Jack came and went without a word so often that it took Ianto half a day to realize that he had gone to Flat Holm the same morning as Gwen. When Jack returned late in the morning, Gwen wasn't with him, and he brushed past Ianto without a word. A familiar queasy feeling settled into the pit of Ianto's stomach, one that had taken up long-term residence when he'd been hiding Lisa.
Ianto went about his work as usual; he had plenty of it. Surely Jack knew where Gwen had gotten her information, and he'd deal with Ianto in his own time. If the silent treatment was part of Ianto's punishment, well, he probably deserved it. He knew that Jack would find out. He'd hoped to be the one to tell him what he'd done, but he couldn't say anything too soon, or Jack would throw up further barriers in Gwen's path. Gwen didn't deserve that, Jonah's mam didn't deserve that, and Jack would realize it eventually.
Or so Ianto hoped. Jack wouldn't even glance at him when he brought coffee, but the tension in Jack's shoulders made it impossible to believe that Jack simply hadn't noticed him. Ianto knew that keeping a low profile at this point was at best faintly ridiculous, but he couldn't help but slip back into the habit of attracting as little attention as possible. He quietly brought drinks around, he cleaned up, he did paperwork, he catalogued, he filed, he brought more drinks, he took care of the Weevils, and he hoped everyone would forget him as soon as he was out of sight.
Gwen came back mid-afternoon and said nothing to anyone, going straight to that damp room where she'd posted all the papers; God and Gwen alone knew why she'd picked that little nook. He had hoped she'd be happier when she got back, or at least relieved. She clearly wasn't either. He followed her to check in with her, to see what had happened and how she was, but her abrupt motions as she pulled down a few pages convinced him not to talk to her just yet. She didn't even seem to have noticed him. Jack headed down that way some time later.
It appeared that Jack was speaking to Gwen, still, or again, but not to Ianto. Well, Gwen had told Jack the whole time she wouldn't give up. She hadn't hidden anything from him. She hadn't been sneaking around behind Jack's back. Really, what had Ianto expected?
Maybe Jack was right, and there were some things people shouldn't know. He hated to think he'd hurt Gwen. When Jack left, she'd kept them all on an even keel, not only saying but believing that Jack would be back. She'd believed it better than Ianto had, despite all his efforts, and she'd been right. He hoped she'd been right to pursue this case, and that he'd been right to help. She had been so upset about the boy's mother, and from what she said it seemed the mother was still completely distraught, and he thought he could help them both.
Gwen reappeared much later and said a couple of words to Tosh as she put together her things to go. Tosh couldn't have said more than a few words in return before she went right back to her work. Gwen nodded towards Ianto across the Hub, so she wasn't angry at him, but she left before he could close the distance and ask her how she was. The room seemed too quiet to call out after her.
Owen went home not long after Gwen, but Tosh hung around for quite a while at her station, intent on her work. Ianto wasn't sure whether to be frustrated or grateful. He hardly wanted to start what might be a heated talk with Jack with Tosh nearby. Jack had shown no sign of wanting to talk, either, so maybe it was best to wait after all.
When Toshiko finally left, he made one more coffee and headed to Jack's office. If Jack still didn't have anything to say to him, he'd go home. Ianto practiced his few words several times mentally so that he could say them smoothly.
Jack sat at his desk, staring out the window into the Hub, not even pretending to do anything. His desk lamp wasn't even on, leaving the room too dark. Jack's office smelled different to the rest of the Hub. Their main workspace was clean and antiseptic, like Tosh's workstation--and Owen's now that he couldn't eat or drink. Other areas held the musty smell of Weevils and pterodactyl. This room smelled richly of wood and polish and Jack, and Ianto loved the smell, but tonight it wasn't enough to put him at ease.
"Coffee." There. He'd sounded quite normal. He set the mug down on the desk. "Is there anything else? Or is that all for today?"
Jack looked straight at him for the first time that day. He looked stern--really stern, not the mock stern look he sometimes got when he felt playful.
"You told Gwen where they were." Jack's statement sounded deliberately neutral, making it impossible for Ianto to tell just how angry Jack might be. Jack could be particularly dangerous in these moods. He would never forget the coldness in Jack's voice when he found out about Lisa. Nor the cold steel of the gun against his skin that day.
Ianto simply nodded.
"Did you think that I'd overlook it because we fuck?" he asked, still with frighteningly little intonation. "Or did you think I wouldn't figure it out? That I'd just go, 'Boy, Gwen was really clever'?"
Ianto shook his head emphatically. "I never thought that!" He hesitated. "I just thought it was better to...get things into the open..."
"And let me deal with the cleanup?" Jack rose to his feet as his voice went up in volume, and Ianto stepped back without thinking, even as the anger directed at him came almost as a relief. "You haven't even been there, have you? Do you have any idea what that place is like? How it affected Gwen?" He came around his desk, hovering close to Ianto that he could feel Jack's breath on his face.
"Or was it just another of those little facts you're so proud of knowing, and you could show off to Gwen! 'Look, I know something you don't know!'"
"That's not fair!" Ianto snapped, to his own surprise. "I didn't--I wasn't even certain she'd know it was me, even though I knew she'd figure it out eventually, and you certainly would," he fumbled. "I wasn't looking for any...praise or thanks."
He took a deep breath before saying a little more coherently, "I thought it would be better than her tearing herself apart for days or weeks or God knows how long because she wouldn't give in and you wouldn't either. And no, I don't know how it affected Gwen because you never told me exactly what's there!" He tried to bite down on his frustration, but he wasn't entirely successful. Jack had tried to keep Gwen from the place; it wasn't Jack's fault she went there. It was Ianto's.
Jack frowned deeply. "If you don't know what it is, then how the hell did you know to send her there?"
Ianto couldn't help his eyebrows shooting up. "When I asked you if Flat Holm was related to these rift disappearances, and if Jonah was there, you said she didn't need to know about it. That's about all I know."
"All you know?" Jack crossed his arms over his chest and stepped back to rest half sitting on his desk. He might be settling in for a long talk, but he didn't invite Ianto to sit. He didn't seem to believe Ianto, and he wasn't volunteering any information himself.
"I've handled requisitions for the place ever since I started working here," Ianto explained, a little annoyed, though he didn't have any right to be. He was telling Jack the truth, and he wanted Jack to believe him, even if Jack was never going to explain all his secrecy. "While you were...gone...for all those weeks, I took phone calls from them. I ordered more medical equipment, I set up the deliveries, and I even disposed of the body when a certain Hal Eberson died."
Jack stared at Ianto, still frowning, but otherwise unreadable. He must have known about the dead man, musn't he? Who the hell did he think took care of it? "You did notice that he died, right? At least that there was one fewer person there than before?"
Jack pulled himself off the desk so fast and leaned so close to Ianto that Ianto automatically dropped into the chair just to get a little space. It didn't help. Jack just leaned further.
"Of course I noticed," Jack hissed in his face while Ianto fumbled at the buttons to undo his jacket and then gave up. "How dare you? You think I don't pay attention? I've been taking care of all those people, the only one who knows what really happened to all of them!"
Ianto dropped his gaze to the floor, feeling his face flush. Jack went a couple of times a month, more when things weren't busy. He didn't tell anyone where he was going, but Ianto had figured it out after Jack's return, and he had seen how it darkened Jack's mood those days. He should never have said it. "I'm sorry, Jack. You're right." Whatever went on there, it ate at Jack; Ianto finally realized that Jack wasn't simply angry at him, but at whatever went on Flat Holm, and he cursed himself for being so slow, and so certain it was all about him.
Jack still hovered, glaring.
"So I disposed of the body, " he said, this time successfully undoing the buttons so his jacket wouldn't bunch up. He still felt like a schoolboy in trouble with the headmaster. "Just as I always do. I went to the island, but I never saw the inside of the facility; a couple of orderlies met me there with a body bag and the barest record of the man's life so that I could fix up some paperwork to make him officially dead, though it turned out that had been taken care of."
Jack straightened a little, though he stayed close to the chair. "He'd been gone more than twenty years," Jack said quietly, staring towards the door. "His wife had him declared legally dead more than a decade ago."
Ianto kept his own voice soft as he responded, "Well, the people at this place of yours didn't know that. And I didn't know what went on there; when they couldn't reach you for weeks, I finally got out of them that they cared for the victims of experiments. I thought these were people who had been injured in previous encounters with aliens here, in Cardiff or nearby, until Gwen and Tosh found that people had been disappearing. That's why I asked you after the meeting yesterday whether these were the Rift victims, and why you wouldn't just tell Gwen."
Jack didn't say anything, and Ianto wondered if Jack could forgive him for hiding Lisa in the basement, forgive him the deaths he'd caused that way, and not forgive whatever he'd shown to Gwen and forced Jack to explain to her. The thought sat like ice in his stomach, cold and hard. He didn't expect anything long-term between him and Jack. He had considered that Jack might simply get bored with him. But with the life expectancies of Torchwood employees being what they were, and the number of close calls he'd had already, he figured that it would end suddenly, and he wouldn't be the one to bear the brunt of the pain when that happened. He felt a little guilty for thinking that, but surely Jack had insulated himself well enough that it wouldn't hurt too much for too long when Ianto was gone.
He had never thought Jack would get so angry at him.
"I nearly told Gwen about the place while you were gone," Ianto admitted, "because she was in charge, and I thought she ought to know, but we were kind of overwhelmed at the time, trying to adjust to a new leader, still wondering when you were coming back. I didn't know much about it myself, and I was going to do some research first." He'd been pretty sure Jack would return, really. "And there was me still fairly new to fieldwork, and we had to keep UNIT from noticing we were down one fearless leader and trying to launch some kind of takeover of us, and..." He trailed off when he realized he was babbling, not so much truly coming clean as simply trying to blunt the force of Jack's anger.
It didn't seem to be working; Jack still had that hard look in his eyes. "And I put it to one side for the time being, and then...I forgot," Ianto finished.
Jack gave a sudden bark of laughter. "Ianto Jones? Forgot?" He didn't sound truly amused, though. He leaned back a little more. When he spoke again, his voice was slow and heavy, the anger drained out of it. "It's probably better that you did; at least this time, I was here to tell her. To tell her that this was the best we could do, that other alternatives had been tried, and they were worse."
"Alternatives?" Ianto asked.
"When I first came, we had two of them in the Vault."
Another chunk of ice joined the first in Ianto's stomach. "With the Weevils?"
"In a different section, so not right next door to them, but yeah." Jack shook his head. He uncrossed his arms and pulled himself further onto the desk, sitting fully on the edge, but still alert, not relaxed. "So you didn't even really know what was going on, but you thought we had some Rift victims there, and you gave Gwen the location?"
Ianto smiled faintly, an automatic defense. "I figured she could work out what I already knew, and then some."
Jack didn't echo his smile as he'd hoped. "And you haven't talked to Gwen? So you still don't know what 'and then some' covers?"
Ianto shook his head.
"Seventeen people spit back out of the Rift or, in two cases, brought back by friendly aliens--yeah, there are a few of those, believe it or not--so seventeen people, all badly damaged, some physically, all psychologically. Jonah was horribly burned, and he saw sights no human being was ever meant to see."
Jack continued, low and relentless, his gaze now somewhere behind Ianto's head. "Alice has nerve damage, phantom pain that no drugs will treat, that comes and goes without warning. Two are deaf and blind now; imagine trying to communicate with them that they're back on Earth, that they're safe, that no one will hurt them again."
Ianto couldn't stop the shudder that ran through him.
Maybe Jack noticed the shudder, because he stopped the litany of injuries. Instead, he said, "We can't retcon them. We've tried, but it won't take. They remember; their own bodies won't let them forget, or the memories burned in too deeply. We can't cure them; we've had some excellent doctors and one of the best psychologists in the world working with them. The best we can do is try to keep them relatively comfortable."
Jack shifted to look him in the eye. "Some of them do pretty well, some days; they can go for walks, enjoy the sunshine--when we get it--read, even talk to each other, a few of them. But some of them..." He gripped the edge of his desk. "A couple are suicidal; one mutilates herself; we've got two in full isolation because they can't stand..."
Jack broke off, rubbing at the side of his head and staring into space again. The feeling of ice in Ianto's stomach was turning to nausea. He couldn't help but think of Lisa again. He really didn't want to remember her as she'd been in her last months, in pain, no longer who she had been, but he couldn't forget. She was no longer the woman he loved, but he hadn't been able to see that. He'd thought he could get her through the pain, find someone who could restore her to herself, and it would be worth it.
He couldn't save her. No one could. These people weren't a threat, or Jack wouldn't have them there, but no one could save them either, end their suffering, make them what they'd been before. And he'd sent Gwen to Flat Holm.
"How much did Gwen see?" Ianto asked, once he found his breath again.
"Jonah? He's in his fifties now. Time displacement caused by the Rift, plus the transit time it took his rescuers to get him back here. It's not the burns, so much. They've scarred over. He...screams. It's...it's like nothing I'd ever heard before." Jack shivered, something Ianto rarely saw him do. "I didn't know the human voice could do those things. Might be related to his injuries."
Ianto wanted to lean forward, to touch Jack, but he didn't think a touch would be welcomed right now, so he clasped his hands together to still the impulse. "And Gwen saw that? Heard that?"
"Gwen and Nikki. The mother."
Shit. Ianto had no idea things had moved so fast. What would a mother make of seeing her son like that? He'd planned for the time when he could tell Lisa's family she wasn't dead, show them their daughter again, but that day never came. So he'd never told on that she hadn't died at Canary Wharf. They didn't need that burden.
"Oh, God," was all he could say.
"I...wasn't there. I didn't want to be there for the...reunion. I was taking care of something else, but I talked to the nurse afterwards." Jack sighed. "I'm going round there tomorrow with retcon. She shouldn't have seen it. I should have told Gwen no."
"But it was her choice--Ms. Bevan's," Ianto said, then wished he hadn't. It was true, but that didn't mean he had to say it out loud. Maybe Jack was right. Maybe he did presume too much because they were sleeping together.
Jack didn't answer. He slid off the desk and turned away, walking around to drop into his chair. He stared across at Ianto. "Her choice. And Gwen's. Not mine?" It sounded less accusatory than Ianto would have expected, and more tired.
Ianto swallowed. "No, Jack. No offense, but you're not the one who has spent seven months looking for her son. Did Gwen tell you? She gets every bit of crowd footage from any kind of event her son might have attended and scans it frame by frame!"
"So now she gets to see her son burned beyond recognition and, and screaming--just screaming?" Jack threw his hands into the air for a moment before slamming them both down on his desk.
Ianto jumped a little, but he wasn't going to take back what he said.
Jack's anger flared again. "He makes this inhuman noise! That's her fifteen-year-old son, the only family she's got!"
Ianto looked at his hands for a moment, now clenched tightly together, but then he made himself look Jack in the eye. "I know what Lisa became, and I know what I'm guilty of myself. And there have been days I wish you'd just retconned me, or killed me"--Jack started almost unnoticeably, the first sign that he had any feeling left for Ianto--"or just let me die. But now, I'm...not glad to have the memories I do, but...grateful, in a way. Because how would I live without knowing what had happened to her? Thinking she'd just disappeared, maybe run off, maybe been kidnapped, maybe been killed? Maybe still alive, held against her will, or hurt, or sick? I'd be looking for her! Right now, most likely!"
"And if I'd retconned away everything? All of Torchwood and every memory of Lisa?" Jack seemed genuinely curious.
He had wondered the same thing once, sometimes wished for it. But then he'd realized he didn't want that. "Well, then I wouldn't be me anymore. I'd be incomplete, even if I didn't know it, and I'd have lost something very important. Something very special. I loved her, and I still love her. Even though I saw what she did, and what I did..." Most days were easier, now, than they had been, but at the moment his stomach felt like it wanted to be somewhere else, and breathing wasn't easy, so he'd better finish. "I still have the good memories, and...well, some days, for a while, I can just think of those."
At some point, Ianto's eyes had dropped down to the front of the desk, but he raised them to find Jack still staring at him. Jack never asked about Lisa, and Ianto never talked about her. Neither of them had ever said they shouldn't speak of it, they just didn't.
Ianto forced his mind back to the topic. "So maybe eventually, if you didn't retcon her, Jonah's mother would decide it's better to know. And Jonah knows she came, that she still loves him--"
"And he'll know she never came back!" Jack's voice was quiet but emphatic.
Ianto wondered what that would be like for Jonah. Maybe he had fucked up again, made things worse for everyone involved.
Jack didn't seem to have anything more to say. He was waiting for Ianto, probably waiting for him to admit he was wrong. And he was, partly. But would it really have been better to let Jonah's mother spend the rest of her life looking for the boy? And for Gwen to keep hunting, losing faith in Jack and in Torchwood, thinking maybe he could have saved these people, or that he'd killed them or had them killed himself? And Jack didn't want to lose her; he'd made that quite clear more than once. Had Jack really thought through the cost of secrecy to Gwen? To them all? Had Jack even met the mother?
Lying low had become a habit for Ianto. Secrecy was a habit for Jack. Maybe they both needed to make some changes.
Recognizing that couldn't help Ianto figure out what to say now, however.
Finally Jack spoke again, still fixing Ianto with his eyes. "So you'll go behind my back, violate my orders, because you think you're right and I'm wrong?"
Ianto considered. "I didn't exactly violate your orders, Jack, since you didn't give me any." And he had made damned sure of that, arguing with Jack very carefully so that Jack wouldn't think to order him not to help Gwen.
"So you won't violate direct orders, but you wlll go behind my back?"
Ianto wondered if Jack shouldn't blink more than he did. Maybe it was part of that resurrection power that he had--his eyes didn't dry out like a normal person's. But Owen still blinked, and he was dead.
At any rate, Jack deserved an honest answer. Ianto told him, "I suppose so. When it's important. I don't think that happens very often."
Jack wasn't moving. It was uncanny. His posture wasn't exactly tense, but he simply didn't move.
"And you think you have the right to decide that?" he demanded.
Ianto hesitated, not wanting to lie, but trying to think how to word his answer.
"Well?" Jack wasn't giving him time.
"Torchwood One taught me to follow orders without question, Jack," he said nervously. "I won't be that person again. I can't."
The anger that flashed across Jack's face was unmistakable, but Ianto held up a hand. "I know you're not at all like Yvonne Hartmann! But you have been with Torchwood for over a century now, and...you've got your blind spots too, Jack. Sometimes you forget what it's like outside Torchwood. What it's like to have family." He knew he was on shaky ground there. Jack's revival of Owen made it quite clear he considered the team family of a sort.
Jack scowled at him but let him continue.
"That's why you hired Gwen, isn't it? And why you wouldn't fire her after she refused to retcon Rhys? To remind you what it's like, and to pull you out of keeping everything to yourself."
"But those were my decisions, Ianto. I listen to her advice, and yours, but I make the final determination. I do the hiring. I decide who gets retcon--and I decided that Rhys, we could trust. It's my job to make those decisions."
Gwen had forced the choice with Rhys, but telling Jack that could only make things worse. Instead, Ianto said, "Is Gwen all right?"
Jack laughed again, a hard sound unlike Jack's usual laugh. "Oh, she will be. I guess. Once she gets over the sound of the screams she heard. And Nikki Bevan telling her that it's all Gwen's fault, that she should have let her keep her hope and her memories of her fifteen-year-old son and not some damaged freak who's now older than she is." As if Jack needed more guilt, more suffering added to all that he'd seen and felt over God knew how many years; Ianto still wasn't sure how old he was, and Jack's answers varied.
And the mother, seeing that, unprepared no matter what Gwen had told her before they went. It wasn't all Gwen's fault. It was at least as much Ianto's.
"We should have faked up a corpse," Ianto said, wondering why the hell he hadn't thought of it before, going over past cases in his head where they'd done such things. His eyes ran over the floor as if he could read there the records he'd made. "A drowning victim. We could have produced a body beyond recognition, told her we'd made a DNA match, made her believe it was him--he'd still have been fifteen in her head, she'd never have had to know! If she'll take the retcon, we can still do it! And Gwen says there are more, another forty or fifty families, at least, who've lost loved ones; should we...?"
He raised his eyes to see a very different expression on Jack's face than he'd seen moments before. He hated that look, the glimpse at the horrors that Jack had seen and would never forget. Jack wasn't angry anymore, but someplace beyond sad, a place Ianto still went to sometimes but tried to avoid. Jack helped him keep from drifting back into it to often; he tried to return the favor, but he knew he wasn't entirely successful.
"Four of the patients we have still have families in the area," Jack said quietly. "But the families have a support group now. If Nikki keeps it going, or someone else steps in. I think...I hope...maybe the support group is the best thing for them. Owen was right. These people need counseling, not us. We can't..." He pushed some papers around his desk and took an audible breath. "It's too tempting to play God, to decide that we know what these people need. We can't give them answers, because they aren't prepared for the answers we have. Should we give them more lies? Sometimes I think we do that to too many people already."
Ianto counted up in his head how many fake or tampered bodies he'd produced in the time he'd been at Torchwood Three. Twenty-three. He'd never had to deal with the families, never had to look them in the eye and tell them that their loved ones had been killed in a car accident or had fallen down a hillside when he knew they'd been torn apart by Weevils or blown to bits by an energy weapon that should never even have come to Earth or, in one really bizarre set of cases, died of terminal orgasm with an alien. The others had taken care of dealing with the families. He was glad of that. He didn't want to see their faces when they heard, didn't want to hear their voices as they tried to hold onto control.
And how many cover stories for other things? For injuries, where survivors were retconned with some story concocted about how they'd been hurt? Where traumatized people were made to forget what they'd seen? Gwen's wedding had been the biggest such op in a while, but he'd been doing these since he came to Torchwood Three over a year and a half ago. The first time--
"Ianto?" Jack was frowning. "Should I take this as agreement?"
"Yes, sir," Ianto said automatically. He ran Jack's previous words back through his head to remember what he'd agreed to. Too many lies. Yes, he agreed with that.
Jack's frown lightened slightly. "Thought we'd moved past the 'sir' thing, Ianto. Are you trying to butter me up or something?"
"No!" He had manipulated Jack in the past, certainly, but he wasn't doing that anymore. And he wasn't lying. Well, there were times he might not tell the whole truth, but there had been enough lies. "It's just--I want you to know that I still respect your authority, sir. Jack." It was late, he was tired, and he wasn't sure what Jack wanted. "I wasn't--I wasn't trying to get away with anything just because we're sleeping together."
"So you'd have tried to get away with it even if we weren't sleeping together?" Jack asked, with a raised eyebrow and something approaching a smile.
"And I'd have succeeded," Ianto said with as much of a smile as he could muster. "I never thought you wouldn't find out. I...relied on your mercy when you did."
That got the first honest laugh Ianto had heard from Jack all day, even if it wasn't a very big one, more of a chuckle, really. "You figured if the going punishment for hiding a Cyberman in the basement was a suspension, whatever I came up with for giving Gwen--what exactly did you give Gwen?"
"A GPS with the location of the facility," Ianto replied, almost weak with relief that Jack's sense of humor seemed to be returning. The nausea receded a little.
"A GPS? Gwen? This isn't Tosh we're talking about! You couldn't just give her a Post-It?"
"I suppose I could have. But I could be pretty sure she wouldn't lose a GPS in all those pieces of paper on her desk, but a Post-It..." And it wouldn't have his handwriting. He knew she'd figure it out in time, but he didn't want her finding it and running right to him and saying, "Is this from you?" Of course, he figured she'd find it the next day, not that night, while he and Jack were in the greenhouse.
Jack laughed again, almost flopping onto his desk. "What am I going to do with you, Ianto?"
"Normally I'd have a few suggestions, Jack, but right now I'm fresh out of ideas."
Jack looked tired too. He said he didn't need to sleep, but sometimes he did, anyway.
After another long moment, Jack finally took a small sip of the coffee and made a face.
"I could warm it up for you," Ianto offered eagerly.
Jack shook his head, pushed back from the desk, and stood up slowly. "Sometimes," he said dramatically, "I very nearly feel my age." He pointed towards the hatch to his quarters. "Bed. Now."
Ianto had no energy left to keep the look of surprise off his face.
Jack laughed. "To sleep. I think we both need it, and...I don't want to be alone tonight."
So apparently he was forgiven. Though Jack would probably come up with some kind of punishment later. It might not be work-related, however; what was Jack going to do, make him clean up Weevil shit? He did that every day already. Jack could get very creative in the punishment department.
He'd worry about it later. Right now, he just wanted to sleep--and after what he'd just heard, and the memories of his own loss, he was glad not to have to be alone either.
Jack didn't actually sleep, Ianto was fairly certain, but at least neither of them had to be alone. Ianto eventually drifted off for a mercifully dreamless few hours. He wasn't surprised to wake up alone.
OoOoO
Jack was gone the next day when Gwen came in; Ianto smiled at her, and she spoke to him, at least, but she was still very subdued and didn't seem to want to talk. Ianto gave her the distance her slow, tight movements seemed to ask. Jack returned an hour or so later, sweeping dramatically into the tourist office as he usually did; Ianto wondered if he made a grand entrance even when the office or the Hub was completely empty. He could always review the CCTV footage and find out.
"You, me, Gwen, conference room, five minutes," Jack said as he strode past Ianto.
So he collected Gwen, and they walked into the conference room five minutes later, but Jack wasn't there yet.
"He went and rectonned her, didn't he?" Gwen said in a tone somewhere oddly caught between accusation and resignation as she slumped into a chair.
Ianto shrugged. Jack would tell her soon enough, and they could have the argument then. Unless something had come up that required Jack's attention, in which case this wait could get uncomfortably long.
"So how's Rhys these days?" he asked, hoping she wouldn't call him on changing the subject so obviously.
Gwen's face crumpled, and for a horrifying moment Ianto thought she might cry. "He's good," she said with a forced smile. "He...I've let him down horribly these last few days, and he was all concerned for me last night, and..." She trailed off, pressing her lips together.
"He's a good man," Ianto said. He'd been shocked when Jack allowed Gwen not to retcon Rhys, but nothing bad had come of the decision; if anything, Gwen seemed the happier for it, and it made the whole wedding mess a little bit easier. Of course, maybe if they had retconned Rhys before, they wouldn't have ended up trying to have a wedding with Gwen looking like she was about to pop with an alien baby and so hyped on hormones that she convinced them all to make the wedding happen right away instead of telling everyone she'd got food poisoning and delaying a week, which would have been his suggestion, had anyone been interested.
Gwen nodded emphatically. "Look," she said nervously, "I should thank you..."
Ianto shook his head. "I'm not sure you want to do that; Jack told me...what you saw. And heard. And about...Jonah's mother. I'm sorry. I think I probably shouldn't have." He still wasn't sure what he should have done, but he probably hadn't done it.
He had to ask, "Do you think his mother will be all right? And what will Jonah think when--if she doesn't come back?" He hastily corrected himself, not wanting to admit that Jack was going to retcon Nikki Bevan, doubtless already had.
Gwen sighed. "I don't know. She took it pretty badly. And Jonah? Maybe now he finally believes he's home; he hasn't, the whole time he's been here. But I'm not sure he's--I'm not sure he has a strong enough grip on the here and now to remember her visit and believe it was real."
Ianto didn't know how to answer that, so he checked his watch, even though he knew exactly what time it was and just how late Jack was.
Gwen took a deep breath and pushed her hair back from her face. "Honestly, Ianto, I don't think we made things worse; they were so bad to start I'm not sure we could! And maybe, just maybe... Anyway, I do need to say that I really appreciate what you did. I should have thought of this before, but--did you get in trouble for it?"
He could smile at that. "I got a stern talking-to."
Gwen smiled back tentatively. "And about the other night..." Her smile widened, though her hands fluttered nervously over the table. "I didn't mean to walk in! I had no idea!"
Ianto was glad to move to a safer topic. "Really, it's all right. We should have reset the Hub alarm; I'm afraid I was a little...distracted."
Gwen giggled.
"It's probably a good thing you didn't come a few minutes later, though," Ianto added with deliberate diffidence, face down towards the table, just barely looking at Gwen.
As he'd hoped, Gwen's eyes widened. Her hands flew to cover her mouth as more giggles poured out. "Oh, God!" she choked.
"Not that Jack would have minded," he added. He decided not to mention that it was just luck he'd been away from Jack when she'd phoned him on his mobile later that night, or it could have been a very interesting conversation indeed.
Her whole body was still shaking when Jack walked in.
"Did I miss something?" he asked with a cocky grin. He probably knew full well what he'd missed. Ianto wondered if he'd been eavesdropping from just down the hall.
Gwen's giggles vanished more abruptly than Ianto expected. "You retconned her, didn't you," she said, more as an answer than a question.
Jack looked at Ianto, eyebrows going up just for a moment. It seemed a significant look; Ianto hoped it meant "I know you didn't tell her" rather than "We'll talk about this later too." He looked back at Gwen. "As a matter of fact, I didn't."
"You didn't?" Ianto made no effort to hide his surprise.
"But she didn't want to know!" Gwen said. Her arms were braced against the table as if to support her.
"And she's still pissed, but right now she's probably more pissed at me for offering her the out than at you for telling her the truth, if that's any consolation," Jack said, walking past Ianto to the seat at the head of the table.
"You gave her a choice?" Ianto asked, only now wondering why Jack hadn't sent him to find some pretense to slip her the drug. He'd done that sort of thing before.
"We know retcon isn't a hundred percent," Jack said, slouching in his chair. "Gwen remembered when we first used it on her. Nikki has awfully strong emotions here, and we know she's incredibly persistent--all those hours and hours, watching footage of events."
"I didn't tell you that!" Gwen exclaimed. "You wouldn't even listen to me that long!" She glanced at Ianto.
Ianto nodded.
"I figured she deserved the choice." Jack studied his own hands on the table in front of him. "I--if it were my son, I'd want to know."
Did Jack have any children? Ianto wondered suddenly. He'd once mentioned being pregnant; Ianto had assumed at the time he was joking. Of course, a lot of things he'd once thought were jokes had later turned out not to be.
"And I don't think she's any risk," Jack added.
Ianto had to object to that. "She's started a support group! What if she tells other parents, other family members?"
"She won't," Gwen and Jack said, almost in unison. Gwen frowned at Jack, but he looked steadily at Ianto.
"But retcon is policy!" slipped out before Ianto could stop himself.
Gwen looked at him like he was crazy.
"I make the decisions and the policies," Jack said firmly. "And this time, it doesn't apply. We have containment on the information. If I tried retcon and it didn't quite take, Nikki could start searching all over again. She knows things aren't quite right, she can't remember the details, she goes back to PC Andy, who, if I'm not mistaken, knew that Gwen was headed out to Flat Holm. He gets suspicious that she seems to be missing memories. Pretty soon, we've got the island swarming with cops, and we have a hell of a lot more retconning to do."
"The rules keep changing, and I can't keep up," Ianto muttered, more to himself than to anyone else.
Jack laughed, and Ianto couldn't decide if that made him feel better or worse.
"Besides, last night you were lecturing me on not following orders and policies mindlessly!" Jack added.
"Hardly a lecture--" Ianto started, but Jack cut him off just as Gwen's eyebrows started to go up.
"I think it's time we had a little talk about chain of command here," Jack said, pressing his palms to the table.
Gwen's eyebrows disappeared into her hair, although, really, they didn't have far to go to do that. She tossed an apologetic look at Ianto and took a deep breath. "Is this where we write a thousand times, 'Jack knows best and I will listen to Jack'?"
Jack laughed out loud. Good to know his sense of humor had fully returned--even if it was sometimes a bit annoying. And difficult. "I hadn't thought of that one! I'll keep it in mind! I've gotta say, I never thought I'd hear those words coming from PC Gwen Cooper!"
Gwen's smile looked a little too fake. "I didn't say I believed it."
Jack continued grinning. "And you, Ianto?"
Ianto stiffened a little. "As I said last night. I don't want to make any promises I might not be able to keep."
"You won't agree to obey orders?" Jack said seriously.
Hadn't they just been through this last night? "I won't agree to obey mindlessly."
Gwen's eyes darted between them nervously, open wide as only she could do. If Jack didn't fire Gwen for all her insubordination, he sure as hell wasn't going to fire Ianto. Ianto still didn't want Gwen to witness this argument.
"If I give you an order, I expect it to be followed. If you have a problem, you talk to me. Got it?"
Ah. He could see a way out of this dead-end. "Yes, Jack. I've got it. I ought, perhaps, to remind you that I did not in fact violate any orders you gave me."
If looks could kill, Ianto would have gone straight from the conference table to Owen's autopsy table. And Gwen's eyes got still bigger, though he wouldn't have thought that was possible.
He continued, "If you're going to accuse me of violating orders, Jack, I think you need to be more explicit in giving the orders in the first place."
He got the blinding grin as he'd hoped. "I can do explicit." Jack's eyebrows moved suggestively, if eyebrows could be said to do such a thing.
Gwen hiccupped, or something.
Jack's attempt to put a straight face back on as he turned to face Gwen wasn't entirely successful. Gwen still had those huge open eyes, which surely didn't help Jack's demeanor.
"I should have trusted you more, Jack, and I'm sorry," Gwen said in a rush, the words almost running together. "But I still think we did the right thing, and the fact that Nikki wouldn't take the retcon means--"
"The fact that Nikki didn't take the retcon means I'm getting soft," Jack said with a tinge of disgust, "as does the fact that I'm not retconning you both and dumping you on the street!"
"There's also the fact that he can't stand anyone else to make the coffee anymore," Ianto whispered across the table to Gwen, bringing a smile back to her face.
"Do you mind?" Jack said, turning back to him.
"Oh, sorry. Still trying to be stern. Right." Ianto tried to look appropriately chastened.
A small chuckle escaped Jack. "You two are getting all the nastiest assignments this week, I'm telling you." It might have been frightening in the right tone of voice, with the right expression, but Jack was so far from threatening at the moment that Ianto couldn't help himself.
"It will make such a change from my usual plum assignments," Ianto said as an aside to Gwen, who began shaking with suppressed laughter.
"Oh, for God's sake! I'm going to bring the others in to tell them about Flat Holm. They don't need the details, but they ought to know--in case, you know, anything ever happens." Jack stood up. "Can you two pull yourselves together while I get Tosh and Owen?"
"I think so," Ianto said.
Gwen sat very straight and folded her hands and shook ever so slightly.
Jack blew out a disgusted breath and went to get the others.
Gwen giggled for a moment after Jack had left, but then she ducked her head again so that her face was mostly hidden behind her hair, and Ianto knew she was thinking of Jonah and Nikki again.
Tosh followed Jack back in, carrying her mug, and took a seat by Gwen before looking around curiously. Owen sauntered in right behind her, hands in his pockets, and sat down next to Ianto. He looked around too.
"Oh, I'm short a coffee! Ianto, could you...?"
Ianto was already on his feet before he remembered. "You're dead! You don't drink..." He dropped back into his chair, annoyed.
Owen laughed. "Told you he was off his game, Tosh."
Jack smirked at him. "I am so not going to let you forget that one, Ianto."
Owen was positively beaming. It was very strange how being dead improved his temperament.
Tosh still looked nervous, and she stayed that way throughout Jack's concise briefing on Flat Holm. They all knew that things and people came through the Rift, but what he hadn't told them before was that occasionally, someone would come through who'd been sucked through the Rift.
"Sometimes they've been gone months, sometimes years; one of the patients fell through in 1817 and just came back a few months ago. She still can't get used to the technology we've got. We have to keep her in a special room without plastics and synthetics; they make her a little crazy."
"So if we ever go out expecting a Weevil and find a person again, we now know they may have fallen through the Rift in the first place," Owen summed up.
"Right," Jack agreed. "It doesn't happen often, but, as I told Gwen, it has been increasing the last year or so."
"Since we opened the Rift ourselves?" Ianto asked guiltily.
Jack's head bobbed noncommittally. "It might have picked up a little before that, but yeah, it may be related."
"Shit," Owen said, probably voicing what everyone thought.
"But isn't it better to get them back than to lose them forever?" Gwen asked, and Tosh nodded.
Jack nodded too.
"And is there no hope?" Gwen pressed on. "Maybe some of them..."
Jack smiled. "And that's why we aren't interfering with any of these open cases. Even if we know they've been sucked through the Rift, maybe one day we'll get someone back who hasn't been gone too long, or hasn't been too traumatized, and they can go home. The ones we've got now? No. I'm sorry, but none of them are at that point, and I don't think they ever will be."
Gwen looked hopeful again. "So maybe not all those missing people whose pictures I filed away are gone forever." Ianto knew she was older than he was, but somehow she looked younger than he did--or younger than he felt anyway. She'd be all right. What had Hart said? "Pretty and resilient."
"I can't give you any assurances," Jack said. "We have no way of knowing until it happens."
"So that's all for now," Jack said, standing. Ianto automatically rose to his feet as well. "Except that Tosh found a police report that sounded suspiciously like a smash-and-grab involving a Blowfish."
Gwen rolled her eyes as she and Tosh stood as well.
"And since you and Ianto worked so well together on this little project, Gwen, I figure you two can go find yourselves a Blowfish!"
"The last one shot a man and took a bloody hostage!" Owen interjected.
Jack pivoted to face Owen. "So you're volunteering to help?"
"No! No, just making an observation." Owen stood up hastily.
"That Blowfish had ingested a pretty high dose of cocaine," Ianto noted. "Maybe we could post an intergalactic travel advisory to avoid the harder drugs while on Earth."
"You do that, Ianto. As soon as you've caught this one." Jack patted Ianto's shoulder on his way out of the room. "But you're right. They're not usually that violent."
Ianto stared. "But we've only ever encountered the one! How do you know?"
"First one you've encountered. Doesn't mean it was the first one I'd encountered," Jack said on his way out the door.
"I opened a file on his species right after you got back, but you never said anything about having met them before! How am I supposed to keep the records if you don't give me all the information?"
Jack's laugh floated back along the hallway as he walked away.
The others had gone before Gwen said, "So this is our punishment?" with a smile.
"I hope this doesn't take too long. I have alien artifacts to catalogue, and apparently now an alien species file to update--if he's willing to tell me something this time," Ianto grumbled, though he really felt tremendous relief. Jack didn't bear grudges. If he said they were getting the worst assignments all week, they'd get the worst assignments all week, but then it would all be done.
"Right. If we take too long, you might have to stay late in the Hub!" Gwen said with exaggerated innocence. Now she was making her eyes big and round on purpose. Unless before it had been on purpose too... "Quite a hardship, you and Jack working late together at the Hub again."
"I'll be sure to set the door alarm this time," Ianto promised.
"Please do." She put a hand on Ianto's arm and stopped him before they left the room. "I think he's a bit easier, for having shared this."
Ianto nodded slowly. "I hope so. It--he really is doing his best, Gwen." He shied away from telling her just how upset Jack had been. If she hadn't seen it herself, well, it wasn't his to share.
Gwen sighed. "I should have known. But how can I know what he doesn't tell us? He shouldn't carry it all himself anyway. Even if he can't die, he's still human."'
"That's why he's got us, right?" Ianto smiled as they walked back into the main Hub.
"Right. Someone has to keep him anchored."
And then Tosh was giving them information on Blowfish sightings, and Jack reappeared to crack more jokes before they could leave the Hub, and Ianto felt like perhaps they hadn't done so badly after all.
FIN