galadriel1010 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
galadriel1010) wrote2012-12-10 07:39 pm
galadriel1010) wrote2012-12-10 07:39 pm
Entry tags:
Another Path Chapter 2
Title: Another Path
Chapter Title: Chapter 2
Challenge/Fest: LongLiveIanto Bingo
Prompt: Library
Rating: T
Dedication: For
Summary: One decision, two possible outcomes. Taking the wrong path leads Ianto down a life he thought he'd lost.
Characters: Jack/Ianto, team, others.
Contains:
Disclaimer: Torchwood and its environs, occurrences and persons belong to the BBC. The original characters have disowned me.
Ianto stirred reluctantly and groaned. His hand knocked against a nearly-empty bottle of vodka, which rolled away to clink against an empty bottle on the other side of the bed. He peered at it through crusty, bleary eyes and made a clumsy grab for it, only managing to knock them both onto the floor. If he’d drunk both of those the night before, that would explain why there was a steelworks in his head and his stomach was roiling.
He dragged himself into the bathroom and found that there was nothing left to come up, and then hauled himself up on the sink to stare in the mirror. Bloodshot eyes, greenish-grey skin, lank hair and dark bruises around his eyes told a story of over-indulgence to the point of abuse. He drank from the tap rather than trying to find a glass and gave up on the idea of standing up for long enough to get a shower, preferring to fall back into bed for as long as it took for the world to stop turning.
It was afternoon before he could sit up and take stock of his surroundings properly. The room was unfamiliar but covered with his things. It was untidy, strewn with clothes and rubbish and a lot of empty bottles, and didn’t have the impersonal emptiness of a hotel room, but he really didn’t recognise it.
He stumbled from the room, kicking bottles aside, and into the living room. There were even more bottles in here, and a pile of abandoned, unopened post, all addressed to him. The cupboards in the kitchen were almost empty of food, and there were no messages on the answering machine that he found buried under a magazine.
“Shit.” He picked up the magazine to put it somewhere less useless and stopped when he finally registered the date, dropping it with a yell. Ripping a letter open confirmed it, but he kept going through the entire pile of bank statements, bills and letters from the council - all on direct debit, thank God.
Direct debit didn’t help the fact that he’d lost over a year and a half. It was just gone.
He sank onto the sofa and stared at the date, trying to piece together his memories. There wasn’t even a jumbled mess to sort through; there was just a gap, like he’d been Retconned. If he’d been Retconned, though, he’d expect to have lost Torchwood, not remember everything up to the Battle of Canary Wharf and then stop abruptly in the days after it.
“Christ, couldn’t I have lost another week?”
The address on the letters told him that he was back in Cardiff, the last place in the world he wanted to find himself. His GP was... dead, to be honest, having been on the seventh floor of Canary Wharf.
Emptiness consumed him again when he remembered what had happened. He could hear the screams, feel the heat and the pain, but he had no idea what had happened next. Lisa had died, and then... he’d left London and come back to Cardiff, because there was a sensible idea if he’d ever heard one. So he had a gap, and an alcohol problem.
“God, I need a drink.” He grabbed the phone instead and dragged a warped, stained phone book out from under the sofa to find the number of a doctor or, failing that, a taxi.
# # #
“Ianto Jones?” The doctor showed him into her office and offered him a chair. “Have a seat, please. Now, what seems to be the problem?”
“I can’t remember,” he told her bluntly. “I woke up this morning and thought it was 2006 - I cannot remember what happened in between, and I don’t know why.”
“You have no idea?”
He shifted and raised one shoulder. “I’m guessing it has something to do with the drink problem.”
She sighed and turned to her computer. “I’ll be honest, Ianto, I’ve never seen memory loss on this scale. You may start to regain your memories in time, but I’d like to refer you to a specialist.”
“Okay.”
“You do need to stop drinking, though.” She turned the screen towards him so that he could see a long, long list of incidents. “You’ve had a very hard couple of years since the terror attack, and it’s been taking its toll. You’re incredibly lucky that you lost just your memories. I hope you didn’t drive here?”
He shook his head. “Taxi. I couldn’t remember if I own a car.”
“That’s a mercy, at least.” She turned away and started typing again, then reached for the printer. “As far as I can tell, the terror attack was the impulse for you to start drinking. Since then you’ve been hospitalised at least once a month, all with alcohol related injuries. Falls, fights, accidents... I’ve never seen anything like it; I’ll be honest with you. It’s like...”
“Like I was trying to damage myself?” he guessed. The urge to do so was still strong, but the physical years and the fog of emptiness had deadened the hurt somewhat. Maybe it was partly the shock of losing those years, as well. “I’ve heard of better coping mechanisms.”
“I’d like to refer you to a psychiatrist,” she told him, smiling with evident relief when he nodded his assent. “I’m also going to refer you to a memory loss specialist, Doctor Green. You’ll get a phone call from the hospital with your appointment details. In the meantime, Ianto, please try to cut down your alcohol intake. Next time could be far worse.”
“I’ll do my best.” He knew he couldn’t make promises, but he wasn’t intending to drink ever again. Grief seemed a small price to pay for being alive. “Now I just need to figure out what I’m doing in Cardiff, and what I’ve been doing with myself.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there, Ianto.” She stood up again to show him out. “But I wish you the best of luck.”
# # #
He went through every room in the flat, finding bottles and piling them into crates and looking for any scraps he could use to piece together his life. When he was done, which didn’t take long in the depressingly small rooms, he had a large pile of glass bottles and a very small pile of scraps of paper with bits of his life on them.
For want of a better idea, he went across the landing to the door opposite his own and knocked firmly. A young woman with a baby on her hip answered, and she scowled up at him. “If he’s crying, there ain’t nothing I can do about it.” The baby was sucking his thumb and staring at Ianto. “What do you want?”
“Erm, no, I’ve not heard... I’m Ianto.”
She eyed him suspiciously and nodded. “You new in there?”
“Something like that.” He thumbed over his shoulder. “I’m just doing some... unpacking. Do you know what day the recycling needs to go out?”
“Tuesdays. Recycling went yesterday, bins go next Tuesday.” She pointed down the stairs. “You should have the boxes in your flat; put them outside the front door on Tuesday morning, cos they don’t come around until eleven. Fucking useless, can’t get in or out when everyone’s rubbish is out there. 'specially the last guy who lived there - all we ever saw of him was his bottles.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a lot to clear out,” he agreed hurriedly. “Must have drunk like a fish.”
“Fuck, and left them?” She shook her peroxide blonde hair out of the baby’s curious reach and bounced him on her hip. “Yeah, never saw him, don’t think anyone did. Barely left the fucking flat, ‘cept for more booze. And he got that delivered, too.”
“That would explain the wine.” He shook his head and smiled. “Anyway, thanks for your help. And don’t worry about the crying - it’s what babies do.”
“It’s what mums do, too,” she grumbled, shutting the door in his face.
“Well, you’re odd,” he told the door.
He went back into the flat and started sorting the bottles into bags by colour, so that he could stash them out of the way more neatly. They ended up as a pyramid of bottles, supported by the sofa at one end and the wall at the other, ranging from green wine bottles at the bottom, through... mostly clear. There were a lot of empty white wine bottles, apparently bought in bulk from wine barns that delivered, and plenty of vodka, bad cider and cheap alcopop bottles. His liver was either pickled or rotted.
Going through the kitchen he found a grand total of three bottles that still had something in them - a terrible cooking sherry, a local brewery’s bitter, and most of a bottle of Lambrini, which was shoved far enough to the back of the cupboard that he assumed he’d decided not to touch it even when drunk. Even a thorough search didn’t turn up more than a packet of stale biscuits, two unidentified tins and an absurd amount of spaghetti, and as he hadn’t eaten since rolling out of bed he was very hungry.
He opened one of the tins cautiously and found peach slices - not his favourites, but they’d do for breakfast - and shoved them in the fridge to keep. Then he boiled water for pasta and threw in the last of a jar of mixed herbs that were older than he wanted to consider, tipped in more pasta than a sane man would eat and left it to bubble whilst he dragged the laptop out, found his wallet and settled down at the Island counter to investigate himself.
His browsing history consisted of a lot of, to Ianto’s new mind, terrible porn, a forum account that he seemed to have used just to shout at people about James Bond, and accounts with several take-away delivery services, a couple of supermarkets and a handful of wine merchants. Both supermarkets had automated shopping lists full of alcohol, so he shut them down and went searching for an email account instead. That, too, was full of junk, and he started to realise what a lonely life he’d been leading.
The pasta was done, and he ate all of it and still wanted to go back for more. He ate the peaches instead and told himself they were healthy because they were fruit. As that nearly exhausted his food stocks, he forced himself back to the supermarket websites and hammered his bank card with a shopping list that would fill his shelves and keep him going in case of the zombie apocalypse. Once he’d sent off the order, it occurred to him to go through his bank statements and find out exactly how stupid that was, and he was pleased to find out that it would take a lot of shops like that to make a dent in his balance.
Unless he was paying it from another account, he wasn’t paying a mortgage or rent on the flat. His bills were low, apart from the porn memberships, and if he was going to be spending less on drink then he’d survive on what he had for a long time. The flat was ratty and small, and probably cost a fraction of the price that he and Lisa had paid for their apartment.
He smiled at the memories, despite how much they hurt. They had paid a stupid price for it, although not for London, because it had a spare room they could use as an office or for a child’s bedroom, it had a private garden and, most importantly, it was right across the train tracks from the new Emirates Stadium. Lisa had been so excited - she’d dragged him to the first match there, and had been toying with the idea of getting a season ticket...
He missed her so much it hurt, but he found that he missed the flat, too. It was theirs, and it had been perfect for both of them. Now she was gone, and it with her, and Ianto was in a concrete block with booze for company, no life, no direction, and no clue where he’d come from.
# # #
There was a library at the other end of the estate from Ianto’s flat, he discovered, and he took to haunting it to get himself out of the house. It was small and fairly sparse, mostly full of holiday romance novels that the mums on the estate lapped up, but there were enough historical and fantasy novels to keep him going for a while. They also had the usual noticeboard of local events, and a few fliers from the careers service. He’d made a few perfunctory searches for jobs, but with an eighteen month gap in his CV and a work history that he couldn’t actually tell people about, he was very short on options.
It was getting late on Friday evening, over a week since he’d ‘woken up’, and he was back in the library with a stack of books for the weekend. The room was deserted apart from him and the weary librarian, and he smiled at her as he approached the desk. “These in, and these out.”
“You do get through them fast, Ianto,” she commented, scanning his finished books in. “You’re bringing them back every day.”
“I’ve not got much more to do,” he told her, shrugging. “I’m just filling the days.”
She looked up at him sharply. “Not working or anything like that?”
“I’ve been... ill,” he said, delicately. “And now I just don’t know where to start.”
“You should try volunteering.”
“Thought about it,” he admitted. “Do you take volunteers on here?”
“Not here we don’t, pet - full staff, you see. But Ely were looking for volunteers, last I heard.” She pulled a leaflet out from under the desk and underlined the address of the right branch for him. “They’re busier than we are, and they often need people to help out. You should go down there tomorrow, tell them Emily sent you.”
“Thanks.” He took it from her, and his pile of books, with a smile. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”
“You do that, sweet.”
He went down there the next morning, in the smartest trousers he could find and a leather jacket, and told them his story. They were sympathetic and friendly, and very eager to have someone who’d worked in government archives, especially if it was too high a security level for him to tell them about. The manager handed him a form - just for the records, she assured him - and wrote her name on the top of it. “Come around tomorrow, dear. We’ll take you on for a week, train you up and see how you fit in and if you like it, and then if it’s all good we’ll take you on for one day a week. Give you plenty of time to do anything else you want to do.”
“Thank you.” He offered her his hand and grinned. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
# # #
The library took him on for Wednesdays, and a hospice charity shop just down the road from there took him on for the rest of the week. It kept him busy whilst the jobs kept not coming, and he settled into a rhythm he enjoyed. The work was easy and organised, the people there were fun, and it left him plenty of time to get himself back in order. He joined a gym and started running again, filled his bookshelves with recipe books, cancelled his porn subscriptions - most of them, he wasn’t a monk - and got a Teach Yourself Welsh book out of the library.
Life started rolling on, in fits and starts. He still felt empty and directionless, but he also felt in control, more than he ever remembered feeling. Nothing was going to come to him, this time, so he had to go out and find it, and everything seemed to be there for the taking. He toyed with the idea of uprooting himself completely and shipping out to Australia, whilst he was still young enough, but he still had a few years and he was only just getting himself back on track. He did book a holiday to Spain to go hiking in the Pyrenees, got on a last minute trip to Ibiza, and bought a motorhome from one of the other volunteers at the charity shop, because he still hadn’t turned up a car and the police hadn’t called to say it had been abandoned somewhere.
Three months after his revelation morning, he was in the shop with the manager, Trisha, helping her to sort out the window display and making the right noises whenever she paused for breath. The shop was empty apart from them, it being a fairly wet and miserable day when most people were staying indoors, and they were making the most of the opportunity to get some real sorting out done. There always seemed to be more stuff than space, and most of it wasn’t really worth keeping.
Trisha passed him one of the books out of the window, and he turned to put it back on the shelf, but paused to look at it. It was a pretty dull, dry finance textbook, put out of date by changes in the law and an international financial crisis that Ianto had managed to miss the start of, and they’d been using it to support a decorative box. Trisha stopped to look up at him, as an idea formed in his head.
“I never got to university,” he muttered, finally getting around to putting it back where it belonged. “School was never my thing and I didn’t bother, then I got a job and it didn’t seem important.”
“You could do it now.”
“I was just thinking the same myself.” He reached over to grab the next pile of things from her. “I’ll have a look tonight. It must be application season, nearly?”
“I think it’s always application season, love. Like the DFS sale.” She reached a hand up and sighed. “Give me a hand up, will you, and get those skirts out of the window for us. You can think about university later.”
He did as he was told - it was safer that way. Trisha laughed when he told her that, and sent him through to the back room for the massive donation of shoes they’d got in the day before, which she thought would look good hanging from the mesh and he thought would look much better in a skip. It wasn’t what he’d planned at any point in his life, but it was fun, and it was good company and not being trapped in the house all day. For that, he would have traded anything.
Chapter Title: Chapter 2
Challenge/Fest: LongLiveIanto Bingo
Prompt: Library
Rating: T
Dedication: For
Summary: One decision, two possible outcomes. Taking the wrong path leads Ianto down a life he thought he'd lost.
Characters: Jack/Ianto, team, others.
Contains:
Disclaimer: Torchwood and its environs, occurrences and persons belong to the BBC. The original characters have disowned me.
Ianto stirred reluctantly and groaned. His hand knocked against a nearly-empty bottle of vodka, which rolled away to clink against an empty bottle on the other side of the bed. He peered at it through crusty, bleary eyes and made a clumsy grab for it, only managing to knock them both onto the floor. If he’d drunk both of those the night before, that would explain why there was a steelworks in his head and his stomach was roiling.
He dragged himself into the bathroom and found that there was nothing left to come up, and then hauled himself up on the sink to stare in the mirror. Bloodshot eyes, greenish-grey skin, lank hair and dark bruises around his eyes told a story of over-indulgence to the point of abuse. He drank from the tap rather than trying to find a glass and gave up on the idea of standing up for long enough to get a shower, preferring to fall back into bed for as long as it took for the world to stop turning.
It was afternoon before he could sit up and take stock of his surroundings properly. The room was unfamiliar but covered with his things. It was untidy, strewn with clothes and rubbish and a lot of empty bottles, and didn’t have the impersonal emptiness of a hotel room, but he really didn’t recognise it.
He stumbled from the room, kicking bottles aside, and into the living room. There were even more bottles in here, and a pile of abandoned, unopened post, all addressed to him. The cupboards in the kitchen were almost empty of food, and there were no messages on the answering machine that he found buried under a magazine.
“Shit.” He picked up the magazine to put it somewhere less useless and stopped when he finally registered the date, dropping it with a yell. Ripping a letter open confirmed it, but he kept going through the entire pile of bank statements, bills and letters from the council - all on direct debit, thank God.
Direct debit didn’t help the fact that he’d lost over a year and a half. It was just gone.
He sank onto the sofa and stared at the date, trying to piece together his memories. There wasn’t even a jumbled mess to sort through; there was just a gap, like he’d been Retconned. If he’d been Retconned, though, he’d expect to have lost Torchwood, not remember everything up to the Battle of Canary Wharf and then stop abruptly in the days after it.
“Christ, couldn’t I have lost another week?”
The address on the letters told him that he was back in Cardiff, the last place in the world he wanted to find himself. His GP was... dead, to be honest, having been on the seventh floor of Canary Wharf.
Emptiness consumed him again when he remembered what had happened. He could hear the screams, feel the heat and the pain, but he had no idea what had happened next. Lisa had died, and then... he’d left London and come back to Cardiff, because there was a sensible idea if he’d ever heard one. So he had a gap, and an alcohol problem.
“God, I need a drink.” He grabbed the phone instead and dragged a warped, stained phone book out from under the sofa to find the number of a doctor or, failing that, a taxi.
# # #
“Ianto Jones?” The doctor showed him into her office and offered him a chair. “Have a seat, please. Now, what seems to be the problem?”
“I can’t remember,” he told her bluntly. “I woke up this morning and thought it was 2006 - I cannot remember what happened in between, and I don’t know why.”
“You have no idea?”
He shifted and raised one shoulder. “I’m guessing it has something to do with the drink problem.”
She sighed and turned to her computer. “I’ll be honest, Ianto, I’ve never seen memory loss on this scale. You may start to regain your memories in time, but I’d like to refer you to a specialist.”
“Okay.”
“You do need to stop drinking, though.” She turned the screen towards him so that he could see a long, long list of incidents. “You’ve had a very hard couple of years since the terror attack, and it’s been taking its toll. You’re incredibly lucky that you lost just your memories. I hope you didn’t drive here?”
He shook his head. “Taxi. I couldn’t remember if I own a car.”
“That’s a mercy, at least.” She turned away and started typing again, then reached for the printer. “As far as I can tell, the terror attack was the impulse for you to start drinking. Since then you’ve been hospitalised at least once a month, all with alcohol related injuries. Falls, fights, accidents... I’ve never seen anything like it; I’ll be honest with you. It’s like...”
“Like I was trying to damage myself?” he guessed. The urge to do so was still strong, but the physical years and the fog of emptiness had deadened the hurt somewhat. Maybe it was partly the shock of losing those years, as well. “I’ve heard of better coping mechanisms.”
“I’d like to refer you to a psychiatrist,” she told him, smiling with evident relief when he nodded his assent. “I’m also going to refer you to a memory loss specialist, Doctor Green. You’ll get a phone call from the hospital with your appointment details. In the meantime, Ianto, please try to cut down your alcohol intake. Next time could be far worse.”
“I’ll do my best.” He knew he couldn’t make promises, but he wasn’t intending to drink ever again. Grief seemed a small price to pay for being alive. “Now I just need to figure out what I’m doing in Cardiff, and what I’ve been doing with myself.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there, Ianto.” She stood up again to show him out. “But I wish you the best of luck.”
# # #
He went through every room in the flat, finding bottles and piling them into crates and looking for any scraps he could use to piece together his life. When he was done, which didn’t take long in the depressingly small rooms, he had a large pile of glass bottles and a very small pile of scraps of paper with bits of his life on them.
For want of a better idea, he went across the landing to the door opposite his own and knocked firmly. A young woman with a baby on her hip answered, and she scowled up at him. “If he’s crying, there ain’t nothing I can do about it.” The baby was sucking his thumb and staring at Ianto. “What do you want?”
“Erm, no, I’ve not heard... I’m Ianto.”
She eyed him suspiciously and nodded. “You new in there?”
“Something like that.” He thumbed over his shoulder. “I’m just doing some... unpacking. Do you know what day the recycling needs to go out?”
“Tuesdays. Recycling went yesterday, bins go next Tuesday.” She pointed down the stairs. “You should have the boxes in your flat; put them outside the front door on Tuesday morning, cos they don’t come around until eleven. Fucking useless, can’t get in or out when everyone’s rubbish is out there. 'specially the last guy who lived there - all we ever saw of him was his bottles.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a lot to clear out,” he agreed hurriedly. “Must have drunk like a fish.”
“Fuck, and left them?” She shook her peroxide blonde hair out of the baby’s curious reach and bounced him on her hip. “Yeah, never saw him, don’t think anyone did. Barely left the fucking flat, ‘cept for more booze. And he got that delivered, too.”
“That would explain the wine.” He shook his head and smiled. “Anyway, thanks for your help. And don’t worry about the crying - it’s what babies do.”
“It’s what mums do, too,” she grumbled, shutting the door in his face.
“Well, you’re odd,” he told the door.
He went back into the flat and started sorting the bottles into bags by colour, so that he could stash them out of the way more neatly. They ended up as a pyramid of bottles, supported by the sofa at one end and the wall at the other, ranging from green wine bottles at the bottom, through... mostly clear. There were a lot of empty white wine bottles, apparently bought in bulk from wine barns that delivered, and plenty of vodka, bad cider and cheap alcopop bottles. His liver was either pickled or rotted.
Going through the kitchen he found a grand total of three bottles that still had something in them - a terrible cooking sherry, a local brewery’s bitter, and most of a bottle of Lambrini, which was shoved far enough to the back of the cupboard that he assumed he’d decided not to touch it even when drunk. Even a thorough search didn’t turn up more than a packet of stale biscuits, two unidentified tins and an absurd amount of spaghetti, and as he hadn’t eaten since rolling out of bed he was very hungry.
He opened one of the tins cautiously and found peach slices - not his favourites, but they’d do for breakfast - and shoved them in the fridge to keep. Then he boiled water for pasta and threw in the last of a jar of mixed herbs that were older than he wanted to consider, tipped in more pasta than a sane man would eat and left it to bubble whilst he dragged the laptop out, found his wallet and settled down at the Island counter to investigate himself.
His browsing history consisted of a lot of, to Ianto’s new mind, terrible porn, a forum account that he seemed to have used just to shout at people about James Bond, and accounts with several take-away delivery services, a couple of supermarkets and a handful of wine merchants. Both supermarkets had automated shopping lists full of alcohol, so he shut them down and went searching for an email account instead. That, too, was full of junk, and he started to realise what a lonely life he’d been leading.
The pasta was done, and he ate all of it and still wanted to go back for more. He ate the peaches instead and told himself they were healthy because they were fruit. As that nearly exhausted his food stocks, he forced himself back to the supermarket websites and hammered his bank card with a shopping list that would fill his shelves and keep him going in case of the zombie apocalypse. Once he’d sent off the order, it occurred to him to go through his bank statements and find out exactly how stupid that was, and he was pleased to find out that it would take a lot of shops like that to make a dent in his balance.
Unless he was paying it from another account, he wasn’t paying a mortgage or rent on the flat. His bills were low, apart from the porn memberships, and if he was going to be spending less on drink then he’d survive on what he had for a long time. The flat was ratty and small, and probably cost a fraction of the price that he and Lisa had paid for their apartment.
He smiled at the memories, despite how much they hurt. They had paid a stupid price for it, although not for London, because it had a spare room they could use as an office or for a child’s bedroom, it had a private garden and, most importantly, it was right across the train tracks from the new Emirates Stadium. Lisa had been so excited - she’d dragged him to the first match there, and had been toying with the idea of getting a season ticket...
He missed her so much it hurt, but he found that he missed the flat, too. It was theirs, and it had been perfect for both of them. Now she was gone, and it with her, and Ianto was in a concrete block with booze for company, no life, no direction, and no clue where he’d come from.
# # #
There was a library at the other end of the estate from Ianto’s flat, he discovered, and he took to haunting it to get himself out of the house. It was small and fairly sparse, mostly full of holiday romance novels that the mums on the estate lapped up, but there were enough historical and fantasy novels to keep him going for a while. They also had the usual noticeboard of local events, and a few fliers from the careers service. He’d made a few perfunctory searches for jobs, but with an eighteen month gap in his CV and a work history that he couldn’t actually tell people about, he was very short on options.
It was getting late on Friday evening, over a week since he’d ‘woken up’, and he was back in the library with a stack of books for the weekend. The room was deserted apart from him and the weary librarian, and he smiled at her as he approached the desk. “These in, and these out.”
“You do get through them fast, Ianto,” she commented, scanning his finished books in. “You’re bringing them back every day.”
“I’ve not got much more to do,” he told her, shrugging. “I’m just filling the days.”
She looked up at him sharply. “Not working or anything like that?”
“I’ve been... ill,” he said, delicately. “And now I just don’t know where to start.”
“You should try volunteering.”
“Thought about it,” he admitted. “Do you take volunteers on here?”
“Not here we don’t, pet - full staff, you see. But Ely were looking for volunteers, last I heard.” She pulled a leaflet out from under the desk and underlined the address of the right branch for him. “They’re busier than we are, and they often need people to help out. You should go down there tomorrow, tell them Emily sent you.”
“Thanks.” He took it from her, and his pile of books, with a smile. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”
“You do that, sweet.”
He went down there the next morning, in the smartest trousers he could find and a leather jacket, and told them his story. They were sympathetic and friendly, and very eager to have someone who’d worked in government archives, especially if it was too high a security level for him to tell them about. The manager handed him a form - just for the records, she assured him - and wrote her name on the top of it. “Come around tomorrow, dear. We’ll take you on for a week, train you up and see how you fit in and if you like it, and then if it’s all good we’ll take you on for one day a week. Give you plenty of time to do anything else you want to do.”
“Thank you.” He offered her his hand and grinned. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
# # #
The library took him on for Wednesdays, and a hospice charity shop just down the road from there took him on for the rest of the week. It kept him busy whilst the jobs kept not coming, and he settled into a rhythm he enjoyed. The work was easy and organised, the people there were fun, and it left him plenty of time to get himself back in order. He joined a gym and started running again, filled his bookshelves with recipe books, cancelled his porn subscriptions - most of them, he wasn’t a monk - and got a Teach Yourself Welsh book out of the library.
Life started rolling on, in fits and starts. He still felt empty and directionless, but he also felt in control, more than he ever remembered feeling. Nothing was going to come to him, this time, so he had to go out and find it, and everything seemed to be there for the taking. He toyed with the idea of uprooting himself completely and shipping out to Australia, whilst he was still young enough, but he still had a few years and he was only just getting himself back on track. He did book a holiday to Spain to go hiking in the Pyrenees, got on a last minute trip to Ibiza, and bought a motorhome from one of the other volunteers at the charity shop, because he still hadn’t turned up a car and the police hadn’t called to say it had been abandoned somewhere.
Three months after his revelation morning, he was in the shop with the manager, Trisha, helping her to sort out the window display and making the right noises whenever she paused for breath. The shop was empty apart from them, it being a fairly wet and miserable day when most people were staying indoors, and they were making the most of the opportunity to get some real sorting out done. There always seemed to be more stuff than space, and most of it wasn’t really worth keeping.
Trisha passed him one of the books out of the window, and he turned to put it back on the shelf, but paused to look at it. It was a pretty dull, dry finance textbook, put out of date by changes in the law and an international financial crisis that Ianto had managed to miss the start of, and they’d been using it to support a decorative box. Trisha stopped to look up at him, as an idea formed in his head.
“I never got to university,” he muttered, finally getting around to putting it back where it belonged. “School was never my thing and I didn’t bother, then I got a job and it didn’t seem important.”
“You could do it now.”
“I was just thinking the same myself.” He reached over to grab the next pile of things from her. “I’ll have a look tonight. It must be application season, nearly?”
“I think it’s always application season, love. Like the DFS sale.” She reached a hand up and sighed. “Give me a hand up, will you, and get those skirts out of the window for us. You can think about university later.”
He did as he was told - it was safer that way. Trisha laughed when he told her that, and sent him through to the back room for the massive donation of shoes they’d got in the day before, which she thought would look good hanging from the mesh and he thought would look much better in a skip. It wasn’t what he’d planned at any point in his life, but it was fun, and it was good company and not being trapped in the house all day. For that, he would have traded anything.
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