Fore note: Un-beta'd. Again, I want to thank everyone who has read, reviewed, followed, and favourited this work. You've all be such great encouragement as I venture forth. We move a twee bit further in Ianto's suspension and I think we've finally made it through his first day... I expect not to write as concentrated (moving us on) for the next (and hopefully final) part of the suspension chapters. I hope you enjoy. As always, reviews and constructive criticism very much appreciated. Diolch yn fawr iawn!
Disclaimer: Torchwood belongs to the BBC and is the creation of the masterful Russell T. Davies. Recognisable characters and scenarios belong to the appropriate parties and are borrowed for entertainment purposes only. Postcards from Italy lyrics belong to Beirut.
Spoilers: Torchwood series 1-3, Doctor Who 'Army of Ghosts', 'Doomsday', 'The Stolen Earth', and 'Journey's End' (potentially others)
Summary: Ianto Jones had made himself a shadow, hidden in the background, unnoticed. How does a shadow cope with being brought into the light?
Pairings: Jack/Ianto (eventually), Ianto/Lisa (mentioned), Gwen/Rhys, etc (standard canon couplings)
Ex Umbra In Solem
(From the Shadows into the Light)
by Gwyddelig
Chapter 7: Suspension III
"Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
There was more to him than met the eye. Not particularly surprising; after all, he did work for Torchwood (and would for the rest of his expectedly short life). What was surprising was that no one had ever noticed, had never caught on. He'd slipped by, hidden behind suits and sirs and a semblance of subservience so uncannily rendered that they didn't once think to look past it, didn't bother to look deeper into the shadows to see what they held.
Now they saw him. Now someone was looking deeper. Hawk-like blue eyes slid over him with a mixed heat, slow burning anger dulled by exhausted understanding dancing in their depths. There was a promise there: he would be watched.
It was strange, to find himself sitting in his living room, sipping coffee with Jack Harkness as if it were an everyday occurrence. Strange, really, for anyone to be there, but more so that the person was Jack.
And stranger still was feeling of being alone while so very obviously not.
Silence buzzed like tinnitus in his head, an overflowing emptiness that ate at him queerly. He'd never encountered such absence of feeling before, even the ground beneath his feet echoed of the ages; but Jack - Jack, whom he could see and touch and smell, who was generally bursting with life and feeling - was not there.
Ianto shuddered, breaking the stillness which had enveloped them. "Could you not… shield so tightly?" he asked tentatively, wincing at the sound of his rough voice in the crisp silence. "It's… creepy, seeing you sitting there and not feeling you at all."
The cascade of emotions before had been overwhelming, but the lack there of was unbearable.
Jack paused a moment before - in eerie synchronicity - he lowered his shields a fraction and opened his mouth to speak. The dual sensory stimulation after the void was almost surreal: softly (ever so softly) frustrated-amusement brushed against his mind as Jack's voice drifted to his ears.
"This explains a lot," the Captain sighed, running a hand through his stylishly mussed hair (hair that Ianto had dreamed of running his own fingers through, secret wishing, in the dark, in the loneliness of nights spent at her side, wrapped in her pain). "No wonder you make such a consummate butler. Should have known you were a mind reader," he joked with a shake of his head.
Ianto ducked his own, cheeks colouring hotly - the flippant response to his most closely held secret like a slap in the face. "Not a mind reader, sir," he denied, retreating behind politesse to master his discomfiture. "Telepathy is not a skill I have ever had nor wish to have."
At his confession, understanding blossomed across his senses and spread across Jack's face like the melting of icicles in the spring. There was a delicacy to it that was curious, almost gentle - as if he'd been handed a precious thing and grokked it in fullness.
"Did she know?" the older man asked softly and with a shrewdness few realised he possessed.
"Yes," Ianto whispered, refraining from biting out that he'd intended to ask her to marry him, of course she knew. Lisa had been the only one he'd willingly shared his gift (curse) with. Sweet, wonderful, accepting Lisa. Lisa who had no psi rating of her own, who was blessedly normal, who treated him as if he were normal, too.
Sympathy touched him as gentle as a lover's caress and Ianto pushed his meagre shields against it to block it out. He didn't want Jack's pity, still wanted to hate the man, to want to watch him suffer and die… but he was quickly losing that desire, watching it wash away under the scouring rush of comprehension: she'd known about him, known he could feel her - and that thing (Owen was right, and how pathetic was that) used that knowledge against him.
"You only saw what it wanted you to see," Jack asserted, his voice soft, making Ianto wonder if the man wasn't gifted as well. "Only felt what it wanted you to feel."
Ianto shrugged off the hand that fell on his shoulder, glancing up in surprise to see Jack standing over him - what was it with that man and suddenly appearing in Ianto's space?
"From the first moment the implant bored into her head the programming was there, unfinished, but the information, the imperative was in place: upgrade humanity, by whatever means possible," crystal-blue eyes met blue-grey. "You were those means. It manipulated you, convinced you that it was still Lisa to convince you to aid it."
"Don't you think I know that?!" Ianto bit out testily (he knows, of course he knows), scrubbing at his face with his hands - as if he could wash it all away, as if it could be washed away. "I can see it - now that she's no longer in my head, now that I no longer feel her. She knew me and because of that it knew me, knew how to get to me, knew it could convince me to do anything - anything, Jack - to save her: no matter the cost to myself or anyone else." He took a shaky breath, fisting his hands on his knees. "I never meant to hurt anyone. I just wanted Lisa back."
Jack stood silent, no cliched adages about intentions and roads, no empty platitudes, no renewed fury or condemnation. There were no bursts of feeling, of emotion, but neither was there the same disconcerting lack there of as before.
"And then - I want so badly to hate you for taking her from me," Ianto continued when it was evident Jack was waiting for him to go on. "But I can't - because you didn't. You didn't because she was already gone. My Lisa died at Canary Wharf. And I know that. Rationally I know that, but I can't promise you I won't be petty or petulant and I can't promise you that I'll be over it all any time soon. Because not only do I want to hate you, but I owe you my life - and I'm not sure yet if I can forgive you for sparing it. Do you have any idea what that feels like, Jack? To have all that going on in your head? To be so conflicted?"
His mind was clearer than it had been in months, all the little bits falling into place as he pressed on. And it made it all that much worse.
"I committed treason, placed not only you all but the entire world at stake, and it was all for naught. I have to live with that - because of you," pained eyes pinned the older man beneath their gaze, a keen despair churning in the stormy depths.
"Are you finished?" The slice of Jack's voice held no hint of condemnation, but was tinged through with mild exasperation.
Ianto shrugged, feeling stiff and old and sick with himself. He supposed he was done… for now.
"Let me tell you a story, then," the Captain said, dropping down to the couch and pushing Ianto over to make room. "There was once a man from the future who'd lost 2 years of his memory, for what reason he didn't know. So desperate was this man to recover those memories, to know why he'd had them taken away in the first place, that he'd do anything, would go to any lengths, to get them back…"
