Chapter 2: The first day of the rest of your life
Ianto Jones woke up feeling bruised and exhausted with no memory as to why. Opening his eyes he found himself in his sister's living room lying uncomfortably on her short two seater couch. That explained the backache, but not the pounding in his head or the ache in his chest. He tried to remember how the hell he got there but it was fuzzy. Walking into the kitchen he squinted at the blinding sunlight flooding through the window. As the room began to spin he found himself retching over the sink. Keeping his eyes closed, Ianto reached out to the draining board and groped until he found a glass. He filled it from the tap and gulped it down, the cold water soothing his parched throat.
Sitting down at the kitchen table Ianto waited for the room to stop swaying. After a few minutes he managed to scribble a note for Rhiannon which he pinned to the fridge, where he knew she would be heading as soon as she woke up for the glass of orange juice which had been a part of her morning routine since they were kids. The thought brought a smile to Ianto's face, his might not be perfect but at least his family got to live nice normal lives.
Outside, Ianto closed the front door silently and listened to make sure that the latch clicked. The morning air still had a chill and the sun was barely visible over the horizon so it couldn't be much after seven. Ianto waited at the bus stop for ten minutes, then rode the number 30 bus all the way from Newport to Cardiff central. By the time he had walked back to his flat, it was 8:15 and his answering machine was flashing red.
"You have two new messages – Message one"
'Ianto Jones I could bloody kill you!' Ianto smiled at his sister's voice over the phone 'appearing in the middle of the night drunk off your arse like that. Then, you're gone by stupid o'clock in the morning. What am I supposed to think? Look, I'll be over this afternoon to check on you. Love you Brawd'
Ianto grimaced, he should have know he couldn't just leave like that, still it was nice that somebody cared about hi,, even if Rhiannon could be a little suffocating at times.
"Rwy'n dy garu de hefyd" *
"Message two." The voice which came over the machine next hit Ianto like a punch in the gut. He slid down the wall he was leaning on and held his knees to his chest for a feeling of security.
"Ianto, it's Jack. I just wanted to check on you and let you know what's going on but I guess you're not home. I'm giving you a month off; you need to grieve. The RETCON I gave you last night should help. It's an ultra low dose I use to take the edge off the pain after something like this, makes it kind of like it happened a while ago. Take care of yourself Jones Ianto Jones. We need you. I need you, and I expect you back at work four weeks today" BEEP
"End of messages." The silence in the flat was suffocating. For hours Ianto just sat there on the floor, letting his grief and relief fall down his cheeks as tears. Lisa had tried to 'delete' Jack, but Jack wasn't going to let himself be deleted just yet. He'd come back from Lisa's attack, and he wasn't going anywhere now. Captain Jack Harkness was a fixed point in space and time. He wasn't about to be erased by something chemical like RETCON. Ianto was glad that the RETCON hadn't wiped the job which had started to become his whole world from his mind. As much as this hurt he couldn't imagine losing the last five years of his life. For the past five years, so many of his dreams had involved Lisa and their future together, involved Torchwood and aliens and all of the amazing, beautiful things he now knew that the rest of the world didn't. Even if he wasn't happy that Jack had given him drugs without explaining what they would do and as much as he would have liked to be able to grieve in his own way he was glad to have kept his memories but now regretted getting stinking drunk last night.
Eventually, Ianto managed to stand, though he faltered when he got to the couch. On the end table was a photograph of him and Lisa on a Ferris wheel at the fair in Brighton about three months before the attack on Canary Wharf. She was kissing him on the cheek while he held out the camera to take the picture. He had eaten too much junk that day and made himself sick. That put a bit of a damper on their first romantic weekend away but they were just glad to be together, in a little B&B on the promenade. Remembering how happy they were and how quickly it all turned to shit had tears burning in his eyes again. Hugging the picture to his chest, Ianto curled up on the couch and cried in a way he hadn't since he was a child.
Around three that afternoon, Rhiannon Davies reached into her handbag and pulled out her key to her brother's flat, a key which she had never had occasion to use in the months since her brother returned to Cardiff but did so without hesitation today . Something was wrong and Ianto had her worried, when he left for university in London he couldn't seem to get away fast enough, so she had been surprised to hear that he was moving back to Cardiff when his girlfriend got sick and didn't want to live in the city any more. Then last night, he had turned up at her door drunk, dirty and sobbing after she hadn't seen him for three months. Something had happened. There was no doubt about that.
Inside the flat, Rhiannon took in how neat it was. Ianto had always been tidy. Mam had a thing about cleanliness. She even used to inspect their bedrooms, and after Ianto had his Game boy taken away a week after Christmas because he hadn't put his clothes in the hamper, he got a little obsessive – apparently it never wore off.
"Ianto? Where are you?" Rhiannon's question received no response but she followed the snuffling sounds down the corridor, passing doors which she assumed led into her brother's bedroom and bathroom and found him on the couch, his eyes red and puffy, clutching a picture frame. Sitting on the edge of the couch she stroked his hair and took a look at the picture in is hands. It was of him and his girlfriend, the one who'd been in hospital since he got back to Cardiff, but she'd never actually met.
"She's dead isn't she, your girl?"
Ianto looked up at her in confusion "How...How did you?"
"Well I thought maybe she'd left you, but what with her being so sick I just figured," she stopped, pulled Ianto into a hug and held him there, feeling his tears soak into her shoulder "That doctor, the Japanese bloke you talked about, he couldn't help?"
Ianto moved back so that they were sat together on the sofa, though he kept Rhiannon's arms around him, feeling safe there.
"No, there was nothing he could do. She was too far gone." It was true. By the time Dr. Tanazaki had arrived, it was too late for his Lisa. Hell, it was too late for her when he pulled her out of the conversion unit in London. Before he knew it, he was being pulled into a tighter hug and his sister was singing to him softly while rubbing circles down his back like their mother did when they were children. Within a few minutes, he was fast asleep.
Rwy'n dy garu de hefyd = I love you too in welsh...I'm trying to avoid putting too much Welsh in this fic because though I understand it fine my welsh isn't the best in the world and I'd hate to teach you all the wrong thing...also I hate writing these translations.
