A/N: Serious Angst and Serious Sweet to be had in this chapter. Bear with me.

Jack's song is "I'll Never Smile Again" by Sinatra. Ianto's is "Only Forever" by Bing Cosby. Listen to them, they are gorgeous. If anyone knows of some more fantastic big band, fourties, etc songs that they love, I'd love to hear them! It might even get you extra chapters. :)

And thank you to Renart for correcting my timeline.

Ianto screamed. He didn't stop screaming, not when the poor intern found him, not when the confused Emergency Services cut the air-sealed glass case open to extract the writhing, skinless body, not even when they tried feeding him morphine through an IV. Not for days, not until he was whole.

And that was when the nightmares started instead. He had lay in that nothing for almost two hundred thousand years, and it seemed it wasn't ready to let him go. He feared sleep, feared closing his eyes. They were straining, red and dry. He demanded the light stay on at all times, furtive.

Whenever his eyes shut he felt like the darkness was wrapping itself around him, drawing him back. It festered in his mind, a rancid sore, unhealing, barely scabbed over. He fought sleep tooth and nail, and woke, screaming, tearing away from blackness.

He was in a psychiatric hospital for three years before they would let him out. Three years of begging for something to keep sleep away, three years pacing an ancient room wondering when the darkness would recede, three years of life as empty as his death.

At the tail end of the first month of his fourth year, his ward got a new therapist. He talked to her no more than he had talked to the others, knowing they would never understand. They never knew what to do with him either, reading his history. Millenia underground, a century as a skeleton on display and now...?

She took it upon herself, though, to slip him some drugs he didn't know about. It was a fairly new invention- a cross between a hallucinogen and a sleeping drug. It hit him sideways.

A hundred thousand million miles away, Captain Jack Harkness never had a chance to know what was coming at him. He wasn't that much different than he had been, not so much. Leaving Earth had done strange things to him. He'd tried to return, several times, but the changes seemed almost absurd. He'd once, long long ago, told a certain Mr. Jones that going back to Boeshire would not be the same as returning home. That, even if he wanted to go back, he would never have met the people he loved, and he wouldn't change that for the world. Ianto had understood his meaning, then, even if it had become confused and muddled in Jack's reticence, in his distracted love for Gwen. How he'd wished, so hard, that he could change just that, remind the man how gorgeous, how perfect, how brilliant he had been before everything had been over, taken so quickly and so underhandedly and so- so cruelly from them both.

Two hundred thousand years later and he was still fulfilling his promise. He remembered the curve of Ianto's eyebrow when the young man thought someone had said something stupid, the quirk of his lips when he shared a secret joke with himself. The blue of his eyes in the sunlight, the sound of his caught breaths when Jack moved just so against him. The edge of frailty in his voice when he was half-awake, the smell of his coffee, the feel of teasing fingers against the lines of his palm when he wanted something. He remembered the precise shade of Ianto's favorite red shirt, the circle of his Welsh 'o's.

He'd, of course, found world-fulls of lovers since he had lost Ianto. Some one-night stands, some had lasted months. None had managed to invade his dreams, dreams of Twenty-First Century love and secrecy, shy looks and hidden smiles, dancing on rooftops under the naked moonlight, coiled limbs twisted in thin sheets in the dark.

John Hart, not too many years after his aching loss, had come to him, and promised that everything would be right again, and had even stayed for long, dragging, painful years to remind Jack of that. And Jack had loved him, but still he ached for the man he had lost in the confusion of Earth's most hidden war.

He sank in his seat. Here again, another worthless bar, surrounded by a thousand species and no one he wanted to see. Three hypervodkas and he could barely see, but his thinking needed to be impaired much further. He pillowed his head in his arms, cheek pressing against threadbare wool. He only wore the coat on special occasions, had it repaired with reconstructors and synthesizers and history, but it was starting to wear away anyway, with memory and something else. "I'll never smile again, until I smile at you," he slurred, the notes coming with difficulty. Sinatra hadn't been his favorite, but he'd played it a thousand times for a thousand willing partners for that sweet dance before the real show. This song, though, he hadn't played since Ianto's death, not for anyone but himself. It hurt to hear it, and it hurt to share it. It didn't belong to any of those play-things, none of those drugs and toys and pretty things. "I'll never laugh again, what good would it do."

He'd played this song once around Ianto. Not for Ianto, no. For all of them, while he was going through some of his favorite (or so he said) albums. It was before Gwen; Tosh and Owen and Suzie sitting around the gramophone even as they worked, Tosh on her laptop, Suzie on her papers, Owen on... nothing, probably, pretending. Ianto had come down to bring them food and coffee and Jack had made him sit, eager for another game of push and pull with the newest (gorgeous) employee. Having his advances rejected had never been so much fun. He remembered Ianto said it wasn't like him. Jack, a single partner? Real laugh. The others had agreed, even Tosh, which Jack had acted appalled at. But Ianto had been right. At least, Jack had thought so, at the time. Things had been easier, then.

"For tears would fill my eyes," he continued, pain spreading out through his chest, through his arms, a hollow cold eating through him. "My heart would realize..." he started to choke on the words, squinting to keep the tears between his lashes. It wouldn't do to break down here. Here, where nobody knew him, where nobody cared, where nobody ever had cared, would care, could care. He forged on. "That our romance is-" he broke off sharply, a soundless gasp. He gagged on air, pain hitting him like a sledgehammer.

Ianto was dead, he knew that, he had known that. But it was like it hit him all over again, fresh and new, and it hurt, it hurt so badly, like an infection, like fire, like drowning, like choking on earth as he was buried alive, and he wondered how he didn't just drop dead from this. Nothing felt real except for the black, bottomless loss tearing through him.

Ianto knew what tranquilizers felt like. He screamed and raged at her, even as she escaped the room, even as keeping his eyes open practically hurt. But sleep could not be escaped, and so he sank into a corner and curled on himself, praying for a relief from the darkness, praying in gods he had never believed in.

The moonlight came to him first. It was stark, sharp and white around his feet. He sucked in a breath, lifting his eyes to the sky. A full moon, heavy and bright, framed by the branches of an ancient winter-bare Elm. The crackling cry of an old gramophone came to him next, his lids flickering shut as he concentrated every ounce of his attention on each static-softened syllable. Bing Cosby. He shaped the name with his lips, grateful relief catching in his throat. This song had always been a little faster than he had wished it to be, the lyrics such a grand promise. Soft, enticing, thick with the future.

The shape of Jack's coat came out next, draped across the back of the rugged old chair the gramophone was placed on. The moonlight made a long shadow of it, stretching almost to his feet. There was something else in the way, though. A hole that, now found, was suddenly filled in by every sense. That smell: he inhaled sharply, feeling himself weaken, musk and spice and summer sands. The edge of a strong jaw in the light, a trace of a smile. The feel of Jack's spine under his fingers, ridged and strong. The feel of Jack's broad hand against the small of his back, a steady pressure, warm and ever so present. Motion like a tide as they swayed together on his building's roof, shared breaths, half a bottle of good wine keeping them cozy in the November air; stolen time he would never regret.

"Do you think I'll remember, how you looked when you smile?" The other man's voice was soft and just as sweet over the old recording, sung against his cheek, a tenderness caught just around its edges. He'd thought it a lie, back then, but the loveliest lie he had ever heard. Even in his sleep his mind worked; he knew now that he could find the man and ask him; ask him if it was true, if he remembered. If he still wanted to be with him forever. "Only forever," Jack continued, his voice barely a whisper yet so distinct, Ianto shivering against him, chilled by the wind, warmed by the man, wanting. "That's putting it mild."

He woke again hours later, fighting against waking for a change. Warmth spread through him; he merely smiled sardonically at the three anxious faces pretending not to be peering at him while the doctors inspected him. He spent only another week before they released him, astounded at the sudden change in his demeanor.

He didn't care; no, Ianto had a goal now. He would find Jack. He would finish eternity's longest game of Hide and Seek.

After two hundred thousand years, there was no trail. Jack could have run laps around the Universe by now. He had only an image, a memory. Even his name could have changed a thousand times. He didn't care. He had forever to find him.

Ianto laughed when he stepped out of the building, spreading his arms, Welsh rain seeping through the thin clothes an aide had produced for his leave.

After counting for so many millenia, he was going to claim a reward so long Jack wasn't going to know what hit him.

Eternity.

'Forever at your side, my darling,' he thought, fresh blue eyes bright and brilliant as he opened his mouth and drank down the (probably poisonous) drops. 'Only forever, if you care to know.'