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Fic: Get Loved, Make More, Try to Stay Alive (5/8)
part 4
The actual treatment of Ianto's illness had required only a few minutes of inhaling some chemical-mint-scented gas from a small mask. Jana had monitored him for several minutes to see that he was reacting properly, and she and Jack had taken up the time rehashing what seemed to be quite an old, and not entirely theoretical, debate about the handling of possible future epidemics in the village. Ianto suppressed the urge to take actual notes, but found himself memorizing the bullet points anyway.
Afterward, they set out back toward Jack's house; Ianto occupied himself with enjoying his rapidly improving lung capacity. Jack still appeared to be contemplating quarantine procedures--or possibly contemplating Jana--and either way, Ianto was content not to interrupt him. He had an entire year to work out exactly what was going on, after all.
There were two men standing at the garden gate, in what Ianto concluded after a few moments' scrutiny must be the current equivalent of three-piece suits, despite the blinding array of colors.
Jack rather pointedly took Ianto's hand as they approached. Ianto thought of what Jack had said about him being arrested, about how Jana had obviously known something was odd about him, and tightened his hand on Jack's.
"Ianto Jones, Torchwood Cardiff," the man on the left said as they approached. "Born August the nineteenth, 1983, veteran of Canary Wharf, defender of the Earth."
Ianto stopped short. Jack squeezed his hand.
"Not bad," Jack said. "Not bad at all."
The one on the right said, "You know we keep an eye on you, Captain. Mr. Jones is in the archives, all right and proper."
"I'm sorry," Ianto said, trying not to sound bewildered--they had to be Torchwood, if they knew who he was, but Jack didn't seem to think there was a problem with them turning up at his home. Jack hadn't said anything about what he was doing these days, apart from raising Junior in Wales, and Cardiff wasn't far... "Is there a problem?"
Both of them turned to face him, straightening to something like attention. "Not at all, Mr. Jones, sir. It's just not every year that we get to administer the Torchwood Pension Plan for a temporally displaced operative. It's exciting for us, to be honest."
Ianto stared. "I'm a pensioner, now?"
"Well," Jack said, dropping his arm to sling an arm around Ianto's waist. "Technically speaking, you are a bit past retirement age."
The hypocrisy, even in obvious jest, was for a moment literally breathtaking.
The man on the left waved a small device--a computer, or something like it, Ianto supposed. "We've registered a local identity for you, so you shouldn't run into any further problems. If you'll just give me your hand, I can place your ident chip."
Ianto looked sideways at Jack, and he shrugged and patted Ianto's hip. "Indy has one, I don't. It's up to you."
If Jack thought it was dangerous, he wouldn't have let them install one in his son--still. "When I go home..."
"It's an entirely passive technology," the man on the left assured him. "It has to be contacted on a very particular frequency for the information to be accessed."
Ianto gave up, extending his right hand. There was a brief, impersonal pressure of the other man's hand around his, and then a stunningly sharp pain in his thumb. Ianto jerked his hand back reflexively, swallowing curses and stopping just short of sticking the offended thumb into his mouth.
Jack laughed, loud and startled-sounding, and Ianto glared at him, shaking his hand against the sting.
"Sorry," Jack said, grinning unrepentantly. "Sorry, sorry."
He caught Ianto's hand, and carefully kissed the tip of his thumb--there wasn't even blood, Ianto noticed, and already the sting was fading into a throbbing ache. Then he kissed Ianto's forehead, gathering him into a hug, and then his lips.
"Sorry," Jack repeated, still smiling. "It's just--your son made exactly the same face."
On Thursday--which was not, for reasons Ianto did not entirely understand, a school day--Junior looked at him across the breakfast table and announced, "You need new clothes."
Ianto couldn't argue; he'd been running his things through the off-puttingly silent and waterless cleaner when he showered, but he couldn't actually keep wearing the same jeans and shirt for an entire year.
Ianto looked to Jack, who had such an entirely innocent air about him that Ianto immediately smelled conspiracy. "Jack?"
"I wasn't going to say anything," he remarked to his breakfast. "But if you wanted to go shopping..."
"Cardiff!" Junior crowed. "Cardiff, Cardiff!"
"Upper Cardiff," Jack corrected, and then gave Ianto a more thoughtful look. "You haven't tried to access any recent history or current events on the household system."
It wasn't a question; Ianto supposed his ident chip would have logged him in, and left evidence for Jack to find. As it happened, though, he'd found watching cartoons with Junior quite overwhelming enough--what Junior called a cartoon was something between a video game and an acid trip--without going looking for things he shouldn't know. "It didn't seem wise."
"No," Jack said. "You'll find you're locked out of the entire 21st century. But it will soon become apparent to you that Cardiff isn't quite where you left it."
Ianto raised his eyebrows.
"Most of it fell into the Rift a while back," Jack said, rather more breezily than Ianto thought warranted, considering. "Torchwood did all right. The city was nearly perfectly evacuated before it fell, and they called in the big guns and finally got the thing sealed up--I guess we should have done that years ago, but--anyway. Cardiff mostly vanished, and the sea took what was left. The old M4 is nearly a coastal road in places, now."
Ianto tried to assimilate that; he'd have to look at a map later. He couldn't quite fathom it all being gone--Cardiff, the Hub, his flat, the shops where he'd bought toner and ammunition and new old buttons for Jack's coat. He wondered if that was what had killed him, or if he had been dead before it happened. He rather hoped it was the latter, so that he wouldn't have to see it, nor be responsible for not preventing it--though Jack made it sound rather like a natural disaster, and apparently whoever had been on the spot had nearly perfectly evacuated the city.
Gwen, he thought, recalling--days ago, centuries ago--the sound of her voice managing the evacuations out to Flat Holm Island. He wondered if even that had survived. "So... Upper Cardiff?"
"That’s what they called what was left--the city reformed on higher ground. This village was far enough back to stay separate."
Ianto stared down at his breakfast a bit longer.
"Well," he said finally. "I do need new clothes."
Junior cheered.
Everyone really did wear those bloody rust-colored trousers; Ianto stuck out badly in his blue jeans, and thought he would go blind from the brightness of the crowds around them. The clothing racks were even worse.
He had money--he'd looked himself up on the household information system, to see what he ought to know, and apparently the Torchwood Pension Plan treated its temporally displaced operatives rather generously. Ianto doubted there were enough of them--or enough pensioners of any description--to require much rationing. He seemed to have enough to buy whatever he liked, and quite nice ones, but he couldn't find anything that wasn't eyeball-scarring, no matter how enthusiastically Jack and Junior suggested different versions of exactly the same thing.
Ianto was a little frustrated, a little weirded out, no more than that--he was Torchwood, wasn't he? He saw a dozen impossible things before breakfast every day, and made coffee for three of them--and so he found it a bit surprising to realize that he was sitting on the floor of a changing cubicle with his hands over his eyes, hyperventilating and shivering.
"Ianto?"
Junior, of course.
"Yes," he managed, breathless. "Just--one moment--"
There was a silence outside, and then Junior said, "Don't move, I'll get Dad."
"Fuck," Ianto sighed, and got unsteadily to his knees, which was when he noticed that he was wearing a pair of the rust-colored trousers. The last several minutes came a bit more sharply into focus--Christ, he was in the future, the bloody future with Jack and their son, Cardiff had fallen into the Rift and everything and everyone he knew was dead, buried, disintegrated, and drowned--and he had to put his head back down for a moment.
"Ianto?" Jack's voice barely preceded the opening of the door, though Ianto could have sworn he'd latched it.
Ianto tried very hard to beam go away, having a nervous breakdown to Jack's mind without saying anything or opening his eyes.
"Oh, hey." Jack was suddenly close--close enough to smell over the new-clothes-and-plastic scent of the cubicle, and Ianto could feel his hands hovering, not-quite-touching. As ever, Jack's presence was an anchor, and Ianto felt the blind panic back off enough to let in massive humiliation. "Shit, I really thought you were in the clear when you got through lunch."
Lunch? Lunch had been fine--weird, the way eating in a foreign place always was. It had been jarring sometimes in its almost-familiarity, but Jack and Junior had been there, keeping him from thinking too much about where exactly they were and why it was foreign. But now, shut in a cubicle alone with a mirror...
"Sorry," he managed, and waved a hand at himself in explanation. He was going to be ready to open his eyes any second now. "Just--sorry."
"Oh," Jack said. "Yeah, here."
There were hands on him then, and the very familiar sensation of Jack rapidly and efficiently undoing his trousers.
"You know," Jack murmured into his ear, in what Ianto distantly recognized as his very gentlest teasing tone, "when I pictured sending Indy off on an errand and getting you naked in the change rooms, this is not quite how I pictured it."
Ianto's laugh caught in his throat, and he wheezed out another, "Sorry, fuck, sorry--"
"Shh, no, hey." Jack paused in undressing him to curl a hand around the bare skin at the back of his neck, warm and reassuring. "You haven't even begun to embarrass yourself yet, honestly." Jack tugged the trousers down, and Ianto twisted to help. Jack kept talking without missing a beat. "Come talk to me when your first real case of culture shock results in unlawful assault on a foreign dignitary and a medium-sized diplomatic incident, and then you can talk about indignity."
Ianto's bare knees touched the cool, smooth floor, and he opened his eyes to look at Jack, who was holding Ianto's jeans in one hand, obviously hiding the offending trousers behind his back with the other. Ianto took his jeans from Jack and raised an eyebrow.
"It was the eyestalks," Jack said, raising his empty hand to make an illustrative gesture. "Just like the sandslipper crabs back home--ugh, the way they moved, I could never stand those things."
Ianto realized Jack was wearing a very slightly different pair of trousers to what Ianto had last seen. "Were you trying those on?"
"Oh," Jack said, and straightened up to look down at himself as Ianto stood to step back into his jeans. "Yeah. Looks like I bought them, actually."
Jack flipped the tag to show Ianto--the not-quite-paper had changed from a price tag to a receipt. Jack had been wearing them long enough to trigger the automatic sale.
"What do you think?" Jack said, turning to check himself in the mirror.
Ianto shrugged. They fit as impeccably as the last pair; beyond that Ianto didn't feel up to making judgments. "Is there some reason everyone decided to wear orange this season?"
"It's rust, and it's been about fifteen years now. Just because you were born in the middle of two centuries of absolutely everyone wearing blue doesn't make it the only acceptable color, you know. After blue there was a grey period, and then red-striped-with-one-other-color for about ten years, and then brown which got progressively more russet. When Indy was born, the high-fashion set really were wearing true bright orange, and I was tempted to stuff him back into the Amphora to save him from the horror. Rust's not so bad."
"Good," Ianto said, reaching toward Jack's left hand to retrieve the trousers he'd been trying on. "Because I'm pretty sure I just bought these."
Jack jerked them away. "We can return them. There's a bespoke tailor's a couple of streets over, he does vintage stuff, we'll get you some more blue."
"Thank you, yes," Ianto said, getting hold of Jack's shirt with one hand and catching the trousers with the other. "I would appreciate that. But I also bought these, and I will be keeping them."
"Ianto, you don't--"
They were almost nose-to-nose, and Ianto lifted his chin and looked Jack straight in the eye. "How long between your first bad case of culture shock and the first time you had sex with someone with eyestalks?"
Ianto could see how badly Jack wanted to break eye contact; his smile was entirely caught-out and false. Ianto kicked his toe against Jack's, and Jack sighed surrender and handed over Ianto's purchase. "That's why it was only a medium-sized diplomatic incident, actually."
"Quite," Ianto said, folding the trousers neatly and tucking them under his arm. "I rest my case."
Ianto couldn't decide what was worst about his nightmares: the fact that they were so painfully transparent, or the fact that they tended to suggest that he was handling the upheaval of his life with markedly less sangfroid than was being demonstrated by his five-year-old son.
After a fortnight, the dream of having a lot of athletic sex with Jack while Junior screamed or cried somewhere in the middle distance, ignored by both of them, had become familiar in its sickening horror. The dream in which he took Junior into the TARDIS with him and shut the door on Jack's stricken face, on the other hand, was still fresh and new and shocking--both in the variation where he dragged the boy kicking and screaming, and tonight's twist, in which Junior cheerfully took Ianto's hand and came along under his own power.
It was just the novelty of the latest nightmare that left Ianto shaking, perched on the edge of the bed and unable even to look at Jack. Just that. Novelty and staggering failure of imagination: honestly, wasn't the subconscious supposed to be slightly less literal than all that?
A small sound behind him alerted Ianto just before Jack's arm wrapped around his waist, and Jack pressed a kiss to his hip. "Same one again?"
Ianto had only told Jack about the first dream--partly because he kept getting distracted by the recollection of it at inopportune moments, and partly because...
Because it wasn't quite unspeakable. Not like the new one.
Ianto nodded before he found his voice. "Yeah. You'd think my brain would get bored, honestly."
"Mm." Jack sounded faintly skeptical, and Ianto wondered whether he'd been talking in his sleep. No, stupid question. He wondered what he'd said, and how much of it Jack had understood.
"You know," Jack said softly, his fingers shifting over Ianto's skin, not-quite-ticklish, and then there was a wordless muffled wail from down the hall.
Ianto froze--sickening déjà vu--but Jack wasn't ignoring the sound at all. He pushed up, dropping a distracted kiss on Ianto's shoulder before he rolled out of bed. "This shouldn't take long--he's usually okay once he wakes up properly," he said as he pulled on the bottom half of a shockingly modest suit of pyjamas and headed for the door.
Ianto could hardly settle back to sleep while Junior was screaming like that. He located his own pyjamas and donned them, and then stood for an indecisive moment in the middle of the bedroom. Junior was still crying out, frantic and incoherent, and Ianto didn't know how best to be of use in this situation. He'd never seen Junior more than overtired and fractious, never really distressed, and now he seemed about to howl the house down. Drawn as much by morbid curiosity as any belief that he could be helpful, Ianto wandered down the hall toward Junior's room.
Closer to, the boy's screams became semi-intelligible, and more heartbreaking for it. He was shrieking, over and over, "I want my dad!"
Ianto stopped in the doorway, close enough to hear Jack's low voice repeating patiently, "I'm here, Indy, sweetheart, I'm here. I'm right here, open your eyes. I'm here, it's all right."
Junior was flailing around wildly, his voice already going hoarse, and Jack was having limited success in holding him still; he was obviously either entirely in the grip of a night terror, or so far gone in hysteria that he didn't understand what he or Jack was saying. When a sudden sideways lunge let the nightlight fall on his wide-open staring eyes, Ianto realized it was likely the latter. He concluded that he might at least administer the sort of short, sharp shock which Jack would not. Jack could comfort him, then.
Ianto braced himself to play bad cop, by the most obvious expedient he knew. Walking softly, unnoticed, to the end of Junior's bed, he caught the boy's flailing ankles and barked out sternly, "Indiana."
Junior went silent and froze, and for a moment Ianto thought he'd succeeded, that he would respond with the familiar retort of "Junior" and a glare at Ianto's intrusion. He realized he was wrong a half-second before it happened, and there was nothing he could do but watch as Junior sat up, lunging toward him with his hands out, straining against Jack's grip, and sobbed out, "Dad."
Jack's grip went slack, and Ianto got a glimpse of his face in the night light as he looked sharply at his son and just as sharply away. It was more than enough; Jack was gutted. Ianto had seen him take mortal wounds with less visible pain and horror, but he didn't make a sound, just sat there with his head bowed, one arm still resting across his son, barely restraining him as he reached for Ianto.
This was how it happened; this was exactly his bloody nightmare come to life, and yet there wasn't anything to do but gather his sobbing son into his arms. Still, when Jack made to stand, Ianto stepped into his path and then half-fell onto the bed, landing himself nearly in Jack's lap and at the extreme edge of the bed. Jack had to throw his arms around them both to keep Ianto from tipping onto the floor with his squirming, sobbing burden, and Ianto hooked his legs firmly across Jack's and held him there.
"We're here," Ianto whispered. "It's all right. We're here."
"You're my dad," Junior wailed. "I don't want you to leave."
Ianto tried to meet Jack's gaze, but Jack kept his head down, though his hand came up and gripped tight on Ianto's sleeve. They'd told Junior the truth from the beginning, more precisely than they'd told anyone else: one year. Three hundred fifty-two days, now. Jack had said it would be best to be honest from the beginning, and Ianto hadn't argued--though he noticed that they both avoided saying on your birthday with scrupulous care.
"I won't leave tonight," Ianto said, because that was as much as he could promise. "Not for a long time. I'm here tonight."
He wasn't sure Junior even understood him, but his screams tailed off into plain sobbing, and he didn't fight anymore, except to cling to Ianto whenever he tried to shift and get feeling back into his feet. Jack had to be worse off, pinned beneath them both, but he didn't move an inch.
At some point Ianto jerked his head up, tightening his arms so hard on Junior that the boy gave a startled squeak.
Jack finally spoke, brushing a hand across Ianto's cheek. "Go back to sleep. I've got you, you won't fall."
Ianto nodded, and he barely realized that he was about to go to sleep curled around Junior and crammed into his little bed with him and Jack before he'd done it.
Ianto woke up with a stiff neck, curled up sideways across Junior's bed, to find Junior cuddled against his stomach and Jack spooned against his back. Jack had pushed up on an elbow, the better to engage in a staring match with Junior, and without looking away he said, "Ianto, tell him he has to go to school today."
Ianto blinked a few times, but neither of them moved. He couldn't feel his feet. "You're mad, both of you. I'm making coffee."
He made it most of the way upright--slowed by pins-and-needles shooting through both legs--before Junior established a firm grip on his right thigh, face buried against Ianto's hip.
Ianto put a hand on the boy's hair. "All right, coffee and a fry up. And then you do have to go to school."
Junior shook his head wildly, and Ianto said, "I'm not going anywhere today, Jun--"
"Indiana."
Ianto looked back at Jack, who was sitting up. His shoulders were slumped, his face in one hand, but after a few beats he looked up and met Ianto's eyes. Jack gave him a wry smile and said, "Only his dad calls him that. Welcome to the club, Ianto Jones."
Ianto looked back down at him. "Indiana. I will walk you to school after breakfast, and I will come and meet you this afternoon. I'm not leaving for a long time yet, and you can't stay home from school all year."
Indiana stared up at him, mutinous, until Jack heaved a sigh and stood, and came around Ianto to pull Indiana bodily away and sling him over one shoulder. He'd apparently used up all his resistance last night, because he only struggled half-heartedly. "Ianto's going to make breakfast, and I am going to make you a timeline. Let's go."
While Ianto was measuring out coffee, Jack dug through a drawer one-handed, as he still had Indiana over his shoulder. He dumped the boy onto the table along with several balls of string, and said, "Pick a color for each of us. You, me, Ianto."
Indiana selected red for himself--nearly the shade of his school uniform, which seemed like a good sign. Ianto could have guessed the next obvious association even without that one, and sure enough Indy didn't hesitate before selecting a deep blue for Ianto, the same color as his jeans. He hesitated over the last, but finally offered Jack a ball of grey, a shade darker than Jack's ancient greatcoat.
"Okay," Jack said, taking up the grey string first. "Now you know I've already lived a long, long time, and I'm going to go on living a long, long, long time." Jack unreeled a huge length of string from the ball, and Ianto rummaged through the refrigerator entirely by touch, watching as Indiana tried to restrain an expression of delight at an adult doing something so reckless.
Jack tossed the ball of string over one side of the table, and dropped the mass of loose string over the other, leaving his own life-thread strung across the table, over the backs of opposite chairs.
"That's me. That's my life. Over here, this is now." Jack tapped the back of one chair. "And here, this is where I first met Ianto and worked with him, where you got started. Do you remember where that was?"
"Cardiff," Indiana said. "Proper Cardiff, before it fell. Long ago."
"Correct," Jack said, and picked up the blue string. He pulled out just a reasonable amount, enough to leave a tail hanging down from the chair designated for the 21st century, and produced a piece of wire from somewhere to fasten Ianto's string to Jack's.
"Ianto and I were together for years in Cardiff, so our timelines are connected. And that's where you got started, too, so you're a part of it."
Jack fed the end of the red string into the wire wrapping the blue and grey, and tossed the red off the opposite side of the table, signifying Indiana's unrolling future.
"All along, while I was living, you were waiting and waiting and waiting to be born," Jack said, gesturing to the red and grey threads that crossed the table together. "And then you were, so here we are together."
He went to the chair representing the present, and connected his and Indiana's timelines with another bit of wire.
"But long before you were born, you know what happened to Ianto."
Indiana reverted suddenly into lump form, tightening his arms around his knees, and looking quickly and warily from Jack to Ianto.
To spare them both, Ianto said firmly, "I died. Long ago."
Jack nodded apparent thanks, and pulled something else from his pocket--a small bottle of glue, Ianto realized.
"Ianto died," Jack reiterated, and cut the blue thread; Ianto saw Indiana wince, felt his own hands jerk at the sharp, decisive sound. Jack glued the cut end of the blue thread to the red and grey. "We were both in the world, and Ianto was gone. We're all connected. That point is fixed."
Jack tugged at the threads, demonstrating that the glue had already adhered.
"But," Jack said. "The Doctor and his TARDIS..."
Jack noisily dragged the 'now' chair around the table so that it was beside the 'then' chair, startling Indiana into renewed interest as the strings looped around him at the center of the table.
"They picked Ianto up from old Cardiff, and brought him right to us."
Jack delicately plucked out the blue thread from between two coils of wire, and drew out a loop to meet the red and grey on the other chair, binding all three together with yet another twist of wire.
"Ianto's here with us, for a while. A year. But look--the loop goes both ways. If we cut it, it would mean death. Ianto is going to have to go back because he's already there. It's already fixed. This is the way it is, Indiana."
Indiana reached out a tentative hand to trace over the slack loops of string, the points of connection. Ianto could see him thinking, trying to solve the puzzle, to find a way out of the knots and past the cut-off end.
"Indy," Ianto said, and the boy looked up at him at once, too much driven by fear for the quick attention to be gratifying. "I will have to go home, as Jack says. And when I do, it's because that's the way time is--it won't be because I want to go, or because Jack wants me to go, and it won't be because of anything you said, or did, or wished. Do you understand?"
Indiana shrugged stiffly. It was important to say, but by the same token it was nothing a five-year-old would absorb all at once, on a morning when he'd had too little sleep and, as yet, no breakfast.
"All right, then," Ianto said, exchanging a glance with Jack, who offered him a weary but surprisingly sympathetic smile. "Get down from there and come help me with the eggs."
One of the more surprisingly strange things about life in the 23rd century--now that he'd more or less got used to the clothes--was the way sex had turned into an almost exclusively daytime activity.
It had mostly to do with the fact that it was only during the day, while Indiana was at school, that they could actually rely on having any reasonable privacy for any length of time. For a few weeks after that awful nightmare, Indiana consistently invited himself into the middle of the bed Ianto shared with Jack halfway through every night, and after that one could never be quite sure that he wouldn't.
Jack wearing pyjamas on a regular basis was another one of the deeply strange things about life in the 23rd century, as it turned out.
Ianto, despite the independent income supplied by Torchwood, was effectively spending his year's holiday as a kept man. Jack had no regular employment either, though he occasionally had to "go talk to some people" for hours at a time, and more rarely made overnight trips to London. He showed Ianto some video footage of the city before inviting him along; Ianto elected to stay home with Indiana. When Ianto asked him what he was talking to them about, Jack shrugged and said, "I have a few areas of special expertise that still come in handy. I consult."
So when Jack wasn't off having his mysterious conversations, he and Ianto were home together during the day, which left them a lot of free time to fill in the traditional fashion.
Ianto couldn't remember ever having sex with Jack in daylight before coming to the future, though he thought they might have done, at some point. There had been times when Jack had stayed all night at Ianto's flat, which he thought had at least once led to a morning not interrupted by a frantic dash to deal with some crisis. It had probably been raining, though, and anyway Ianto had always kept the blinds drawn. Otherwise it had mostly been at the Hub, where day or night made no difference, or a few times in the SUV or other semi-public places, all definitely under the dubious cover of darkness.
Now, though, what with all their free time occurring between the hours of nine and three and a slight shift in Welsh weather patterns, Ianto was getting used to the sight of Jack in sunshine, stretched out catlike on the bed they shared. He was gorgeous, of course, as always; he was Jack.
With time and good light, however, Ianto discovered all the little imperfections--some new, he thought, like the vaunted six grey hairs, and the small ugly knot of scar tissue on Jack's left side, nearly invisible to sight but quite apparent to Ianto's fingers, once he knew it was there. Others--smaller scars, the odd wrinkle or hair out of place--Ianto wasn't sure about. Maybe they'd been there all along, and he'd never seen, rushing in the dark.
He didn't realize how often he brushed his fingers over that telltale scar until the time they were lying together, after, catching their breath. Jack put his hand down, trapping Ianto's fingers in place over it.
"You know," Jack said, "I don't think you called me by his name once, that time."
Ianto murmured something universally appropriate about Jack and his ego, and did his best to fall asleep. But he couldn't help thinking about it--about his other Jack, who he scarcely ever thought to miss except in the sense of missing the work. His Jack, who he would go back to, in the dark, who wouldn't know the difference when Ianto called him by someone else's name.
Ianto kept his eyes closed more often after that, and if Jack took note, he was kind enough not to bring it up.
School uniforms were not required for field trips--particularly ones as apt to be hard on clothing as a hoverboat trip onto the Cardiff Inlet--so the first of the day's many challenges involved Indiana choosing his own clothes. Ianto was already dressed--properly, so as not to embarrass himself or anyone, in the rust-colored trousers and a locally-made jersey--and had a horrible sensation that he'd turned into his father at some point when he wasn't looking. He found himself putting his hands on his hips and saying, "Ianto Jones Junior, you are not--"
Jack's hand clapped over his mouth before he could finish that disastrous sentence.
"That's fine, Indy," Jack said, and Ianto twisted to glare at Jack, who shrugged and kept his hand firmly over Ianto's mouth. "He's decent, Ianto, that's all we can ask. And it's a compliment, really."
Ianto looked down at Indiana, happily shrugging a jacket on over a red t-shirt and the blue jeans he'd cajoled Jack into having made for him. Ianto raised his hands in surrender.
"You completely missed the month of cowboy-hat-and-tulle-skirt," Jack added. "He used to get the weirdest-looking sunburns."
Ianto reached up and pulled Jack's hand down. "Which reminds me: hat or sunblock, Indiana."
Indy huffed, but stalked over to the closet and came back wearing a drab jungle hat.
Ianto looked down at him, then over at Jack, and murmured, "What, no fedora?"
Jack shrugged and murmured back, "Would've been a little on the nose, don't you think?"
Ianto was one of six parent-chaperones on the trip, one of two in a hoverboat with a half-dozen five-year-olds. Three of them, counting Indiana, were named Ianto.
("I thought it would be sort of classic and unusual now," Jack had explained glumly, when Ianto first saw the roster for Indiana’s year. "But it turns out everyone thought that the year he was born."
There were a total of six Iantos in Indiana's school cohort, two of them girls, one of them also named Ianto Jones. Ianto was beginning to understand his son's insistence on Junior from people who weren't his dad. No one else at his school was called Junior.)
In a fit of pique or independence, Indiana took the seat furthest from Ianto on the boat. Ianto studiously did not listen to the brief repetition of the events of the fall of Cardiff into the Rift and the sea, and then they set off over the waves.
Literally over them; the hoverboats were made not to disturb the water, as most of the Cardiff Inlet was considered a burial ground, between the number of cemeteries gone under the waves with the city, and the number of people who hadn't got out in time. Nearly perfect evacuation hadn't been quite near enough, it seemed.
They went out a long way, following the ordinary buoys of the lone designated channel for shipping, tracking what had been the line of the Taff down to the sea, and then turned out onto the Inlet proper. Miss Abernathy announced, "Look left, we're passing the Splott bell."
When Ianto looked, he realized he'd been hearing the bell for a few minutes, over the constant sound of the waves. It was as big as a church bell, mounted on a buoy, with its name emblazoned black-on-white. All that was left of good old Splott, grave marker for an entire town. Ianto remembered standing in the Hub while Owen and Gwen and Tosh studied it on the map; he tightened his hand on the edge of the hoverboat and felt unreasonably seasick.
They continued further out, paralleling the shipping channel. Miss Abernathy was talking about the other belled buoys they could see to either side, but Ianto had his eyes on their destination, and he could hardly hear her over the ringing.
They halted at a respectful distance from the grouping: two bells surrounded by five others. They were smaller than the Splott bell, but not so small that Ianto could not read JACK on one of the central buoys.
Torchwood had held enough bodies to count as a cemetery all on its own--these bells marked where Suzie's body had been, and Tosh's--and...
And probably his own.
Miss Abernathy was telling the children about the Torchwood bells, and Ianto stared fixedly out to sea--the same sea, and, once he'd got his bearings, even the same distant hint of Flat Holm Island through the haze. He didn't hear a thing but the bells until he felt a touch on his knee, and looked down to see that Indiana had come to his side.
Ianto smiled at his son, and then realized that he must have traded places with one of the other children to get there. He looked up, lunged, and caught Ianto P. just before she managed to fall over the side.
There was a wolf-whistle from the next boat, and Ianto looked up to see Miss Abernathy fighting a smile, and one of the other parents holding up what seemed to be a score-card.
"That's one to Mister Jones!"
By the end of the day, Ianto had come in neither first nor last, and had escaped the particular ignominy of missing his catch and having his own child go overboard, which two of the six chaperones had done. He had taken a penalty for missing (it had been Ianto P.'s fourth time nearly going over; if he'd been a bit slower than he had to be by then, no one could prove it) but gained back half on style points, for fishing her out without getting his clothes wet anywhere but the arm that reached out of the boat for her.
The children--and, in fact, adults--were all equipped with excellent flotation devices, so it wasn't as if there was any harm in keeping score; it was simply a way of organizing the buying of drinks at the post-Field Trip debriefing session down the pub. Ianto took his turn third, or possibly fourth; either his tolerance had gone down horribly due to months of quiet, sober, fatherly living, or they were making the drinks a lot stronger two hundred years in the future.
In any case, he found the post-mission trip to the pub wonderfully familiar, and alcohol smoothed down all the ragged edges. Possibly a little too much so, as his feet were having a bit of difficulty finding purchase on the ground by the time the session broke up; it was just as well Jack turned up to find him and accompanied him home. It was a fine enough night, and Ianto would have liked to lie down in the garden a while, but Jack--fussy bastard--insisted he go inside and take his clothes off and lie in the bed.
Ianto woke up to Indiana saying "Dad?" much too close by.
He had time to wonder where Jack was, and why Indy hadn't gone to his side of the bed, as usual, before he opened his eyes. When he did, he discovered that Indiana was actually leaning onto the mattress, nearly nose-to-nose with him, and that he had a really quite spectacular hangover.
Ianto shut his eyes again, and reached for the pillow, to hide, or possibly to smother himself. Or Indy.
"Dad had a meeting thing," Indy explained, nearly into Ianto's ear.
Ianto dug his fingers into the pillow, and restrained a general impulse toward homicide.
"He said you're not ill, you're hungover, so I shouldn't bring you medicine no matter what you say, you can crawl to the loo and get it yourself."
Ianto cracked one eye. Indy was right where he'd been the last time Ianto looked. Biting the words off carefully, one at a time, Ianto said, "Indy, your father is a sadist."
Indy shrugged, and raised his hands into Ianto's view, one holding a small green bottle Ianto recognized from the medicine chest, the other holding a bottle of water. "I didn't listen."
Ianto blinked. "You, on the other hand, are a Welshman and a gentleman, my son."
Indy beamed at him--so bright Ianto was tempted to shield his eyes--and held out the medicine bottle first.
"Just a drop on your tongue. It makes Dad make a face, like..." Indy did his best impression of having bitten a lemon.
Ianto smiled, and squinted at the label. It was, indeed, indicated for hangover, and the dosage was a single drop on the tongue, to be followed by as much water as desired. He unscrewed the cap, which came away with an eyedropper, and squeezed a single drop onto his tongue.
Ianto had just an instant to realize that if it made Jack make a face like that, it was liable to kill him. He managed to set the medicine down and reach for the water bottle Indy was still holding, and then his face and throat seemed to convulse, his salivary glands on fire, and he couldn't remember how to open the bloody damned bottle. Indy's hands squirmed under his and got the top off, and Ianto struggled half upright and drank frantically, not stopping until the whole bottle was empty.
He set the bottle down and wiped a hand across the back of his mouth; it took him a moment to realize that he didn't feel like he was about to vomit. He blinked a couple of times. His head didn't hurt, either, and his eyes didn't feel like they'd been sandpapered. All he felt was tired, like he'd been woken up at an ungodly hour by his son, who probably wanted breakfast or someone to watch cartoons with.
He fell back against the pillows, and looked over at Indy, who was still standing beside the bed. He'd put the cap back on the medicine bottle and set it on the night stand, and now he was just watching Ianto.
"Breakfast?" Ianto asked, trying to keep the actual dread out of his voice.
Indy shrugged. "Dad made me some before he left. He said you would sleep late."
"And yet," Ianto muttered, eyeing his son, who was after all the offspring of a sadist. "I'm awake."
Indy grinned, and climbed up on the bed. "You have to tell me a story now. That's what Dad does when he wants to have a lie-in and I'm bored, he tells me a story."
"Does he," Ianto said, but Indy snuggled into the bed beside him and blithely tugged Ianto's arm over himself for a cuddle; squeezing him a fraction closer was just instinct, by then.
"Okay," Ianto sighed. "Um, let's see. Once upon a time--"
"No! Dad, not like that. A proper story. A Cardiff story."
Ianto remembered the waves, suddenly, the water and the markers and all the many bells and what lay beneath them. He squeezed Indy closer again, entirely deliberately.
He hoped Jack had understood why he got so utterly pissed last night, but he didn't think Jack would have needed telling. Jack had encouraged him to go along on the field trip in the first place.
"All right," Ianto said slowly. "You saw the Torchwood bells, yesterday, didn't you?"
Indy nodded quickly. "Jack and Jill, Rhiannon, Pryderi, Henry, Victoria, and Myfanwy."
"Very good," Ianto said. "Do you know who the Myfanwy bell is named for?"
"Jack is Dad," Indy said quickly, and then, "No, who?"
"Well," Ianto took a deep breath. "Let me tell you a story about the day Jack hired me to work at Torchwood Cardiff, then."
Indiana died around ten in the morning, a couple of months short of his sixth birthday. The as-yet-unidentified alien attack struck his school, leaving no survivors; Ianto found out when Jack rushed into the med center and shouted the news to the room at large.
Ianto ducked his head and bit his lip, trying to keep from laughing as he treated a sucking chest wound; his patient, quite unrealistically, did let out a generous chuckle. Jack was, perhaps, getting a little too enthusiastically into his role.
He'd tipped his hand a fraction that morning, lingering longer than usual when he paused to press a good-bye kiss to Indy's hair before leaving for one of his increasingly-frequent meetings. Special expertise, ha.
Ianto shook his head, sealed down the plastic dressing, and said, "Right, Alaine, I think you have to lie here a bit and simulate taking up space in the infirmary, now."
Ianto P.'s mother just rolled her eyes and tugged her shirt down. "They'd better be giving out special shirts for having got wounded this year, that's all I'm saying. And if they keep the kids all night they're going to be monsters in the morning. We'd do better with the aliens."
Torchwood reflexes--embarrassingly rusty after ten months of soft civilian life, but still enough to distinguish him from the actual civilians around him--served Ianto well through the rest of the day. He managed to keep himself alive, and to protect a respectable number of people into the bargain. He was still on his feet to hear the backup arrive: military units for whom the training exercise was just beginning.
When a unit landed in the street where Ianto was working, he quickly realized that it would be up to him to orientate them to the current situation. The other villagers nearby had--somehow, without his particularly intending it--fallen under his command in the last few hours.
He held his hands up to show himself--presently--harmless as he approached an officer surrounded by a knot of uniformed soldiers. He received an acknowledging nod, and was focusing most of his attention on putting his observations in order. Even though it was only a game, it was wonderfully like being at work again, doing something.
There was a shout from behind him simultaneous with a flash of light ahead, and suddenly he was face down in the street.
The back of his head hurt quite a lot, and something cool and wet was dripping down his cheek. Ianto thought with an absurd sort of clarity that he'd always thought you didn't feel anything after you'd been shot in the head.
"Oh, fan-bloody-tastic," said a voice with what Ianto recognized, after a few seconds' thought, as what currently passed for an upper-middle-class London accent. "Congratulations, Collins, on the ground five minutes and you've already shot a villager."
Ianto reached up toward his head--fuck, that hurt, must have been nearly point-blank, what kind of idiot was this Collins, anyway?--but a hand caught his wrist and held it away.
"Don't, son, you'll get the dye all over your fingers. Can you sit up?"
Ianto nodded to the cobbles, and then gathered himself and rolled over. It was the officer who was crouching over him, and he gave Ianto a hand up to sit.
"Sorry about this," he said with an apologetic grimace, and a glare over Ianto's shoulder, presumably at Collins. He scrawled something across Ianto's forehead--DEAD, Ianto realized. He'd marked a few corpses himself, at the med center.
"Now," the officer said, "let's see..."
He raised a small viewer, which must have picked up Ianto's ident chip. The officer's glare sharpened. "Oh, honestly, Collins, brilliant. You've just blown the head off of Captain Jack Harkness's registered cohabitant. Sorry, Mr. Jones."
"Don't mention it," Ianto murmured, even as someone behind him made a small, deeply alarmed noise.
Collins and another man were detailed to transport Ianto's body to the makeshift morgue. Ianto, being dead, was not allowed to explain to them where it was, nor where the safe route to that location lay. Collins thus was at least temporarily spared the embarrassment of explaining to anyone just how he'd killed Ianto, when he was shot himself, going round a blind corner into an alley held by the invaders.
Ianto thought he detected relief in the alacrity with which the second stretcher-bearer reported Collins killed as he took cover. The man bolted soon after, leaving Ianto lying on the ground near Collins.
Ianto was rather luckier, though. He had the stretcher to lie on.
"Oh my God, Ianto. What have they done to you?"
Ianto smiled at Jack's continued role-playing, and cracked an eye open. It'd been quiet for about half an hour, and after a few awkward attempts, Collins had stopped trying to make conversation. Ianto had nearly managed a nap.
"Am I allowed to answer that question?"
Jack's sudden bright smile had an edge of actual relief. Belatedly it occurred to Ianto that Jack had actually already seen him die once--well, twice--and the déjà vu might have been rather unpleasant. He hoped the dye was a nicely unrealistic color, at least.
"By all means," Jack said, sweeping a thoughtful look over the tableau. "Civilian corpses are being dismissed, so we can get the kids home and have people around to be fractious and surly toward the continued military presence tomorrow."
"I'll work on my sneer," Ianto said, sitting up and casting a glance toward Collins, who seemed to be holding his breath in pursuit of a really excellent performance as a corpse. "Especially given it was a friendly fire incident."
Jack sighed theatrically, even as he cast a look of genuine disfavor at Collins. "There are always a few. You're probably going to need solvent for the dye. Or a lot of bright blue hair-color, to even it out."
Ianto winced as he got to his feet--not so much at the thought of blue hair, although he probably couldn't carry it off to quite the same effect he had when he was seventeen, as at the thought of Indy inevitably demanding to dye his the same shade. "Solvent. Yes."
Jack nodded distractedly, tossing something down in the spot where Ianto had been lying. Ianto looked back, and discovered he was having an out-of-body experience--there he was still on the ground. The DEAD had gone off his forehead, but then it was hardly needed with half his head covered in blood like that.
"That for ambiance?" he asked, working to keep his voice even. It was really rather disconcerting.
Jack just stared at it, then shook himself and met Ianto's eyes. "Yeah, decoration and design for the end of the world. What do you think?"
"I think you need a hobby," Ianto said, searching Jack's eyes.
Jack just smiled, revealing nothing, and leaned in to kiss him briefly.
"Off you go," he said, dismissing Ianto with a fond smack on the arse.
Ianto headed down the alley a few steps ahead of Jack, and didn't look back to see whether Jack was looking back.
Jack came back from putting Indy to bed--in his new Disaster Day pyjamas, which he'd insisted on for eight nights straight so far--and sat down rather closer beside Ianto on the settee than he would have expected from Jack's distant expression.
"Is Indy all right?"
Jack said, "Probably," and then, after a pause, "well, probably not, actually." And, after a proper silence: "He wants to know how you died."
Ianto touched the back of his head--they'd had to dye over the damn blue, in the end, and he'd had a pale shadow like a bruise across his cheek for days--and wondered yet again just how bad Jack's case of déjà vu had been.
Jack caught the motion, and smiled bleakly. "Yeah, the simulation didn't help. He's just starting to get the idea of what dying actually means--I've been saying that to him since he was born, that you died. He's always known that was the end of the story. But now..."
Now dying was more real, and less, and desperately lacking in specifics by which to make sense of it.
"And I can't just say bravely," Jack added. "Or anything nice and simple like that. He's starting to realize that this is something that is actually going to happen to you when you leave, and he wants to know how it works. He wants the story. He wants cause of death."
Ianto wondered if Jack's choice of adverbs was any consolation for the fact that, Jesus Christ, this was actually going to happen to him when he left.
"What did you tell him?"
Jack sighed. "The truth."
Ianto froze, and Jack kept speaking. "Which is that I can't tell him anything about what happened while you're still here, because there's too much danger of you finding out and creating a paradox which might, for starters, cause him never to be born."
"Ah," Ianto said, and watched Jack staring into middle distance for a moment before he decided that this was a ridiculous way to spend an evening, when they only had a finite number of them left.
"I thought you might have told him the other truth," Ianto said, earning himself Jack's wary attention.
Ianto pushed up and twisted, lowering himself to straddle Jack's lap. Jack's hands settled automatically on Ianto's hips. Ianto braced his own hands on Jack's shoulders, holding him down, and whispered against Jack's parted lips.
"I'm not dead yet."
A month before his birthday, without being asked, Indiana declared that he was not having a birthday party.
Ianto wanted to argue on principle--six-year-olds should have birthday parties--but half a second's thought forced him to recognize that it wouldn't be more than a miserable shadow of an actual party.
"You don't have to," Jack said. "You'll turn six whether we have a party or not."
Indiana scowled ferociously. "And the Doctor isn't invited. He's not allowed to come here. He can't come in our house, not even into the garden."
Jack raised his eyebrows at that, and Ianto wondered whether he was going to point out that it was his house, his garden, and his very old friend at issue, but Jack simply said, "All right. On your birthday, we will ask the Doctor not to come into the house or the garden."
Indiana scowled harder, shoulders bunching up fiercely. Seventeen had come early, Ianto thought. If Jack kept up being calm and reasonable, Indy was going to take a swing at him. Time to deflect his attention.
"I still have to leave, Indiana."
Indy's chin dropped, his shoulders tensing all the harder. "I know."
Ianto glanced over at Jack, but Jack just nodded, giving him an open-handed gesture: go for it.
"I have to go, and the Doctor has to take me. It's not his fault, either."
"I know," Indiana repeated, the word nearly a sob this time, but he still wasn't looking at either of them. "But he's not invited."
Indy had started crawling into their bed again. He still came to Jack's side every time, and though Jack always placed him in the middle, Indy clung to him. If Ianto reached for him, Indy would grab his wrist and hold on, but he didn't seem to allow himself more than that.
Ianto didn't think he'd ever seen anything more awful than a five-year-old being brave.
The morning before his birthday, Indy got up when it was time to get up, and sat obediently at the table for breakfast. They'd none of them slept properly--Ianto thought he might have bruises from the strength of Indy's grip, which had never seemed to loosen--but they had a routine by now, long since established, and Ianto and Jack moved through the motions automatically. Indy didn't play with his food, just ate quietly and mechanically, right up to the moment when he suddenly bolted from the table without asking to be excused.
He stopped short a few strides from the table, seeming torn about where to run to, and wound up being sick right there on the kitchen floor; Ianto and Jack managed to converge on him before he'd stopped. Jack's hand cupped his forehead as Ianto wiped his mouth.
"Fever," Jack said. "Indy--"
"Sorry," he whispered. "I didn't mean to."
Jack sighed and kissed his temple. "I know you didn't. It's not your fault."
Ianto squeezed Indy's shoulder. "I'll get you some water."
Ianto took it to him in bed--in Jack's bed, where he'd already been tucked back in. Jack was stretched out beside him, saying, "But then Ianto said he already knew where they'd taken our transport, because he'd kept the locator with him."
Ianto sat down beside Indy, and held the glass for him to drink a mouthful, and then he lay down, curled an arm gingerly around his son, and prepared to listen to stories.
On the morning of his birthday, Indiana got out of bed before dawn. Ianto woke and found him gone, Jack sleeping or feigning sleep on the other side of the empty space in the middle of the bed. He went downstairs as the sun began to rise properly, and found evidence in the kitchen that Indy had fixed his own breakfast. His school shoes were missing from beside the door.
Ianto went to the door and stepped out, already wondering how long it would take Jack to track him down by his ident chip--but Indy was there, in uniform, standing stiffly by the garden gate. He turned to look when Ianto approached, and said, "He's not allowed to come in."
Ianto leaned against the wall beside him. "His ship might land here before we can tell him that, you know."
"Then he can leave."
Ianto reached out and brushed the hair back from Indy's forehead. He seemed fine now, physically; his fever had broken in the early evening, and he'd slept like the dead since. Indy stayed motionless under Ianto's touch, staring out at the street grimly. He was altogether too much like Jack in miniature, just at that moment, a Jack Ianto hadn't seen for a year and a day.
"It's your birthday," Ianto said softly, because he couldn't bring himself to wish his son a happy one. "You're six today."
Indy nodded sharply, and Ianto took back his hand.
"You've grown since I came."
Indy straightened up even taller for a moment, chin up.
Then, all at once, he turned and jumped at Ianto, nearly climbing him before Ianto could gather him up, ending with his arms clasped tight around Ianto's neck. He was heavy and awkward to hold--he didn't often consent to be carried anywhere anymore, except when ill or sleeping--but Ianto straightened his spine and kept his grip. They stood watch together until Jack came out to insist that Ianto had to get dressed.
Ianto showered, and put on his old (two-hundred-year-old) blue jeans, and his button-down shirt. That part was easy, though Ianto suspected they fit slightly differently; he couldn't tell for certain whether he'd gained weight, or lost it, or if it was all just a matter of having got used to the shape of clothes from the 23rd century. Everything was cut disconcertingly differently, and he was surprised to realize he'd come to expect it.
After that, Jack called up the image of Ianto stored in his ident chip, from his first day here, and started messing with his hair. Indy sat to one side, first just watching, then offering his opinions. Jack debated every stroke of the comb, trimmed one hair at a time, and in general managed to drag out the entire operation until they heard the unmistakable sound from the back garden.
Indy rushed out first. Jack set down the scissors, brushed Ianto's shoulders, and sighed. "You'll do."
Ianto kissed him briefly, and then turned and ran out after Indy, with Jack hard on his heels. Indiana probably wouldn't actually attack the Doctor, but then he was Jack's son. And Ianto's, God help them.
Indiana was standing at the door of the TARDIS, which had parked exactly where it had the last time, inside the garden. Seeing it there, Ianto had a flash of déjà vu, worse even than putting on his old clothes. The Doctor had come back for him. The moment was here, circled around again.
"No, of course, quite right," the Doctor was saying thoughtfully. "But a TARDIS is sovereign soil for a Time Lord--to say nothing of being dimensionally transcendental--so technically as long as I stay inside it, I'm not in your garden."
"You can't come out," Indiana said, but his voice was losing its fierce edge, and he looked back uncertainly at his parents.
"I wouldn't dream of it," the Doctor said. "But here's a thought: Jack is a very old friend of mine, and a very dear one, and I try not to do things he doesn't like when I'm visiting him. And Jack hasn't given me permission to take you anywhere, although I'm sure he doesn't mind if you come inside the TARDIS."
"Why should I?" Indiana's voice was half contrary, half baffled.
Ianto was reasoning just far enough ahead of him to realize that this was not going to help at all, but Jack laid a hand on his arm, gently restraining.
"Well," the Doctor said. "If I don't have permission to take you anywhere, I can't go anywhere while you're aboard."
Indy gave them one brief backward glance, and then nearly bowled the Doctor over as he leapt inside, slamming the door shut behind him. The Doctor gave them a quick wave as he disappeared.
"Jack, what--"
Jack kissed Ianto not at all briefly, rather pointedly mussing his hair in the process.
"The Doctor just volunteered to babysit while we say goodbye properly," Jack said, his mouth too close to Ianto's for him to see just how sad that smile might be. "I'm not going to turn him down."
part 6
The actual treatment of Ianto's illness had required only a few minutes of inhaling some chemical-mint-scented gas from a small mask. Jana had monitored him for several minutes to see that he was reacting properly, and she and Jack had taken up the time rehashing what seemed to be quite an old, and not entirely theoretical, debate about the handling of possible future epidemics in the village. Ianto suppressed the urge to take actual notes, but found himself memorizing the bullet points anyway.
Afterward, they set out back toward Jack's house; Ianto occupied himself with enjoying his rapidly improving lung capacity. Jack still appeared to be contemplating quarantine procedures--or possibly contemplating Jana--and either way, Ianto was content not to interrupt him. He had an entire year to work out exactly what was going on, after all.
There were two men standing at the garden gate, in what Ianto concluded after a few moments' scrutiny must be the current equivalent of three-piece suits, despite the blinding array of colors.
Jack rather pointedly took Ianto's hand as they approached. Ianto thought of what Jack had said about him being arrested, about how Jana had obviously known something was odd about him, and tightened his hand on Jack's.
"Ianto Jones, Torchwood Cardiff," the man on the left said as they approached. "Born August the nineteenth, 1983, veteran of Canary Wharf, defender of the Earth."
Ianto stopped short. Jack squeezed his hand.
"Not bad," Jack said. "Not bad at all."
The one on the right said, "You know we keep an eye on you, Captain. Mr. Jones is in the archives, all right and proper."
"I'm sorry," Ianto said, trying not to sound bewildered--they had to be Torchwood, if they knew who he was, but Jack didn't seem to think there was a problem with them turning up at his home. Jack hadn't said anything about what he was doing these days, apart from raising Junior in Wales, and Cardiff wasn't far... "Is there a problem?"
Both of them turned to face him, straightening to something like attention. "Not at all, Mr. Jones, sir. It's just not every year that we get to administer the Torchwood Pension Plan for a temporally displaced operative. It's exciting for us, to be honest."
Ianto stared. "I'm a pensioner, now?"
"Well," Jack said, dropping his arm to sling an arm around Ianto's waist. "Technically speaking, you are a bit past retirement age."
The hypocrisy, even in obvious jest, was for a moment literally breathtaking.
The man on the left waved a small device--a computer, or something like it, Ianto supposed. "We've registered a local identity for you, so you shouldn't run into any further problems. If you'll just give me your hand, I can place your ident chip."
Ianto looked sideways at Jack, and he shrugged and patted Ianto's hip. "Indy has one, I don't. It's up to you."
If Jack thought it was dangerous, he wouldn't have let them install one in his son--still. "When I go home..."
"It's an entirely passive technology," the man on the left assured him. "It has to be contacted on a very particular frequency for the information to be accessed."
Ianto gave up, extending his right hand. There was a brief, impersonal pressure of the other man's hand around his, and then a stunningly sharp pain in his thumb. Ianto jerked his hand back reflexively, swallowing curses and stopping just short of sticking the offended thumb into his mouth.
Jack laughed, loud and startled-sounding, and Ianto glared at him, shaking his hand against the sting.
"Sorry," Jack said, grinning unrepentantly. "Sorry, sorry."
He caught Ianto's hand, and carefully kissed the tip of his thumb--there wasn't even blood, Ianto noticed, and already the sting was fading into a throbbing ache. Then he kissed Ianto's forehead, gathering him into a hug, and then his lips.
"Sorry," Jack repeated, still smiling. "It's just--your son made exactly the same face."
On Thursday--which was not, for reasons Ianto did not entirely understand, a school day--Junior looked at him across the breakfast table and announced, "You need new clothes."
Ianto couldn't argue; he'd been running his things through the off-puttingly silent and waterless cleaner when he showered, but he couldn't actually keep wearing the same jeans and shirt for an entire year.
Ianto looked to Jack, who had such an entirely innocent air about him that Ianto immediately smelled conspiracy. "Jack?"
"I wasn't going to say anything," he remarked to his breakfast. "But if you wanted to go shopping..."
"Cardiff!" Junior crowed. "Cardiff, Cardiff!"
"Upper Cardiff," Jack corrected, and then gave Ianto a more thoughtful look. "You haven't tried to access any recent history or current events on the household system."
It wasn't a question; Ianto supposed his ident chip would have logged him in, and left evidence for Jack to find. As it happened, though, he'd found watching cartoons with Junior quite overwhelming enough--what Junior called a cartoon was something between a video game and an acid trip--without going looking for things he shouldn't know. "It didn't seem wise."
"No," Jack said. "You'll find you're locked out of the entire 21st century. But it will soon become apparent to you that Cardiff isn't quite where you left it."
Ianto raised his eyebrows.
"Most of it fell into the Rift a while back," Jack said, rather more breezily than Ianto thought warranted, considering. "Torchwood did all right. The city was nearly perfectly evacuated before it fell, and they called in the big guns and finally got the thing sealed up--I guess we should have done that years ago, but--anyway. Cardiff mostly vanished, and the sea took what was left. The old M4 is nearly a coastal road in places, now."
Ianto tried to assimilate that; he'd have to look at a map later. He couldn't quite fathom it all being gone--Cardiff, the Hub, his flat, the shops where he'd bought toner and ammunition and new old buttons for Jack's coat. He wondered if that was what had killed him, or if he had been dead before it happened. He rather hoped it was the latter, so that he wouldn't have to see it, nor be responsible for not preventing it--though Jack made it sound rather like a natural disaster, and apparently whoever had been on the spot had nearly perfectly evacuated the city.
Gwen, he thought, recalling--days ago, centuries ago--the sound of her voice managing the evacuations out to Flat Holm Island. He wondered if even that had survived. "So... Upper Cardiff?"
"That’s what they called what was left--the city reformed on higher ground. This village was far enough back to stay separate."
Ianto stared down at his breakfast a bit longer.
"Well," he said finally. "I do need new clothes."
Junior cheered.
Everyone really did wear those bloody rust-colored trousers; Ianto stuck out badly in his blue jeans, and thought he would go blind from the brightness of the crowds around them. The clothing racks were even worse.
He had money--he'd looked himself up on the household information system, to see what he ought to know, and apparently the Torchwood Pension Plan treated its temporally displaced operatives rather generously. Ianto doubted there were enough of them--or enough pensioners of any description--to require much rationing. He seemed to have enough to buy whatever he liked, and quite nice ones, but he couldn't find anything that wasn't eyeball-scarring, no matter how enthusiastically Jack and Junior suggested different versions of exactly the same thing.
Ianto was a little frustrated, a little weirded out, no more than that--he was Torchwood, wasn't he? He saw a dozen impossible things before breakfast every day, and made coffee for three of them--and so he found it a bit surprising to realize that he was sitting on the floor of a changing cubicle with his hands over his eyes, hyperventilating and shivering.
"Ianto?"
Junior, of course.
"Yes," he managed, breathless. "Just--one moment--"
There was a silence outside, and then Junior said, "Don't move, I'll get Dad."
"Fuck," Ianto sighed, and got unsteadily to his knees, which was when he noticed that he was wearing a pair of the rust-colored trousers. The last several minutes came a bit more sharply into focus--Christ, he was in the future, the bloody future with Jack and their son, Cardiff had fallen into the Rift and everything and everyone he knew was dead, buried, disintegrated, and drowned--and he had to put his head back down for a moment.
"Ianto?" Jack's voice barely preceded the opening of the door, though Ianto could have sworn he'd latched it.
Ianto tried very hard to beam go away, having a nervous breakdown to Jack's mind without saying anything or opening his eyes.
"Oh, hey." Jack was suddenly close--close enough to smell over the new-clothes-and-plastic scent of the cubicle, and Ianto could feel his hands hovering, not-quite-touching. As ever, Jack's presence was an anchor, and Ianto felt the blind panic back off enough to let in massive humiliation. "Shit, I really thought you were in the clear when you got through lunch."
Lunch? Lunch had been fine--weird, the way eating in a foreign place always was. It had been jarring sometimes in its almost-familiarity, but Jack and Junior had been there, keeping him from thinking too much about where exactly they were and why it was foreign. But now, shut in a cubicle alone with a mirror...
"Sorry," he managed, and waved a hand at himself in explanation. He was going to be ready to open his eyes any second now. "Just--sorry."
"Oh," Jack said. "Yeah, here."
There were hands on him then, and the very familiar sensation of Jack rapidly and efficiently undoing his trousers.
"You know," Jack murmured into his ear, in what Ianto distantly recognized as his very gentlest teasing tone, "when I pictured sending Indy off on an errand and getting you naked in the change rooms, this is not quite how I pictured it."
Ianto's laugh caught in his throat, and he wheezed out another, "Sorry, fuck, sorry--"
"Shh, no, hey." Jack paused in undressing him to curl a hand around the bare skin at the back of his neck, warm and reassuring. "You haven't even begun to embarrass yourself yet, honestly." Jack tugged the trousers down, and Ianto twisted to help. Jack kept talking without missing a beat. "Come talk to me when your first real case of culture shock results in unlawful assault on a foreign dignitary and a medium-sized diplomatic incident, and then you can talk about indignity."
Ianto's bare knees touched the cool, smooth floor, and he opened his eyes to look at Jack, who was holding Ianto's jeans in one hand, obviously hiding the offending trousers behind his back with the other. Ianto took his jeans from Jack and raised an eyebrow.
"It was the eyestalks," Jack said, raising his empty hand to make an illustrative gesture. "Just like the sandslipper crabs back home--ugh, the way they moved, I could never stand those things."
Ianto realized Jack was wearing a very slightly different pair of trousers to what Ianto had last seen. "Were you trying those on?"
"Oh," Jack said, and straightened up to look down at himself as Ianto stood to step back into his jeans. "Yeah. Looks like I bought them, actually."
Jack flipped the tag to show Ianto--the not-quite-paper had changed from a price tag to a receipt. Jack had been wearing them long enough to trigger the automatic sale.
"What do you think?" Jack said, turning to check himself in the mirror.
Ianto shrugged. They fit as impeccably as the last pair; beyond that Ianto didn't feel up to making judgments. "Is there some reason everyone decided to wear orange this season?"
"It's rust, and it's been about fifteen years now. Just because you were born in the middle of two centuries of absolutely everyone wearing blue doesn't make it the only acceptable color, you know. After blue there was a grey period, and then red-striped-with-one-other-color for about ten years, and then brown which got progressively more russet. When Indy was born, the high-fashion set really were wearing true bright orange, and I was tempted to stuff him back into the Amphora to save him from the horror. Rust's not so bad."
"Good," Ianto said, reaching toward Jack's left hand to retrieve the trousers he'd been trying on. "Because I'm pretty sure I just bought these."
Jack jerked them away. "We can return them. There's a bespoke tailor's a couple of streets over, he does vintage stuff, we'll get you some more blue."
"Thank you, yes," Ianto said, getting hold of Jack's shirt with one hand and catching the trousers with the other. "I would appreciate that. But I also bought these, and I will be keeping them."
"Ianto, you don't--"
They were almost nose-to-nose, and Ianto lifted his chin and looked Jack straight in the eye. "How long between your first bad case of culture shock and the first time you had sex with someone with eyestalks?"
Ianto could see how badly Jack wanted to break eye contact; his smile was entirely caught-out and false. Ianto kicked his toe against Jack's, and Jack sighed surrender and handed over Ianto's purchase. "That's why it was only a medium-sized diplomatic incident, actually."
"Quite," Ianto said, folding the trousers neatly and tucking them under his arm. "I rest my case."
Ianto couldn't decide what was worst about his nightmares: the fact that they were so painfully transparent, or the fact that they tended to suggest that he was handling the upheaval of his life with markedly less sangfroid than was being demonstrated by his five-year-old son.
After a fortnight, the dream of having a lot of athletic sex with Jack while Junior screamed or cried somewhere in the middle distance, ignored by both of them, had become familiar in its sickening horror. The dream in which he took Junior into the TARDIS with him and shut the door on Jack's stricken face, on the other hand, was still fresh and new and shocking--both in the variation where he dragged the boy kicking and screaming, and tonight's twist, in which Junior cheerfully took Ianto's hand and came along under his own power.
It was just the novelty of the latest nightmare that left Ianto shaking, perched on the edge of the bed and unable even to look at Jack. Just that. Novelty and staggering failure of imagination: honestly, wasn't the subconscious supposed to be slightly less literal than all that?
A small sound behind him alerted Ianto just before Jack's arm wrapped around his waist, and Jack pressed a kiss to his hip. "Same one again?"
Ianto had only told Jack about the first dream--partly because he kept getting distracted by the recollection of it at inopportune moments, and partly because...
Because it wasn't quite unspeakable. Not like the new one.
Ianto nodded before he found his voice. "Yeah. You'd think my brain would get bored, honestly."
"Mm." Jack sounded faintly skeptical, and Ianto wondered whether he'd been talking in his sleep. No, stupid question. He wondered what he'd said, and how much of it Jack had understood.
"You know," Jack said softly, his fingers shifting over Ianto's skin, not-quite-ticklish, and then there was a wordless muffled wail from down the hall.
Ianto froze--sickening déjà vu--but Jack wasn't ignoring the sound at all. He pushed up, dropping a distracted kiss on Ianto's shoulder before he rolled out of bed. "This shouldn't take long--he's usually okay once he wakes up properly," he said as he pulled on the bottom half of a shockingly modest suit of pyjamas and headed for the door.
Ianto could hardly settle back to sleep while Junior was screaming like that. He located his own pyjamas and donned them, and then stood for an indecisive moment in the middle of the bedroom. Junior was still crying out, frantic and incoherent, and Ianto didn't know how best to be of use in this situation. He'd never seen Junior more than overtired and fractious, never really distressed, and now he seemed about to howl the house down. Drawn as much by morbid curiosity as any belief that he could be helpful, Ianto wandered down the hall toward Junior's room.
Closer to, the boy's screams became semi-intelligible, and more heartbreaking for it. He was shrieking, over and over, "I want my dad!"
Ianto stopped in the doorway, close enough to hear Jack's low voice repeating patiently, "I'm here, Indy, sweetheart, I'm here. I'm right here, open your eyes. I'm here, it's all right."
Junior was flailing around wildly, his voice already going hoarse, and Jack was having limited success in holding him still; he was obviously either entirely in the grip of a night terror, or so far gone in hysteria that he didn't understand what he or Jack was saying. When a sudden sideways lunge let the nightlight fall on his wide-open staring eyes, Ianto realized it was likely the latter. He concluded that he might at least administer the sort of short, sharp shock which Jack would not. Jack could comfort him, then.
Ianto braced himself to play bad cop, by the most obvious expedient he knew. Walking softly, unnoticed, to the end of Junior's bed, he caught the boy's flailing ankles and barked out sternly, "Indiana."
Junior went silent and froze, and for a moment Ianto thought he'd succeeded, that he would respond with the familiar retort of "Junior" and a glare at Ianto's intrusion. He realized he was wrong a half-second before it happened, and there was nothing he could do but watch as Junior sat up, lunging toward him with his hands out, straining against Jack's grip, and sobbed out, "Dad."
Jack's grip went slack, and Ianto got a glimpse of his face in the night light as he looked sharply at his son and just as sharply away. It was more than enough; Jack was gutted. Ianto had seen him take mortal wounds with less visible pain and horror, but he didn't make a sound, just sat there with his head bowed, one arm still resting across his son, barely restraining him as he reached for Ianto.
This was how it happened; this was exactly his bloody nightmare come to life, and yet there wasn't anything to do but gather his sobbing son into his arms. Still, when Jack made to stand, Ianto stepped into his path and then half-fell onto the bed, landing himself nearly in Jack's lap and at the extreme edge of the bed. Jack had to throw his arms around them both to keep Ianto from tipping onto the floor with his squirming, sobbing burden, and Ianto hooked his legs firmly across Jack's and held him there.
"We're here," Ianto whispered. "It's all right. We're here."
"You're my dad," Junior wailed. "I don't want you to leave."
Ianto tried to meet Jack's gaze, but Jack kept his head down, though his hand came up and gripped tight on Ianto's sleeve. They'd told Junior the truth from the beginning, more precisely than they'd told anyone else: one year. Three hundred fifty-two days, now. Jack had said it would be best to be honest from the beginning, and Ianto hadn't argued--though he noticed that they both avoided saying on your birthday with scrupulous care.
"I won't leave tonight," Ianto said, because that was as much as he could promise. "Not for a long time. I'm here tonight."
He wasn't sure Junior even understood him, but his screams tailed off into plain sobbing, and he didn't fight anymore, except to cling to Ianto whenever he tried to shift and get feeling back into his feet. Jack had to be worse off, pinned beneath them both, but he didn't move an inch.
At some point Ianto jerked his head up, tightening his arms so hard on Junior that the boy gave a startled squeak.
Jack finally spoke, brushing a hand across Ianto's cheek. "Go back to sleep. I've got you, you won't fall."
Ianto nodded, and he barely realized that he was about to go to sleep curled around Junior and crammed into his little bed with him and Jack before he'd done it.
Ianto woke up with a stiff neck, curled up sideways across Junior's bed, to find Junior cuddled against his stomach and Jack spooned against his back. Jack had pushed up on an elbow, the better to engage in a staring match with Junior, and without looking away he said, "Ianto, tell him he has to go to school today."
Ianto blinked a few times, but neither of them moved. He couldn't feel his feet. "You're mad, both of you. I'm making coffee."
He made it most of the way upright--slowed by pins-and-needles shooting through both legs--before Junior established a firm grip on his right thigh, face buried against Ianto's hip.
Ianto put a hand on the boy's hair. "All right, coffee and a fry up. And then you do have to go to school."
Junior shook his head wildly, and Ianto said, "I'm not going anywhere today, Jun--"
"Indiana."
Ianto looked back at Jack, who was sitting up. His shoulders were slumped, his face in one hand, but after a few beats he looked up and met Ianto's eyes. Jack gave him a wry smile and said, "Only his dad calls him that. Welcome to the club, Ianto Jones."
Ianto looked back down at him. "Indiana. I will walk you to school after breakfast, and I will come and meet you this afternoon. I'm not leaving for a long time yet, and you can't stay home from school all year."
Indiana stared up at him, mutinous, until Jack heaved a sigh and stood, and came around Ianto to pull Indiana bodily away and sling him over one shoulder. He'd apparently used up all his resistance last night, because he only struggled half-heartedly. "Ianto's going to make breakfast, and I am going to make you a timeline. Let's go."
While Ianto was measuring out coffee, Jack dug through a drawer one-handed, as he still had Indiana over his shoulder. He dumped the boy onto the table along with several balls of string, and said, "Pick a color for each of us. You, me, Ianto."
Indiana selected red for himself--nearly the shade of his school uniform, which seemed like a good sign. Ianto could have guessed the next obvious association even without that one, and sure enough Indy didn't hesitate before selecting a deep blue for Ianto, the same color as his jeans. He hesitated over the last, but finally offered Jack a ball of grey, a shade darker than Jack's ancient greatcoat.
"Okay," Jack said, taking up the grey string first. "Now you know I've already lived a long, long time, and I'm going to go on living a long, long, long time." Jack unreeled a huge length of string from the ball, and Ianto rummaged through the refrigerator entirely by touch, watching as Indiana tried to restrain an expression of delight at an adult doing something so reckless.
Jack tossed the ball of string over one side of the table, and dropped the mass of loose string over the other, leaving his own life-thread strung across the table, over the backs of opposite chairs.
"That's me. That's my life. Over here, this is now." Jack tapped the back of one chair. "And here, this is where I first met Ianto and worked with him, where you got started. Do you remember where that was?"
"Cardiff," Indiana said. "Proper Cardiff, before it fell. Long ago."
"Correct," Jack said, and picked up the blue string. He pulled out just a reasonable amount, enough to leave a tail hanging down from the chair designated for the 21st century, and produced a piece of wire from somewhere to fasten Ianto's string to Jack's.
"Ianto and I were together for years in Cardiff, so our timelines are connected. And that's where you got started, too, so you're a part of it."
Jack fed the end of the red string into the wire wrapping the blue and grey, and tossed the red off the opposite side of the table, signifying Indiana's unrolling future.
"All along, while I was living, you were waiting and waiting and waiting to be born," Jack said, gesturing to the red and grey threads that crossed the table together. "And then you were, so here we are together."
He went to the chair representing the present, and connected his and Indiana's timelines with another bit of wire.
"But long before you were born, you know what happened to Ianto."
Indiana reverted suddenly into lump form, tightening his arms around his knees, and looking quickly and warily from Jack to Ianto.
To spare them both, Ianto said firmly, "I died. Long ago."
Jack nodded apparent thanks, and pulled something else from his pocket--a small bottle of glue, Ianto realized.
"Ianto died," Jack reiterated, and cut the blue thread; Ianto saw Indiana wince, felt his own hands jerk at the sharp, decisive sound. Jack glued the cut end of the blue thread to the red and grey. "We were both in the world, and Ianto was gone. We're all connected. That point is fixed."
Jack tugged at the threads, demonstrating that the glue had already adhered.
"But," Jack said. "The Doctor and his TARDIS..."
Jack noisily dragged the 'now' chair around the table so that it was beside the 'then' chair, startling Indiana into renewed interest as the strings looped around him at the center of the table.
"They picked Ianto up from old Cardiff, and brought him right to us."
Jack delicately plucked out the blue thread from between two coils of wire, and drew out a loop to meet the red and grey on the other chair, binding all three together with yet another twist of wire.
"Ianto's here with us, for a while. A year. But look--the loop goes both ways. If we cut it, it would mean death. Ianto is going to have to go back because he's already there. It's already fixed. This is the way it is, Indiana."
Indiana reached out a tentative hand to trace over the slack loops of string, the points of connection. Ianto could see him thinking, trying to solve the puzzle, to find a way out of the knots and past the cut-off end.
"Indy," Ianto said, and the boy looked up at him at once, too much driven by fear for the quick attention to be gratifying. "I will have to go home, as Jack says. And when I do, it's because that's the way time is--it won't be because I want to go, or because Jack wants me to go, and it won't be because of anything you said, or did, or wished. Do you understand?"
Indiana shrugged stiffly. It was important to say, but by the same token it was nothing a five-year-old would absorb all at once, on a morning when he'd had too little sleep and, as yet, no breakfast.
"All right, then," Ianto said, exchanging a glance with Jack, who offered him a weary but surprisingly sympathetic smile. "Get down from there and come help me with the eggs."
One of the more surprisingly strange things about life in the 23rd century--now that he'd more or less got used to the clothes--was the way sex had turned into an almost exclusively daytime activity.
It had mostly to do with the fact that it was only during the day, while Indiana was at school, that they could actually rely on having any reasonable privacy for any length of time. For a few weeks after that awful nightmare, Indiana consistently invited himself into the middle of the bed Ianto shared with Jack halfway through every night, and after that one could never be quite sure that he wouldn't.
Jack wearing pyjamas on a regular basis was another one of the deeply strange things about life in the 23rd century, as it turned out.
Ianto, despite the independent income supplied by Torchwood, was effectively spending his year's holiday as a kept man. Jack had no regular employment either, though he occasionally had to "go talk to some people" for hours at a time, and more rarely made overnight trips to London. He showed Ianto some video footage of the city before inviting him along; Ianto elected to stay home with Indiana. When Ianto asked him what he was talking to them about, Jack shrugged and said, "I have a few areas of special expertise that still come in handy. I consult."
So when Jack wasn't off having his mysterious conversations, he and Ianto were home together during the day, which left them a lot of free time to fill in the traditional fashion.
Ianto couldn't remember ever having sex with Jack in daylight before coming to the future, though he thought they might have done, at some point. There had been times when Jack had stayed all night at Ianto's flat, which he thought had at least once led to a morning not interrupted by a frantic dash to deal with some crisis. It had probably been raining, though, and anyway Ianto had always kept the blinds drawn. Otherwise it had mostly been at the Hub, where day or night made no difference, or a few times in the SUV or other semi-public places, all definitely under the dubious cover of darkness.
Now, though, what with all their free time occurring between the hours of nine and three and a slight shift in Welsh weather patterns, Ianto was getting used to the sight of Jack in sunshine, stretched out catlike on the bed they shared. He was gorgeous, of course, as always; he was Jack.
With time and good light, however, Ianto discovered all the little imperfections--some new, he thought, like the vaunted six grey hairs, and the small ugly knot of scar tissue on Jack's left side, nearly invisible to sight but quite apparent to Ianto's fingers, once he knew it was there. Others--smaller scars, the odd wrinkle or hair out of place--Ianto wasn't sure about. Maybe they'd been there all along, and he'd never seen, rushing in the dark.
He didn't realize how often he brushed his fingers over that telltale scar until the time they were lying together, after, catching their breath. Jack put his hand down, trapping Ianto's fingers in place over it.
"You know," Jack said, "I don't think you called me by his name once, that time."
Ianto murmured something universally appropriate about Jack and his ego, and did his best to fall asleep. But he couldn't help thinking about it--about his other Jack, who he scarcely ever thought to miss except in the sense of missing the work. His Jack, who he would go back to, in the dark, who wouldn't know the difference when Ianto called him by someone else's name.
Ianto kept his eyes closed more often after that, and if Jack took note, he was kind enough not to bring it up.
School uniforms were not required for field trips--particularly ones as apt to be hard on clothing as a hoverboat trip onto the Cardiff Inlet--so the first of the day's many challenges involved Indiana choosing his own clothes. Ianto was already dressed--properly, so as not to embarrass himself or anyone, in the rust-colored trousers and a locally-made jersey--and had a horrible sensation that he'd turned into his father at some point when he wasn't looking. He found himself putting his hands on his hips and saying, "Ianto Jones Junior, you are not--"
Jack's hand clapped over his mouth before he could finish that disastrous sentence.
"That's fine, Indy," Jack said, and Ianto twisted to glare at Jack, who shrugged and kept his hand firmly over Ianto's mouth. "He's decent, Ianto, that's all we can ask. And it's a compliment, really."
Ianto looked down at Indiana, happily shrugging a jacket on over a red t-shirt and the blue jeans he'd cajoled Jack into having made for him. Ianto raised his hands in surrender.
"You completely missed the month of cowboy-hat-and-tulle-skirt," Jack added. "He used to get the weirdest-looking sunburns."
Ianto reached up and pulled Jack's hand down. "Which reminds me: hat or sunblock, Indiana."
Indy huffed, but stalked over to the closet and came back wearing a drab jungle hat.
Ianto looked down at him, then over at Jack, and murmured, "What, no fedora?"
Jack shrugged and murmured back, "Would've been a little on the nose, don't you think?"
Ianto was one of six parent-chaperones on the trip, one of two in a hoverboat with a half-dozen five-year-olds. Three of them, counting Indiana, were named Ianto.
("I thought it would be sort of classic and unusual now," Jack had explained glumly, when Ianto first saw the roster for Indiana’s year. "But it turns out everyone thought that the year he was born."
There were a total of six Iantos in Indiana's school cohort, two of them girls, one of them also named Ianto Jones. Ianto was beginning to understand his son's insistence on Junior from people who weren't his dad. No one else at his school was called Junior.)
In a fit of pique or independence, Indiana took the seat furthest from Ianto on the boat. Ianto studiously did not listen to the brief repetition of the events of the fall of Cardiff into the Rift and the sea, and then they set off over the waves.
Literally over them; the hoverboats were made not to disturb the water, as most of the Cardiff Inlet was considered a burial ground, between the number of cemeteries gone under the waves with the city, and the number of people who hadn't got out in time. Nearly perfect evacuation hadn't been quite near enough, it seemed.
They went out a long way, following the ordinary buoys of the lone designated channel for shipping, tracking what had been the line of the Taff down to the sea, and then turned out onto the Inlet proper. Miss Abernathy announced, "Look left, we're passing the Splott bell."
When Ianto looked, he realized he'd been hearing the bell for a few minutes, over the constant sound of the waves. It was as big as a church bell, mounted on a buoy, with its name emblazoned black-on-white. All that was left of good old Splott, grave marker for an entire town. Ianto remembered standing in the Hub while Owen and Gwen and Tosh studied it on the map; he tightened his hand on the edge of the hoverboat and felt unreasonably seasick.
They continued further out, paralleling the shipping channel. Miss Abernathy was talking about the other belled buoys they could see to either side, but Ianto had his eyes on their destination, and he could hardly hear her over the ringing.
They halted at a respectful distance from the grouping: two bells surrounded by five others. They were smaller than the Splott bell, but not so small that Ianto could not read JACK on one of the central buoys.
Torchwood had held enough bodies to count as a cemetery all on its own--these bells marked where Suzie's body had been, and Tosh's--and...
And probably his own.
Miss Abernathy was telling the children about the Torchwood bells, and Ianto stared fixedly out to sea--the same sea, and, once he'd got his bearings, even the same distant hint of Flat Holm Island through the haze. He didn't hear a thing but the bells until he felt a touch on his knee, and looked down to see that Indiana had come to his side.
Ianto smiled at his son, and then realized that he must have traded places with one of the other children to get there. He looked up, lunged, and caught Ianto P. just before she managed to fall over the side.
There was a wolf-whistle from the next boat, and Ianto looked up to see Miss Abernathy fighting a smile, and one of the other parents holding up what seemed to be a score-card.
"That's one to Mister Jones!"
By the end of the day, Ianto had come in neither first nor last, and had escaped the particular ignominy of missing his catch and having his own child go overboard, which two of the six chaperones had done. He had taken a penalty for missing (it had been Ianto P.'s fourth time nearly going over; if he'd been a bit slower than he had to be by then, no one could prove it) but gained back half on style points, for fishing her out without getting his clothes wet anywhere but the arm that reached out of the boat for her.
The children--and, in fact, adults--were all equipped with excellent flotation devices, so it wasn't as if there was any harm in keeping score; it was simply a way of organizing the buying of drinks at the post-Field Trip debriefing session down the pub. Ianto took his turn third, or possibly fourth; either his tolerance had gone down horribly due to months of quiet, sober, fatherly living, or they were making the drinks a lot stronger two hundred years in the future.
In any case, he found the post-mission trip to the pub wonderfully familiar, and alcohol smoothed down all the ragged edges. Possibly a little too much so, as his feet were having a bit of difficulty finding purchase on the ground by the time the session broke up; it was just as well Jack turned up to find him and accompanied him home. It was a fine enough night, and Ianto would have liked to lie down in the garden a while, but Jack--fussy bastard--insisted he go inside and take his clothes off and lie in the bed.
Ianto woke up to Indiana saying "Dad?" much too close by.
He had time to wonder where Jack was, and why Indy hadn't gone to his side of the bed, as usual, before he opened his eyes. When he did, he discovered that Indiana was actually leaning onto the mattress, nearly nose-to-nose with him, and that he had a really quite spectacular hangover.
Ianto shut his eyes again, and reached for the pillow, to hide, or possibly to smother himself. Or Indy.
"Dad had a meeting thing," Indy explained, nearly into Ianto's ear.
Ianto dug his fingers into the pillow, and restrained a general impulse toward homicide.
"He said you're not ill, you're hungover, so I shouldn't bring you medicine no matter what you say, you can crawl to the loo and get it yourself."
Ianto cracked one eye. Indy was right where he'd been the last time Ianto looked. Biting the words off carefully, one at a time, Ianto said, "Indy, your father is a sadist."
Indy shrugged, and raised his hands into Ianto's view, one holding a small green bottle Ianto recognized from the medicine chest, the other holding a bottle of water. "I didn't listen."
Ianto blinked. "You, on the other hand, are a Welshman and a gentleman, my son."
Indy beamed at him--so bright Ianto was tempted to shield his eyes--and held out the medicine bottle first.
"Just a drop on your tongue. It makes Dad make a face, like..." Indy did his best impression of having bitten a lemon.
Ianto smiled, and squinted at the label. It was, indeed, indicated for hangover, and the dosage was a single drop on the tongue, to be followed by as much water as desired. He unscrewed the cap, which came away with an eyedropper, and squeezed a single drop onto his tongue.
Ianto had just an instant to realize that if it made Jack make a face like that, it was liable to kill him. He managed to set the medicine down and reach for the water bottle Indy was still holding, and then his face and throat seemed to convulse, his salivary glands on fire, and he couldn't remember how to open the bloody damned bottle. Indy's hands squirmed under his and got the top off, and Ianto struggled half upright and drank frantically, not stopping until the whole bottle was empty.
He set the bottle down and wiped a hand across the back of his mouth; it took him a moment to realize that he didn't feel like he was about to vomit. He blinked a couple of times. His head didn't hurt, either, and his eyes didn't feel like they'd been sandpapered. All he felt was tired, like he'd been woken up at an ungodly hour by his son, who probably wanted breakfast or someone to watch cartoons with.
He fell back against the pillows, and looked over at Indy, who was still standing beside the bed. He'd put the cap back on the medicine bottle and set it on the night stand, and now he was just watching Ianto.
"Breakfast?" Ianto asked, trying to keep the actual dread out of his voice.
Indy shrugged. "Dad made me some before he left. He said you would sleep late."
"And yet," Ianto muttered, eyeing his son, who was after all the offspring of a sadist. "I'm awake."
Indy grinned, and climbed up on the bed. "You have to tell me a story now. That's what Dad does when he wants to have a lie-in and I'm bored, he tells me a story."
"Does he," Ianto said, but Indy snuggled into the bed beside him and blithely tugged Ianto's arm over himself for a cuddle; squeezing him a fraction closer was just instinct, by then.
"Okay," Ianto sighed. "Um, let's see. Once upon a time--"
"No! Dad, not like that. A proper story. A Cardiff story."
Ianto remembered the waves, suddenly, the water and the markers and all the many bells and what lay beneath them. He squeezed Indy closer again, entirely deliberately.
He hoped Jack had understood why he got so utterly pissed last night, but he didn't think Jack would have needed telling. Jack had encouraged him to go along on the field trip in the first place.
"All right," Ianto said slowly. "You saw the Torchwood bells, yesterday, didn't you?"
Indy nodded quickly. "Jack and Jill, Rhiannon, Pryderi, Henry, Victoria, and Myfanwy."
"Very good," Ianto said. "Do you know who the Myfanwy bell is named for?"
"Jack is Dad," Indy said quickly, and then, "No, who?"
"Well," Ianto took a deep breath. "Let me tell you a story about the day Jack hired me to work at Torchwood Cardiff, then."
Indiana died around ten in the morning, a couple of months short of his sixth birthday. The as-yet-unidentified alien attack struck his school, leaving no survivors; Ianto found out when Jack rushed into the med center and shouted the news to the room at large.
Ianto ducked his head and bit his lip, trying to keep from laughing as he treated a sucking chest wound; his patient, quite unrealistically, did let out a generous chuckle. Jack was, perhaps, getting a little too enthusiastically into his role.
He'd tipped his hand a fraction that morning, lingering longer than usual when he paused to press a good-bye kiss to Indy's hair before leaving for one of his increasingly-frequent meetings. Special expertise, ha.
Ianto shook his head, sealed down the plastic dressing, and said, "Right, Alaine, I think you have to lie here a bit and simulate taking up space in the infirmary, now."
Ianto P.'s mother just rolled her eyes and tugged her shirt down. "They'd better be giving out special shirts for having got wounded this year, that's all I'm saying. And if they keep the kids all night they're going to be monsters in the morning. We'd do better with the aliens."
Torchwood reflexes--embarrassingly rusty after ten months of soft civilian life, but still enough to distinguish him from the actual civilians around him--served Ianto well through the rest of the day. He managed to keep himself alive, and to protect a respectable number of people into the bargain. He was still on his feet to hear the backup arrive: military units for whom the training exercise was just beginning.
When a unit landed in the street where Ianto was working, he quickly realized that it would be up to him to orientate them to the current situation. The other villagers nearby had--somehow, without his particularly intending it--fallen under his command in the last few hours.
He held his hands up to show himself--presently--harmless as he approached an officer surrounded by a knot of uniformed soldiers. He received an acknowledging nod, and was focusing most of his attention on putting his observations in order. Even though it was only a game, it was wonderfully like being at work again, doing something.
There was a shout from behind him simultaneous with a flash of light ahead, and suddenly he was face down in the street.
The back of his head hurt quite a lot, and something cool and wet was dripping down his cheek. Ianto thought with an absurd sort of clarity that he'd always thought you didn't feel anything after you'd been shot in the head.
"Oh, fan-bloody-tastic," said a voice with what Ianto recognized, after a few seconds' thought, as what currently passed for an upper-middle-class London accent. "Congratulations, Collins, on the ground five minutes and you've already shot a villager."
Ianto reached up toward his head--fuck, that hurt, must have been nearly point-blank, what kind of idiot was this Collins, anyway?--but a hand caught his wrist and held it away.
"Don't, son, you'll get the dye all over your fingers. Can you sit up?"
Ianto nodded to the cobbles, and then gathered himself and rolled over. It was the officer who was crouching over him, and he gave Ianto a hand up to sit.
"Sorry about this," he said with an apologetic grimace, and a glare over Ianto's shoulder, presumably at Collins. He scrawled something across Ianto's forehead--DEAD, Ianto realized. He'd marked a few corpses himself, at the med center.
"Now," the officer said, "let's see..."
He raised a small viewer, which must have picked up Ianto's ident chip. The officer's glare sharpened. "Oh, honestly, Collins, brilliant. You've just blown the head off of Captain Jack Harkness's registered cohabitant. Sorry, Mr. Jones."
"Don't mention it," Ianto murmured, even as someone behind him made a small, deeply alarmed noise.
Collins and another man were detailed to transport Ianto's body to the makeshift morgue. Ianto, being dead, was not allowed to explain to them where it was, nor where the safe route to that location lay. Collins thus was at least temporarily spared the embarrassment of explaining to anyone just how he'd killed Ianto, when he was shot himself, going round a blind corner into an alley held by the invaders.
Ianto thought he detected relief in the alacrity with which the second stretcher-bearer reported Collins killed as he took cover. The man bolted soon after, leaving Ianto lying on the ground near Collins.
Ianto was rather luckier, though. He had the stretcher to lie on.
"Oh my God, Ianto. What have they done to you?"
Ianto smiled at Jack's continued role-playing, and cracked an eye open. It'd been quiet for about half an hour, and after a few awkward attempts, Collins had stopped trying to make conversation. Ianto had nearly managed a nap.
"Am I allowed to answer that question?"
Jack's sudden bright smile had an edge of actual relief. Belatedly it occurred to Ianto that Jack had actually already seen him die once--well, twice--and the déjà vu might have been rather unpleasant. He hoped the dye was a nicely unrealistic color, at least.
"By all means," Jack said, sweeping a thoughtful look over the tableau. "Civilian corpses are being dismissed, so we can get the kids home and have people around to be fractious and surly toward the continued military presence tomorrow."
"I'll work on my sneer," Ianto said, sitting up and casting a glance toward Collins, who seemed to be holding his breath in pursuit of a really excellent performance as a corpse. "Especially given it was a friendly fire incident."
Jack sighed theatrically, even as he cast a look of genuine disfavor at Collins. "There are always a few. You're probably going to need solvent for the dye. Or a lot of bright blue hair-color, to even it out."
Ianto winced as he got to his feet--not so much at the thought of blue hair, although he probably couldn't carry it off to quite the same effect he had when he was seventeen, as at the thought of Indy inevitably demanding to dye his the same shade. "Solvent. Yes."
Jack nodded distractedly, tossing something down in the spot where Ianto had been lying. Ianto looked back, and discovered he was having an out-of-body experience--there he was still on the ground. The DEAD had gone off his forehead, but then it was hardly needed with half his head covered in blood like that.
"That for ambiance?" he asked, working to keep his voice even. It was really rather disconcerting.
Jack just stared at it, then shook himself and met Ianto's eyes. "Yeah, decoration and design for the end of the world. What do you think?"
"I think you need a hobby," Ianto said, searching Jack's eyes.
Jack just smiled, revealing nothing, and leaned in to kiss him briefly.
"Off you go," he said, dismissing Ianto with a fond smack on the arse.
Ianto headed down the alley a few steps ahead of Jack, and didn't look back to see whether Jack was looking back.
Jack came back from putting Indy to bed--in his new Disaster Day pyjamas, which he'd insisted on for eight nights straight so far--and sat down rather closer beside Ianto on the settee than he would have expected from Jack's distant expression.
"Is Indy all right?"
Jack said, "Probably," and then, after a pause, "well, probably not, actually." And, after a proper silence: "He wants to know how you died."
Ianto touched the back of his head--they'd had to dye over the damn blue, in the end, and he'd had a pale shadow like a bruise across his cheek for days--and wondered yet again just how bad Jack's case of déjà vu had been.
Jack caught the motion, and smiled bleakly. "Yeah, the simulation didn't help. He's just starting to get the idea of what dying actually means--I've been saying that to him since he was born, that you died. He's always known that was the end of the story. But now..."
Now dying was more real, and less, and desperately lacking in specifics by which to make sense of it.
"And I can't just say bravely," Jack added. "Or anything nice and simple like that. He's starting to realize that this is something that is actually going to happen to you when you leave, and he wants to know how it works. He wants the story. He wants cause of death."
Ianto wondered if Jack's choice of adverbs was any consolation for the fact that, Jesus Christ, this was actually going to happen to him when he left.
"What did you tell him?"
Jack sighed. "The truth."
Ianto froze, and Jack kept speaking. "Which is that I can't tell him anything about what happened while you're still here, because there's too much danger of you finding out and creating a paradox which might, for starters, cause him never to be born."
"Ah," Ianto said, and watched Jack staring into middle distance for a moment before he decided that this was a ridiculous way to spend an evening, when they only had a finite number of them left.
"I thought you might have told him the other truth," Ianto said, earning himself Jack's wary attention.
Ianto pushed up and twisted, lowering himself to straddle Jack's lap. Jack's hands settled automatically on Ianto's hips. Ianto braced his own hands on Jack's shoulders, holding him down, and whispered against Jack's parted lips.
"I'm not dead yet."
A month before his birthday, without being asked, Indiana declared that he was not having a birthday party.
Ianto wanted to argue on principle--six-year-olds should have birthday parties--but half a second's thought forced him to recognize that it wouldn't be more than a miserable shadow of an actual party.
"You don't have to," Jack said. "You'll turn six whether we have a party or not."
Indiana scowled ferociously. "And the Doctor isn't invited. He's not allowed to come here. He can't come in our house, not even into the garden."
Jack raised his eyebrows at that, and Ianto wondered whether he was going to point out that it was his house, his garden, and his very old friend at issue, but Jack simply said, "All right. On your birthday, we will ask the Doctor not to come into the house or the garden."
Indiana scowled harder, shoulders bunching up fiercely. Seventeen had come early, Ianto thought. If Jack kept up being calm and reasonable, Indy was going to take a swing at him. Time to deflect his attention.
"I still have to leave, Indiana."
Indy's chin dropped, his shoulders tensing all the harder. "I know."
Ianto glanced over at Jack, but Jack just nodded, giving him an open-handed gesture: go for it.
"I have to go, and the Doctor has to take me. It's not his fault, either."
"I know," Indiana repeated, the word nearly a sob this time, but he still wasn't looking at either of them. "But he's not invited."
Indy had started crawling into their bed again. He still came to Jack's side every time, and though Jack always placed him in the middle, Indy clung to him. If Ianto reached for him, Indy would grab his wrist and hold on, but he didn't seem to allow himself more than that.
Ianto didn't think he'd ever seen anything more awful than a five-year-old being brave.
The morning before his birthday, Indy got up when it was time to get up, and sat obediently at the table for breakfast. They'd none of them slept properly--Ianto thought he might have bruises from the strength of Indy's grip, which had never seemed to loosen--but they had a routine by now, long since established, and Ianto and Jack moved through the motions automatically. Indy didn't play with his food, just ate quietly and mechanically, right up to the moment when he suddenly bolted from the table without asking to be excused.
He stopped short a few strides from the table, seeming torn about where to run to, and wound up being sick right there on the kitchen floor; Ianto and Jack managed to converge on him before he'd stopped. Jack's hand cupped his forehead as Ianto wiped his mouth.
"Fever," Jack said. "Indy--"
"Sorry," he whispered. "I didn't mean to."
Jack sighed and kissed his temple. "I know you didn't. It's not your fault."
Ianto squeezed Indy's shoulder. "I'll get you some water."
Ianto took it to him in bed--in Jack's bed, where he'd already been tucked back in. Jack was stretched out beside him, saying, "But then Ianto said he already knew where they'd taken our transport, because he'd kept the locator with him."
Ianto sat down beside Indy, and held the glass for him to drink a mouthful, and then he lay down, curled an arm gingerly around his son, and prepared to listen to stories.
On the morning of his birthday, Indiana got out of bed before dawn. Ianto woke and found him gone, Jack sleeping or feigning sleep on the other side of the empty space in the middle of the bed. He went downstairs as the sun began to rise properly, and found evidence in the kitchen that Indy had fixed his own breakfast. His school shoes were missing from beside the door.
Ianto went to the door and stepped out, already wondering how long it would take Jack to track him down by his ident chip--but Indy was there, in uniform, standing stiffly by the garden gate. He turned to look when Ianto approached, and said, "He's not allowed to come in."
Ianto leaned against the wall beside him. "His ship might land here before we can tell him that, you know."
"Then he can leave."
Ianto reached out and brushed the hair back from Indy's forehead. He seemed fine now, physically; his fever had broken in the early evening, and he'd slept like the dead since. Indy stayed motionless under Ianto's touch, staring out at the street grimly. He was altogether too much like Jack in miniature, just at that moment, a Jack Ianto hadn't seen for a year and a day.
"It's your birthday," Ianto said softly, because he couldn't bring himself to wish his son a happy one. "You're six today."
Indy nodded sharply, and Ianto took back his hand.
"You've grown since I came."
Indy straightened up even taller for a moment, chin up.
Then, all at once, he turned and jumped at Ianto, nearly climbing him before Ianto could gather him up, ending with his arms clasped tight around Ianto's neck. He was heavy and awkward to hold--he didn't often consent to be carried anywhere anymore, except when ill or sleeping--but Ianto straightened his spine and kept his grip. They stood watch together until Jack came out to insist that Ianto had to get dressed.
Ianto showered, and put on his old (two-hundred-year-old) blue jeans, and his button-down shirt. That part was easy, though Ianto suspected they fit slightly differently; he couldn't tell for certain whether he'd gained weight, or lost it, or if it was all just a matter of having got used to the shape of clothes from the 23rd century. Everything was cut disconcertingly differently, and he was surprised to realize he'd come to expect it.
After that, Jack called up the image of Ianto stored in his ident chip, from his first day here, and started messing with his hair. Indy sat to one side, first just watching, then offering his opinions. Jack debated every stroke of the comb, trimmed one hair at a time, and in general managed to drag out the entire operation until they heard the unmistakable sound from the back garden.
Indy rushed out first. Jack set down the scissors, brushed Ianto's shoulders, and sighed. "You'll do."
Ianto kissed him briefly, and then turned and ran out after Indy, with Jack hard on his heels. Indiana probably wouldn't actually attack the Doctor, but then he was Jack's son. And Ianto's, God help them.
Indiana was standing at the door of the TARDIS, which had parked exactly where it had the last time, inside the garden. Seeing it there, Ianto had a flash of déjà vu, worse even than putting on his old clothes. The Doctor had come back for him. The moment was here, circled around again.
"No, of course, quite right," the Doctor was saying thoughtfully. "But a TARDIS is sovereign soil for a Time Lord--to say nothing of being dimensionally transcendental--so technically as long as I stay inside it, I'm not in your garden."
"You can't come out," Indiana said, but his voice was losing its fierce edge, and he looked back uncertainly at his parents.
"I wouldn't dream of it," the Doctor said. "But here's a thought: Jack is a very old friend of mine, and a very dear one, and I try not to do things he doesn't like when I'm visiting him. And Jack hasn't given me permission to take you anywhere, although I'm sure he doesn't mind if you come inside the TARDIS."
"Why should I?" Indiana's voice was half contrary, half baffled.
Ianto was reasoning just far enough ahead of him to realize that this was not going to help at all, but Jack laid a hand on his arm, gently restraining.
"Well," the Doctor said. "If I don't have permission to take you anywhere, I can't go anywhere while you're aboard."
Indy gave them one brief backward glance, and then nearly bowled the Doctor over as he leapt inside, slamming the door shut behind him. The Doctor gave them a quick wave as he disappeared.
"Jack, what--"
Jack kissed Ianto not at all briefly, rather pointedly mussing his hair in the process.
"The Doctor just volunteered to babysit while we say goodbye properly," Jack said, his mouth too close to Ianto's for him to see just how sad that smile might be. "I'm not going to turn him down."
part 6