promises made have turned to all apologies -;- open to capnhotness
You're a liar, Ianto Jones.
Ianto sinks into his chair and empties the contents of his pockets onto the desk, playing the scene with Jack over and over again in his mind, each time successively more painful. Jack is ... more broken now than he was when he left. Charged now with the task of looking through the CCTV footage from the Valiant, Ianto is hesitant, afraid of what he will see. Evidence of Jack's trauma. Things that will, undoubtedly, leave him feeling as if what he's already done to the Time Lords was simply not enough. He turns the letter from Kate over in his hands, slightly taken aback that Jack hadn't even asked about her. He'd been excited over the idea of becoming a father; should he not wonder, now, the fate of his unborn child and its mother?
Perhaps the happier the memory, the less likely Jack is to remember it. That would, at least, explain why Jack seems to have no trouble remembering him. Ianto will mention nothing of it, either, he decides. Jack needs time, more than anything, and when he's ready - if he ever is - then Ianto will give him the letter, will tell him the truth.
It was their first conversation and Ianto had already lied. Ears ... He leans back in his chair, sliding the blue stone to the side with the two tarnished silver watches. They all represent something to him now: Time Lords. Kate had asked him to give it, along with the PINpoint, back to Ears after he came back from the Valiant. Ears hadn't come back, and with any hope, the PINpoint never will, either, long gone back to the hated Nexus with the evidence of his wrath.
Ianto places everything in a drawer of his desk and locks it, and places the key in his pocket. Soon, he will have to find a place of permanent safe-keeping for all of it, but for now that will have to do. He pours himself a glass of whiskey from the tumbler on his desk and takes a great gulp of it, desperately wishing to soothe his own frazzled nerves. The burning turns to a certain warmth spreading throughout his body, keenly artificial but welcome after so long feeling as if he'd never be warm again. That awful disease, the horrible, wasting disease ... burning people from the inside out - and when it was over, when the fever broke, the cold lingered to his very bones.
No. Don't think about it.
Calling up the CCTV footage, Ianto turns to his next grim task instead. They've had long enough now to sort it by camera, into months, down to weeks and days, but still he has little idea where to begin. His people have left footnotes on certain areas of the footage - anything they've gone through that might be of particular interest for future study. Even so, this task is going to be about as simple as unraveling a tangle of thread. He knows that he has something and someone specific to look for, but thinking back again on the awkward, stilted interaction with Jack, he can't help but wonder instead what happened, what was so horrific as to leave Jack nearly unrecognizable, and unwilling to see any of this played over again. And more, does he want to know?
This isn't how it should be. He should be preparing to go home for the night - home with Jack, to walk his dog and have dinner and tumble, exhausted but satisfied, into bed.
But this is what he has.
Ianto rings the head of the team going through the video and asks for help. They've seen the tall, gangly prisoner. He'd been in a single cell, but was taken up to the bridge on the launch day. With their assistance, Ianto finds the exact file number for that bit of footage and queues it up, fast forwarded slightly. There's Martha Jones. Everyone, chanting the Doctor's name. Jack, running away at a shout from the Doctor ... and there - at the moment the paradox machine must have been shut down. A rip in space and time, and the errant Time Lord named Ears vanishes.
He takes a cut of those few seconds, saving them for Jack to view, and then picks up his phone to dial the extension he'd given the captain earlier.