Disclaimers: This work is a crossover between Torchwood and the Velgarth books by Mercedes Lackey. I decided to publish it as a Torchwood fanfic because it makes more sense to approach it from the Torchwood angle. You don't need to be familiar with Mercedes Lackey's works in order to understand what's going on (although I do recommend reading them just because they are so entertaining), but you do have to know and love Ianto. Neither the Torchwood nor the Velgarth characters belong to me. Enjoy.
Chapter 1
There was nothing. Literally, nothing. Ianto was not prepared for this. Sure, both Suzie and Owen had warned them about afterlife promising neither heaven nor hell, but Suzie was evil and might have been lying, while Owen had only been dead briefly the first time around and could have been mistaken. Yet, here he was surrounded by absolute blackness. Even under his feet, Ianto sensed the absence of anything substantial to hold him up, and that was assuming that he still had feet, which was questionable at best. Do dead souls get to keep some semblance of bodies?
Ianto closed his eyes and felt a second of relief. His neurons, if he still had those, produced sparks of light behind the eyelids, and even that was better than the utter emptiness around him. He was not certain how long he has been there. There was no way to tell time. There was nothing to do. How is it possible to stay in a place this empty and remain sane? Maybe that's what happened to Suzie… But no, she had planned her return in advance, so she must have been crazy before her first death. Could Jack find another Glove to bring him back to life? After all the misery the resurrection brought Owen, would Jack even want to?
There was no use in wondering. It would just drive him insane faster. Ianto opened his eyes, and the darkness was still there, or rather not there. He could not tell which pressed on him more – the primordial, instinctual fear of the dark or the knowledge that even the dark was insubstantial; there was nothing there, only emptiness. Ianto opened his mouth to scream, wondering briefly if the ever-present voices that Suzie described haunting her in the night were really just screams of fellow souls trapped in this hellhole, but no sound came out. The emptiness did not contain even air, and without air, the sound waves could not propagate. He tried to scream again and again until his throat was sore, but still the deadly silence remained unbroken. Somehow, that made it worse, like he was stripped of all of his senses. At least, eyesight remained, although apparently he could use it only for things conjured by his own imagination. Ianto honestly would have preferred the haunting voices.
What other senses were there, anyway? Sight, hearing, olfaction, taste, touch… There was nothing in the empty darkness to taste, and the absence of smell seemed as pervasive as the absence of light and sound. Ianto had no idea that smell had played such an important part in his life until it was so suddenly gone. That left only touch. He curled his fingers and dug his fingernails into the palms of both hands, taking a moment to revel in the feeling of pain and the accompanying rush of endorphins. It was a small comfort, but a comfort nevertheless. At least one thing remained of his old life. That was a weird turn of phrase in itself. "Old life" implied that there was a new life that had taken the place of the previous one.
Eventually, both the pain and the endorphins wore off. Ianto would have sighed if he did not know how futile such a gesture would be without the air to breathe in. His eyes were closed against the surrounding darkness. He had wished for death so many times in those months right after Lisa's death and before rediscovering himself with Jack, but this was definitely not what he had imagined. Ianto did think that there would be nothing, but he had not expected the consciousness to remain and to continually perceive that nothingness. He had not expected the feeling of being torn away not only from his life and all the people in it, but also from himself. Ianto would have screamed again if it had not been such a terrifying experience the first time around – like a nightmare where a single shout would summon aid against some invisible monster, but your throat refuses to produce a sound or emits just a hoarse little whisper.
Keeping his eyes closed, Ianto willed himself to fall asleep, seeking at least some form of escape, but either he was too wound up or the dead were "asleep" to begin with and could not fall into that state any deeper. Instead, with every passing minute, he felt himself sinking further into despair. Enduring this for eternity would be excruciating, but he deserved nothing else, not after keeping Lisa alive in her own peculiar sort of limbo despite the pain it had cost her, and not after having the deaths of two innocent people lie squarely on his conscience as a result. In some ways, Ianto was as much a murderer as Suzie, although none of it had been premeditated or intentional. Still, he could not imagine a more cruel punishment than the slow, deliberate descent into insanity that this place promised. Ianto would have cried, if he were not so terrified that tears are also reserved exclusively for the living. Had Jack felt the same thing in the intervals between deaths buried in the ground beneath the future city of Cardiff?
Minutes or hours later—he honestly was not sure—Ianto opened his eyes again, just because it was something to do, a way to occupy himself with something other than dark thoughts at least for a moment. And in the very corner of his peripheral vision he noticed… light.
It was only a tiny spark, but the surrounding darkness was so complete that it stood out against the background brighter than a full moon against the sky on a clear night. Ianto willed himself towards it with all the power left in his soul or body, and the spark grew larger. He could not tell if he was the one moving towards it or if it was approaching him—and if he was the one moving without anything for his feet to push against, it would certainly violate Newton's Third Law—but it did inexorably appear closer and closer with each passing moment until it halted right in front of him, a brilliant whiteness in the midst of the absolute dark.
Ianto also paused briefly, but anything was better than the place he was currently in, so he steadied himself and pushed forward into the light.
For a moment, he felt completely blinded and almost panicked, thinking that this was all just a ploy to strip him of the last of his senses. But then his eyes adjusted, and he found himself in an entirely different place. He was surrounded on all sides by grayish, opalescent mist that seemed to glow with unearthly light. Glancing behind, Ianto saw no sign of the dark "light" he had half-expected to remain at the spot where he had just entered this new place. There was still nothing solid below his feet, but the mist reassured him: if it could hang in space without dissipating, there must have been air and gravity keeping it there.
"Hello! Anyone here?" Ianto cried out experimentally and was so elated to hear the sound of his own voice that he almost forgot the question itself until a reverberating voice behind him replied, "Yes, child of Earth, here am I."
Ianto spun around and nearly chocked as he saw two human-shaped forms standing before him. One was male with shoulder-length dark blond hair and a stern face, while the other one was female with shorter hair and with skin the color of dark chocolate. Both wore white togas and had something light around their heads, while behind their backs, he could just make out the silhouettes of enormous white wings barely visible in the mist. Well, can't say I expected this, he thought, trying to recover from a sort of stupor. Ianto had been religious once, as a kid, but what belief had not dissipated in the face of hard scientific facts and the inherent impossibility of proof while he was still growing up was surely extinguished later. Torchwood did that to people. Ianto did not consider himself an atheist really; he was actually more of an agnostic, allowing some room for a possibility that something greater existed out there, although certainly not in the simplistic form most religions seemed to attribute It. Therefore, being confronted by angels was a disappointment in a way; he was not prepared for this level of banality out of the afterlife.
"It matters not in what guise I appear. This form is but one of many. Such is your people's belief, and therefore, such is the way that I show myself to you," the voice emanated from both angels at once, and both moved their lips in perfect synchrony with each other, so Ianto sensed that the apparent unity of their speech merely echoed a deeper unity. They were not really "they" so much as a single entity that, for whatever reason, had chosen to appear before him in two bodies. It was very unnerving, not in the least bit because it made it impossible to look both of them in the eyes while they were speaking, as the rules of politeness would dictate, and Ianto found himself constantly shifting his gaze between the two.
"So… what now? Are you going to judge me?" he asked, trying to sound nonchalant. It was probably useless—Ianto was reasonably certain that the angels could read his mind—but it did help him to feel in control of himself.
"No," the angels shook their heads, their faces about as impassive as Ianto had tried to make his own. "The right to Judge belongs to a greater Power. I am merely a servant. Moreover, the Judgment has already been passed, and now it is up to you to choose your fate."
Ianto opened his mouth, but then closed it again, unsure what to say in response to such a strange statement. If the choice were between Heaven and Hell, he sincerely doubted that any sane person (soul?) would choose the latter. So why leave such a decision to the highly subjective judgment of someone whose life should, by all rights, be judged by an objective, omniscient Being? On the other hand, perhaps, this was a test. Hadn't he just thought about deserving any punishment he might receive as a penance for what had happened to and because of Lisa? Maybe that was the point – a punishment one made up for oneself would likely to be worse than anything anyone else could come up with.
However, as Ianto grew more confused, the angels' faces seemed to soften in perfect synchrony. "Ianto Jones," they intoned finally, "the choice before you is not that between Heaven and Hell. It is between life and… me."
At that moment, Ianto realized just whom he was facing. And they were right, their visible form was nothing but a guise. After all, what physical shape could possibly belong to Death?
"If you decide to embrace me," the "angels" continued, their faces now practically beaming with satisfaction, "you will enter a place of Light. Guilt, doubt, and self-hatred will no longer touch you. You will be content and happy, at peace with who you are and sharing the company of those who have met me before you."
It sounded so perfect. "I don't deserve it," Ianto choked, knowing in his heart the truth of this statement.
"But you do," the angels shook their heads, gazing at him compassionately. "Your sins—if ever they could be called such, for they were not committed with ill intent—have already been paid for in full. I will gladly embrace you and ease your pain."
"And my other choice…?" Ianto asked automatically, scarcely knowing what to think anymore. He had wanted Death so much in the past.
"Life is… life. Guilt, doubt, self-hatred, and pain are a constant for living humans. And if you choose life, you will find yourself on a different world devoid of familiar people and things, even more alien than you had been feeling before. Finally, there are conditions that you must fulfill in exchange for choosing that option."
"Conditions?" Ianto frowned. "What kind of conditions?"
"There is a purpose to your second life. You must swear an oath to do no willful evil and to protect those who cannot protect themselves. You must give your soul to a Power greater than a mere mortal can ever perceive and do its bidding for the sake of the many people who should not meet my embrace prematurely. Are you capable of bearing such duty?"
"I don't know," Ianto answered truthfully, uncertain if anyone was capable of really bearing it. After all, did not Jack try to protect the people of the entire Earth when he sacrificed those children to the 456? Did that count as "protecting those who cannot protect themselves" or was that precisely the "willful evil" that he must foreswear? This was all too abstract, too black-and-white, while real people tended to operate more in the shades of gray.
"You will be human, and you will make mistakes. It would be foolish to expect anything else," the "angels" assured him. "However, you will have an obligation to always help irrespective of the harm it might cause you, and you will have the duty to obey the wishes of the Higher Power when presented to you by an indisputable messenger."
All of this sounded very complicated and purposefully vague. Ianto would have felt highly suspicious if this proposal had not come from the mouth (or mouths) of someone who could not and would not lie. Still, omissions were hardly lies, and there had to be something that the "angels" omitted, because when presented in such a way, the choice seemed painfully clear: die and exist in a continuously happy state or live and experience all the misery associated with life further complicated by obscure duties he did not fully understand.
The "angels" lowered their collective gaze, and Ianto sensed hesitation in them, as if they were uncertain if they should upset the balance of choices set before him. However, a moment later they raised their eyes once again and said, "You should know that if you choose not to embrace me, you will be able to see him again."
Ianto did not have to ask whom they meant. He glanced away, but there was nothing to see except for the mist. Ianto swallowed a lump in his throat and whispered, "He doesn't love me," making it sound much too much like a question than he would have liked.
"Is that truly relevant?" the "angels" replied, once again looking at him with compassion.
It was not. Ianto knew the answer as soon as they asked the question. The decision was clear. He had already chosen to live for Jack once without knowing if the other man would ever love him, and it only made sense to do so again.
Ianto looked into the eyes of one "angel" and then the other. "I choose life," he said and was immediately enveloped in bright white light, his mind only briefly registering a sorrowful smile on Death's faces.
