05.06.2009

The soft and unobtrusive beeping of hospital equipment was always a bad sign upon waking up. It didn't take long for Ianto to remember how he'd landed himself in the latest mess, and when it came back to him he groaned aloud. Not from pain, although there was definitely some lingering soreness, but at the sheer idiocy of his actions. Someone in the room with him moved, so he opened his eyes and rolled his head to the side, and was somehow unsurprised to see Jack at the window, hands in his pockets and a far from happy look on his face. When he realised that Ianto was awake, he crossed the room in two short steps and picked up a plastic cup of water from the bedside table.

"Can you sit up?" he asked, offering Ianto a hand in case he couldn't. It was unnecessary in the end, although putting his weight on his hands to push himself up made his shoulders burn.

He got himself settled back against the pillows and accepted the cup from Jack with barely shaking hands, and was slightly more surprised when Jack sat carefully on the edge of the bed and watched him like a hawk. "What happened?" he asked, voice rougher and weaker than he'd hoped. Another sip of water did little to calm the soreness of his throat, but it did ease his voice a little. "Is Hart..."

"Dead. You were right, he wanted to put on a show." Jack took the cup back from him when he was done and put it back on the bedside table, even though Ianto could have reached it fine on his own. "He took you a week forwards in time and sent us on a treasure hunt to find you."

"Only a week?"

"Damnit, Ianto!" Jack leapt to his feet and stalked over to the window. "What were you thinking? How could you be so stupid, after everything you told everyone else? Why did you confront him?"

He bristled at the accusations. "I didn't confront him. I pursued him and he laid a trap for me."

"Of course he did! That was exactly what he wanted you to do." Jack glared at him. "Did you think he was in Vegas at the same time as you by accident?"

"Why wouldn't it be an accident? What would he want with me? You're the one he's obsessed with."

"And you're the one I love," Jack snapped. He came back to the bed to loom over Ianto again. "He hated you for it. He wanted to take you away from me, and he wanted to be the one who brought you back to me. Because then I'd owe him."

Ianto's head swam. He really wanted to restart the conversation, in the hope that it would make more sense a second time through. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"You have the one thing that he wanted. You didn't think that that would make him come after you?" Jack's fists clenched. "I told you, he kept you a secret from Gray because he knew how important you are to me."

The glimmer of something like comprehension was starting to dawn on the horizon, and it was pissing Ianto off enormously. "For some reason, maybe because I'm not a psychopath, that didn't immediately translate into realising that he wanted to kill me himself. Is that what you're trying to tell me? That he escaped Gray and came back for me? Jesus fuck."

"Ianto..." Jack sank down on the edge of the bed again and hung his head when Ianto shifted away, suddenly too angry to be near him. "You nearly died," he said at last in a voice barely above a whisper. "We've been hunting for you for a week, and I didn't know if I'd ever see you again. When I found out he was dead, I thought they'd taken away my last chance and it was my fault. If I'd just... warned you."

He sighed and relaxed back into the pillows as well as he could. "Yeah. That would have helped. You know, you've told me you love me more since I woke up than you have in the previous two weeks."

"Not quite," Jack chuckled. "You should have heard me when they first let me in to see you." He took Ianto's hand carefully and rubbed his thumb over a spot that hurt enough to suggest he'd been on a drip for a while. "We were nearly too late. A week of waiting for news, and then a race against time to find you, and it came down to him turning the air conditioning off." His grip on Ianto's hand tightened suddenly. "I've been seeing a UNIT therapist over the last few days. Like you asked me to."

"Good. Has it helped?"

"A bit. Hard to work through it all with the worry about you going on." He ducked his head, which did little to hide the fact that he was crying. "I'm sorry. You deserve better than... this mess."

Ianto smiled and squeezed his hand. "I know. But we'll get there. It's going to take more than John bloody Hart to split us up. Even the Doctor hasn't managed it."

"That's true." He chuckled. "He helped, actually. The one you like, with the bow tie. Canton called him. They're all waiting for news on you."

"Well," Ianto said, the reality of him being missing for a whole week suddenly crashing into him. "The news is that I'm really, really hungry."

Jack chuckled. "I'll get something sent up, Director." He stood up to leave, but bent down to kiss Ianto gently before he went. "I'm still mad," he told him, "but I'm also very relieved." There was a spring back in his step as he left, and Ianto found he could relate to the feeling.

# # #

They left him in bed for most of the day, with occasional visits from Jack and Martha to check up on him whilst the world carried on without him as it had for the last week. By late afternoon, though, he was deemed fit to join in on a debrief, albeit with strict restrictions on what he was allowed to do, chief on the list being any sort of movement. They did, at least, allow him to walk to the meeting room just down the corridor. He was informed that he'd been taken to yet another Liberty Towers facility out in the Nevada desert, this one primarily a detention centre like the one where Tosh had been held for a while. Alongside the extensive prison, though, it also had a top of the range medical and rehabilitation centre - lucky for Ianto.

He stopped by the window whilst they waited for the rest of the officials to arrive for the meeting and stared out at the vast empty expanse of dusty red and grey. The sun was sinking towards the horizon off to his left but still bright and fierce, and a heat haze shimmered on the horizon. He could just make out the dusty track that led to the facility across the desert, and in the far distance the dark line of the motorway that cut across it. At night it would be easier to make out the line of lights, but it was still an empty, desolate place and hard to believe that the glitz and glamour and life of Las Vegas was just over the hill, or the next one. He wasn't entirely sure.

The door opened behind him and the officials started to flow in, greeting him with cautious respect and relief. Captain Galbraith was there, deferring to a diminutive general who made a bee line for Ianto. He shook her hand, allowing the firm grip and its display of dominance, and dredged a name up from the files he'd read that afternoon. "General Halham."

"Director Jones." Her tone of voice left him in no doubt that she considered his title to be no more than decoration here, and him to be no more than a colossal pain in her ass. "Good to see you back on your feet."

"Well, I'll do my best to get out from under yours as soon as I can," he assured her, guessing that bluntness was going to serve him better than any attempt at smooth and suave. It seemed to pay off, as her grip and expression relaxed slightly and she dropped into the chair at the head of the table. Although it was big enough for a dozen people, Jack and Martha were the last two to enter and closed off an intimate group of five, including Ianto. He took his seat to her left and tried not to let it show how grateful he was to be off his feet. "So, it sounds like I missed all the fun."

Jack's face darkened at his flippancy, but Martha reached in to cut him off before an argument could start. "Captain Galbraith raised the alarm as soon as they lost contact with you, and that's when we came in. Las Vegas is popular with time travellers, for obvious reasons, but Canton called in the Doctor to help. He was able to identify the specific signature of Hart's wriststrap and confirm that he had moved in time, but with so much traffic he couldn't follow it and retrieve you. Thankfully, Hart was most interested in showing off, so he left us plenty of clues to find you, even after he was killed."

Captain Galbraith, looking distinctly uncomfortable and like he knew he was lucky to have kept his position, slid a report across the desk. "Thanks to Tosh at Torchwood, we were able to monitor every networked CCTV system in Las Vegas for the sort of manipulation affects that indicated the presence of his wrist strap. That was the first warning we had that he was back in the city. That was three days ago, and gave us enough warning to prepare. We eventually cornered him not long after he brought you here, when he went down to the hotel casino to wait. Captain Harkness confronted him and... was shot."

Ianto's head snapped up at that and he glared at Jack. "You weren't going to mention that?"

"It wasn't important," Jack protested.

Captain Galbraith cleared his throat to interrupt the impending domestic. "Unfortunately for Hart, he didn't take into account the cultural differences between Cardiff and Las Vegas. Although Captain Harkness didn't have close backup from our team, an armed bystander recognised the threat he posed and killed Hart."

Ianto rubbed at his forehead. Armed bystanders wasn't something he'd ever had to take into consideration, and apparently not something Hart had considered. Or perhaps he had and he thought it an acceptable gamble. "He's definitely dead, then?"

"Very definitely. Our hero of the hour wasn't taking any chances with that." He smiled ruefully. "We admitted Hart's connection to the attacks on Cardiff, slapped a medal on the shooter and recruited him into Liberty Towers. Welcome to America."

Martha sighed. "Unfortunately, Hart was the only person who knew where he'd hidden you. We found about a dozen stolen cards on his person, and every single one had been used to book multiple hotel rooms across the city and even across the States. Tosh came into her own again, but I have to admit it was a close call. If we'd been much longer..."

"But you weren't," Ianto pointed out, "and we can't live on maybes. Hart knew what he was doing and, for whatever reason, he let you find me. Let's be honest, if he wanted me dead I would be."

"Our theory is that he was using you to get at Captain Harkness," General Halham said, with an acidic glare across the table at Jack. "He must have known that actually killing you wasn't going to work in his favour, but I'd imagine he expected that being the only one who knew where you were would keep him alive. It's all been a mess, Director Jones."

"That's your basic starting point when dealing with time travellers, General." He rubbed at the back of his neck, fighting back the urge to yawn, and stared blankly at the reports. "He brought me here for a reason. If he was really being an asshole, he would taken taken me forwards past the wedding, or centuries in the future."

Martha shook her head. "That's too big. Even the Doctor can't work precisely over short timescales. Anything more than a couple of weeks and we could extract you too easily. Assuming Hart knew that we could call on the Doctor for help, which..."

"We were at a meeting made up almost entirely of former companions of the Doctor," Ianto realised. "Did he know, or did he just guess?"

"We might never know. Or worse," she said, "we might find out."

Ianto found that he didn't really want to know any more. "Fair point. But for now, it's over?"

"It's over," General Halham confirmed. "So I'll arrange your flights back to the UK for as soon as Doctor Jones decides you're clear to travel."

Ianto knew when he was dismissed, so he let Martha drag him back to his hospital room with Jack in tow for yet another check-up.

# # #

The light and colour bled from the landscape as the sun finally set in a blaze of fire over the mountains to the west, leaving the desert as a sea of undulating grey around them, broken by the occasional lump of a shrub or boulder to disturb the otherwise smooth run to foothills. Ianto leaned against the window more heavily than he would have liked, and couldn't muster the energy to turn when he heard the door open once more.

"Are you supposed to be up?" Jack asked him, approaching to stand behind him, close but not touching. "Doctor's orders are pretty clear."

"I was just watching the sunset," he admitted. He was trapped between warm and cold, but he didn't know which of Jack and the darkening night was which. "It always seems like an achievement to get to another one."

Jack chuckled. "Nice to see proof that the world is still turning after everything?" He stepped closer to Ianto and dropped his voice to a whisper. "Ianto..."

"We can't go on like we were," he said softly. "You know that as well as I do. We can't keep pretending that everything is fine until another crisis comes along and tries to destroy us. Each one gets harder and harder to deal with. I don't want to lose you, but something has to change."

Their reflections were becoming clearer as the night grew darker, so Ianto saw Jack's sharp intake of breath and the way he looked away. He didn't move, though, except to rest one hand, almost timidly, on Ianto's hip. "I don't want to lose you either. But I worry that... that I'm not the man I was before. That I'm going to lose one of us. I'd rather lose myself than you."

Ianto turned to face him at last, resting his shoulder against the glass for support. Jack's hand came back to his waist, steadying him when he swayed. The toxins in the paralysing lipgloss had done more damage than he'd hoped or Hart had planned. Only time would tell if he would recover fully, and until then everything was going to be that bit harder. Of course, because nothing in his life could ever go right. He sighed and rested his hand on Jack's arm. "We've both changed, Jack. We do it all the time. And honestly, I don't think either of us is the man you remember. I sometimes feel like you think I was perfect, this hero on a shining steed who rode to your rescue, but I was never that. I'm messy and flawed and I fuck up, and trying to hold us together last time nearly broke me. I'll try, though, and that's all I'm asking from you."

"Yeah, about that." Jack looked down again and laughed. "I'd forgotten your habit of running headfirst into disaster. Martha told me you do it a lot."

"I learned from the best. So how about we both take a bit more care about putting ourselves in danger?" He closed his eyes and dropped his head forwards. "I know it's stupid, but I always worry that... that this time you won't come back. Or that you will, but this time I won't be able to hold us together."

Words never came easily to them, not as easy as touch and showing each other what they meant. It proved true again, when Jack leaned in and caught Ianto's lips in a kiss that was simultaneously tender and searing, fierce and frightened. Ianto's hands flew up and he clung to Jack's broad shoulders even as he pushed back against him. Within moments they were wrapped up in each other, pieces slotting back into place in a way that neither of them would ever have found the words to achieve. The warmth that spread through Ianto was equal parts arousal and relief that left him dizzy, and when they broke apart at last he felt the absence of the anxiety and stress of the last few weeks keenly. He rested his forehead against Jack's and smiled at last. "Good answer," he breathed.

"Yeah?"

"Yep." He eyed the bed behind Jack speculatively and then remembered the very specific instructions Martha had given him, and the complete lack of lock on the door. And, actually, the complete exhaustion that made every movement a chore. "I'll sleep better for that."

Jack laughed. "Tease." He ducked his head again and kissed Ianto more gently, a quick, soft brush of their lips. "Me too."