "But I do. And for that, one must make sacrifices."
"Oh," Ianto said sadly, letting his eyes flick away out to the cloister garden again. "I keep trying, you know, or trying not to. I'm not sure. It's not... it's not religious. And it's...."
The guide tipped his head to the side and smiled, his mouth closed and eyes bemused. "Whatever it is, where you're from, it's just love and stories, as long as it serves that, I suspect you're doing just fine."
Ianto nodded. "We both are. Were. Something," he said softly, and ran his fingers through his hair with a nervous laugh.
"I should be jealous of you," the man said, simply.
Ianto tried to push away all the fashions in which he found that disturbing. "Why aren't you?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. It deserves examination. You've handed us many mysteries. Maybe I'm jealous of Him."
"I want to go home," Ianto said softly, not caring if it was a rude response to what may or may not have been a clumsy pass.
"You are home, Mr. Jones."
"How's that?"
"I think we can both agree, home is where He is, can't we?"
His guide gave a small bow and backed out of the room, as if Ianto was someone important or the subject of a particularly elaborate joke. Considering what had just become clear between them on the matter of congress with gods, Ianto supposed both were reasonably true and considered the possibility that he ought to resign himself to this place. Just for a bit. Until the Doctor came back. Which had to be soon if it was going to be at all.
It was, after all, really the least he could do for Jack, who if he could ever know about this would have shouted at him for squandering such an opportunity on misery and then asked him if he had fucked the priest.
Ianto laughed, because he knew Jack would be disappointed he hadn't (and he wasn't going to, although he was maybe going to have to concentrate on that a little harder than he would have liked, because comfort and kindness certainly held a certain appeal right now and this nameless man and he seemed to be of the same tribe of loss), but then would no doubt rapidly lose interest -- Jack liked transgression -- when Ianto noted that celibacy didn't seem to be part of the deal.
Clothes came, as he'd been promised, in the arms of a girl and Ianto wasn't sure whether she was shy or mute. While he had hoped for black, the grey would no doubt have to do. He hoped it wouldn't cause too much confusion or that he wouldn't be left alone anywhere where it could. Impersonating a priest was low on his list of things to do, although again, he knew Jack, and maybe even the Face, might appreciate it.
While he had intended to change and explore, and out of some warped sense of duty perhaps seek out the ludicrous idea of Jack's holy book (surely there was one), he found himself unwilling to give up his solitude which seemed as bright and perfect and slightly sad as it did in his flat on solitary Sundays. Certainly, it seemed ordinary if he didn't think too hard, and that was gratitude, deep and thrumming.
He found himself kneeling on the floor of his small room by the bed, but whether it was in some strange experimental attempt to grasp what Jack had become in this time and place to others if not himself, or the recollection of a childhood comfort, Ianto wasn't sure.
Jack was, Ianto knew, going to be angry when he got back. He'd known that from the beginning, from the very second the Doctor had touched his shoulder in Tesco (and wasn't that the start of some horror movie or romance or something else just simply bloody awful?). But what he also knew, now that he was letting himself think on it, was that Jack was going to be angry because he was scared or lonely or felt abandoned or betrayed. Right now, Jack was fucking miserable and probably driving the rest of the team to insanity and there was nothing Ianto could do or could have done to change that.
Except leave a note.
Except break all the rules.
Ianto sighed and wondered if it was the Face of Boe being, well, just a face, that made the absence of Jack's hands so damn palpable to him right now. This wasn't what he had imagined when Jack had once said that maybe he could show him the stars sometime. And it sure as hell wasn't what he had meant when he'd drunkenly offered to share the night sky and the lonely universe.
He sank down onto his hip and crossed his arms under his head on the bed and thought of Tosh. She would have loved the Face easily, Ianto thought and envied her.
Temples are cavernous places, but so are minds. Quiet, but made for echoing, and a place for secrets to be kept unhidden. The Face has learned, so long ago that he has forgotten when or how, not to listen widely, lest sense be lost in chaos, but he can't help but feel the rhythms of a place, its moods and the disturbances of joy, the recycling and replacements of people, the studious stride of grief and the shapes of longing. He knows also particularly the approach of those for whom he has specific fondnesses and senses the intent and desire of touch as if it could actually reach his flesh.
One of his priests, one of his favorites, sits on the top step of his platform in the audience hall and curls into himself just slightly, leaning against the Face's glass. The Face observes the man as he silently debates whether he is giving the Face his grief or seeking without merit, his comfort.
The Face would, if he could, stroke the boy's hair but knows it is best he can't. Denial suits this one and the Face humors him as he can, even if it is hard work, even if gods must know a bit of shame in their lies.
This creature is, in some ways, the happiest and easiest among those here, which is why the Face marvels that he has, it seems, connived his way into so strange and arduous a test. It is no way, the Face thinks as quietly, softly, silently as he can, to forget one's own name.
Their young visitor knows better ways, of course. He dreams of them, quiet and easy, rough palms hooked into the crooks of his elbows hoisting him into bed and pinning him before the one thing that is, for a moment, all his world and the Face can't help but purr with a pleasure which is not that of lonely and longing boys, but is the product merely of remembering briefly, the shape of his own hands that languish now surely in atoms.
The two days -- which Ianto had identified as approximately 1.27 times longer than the days at home thanks to his trusty stopwatch and a facility for observation and mental arithmetic -- fell into what might be called a pattern: waking, putting on another one of the perennially grey suits offered to him, and then wandering through the temple hallways, trying to imprint the shape of the place on his memory.
He didn't know quite why this seemed so necessary, but it did, and so he obeyed the impulse. This he followed with breakfast, seated at the long low benches, squeezed in between priests and pilgrims and not knowing which one of them he was.
And then the Face would send for him.
He would talk for several hours -- drinking water and wine when his throat felt too parched to continue speaking and when he needed it just to get through some particular episode, and eventually his recital of his and Jack's life together just seemed like another form of prayer, although Ianto did not know to whom.
Each day before sunset, the Face would inevitably dismiss him.
"Why then?" Ianto had asked, on the second day.
"Twilight is the time for revealing secrets and telling stories. Much easier to unburden yourself to those you cannot clearly see," the Face had replied.
"Oh," Ianto had said. "That explains a great deal, actually."
He still found it hard to imagine Jack -- who talked more than he listened, and who hated paperwork with a passion -- as some kind of recording angel, but then he'd remember Jack's lockbox filled with photographs and artifacts, and realize that even after all this time, and all these adventures, he was still in danger of buying Jack's party line.
So Ianto would retreat to the safety of his room or the cloistered garden where he could look up at the alien sky and wish that he could feel wonder instead of regret. And he would stare at the curious alien hazelnut that had in a way brought him here and wonder briefly what it was. But he didn't ask.
Sometimes his guide would catch his eye, and Ianto would feel a slight frisson of tension -- but he couldn't tell if it was the kind you got when there was sexual energy in the offing, or if it was the kind of shiver that his mum used to call someone walking over your grave.
Ianto figured that wasn't possible, unless somewhere, or more likely somewhen, back at Torchwood, someone was leaning against the box into which he'd be shoved when he was done. Which he was -- done, that was -- because at this moment in time, whenever it was, he was dead under what the Doctor had indicated was some sort of great blue pyramid.
Maybe back home, Jack was in the mortuary contemplating which box to shove his corpse into when he got back, Ianto thought, and felt his lips stretch unwillingly into a smile.
On the third day, when he had done with telling how Gwen and Maeve and Andy and Ravi had joined them, grasping for more, he began to tell the Face stories that he had only heard or been only peripherally present for.
First things he had discovered for himself -- stories about Jack that he had stolen for Lisa out of the Torchwood archives to lay at her feet and make her smile. And then later, how Jack had found Owen and Tosh, who they had all lost; about Suzie who had been terrifying; of John Hart and his taste for explosions; and about Gwen, who Ianto was pretty sure his Jack still loved.
Then it was the stories he had been given, tales of traveling shows, car races, and wars, tales of Jamie and Alex and Jack's wife, dead long before Ianto had even been born. It was then that Ianto began to fully grasp the shattering immensity of it all, that his stories would all be finished soon and that his life with Jack was the smallest imaginable fraction, and soon it would be over, and all their memories done.
He cried then, not gulping sobs, but a slow, continuous seep of tears that left his eyes burning and red. The Face courteously pretended not to notice, and let Ianto scrub his sleeve over his eyes, over and over, without commenting on it.
And then, slowly, not knowing if some of this too had been forgotten -- does someone forget the beginning as easily as the middle? -- he began to tell the Face the last stories he had, stories of Jack's childhood, the little pieces that Jack had told him, quietly in the night, never looking at his face.
Even with so many millennia behind him, and who knows how many stretching forth in front of him, the nights still feel long to the Face, still feel as if there is something he ought to be doing.
It has been a long time since he has slept.
In his quarters, when the temple is mostly silent save for the vague mental skitterings of dreams and the sounds of people breathing to disturb the quiet, he casts his mind out among the stars, into the black curtain of space, and remembers like a ghost the sensation of falling through the air, and then coming to rest under gentle waves of peaceful, unknowing darkness.
He misses it. And in the missing remembers it. For loss, as the Face has always known, is the threshold of memory.
The Face thinks of destiny, and time, and their great spiraling dance until the first lightening of the sky at dawn.
Ianto almost didn't expect to be summoned on the fourth day. And yet, still the call came, exactly in the same way that it had before, delivered by his still nameless guide.
Things proceeded as usual, until he stood in front of the Face, and there was an echoing, expectant silence in the room.
Ianto cleared his throat, the sound harsh against the quiet. "There is nothing more I can tell you," he said as loudly as he could, not wanting to cry again.
"Have you no questions then?" the Face asked. "Nothing I can give you in return?"
Ianto shook his head.
"Truly?" the Face prodded. "For I will answer them."
Walking over to the window, Ianto sat down on the sill and looked out. Many of the priest seems to be there, moving about in various, purposeful ways. His own guide looked to be directing traffic among some of the pilgrims and visitors that had recently come. He looked very organized about the whole thing. Ianto almost wanted to go out there and assist.
"Could you tell me his name?" Ianto asked abruptly, still looking outside.
There was a pause. "I could," the Face admitted slowly. "Do you think that I should? Would it not be betraying a confidence?"
"He told me he'd given it to you so it wouldn't be his anymore," Ianto said. "Doesn't that make it yours to do what you like with?"
The Face seemed to chuckle. "You are quite clever, as I have remarked before."
"That's why you keep me around."
"His name is Dovev," the Face said.
"Why did you let him give it to you?"
"I have no hands with which to speak any longer," the Face said, and watched as Ianto put his own palms up to the glass, and cried.
It was a long time later when Ianto could talk again. "Why did I come here?" he mumbles finally, voice cracked and sore. "Why did I have to come here?"
"You came to bring me back something which I had lost," the Face said, after another long silence.
"What is it?" Ianto asked, needing somehow to know exactly what the truth was, even as he was sure it would not be comforting.
"It is my child," the Face said.
Ianto blinked.
"Or it will be," he continued. "They tell me their stories and I fold them in amongst the rest, within my memory. But even that grows too large for a single mind to encompass. Eventually, some pieces break away, and then, after some time, they grow. To have a life of their own. Short in comparison to mine, it's true. None of my children have lived long. But they live again. And that is what I do here, young Ianto Jones. I am not a god, but as I told you before, I share my gift of life as best I may."
"Oh," Ianto said, somewhat staggered at the precision of the reply. "So I was some sort of... midwife?"
"I suppose that is one way of looking at the matter. Or perhaps--"
"Any other way is a bit too disturbing for me, thanks, and if you don't mind not waggling your tentacles at me suggestively, Jack," Ianto said, before he thought.
The Face laughed, and Ianto was caught again by how easy it was to fall into all this. He almost wanted to say so, but instead said, plaintively, "I thought it was a giant hazelnut."
"An easy mistake to make," the Face said with mock-seriousness, and Ianto laughed with the release of tension. "Any other questions?"
Ianto started to shake his head and then suddenly remembered something. "That mural thing... on the mountain?"
"Yes?" the Face asked.
"You made it," Ianto said slowly, as the pieces came together. The caricatures, Jack's hands.
"Yes," the Face agreed. "So I should not forget."
"You left yourself a note," Ianto said.
"It was very important, to more than just myself. A message I will someday pass on. So that time unfolds in the way that it must."
Ianto nodded.
"I began making it the day I realised I had forgotten someone's name. I do not remember the name, only the feeling of the absence. I was shaped like one of you then still. A long time ago now."
The boy puts his hands up to the glass -- possibly the first time anyone has done this to comfort instead of to be comforted.
For the boy, it is also the last time, though he doesn't yet know it.
Because around his neck hangs a piece of metal that the Face recognizes.
And it is glowing.
"It's time for you to go."
Ianto opened his eyes and stepped back just fractionally from the Face's tank. It was an odd impulse, he thought, to want to maintain appropriate speaking distance with something that was mostly thinking at him.
"I don't understand."
"The Doctor has come back for you," the Face said.
Ianto looked down at the key, open mouthed. Some part of him, he knew, hadn't believed it would ever glow and that the Doctor would ever come back.
"I'm not ready," he blurted as if any of this had been up to him at any point.
The Face seemed to scoff. "You have no more to tell me and nothing else to ask."
"But --"
"Go home to me. It seems I will have missed you."
"But we don't even know if I do go home. You don't remember and no one's told me --"
Shhhhhhh.
The Face of Boe shushed him as if he were a frightened child, and it was exactly the sensation of comfort he had longed for in every moment of self-hating panic that had graced his life. It was also startlingly erotic. And terribly, terribly unfair.
"Now you know why Dovev gives me his name," the Face said, reading, Ianto assumed, his mind.
"I already knew," he said, somehow full of fierce pride. He might be small and human and young, after all, but he wasn't stupid.
The Face laughed. "Yes, I suppose so. He will escort you back to the cave."
"And where do I leave this?" Ianto asked, indicating the box with the hazelnut, the seed, the child, whatever it was best to call it, again.
"In his care. As you must leave me."
"Now," Ianto replied, meaning for it to be a question and failing.
"Yes, Ianto Jones, now."
"I --" Not knowing what to say, he leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the glass. The Face was silent, and Ianto knew what it was to feel pinned and memorized like perhaps a million dead moths that might not have ever even existed.
It was his guide who pulled him away from the glass, and he was glad of it, because it would have had to have been someone, and Ianto didn't think he could bear a stranger.
He knew he was supposed to have made other friends here, but he hadn't been able to stand the thought of it and smiling at this strange man he was glad of that too, even as his own eyes were watery again, and wasn't that embarrassing? Ianto thought he had never cried so much in his life
"I've brought your things," the other said simply -- Ianto tried not to think of him with his name, it didn't seem right somehow -- and then gestured towards the case Ianto had been dragging about with him all week. "I'll take that from you at the end."
Ianto nodded, grateful to finally have something resembling clear directions in this mad place. He turned to the Face again, but the priest shook his head.
"One cannot say goodbye to memory."
"No, of course not," Ianto muttered as if he didn't believe it at all. Certainly, he had no patience for a rote phrase his guide probably uttered to a thousand pilgrims a day.
When the man slipped an arm around his waist, Ianto wished he felt strong enough to shove it off.
He did, eventually, but not until they were outside, and trudging silently up the mountain they had once strolled down.
When they entered the cave again, Ianto asked that they stop for his eyes to adjust to the light, but Dovev merely took his hand and led on grimly, Ianto thought, as if his going was an insult to them all.
When they found the TARDIS the Doctor was sitting in front of it on a large rock, tossing a small rock up and down in his hands as if it were the most novel and excellent way to spend a bit of free time ever.
"Well, there you are!" he exclaimed bounding up and then pausing to glare at Ianto's hand still linked with the priest's.
Ianto felt his guide try to pull away, but he squeezed his hand instead and merely glared at the Doctor.
"Thought I was going to have to leave without you! You boys certainly took your time," the Doctor said, and Ianto wanted to scowl at the innuendo in it. Surely this was how the man talked to Jack too, and that just wasn't acceptable.
"We had to walk up a mountain," Ianto said sharply.
"And parting takes time," the priest said.
"Yes, well," the Doctor managed, shifting from foot to foot, awkwardly.
"Don't look so uncomfortable," Ianto snapped, "you haven't the right."
"Haven't the right! I'm the one stuck here in a cave!" the Doctor chortled, but there was an edge to it, and Ianto knew enough to be unsettled even if his guide maybe didn't.
"Choose a better landing spot next time!" Ianto said, full of frustration. This wasn't supposed to end like this, not stupid and petty and confused.
"Well, come along then," the Doctor said.
"Are you sure?" Ianto asked.
The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Would I have come back if I were planning to abandon you?"
"I mean," said Ianto through grit teeth, "are you sure I'm supposed to go back?"
"Are you sure you're supposed to...? Don't be ridiculous. Jack would have my hide if I..."
"But Jack's here," Ianto said.
"Your Jack," the Doctor clarified.
"Yes," Ianto said simply.
"Oh for... tell me you did not just get seduced by a giant head in a jar!" the Doctor shouted.
Behind him, he heard the priest chuckle darkly.
Ianto ignored the Doctor's entreaty. "When am I supposed to be, Doctor?"
"Not here," the Doctor said, seriously. "I promise you. And I haven't broken my word to you yet."
Ianto nodded. "Are you planning to later?"
The Doctor looked down at his shoes. "I think that probably depends."
"On what?"
"What promises you force out of me," the Doctor said quietly.
"Trust me, I know better."
Before the Doctor could say anything else, Ianto felt the hand he was holding slip from his.
"You do need to go, Mr. Jones."
Ianto laughed nervously and ran his hand back through his hair. "Couldn't you use my first name by now?"
"You didn't ask," the priest said simply.
Ianto snorted. "This is me asking."
"Goodbye then, Ianto. I'll remember you, as best I can."
Ianto stared at him for a moment and then smiled like a cat. "Goodbye, Dovev."
"He told you?"
"I asked. Cajoled really. Since you gave it to him, I told him he could do as he pleased with it, so he told me. It's nice to say."
"But --"
Ianto shook his head. "You don't get it, either, do you? That's what betrayals are for. Now you can give it to him again."
The priest gaped at him for a moment, and Ianto leaned forward to kiss him chastely on the lips.
"Ianto!" the Doctor said sharply.
Ianto ignored him. "Thank you," he said to the priest, putting as much intensity as he could into the words. "For everything. You'll look after him?"
"As you have done," the priest replied simply.
Ianto looked towards the Doctor, who nodded slightly towards the box. He took a deep breath, and then placed it into the man's hands. "I believe," he said, "this belongs here."
The man who had once been called Dovev took the box and stepped back. Ianto looked over his shoulder and realized that the TARDIS door was open, and the Doctor was standing in the aperture, backlit such that he almost looked as if he were glowing.
"Ianto Jones," the Doctor said. "It's time to go home."
"I have to go," Ianto got out, feeling his voice shake a bit. Before he could disgrace himself again, he stepped back into the TARDIS, and heard the door swing shut behind him, almost of its own volition.
He stood there, feeling his eyes sting and his limbs tremble with the tension of holding them still, wanting nothing more to fly back out the door, maybe even stay here until the span of his life ran out.
"Ianto," he heard from somewhere very far away, "keep this lever pulled." The Doctor was pressing something into his hand. "And hang on to this." The Doctor darted around the console in a frenzy of movement, and Ianto swallowed down all his regret -- he'd been given a task, and he needed to do it. That was his function.
So he hung onto the lever with one hand, and pulled the cord he'd been handed with the other, and for a few minutes, he thought of nothing else at all.
Then finally all the movement came to a stop, and the Doctor was prying his hands loose from the controls. "You can let go now," he said. "Thank you."
Ianto let his hands go limp as he turned to look at the TARDIS door. "Are we here?" he asked, feeling somewhat dazed still. "Am I back?"
"Well, not quite." The Doctor folded his arms across his chest, and lounged easily against the wall, watching him with steady eyes.
"Where...I mean...when are we?"
"Ianto," the Doctor said, and then paused for a second.
"What? Is there something more I need to--"
"No," the Doctor said quickly. "Nothing like that. We're just going to wait here for a bit. Nice, peaceful. A little relaxation. Maybe a nice cuppa? Or a drink? I've got some Arcturan brandy that's got a kick like you wouldn't believe--"
"You said you were going to take me home!"
"And I am," the Doctor assured him. "But not just yet. You look like you've been through a war. Several wars, killed and then brought back, but only half way."
"I'm fine," Ianto said, trying to sound as detached as possible.
The Doctor laughed.
"What?" Ianto said sharply.
"Just finally understood what it might sound like from the other end, that's all. I know someone who would've been proud." He looked a bit distant and sad as he gently stroked one of the TARDIS controls before going on. "You're not fine, Ianto. But you will be. And we're staying right here until that's a bit closer to true."
Ianto stared at the floor, without really seeing it. Images of the Face, the temple, the mountains kept going through his head in a continuous loop. "Why did you do it?" he asked finally. "Was it just for fun? To see us dance like puppets on string?"
"No," the Doctor said. "I don't enjoy that."
"You're lying," Ianto said.
"All right. Sometimes I do enjoy it, but not this time. I did it for you, and for Jack. And because I couldn't."
"Why not?" Ianto said, feeling his voice quiver a bit and hating that it was. "You didn't need me, not really. You could have done this all yourself."
"Did Jack ever explain to you why I don't see him any more than I can help?"
"I thought that was just because you were a bastard."
The Doctor grinned. "Well, a bit, perhaps. But that's not why. Or at least, not the only reason. Jack's become a fixed point, Ianto. A fact. A nail driven through the fabric of time, pinning it down. It wasn't meant to happen like that, but it did. And now we're stuck. When he says something, it has to happen that way. What he remembers, what he sees -- it's all there is. It can't be undone, or rewritten. Not even by me. He kills other choices just by existing."
"That's not his fault," Ianto protested. "He didn't ask for that."
"Of course it's not his fault. But it's the way it is. The Face of Boe told me that I would see him three times, and no more. And that's already happened. There's nothing I can do. I can't change it. And I can't help trying to do that anymore than you lot can stop breathing. Because timelines shift around me. That's what I am. The nature of a Time Lord. If I were to -- well, what happens when you've got a nail driven through a cloth, and then you pull on the cloth?"
Ianto thought for a moment. "It tears?"
"Exactly. Paradox. A rip in space and time."
"So why not just leave it? Why did you need to get this back to him? Why bring me into it? Why leave me there for so long?"
"I thought you should know," the Doctor said simply. "And I thought Jack deserved to have someone who knows. You can't love someone without knowing them. Not really. Not enough."
"But does Jack know?" Ianto asked, horrified.
The Doctor shrugged. "Where's Jack from, Ianto?"
"The future," Ianto said, annoyed that he was being asked to think when it was clear he could just be told. Especially when he had asked a yes or no question.
"Not when. Where."
"The Boeshane peninsula, not that I've the slightest idea wh--"
"It's a bit of a backwater, that peninsula. Far flung part of a far flung planet. Barely a functioning colony in Jack's childhood, only been there for a couple of generations. Huge big deal when our Jack gets himself signed up with Time Agency. Wound up a bit of a poster boy."
"So?"
"Sooooo ... he told me they called him 'the Face of Boe.'"
"That doesn't mean he knows!" Ianto blurted.
"No, it doesn't. Also doesn't mean he's telling the truth. But how could he be Jack and not suspect something by now?"
"Easily," Ianto said. "He's good at denial."
"Not that good."
"No," Ianto said sadly, "I suppose not."
"Have you eaten today?" the Doctor asked brightly and abruptly.
"I don't even know what day it is."
"Oh, well, it's not any day! Not here."
"Great," Ianto muttered. "I'm sorry, Doctor, but I just want to go home."
"Have you decided where that is again, then?" the Doctor asked seriously.
Ianto tried to answer and couldn't. Home didn't exist in a universe that behaved like this, and he wished more than a bit that he could have stayed asleep to it all and never left Cardiff in the first place -- not this time and not any time.
The Doctor sighed and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I'm not very good at taking care of people, Ianto Jones, especially people who don't like me. The TARDIS, she's a little more handy with it though, so I'm going to give you directions and you're going to remember them, and then you're going to go lie down and take a nap. And then you'll wash your face and have some food and I'll take you home. Just like I promised."
"What am I, a child?"
"Yes, Mr. Jones, you are."
Ianto was too exhausted to argue. He wasn't even sure he disagreed enough that arguing would make sense and so he followed the Doctor's instructions, out doors, over ramps, down stairs, lefts and rights and odd turns he had no idea how he remembered except that the ship didn't seem to give him any other options and when he came to the right door he only knew it for what it was because it opened to him before he could even fuss with the mechanism of it.
A bed, a desk, a lamp -- everything that should have made a guest room look utilitarian and only didn't to him, because it was clearly part of the TARDIS and therefore organic and almost pleasing and well lit if nothing else.
Ianto laughed and wrapped his arms around himself. The bed was certainly big enough, not the cot-sized affair that had been his at the temple, but even as the space was clearly impersonal, he felt like he was intruding too much to do anything more than toe his shoes off before lying down, whereas had he been home, he would have promptly dragged his duvet up over his face to muffle the existence of the world.
Of course, out here, Ianto was fairly certain the world didn't exist at all. At least right now.
The TARDIS might have been good at taking care of people, certainly, it seemed it -- she, he corrected himself -- had prevented him from getting lost, and that was good, because whatever his fate was supposed to be he was pretty sure it wasn't wandering lost in the innards of a decrepit time-traveling police callbox.
Even so, he was almost surprised he couldn't sleep, as if he had expected to be drugged, or at least lulled by something strange and alien. Not that the strange or alien was generally proving to be very lulling, but Ianto had to work with what theories he had.
Maybe when Jack was done being furious with him for this terrible secret, he would laugh at his misery about all this. It was something Ianto normally loathed, but right now he couldn't think of anything that sounded more welcome.
He sat up and looked around the room. He was on a fucking spaceship -- timeship, something! -- and he hadn't even looked in the night table drawers to see what the intergalactic time-travel version of a Gideon Bible was.
He reached over and tugged at the drawer, and sure enough it slid open easily and lightly with the unmistakable sound of a book shifting within. If it really was a Gideon Bible he suspected he was either going to be oddly delighted or completely disappointed.
But it wasn't. It was a novel. A Sherlock Holmes novel, old and battered with a cracked leather spine, like those that had belonged to his father and sat in his flat on the bottom shelf of the large bookcase, when Jack didn't have one of them resting beside the bed or left randomly in the kitchen.
While it was in worse condition than the volumes in his house, being clearly just a bit more brittle, still he knew with certainty that it was his, just as this room, utilitarian and, well, awfully blue, was surely, he realized now, Jack's little domain when traveling with the Doctor.
Ianto replaced the book in the drawer, shutting it gently. At least he knew where home was now. At least it seemed happy, even if he wanted to hold that blasted book to his chest and cry.
And he was starting to wonder, how on earth he was ever going to manage to keep all this to himself.
When he finally left Jack's room, face composed again even if the feelings inside didn't match, and made his way back through the maze of hallways to the console room of the TARDIS, he decided to ask the Doctor just that.
"So," the Doctor said, without turning to look at him standing in the doorway, and continuing to fiddle with something, "had a nice kip?"
"That's really disconcerting," Ianto said, thinking that even the line of the Doctor's back looked smug.
"But you aren't disconcerted. So it's not, really, is it?"
"You sent me to Jack's bedroom," Ianto said, flatly.
"Did I? How clever of me."
Ianto shook his head. There was no use in trying to score points with this man. It was bit like trying to play cards with someone who had the deck memorised, could read your mind, and if all that weren't enough, kept bloody smiling the whole time.
The Doctor turned to face him, and grinned at the look on his face. "You look more like yourself now," he remarked, and Ianto thought that he actually seemed genuinely pleased. "We'll have a wander down to the kitchen, get you something to eat, and then it's back to Torchwood for you."
"Doctor," Ianto said. "I have to ask you something. You wanted to keep this a secret from Jack. Why?"
"Because no one should know their own future, Ianto. Not like that. Jack might suspect, but he can't know. Not for sure. That's why we had to get what you stole for me back to where it belongs. Otherwise -- if it had come to life where you were, there would have been a piece of his future, a memory of his future, hanging about in the past, drawn to Jack through the rift. Just got the wrong time frame, that's all. And if it had been born there -- imagine that. A little tentacled baby hanging about in Torchwood. You lot would have probably shot it or something."
"That's not very kind," Ianto protested. "We're not killers."
The Doctor raised an eyebrow at him.
"We're not! We're soldiers. There's a difference."
"Soldiers are killers," the Doctor said. "The reason doesn't make much difference to the people who are dead."
"What do you expect us to do?"
"Find another way," the Doctor said. "Try, at least. Dead things can't change, Ianto. But life -- that's the best of it. It's not set. It alters. It moves. You never know what people can do when they try. Let them surprise you."
"We're not all Time Lords, sir. We don't have that luxury."
The Doctor shook his head. "If you've got a gun in your hand, you have only two choices. Fire? Or not? Weapons are like that. They narrow things down. There are other options, Ianto. A whole world of possibilities in every moment. It's like telling Jack about all this, giving away spoilers. If he knew, he'd be trapped, a prisoner. Down to only two choices every time -- going along with it, or trying desperately not to. Doesn't that seem small to you? Wouldn't it ruin it all?"
"Is that why you took my gun?" Ianto asked.
"Blimey," the Doctor said innocently. "Did I do that? Sure you didn't just drop it somewhere? Bit careless of you."
Ianto shook his head. "You're mad. Utterly, utterly mad."
"I think I've heard that somewhere before," the Doctor said, with another one of his manic grins.
Ianto sat down on the sofa. "So it was just about getting the seed thing out of Torchwood. That was really it."
"Well," the Doctor said. "It's not ever just about one thing, is it?"
There was a pause, and then the Doctor continued. "Jack gave me a very important message once. Perhaps I wanted to return the favour." The Doctor strolled to the doorway that led deeper inside the TARDIS, and nodded for Ianto to follow him. "Come along, let's find you some food."
Ianto waited for him to explain this somewhat cryptic comment, but instead it was a solid metric ton of inconsequential babbling on fruit-bearing trees and garden planets, and the terraforming capabilities of the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, through which Ianto was unable to get in a single word edgewise.
When Ianto had managed to eat a sandwich and drink a bottle of lager (the most aggressively normal food he could find in the Doctor's pantry), the Doctor suddenly stopped mid-flow, looked him up and down, and declared it was time for him to go.
He escorted Ianto, who was still feeling a bit dumbstruck by the mercurial shifts in behaviour, back to the console room. Ianto started to go over to where he'd left the rubbish bags which contained the other two mysterious objects that he had collected from the Archives, but then saw the Doctor shake his head.
“What?” Ianto said.
“Those belong to other people too,” the Doctor pointed out.
“You're going to return them?”
The Doctor shrugged. “Why not?” he said casually. “Since they're already here. You lot weren't using them.”
“Suppose not,” Ianto admitted.
Then he held out his hand, and Ianto lifted the metal pendant and cord that the Doctor had given him over his head and handed it back.
"I'll keep this for you," the Doctor said, shoving it into his pocket. "Might come in handy next time, eh?"
"Next time?" Ianto gasped. "There's not going to be a next --"
"Wait and see," the Doctor said. "Now go on, or Jack really will have my head."
As Ianto began to unlatch the door, he turned back to look at the Doctor. "What was the writing?" he asked baldly. "On the mountain face, under the carvings. That was the message he gave you, wasn't it? What did it say? I never got a chance to look."
The Doctor smiled at him, and if he'd been another man, Ianto would have thought he looked proud of him. "It says, 'you are not alone.'"
Ianto stared at him for a second, nodded, and then walked out of the door.
Continue to Part 5
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One of my favorite lines ever from a book -- The Young Unicorns, by Madeleine L'Engle -- is "...when our trust is betrayed the only response that is not destructive is to trust again." and somehow it folded itself in there.
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This is so very sad, yet incredibly hope-filled...
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