Chapter Text
Jack Harkness of Torchwood laid on the ground. “Jack! Jack!” Blood seeped into his spiked brown hair. His blue eyes, always so full of life stared blankly with nothing behind him. He was dead. And never coming back.
Ianto cradled the bloodied body. Sobbing. No. No. Not like this. He’d already lost Lisa. The thought of losing Jack too...he continued to hold Jack’s dead weight in his arms.
Ianto’s face was hot. The cyberman that did this had to be near. He should run. Jack would want him to run. But he couldn’t move. Couldn’t bring himself to do anything but hang onto Jack’s lifeless form. Hold onto Jack while he still could.
“Life form detected,” said a mechanical voice. “You will be deleted.”
Ianto still had his gun in its holster. The big gun, the one he stood a chance with, the one that Jack had been brandishing before they got him, wasn’t at a charge yet. It wouldn’t be in time. All he had was the glock with useless old style bullets.
He lifted it up anyways, and fired rounds. They weren’t going to get near Jack. He wasn’t going to allow it. It was the last thing he remembered, before waking up on the conversion table and screaming as loud as he could before the conversion could take hold...
Ianto Jones died.
And then...Ianto had always suspected that there would be nothing.
This was something.
A void.
Some kind of dimensional space he felt like he was floating in.
The void called to him. Called him somewhere. The world was new and so like his own, but so different at the same time. He had some measure of control on where he went. He wanted familiar. Something he could latch onto.
He thought of his family. Of Rhiannon and of his mother. Of Lisa.
And then of Jack. His strange control of the void, or maybe not control but the voids allowance for him to surf it, took him to where he wanted to be.
Jack
Jack alive and breathing in front of him.
Jack free of scarring and of blood and there.
He looked at him. Taking it all in. Jack .
“Who the hell are you?”
“ Jack… ”
Jack was looking at him dumbfounded. There was no recognition there. No love.
He’d found a Jack, but not his. This Jack didn’t know him. Suddenly the void took him back, back to the void space. And away from Jack.
The void would bring him back to Jack in that strange but wrong world, periodically in shifts.
Jack seemed happier to see him over time, but Ianto knew the recognition wasn’t there. Still it was Jack. Maybe not his Jack. But he was alive and handsome as ever. And maybe the safeness that he couldn’t just reach him showed but he wanted to be there anyways at his side.
There was one more shift. And Ianto found himself in an office block. A normal Earth office block.
Weird afterlife...
It was the last thought Ianto had before he looked down and saw the metallic body. Before his programming kicked on.
Delete.
The cyber warrior took out his order to finish rush jobs, half conversions to make more soldiers as fast as possible. The cyberman threw one last human onto the conversion table before the Dalek stalk got him.
They were at the wreckage site, what was left of the Torchwood Tower, salvaging what they could from the destroyed archives. Dealing with the sharp metal that needed to be incinerated. Jack threw some of the scrap into the disposal unit for transport. A sort of high tech rolling bin.
“If that’s the case, why didn’t I know my ghost?”