21 – Ianto
Lisa is at work, as she said she would be and I let us in with the spare key, still in the little indent above the door. I have told her so many times to move it but she is a creature of habit I suppose.
It feels different, like… I am a visitor now. It is not so inviting as when I lived here. The air is different if ya know what I mean. Feels weird, the sofa we cuddled on is covered in a throw I've not seen before. Someone else lives here now, someone with the same face as the woman I loved. It is easier to think if it that way… this is someone else's place now.
The ladder to the attic slides down with ease and I am soon up in the crawl space, puling boxes about, finding my shit and lowering it to the waiting hands of Jack. I get lost for a moment or two in a box of memorabilia, plucking out a few things I would like from the box of memoires, leaving the rest for her. I wonder if she wants them at all, these moments of time we had. As I ponder this, my gaze stuck on the box,I hear Jack call out my name and I move to the manhole to look down.
Jack is holding something I do not like seeing and I screw my nose up "Just shove it back in the box, yeah? I will shove it under the bed or something when we get home."
"Buts it's a bravery award!" he is taken with it, holding it up to look at me closely then to my annoyance he dives back into the box to seek something else coming up with the small black box I don't look at much "Jesus Ianto. It's the Queen's Medal of Honour in here!"
"It's a reminder of a bad time" I try to explain "A hard time, a day of sorrow and violence. I don't like to look at it, it only reminds me tht monsters live in this world and they wear the faces of men."
He seems to understand, placing them back in the box, then rising to wait for the next thing. Soon we have it all down, including her Christmas things that I push into the spare room to deposit only to find she told me the wrong room after all. I do not know if it was deliberate, me telling her I didn't want to see the nursery so I am instructed into it anyway … maybe she forgot … her directional skills do leave a lot to be desired. Can't read a map to save herself and in the past she did yell left while pointing right sometimes.
Blue.
A sea of blue and I know now that it is a little boy she carries to another man. A son.
I feel lost but then hear his voice behind me "Jesus, bugger if he likes pink then."
It breaks my silence with a snort as I struggle now, the thought that she might have a little boy who wants pink and pigtails making me giggle as we place the boxes in the other room opposite, my eyes not drawn back to that room once.
Something I cannot have. Something lost to me long before I even met her. A choice I made. To live.
It is not until we are driving that Jack finally asks and I know he is being respectful "So … the medals?"
"Turn here" I point and I take him to the town square, to my little shop along the quay.
"Torchwood" he says softy as he looks at it with surprise, whatever image he had in his head, it was clearly not this.
My shop front looks like an old gnarled tree, reaching out with the window partially covered and the sign with the name is hanging from a branch. Designed it meself. The door is in the trunk so you enter the tree to come in. Kids love it, they are really one of my biggest customers, dragging their parents who quickly smell the coffee while their kids get lost in cats and books.
"Hello there Ianto" Toshiko says with a soft smile, coming around from behind the counter and we embrace before I introduce Jack, noting her eyes measuring him up in that disapproving little sister way.
Jack seems to realise this friend is important and he does not leer or pretend to be a horn dog, instead he is gracious and then sees a cat, makes a strange gargling noise and runs off with jazz hands.
He likes cats.
They like him too. By the time I brewed us a cup and look for him, I found him in the beanbags smothered in a mass of cats like a weird fur coat of splotches of colour and tabby.
"Found you" I say like he was hiding and he laughs, reaching so careful so as not to upset the cats. Kinda cute.
I know what he wants to hear and much as I don't like to talk about it … he is maybe one of the few who will understand why.
The day the children died.
