Archive of Our Own

Ianto pushed his chair back from his computer with a sigh. He closed his eyes, just for a moment (no he was not going to cry) and stretched to ease the kink in his back and the pain in his neck. He took a deep breath. It was done. Only one thing left to do.

He checked his watch. Half past midnight. He thought a moment, factoring in daylight saving then pulled out his phone. It would be half past eight in the morning in Japan. He checked around. The Hub was empty. Gwen had long since left and Jack was… well he didn’t actually know where Jack was but he was quite sure he wasn’t here. Jack was doing his best but he was obviously extremely uncomfortable staying in the Hub at the moment. He was only in here when absolutely necessary. He also didn’t bother informing anyone where he was going. Ianto had a feeling he’d been gone for hours.
But not here right now, was good. Ianto took a few more deep breaths for strength and dialled the international codes he’d already memorised and then the number he didn’t need to check from the screen. The phone was answered after two rings. ‘Moshi moshi,’ a woman answered.
‘Ianto Jones, de gozaimasu ga.’ He paused, suddenly reluctant to speak.
‘Ianto?’ The woman switched to English. ‘Have you done it?’
‘Yes.’ The pain in his chest nearly stopped him from speaking. ‘She’s on her way.’ He had to steady himself and thought he heard a sob, thousands of kilometres away. ‘She is on a British Airways flight arriving in Tokyo at 5.45 pm today. All the paper work is done and I have contacted an undertaker to collect her. He has your details and ...’ His eyes flooded with tears and he couldn’t speak.
‘Thank you,’ Toshiko Sato’s mother cried.
‘It was the least I could do,’ Ianto managed. ‘I am so…’
‘I know,’ she snapped and the phone disconnected.
Ianto buried his head in his hands. He was alone. He finally gave in and let the tears come.
He staggered over to the sofa and curled up on it. He ached. There was a raging pain in his chest and all his muscles were so taut he felt he might snap. He wanted to scream and fight and break things but none of it would do any good. He needed Jack, to fight with or fuck with, he didn’t care. But Jack… wasn’t coping… and Jack wasn’t here.
Jack was behaving oddly and Ianto didn’t blame him one bit. He’d been buried alive by the brother he’d lost and agonised over for so many years, a brother who turned out to be a homicidal maniac who had managed to kill two of Jack’s team. Odd behaviour was to be expected. It didn’t stop Ianto from worrying about him. He stood up. ‘Okay Jack. Where are you?’ If nothing else, looking out for Jack helped take his mind off the gaping absence of Tosh and Owen, not just in the Hub but in his heart.
He went back to the computer and called up the tracker on Jack’s car. The map of the city came up and there was the red dot out on the A48, travelling west. Ianto sighed. The first two nights after Tosh and Owen died (and Jack had returned after being buried for two thousand years) Jack had wandered aimlessly through the streets, backwards and forwards, around and around before finally ending up on a roof. On the third night he’d taken to his car, driving equally aimlessly in slightly increasing concentric circles before turning up back here in the morning. Ianto knew this because he’d put a tracker on his car. He wondered if Jack was guilt tripping by seeing all the areas of devastation and damage reaped on the city by his brother.
Jack seemed so lost. He hadn’t slept, at all. He barely spoke. His response to Tosh’s surprise message had been the most positive thing he’d said in days. He’d played it over and over again, a small smile on his face until Ianto and Gwen had had to flee the Hub unable to bear the sound of her voice. It was just as well the rift was quiet because frankly, corralling weevils seemed the most complex thing Jack was capable of right now. Ianto and Gwen were fielding all official calls after a particularly nasty moment when Jack had called HRH Prince Charles’ personal secretary a wanker with a liking for horses. His usual, fairly limited ability to sensor himself seemed completely missing. It was particularly bad because the Princes’ man was passing on a genuine and personal message of condolence on their losses from the heir to the throne.
Ianto sighed and turned off the monitor. He had to let Jack grieve in his own way. He just wished…
Sadly Ianto wandered around, powering down the Hub. He collected his coat and keys and went home, turning on the TV to hide the silence of the empty flat. He missed Jack, not just in his bed but in his home. Jack hadn’t shown the slightest inclination to come home with him, even though to all intents and purposes this was where he lived now. He was either in the Hub or he was wandering. As well as not sleeping in the last seven days, not coming home meant he had to be recycling the last three sets of clothing that he had left at the Hub and he hadn’t asked Ianto to do any washing. It was like he didn’t want any more than unavoidable and work related contact with any of them. Except for the cuddles.
It was just one more contradiction of Jack acting weird. He wanted cuddles and touches, could not go past him or Gwen without touching them but initiated nothing further. He hadn’t flirted with either of them, not once. And while Ianto recognised that flirting wasn’t a normal response to trauma and grief, this was Jack they were talking about. It was like the sexual side of him was shut down.
twtwtwtwtwtwtwtwtw
To Ianto’s surprise, he slept, crawling back into daylight with a groan. Paracetamol, antacid and coffee made do for breakfast because he woke up with headache and body aches as bad as the flu. He dressed and went to work. The Hub was quiet and dark, still powered down when he got in. Jack hadn’t come back yet.
He checked the rift monitor, filled the coffee machine with water and started to prepare breakfast for the inmates. Gwen arrived as he was humping weevil chow into the service lift. She was clutching a bag of cinnamon doughnuts, the fragrance wafting ahead of her. For the first time in days her eyes weren’t red rimmed. Ianto smiled at her. ‘You look like you got some sleep?’
‘Yeah I did.’ She ducked her head. ‘I helped myself to some sleeping pills from Owen’s stock.’ They both paused for a moment, still unable to use the name without the obligatory twinge of pain. Gwen carried on, her smile only slightly wobbly. ‘Made the world of difference it did. I feel like a new woman.’ She gave him a genuine smile. ‘You should try it. You look like shit.’
‘Right,’ Ianto drawled, ‘cause I really need to feel like a new woman.’
It wasn’t very funny, but Gwen laughed and momentarily Ianto felt better. She handed him a bun. ‘Come on, you need to eat. Bet you haven’t. Have you?’
Ianto shook his head. He brought the doughnut to his lips and the soft sugar melted, sweet and lovely in his mouth. He sighed.
‘Go on,’ Gwen encouraged. ‘Eat it.’
He took a bite, cinnamon and jam exploded in his mouth. ‘Mmmm.’
Gwen smiled fondly. ‘That’s better. We all need to start looking after ourselves a bit better.’ She squared her shoulders. ‘Where’s Jack?’
Ianto shrugged. ‘Not here.’
Gwen narrowed her eyes.
‘I don’t know,’ he protested. ‘He disappeared off in his car about half eight last night and he hasn’t come back. I haven’t looked at the tracker yet this morning. He’s probably up a mountain in Snowdonia. He was heading west when I went to bed last night.’
Gwen sighed, ‘I’m really worried about him.’ She turned on her computer. ‘I mean this is hard, this is really really hard,’ and there were the tears again, ‘but we need Jack. He can’t just go to pieces on us.’
‘I don’t think he means to.’ Ianto snapped. ‘I mean, he not only had his long lost brother turn up and murder his team he was frozen and buried for two thousand years. I mean we’ve lost our colleagues, Jack’s been through a bit more.’
‘I know that,’ Gwen hissed back.
‘Really? Because for a minute there I thought you were suggesting that Jack didn’t have a right to be grieving…’ Ianto looked at Gwen’s face spoiling for a fight and backed away aghast. ‘Oh shit.’ He fell into his chair. ‘Sorry. You didn’t mean that. I know you didn’t mean that.’ His chest was so tight. ‘We can’t fight.’ It hurt so bad. ‘There’s only us.’
‘Oh god.’ Gwen looked shocked. ‘Noo no no no. I didn’t. Oh hell,’ She raced across to him, giving a wobbly smile. ‘Come here you,’ and grabbed him into a hug. All this hugging was getting on his nerves.
Ianto froze and then something broke inside him. It was like he was a puppet and someone had cut the strings. He sagged, falling against Gwen, her body warm and solid and alive as she held him. Her hair smelt of some herbal shampoo and there was a hint of mint toothpaste under the cinnamon on her breath. She held on to him fiercely while he tried to get himself under some sort of control because if he broke now that would be it, he’d be sobbing for hours.
When he felt like he could safely speak again he pushed her away and straightened his clothing. Gwen smiled at him. ‘You’re right,’ she seemed remarkably self constrained this morning, ‘there are only the two of us left. And Jack of course. And Jack isn’t coping. Is he?’
Mutely Ianto shook his head.
‘So we have to look after him and we have to help him. Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay. Well first things first.’ She nodded at the computer. ‘Let’s find out where he’s got to shall we? Which building is he standing on today?’
‘I’m picking he’ll be up a mountain this time.’ He activated the GPS tracking programme. Considering that last night Jack had appeared to be heading out of town, Ianto was more than a little surprised to see the map zoom in on the centre of town and the tracking unit indicate that Jack’s car was in the parking area at Cardiff Central Railway Station. ‘Oh.’
Gwen was looking over his shoulder. ‘There see. What big buildings are around there? The Altolusso is just up the road. He likes that one doesn’t he?’
‘Yeah,’ Ianto grinned. He had a wonderful still shot of Jack, all dramatic, coat sweeping out behind him in the wind, on the very edge of the hanging buttress on the front of the building. It was taken by a news helicopter on its way back from a scene and it had taken Ianto a hell of a lot of work to get the footage and keep it out of the papers. ‘But he’d park in their own car park. I can’t think why he’d park in the railway station.’
‘Catching a train maybe?’
They looked at each other in concern. ‘Why?’ Ianto finally asked.
Gwen shrugged.
‘I mean,’ Ianto stuttered, his mind churning at a thousand miles an hour, not thinking about Jack leaving, ‘where would he go?’
‘I don’t know sweetheart…’ Her phone rang and they both jumped. ‘I mean you know him better than I do.’ She answered the phone. ‘Andy?’
twtwtwtwtwtwtw
It was nearly 6pm before they crawled back into the Hub, filthy and exhausted. They’d dealt with at least sixteen weevils, wrestled them, wrangled them, and shot only two. The entire Cardiff weevil population was still very disturbed. In between times they’d managed to come to an agreement. ‘So I’ll ring Unit,’ Gwen said as she steered back into the underground park.
‘And we cover for Jack,’ Ianto agreed. ‘Like when he was missing.’
‘Whose car isn’t here,’ Gwen pointed out.
‘Shit.’ Jack’s parking spot was conspicuously empty. ‘Not missing yet though,’ Ianto muttered. He wasn’t going to consider that just yet. Tosh’s Mini was still in the spot she’d left it and Ianto was going to have to do something about that soon. He was pleased that Owen had relied on public transport. ‘Let’s get cleaned up and we’ll get on it. They can send us five people at least. No best make it six; we can send them out in threes. They can round up weevils and we can catch up on the other stuff.’ And look after Jack.
The shower was unbelievably good; heat and steam swirling around his body and Ianto allowed himself a few minutes to enjoy it. He was just drying off when he heard the cog wheel siren blaring and a tension he didn’t know he’d been holding released. Jack was back.
Only he wasn’t. It was Rhys, arriving with a dish of lasagne which right there and then was nearly as welcome. As Ianto shovelled the food into his mouth he realised that he’d been nearly light headed with hunger. Yes, bringing in help from Unit was a good idea. Jack was just going to have to wear it. They couldn’t go on the way they were, someone else was going to get killed.
Jack’s car was still at the railway station.
‘Where would he go?’ Rhys asked. ‘I didn’t think he had any family.’
‘Actually he does,’ Ianto answered. He deliberately didn’t look at Gwen because he was fairly sure she didn’t know of her relationship to Jack – great, great granddaughter from a whirlwind illicit relationship in the twenties. ‘There’s a daughter and grandson in Swansea,’ he was mildly amused at Gwen’s reaction, ‘and his great granddaughter Manda and her family in Cornwall. Manda’s great Grandmother Camille was one of the loves of his life.’
‘So which of them would he go to?’ Gwen knew about Manda after Jack and Ianto went to stay in the old family home in Cornwall after Ianto was injured by the Flyers.
He couldn’t imagine Jack going to Alice, but the way he’d been. Ianto shrugged. ‘I’ll call them both.’
‘But why would he catch a train anyway?’ Gwen asked again. ‘Why not drive?’
Rhys wrapped an arm around her. ‘You said he’s not up to snuff? Yeah?’ Rhys looked at them like it was obvious. ‘So he decided he wasn’t safe and did the right thing.’ Ianto was sure his incredulous look was the same as Gwen’s. Rhys caught it. ‘But this is Jack. Nah. He’d drive anyway.’
‘But he didn’t,’ Gwen said. ‘His car’s right there.’
‘Shame you didn’t put a tracking thingy on that coat of his,’ Rhys remarked.
Ianto snorted. ‘Owen did once. Jack was spitting mad when he found out. And anyway, he’s not wearing his coat. I’ve got to get a new one for him. Two thousand years underground pretty much destroyed it.’
The call to Alice was as unpleasant as Ianto had been expecting. He was pretty sure that the words Jack Harkness and Torchwood caused a Pavlovian reaction in Alice and that she didn’t personally have anything against him. It only took a few seconds to discover that no, Jack was not there.
The call to Manda helped soothe his soul. He could feel her hugs through all the miles between them but Jack wasn’t there either. He held his hand over the handset.
‘Manda says she’ll come. She can help.’ He desperately wanted to see her.
‘No.’ Gwen was adamant. ‘The last thing we need is a civilian getting in our way.’ She saw the pointed look Ianto threw at Rhys. ‘A civilian who doesn’t know how we do things.’
‘We could use her. She’s smart and she’s not just any civilian. She’s Army Intelligence.’
‘Who’s related to Jack. Let’s stick with Unit grunts. You know, just in case of peripheral damage.’
He had to concede she had a point. ‘Maybe later,’ he told his friend. ‘Come see us when we’ve found him.’
Manda sighed but didn’t argue. ‘Ianto. I don’t want to tell you how to do your job but you’re tired. Are you sure Jack got on a train? Have you checked? Could something else have happened?’
‘Oh my god,’ and Ianto realised that they hadn’t checked at all. They’d just assumed.

There were three CCTV cameras in each of the rail station car parks, two on each of the station platforms plus two in each of the entry ways. ‘Look at the car park ones,’ Ianto said. He was on the A48 about 1am, so after that.’
Because the screen could show four cameras at once Gwen also ran the one at the entry closest to where Jack’s car was parked. And that was how come they saw the weevils; a family of weevils, a big buck, a doe and three juveniles. A panicked family of weevils that burst out of the closed ticket office and disappeared down into the dimness of the closed station. ‘Do you think Jack was there for weevils?’ Gwen turned to Ianto. ‘Was he carrying a Hub monitor?’
A realisation hit Ianto. He hadn’t taken a monitor home with him last night. If there’d been any calls he didn’t know about it. Hurriedly he called up the log. There’d been three weevil alerts last night, all of them in the vicinity of the Central Railway station. ‘Shit.’
Rhys patted him on the shoulder. ‘You’ve been really tired mate. Don’t beat yourself up.’ He nodded to Gwen. ‘Keep playing the tapes. See when Jack turns up.’
At 2.34, about twenty minutes after the weevils appeared Jack’s car careened into the parking space, stopped across three spaces and Jack leapt out. He could be seen checking his holster, zipping up his leather jacket and sprinting into the building. Gwen toggled through the cameras and followed him through the entrance where he briefly stopped to study the broken door of the ticket office before disappearing into the station proper. He ran down an escalator to the north bound platforms and then disappeared from sight, somewhere between the bottom of the escalator and the platform. ‘Where did he go?’ she asked, frantically scanning for other camera angles.
Each of them took a computer and a group of cameras but Jack never reappeared. Rhys spotted another group of weevils, all adults on one of the platforms an hour or so later but they too disappeared. Then there was nothing anywhere until staff arrived to clean and open up before the morning trains.
Ianto had already pulled up the schematics of the station. ‘Guess what?’ he sighed. He pointed to the screen. ‘Sewer access points. The old sewer mains run under the station, from when everything used to be pumped into the river. They’re not connected to the modern system so at least they’re not full of modern shit, but there’s miles of tunnels under there.’
‘Well,’ said Rhys matter of factly, ‘at least he didn’t leave town.’
twtwtwtwtwtwtwtw
‘Do you think the weevils have kidnapped him for letting Owen die?’ Gwen suggested.
‘That is a very disturbing thought,’ but Ianto couldn’t think of anything more realistic.
‘Those beasts were panicked,’ Rhys reminded them. ‘They weren’t just ambling along. When they burst out of that office they were running for their lives.’
‘What goes after weevils?’ Gwen asked.
Ianto rubbed his aching neck. ‘Well if something is chasing them, that might explain why we’re having so much trouble with them. It’s not just that Owen died or whatever that was about.’
‘Do you think this something has got Jack?’
Ianto gave a terse nod. ‘We need to get down there and find out.’
‘Oh no no no no no.’ Rhys put a hand on his shoulder holding him down. ‘No-one is going anywhere tonight. Especially not you Ianto mate. You look like death warmed over. This is Jack we’re talking about ‘ere, yeah?’ Ianto glared at him and Rhys held his hands out placatingly. ‘I know I know; I don’t want to see him hurt either, but come on. What can you do tonight?’ He shut him down as Ianto started to answer. ‘Get yourself killed, that’s what you’ll do.’
‘Do you think I can sleep knowing Jack’s down there underground with panicked weevils?’ Ianto started up, rounding on Rhys.
‘No,’ Gwen yelled. ‘Ianto no.’ She stepped between them. ‘Rhys is right. Jack can’t die and he hates us taking unnecessary risks for him. You need to sleep. We’ll go down there in the morning. We’ll find him. We will.’ She took his arm. ‘Come on sweetheart. We’ll take you home. I had a good sleep last night with one of Owen’s pills. It’s your turn tonight. You sleep and I’ll keep watch, deal with anything that comes up. Rhys will help.’
‘No.’ He tore away.
Gwen growled. ‘Ianto.’
‘No. Don’t you get it?’ He glared at them. ‘Jack’s got to be in a bad way. He wouldn’t stay down there if he had any choice. You know that.’
‘We don’t know what Jack would do right now,’ Gwen yelled at him. ‘He’s not himself. Maybe,’ she flung her hands up, ‘Maybe he’s just hiding down there in the dark, alone. Quiet. Healing.’
And with horror Ianto realised that that was the last thing that Jack would do. Jack brooded in the light, in the open. And that was before… ‘He’s just spent two thousand YEARS in the dark.’ He looked around the Hub, seeing it properly for the first time in ages. ‘Jack can’t even bear to be in here.’ He saw Gwen’s eyes widen as she made the connection with Jack’s odd behaviour. He pressed his advantage. ‘If he’s trapped somewhere underground he’s going to go mad.’
twtwtwtw
It took them two hours to organise things, bringing Unit in to cover and assist. In the end they took a whole squad of troops, sending them down into the old sewers under the station. The three of them went down too. It still took them three days to find Jack.
twtwtwtw
They’d spread out through the tunnels, working outwards from the railway station and discovering very quickly that there was something nasty in the old tunnels. The desiccated bodies sort of gave that away. That and the skittering noises in the dark.
‘Two dried dogs, three things that might have been rats and a juvenile weevil,’ Corporal Neville Wills reported, marking the finds on their map of the old tunnels. ‘Seems like we’re getting closer. Those were all in a bunch, covered in that web stuff right here.’ The spot was on the river side of the station. ‘There’s none of your weevils living out this way, not like over the city side. And,’ he shuddered, ‘I reckon we heard them. Whatever these things are. Like lots and lots of cockroaches running across dry paper. God knows what they are, but there’s lots of them.’
Ianto tried not to react, he’d heard them too and the sound had raised the hairs on all of his body. There was every possibility that they really were cockroaches, but with Torchwood’s track record they’d be at least the size of rhinoceroses. ‘That’s a very apt description. I don’t want anyone in there without being fully armed. And each team to carry a flame thrower. If there are lots of legs, sometimes fire works better than bullets.’ It worried him that the creatures seemed to have been checking them out but no-one had actually seen them yet. He looked at the map and the area they’d covered. There were miles and miles of tunnels under the city, old service tunnels, sewers, even early streets covered over by progress. Weevils, rats and the odd drunk were the usual inhabitants of the place but in this corner of the maze, all of those things were conspicuously absent. Living versions of them anyway.
He put his finger on the railway station on the map and drew it out in a spiral, pretty much describing the way they’d explored the tunnels. There’d been no sign of Jack but he hadn’t surfaced anywhere else either. He was down there all right. ‘Let’s concentrate all efforts on this corner out by the river. Not much of this area left and all signs suggest this is where it is. ’ He looked up at the Corporal. ‘Finish your break and check your weapons. We’re going back in.’
‘Yes Sir.’
‘And for heaven sake Wills, don’t let the men run around in the main station with all their weapons. We said we’re a filming a movie, but the public aren’t all completely gullible and people are still jumpy after the attacks. It makes my job much harder.’
‘Sir.’
Ianto tried not to grin at being called “Sir”. He ran his finger over the map again, as if he could tell where Jack was by feel. The creatures had to be in this corner here and if they didn’t have Jack trapped somehow Ianto would be very surprised. He allowed himself a minute to relax, let his eyes unfocus and hoped his brain, would follow suit. The lines on the map blurred and a startling thought popped into his brain. They’d explored the tunnels starting from a central known point, the railway station, moving outwards and away from that point. Their movements exactly paralleled Jack’s seemingly aimless wanderings in the week between his brother’s attack and his disappearance. Jack’s wandering had not been aimless at all. Using the Hub as his central known point Jack had been discovering Cardiff.
‘Oh shit,’ Ianto scrubbed at his eyes, trying to rub away the prickling hurt. It was a hypothesis Ianto might have come to quicker if he hadn’t been blinded by his own grief, but it certainly made a lot of things clearer.
A little mental arithmetic, because Ianto couldn’t help himself, suggested that if Jack had managed to be conscious even for a minimum of two hours in twenty four in those two thousand years, he would have been awake for the equivalent of 166 years, which was an awfully long time without sleeping. Jack didn’t remember the city. What else had he forgotten?
twtwtwtwtwtwtwtwtw
‘Jesus,’ one of the unit soldiers swung round. ‘Listen.’
The tunnel echoed with a tk tk tk tk tk tk noise of hundreds of skittery feet.
‘Where the fuck’s it coming from?’ the boy whispered, swinging his gun around wildly. ‘What are they?’
‘He’s new isn’t he?’ Gwen whispered.
‘Must be,’ Ianto whispered back. ‘Not wearing a red shirt I hope.’ The soldiers weren’t actually wearing anything red having swapped out their berets for black beanies, protection from the frigid chill of the tunnels.
Gwen sniggered and Corporal Wills glared at them. ‘Hold your positions,’ he said sternly to his team. ‘Weapons ready.’ He staggered as his foot hit something and he swung his torch down. A foul stench rose in the air from the disturbed weevil corpse. ‘We’re getting close.’
They had been finding more and more web hanging from the ceiling and the brickwork of the walls. It was like a bad horror movie/haunted house effect. There were now huge amounts and they were pushing through curtains of it, slightly sticky and thick with dirt. ‘We must be getting close to a nest,’ Gwen said. Fairly needlessly Ianto thought. It was fairly obvious.
The noise of movement increased as they turned a corner. It sounded as if hundreds of cockroaches were swarming just outside their torch light. Large cockroaches. Then Ianto went to push a curtain of web out of the way and found it solid. ‘What?’ With quite a bit of trepidation he felt it. Lumpy. He imagined thousands of vicious giant alien cockroaches rushing out of it.
‘I’ve found the nest.’
Gwen gasped and one of the soldiers swore as Gwen swung the big searchlight around. They were in a chamber, possibly an old soak pit, full of lumpy web wrapped objects bundled and wrapped all higgledy piggledy together. Gwen played the light on the lumps and sticking out of the webs was a dog’s snout, several weevil limbs, fabric, fur and a bundle with a human looking foot sticking out of it. ‘We’ve found the nest all right.’
Carefully Ianto approached the bundle with the foot. ‘Jack?’
He reached out carefully to touch and jumped out of his skin as gun fire suddenly erupted behind him. He whipped around, gun already drawn as a man screamed and he realised that there were lots of legs all right but not lots of creatures. All the legs belonged to one horrifying beast. It was a centipede by about a thousand. It was only as big around as his thigh but enormously long. And it moved phenomenally fast.
The business end, a head with huge mandibles was coming straight at him even as the tail end whipped around, shooting out web like a lasso. It knocked two men off their feet and with a nearly impossible flip of its rear had them rolled and halfway tied in thick sticky strands before any of the soldiers could blink, all while the front end, mandibles gaping was headed straight for Ianto.
Gwen was used to aliens. She’d seen things bigger, faster and just plain uglier than this thing so even as Ianto flung himself sideways and the soldiers fired indiscriminately into the brick walls Gwen calmly aimed the flamethrower at the creature’s head and let off a burst.
The creature hadn’t made any vocalisation before but now it screeched, a high pitched scream as its exoskeleton melted and its insides boiled. In its death throes it writhed, it’s long whip like body flinging around like an uncoiling spring, all the myriad legs as sharp as the strands in a wire rope. It was a chaotic scene as bodies, bundles and more importantly weapons and torches were thrown around. The tunnel filled with the smell of burnt carpet and shit.
‘Thanks,’ Ianto said quietly as things went quiet. He untangled himself from the sticky bundles and stumbled across them until he could pick up one of the lanterns. He didn’t want to think about what he was standing on.
Gwen grinned and blew across the muzzle of the flame thrower. ‘You’re welcome.’
‘Status report,’ Corporal Wills, ground out. He staggered to his feet. ‘Any casualties?’ His eyes met Ianto who was amused to note that the man was bricking himself. ‘Is that the only one?’
‘No way of telling at this stage,’ Gwen told him. ‘You want to get everyone on their feet and do a perimeter check?’
Now that everything was disturbed the smell in the chamber was incredibly bad, decaying flesh layered with a sharp vinegary reek from the creature.
Ianto’s eyes were watering but he tuned it all out. He pulled the tangly mess apart, searching for what he’d seen before the creature had arrived. There.
‘Gwen.’ He felt slightly faint. This was bad. ‘Here.’ He reached out and touched the foot. It was a bare left foot and it was cold, but not as cold as he’d been expecting.
‘Oh God.’ Gwen was at his shoulder. Pulling other web wrapped lumps away it became obvious that this one was definitely man sized. The both tried tearing at the web, clawing it, trying to break through but it was incredibly strong.
‘Scissors?’ Gwen said.
‘I’ve got a Swiss Army knife.’
‘Me too.’
Even with knives it was incredibly hard to pull the web off the body. Not very far up the leg they hit fabric, familiar flannel trouser fabric. ‘Oh fuck.’ Ianto kept his hysterical thought, that it was like taking the pastry off a beef Wellington, to himself.
Wills came back about the time they were ripping the stuff off Jack’s torso, easier to slash right through his clothes and pull the whole lot away from him. His skin was cold. His head was still buried, his body twisted, and an arm and a leg tangled somewhere behind him and out of sight. ‘Oh my God,’ Wills breathed. In the lamp light he looked very pale. He reached over and helped wrench at the web. ‘Is he dead?’
‘Not cold enough,’ Ianto muttered, but actually he didn’t know. Jack didn’t seem to be breathing, he could be dead, the minor amount of warmth in his body the result of having been alive and dying in the last hour or so. The thought of Jack cycling from death to being alive and aware before dying again, trapped in the web in the dark was horrible. His skin was white, slightly odd and rubbery to the touch but while he wasn’t alive, he didn’t quite seem dead either.
Gwen slashed at the web across Jack’s chest. ‘This is like what spiders do. Yeah? They inject their prey with something that paralyses them and keeps them in a sort of suspended animation so they can eat them later.’
Ianto had already had similar thoughts. The bundled up bodies were being stored for a reason. A few minutes later the idea was more or less confirmed when Jack’s collar bone was exposed. His jacket and shirt were shredded and there was a huge and nasty wound, black around the edges close to his neck and another further out towards the shoulder. ‘A bite? Wills gasped.
Ianto tried to estimate what sort of bite those mandibles would make, but he’d only seen them briefly and they’d been coming straight at his face. They didn’t even exist anymore, Gwen had seen to that.
Jack’s head was twisted sideways from his body. They tried to straighten him and with a lot more care than before they peeled the web back from his face. His lips were open, (in a scream?) his mouth dry, a trail of dried black goo running from the corner down to his ear. Some more careful cutting and pulling and, ‘Oh God,’ Ianto breathed. Jack’s eyes were open.
Ianto felt Gwen shudder beside him. She held up the lantern and Jack’s stare stayed the same, his pupils fixed and dilated, not changing with the light. ‘Christ,’ Gwen swore, ‘hurry up. Let’s get him out of here.’
Jack’s right arm was caught behind him, intimately tangled with a juvenile weevil body. Ianto grabbed the arm, trying to work it free. It was difficult, Jack’s skin didn’t seem to be attached to the underlying structures, it slipped like a loose sleeve. Ianto refused to think about what that might mean. He had to grab on tight to the arm to get any leverage, trying to pull it around the weevil’s leg. There was a sudden crack as it gave. ‘No,’ he whispered in horror as he realised what had happened. Jack’s bones were so fragile he’d just broken his arm.
‘Oh God,’ Gwen moaned, the shock in her voice catching his attention. ‘He felt that. I was watching his eyes,’ she turned to Ianto, her own eyes wide with distress, ‘He’s aware – somewhere in there. His eyes changed. Something happened to the irises.’ She stroked Jack’s face. ‘Jack I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We’re not trying to hurt you. We’re here now. We’re getting you out. You’re safe.’
Ianto looked at Jack’s eyes. They were still fixed and unmoving, but there was something. Gwen was right; he could see something in them. Very carefully he redoubled his efforts to get him free.
Ianto worked on freeing the trapped leg as two Unit guys moved in with a scoop stretcher and started manoeuvring Jack onto it. He had to bite his tongue to stop himself from telling them to be careful. They were being careful; he could see they were. They didn’t need him snapping at them. With most of his body strapped onto the stretcher it was possible to turn and tip him ninety degrees and head down to untwist the limb enough for Ianto to work it out. He left behind Jack’s remaining boot and most of the trouser leg. ‘Right,’ Ianto muttered as he straightened up. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’
‘Oh ghck,’ one of the Unit men covered his nose. ‘What is that?’ There was a thin stream of black liquid oozing out of Jack’s mouth. ‘That is rank.’
‘Get him levelled off,’ Gwen ordered, grabbing for the head of the stretcher.
‘Oh man,’ the soldier gasped. ‘It’s like he’s gone rotten on the inside.’
Ianto caught Gwen’s eye, both of them taking strength from the other. ‘He’ll be all right,’ Gwen said firmly, eyes locked with his. ‘He always is.’
twtwtwtwtwtwtw
Once clear of the chamber, Ianto and three men headed for the surface with the stretcher and their nightmarish burden. Gwen, Corporal Wills and the rest of the squad stayed behind to torch everything left in the chamber, just in case any of those lumpy objects was actually the creature’s eggs. Once they’d done that Gwen and an escort would head for the surface while the Corporal and his remaining men would reccy the surrounding tunnels for signs of more creatures or nests.
Ianto and the stretcher bearers had barely made it to the Unit Ambulance parked in their operational base camp at the side of the railway station before Gwen was pulling herself in the door behind them. ‘Done,’ she said, running a filthy hand through her hair. ‘Whatever it was, there’s nothing left.’ She’d come a long way, Ianto thought, from the girl who would have tried to save it three years ago.
The Med Tech was still doing his initial scans, pointing a device very like their bekaran scanner at Jack, at the same time checking back on his computer screen that the telemetry was working. ‘Are you getting this?’ he asked into the headset he was wearing.
‘Martha,’ Ianto whispered for Gwen’s benefit. ‘She’s getting the read outs in real time.’
In daylight Jack’s skin seemed strange, nearly transparent and vaguely blue. His eyes were still open and staring. Ianto reached out and took his hand, the one on the undamaged arm that he hadn’t broken. How long could Jack stay in this strange limbo, not alive yet not actually dead?
The driver, a small blond girl who looked too young to be out of school peered through from the front. ‘Come on Jed, hurry it up. We’ve been here all bloody day and I’m bored rigid. Where are we going? Our hospital or their base?’
The tech held up a hand and tapped his earpiece. ‘Hold on,’ he hissed. ‘Yes ma’am,’ he said into the head set. ‘Yes. Okay. Just a minute.’ He pulled the head piece off and passed it to Ianto. ‘She wants to speak to you.’
‘Martha,’ Ianto said, completely unable to put any of his usual teasing warmth into his greeting.
‘It’s all right Ianto,’ was the first thing she said to him, ‘He’ll be all right.’
Martha had given quite a bit of an explanation before Ianto zoned back in again. ‘So can you get me a sample?’
‘Sorry,’ he said with a start, ‘a sample of what?’
He could hear Martha smile. ‘You didn’t hear a word I said did you?’
‘No.’ Ianto grimaced. ‘Sorry, I didn’t.’
‘Okay, let’s say it the short way. It’s a neurotoxin and it appears there’s some sort of digestive enzyme or three. He’s paralysed and it’s attempting to dissolve him.’ Ianto must have made some sort of noise because Martha hurried to reassure him. ‘Ianto he’ll be okay. This is Jack.’
‘Okay,’ Ianto said automatically but he was terrified. He loosened his death grip on Jack’s hand. No wonder his bones had broken.
‘Right, what I asked before, can you get me a sample of the venom?’
Ianto forced his brain to work. Jack needed him to stay calm. ‘Sorry no. The creature’s been vaporised.’
‘Oh,’ Martha said. ‘Pity. It would have been interesting to study.’
‘Do you need it?’ Gwen asked, she’d been listening in, her head up against Ianto’s.
‘We’ll manage without,’ Martha assured them. ‘Get back to the Hub. I’ll send Jed a list of tests I want him to run. This is Jack though. Yeah? By the time we’ve worked out just what it is and what we should do about it he’ll be back to normal and it will all have been a waste of time.’
twtwtwtwtwtwtwtwtwtw

Ianto woke groggy and confused. The room he was in was nearly completely dark, the only light coming from a constellation of green and red spots over to his right, the lights on the front of a powered down computer that wasn’t turned off at the wall. He stretched and reached his arms out across a large comfortable bed before reaching up and hitting concrete block wall. Time out room. Yeah. He barely remembered coming in here and collapsing into the bed. He was over heated and tangled in clothing and bedclothes, he obviously hadn’t undressed. He closed his eyes again trying to sink back into the dark, to hold the anxiety and fear at bay for a moment longer, but it didn’t work.
‘Lights,’ he said sharply and the room flooded with light. With a sigh he sat up, flinging back the bedclothes. He was fully dressed, rumpled and wrinkled and far too hot. His mouth was tacky and dry. ‘Gack.’ He tried to get some spit in his mouth and loosen his tongue. He staggered to the bathroom, running the water, splashing some in his face and drinking it down. He took a piss.
The clock on the wall showed he’d slept for nearly NINE hours. Un-fucking-believable. He ran his tongue around his mouth, tasting, suspicious. He’d been drugged. He must have been. It was the only thing that made sense.
Well, whatever was happening out there in the Hub, a full blown UNIT takeover seemed entirely possible, then it was happening without him and could manage to do so a few minutes more. He yanked his fusty clothes off, dropping them where they fell and stepped into the shower. He wasn’t wimping out on checking on Jack. He wasn’t.
Refreshed by his shower he was just pulling on trackpants and a tee shirt, the only spare clothes he had left in his locker when Gwen cooeed and poked her head around the door. ‘Oh you’re up. I was coming to see if you’d died in here.’
Ianto grimaced. ‘Just about.’ He glared at her. ‘What did you slip me?’
‘What?’ Gwen realised what she’d been accused of. ‘Nothing. Honestly. I swear. You just hit the wall and collapsed all on your own. It was lucky the bed was already made up.’
‘Truly?’ He dragged his fingers through his hair, trying to settle it. He didn’t have a comb in here. His stuff was through the door that led from this room into Jack’s room and he’d been keeping that door secret for so long he wasn’t going to let Gwen in on it now.
Gwen gave him her most innocent look. ‘Truly.’ The trouble was Ianto did believe her.
‘What about that weasel, Jed? I wouldn’t put it past him to slip me something.’
‘Ianto, no one gave you anything. Get over yourself.’ She huffed out a breath. ‘I came to see if you want anything to eat. I’m going to get in something from that place that does roast dinners. Jed doesn’t like,’ she made dit dit marks in the air with her hands and rolled her eyes, ‘ethnic foods.’
‘For breakfast?’
Gwen huffed out a laugh. ‘It’s dinner time love.’ She saw the confused look on his face. ‘Ianto,’ she said gently. ‘You’ve been asleep for nearly twenty four hours.’

When Ianto got back out to the med bay Jack was much improved from the state he’d been in when they’d brought him back from the tunnels. Then it was hard to tell if he were alive or dead. Now he was definitely alive and it truly seemed he would be better if he weren’t.
Ianto stood beside his bed and tried not to show his distress. Jack’s eyes were shut now and he seemed to be unconscious. An oxygen mask covered his face and each breath was a herculean effort to force air through fluid that burbled and bubbled deep in his lungs. It made Ianto want to cough himself, like his own lungs were full of fluid. Jack was drowning.
‘I’ve tried suctioning,’ Jed explained tiredly. The man looked haggard. ‘But it’s no good. His lung tissue is so porous, it’s just leaking fluid.’ He rested the back of his hand briefly on Jack’s cheek. Ianto was taken aback by the intimacy of the gesture. ‘We just get on top of one thing and something else happens.’ He looked up hopefully. ‘Don’t shoot me,’ he said quickly, ‘but I’ve heard the stories about Captain Harkness. Wouldn’t it be better just to put him out of his misery? Overdose of morphine, stop him breathing altogether.’
‘No,’ Ianto said sharply.
The Unit man sighed. ‘Gwen said you’d say that.’
Ianto fought to hold his temper. Jack had been through so much, had two thousand years of dying to make up for. Ianto couldn’t let him die again. He did a quick circuit of the room, picking up equipment wrappers and the odd drape that had fallen on the floor. Then he was drawn, as always, back to Jack. He pulled a stool up beside the bed and took his hand. His arm was in a violent lime green fibreglass cast, cold fingers poking out of the end. The other hand had an IV line running into the back of it and the flesh was torn and bruised.
‘Is he getting any better?’ He looked up, catching the medic in a gigantic yawn. Embarrassed the man turned his back and fiddled with the computer, covering up. He brought up a screen full of medical indicators and figures that meant nothing to Ianto. ‘We think so, yes.’ He turned back to face him. ‘We, that’s Doctor Jones and I, think that’s he’s starting to recover faster than the toxin can kill him. Dr Jones thinks, she knows quite a bit about the Captain, that the whole time he was in the nest he was in a sort of stasis, his accelerated healing powers more or less cancelling out the alien’s toxins, possibly even winning out, but there’s signs that the creature came back and dosed him several times.’ He peeled back the duvet wrapped around Jack, exposing a large bandaged area on his shoulder. He made to uncover the dressings but Ianto stopped him. ‘It’s okay. I don’t need to see.’ He’d seen it when they rescued him. It was pretty ugly.
‘Food’s here,’ Gwen called from above them. ‘Board room. Now. You too Jed.’
‘Julie,’ Jed called. ‘I need you here please.’
Jed had a minion, a skinny little blond girl called Julie. Only that wasn’t exactly true and they were all pretending, so as to seem polite. She’d been introduced as Jed’s assistant but she was a UNIT spy, full stop. She spent time in the med bay only under duress and the rest of the time she was wandering through the Hub, sticking her fingers and her beaky little nose into places she shouldn’t. It was fine. Ianto would make sure she left the Hub through the carpark entrance, thereby passing through a particularly hi tech portal that would wipe any storage devices and tech she was carrying with her. As for her own particular “soft ware”, well Ianto was THE go to guy, as Jack would say, for retcon treatment. And anything she was sending out of the Hub from the inside wasn’t going where she thought it was. Ianto didn’t like leaving her alone with Jack, but a lack of interest in his care didn’t equate to malicious intent so he reluctantly ushered Jed into the boardroom for dinner.
In spite of his enormous sleep Ianto still felt groggy and disorientated. Strangers in the Hub didn’t help and he was still expecting to see Tosh or Owen, especially Owen, appear around a corner at any moment. He really didn’t like having another medic caring for Jack, and it was only the fact that Martha was so intimately involved that was giving him any sort of peace. And Ianto really needed some peace because he just could not forgive himself for not realising that Jack was in trouble and not starting to look for him sooner.
‘I thought he’d just wandered off somewhere,’ he said quietly.
Gwen looked at him kindly. Ianto was pretty sure she was suffering the same guilt trip.
‘Pardon?’ Jed asked. He was shovelling roast beef into his mouth like he hadn’t eaten for days. Free food, Ianto thought cynically.
‘Nothing. Sorry. Thinking out loud.’ He finally asked what he really wanted to know. ‘Was Jack dead?’
Jed wrinkled his nose and pushed his plate away. ‘I’m not sure.’ He shuddered. ‘Anyone else I’d say yes. He was rotten inside, GI system completely destroyed, other systems failing. His bones broke down, his connective tissue broke down, that’s why his skin seemed so loose. I’ve never seen anything like it. Well not on anyone who slowly gets better instead of worse. I wasn’t sure…’
Jed suddenly jumped and touched his ear. He was wearing a Bluetooth headset, Ianto realised. ‘He’s coughing,’ Jed announced. ‘That’s good,’ he told Julie. ‘Means his gag reflex is back. Sit him up a bit, make it easier. I’ll be there in a minute.’
He looked at them. ‘I wasn’t sure if he’d actually make it. Things seemed pretty much in balance there, the toxin versus his ability to heal. I don’t think we’ve actually managed to do anything to help other than stopping him getting another dose from that creature. The rest of it is all up to him.’
‘Julie really isn’t a medical technician is she?’ Gwen asked.
Jed sighed. ‘No. No, she isn’t.’
twtwtwtwtwtwtwtw
Jack coughed up foul black tar by the bucketfuls at the same time he seemed to slowly drag himself back to consciousness. His gastro-intestinal tract kicked into something resembling normal function and very unpleasantly attempted to eject the black stinking rot from his system, generally from both ends at once. For a very nasty period of about twenty four hours Ianto wondered if it might not have been kinder to have killed Jack and let him come back whole. The trouble was he knew that mental health was quite different to physical health and had a fair idea that to kill Jack would be a very bad thing to do.
Jed, for reasons Ianto understood far too well suddenly banned Julie from the Hub. Ianto knew it had nothing to do with her piss poor nursing skills. He was grateful she was gone; it took a huge load of stress off him and Gwen. The trouble was she’d escaped the small leaving party he’d had prepared for her. He didn’t waste too much time worrying about it. There was just the three of them cleaning, soothing and doing their best to ease Jack’s pain and distress as his body reknit itself and removed all trace of the alien toxin and its breakdown products. Julie and her silly spy games barely rated.
Racked with cramps, bone pain and raw from coughing Jack held onto the hand of whoever was closest and whimpered in distress. He seemed to have little understanding of what was happening to him. He lay there like a bemused sick child, startling at loud noises and sudden movements. He passively allowed them to do whatever was necessary to clean and care for him. He didn’t speak and he didn’t sleep. It was breaking Gwen and Ianto’s hearts. Then his immune system finally kicked in and his temperature soared. Now he was delirious and distressed. Martha and Jed made the decision to sedate him to let him rest and Ianto held his hand as Jed fed the drugs into the IV line. He helped Jed position him on his side, oxygen mask over his face once he stopped fighting to remove it. The moment Jack went slack Ianto did too.
twtwtwtwtwtwtwtwtw
It was the right thing to do, Gwen explained to Rhys. She was really trying to justify it to herself but Rhys didn’t need convincing. With a bit of careful shepherding, because he knew Gwen wouldn’t rest until she knew that Ianto was; he managed to get them both to bed in the time out room (Ianto insisted Gwen take the large bed). Rhys accepted he wasn’t going to get Gwen home, not yet, so ensuring she got some sleep was the next best thing. He took the first watch allowing Jed to go back to his hotel too. He had Martha on a secure computer link if he needed her. As he settled into an old armchair that had just appeared by the bed in the med bay he didn’t think he was going to have to call her. Jack lay as still and inert as a log.
twtwtwtwtwtwtw
The kept him unconscious for two days by which time everyone had managed to catch up on sleep and Jack’s temperature had returned to nearly normal. Rhys had taken over rift watch, directing the UNIT patrols. The soldiers didn’t quite know what to make of him but Rhys found it very amusing to tell them what to do.
When Jed reversed the sedation they all had high hopes that Jack would wake up, back to nearly his normal self. But he didn’t. He opened his eyes and he just lay there. Physically he was getting better but he still didn’t speak. Ianto wasn’t sure whether he physically couldn’t, maybe his larynx hadn’t properly healed yet, or possibly whether he’d forgotten how. Maybe he just didn’t have anything to say.
He held Jack’s hand after he’d settled him for the night. Jack lay how they placed him but he didn’t sleep, eyes moving constantly, scanning the Hub, watching them come and go. It was creepy. Ianto placed his other hand on his cheek, feeling the skin slightly greasy and stubbled under his palm. Jack briefly closed his eyes before jerking them open again, his eyes fixed on Ianto.
‘We’ve broken you haven’t we?’ It was all Ianto could do not to cry.
twtwtwtwtwtwtwtwtw
‘Jack,’ Ianto coaxed. ‘Come on. Have a go at eating this. Martha says if you haven’t shown some signs of improvement by tonight she’s having you moved to a UNIT facility.’ She’d meant it too. Non negotiable she’d said. Jack was propped semi upright on the narrow med bay bed. If they sat him too high his blood pressure crashed.
Jack’s eyes focussed on Ianto for a moment with a nearly comical look of fright before they skittered away, looking everywhere but at the spoonful of egg custard Ianto held. His face was still deathly pale and he had lost so much weight his cheek bones would cut paper.
‘You understood that didn’t you?’ Ianto accused. He was sure by now that Jack did understand and that he could speak if he chose to. Ianto just didn’t know what it would take to make him do so. ‘Come on Jack. Please try.’ He knew that it was Jack’s mental state that Martha was really worried about and he shared her concern. He didn’t want Jack to be sent away, but Jack needed professional help. It didn’t help any that since Jack seemed unable to consent he would have to be sectioned. Ianto had to trust Martha to know the best thing to do.
Jack’s eyes came back to Ianto’s face and studied him.
‘Please Jack. Try to eat. Come on. You’ve been managing water all day.’ Just small sips but it was something. ‘Try some real food.’
Jack shuddered, then leaned forward a little and opened his mouth.
‘Oh thank god.’ Ianto’s joy that Jack had actually responded and was eating disappeared as he watched Jack struggle to swallow. It seemed to take tremendous effort and was accompanied by retching noises. He was obviously still nauseous.
‘Okay. That’s good. That’s enough for now. Thank you for trying. We’ll let that sit for a bit and see how it goes,’ he suggested as Jack finally got it down and opened his mouth again looking resigned. There were tears in his eyes. ‘Do you want a sip of water?’
Jack blinked in what Ianto took to be a yes. He trickled a small amount of water into his mouth and turned away to put the plate down when he heard Jack gasp. The next moment he was vomiting onto the bed, too weak to turn his head, bringing up the small amount of custard, water, bile and still, traces of the revolting black rot. Ianto felt like they were right back at square one. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered to Jack. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Gwen came to help him clean Jack up. He lay there, inert again, letting them wash him, roll him, and undress him. The small signs of interaction Ianto had had with him earlier were completely gone.
‘We need to change the whole bed,’ Gwen said wrinkling her nose. ‘Under blanket and all. It’s gone right through.’
They rolled him onto his side facing Ianto who held him while Gwen rolled up the soiled bedding behind him. It was always difficult to do this as the med bay bed was so narrow, but somehow this time they had their angles all wrong and Jack’s long legs were sliding off the cot. His whole body seemed set to follow.
‘Hang on,’ Ianto grunted. ‘We’re losing him. Bloody hell Jack, it would be good if you could help yourself a little.’ He grabbed his patient to stop him falling and then it seemed the most natural thing in the world to pick him up in his arms and sit back in the armchair beside the bed. Ianto held Jack on his lap, all long skinny limbs and sharp hip bones. A bag of bones his Grandma would have described him. Gwen threw him a soft cotton fleece blanket which Ianto tucked over him and Jack gave a soft moan, twisted and nestled his face into the crook of Ianto’s neck. Ianto felt the tense body relax and automatically tightened his grip as Jack snuggled closer. The position was incredibly awkward. Jack’s legs hung over the arm of the chair, his arm with the IV was caught between their bodies while the one in the cast hung limp, banging against Ianto’s knee. Jack didn’t seem to mind. He gave a sigh and was suddenly completely inert, a dead weight in Ianto’s arms, his breath ghosting against Ianto’s neck in a slow and regular pattern. Bemused he glanced up at Gwen who was looking at them with an “Awwwww” sort of expression on her face. ‘He’s gone to sleep,’ he whispered.
‘That’s the first time he’s slept in days.’ Gwen finished tucking in the sheets and turned the top one down. ‘You want to get him back into bed?’
Ianto was about to say yes when the realisation of what they’d done struck him with enough horror that he nearly cried out. He tightened his grip on Jack.
‘What?’ Gwen asked, concerned.
‘Go and make up the time-out bed,’ Ianto told her. ‘I want to take him there.’
‘Why?’
Ianto rubbed his cheek against Jack’s greasy hair. ‘Because he needs to be held.’ He watched Gwen’s face as she worked it out too. Jack was an incredibly tactile person. He was always touching, wanting contact. He’d just spent the most awful week, lost in the dark, helpless, perpetually dying. He’d been ill, in pain and so alone. He couldn’t have known if he would ever be found and rescued. And this had happened to him only weeks after he’d come back from two thousand years of dying buried underground.
‘We’ve only touched him when we had to, this last week when he’s been so sick.’ Gwen crouched beside them and rested a gentle hand on Jack’s head. ‘He’s been afraid to sleep.’ Her dark eyes were swimming with tears too. ‘Did we even tell him the creature was dead?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ianto whispered through tears of his own.
‘Oh god,’ Gwen shuddered. ‘Right lousy pair of best mates we’ve been.’
Twtwtwtwtwtw
It took a tremendous effort for the two of them to carry Jack through to the time out room. He might have lost a lot of weight but he was still a big man. Jostled awake he was confused and frightened and manoeuvring him down the tunnels to the large and comfortable bedroom beside the conference room freaked him out. ‘Shhh, Jack. Shhh.’ Gwen tried to keep hold of his flailing legs. ‘You’re safe. It’s all right.’
‘He doesn’t remember,’ Ianto said sadly. ‘He doesn’t know where he is or where we’re taking him.’ He was starting to realise just how very badly he’d misjudged things after Tosh and Owen’s deaths. It wasn’t grief that had made Jack so distant and behave so oddly, it had been the loss of his memories of his life in Cardiff after two thousand years buried alive. ‘Jack, calm down.’ He wrapped his arms more firmly around Jack’s chest. ‘We’re taking you somewhere more comfortable.’ Jack had just been very good at covering up how confused he was.
‘Here,’ Ianto grunted and they both fell onto the bed with their patient. They were exhausted. Jack gave a sob and burrowed back in against Ianto, head buried against his chest. Ianto wrapped one arm around him and stroked his hair with the other. ‘It’s all right Jack. You’re safe and I’m not letting you go.’
‘You stay put,’ Gwen told him, hauling herself off the bed. She straightened Jack’s gown and pulled the sheet and duvet up over both of them. ‘I’ll go get the IV stuff.’
By the time she got back Ianto had managed to fight his way out of his jacket and shirt, not easy with Jack attached like a limpet and was trying to kick his way out of his trousers. Gwen giggled. ‘Here, let me.’ It said a lot about how far they had all come that Ianto had no qualms about letting her undress him. Once he was down to his underwear the two of them managed to heave Jack around until he and Ianto were in the bed in a more or less normal position, heads on pillows, feet near the bottom end. Gwen hooked up the IV line in Jack’s arm that they’d luer locked while they moved him and they held their breath until she got it working again. ‘There,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘Anything else I need to do?’
Keeping as much body contact with Jack as he could Ianto eased himself up in the bed and slung his shirt back around his shoulders. ‘Can you bring me my laptop?’ He looked fondly down at his lover who, face pressed into Ianto’s hip appeared to be sleeping soundly again. His arm was wrapped tightly across Ianto’s legs. ‘I think I need to stay here for as long as he needs me to get some decent rest. But that doesn’t mean I can’t catch up on some work stuff while I’m at it.’
Twtwtwtwtwtw
Gwen and Rhys came down and had dinner with Ianto. Another Rhys cooked special, a surprisingly good tuna mornay, although the fishy smell did linger a little unpleasantly in the air of the enclosed room after they’d finished.
Jed, who was supposed to be having an afternoon off arrived back around 8.30 to check on his patient for the night and promptly freaked out when he wasn’t in the med bay. It took a fair bit to placate him and it was only that Jack was very obviously sleeping naturally and deeply, for the first time since his rescue, that stopped his rant from reaching epic proportions. Ianto couldn’t help thinking that Jack would really enjoy butting heads with this man when he was well again. In a huff Jed then headed back to his hotel for the rest of his time off. Ianto was fairly sure that he was actually pleased.
Jack seemed so settled that Ianto couldn’t see the point of Gwen staying the night and Rhys obviously agreed with him, so they took the rift monitor and went home. And Ianto finally got to turn down the lights and take Jack in his arms, spooning around him, breathing him in and keeping him safe, holding him as he slept. Having Jack in his arms and in his bed again felt so right. It was the first time since the night before John Hart had arrived and everything went bad. Ianto slept more soundly than he had in weeks.
Twtwtwtwtwtw
Ianto woke in the morning to the familiar feeling of his morning erection pressing into Jack’s buttocks. His legs were tangled with Jack’s and his senses full of Jack’s scent. He pressed his hips lazily against Jack’s arse enjoying the contact until reality caught up with him and he realised that what felt so normal was in fact not, and he hadn’t woken up like this in over a fortnight. They weren’t in their bed at home in his flat, they weren’t about to have morning sex before leaping into another day’s action, and that instead of waking to find Jack awake well before him Jack was in fact lax and limp in exhausted sleep. He sighed. It was also the first time he’d slept long enough and well enough to actually wake with a stiffy.
He couldn’t quite stop himself thrusting gently against Jack.
Moaning softly Ianto reached down and freed his cock from his underwear. A quick wank. Sort himself out. Jack wouldn’t mind.
Jack was wearing only a hospital gown, he might as well have been naked. His bum certainly was and the skin was warm and soft. Ianto ran his cock up the crease in Jack’s arse, only mildly concerned about Jack waking up and catching him at it. It felt so good. He wrapped himself tightly around Jack, spooning him, his chest pressed to Jack’s back and his hips moving, pressing the length of his cock, up and down, between Jack’s buttocks.
It wasn’t enough though. He wanted more friction but he was reluctant to pull away enough to get his hand in there to do the job.
He did reach down, running his thumb over the end, making himself moan as he spread precome around, slicked himself with it. He was leaking, a lot. It had been a long time since he’d had sex and Oh God, he wanted to thrust into something now. He wanted to fuck. He pushed his cock down and slid it into the warm pocket at the top of Jack’s thighs, his cock rubbing along Jack’s perineum, enclosed and stimulated by his legs, tight together as he lay on his side. Even Ianto couldn’t convince himself that it was alright to fuck him while he was asleep, but this, this wasn’t invasive. Probably still wasn’t quite right, but Jack was an intergalactic whore, or so he wanted people to believe and Ianto was questioning so much more of the truth between what Jack projected and what was actually true and … oh that felt so good. He mouthed the skin at the back of Jack’s neck, licking and kissing, his arms tightening around him as he thrust.
Then he was coming, jerking and grunting, the end of his cock hitting the back of Jack’s balls and intensifying the sensation.
He placed another kiss on Jack’s neck and sank back, his breathing still jerky.
‘I felt that,’ a voice said. A voice husky and dry from disuse.
Ianto’s heart jerked to match his erratic breathing and he flung himself forward again, hugging him to him. ‘You’re back.’
‘Mmm.’ Making words didn’t seem to come easy and he swallowed and coughed. ‘I think so.’ His words were slurred. He shifted carefully, with a moan, rolling in Ianto’s arms so that he was looking up at him. His mouth pulled up in the corners to a slightly bemused smile. ‘You just … spunked me?’
Ianto’s own mouth curled into a huge smile. ‘Ah yeah. Sorry about that.’
Jack was shaking his head slowly. ‘So we… we’re together? Like that?’ Ianto couldn’t read the expression in his eyes, was that hope or fear?
He went with hope. ‘Yes. We are.’
Jack shut his eyes and smiled. ‘I … Good. That’s good. I thought we… I was scared to presume.’ He ran his tongue over his dry lips and Ianto suddenly remembered that sorting out their relationship should not be his top priority.
‘Do you want a drink?’
Jack nodded and there were tears in his eyes. Ianto wasn’t quite sure why. He helped him sit enough to drink half a glass of water before he sank back on the pillow exhausted, his eyes drooping closed. Ianto started to carefully climb out of bed but Jack’s hand snagged him. ‘Don’t go.’
‘I need to get us cleaned up.’ Jack was still deathly pale, skinny as a rake, but there was something about him, his essence that seemed to be back. This was Jack again, even if he didn’t quite look like himself yet.
A quick wipe down of them both with a warm flannel and then Ianto slid back into bed, collecting Jack in against him so Jack’s back was against his chest. ‘Are you all right? I’ll get us some breakfast when Gwen comes in. Is there anything else you need?’
‘Sun.’ Jack jerked and turned, once again wrapping tightly around him nose buried against his neck. ‘Get out of the dark.’ He gave a sob. ‘I have to get out of the dark.’
‘It’s okay.’ Ianto stroked his hair and down his back. ‘It’s okay. We can do that. After breakfast. We’ll get dressed and I’ll take you home. I warn you though. I think it’s due to rain for the next week.’
Jack was trembling and Ianto stroked, trying to project calm through his touch. ‘We have a home?’ Jack asked tentatively.
Ianto kissed him, and his breath was awful. ‘Yes Jack. We have a home. You’ve been living at mine for months. It just sort of happened.’ There were tears in his own eyes.
‘I don’t mind it raining.’
Ianto smiled. ‘Good.’ Jack sagged back into sleep, his body heavy and limp in Ianto’s arms.

Jack managed a couple of teaspoons of yoghurt and some canned peaches for breakfast then Ianto helped him dress in clothes that were at least two sizes too big for him. ‘I’ll go out and buy you some new pants,’ Ianto said as he worked a new hole into Jack’s belt with the spike on his pocket knife. ‘It will be a while before you fill these out again.’
‘Why didn’t you just shoot me?’
‘Huh?’ Ianto looked up and met his eyes, dark and concerned. ‘You’d died so much.’
‘Pleased you didn’t,’ his words were slurring again, tired from the effort of dressing. ‘It’s awful… in the black.’
Ianto kissed his forehead. ‘Go to sleep Jack. I’ll take you home when you wake up. There’s no hurry.’
‘No,’ Jack struggled up. ‘I have to get out.’
‘Okay. Sit up then.’ He threaded the belt back into Jack’s trousers, Jack using it as an excuse for another cuddle. He cuddled back, his heart breaking again as he thought of Jack craving touch.
‘Ianto?’
‘Mmmm?.’
‘Don’t let me die. Not ever again.’
‘I won’t.’ And he meant it. He was quite sure that once Jack was better he’d throw himself back into his usual way of life with gusto and his usual complete disregard for his own safety, but Ianto would do his best to make sure that he didn’t die. He didn’t expect it to be easy.

Watching Jack in the car, his face reaching for the water logged sun, Ianto made another vow. He was going to move them into the sunlight. There was no reason for Torchwood to work in the dark. Underground bunkers were all right for fictional heroes like Batman, but for real people… His mind was filled with images of office buildings, a boring front office hiding high tech working spaces inside, maybe a large glass roofed atrium open to the sky.
He pulled up in front of his flat and came around the car to help Jack out. He’d thought of bringing the wheel chair but with the steps up to the door and then the complication of stairs up to the bedroom there hadn’t seemed much point. He intended to get Jack inside and comfortable on the sofa and then attempt the getting upstairs sometime late in the afternoon. Hopefully he’d also manage to get him into the bath at some stage. He hadn’t had a real wash since this all began and he was sure Jack would feel much better properly clean.
Jack had at least stopped pretending that nothing had changed and Ianto’s heart sank a little as he watched him looking curiously around him, taking in the row of terraced houses like he’d never seen them before. They made slow progress up the path, Ianto taking most of Jack’s weight. It took a bit of effort to get the key in the lock and then they were inside and Jack was sagging.
‘Here,’ Ianto said with a grunt, picking Jack up, like, he thought hysterically, like he was carrying his bride over the threshold. Oh lord that was an image that made a lot of horrible sense. My huge gangly bride, he snorted, putting a herculean effort into throwing Jack onto the couch. Jack lay there, eyes shut, pale and physically shaking. Ianto dropped to his knees and grabbed his hand. ‘Are you okay? Jack?’
Jack tried to smile. When he spoke his words were so quiet Ianto hardly heard them, ‘… want to try and see what dying of old age is like.’
Ianto started and stared at him. Jack opened his eyes, looking at him deadly serious. His breathing settled. His smile was tentative, worried that Ianto wouldn’t take him seriously but Ianto could see that this mattered to him, a lot. There were huge implications to that sentence.
Ianto smiled back. ‘That sounds like a great idea.’
Jack looked around. ‘I remember here.’ He smiled properly. ‘I was happy here.’