Jack would have traded it all. He really would have. If he could have taken it all back; rewound time to before the aliens called his bluff and released the virus, he would have given the children over losing Ianto. It added to his self-loathing, but he didn't care. He just didn't want Ianto to die.
...XoXoXo...
"It was good, yeah?" Ianto's voice was leaving him; the overwhelming sadness of it all ending wracked his voice like an earthquake.
Jack pleaded with him to stay, as if somehow he could just keep Ianto with him by coaxing and begging. But the light was gone from his eyes; soon Jack was gone too.
Except Jack got to come back, and Ianto did not.
Cue the emotional shutdown.
...XoXoXo...
Jack found it impossible to move on. In some ways, he just had to. He still ate, drank, and slept every once in a while. He felt numb. Everything in his life felt empty.
Even with the world saved and the Four-Five-Six gone, Jack felt no joy or happiness. He felt guilty. Ashamed. Alone.
He hit a place worse than rock bottom. For a while all he could do was drown himself in stimulation: meaningless sex, drinking, some drugs, many fist fights. He found himself both reviving from death and awaking from slumber with foreign objects or body parts impaling his body, more times than he cared to count. And through it all; all of the planets and galaxies he could travel to, Jack could not outrun his grief. No number of pretty boys in his bed could make Ianto any less fantastic in his memory; any less gone.
...XoXoXo...
Then there was a night; one night where Jack got to say goodbye, a little more properly than the last. There was a house; a house attached to the rift. And there were ghosts, souls that were left floating through the void, probably. It broke Jack's heart to think that Ianto's consciousness was going to simply exist inside a vast nothingness for all of eternity.
And Ianto saved the day in the end; Ianto's ghost, who was every bit just as much the uptight and proper Welshman he always was.
...XoXoXo...
"Don't do this!"
"Sorry, Jack. Someone's got to destroy the rift. Quite a way to go."
"No! Not like this! Don't leave me like this!"
"I've got to go!"
"Ianto, no! ...I never said it properly before."
"It doesn't need saying."
"Yes, it does. Ianto Jones, I love you."
...XoXoXo...
Jack had never spoken to a real ghost until that night. He had never thought he ever would. And it was so real. So tangible. He wished he'd kissed Ianto; hugged him; done something other than just stand there! But he didn't. And then he was gone. Again.
...XoXoXo...
After that, after all that heart ache and pain, Jack was done trying to pretend he was okay. He was done trying to stop feeling. He was just… done.
He lived by meager means, to put it mildly. He afforded himself no luxury, living like a tramp in abandoned buildings, drinking poorly made coffee and pining for Ianto with every cringing sip.
Jack wore self-loathing well. He wallowed in it for almost two years.
Then the world came knocking again.