TW Fic: Intersecting Geodesics (4/5)
Title: Intersecting Geodesics (4/5)
Author: nancybrown
Rating: R (language, situations, violence)
Spoilers: up through CoE, brief mentions of events from "Pack Animals," "Almost Perfect" and "Lost Souls"
Characters: Ianto, Jack, John, (Eleven and announced companion)
Warnings: Various shades of dub-con, non-descriptive mentions of sex trafficking, character death. I am operating under the assumption that John Hart is Captain Bad Touch, and so should you for the duration of this story.
Wordcount: 36,000 overall, 5700 this section
Betas: Deepest thanks go out to 51stcenturyfox and amilyn for the Britpicking, beta work, and all those other little details that made this story stronger; anything that's still misplaced, misspelled, misplotted or just plain missing is my fault
Disclaimer: Not my characters, not my show. If they'd catch a clue and shut up in my head, we'd all be happier.
Summary: Stuck in the wrong time with a Jack who hasn't met him yet, all Ianto really wants is a way home.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
***
Chapter 4
***
"If you ever do anything that stupid again, I'll kill you myself."
Ianto opened his eyes. The light was too bright, and he groaned. His head ached.
"What happened?" he tried to ask, but it came out, "Whappen?"
"You rushed a Lognian. An armed Lognian. Speaking of arms … "
He couldn't feel his. The panic rushed his throat again, and Ianto tried to sit up, but Jack's hand pushed him against the surface he was on; Ianto no longer assumed the existence of beds.
Someone said something in a different language than the one he was learning, and Jack responded. Ianto turned his head and was relieved to see his left arm, and with effort, turned to see its mate on the other side. His shoulders were heavily bandaged. No amount of effort made his fingers move.
"I remember." He rested for a while. The other voice discussed more with Jack, and Ianto let them talk. He was clearly no longer at the pub, and had been treated by someone. Nothing he could do.
After a while, his vision cleared enough to focus. The other voice was a robot, all white angles and surgical steel fingers. The doctor, though obviously not the Doctor.
"What's going on?" Ianto asked Jack.
"You were hurt. If I hadn't killed him before he pulled out his blades, you'd have bled to death."
"He was going to kill you."
"No, he thought he was. That was incredibly stupid of you to get in his way."
"I thought I was protecting you."
Jack brushed a hand over Ianto's head. "Don't do that again. I'm not worth it."
"You are to me."
"Sap."
"Arsehole." His mouth was dry. "Am I going to regain the use of my arms?"
Jack asked the doctor, who responded in what sounded like a positive tone.
"The doctor says you need to rest today and tomorrow, but you should be fine. He repaired the damage. Now you just need time for your tissues to finish healing."
"Finish?"
"It's not as high-tech as the Agency's equipment. I didn't want to get you noticed at a real hospital. The doctor is, um, let's call him an off the books kind of guy."
"We're at a back alley clinic?"
"What's an alley?"
"Forget it." Out of the way, behind the scenes, off the books. Whatever Jack called it, the clinic would be expensive, and Jack was sure to keep track of just how costly Ianto's treatment was.
"We're someplace safe. When you're ready to walk, we'll go home."
"Sir's going to be pissed that I didn't finish my shift."
"Are you joking? He's gonna tell stories about you for years. The cleaning boy who fought off an armed Lognian. Business will boom."
"Oh. Good." He closed his eyes, and didn't realise he'd fallen asleep until Jack nudged him again.
"Time to go."
***
Jack hired a car to take them home, and half-carried him back to the flat. He made Ianto sit in a chair while he readied a nice comfortable place on the floor with extra pillows, and then helped him undress and lie down.
"You're not supposed to eat until tomorrow, in case the medication makes you vomit, but you can have some water."
"That would be great. Thanks."
Jack brought him a glass and Ianto drank the whole thing. "Careful."
"Thirsty."
"That's the anaesthesia. You were under for a while. Fortunately, the doctor has worked on humans before."
"51st Century humans."
"Not much difference, except you have extra teeth and this weird little organ by your stomach he was wondering about."
"It's called an appendix."
"What's it do?"
"I don't think anyone knows." Ianto frowned. "Extra teeth?"
"In the back."
"Wisdom teeth."
"Do they work?"
He thought about it. "No."
***
Either Jack had time off or he took some holiday leave, because he barely left Ianto's side the next two days. It was nice to be taken care of, to have someone else fetch his meals as tingling, painful feeling came back to his hands slowly. Ianto dozed intermittently, falling asleep to the touch of Jack's hand on his forehead, the sound of Jack's singing in a low voice in his ear. When he was more alert, Jack read to him a bit from the books he had, which reminded Ianto of just how long it had been since he'd read anything himself.
"Can you teach me?" he asked Jack suddenly in the middle of what was probably a potboiler if Ianto could understand what was going on better. "To read? If you'll pardon the metaphor, it feels like my hands are cut off because I can't figure out what I'm seeing."
"I can try. You don't know much of the language."
"I've been picking up loads." Ianto hesitated, and then said, "Two pints and a side of fried tubers, you dumb thing," as well as he could.
Jack laughed. "We'll see. I was kind of thinking you might like to try an old film."
"You have films?"
"There are records of your time, you know. I'll bring you a list of the ones they have at the shop and you can pick something."
While Ianto slept, Jack must have gone out, because when he awoke, Jack had another paper, and he helped Ianto learn the words for it.
"Pa-doe. It means, 'adopted father.'"
"Pa-doe." Ianto thought. "The Godfather?"
"Could be."
They kept reading, slowly, until they reached one that was a literal translation of the original title. Ianto grinned. "Let's get that one." He'd seen a listing for "Goldfinger," but wanted to save it. This one would do.
"All right. I'll be back."
Jack went out and returned with a small silver cube. He set it on the table, activated the hologram, and cuddled beside Ianto on the floor. "This one is in the original English."
"Good." Ianto leaned back, and watched Jack's face as Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones dealt with aliens.
"This is nothing like how first contact went on Earth," Jack said.
"It's a movie. It's not supposed to be accurate, just entertaining."
"They catch and fight and talk to aliens for a living. Who does that?"
"I did. It was my job." They watched the scene with the vomiting baby squid. "I got more than my share of that."
"Liar. You were early twenty-first century. Aliens weren't on Earth in groups that stayed until later."
"Tell that to the Doctor."
"Who is that? I couldn't find anything in the Agency records about him."
Ianto sighed. The Doctor was good at not being noticed when he chose, but it made tracking him down damned difficult. "Just watch the film."
***
Jack liked "Goldfinger," but he thought "The Godfather" was the best film he ever saw.
*
It is Wednesday, the middle of his third week of suspension, and his rooms smell strange. Ianto has left his flat only once, to buy food he does not remember eating. As he came home from that one trip, he spied the camera at his door, realised belatedly it wasn't the only one.
The first day, Owen and Tosh came to go through his flat and see what tech he had stolen from either Torchwood. Since he had taken everything to the Hub when he'd installed Lisa, they found nothing but apparently left the cameras. The second day, he packed Lisa's things, the few not still in boxes from when he brought them to Cardiff. The third day was his trip to get groceries. He set the bags on the kitchen counter and looked at the camera above the stove, and instead of putting the food away, he left it. That probably explains the smell.
He has spent the last two weeks watching the cameras watching him. He wonders whose job it is to monitor him. Maybe the new woman, Gwen. Give her something to do, watching him read and use the toilet and sleep too much and sit quietly staring back.
He expects a bullet or a pill. He finds himself dreaming about each. Jack is there in his mind every night, forcing Ianto to his knees before blooming pain and blessed peace, or pushing the Retcon down his throat before a different kind of oblivion. He dreams about fractures in his memories, chunks carved out of the gristle of his brain, dripping blood, like Lisa's body and Annie's body and the doctor's body. He will be someone else without these memories and the person he is now will be dead.
The knock on the door is insistent, and he rises from the sofa where he's sat all day, letting the tingling in his feet wake him as he reaches the door.
Jack is on his doorstep. It's time.
"Can I come in?"
Ianto moves out of the way, lets the man who is going to kill him inside. He doesn't fight. There's no point in fighting.
Seeing that Ianto is not going to offer him a seat, Jack goes to the sofa and sits. Ianto joins him, mouth tight, eyes wide.
"How are you doing, Ianto?"
He blinks. His mouth moves to automatically frame the word "Fine" but freezes on the lie. He's not going to lie to anyone anymore, not about the things that matter. "I don't know, sir."
"You haven't left your flat in weeks."
"Nowhere to go, sir."
"Are you planning on killing yourself?
The sudden clarity of the question shocks him. "No." Its meaning sinks in. "You've been waiting for me to do the job myself."
Jack frowns in confusion. "What job?"
"You're here to kill me. You'll either shoot me, or make me forget everything since Canary Wharf, more likely since I started at Torchwood London, and I'll be just as gone only you'll have someone walking around who doesn't even know he's wearing a dead man's body." Like Lisa was at the end, wearing Annie like a grotesque suit.
"If we had decided to kill you or Retcon you, you wouldn't have gone home that first night." Jack must be using the royal We, because Ianto had no illusions the others would be consulted in his final decision. "I told you that you're on suspension, not death row."
"You have been known to lie on occasion, sir."
"Likewise."
They sit in silence for a few minutes, Jack taking in the room, the few personal touches Ianto has around the flat.
"The IDs were flawless," Jack says, his eyes on a photograph of Ianto and Lisa, snapped a year ago. Tosh and Owen took the small bag Ianto hid in the corner, holding two passports for each of them, money in different currencies, drivers licenses. Ianto wanted to be able to drop identities as they fled this terrible place and never look back. Now he doesn't know what he wants. Wanting happens to the living and he is not ready to number himself among them despite Jack's assurance.
"I've had practise."
Jack reaches into his coat and Ianto waits for the Webley. Instead Jack pulls out a set of papers and puts them on the coffee table. "Did you know Michael Goodson?"
"The name isn't familiar."
"He worked at Torchwood One. He survived the battle."
"We didn't form a club."
"So you don't know him."
"No."
"He's dead. Swallowed a gun." Jack indicates the papers, and Ianto can see the letterhead, realises they are police reports.
"I see," he says, although he doesn't. Does Jack think Ianto killed the man? Even if he does not, it would not be the first time Torchwood has blamed a death or five on someone who can no longer protest the charges. Creative rewriting of history makes cleanup easier while explaining the unexplainable to grieving relatives. He remembers Lisa's family at her memorial service, how he had to pretend at grief, not daring to share his wonderful secret with them. Now the grief is entirely his own, another secret hidden to the people who would care, a relief to everyone else who knows.
"That makes nine suicides from the twenty-seven survivors," Jack is saying from another planet, and Ianto tries to pay attention. Jack asked him about suicide. "A third of the people who walked out with you are dead now." Simple mathematics belie the human costs. It's like a line from a play and Ianto almost bursts out in inappropriate laughter. "This is funny?"
"I don't know. Is it, sir?" His face hurts from the smile, and he's pretty sure he's lost his mind.
As he has waited here to die, he's pondered how they will convince Rhiannon he killed himself. Owen does the best handwriting forgeries, and Tosh can set a paper trail, and that new woman seems like she could cry well comforting Rhi. Jack might have the suicide note in his pocket right now, and Ianto's fingers itch to reach into Jack's coat and find it, read what Jack dictated to Owen. Jack is the devil himself, equal parts seductive charm and monstrous cruelty, but Ianto has observed that he's also a romantic and will likely ghostwrite tear-stained lines about Ianto's wanting to be with Lisa forever.
"I'm tired of watching people die, Ianto. I'm tired of locking up dead bodies and stowing away the remainders of lives in sheds. Do you understand?"
He doesn't understand at all, has seen Jack happily kill people, but he nods anyway.
"So that's settled," Jack says, as if they had an entire conversation. "Get your coat."
Ianto obeys, because he can, and Jack makes him get into the car, and Ianto sits calmly, wondering if they're going somewhere secluded, if Jack will dump his body in the woods or the Bay so as not to have to bother with freezing him. He watches the streets go by, vaguely recognising the area and then Jack has stopped the car, and they are going into a restaurant, and Jack is ordering for them both, something with protein and vegetables and a baked potato.
He expects death, not spuds with butter and sour cream. Ianto reels.
His brain, which has spent weeks almost entirely shut off and months before that tiptoeing around a nervous breakdown, begins to stir with the notion that this is not the end. The least likely person on the planet to want him alive appears to be genuinely interested in keeping him so. He isn't sure what to make of that, nor of the friendly if completely one-sided patter Jack is keeping up. He tells Ianto about things he's missed at work. Funny stories. Something witty Tosh said. How Gwen is settling in, all knees and elbows but getting there. How Owen got splashed with Weevil guts just yesterday. Ianto sits and listens owlishly as Jack talks and laughs at his own jokes and smiles at Ianto as if they are mates, as if neither ever threatened to shoot the other, as if they are starting over.
"Eat," Jack says, when the food arrives. So he does.
*
Sir greeted Ianto back with open arms, and even the Tweedles looked on him with a little awe. He still had to clean and help cook and wait tables when he could, but now when the customers got grabby, Dee would smack them with her tray. John wasn't so much banned from the pub as followed every minute by Dum until he got annoyed and walked out.
Ianto appreciated the attention, and the kindnesses, and he didn't mind the lost tips.
Jack spent more evenings at the pub than not when he wasn't working an assignment. After a while, Ianto lost track of how long it had been since he'd found someone else back at the flat, though Jack still spent nights away. Asking where he went or with whom wasn't on the table, and anyway Ianto had grown used to what they had, which was not so much a relationship per se as it was a roommate situation with benefits. For himself and for whatever it was worth, he opted to stay faithful to his Jack, and he'd chosen to believe an ongoing affair with Jack's younger self did not qualify as cheating but instead as long-term foreplay. Really spectacular, really long-term foreplay.
One foggy night, he overheard Jack and John arguing outside the pub, but John had stalked away down the street before Ianto could get a handle on what their fight was about.
To Ianto's surprise, Jack never once mentioned how much the clinic had cost.
***
As he learned to read, Ianto made more requests of files from Jack. So as not to give Jack more information about his own future than he needed, he gave him dozens of names, mostly of people Ianto had met briefly, but he really only wanted the files on Gwen, Martha, and, after some thought, Alice and Steven. He read over the brief information alone.
Gwen and Martha both lived long lives. He read the names of their children, the few records that survived of their other exploits. Gwen was listed as the head of the rebuilt Torchwood Institute for almost forty years. Martha was the Medical Director at UNIT for almost as long. Only one marriage was listed for each.
Jack explained, more than once, that the records the Agency had were incomplete, that genealogies were the best they could offer for most people and those themselves were compiled by later descendents. That would explain the paucity of data on Alice Carter. Ianto mourned when he read the date of Steven's death, and he didn't dare tell Jack why. But Alice's file was stranger and sadder, because while he could read the date of her birth, there was no record of her at all after a few months following the loss of her son, not even a death date. Alice had vanished from history, with no one left in her family to note her passing.
The Agency had numerous records of Canary Wharf. They referred to it as The Battle of Torchwood now, and debate had raged for years at the Agency whether they ought to acquire the available stock or if the presence of the Cybermen and Daleks contaminated the scene too badly. The records included the final death tally. According to Agency records, someone was considered to have survived a disaster if he/she/ze lived more than five years after the event. Including the suicides, accidents, and in Ianto's case alien death flu, the tally was the full employee headcount. History said there were no survivors of Canary Wharf.
He didn't yet dare to ask for records of Jack Harkness. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what had happened next.
***
One evening at closing, Tweedledee helped Ianto with the mopping, and then asked in broken English if he and his hoepa would join her family in the morning. It was a special day for Tweedlekind, apparently, because Dum and Dee both had the day off.
"Hoepa?" Ianto asked, and Jack broke in, "We'd love to," in Dee's language.
"What's a hoepa?" Ianto asked as they walked home together.
"Don't worry about it."
Jack had gotten directions from Dee and hired a car to take them to her home. Ianto had never seen anyone else's home on the inside, not since he'd been here, and he took in the overlarge mushroom shape with trepidation. Jack grinned at the spill of tiny Tweedles from the door, and helped translate Dee's hurried introductions of various offspring, nieces, nephews, cousins, and grandchildren as older Tweedles came in and out. He and Jack were the only humans, but Jack seemed perfectly at ease. Ianto followed his lead, and stayed close as Dee introduced her four husbands and two wives as they meandered in and out of the squashy rooms.
Ianto swore he heard the word "hoepa" again but Jack kept pushing him to meet more Tweedles.
Food covered the low table that took over most of one room, and the rest of the house was decorated in plump pillows and holographs of more Tweedles. Ianto could read the inscriptions on some of them, but it was hard.
"The Nardeks were the native species on this world," Jack told him. "Humans colonised it about a thousand years ago, and its location made this a hub of galactic trade. You'll see a lot of family pride in Nardek homes that can trace their ancestry back to before the other species moved in. This one," he said, pointing to a holograph that looked a bit like Tweedledum, "is T'wentani'kanadee's great-great-great-grandfather, many times removed."
"I don't think I could go past my great-granddad's name."
"I forget my parents' names some days," Jack said. His knees were attacked by a wee Tweedle, and he burst out laughing, and said something like, "That's a tree growing fast!"
"The language you're speaking. Is it Nardek?"
"Yeah. Official language here. You didn't know?"
"No one told me."
"Not my first language, but I'm good at it."
"Say something in your first language."
"No."
"Oh, go on."
Jack picked up the wee Tweedle, and then he said a phrase that sounded like a song. The Tweedle giggled and Jack put it down to run off.
"What's it mean?"
"It's a poem. Nothing important."
Dee called them to luncheon, and soon Ianto was tasting much better food than Dee had ever served up at the pub. He praised her as best he could in Nardek, causing the other Tweedles to laugh. Dee said the words he'd gotten used to hearing: half-wit, cleaning boy. Then she said something else, and Jack nudged him. "She's talking up your go at the Lognian."
"It was really not a big deal."
"Watch them." Ianto saw the looks of respect on the Tweedle, sorry, Nardek faces, and he puffed up a little inside.
Eventually, Jack thanked Dee for inviting them and said it was time to go. Nardeks and Time Agents had a holiday but the pubs were still open and Ianto was working a short-staffed job tonight.
Later, after being run ragged by Sir and even with a little help from Jack who could at least understand the rapid-fire orders from the customers, Ianto dragged home in Jack's bubbly wake. Jack had helped himself to drinks behind the bar while he'd tended for Sir, who'd been too busy cooking to do everything, and no one trusted Ianto not to accidentally poison someone.
Jack was singing, the same poem from earlier. Ianto had heard this song before, though he hadn't known it at the time, murmured sleepily into his hair after long nights at the Hub, accompanied by Myfanwy's cooing clicks from her nest or the hum of Ianto's icebox from the wall his bedroom shared with the kitchen.
"Tell me," he said, putting his tired hand in Jack's. "Please."
"'The sun is in the sky, and the water is in the sea, and I am with you. Perfection.'"
"It's a love poem."
"The best ones always are."
***
Jack brushed him awake with a kiss, and Ianto groaned. "It can't be morning yet."
"It can be and it is."
Something unusual reached Ianto's nose. Something … familiar. His eyes came open, and he sat up. The table had food on it, fruit and pastries from the cart two streets away. Jack must have brought them back.
"Breakfast," Jack said. "And a surprise." He handed Ianto a small bowl, hot to the touch, and Ianto sniffed the brown liquid inside.
"Is that … "
"I looked up the records. They still grow beans in the systems closest to Earth, so I ordered some and followed the instructions on how to prepare them. Thought you'd like it."
"I … " He took a sip, and it was hot and bitter and clearly scalded, but it was right in so many ways he could cry. "Thank you."
Jack's face broke into a smile. "I tried some. I don't see why you keep going on about the stuff."
"Let me figure out how to make it properly here, and I'll show you." He took another drink of the terrible coffee and knew what men dying in the desert thought of the brackish pools that saved their lives.
"Happy anniversary," Jack said.
"Hm?"
"You arrived at the Agency a year ago today."
"I did?" It had seemed both like a lifetime and no time at all.
"You did. After breakfast, we'll tour the city. You never really got a chance to see much when you first came, and we've been busy since."
"We're going to be tourists."
"Why not?"
"I hate tourists." Although it had been a year, true, and the sharp hatred had dulled.
"Everyone hates tourists. And we are going to be rich tourists, so they'll hate us even more."
"Let's eat."
***
A willowy building stretched above them into the low-lying clouds.
"The United Council building was built a little over two hundred years ago. There was a reception on the bicentennial that we crashed. Food wasn't very good, but the drinks were to die for, and Georgn and I went home with these three women who'd come all the way from Tau Ceti."
Ianto tried to take everything in as Jack scratched his brain for the history of the building and instead came up with more sex stories, which for once he ended before going into detail. They'd walked across bridges, checked out two tiny nature preserves, and marveled at building after building. Jack had a holomap, used it to point out attractions and let Ianto decide if he wanted to see them in person. All they were missing were cameras and overpriced t-shirts, he mused, but since the parts of the future world he tended to see were dark, dirty, and covered in someone else's vomit, this made a nice change.
At lunchtime, Jack bought them sweets that tasted a bit like orange sherbet and a bit like pie filling, and Ianto only ate about half before his stomach started to ache with sugar shock. Jack finished both treats himself, and then coaxed Ianto into walking several streets over to a shop that sold music on tiny blue chips.
Jack slipped one into Ianto's ear, and to his surprise, Depeche Mode started to play. "That's from your time, right?"
"Close." Ianto tugged it free from his ear. He didn't want to tell Jack he hated that song.
"There's more. We can pick up a few. Keep you from being homesick."
"Thanks." Even with his slow acquisition of the language, the labels on the chips were mysteries. With some help from Jack, he found a Pink Floyd album, not something he normally liked but given the sparse selection, he'd take it.
As they walked back towards home, Jack took his hand and gave it a squeeze. "I was thinking you might want to see the spaceport next."
"That'd be … " He stopped. "Why are you showing me all this?"
Jack shrugged. "I thought you'd like it."
"I do." But I'm going to have to do the same thing you do and never mention it again when I go home. "It's like you're showing off."
Jack made a point of looking down the street and away from Ianto. "Thought you might … " he mumbled something.
"I didn't catch that."
"Catch?"
"I didn't hear you."
"Don't worry about it." He dropped Ianto's hand and hurried forward across the street. Ianto caught up with him.
"Jack, why are you showing off?"
"Because then maybe you'll want to stay here." Ianto had never seen Jack blush before, was startled by the reaction.
"I can't stay here," he said automatically.
"Why not?!" The colour flushed Jack's face completely now, and Ianto went to brush his cheek, but Jack pulled away. "Timelines, I get it. Whatever. But you're dead in your time. Why can't you just get used to the idea of staying here?"
"Because … " He thought of Jack, his Jack, needing him, and he almost missed the movement of this Jack's lips, almost missed him mouthing the words, "With me."
Jack glared. "Because of your boyfriend back home?"
Ianto bit his lip, and he looked at Jack, really looked at him. How had he missed this? Ianto had spent so much time anxious even after Jack had returned to them from his trip with the Doctor, knowing he could only ever achieve second-best status, knowing there was someone who, if he called, Jack would leave with without a backwards glance.
He'd never intended to do that to someone else.
It was an unfair question, but he needed to know. "Do you love me?"
Jack wouldn't meet his eyes.
"Jack … "
"Let's just go."
Ianto could not help the laugh that bubbled out of him, but he stopped as soon as he saw the hurt expression on Jack's face. "Oh God, I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you. I'm just … You and I have the worst timing in all of history." Jack had already stalked away. Ianto caught up with him, grabbed his arms, and kissed him deeply.
"Stop it," Jack said, breaking the kiss. "Don't you dare feel sorry for me."
"I don't."
"I hope you choke on memories of your boyfriend."
"I do," Ianto said, and took his arms again. "Every single time I look at him." He held Jack's eyes, wanting him to know, wanting him to understand.
Jack blinked. Ianto smiled. "No." Ianto nodded. "Really?"
"Really."
Jack's mouth opened. Then it shut. "I showed you all those … That thing with the … ?" He mimed a particularly clever movement with three fingers, the memory of which immediately made Ianto's breath quicken.
"Apparently after I showed you. Mystery of the universe. Best not to think about it. I've been trying not to."
"You do love me." The smile on Jack's face now was one of the rare ones, the real ones he saved for when he was honestly happy, and not just trying to get something from someone. Ianto felt awful for having to ruin it.
"I … will." And there it went, the sun behind a storm cloud.
"But I'm him. The guy you're always thinking about, even when you don't know you're doing it. The one you've been trying to go home to. That's me."
"That will be you." He licked his lips. "You're going to live a lot more before we meet again. You're going to experience so much. Jack … " he didn't know how to go on.
"It's that way you look at me. Here and now. Like you think I'm some kind of hero, like I ought to do things better. Isn't it?"
"It's who you will be. You're going to be," Ianto turned his head, trying to picture his Jack in front of him, "the bravest man I ever meet." Jack looked at him in disbelief. "The man I know always tries to be the best person he can be, to make the best decisions he can. And sometimes he fails, and I love him even more in his failures because he always keeps trying harder. I love him for the man he thinks he ought to be."
Jack walked them over to a bench, lost in thought as they sat together.
"It's not that I don't like you," Ianto said. "I can see so much of who you're going to be in you now, and believe me, I'm happy to know he's in there."
"But I'm not him. Not yet."
"No. I'm sorry." He took Jack's hand and kissed the knuckle. "But I can promise you this much. When you're him, I am going to love you more than anything or anyone." A small part of him remembered that he had chosen Lisa over Jack, but he knew making that choice had been the only way he'd found peace with her loss, and with the choices he'd made after she was gone. Because he had been loyal to Lisa until the end, he could face falling in love with the man who'd killed the shell she'd become.
Ianto said, "Someday, I'm going to believe you hung the stars in the sky and that you can move mountains just by crooking your finger. I'm going to wake up next to you every morning and know I'm exactly where I'm meant to be, for as long as I can be lucky enough to have you. I'll follow you anywhere, do anything you ask."
Jack let out a breath. "All that?"
"Much more than that."
"Oh." Jack sat back on the bench, looked up at the sky. Overcast today, but the rain hadn't fallen yet. Ianto watched the dull clouds with him for a few minutes, wondering what he was thinking. "So. What you're telling me is that I'm stuck in a love triangle. And I'm two of the corners?"
Ianto chuckled. "You could put it that way."
"Then I guess I'm going to have to get out the big guns."
"Excuse me?"
The gleam was back in his eye. "You know what to do in a love triangle. You make sure you're the one who wins. I've got the advantage over future me." He frowned. "Past me. Whatever. Stupid English. I'm here. He's not. And I've got the best source of information about him sitting right next to me."
"I've already told you too much about your future."
"I don't need to know days and dates. I want to know about me. Tell me about the man I'm going to be, the one you're crazy about. Maybe I can get a head start."
Ianto studied Jack's face, was taken all over again by his relative youth. He was alive in ways that had nothing to do with immortality, and in fact had been destroyed by it. This Jack was so very human, and needy, and real, and he wanted to be better. He wanted an ideal to live up to. And if that ideal happened to be an older version of his own personality, well, Jack of any time had always been more than a little in love with himself.
"To begin with, he uses the name Jack Harkness," Ianto said. "He stole it from a dead man, a war hero who gave his life to save his men. He's been trying ever since to live it down."
***
Chapter 5
Author: nancybrown
Rating: R (language, situations, violence)
Spoilers: up through CoE, brief mentions of events from "Pack Animals," "Almost Perfect" and "Lost Souls"
Characters: Ianto, Jack, John, (Eleven and announced companion)
Warnings: Various shades of dub-con, non-descriptive mentions of sex trafficking, character death. I am operating under the assumption that John Hart is Captain Bad Touch, and so should you for the duration of this story.
Wordcount: 36,000 overall, 5700 this section
Betas: Deepest thanks go out to 51stcenturyfox and amilyn for the Britpicking, beta work, and all those other little details that made this story stronger; anything that's still misplaced, misspelled, misplotted or just plain missing is my fault
Disclaimer: Not my characters, not my show. If they'd catch a clue and shut up in my head, we'd all be happier.
Summary: Stuck in the wrong time with a Jack who hasn't met him yet, all Ianto really wants is a way home.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
***
Chapter 4
***
"If you ever do anything that stupid again, I'll kill you myself."
Ianto opened his eyes. The light was too bright, and he groaned. His head ached.
"What happened?" he tried to ask, but it came out, "Whappen?"
"You rushed a Lognian. An armed Lognian. Speaking of arms … "
He couldn't feel his. The panic rushed his throat again, and Ianto tried to sit up, but Jack's hand pushed him against the surface he was on; Ianto no longer assumed the existence of beds.
Someone said something in a different language than the one he was learning, and Jack responded. Ianto turned his head and was relieved to see his left arm, and with effort, turned to see its mate on the other side. His shoulders were heavily bandaged. No amount of effort made his fingers move.
"I remember." He rested for a while. The other voice discussed more with Jack, and Ianto let them talk. He was clearly no longer at the pub, and had been treated by someone. Nothing he could do.
After a while, his vision cleared enough to focus. The other voice was a robot, all white angles and surgical steel fingers. The doctor, though obviously not the Doctor.
"What's going on?" Ianto asked Jack.
"You were hurt. If I hadn't killed him before he pulled out his blades, you'd have bled to death."
"He was going to kill you."
"No, he thought he was. That was incredibly stupid of you to get in his way."
"I thought I was protecting you."
Jack brushed a hand over Ianto's head. "Don't do that again. I'm not worth it."
"You are to me."
"Sap."
"Arsehole." His mouth was dry. "Am I going to regain the use of my arms?"
Jack asked the doctor, who responded in what sounded like a positive tone.
"The doctor says you need to rest today and tomorrow, but you should be fine. He repaired the damage. Now you just need time for your tissues to finish healing."
"Finish?"
"It's not as high-tech as the Agency's equipment. I didn't want to get you noticed at a real hospital. The doctor is, um, let's call him an off the books kind of guy."
"We're at a back alley clinic?"
"What's an alley?"
"Forget it." Out of the way, behind the scenes, off the books. Whatever Jack called it, the clinic would be expensive, and Jack was sure to keep track of just how costly Ianto's treatment was.
"We're someplace safe. When you're ready to walk, we'll go home."
"Sir's going to be pissed that I didn't finish my shift."
"Are you joking? He's gonna tell stories about you for years. The cleaning boy who fought off an armed Lognian. Business will boom."
"Oh. Good." He closed his eyes, and didn't realise he'd fallen asleep until Jack nudged him again.
"Time to go."
***
Jack hired a car to take them home, and half-carried him back to the flat. He made Ianto sit in a chair while he readied a nice comfortable place on the floor with extra pillows, and then helped him undress and lie down.
"You're not supposed to eat until tomorrow, in case the medication makes you vomit, but you can have some water."
"That would be great. Thanks."
Jack brought him a glass and Ianto drank the whole thing. "Careful."
"Thirsty."
"That's the anaesthesia. You were under for a while. Fortunately, the doctor has worked on humans before."
"51st Century humans."
"Not much difference, except you have extra teeth and this weird little organ by your stomach he was wondering about."
"It's called an appendix."
"What's it do?"
"I don't think anyone knows." Ianto frowned. "Extra teeth?"
"In the back."
"Wisdom teeth."
"Do they work?"
He thought about it. "No."
***
Either Jack had time off or he took some holiday leave, because he barely left Ianto's side the next two days. It was nice to be taken care of, to have someone else fetch his meals as tingling, painful feeling came back to his hands slowly. Ianto dozed intermittently, falling asleep to the touch of Jack's hand on his forehead, the sound of Jack's singing in a low voice in his ear. When he was more alert, Jack read to him a bit from the books he had, which reminded Ianto of just how long it had been since he'd read anything himself.
"Can you teach me?" he asked Jack suddenly in the middle of what was probably a potboiler if Ianto could understand what was going on better. "To read? If you'll pardon the metaphor, it feels like my hands are cut off because I can't figure out what I'm seeing."
"I can try. You don't know much of the language."
"I've been picking up loads." Ianto hesitated, and then said, "Two pints and a side of fried tubers, you dumb thing," as well as he could.
Jack laughed. "We'll see. I was kind of thinking you might like to try an old film."
"You have films?"
"There are records of your time, you know. I'll bring you a list of the ones they have at the shop and you can pick something."
While Ianto slept, Jack must have gone out, because when he awoke, Jack had another paper, and he helped Ianto learn the words for it.
"Pa-doe. It means, 'adopted father.'"
"Pa-doe." Ianto thought. "The Godfather?"
"Could be."
They kept reading, slowly, until they reached one that was a literal translation of the original title. Ianto grinned. "Let's get that one." He'd seen a listing for "Goldfinger," but wanted to save it. This one would do.
"All right. I'll be back."
Jack went out and returned with a small silver cube. He set it on the table, activated the hologram, and cuddled beside Ianto on the floor. "This one is in the original English."
"Good." Ianto leaned back, and watched Jack's face as Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones dealt with aliens.
"This is nothing like how first contact went on Earth," Jack said.
"It's a movie. It's not supposed to be accurate, just entertaining."
"They catch and fight and talk to aliens for a living. Who does that?"
"I did. It was my job." They watched the scene with the vomiting baby squid. "I got more than my share of that."
"Liar. You were early twenty-first century. Aliens weren't on Earth in groups that stayed until later."
"Tell that to the Doctor."
"Who is that? I couldn't find anything in the Agency records about him."
Ianto sighed. The Doctor was good at not being noticed when he chose, but it made tracking him down damned difficult. "Just watch the film."
***
Jack liked "Goldfinger," but he thought "The Godfather" was the best film he ever saw.
*
It is Wednesday, the middle of his third week of suspension, and his rooms smell strange. Ianto has left his flat only once, to buy food he does not remember eating. As he came home from that one trip, he spied the camera at his door, realised belatedly it wasn't the only one.
The first day, Owen and Tosh came to go through his flat and see what tech he had stolen from either Torchwood. Since he had taken everything to the Hub when he'd installed Lisa, they found nothing but apparently left the cameras. The second day, he packed Lisa's things, the few not still in boxes from when he brought them to Cardiff. The third day was his trip to get groceries. He set the bags on the kitchen counter and looked at the camera above the stove, and instead of putting the food away, he left it. That probably explains the smell.
He has spent the last two weeks watching the cameras watching him. He wonders whose job it is to monitor him. Maybe the new woman, Gwen. Give her something to do, watching him read and use the toilet and sleep too much and sit quietly staring back.
He expects a bullet or a pill. He finds himself dreaming about each. Jack is there in his mind every night, forcing Ianto to his knees before blooming pain and blessed peace, or pushing the Retcon down his throat before a different kind of oblivion. He dreams about fractures in his memories, chunks carved out of the gristle of his brain, dripping blood, like Lisa's body and Annie's body and the doctor's body. He will be someone else without these memories and the person he is now will be dead.
The knock on the door is insistent, and he rises from the sofa where he's sat all day, letting the tingling in his feet wake him as he reaches the door.
Jack is on his doorstep. It's time.
"Can I come in?"
Ianto moves out of the way, lets the man who is going to kill him inside. He doesn't fight. There's no point in fighting.
Seeing that Ianto is not going to offer him a seat, Jack goes to the sofa and sits. Ianto joins him, mouth tight, eyes wide.
"How are you doing, Ianto?"
He blinks. His mouth moves to automatically frame the word "Fine" but freezes on the lie. He's not going to lie to anyone anymore, not about the things that matter. "I don't know, sir."
"You haven't left your flat in weeks."
"Nowhere to go, sir."
"Are you planning on killing yourself?
The sudden clarity of the question shocks him. "No." Its meaning sinks in. "You've been waiting for me to do the job myself."
Jack frowns in confusion. "What job?"
"You're here to kill me. You'll either shoot me, or make me forget everything since Canary Wharf, more likely since I started at Torchwood London, and I'll be just as gone only you'll have someone walking around who doesn't even know he's wearing a dead man's body." Like Lisa was at the end, wearing Annie like a grotesque suit.
"If we had decided to kill you or Retcon you, you wouldn't have gone home that first night." Jack must be using the royal We, because Ianto had no illusions the others would be consulted in his final decision. "I told you that you're on suspension, not death row."
"You have been known to lie on occasion, sir."
"Likewise."
They sit in silence for a few minutes, Jack taking in the room, the few personal touches Ianto has around the flat.
"The IDs were flawless," Jack says, his eyes on a photograph of Ianto and Lisa, snapped a year ago. Tosh and Owen took the small bag Ianto hid in the corner, holding two passports for each of them, money in different currencies, drivers licenses. Ianto wanted to be able to drop identities as they fled this terrible place and never look back. Now he doesn't know what he wants. Wanting happens to the living and he is not ready to number himself among them despite Jack's assurance.
"I've had practise."
Jack reaches into his coat and Ianto waits for the Webley. Instead Jack pulls out a set of papers and puts them on the coffee table. "Did you know Michael Goodson?"
"The name isn't familiar."
"He worked at Torchwood One. He survived the battle."
"We didn't form a club."
"So you don't know him."
"No."
"He's dead. Swallowed a gun." Jack indicates the papers, and Ianto can see the letterhead, realises they are police reports.
"I see," he says, although he doesn't. Does Jack think Ianto killed the man? Even if he does not, it would not be the first time Torchwood has blamed a death or five on someone who can no longer protest the charges. Creative rewriting of history makes cleanup easier while explaining the unexplainable to grieving relatives. He remembers Lisa's family at her memorial service, how he had to pretend at grief, not daring to share his wonderful secret with them. Now the grief is entirely his own, another secret hidden to the people who would care, a relief to everyone else who knows.
"That makes nine suicides from the twenty-seven survivors," Jack is saying from another planet, and Ianto tries to pay attention. Jack asked him about suicide. "A third of the people who walked out with you are dead now." Simple mathematics belie the human costs. It's like a line from a play and Ianto almost bursts out in inappropriate laughter. "This is funny?"
"I don't know. Is it, sir?" His face hurts from the smile, and he's pretty sure he's lost his mind.
As he has waited here to die, he's pondered how they will convince Rhiannon he killed himself. Owen does the best handwriting forgeries, and Tosh can set a paper trail, and that new woman seems like she could cry well comforting Rhi. Jack might have the suicide note in his pocket right now, and Ianto's fingers itch to reach into Jack's coat and find it, read what Jack dictated to Owen. Jack is the devil himself, equal parts seductive charm and monstrous cruelty, but Ianto has observed that he's also a romantic and will likely ghostwrite tear-stained lines about Ianto's wanting to be with Lisa forever.
"I'm tired of watching people die, Ianto. I'm tired of locking up dead bodies and stowing away the remainders of lives in sheds. Do you understand?"
He doesn't understand at all, has seen Jack happily kill people, but he nods anyway.
"So that's settled," Jack says, as if they had an entire conversation. "Get your coat."
Ianto obeys, because he can, and Jack makes him get into the car, and Ianto sits calmly, wondering if they're going somewhere secluded, if Jack will dump his body in the woods or the Bay so as not to have to bother with freezing him. He watches the streets go by, vaguely recognising the area and then Jack has stopped the car, and they are going into a restaurant, and Jack is ordering for them both, something with protein and vegetables and a baked potato.
He expects death, not spuds with butter and sour cream. Ianto reels.
His brain, which has spent weeks almost entirely shut off and months before that tiptoeing around a nervous breakdown, begins to stir with the notion that this is not the end. The least likely person on the planet to want him alive appears to be genuinely interested in keeping him so. He isn't sure what to make of that, nor of the friendly if completely one-sided patter Jack is keeping up. He tells Ianto about things he's missed at work. Funny stories. Something witty Tosh said. How Gwen is settling in, all knees and elbows but getting there. How Owen got splashed with Weevil guts just yesterday. Ianto sits and listens owlishly as Jack talks and laughs at his own jokes and smiles at Ianto as if they are mates, as if neither ever threatened to shoot the other, as if they are starting over.
"Eat," Jack says, when the food arrives. So he does.
*
Sir greeted Ianto back with open arms, and even the Tweedles looked on him with a little awe. He still had to clean and help cook and wait tables when he could, but now when the customers got grabby, Dee would smack them with her tray. John wasn't so much banned from the pub as followed every minute by Dum until he got annoyed and walked out.
Ianto appreciated the attention, and the kindnesses, and he didn't mind the lost tips.
Jack spent more evenings at the pub than not when he wasn't working an assignment. After a while, Ianto lost track of how long it had been since he'd found someone else back at the flat, though Jack still spent nights away. Asking where he went or with whom wasn't on the table, and anyway Ianto had grown used to what they had, which was not so much a relationship per se as it was a roommate situation with benefits. For himself and for whatever it was worth, he opted to stay faithful to his Jack, and he'd chosen to believe an ongoing affair with Jack's younger self did not qualify as cheating but instead as long-term foreplay. Really spectacular, really long-term foreplay.
One foggy night, he overheard Jack and John arguing outside the pub, but John had stalked away down the street before Ianto could get a handle on what their fight was about.
To Ianto's surprise, Jack never once mentioned how much the clinic had cost.
***
As he learned to read, Ianto made more requests of files from Jack. So as not to give Jack more information about his own future than he needed, he gave him dozens of names, mostly of people Ianto had met briefly, but he really only wanted the files on Gwen, Martha, and, after some thought, Alice and Steven. He read over the brief information alone.
Gwen and Martha both lived long lives. He read the names of their children, the few records that survived of their other exploits. Gwen was listed as the head of the rebuilt Torchwood Institute for almost forty years. Martha was the Medical Director at UNIT for almost as long. Only one marriage was listed for each.
Jack explained, more than once, that the records the Agency had were incomplete, that genealogies were the best they could offer for most people and those themselves were compiled by later descendents. That would explain the paucity of data on Alice Carter. Ianto mourned when he read the date of Steven's death, and he didn't dare tell Jack why. But Alice's file was stranger and sadder, because while he could read the date of her birth, there was no record of her at all after a few months following the loss of her son, not even a death date. Alice had vanished from history, with no one left in her family to note her passing.
The Agency had numerous records of Canary Wharf. They referred to it as The Battle of Torchwood now, and debate had raged for years at the Agency whether they ought to acquire the available stock or if the presence of the Cybermen and Daleks contaminated the scene too badly. The records included the final death tally. According to Agency records, someone was considered to have survived a disaster if he/she/ze lived more than five years after the event. Including the suicides, accidents, and in Ianto's case alien death flu, the tally was the full employee headcount. History said there were no survivors of Canary Wharf.
He didn't yet dare to ask for records of Jack Harkness. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what had happened next.
***
One evening at closing, Tweedledee helped Ianto with the mopping, and then asked in broken English if he and his hoepa would join her family in the morning. It was a special day for Tweedlekind, apparently, because Dum and Dee both had the day off.
"Hoepa?" Ianto asked, and Jack broke in, "We'd love to," in Dee's language.
"What's a hoepa?" Ianto asked as they walked home together.
"Don't worry about it."
Jack had gotten directions from Dee and hired a car to take them to her home. Ianto had never seen anyone else's home on the inside, not since he'd been here, and he took in the overlarge mushroom shape with trepidation. Jack grinned at the spill of tiny Tweedles from the door, and helped translate Dee's hurried introductions of various offspring, nieces, nephews, cousins, and grandchildren as older Tweedles came in and out. He and Jack were the only humans, but Jack seemed perfectly at ease. Ianto followed his lead, and stayed close as Dee introduced her four husbands and two wives as they meandered in and out of the squashy rooms.
Ianto swore he heard the word "hoepa" again but Jack kept pushing him to meet more Tweedles.
Food covered the low table that took over most of one room, and the rest of the house was decorated in plump pillows and holographs of more Tweedles. Ianto could read the inscriptions on some of them, but it was hard.
"The Nardeks were the native species on this world," Jack told him. "Humans colonised it about a thousand years ago, and its location made this a hub of galactic trade. You'll see a lot of family pride in Nardek homes that can trace their ancestry back to before the other species moved in. This one," he said, pointing to a holograph that looked a bit like Tweedledum, "is T'wentani'kanadee's great-great-great-grandfather, many times removed."
"I don't think I could go past my great-granddad's name."
"I forget my parents' names some days," Jack said. His knees were attacked by a wee Tweedle, and he burst out laughing, and said something like, "That's a tree growing fast!"
"The language you're speaking. Is it Nardek?"
"Yeah. Official language here. You didn't know?"
"No one told me."
"Not my first language, but I'm good at it."
"Say something in your first language."
"No."
"Oh, go on."
Jack picked up the wee Tweedle, and then he said a phrase that sounded like a song. The Tweedle giggled and Jack put it down to run off.
"What's it mean?"
"It's a poem. Nothing important."
Dee called them to luncheon, and soon Ianto was tasting much better food than Dee had ever served up at the pub. He praised her as best he could in Nardek, causing the other Tweedles to laugh. Dee said the words he'd gotten used to hearing: half-wit, cleaning boy. Then she said something else, and Jack nudged him. "She's talking up your go at the Lognian."
"It was really not a big deal."
"Watch them." Ianto saw the looks of respect on the Tweedle, sorry, Nardek faces, and he puffed up a little inside.
Eventually, Jack thanked Dee for inviting them and said it was time to go. Nardeks and Time Agents had a holiday but the pubs were still open and Ianto was working a short-staffed job tonight.
Later, after being run ragged by Sir and even with a little help from Jack who could at least understand the rapid-fire orders from the customers, Ianto dragged home in Jack's bubbly wake. Jack had helped himself to drinks behind the bar while he'd tended for Sir, who'd been too busy cooking to do everything, and no one trusted Ianto not to accidentally poison someone.
Jack was singing, the same poem from earlier. Ianto had heard this song before, though he hadn't known it at the time, murmured sleepily into his hair after long nights at the Hub, accompanied by Myfanwy's cooing clicks from her nest or the hum of Ianto's icebox from the wall his bedroom shared with the kitchen.
"Tell me," he said, putting his tired hand in Jack's. "Please."
"'The sun is in the sky, and the water is in the sea, and I am with you. Perfection.'"
"It's a love poem."
"The best ones always are."
***
Jack brushed him awake with a kiss, and Ianto groaned. "It can't be morning yet."
"It can be and it is."
Something unusual reached Ianto's nose. Something … familiar. His eyes came open, and he sat up. The table had food on it, fruit and pastries from the cart two streets away. Jack must have brought them back.
"Breakfast," Jack said. "And a surprise." He handed Ianto a small bowl, hot to the touch, and Ianto sniffed the brown liquid inside.
"Is that … "
"I looked up the records. They still grow beans in the systems closest to Earth, so I ordered some and followed the instructions on how to prepare them. Thought you'd like it."
"I … " He took a sip, and it was hot and bitter and clearly scalded, but it was right in so many ways he could cry. "Thank you."
Jack's face broke into a smile. "I tried some. I don't see why you keep going on about the stuff."
"Let me figure out how to make it properly here, and I'll show you." He took another drink of the terrible coffee and knew what men dying in the desert thought of the brackish pools that saved their lives.
"Happy anniversary," Jack said.
"Hm?"
"You arrived at the Agency a year ago today."
"I did?" It had seemed both like a lifetime and no time at all.
"You did. After breakfast, we'll tour the city. You never really got a chance to see much when you first came, and we've been busy since."
"We're going to be tourists."
"Why not?"
"I hate tourists." Although it had been a year, true, and the sharp hatred had dulled.
"Everyone hates tourists. And we are going to be rich tourists, so they'll hate us even more."
"Let's eat."
***
A willowy building stretched above them into the low-lying clouds.
"The United Council building was built a little over two hundred years ago. There was a reception on the bicentennial that we crashed. Food wasn't very good, but the drinks were to die for, and Georgn and I went home with these three women who'd come all the way from Tau Ceti."
Ianto tried to take everything in as Jack scratched his brain for the history of the building and instead came up with more sex stories, which for once he ended before going into detail. They'd walked across bridges, checked out two tiny nature preserves, and marveled at building after building. Jack had a holomap, used it to point out attractions and let Ianto decide if he wanted to see them in person. All they were missing were cameras and overpriced t-shirts, he mused, but since the parts of the future world he tended to see were dark, dirty, and covered in someone else's vomit, this made a nice change.
At lunchtime, Jack bought them sweets that tasted a bit like orange sherbet and a bit like pie filling, and Ianto only ate about half before his stomach started to ache with sugar shock. Jack finished both treats himself, and then coaxed Ianto into walking several streets over to a shop that sold music on tiny blue chips.
Jack slipped one into Ianto's ear, and to his surprise, Depeche Mode started to play. "That's from your time, right?"
"Close." Ianto tugged it free from his ear. He didn't want to tell Jack he hated that song.
"There's more. We can pick up a few. Keep you from being homesick."
"Thanks." Even with his slow acquisition of the language, the labels on the chips were mysteries. With some help from Jack, he found a Pink Floyd album, not something he normally liked but given the sparse selection, he'd take it.
As they walked back towards home, Jack took his hand and gave it a squeeze. "I was thinking you might want to see the spaceport next."
"That'd be … " He stopped. "Why are you showing me all this?"
Jack shrugged. "I thought you'd like it."
"I do." But I'm going to have to do the same thing you do and never mention it again when I go home. "It's like you're showing off."
Jack made a point of looking down the street and away from Ianto. "Thought you might … " he mumbled something.
"I didn't catch that."
"Catch?"
"I didn't hear you."
"Don't worry about it." He dropped Ianto's hand and hurried forward across the street. Ianto caught up with him.
"Jack, why are you showing off?"
"Because then maybe you'll want to stay here." Ianto had never seen Jack blush before, was startled by the reaction.
"I can't stay here," he said automatically.
"Why not?!" The colour flushed Jack's face completely now, and Ianto went to brush his cheek, but Jack pulled away. "Timelines, I get it. Whatever. But you're dead in your time. Why can't you just get used to the idea of staying here?"
"Because … " He thought of Jack, his Jack, needing him, and he almost missed the movement of this Jack's lips, almost missed him mouthing the words, "With me."
Jack glared. "Because of your boyfriend back home?"
Ianto bit his lip, and he looked at Jack, really looked at him. How had he missed this? Ianto had spent so much time anxious even after Jack had returned to them from his trip with the Doctor, knowing he could only ever achieve second-best status, knowing there was someone who, if he called, Jack would leave with without a backwards glance.
He'd never intended to do that to someone else.
It was an unfair question, but he needed to know. "Do you love me?"
Jack wouldn't meet his eyes.
"Jack … "
"Let's just go."
Ianto could not help the laugh that bubbled out of him, but he stopped as soon as he saw the hurt expression on Jack's face. "Oh God, I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you. I'm just … You and I have the worst timing in all of history." Jack had already stalked away. Ianto caught up with him, grabbed his arms, and kissed him deeply.
"Stop it," Jack said, breaking the kiss. "Don't you dare feel sorry for me."
"I don't."
"I hope you choke on memories of your boyfriend."
"I do," Ianto said, and took his arms again. "Every single time I look at him." He held Jack's eyes, wanting him to know, wanting him to understand.
Jack blinked. Ianto smiled. "No." Ianto nodded. "Really?"
"Really."
Jack's mouth opened. Then it shut. "I showed you all those … That thing with the … ?" He mimed a particularly clever movement with three fingers, the memory of which immediately made Ianto's breath quicken.
"Apparently after I showed you. Mystery of the universe. Best not to think about it. I've been trying not to."
"You do love me." The smile on Jack's face now was one of the rare ones, the real ones he saved for when he was honestly happy, and not just trying to get something from someone. Ianto felt awful for having to ruin it.
"I … will." And there it went, the sun behind a storm cloud.
"But I'm him. The guy you're always thinking about, even when you don't know you're doing it. The one you've been trying to go home to. That's me."
"That will be you." He licked his lips. "You're going to live a lot more before we meet again. You're going to experience so much. Jack … " he didn't know how to go on.
"It's that way you look at me. Here and now. Like you think I'm some kind of hero, like I ought to do things better. Isn't it?"
"It's who you will be. You're going to be," Ianto turned his head, trying to picture his Jack in front of him, "the bravest man I ever meet." Jack looked at him in disbelief. "The man I know always tries to be the best person he can be, to make the best decisions he can. And sometimes he fails, and I love him even more in his failures because he always keeps trying harder. I love him for the man he thinks he ought to be."
Jack walked them over to a bench, lost in thought as they sat together.
"It's not that I don't like you," Ianto said. "I can see so much of who you're going to be in you now, and believe me, I'm happy to know he's in there."
"But I'm not him. Not yet."
"No. I'm sorry." He took Jack's hand and kissed the knuckle. "But I can promise you this much. When you're him, I am going to love you more than anything or anyone." A small part of him remembered that he had chosen Lisa over Jack, but he knew making that choice had been the only way he'd found peace with her loss, and with the choices he'd made after she was gone. Because he had been loyal to Lisa until the end, he could face falling in love with the man who'd killed the shell she'd become.
Ianto said, "Someday, I'm going to believe you hung the stars in the sky and that you can move mountains just by crooking your finger. I'm going to wake up next to you every morning and know I'm exactly where I'm meant to be, for as long as I can be lucky enough to have you. I'll follow you anywhere, do anything you ask."
Jack let out a breath. "All that?"
"Much more than that."
"Oh." Jack sat back on the bench, looked up at the sky. Overcast today, but the rain hadn't fallen yet. Ianto watched the dull clouds with him for a few minutes, wondering what he was thinking. "So. What you're telling me is that I'm stuck in a love triangle. And I'm two of the corners?"
Ianto chuckled. "You could put it that way."
"Then I guess I'm going to have to get out the big guns."
"Excuse me?"
The gleam was back in his eye. "You know what to do in a love triangle. You make sure you're the one who wins. I've got the advantage over future me." He frowned. "Past me. Whatever. Stupid English. I'm here. He's not. And I've got the best source of information about him sitting right next to me."
"I've already told you too much about your future."
"I don't need to know days and dates. I want to know about me. Tell me about the man I'm going to be, the one you're crazy about. Maybe I can get a head start."
Ianto studied Jack's face, was taken all over again by his relative youth. He was alive in ways that had nothing to do with immortality, and in fact had been destroyed by it. This Jack was so very human, and needy, and real, and he wanted to be better. He wanted an ideal to live up to. And if that ideal happened to be an older version of his own personality, well, Jack of any time had always been more than a little in love with himself.
"To begin with, he uses the name Jack Harkness," Ianto said. "He stole it from a dead man, a war hero who gave his life to save his men. He's been trying ever since to live it down."
***
Chapter 5