Expect several more POV shifts this chapter...

Chapter 14: The Answer to the Question

Edinburgh, Scotland, Present Day

In the blink of an eye...

In a wink of starlight...

In a lightning's flash...

Both triggers were pulled, and the sound of gunfire filled the church. Filled it, then dissipated. Silence. Nothing. Then the dread, muted thud, the sound of bodies hitting the floor.

"NO!"

Will rushed forward to the fallen body of Robert Knox. He viciously shoved the Doctor aside into a pew, hissing, "Get away from him!" as he dropped to his knees beside the older man. His hands were shaking as he reached down to turn his lover's face to the side. Blood marred his salt-and-pepper hair; it stained the pale skin of Will's hands. His hands, which were so accustomed to handling corpses.

"No, no, no, no, no!"

Will pushed the Doctor back again when he tried to intervene. His emotions were in turmoil, his sense of logic obliterated. "Robert? Robert?" Will shook the dead man's shoulder, as if he were sleeping, as if this small, useless act could bring him back. "Robert?" Will's voice inched up another octave, inched precariously toward the sound of breaking.

"Robert?"

There was a loud groan from the aisle behind him. Will turned his head to see Harkness struggling up from his formerly prone position on the floor. As the other man crawled onto his knees, Will could see the star burst pattern of blood on the floor, evidence of his most recent death. Will's eyes turned black with hatred as he stared at the Torchwood captain. Unfair! It wasn't fair! Why does he get to live? Will felt the rage of angels descend upon him, and he lunged at Harkness, screaming, "BASTARD!"

Scotland was proving to be an inhospitable place.

That was Jack's first thought as he emerged from the swallowing darkness of death. Specifically, death number three. He'd been in Edinburgh for barely more than a single day, and he had already managed to get himself killed three times. Three times. That was a bit much, even for him. Maybe there really was something to England's hostility toward Scotland...

"BASTARD!"

Before Jack had a chance to fully recover, before he had time to become fully cognizant of his surroundings, there was a punch being thrown at his face. "Bastard!" Ianto had just hit him. No, not Ianto, he corrected himself, the person who had hijacked Ianto's body. Jack's head snapped back, and his vision danced as he stared up at the church's decorative ceiling.

"Die! Die! Why won't you die?"

The sound of those words being hurled at him in Ianto's deep, sonorous voice was terrible. Jack sat, stunned, as the Doctor tried to haul the other man back, as the two of them struggled on the floor of the nave. The other Ianto's eyes were ablaze with hatred as he spat curse after curse at Jack. And Jack just sat, unmoving in the aisle. And that's when he noticed the dark, unmoving shape on the floor.

Knox. Dead.

Dead, because Jack was a crack shot with a pistol. He never, ever missed. Never. Jack slowly got to his feet; he began walking toward the fallen man, even as the other Ianto continued to scream bloody murder at him. One look at the maroon colored flower blooming on the floor beneath Knox's head told Jack all he needed to know. Knox had died almost instantly.

The church fell into silence once more.

Jack turned to stare down at the fake Ianto; his head was bowed, and he had gone almost preternaturally quiet. Jack watched the other man's shoulders shake with muted sobs. There was something in his attitude, something in the slumped, defeated set of his shoulders, which forced Jack to say his next words, to say something that was completely and wholly unexpected:

"I'm sorry."

Jack felt all his rage and anger disappear, felt it crumble in the face of this other man's tragedy. And it was tragic. Jack knew he shouldn't be feeling this way. He knew he shouldn't have such empathy for a person who was obviously both a criminal and a murderer. Yet he did. He did. He felt for him, because...

I was once a criminal and a murderer, too, he thought. It did not matter that it had been for the military or the time agency or whoever. Torturing, killing, stealing, manipulating. All of this was part of Jack's past, so who was he to judge someone else for doing these things? Even though it was now his duty to make it all right, to dispense justice. Still...

"I'm sorry," he repeated.

"Shut up." The words were little more than a hoarse, misery-laced whisper.

"Jack," the Doctor interrupted quietly from his perch on one of the pews. "We should probably not dawdle any longer than necessary."

"...the clock on that body is very soon going to run out..."

Jack stared down at the unknown man on the floor, at the body he knew so well. "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to take you back to the hub now." Then: "Where is the glove?"

A small pause. "It's hidden in the tabernacle."

Jack merely stared at the man crouched on the floor. "Don't try and run again."

"I don't want to run." Words tainted with a bitter resolve. Blue eyes flicked upward; their gaze emitted an aura of pain. It was Ianto's voice, but it had gone dull, lifeless.

"I don't want to live."

The Doctor spoke softly from his perch. "Once you're back in that other body, I'm afraid you won't-"

"-I don't want to live," the other Ianto repeated stubbornly. His eyes turned back to Jack, now imploring. "Not for a second longer. When you put me back in that body, I want you to turn off the machinery. All of it. Because if you really are sorry, then you'll do this one little thing for me. Yes?" Jack met the other man's gaze and held it. Silently, an agreement was reached. And Jack answered aloud:

"Yes..."

A fat, mother-of-pearl moon hung over the spindly branches of the trees, lighting the way as the three men trudged solemnly across the graveyard. Will barely noticed anything: not the headstones, the monuments, the castle, the stars; he no longer cared for any of it, because he had lost the one true thing he had cared about. Everything else in the world was inconsequential.

Captain Harkness stayed close, tracing his steps in tandem. The Doctor was somewhere in the shadows behind them, carrying the glove. Will marched towards the gates of Covenanter's Prison, marched toward the inevitability of his own death. Well, so be it. There was nothing left for him now, no feeling left to make the effort of living worthwhile.

Soon, he would be just another corpse on a slab.

Rocks and branches crunched beneath the captain's boots as he hovered beside him. Numbly, Will looked over at him, and out of the blue, he asked:

"Do you love him?"

"Huh? What?"

He could just barely make out Harkness's startled expression under the frosty blue cast of the moon. "What do you mean?" he asked hoarsely.

"Him. The one lying in the bed. Do you love him?" Will repeated. He watched Harkness's expression curiously. Watched as a myriad of emotions played out across it: confusion, fear, longing. A veritable prism of feeling.

"I don't...I don't know how to answer that question."

"Yes, you do. It's the easiest question in the world."

"What do you know about it-"

"-I know that I've been in love with the same person for almost two-hundred years. And it is...was...easy. Once you know the answer."

Harkness didn't speak. Nothing was said as the three men filed through the doorway of the Black Mausoleum. Once inside the lift, Will spoke again, in a low voice meant for Harkness's ears.

"He loves you, you know. I can feel it...the thought keeps bouncing around inside my head, this head, like an echo, like something that won't go away. It happens like that sometimes, when you're inside another person's body. Pieces of them remain. Their emotions remain. Like when I saw you on the lift with that other one. I swear I felt a jealousy that wasn't mine. And then, when I called you a faithless bastard in the church, those words...those words weren't really mine, either."

Harkness's eyes went wide as he absorbed Will's words. He dropped his head to stare at the floor of the lift, then said, "So what do I do?"

"Do?" asked Will, as the lift came to a shuddering halt. "Do? Why...you know what to do, captain." And as the three of them exited the lift, as they took the corridor leading to the infirmary, Will said:

"Surely, if a monster such as myself can figure out what to do, then you can too..."

This...this was a nightmare. A nightmare from which he could not wake, could not escape. He couldn't do anything, anything! His limbs wouldn't move, his limbs wouldn't even twitch. There was nothing, absolutely nothing. Just this trap he was caught in: this prison without bars that would not allow him to move or speak or even breathe on his own. This was a nightmare, and there was no end to it. It was eternal. He was trapped, trapped! He was lost inside here, and no one could hear him; no one could hear him scream. "Help me! Help me!" There was no one, only darkness. He was never going to talk to Jack again, was never going to touch Jack again. He was never going to wake up from this nightmare; he was never going to get out of this prison. He was trapped in here, waiting...waiting for some kind of rescue. Waiting to be released from this torment. He was in a hell of waiting, and it just went on and on and on. He was trapped in a living prison cell, waiting for the one man who could free him from it. Waiting on the fulfillment of a promise, the words of which were like a distant, shrinking echo in his mind:

"...I will find a way to fix this. You can count on it. We'll put you back where you belong..."

Jack! Jack! Where are you?

And what if Jack didn't come back? What if his promise was a lie? What if he left again, like before? What if he went off with the Doctor? The Doctor, who could still move and speak and laugh and feel...

No! No! That's crazy! Jack wouldn't! He couldn't leave him like this, couldn't leave him alone in the dark, with no one, without being able to move! He couldn't...

Jack, where are you? Jack, speak to me! Jack! Jack!

Out of the darkness, there came a sound. A far away sound, like a train rushing past, like the brazen howl of a distant winter wind. It grew louder, bolder. And in this shell, within the darkness of this prison that was made of flesh, he felt a hand reach out of nowhere and GRAB him. A cold hand, cold as death...as cold as the steel surface of a refrigerator. And suddenly he was being pulled, dragged. The hand that had come out of the darkness was dragging him through a tunnel of howling wind, through an electric field that crackled with the energy of an oncoming storm. He was flying through the blackness toward a distant light, toward a hole that was as small and insignificant as the eye of a needle. He knew that the hand meant to drag him through the pinhole, and he wouldn't fit. He wouldn't fit! He was flying towards it, and it wouldn't stop, he couldn't stop, and the tiny hole of light was there, waiting, waiting...

"JACK!"

There was a rush of sound and light and color. His nerve endings were alive, crackling with feeling, crackling with a renewed ability to move that he had thought he would never have again. He was no longer lying supine on the bed; he was sitting in a chair, and he was clawing at some object in front of him, some shape that was burning amidst a halo of light. "Jack! Jack!" He could hear his own voice screaming, calling out. There was the heavy weight of fingers clutching his arms, their grasp burning a hole in his skin. His whole body tingled with electricity. And by his ear, he heard a soothing, familiar voice say:

"Ianto, stop shouting! It's alright; I've got you!"

"Jack?"

"I'm here. Stop screaming."

Eventually his vision returned. The light narrowed, the halo disappeared, and there was only Jack's face in front of his own. Ianto lifted a quivering hand, tentatively reached forward to touch the captain's face. Real. He was real. This was not a dream. The bright sheen of tears brought a sparkle to Ianto's eyes as they filled up with a flood tide of relief. "Jack," he whispered, in his own voice, the voice that he thought had been lost forever. "I was...I was trapped. I couldn't move. I couldn't do anything. I was trapped, and I was so scared-"

"Shhh, It's over now. Done. You're back where you belong." Ianto felt Jack's arms encircling him, pulling him close, enveloping him in a warm haze of animal comfort. Ianto collapsed into the embrace-willingly, gladly-squeezing out a waterfall of unshed tears that was allowed free reign over his face, cascading downward, leaving dark stains on Jack's coat. Ianto held onto to Jack like a life line.

"It was terrible in there," he choked. "Terrible. The worst kind of trap. And I was afraid you wouldn't be able to get me out. That you wouldn't come back."

"I'll always come back for you."

"I wasn't sure-"

"Be sure." There was the feather-light whisper of a kiss on his forehead. "I wouldn't leave you behind for the world, Jones. I'll always come back for you." Ianto felt a groundswell of warmth, of relief, flood through him. Maybe even happiness. He sighed in contentment, and he felt a tightness in his chest begin to unravel, felt it drift away, even though he hadn't realized that it had been there. This tight ball of worry, of fear. This feeling of being on unstable ground, of standing on a fault line. Now, he felt perfectly secure in the captain's arms.

"How...how did you do it? How did you manage to get me back?"

"The Doctor did it. He used the glove on you. Well, the other glove." Ianto stiffened at the mention of the Doctor, almost more so than he did at the mention of the other glove. The memory of Albert and the glove coming towards him, of it ripping him right out of his body, was little more than a fuzzy, indistinct memory. A half-remembered nightmare. Jack continued to hold him, continued to whisper in his ear. "You know, I was complete crap with the other glove. No use even trying with this one. But here's the thing: the glove, it belongs to the Time Lords. Can you believe that? Time Lords!"

Jack couldn't see his face, couldn't see the change in his expression. Couldn't see the lingering doubt, the threatening darkness. "You're not leaving with him again are you?" Ianto blurted out before he could stop himself. Before he could successfully tame his one true-and before this moment-unspoken fear.

"What? No. Why would you-" Jack interrupted himself; he drew back to look at Ianto's face. "Ianto, you're not serious are you? You don't really think-"

"-you did it before. You left without a word."

He watched Jack's face soften in a way that was rare, that was unexpected. "I know. And I'm sorry about that. I should have apologized to you long ago. But I didn't want you to think that..."

"Think what?"

"I didn't want to give it a weight...I didn't want to add more meaning to our...relationship that wasn't really there."

Ianto's voice turned dissonant, darkened by the specter of disappointment. "Not there?"

"Not then. No. But now-."

"-now?"

Jack smiled. "Now...now I think maybe we could explore things a little more in depth." He reached up to affectionately sweep back a strand of Ianto's hair.

"Is that some sort of wishy-washy 51st century American speak for saying you want to try and have a real relationship?"

"No," said Jack. Before Ianto could react, Jack swept in and claimed his lips with a kiss. It was gentle yet insistent, with just a playful hint of tongue that was there and gone again. It was a kiss which promised more-so much more. Jack drew back with a satisfied grin and said. "No, it's my wishy-washy 51st century American way of saying I'm in love with you, Jones."

Ianto said nothing, couldn't say...anything. He was trapped all over again, unable to move or speak or breathe...

And it was a most welcome trap.

"Ah...I see I've finally managed to leave you speechless," said Jack with a smirk. "You know, I think this might call for a celebration later. A little night on the town, just the two of us." Ianto remained silent. Then Jack called over his shoulder:

"What do you think, Doctor? Don't you think this deserves a celebration?" Nothing. No answer. Ianto watched Jack swivel his head, watched his eyes sweep over the medical bay. There was nothing, no one. The room was completely empty save for the now deceased body (his former prison) that was on the bed next to them. Otherwise, all was quiet. It was just the two of them.

The Doctor and the glove had both vanished...

End Chapter 14.

Up next: the final chapter!