Ianto leaves and then he comes back.
There one second, gone the next, back with news that shatters Jack to his core and throws Torchwood into the strongest lockdown it's seen in the past hundred years.
"Her name is Lisa," Ianto says, tears streaming down his cheeks, indicating the partially-converted woman in the basement.
The machines around her are beeping, her fingers are twitching, her eyes are moving rapidly behind her eyelids. She's there. She's not human.
"She is," Ianto says, taking a step forward and placing himself between Jack and the conversion chamber. "It's not reached her brain, it's trying but she's fighting, but she—"
"You're risking the world."
"She's my world." Ianto swallows more loudly than he intended, his grief-stricken face breaking and schooling itself in a single second. "Haven't you ever been in love, Jack? She—she was at Canary Wharf, you owe it to her, you scavenged the Tower, you can't just leave her."
Jack bites back a growl. Love. He wants to scoff, his armored heart and weary soul knowing far better than Ianto's young idealism—which was shattered, had crumbled around him like Torchwood did, which is held together with scar tissue and sarcasm and suits.
"If she's not human…" Jack doesn't say what that would lead to. Ianto knows.
Ianto knows, too, that Lisa is human, that she's fighting, a hope that lasts them hours and stands strong against Tosh's horror and Gwen's confusion and Owen's empty glare when Jack tells him to save her.
Ianto doesn't gloat, doesn't say I told you so, but sinks to his knees by her bed and cries. Lets Jack put his arms around him, not quite holding and not quite supporting, but there; lets himself break in front of Jack's averted eyes and Lisa's still form, hope and grief coming to the surface and finally turning into relief.
.oOo.
Jack leaves and then he comes back.
Gone one second, there the next, and it's not nearly as simple as it should be.
Gone one second, theoretically planned but really half-cocked, thrown to the end of the universe and living a year that never happened. Two years of his memories are gone already; part of Jack wants to beg the Doctor to take this one as well.
"Take me home," he says instead.
Home, with Gwen and Owen and Tosh, and Ianto and Lisa, if they still want him. Ianto and Lisa, who he's flirted with, slept with, kissed on the right occasion; who he's never given himself the chance to get close to, who will leave him just like everyone always did and always will—forever, the Doctor told him. Over a hundred years in and he still can't conceptualize it.
Ianto and Lisa, who move as a well-oiled machine not only with each other but with the rest of the team, who take one look at Jack and see something wrong, who don't prod beyond asking if he plans to stay, who give him a second chance when he promises he will.
A chance, not a promise. Not a test. Open, hopeful looks and welcoming arms, the distance between them growing smaller with every passing week.
.oOo.
Lisa leaves and then comes back.
Twice.
A cyberwoman, the first time. Human one second and alien the next, fighting every second to retain control of her brain even as her body was taken over.
She's getting over the nightmares—not gone, never gone, but better, now. Better when she's not sleeping alone, when she has someone to bring her back to herself when she's shocked awake. She's scarred, both inside and out, arms and legs and chest and back retaining the outlines of her cyber implants, thin lines that will fade with time but will never let her forget.
Jack doesn't have scars. He will never have scars. The handsome face that attracts hundreds and gets Torchwood budget increases every year will stay that way for millennia.
The Master timed Jack's healing, at first. He bored quickly and left him bleeding after the first month, only caring that he'd healed enough for the next session; Ianto and Lisa catch him when he jolts awake from a nightmare, too.
As summer turns to autumn, Lisa turns to old outfits, ones she couldn't wear when she was healing, fancy shirts and skirts and trousers, casually donning blazers as if she doesn't know the effect she's having.
She does. She smirks at Jack when he spills his water and at Ianto when he overbrews his coffee the first time she joins them in the morning in her new outfit.
A watch, the second time.
Deep in a pocket of her blazer, covered in dandruff, the chain worn but the case clean, intricately decorated with circles and lines and circles—not breaking when Jack drops it to the floor in his haste to back away.
"What is it?" Lisa asks as if Jack hasn't found his damnation in her pocket during a groping session.
"What is it?" Lisa asks as if her approach doesn't make the hair on Jack's skin rise.
"What is it?" Lisa asks—Lisa, human Lisa, who doesn't know anything about her family heirloom other than the fact that it never opened.
Poor Lisa.
Lisa, human Lisa, who doesn't pick up the pocketwatch when Jack brokenly tells her, his throat dry, his words breaking off halfway, his sentences jumbled, his heart racing; who backs up to the opposite side of the room, leaning on the wall, a hand pressed to her mouth, to her neck, where a thin line traces the memory of conversion.
"I don't want to—"
She breaks off, tears her eyes away from Jack and desperately looks at Ianto. He fixed her once before, surely—
Jack has no such hope.
"I don't want to lose myself again."
Lisa swallows and is silent and Jack tries not to blink for fear of bringing forth the memories; blinks to clear them from his eyes anyway, is frightened of the moment of darkness.
In the silence, Ianto steps forward and picks up the watch. Holds it in his hands, weighing it. A normal watch, Jack knows, if not for the markings. If not for the consciousness contained inside it.
Ianto looks at them both and puts the watch in his pocket. Jack can almost imagine it disappearing, following Ianto into the maze of archives, staying there, taunting them, pulsing with life and never getting it—
Safe. Away from temptation.
A foolish hope.
Lisa leaves and then comes back, gold in her eyes and in her hair, looking at Jack with old eyes and at Ianto with sorrow.
"You look—"
Wrong.
"Right."
She reaches out a hand and waits for Jack to approach, holds out a second to Ianto and takes him in as well, holding them firmly with all the power of time itself, holding them with familiar arms, pressing familiar kisses onto their cheeks, fitting familiarly into the space between them.
Lisa leaves and then comes back, and it's all much simpler than it could have been.