The Adventures of a Consulting Time Lord

By Soledad

Episode 01: Ginger, At Last! (But Still Rude)

Disclaimer: Both Dr. Who and Sherlock belong to the BBC. I'm just borrowing them to have some fun.

Author's note: Yep, I know the CoE fix-it is neither unique nor original. It wasn't my intention to come up with something that's never been done before. I just wanted Ianto back.

Part 06 – Wrong

The feeling was so strong that for a moment he could barely breathe. It was similar yet at the same time subtly different from what he used to feel around Jack Harkness… only that he'd grown used to Jack's wrongness. With considerable effort, he could even ignore it.

This, however, was something entirely new.

Giving the young man a good, hard look, the Doctor got the vague impression that he ought to know him from somewhere. He took another look, an even closer one, taking in the smooth, youthful face and the blue eyes that had that special thousand-year-stare, revealing that their owner had already seen too much in his young life.

The young man had a kind of bland smile plastered over his face used by shopkeepers or hotel receptionists mostly; usually when dealing with particularly bothersome clientele. But those blue eyes of his remained colder than the polar ice caps. They even mirrored some deep-rooted dismay as he looked at the Doctor.

"That's him?" he asked from Mycroft with a somewhat old-fashioned politeness. "The new him?"

Mycroft nodded. "That's him, yes. Have you found anything?" he then asked, seemingly out of context, but the young man appeared to understand him anyway.

"There are a few possibilities, sir, but not too many," he replied. "I've already filed my report."

"Mr. Jones is my librarian," Mycroft added by way of introduction.

"Archivist, sir, if you don't mind," the young man corrected for what must have been the umpteenth time if his eyeroll was any indication. "That's what I've been trained for, and I take great pride in my work, as you know."

"Semantics," Mycroft waved off the young man's protest loftily.

Still, the Doctor couldn't help being impressed. Few people could correct Mycroft Holmes and get away with it.

Strangely enough, that only increased the feeling of nagging familiarity that pierced even the nauseating wrongness that enveloped the young man.

"Do I know you?" he asked, frowning.

"You should," the young man replied with an indifferent shrug. "I'm not surprised that you won't remember, though. We never actually met; not in person. And the only time you saw me on a viewscreen, you were only interested in Gwen. If I remember correctly, you and that Rose person were babbling something about spatial genetic multiplicity. Cos, of course, Gwen-bloody-Cooper could be the only person of importance, as always."

The Doctor's eyebrows drew closer together. "You worked for Torchwood? Jack's Torchwood? In Cardiff?"

"For both branches, actually," the young man answered coldly. "I'm the only Torchwood Archivist who survived Canary Wharf. Then I worked for the Cardiff branch until our base got blown up by certain government agents who wanted to cover their dirty tracks that could have connected them to the 456 invasion."

He gave Mycroft a look that was positively glacial. The former Time Lord sighed.

"Ianto, I told you many times how sorry I am. For not knowing about the first contact with the 456 to begin with. For not even being in London when the whole mess got out of control. Dekker and his associates knew why they lured me away to the Arabian Desert with the false premise of a political crisis. They knew I wouldn't have let them get away with that abysmal plan of theirs."

The Doctor was only half-listening to Mycroft's excuses. He was staring at the young Welshman in genuine shock.

"You're Ianto? Ianto Jones? Jack's Ianto? But that's impossible! Jack's Ianto died from the 456 virus!"

"I did," the young man replied blandly. "I'm better now."

"No!" the Doctor protested. "No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. You can't be! There can't be two of you! It's wrong!"

"Yeah, I remember Jack mentioning something about that to me," Ianto said coldly. "How it was your first reaction to him, after he'd waited almost two centuries for you, hoping that you'd help him… and that you couldn't start the TARDIS quickly enough to get away from him. Not even caring that he was still clinging to that stupid wooden box. So forgive me if I don't give a shit for your temporal sensitivities. He didn't choose to become what he is, and neither did I. It… it happened; and you're a cold-hearted bastard."

"But it's impossible!" the Doctor argued. "When it happened to Jack, it was the TARDIS… and Rose, who opened the heart of the TARDIS, absorbed the Time Vortex…"

… and ever since then, Jack has been carrying a tiny spark of the Time Vortex inside him," Ianto cut in. "That enables him to give others from his life energy; to help them as long as they aren't beyond help yet – or to bring them back if he gets to them in time. Well, he did get to me in time; in both cases. He's brought me back twice, and the second time it seems to have stuck."

"So, now you're a fixed point in time like Jack?" the Doctor asked doubtfully. "You feel… different. Still wrong, mind you, but in a different way."

"I'm flattered," Ianto replied with a look that could have frozen Hell over.

"We're not entirely sure about the ramifications; not yet," Mycroft intervened. "His resurrection isn't spontaneous like that of Captain Harkness. It took him days in the morgue of St. Bart's to come back, and he was fortunate that we've got an… associate there who helped him instead of stabbing him with a scalpel or calling MI5. We don't dare to test his abilities; his resurrection may be dependant on the life force of Captain Harkness. We simply don't know. So, until we flush out the whole conspiracy behind the 456 crisis, I found it better to keep him here where he's safe.

The Doctor nodded absently. What little he'd learned about the conspiracy gave Mycroft's actions a lot of sense.

"Does Jack know?" he then asked. "He's devastated by the loss… a shadow of himself."

"Unfortunately, Captain Harkness had already left planet when Ianto came back," Mycroft replied. "We're watching out for his eventual return, of course, but we have no means to contact him while he's off-world."

"What if he never returns?" the Doctor asked.

"He will, given enough time," Ianto said simply. "He's promised to come back; that he'll always come back. He just needs to deal with he pain first. He didn't just lose me; he lost everything, including the only family he still had."

"You shouldn't trust his promises unconditionally," the Doctor warned. "He's not the sort of person to settle down."

If Ianto was insulted on Jack's behalf he gave no sign of it.

"He waited for you a century and a half," he reminded the Doctor flatly. "Not his fault that he did so in vain. Now, are you taking the bloody watch or not?"

"Language, Mr. Jones," Mycroft said quietly. Ianto just shrugged.

The Doctor gingerly picked up the watch from the young Welshman's palm and stared at the circular Gallifreyan symbols etched onto the surface of its lid in shocked surprise.

"But this is my watch!" he exclaimed. "The old one I've already used once."

"Of course," Mycroft replied smugly. "New ones are hard to come by in these days, you know."

~TBC~