When Ianto had emerged from Jack's office, Owen leaned over to Gwen.
"Now there's someone that doesn't look like they've just had a quick shag."
Gwen gave him a disbelieving look, half irritation, half guilt. Any bollocking Ianto had just had was that bloody GPS's fault, after all. "Just shut up, Owen."
He gave a low whistle. "Touchy. Sounds like someone else is in need of…"
"Finish that sentence and I'll do something permanent."
"Alright, alright!"
She waited until Owen had lost interest, returning to whatever it was that he was looking at, before she slipped away, finding the man she was looking for.
"Ianto I'm so sorry," she started.
"It's fine," he insisted, clicking on another of the websites that Torchwood monitored for security leaks.
"It's really not, I never meant to make things… you know, difficult."
He looked at her sidelong, then. "Unless I've been retconned, you never asked me to do anything," he pointed out.
"But you still didn't have to do anything, and you did."
He stopped then, fingers moving from the mouse to the cup of coffee – for once, his own – to warm them idly on the diminishing heat, and looked at her.
"I did it because Jack wouldn't, and I thought you deserved to know."
There was nothing but honesty in his face. Sometimes Gwen had trouble reconciling her view of Ianto as the nice, honest, Cardiff lad with that of the man who'd betrayed them all. It was hard to remember that he'd hidden terrible secrets when he refilled your coffee in that mid-afternoon lull and made sure you didn't run out of staples.
"Why?" she pressed. "You must've known…" She waved her hand in the general direction of Jack's office, where a shadow paced broodingly. In her uncharitable days, she wondered if the lighting of that office was deliberate.
Ianto shrugged. "You weren't going to let it go, no matter what Jack said. I just sped you on your way."
Gwen wanted to point out that if he was so sure of that, he wouldn't have said anything; wouldn't have risked Jack's anger on a dead cert. She wasn't sure what was between them, wondered if they did, sometimes, but Ianto's loyalties weren't open to doubt. Not now, anyway.
"Besides, if you don't care about them, who will?" he continued, clicking on a post that – from what Gwen could see – was either about Weevils or teenagers, and scanning through it quickly.
She wanted to ask him if he'd lost anyone like that; a school friend, a relative, a neighbour. The dad who'd taken him to a cinema of a Saturday, maybe. But that wasn't Torchwood. For a moment she thought fuck Torchwood and drew breath, but then realised the futility of asking Ianto, of all people, if he'd lost anyone to the place. She could answer that one by herself.
Instead, she said, "Did you know Jonah's mum won't see him again?"
The finger scrolling down the page paused for a second, and Ianto's gaze dropped from the screen for a second, looking at thin air yet not focusing on anything as a flash of something foreign crossed his face. Then he smiled at her, briefly, tightly. "Give her a few days. You'd be surprised at what people can live with, for the people they love."
Shit. Shitshitshit.
More questions she couldn't ask, more wounds she'd accidentally reopened. Had it been like that for him? For any of it, all of it? Had he started with revulsion and rejection, and turned it round to love and duty? What had he done because he'd wanted to, and how much was forced by circumstance?
Bloody Torchwood.
"We see the worst bits, in this job," he continued, filling the growing silence.
It was easy to forget the woman who believed so desperately, the woman who'd brought together the hopes of those who'd lost, when you saw her reject that which she searched for. You only saw the son's pain as his mum shrank from him in horror.
She wanted to tell him that it was alright. That Jack would forget the undermining of his authority, that there was something there that made just this, this one thing, personal. She wanted to tell him that she was trying to see the hall filled with people, Jonah in his mother's arms for the first time in a lifetime of hell.
But believing was hard, when you saw so much unflinching truth. When Jack wouldn't say why this one seemed to push his buttons, why he'd made the hiding of the lost his little side project; he'd hidden it throughout Torchwood's history, she'd been told, that nursing home for those tortured by time itself. She'd been brought to Torchwood to be the one who believed, and it was hard to admit that it got more difficult – truth by hard, cold truth.
She settled for picking up the cooling coffee cup. "Refill?"