And so, Jack confessed.
He told Ianto about how after he had died, he'd ran away. He'd run as far as he could. But it still wasn't enough. It would never be enough. He wanted to leave. He was planning to leave. He didn't want to spend any longer on Earth. Torchwood was gone, his team were dead, and the place he'd come to call home had been destroyed. He didn't want to live, but he was an impossible thing, a wrong thing, a fixed point in space and time destined to die and die again only to be dragged back into life. He couldn't escape from life, but he could escape from Earth. He would run and run and run until he could run no more.
But then he'd heard rumours – stories surrounded in myth and legend. They offered a way to seal the Rift forever and a way to Ianto one last time. Gwen would be safe, Cardiff would be safe, and he would see Ianto one last time before he died. But it didn't work like that. He had underestimated Syriath. She was far more powerful than he'd imagined.
"Syriath?" Gwen asked gently.
"'The Death Feeder'," Jack replied.
"Apparently, she's this ancient creature from before Time, whatever the hell that means," Ianto added, craning his neck over his shoulder to look at her before turning back to Jack. "Although god knows how you know this stuff. I think you just make it up most of the time."
"Hey!"
Both Martha and Gwen smothered their laughter at Jack's protest.
"Anyway," Jack said, propped up on his elbow to stare over Ianto's shoulder at Gwen who grinned back at him. "Syriath was this all-powerful being who could bend time. Somehow, she ended up trapped in the Rift. And, I will admit, I don't know how." He slumped back down onto his side again.
"Do you reckon it gets crowded in there? Seems to be quite the popular place to imprison creatures with massive appetites," Ianto mused.
"She was like Abaddon?" Martha asked. She'd heard of the giant death-demon that the Torchwood team had unintentionally released when they'd been manipulated into opening the Rift against Jack's orders. It had been the opening of the Rift that had drawn the TARDIS to Cardiff to fuel, and where Jack had been reunited with the Doctor after waiting for him on Earth for almost 140 years.
"Hm, the Great Devourer," Ianto mused, then shrugged.
Jack then continued his story. He told Ianto how he came back to Wales for one last time with a plan to end it all.
But the séance had barely started when he arrived, but Ianto was already there, waiting for him at the door.
"They thought you were a ghost, what with the way you dress," Ianto said with a smile, stroking Jack's cheek. "Dark and stormy night, and all that. I suppose you can be quite imposing, especially when chairs are flying 'round and everything."
Jack snorted. "And of course, you scolded me for being late."
"You'd been off acting all mysterious all day, not telling us a thing," Ianto said before turning and grinning at Gwen. "You know what he can be like. Disappears all day then tells you to get your ass over here pronto. Doesn't give you any more info than that. I had to look it up myself."
Gwen gave a strained smile. "Why were you there?"
"Because he phoned me, of course. He wanted me to look into what was happening at the pub. 'The House of the Dead', they called it, the most haunted pub in Wales. Was the oldest Pub in Wales too before we came along. Had been there for six hundred years, but last night was its final night before it closed. The owners were holding a Séance to mark the occasion."
"But that's where you called me to," she said.
Jack nodded. "Because we couldn't stop the Psychic, Evadne Wintergreen, from connecting to Syriath."
Mickey snorted. "Come on, are you saying that Psychics are real? That they can really see ghosts? Ghosts aren't real, though, are they? Psychics are just good at reading people and getting people to feed them information."
"She could do more than that. Syriath could pull ghosts out of time, using Mrs Wintergreen as a bridge to this world, and bring them here. And yes, she was a psychic. That's how she managed to reach out to Syriath. Some people, though barely any in this century, have that same ability to sense the wants and desires of others and reflect it back at them, a bit like psychic paper. And she was by far the most powerful psychic I've ever met. And what with the pub having been built in the perfect place for hauntings, Mrs Wintergreen was going to inadvertently open the Rift and let Syriath through."
Jack recounted what had happened next. He repeated to Ianto how the ghosts had appeared, intent on devouring the people who'd given them form, those who'd loved them most, those who missed them most. Then he paused, a far off look in his eyes.
"You had a cousin at Torchwood One, didn't you Martha?" he asked, looking over at her.
"Yes. Adi. Adeola," she confirmed. "Everyone always said that we looked like twins when we were growing up, even though she was five years older than me."
"Did the Doctor ever tell you what happened there? How the Cybermen came to Earth?"
Martha knew her cousin had worked at Canary Wharf, just as Ianto had done. She hadn't really known what had happened to her, other than the official statement which said that they had all died in a terrorist attack at the tower, until she met the Doctor. "They came through a hole from a parallel universe that Torchwood created, right?"
"Yeah. Only before the battle, they appeared as ghosts, remember? For two months, most of the Human Race believed that they were ghosts. Remember the Ghost Shifts?"
They all nodded.
"So many people wanted to believe that those humanoid figures were the ghosts of their family and friends coming back to them. And that made the Cybermen stronger. It gave them a connection to this universe. We wanted to believe they were here, so they were."
Mickey nodded, having heard this from the Doctor. "And that's what Syriath was doing? Using the Ghosts to…" He trailed off, unable to continue.
"She was using the ghosts to manipulate us. Pulling the dead out of time to amplify their loved one's emotions. The people there… they couldn't resist them. And with each person she took, she became stronger."
Jack fell into silence, stuttering over the painful memory.
"Even me and Jack weren't safe. Gwen too, though you were still stuck in the bloody traffic," Ianto said.
Martha threw Gwen a questioning look. She frowned and shook her head slightly but didn't comment.
As far as Martha knew, as soon as Gwen had gotten the phone call from a woman claiming that Jack needed her, she'd driven like a bat out of hell to get there. She'd even asked if Mickey could wipe any potential speeding tickets that she'd gotten because she'd driven so fast on the empty roads to Abergavenny.
Ianto gave a strange, strained laugh, apparently not having noticed the look between the two women. "God, I really needed you, Gwen. Jack had been acting strange all evening, all day actually. And then he goes and pulls out a bomb. A bomb! And he just chucks it at me, expecting me to catch it, tells me he's always trusted me and throws it right at me, and then I was holding this bomb and I didn't know what to do and-"
Ianto suddenly sucked in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and slowly let it out again.
"I'm sorry," Jack whispered to him. "I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry."
Ianto shook his head. "Not your fault. It's all a bit much. It only happened a few hours ago and I didn't get much sleep on Gwen's sofa last night. Only think I managed to doze for an hour or so. Sorry."
Jack pulled him in, still whispering apologies.
"And that's when I had to tell you," Jack said in a rough voice once Ianto had stopped shaking in his arms.
"Tell Ianto what?" Martha asked gently when it seemed neither of them was going to continue.
"About what Syriath had done," Jack replied.
"I'd been talking to Gwen all evening over comms.," Ianto said subduedly. "But then she started yelling in my ear, telling me not to listen to Jack, not to trust him. And I nearly did. It nearly worked. But Jack kept telling me to look at my headset and the stupid thing wasn't even on. I'd been talking to Gwen all evening, but it wasn't even on. It was just another of Syriath's mind games. She had been manipulating me all evening and I believed it. God, it was easier when it was just the ghosts. I mean, the ghost of my father was hard enough, but she could manipulate everything."
"You saw your dad?" Gwen asked.
"Yeah, earlier when Jack went to speak with Mrs Wintergreen. I heard his voice, calling my name from the floor above. I know I shouldn't have gone up there, I knew it then too. But I did it anyway. I couldn't stop myself. He told me that I should send Jack away, that the dead were returning. He said they were coming back to life. Owen and Tosh, Lisa, all my friends from London, my mum…"
Gwen found herself coming to sit on the bed at Ianto's side, squeezing his shoulder gently in sympathy and support. Jack glanced up at her with wet eyes as she sat down before focusing back on the man in his arms.
"Dad told me to tell Jack to turn around and leave with me," Ianto continued with a sniff. "Funnily enough, I didn't get the chance. There was so much going on, that I kinda forgot about what he said. They'd started the séance again downstairs. Jack had come looking for me, instead. It was all my fault."
"It wasn't," Jack whispered harshly. "It wasn't your fault. I know I said it was, but it wasn't. I was just frustrated."
"Doesn't matter," Ianto replied, almost emotionlessly. "It wasn't like we could just leave anyway. Mrs Wintergreen had succeeded in opening the barrier between our world and where Syriath was trapped. If she managed to get through, the Rift would open and destroy the Earth if Syriath didn't manage to do it first."
"And that's what your bomb was for, wasn't it Jack?" Gwen sighed. "Last night, Ianto said that you thought that you'd found a way to kill yourself. Permanently. You were going to let your life be taken by Syriath, just like you did with Abaddon, weren't you?"
"Not quite."
"His plan was even more stupid than that," Ianto said. "A typical 'Captain Jack Plan' with added suicidal tendencies. He had this battered cardboard shoebox filled with pebbles and coal and this weird looking thing he'd made with wire and too much solder. That's all he had against the most powerful creature in creation. He was going to blow the place up with the energy that was stored in the rocks and seal the Rift forever. He didn't even need to be there when it went off but the device he'd made didn't even have a timer for detonation."
"There was no point. Not when you were dead."
Gwen closed her eyes, but a few tears still fell silently down her face.
This time, Jack continued his story in a subdued tone as he explained how the Rift had opened and Syriath began her journey to this world. He still had his bomb and his plans for eternal oblivion. But then, Ianto's father, or rather the ghost of Ianto's father, turned up again. He had a different idea. It was an idea that Jack had pushed to the back of his mind, only for it to surface time and time again in his dreams. It was a chance to see Ianto not just for the last time, but every day for the rest of Ianto's life.
So, they'd run. They'd run for the chance to be side by side again, arm in arm, hand in hand once more. Jack had led and Ianto followed behind. But when he'd looked back, Ianto wasn't there. It had been a trick.
"No," Ianto said, voice soft and gentle. "It wasn't a trick."
"Fine, a trap." Jack tried to force the words out with all the bitterness he knew he should feel but his voice just broke instead.
"Never. I wouldn't do that to you. I couldn't. I was going to come. I didn't want to leave you, not again. But…" He sighed and pulled Jack closer, mumming the words into Jack's hair. "I couldn't let the Rift open. I couldn't let Syriath through. She would have destroyed the Earth. And if I let that happen, what would have happened to you?"
"I can survive anything." This time Jack didn't have to force the bitterness as he spat the words out.
"You wouldn't have been born!" Ianto hissed. "'The twenty-first century is when everything changes' – that's what you always tell us. But not even you could survive being rewritten out of history. If Syriath had risen, everyone would have died! Gwen and Rhys and their baby, my sister and niece and nephew, Martha… Everyone I ever loved would have died! You might have gotten me back for a few extra seconds, but what then? The Earth would have been swallowed. I'd have died again, and you'd have never been born!"
Jack fell silent once more. He clutched at Ianto tightly, hands bunching his shirt. He pressed his face into the crook of Ianto's neck, mouthing words against the warm skin. They were so quiet that Gwen had difficulty making them out.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Jack was repeating over and over again. "God, I'm sorry."