Jack couldn't sleep, now that all the madness of 456 had cleared up. No, that was an understatement. He couldn't even lie down, couldn't sit still, couldn't even breathe through the aching in his chest. It was like a hole had been blown straight through him, leaving an open, gaping nothing in its wake.
He was gone. Ianto was dead, and he'd watched him die – held him in his arms as the life left his broken body. And he had been so broken. Cuts and bruises littered his body, broken ribs, and his leg…God, his leg. Martha had done the autopsy, and he'd seen…oh, his poor Ianto. Always so quiet, always so valiant, he hadn't even said he'd been hurting. Jack guessed it had been from the explosion, for the most part, and he hated himself for not noticing, for not asking him.
Martha had been very clinical when she'd explained it to him – something that he both despised and appreciated. Two breaks in his left femur just above his knee cap, a compound fracture in his tibia, a tear in the ACL, and the cartilage had been shredded, no doubt from his walking on it. Three ribs broken, two cracked: the bruise had covered his entire right side. He had a hairline fracture on his right forearm; it had already started to heal, albeit improperly. Jack had watched as Martha cut the intricate braces from his body.
And he'd thought Ianto had escaped the blast with nothing but the scratch on his cheek. How foolish he'd been; how foolish, and how ignorant. He hadn't noticed he was in pain, and there was no doubting he had been. He'd still had the Demerol coursing through his veins when he…when Martha had run the tests.
Why hadn't he noticed? He'd had the opportunity. In the main warehouse that day, when he'd asked Jack...when he'd asked to spend time with him, and Jack had let the moment slip by. How he hated himself for that. If only he'd made Rhys leave, he would've seen the wounds his beautiful, broken Ianto had been hiding from him. He would never have let him go to that building; he would never have breathed in that poison.
Before he could stop it, a shout ripped from his throat and he slammed his fist against the wall of his bedroom.
His bedroom…it didn't feel like his. Sure, they'd dressed the warehouse up – it almost resembled the old Hub with a kitchen, a bedroom for Jack, an infirmary, indoor plumbing and, of course, a morgue. Gwen and Rhys had moved into a house of their own, so he supposed it was just him and Ianto there. "So…just me," he breathed, a ghost of a chuckle forming on his lips.
A sudden sound caught his attention, and he stood. "At least, I thought it was," he mumbled. He didn't really know why he said it aloud – maybe just to fill the companionless silence. Then again, it wasn't quite silent. No, the sound continued, barely audible, almost like a breath of wind in his ear, accented by soft, rhythmic clangs.
He grabbed his gun off his bedside table and pushed open the door to his room, slipping outside into the open warehouse. It was a game of follow the leader, and with his ears as guides, he walked out past the make-shift work stations and kitchen, past the sofa.
It didn't take long for him to realize where he was going; the noise was coming from the morgue.
Swallowing deeply, he made his way into the cold, dim-lit room, and found himself immediately facing a wall of cabinets. Of them, only one was filled, and as he approached…but no, that couldn't be right. The noise, it was coming from the cabinets.
More than that – it was coming from the cabinet. Ianto's.
Heart now thudding in his chest, Jack walked, gun brandished, towards the centermost square door. His palms were sweating as he reached out to grasp the handle, and he recoiled as a sudden thud bounced the handle in his grip.
And suddenly, he couldn't get the door open fast enough. The sound, muffled by the closed door, was more distinct now, and he realized with a start what it was.
Screaming.
He practically ripped the door off its hinges trying to get it open, and suddenly the full volume of the shouting struck him. He knew that voice.
With one hefty tug, he pulled the table from the shelf, and was shocked to see the body bag resting there…writhing. It was writhing, frantically, and Jack was equally frantic as he ripped at the zipper.
An arm lashed out at him, catching him in the face, but he barely felt it as incoherent screams tore into his ears. He didn't care; all he cared about was the body that was thrashing on the metal table.
"Ianto," he breathed, and just like that, he snapped back into himself. "Ianto!" he repeated, stronger this time, and he grabbed the thrashing arms, leaning over the table and holding them as cold flesh tightened over straining muscles in his grasp. Cold, but very much alive as the pulse pounded beneath his fingers.
A pair of frantic blue eyes looked up into his, unfocused and panicked, and the face staring back at him made his heart skip in his chest.
Another unintelligible scream drew him back to the present, and the agony, the terror in it, made his heart wrench.
"Ianto, it's okay," he said before he could even forge a thought. The words just seemed to come, and he let them, keeping his hold on Ianto's cold, slender wrists even as he struggled against him. "Shh, it's okay. It's me, Yan; it's Jack. I'm here now, all right?"
The screams cut off abruptly, replaced by startled breaths and grunts as Ianto started trying to push himself up and back, his legs twisting and kicking in the body bag.
Jack didn't know what was going on, or how Ianto was suddenly alive and apparently kicking, but he did know that the pain on amount of pain Ianto's face and the amount of movement seemed to be directly related. "Stay still," he commanded, his voice calm but firm as he pushed Ianto back down onto the cold metal table. "I promise I'm not going to hurt you, Yan, but I need you to lie still, okay?"
But Ianto didn't seem to understand, his eyes wide and his breath quickening still. At this rate, he'd hyperventilate or something.
So, Jack did the only thing he could think of: he pulled Ianto up into his chest and wrapped his arms around him.
And just like that, Ianto broke down. The panic from before became sobs, harsh and heart breaking, as Ianto buried his face in Jack's shoulder.
"Help," he cried as his tears soaked through Jack's button-up.
"Shh, I will," he promised. He could feel Ianto shaking against him, hard, and decided that first, he needed to get Ianto somewhere warm. "Come on, let's get you out of here." He wondered, for a moment, how he was going to go about doing that. Should he let Ianto walk?
A glance at the bruises, now freshly revitalized as blood now apparently pumped through Ianto's system again, led Jack to believe that his wounds had not healed even if he was alive. And Jack remembered his leg, remembered the broken bones there. Ianto couldn't walk on that. "I'm going to pick you up, all right?" he told Ianto. When Ianto didn't respond, still reduced to hysterical cries into Jack's shoulder, the older man slid an arm under his bare knees and lifted his bare form from the table.
Suddenly, Ianto had something to say. "Stop!" he screamed, pushing frantically away from Jack. "Please!"
Jack didn't put him down, though; he held him tighter to keep him from falling, despite knowing exactly why Ianto was begging to be released. His leg hadn't healed, and neither had his ribs, and as he twisted and struggled, Jack could feel the bones popping and shifting. "I'm not putting you down, I'm sorry," he told him as he carried his charge out of the morgue. It was, if he was being honest, just as much for Ianto's benefit as his own; the morgue was a place Jack found he could no longer stand; he needed to get his resurrected love somewhere he could help him, and the morgue just wasn't it.
Thankfully, the infirmary was only one room over, and he backed into the door to push it open before carrying Ianto straight in and to the bed where he sat him down. He guessed if something good had come out of the destruction of the Hub, it would be this new infirmary; it was more than a step up from the old one, fully equipped and far better furnished. It wasn't the clinical white of a usual infirmary – they had Ianto to thank for that, actually – and Jack had to hope that the sheet-covered hospital bed in the center of the room was an improvement from the cold metal drawer of the morgue.
"There, see, you're okay," Jack told him, running a hand through Ianto's sweat-dampened hair and pulling the blankets of the bed over his bare form. "I'm going to call Martha, okay, so she can get a look at you."
Ianto was silent as Jack made the call, shaking hard all the while, but then, "Jack," he whispered, his voice raw as he looked up, his blue eyes scared and searching, "what's going on? How did I get here?"
Jack's jaw clenched and he fought back the lump in his throat. "We'll talk about it later, okay Yan, when you're feeling better."
The lump only grew larger as tears gathered and streamed from Ianto's eyes. "It hurts, Jack," he choked out, and he sounded so utterly pleading that Jack couldn't resist the urge to pull the smaller man into his arms once again. He didn't know if he could ever let him go now, not after he'd been without him so long.
"Shh, I know it does," Jack soothed, fighting back tears of his own, "but Martha's gonna be here soon, and she'll fix you right up, okay? Then it won't hurt anymore." He forced a smile through moist eyes as he dipped his head to meet Ianto's eyes.
Only to see the most haunted look he'd ever seen. "I'm so sorry," the younger man breathed.
The oddity of the statement caught Jack off guard. "What on earth could you have to be sorry for?"
"What you must've seen…all those deaths you've died," Ianto said, his voice barely above a whisper. His eyes bored into Jack's, but he almost got the feeling Ianto wasn't seeing him at all. "It's so dark there, Jack. There's nothing…." Suddenly, Ianto's gaze became so sharp and pointed Jack almost shuddered under the intensity. There was a plea in that look. "I can't go back there. Please don't make me go back." He was begging by the end of it as he once again descended to hysterics.
Jack immediately pulled him closer, letting Ianto bury his face in his chest as he rubbed his back carefully through the fabric of the blankets. "You're not going anywhere, Yan," he assured him, pressing a kiss to the top of Ianto's head. "I'm not letting you go anytime soon, I promise."
And that was a promise he intended to keep, whatever it took.
