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When Gwen and Ianto got to Thames House, Jack was sitting at the end of a corridor with his head in his hands, looking like he'd died and come back but didn't know it yet. Ianto slowed his steps. He didn't want to be pushed away again, and he was a little afraid Jack blamed him for everything.
Gwen, who never suffered from these doubts, ran ahead and threw her arms around Jack. He returned her hug patiently, and as he lifted his head, his eyes fell on Ianto.
"Good thing you didn't come along, huh?" he said. But he didn't sound relieved; he sounded like all those dead people downstairs were the punchline of a cynical joke.
By the time Jack told them the plan was off, Ianto was too numb to protest. Jack had agreed to things over their heads, and the wheels were already turning. At last, Jack took Ianto in his arms next to a waiting helicopter, kissed his ear and whispered, "Keep them safe." Too late, Ianto understood what was going on. The aliens had won, and Jack was doing what he always did—making an awful choice between bad and worse.
Hours later, as Rhiannon's lounge filled up with children and adults, Ianto stood apart making phone call after phone call, trying to get through to Jack or someone near him. No one would give him the whole story, but he gleaned two things: that Jack had made the impossible happen once again, and that it had been horrible. He wondered how horrible it could possibly be if most of the world was still alive and Jack himself had shrugged off death as usual.
He didn't have to wonder long. As he sat on the couch staring at the news, Gwen came in and pulled him into another room.
"He's gone," she said once they'd shut the door.
"Gone?" That made no sense—Jack would never be gone. "Where?"
Gwen's eyes filled, and she told him about Steven.
Stupidly, Ianto said, "What?" But he'd heard her perfectly, and he hated himself for only caring that Jack was gone now when people were dead, children were dead, and Jack had—
Jack had murdered a little boy to save the world.
Of course he was capable of it. That had been one of the first things Ianto had learned about him. And Jack was not the sort who asked others to make sacrifices he wouldn't make. Ianto loved him for it, although it frightened him. Jack was god-like, indifferently just. There were plenty of people who loved a god who allowed children to die—Ianto was just one more.
*
Gwen took over Torchwood without ceremony or discussion. There wasn't anything else to do; Ianto certainly didn't want the job. The new recruits were useful, though, especially Lois and Johnson. No one was quite sure about Johnson—as far as they knew, she had only joined because there were no other open positions for unemployed government assassins—but they needed her too much to be picky.
They moved back to Cardiff as soon as they could. Ianto wondered about the wisdom of rebuilding the Hub now that it was no longer secret—but secrecy was becoming more and more irrelevant. The toothpaste was out of the tube as far as aliens went; after the recent near-apocalypse, feeding Retcon to anyone who saw a Weevil seemed like a waste of time.
Gwen was, of course, magnificent. Every morning, her musical voice came through the thin walls of her trailer-office, haranguing officials, secretaries, generals and clerks. When the day's first Rift alert went off, she emerged, accepted a thermos of coffee from Ianto, and led them cheerfully into danger. It was an adjustment, after Jack's quasi-military style, to be ordered about by someone who called you "sweetheart" and sometimes wore pigtails, but no one questioned her, not even Johnson. Gwen just got on with things, and Ianto fell into line right behind her.
It took them maybe another month to figure out that Jack wasn't coming back.
Ianto's hope didn't die all at once. Without realizing it, he had been sticking close to Johnson—she terrified him, but she was the last person who'd been with Jack, and Ianto was clinging to that imaginary thread keeping Jack there, at least in potential. One day when he came to get her lunch order, she spun around and said, "I've told you everything, he just walked out, now bugger off!" and a little bit more of his hope went underground.
It was Gwen who found the Vortex Manipulator. Or rather, identified it in the mountain of metal debris that had come out of the crater in the Plass. Any alien artifact had to be accounted for and destroyed if it couldn't be salvaged, and they'd been sorting for weeks until one afternoon, bent over the table where the blackened bits of metal were spread, Gwen gave a cry. When Ianto saw it, scorched and naked without its leather strap, he felt again as if Jack were a tiny bit less gone.
Johnson spotted him turning it over in his hands. "It's not like he's attached to it," she said. "You didn't find him, you found a piece of junk."
Ianto still insisted on fixing it. He had nothing like Toshiko's skill, but he didn't like the idea of anyone else touching it—it had virtually been a part of Jack's body, and Johnson at least had not taken much care with Jack's body in the past. This little piece of Jack deserved to be looked after. Ianto eventually got it to switch on and respond to some of his commands—he didn't dare mess with the time-travel components, which were still broken—and then took it to be fitted with a new strap. Finally he polished it, and put it away in a drawer.
"Oh good," said Johnson. "At least you're not wearing it around."
The truth was, he'd put the thing away because he no longer wanted to be reminded of Jack constantly. Over time, thinking about Jack had grown more painful, not less, and so he tried to do it as little as possible. He wanted his memory of Jack to stay in the drawer with the Vortex Manipulator, safe but out of sight.
He still spent hours on the Internet every night, reading Interpol reports and message boards. Gwen thought it was a waste of time; but Gwen was convinced that Jack would eventually return on his own. Ianto rationalized it by declaring it a sort of hobby—he never looked for Jack during business hours, or let it interfere with his work—and after a while, it was just a habit, like video games or online chess. He didn't even think about Jack as he did it. But then he started sleeping less and less, which did interfere with his work, and when Gwen asked him directly why he wasn't sleeping, a flimsy lie came out of his mouth. Alarmed that he was now covering up his habit like an addict, he decided to try cutting back, but at night when he went home, there was nothing else to do—he had no interests, no social life. So the cycle began again.
He'd just started to wonder what kind of twelve-step program he could lie his way into when he ran across a law enforcement bulletin describing a man who could only be Jack. Ianto's world upended—it had been months since he'd searched for Jack actually expecting to find him. Jack was apparently in Senegal, doing something mildly illegal that had nothing to do with aliens or Torchwood business of any kind.
Violent feelings flooded in—sharp, painful longing, and breathless fear that made his hands shake as he typed Dakar into a text field. There was no way he could ask permission—yeah Gwen, just popping round the world for a few days, see you next week—because she would either forbid him, or insist on coming too. Besides, there wasn't time. He sent her a one-sentence e-mail, then pulled out his suitcase.
The taxi driver was kind enough to stop by the Plass, where Ianto collected the Vortex Manipulator from its drawer. He had no idea why he needed it, except that in his mind, it had become a talisman with the power to draw Jack home, which was silly. He also had a dim notion that he could use it to barter with Jack, which was even sillier. Mostly it made him feel like Jack was close by. Strapped to Ianto's wrist, it was a kind of prosthesis, supplying the hope he could no longer locate inside himself.
Jack was gone by the time Ianto reached Dakar. But there was a trail, and the Vortex Manipulator was the most devilishly useful little device, especially for translating, which he'd have been quite lost without. The trail led to Morocco, and before the week was out, Ianto arrived in Rabat with a surveillance photo and a list of addresses, which he went straight to work on.
The third address down was, of all things, a coffee shop. Ianto got there at three o'clock, just as the place was filling up, and bought a cup of coffee so he'd have an excuse to sit there for a while.
An hour passed. He sat in a corner with a newspaper, testing the limits of his guide-book French, and looked at every face that came through the door. At around half past four, Jack's appeared.
He spotted Ianto immediately, and his face went carefully blank as he lingered in the doorway. Ianto folded his newspaper and gave him a little smile. People entering the shop behind Jack eventually forced him to come all the way inside, and he made his way over to Ianto's table with a false, overdone sigh.
"I guess I've got a bit set in my habits," he said as he sat down in the chair beside Ianto. "Should have known you'd be paying attention."
"Indeed, sir," said Ianto with a smile. Jack didn't look at him.
Ianto had no idea what to say, where to begin, although he'd played this moment over and over in his mind. For a while, nobody said anything. Then Jack started, as if they were resuming an interrupted conversation and not seeing each other for the first time in six months.
"This is my kind of country," he said, squinting out at the street. "Everyone stops for coffee and pastries mid-afternoon, like clockwork. The coffee's amazing. Even the tea is good—and you know how I feel about tea."
Ianto gazed at him, paralyzed with longing. He'd expected the tragedy to be visible somehow, but Jack looked good—better than good, actually. His skin was bronze, like one of the ancient Greek ephebes dug up outside the city they were in now, whose burnished bodies gleamed under a green patina built up over centuries in the desert air. Jack was like that—beautiful and ancient and hard.
"You don't want me here," said Ianto. He hadn't meant to say it; he'd been determined not to seem needy. So much for that.
"What makes you say so?" Jack turned look at him with eyes extinct of light. Under the table, his hand slid up the inside of Ianto's thigh, big and warm, callouses catching on wool. Ianto's pulse leapt in his throat, all of his nerves surging to life—Christ, he was lonely. He missed Jack, and this man whose wrist was brushing his balls looked like Jack, even if everything about him that made Ianto feel safe and loved was gone. He wanted to take what Jack was offering and just not care. He wished he were the sort of person who could.
He glanced around, but the men drinking coffee on either side of them couldn't see Jack fondling his thigh. After a minute, Jack withdrew his hand, trailing his fingers over Ianto's incipient erection.
"My room is just a few streets over," said Jack softly. It was the same indifferent lechery he directed at everybody—Ianto watched him lavish it on other people all the time without feeling a trace of jealousy. It would have hurt vastly less if Jack had refused to touch him at all.
God, how he wanted to let Jack take him back to that room and lay him out in the afternoon heat—but he knew how he'd feel afterward.
"No, thanks," he said, as lightly as he could.
Jack shrugged. "Your loss."
They sat in silence for a while longer. Then Jack turned to him and said, "Anything else?"
"Jack," said Ianto. "Come home."
"What for?"
"What do you think?" He had sworn he wouldn't make this about him, because that was a certain way to fail. Jack seemed to find people's feelings for him a burden most of the time, and surely that was even more true now. But Ianto had nothing else to appeal to, and so he said what he knew would do him no good. "I love you," he said.
He had expected rejection, denial. Some insistence that Jack didn't deserve it. What he had not expected was for Jack to give him a withering look and say, "Oh come on."
Ianto's heart constricted. "It's the truth," he said, not really knowing why he was still talking. "Nothing you've done—nothing you could do will change it."
"Nothing? Really?" Jack's lip curled. "If it had been your sister's kids, you'd have been okay with that?"
Ianto shut his eyes and sighed. "Of course not." He looked down. "But I'd still love you."
Jack raised both eyebrows. "Wow. That's—pathetic, actually. Are you really that terrified of being alone?"
Ianto knew how cruel Jack was capable of being, how cold—that's how they got to be sitting here, after all. He knew what he was up against. "You're a good man, Jack. I know you don't believe that—"
"You have no idea." Jack looked up as though he'd had a sudden inspiration. "You don't know me at all. Seriously—what do you really know about me?"
Ianto blinked. It had never been like that; they had never made an issue of the details. And it wasn't like Ianto hadn't tried to find out everything he could anyway. "I know you always do what's necessary," he said. "I know you saved everyone. I know you did something no one else could have done."
"That's right!" Jack's eyes were wild. "And for good reason! I'm not a nice guy, Ianto, in case you missed that!"
"It hurt you, didn't it?" Ianto's voice felt rough. "You didn't let—let Steven die because you were indifferent, or because you wanted to. It tore you apart, but you did it anyway because there was no other choice, and I—"
"No, you don't," said Jack coldly. "You just think you do, because you think loving me will make you special. That's what you do, isn't it? You find somebody to worship, because deep down you think you're nothing, and if you can just claim a piece of somebody else, you can borrow a bit of what they have. You think loving me will make you someone new. And all the better if I'm a monster, right?" His voice rose a little, and he laughed. "Like Lisa was. Because it's easy to love someone nice, but loving a monster, that deserves a goddamn medal, doesn't it? So you can pat yourself on the back for loving the person no one else could, and maybe if you really give it your all, you'll stop being that dull little nobody you're afraid you are." Jack paused and took a breath. "So don't try and feed me that line. You've got your own sad reasons for being here."
There was no heat in Jack's voice, no deliberate cruelty—and that was what finally destroyed Ianto's hope. Always before, he could get a reaction, could engage Jack's anger or his lust, to remind him that there was still feeling left in the world—but this was beyond those other griefs. This was not something Ianto could touch. Nothing about his body or his little mortal life could console Jack for this. He was going to lose Jack and there was nothing he could do.
It seemed contemptible, when a little boy was dead, to fixate on his own loss. What he was losing was nothing compared to what Jack had lost, what Alice had lost—what Steven had lost. His feelings didn't matter in this universe of grief. But they were what he had, his little corner of human life to tend; they mattered to him. He opened his mouth to argue, to plead his case, but his throat had closed up.
Jack glanced over at him, and his eyes widened. "What's that?" he snapped, pointing at Ianto's wrist.
The leather strap of the Vortex Manipulator had slipped down and the edge was showing beneath his sleeve. Jack got up, the legs of his chair screeching, and pulled Ianto toward the door. Outside, he grabbed Ianto's sleeve and shoved it up.
"We found it in the wreckage," Ianto said. He pulled his wrist out of Jack's grip and rubbed it.
"Give it to me," said Jack, looking Ianto straight in the eye.
"What? No!" Ianto pushed the strap back up his arm, hiding it. "You'll use it to run away!"
"So, what?" Jack's voice rose, sharp and mocking. "You're going to hold me prisoner? You think if you keep it from me, I'll just give up and follow you home?"
Ianto clutched the Vortex Manipulator through his sleeve. For a moment, he seriously considered it—holding the thing hostage, or destroying it, so that Jack would be trapped on Earth. Maybe he would keep running, but never to a place Ianto couldn't follow.
It wouldn't work. Jack was faster and stronger than him, for one thing. Would Ianto even have the will to defend himself if Jack tried to take it by force? Either way, Jack would never forgive him. It would be Lisa all over again—his efforts would only prolong their suffering. Jack, like Lisa, was already out of reach, although his body might still be here. Ianto could pretend for a while, but that was it.
Tears blurring his vision, every part of him crying out against it, Ianto unbuckled the strap, slid the thing off his wrist and handed it to Jack.
"Thanks," said Jack. He actually sounded grateful. Of all the things Ianto could offer him, the only thing he was grateful for was the power to leave. And now Ianto had nothing left to bargain with.
"Please," he said, his voice shaking. "Just—not yet. I'm not asking you to stay forever, just don't go right this second."
"Sorry," said Jack, pressing some buttons on the wrist strap. "I don't have what you want anymore. And I need to get far away from here. Take care of yourself, Ianto." And he vanished in a burst of light.
Ianto watched the spot where Jack had been standing for a long time. There was a roaring in his ears that had started when he'd realized Jack had been replaced by a stranger, and now it grew louder. As he made his way back, toward his own country and his own chilly home, it took over everything, drowning out the sounds of life so that he was alone with one thought: I'm never going to see him again.
*
Gwen didn't say anything as they drove back from the airport. Ianto had told her what had happened over the phone, and now there was nothing to talk about except what they were feeling; and for once, Gwen appeared to have as little interest in that as he did. She drummed her fingers on the wheel, and Ianto wondered if she was going to fire him. He hadn't actually apologized for running off, and he had no immediate plans to do so. His mind felt like an open sore—he couldn't touch anything in it without pain, and now, Gwen's anger was another layer on top of his grief. He wished she had just let him take the train.
But when they pulled up in front of his flat, she got out and hugged him before he could escape. She cried a bit as they held each other, and his own eyes burned, only in sympathy—whatever he was feeling, it refused to come out that way. He had a vivid memory of kneeling on a bloody concrete floor and sobbing uncontrollably, grief pouring through him and out. But that wasn't him anymore—Lisa had drained him of his last uncomplicated tears.
A few weeks later in the new Hub, after a morning of moving furniture in, Ianto stopped and sat down on the steps. When Gwen ran across him an hour later, he hadn't moved.
"I can't do this," he said after she'd sat beside him for a while.
"Yes, you can," said Gwen gently, and that had been exactly what Jack had said, after Lisa. What else could a person say? It all looked so easy to them. He didn't feel like arguing; better just to nod and pretend to agree. But it was hard to fake the act of moving around when you'd completely given up.
"What do I do?" he asked her, without expecting an answer. What had he done the first time? Went and fell in love with Jack, he supposed.
"Come for supper tonight," said Gwen. "Rhys is making lasagna."
He went out of gratitude more than an actual desire to go. He wasn't fit company for man or beast, but Gwen was trying, even if there wasn't much she could do, and it touched him. It was more than Jack had done. After Lisa, Jack had offered a bit of physical comfort once Ianto could tolerate it, but with clear limits and conditions—nothing like the friendship and understanding Gwen gave. That had all come much later.
Ianto never felt at ease in other people's homes, especially if he was the only guest, and so he didn't truly relax until they gave up and allowed him to do the dishes. He put on Rhys's DANGER: MEN COOKING apron and started the pan soaking while Rhys stretched out on the settee in front of the evening news.
"You're hiding again," said Gwen in the kitchen doorway. She was quite pregnant now; only one more month to go.
"It's how I cope," he said with a flippant smile as he shoved a brush into a glass.
"I know. Are you sure it's working?"
He set down the glass and shut off the water. "I—no, maybe not," he said to the sink. "But could you—just—"
"Pretend not to notice?"
"Yeah."
She sighed, then came over to lean against the drawer beside the sink. "You know, I miss him too."
"I know." His chest ached. "Sorry."
"It'll get better," she said. "As time passes. Things will improve."
He nodded. "Right."
Her hand, little but so strong, rubbed the small of his back. "Now take that thing off and come waste an hour in front of the telly with us."
He untied the apron and draped it over the back of a chair. Then Gwen reached for his neck and pulled him down into her arms. Tucking his face against her shoulder, he drew a shivery breath and stayed there, clinging to her strength.
"Ianto?" she said after a moment.
He stroked a hand down her hair, and kissed her neck. When she started to pull away, he followed, and pressed his mouth to hers.
"Ianto." Her hands slid up his chest and gently but firmly pushed him back.
His face flushed. When he looked up, Rhys was standing in the kitchen doorway. "Mate," Rhys said slowly, "what the hell?"
"Sweetheart, it's okay," Gwen said, though it wasn't clear which one of them she was talking to.
"Shit." Ianto backed away into the counter. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
Rhys was saying, "I think you should go," while Gwen said, "He's had a hard time, love, he didn't mean anything by it, now let's everyone—"
Ianto squeezed past them and made for the front door. "I'm sorry," he said again, not loud enough to be heard.
"Ianto!" Gwen followed, but didn't touch him. "I know you didn't—Rhys, make him—oh, stop being idiots, both of you!—Ianto don't leave we need to talk about—"
But Ianto was already halfway down the stairs. By the time he reached the bottom, he had started to shiver, a bubble of panic clogging his throat. Five minutes later, he was still walking, with no idea where he was—he'd left his car near Gwen's flat and now he was on a street he didn't recognize. His mobile rang for a minute, then buzzed with an incoming text message. It said, are u ok? He stopped and leaned against a street lamp, still shaking, while he sent his reply: yes. see u tomorrow. He sat down in an entryway and watched the screen of his phone for a few minutes, but nothing else came through.
At last, sitting on someone's front steps with his cheek resting on his knees, he let himself cry. He didn't even know what it was for—the pain felt old and infantile, a baby's sadness at being born. Yet he also felt buried, embalmed, amputated from the world. He sniffed the salty trickle in his throat and drifted, his swollen eyes half-closed.
After he was done, he got up and wandered for a while, stiff and chilled, until he found his car again. At first he drove toward home, but found himself passing the turn for his neighborhood and driving on.
Outside his sister's house, he understood a little how Jack felt—sick with the weight of other people's needs. He had no right to show up now, when he needed someone to take care of him, after being so useless for so many years. If Rhiannon turned him out, he'd deserve it, as far as he was concerned. He'd left his family behind to become, as Jack had cruelly said, somebody special, and it had amounted to nothing.
David opened the door when he knocked. He looked at Ianto blankly and then shouted, "Mum!" as he wandered off.
Rhiannon appeared, smiling, but her smile vanished when she saw him—she would probably never look at him again without thinking of the day the army tried to take away her children. "What's the trouble, then?" she said.
"Nothing." He stood, frozen on her threshold. "I just—sorry."
"Oh, come on." She waved him inside impatiently. "What am I supposed to think when you turn up here? That you've come to take the kids to the cinema like you said? Not bloody likely. Come on, sit down." She started to fill the kettle, then looked up and stopped. "Ianto? What's the matter?"
"I dunno." His smile felt ghastly. He turned away and sat down on the couch.
"Is, um…" Rhiannon set the kettle going and came over. "Is it something to do with your—bloke?"
Ianto laughed, a little choking sound. "Yeah, I guess."
"Oh, love." She rubbed his shoulder, jostling him a bit, like she was trying to shake him out of his sadness. "Blokes aren't any kinder than girls, are they?"
"Guess not," he said, numb.
He wanted to tell her everything. All of it, from the beginning—London, Lisa, Torchwood, Jack. The brief time when his life had been extraordinary. He'd thought the change was permanent then, that he had changed somehow, but he was still Ianto Jones, at the end of it all. Still the same dull little nobody. And while he still had Torchwood, which itself was marvelous beyond imagining, the real wonder had passed—Jack had taken it away with him, wherever he'd gone. Gwen was luminous, but Ianto couldn't borrow her light the way he'd borrowed Jack's. If he was going to be in any way extraordinary, he'd have to do it on his own.
In the end, he told her nothing. Telling his big sister the story of his life felt too much like admitting the whole thing hadn't been quite real. "I'm not so good at getting over things," he said instead. "Or at being alone."
"Don't worry, there'll be somebody new," Rhiannon assured him.
Maybe there would be. Somehow that only made him sadder.
*
The next morning, Gwen came into her office and found Ianto already sitting there. A typed letter lay on her desk.
"No," said Gwen, "I don't accept this."
"I'm not asking for your permission," said Ianto.
"What happened last night," Gwen protested, "it wasn't a big deal, it was just a thing—Rhys has already forgotten it. There's no need to—"
"It's not about last night," said Ianto. He sighed and rubbed his face; he hadn't slept much. "I just need to go. I can't leave the planet like Jack, but I can get away from here for a while, see some new places, make some new memories that don't involve aliens and losing everyone I love."
Gwen's eyes filled with tears. "And what about me? On top of the rest, I've got to lose you too?"
"You've got a family. And a team who respects you. You're on the new Prime Minister's speed-dial." Ianto sighed. "And more importantly, you know exactly who you are. I have no idea who I am, Gwen. None."
"And you think you'll find out by leaving?"
"I dunno. But it's never going to happen here. I thought I'd become somebody I liked, with Jack, but—I don't think that was real. It was just what I wanted to be real."
Gwen wrapped her arms around his neck. It was only a little bit awkward this time, with nobody embarrassing themselves. The night before, he'd been looking for someone new to worship, that was all. It felt like a hundred years ago.
He pulled away. Already he felt lighter—empty, like an unloaded sack. "I won't be gone forever," he said, and he was reasonably sure he meant it.
"You've got to stay in touch, though," she ordered, sniffing and wiping her eyes. "No excuses—you have a perfectly good mobile, and there's a thing called the Internet now."
"Okay," he said, smiling.
Later that afternoon, he took the train to Heathrow, where he stood under the departure board and searched the column of destinations for one that sounded right. Near the bottom, he found a city name with no associations, no feelings attached—just a string of letters that inspired neither longing nor excitement nor fear. A word awaiting a meaning. Yes, he thought. That is what I want.