"You're quiet," Ianto remarked. He was giving me a lovely neck rub, but my mind was lightyears away.

"Sorry," I murmured.

"What's bothering you?" he asked me, straight to the point.

"My father," I admitted.

Ianto settled his hands on my shoulders and inquired, tentatively, "What about him?"

"I ran," I told him softly.

"So did he," he reminded me.

"Yes, but first he took a stand. He didn't show the Daleks his back. He was the last man standing. I was the last girl running," I pointed out.

"You were only eight."

"No excuse," I scoffed. "Time Lords have duties."

"To protect timelines from paradoxes and such," Ianto murmured. "What exactly did you do the moment you came to Earth? You kept Jack from creating a paradox. You did your duty for a century. How is that cowardly?"

"I didn't do it because of the rules," I admitted. "I did it for Jack."

"And Jack re-made Torchwood for your father, in his honour. Protecting the universe for the ones you love is braver than doing it because you're following someone else's rules. Especially when you make sacrifices to protect them, like not being able to see your father, or your sister... Like messing with the computers on Gallifrey to protect John."

"How did you know?" I asked him, astounded and affronted, my shoulders stiffening.

"Jack reads lips," he said matter-of-factly. "I don't want you to leave. Neither does Jack. We're not afraid. If you know something, though... If leaving with John is what you're meant to do, we won't try to stop you." He said this last with tears in his voice, and when I turned on the bed to face him, there were tears in his eyes as well.

"Sweet Ianto... I love you too much," I whispered, crying a few tears of my own.

"Do you think there is such a thing as too much love?" he asked me after a tender kiss.

"Oh, yes," I replied without pause. "I suffer from it constantly," I told him, smiling wryly.

"It is said a shared burden is a lighter one," Ianto ventured, his hands warm on my bare waist.

"I want to show you something," I told him.

"Something tells me it's not what I was hoping for just now," he remarked, looking disappointed.

"Do you remember Jack calling me 'the fire of a thousand suns'?" I asked him.

"Yes."

"Fire burns, Ianto. All fire burns... My father used to call me lilium inter spinus."

"The 'lily among the thorns'," he translated.

"Yes. But I'm not that. I'm more like a rose. A wild one, complete with thorns. I can hurt you, Ianto, without even meaning to, and you need to be aware of that."

"I am," Ianto said placidly. "You've never hidden the fact that you have a dark side."

"You don't understand," I told him, "or you wouldn't be so calm."

"So help me to understand. That's what you want to show me, isn't it?" he ventured.

"You won't understand it, Ianto. In fact, trying to might kill you," I admitted, stroking his cheek.

"Show me anyway," he said gravely.

"This might hurt," I whispered, putting my fingers to his temples.

The first things I allowed Ianto to see that night were personal. Concrete. Things he could relate to. I showed him my trek through Brecon Beacons, the wind slicing across the moors, chilling me to the bone. The day Jack first taught me to fire a pistol, a line of tin cans disappearing one by one off a rock in an open field as my finger pulled. The afternoon when I was sixteen and first realized I was in love with Jack, crying at the window of our flat and feeling empty, devoid of everything but that mixture of love and anger. The day Jack first took me up in a plane, the joy I felt at finally being cut loose from the earth once more. Then hiding. Hiding from Jack's other self, hiding from my father, hiding my own feelings... Ianto could feel those feelings I had hidden from everyone but myself. I even showed him that winter evening when Jack had finally realized that what I felt for him wasn't as simple as he'd thought, when he'd made love to me on the living room rug of the flat we'd kept in the 70s and 80s. John shooting me in the eyes as I was coming out of the small house we'd owned in the 90s with a smile on my face and a paper bag of breadcrumbs in my hand to feed to the gulls and the swans. The crows had fed instead that day.

All of this I showed Ianto, like a movie playing in my head, but one he could walk around in and feel the texture of. He could even smell the grass of our front lawn as I lay sprawled in what had been evening light and become utter darkness. It was then, in the darkness, that he could see the things that could not be seen with the eye, but only felt with the mind. The pull of the sun. The turning of the earth. The burnt-orange sky of Gallifrey that only existed as an echo in the minds of the few of us left who had seen it. And then the Vortex... matter and anti-matter... four-dimensional space... Time: then, now, and forever swirling and spinning, changing, never holding still... As I closed the door, I showed him myself pirouetting to Lizt. Spinning. Never holding still.

"Is that what you see," he asked me, sounding breathless, "all the time?"

"Yes," I whispered. "And that's how I feel."

"It's like puberty," he remarked.

"What?" I blurted. It was the last thing in the universe I'd expected him to say.

"Constant change, everything feeling like it's out of your control, the terror and the wonder. Like a teenager on acid," he said, and I laughed. "Has Jack ever seen... I mean, have you shown him?"

I shook my head. "He's seen many things in his time. He's even seen part of the Vortex. But he's never seen the inner workings of my mind."

"Why not?" Ianto asked me gently.

"Because there's a lot in here he'd laugh at, and a lot that would scare even him senseless," I admitted. "My locket... I know he looked into it, but even now he won't say exactly what he saw. It was bad enough to make Alex Hopkins slaughter his entire team, including himself, but there are so many things I've seen, Ianto... that I still see... that I can't figure out what exactly terrified them so. I live with the stuff of nightmares in my head every moment of every day, and I'm so accustomed to it that I don't know what's bad enough to make an ordinary man run mad," I explained. "And that's why I'm dangerous, Ianto. I looked into the Vortex, and the Vortex looked into me... You would call it the Abyss, I suppose, but it comes down to the same thing. All the gods and all the devils, the wonders and the terror... I can't fathom what a person, a normal human, can really handle."

"That's why you hold back," Ianto understood what I hadn't been able to put into words. "That's why you hid your feelings from Jack and you pull away from me. Because you're worried you won't know when you're overestimating us."

"I just underestimated you," I admitted. "You are interesting, Ianto Jones."

"Something's coming for us, isn't it," he said; a statement, not a question.

"You saw?" I whispered. He nodded. "I hoped you hadn't."

"What is it?" he pressed.

"Couldn't you see?" I asked him cautiously.

"No. It was hiding in the shadows."

"Ianto," I whispered, "what you saw... it was the shadows."

"Literally? Like what you told Jack about smoke and fog?"

"I don't know," I admitted.

"But it's close," he ventured. I nodded. "We'll be all right, you know," he murmured, pressing his forehead to mine.

"Oh?"

"We've got you, your dad, and Dashing Jack. How could we fail?" he said, putting on a brave face.

"All too easily, Ianto. Remember what I said. Things are in flux. Our tidy little universe could be wiped clean and re-written in the blink of an eye." He was staring at me intently. "Sorry. I know that's not very reassuring."

"I don't need you to reassure me, Sage," he murmured. "I think that's my job now. To reassure you, Time Lord."

"Don't call me that," I protested softly.

"What you showed me... you can't take it back. But I trust you, and I trust Jack. And I love you. Even if all I can do is hold you when the darkness comes, I will."

"You didn't see her, did you," I ventured.

"See who?"

"Behold a pale horse," I paraphrased, "and her name that sat on him was Rose, and Hell followed with her…"

"She's coming?"

"Oh yes… I hope for all our sakes she's as strong as Jack says. Otherwise, I'm afraid the story of our lives will come up short and end badly," I murmured.

"I meant what I said, Sage. Even if all I can do is hold you."

"I know," I whispered, kissing him tenderly. "I love you, too."


[May 4, 2008 – June 1, 2008]

Concluded in "Torchwood: Darkness Falls"