ver·i·si·mil·i·tude: n (formal): the appearance of being true or real; something that only appears to be true or real
He'd expected instant attack upon entering the boardroom. Instead, there was silence. The team sat around the table, looking up at him without saying a word; the screen on the back wall still displayed live CCTV footage of Adam's cell, but the sound had been turned off.
Jack paced around the table, closer to the screen. Every few seconds Adam would glance up at the camera as if he knew they were watching. For a moment he just watched the screen, unable to stop small doubts from needling his mind. Then he turned around, and his eyes found Ianto. The young man looked back at him with enough faith for the both of them, and worlds beside. I believe in you. It went both ways, and he was counting on Jack to fix this.
"Our memories define us," the Captain began firmly, breaking the silence. "Adam changed those memories… changed who we are. Now I have to help you all go back. Find a memory that defines you," he explained, circling back to the head of the table. "Rediscover who you are." He leaned against the table, feeling his team's eyes upon him even as he watched the redheaded creature pace in his cell. "If I'm wrong," he added quietly, "he'll still be here when we've done this."
He hit the center controls, shutting off the feed to Adam's cell and setting the shifting, mesmerizing blue lights floating across the screen. Hypnosis had once been one of the most benign tools in his repertoire — this wouldn't even be the first time he'd used it on fellow members of Torchwood. But it was the first time he'd been this anxious, this invested in its outcome. It was the only way he could think of to completely undo what Adam had done. They had to not only forget, but believe.
"Let me take you back to before we all met," Jack murmured. He hit the controls again, dimming the lights in the room. "Feel around for anything that makes you who you are," he instructed, keeping his voice quiet and encouraging. "The hidden and the forgotten." He waited a moment; none of them were looking at him now, all of them into the middle distance in front of them. So far, so good. "Tell me where you are," Jack whispered.
After a long moment, Gwen spoke first. "The college canteen," she murmured. "Rhys is sitting opposite me…" then she giggled slightly, her face lighting up. Jack smiled.
"I'm ten." He looked over at Owen. The medic's face was blank — then he frowned. "But I love you, because you're my son," he said, as if puzzled, as if working over someone else's words. Jack's smile had faded. Not all of these wonderful, incredible people had been made by happy, glowing moments.
Toshiko smiled, though, as she murmured, "Something so reliable about maths." But her momentary look of contentment faded quickly, her dark eyes looking far, far back into the surety and loneliness of her numbers.
Jack looked down to his right, to Ianto, just in time to catch the smallest flash of a youthful, white grin. "Falling in love," he murmured, almost too quiet to catch. "Never felt so alive." Jack looked down at the table, feeling an ache that he tried to push away. As glad as he was that Ianto had that memory, that smile… he knew it wasn't for him. And that hurt him more than it should.
Owen scoffed under his breath, drawing Jack's gaze again. His lips curled in the scathing, defensive 'go to hell' sneer Jack was starting to remember. "That is the nicest thing you've done for me in years, Mother," he declared to someone out of sight.
Family — or lack thereof. Owen had never been able to trust the people who should have always been there for him. That cynicism, that hard outer shell of sharp wit and acid tongue, had developed far too early. No changing it now — it was intrinsically Owen.
Toshiko's small smile came and then disappeared again. "I don't have a flat-warming," she muttered, her voice gone flat with old bitterness, loneliness and the acceptance of it. She stared down at the table, her lips pressed together in disappointment at herself and humanity.
"Like the world had ended," Ianto whispered beside him, and Jack's heart almost broke — because he knew that tone, knew it all too well from a month of visits to a dark, quiet flat where the curtains were drawn and the pictures put away. Ianto Jones hid his heart more than anyone his age should ever know how to — but that didn't stop him loving, wholly and helplessly, and it hadn't stopped him dying a little bit when he'd lost it. Didn't stop him breaking in a way Jack himself was altogether too familiar with.
Across the table, Gwen had remembered. "I love him," she proclaimed softly… then she looked up at Jack, a dazed look in her reflective eyes. "But not in the way I love you," she added.
There was nothing Jack could say to that — except, "take this," as he held out a small white pill toward her. Not in that way, Gwen, he kept to himself, even as a little twinge of could-have-been still ached. Not for either of us.
To her credit, Gwen didn't hesitate as she took the Retcon from his hand. He brushed her hair back as he passed, as she clenched her fist around the pill.
Tear tracks glistened across Tosh's face in the blue lights. "Knowing I'm special," she almost sobbed, except that his Toshiko was far too strong to let that escape. "Waiting for someone to see it…"
Jack set a hand on her trembling shoulder. She looked up at him, searching desperately, as lost as the day he'd found her. He smiled at her, at his real memories of her, her intelligence and her quiet strength. "I saw it," he assured her, willing her to remember, to let go of Adam and remember what was real — and that he saw her.
"You save one life," Owen was muttering to himself, his voice suddenly less biting, more vulnerable. "A hundred lives, but it-it's never enough… Who'll save me?" The broken faith in his voice went back, so many years, even before he'd joined Torchwood. Owen's faith in himself, his talent, his profession and the oaths he'd taken had been crumbling long before Jack found him — but his skill itself never faltered. Jack had shown him that once: given the chance, he'd do it again.
"I will," he promised Owen. He resisted the sudden urge to rumple his medic's carefully combed hair, and simply set the Retcon pill down on the table in front of him. Owen blinked rapidly without looking at Jack; and the Captain moved to the last member of his broken team.
"Coming here," Ianto murmured, "it gave me meaning again…" he paused, deep in thought — then he turned, seeking Jack's gaze. "You," he said so simply, so innocently, clarity and trust and love shining from those blue eyes. It ached again, more than he cared to admit. But this… this was kind of a good ache.
He smoothed his hand gently over Ianto's hair, resting his fingers at his nape as he pressed a simple, soft kiss to his young lover's forehead. Without moving away from Ianto, he set the amnesia pill down in front of him; lingering, he trailed his fingers over the sensitive skin of Ianto's throat, pausing to feel the strong pulse under his fingertips. Ianto's eyes opened slowly, both of them familiar with the caress, one of Jack's almost compulsory unconscious habits. As much as Jack wanted to stay here, to hold onto his lover and feel that they were both safe and content, and maybe even have the balls and the brains to let the last walls down inside his heart and let himself feel truly happy…
Not now.
Reluctantly he stepped away from Ianto, back to the head of the table. "You each have a short-term amnesia pill. It'll make you forget Adam," he explained. "We have to wipe out the last forty-eight hours from our memories. Go back to who we were."
Ianto was the first to place the pill on his tongue, washing it down without hesitation. Gwen followed suit, her movements deft and sure even as she looked up at Jack once more.
Toshiko and Owen hesitated. They exchanged a look across the table; then Owen picked up his pill and dry-swallowed it. He took off his reading glasses and set them aside, with a tiny smile at Tosh. Then he put his head down on his hands to wait.
Abruptly Tosh stood up — she grabbed the remote control and switched the TV screen back to the real-time of Adam frantically pacing his cell. "I'm going to lose so much," she murmured as Jack approached her.
"None of it was real," he told her, firmly even though he regretted it. She deserved real love. As brilliant as she was, she didn't deserve a life in which she'd never known the real thing.
"He loved me," she squeaked breathlessly. She whirled to Jack. "And I loved him," she insisted desperately. "It's no different from real memory!" Her voice broke, even as Jack knew she wanted him to say she was right — she wanted to convince both of them. She wanted her Captain to tell her it was okay to be in love.
And no one understood that better than he did. No one wished more at that moment that Adam could be real, could give Tosh everything she deserved and everything she wanted. But he couldn't.
"He forced it on you," Jack reminded her, remaining firm. Tosh looked down; he tilted her chin back up to him. "You have to let it go," he insisted. Then he let his hands fall, let her turn and look at the screen showing the alien they were killing, the appearance of a man she thought she loved.
Finally Jack closed her hand around the Retcon, and she let herself be sat down. She swallowed the pill, painfully, tears streaming down her face. "Goodbye, Adam," she whispered, then rested her head on the table.
…
Making evidence disappear from around the Hub was easy enough. Adam didn't have any material possessions to incinerate. There was the matter of going through everyone's desks to make sure he hadn't left any papers, notes, or little mementoes in the past two days, which Jack felt a little twinge of guilt over — but he figured that he'd forget it ever happened in the morning, so really, no invasion of privacy there. He checked Ianto's diary as well, having found it left abandoned on the floor. There was only one reference to Adam, which Jack promptly tore out — but in the name of thoroughness, he did flick through a bit more. Several interesting notes caught his eye, leaving a small smile on his lips. Trust Ianto. Feeling lighter and a little mischievous, he left the diary in his office, instead of putting it back in Ianto's drawer. A little present for himself, as a reward for a memory job well done… on himself.
Having purged the Hub of physical evidence, Jack set to work on the computers. Mainframe contained a long-standing corruption protocol, in case Torchwood was in imminent danger of being taken over by hostiles who should never get the information stored in their databases. It was simple enough to rewrite part of that protocol, destroying only the last forty-eight hours. While the program ran its course, Jack tied up the last loose end — Rhys Williams turned out to be surprisingly cooperative about taking a smaller dose of Retcon. Of course, that may have had to do with Jack's very serious threat of keeping Gwen quarantined in the Hub until her fiancé acquiesced.
Finally, the Captain approached Adam's cell once more. The redheaded alien no longer fought and yelled — he just sat there, staring at the floor.
"Just me left," the Captain said mildly.
Adam raised his head, exhausted and afraid. "Jack, I know what it's like not to exist," he revealed hollowly. "Please, don't send me back there."
"I have to," Jack replied calmly.
Adam raised his head out of his hands again. "What are you gonna do?"
In answer, Jack held up his last Retcon pill between his fingers. "This will wipe out the last two days," he explained.
The angry helplessness on Adam's face confirmed his theory once and for all. "But you'll still keep the bad memories," Adam said bitterly, "because they were all yours."
Jack had no rebuttal to that. Losing his father, losing Gray, watching his mother step further away from him day by day until he simply felt too alone to stay in that ghost of a home for another second… those were all his memories. Those were the moments that had started defining him.
Adam rose to his feet, leaning against the glass partition. "What about the good times, Jack?" he prodded. "What about the last good memory of you and your dad?"
That stung. "It's lost," Jack snapped coldly. Lost long ago, when he'd tried to block them out because they hurt. He hadn't expected to live long enough to ever want them back so very badly.
"I can help you find it," Adam overrode him. Jack stared at him. "I can take you back there," the redhead continued. "Before I die."
Jack tried to scoff, tried to look away from him — but Adam was dying, and there was nothing he could gain. And there was a longing in Jack which he'd been shoving away for decades. All this time, and he still hadn't found any trace of his little brother. Still hadn't laid those ghosts to rest.
"Why would you do that?" he heard himself asking Adam. His voice felt shaky. All of him felt shaky, all of a sudden. He'd always been touchy about his memories, ever since those two years had been taken from him. What else had he lost over time? What if he could finally get something back?
"I was in the Void for so long," Adam murmured. "The colors of this world nearly blinded me, Jack." Adam pressed his hands to the glass, caught between a smile and tears. "It was so beautiful after the darkness and the stench of fear. You gave me that," he insisted, staring up at Jack. "Let me do this for you."
Jack glanced toward the doorway again. The main Hub was visible — just beyond that, he'd left his team, his friends and his lover, asleep in the boardroom. He'd taken care of everything to finish off this intruder.
"Come on," Adam wheedled. "You want this," he added quietly.
It was his memory. He was in control. Adam was only a tool here. Jack closed his eyes.
Author's Note: Thanks to the lovely Village-Mystic and BelladonasMom for reviewing last chapter. Just one more part to go in this piece, unless I still end up with that epilogue. Haven't decided on it, yet. Anyway, hope y'all enjoy it.