Title : Flame beneath ashes - Chapter 2 : One life for another one
Summary : AU. After the events of Countrycide, Ianto was retconned and allowed to start a new life in London. Intervening accidentally in a burning building, it's a very different man Jack meets four years later. But can Ianto really escape his own destiny?
Rating :T
Characters: Ianto Jones, Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato, Myfanwy, Original characters.
Pairing : Jack/Ianto, Owen/Tosh, Gwen/Rhys (mentioned), Ianto/Lisa (past)
Genres: Alternate universe/action/romance.
Warnings: Violence, swearing, sexual situation (nothing graphic), character's death (temporary)
Spoilers: Spoilers for seasons 1 and 2. Exit wounds and Children of Earth are only mentioned as incidents and Miracle Day, of course, never happened
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
Author's Notes : Special thanks to my wonderful beta reader welsh_scotsman who is always there when I need her and to the lovely readers who took time to review and favorite. Here is the second chapter. I couldn't wait to post it. Hope you'll like it.
TW TW TW TW
Chapter 2 : One life for another one
Jack could never forget the night following their disastrous trip to the Brecon Beacons, where he had found Ianto slumped on the dampened floor of a basement room - the same place he had hidden Lisa for months.
A gun pressed against his temple and tears streaming down his face, the young man had literally begged him on his knees.
"Please, make it end... Pain so constant, like my stomach's full of rats. Feels like this is all I am now. There isn't an inch of me that doesn't hurt. Please, Jack, help me... Make it end, please."
By the look on his face, Jack had known he didn't have any other choice. It was too late. After Canary Wharf and Lisa's death, the cannibals had been the last straw and Ianto was now broken beyond repair. All Jack could have done had been to call Owen for help and cradled Ianto in his arms until the medic arrived. He'd come less than ten minutes later, dishevelled and barely awake, having obviously broken all the speed limits on his way. Owen could be the world's biggest prat sometimes, but when it was about his patients, the only watchwords were reliability and efficiency.
Jack and he hadn't uttered a word, contenting to instead nodding to each other, before Owen withdrew quickly into his lair. Whilst he had been working out the right amount of Retcon necessary for erasing Ianto's memory since he had joined Torchwood One without turning him into a vegetable, Jack had tried his best to comfort the young man, promising him that everything would be alright and he would soon have a new life, freed from pain and sorrow.
When Owen had come back with the pills, a glass and a bottle of scotch, Ianto had suddenly relaxed in his arms as if he was relieved that the choice was taken out of his hands and his torments, at last, came to an end. Being retconned was better than a bullet to the head or to spend the rest of your life in a psychiatric hospital. It had been heartbreaking to see Ianto's utter gratitude when he had given him the pills. He had held him close until the drug started to have an effect. After Ianto had finally passed out and with one last kiss on his forehead, he had left him in the care of Owen and spent the rest of the night and the following morning on a rooftop, leaving the rest of the team to deal with the aftermath.
None of them had complained, though. They knew Jack felt personally responsible for the members of his team and they had already seen how he had been affected by Suzie's betrayal and her suicide. Losing Ianto had been another bitter defeat. Even more painful, considering they had been intimate. Well, he had thought they were intimate. Events had proved him wrong.
From Jack's point of view, he had failed. Ianto was barely more than a kid. A frightened and devastated kid struggling to stick back together the shattered pieces of his life. Jack was convinced he should have been more careful, more perceptive. He was Torchwood's leader, for God's sake. He should have seen the signs and tried to help him in any way. Instead, he had let himself be distracted by his attraction to the young Welshman. To know it was exactly what Ianto had been aiming for hadn't been a consolation.
He had been silent for a long time and he realized that Ianto might take his musings as a sign of dismissal.
He could already felt the Vortex energy running through his veins and his strength slowly coming back. Soon, he would be able to get up and leave. A little voice in his head told him that it was high time that he left, but he wasn't ready yet. He caught himself wanting to know more about what had happened to Ianto since he left Torchwood, and not only by means of impersonal reports. He needed to be sure they had made the right decision.
He looked at Ianto surreptitiously.
"So you're a fireman," he said in order to revive the conversation.
"Yep," answered Ianto with a large smile. « For three years now. »
"Family tradition?" asked Jack, eager to learn more about the man he had become.
Ianto shook his head and let out a snort.
"No. Not at all. My father worked in Debenhams and never approached a fire truck in his entire life."
Jack frown. Debenhams? Ianto had always told them his father was a master tailor. It seemed that it was another part of Ianto's life he had faked and Jack wondered if there had been only one (any)thing true about the young man he had met at Bute Park
Unaware of Jack's bemusement, Ianto carried on.
"In fact, my first job had nothing to do with the fire fighters. I used to be a linguist."
Jack pulled a sceptical face. "Really?"
Ianto smirked.
"Really. Believe it or not, but I can speak at least six different languages."
"Really?" repeated Jack, who knew perfectly well it was the truth. Not only did Ianto have an eidetic memory, but he also had predisposition for foreign languages, not to mention some alien dialects too.
"Parfaitement, Monsieur," replied Ianto with a challenging tone. "I speak fluently French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian and a dash of Japanese. Aside from Welsh, of course."
"Because you're Welsh? I'd never have guessed," teased Jack playfully.
Ianto glared at him through his eyelashes, still smiling. "Are you really interested in what I say or are you just making fun of me?"
"Ok, ok, I'll stop it," said Jack, raising his hands in a fake defensive posture. "So what made you give up linguistics for fire trucks and big ladders?"
Ianto's smile faltered and his features darkened.
"The company I used to work for was in the Torchwood Tower," he answered simply, as if it explained everything.
And in a way, it did. Like the World Trade Center before it, the Torchwood Tower had become a symbol of death and destruction for most people and the ones who had been involved in its destruction were still deeply marked, physically and mentally.
"The terrorist attack?" asked Jack, for form's sake, sticking to the official version provided by UNIT after the Torchwood One debacle.
"Yes," sighed Ianto, running his fingers through his hair.
"Were you..."
"No," answered Ianto, his eyes fixed on an invisible point somewhere on the opposite wall. "I was on sick leave when it happened, but my fiancée was in the building at that time."
A veil of sadness clouded the crystal of his eyes and he let out a breath: "She died."
A vision of Ianto, covered of blood and cradling the corpse of his dead girlfriend passed before Jack's eyes, as a smell of powder assaulted his nostrils.
"I'm sorry," said Jack quietly. He knew it was derisory, but he really meant it. He cleared his throat and asked : "Is it the reason you became a fireman?"
"Yes... No... Well, not exactly."
Ianto shook his head and tried to gather his thoughts. It was still hard to talk about it, but there was something in the Captain that encouraged confidence, and he carried on :
"After the attack, staying at London was unbearable, so I went back to Wales. I found a job as a civil servant at Cardiff's tourist office and did it for almost a year, until I had an car accident." He paused. "I was on my way to visit friends at London when I lost control of my car and crashed against a pillar. Bang!"
He clapped his hands together and the sound of it echoed grimly through the room.
"But once again my lucky stars were watching over me, because though my car had been totally wrecked, when I woke up at Saint Helen's Hospital, after three days in a coma, I was miraculously unharmed. With a little exception though : almost two years of my life were missing. The doctors named it PTS - retrograde amnesia. A fancy way to say I can't remember anything that happened to me between being hired by the company after Uni and the accident."
Jack stayed silent as Ianto finished relating almost word for word the scenario tied up by Tosh and Owen in order to explain Ianto's loss of memory. Saint Helen's Hospital was affiliated with UNIT, so it hadn't been too hard to get their collaboration. He knew only too well how Ianto must have felt when he had woken up with such a gap in his life and felt sorry for that.
He glanced at him and refrained from reaching out towards him.
"It must have been awful," said Jack, his voice quiet and sympathetic.
"Yes, at first." Ianto shrugged. "It drove me crazy : I remembered meeting Lisa, living with her, I felt the pain of her lost, but I haven't a clue of what it had been to hear of her death or how her funeral had looked like. I was unable to say what my life was like when I lived in Cardiff. All I knew was what people said to me."
He paused and looked at Jack.
"It felt so unreal, like when you wake up from a nightmare and all that remains of it is that feeling in your guts that something terrible had happened to you."
"Have you regained some memories since then ?"
"None. Apparently, it's a defensive reflex of my mind, the only way it has found to move on." Ianto sighed and his fingers played absently with the seam of the pocket where his cigarettes were hidden. "My grandmother was convinced that everything that happened to you has a reason to. I'm inclined to share her opinion, so I tried to figure out why it happened to me and decided it was time for making some changes in my life to make it more... useful."
"Very praiseworthy."
Ianto shrugged his shoulders.
"At first I wanted to go into medicine, but the tuition fees were prohibitive. I didn't have any grants, a part-time job wasn't enough and a full-time job incompatible, so I had to give up."
Jack cursed inwardly. He had provided a certain amount of money to Ianto in order to help him to start a new life, but it hadn't come into his mind that the young man might want to go back to study. He had just assumed that he would return to his former job of linguist.
"For a moment I was considering becoming a paramedic, then one of my friend told me I should try to join the firemen... et voilà," said Ianto with a large smile, spreading his arms.
"Don't you ever regret it?" Jack wanted to know.
"Not for a second. The guys I work with are great, the job is exciting and for the first time of my life, as much as I can remember, I feel like it has a meaning."
Hearing those words, Jack's heart tightened. At least, Ianto sounded genuinely happy. No one deserved more to be happy than him. He had suffered so much in his short life. All Jack could do was to hope that what they had done hadn't been useless and he had offered him a better life.
There were still so many things he wanted to know about him.
Do you have someone in you life ? Are you married ? Engaged ? Do you have children? Want to?
He was about to ask more questions, when the door slammed open and half a dozen of people surged into the room in a joyful din. All of them were wearing the same outfit as Ianto, so Jack assumed they were his colleagues. They headed straight for Ianto's bed and surrounded it, laughing and joking.
"Hey Jones!" shouted out a guy built like tank. "How are you, mate?"
"I'm fine, Mike. I'm fine," answered Ianto sheepishly, squirming on his bed, uneasy being the centre of attention
A blonde girl threw her arms around his neck and gave him a passionate kiss, Jack's heart skipped a beat. Then, she took a step back and glared at Ianto, her arms crossed on her chest.
"Do it again Ianto and I swear I'm gonna kill you."
Ianto blushed and lowered his head before looking up with a smirk.
"I won't, Jennie. Word of honour," he promised, theatrically putting a hand over his heart.
The girl rolled her eyes and muttered : "As if I could trust you."
"Fucking hell, Jones. You scared us all stiff," said a thin black man, who punctuated his words with a thump on Ianto's shoulder.
"Eh! Take it easy Taylor," scolded the man called Mike with a grin. "No need to damage him even more."
"Come on Mike, he isn't made of glass," said Taylor defensively.
"Drop it, Mike," intervened Ianto in a smoothing tone, lifting his hand. "I told you I was fine. Except for a slightly sprained ankle, I'm perfectly unscathed. Thanks to Captain Harkness there."
He pointed to the bed nearby and his companions looked around only to turn back immediately. Ianto's smile fell from his face : the bed was empty and the crumpled sheets were the only sign that it had been occupied. He looked at his friends with dismay.
"Where'd he go? He was still here a moment ago," stuttered Ianto as he struggled to sit up.
"Calm down, Ianto," said Mike putting a hand onto his arm and forcing him to remain quiet. "Did he say something to you?"
"No, no. We were just talking whilst waiting for someone to come to check us."
"Maybe he's just gone for a walk in the corridor," suggested Mike. "He can't be far."
"Well, maybe he's just allergic to hospital," joked one of the firemen with a shrug, trying to lighten the atmosphere.
"Or, he's like Superman and he's gone to find a phone box in which he could change back into Clark Kent," added Taylor with a booming laugh.
Ianto pulled a face and leant back against his pillows, as his friends gathered around him and resumed their chatter, musing and joking about where his mysterious saviour could have disappear.
Lost in his thoughts, Ianto no longer listened to them. The image that came to his mind when he thought about the Captain Harkness had nothing to do with Superman. Without being able to explain it, it was more about Batman, standing on rooftop in the dead of night, driving a big black car and hiding himself into a sort of a Batcave.
Seeing he was still upset, Jennie leant towards him.
"Are you alright, love?" she asked him in a low voice.
Ianto nodded slowly.
"Yes, yes. I was just wondering..."
"What?"
"I don't know." He hesitated then changed his mind. He gave her a reassuring smile. "Leave it. I must be more tired than I thought."
She patted his hand and smiled softly.
"Don't worry, sweetheart. I'm sure he's fine."
Ianto squeezed her hand and smiled in return, but his smile faded as soon as he glanced at the empty bed beside him and he felt something prickling in the back of his mind.
To be continued...