The first fortnight had been non-stop and exhausting. Ianto didn't do nearly the same mad working hours that the rest of the team kept, but was still racking up close to 70 hours a week. He had to be in before them all and out after them all. Well, all but Jack. But he generally blocked all things Jack from his mind except when he absolutely couldn't.
Fortunately, things got a bit easier once the dust settled and alien issues were again more interesting than the guy who more or less walked in off the street and started cleaning up around the Hub.
Then came the day he finally got deep enough into the archives to come across Jack's file – Jack's real file… the whole one. At first, Ianto assumed that "Captain Jack Harkness" was just the standard code name the Torchwood 3 'field office' had adopted for whoever the leader was at the moment, a bit like the Dread Pirate Roberts. Until he saw the photos. They were definitely vintage, not photoshopped. And they were all the same man. The exact same man. 'The exact same, strikingly handsome man,' was the precise phrase that had passed through the thoughts of Ianto Jones.
His style of dress and haircut changed a bit over the years, but his face didn't. Except the eyes, Ianto noted. Something about Jack's eyes… they looked more tired, haunted even, as time went on. Well, they would… being around that long, Ianto reckoned.
Did he just never change? Ianto wondered, going back through and reading the reports filed on the Captain more closely. Killed stone dead dozens of times in the first week alone, but always came back to life within hours. Alien for definite, then. That was a new one – an alien working for Torchwood.
Ianto took a deep breath when he realized that he should be a lot more shocked that he'd actually slept with an alien. There had been a lot of stories around T1, naturally, about weird alien tentacle sex, but Ianto always rolled his eyes at that stuff. Well, it wasn't exactly a tentacle, anyway….
Sitting back, Ianto considered for a moment that maybe Jack, being alien himself, would understand about Lisa. The wave of guilt that rushed over him squelched that thought. More troubling, perhaps, was that he couldn't be sure just for whom he had a sense of guilt at that moment.