Reviews are love and the mystery of Joseph Hall thickens...

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Chapter Three

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He pressed the fabric to the bleeding wound, ordering John to hold the injured person still.

This couldn't happen. This was not supposed to happen.

'You have to do it now!' John shouted. 'Do it now!'

He nodded and pressed his other hand to the wound. 'I know.'

'Don't stall! We can't afford to stall, not anymore!'

'I know!' Ianto yelled more forcefully. 'I just... I can't leave him.'

'You aren't leaving him. You're going back to him, your Jack.'

Ianto dried his eyes with his bloodstained hand, refusing to acknowledge that it was tears. He would not cry because of something that wasn't right in the first place. He couldn't cry over spilt milk, however bad the metaphor.

'Do it, Yan,' a haggard voice said.

He stared down onto the face of a younger Jack, a mortally wounded Jack who would not come back to life. 'Right,' he finally said and slipped back to press the buttons on the Vortex Manipulator around his wrist. 'Hold on,' he warned and they slipped through the Vortex, Jack crying out in pain and nearly losing hold of the Manipulator. Ianto and John held him tighter until they landed in a heap on a floor.

Ianto closed his eyes for a second, settling his stomach and praying to the Powers to bring him any luck they were willing to give him. When everything had settled somewhat, he gave John a look and the other man quickly took over pressing his hands to Jack's wound.

Then he looked around and sighed in relief when three familiar faces stared down at him in shock. 'I'm in the right place,' he told himself loudly, but there was no time to dwell on his return. Jack's entire existence was hanging in the balance.

He rushed out of the autopsy bay (because that was where they had landed) and up the stairs towards Jack's office, the other immortal Jack's office. He nearly doubled over in nausea because of the time travel, but kept on.

'Retcon,' he shouted out when he got the door open and came face-to-face with a startled Jack, the immortal Jack. 'I need retcon.' Taking the little box he knew was where Jack kept the little white pills, he rushed back out and down the stairs, nearly tripping over his own legs in the process. Side-effects of time travelling were a fucking bitch.

He reached John and Jack, the mortal one, in record time and quickly opened the box and tried to remember the dose given for two years of memory loss.

'I got it,' he said.

John looked at him gravely. 'You sure this will work?'

It has to, he thought to himself. 'If this doesn't work, all three of us will be wiped out of existence.'

'It better work then,' Jack groaned. 'Get on with it!'

Ianto could hear footsteps behind them and knew time was running out. 'Here,' he told John and gave him four square pills. 'Two years.'

John nodded. 'Be safe, Ianto Jones.'

'Always am,' Ianto replied and nodded. 'Go!'

John hesitated and Jack had blacked out.

'Will you just fucking leave before I change my mind?' Ianto yelled and scrambled backwards away from the two men.

The Vortex opened and Jack and John were gone, leaving him crashing into a tray and into the wall. He fell to the ground, leaning against the wall, and staring at the now empty spot. He breathed heavily, seeing flashes before his eyes, and quickly began to open his coat to reveal his own wound, finally now aware of the damage he also had obtained from that last fight.

He fell to the side and crashed into the darkness, seeing Jack's brilliant smiling face before losing consciousness.

...

'What just happened?' Owen asked alternating between looking at the spot where two very familiar men had disappeared; to the also very familiar man he was treating.

Gwen shrugged helplessly.

Tosh waved her gadgets around, trying to pick up something, anything to indicate what had happened and why the Rift alarm hadn't gone off. 'There are spikes, but it's laced with something else,' she said and frowned when her device wouldn't give her a conclusive answer.

'It's the Vortex,' Jack commented. 'It is leftover energy from the Time Vortex.'

He was standing with his arms across his chest, staring fixatedly at... well, what appeared to be Ianto, except he wasn't quite right, Gwen thought. He looked older somehow and even completely off in dreamland, there was a frown around his mouth. His adorable curly hair had been shaved off, replacing it with a military cut that looked far to alien on him. His clothes were an all-black uniform with shining silver cuff links and buttons in a row on each side of his chest. The shoulder pads clearly showed some kind of military rank, but it was nothing she'd ever seen before. His trouser legs had been shoved into sturdy booths that clearly had seen their fair share of action. The only part the uniform that wasn't entirely black was the waistcoat hidden underneath the jacket with delicate red symbols, now ruined by blood.

'He should be fine. It's just a flesh wound,' Owen said and stepped back from Ianto.

'Are you saying Ianto just came through the Time Vortex?' Tosh asked Jack.

Jack crouched down beside Ianto and took hold of Ianto's left wrist where a black wriststrap was hidden underneath the uniform. 'Time Agent technology,' he said, frowning. He scanned Ianto with his own strap and it quickly lit up like a Christmas tree. 'There's Vortex residue all over him.'

'What does that mean?' Gwen asked.

'Remember when Martha went into the Pharm and Doctor Copley took note of something special around her?' Jack asked, trying to explain.

The team nodded simultaneously.

'When you time travel you're exposed to harmless radiation, but it'll stay on you.'

'Ianto time travelled?' Tosh said.

'Looks like it,' Jack answered.

'Is it him, though?' Gwen asked, staring worriedly down on the unconscious figure.

'I'll do some tests when he wakes up. Then we'll all have answers,' Owen said and gave Jack a worried look.

Jack nodded, still with a deep frown marring his features. 'I'll stand guard. You've all got work to do until he wakes.'

...

He coIuldn't get out. He couldn't gaet out. He coulmdn't get out. He couldn't get obut.

aHe couldn't get out. He coduldn't get out. He couldn't gewt out.

He couldn't goet out.

He coulldn't get out. He fcouldn't get out. He had to get out...

He crashed around, unable to open his eyes, afraid that the nightmare had become real again. He breathed heavily, for the first time really noticing the clean air of the twenty-first century.

'Hey Ianto, easy!' a familiar voice said and it instantly soothed him.

He slowly opened his eyes and found himself staring at the autopsy bay's ceiling.

'Interesting,' he said and groaned when he tried to move.

'Don't move. You've got stitches,' Jack said.

Ianto was lying on the ratty old couch and briefly wondered why exactly the couch was down in the autopsy bay, but technicalities aside, he was still in the Hub. He'd still made it to Torchwood Three.

He breathed out a sigh of relief.

Jack was sitting beside him on a chair, looking coolly down at him with his Captain's look.

'Who are you?' he asked.

'Ianto Jones.'

'Can you prove that?'

Ianto rustled with his bloodstained hands, but they were somehow cuffed to the couch. 'Left jacket pocket,' he said once he realised it would be impossible for him to get his proof.

Jack reached over and got out a pocket watch that Ianto had held close to his heart for six years. It was the one thing he had never left behind, one thing he'd never let go off because it was home, his real home, something he'd continually doubted towards the end.

'It's mine,' Jack stated.

'Yes,' Ianto said. 'I was gone for six years almost to the date, but I never let go of the watch. I couldn't.'

Jack stared at him. 'I missed your thirtieth birthday,' he said with sincere regret and placed his hand over Ianto's.

Ianto closed his eyes, loving the familiarity of the contact, but unable to face this Jack just yet when the mortal Jack was still fresh in his mind, not troubled in the same way as the immortal one was. 'No, you didn't. You just don't remember,' he whispered.

Jack gripped his hand tightly. 'You retconned me and made me lose two years of my life!'

'I did what was necessary, Jack!' Ianto hissed.

'Two years!' Jack almost shouted. 'I knew nothing!'

'If I had left you to remember, it would have disrupted the space-time continuum. You know this!'

'Apparently, so do you!'

Ianto bit his lip.

'Are you a Time Agent?' Jack asked calmly.

'Yes,' Ianto simply answered.

Jack stood up in frustration. 'Your uniform is late twenty-ninth century UNIT special force, which would later become the Time Agency. Is that where you ended up after the Rift took you?'

'No. I just liked the design,' Ianto told him honestly.

'Where did you end up then?' Jack asked sternly.

'Does it matter?'

He hated putting Jack in this position, of feeling his own medicine, but talking... that was out of the question, too.

Jack instantly retreated behind a wall of icy stone and Ianto almost cried because mortal Jack hadn't had that look. Not once in the two years Ianto had spent with Jack in the Time Agency had he had needed to retreat behind a protective wall to keep enemies at bay.

'No, it doesn't,' Jack said coolly. 'You're back and that's what matters.'

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