Chapter 7: Jack's Back
AN/ As promised Jack is back, and because I love you there's an extra long chapter...actually I just couldn't justify splitting this chapter into one of drama and a part 2 that was basically a porno (as much as I would have liked to), anyway, enjoy^^
"Excuse me have you seen a Blowfish driving a sports car?" Gwen wished that was the weirdest question she'd asked a member of the public while working with Torchwood. They followed the car until Owen shot out its tires and the land fish ran into the nearest house. They took their positions and tried to figure out how to get rid of the alien without harming any hostages, the blowfish wasn't helping the situation and honestly seemed to know a little too much about each of them.
"And that leaves me with the secretary, soft girly hands that have never fired a gun" He was right, since Ianto had changed he had never had to shoot anyone and hadn't even used the shooting range because it was no fun on his own. However if the blowfish thought because these hands were free of blood he wouldn't fire then he was sadly mistaken, Ianto had six weeks of pent up anger on his side and cut the overgrown tuna off in the middle of it's speech on how stupid they all were with a bullet in the brain.
Tosh looked at Ianto in shock, he had shot the blowfish between the eyes mid-sentence and the look in her best friends eyes was ice cold, like he had been aiming that bullet at someone else. Another thing that bothered her was that she was sure that she heard two shots but they were too close together for Ianto to have fired twice, taking a closer look at the blowfish there were infact two entry wounds, one between the eyes and one about an inch higher. She turned around to try to figure out ho else had fired and saw the last person she could have expected to see
"Hey kids, D'you miss me?" Toshiko wasn't the only person surprised. Ianto whipped his head around so fast that he got dizzy then once he was able to focus on the man stood in front of him he collapsed onto the carpet in a dead feint, Gwen and Owen's reactions were slightly less violent, Owen throwing something at the captain and Gwen giving him a good slap.
"Wow, you sure know how to make a guy feel loved, but I've gotta say it's been a long time since I've knocked someone out by saying hi" He looked at the woman on the floor and frowned, who was she and why was she with the team, surely he hadn't been gone long enough that they had recruited new members to replace him? She was a pretty good shot, probably a UNIT transfer by her haircut. He helped the team to clean up the house, retcon the family and sending the injured man off in in an ambulance, that sort of thing was usually Ianto's job and the team refused to answer his questions as to the Welshman's location.
Ianto Jones regained consciousness in the back of the SUV, he could see Gwen driving and his head was in Tosh's lap, he didn't know where Owen was and at the moment he wasn't too interested. Jack was back and his head was spinning.
"Don't even think about it!" Tosh put her hands on Ianto's shoulders to stop her friend from sitting up before he was ready, after a brief struggle he gave up and lay with his legs curled up watching the lights go by as Tosh stroked her fingers across his scalp soothingly like a mother would to her child. Ianto's hand rested on her knee and smiled, Toshiko always knew how to calm him down and right now he needed it. As much as he had hoped and prayed for Jack to come back in the last three months there had been a nagging fear that if Jack came back before Toshiko could turn him back into a man then Jack wouldn't want him any more. He may not be ready to jump back into bed with the man who had walked out on him but that was a different story from that man rejecting him because of something that was done to him against his will. He wasn't ready to face that and it was all he could do to keep his breathing steady as the lights of the road sped across the roof of the SUV and finally as the inside lights came on when Gwen parked them on the edge of the Plass.
Jack sat in the front passenger seat of the SUV itching to break the silence, the team were never this quiet without it being awkward but it seemed that while he was gone they had got so comfortable with each other that they could happily sit and enjoy the few minutes of quiet they had before Owen caught up with them in the stolen sports car and put the blowfish in the morgue. There was also the issue of the woman lying across the backseat, she was content to lie on Tosh's lap and the technicians behaviour after her colleague woke up made him think that maybe there was something going on between them. He held his tongue however to minimise the risk of being hit again tonight, as delicate as the Japanese woman was she could throw a hell of a punch and if the stranger's marksmanship was anything to go by then she could take care of herself too. They had been sat in silence for five minutes and Owen was inside the HUB while they waited for him. Still nobody had mentioned Ianto and it was too much for Jack. He moved to get out of the car but Gwen's hand on his own made him hesitate.
"Jack" She cast a glance at Ianto in the backseat and hoped that she was doing the right thing "There's something you need to know before you go any further" Behind her Ianto sat bolt upright and in the rear-view mirror she could see his trademark glare but she knew that he wouldn't' be able to do this himself right now and leaving Jack without answers wasn't fair even if the man had abandoned them.
"It's Ianto isn't it?" Jack unbuckled his seatbelt and turned so that Gwen couldn't see the tears shining in his eyes, during his time on the Valiant and especially in the few months after the Master had shown him footage of Ianto's bloodied corpse – killed by the toclafane while fighting the good fight, Jack had got through the day and found a reason to keep fighting in his desire to complete the Doctor's plan, turn back time and see Ianto again. If the Welshman had died before they could be reunited then he will have helped to save the world but it was all for nothing. In the side mirror Ianto saw the change in Jack's face and though he knew Jack didn't recognise him he put a hand on his shoulder to offer the little comfort he could until he could explain himself properly.
That bloody woman had her hand on his shoulder, he didn't know who she was. He didn't want to know who she was and he honestly didn't care, one way or another Ianto was inside the HUB, either working in the archives or frozen in the morgue Jack had to see him. He flew out of the car door and was half way to the tourist office when he heard someone running to catch him.
"Jack" It was her again, wasn't him shrugging off her hand as he left the car enough? He increased his stride but she matched it and Jack only had half a seconds notice before he was pulled by the lapels of his coat to face the odd woman following him.
"Cariad, stop this" Ianto didn't know what else to do, Jack wasn't going to stand still long enough for him to explain the long story of his life during the last few months so he did the one thing he knew he could do to show Jack who he was. He kissed him. For a moment the Captain resisted but the kiss was so familiar, he had felt those hands in his hair so many times and somehow the tongue ghosting its way across his bottom lip and begging permission to enter his mouth tasted the same even if the person kissing him looked totally different.
"Ianto?" Jack looked down at the person in front of him,she was tall, pale and wore black jeans and a red button down shirt. She was trembling and worrying her lip but Jack couldn't look away from her eyes, those ice blue pools where the only thing he had wanted to see for what felt like forever.
"You're?"
"A woman. I kind of noticed"
"When did this happen?" Jack wasn't 100% sure of how long he had been gone but it wasn't long enough for Ianto to have gone through gender reassignment surgery
"About six weeks now, but I'm still me and I" Jack cut him off with another kiss then hugged him to his chest before the Welshman could start babbling, Ianto stayed inside the warmth of Jack's coat and breathed in the scent he had missed, hooking his fingers into Jack's shirt to feel the skin beneath and prove to himself that he wasn't dreaming. For a minute everything was quiet then they heard Tosh calling from the SUV and looked up to see what was going on.
"Guys' we're not going back into the HUB we've got a rift alert" Tosh held up her PDA and indicated that they should get back into the car. She had moved to the passenger seat so that Jack and Ianto could sit together in the back. Owen had put the blowfish into cold storage and was driving while Gwen sat in the back fastening her seatbelt. They headed out to the coordinates of the rift spike and found a body which had been thrown off the roof of a multi story car park. They had thought it would be a simple case of catch the psychopathic alien but then something totally unexpected happened. Jack's wrist strap beeped.
Stood on the rooftop after time had reset itself and John Hart had walked through the rift fissure and out of their lives all Ianto wanted to do was sleep. As if his day hadn't been stressful enough he had now been up for over twenty hours, had spent the entire night running around the city trying to save his team and now had to deal with Jack and the conversation they didn't get time for earlier.
"Right, I'm going home, you said that we need to avoid our past selves for the rest of the night so if you want you're welcome to come back to mine but I'm just going to have dinner and go to bed" Everybody agreed that Ianto's was the best place for them to spend the night if they wanted to avoid themselves, except for Gwen who had gone home to spend an entire night with Rhys confident that she wouldn't get called into work as technically she was already there. Inside Ianto's flat Owen challenged Tosh to a game on the wii and Jack followed Ianto into the kitchen where he watched the Welshman dish up the Chinese food they had bought on the way in.
"So you've been a woman for six weeks, how's that working out for you?" Ianto responded with a death glare as they carried the plates to the table.
"Guys, food" He shouted to Tosh and Owen who were getting a little over competitive with the game "As soon as we work out how to change me back I'll be more than happy to get these nano bots out of me"
Jack's jaw practically hit the table, he hadn't seen nano gene technology since that incident with the Chula ambulance in world war two, the trouble they caused there had certainly put him off them so the thought of that same technology being responsible for Ianto's change put him on edge.
"Owen you're supposed to be a doctor how could you leave those inside Ianto for six weeks, don't you know how dangerous nano genes can be?"
The team stopped eating and looked at Jack in confusion, they had done their best to minimise the damage done during the first few hours after Ianto's change but until they knew how to reverse the effects Ianto insisted that they leave the nano bots be, he didn't want to risk not being able to get them back inside him to change him back when they figured out how to.
"How am I supposed to know that the little robots that I cant see and that'll change a bloke into a woman are dangerous. I'd never seen them before and I'm sorry but you were gone and we did the best we could" Owen was furious that Jack would just sit there and tell him that they hadn't done the best job they possibly could in a crazy situation. He grabbed his plate and took it with him into the spare room.
"Owen!" Tosh followed the medic and Jack and Ianto were left alone at the dining table pushing food around their plates in awkward silence. Ianto yawned.
"Hey you should get some sleep" Jack stood and walked over to the cupboard built into the wall and pulled out blankets and a pillow that he knew were stored there.
"What are you doing?" the only person who ever used those were Owen when he stayed but it seemed that he and Tosh were staying in the guest room from the medics loud snores.
"Your couch is much more comfortable than Owen makes it out to..."
"Don't be stupid you're not going to sleep on the couch" Ianto smiled at the fact that Jack was willing to give him some space but there was no reason for him to sleep on the couch when there was a king size bed in the next room.
"Oh, I thought you'd want..."
"Jack, the other week four people fit into that bed, I'm sure the two of us will manage just fine, god you're worse than Owen" Jack ignored the slightly upsetting idea of different people being in Ianto's bed but followed him into the bedroom and they settled in to get some sleep, both keeping to their own sides of the bed.
At 3am Ianto woke up, he'd had a few hours sleep but Jack had got out of bed a few minutes ago and that had disturbed him.
"You should be sleeping" Jack came back into the room with a glass of water but stopped in the doorway when he saw that Ianto had woken up and turned on the bedside lamp.
"You can talk, how often do you sleep at night?" Ianto watched as he got back into bed, wearing the sleep pants and his under shirt Jack was wearing more to bed than Ianto had ever seen before and that amused him, though he was sure that his own choice of pyjamas - the bay watch shorts and matching shirt – were no better.
"You seemed to know about the nano bots earlier" Ianto had wanted to ask him about this earlier but had been too tired.
"Yeah, I've seen them before, if you want I should be able to reprogram them from my wrist strap then they do all the work"
Ianto beamed at him and for the first time since 1941 Jack didn't feel guilty for unleashing the nano genes on the ill of London, without that experience he would not be able to bring that look of happiness to Ianto's face.
"When?"
"If you want we can do it at the HUB tomorrow, Owen will want to monitor you and it'll probably take a few hours for the changes to be complete but then you'll be yourself again." Jack was unprepared for the armful of Welshman that came hurtling across the bed towards him and captured his lips in a kiss. In the office block earlier Ianto had agreed to go on a date with him once he had his on body back but they had been planing to take it slow while Ianto learned to trust him again.
"What happened to taking it slow?" Jack asked as Ianto ran his hands under the tshirt Jack had been sleeping in.
"Shhh" Ianto's lips continued their trail down his neck and to his chest where he pulled the tshirt over Jack's head and tossed it aside. Jack didn't need any more encouragement than that and Ianto found himself pinned to the bed and gasping with new sensations. They both needed this, Ianto had felt so alone even with the support of his team since Jack left and even if he regretted it at dawn he couldn't tell himself that this was wrong now. Jack had been to hell and back in the year he was away and he allowed himself to get lost in the loving caresses of the man he had thought lost to him forever. Ianto may not trust Jack to stay with him forever but he trusted him tonight, trusted him with the body he was still so unfamiliar with but which came to life under the Captains hands, lips and tongue.
"Jack" Ianto woke up for the second time that morning but this time he was not alone, he was wrapped in the warmth of Jack's sleeping body and the weight of the captains arm was on his waist. As the man began to stir he did what he always did, he nuzzled Ianto's neck, kissing the pulse point that had come up in a bruise from his attentions earlier. "Jack stop it, I said Stop!" Ianto pushed himself into as sitting position then got off the bed, leaving a still half-asleep Jack sprawled on his stomach.
"Yan, what's wrong?" Ianto was stood next to the dresser pulling out his clothes for the day wrapped in the red sheet he had taken with him from the bed.
"I can't do this, we had a plan remember? Take it slow, go on a date and see where it went from there and I ruined it"
"Hey I'm not complaining" Jack picked up his boxers from where Ianto had thrown them and put them on before going to the closet to see that Ianto still kept a clean shirt, pants and a pair of braces there for him.
"Well you wouldn't but I'm not ready, before we can be us again I need to be me again"
"And I said I'd do that for you"
"And I need to believe you when you say you won't leave again." Tears shone in the Welshman's eyes and Jack felt a stab of guilt, in the back of his mind he knew that there was no way that Ianto would be able to forgive him for leaving right away but Ianto's behaviour earlier had given him reason to hope.
"Then I'll do what I have to do, I love you Ianto", Saying the words he had wanted to say when he first got back Jack thought everything he had gone through to get to this point was worth it. Finding out that the doctor had left him on purpose had cost him a dream, Surviving on board the Valiant had nearly cost him his sanity but the look on Ianto Jones' face when he told him that he loved him for the very first time was priceless.
AN/Right, as I have now been up for 32 hours straight I am going into hibernation now, Just wanted to get this finished before I fell asleep and totally forgot.
