Saturday

[galadriel1010]

Ianto blinked sleepily and focused on the face in front of him. In the half-light of the bedroom Jack looked tired and so very human. He was frowning slightly, and his lips formed a delicious pout, as though he was thinking deeply about something. Ianto was startled by how attractive he found Jack, even though he knew the captain was a good looking man, he’d never been attracted to a man before; and the time to start being attracted to men was not when the man in question was in bed with you.

He took a moment to study Jack’s face; the laughter lines that crinkled when he flashed that trademark grin, the soft, full lips, that jaw line that looked like it was crafted rather then a result of biology, those blue eyes unfocused from sleep but gazing at him in amusement, “Like what you see?” The captain drawled dozily.

“Name me one person who doesn’t.” he grinned as he flopped onto his back, trust Captain Jack Harkness.

“Fair point, my turn…” Jack now propped himself up and studied Ianto’s face as the younger man watched him warily, probably best not to push it, “You need a shave.”

“So do you.”

He ran a hand along his jaw, “So I do, back shortly.” Glancing back as he left the room he was disappointed not to see Ianto watching him; in fact it looked as if the younger man had fallen asleep again. He chuckled as he went into the bathroom and emerged a short while later feeling much fresher, but even more tempted to simply fall asleep next to Ianto again, it had been a long couple of days.

He noted that it was going on for noon and discovered that he didn’t care, so he collapsed forwards onto the bed and was rewarded by a chuckle from his young friend, “Sorry, Yan. Did I wake you?” He apologised groggily.

“Not to worry, not after the number of times I woke you last night anyway.” Ianto propped himself up slightly and watched as the captain got himself more comfortable, “How many times did I wake up during the night?”

“Mmmm, three?” Jack’s voice was muffled by the pillows he’d buried his face in as he turned back to face Ianto only when he’d finished speaking, just in time to catch the grimace of guilt crossing his face, “Don’t worry about it, it’s not your fault. I’m here to help.”

“I can only remember two times.” Came the rueful reply.

“Possibly, I don’t remember, it’s far too early.”

“Jack, it’s nearly noon.”

“See, far too early, go back t’sleep.” He groaned and was relieved when Ianto lay back down and appeared to do as he was told.

A short while later, however, he heard Ianto curse softly, “I was going to get the Lord of the Rings out today. Too late now.”

“Too tired, Rings requires concentration.” His voice was slurred, Ianto hadn’t realised he was still awake even.

“Maybe if we sleep through the day we can pull an all-nighter and watch it tonight?” he asked through a yawn.

“Mebbe, I’d never really considered an all-nighter for something fun before.” Ianto looked at him with a raised eyebrow and was astonished to see a blush colour Jack’s cheeks, “Stop it, Yan. I’m far too tired to play that game.”

“Damn.”

“What?”

“I just lost the game?”

“What game?”

“The Game.”

“You’re making no sense…” and this time Ianto was sure he really was asleep. The Welshman found that he was looking forwards to sharing the house with Jack. He was good fun, especially to wind up when he was tired like this. Ianto felt suddenly guilty, it was his fault that Jack was this tired, he really shouldn’t be enjoying it. Still… he was funny when he was groggy like that.

He smirked at the ceiling as he struggled to piece together his feelings over the last couple of days. He felt strangely detached from his emotions, like he’d felt other people’s during his psychic training, tangible and separate, but it was hard to tell where one finished and the next one started.

It always helped to think of it in terms of coloured wool with different strands twining together. The main strand, a constant binding the whole together, changed colour like a jackdaw’s wing; one moment it was jet black, glinting darkly; then it was blood red and burning, next moment icy blue and freezing, and then a deep, throbbing purple shot with acid green. It was pain, sometimes deep and bruising, sometimes cutting sharply across the surface, but always there twisting and twining through the heart of his being, indelible.

In with the pain was twisted a strand of guilt which seemed a dull grey until the light caught it and it lanced a brilliant, blinding white through his mind, splintering the surrounding emotions and somehow knotting the pain even tighter. It was wrapped most tightly around a thin golden strand of happiness at having emerged from the affair with a greater friendship with two of his team-mates. No matter how hard the guilt tried to smother it, that strand survived and would grow stronger and brighter with time.

Another pair were twisted together, growing stronger and weaker in their turns, one beautiful and one bitter, love and anger, his love for Lisa and his anger at her fate, still competing for dominance over his life.

Then there were the other emotions twining through the whole: silvery blue fear and dusky pink hope surfacing where he least expected them, coppery confusion tying his thoughts in knots, and a pinkish, bluish, silvery strand which glinted metallically like a fish’s scales. Actually, a fish was a very good simile, because it was like one of the small fish that dart among reeds, gone as soon as he saw it and like it had never been there whenever he tried to get a closer look.

Feeling a headache forming, Ianto put down his metaphorical knitting needles and chanced another look at the captain’s sleeping form. Jack had curled onto his side facing away from Ianto and the young man could see the tension, even in sleep. His heart bled for the worries and troubles Jack carried, had carried and accumulated over the last hundred plus years. How could one person deal with the whole of Torchwood and seeing everything he loved wither and fade whilst he stayed constant and remain as strong and as caring as Jack was? Whoever the Doctor was, however much Ianto wanted to hate him for what he’d done to Jack, he couldn’t have done it to a better man. Maybe only this one man in the whole of time and space could have coped with the challenges he had faced. Or maybe that’s how people became after travelling with the magical Doctor.

He folded his arms behind his head and let his mind wander into the vastness of space. Since joining Torchwood and having the wonders and the dangers revealed to him he’d wanted to travel and see it. Of course, when he’d been with Torchwood One he’d seen the Doctor just as a threat, someone who they needed protecting from, someone to be feared. But then the Battle of Canary Wharf had happened, the Doctor had saved the day and was the reason that he was still alive and Ianto had returned to Torchwood in Cardiff, where things were a bit different. Yvonne, a good woman in her way who he’d trusted completely, had detested them, so so had Ianto; when he’d needed them for Lisa he’d had no qualms about using them. Now though… Jack had opened his eyes to yet another world, one where heroes and enemies fought over the Earth without anyone ever knowing about it, where love and monsters rubbed shoulders and wonders never ceased. His whole universe had been turned upside down, and he so badly wanted to see what Jack had seen, to travel in the strange blue box and visit an alien planet, see the Earth as they saw other planets.

As the Captain stirred slightly, Ianto wondered if the Doctor would ever turn up again, and if Jack would go. He’d been in Cardiff a long time now, but it was just a stopping off point, a temporary measure, just like the bunker beneath his office. That was Jack all over, supposed to be temporary but ended up lasting forever.

Guessing that Jack would wake soon, he went to the kitchen to make a full English breakfast for the pair of them and then brought it back to the kitchen to find his friend half conscious and blinking blearily, but he was rewarded by an astonishing smile when Jack saw the breakfast, “Ianto you are a star!”

“Least I could do.” He smiled and handed Jack a plate and a mug of coffee once he’d sat up and then settled at the other end of the bed to eat his own, “Could we get any more debauched?”

The captain appeared to consider this for a moment, “Yeah, I could quite easily. Want to give it a go?” They laughed and settled into a mindless argument about whether cricket or rugby was the better game (doing wonders for stereotyping there) as they ate and then tried to decide what to do. The rift was quiet so Jack didn’t have to be elsewhere and they didn’t really want to watch films again. “So talk to me?” Ianto suggested.

Jack looked slightly taken aback, “What about?”

He recalled his previous train of thoughts, “Tell me about the Doctor. I spent more than two years hunting him, now I’m led to understand that he’s the hero of the piece. Who is he?”

“I wish I knew.” Jack looked slightly wary but eventually seemed to decide that he could tell the young man, “The Doctor really is a hero, my hero, my Doctor. Like I said yesterday, we travelled together for about two years, there was him and me and two girls called Rose and Jasmine. We travelled in time, to the extent that Jasmine was born two years before Rose but was actually younger than her.”

“How on Earth?”

“Not on Earth, that’s the key. Time got a bit… relative. Rose met the Doctor in 2005 when she was nineteen, I met them in 1942 over three thousand years before I was born, don’t ask me how old I was because I honestly haven’t a clue, but we picked Jazz up in 1999 when she was fifteen. And then we went back and forwards and generally got very confused and had a whale of a time together, visiting these amazing planets and saving the day, running for our lives most of the time but loving every minute. I wish you could meet him Ianto, I hope you will one day. But I don’t know. I was told I’d have to wait over one hundred years to see him again, but I’ve waited longer than that and I’m worried that I’ve missed him. He was at Canary Wharf, maybe that was my chance.”

“You said one of the girls was called Rose, is she Rose Tyler?”

“Yeah, died at Canary Wharf with her Mum. I think that’s when I really stopped blaming him for leaving me; he loses everyone eventually. Better to not check to find out if I was alive or dead than to check and find that he’d lost one more.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’d been sucked from our spaceship, the TARDIS, by a transmat and we’d been put in game shows on a space station in the future. They were lethal, you could get shot or dismembered, and it wasn’t a nice place. And then we found out that it was being run by the Daleks, and they attacked the station and the Earth. I organised the defences whilst the Doctor tried to destroy them, Rose stayed with the Doctor and Jasmine stayed with the other civilians, I begged her not to come with me, because I thought she’d be safe there.”

“What happened?”

The pain in Jack’s eyes was evident and heartbreaking as he met Ianto’s eyes again, “I heard her die, all of them, I heard them all die, but she was the first to die. She stood and faced them. And not long after I went the same way. Lived a coward, but at least I died a hero. First time anyway.” He laughed bitterly, “Next thing I know I’m gasping back to life again and there’s this dust everywhere, then I hear the TARDIS engines going and by the time I got there they’d gone, however many of them survived. And I couldn’t bring myself to go and find her, because I knew she was dead, but as long as I didn’t see her I could believe that she’d survived. That hope’s long faded now though. But I suppose that, give it a couple of million years or however long it was, I’ll be able to go back and find her this time. Do it right.”

“Is that why you didn’t do what you should have done with me? Because of her?”

“If you mean is that why I broke the rules, then yes. Because it might have been a very long time ago, but I can’t forget that I would have done the same for her. But I don’t equate the right thing to do with what the rules tell me to do, not always anyway.”

“I’d noticed.” Ianto shifted uncomfortably and tried to think of a way to cheer the conversation up, but Jack did it for him.

“We had some great times though, before we were separated. We went to this planet once, I forget what it was called because it was a really boring name, but their dreams were their enemies, because there were these microscopic organisms which fed on mind waves and magnified them like… You’ve read the Hitchhiker’s Guide?” Ianto nodded, “Yeah well, I had a copy of the real thing in the TARDIS, useful book, it’s like the babel fish, it fed back their dreams until they were magnified and horrible. People went mad on dreams, and I thought that it was an oppressive regime stifling creativity. Honestly, it was hell, no colour, no imagination, just completely bland, so I tried to brighten things up a bit. Oh I managed. I definitely managed, I went through the whole city telling stories, the one about the Armoured Sharks was particularly popular, then got myself arrested and taken to a mental hospital. Honestly, I nearly got lobotomised because I was a threat. Then engaged in a shootout with police, and this is all in a day’s work for us you understand.” He was grinning broadly and Ianto couldn’t help joining in, “I’m up the proverbial creek without a paddle, chocolate creek without a Popsicle stick, call it what you will, nearly with a chunk of my brain removed when an alarm goes and I manage to escape with sheer brute strength, and He just swans in and takes over the show. I’m like, well couldn’t you have done that earlier? But it’s no fun if it’s not the last minute.”

“So what happened, did they sort it, leave?”

“Sorted it, developed a serum to protect against the organisms. They can all dream freely now, and, I hope, pass around the legend of Captain Jack Harkness.”

“Modest as always?”

“Yeah well, I’ve had an interesting life, it’s no fun if you can’t share the stories with someone.”

“Go on then.” Ianto leaned forwards with a grin, “Tell me your stories. Tell me the one about the armoured sharks.”

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Author's note: Don't own it, much though I'd like to

Sorry it's taken so long to update, I've been away again. But we are now nearing the end and it should get easier from here. Apart from the fact that I'm going away again in just over a week. I will get it done, I promise, before I go to Towersey hopefully. There are references in here again to Jasmine, who's going to be great fun to write, but that won't come for a while, maybe. Slightly AU by this point, but I can't get rid of her and I can't write that story in the future without mentioning her here really. Cos that would just feel silly.