Same Ianto, Different Jack

Chapter 34

by Gracefultree

A/N: I'm posting this chapter a day early because I'll be busy with family commitments for the entire weekend and won't be able to get any work done on my stories. Enjoy!

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"Oh! I'm sorry!"

Gwen's voice on the other side of the glass startled Ianto, despite having heard her coming down the corridor. He finished doing up his fly and turned to her, accepting the shirt Jack handed him and shrugging it on.

"Um," he started, stopping when he realized he didn't have anything intelligent to say. He couldn't help but stare at her. Eight years on Jack didn't look like any time had passed, other than the emotional wear and tear, but Gwen was older. She dyed her hair, he could tell, from the bit of gray roots peeking out, and her figure was fuller. He wondered if she and Rhys had any children. She had slight laugh-lines around her eyes, despite the stress of working for Torchwood for so long. It was good she could still have fun, he reasoned.

"Sorry! Bruce said he gave you ten minutes warning, so I took another ten just in case. Even checked on Rex, and he's coming back, but slower than before, and I'm not looking forward to dealing with your issues with him, Jack…" She smiled shyly at Ianto. "I'm sorry," she repeated.

"Doesn't matter," Ianto said, blushing. For some reason, his fingers weren't working as well as he liked, and his shirt was still half-open. Jack leaned against the dresser, predictably enough for him not bothering with a shirt, though Ianto was glad to see that he'd done up his trousers properly.

"Of course it matters," Jack countered. "We could have used you an hour ago to keep Rex from killing me!"

"Well, I didn't know Ianto was coming back today, did I?" Gwen asked in mock anger before smiling widely. "Now open up so I can give him a hug."

Jack, grinning like a cat with a fresh bowl of cream, sauntered past Ianto to the palm-print reader and pressed his hand against it. He started reciting a poem by 13th Century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, titled 'Ode to the Penis.' One of the most lewd bits of poetry, or anything else (except Jack's diary) that Ianto had ever read, he wasn't at all surprised that Jack could recite it word-for-word, given the subject matter.

What surprised him was that Jack was speaking Welsh. American-accented Welsh, but Welsh, none the same.

Perfect Welsh.

And he didn't miss a single word of the poem.

By the look on Gwen's face, she couldn't understand what he was saying, though she picked up on a few key words here and there. She'd never been fluent. Not that Ianto minded, because halfway through the recitation, Jack glanced back at him and winked, sending a blush back to his cheeks and another erection to his trousers. Ianto turned away and went to the wardrobe to get a shirt for Jack, resolutely thinking of Weevils and Hoix and those spider-mouse things he occasionally found in the Archives that creeped him and Jack out so much. It wouldn't do to have an erection when hugging Gwen. And why was he blushing? It's not like they were having sex when she walked in on them. Oh, wait, they practically were.

Finally, when Jack finished the poem and the door to the corridor slid open, Ianto had cooled down enough to join the others.

"Bastard," he hissed in Jack's ear as he handed over the shirt.

"Oh, but you love me for it," Jack teased, trying to steal a kiss, which Ianto avoided by stepping around him to kiss Gwen's cheek and hug her. Jack shrugged and input some commands into his vortex manipulator. Mainframe informed the base that the lockdown had been lifted. The regular lighting came on. Maybe Gwen didn't look as old as he first thought.

"It's so good to have you back, darling!" Gwen exclaimed, trying to hug the life out of him. "You'll help Jack settle down, yes? Get his head back?"

"Um, by settle down…"

"She means 'stop trying to murder anyone within five feet of me when I resurrect,'" Jack explained. He shoved his feet into his boots and bent over to tie the laces. "It's a bad habit I picked up somewhere along the line."

"How…?"

"Learned response to torture," Jack said briskly. "Now, grab your kit and let's go." With a wave of his hand, he motioned them both to follow him down the corridor. Ianto glanced at Gwen.

"That's as much as he's told me," she whispered. "Maybe you'll have more luck."

Ianto grunted and grabbed his backpack, reaching under the bed for his gun and comm unit. He didn't want to leave either behind, since they'd been gifts from various Jacks. "When did it start?"

"When he came back to Earth the second time. He told me to be careful around him and not let anyone near. That's all. I thought it was about you not being there, but then I saw it myself for the first time. He killed our medic on her second day without meaning to. Wouldn't go in the field for nearly a month after that."

"Wow. This is bad."

"But you're here now. It'll get better. He'll get better."

"I'm just a man, Gwen. I'm not a miracle worker."

"I know, but we all have hope that you can help him." He offered her his free arm and she took it, walking at his side towards the door. "The Hub's a bit different than you remember," she said after the stop at the loo where Ianto and Jack cleaned up, and Jack gave Ianto another record-quick blow job because, as he told Ianto, he couldn't live any longer without tasting him. Ianto hadn't even given a token protest, wanting to feel Jack's mouth around him. The three of them turned the corner into a brightly-lit atrium. Artificial sunlight bathed his face in warmth. "Jack hired an architect and everything," Gwen explained.

Ianto looked around, seeing that while the basic shape of the Hub was no different, it was more efficient and larger. He could tell by how high the domed ceiling was that they were much deeper underground. Still basically a circular room with the watertower and Rift Manipulator at the center of the cavernous space, there were clusters of workstations along different levels, and each corridor off the main area was clearly marked. Vaults, Archives & Administration, Barracks & Training, Medical & Morgue, Research & Development, Garage. Owen's medical bay was gone, replaced by one of the clusters of workstations, with easy access to the Medical & Morgue hallway. The Armory, much larger, and the greenhouse, rebuilt to fit over the Armory, were glass-walled, and he could see an impressive array of alien plants and weapons in their respective rooms. Jack disappeared into his office, still in basically the same place, able to look out over the entire main floor. He didn't see the kitchenette or coffee machine anywhere, though everyone seemed to have coffee on their desks, so it had to be somewhere. He'd have to find it. The metal grating had been replaced with tiles, and the brickwork of the walls was both modern and classic. Ianto immediately hated the tile as far too slippery.

Most impressive, everything was clean. Not in the sterile, Torchwood London way, but it was reasonably organized and there didn't seem like much to trip over or mounds of rubbish littering the place.

"It doesn't look like a sewer anymore," he said under his breath.

"Wait until you see the Archives!" Jack exclaimed, coming up behind them. He'd put on his greatcoat and was pocketing some keys. "You'll love them. Then you'll hate them. Then you'll redesign them. Then you'll love them again." He clapped his hands. "People! Gather 'round!"

Ianto watched as about twenty people left their workstations to lean against the railings and look down/over at Jack, Ianto and Gwen. He tried to figure out who did which task, but apart from the people in white lab coats, who could be either scientists or medical staff, or the military folks, he had no idea. Bruce Thomas stood in a 'corner,' talking to a few people with the distinctive black military garb. He smiled at Ianto. Ianto smiled back.

"This is Ianto Jones," Jack declared, putting a hand on Ianto's shoulder. A small cheer started, quickly rushing around the room until everyone was clapping and hollering. "Settle down, settle down," Jack said, laughing, his smile huge and bright. "You all know what this means," he added when the room quieted. "Mama Gwen's in charge for a while."

"How long's a while?" someone demanded loudly.

"Twenty quid says a week!" someone else shouted.

"Thirty says a month!"

"Fifty says Monday because Jack can time travel, idiots," a woman said, and though her voice was soft, everyone heard her and the comfortable teasing in her tone. Esther, Ianto assumed, recognizing her voice from the comms. He glanced around to find a thirty-something blonde woman wheeling her way over to him. He tried to keep his face impassive. He'd never seen someone in a wheelchair at Torchwood before, even at Canary Wharf, which had been built 'up to code,' as the late Yvonne Hartman liked to say. His eyes flickered around the Hub again, and he realized that the place had been designed so that Esther, or anyone with a mobility impairment, could get anywhere. "Esther Drummond," she said, extending her hand to Ianto. He immediately took it, bending to kiss her knuckles. "I was with the CIA until Jack dropped into my life."

"Literally," Jack stage-whispered. "We jumped out a window into a fountain within minutes of meeting."

"Pleasure," Ianto whispered, delighted to see Esther's blush.

Just then, he heard a screech from above him, and to his joy, Myfanwy appeared, winging over to him. Esther backed up so that she'd have room to land, and Jack pressed a bar of dark chocolate into Ianto's hand with a wink. The pteradon landed gracefully, stepping forward to butt her head against his side. He got to his knees and hugged her beak, feeding her the first bit of chocolate. She started cooing happily. He glanced up at Jack.

"How?"

"She wasn't back yet when the first Hub exploded," Jack explained. "I was giving her a little extra time for exercise. Found her again when I built this place. She recognized me, and everything, though the chocolate helped."

Ianto rubbed his forehead against her head ridge, scratching over her eyes the way she liked. He murmured some endearments in Welsh and fed her the rest of the chocolate. Myfanwy raised her head to squawk at Jack, who smiled and tossed some chocolate into the air. She took off after it.

"Go on, you overgrown chicken!" he exclaimed, his voice and eyes showing the fondness he felt for her. He offered Ianto a hand up. "Kids, we'll do the formal introductions Monday at the staff meeting," Jack called to the assembled staff. "Have your reports in on time this week! We have a new Archivist, and he demands punctual paperwork."

Gwen gave Ianto another hug and a kiss on the cheek. "Take good care of him," she said softly in his ear. "And I'm buying you a drink when you're settled."

"I'll get the second round," he replied with a smile.

It only took ten minutes to reactivate Ianto within the Torchwood systems.

"Come on," Jack said impatiently, grabbing Ianto's hand and dragging him towards the garage entrance. At the underground car park, Ianto counted fifteen Torchwood SUVs, as well as several dozen employee cars. Jack led him to one of the SUVs, parked in a space marked 'Director.' He casually informed Ianto that with him, there were 50 people on staff at Torchwood. Plus Archie in Glasgow and a pair of caretakers over at Torchwood House. Ianto shrugged, figuring he'd get an explanation at some point for the vastly-increased staff.

"Still no car of your own?" Ianto asked, climbing into the passenger side.

"No need for one. I've got a flat, though. I think you'll like it. The TARDIS helped me with the interior design."

"The TARDIS did?"

"She has a pretty good design sense, for a time traveling spaceship," Jack replied, starting the car. Five minutes later they were getting out of the car at another underground car park, though this space was marked 'Harkness.' Jack pressed a button for the lift, then used a key to unlock the penthouse. "Top floor, as you may have expected," he said. "Torchwood's public, now, by the way. And I'm listed as one of the 'World Leaders.' I hate it. There are so many conferences and summits. I try to send one of the others when I can."

"Torchwood's public? As an alien-fighting organization?"

"Oh, we don't just fight them anymore. We help them integrate into society. Three years ago there was a spaceship full of Balantazi who crashed in the Atlantic and needed to be given places to live. They're humanoid, learned our languages very quickly, and though they had space travel, it wasn't very advanced. Their technology was behind ours in some ways, better than ours in others. Their landing caused enough of an international stir that the whole planet heard about it, and it finally got people to pay attention to the extra-terrestrials among us in a way that Canary Wharf and other disasters didn't."

"Do they have the same rights as humans?"

"Well, not yet," Jack hedged. "But I'm working on it. They picked me as their representative on Earth, since I'd known several of their ancestors way back when…"

"And they remembered you?"

"They didn't know my name, but it was one of those Time Agency missions that actually helped people. I got them off their planet before it blew up about a thousand years ago. At the time, I didn't know that they had to leave so that they could make their way to twenty-first century Earth, but as soon as I saw their ship in space, I knew who they were and contacted them." Jack smiled gently. "I'll introduce you to their leaders, of course."

"Of course. And try to send me to the summits and meetings, no doubt," he added, indicating with his tone of voice that he didn't mind.

The door pinged and they got off the lift, walking down the hall to the single door. Jack unlocked it and held the door open for Ianto.

They made it three steps inside before they were kissing, and Ianto only had a very blurry impression of large windows, a wonderful view of the Bay, and dark wood, before he found himself sprawled on a huge bed, naked with Jack and no memory of where their clothes had gone. He didn't care.

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Hours later, as the sun was slanting lower and lower in the sky, Ianto decided it was time to find out the answers to some of the biggest questions he had about what had happened to his home universe while he was away. He made sure he and Jack were curled up tightly before asking his first question, deciding to start with the most puzzling thing.

"Jack, I'm pretty good with change, and going with the flow of Torchwood, but did you say you've killed Rex seven times this year? What's going on?"

"When the Miracle happened, Gwen and I teamed up with Rex and Esther and Dr Vera, who died pretty soon after. It wasn't ideal, but it was what we had as an option at the time. They were CIA. No one could die, Ianto. They called it the Miracle. No one in the entire world could die, except me. Somehow, I was the key.

"The Three Families used my immortal blood to make everyone immortal. Only it didn't work the same way. They didn't come back if they died. Because they never quite died. They kept on living, heartbeat, lungs working, feeling pain, but dead. The world fell apart. There were huge concentration camps, overflow camps, they were called, where people were burned alive. All over the world. The economy crashed. Martial law was declared in every Western country. It was the Nazis all over again, only the entire world was the Nazis and the bystanders who fought for a few weeks, then rolled over and let them do it.

"Everything was going to shit, and I'd been shot, but I was healing at the regular pace. I wasn't used to it, you know? I was delirious for months with fever and infection and pain. Not to mention Esther taking a pint of blood from me every few days. But you were due back any day, so I held on as best as I could.

"I called the Doctor, of course, but he never came. And you didn't come at the right time. At the end of it all, I stared into the abyss and it weighed my soul. I've done more good than bad. That's what I learned. A lot more good than bad. But I didn't want to live without you. So I sacrificed my life so that my mortal blood could make everyone mortal again through the morphic field. I knew I was going to die, and I was ok with that. I was actually, really ok with it.

"Only I didn't die. Rex was carrying my blood in his body, so when the Miracle was reversed and I got my immortality back, he became immortal, too. Esther had some in herself, as well, that we didn't know about, and she got it. My immortality's become a blood-born illness." Jack gave a harsh bark of laughter that sounded almost pained.

"I got stuck with Rex for the rest of time, when all I wanted was you. Esther, though, she's great. Almost as good as Tosh was with computers, though she can't do anything with alien tech and was rubbish in the field. That's how she ended up in the chair. She didn't have enough of my blood to heal fully when her spine got shot out when we were confronting the Three Families at the Blessing. She's adapted quite well, all things considered."

"But your immortality's not about your blood," Ianto protested, not stilling his hands from their constant caressing of Jack in an effort to soothe him through the telling. "That doesn't make any sense! The Doctor said —"

"He doesn't know what he's talking about half the time," Jack muttered. "But you're right, it's not about the blood. The Blessing used my blood and a bit of its own anatomy and a world-wide morphic field to mimic what I can do, but it wasn't the same at all. My immortality is about the Time Vortex and Rose Tyler and Bad Wolf. Theirs was about a surplus of life energy that the Blessing gave them by harnessing the energy of the universe. It all came down to time, though. Everything's about time, in the end."

"Speaking of that," Ianto started to say. Jack raising his head from where it rested on Ianto's chest. "I tried to tell you before, on the TARDIS, but —"

"Time?"

"I've ridden the Rift 12 times. The Doctor said that opened my body to certain possibilities. Remember what I wrote about meeting Game Station Jack?"

Jack closed his eyes and thought for a moment. He started reciting Ianto's journal from memory.

"Finding a transmat station wasn't very difficult. They were on every corner. Finding one that would send me to the Game Station was a bit harder. I did it. The first thing I saw was a pile of bodies. The basement level, where the transmat dropped me, was a graveyard. No survivors, and it didn't look like they'd had much of a chance. None of them had weapons. There were piles of dust everywhere. I assumed they were what was left of the Daleks, from what Jack's told me happened."

"Wait," Ianto said, interrupting him. "You memorized it?" he asked in shock.

"It was all I had of you," Jack explained. "I know the whole thing, word for word, cover to cover." Ianto grabbed his face in both hands and pulled Jack close for a deeply passionate kiss that lasted several minutes. "Should I continue?" Jack asked, slightly out of breath, when Ianto finally released him. Ianto nodded.

"The computer was extremely helpful, and it told me where Jack was. I'm calling him Game Station Jack for now, since I don't know if he's mine. Even if he is, he wouldn't have met me yet. I took the lift to the top floor where he was sitting on the floor with a stunned look on his face. He looked completely devastated.

"It took a few minutes for him to acknowledge me, but when he did, it was in the usual Jack Harkness style. All compliments and flirtations. They seemed a bit forced. He asked how I'd gotten there, and I told him. He asked if others were coming, and I couldn't tell him, since I didn't know. Then he really looked at me for the first time.

" 'You're cute. Wanna shag?' he asked. Bold as always, Jack. I told him I would if he could find us a bed. I wasn't going to do it on the floor. Ten minutes later, we were naked.

"He was sad. I could tell from his kisses. I could tell by the way he touched me. But he was still Jack, and focused on me in his usual attentive way, and I gathered that he hadn't had a lover in a while, for him, about six months. His hands shook just a little when he first touched me, but that went away quickly. I don't think he cried.

"He fucked me the first time, and while I kept my eyes closed, let myself forget for a moment that he wasn't My Jack, he opened his, because he told me that I'd started glowing. Glowing yellow. Now, in all the years I've been fucking Jack, in all the Jack's I've fucked, this has never happened to me. He didn't seem to mind, so we finished up. Later, when I fucked him, there wasn't a glow. We both looked for it.

"I wonder what the glow was, what it was all about. Could it be that I sucked up some of the Time Vortex because I was the first person he slept with, and we did it so soon after Rose changed him? Could I have taken some of the Time Vortex energy into me? Like My Jack gave some to Carys Fletcher?"

Jack opened his eyes wide. "Does that mean —?"

"The Doctor says that because of the Rift, I was open to other forces, and that because I had sex with Game Station Jack within a few hours of his first resurrection, when the Doctor himself was regenerating and the whole Time Vortex was a bit 'wonky,' his word, that I sucked it up like a sponge."

Jack blinked, unable to form words.

"He says that I'm not a fixed point, like you, and that I won't come back from dying, but I will heal very quickly, and I'll age very slowly. I'll die, but not for a very long time. He couldn't predict how long, though he thinks it'll be several thousand years."

Jack's face was slack with shock.

"Um, Jack?" Ianto waved a hand in front of his face. "Jack, say something!"

"Marry me!" Jack blurted.

"What?"

"Marry me," Jack repeated. "I'll do the whole romantic proposal thing, flowers, nice restaurant, down on one knee, ring in your desert, all that, just say yes!"

"Jack, I — this is rather sudden, don't you think?"

"You don't want to?"

"No, I do, it's just — I didn't expect it. I thought there'd be more whooping for joy and fucking first… I didn't think you'd jump straight to this."

"But you thought I'd ask?"

Ianto huffed in exasperation and rolled his eyes. "Of course I thought you'd ask," he answered, tapping Jack's shoulder affectionately. "You're desperate for someone who won't die in a few decades, and you already love me. I figured it was a foregone conclusion."

"So you'll say yes?"

Ianto leaned forward and kissed Jack gently and thoroughly. "Ask me again in a nice restaurant with flowers and a ring and I'll give you my answer," he whispered, though his eyes were alight with joy. Jack grinned, not at all put out by Ianto's response, especially considering where Ianto's hand was moving.

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tbc