RESURRECTION
Chapter One
He stood in the doorway, tea-tray held out before him, his eyes fixed on the still, silent form standing beside the wall of stainless steel drawers, filled with the corpses of former comrades, friends and foes, human and otherwise. The forlorn figure was staring down at an opened drawer, containing a body so pale as to be nearly indistinguishable from the pristine white sheet which covered it from the chest down. She had seemingly not moved since his last check, three hours ago. He carefully avoided looking at the body lying on the dull grey metal slab as he moved silently forward, pushing aside his reluctance to disturb her vigil. She didn't look up at his approach. He didn't even see her blink.
"Gwen?" he said softly.
Gwen turned to him slowly. Her eyes were puffy and red from lack of sleep and intermittent torrents of tears, heavily underscored by smudged make-up and bagged from lack of sleep. Her clothes were wrinkled and stained, giving the impression that she had slept in them for several days. This impression was a false one, though – he knew that she had not slept for precisely one day, twelve hours and twenty-three … twenty-four minutes. 'Careworn' would be the most apt description, he thought to himself, suppressing the urge to flee to the nearest reflective surface to ensure that his own emotional state could not be as easily read from his own attire and features.
"I made you some coffee," he said, carefully not wincing as she turned her dark eyes towards him, and a nearly palpable wave of pain washed over him, trying to drag him back into the depths of despair he had only recently retrieved himself from. He warded his mind as best he could from her, determined not to be pulled under again. Not yet. There was too much to be done.
She blinked, and he could almost hear the sound of her eyelids scratching over her dry, grit-filled eyes.
"Thank…" She cleared her throat, her voice husky from lack of use. "Thank you, Ianto." She reached out for the mug, and he watched the shadow of her hand drift over the blank face of the man lying before them. He felt himself start to slip, and quickly shifted his attention back to Gwen. She picked the mug up from his tray, and wrapped her small hands around it tightly. She smiled faintly as she ran her thin fingers over the design, a cartoonish picture of a small dog with the caption "Tell another shit joke about me, and I will sue!" A gift from Rhys, he imagined. He assumed the dog was of the shi-tzu breed. "I thought you threw this out," she said after a moment. "You thought it was tasteless."
"I don't recall mentioning that." Ianto Jones was never tactless.
"You didn't have to," she replied, her smile more genuine this time, though still sad. "I saw your expression when I first brought it into the kitchen. You looked like you had swallowed a live fish." Gwen sighed, gazing back down at the corpse. "Jack almost shit himself laughing, when Tosh showed him the security footage."
Ianto turned away, ostensively to place his empty tray on a nearby bench, though in reality he moved so that Gwen could not see the flash of pain that he knew would show in his eyes. God, that laugh. . . he doubted he had ever heard a sound more alive. It was all he could do, sometimes, not to grin and join in when the Hub echoed with Jack's mirthful cackling.
He hesitated for a moment, then moved back to her side, placing a hand on the woman's shoulder. She tilted her head, brushing her cheek against his fingers. They stood like that for awhile, Gwen's cheek warming his cold hand, her hair brushing like black silk over the sleeve of his jacket. Her pain was like the tide, lapping against the island of his calm, slowly eroding his restraint. 'I should go,' he told himself. 'Leave before I lose control. I don't have time to deal with Gwen's overwhelming need to fix everything and everyone.' He gave a silent sigh. He couldn't leave just yet.
"It's like he's sleeping," she said eventually, dreamily. She reached out brushed a hand against Jack's hair, messing it slightly. Ianto firmly suppressed the irrational compulsion to pull out his comb and put the hair back into order. "And I'm sure that if I stay here long enough, he'll wake up. He'll open his pretty blue eyes and see me staring down at him." She pulled away from him slightly, and rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. He allowed his arm to fall back to his side. "Then he'll grin up at me, and say something particularly inappropriate and Jack-like." Her lips quirked slightly. "Maybe, 'Hi there, Gwen. See something you like?' or 'Hey, Gwen, it's kind of cold in here. Would you like to climb aboard and warm me up?'" Ianto felt the slightest smile tug at the corner of his mouth. "Then he would laugh, and I would laugh, and you , Ianto, would stand there looking faintly disapproving, but I'd know that you'd be just as relieved as I was." She glanced up at the camera, whirring faintly from its position above the doorway. "And Tosh, knowing her, is likely sitting at her desk and watching us on the security footage; she would see that Jack was awake, then she'd smack Owen out of his alcoholic stupor and they'd both come belting in here, hell-for-leather. And everything would go back to normal." She sighed, closing her eyes.
'If this was a fairytale, that is exactly what would happen,' he thought to himself. She was always so certain that everything would turn out alright eventually, despite how often it all ends in tears. And then, when everything goes to shit, she'll howl to the heavens at the unfairness of it all, as if there's anyone there to care. She made him feel so old, sometimes.
"But that's just wishful thinking, isn't it, Ianto?" Gwen continued, as if she could hear his thoughts. He was surprised at the bitterness in her voice. "Even if he does 'wake up', he's more likely to say, 'Get the fuck away from me, you traitorous bitch!" The self-loathing and disgust etched on her tired face and through her strained voice, permeating the air around her, an echo of his own suppressed emotions. "We betrayed him, Ianto." She began to walk back and forth, back and forth, along the metal slab, as if she wanted to flee the object of her guilt, but couldn't bring herself to leave him. "He's lying there, cold and still and dead, because of us. I mean," she continued, the fingers of her free hand absently scratching across the arm holding her imperilled coffee aloft as she paced, "How could we have been so stupid! How could we have fallen for that? After all that we have seen, everything we have done, the ghosts of our dearly departed suddenly start appearing out of the blue and telling us to open the rift, and we actually do it!" She came to a sudden halt, spilling coffee onto the tiled floor, her bout of furious energy apparently exhausted. "And he pays the price," she finished, nearly whispering.
'At least you had some excuse,' he thought bitterly, but said nothing. Gwen had only just lost Rhys, when Bilis moved into the final act of his epic production; the pain had been fresh and spilling from her mind to soak the atmosphere around her like blood pouring from an open wound. Rhys' death had been too recent, unreal, unacceptable.
Ianto's eyes were drawn involuntarily to Drawers 11 and 12, on the right hand corner of the top row. They were like old friends, those drawers – so familiar, every scratch and stain on them etched into his memories. Where the bodies of two young women rested, one entombed in a casket of wires and metal, stab-wounds all over her body; the other, wearing a red-stained Jubilee Pizza uniform, with her skull split in half and crudely stitched back together, gunshot wounds perforating her stomach and chest.
He looked down at the corpse … 'No, not a corpse, it's Jack, God damn it,' he snarled to himself. He made himself look away - Ianto knew he wouldn't be able to keep his distance if he stared for too much longer. Jack had more life to him than anyone he'd ever met before. He was never still, and to see him so white and cold and still was more than he could take.
'So the tally is now at three.' he thought to himself bleakly. 'The three victims of Ianto Jones, all stored away in a hermatically-sealed metal filing cabinet.'
Lisa. Annie. Jack. The names echoed through the hollowness that had displaced his soul.
'The first brought down by my lack of punctuality, the second by my selfishness and the third by my stupidity.'
"Your coffee is getting cold," he said to Gwen, his voice flat and cold from the effort it took to keep his emotions suppressed, to keep from cracking and breaking apart like ice in thaw.
He walked out of the room and stood still, out of sight in the hallway. He looked up at the blank white ceiling above him and concentrated, breathing slowly and deeply, carefully pushing his emotions down into the deeper, darker corners of his mind. He carefully filed them away, locking them up to be dealt with later on. He stood there until he was cold, his surface thoughts clear and untainted.
When he was calm again, he walked into Owen's laboratory and retrieved his office chair.
He re-entered the mortuary, pushing the chair before him as he walked, its wheels clicking irritatingly across the white tiled floor. He nodded with satisfaction when he saw that the mug had been emptied and placed back on the tea-tray. He positioned the chair beside Gwen, so that it would interfere with any further mindless pacing. She ignored the chair, not taking hear eyes from Jack's face.
"He'll wake up, Ianto," she said with conviction. She had faith. The kind of blind, rock-bottom faith that says 'I've done everything I can, and this has to work because if it doesn't there's nothing left.'
"I'm sure he will." he replied, voice carefully even. 'Though he may need some assistance,' he added silently. Because this wasn't it. Because he hadn't done everything, hadn't tried everything. Not yet.
He'd felt that kind of faith before, and had no intention of ever doing so again.
She nodded, satisfied, or if not satisfied then too fearful to challenge him, fearful of losing her tenuous certainty.
'The scene is set.' Ianto thought to himself. Now, he could leave.
Without another word, he turned and collected his tea-tray, then walked out of the morgue, leaving her to her vigil.