sam_storyteller (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-18 01:32 pm
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-18 01:32 pm
Entry tags:
Beggars for Roses
Title: Beggars for Roses
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Notes, Warnings: COE fix-it fic; passively sort of ignores the events of "The End of Time". With many thanks to the kindness of strangers.
Note: Sam did not write this! It is an anonymous fanfic written to say thank-you to the Cafe for their generosity and good wishes. If you comment here, the author will get your feedback. :)
Posted by Sam on 3.11.2010.
***
It rained on the day of Ianto's funeral.
Jack watched from the hill above the cemetery, eyelashes thick with rain, hair curled flat along his skull. He'd buttoned his coat all the way up and burrowed his chin into the collar. He didn't have to look up to know who it was stood beside him. He'd heard the familiar sound after all.
"I'm so sorry."
The Doctor stood with his hands in the pockets of his suit trousers, coatless, and his eyes were just as hollow as Jack's. The lines in his narrow face seemed deep, and rain slid down their contours and dripped off of his jaw onto his sodden suit.
Jack's eyes slipped wearily across the Doctor's visage, and back to the wet, damped grief below. It was easier to look at things far away. He'd been standing there since before the funeral procession even arrived, and his limbs felt as though they'd rusted in place. He was cold, but moving from the spot seemed like a journey of imagination. The coffin had been lowered, the dripping wreath of white flowers removed, and Jack saw the diminished form of Ianto's sister step forward to drop the first handful of earth.
"You decided not to attend."
It could have been an accusation, but the Doctor's voice was as grey as the rain, and it came out as an acknowledgment of grief that could never be spoken.
"I couldn't." Jack's throat felt rusty, too. "It was my fault."
The Doctor said nothing for a while, and the minutes trickled down cold and fleeting over them.
"I...I almost destroyed the entire course of the Universe."
"Yeah?" Jack's voice was a flat croak. "For who?"
The Doctor looked at him then, and Jack could see that thing he craved and dreaded--that apology, that love, in the dark eyes.
"Doesn't matter. Thing is..." and his voice broke, a cracked sound like a stabbing pain somewhere below Jack's ribs. "I'm not entirely sure who I am right now. And that can be a dangerous thing."
Jack shifted his gaze back to the small, slowly dispersing funeral party, and left it there, unmoving. The soft rain fell a little harder, a remote silver pattering filling the blanks of his mind.
"That's why I need you to let me do this for you."
A breath lodged in Jack's throat, sharp and painful. "Y-you can't."
"But I will. Just this one time, Jack, I will. Say yes."
Jack's heart, which had felt sluggish and heavy as iron for weeks, now seemed to be beating too fast. It hurt. Every instinct he had pushed its way up his throat, fighting to break past the clamped-tight barrier of his lips and tell the Doctor no. To bargain with Time like this wasn't right; the Doctor couldn't be in his right mind to have said it. But Jack was tired of being the one forced always to abide by the rules. The cars, their headlights on against the wan dimness of the rain, began to file out of the cemetery one by one. Only one mourner remained, and that was because, Jack knew, she would never forgive herself for a death that wasn't her fault.
He parted his lips, felt himself sucking down a breath of cold, damp air as though it were his first.
"Yes."
~~~
Jack was a fixed point in Time--a lynchpin around which the gears of the Universe could endlessly revolve, spinning off new timelines and histories without ever changing the fact of him.
He could feel it, too, sitting in the TARDIS as the Doctor did what no Timelord should ever do: lifted a skein of Time, cut it, and deftly stitched it to a new thread. Jack had thought it would feel wrong, or terrifying, but it didn't. It flowed as easily as any other journey through the Void--a new melody, but not a discordant one. It was like a high hum as the events of the past few weeks unraveled, carefully, and the TARDIS materialized in a familiar dark chamber, as a voice that echoed in Jack's nightmares told them that it would wage war on the whole human race.
The memory slipped itself seamlessly into Jack's head: turning to look at the familiar noise, gun still aimed, but turning, heart leaping, and Ianto turning as well, confused, alarmed, when a thin man in a brown pinstripe suit opened the door and held out his hand, saying, "Come with me, now. There isn't much time."
Jack kept out of sight in the TARDIS so that he wouldn't see himself, and closed his eyes, remembering pushing Ianto towards the door, looking into the Doctor's eyes and seeing everything that had just not happened: the funeral, the offer on the rainy hillside. A nod, tense, grateful, and the door of the police box closed before Ianto could shout his protest.
He opened his eyes, then, and stood, crossing to where Ianto was frozen, torn between gaping at his surroundings and angrily demanding that the Doctor tell him what was happening. His gun was still drawn, but angled towards the floor.
Before the Doctor could tell him to put the gun away, before Ianto could draw another breath or fully register the sight of Jack walking towards him across the softly lit control room, Jack had caught him by the arms and pressed a kiss to his startled lips. He felt the sound of his name uttered against his mouth as the young Welshman surrendered his confusion for the moment and kissed him back, pliant and wondering against the fervor and Jack's warm tears of relief.
~~~
"I still don't get it." Ianto stood in the TARDIS library, fingers running lightly over the spines of books that wouldn't be written for a thousand years yet. "Isn't this...like...I dunno, something you're explicitly not supposed to do?" He was still a little ruffled by the experience, Jack could tell, underneath the wry affectionate smile and the placid tone.
"It's like the Doctor said." Jack sat on the couch, elbows on knees, his hands wrapped around his cooling cup of tea. He watched, pleased, as Ianto wandered around the room, still slightly dazed. "Every once in a while, something happens...a balance has to be made."
"So...I wasn't supposed to die?"
Jack opened his mouth and shut it again. The two memories played through his mind like competing film reels--the cold grey emptiness of a Cardiff cemetery and the warmth of the TARDIS' heart, spilling out across the black marble floor at Thames House. "Who knows."
"Well, he knows." Ianto made eyebrows and jerked his head meaningfully in the direction of the library door. He was still wary of the Doctor, though respectfully so.
Jack smiled. "Well. And I trust him."
Ianto's blue eyes held Jack's for a moment, serious. Then he smiled, and left his exploration of the shelves to come sit next to him again, side against Jack's side, thigh against his thigh. Jack slid his arm around Ianto's shoulder and pressed a kiss to his hair. His eyes closed gently, and for a moment, his world was wonderfully small and wonderfully complete: the soft glow of the old-fashioned chandelier lanterns, the dusty, warm space of the high-ceilinged library around them, and Ianto's body pressed close, smelling like clean sweat and stale cologne.
Jack felt Ianto's sedated murmur against his neck.
"So when do we go back to Cardiff?"
~~~
"The only way I can do this is to bind his energy signature to that of the TARDIS," the Doctor had told him, hands flying across the controls. He'd paused just long enough to pierce Jack with a gaze that held no jovial excitement, just a burning intensity that Jack had seen rarely enough to know that things were serious. A matter not of life and death, but of the survival of the Universe. "Do you understand? If I don't, his new timeline will unravel some other timeline, and slowly, everything, everything will start to fall apart. Five years. That's all. If he stays where he is, away from the TARDIS, he's only got five years."
"Five years..." Jack had murmured. He knew how fleeting those years would be.
"Or."
"Or?"
"He could come with me. Every five years I could take him somewhere, somewhen different. A new stop along the way."
And Jack, living eternally, would wait for centuries, playing catch-up. He had looked up at the Doctor and his eyes held all the knowledge of what that would mean.
"Would he age?"
"Yes."
"It's up to him."
The Doctor had nodded, and turned back to the TARDIS' glowing controls, fingers caressing her into Time's slipstream.
"Doctor..."
"Hmm?"
"Whichever one it ends up being..." Jack had let out a breath, and it had felt soft as a prayer, releasing his hold on everything, surrendering. "Thank you."
~~~
The light of midsummer on Thalacticus was a dazzling white-blue. It took a while for human eyes to get used to it, unshielded, but Jack had the benefit of that 51st-century adaptability. Still, it sparkled almost blindingly on the cobalt-tiled rooftops of old town Maridas, a city dug deeply into the heart of the planet's history, and now a popular destination for a certain academic sort of tourist. Jack cupped a palm to his brow as he made his way through narrow stone streets, avoiding street merchants and pickpockets with an ease born of long habit.
He saw him sitting at an open-air cafe, dark glasses on, pale Welsh skin standing out a bit in the crowds of brown-skinned natives and tourists with tans. Jack's heart lifted with a painful joy. It had been five hundred and two years for him, since the mid-2400's on Earth. He pressed through the throng with his pulse in his ears, oblivious to the cries of marketeers, the honking of traffic, the songs of street performers, the colors of the advertisements flashing on the sides of buildings, until he found himself at the table, his shadow falling across the pages of the book Ianto was reading and startling the Welshman out of his reverie as he looked up, and smiled.
"You found the place. I was starting to wonder."
It was subtle, but Jack could hear the worry in Ianto's voice. He grinned, and slid into the seat opposite.
"I told you, the Doctor wouldn't let us down." He picked up Ianto's empty glass, the still-fresh imprint of his lips in green against the rim.
"Some kind of flower-based horchata, I guessed. It's not bad."
Jack leaned across and kissed the taste from his mouth.
That night they slept in a comfortably sweaty tangle of gossamer sheets at an inn on top of the hill in Old Town, overlooking a sea of cobalt roofs that spilled from the loins of the mountains towards the distant shimmer of ocean. Jack laid on his side and watched Ianto breathe, still a little noisily from that broken nose he'd got back in Cardiff, nearly ten years ago in his lifetime. A brutal left hook from an angry, drunk Blowfish. Jack slid his hand across naked skin, still smooth, and felt him shift contentedly in his sleep.
It had been hard for Ianto, he knew. The choice of a certain, but unknowable death after five years, or saying goodbye to family, friends, everyone he knew, to be carted across Time and step out into a new century, a new place, waiting for Jack to be there. Why he'd made the decision he did, Jack still wasn't entirely sure. Perhaps it was simply because, at the end of his five years in Cardiff, back in the 21st century, Ianto had been afraid of death. He'd been only thirty-one years old. And so, when the TARDIS materialized on the Plass, he'd taken the offer. Jack still remembered him standing there in the doorway, forcing his eyes to drink in the sight of the Bay, the Millennium Centre, his friends--Gwen with her head held high and tears on her cheeks--as though he'd never see them again. That was certainly partly true.
Gwen had died at a respectable age, long before the TARDIS returned to Cardiff in the 25th century. Jack had been there, holding her hand, as the nurses took her off of life support, and she'd squeezed gently, telling him to say hello to Ianto for her. It had taken Ianto months to be able ask about her, and Jack had held him, too, as tears slid down his face. The worst part, that Jack would never tell Ianto, was that he knew it would never get easier.
All that Jack could promise was that he would always be there. He would always come to him, in whatever century and whatever place, and that he would give him a good life. These promises, he was to whisper every time, like a private ritual, starting at their tower offices in 25th-century Cardiff, that night when the first transgalactic spaceflight took off from the station at Mumbai, and continuing here, in the cool blue night above a city whose tumultuous rise in its native history had begun as a result of that flight, five hundred and two years ago and so far away.
In the morning, Jack thought, he would show Ianto some of the ruins of the pre-Federation Corscus Dynasty. The majestic slate-blue spirals of the Fortress Corscuvox on the western sea-cliffs. Maybe later, if they stayed, he would show him the site of that landing, the monument to an event Ianto had witnessed in silent awe long ago, his wide eyes turned skyward to watch the trails of a vessel he couldn't have imagined being alive to see, his hand tight on Jack's at the railing of their three-hundredth story balcony, the last time he'd seen Earth.
However, in the morning, Ianto looked at Jack over breakfast in that disarmingly shy way he had when he was going to ask for something personal, and suggested that they go to a museum he'd seen on the way to the inn. Jack was about to open his mouth, impress him with his savvy knowledge of wildly foreign centuries and planets--the place was a bland tourist trap, some half-assed history of the region, and overpriced--but he stopped himself. Uprooted from his home planet and ten years and half a millenium removed from the century he knew, Ianto wouldn't necessarily care that a third of the artefacts in the museum were careful replicas. He needed this--something to ground him in this time and place, to let him orient his life along a broken trajectory. Jack put his hand over Ianto's and nodded. He saw the flash of gratitude in Ianto's eyes as the Welshman leaned over the breakfast table and kissed him sweetly.
At the museum, Jack watched as Ianto studied the exhibits with the intensity of one facing a comprehensive examination. He'd always been a quick learner, and Jack knew that by the end of the day, Ianto would probably be correcting him on Thalactican history.
"Maybe you could get a job in their Archives," he teased.
"Are we going to stay here?" Ianto asked after a moment, crouched down to look at the details on a tomb chest from the pre-Corscuan era.
Jack studied his profile, still subconsciously comparing it to faulty memory. The centuries without him, as the first four hundred years, had in some ways made him seem like a dream. Then, suddenly, there he was again, real and subtly changed, familiar and wonderful, soothing the ache of all that time. "We could. Or we could go. Anywhere."
"Like Earth?" Ianto's eagerness was tempered with caution. It had only been a matter of weeks for him since the 25th century, but he had learned, during those previous five years, that you could never go home again. Jack could see the pain of that lesson still in his eyes, and hear it in his voice.
"Sure."
They stayed in Maridas for three years.
Jack had done some free-lancing with the new Time Agency, mostly as an instructor, so money wasn't much of a problem. Ianto, though, wasn't one for idleness, and after six months of getting his feet under him, found work at a travel agency. A lot more boring than Torchwood or the Federation Investigation Division, he joked, but safe.
All that time building cruise packages for tourists put the itch of travel in him, however, and, maybe unconsciously realizing his time was getting short, he quit one day and came home to Jack with a fistful of brochures and an adventurous light in his eyes that Jack hadn't quit seen the like of before.
"Anywhere?"
Jack smiled.
~~~
Ianto had grey at his temples when Jack found him at a highway transit stop on Petuin-Parsas six hundred and fourteen years later. He hadn't remembered that detail from before--or maybe it was that in the between-times, his memory regressed to Earth, to Torchwood. The desperate young man offering him coffee near the boat docks one April morning.
He was a little heavier, too, than in Jack's memory, but Jack had put on a couple extra pounds himself during the last few years, and anyway, Ianto's face was still so sweet in profile, bent over a cup of hot brew and a map.
"Hello, stranger."
The look of relief on Ianto's face was unmistakable but he quickly covered with a wry little smile. "And here I was, thinking I was going to have to somehow figure out this abysmal train system, and go looking for you." He offered Jack a sip from the cup. Jack took a swig and wrinkled his nose.
"It's not your coffee, that's for sure."
Ianto smirked. "Do you even remember what my coffee tastes like?"
"It has been a while," Jack replied quietly. Ianto never asked how long. Often, he had to learn a whole new system of dating and timekeeping when he arrived, and Jack noticed that he clung to it once he'd deciphered it. It was hard to keep being reminded of how far he'd come.
Ianto looked around himself with exaggerated interest. The transit stop was dingy and poorly lit, plastered with posters for concerts and travel promotions that one could tell were sorely outdated simply by their faded colors and torn corners. "Well, this certainly is nice."
"Oh, stop it," Jack said, flashing a bright grin. "It's certainly no worse than, say, Minffordd."
That earned him a laugh.
"Anyway, I have a nice little place just up in the woods a ways..."
"Tell me you're not serious."
"I'm not serious. C'mon. Let's find civilization, shall we?"
He held out a hand and tugged Ianto to his feet, arms going around him and pulling him close. When he closed his eyes and kissed him, all of the intervening centuries seemed to slip away.
Ianto always wanted to hear stories about Jack's adventures without him. Jack chose the funny ones, the pleasant ones. He tried not to talk about the people he'd lost, but this time, Ianto surprised him, as they rode the air rail to the capital province of Verd, by turning to him in a moment of silence with a pensive look.
"Do you remember Faroe, back on Thalacticus? Faroe M?"
Jack had to crank his brain to come up with a face to put to the name. Then he smiled; Ianto never had learned to pronounce Mynkka,i,jas' last name, which was a pretty hard thing to admit for a Welshman, Jack had thought. Faroe had been one of the ones who'd pushed blithely past Ianto's hesitant facade and become something more than just an acquaintance.
"Yeah...yeah, I do."
Ianto's brow was slightly furrowed. "I don't know why, but I was thinking about zir lately. I suppose ze's not...you know. Alive anymore. But ze always talked about zir hometown, and I think it was on this planet."
Jack slowly nodded. Ianto looked out the window again, fascinated by the foreign scenery passing around and below them, but his hand crept onto Jack's thigh, and found his hand.
"It's weird," was all he said.
This time, Ianto found work at a police agency, despite Jack's protests. He said it made him feel useful, and he seemed slightly disappointed that Jack didn't want to join him. Jack didn't tell him that actually, he was sort of involved in an underground effort to get guns and money to revolutionaries on an Inner Ring planet a system away. If he was absent from their rented apartment in Verd City Prime more often than he wanted to be, it was only because he was making sure that nothing happened to Ianto because of him.
All the same, it was Ianto who turned up in the hospital, shot, one day in the middle of the rainy season. Jack caught the fastest express ship home and sat in the waiting room with his heart in his throat, feeling sick, for forty-five minutes while the surgeons patched Ianto up. It felt like hours.
The look on Ianto's face, when Jack, pallor like the grey of the walls, came into post-op to see him was undeniable relief. And maybe a hint of accusation. Where were you? But though he held onto Jack's coat with white knuckles when they embraced, all Ianto said was, "I think I'm getting too old for this." They both laughed.
Petuin-Parsas wasn't bad, for all that. They stayed there the whole five years. And on the day the TARDIS came, Ianto gave Jack a small black box. "You don't have to open it if you don't want to, seriously," he said, earnestly. And he took a deep, audible breath and kissed Jack goodbye. There was a painful twisting feeling in Jack's stomach and it was very hard to let go for a moment, there in the TARDIS doorway. The Doctor stayed occupied inside; he always gave them as long as they needed.
But it was just like death, in a way: Jack was getting used to it. So he blew out a lungful of air into the autumn sunshine and when he opened his eyes, the TARDIS had gone.
~~~
A thousand years was a very long time.
He sometimes sort of forgot what Ianto looked like, or the sound of his voice, even though he'd made photographs and holograms of him throughout the years. It was easier, somehow, not to look at them much. He preferred to remember him through impressions and sensations--the dark pleasure of a good cup of coffee, when he could find it; the joy of skin against skin; the dusty spaces of archives or the slant of the sun on windows. In those centuries, Ianto became his personal spirit guide, more guardian angel than friend or lover, a benevolent presence tucked away in his heart, beneath the ring he wore on a chain around his neck.
And then suddenly, one day, there he was again, so real and imperfect and familiar and strange that Jack couldn't help but grab him and inhale his scent, nearly lifting him off the ground in the joy of being able to speak to him, feel him, watch him again.
"Christ, Jack! Public!" Ianto was laughing but he did pull away and try to smooth out his waistcoat and tie. He was also wearing a sharp suit jacket--he remained consistently formal. Jack grinned, gazing at him there in the desert valley of a brown planet that didn't yet have a formal name. Ianto looked around a little skeptically. "We're...archaeologists this time?"
"I'm running a supply train for settlers. Real Old West stuff. I've only been here a year."
"Dear God do they have running water?" Ianto deadpanned.
"Even better. They have replicated water."
"Always an adventure."
They helped build the roots of a colony there, tiny particles of humanity who had taken once again to the highways and by-ways of the stars to escape overcrowded planets, bad economics, despotic leaders, or just plain boredom. It was anarchic, creative, frustrating, and to Jack, still inspiring. It was life on the edge of things, and that never ceased to excite him. Ianto didn't feel exactly the same way, but he tolerated it, with the notable exception of the time Jack, feeling invigorated by all of the newness, suggested adding a third to their relationship.
He'd been tight-lipped with annoyance, something that surprised Jack at first.
"I'm forty-three years old." He'd huffed, turning with arms folded to gaze out their full-wall window. The desert stretched before and around him, beige and red and gold, off to the hazy horizon where the distant peaks looked like a purple mirage against the brown-blue sky.
"So?"
"So..." Ianto turned back to him and his blue eyes were a striking color, an oasis in dust-colored surroundings. He was smiling, a little curve of those still-soft lips. "You're quite enough for me." He came closer, wrapped his arm around Jack's waist, and Jack let out a pleased, surprised breath, resting his head on Ianto's shoulder.
Before he left this time, Jack made him a ring out of twists of the bright copper that was so plentiful in the rocks. He slipped it into his breast pocket as his fingers trailed in farewell across his chest.
~~~
The next three hundred years were not easy ones for Jack. He was late to the meeting point the Doctor had transmitted to his wristband by two months, because he'd had to escape from a Tellurian morgue. He'd been imprisoned for twenty years there, and death had been the only way out in the end.
His hair was greying, his face more gaunt than it had been in a long time, and the delayed recognition in Ianto's eyes when he arrived, dusty and travel-weary, at the Library, was a bit of a painful shock.
"This is what I can't stand," Ianto murmured to him that night, lips against his neck. He held him close and warm in the room of the traveler's lodging he had rented while waiting, and the big double bed was angled to look out over the city. Ianto loved a place with a view. "Knowing that in between, anything could happen to you, and I can't do anything about it." His voice was low and steady, but his arms tightened around Jack's thin ribs and Jack thought he could feel him tremble a bit.
"Still can't die," Jack reassured him with a weary grin. Ianto snorted at that, and just pressed his face against Jack's hair.
After a long, warm silence, Ianto shifted and Jack looked up to see that naughty little smirk on his face.
"What?"
"At least you're almost as grey as I am, now."
~~~
Five years was never enough. But Jack was grateful. For him, those half-decades, scattered throughout his life like rare stones in a field, almost made his eternal life into a thing small enough to understand, stretches of time that he could almost get comfortable in, knowing that they were each finite, however long.
They found each other again on the Martian Colony, on the space station Pegasus which they quickly left after watching the spectacle of a sun going nova from a safe distance, on the Planet of the Ood where a haunting song thrummed in the air and through their veins while they lay skin to naked skin for one of the last times.
Each time Ianto was quieter, more withdrawn, than before. His hair whitened. His eyes grew paler and got a faraway look that Jack recognized from the faces of old space travelers, and sometimes in his own reflection. He tried not to think constantly of all that Ianto had given up, all the things he'd willingly taken on, for him. But sometimes, it was inevitable that he would catch the look in his eyes during a pensive moment, and wonder if it had been worth it, to him.
Yet Ianto didn't complain. He found new interests, though increasingly fleeting ones, in every place they went. He added their stories to his journals, which Jack never asked to read, though sometimes he snuck a peek while Ianto lay sleeping, never far away. There in the neat handwriting, among ticket stubs and photographs and holo-prints and dried plants, he read very few regrets. Subtle longings, and steadfast love.
It was shortly after the Planet of the Ood, where they'd spent only a few weeks, that Ianto came into their room and Jack knew he was done.
"I want to go home." He said. His voice was firm. Jack stood and gently pulled him into his arms. He felt less substantial, somehow, than Jack remembered. His hair was thinner, pale as the rest of him, but he put his arms strongly around Jack and smiled up at him in trust. The copper ring gleamed like startling fire on his slender finger.
"Okay."
~~~
The Doctor looked up from the TARDIS console, his latest, youngest incarnation looking just as scattered as any before, wild hair included. Jack had a brief moment of resentment for the Timelord who got younger with each death. But the Doctor's eyes were older than ever before.
"Jack."
"He'd like to go home, Doc." Jack leaned against the TARDIS wall and felt her heartbeat like a soothing hum in his ears. His own heart ached a little.
The Doctor nodded. "Has it been good?" He asked thoughtfully.
Jack let memory flow through his mind for the space of a held breath, then gave the Timelord a brilliant grin.
"It's been wonderful."
~~~
It was sunny on the day of Ianto's funeral.
Jack stood by the carved white gravestone, braced against he wind from the sea as it swirled his coat around his legs. The coat was in its fifth incarnation, a gift from Ianto from what had to be the last hand-tailoring shop in all of Wales, and he was grateful for its warmth even though the air was so bright. It might have been his imagination, but it seemed he felt the cold a little more keenly these days.
He breathed in the sting of salt air, letting it fill his lungs like buoyant light, and let his handful of dirt fall onto the lid of the smooth titanium coffin.
As the last of the mourners filed out, friends, acquaintances, even those that they'd come to view as family, Jack felt the Doctor come to stand beside him.
"My condolences, Jack." His voice was low and warm. Jack looked over at him with a small smile, the narrow youthful profile and close-cropped ginger hair.
"Thanks. You know, for everything."
The Doctor turned to look at him and smiled. He bumped Jack with his elbow. "It was my pleasure. It was my...honor. He was a good man."
"He was."
Jack had rarely stuck around to see anyone live out their lifespan before. Most of them were ripped away, too young. And for a moment, if he closed his eyes, he could call up that other memory, that other strand of Time, a hillside in the rain. He opened his eyes again to the sun and the sea. Perhaps Ianto had sacrificed a decade or so, in the end, but he'd been happy to be back in the green hills of Wales. And Jack had been happy to be anywhere he was.
"So," the Doctor said at length. "I was thinking. Just about a millennium from now, the First Grand Empress of the Third Great and Bountiful Human Empire is having her jubilee. I hear she's quite the political rogue, though, and it sounds like it'll certainly be someplace very.....ah, interesting...to be..." He raised an eyebrow at Jack.
"You know. When you're ready."
Jack smiled, looking back up the hill to where their house stood, the white clematis around the door. It had been a good home. He breathed deeply.
"Give me about...five years?"
The Doctor smiled, and clapped a hand on Jack's shoulder.
"I'll know where to find you."
End.
So we must join hands in the dew coming coldly
There in the hush of the wood that reposes,
And turn and go up to the open door boldly,
And knock to the echoes as beggars for roses.
-Robert Frost
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Notes, Warnings: COE fix-it fic; passively sort of ignores the events of "The End of Time". With many thanks to the kindness of strangers.
Note: Sam did not write this! It is an anonymous fanfic written to say thank-you to the Cafe for their generosity and good wishes. If you comment here, the author will get your feedback. :)
Posted by Sam on 3.11.2010.
***
It rained on the day of Ianto's funeral.
Jack watched from the hill above the cemetery, eyelashes thick with rain, hair curled flat along his skull. He'd buttoned his coat all the way up and burrowed his chin into the collar. He didn't have to look up to know who it was stood beside him. He'd heard the familiar sound after all.
"I'm so sorry."
The Doctor stood with his hands in the pockets of his suit trousers, coatless, and his eyes were just as hollow as Jack's. The lines in his narrow face seemed deep, and rain slid down their contours and dripped off of his jaw onto his sodden suit.
Jack's eyes slipped wearily across the Doctor's visage, and back to the wet, damped grief below. It was easier to look at things far away. He'd been standing there since before the funeral procession even arrived, and his limbs felt as though they'd rusted in place. He was cold, but moving from the spot seemed like a journey of imagination. The coffin had been lowered, the dripping wreath of white flowers removed, and Jack saw the diminished form of Ianto's sister step forward to drop the first handful of earth.
"You decided not to attend."
It could have been an accusation, but the Doctor's voice was as grey as the rain, and it came out as an acknowledgment of grief that could never be spoken.
"I couldn't." Jack's throat felt rusty, too. "It was my fault."
The Doctor said nothing for a while, and the minutes trickled down cold and fleeting over them.
"I...I almost destroyed the entire course of the Universe."
"Yeah?" Jack's voice was a flat croak. "For who?"
The Doctor looked at him then, and Jack could see that thing he craved and dreaded--that apology, that love, in the dark eyes.
"Doesn't matter. Thing is..." and his voice broke, a cracked sound like a stabbing pain somewhere below Jack's ribs. "I'm not entirely sure who I am right now. And that can be a dangerous thing."
Jack shifted his gaze back to the small, slowly dispersing funeral party, and left it there, unmoving. The soft rain fell a little harder, a remote silver pattering filling the blanks of his mind.
"That's why I need you to let me do this for you."
A breath lodged in Jack's throat, sharp and painful. "Y-you can't."
"But I will. Just this one time, Jack, I will. Say yes."
Jack's heart, which had felt sluggish and heavy as iron for weeks, now seemed to be beating too fast. It hurt. Every instinct he had pushed its way up his throat, fighting to break past the clamped-tight barrier of his lips and tell the Doctor no. To bargain with Time like this wasn't right; the Doctor couldn't be in his right mind to have said it. But Jack was tired of being the one forced always to abide by the rules. The cars, their headlights on against the wan dimness of the rain, began to file out of the cemetery one by one. Only one mourner remained, and that was because, Jack knew, she would never forgive herself for a death that wasn't her fault.
He parted his lips, felt himself sucking down a breath of cold, damp air as though it were his first.
"Yes."
~~~
Jack was a fixed point in Time--a lynchpin around which the gears of the Universe could endlessly revolve, spinning off new timelines and histories without ever changing the fact of him.
He could feel it, too, sitting in the TARDIS as the Doctor did what no Timelord should ever do: lifted a skein of Time, cut it, and deftly stitched it to a new thread. Jack had thought it would feel wrong, or terrifying, but it didn't. It flowed as easily as any other journey through the Void--a new melody, but not a discordant one. It was like a high hum as the events of the past few weeks unraveled, carefully, and the TARDIS materialized in a familiar dark chamber, as a voice that echoed in Jack's nightmares told them that it would wage war on the whole human race.
The memory slipped itself seamlessly into Jack's head: turning to look at the familiar noise, gun still aimed, but turning, heart leaping, and Ianto turning as well, confused, alarmed, when a thin man in a brown pinstripe suit opened the door and held out his hand, saying, "Come with me, now. There isn't much time."
Jack kept out of sight in the TARDIS so that he wouldn't see himself, and closed his eyes, remembering pushing Ianto towards the door, looking into the Doctor's eyes and seeing everything that had just not happened: the funeral, the offer on the rainy hillside. A nod, tense, grateful, and the door of the police box closed before Ianto could shout his protest.
He opened his eyes, then, and stood, crossing to where Ianto was frozen, torn between gaping at his surroundings and angrily demanding that the Doctor tell him what was happening. His gun was still drawn, but angled towards the floor.
Before the Doctor could tell him to put the gun away, before Ianto could draw another breath or fully register the sight of Jack walking towards him across the softly lit control room, Jack had caught him by the arms and pressed a kiss to his startled lips. He felt the sound of his name uttered against his mouth as the young Welshman surrendered his confusion for the moment and kissed him back, pliant and wondering against the fervor and Jack's warm tears of relief.
~~~
"I still don't get it." Ianto stood in the TARDIS library, fingers running lightly over the spines of books that wouldn't be written for a thousand years yet. "Isn't this...like...I dunno, something you're explicitly not supposed to do?" He was still a little ruffled by the experience, Jack could tell, underneath the wry affectionate smile and the placid tone.
"It's like the Doctor said." Jack sat on the couch, elbows on knees, his hands wrapped around his cooling cup of tea. He watched, pleased, as Ianto wandered around the room, still slightly dazed. "Every once in a while, something happens...a balance has to be made."
"So...I wasn't supposed to die?"
Jack opened his mouth and shut it again. The two memories played through his mind like competing film reels--the cold grey emptiness of a Cardiff cemetery and the warmth of the TARDIS' heart, spilling out across the black marble floor at Thames House. "Who knows."
"Well, he knows." Ianto made eyebrows and jerked his head meaningfully in the direction of the library door. He was still wary of the Doctor, though respectfully so.
Jack smiled. "Well. And I trust him."
Ianto's blue eyes held Jack's for a moment, serious. Then he smiled, and left his exploration of the shelves to come sit next to him again, side against Jack's side, thigh against his thigh. Jack slid his arm around Ianto's shoulder and pressed a kiss to his hair. His eyes closed gently, and for a moment, his world was wonderfully small and wonderfully complete: the soft glow of the old-fashioned chandelier lanterns, the dusty, warm space of the high-ceilinged library around them, and Ianto's body pressed close, smelling like clean sweat and stale cologne.
Jack felt Ianto's sedated murmur against his neck.
"So when do we go back to Cardiff?"
~~~
"The only way I can do this is to bind his energy signature to that of the TARDIS," the Doctor had told him, hands flying across the controls. He'd paused just long enough to pierce Jack with a gaze that held no jovial excitement, just a burning intensity that Jack had seen rarely enough to know that things were serious. A matter not of life and death, but of the survival of the Universe. "Do you understand? If I don't, his new timeline will unravel some other timeline, and slowly, everything, everything will start to fall apart. Five years. That's all. If he stays where he is, away from the TARDIS, he's only got five years."
"Five years..." Jack had murmured. He knew how fleeting those years would be.
"Or."
"Or?"
"He could come with me. Every five years I could take him somewhere, somewhen different. A new stop along the way."
And Jack, living eternally, would wait for centuries, playing catch-up. He had looked up at the Doctor and his eyes held all the knowledge of what that would mean.
"Would he age?"
"Yes."
"It's up to him."
The Doctor had nodded, and turned back to the TARDIS' glowing controls, fingers caressing her into Time's slipstream.
"Doctor..."
"Hmm?"
"Whichever one it ends up being..." Jack had let out a breath, and it had felt soft as a prayer, releasing his hold on everything, surrendering. "Thank you."
~~~
The light of midsummer on Thalacticus was a dazzling white-blue. It took a while for human eyes to get used to it, unshielded, but Jack had the benefit of that 51st-century adaptability. Still, it sparkled almost blindingly on the cobalt-tiled rooftops of old town Maridas, a city dug deeply into the heart of the planet's history, and now a popular destination for a certain academic sort of tourist. Jack cupped a palm to his brow as he made his way through narrow stone streets, avoiding street merchants and pickpockets with an ease born of long habit.
He saw him sitting at an open-air cafe, dark glasses on, pale Welsh skin standing out a bit in the crowds of brown-skinned natives and tourists with tans. Jack's heart lifted with a painful joy. It had been five hundred and two years for him, since the mid-2400's on Earth. He pressed through the throng with his pulse in his ears, oblivious to the cries of marketeers, the honking of traffic, the songs of street performers, the colors of the advertisements flashing on the sides of buildings, until he found himself at the table, his shadow falling across the pages of the book Ianto was reading and startling the Welshman out of his reverie as he looked up, and smiled.
"You found the place. I was starting to wonder."
It was subtle, but Jack could hear the worry in Ianto's voice. He grinned, and slid into the seat opposite.
"I told you, the Doctor wouldn't let us down." He picked up Ianto's empty glass, the still-fresh imprint of his lips in green against the rim.
"Some kind of flower-based horchata, I guessed. It's not bad."
Jack leaned across and kissed the taste from his mouth.
That night they slept in a comfortably sweaty tangle of gossamer sheets at an inn on top of the hill in Old Town, overlooking a sea of cobalt roofs that spilled from the loins of the mountains towards the distant shimmer of ocean. Jack laid on his side and watched Ianto breathe, still a little noisily from that broken nose he'd got back in Cardiff, nearly ten years ago in his lifetime. A brutal left hook from an angry, drunk Blowfish. Jack slid his hand across naked skin, still smooth, and felt him shift contentedly in his sleep.
It had been hard for Ianto, he knew. The choice of a certain, but unknowable death after five years, or saying goodbye to family, friends, everyone he knew, to be carted across Time and step out into a new century, a new place, waiting for Jack to be there. Why he'd made the decision he did, Jack still wasn't entirely sure. Perhaps it was simply because, at the end of his five years in Cardiff, back in the 21st century, Ianto had been afraid of death. He'd been only thirty-one years old. And so, when the TARDIS materialized on the Plass, he'd taken the offer. Jack still remembered him standing there in the doorway, forcing his eyes to drink in the sight of the Bay, the Millennium Centre, his friends--Gwen with her head held high and tears on her cheeks--as though he'd never see them again. That was certainly partly true.
Gwen had died at a respectable age, long before the TARDIS returned to Cardiff in the 25th century. Jack had been there, holding her hand, as the nurses took her off of life support, and she'd squeezed gently, telling him to say hello to Ianto for her. It had taken Ianto months to be able ask about her, and Jack had held him, too, as tears slid down his face. The worst part, that Jack would never tell Ianto, was that he knew it would never get easier.
All that Jack could promise was that he would always be there. He would always come to him, in whatever century and whatever place, and that he would give him a good life. These promises, he was to whisper every time, like a private ritual, starting at their tower offices in 25th-century Cardiff, that night when the first transgalactic spaceflight took off from the station at Mumbai, and continuing here, in the cool blue night above a city whose tumultuous rise in its native history had begun as a result of that flight, five hundred and two years ago and so far away.
In the morning, Jack thought, he would show Ianto some of the ruins of the pre-Federation Corscus Dynasty. The majestic slate-blue spirals of the Fortress Corscuvox on the western sea-cliffs. Maybe later, if they stayed, he would show him the site of that landing, the monument to an event Ianto had witnessed in silent awe long ago, his wide eyes turned skyward to watch the trails of a vessel he couldn't have imagined being alive to see, his hand tight on Jack's at the railing of their three-hundredth story balcony, the last time he'd seen Earth.
However, in the morning, Ianto looked at Jack over breakfast in that disarmingly shy way he had when he was going to ask for something personal, and suggested that they go to a museum he'd seen on the way to the inn. Jack was about to open his mouth, impress him with his savvy knowledge of wildly foreign centuries and planets--the place was a bland tourist trap, some half-assed history of the region, and overpriced--but he stopped himself. Uprooted from his home planet and ten years and half a millenium removed from the century he knew, Ianto wouldn't necessarily care that a third of the artefacts in the museum were careful replicas. He needed this--something to ground him in this time and place, to let him orient his life along a broken trajectory. Jack put his hand over Ianto's and nodded. He saw the flash of gratitude in Ianto's eyes as the Welshman leaned over the breakfast table and kissed him sweetly.
At the museum, Jack watched as Ianto studied the exhibits with the intensity of one facing a comprehensive examination. He'd always been a quick learner, and Jack knew that by the end of the day, Ianto would probably be correcting him on Thalactican history.
"Maybe you could get a job in their Archives," he teased.
"Are we going to stay here?" Ianto asked after a moment, crouched down to look at the details on a tomb chest from the pre-Corscuan era.
Jack studied his profile, still subconsciously comparing it to faulty memory. The centuries without him, as the first four hundred years, had in some ways made him seem like a dream. Then, suddenly, there he was again, real and subtly changed, familiar and wonderful, soothing the ache of all that time. "We could. Or we could go. Anywhere."
"Like Earth?" Ianto's eagerness was tempered with caution. It had only been a matter of weeks for him since the 25th century, but he had learned, during those previous five years, that you could never go home again. Jack could see the pain of that lesson still in his eyes, and hear it in his voice.
"Sure."
They stayed in Maridas for three years.
Jack had done some free-lancing with the new Time Agency, mostly as an instructor, so money wasn't much of a problem. Ianto, though, wasn't one for idleness, and after six months of getting his feet under him, found work at a travel agency. A lot more boring than Torchwood or the Federation Investigation Division, he joked, but safe.
All that time building cruise packages for tourists put the itch of travel in him, however, and, maybe unconsciously realizing his time was getting short, he quit one day and came home to Jack with a fistful of brochures and an adventurous light in his eyes that Jack hadn't quit seen the like of before.
"Anywhere?"
Jack smiled.
~~~
Ianto had grey at his temples when Jack found him at a highway transit stop on Petuin-Parsas six hundred and fourteen years later. He hadn't remembered that detail from before--or maybe it was that in the between-times, his memory regressed to Earth, to Torchwood. The desperate young man offering him coffee near the boat docks one April morning.
He was a little heavier, too, than in Jack's memory, but Jack had put on a couple extra pounds himself during the last few years, and anyway, Ianto's face was still so sweet in profile, bent over a cup of hot brew and a map.
"Hello, stranger."
The look of relief on Ianto's face was unmistakable but he quickly covered with a wry little smile. "And here I was, thinking I was going to have to somehow figure out this abysmal train system, and go looking for you." He offered Jack a sip from the cup. Jack took a swig and wrinkled his nose.
"It's not your coffee, that's for sure."
Ianto smirked. "Do you even remember what my coffee tastes like?"
"It has been a while," Jack replied quietly. Ianto never asked how long. Often, he had to learn a whole new system of dating and timekeeping when he arrived, and Jack noticed that he clung to it once he'd deciphered it. It was hard to keep being reminded of how far he'd come.
Ianto looked around himself with exaggerated interest. The transit stop was dingy and poorly lit, plastered with posters for concerts and travel promotions that one could tell were sorely outdated simply by their faded colors and torn corners. "Well, this certainly is nice."
"Oh, stop it," Jack said, flashing a bright grin. "It's certainly no worse than, say, Minffordd."
That earned him a laugh.
"Anyway, I have a nice little place just up in the woods a ways..."
"Tell me you're not serious."
"I'm not serious. C'mon. Let's find civilization, shall we?"
He held out a hand and tugged Ianto to his feet, arms going around him and pulling him close. When he closed his eyes and kissed him, all of the intervening centuries seemed to slip away.
Ianto always wanted to hear stories about Jack's adventures without him. Jack chose the funny ones, the pleasant ones. He tried not to talk about the people he'd lost, but this time, Ianto surprised him, as they rode the air rail to the capital province of Verd, by turning to him in a moment of silence with a pensive look.
"Do you remember Faroe, back on Thalacticus? Faroe M?"
Jack had to crank his brain to come up with a face to put to the name. Then he smiled; Ianto never had learned to pronounce Mynkka,i,jas' last name, which was a pretty hard thing to admit for a Welshman, Jack had thought. Faroe had been one of the ones who'd pushed blithely past Ianto's hesitant facade and become something more than just an acquaintance.
"Yeah...yeah, I do."
Ianto's brow was slightly furrowed. "I don't know why, but I was thinking about zir lately. I suppose ze's not...you know. Alive anymore. But ze always talked about zir hometown, and I think it was on this planet."
Jack slowly nodded. Ianto looked out the window again, fascinated by the foreign scenery passing around and below them, but his hand crept onto Jack's thigh, and found his hand.
"It's weird," was all he said.
This time, Ianto found work at a police agency, despite Jack's protests. He said it made him feel useful, and he seemed slightly disappointed that Jack didn't want to join him. Jack didn't tell him that actually, he was sort of involved in an underground effort to get guns and money to revolutionaries on an Inner Ring planet a system away. If he was absent from their rented apartment in Verd City Prime more often than he wanted to be, it was only because he was making sure that nothing happened to Ianto because of him.
All the same, it was Ianto who turned up in the hospital, shot, one day in the middle of the rainy season. Jack caught the fastest express ship home and sat in the waiting room with his heart in his throat, feeling sick, for forty-five minutes while the surgeons patched Ianto up. It felt like hours.
The look on Ianto's face, when Jack, pallor like the grey of the walls, came into post-op to see him was undeniable relief. And maybe a hint of accusation. Where were you? But though he held onto Jack's coat with white knuckles when they embraced, all Ianto said was, "I think I'm getting too old for this." They both laughed.
Petuin-Parsas wasn't bad, for all that. They stayed there the whole five years. And on the day the TARDIS came, Ianto gave Jack a small black box. "You don't have to open it if you don't want to, seriously," he said, earnestly. And he took a deep, audible breath and kissed Jack goodbye. There was a painful twisting feeling in Jack's stomach and it was very hard to let go for a moment, there in the TARDIS doorway. The Doctor stayed occupied inside; he always gave them as long as they needed.
But it was just like death, in a way: Jack was getting used to it. So he blew out a lungful of air into the autumn sunshine and when he opened his eyes, the TARDIS had gone.
~~~
A thousand years was a very long time.
He sometimes sort of forgot what Ianto looked like, or the sound of his voice, even though he'd made photographs and holograms of him throughout the years. It was easier, somehow, not to look at them much. He preferred to remember him through impressions and sensations--the dark pleasure of a good cup of coffee, when he could find it; the joy of skin against skin; the dusty spaces of archives or the slant of the sun on windows. In those centuries, Ianto became his personal spirit guide, more guardian angel than friend or lover, a benevolent presence tucked away in his heart, beneath the ring he wore on a chain around his neck.
And then suddenly, one day, there he was again, so real and imperfect and familiar and strange that Jack couldn't help but grab him and inhale his scent, nearly lifting him off the ground in the joy of being able to speak to him, feel him, watch him again.
"Christ, Jack! Public!" Ianto was laughing but he did pull away and try to smooth out his waistcoat and tie. He was also wearing a sharp suit jacket--he remained consistently formal. Jack grinned, gazing at him there in the desert valley of a brown planet that didn't yet have a formal name. Ianto looked around a little skeptically. "We're...archaeologists this time?"
"I'm running a supply train for settlers. Real Old West stuff. I've only been here a year."
"Dear God do they have running water?" Ianto deadpanned.
"Even better. They have replicated water."
"Always an adventure."
They helped build the roots of a colony there, tiny particles of humanity who had taken once again to the highways and by-ways of the stars to escape overcrowded planets, bad economics, despotic leaders, or just plain boredom. It was anarchic, creative, frustrating, and to Jack, still inspiring. It was life on the edge of things, and that never ceased to excite him. Ianto didn't feel exactly the same way, but he tolerated it, with the notable exception of the time Jack, feeling invigorated by all of the newness, suggested adding a third to their relationship.
He'd been tight-lipped with annoyance, something that surprised Jack at first.
"I'm forty-three years old." He'd huffed, turning with arms folded to gaze out their full-wall window. The desert stretched before and around him, beige and red and gold, off to the hazy horizon where the distant peaks looked like a purple mirage against the brown-blue sky.
"So?"
"So..." Ianto turned back to him and his blue eyes were a striking color, an oasis in dust-colored surroundings. He was smiling, a little curve of those still-soft lips. "You're quite enough for me." He came closer, wrapped his arm around Jack's waist, and Jack let out a pleased, surprised breath, resting his head on Ianto's shoulder.
Before he left this time, Jack made him a ring out of twists of the bright copper that was so plentiful in the rocks. He slipped it into his breast pocket as his fingers trailed in farewell across his chest.
~~~
The next three hundred years were not easy ones for Jack. He was late to the meeting point the Doctor had transmitted to his wristband by two months, because he'd had to escape from a Tellurian morgue. He'd been imprisoned for twenty years there, and death had been the only way out in the end.
His hair was greying, his face more gaunt than it had been in a long time, and the delayed recognition in Ianto's eyes when he arrived, dusty and travel-weary, at the Library, was a bit of a painful shock.
"This is what I can't stand," Ianto murmured to him that night, lips against his neck. He held him close and warm in the room of the traveler's lodging he had rented while waiting, and the big double bed was angled to look out over the city. Ianto loved a place with a view. "Knowing that in between, anything could happen to you, and I can't do anything about it." His voice was low and steady, but his arms tightened around Jack's thin ribs and Jack thought he could feel him tremble a bit.
"Still can't die," Jack reassured him with a weary grin. Ianto snorted at that, and just pressed his face against Jack's hair.
After a long, warm silence, Ianto shifted and Jack looked up to see that naughty little smirk on his face.
"What?"
"At least you're almost as grey as I am, now."
~~~
Five years was never enough. But Jack was grateful. For him, those half-decades, scattered throughout his life like rare stones in a field, almost made his eternal life into a thing small enough to understand, stretches of time that he could almost get comfortable in, knowing that they were each finite, however long.
They found each other again on the Martian Colony, on the space station Pegasus which they quickly left after watching the spectacle of a sun going nova from a safe distance, on the Planet of the Ood where a haunting song thrummed in the air and through their veins while they lay skin to naked skin for one of the last times.
Each time Ianto was quieter, more withdrawn, than before. His hair whitened. His eyes grew paler and got a faraway look that Jack recognized from the faces of old space travelers, and sometimes in his own reflection. He tried not to think constantly of all that Ianto had given up, all the things he'd willingly taken on, for him. But sometimes, it was inevitable that he would catch the look in his eyes during a pensive moment, and wonder if it had been worth it, to him.
Yet Ianto didn't complain. He found new interests, though increasingly fleeting ones, in every place they went. He added their stories to his journals, which Jack never asked to read, though sometimes he snuck a peek while Ianto lay sleeping, never far away. There in the neat handwriting, among ticket stubs and photographs and holo-prints and dried plants, he read very few regrets. Subtle longings, and steadfast love.
It was shortly after the Planet of the Ood, where they'd spent only a few weeks, that Ianto came into their room and Jack knew he was done.
"I want to go home." He said. His voice was firm. Jack stood and gently pulled him into his arms. He felt less substantial, somehow, than Jack remembered. His hair was thinner, pale as the rest of him, but he put his arms strongly around Jack and smiled up at him in trust. The copper ring gleamed like startling fire on his slender finger.
"Okay."
~~~
The Doctor looked up from the TARDIS console, his latest, youngest incarnation looking just as scattered as any before, wild hair included. Jack had a brief moment of resentment for the Timelord who got younger with each death. But the Doctor's eyes were older than ever before.
"Jack."
"He'd like to go home, Doc." Jack leaned against the TARDIS wall and felt her heartbeat like a soothing hum in his ears. His own heart ached a little.
The Doctor nodded. "Has it been good?" He asked thoughtfully.
Jack let memory flow through his mind for the space of a held breath, then gave the Timelord a brilliant grin.
"It's been wonderful."
~~~
It was sunny on the day of Ianto's funeral.
Jack stood by the carved white gravestone, braced against he wind from the sea as it swirled his coat around his legs. The coat was in its fifth incarnation, a gift from Ianto from what had to be the last hand-tailoring shop in all of Wales, and he was grateful for its warmth even though the air was so bright. It might have been his imagination, but it seemed he felt the cold a little more keenly these days.
He breathed in the sting of salt air, letting it fill his lungs like buoyant light, and let his handful of dirt fall onto the lid of the smooth titanium coffin.
As the last of the mourners filed out, friends, acquaintances, even those that they'd come to view as family, Jack felt the Doctor come to stand beside him.
"My condolences, Jack." His voice was low and warm. Jack looked over at him with a small smile, the narrow youthful profile and close-cropped ginger hair.
"Thanks. You know, for everything."
The Doctor turned to look at him and smiled. He bumped Jack with his elbow. "It was my pleasure. It was my...honor. He was a good man."
"He was."
Jack had rarely stuck around to see anyone live out their lifespan before. Most of them were ripped away, too young. And for a moment, if he closed his eyes, he could call up that other memory, that other strand of Time, a hillside in the rain. He opened his eyes again to the sun and the sea. Perhaps Ianto had sacrificed a decade or so, in the end, but he'd been happy to be back in the green hills of Wales. And Jack had been happy to be anywhere he was.
"So," the Doctor said at length. "I was thinking. Just about a millennium from now, the First Grand Empress of the Third Great and Bountiful Human Empire is having her jubilee. I hear she's quite the political rogue, though, and it sounds like it'll certainly be someplace very.....ah, interesting...to be..." He raised an eyebrow at Jack.
"You know. When you're ready."
Jack smiled, looking back up the hill to where their house stood, the white clematis around the door. It had been a good home. He breathed deeply.
"Give me about...five years?"
The Doctor smiled, and clapped a hand on Jack's shoulder.
"I'll know where to find you."
End.
So we must join hands in the dew coming coldly
There in the hush of the wood that reposes,
And turn and go up to the open door boldly,
And knock to the echoes as beggars for roses.
-Robert Frost
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The soft rain fell a little harder, a remote silver pattering filling the blanks of his mind.
I like very much that Ianto becomes a point of return for the fixed-point Jack, rather than a constant companion; a respite from constant loss, not a denial of it. And of course I love very much that they age together, in the end, because that's a luxury that Jack can't have elsewhere. Beautifully executed, in all events.
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Thank you for sharing. Thank you so very much.
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(Sam, this is lovely. It fits with your own voice quite well enough to blend into your collection seamlessly. Thank you, because I don't actually read anyone else but you regularly, so I'd never have seen this otherwise.)
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If you're interested, http://www.delicious.com/tw_fic is my personal Torchwood fic recslist -- everything on there is handpicked by me, so if you like what I write you may enjoy what I read :)
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I'm not much for commenting on the journals of people I don't know (or, honestly, those I do), but since this is a twofer - Anon., this story was lovely. And Sam, yours is stuff I come back to routinely, and there's not a lot of people who make that cut. Thank you both.
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Ah, this is great. And I'd choose the TARDIS too.
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My compliments to the writer.
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Thank you for writing this and thank you for sharing it as well. And thanks to Sam for hosting this too;)
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Sam, you have VERY talented friends, thanks for agreeing to host this lovely brain child of a fic.
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I think this is pretty much a perfect fix-it because it's not perfect. Jack and Ianto get to be happy together, but not in an ideal way -- it's still messy and painful, and Jack is always going to have to keep on facing loss and grief no matter what.
Really well done.
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that Ianto and Jack could be anchors for each other like that.
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I think what I loved about this is that it's not "And then Ianto was saved and they all lived happily every after." There are consequences to saving him. Even though he does his best to be there for Jack, there's still, like you say, not regrets, but longings and wistfulness. There's an acknowledgment that he's giving this up and that it's for Jack, and that it can't be forever. I also like that it gives Jack a chance to spread out his time with Ianto, take it in chunks over his lifespan. It makes the affection and love between them that much clearer.
Anyway, this was wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing it.
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Thank you so much...
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Beautiful, thank you for this.
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Beautiful. *applauds*
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Wonderful story, mystery writer, and I'm glad the Cafe helped you in whatever way it did.
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thank you for sharing
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Thank you so much for the lovely story. :)
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All through CoE I was yelling to myself in my head, "NOW DOCTOR! COME AND SAVE YOUR EARTH!" but he never did come. How could the Doctor/Tardis have not heard the pain of the earth/humans caused by the 456? I could not believe it. It was not just that we lost an amazing character/actor in Ianto, but more that it was WRONG for the Whoniverse.
This fix is elegant and RIGHT with the Whoniverse IMHO. Thank you.
(added to memories)
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Canon canon canon. This is canon. And the rest of the Who-verse can just twist itself around this particular time line like a climbing vine, cause this is canon and I'm stickin' to mah guns on that!
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