Author's Notes: Well, these prompts keep getting weirder all the time. Hope I handled it well. Now that I looked at the list of prompts, River will take a few more chapters and I've already thought her chapter through so... I hope you enjoy this one for now.

Day Ten: With Animal Ears

When Jack found Ianto, he was curled up on a couch in the TARDIS's library and he was, by the looks of it, completely engrossed in whatever it was that he was reading. "How did you find me?" He asked anyway without so much as lifting his head.

"The Doctor told me where you've gone," Jack admitted as he carefully sat down next to his lover. "I'm sorry. It must hurt; knowing that there's no one left."

Ianto shrugged minutely. Gone was the confident, self-assured man he'd been in the last days before his death; he seemed small and alone and still sickly pale from whatever treatment the Shadow Proclamation folk had given him and he was so thin that Jack could practically cut his finger on most of his bones when he tried to embrace him.

"I already knew they were gone, but hearing it confirmed... yes, it hurts." He took a deep breath. "I keep remembering more and more and... my family, all my friends – they were in there. In the hell of the war and they still are, because it's not really gone. It's Time Locked and that only makes it worse. Is it wrong that..." Ianto licked his lips, apparently unsure of what he wanted to say. When he did, the Captain could barely hear him. "Jack, is it all that bad that I want to go back there?"

Ianto had came back mere hours ago and Jack was still trying to grasp the idea of it all. The Doctor had helped him with his memories by projecting some of his own into the younger Time Lord's mind and making him remember the same places and people (much to Jack's delight, Ianto had been pleased to meet the Time Lord now his face had changed. The Captain supposed that the last one brought only painful memories – after all, he reminded himself, for Ianto Canary Wharf and the Dalek invasion weren't that far back in the past), and now Ianto was sitting here, completely broken by the idea of everything and everyone being lost and unreachable in time.

"Tell me about it," Jack said in the end, instead of an answer. "Tell me about the war."

Ianto smiled bitterly, then placed his book on the table in front of them. "When I was born, we were already as close to a war as we could get. The tension was building up every day and we all knew what would follow. I craved to be out there. I wanted it so much; to fight in the war as if it would bring me everything I had ever wanted – I'd be acknowledged, admired and I'd fight for what I believed in at the same time. When I was accepted, I felt as if all my dreams had become true."

"And then you realised that war is much more than that," Jack guessed but to his surprise, Ianto shook his head.

"Not really. Not at first. It was just like I had imagined it would be. My parents worked in the government, so there wasn't really anything exciting that had happened until then and the war was new, it was an adventure. I got to be the hero, the saviour. I met some of the best friends I've ever had there, especially when they made me a junior Commander. I was good at what I was doing and didn't care much about my own life but... there were people who disagreed.

"It was like the children they sent in the countryside during World War Two," Ianto continued after a short pause. "Only they did it without me knowing it. I was injured – a bad wound, but not fatal, so I was out of it for a while, and my mother took the advantage. Re-set my memories, then sent me with the first starship that could get me to any planet that had managed to stay out of the Time War, and Earth was one of the pieces of the Universe that was still standing. So there I was – twenty years old, with the memories of a human, totally lost and not really knowing who I was. And there came Torchwood – probably the closest to home that I could find, which is a terrible irony." When Jack didn't react to the attempt at a joke, Ianto just sighed and took his hand. "That's all in the past, Jack. I'm fine. I really am."

Jack wanted to ask him if he could remember his death – if he would tell Jack that he was fine if he knew that he'd had to witness that – but he didn't need to, as Ianto picked the thought up himself.

"I remember two timelines," he said, his hand making absent-minded circles on the surface of the couch. "In the first one, I die, but it feels more like... I don't know, like a fragment of my imagination. The second one is that I woke up and you rang me that we had to see some doctor from the hospital because there was something alien in a man's body and they'd find it in the post mortem, but then, ten minutes later, you rang again and told me that the House of the Dead was a more pressing matter and we had to go immediately."

"How long ago was that for you?" Jack asked quietly and Ianto shrugged. "I don't know. Two, three weeks at most. You?"

"A year. It's okay," he hurried to add when he saw something resembling pity in Ianto's eyes. "Like you said, it's in the past. It doesn't matter."

Ianto smiled and, without another word, brought him closer for a kiss. Jack had yet to get accustomed to the unfamiliar details – he felt like he was now seeing and sensing Ianto in his entirety instead of the human version he'd adored kissing just as much before – but he tried to push the thought away. There would be time to discover Ianto from the beginning if he needed to. If the Time Lord was completely unlike the Human, then Jack knew he would manage to find all differences and learn to love them one by one all over again.

Ianto's hand slid into his hair and then Jack felt him freeze into the kiss and pull back, his eyes careful and unsure. "Jack, I'm not sure how to ask this but... have you got cat ears?"

Jack felt strangely embarrassed under Ianto's curious eyes. "Ah, yes. That's part of the reason why the Doctor sent me to find you. The planet we've landed on – Gunthra – has some sort of bring-your-own politics when it comes to humans so I can't come out unless you introduce me as your slave."

Ianto frowned. "What century is this?"

"Year 3 025 436," Jack said, already having taken Ianto's trains of thought. "So yes, humans have started to evolve."

"And that's why you need cat ears?" A small smile was tugging at the corners of Ianto's lips. "Why are we going there at all?"

"The Doctor said that you've told him about being there once and he thought it might... you know, help with the memories you haven't got back yet."

Ianto nodded slowly, lost in thought. "I remember it Sort of. My squad was sent there to establish their position in the war. They didn't want to fight, of course – what do you expect of a race controlled by a super-computer – but wanted to send their slaves into it all, so we preferred to let them maintain their neutrality."

"I've heard that it's a beautiful planet," Jack said when Ianto didn't make a move to get up and walk out of the library. "Their birds are translucent and someone once told me that there's a whole forest full of plants that glow at night." His voice had an almost pleading edge to it now because honestly, the Ianto he knew would be out of the door in a second and while he understood that the sudden shock of having lost your entire planet was unbearable, he still had to get the Time Lord out of whatever state he was in.

"Yes, there is," Ianto said with another smile as he got up and dragged Jack after himself. "So come on, Kitty, we've got a planet to visit."

Jack glared daggers into Ianto's back as they made their way back to the control room, but the man's laughter was very much worth the cat jokes he knew he'd be the victim of for weeks.