Notes: I've just moved house, and this update is a peace offering. I won't actually be able to do much for a while, but you've all been so nice about the incredible delays that I'm offering a present. However, in the move, I've lost my records book: I no longer know who wants what extended. Can everybody who requested something that wasn't posted please let me know? Otherwise it won't happen unless someone else asks. So if there's anything special you want extended, tell me in your reviews or messages, please. And, as always, tell me any of the new ones you want extended too.
One Hundred and One
"I think it's sad," Gwen said. "Jack can't love Ianto because it'll break his heart when he dies, but Ianto..."
She was going to say 'loves Jack' and follow it up with those exaggerated terms that romantic women like Gwen enjoy, but Tosh, to her surprise, interrupted.
"...Can't love Jack."
"What?" Gwen blinked.
"Ianto can't love Jack either," Tosh said. "In fact, I think Jack loves Ianto, but Ianto doesn't love Jack."
Gwen mused, then frowned: "But that's the wrong way around."
"Jack knows Ianto, but Ianto doesn't know Jack. Nobody knows Jack. You can't really love what you don't know; you just love what you think you know."
"Do we really know anybody?" Gwen asked.
"More than we do of Jack," Tosh said. It was why she preferred computers: they kept no secrets.
One Hundred and Two
Immortality is a faulty conception, and in the end, Jack did as all humans do. In the end, Jack died. In the end, he found himself on a grey stone road in the middle of the darkness, looking for familiarity in the ghostly faces on the sidelines, and finding none.
He was unsurprised. He hadn't known other people for a hundred years or more, and who would wait so long for the immortal to die?
And then a shadowed form stepped from the white, shapeless crowd lining the roadsides, and smiled.
And it was a familiar smile.
"So what do they call you now, sir?"
"Many things," Jack murmured, "but Jack was always my favourite."
He barely recalled the name Jack, barely recalled that face that smiled at him, but the slow burn in his mind was something he never forgot, and experienced more times than he cared to know. A burn that was lost, and that he missed, and he smiled back at the man in the grey suit.
"So I can still call you Jack?" he asked, pleasantly and effortlessly polite.
"Yes."
The man offers a hand to be shaken, a gesture that Jack has forgotten, and the smile widens.
"Welcome to the place you thought wasn't there, Jack," he said smoothly.
"What do they call you now?" Jack echoed, and the smile turned into a gentle laugh, and Jack recalled that laughter itself had an accent, long ago.
"These days?" the man mused. "I suppose I go by Yan, these days."
Jack gripped the hand that memory was beginning to reshape, and his smile became a touch more genuine.
"Yan," he echoed, and the white ghosts began to recede.
One Hundred and Three
Gwen is hovering outside the door to the main room of the Archives, and she shushes Jack hastily as he approaches.
"Look," she breathes, and they edge around the corner like naughty children.
And then Jack hears it.
Ianto is singing, a soft murmur almost under his breath, and definitely in Welsh. It rolls off his tongue like water, spilling into the room and splashing on the walls. He ignores them – or isn't aware of them – and Jack finds himself holding his breath.
And the melancholy in the voice strikes a chord inside Jack, and before too long he has to turn away. He can't memorise Ianto sounding so mournful, even if he doesn't understand the words.
One Hundred and Four
Torchwood One always did collect insane amounts of information about their employees, and Ianto is no exception to the rule. But what strikes Jack in the 'family and friends' section of the file is not the absence of Lisa's name next to 'partner' – after all, they met at Torchwood One, and Jack doesn't know if their superiors had ever picked up on it – but the list of names under 'former partners'.
Names Jack doesn't know, names Ianto had never mentioned, names that mean nothing but, at some point, clearly did.
"You have a load of exes," Jack comments, glancing over at his partner (now) who is fixing the runners on the drawers of the filing cabinet.
"If you say so," Ianto replies vaguely, and Jack frowns.
"Why so many? You're only twenty-five. I didn't have this many when I was twenty-five."
"I doubt you even remember, Jack," Ianto sighs. "Yes, I had a lot. But they want all of it – the casual, couple-of-weeks girlfriends as well as the serious ones. So really..."
"Still," Jack says doubtfully.
"I was a lonely teenager, alright?" Ianto shrugged. "Girls liked me, and I suppose I just wanted someone to give a damn. So I dated. Possibly more than you, at one stage."
Jack covers it up with a smile and a joke, but something stings at the idea that Ianto searched so diligently for someone to care.
Because he's seen that expression on his face sometimes, and Jack realises that Ianto is still searching.
One Hundred and Five
Gwen says he knows more about Jack than anyone, but Ianto doesn't think that's strictly true. He knows that he could, if he wanted to, but he doesn't bow to that temptation.
"He's your..."
"My whatever."
"Your whatever, then, and you know nothing about his...I don't know...his history, at least?" Gwen had demanded.
"No," Ianto said, "because if I don't pry into his, he can't pry into mine."
One Hundred and Six
Eons later, when Torchwood is a name degraded, and something no sane person would support, people find it strange that Jack keeps a photograph, preserved behind glass, of the original Torchwood staff, at the original facility.
He keeps it, despite the face of Yvonne Hartman, because there is another face in that crowd that he does remember, that makes him smile and cry in the same motion, but he can't remember why.
One Hundred and Seven
It frustrates Jack, sometimes, that Ianto has had twenty-five years of practice at being so completely invisible. So much practice that he can slip away if Jack is distracted for even a second; that he can spend hours God-knows-where, and Jack doesn't notice his absence; that he can absent himself completely from even team conversations and disappear like a ghost.
Jack doesn't want to remember ghosts.
One Hundred and Eight
Jack has started to deliberately relocate the cereal boxes in Ianto's flat to the top of the kitchen cupboards. They're just high enough that Ianto has to stretch; but just low enough that he won't bother to stand on a chair to reach. And, of course, when he stretches, his t-shirt rides up and exposes a long, flat expanse of rigid stomach and smooth, pale skin.
Sometimes Jack sits back and enjoys the view, and sometimes he acts on the ideas that the view gives him.
Especially if Ianto then bends down to get the milk out of the fridge.
