protest
A man in a striking blue coat accosts a shy university student.
The boy drops his books and papers in shock, muttering an apology as he bends down to get them. The man takes them instead, handing them to the boy with an intense look.
"Ianto Jones," he says, and the words almost seem to pain him.
"I'm sorry," Ianto says, staring at the papers he's re-organizing, "where exactly did we meet?"
"Oh, I knew you in Cardiff," the man says lightly. As Ianto's backing away, escaping, he takes the boy by the shoulder. "You're going to London soon. And you'll have to make a choice— and that choice is going to affect the world."
"I— what?" The boy backs away, unsure what exactly he's supposed to do. "I'm sorry, you must have the wrong— "
"Forget," the man says, looking far too old, "Choose to forget everything."
"Why?" Ianto demands, a flash of rage at some situation greater than this one incident, "What if I don't want to forget it?"
"I'll explain everything," the man says, "Just forget. Please."
"Or what? I'll destroy the world?" The boy looks down, remembering that he's shy. "I don't like people being cryptic, sir."
The man laughs, but there's deep sadness to it. "Just forget it. Please, Ianto."
"I'll consider it." Ianto backs away. "Goodbye, sir?" He quavers on the last word; he hopes it's goodbye— and he hopes it's not.
"Goodbye," says the man; wistfully, because it is.
forget
Ianto Jones can't remember any choice he had in London. It haunts him, a bit, but he hasn't got a thing to go on. So he lets it go. He forgets, and his chest tightens with distaste at himself for doing it.
He gets a bit of an odd feeling when the news starts talking about a woman who died in mysterious circumstances— mauled inside the British Museum— but isn't sure if it has to do with the Man In The Coat, or just his natural sense of fantasy. In a few months he's forgotten the name Lisa Hallett, anyway.
He studies history and literature, and says he'll go on to greatness. As time goes by, he doubts it, though. After his years of pouring his soul into his studies, sleepless nights and occasional throwing books at the wall and seriously considering moving to who-knows-where and being a who-knows-what (Ianto was never very good at spontaneity or irresponsibility. Which galled him, a bit), he ended up nothing special. He'd wanted to be a research librarian, working with old manuscripts.
Instead, he ended up in an underpaid, understaffed, and undersized local library, near where he'd grown up. He spent most of his time in the children's section, remembering his child self that had practically set up a second home there.
Of course, barely scraping by in a library threatened with shutting down every year, with such a meager supply of books he found himself lending out his own (and getting them back ruined, sometimes) wasn't nearly what he'd dreamed of, sitting in the library and reading through piles of adventure stories. But he took to the library like it was his child, and it managed.
He managed, too. Mostly.
protest
They're just sorting through rift drift (Ianto's name, chosen over Owen's 'alien shit' and Tosh's 'specimens'), when Ianto touches it.
He was in the middle of a particularly long insult for Owen, sending Tosh into a fit of the giggles, and it moved.
The thing resembled a beetle, and in an instant Jack was ready to shoot it and Gwen tried to smash it with the statue she was holding.
An instant was too late.
What led you here?
Lisa had. That day in London, when he hadn't forgotten.
He forgot.
forget
Ianto Jones didn't vote Saxon.
He was mind-deep in a book about fairies when the Toclafane came. Not for him. No, he was left. To struggle to make sense and a life out of a world where he wasn't a librarian anymore; that was what he was left with.
(How long had it been since he'd had to make sense of a world where he was a librarian? A mundane world. Be careful what you wish for, Ianto Jones.)
A few children flocked to the library, and he couldn't help but feel a swell of pride at that. It was what he would have done; had done in far less dire situations, and if he had made his library any semblance of that safety for even a few children, maybe they stood a chance in a world where safety didn't exist.
"Knowledge," he tells them, "is power. Now, come on— you all know what section books on camping will be in, right? Right. We'll need those— you, Blair, you're the oldest, make sure we have the fewest possible. Michael, with me— you're going to see the special librarians' room."
It frightens him, a bit, how well he handles this. Inside, of course, he doesn't handle it at all. Who did?
But they manage- him and a small pack of children with books and vending machine contents in suitcases, they manage. They meet up with Rhiannon, and he cries in her arms, and she cries in his, and for a little while they manage.
They take Johnny away, who knows why. Mica refuses to speak, and when little Michael wakes him up to say Mica is gone (he'd latched onto her immediately), Ianto goes out alone to bring her back, to talk her down from trying to save her father. They lie out under the stars and talk about their fathers, and she comes back quietly. Rhiannon never knew, and didn't have to.
The story of the Doctor comes to them early, matched with the tale of Martha Jones, the woman who walks the earth to tell her tale.
The children cling to it with all their might, making up their own stories about a man who travelled through time in a blue box, saving the world and taking children off on adventures.
Rhiannon doesn't believe a word of it. "Lovely, hearing the children and that yarn about the Doctor. It's good for them, to have something to believe in."
"I believe it," says Ianto, trying not to focus on what he was doing, with the charred flesh and the empty eyes and wrong wrong wrong.
"Well, of course you would. You, with your wardrobes and rings and fairy-stories." Rhiannon snorts. "Always hated that about you, to be honest. Never could face that things just don't turn out fine..."
"I think I met him, once," Ianto says, "A man with a blue coat."
"Well, what did he tell you?"
"To forget."
"Forget what?"
"I've forgotten."
"Well, I think if this Doctor fellow was going to save us, he'd have done it already!"
"That's because you never read fairy-tales," Ianto says, and leaves it at that.
It isn't a fairy-tale, of course. One by one, the children are lost, to Toclafane and infections and who-knows-what. Ianto and Mica are left alone, Rhiannon hopefully with at least some of the others.
They were in France. A small family had taken them in, a dark-haired girl Morgaine a bit older than Mica, a wild-haired and bespectacled grandfather, and a pair of maiden aunts, one quiet and red-headed, the other small and spirited. Their English was about as good as Ianto's French, but they made the best of it and kept themselves fed.
"Martha Jones is coming back," says the girl, coming back from the market with precious little food, "We must help the Doctor soon."
"The Doctor and Martha Jones will save us. Right, Uncle Ianto?" Mica says, helping Morgane with her basket.
"'Course they will," he says, "And then we'll go find the others."
"We'll have a banquet," she says, and she and Morgane begin laughing and planning it out.
The grandfather, whose name Ianto never quite caught, shook his head. "Tears," he says.
The quiet aunt, Eglantine, shushes him and tells him to have hope. Ariana, the other, presses closer to Eglantine in the big sitting chair they like to share. "Nothing lasts forever," she says.
It doesn't, of course. Ianto's faith certainly hasn't. He's had only the man he now thinks was the Doctor for years now, and after going through mundane life instead of greatness, and then a horror story to replace it, it's completely shattered.
And despite all that, when a resistance fighter, Sato, is bedraggled and dying on their doorstep, he's her most passionate ally, standing with only Eglantine at his side, tearing through every rousing speech he can think of.
The woman stays.
The Toclafane come.
Ianto Jones' dying thoughts are of the Doctor.
protest
"Fancy a trip?"
Jack turned to see a familiar man leaning against a familiar blue box. Same old wild grin, and right now he can't understand it.
"Where to?" he asks, instead of any of the other things he could say. Jack just wasn't willing to confront the Doctor today.
"More of a 'who'," the Doctor said, sticking his hands in his pockets.
"Who then?" Jack stood in the middle of the street, not willing to guess who it might be. Either choice was too painful.
"Well, you understand... There's a certain timeline we have to set right." The Doctor took a step closer,
"Just tell me who, Doctor." Right. What did right even mean? Jack felt like he'd known. Once.
The Doctor coughed into the distance. "Well... your Mr. Jones."
"My Mr. Jones?" It didn't quite out quite as flippant as he'd meant it. (It came out like he meant it.)
"He ran into a certain... well, I'm sure you know all about the Trickster's Brigade?"
"The bug."
"So, what do you say?" The Doctor offered a hand, with a smile. An old, tired smile.
Jack thinks about it. "Make sure he joins Torchwood?"
"Or else—"
"Yeah, I know, Time Lord." Jack takes the Doctor's hand, forcing a smile in kind. "Thank you."
"Least I could do, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Jack says quietly as the step into the TARDIS, "It really is the least you could do."
The timeline was set wrong.
forget
When they start saying things, the children flock to the library. Not because they're frightened, mostly because they're curious, and every answer is in the library— the librarian knows everything.
Ianto Jones doesn't know anything, really, and he's frightened out of his mind. So he organizes a research expedition, mostly to comfort himself, and finds out absolutely nothing.
The world's on edge, honestly, and on a smaller scale he doesn't trust the explosion in Cardiff— Ianto Jones has given up on the mundane for good this time, after nearly being consumed by it. Fairytales never were like Rhiannon thought, which was probably why she didn't like them— she never understood how horrible beginnings have to be, for a proper ending. Things were shaping up to a beginning.
And then, less than a week later, it begins in earnest. Even before everything comes clean, even before the children are gone (Michael, Janine, Adelaide, Francis, Linda), he doesn't buy what they're saying.
He keeps quiet.
The next day, it's all begun.
First, he quietly takes count of the faces, and there are so many fewer. Mrs. Shirley, the head librarian (who goes around in a old-fashioned floral dress and kerchief, bearing like a queen, and has told Ianto she'll recommend him for her job once she's dead) is stacking up a good chunk of the history section; "to prepare" is all she'll say, later confiding that her grandchildren are gone.
And then, when he's at home watching the news and stirring his dinner, comes the man. Even without the coat, Ianto knows that face. He'll save us, an instinct says, and for a moment Ianto hopes that this isn't the beginning, it's an ending.
"The government has killed your children," the man says bluntly, "Handed them over to aliens."
There's a pit in his stomach, and it feels like the whole world must share it.
"Well, I say killed; that's putting it nicely," the man continues, "I figured you deserved to know. So I'm telling you. Don't let them get away with this."
He continues on with the details and Ianto absorbs every single one.
Outside, there are smashed things and fires. Shouting.
A beginning, if we're lucky, he thinks, detached and empty.
Ten percent. Gone.
And the ones he'd known the names of, the hopes and dreams of, had trusted him.
The world is wrong.
He calls Rhiannon. David and Mica are fine, but Johnny's been shot. They spend the night talking, and it's the closest they've been that Ianto can remember. It hurts, that it took this to bring them together.
She talks about Johnny, how brave he was, how much she needs him now. How afraid she is to go through this alone. She doesn't know what to do. She doesn't even know if she can do it.
He admits he's a coward. He tells her about the children he'd become responsible for, in a way— someone they trusted, and felt safe with. (And he hadn't done what Johnny had. He'd done nothing for them.)
In the morning, he hangs up and throws everything he needs in a suitcase. Going through the trashed and smouldering streets, he leaves a note of resignation and his books at the old library, and goes off who-knows-where to do who-knows-what.
It's eventful, certainly. He's caught in a London revolution, at the edges of a mob held back by red-bereted soldiers. He doesn't join; this is a chaos in which he won't dance. This is the age of action and chaos and anger.
Later, it will be time for historians and librarians. Then, he'll see if he's honestly what he thought. (Ianto doubts it, now.)
Who-knows-where turns out to be Germany, at least for a little while, mostly because he doesn't speak a word of German and almost likes it that way. Just while he's figuring it out.
The sky is more beautiful than it has a right to be, the stars brighter than he's seen them in years. It smells of cold and trees, wind just barely blowing through the grass. Ianto hates the marks his footprints leave in the grass, hates the lack of them he leaves in the world.
There's a man lying in the grass, tracing the stars. Ianto stops and waits until the man looks at him.
The Man. He still doesn't have the coat. But it's him.
Because it feels right, somehow, he lies down in the grass beside him.
"What's your name?" he asks, joining in to trace a constellation.
"I'm not sure," the man says, "And you?"
"You knew it last time we met."
"We've met?"
"Seven years ago. You told me to forget." The wind blows the grass against their faces and bodies, the ground seeming to press against them.
"Forget what?"
"I forgot." He nearly smiles at that.
"Maybe I forgot, too." The man turns over to face Ianto. "So, your name?"
"Jones," Ianto says, looking at the stars, "Ianto Jones."
"Jones Ianto Jones," he says, the flirting tinged with sadness.
"Spelt with one 'Jones'," Ianto corrects.
"All right then, Jones Ianto Jones spelt with one Jones."
It's the sort of thing that's funny in a field in the middle of the night while the world's gone to hell.
"You broke your promise, you know," Ianto says, subdued. "You never told me why I had to forget."
"I'd tell you if I remembered."
"Would you?"
"I don't know," the man admits.
The moonlight is dim, but there's something peaceful about the field. Too peaceful, really. It's wrong, really, in this world of revolution.
"I don't know what to do," Ianto says; almost whispers.
"Neither do I," the man admits. "I... I was supposed to save the world."
"I was supposed to be important." And he hadn't been, and he'd never been. He was a librarian for god's sake, in a library that could have lost its funding any year. The only good and meaningful part of his life had been making a safe place for the children, the ones like him who needed a library to call home.
'Safe' didn't exist anymore.
"Everyone thought I was some great hero."
"They thought I knew everything. And I knew... but what the hell did I do about it?" His fists clench. "Nothing," he whispers.
"Nothing you could have done," the man says, resting his thumb on Ianto's wrist.
"Maybe I could have remembered," he says.
"Maybe," the man agrees, instead of any of the arguments Ianto expected.
"So what are we supposed to do?"
"I don't know," the man says. Slowly, he takes Ianto's hand, holds it tightly for a moment, and lets go. (He keeps his hand on top of Ianto's, though.) "But we're bound to come up with something, right?"
"Are we?"
The man paused, sitting up. He looked up to the stars. "I could've stopped it, you know."
"I could have fought them when they came."
"No, I mean I could have stopped it. One child. That's all it would have taken. But I didn't do it. I couldn't."
Ianto sat up. "I guess," he said, curling his fingers around the man's hand, "we've just got to do our best to make up for it."
"Yeah," the man agreed. He met Ianto's eyes, smirking out of old habit. "Captain Jack Harkness, by the way. And..."
"And?"
"Never mind. I just thought I saw something on your back."
forget
protest
Ianto Jones was soaking wet, due to the fact that he had no umbrella and was in London. Had he been in possession of an umbrella, it wouldn't be raining; but as he wasn't, it was.
Due to this, he was in a very bad mood, which was not enhanced by being grabbed by a man in a long tan coat. The man's hair was plastered to his face, and he was wearing rather odd shoes.
"Ianto Jones!" he said, enthusiastically.
"Not again," Ianto said, with great exasperation.
"Oh, you've met Jack, then?"
"Assuming 'Jack' is the man with the blue coat who told me to forget whatever happens here, yes. Why?" Ianto paused. "Please?" He grinned nervously.
"Oh, because you should never send a human to do a Time Lord's job. Turn around, would you?"
"Why?" Ianto asked, turning around and feeling rather foolish.
"Because you've got something on your back. Part of the Trickster's Brigade..." There was a whirring sound, and the Doctor muttered something. "You're going to join Torchwood, you understand? This thing is trying to make sure that never happens. Create a whole lot of chaos. Which gives the Trickster a hand up in turning the whole universe into entropy and chaos."
"Oh." Ianto paused to consider this. "Speeding up time?"
"Not bad for the twenty-first century," the man said. There was another whirring noise and a triumphant exclamation. "There. Now, why don't we just make sure everything works out... When I say 'run', run."
"Why?" Ianto demanded, turning around.
"So that I can run after you pretending to be evil, and then Torchwood will find you."
"Why?"
"Because if you don't join Torchwood, the Trickster will take over the universe." The man paused, his smile fading. "And I am sorry— I am so sorry— for what you're going to have to go through."
He'd have to go through things. Ianto felt oddly empty; light-headed. "So I'm..." He finally dared the word that had been running through his head since Jack With The Coat. "I'm important?"
"Oh, everyone is." The man grinned again. "Run."
Ianto ran. The man chased him, yelling a somewhat villainous monologue about how he'd kidnap Ianto and force him to destroy the Earth. (And seemed to be having far too much fun with it, anyway.)
Eventually, in the middle of a crowded street, he skidded on the wet pavement and fell into a woman's legs.
"Stay still," she said. He looked up. She had a gun pointed for the Doctor- a dark woman, with short hair and a worn brown bomber jacket.
"All right then," he said, arranging his legs into a more comfortable position. He turned just in time to see the Doctor grimace, give a discreet thumbs-up, and run for the hills. The woman swore loudly, holstered her weapon (it wasn't, at a closer look, quite a gun), and gave Ianto a hand up.
"You all right?" he asked.
"A bit wet, slight wound to my dignity," he said, "I'm, er— Jones. Ianto Jones."
"Lisa Hallett," she said, thrusting her black umbrella upon him. "Do you know what just happened?"
"Not really, no." He did his best to make sure they were both under the umbrella. With a smile, Lisa Hallett took his arm.
"I work for an organization called Torchwood..."