Author's Note: This is it! The long-awaited (by somebody, surely) prequel I promised to 'New Day'. It's not necessary to read that one before or after reading this, although I think that fic's pretty snazzy by itself, and I would definitely take a look if I were you.
I hope this meets expectations, it's been in my head for several months. Tell me what you think.
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He doesn't regret it until hours later. He's too pissed. Because it's all he can do to keep his team alive under normal circumstances, they don't need any help getting killed from one of their own fucking colleagues.
"You brought this down on us," he says, each word measured and ever so heavy with disgust and loathing. "You hid her. You hid yourself from us." Because that's really the important thing, right, Jack? "Now it's time to stand as part of the team."
Gwen's hand on his shoulder- he knows it's hers, who else would, really?- warns him that maybe a gun to the face isn't the best way to engender loyalty, but he can't slow down this momentum, can't calm down with that traitor staring him in the face, distraught but defiant through it all, denying the truth.
"The girl you loved has gone," he says, and it's true. "Your loyalty is to us now."
And Ianto shakes his head. "You can't order me to do that."
So fucking sure of himself! Like it's Jack who's being unreasonable, like this is a joke. Jack can't contain his fury.
"You execute her or I'll execute you both!"
And Jones stares back. "I won't do it," he says. "You can't make me."
It reminds him of what Carys said: 'The words say you will but the eyes say you won't.' Just in this case everything about Jones is reading true, and his eyes are saying there's not a single thing Jack can say or do to make him change his mind. Even if Ianto's words about having nothing to lose aren't true, it is clear that there is nothing in the world he could lose that would mean more to him than the monster which has invaded Jack's home.
"You like to think you're a hero," Ianto taunts, even as Jack is figuring it out. "But you're the biggest monster of all."
It's abruptly ridiculous. Jack stares into the condemned man's eyes, already knowing how this will end. "I'm giving you ten minutes. Then we're coming in."
He steps back, lets Ianto see them all, together, standing against him. Showing him the strength behind his words. Ianto hesitates. "Pick it up," Jack spits at him.
If you're going to betray us for the last time, do it with some fucking dignity, he thinks.
Ianto takes a last look at them all, then scoops up the fallen weapon and disappears into the Hub.
"How can you ask him to-"
Jack spins around, enraged. "I don't need your opinion," he snarls, despite Tosh's disbelief and Gwen's complete shock. How can they question him, when they have just seen what they're up against? What he's trying to save them from? The mindless follower of a creatures whose sole purpose is to rape human bodies and demolish their minds.
Jack breathes deeply, his ragged breaths loud in the stuffy tourist office. Of course, when he'd come up with this plan, he hadn't considered that they'd all have to stay here, out of the action, for ten minutes.
Gwen makes a noise that sounds horrifically like a choked-back sob. Jack doesn't look up from the spot he's chosen on the floor. He can't. He can't think about anything but his rage, his desire to defend his team against anything and anyone, even if it's one of their own.
"I can't believe you just did that."
He doesn't look up, even though it's Tosh speaking and not Gwen. Gwen, he knows, would accept him ignoring her, at least for a while, would consider it part of his mysterious charm. Tosh, on the other hand, has known him longer than that. She doesn't demand attention very often, but when she does, she expects people to pay attention.
"He has been trying to save her life for months. You can't possibly expect him to kill her now."
He doesn't respond, doesn't even move.
"Unless… Oh my God, Jack… You knew!"
"Knew what, Tosh?" Gwen asks. Her voice has that edge, that edge that comes when someone feels like they can't take any more. Jack knows better. He knows exactly how much they can take, and this isn't it.
He finally takes his gaze away from the floor, and the look in his eyes appears to confirm every one of Tosh's fears. She shakes her head in denial. "You know he won't do it. You've sent him down there, knowing that there's no possible way he'd kill her, and you're going to execute him afterwards!"
Her shouts have angered him again. How dare she question him? "I would have to execute him anyway!" he fires back. "He has endangered the entire planet! He lied to all of us!"
"He didn't mean to hurt anyone, Jack!" Gwen says, standing up from her slump on the far wall. "He was just trying to save the woman he loves, you heard him!"
"I'm with Jack," Owen announces. The girls turn to stare at him accusingly, but he shrugs, face contorted into the arrogant scowl that it hold all too well these days. "Sorry Gwen, but you haven't seen what those things do. We went to Torchwood One after the battle," he indicates himself and Jack. "Jack's right. Anyone who lets one of those things loose deserves death, girlfriend or not."
"Didn't it ever occur to you that he needed to save her?" Gwen fires back. Jack can see the light coming back into her eyes, the one that always blazes as she challenges him, when she stands up for her principles. Jack admires her idealism, but it doesn't belong in this circumstance. "If you're right, if Torchwood London was that terrible, maybe he needs to save something. It's like, PTSD, or something," she looks at Tosh for support.
Tosh is still staring at Jack, though. "I would have thought you would understand," she says, voice low enough that it's almost a hiss. "I would expect you, of all people, to look at his situation rather than his crime. I thought you would see him for who he is instead of what he's done."
The moment he realized what she was referring to Jack had to fight the urge to step over and pull her into his arms. It's an instinct that has been hardwired into him since he first got her out of that UNIT prison, one which he hasn't come up in years. But she's standing proud, not needing his help, and, if the emotion in her shining eyes is anything to go by, not wanting his help either.
She looks at the others. Gwen's chin is up and she meets Tosh's gaze with solidarity. She doesn't know about Toshiko's past, all she heard was the Japanese woman sticking up for Ianto. Owen looks wary; he does know, but he's never heard her talk about it.
Tosh spares a last glance at Jack. "It's been ten minutes," she says, and leads the way into the Hub.
The lift ride is filled with silence, hostile silence. Jack is smoldering, but he can't say anything, because this really is nothing like Tosh's situation. The most obvious reason is that the sonic modulator, while a dangerous weapon, could not have been used to convert the entire human race into soulless machines. Toshiko's mother was under threat, yes, but it was actually physically possible to save her: Lisa's condition could not ever be reversed, it simply is impossible. Anyone who knows the first thing about Cybermen knows that, and from the looks of Ianto's set-up downstairs, he'd definitely done the research.
But when they get to the main Hub and see the pizza boxes, it's Tosh who cries out "Oh no, Annie!" and leads the way to the Cyberwoman's lair.
Of course Jack feels pity when he sees the Cyberwoman yanking Ianto around by his dick, anyone would. But when the thick idiot actually hugs her is when Jack knows, he just knows that he's going to have to kill Ianto Jones. Even if he wasn't a traitor, a lying backstabbing remnant of every arrogant prick from Torchwood One, Jack knows he'll never believe that Jack is only doing what he has to do when he shoots her.
The others follow his lead, even Tosh and Gwen. He knew they would; he was right the entire time, after all.
Once she falls, Ianto steps forward to face them all. Gwen can't even look at him, and Jack knows he's not misreading the hatred in Ianto's face through the shock that's obviously there in droves. But he's not a cruel man, not anymore, so he allows Ianto a minute to mourn his lover.
When the allotted time is up, Jack steps forward and pulls Ianto to the feet by his collar. The man makes no move to resist, but none to help, either, so picking him up is moving complete deadweight. Jack shakes him with the hand that isn't holding his gun.
Ianto makes eye contact with an expression that's nothing short of hatred. "Are you going to kill me now, sir?" he nearly spits in Jack's face.
"Don't tempt me," Jack growls back, shoving Ianto toward the entrance to the room.
Ianto stands his ground. "If you're going to do it, then do it," he says, his voice broken.
Jack raises his gun to forehead level. Ianto doesn't close his eyes, but leaves them open, burning into Jack's. His hand is tightening on the trigger when Ianto's eyes flick to the side and land on Lisa.
Jack hesitates. He really is just a stupid boy in love. Jack could retcon him, let him live a peaceful life. Isn't that what the Doctor would want?
"Get out of here," Jack orders, face twisted. He takes his aim off Ianto's forehead.
The boy sneers at him. Fucking sneers. "What, you can't do it? You can kill an innocent woman but not me? You call yourself a hero, you call yourself a role model?" he rages.
Jack refuses to take this from someone whose life he has stupidly spared. "Get out!" he bellows, stepping forward and shoving Ianto so had he nearly falls to the floor. "I don't want to see your face here ever again! If you come anywhere near Torchwood, I'll report you to the Committee!"
Jones pales even more than he already was, impossibly pale. There's blood all over his once-pristine suit, and he stumbles as he backs away from Jack. Owen and Gwen and Tosh step aside as he leaves, his harsh breaths and aborted sobs echoing through the stone hallway along with his heavy footsteps as he begins to run.
Jack can do nothing but watch him go, heaving breaths. There is silence for a long time after the sounds of Jones have disappeared. The smell of cordite hangs in the air from Jack's Webley; the other guns all use smokeless powder, which means that the stench of blood and metal and wrongness from the cyberconversion unit stings Jack's nose. Eventually, he turns, as though his limbs are weightless, to take in the view.
Lisa's skin was dark brown when Jack saw it in the emergency lights of the Hub. Now there's hardly and inch that isn't covered in blood, slimy, slow-moving, unhealthy blood that sticks and pools. Her- no, it's, this stopped being a woman long ago- it's neck is at an odd angle, the skull ruined.
Annie's almost the opposite. Her clothes are rumpled, but her white shirt is clean besides the marks left behind by the thick torrent of blood that has stained the front of her pants, her socks and trainers. That blood still seeps out of the wounds, despite the fact that her heart surely stopped several minutes ago. The awful lines on her forehead are throw into sharp relief against her white skin, highlighting the agonized expression she died with, eyes wide and confused.
Like the abandoned tanks left behind on the battlefield, the conversion unit shines in the dim light of the room, undamaged. Jack can almost feel the heartless intelligence that created the machine, and a surge of hatred for it coils inside of him.
"Let's get this out of our home," he resolves. "Owen, Gwen, you move the bodies to Autopsy. Toshiko, help me take this apart."
They obey, not speaking, moving silently and without expression. Gwen is crying, is still crying when she and Owen come back, hands red, for Lisa's body. Tosh won't meet his eyes as they detach the unit from the Hub's power supply, doesn't speak when he comes back with a lantern for the now dark storage room.
Once they've removed enough that there's no chance the unit could function again, Jack tells her to stop. "We've done enough," he says quietly.
For just a moment, she glares at him, and he can see tears on her cheeks, too. "No, Jack. You have."
She leads the way to the main Hub.
When they get there, Gwen is sitting on the steps to the medical bay, a pile of bloody wet wipes beside her and cleaning her hands with another. She looks up at them with wide, scared eyes, then goes back to watching Owen inspecting Lisa's body on the table. Annie is on a cot that's been set up to the side; it's been a while since they've had two corpses at once.
"Tosh, help him make sure she's dead," Jack orders, gently. "The rest can wait for tomorrow."
He turns to his office, planning to fetch a blanket for Gwen, who looks as though she's going into shock. He hears a scuffle as she stands behind him.
"And what are you going to do about Ianto?" her voice rings out into the Hub.
Jack closes his eyes. He just wants to have a few minutes to rest after the crisis before he has to make any more decisions. A few quiet minutes for regrouping, is that too much to ask?
But he's been in wars, and he knows that you don't always get a minute. He turns back. "I don't know, Gwen."
"Maybe he'll take care of himself for us," Owen says darkly from the medical bay.
"You are sick, Owen, sick!" Gwen shouts. She whips back to Jack. "Is that what you're hoping as well, Jack? You want Ianto to just off himself, so you won't have to go through the trouble?"
He doesn't get a chance to answer. He doesn't know what he'd say if he did.
"You asked me what it is to be human, Jack," she reminds him, her finger vicious as it stabs the air in his direction. "You want to know? Being human is loving someone enough to see through their faults. Loving someone enough that you will do anything to save them. Ianto loved that woman," the finger flies out over the chain railing around the medical bay, pointing to the twisted pile of metal and red-stained black flesh that lies on the table. Owen and Tosh have looked up and are watching her, eyes filled with something akin to wonder, but not nearly as optimistic.
"Ianto loved her so much, that he would die for her. That he would hide for months, doing our dirty work, just to give her a chance. A chance to survive."
Gwen steps forward. "And you know what wouldn't be human, Jack? It would be the exact opposite of human, if he were able to kill her after all that. Ianto asked you if you've ever loved anyone that much, that you wouldn't ever give up. Have you, Jack?"
When Ianto asked the question, he was obviously trying to connect with Jack, make him understand in the hope that Jack would side with him and try to help the creature. Gwen's words are a challenge. She stares up at him, hair wild, eyes matching, demanding an answer. "Yes, I have."
He'd died, hadn't he? He'd never doubted. And he'd been waiting ever since.
Gwen lifts her face, her hands fisting by her sides. "And would you be able to kill her?"
He'd been thinking of the Doctor, but Gwen makes him think of Rose. His very soul recoils at the idea of shooting Rose. He tries to imagine her in the metal cage of the Cyberman, and can't.
Gwen is patient. She doesn't move, doesn't speak, as he looks away, into the medical bay, at Lisa. As he tries to imagine blond hair, her wide, smiling lips, white skin. As his mouth opens and then closes and he can feel his expression shift from hard anger to vulnerable. When he looks back Gwen's eyes have softened.
"No," he whispers.
She doesn't say anything for a minute, for which he's grateful. A lesser woman might have pushed the advantage, but Gwen knows that even the great Jack Harkness is human enough that he needs to breath. He can't imagine going back to a time before she was here.
"So what are we going to do?" she eventually asks.
Jack closes his eyes and takes a deep, cleansing breath. Then he directs his attention down into the medical bay. "Tosh, could you help me out up here for a minute?" She nods and puts down the tools she'd been holding and comes up from the medical bay.
Jack turn to Gwen and answers her question. "We find him," he answers.
She catches his arm as he tries to follow Toshiko to her station. "And?" she prompts.
"And what?"
"And we support him through it. He's going to need help, Jack," she reminds him.
Jack swallows, sighs. "Yeah." He checks the time. "Why don't you call Rhys, he must be worried sick about you." He tries to pull of his normal carefree smile, but his face seems to have forgotten how to move that way.
She does slightly better. "Yeah, I will."
Jack walks behind Toshiko and find that she's already called up the CCTV cameras for the Plas. The black and white feeds show Ianto walking away from the Hub, stumbling, one hand holding his side. Jack guesses he'd been hurt when Lisa had thrown him into the Rift pond.
"Can you track him?" Jack asks, more for lack of anything else to say than doubt. Tosh could locate a single pigeon in all of Cardiff, and had, for one case. He knows she'll be able to locate Ianto.
"He's not on the CCTV anymore, but the GPS on his phone is still functioning." Jack swallows at the ire in her voice. She turns around, the GPS program running behind her back, and stares at him through her glasses.
"Were you…" her eyes dance away, and she has to stand up straighter in preparation before she looks at his face again. A horrible feeling spawns in his gut, right next to the dark emotions of the rest of this night. If he's scared Toshiko, actually scared this woman who constantly proves to be so much braver than he could ever expect…
"Were you really going to report him to the Committee?" Tosh asks quietly. "Gwen doesn't know what that is, but… even Owen said he'd just shoot Ianto, rather than hand him over to them."
Jack thinks. When he'd yelled that threat to Ianto, it had been in anger and protectiveness over his team. He'd cast his thoughts out for the worst possibly punishment, and they'd landed on the Committee, the judicial body of Torchwood London that had survived the Battle mostly intact and still had a hand in determining the greater matters of the Torchwood Institution. Anything the Committee did to Ianto would be unthinkably worse than Toshiko's endless incarceration with UNIT.
Jack shakes his head. "I couldn't," he says honestly.
Tosh stares at him for several long seconds, before saying grudgingly "I believe you."
But he's had more than a century to read people, and he can tell that was an 'I wish I could trust you' instead of 'I know you would never do something like that'. The thought that he has destroyed the faith Toshiko has in him- even if Owen still believes Ianto should be dead, even if Gwen is satisfied with his change of heart- if Tosh can no longer trust him… for the first time the situation feels truly out of Jack's control.
"I couldn't Tosh, honestly," he swears. "I could kill him, but I could never subject a member of my team to that, not if all they'd done was-" he stopped.
Tosh looks over her shoulder with a weak smile. "Exactly."
Jack sits in heavily her chair. Jones hadn't acted with malicious intent. He hadn't been acting for greed or pride, or money or revenge. He hadn't sided against Torchwood, he'd just found something more important. The opposite of Torchwood London, where nothing had been more valuable than the cause. He'd even tried to kill the Cyberwoman, had held his gun in her face when he finally realized what it was, but like Gwen had said, he wasn't inhuman enough to pull the trigger on even the last remnants of the woman he loved.
Jack lets out a breath as big as his lungs, and with it, the last of his hate for Ianto's action. He feels forgiveness, and when he looks up, Toshiko is smiling at him.
"I have the address he's at set up in the SatNav. He's inside a residential house."
"Thank you, Tosh," he says fervently. He leans in to kiss her on the cheek as he stands, then rushes to the Torchwood garage.
As he pulls out onto the road behind the wheel of the Range Rover, Jack can see the sun coming up on the horizon. He steps harder on the gas pedal, leaving the last vestiges of dark behind him.
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In case you're reading this chronologically rather than order of publication (lol, I'm C. S. Lewis), here's the link to New Day, the much lighter-toned sequel: fanfiction dot net/ s/ 6556775 /1