promises made have turned to all apologies -;- open to capnhotness

[coffee_cult]

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

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[capnhotness]

Hours have passed, but Jack hasn't particularly noticed them as they crept slowly by. There doesn't seem to be a clock in his room in the infirmary, he hasn't seen his pocket watch in what must be ages, and his natural, somewhat acutely tuned sense of time itself has been thoroughly skewed. To make matters worse, Torchwood London is no longer located at Canary Wharf, but somewhere underground - much like his own division of the Institute - and he couldn't begin to tell anyone what time of day it is by the flicker of the inorganic fluorescent lighting.

When the phone rings - startling him in a way he's beginning to loathe - Jack scrambles up from where he's still curled up in bed and blinks a few times at the cordless before he finds the appropriate button to answer the call. "Hello?" Jack asks rather tentatively.

[coffee_cult]

There it is again, the attitude that so acutely does not fit with the voice Ianto is accustomed to, and he finds a moment's hesitation of his own before saying anything, fighting around the lump that forms in his throat. "It's Ianto." He feels the need to announce himself for the first time in ages; once, his 'Welsh vowels' would have been enough to identify him immediately, without any further explanation necessary.

"I've found the footage, if you'd like to come up to my office. I can ... send someone to come get you." It seems like such a ridiculous thing to suggest, but Ianto is no longer convinced that Jack can find his own way.

[capnhotness]

He feels ... ridiculous. Of course it's Ianto. Who else would be calling the cordless extension Ianto left for him? There isn't an adequate excuse, really, he should have remembered and realized and connected the two events in his mind, been more sure of himself and the solution he should have worked out, but there's too many pieces missing to make cause-and-effect logic workable anymore, it seems

[coffee_cult]

Ianto looks down at his desk as Jack speaks, absorbing the words with the sheer joy of being able to hear his voice, even as melancholy-wrong as it all is. He leans back in his chair, picking up the awful, framed picture of the two of them that Fred had taken at his parents' house - forever ago, like everything else - and smiles just a little in spite of himself. The desire for independence on Jack's part is a good sign, isn't it? He sets the picture back down, heartened by the sight of Jack smiling, even if frozen in time.

"Down the hall and take a left." Giving the directions is easy for Ianto, he feels he's been there often enough in the last few days to have the way memorized. (Had gone there enough when so many lay dead and dying ...) "When you get away from the infirmary, the corridor will take you down to the command center. If you look straight ahead from there, my office is at ten o'clock."