Title: Persistence (The Long Goodbye Series)
Author: Syberina5 or tsarcasm
Word Count: 6,358; Complete
Beta: S'wonderful, s'werrific, s'marvelous lj user="freakykat"/lj
Summary: And Ianto could understand love that left you broken.
Disclaimer: Any resemblance to actual persons or chocolate is purely coincidental or… um, totally on purpose.
Author's Notes: This one was supposed to be last in the series but it really needs to be read in the middle; it mingles in both Penitence's timeline and Perspicacity's. If you don't know what a Kinder Egg is—for shame—google it.
per·sist·ence /pərˈsɪstəns, -ˈzɪs-/ [per-sis-tuhns, -zis-] –noun
1. the act or fact of persisting.
2. the quality of being persistent: You have persistence, I'll say that for you.
3. continued existence or occurrence: the persistence of smallpox.
4. the continuance of an effect after its cause is removed.
5. the continuance of a part or an organ, rather than having it disappear in an early stage of development.
Use persistence in a Sentence
See images of persistence
Search persistence on the Web
Also, per·sist·en·cy.
Origin: 1540–50; persist + -ence
—Synonyms
1. See perseverance.
—Antonyms
1. intermittence, idleness, doubt.
Sometimes when Gwen was gone and it was just him and Jack in the hub, he'd stand just the other side of the wall from where Jack was, by the doorway in or near a vent that crossed over. He'd stand there and he'd listen. He'd listen and he'd breathe and if he closed his eyes it was almost like he was in the room with Jack. Like he was just waking up after some energetic bout to Jack entertaining himself while he waited.
So he stood outside the door of Jack's office tricking himself and listening to his ever-restless lover.
But then, instead of laughing at something he'd found in an old record or a new lead that meant trouble or a mistake, Jack grumbled, fumed even. Ianto couldn't ignore what had come over Jack. Since everything had settled the man had become a bigger mystery than ever.
*
Ianto breathed in again as he listened to Jack chuckle at the large chunk of blowfish in Gwen's hair.
"Stuff it, Harkness, or I'll see to it something special makes it into your lunch."
Which only made Jack laugh harder.
Ianto stepped up to Gwen and began to try and extricate the hanks of alien from her hair while she wiped at the substance on her face and hands. "A little rice, some kelp, ginger. It could be quite good." Gwen laughed with him, smiling.
Jack was smiling too but moving away, "Well, now I'm going to find some old, un-tampered-with pizza and lock it in the safe for later."
Gwen threw the rag at him, giggling and moving off to have a proper clean up.
He smiled at her as she rubbed his arm and passed but his mind drifted out with Jack. Jack who was always across the room from him. Jack whose banter was just another way to build the distance. Jack who hadn't touched him since they'd dusted themselves off and gotten back to the business of sorting the mess Jack's past had brought to Cardiff.
They'd clung together then, just over the edge of disaster, made love mercilessly. The saltiness of kisses had been as much sweat as tears, whimpers of pain and rapture, cries of misery and bliss.
But when Jack had finally let him go he'd become this man. A man who only pretended to be Captain Jack Harkness. To have his bravado and zest, his humor and understanding. Even the drive seemed forced.
Ianto ached for this Jack, for the man who lost his brother, his partners, and kept moving as though nothing had changed. Ached as much as he missed the Jack who would ramble pointlessly when he was nervous. But he was never nervous about death. Just life, just the actual business of living.
The way he had stood on the steps down to Ianto's rooms, his hands in his coat blathering about some 1968 battle he'd been in that illustrated his point about the futility of handrails after their first date. Ianto had watched him, face animated, eyes flicking away but coming back to his lips, hands directing.
Ianto'd unlocked the narrow door hidden by the steps leading to the aboveground flats and yanked Jack through it by the lapels of his coat, and, slamming him up against it when they reached the other side, took his lips rough and steady.
"Don't date much, do you sir?"
"Been awhile. This was the part I—"
Ianto had kissed him again, wallowing in how, for once, the butterflies in his stomach weren't uncertainty.
"Remember it yet?"
"Coming back to me," Jack'd gasped and the next complex thought either of them voiced had been his as well. "I thought good girls weren't supposed to put out on the first date."
They'd laughed and Ianto had rolled up on an elbow to watch Jack's face. "Doesn't mean I'm not good," he'd drawn out, "just means I'm easy."
"Oh, Ianto Jones," Jack's eyes had gone far away though the man was right beside him, "easy you are not." He'd reached up a hand, wrapped it around Ianto's neck, dragged a thumb down his cheek as their eyes connected. Both very much together in that place, happy to be. The kiss had taken a moment but was simple and easy, like sighing in the springtime sun.
He ached for that Jack, too. Missed him.
Wasn't sure he would ever come home.
*
Oh, Ianto Jones, easy you are not.
Yes I am, Jack, he wanted to plead. I'm so easy, so willing that you don't even have to say you're sorry, you miserable wanker. So easy all you'd have to do is touch me. Touch me again and I'm yours. All the pointed silences, all the John Harts, all the disappearing acts in the world. But as long as you touched me I wouldn't care.
Part of him begged Jack to cut him, to slice him open with his letter opener, to let his blood pour out all over the floor so that Ianto could stand there still loving him, still wanting him, still wanting Jack to touch him.
Which was just fucked up.
The night he'd realized that, standing there watching Jack ignore him, he started trying to walk away. Not from trying to be there for Jack but from offering up his veins to the man, bartering for more pain.
*
Ianto had seen a Weevil on the walk to his flat—a walk he was forcing himself to take, to get him out of Jack's sphere, out of range of the knife. He started following it through the warrens of back alleys and garages. Several turns later, not worried about being lost, he heard a gasped scream up ahead and sprinted towards it.
He saw the Weevil hiss at a strange statue and curl away, ambling further down the alley.
Ianto approached the statue which appeared to be a personified animal of the felinae or canidae families—its long, angular jaw hinting at more of a snout than a cat would normally bear, the ears larger—wearing clothes with its paws drawn up in defense though not in aggression. He drew closer to look between them and the closed eyed wince of the beast when he kicked something with his shoe. Stooping to inspect it he picked up and popped open a silken, purple purse. He checked the ID inside and looked intently at the thin, somewhat feline face of the smooth complexioned woman.
Returning it all to the way he'd found it he bounded off after the Weevil, failing to catch it.
*
"I thought you went home." Jack stated dismissively high above him while Ianto continued to search for signs of the Weevil on the different systems they were hacked into.
"Did," he said dismissively as well.
"You came back because…"
"Well, it wasn't for your sterling conversation." He waited half a beat to see if Jack, his Jack, would respond. "Spotted a Weevil en route but lost it."
"Really," Jack moved to disbelieving and a position behind Ianto.
"Making its way through this section." He circled the area of closes, alleys, and mews with his finger.
"Lost?"
"Didn't seem like it. Seemed to know where it was headed."
"Well, I know where I'm headed."
Both of them off again, the two of them a team, to track things that went bump in the night. Ianto tried desperately not to take it as more.
*
Jack was farther away than ever. Ianto couldn't help but blame the confrontation they'd had. Ianto had asked, straight out what Jack wanted and Jack—for the first time ever—treated him like a regular employee in some banal office tiff. It had sliced deeper to hear words to the effect of his actions, especially on top of the brief coming together, the kiss, they'd had chasing the Weevil. Jack seemed to want their past affairs behind them, for Ianto to leave them there.
But he kept burning his way through it, the feel of Jack's ribs pushing against his own, his eyes bright with battle glory, the determined twist of his lips. The way they began to move under his, like they always had: with hunger and desperation and glee, want, abandonment.
But then Jack had pulled away, not with a work now, fuck later smack to his ass. Pulled away and left him the way he would have left a stranger on the street he'd tripped over in pursuit.
Ianto, feeling the edge of that knife again, afraid he was bleeding from somewhere, read over the dossier—pouring over the sketches he'd done of the stone, pictures of her and a few of animal characteristics—he'd pulled up the woman whose purse had sat at the foot of a statue which had not been in that alley the last several times he'd checked. There was no CCTV with a conclusive shot to say when the statue had been placed there or removed. It was curious and daunting and much more distracting than making tea or mending the newest, life-threateningly placed rip in Jack's coat. There was nothing of note in her bio or even in those of her extended family. They had a tendency to move often and more or less as a group but beyond that they were all good, quiet citizens.
He went through her credit card statements, through her NHS file. The first showed she had a penchant for meat market bars, the second that she was incredibly healthy or terribly afraid of medics.
Ianto noted a few of said establishments and decided to take a long journey home.
*
He saw her exiting the third bar with an inebriated bloke on her arm. He followed them back to the man's flat outside the centre of the young, hip professionals neighborhood. He tapped the new building's extensive CCTV and watched her stumble under the man's steam and ardor through his door. A few hours later she meandered out alone and hailed a cab home while the sun climbed.
He sighed as the building's door latched behind her and leaned back against the seat. He'd shower and change and head into the hub.
*
He'd followed her again. What was two or three times more? Once he'd lucked out when the gentleman had lived on the ground floor and he could catch glimpses and hear conversation with a little help. It had seemed to be somewhat anonymous, mutual physical exuberance of which Jack would hardily approve.
He'd have called himself crazy for doing it—had on occasion—had it not kept him sane. Tracking this non-mystery woman from one assignation to another, wondering what the attraction to each might have been, what it was that kept their meetings short, singular, and to the point, why he'd yet to see her in the company of friends, kept him from thinking about what was going on with Jack.
Jack who had locked his brother into an endless sleep; the two of them set to live unchanging through eternity, one cold and hard, nearly lifeless, the other filled with so much heat, so much life he was giving it away. Both loving the other so much it had broken them.
And Ianto could understand love that left you broken.
Could understand the pure torture that having a brother—one whose intelligence and existence you questioned, mocked—could be. After all he'd had Owen, hadn't he? Grappled with the teammate, mocked the man, mourned the brother. Twice now.
But Jack wasn't visiting Gray the way he was visiting Owen, the way he was visiting Tosh. Blood turning out to be thicker than Torchwood. Thicker than the hundred some odd teammates Jack had seen die as a member of it.
Which of course it should be. He'd loved his father more, would have bleed more for him than he would have for the head of research in London. However many actual years there had been between Jack losing and finding Gray no other brother had replaced him, not John, not Owen. All the years spent dying in a moldering jacket couldn't wipe out the debt.
It was slowly wiping out Jack instead. Right before Ianto's eyes.
Debt he understood too. All the debt he'd accrued on Lisa's behalf. Lisa, only wanting, waiting for rest, for release, like Gray in his tomb, Jack in his jacket, and Ianto in a liquor sodden bar surrounded by squealing and rutting.
"I've seen you round, haven't I?"
The voice was unbidden and unwelcome in his swirling cavort through misery.
"Doubtful," he said without looking at whoever's light, flowery sent was wafting over him rather than the heavy breath of sugar martinis he'd been greeted with during these stake outs.
"Why not?" He felt her settle lithely onto the bar next to him.
"Not where I usually spend my time." He looked up for the first time and saw—so near—the face he'd been watching for too long.
"Hmm, above the honesty in a place like this?"
"No, honesty I can respect. None of this is honest." He cast a look around the deep, thin room thick with unhappy, braying humanity.
"What is it?"
"Desperate." He looked down into the soda and blackcurrant squash he'd ordered for appearances.
"Is that what you think I am, desperate?" Her fine, angular face with its graceful cheeks and swept brows was open to his appraisal. In it there was no desperation but a calm, neediness, an acceptance, a sadness in the amber irises.
"No. I'd say lonely and for some reason intent to stay that way."
Her head tilted to the side almost imperceptibly and her sorrow welled and came close to spilling onto her lashes before she smiled.
"I'm Janelle," she said with no move to touch him, no move to deepen the places where their bodies were already pressed in the tight bar.
"Ianto."
*
They went back to neither his place or her place at the end of their first real evening and she seemed to almost stumble over the words goodnight, blushing back in her cheeks like a little girl who'd lived on his street had when they were seven and he'd kissed her. He hadn't kissed Janelle. After a lovely evening—in which they discussed her bizarre addiction to Kinder Eggs, his fear of Cadbury as a rule, and a mutual love of a spirited sail in which they had to do nothing to stay afloat or on tack—he held her hand beside the taxicab. He didn't shake it or squeeze. He held it. Looked into her eyes and saw the sadness and awe.
"I'd like to see you again," she said. "Go out with me, tomorrow. Dinner, a play, St. Fagan's, hot dogs on the pier, beer at a pub." She smiled, full and long, her thin, dark lips spreading to reveal narrow, round, glistening teeth.
*
It had been petty but Proper Employer Jack would no longer make blithe remarks about how Ianto spent his time away from Torchwood forcing him to state his true itinerary for the public record. He'd worked a bit on Gwen who still needed the normalcy of office chatter to cover up the absence of those who were so good at providing it to her.
Jack's failure to monitor the date with Janelle at all, even from the hub had thrown him.
Pettiness didn't pay apparently.
And no matter how many times he watched the CCTV recordings of that night, dug through the computer logs, his pettiness—which proved monumental—couldn't find a thing.
*
Janelle let her head, with its thick, dark, burnt umber hair rolling away from her face, fall back as she laughed loudly into the night air. The moon highlighting the planes of her face, the sparks of her eyes. "What did you say?" Her voice rang off the fountain.
"Pardon me." She laughed harder and doubled forward. "I couldn't think of anything else. What would you say to a 94 year old gentleman who's walked naked into the kitchen and sat down beside you, a roly-poly nine?"
"Probably would have screamed for my mum." She wiped a bit of moisture from her eyes.
"See? I showed reserve and good manners."
"Hmm." Sitting up right again, poised, she watched the fountain tickle and splash. "What wonderful first date material. I'd think you'd made it up but you still get red." She bobbled a laugh, "Right here," and ran a finger across his cheek. On cue he felt the heat again race its way after her touch while she laughed deeper.
"Tit-for-tat. My utter embarrassment for yours." He tried to get his face under control and eyed her menacingly.
"Oh, glory. Ok." She stared again at the top tier of the fountain and seemed lost in thought. "Ha," she said. "I've got one." She turned to him. "The worst first date I've ever been on—"
"This one aside, of course."
"Of course—was with a man who seemed to think he was Austin Powers…only Swedish. Every statement ended in 'Baby, yeah' or had at a baby or two in the midst of it." It was Ianto's turn to sheepishly laugh. "He seemed intelligent enough most of the time but he took me to see a Burt Bacharach cover band." He felt his eyes almost cross trying to imagine that. "Only instead of just the 'Illustrious Burt's' music they also played," she cleared her throat, "that amazing American sensation, Britney Spears."
"This is all wonderful but you have yet to be embarrassed."
"I'm getting there, sir. My date—we'll call him Sven as names have been changed to protect my dignity—knew the band apparently and had arranged for me the enormous honor of singing with them… on stage."
"Oh, this is excellent." Ianto scooted down in the bench, put his feet out and watched the dual movie of gracingly inclined Janelle merry but nervous before him and his amusement and nervous and annoyed in front of a bar audience.
"Hmm. Sven had even had the band learn a special number for me."
"What an honor."
"I can barely standup beneath it, even now."
"Well, of course you have to sing the song now."
"No."
"Yes. Naked 94 year old man." She began to laugh again.
"Oh no, you couldn't possibly appreciate the performance without the band. They were half of them on one tempo the other on another and then there was me who was trying to sing it the way it actually is on the record."
"What was it?" She continued to look stately away. "I will torture you. I know precisely to drive wood under your fingernails."
"Which it doesn't disturb you at all to admit."
"I watched a lot of that new reality TV program: Survivor – Guantanamo Bay." She laughed. "I'll dangle Kinder Eggs on strings and lead you round the city until you give in."
She groaned good-naturedly. "Beautiful Dreamer." But then she turned her eyes, still abashed at her own past and merry, on him. "Now you owe me an egg, sir."
"Right this way, madam."
*
"This girl," Jack muttered on Ianto's way out of the office, empty tray in hand, "if she gets turned into a robot you can not stash her in the vaults."
"What about a half-robot?" Ianto only partially turned to see Jack's face sedately going over archived reports.
"No."
"Addicted to Marmite?"
"No."
"Vomiting blood?"
"No."
"The second coming of Christ?"
"No."
"Having—"
"No," Jack snapped his head up, glared for half a second directly into Ianto's eyes and then looked away. "Keep your life out of the hub."
"The way the Gwen does? That you do?"
"Has either of us ever looked like a shining example of a well-balanced life to you?"
"You have a terrible grasp of boundaries." And Ianto walked out feeling better than he had since a building had fallen on him.
*
He had done and hadn't done many things in his life of which he was not proud. Standing, masked, in an alley he knew had no surveillance, with an array of weapons waiting for the woman he'd been spending all of his free time with or investigating was one of them.
It was, he feared, the last straw. He'd dragged out his time with her, waiting to realize that the notion he had about the statue was only his Torchwood credentials at work and she really was just another clueless inhabitant of Earth. That the statue had been loaded into a truck or van or lorry at the far end where there were no camera angles to catch it. Or waiting to be proved right, for her to say or do something, to find something in the perusal of her personal life that said clearly, "Yes, here I'm, an alien in hiding."
But nothing had proclaimed her innocence or her guilt. No solid, rational conviction had been born in him.
So he stood waiting for calm, lonely, lissome Janelle with her open eyes and her curving neck with the purpose of terrifying her. Push her and whatever was inside of her might push back and he would know. And he would know what do to next.
So he did it. Attacked her. Terrified her.
In a split second she changed before him, arm spread against the wall to catch herself as she went crashing towards it, orders not to scream in the air. The shift in the bones nanoseconds before the new, fine fur, turned from ginger to white, hard, seconds before the dress she was wearing was rock as well.
*
He sat high on the catwalk, feet dangling 150 meters over the main floor of the hub. Myfanwy—perched across the maw on a pipe—crooned in her throat again and he broke off half the chocolate bar and lobbed it for her beak. It was gone in a moment while his put a much smaller bit in his own mouth. She clucked her tongue and he tossed the rest of the bar out, let it plummet to the floor while Myfanwy dove for it.
She came back up and around, the air off her wings stirring against his face, too warm and dry to be the bracing sea air he wanted. He tossed another piece into his mouth, not snapping it as handily as she had. Ianto unwrapped a new package for her, wondered if she'd appreciate a Kinder Egg. Doubted her bowels would.
He'd never tried anything but Green & Black's. "Short sighted of me, love. Sorry."
She couldn't nest by him, perch, because of the rails on the catwalk but she flew round again, her wing brushing his leg.
"How really unfair, denying you something for which you might have a great, if undiscovered, love." He lay back against the grate, let the air swim as she soared around him; the two of them at the top of the tower but her still so far above. "Why isn't it anger, oh Myfanwy, that fills your eyes so dark and clear? What have I done to earn your love so fond, so true, oh my Myfanwy? Is it too—"
"Ianto… are you drunk?" Jack was passing by on the lift and without thinking Ianto raised an arm in wave at him as he came closer and sat up to watch him as he sank further away so low as one in a tomb.
His eyes filled and he tipped back again. Bad to cry over Jack's fate, eternal return from death most brutal making him more a Juliet.
"I expected better than drinking on the job from scrupulous Ianto." Jack's voice was clear, close. He must have sent the lift back up.
"Not drunk."
"Right."
"Sugar high. Maybe low. Possibly ODing on serotonin—doesn't seem plausible." Maybe the extreme level, given the amount of cocoa he'd ingested was actually blitzing his system so that rather than feeling incredibly happy he felt even more depressed.
Myfanwy cawed from somewhere, out swooping along. He held out her next chunk then, realizing it wouldn't be very comfortable for either of them for her to take it from his current position, he chucked it mindlessly out. He picked up another of his pieces and ate it.
A bit for the bird. A bite for him.
What was a little more at that point anyway?
"Are you going to be at it much longer or should I plan on not sleeping tonight?"
"You don't sleep," Ianto responded pondering the crossbeams holding up the bricks and paving stones and cobbles above him. "Why don't you go out and visit Owen, Tosh's mother, scare up a Weevil that way you won't be bothered." He slipped another, small piece slowly into his mouth feeling, knowing more than seeing, Jack's eyes on him.
He listened for the lift, for Jack slamming something in his haste to be away from Ianto's knowing but only heard Myfanwy call again and he thought, "Give me your hand, my sweet Myfanwy,/But one last time, to say 'farewell'."
*
"Ianto. You don't look well." Janelle slid a cool hand to his cheek. "What's happened?" The sweet, consolatory concern on her face so clear and wide.
"Nothing dire," he said taking her hand from his flesh, the gathering heat making him a bit sick. "Just over did is all. Paying the piper." He held her hand beneath his on the table, felt the long thinness of the bones there, how intricately they came together and how fluidly the tendons shifted them.
He knew her hands this way but he knew Jack's in every way. Knew the stinging crack of them, the water-like caresses of them, knew their grip, gripe, knew the rhythm they drummed when he was impatient, angry, frustrated, helpless, excited, desperate.
But he knew more about Janelle than free, unfettered access to the archives would ever tell him about Jack. He watched Janelle smile at him in that Nightingale way of certain women. Like Gwen and Tosh and his mother, Lisa. He knew her relationship with her mother was difficult because her mother wanted her to marry, to be settled into a family but not to just anyone. She knew her father had been killed in a hunting accident when she was young and that she had grown up looking to her rapscallion of an uncle. She didn't have any siblings to distract her mother and her cousins, though many, weren't close because of differing opinions on Uncle Vincent. He could see the waves of her life forming out, patterning themselves around the rocks and twigs in her way, rolling smoothly out into the sound and eventually petering off. There was no mystery or deep search with Janelle. He knew her as he would never know Jack; though he knew Jack as he could never know Janelle.
"We…we could go. Do this another time." Her voice nervously lilted, her hand twitching under his.
"No, I've missed you. Just don't mention dessert." She looked at him confused and querying. "Best not to ask."
*
He held her hand all the way home. Arms looped together, hands securing the knot.
They liked to walk. The quiet of the residential streets, the time to talk, to laugh, to let all the other things go. It was the thing he would miss the most.
He deposited her on the steps to her building and kissed her cheek, ending the ritual. But he didn't pull away as quickly, didn't feel her move, but breathed in the perfumed air around her of spring blossoms and breeze the bright scent of a woman rather than the heady scent of a man. Of Jack.
"I don't know what to want from you, Ianto." Tremulous and weak, she curved into his hand as it slid up her back and into the shining hair at her nape. Silken and shivery, his thumb stroked. "I'm afraid of what I'll get."
He pulled back then, just a tad, to see her eyes turned to meet his. They held fear and love and desire and he knew that feeling so well and deeply that he kissed her. Pressed his lips to her long soft mouth and let them go. Felt her hands move up his arms.
The trembling had taken over most of her now, breath and lips shaking against him. "You could," she rasped eventually, "you could come up."
"I could."
"Would you?" Her tone asked something, was not just an invitation.
"If you wanted, Janelle."
She didn't say anything more but lead him up the stairs behind her.
*
He accepted the tea, took a biscuit to be polite, and watched her fight to relax in the dress she'd worn to dinner. "If you'd like," cleared his throat to keep his voice from cracking, "to change, do."
She inhaled deeply but seemed to deflate, anxious to escape. "Yes." She got up and headed to her room in the back. Ianto didn't need to see her slip through the door to know it was a warm eggplant.
He'd searched it in his never ending obsession to know what she really was. He'd taken hair from her brush for DNA and other tests, he'd looked for clothing resembling that the statue had but the substance had obscured so much that he'd had to take random samples. He'd feel worse if those things hadn't proved so helpful in understanding what he was dealing with and far less intrusive—in an invasion—than the tests Torchwood would want to put her through. Even only on suspicion.
He was broken out of half-regrets by the thud of something dropping in the next room. He rose to check on Janelle, pushed the unlatched door just a crack and said her name. He saw just enough to see her spin and go the deathly white of Dover limestone. He pushed it open slowly the rest of the way. Her hands were stretched out to stop him, what he assumed was a dressing gown swinging as she turned quickly.
He frowned and dug into his pocket taking the few steps to her. He ran his fingers over the rough hardness of her cheek, "I'm sorry." He called up the SUV's coordinates, saw it was out on a mission, and started his stopwatch. He left, taking her keys and closing up behind him, already laying out a worst case time line
*
"So you know what I think?" Jack said, boring in as ever while Ianto slunk down the steps—careful to keep to the shadows. "I think you were going along, cutting through an alley to a better place to pick up a taxi and you saw this thing coming at you that looked remarkably like you." He dropped an open file of photos of Janet and other Weevils they'd had in front of her. "Another alien. And rather than fight for turf you went turtle. Only your shell doesn't make as tasty a soup. But you know all that, what you didn't know was that you were observed. By one of our operatives—"
"One of your operatives?"
"One of our operatives—"
"Who?"
"Me." Ianto stood where Jack couldn't see him by the stairs but Janelle would. He waited for the betrayal and anger and all those other things to cross her face, to burn through her eyes but they didn't. She teared and looked down, away.
"I see," she said faintly, her slight hands lacing delicately together.
"Let me do this Jack."
But he laughed. "I don't think so. Don't you have a report to write? Perhaps a few details to fill in?"
"I'll stay," he said to Janelle rather than Jack, offering to protect her if she still wanted him.
"Go," she said quietly again, not looking at him, not wanting him.
So he watched from the perch. Watched her cry gracefully, the way she did all things, and whisper her answers to Jack's bellowed questions filling in all the blanks Ianto had in his knowledge of her and flushing out quite predictably areas he'd surmised on his own.
He wasn't surprised when Gwen squeezed his arm, offered silent support as they listened, but he hadn't known she was there.
*
"You always knew." She spoke, finally, starting what would likely be their last conversation. The conversations he would miss, the woman he would miss.
"Always suspected. Jack…. Interrogation frequently misrepresents."
"So that I'll correct you and in so doing give myself irretrievably away." She pulled the deep maroon dressing gown around her.
"Yes."
"You were never interested in me, just what I become."
"I was interested in you. Am. I had no conclusive evidence. I should have let it go long before I did." He shrugged. "I was interested."
"Now that you know for sure?"
"It was me, that night. The alley. The mask." He watched realization shutter her eyes and stiffen her shoulders, steal her breath. He waited while she turned away from him, drifted farther into the cell. "I've known and still wanted to see you. Still wanted to know you."
"Why didn't you bring me here that night? You knew, had seen." He saw her fingers dig into her neck.
"I didn't know how long the stasis lasted, didn't want you to find yourself strapped to the roof of my car." Had desperately wanted not to have to.
"Is that how you brought me here?"
"No, inside a closed vehicle, no straps, no rope. Gwen and I kept you steady."
"Who's Gwen?"
"She'll be down soon. She went to yours. She's bringing you some things.
"How long will I be kept here?"
"Not long." He looked at the age-old grime of the cell. "It's just one of Jack's power plays."
"Keeping me locked up?"
"He wants you afraid of him, so you'll do as he says."
"What does he want from me? To run, to hide, to never show my inhuman face again?"
"No. He wants you to live, safe, happy, and someday very, very old." She turned then to look at him again, some vague amusement in her eyes. "Father knows best." He shrugged again and kept his shoulders up, took a step forward when that familiar amusement in her eyes grew.
And dimmed. "What about my family?"
"We'd like to meet them, help them."
"Why?"
He felt his cheek quirk and didn't bother to fight the smile. "It's what we do."
She smiled back at him then looked away again. "They won't stay. When they know you've discovered me they'll be up and out of their lives so fast even your Torchwood won't find us."
He nodded though she couldn't see him. "There are other people out there, Janelle. People who want far more from your family than we do."
"You think we don't know that?" She looked over her shoulder at him. "We've been hiding for centuries. We know how to do it."
"It's a lot harder now. Technologies make it nearly impossible to vanish unless you're apt to live in a cave in the Congo."
"I can hold my form for years Ianto."
"But do you want to?"
The answer on her face was definite and painful.
*
"Is this everything?" Jack said, holding the thick file Ianto had compiled on Janelle's condition and her family's history.
"Yes, sir."
"No little assignations or cookie crumbs missing."
"Every test, record, sketch, observation, conversation, and bit of research. Sir."
"Good. Thank you, Ianto." A dismissal.
He turned walked out, hands obediently at his sides.
"Oh, Ianto?"
"Yes," he asked over his shoulder.
"How is she?"
"Less terrified of you than you wanted her to be but more terrified of how her family will react."
"She doesn't have to go with them." Proving Jack had monitored their discussion in the vaults.
"What else does she know? Who else can she trust?"
"You." Jack said it into Ianto, the way he used to say so many things.
"I don't think she feels that way," he said and walked back to his area below.
*
He'd seen the Tesco on his way home that night and thought of the Kinder Eggs. A paper bag with nearly a dozen in hand he headed down to see her where he'd left her hours before in the vaults. He walked through the open door and found it empty, none of the things Gwen had brought her were there, the bag of clothes and toiletries gone, but the scent of her lingered on the air.
"Where is she?" He asked Jack who was suddenly leaning against the reinforced doorjamb.
"She doesn't want you to know."
"Do you?" He felt the brown paper crinkle in his fist.
"Probably not." Jack was smiling, looking off into the likelihood she hadn't mislead him to cover her tracks.
"Damn it, Jack," he yelled hurling the package at him.
"Hey," he said blocking the missile with his hand. "Father knows best."
Ianto launched at him, slammed him against the dirty walls, and crashed their mouths together. His hands left Jack's chest, taking his arms, his hair, his face instead. He ripped them apart, his hands gripping Jack's head. "Bloody hell you do, Jack." They came together again and parted slow, Jack's hands warm on his back, Ianto's brow leaning against him. "I'm your family too."
"I know," Ianto heard and raised his head just that inch to clearly see Jack's face. Their eyes, tired and weary, locked together. Jack's hand wrapped around and squeezed his neck and they held each other.