Without you
Ianto walked through the bustling thriving street staring blankly ahead. It was night. A year since he left. A year of waiting, wishing desperately for a sign that he might come home, everyday looking for something – anything that might mean his captain was coming back for him, or even thinking of him. He saw Jack everywhere, in his dreams, in busy crowd scenes, and every time he tried to follow him, he always moved further and further away, receding into a mass of vile bodies that signified nothing, and were nothing to him.
Ianto turned abruptly down a side alley, it was beginning to rain, and the swollen droplets soaked his cold skin until he was shivering. He pulled the coat that Jack had bought him one afternoon in Cardiff closer around his thin shoulders and then remembering once again that Jack had left him, to come to this, he ripped the coat off his shoulders and flung it on the cold concrete pavement, slamming his hands against the alley wall. Tears of anger, sorrow and misery coursed down his cheeks and mingled with the rain drops. Ianto remembered how Jack used to kiss the tears away and sooth him form his nightmares, but today, everyday for the past year in fact, his tears dried without Jack.
With the appearance of someone bound to a fate that they don't deserve Ianto pushed through a blue metal door and into a filthy, grimy stairwell. He climbed the stairs three at a time, scared that if he didn't reach his destination soon then he would lose his nerve, and go back to crying himself to sleep at night, serving coffee to a team who didn't notice, and didn't care what happened to him. Ianto reached the top of the stairs and reached for the door handle, looking past the shattered fragments of glass that lay on the stairs, or the crude graffiti that smothered the walls. He held his breath. Closing his eyes Ianto dared to inch his hand towards the icy handle, knowing exactly what he was going to do when he reached the other side and was outside, exposed, alone on the roof of one of Cardiff's tallest buildings. Ianto thought of Jack, and was seized with uncontrollable, reckless desire. He wrenched the handle from its fitting and burst through the door back out into the storm. Ianto sunk to the floor the icy rain soaking him to his skin, he focused on Jack, thinking of nothing else but his lover, his friend until he could feel the earth turn beneath him. Stars gleamed and the moon glowed down upon him, reflected in the dead lonely eyes of a man who couldn't see anything but the face of his long lost love. The silver of the moon seemed to dribble down over Ianto's eyelids as he thought of Jack. Tides changed, oceans crashed, babies cried, crowds roared. The world around him seemed to be building to a cataclysm of intense feeling and the noise raged and stormed through Ianto's body. Through a soul that was broken and scarred.
Suddenly Ianto stood up, breathing deeply. He clenched his fists and took several steps backwards from the low wall that surrounded the edge of the rooftop. The city around him was silent now, but the tide still ebbed and flowed across the sandy bay. Some things he had no control over. God knows Jack was one of those things. Like the tide he had turned away from Ianto, and Ianto had no way of pulling him back until he was ready, until he wanted to. But Ianto couldn't live much longer without Jack. Through a blur of salty teardrops Ianto said a quiet prayer, to who, he wasn't sure; "Jack," he began, "Without you…" he faltered his words choking him, how could he possibly even begin to describe what being without Jack had done to him. Great spasms of grief consumed him until he was able to speak again. "Without you, the world still turns, tides still change, coffee still gets made, Gwen still argues with Owen, Owen still doesn't notice Toshiko, life goes on. Jack. But I, I can't. Ianto glanced bitterly to his right, across the water but then let out a soft laugh, a heartbreaking, cynical release. "Cos I die without you Jack".
Ianto turned and began to run through the rain, away from pain, loss, rejection, misery, from his own sick tormented heart. Ianto reached the edge of the rooftop, and jumped.