Title: Hallet's House elf
Author: caz251
Fandom: Harry Potter/Torchwood
Rating: Pg
Character/Pairing: Ianto Jones, Lisa Hallet, Team Torchwood
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or Torchwood.
Summary: Ianto was not who or what the team thought.
AN: Written for longliveianto bingo round 2 Prompt: Elf
Ianto Jones was not what you would expect when looking at an average Welshman, for example the average Welshman didn't catch aliens for a living. Then again, Ianto Jones wasn't actually Welsh, no matter what he may say, nor was he really a man in the terms of mankind. No Ianto Jones was something much smaller than man, but much more powerful. Ianto Jones was known mostly as Jones, and Jones was a Hallet house elf. A house elf was a bonded servant, bound to one family their entire lives, normally that is. Sometimes an elf is freed and they will bond to another family or maybe even an organisation, like the Ministry for Magic or Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. However a house elf would be bonded to one family for life in most cases.
Jones was ninety-nine years old, and was technically still an elfling as far as house elves were concerned, but he had been in full service of the Hallet family since he was in his thirties when the other house elves of his line had been killed in the Grindewald wars. A large proportion of the Hallet family had been killed as well, leaving only one direct line. That direct line had been the one that he had served, a line that had also died out now. His last Mistress, Mistress Lisa, had died only recently, and it was something that he would never forget, partly because he felt like it was his fault.
Mistress Lisa had decided to go into the muggle world after she graduated something that Jones had thought unwise. However, Jones was only a servant, although a much loved one, he had no say in the decisions of his Mistress. Things hadn't been as bad as he had thought they might be though, so for a while he hadn't minded. They had set up home in one of the families properties in London and his Mistress had begun to learn about how to operate in the muggle world. He too had to learn how to navigate around the muggle world, and to make sure that no-one realised what he really was. Jones was lucky in a way that he was the last of his line of elves as it meant that all the power of the generations past was in him alone, rather than spread between a larger group, it meant that he had more magic to draw on to help him. It was rather easy for him to project an image of a human male onto himself, making it seem solid and real to the touch.
He had never really imagined though, that he would need to use his illusion for anything but doing the shopping or acting as his Mistress's butler when she had guests, but it soon became clear that it would be necessary after his Mistress started to work for Torchwood. There was something about Torchwood that set his nerves on edge and while he had tried to warn his Mistress she wasn't as worried as he appeared to be. She finally consented to allow him to go to work with her, so that he would be close if she needed him. They had decided that it would be best if he got an entry level job in Torchwood, he had enough knowledge of the muggle world and how muggles acted that he would be able to get away with that without a proper muggle education. It was obvious that he needed another name, because no matter how eccentric he could pretend to be in Torchwood he would still need both a forename and surname. His Mistress gifted him with the name Ianto, and he started with Torchwood as a junior researcher, to be honest he was a glorified runner for the more senior researchers.
He was hoping that his fears and worries had been unfounded, but then they came, and he knew he had been right. The ghosts, or cybermen, as he later discovered they were, completely wrecked the little world his mistress had constructed for herself. He had been too late to get to his Mistress and she had already been taken by the metal men and partially turned into one. The best he had been able to do was overload the machines circuits with magic and take both the conversion machine and his mistress back to the flat. He then had to figure out how to keep his Mistress alive and await her next set of orders.
His Mistress when she came round seemed to know exactly what to do, and she ordered that he pack the flat, get them new accommodations in Cardiff and get himself a job with Torchwood Three. Ianto really didn't want to go back into Torchwood of any kind, but he couldn't refuse an order from his Mistress. It took a while for him to get the head of Torchwood Cardiff to allow him into his base. Once he had gotten his Mistress installed in the hub she ordered him to work with the team without drawing suspicion and to find a way to help her.
He hadn't been successful though, and had obviously managed to draw suspicion to himself as Jack managed to find his Mistress. The team, his co-workers, people who would have been his friends in another life if he was human, killed his Mistress, executing her. Ianto hadn't been able to help his Mistress and he had felt her death as the bond between them snapped, and his illusion dropped. He was pretty sure that Jack must have had a great deal of knowledge about the wizarding world, because he was explaining what Ianto was.
Now that the team knew they were treating him differently, he had been bound to the Torchwood Institute and was expected to help out more often. The team were a lot more willing to trust him now that they could order him not to reveal their secrets, and he found things were settling down into a routine. That routine may not be the most normal of routines, the aliens they caught ranged from weevils to blowfish. So no, Ianto Jones was not what people would expect of the average Welshman, but then he never had been one in the first place.