Timeframe: Through the end of Exit Wounds and Journey's End. AU after, ignoring all the specials and the events of Children of Earth
RENASCENCE
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.
Ianto
This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed...
Stop me if you've heard this before. A doctor, a captain, and a—
Wait. That's not it.
I mean to say that a knight, a queen, and a pawn set the board. But that's wrong, too. I'm terrible at jokes.
Okay. A doctor, a captain, and a faggot secretary walked into a pub. Two of them died a long time ago, and one was never really alive to begin with. I was the one on the far left.
The doctor—Doctor, actually, possessing no other name or occupation—turned immediately to a table in the back. The captain (Jack) exchanged short, ugly words with the faggot (me) and went to join the Doctor. There was a TV above the bar which had the keep's full attention, so I rapped my knuckles against the till. He was always more Owen's friend than any of ours, but he wasn't unkind.
"Two beers," I said.
"Three," the keep replied, plunking the bottles near my hand. He gestured to the Doctor with the point of his chin, like an accusing finger. "No-one sits for free."
I agreed and paid full. A tab would only have extended our temporary relationship, and I was terrible at those, too. I didn't look at the labels—nothing was named. Even the faces are indistinct now, blurred by the bottleneck of empty hours standing between us.
I mean to say that I am trying to remember how I got here from there.
I had crossed the room, maybe, from the end of the bar to the back of an empty townhouse. I could see myself sitting beside the pool table, rearranging a torn jacket.
"Get away. I'm not drunk enough for you yet."
I fingered the edge of my collar. It was clean, unmarred. Perhaps it had already scabbed over. I was remembering what could never possibly happen.
So instead I waited. The Doctor and Jack leaned easily into each other, arms entwined on the tabletop but not touching. I sat at the bar a moment too long, watching them. They could keep their secrets. When I returned, they broke apart, settling back in their chairs. The Doctor resumed his dust-drawing, perfect concentric circles woven together with indecipherable patterns. I set the bottles in the center of the smallest three. Whatever conversation they had planned fell apart after my approach, and so I drank, willing the silence to consume us.
The pub visits were habitual. Every few weeks the TARDIS would slam down in Cardiff, and the Doctor would come looking for Jack—less and less of him, it seemed, coiled into that coat with the collar pulled past his ears, all bent elbows and hunched shoulders. He never thought much of me.
When the Doctor began to talk, I drained my bottle and took Jack's, staring past his head to the television. There was an old match on, and a woman bent over the till who I might've known.
"I have dreams now," the Doctor muttered, picking at a gouge beneath his wrist. His eyes danced about, seeking our attention. "Terrible things...beautiful. I see Davros and Dalek Caan and the Cascade. I write equations in my sleep and wake with my fingers covered in ink."
He sighed.
"I never dreamed before."
"Nightmares," I murmured, expelling my required participation for the evening. The woman left the bar, opening an unseen door, and disappeared up a flight of unfinished stairs. I followed her up past her bed, to the bath and a cache of coins she was siphoning from the till.
I mean to say that I saw all this in my head, an illusionary tract that would end if I could only close my eyes.
"Emily thinks so. She tells me that it's too much sugar before bed."
He laughed in a self-deprecating manner and swept his hand across the designs, obscuring them. He gave a contemplative look to the untouched bottle. He was waiting for response, a machine that relied on input to function. Jack was his faithful operator.
"What do you think it means?"
"I don't know. I don't think I want to know."
"Then why tell us?"
They hadn't heard me. The Doctor turned, glaring out our muddied window at the people who passed quietly along the street. Work had ended for everyone else. They had homes lingering.
"I wonder what they do all day," he said, contemptuous. "How they can live with themselves, so empty and shallow. I wonder how they could ever sleep."
I was wondering how long I'd have to let Jack fuck me before I could crawl back to my flat. He liked to think he didn't sleep but he did, when he was sated or drugged or bored enough. I wasn't sure which of the three I was aiming for, only that I escaped before one or two in the morning. I had laundry waiting in the machine, and there was a stack of books by my bed I kept thinking to finish.
I mean to say that I felt as empty and shallow as the people that the Doctor so reviled.
The keep refused me a fifth round, and I stumbled into my chair again, hours later. I squinted at the Doctor and saw nothing.
I mean to say that he had left, having laid all his burdens on us. I reached out and couldn't find Jack either.
"We're leaving," he said, voice tight and closed.
In the car, I slumped against the window, nodding through a fog of intoxication. Jack had left the music off, but I couldn't keep still—right to left I rolled, fingers twisted into the damp fabric of my trousers. From below I could see only the sharp downward cut of his mouth, the muscles of his jaw twitching. He was angry with me for getting so drunk.
"You missed it," I sighed, as the turn took a nosedive and disappeared over Jack's shoulder.
"You can't be left alone."
"I don't need a fucking sitter," I snapped, shoving his arm from the center console. Newtonian in response, my head cracked into the window. Blood blossomed across the glass.
"Dammit, Ianto!"
His driving never helped. He slammed into the curb and reached over to help.
"Don't touch me!"
I hit the latch somehow. I was pushing at his hands and leaning back. The fall to the pavement was short.
I expected pool cues and found none, so I examined my abused shirt. It was bleeding.
"Ianto!"
He struggled with the key and then gave up too easily, setting one foot on the pavement.
I was sick of myself and him—how terribly disgusting I looked, sprawled across the curb with my torn jacket and blood sprinkling my collar. The skin across my knuckles had split in whorls.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Jack shouted. "What's going on?"
He'd asked already, many times in the weeks since I went to see a doctor and wouldn't tell him why. That doctor was a nice Korean woman who spoke to me slowly and with kindness. She had asked me to come back. I hadn't.
The other foot exited as well, steadying him.
"Ianto, you're scaring me. Please come home."
I was sitting up against a bin, rearranging myself against the tide pull.
"That place isn't home. I hate it."
I mean to say that I was rebuilding defenses, shutting Jack out for the last time.
He had made it around the front of the SUV and stood in the glare of one headlight, staring down at me. I looked like nothing at that angle.
"Don't you ever say anything?" I snarled, a ridiculous question that my tongue twisted over. I might have been crying.
"Just come back."
I was staring at a little boy tugging impatiently at his hand, unnoticed. He wanted to play catch, before they were called to dinner. Jack didn't know that. He never asked. The lovely doctor came to mind again, with her apologies.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Jones. I'm so sorry."
I mean to say that I was falling to pieces faster than Jack could ever fix me.
I was approaching the end. I could see it then, just past the broken grate.
"Get away," I snapped. "I'm not drunk enough for you yet."
He recoiled, less from the words than the way I said them. I didn't care anymore how it ended. He just had to leave.
I mean to say that I knew. I wanted him to go. I didn't want him to see.
"Fine," he said. "Stay in the gutter."
The SUV squealed around the corner, and I was already gone. I pulled myself up the pavement at a hunched crawl, fingers crushed into rough grouted grooves. I cradled the closest wall. I couldn't remember the number, and squinting helped none.
"We weren't always this terrible," I told the wall. "I remember loving him, once."
That building had no interest, so I turned to the next expectantly.
"We're going to be alright. Every couple has their fights. We're going to adopt."
A woman pushing a pram gave me no notice. I tried to tell her that it wasn't April anymore.
"We won the war!" I shouted after her retreating back. "Go home, if you still can!"
I saw her mangled torso scattered in seven oversized bins and turned another corner.
"You're following. Stop following!"
I mean to say that I wanted to be alone just then, for once. I could never get what I really wanted.
He was curled beneath a lamppost like a dark cat, clawed and patient. Obedient to the end, I let him approach.
"We never spent any time together," he lamented, making a sudden twitchy movement towards my chest.
I felt nothing at first. Pain is in the acknowledgment, and I stared dumbly at the line just beneath my sternum. Fingers scissoring at either side, I tried to pinch the slash closed. I could not be contained and neither could he, following my backward descent with grace, as a dancer dipping his nervous partner. He chopped a gleeful circle around my heart and then stood, face obscured in the shadow of the lamppost halo.
"How marvelous-brilliant-fantastic!"
He chain-smoked each word to its filter, tongue sliding experimentally over his teeth, as though tasting them against each syllable.
I mean to say that he sounded wrong.
The knife he wiped carefully on my jacket, fraying a small stitch near my elbow. He curled my fingers around the handle, smiling.
"No need for that just now. You're the next-to-next-to-last piece. The antepenultimate."
"I know," I said.
I mean to say that I didn't, really, but didn't know what else to say.
He pushed up his sleeve, checking an imaginary watch.
"We've little time," he said. "Care to chat?"
It could have been someone else entirely who was drowning there. The woman, perhaps, shackling those stolen coins to her ankle.
"It took ever so long to get here, you know," he continued, settling at my side. His hand hovered above my heart. He was patient. "But I'm clever. Clever by half, whatever that means."
I closed my eyes. I opened them again, slowly.
"Are you bored?" he asked, wounded. "I'm sorry. You know I'm terrible at conversation. I'm trying to get better. I'm trying to get better at a lot of things, come to that."
He flipped his wrist and showed me a bright red patch on the underside.
"I keep scratching," he said with a frown. "As though one day the skin will finally flake away, and I'll become something new."
In every movement was a twitch, a slight tumble of pain or confusion. Fragments of phrases seemed jammed in his throat, desperately seeking escape before he could release them.
"What are you?" I asked, peeling each word from a copper tongue.
"A hand," he replied. "The Hand of God. Or, well, a god, anyway. The lonely god. Not so lonely."
He smiled.
"Don't you remember? I am the unhappy wolf."
He unfolded a sheet of paper from nowhere, slipping dirty spectacles from his pocket. I could make nothing of it. The figures danced beneath his fingers.
"These are very precise calculations, you know. Or don't know. I don't suppose you moonlight as a mathematician?"
"No."
"Well, that's unfortunate."
I sucked in a shallow breath.
"What are you waiting for?"
He changed, shouting.
"I'm always waiting. Always!"
He pushed off the wall and set his feet at my head. He became the sky, black and starless.
I mean to say that he obscured everything else. He was all I could hear anymore.
"You can't understand. You just can't, because I won't explain. I'm sorry. I know that I ought to outline every detail of my overarching plan to you, but I've never felt the compulsion to monologue quite like he did."
He picked at his cuffs.
"It's the suit. I was never this existential in brown."
A knight and a pawn meet at the diagonal for tea. Neither knows why, yet, or when they'll be leaving. It wasn't a joke at all.
"I'm taking up all your time," he said miserably, stepping away. "I'm sorry."
He frowned and walked back to the lamppost, stopping only on its far side.
"You've lasted much longer than the other. Still clinging to something of this?"
He turned back, curling an inquisitive tongue over his teeth.
"What is it that you want to keep? All your friends are dead, and Jack hates you, and you've nothing, nothing to hope for. All your decisions have led you here, you know."
"I know."
I was sitting in the crowded pub again. I saw for a moment the Doctor's drawing, until his other half reached in and shook it from view.
"I didn't have that. Every choice," he said. "I didn't even get to pick my own name. She wanted to remind me."
I could no longer see his feet or my own, and his return to my side was a ghostly saunter, disjointed and irritable. I watched myself crawl along the brick behind him, screaming obscenely.
"He chose that life," the not-Doctor snarled. "Let him live it awhile. See how great the mortal coil is, just when you're shuffling off the edge."
His eyes flicked to mine.
"No offense."
He crouched at my level. He hadn't blinked yet.
"Do you forgive me?" he said earnestly. "If I say sorry enough, will you forgive me anything? Because I'm sorry, Ianto. I am so sorry."
His eyes were the same and different, as he leaned in.
"He gave me that knife. He gave me all of this."
He pulled the handle from my loose fingers and pressed it down again. I feel pain.
I mean to say that I remember now where I am.
"You have no idea," he says, twisting the knife and twisting the knife, "how this hurts me. How this hurts me."
I am arranging my head on Jack's pillow, saying, "I've such a headache, you know—I think I'll sleep for ages." Jack's hands are tracing the outline of the knife, guiding it into my stomach, stitching time through the wound. "Sleep," he says, smiling. "I'll be here when you wake up again."
There is sunlight behind his head, blinding me. Everything washes gold, then white and empty.
I mean to say that I am dying.
He is standing above me now, sadly, waiting for something. I am cold. I reach for his hand.
"This isn't so terrible," he promises. "It could have been worse."
I have so many questions, and so many answers. I am thinking of Owen. I am wondering how to say goodbye.
"There was more, I thought," I say, though I don't know why. "Wasn't there?"
I don't know if he can hear me.
"This isn't so bad. It wasn't so bad."
I mean to say that everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.