No spoilers
Beta-ed: GlassSplinter
In the Hub everything was quiet once again. Jack went to the vaults and sat down in front of Janet.
"You felt them too, didn't you?" he spoke gently. "They weren't just calling mummy, they were probing, collecting information. But don't worry, soon they will realize that colonization is impossible, and that it is better for them to hide themselves. I almost missed them and let them spread."
Janet moaned and Jack smiled.
"I know, Ianto forgot your dinner. Sorry about that, my fault. I distracted him a little." He got up and went in search of food.
Where would Ianto store it? He had begun to depend on the young man too much. It took a while, but he did find a stock of food. It was in the logical place in the side corridor, it was convenient so he didn't have to carry the food too far, but it was the last place where Jack looked.
That reminded Jack of the hideout that Ianto chose this afternoon. It was the last place Jack would have looked for him if it wasn't for the useful device. That's why he hid his personal files in that room. He hadn't stumbled upon that room since. He couldn't bring himself to destroy the full drawer of files that contained his pictures and name. If the others discovered it, his careful hiding would come to an end. He managed to hide his stubborn defiance of death; he wasn't able to stay dead. Before he took charge of Torchwood, before they all died, everyone in Torchwood three knew all about him, and that had made him feel alienated, someone who they understood only through his anomaly. There were more than a few of Torchwood generations that he'd greeted and stood at their funerals. They'd filled out reports about him and his behave, tried to find ways to control him. He put up with it for his own reasons.
When he got ahold of the files he couldn't burn them. He knew all too well how fragile was memory. Pictures, names, events were lost in a stream of new stimulations. And there were other ways to forget. The Time Agency used a lot of them. Retcon was only a fragment of their training. He'd used it many times, and they used it on him. Sticky balls, how Owen called them, were an ultimate deleting tool. They immersed a subject in them and he would emerge clean of recent events. He'd entered that kind of bath and got out a little too clean, he'd lost his name and many memories of his family. It had taken him years to recover some of them. It was easy to find his name, but it just didn't stick anymore. He'd felt uncomfortable with it. So he'd searched for a new one. The Doctor found him while he was Jack Harkness and it stuck. It seems that when the Doctor says something it comes to life. In that sense, maybe he is a real doctor, since he healed that hole. Or at least it was fun to be Jack, not a dangerous rogue and conman, but someone almost honourable and overall charming. He grinned. Sometimes he didn't need to do anything, people just came to him.
He got out an old typing machine from a cabinet and wrote on a white scrap Northern expedition. It was a well known, well documented and eternally boring expedition on the North Pole that turned out to be a wild goose chase. Nobody had opened a drawer with that note in fifty years. He descended to the file room. Now that Ianto has been there he surely would come back to clean up every once in a while, he did have that strain in him, it wasn't just a pose.
When he entered he discovered that he'd already been here. There was air freshener. He chuckled. Ianto didn't leave loose ends. Luckily he hadn't had time to go further into the room. Jack went to the back cabinet and slipped scrip over his name. He opened it. There it was, his life and many deaths in Torchwood. If nothing his predecessors in Torchwood Three hid the true nature of his condition from London. At first because of fear that they would claim him, later for the pure advantage they had before them. For London he was only a name that agents took in the field, they didn't know that he was that field agent all along. In time some of them worked it out, but they only discovered that he aged surprisingly graceful. That made it possible for him to take charge when all went to hell. In other circumstances they would simply send bunch of new people to tie him down.
This way he could choose who he worked with, and what they would know. As long as he managed to be alone when he dies it worked. He would send the others in another direction and revive before they met up. Only Gwen knew, because she saw it before he took her in. She coped with it surprisingly well, as if it was just one of his strange qualities. And it was convenient, this way he could take her with him in the field. It was more fun that way, and he remained a field agent amongst all. It was a habit that grew on him. Sitting behind a desk just wasn't his cup of tea.
The others did see him deleted by Lisa, but death by electricity was such an invisible thing, they just thought that her circuits malfunctioned. It was easy to find excuses. He knew that that time was approaching, a time when he wouldn't be able to hide his death, but he was enjoying the time that was given to him, a time and space where he was almost normal. In that time he had established a relation to his team. They defied him, disobeyed, argued, complied, and it was amazing. And strangely they trusted him, most of the time.