Author's Notes: Sorry about that, but 'arguing' sort of requires angst. Worry not, though, as the next chapter is 'making up afterwards', so it's going to get fixed as soon as possible.

Day Twenty-Two: Arguing

As soon as the light started subsiding, Jack tentatively looked through his fingers, only to see Ianto on his knees by the console with his back to them.

"Oh." His voice was quiet and yet the Captain could hear – with a great amount of relief – the same deep timbre and melodic accent. "This is... new." He rose to his feet, still not turning around and looking at his slightly twisted reflection on the surface of the console. "Oh, this is nice." He shook himself like a bird ruffling its feathers and then turned around to face them with a wide grin. "Hello."

"Ianto!" Jack didn't even bother to hide the relief in his voice as he rushed to embrace his lover, squeezing him tightly in his arms. Ianto smiled at him, apparently amused, with the face Jack had seen so many times – and most of said times it had been holding the same expression of fond exasperation. "Hell, for a moment here I thought–"

"I promised, Jack," Ianto said softly, disentangling himself from the Captain's embrace. "And I always keep my promises."

"You really don't," Jack scoffed. "And the 'oh this is nice' was misleading."

"I was talking about the feeling. It's... if you could regenerate, I bet you'd do it all the time."

"Yeah," River put in. "It feels like the most amazing–"

"Never mind that," the Doctor put in loudly as he saw Ianto nod enthusiastically in agreement to her words and Jack start to laugh out loud "Ianto, are you okay? It's quite possible to feel some confusion and be generally exhausted after a– whoa!"

Ianto had been listening to the Doctor intently before suddenly going limp in Jack's hands and trying to put himself together just a second later. "I'm fine," he mumbled, but Jack could feel that he wasn't entirely relaxed on his legs. "It's just, my head hurts and I feel like I might..." and with that, his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he blacked out.

"Doctor!" Jack called out, alarmed. "What's going on?"

"It's okay," the Doctor assured, carefully sliding his palm over Ianto's face to check his temperature. "It's absolutely normal, but... you'd better take him to his room.

And that was how, ten minutes later, Jack sat by Ianto's bed as he exhaled another breath of golden energy. It dissolved in the air above them. The Captains sighed. Ianto had been asleep for mere minutes from what the Doctor had told him could take hours, and he was getting impatient. He wanted to see Ianto awake again; to be able to talk to him, explore that new regeneration and take the time to find out what was new and what wasn't in him as a person, considering that his body hadn't changed a bit. Seeing him like this – unmoving and quiet – sent shivers down Jack's spine. Even when he wasn't doing anything in particular, Ianto was constantly moving. Damn, even in his sleep the Captain could feel him turn and toss about as he dreamt, so this was as unnatural a state for him as I could get.

"His body is still recovering, so he has to rest," the Doctor said quietly as the three of them watched over him. "He'll be completely okay; it's just a part of the regeneration process."

"It happened to me with my first regeneration," River said to no one in particular. "I fell asleep in the middle of the street. Tasha found me."

The Doctor frowned. "Who's Tasha?"

"Never mind that now," River said hastily. "What I'm trying to say is, some regenerations would do that kind of thing to you when others don't. Time Lords usually fall asleep immediately if it was a pretty violent death, which his was. His body would have been blown up with the rest of the building if it hadn't been for the regeneration energy holding him together."

"So what do we do now?" Jack asked, tapping with his food subconsciously as Ianto sighed in his sleep. "How do we wake him up?"

"We don't," the Doctor said, avoiding the Captain's expecting eyes. "We wait."

o.O.o

Hours later, when the Doctor and River had went away for reasons Jack couldn't remember, he was still sitting by Ianto's bed. The Captain hadn't moved a muscle in hours and yet it didn't bother him; all he wanted was to be here when the Time Lord eventually woke up.

He had been so close to losing him today that his mind couldn't take it completely. There had been no guarantee that Ianto would ever walk out of the ruins of that building, regeneration or no regeneration. A small, familiar gasp, however, brought him back from his thoughts and Jack's eyes immediately focused on Ianto who was slowly opening his eyes.

"Jack?" he asked softly, blinking against the muted light in the room (the TARDIS had gone out of her way to help him). "Where's everyone?" He sat up quickly and threw the duvet off himself. "How long have I been out of it?"

"Several hours, I think." Time didn't pass in the TARDIS as it would have outside, and Jack had somehow lost track of it. "The Doctor is taking River home, I think. You need to rest," he hurried to add when Ianto stood up.

"Bollocks," Ianto said cheerily, pulling Jack up to his feet as well. "I'm feeling great. Can we go out now?"

"Just a moment," Jack said, his heart heavy with dread. River had suggested doing that test and Jack knew that it'd be necessary. They'd wanted to see if Ianto still had any of the fake memories as a human, so he tentatively asked, "Does the name Gwen ring a bell?"

"Of course." Ianto's voice suggested that the question was ridiculous, but when Jack kept staring at him expectantly, he kept going. "Gwen Cooper, born 16th august 1978. Joined Torchwood several months after me. Dark hair, green eyes, about this tall." Ianto gestured vaguely somewhere about his own shoulder. "Happy?"

"Immensely. Now, what about Alun Jones?"

Ianto frowned and bit his lip and, after a moment, shook his head. "No clue. Was it someone important?"

"No," Jack said through whatever was blocking his throat. It was unfair and selfish; he knew it, to hope that Ianto might have kept whatever was left from his inflicted human memories, but it was apparent that Ianto was, as River had put it in, 'back to factory settings'. Time Lord and nothing else, with his memories on Earth starting where they had actually began – with him being recruited for Torchwood One. "Not at all. And now that we've cleared that up," he started, getting a chance he'd been waiting for since Ianto had told them all that he was going to activate the chemical bomb, "How could you do something so stupid? Don't you understand that you've got a limited number of lives?" He didn't give Ianto the opportunity to respond. "Can't you see how reckless it is to do something like that? You can't waste your regenerations like money on the summer fair, Ianto!" The man in question's eyes had widened and he looked shocked enough to make Jack reign in it – after all, Ianto could rarely be truly shocked. "You could have thousands of years if you'd just be careful and the next instant you go out there and waste a life that could go on for centuries when you're twenty-five?"

"Nearly twenty-six," Ianto tried but when the only response he got was a glare, his expression hardened as well. "You seemed to have accepted that I was going to die early, back when we were at Torchwood. What changed?"

"You did," Jack said quietly, not breaking their locked gazes. "And I can't– I can't watch you die and throw away all that potential just because you feel like it. It's insane. It's pointless."

"My life is not a clock running out in front of you." Ianto's voice was low and dangerous and it was Jack's turn to be stunned. "I make my own decisions and you, Jack, don't get to decide whether I'm going to sacrifice it or not when I think it's worth it. You don't get to decide when and how I'm going to die because my life is still going to be the smallest part of yours. My millennium or so will be a blink of an eye compared to the millions and billions of years you're probably going to live through. But if you think that the longer I am around you the harder it would be to accept that I'm not there later, Jack..." The Captain flinched as the words – once again – voiced his own thoughts painfully clearly, "then maybe it'd be better if you never see me again, right? Maybe it'd be easier, if you'd like, to distance yourself from me right now."

"Ianto, this isn't what I meant–"

But even before he could finish his sentence, Ianto had walked out of the room, slamming the door in Jack's face as his footsteps echoed down the corridor.