Fic: Third Time's the Charm
Mar. 5th, 2024 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jupiter2932Title: Third Time's the Charm
Author:jupiter2932
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: T
Word Count: 11,719
Characters: Ianto, Jack & Team Torchwood, Suzie, Rhiannon/Johnny
Notes: Warning for suicide-related scenes; also, a graphic depiction of bodily harm sustained by someone resulting in death.
Also I only just now realized how much I've made poor Ianto puke in fics recently. That was entirely unintentional.
Summary:
The first time Ianto meets someone from Torchwood Three, they help him. The second, he almost dies.
The third time around, he meets Jack Harkness.
The first time Ianto meets Torchwood Three is at Canary Wharf.
Lisa doesn't die right away. The conversion machine is only partway through the process when it shuts off, her mind still nearly entirely human; too human to survive, with that much metal grafted onto her body. She screams when Ianto takes her off of the machine; he stumbles, slipping on the floor that's slick with blood, red and frictionless from all the bodies. She slips into a seizure while he's trying to find his footing and takes him down to the floor with her, spasming, when he tries to heft her up.
She seizes for seven minutes, every second a terrifying cacophony. Ianto tries to help—tries to clear a space for her to seize in, move her onto her side, to the recovery position, tries to slide his jacket under her head—but they're in between conversion units, chunks of the building dropping down around them and splitting on the concrete floor, smoke from the fire that's heating the area unbearably; he burns his hands when he touches her, and when he tries again he jars the metal plates on her chest; it moves, shifting against her skin, into her skin, sinking deeper into her body so he feels some of her ribs scrape against it and shift and she screams, she screams and screams ; he tells her he's sorry, he's sorry, oh god he's sorry, please, please, and her arm snaps out and smacks the edge of one of the conversion units and hits it so hard, reinforced as she is with metal, that her arm snaps so violently the bone snaps in half; one jagged end of it tears through her skin and bumps into one of the loops of metal over her arm. The other end of bone rips through her brachial artery and kills her.
Ianto tries to save her; the first spurt of blood catches him unaware, splashing hot across his neck and chest when her broken arm snaps up and to the side in a muscle spasm. It only takes him seconds to jerk into action, though; he grabs at her arm, touches hot hot metal and burns his palms and holds on regardless; her whole body twists, snaps away, and he has to kneel and tuck her wrist between his knees so he can yank his tie off. He gets it around her upper arm, snaking it under the metal bands to fasten it in a tourniquet. Her seizing's slowing, so he's not worried about her breaking her neck if he holds her still, but there's tacky blood everywhere now, under his knees and shins and on his hands and on his face and all over Lisa, too; he pats his pockets down frantically for a pen to use for the tourniquet, finally yanks his suit jacket back out from under her head and finds one in his left front pocket, wedged between the lining of the pocket and the small box. It's the fancy fountain pen Lisa bought him for his birthday. The cap of the pen jams in the closely-set metal bands around Lisa's upper arms, and he fumbles with blood-slick fingers to take it off.
He sees flames some distance behind them, orange light flickering in the reflection off the metal helmet that's melted the skin at the edges of Lisa's face. Somewhere even farther away, on another floor, a sudden spate of gunfire erupts and falls just as quickly silent.
"It's okay," he tells Lisa, yanking her up closer by her arm and wincing in apology. "I've got you, sweetheart. ."
She moans, weakly, as he finally slides the pen in and twists the ends of his tie around, watching as the heavy sprays of blood sputter down and die.
"I'll get you out of here," he promises, and twenty seconds later she dies too.
There's flames behind him and debris in front, so he'd have a job getting out safely if he wanted to try; he doesn't, but it's what he talks about the next day. Fire and debris and gunshots, so I thought the best thing was to shelter in place and wait for rescue, is what he tells the UNIT staff member who comes to his hospital room with a clipboard and mispronounces his name.
He doesn't think about it now, though. He holds Lisa in his arms and asks her to wake up and she doesn't, so he sits there and holds her up to his chest and presses his face against the steel cap where her hair should be and begs and begs and begs, and eventually the sprinklers come on and put the fire out, and then at some point after that he feels a hand on his arm and turns to see a soot-streaked woman in jeans and boots and a fire retardant jacket shine a torch in his face.
"Sir? Are you—oh my God," she murmurs. She touches her hand to her ear—oh, she must be Torchwood, though Ianto's never seen her; perhaps she was stationed off-site, he thinks.
"Owen," she says, a little louder, raising her voice to be heard over her comm. "I need you. I've got a survivor. He's—yes."
She says a few other things, but Ianto tunes them out after male, young, shock, and hoists Lisa up a little, back onto his lap. His legs are numb, and his hands and arms and the skin around his collarbone are red and—red and white and puffy and not quite right, the skin, where Lisa's lain against him, where the metal on her body's touched, and it hurts, but he doesn't care. He sets his hand on her head, on the metal cap that settled on her scalp while she was still screaming, hiding it so he can't see it. She looks almost like she's sleeping like that, with his hand framing her face. When he moves it away the edge of his sleeve snags on a sharp bit of metal; it holds for a moment before it tears, and the metal cap on her head shifts; some of the skin at the edge of her forehead, burned and bruised and damaged, sort of stretches, and then, when he yanks his hand free with a rip, the skin tears a little too, in a bloodless, ragged gash maybe two or three inches long; gravity on the weight of the metal cap pulls it back, and the scalp, melted on, starts to go with it, and Ianto sees muscle and bone and Lisa's not supposed to look like this, she's not—
"I'm sorry," he cries, claps his hand down on the cap and pushes it down, shuts his eyes and bends over her and rocks her corpse in his lap. "I'm so sorry sweetheart, I'm sorry, sorry, please."
There's movement at his side again, both sides this time, and hands on his chest. Gloved hands, latex, doctor's hands holding a penlight and reaching into a standard Torchwood chest-strapped medkit, taking a bandage pack out and ripping it open.
"Okay, mate," the voice attached to the hands asks, and the hands reach up and cradle one side of his head and press the adhesive bandage patch up to the other. "What's her name?"
She's gone cold in his arms, even though it's hot all around them. He's hot. His skin—his skin is—
"Lisa," he says. She's not supposed to be cold. He looks around and—there; his suit jacket's just a foot away. She's always getting cold and borrowing his jacket, jokes about how she keeps him around for his Italian three-pieces. He sets it over her, covers up the metal on her chest and her mangled arm, and when he's done he sets his hand back on top of her head so the metal there doesn't move when he shifts.
"Tosh is going to take care of Lisa for a second, yeah?"
He's surprised to see the others there with him, still; he'd forgotten about them, just then, but the woman's smiling at him and the man, who's taking a syringe out of his bag and leaning in again. The woman tugs at his arm, and Ianto's arm moves, doesn't work when he tries to stop it.
"She needs m'jacket," he says, and then Lisa's not on his lap any more, which is wrong but also maybe good because his body doesn't want to sit up straight suddenly; doesn't want to sit up at all, wants to slump forward and rest. He thinks he should be allowed to rest now.
Hands catch him. Lower him to the floor and roll him softly onto his side.
"This is Dr. Harper," someone says. "I need a medical evac. Twenty-seventh floor, north wing."
Ianto can see the woman in the fire-retardant coat; Lisa's lying in front of her, and she's running a scanner over her body. His jacket's still on her, but it's shifted down a little so her shoulders are bare.
"She's cold," he tells the man, who's leaning over and scanning Ianto, for some reason. "She always borrows my jacket when she's cold. Y'should cover her up."
The scanner beeps. The man meets Ianto's eyes—he has kind eyes, the doctor does—and nods.
"Tosh, love," he says, and Ianto shuts his eyes and falls unconscious.
He wakes up alone in a hospital eleven hours later. His arms and chest and palms are bandaged up, and there are stitches on a cut on the side of his head and a nasal cannula feeding him a soft, cool stream of oxygen, and the jewelry box that was in the front left pocket of his suit jacket, with the engagement ring still inside, is sitting on the food tray folded out to the side of the bed.
The second time he meets a representative of Torchwood Three is in the living room of his flat in Cardiff, five months later.
He spots the woman following him on the drive to his flat first one morning, on his way to pick up a few changes of clothes to take back to Rhiannon's. He can't make out much of her besides her long, dark hair; she's hunched over the wheel of a 2003, blue Vauxhall Astra, which he sees two cars behind him on several streets through his drive. He thinks it's a coincidence at the time, decides to drive back the scenic route to check and thinks he loses her.
He makes it all the way to Rhi's, bag in hand, without catching sight of her again.
It's easier, being at Rhi's, than it would be sitting alone in his flat. Rhi knows what he needs for now; she makes sure he's busy, making him fold flyers with her and chop veg for her meal prep and going with him on a run to the store to find a replacement uniform for David since he ripped a pair of trousers on the playground the week before.
She doesn't trust him to go alone, which, considering Dylan, the nurse he knows from the clinic, texts him while they're out, is probably for the best.
She catches him reading the text and gently snags his cell phone, powers it off, and sticks it in her pocket.
He's pretty sure it's to distract him that she decides to do the rest of her weekly shopping early, as they're there. She must be running out of things to busy him with at the house.
Hell, maybe she'll finally let him organize her hall closet. He's been itching to every time he's opened it since she and Johnny moved into that house. If she'd just let him go at it with some plastic boxes and a label gun, he could sort it out in an hour. Four hours tops.
"Just get through today," she says, squeezing his arm when they queue up in the checkout line. "If you make it to Sunday, you can come with us for lunch with Mam. I'll get her to make Welsh cakes, even."
"Brilliant," Ianto snaps. He reaches into the trolley and grabs a cheap pair of flip-flops, a can of roach spray, and David's new trousers and dumps them on the conveyor belt. "My big sister's bribing me with sweetbread for good behavior. This is exactly where I envisioned myself in my twenties."
She gives him a look but doesn't rise to the bait. "Do you not want Welsh cakes, then?"
She leans over and picks up a value pack of low-fat Greek yogurt, the kind he knows she doesn't like, which he's kept his own fridge stocked with since he came back.
"Sorry." He takes a breath and holds it. She's going to a lot of trouble to help him, her and Johnny both, and he doesn't need to be an ass about it just because she makes an easy target.
She sighs and pushes the trolley up—then leans over when he follows and stretches up to plant a kiss on his temple.
"We won't take it personally," she says, setting the divider behind her groceries. "Me and Johnny, whatever you say this week. You're not the first person we know who's gone through this, you know."
Ianto does know. He heard all about Johnny's cousin Martin and Rhi's friend Dawn last week after his mam brought him home from the hospital to find Rhi, Johnny, and Rhi's friend Martha, who works as a counselor at the local youth center, camped out in his living room, waiting for him.
It makes him squirm inside when he thinks of it. It makes it worse that they're not wrong.
"Hot?" Rhi asks, wallet in hand. "You look flushed. Want to wait out—by the doors?"
He stops himself from snapping again and walks off with a nod. He does duck outside, but he stays within sight of the registers through the glass doors, leaning against a safety bollard and wishing desperately he hadn't given up smoking when he met Lisa.
Christ.
He is hot, starting to sweat more than he should be given the early spring chill. He grabs his collar and yanks at it, flapping it a little to try to cool off. He knows this is just a part of the process—went into this open-eyed, had no illusions that quitting would be a pleasant process; he just had not, at the time he started, assumed he'd ever want to quit.
If it hadn't been his mam who found him, honestly, after his little blip of an overdose the week before, he'd be hitting up Dylan for more stolen pills right now instead of voluntarily imposing on his sister's family to be watched like a delinquent for a week while he comes off the opiates.
It's hard not to feel like a total dick even through the anger. Rhi looks tired, even at this distance, her face drawn, dark circles under her eyes. It's unfair of him, he knows, showing up after four years away to just—to just be a mess in his family's life, the sort of mess he'd run to London to get away from. Dead girlfriend, PTSD, purposefully getting hooked on prescription drugs so he can make it through the day without breaking down. He'd only seen his family three, four times since he'd moved back, and ducked any hints of sympathy from them with pleas of being busy at his new job at the bank, spent his evenings curled up on the sofa trying to numb himself however he could. Didn't plan on making it to twenty-four, until he woke up in the hospital with his mam weeping over him and Rhi, as terrified as she was furious, giving him a dressing-down worse than anything he'd ever seen Yvonne Hartman dish out before she'd gathered him up and let him sob his heart out on her shoulder.
It's not been fair on her, or on his mother, or on Johnny or the kids—though at least the kids are happy enough, having been packed off to Gran and Grandpa Davies' for two nights while Ianto 'gets over the worst of it.'
It's not been too bad, yet; he decided to try to taper off a little, and took his last half dose late last night before Johnny picked him up. He's feeling a little achey, maybe, like he's overdone his morning run, and his palms are damp with sweat now, sweater feeling warm despite the cold breeze, but he knows tonight's probably going to be rough.
He's looking back at Rhiannon when he spots the woman out of the corner of his eye. She's standing in the parking lot pretending to be sorting out a problem with a trolley, but she's really watching him.
He's sure it's the same woman from his drive earlier; for one thing, her hair's the same: long, dark, a little curly in that style Rhiannon would know the name for; for another, there's a blue, 2003 Vauxhall Astro parked behind a moving truck in the third row from Rhiannon's car.
He knows her from somewhere; he's sure he does. Not London. He knows every single one of the people who survived Canary Wharf, and she's not one of them.
UNIT, maybe? Or maybe from one of the companies Torchwood had tech contracts with? He did so much work liaising for Yvonne his last year there, met so many people every day he couldn't possibly remember every one, but he knows he's seen her before. In a file, maybe, seen her picture, he thinks. Maybe.
He looks again, hoping to remember, but just then Rhiannon comes out of the store, calling his name.
When he looks back again, the woman is gone.
It's a miserable night.
The stomach cramps start up just before Johnny comes home from work, and they don't ease up a bit for the better part of a day. He spends the night curled up on the floor of the ground-floor toilet, shivering the whole night through even while he sweats right through his t-shirt and the shorts Johnny lends him when he vomits on his pajama pants.
Rhi ducks in and out, checking on him several times throughout the night and one time sitting next to him cross-legged, wiping his face off with a damp cloth and covering his body with a soft knit blanket.
"I'm sorry," he mumbles, resting his head on her thigh and clumsily patting her shin. "I didn't mean to come home just hurt you."
She runs her fingers through his hair; it's wet enough with sweat the locks just flop limply out of the way when her fingers move past them.
"It's not me who's hurting right now, is it?" she asks. Her fingers ghost across his forehead, rub soft, soothing circles into his scalp. "If you hadn't come home, sweetheart, Mam wouldn't have found you on Tuesday, and you wouldn't be alive to apologize right now. So don't think for a second that I'm sorry you're here, you twat."
He doesn't say, I wish I'd stayed in London, then, because he's not a total piece of shit, but just for a second he thinks it.
The don't have time to linger on sentiment for long anyway. Ianto throws up again a few minutes later, heaves sports drink into the toilet while Rhi rubs his back until the muscles in his stomach ache.
He doesn't emerge from the Davies' house for two days after that, on Saturday morning. Rhi doesn't want him to go, but he pleads his need for some more clothing, and Johnny backs him up with an, "I was thinking of running out before the kids get back. Thought we could get some frozen pizzas and rent them a movie, make a night of it. The more the merrier, hey?"
Rhi agrees easily to that; Ianto suspects it's less that she's happy about having Ianto out of sight and more she's too tired from looking after him to want to cook tonight, and Johnny likewise.
He hopes she takes a nap while they're out. Not likely she'll have a chance for it once the kids get back from their grands'.
Of course, it turns out Johnny actually meant it when he promised Rhi he'd keep an eye on Ianto just before they left, when they thought Ianto wasn't listening. The best Ianto can manage for a little privacy is getting him to wait in the car while Ianto takes five minutes to grab himself some clothes.
His own fault for giving in to sentiment and volunteering to be watched, he knows, but after two days cooped up in the house, it's starting to chafe. The irritation and moodiness from the withdrawal, he's sure, probably isn't helping.
He wonders, on his way up the stairs to his flat, how much Rhi told Johnny about what happened in London. He'd written her down, not his mam, as his emergency contact when he joined Torchwood, so it was her that got the call when he was initially reported as missing at Canary Wharf, before the people from Three found him. She'd been on her way to London when he called and told her not to come, that he'd been in an accident but he was fine. That he was going to be fine.
And it was Rhi that showed up in the hospital the day after, and to whom he spilled his guts over a beer—about Lisa, about the engagement ring, about what he'd been doing in the four years since he left Cardiff—once he was released.
He knew it was a mistake at the time, but it came tumbling out, encouraged by a combination of grief and alcohol and pain medication. He'd actually thought about Retconning her, after—for about half a second.
But he couldn't ever, he knows. Not to his sister, not unless she was in danger.
She knows how to keep her mouth shut when she needs to, anyway, which is what matters. Oh, Johnny knows, he's sure, but it won't go farther—at least, not the stuff that she could get in trouble for knowing.
The thing about his girlfriend tragically dying right before he was about to propose, that Ianto is certain is common knowledge among Rhiannon's friends.
He doesn't really care, much, any more.
But he's distracted enough thinking about it that when he opens his front door and walks in, Suzie Costello almost manages to stab him in the chest.
It's luck more than skill that saves him; she's almost as surprised as he is at the intrusion, and all the way across the living room when she hears him jiggle the key in the lock; she's mid-sprint when he steps in, his eyes down on the keys in his hands, and so it's luck—and maybe some exhaustion—that trips him backwards so instead of a knife in his lung he ends up with a long but shallow slash across his shoulder.
It's a jumble after that.
Ianto did some training when he was with One; he worked directly under Yvonne Hartman, and nine times out of ten she went out during business hours he was half a step behind her, comm in his ear and PDA in hand.
Plus, he grew up on a housing estate in 1990s Cardiff, a quiet, reserved boy who went Goth in his teens and mostly hung around with girls. Johnny Davies had taken one look at him, the first time Rhiannon brought him home, and taught him how to throw a punch.
So he's not completely lost when Suzie slips on his welcome mat, course correcting in a few seconds and swiveling, setting her left foot on the wooden floor and lunging at him again.
Ianto would be the first to admit that hand to hand isn't one of his strengths; even with his training, he's not a martial arts adept, and he hasn't kept it up since Canary Wharf.
Also, he's just spent the better part of the last three days shivering his way through withdrawal.
But it turns out that someone trying to stab you in the heart has amazing powers for revitalization; and it also turns out, as Ianto will later confirm, that Suzie Costello's main capabilities don't lie in hand to hand fighting, either.
Whatever it is, he manages to dodge her next lunge, and he jerks several steps back when she turns again and ducks and avoids a cut through his radial artery. She snarls, changes her grip on the knife, and lunges again—and, reaching out blindly with his hand, he grabs a pan off the dish drying rack, swings it, and smashes it into her head.
She drops like a rock.
Ianto drops the pan, leans over with his hands on his knees, and vomits.
As if they're in a bad, buddy cop comedy, it is at that exact moment that Johnny bursts through the door.
"It's okay," Ianto says once he catches his breath. "I'll sort this out."
The third and last time Ianto meets a representative from Torchwood Three face to face is at a quarter to eleven on a Saturday night two months after he sorts it out.
It's a beautiful night. Ianto's almost forgotten what it's like to be out on a spring night in Wales. He's barely seen the night sky since he moved back, outside of peering up at it through his windshield on his drive back home, on occasion.
But it's lovely. Even here in the city, in the heart of Cardiff. He can't see the stars much, past the city's light pollution, but the moon's hanging low and big in the sky tonight, and he can make out Orion's belt and the Big Dipper in the sky above. There's a soft breeze that stirs up now and then, brushing feather-light against Ianto's face, ruffling the hair he hasn't bothered putting product in for several days, now. It's not fresh, not here in Ely East, but the steel-and-gasoline smell that wafts over from the mechanic's down the street feels familiar, comfortable from weekends helping his dad, then Johnny, try to keep the family car running.
It's not the most comfortable place to be, sitting on tired scrub grass with his back against a tree, but it's quiet. This isn't a popular park for after-hours dallying of any kind—there's a larger, nicer park, with more secluded spots and a well-kept set of bathrooms—just a ten-minute's walk away; so this, a modest field with several clumps of trees and a few aging play sets, is empty this time of night. Just Ianto, sitting against a tree, raising his bottle of Scotch to his lips and taking a bracing sip.
He feels a little sick already, a hint that proper nausea is on the horizon, but he takes another drink and settles back, shuts his eyes and feels the wind pick up for a few seconds; it dies right after, the sound of it plummeting down back to nothing so there's just the noise of an old car rumbling down a street a block or two off, a woman in a house nearby, with a window opening, probably, breaking into a screech of laughter that just as quickly cuts off, a front door slamming shut. He remembers the soundscape of a Cardiff neighborhood like this, from hours spent lying in bed as a kid, trying to fall asleep to the noise of the world outside, his window cracked.
It's just such a nice night, Ianto thinks, and he lets the bottle sit loose in his grasp next to his hip on the ground beside him.
He should screw the cap back on, he knows, or if it sits out on the ground long enough it will attract insects, and that could make a mess.
In a minute, he thinks, and a small part of him says, leave it, it's not your problem to take care of messes any more.
He lets it sit for now, anyway, for another few minutes until the breeze picks up again and his arms, bare with his short-sleeved tee, feel cold. He swallows down a mouthful; his hand shakes a little on its way up, and when he sets the bottle back down it sloshes, and when he moves to wipe his hand off on his jeans, he knocks it over, and the rest of the Scotch glug-glug-glugs out of it, toasting the dirt.
Oh, well. He's probably had enough.
He takes a long, deep breath, relishes the feeling of it, and shifts, crossing his arms over his chest when a shiver runs through him.
For the first time in months, he can't feel the burning, corrosive hurt in his lungs—on his chest—that's dogged him since Canary Wharf. Since he got noticed by Yvonne. Since he started at Torchwood. Since he ran off from Cardiff at nineteen, looking for—
Hell, maybe never. Maybe this is the first time he knows what it feels like to be comfortable, to be okay.
It's a quiet, beautiful late spring night in a shitty, underfunded park less than a quarter mile from Ianto's childhood home, and, alone in this sea of consciousness, he thinks he finally knows what happiness feels like.
He's curling in a little, bringing his knees up because he didn't think things through and bring a jacket, when there's a very loud smash in the deep recesses of an alley nearby, and then a series of loud, scuffled clangs, and then a voice, with a distinctly American accent, yells, "Shit! Shit, shit, shit!" very loudly.
It's maybe twenty seconds before Captain Jack Harkness runs into the park, two weevils hot on his heels.
It's a night of firsts for Ianto, which in any situation that didn't involve someone in imminent danger he'd laugh at the irony of. First time seeing Jack Harkness and weevils in person, and here he's got a front-row seat to both.
Harkness is calling out to someone through his comm; he sounds considerably calmer about it than most in his position would, Ianto thinks, giving his location to someone called Gwen and ordering her to "Bring the van, ASAP!"
There's clearly been changes at Torchwood Three since Ianto last took a snoop; they've hired at least one new staff member—presumably to replace Ms. Costello, and, perhaps more impressively, they've bought a van.
Yvonne always did wonder how they managed without one.
It's probably not the best time to sit about reminiscing, though. Harkness is tearing through the park at a dead sprint—a gun in one hand and, incongruously, a spray bottle in the other—when he spots Ianto. He stutters, stops, and pivots, losing two precious seconds of his lead on the weevils to lead them away from Ianto, who he probably takes for a homeless guy kipping in the park for the night.
It's gallant of him. Brave. Lets the nearest weevil take him down with a flying leap thirty feet away.
Ianto almost doesn't get up. This is not his problem; none of this is any longer his responsibility. Not since Canary Wharf, not since Torchwood's government overseers left the survivors high and dry, sweeping it all under the rug; and especially not tonight.
He sits there, under the tree, for several long moments and watches Jack Harkness wrestle a weevil by the merry-go-round and Ianto almost, almost doesn't get up.
But then the other weevil moves in for the kill, and Ianto curses under his breath and heaves himself to his feet.
He's not exactly steady once he gets up. Walking in a straight line is a challenge, let alone trying to hurry, and with every step he take his head feels—feels tighter, somehow, like there's pressure building up inside that wants to burst, except the inside of it feels like it's been packed with cotton balls, like the things Lisa used to use to take off her nail polish. Fuzzy and itchy and full, tighter and tighter with every inch he moves. He can feel the Scotch sloshing around in his stomach, too, and the nausea that had threatened to show earlier is making itself known now, sick disorientation of the gut rippling out from his stomach and making him swallow heavy and desperate every two steps.
There's no finesse to it, not tonight. Harkness is stretched out on the ground, just barely holding off one weevil, which has got him pinned; the other's crept up next to them and is just about to strike when Ianto creeps—or, rather, staggers—behind it and, failing to see anything he can use as a better weapon nearby in the park, reaches into his back pocket, grabs the taser he's carried since he got home from the hospital and found UNIT had confiscated his personal firearms, sticks it to the weevil's neck, and clicks it on.
He's honestly kind of surprised when it works.
It doesn't take the weevil down right away; the creature has enough time to lash out and swipe with its claws. It catches Ianto across the thigh, though Ianto only notices when the claws catch on the side seam of his jeans and rips through.
The slashes don't hurt at all just then, which is nice.
Then the weevil takes a step towards him, staggers, and pitches towards the ground, twitching.
Ianto leans over and zaps it again, just in case.
It makes the weevil stop twitching, which is good; but when Ianto tries to straighten up again, he stumbles, sways like a dandelion in a strong wind, and sits down hard on the ground.
"Shit," he says, and his head swims so he has to hunch forward and rest his weight on his hands so he doesn't fall over prone. "Shit."
"Hey," Harkness says, and Ianto manages to look over and sees the other weevil also lying unconscious on the ground. Then there are hands on him, one on his shoulder and one on his chin, trying to move his head and make him look up, and that's a mistake. That's really not good.
"You okay?" Harkness asks.
And Ianto swallows, moans, and without further ceremony turns to the side as well as he can and vomits.
It's shit.
He didn't think it would feel this bad. The puking doesn't make him feel any better, like it usually does when he's drunk. There's a brief sense of relief, when the first round of heaving stops and he manages a breath, but it disappears directly. Ianto's head is aching; beyond aching. It's just tighter and tighter, the pressure ramping up so his eardrums feel like they're being crushed and his eyes feel like they're going to burst out of his head, the fuzzy, woolen-headed nothingness coming for him, starting to make him blink, darkness stretching out its hands to grab him round the neck and pull him in.
Harkness, to his credit, is a gent through it all. He keeps Iankto from tipping over when his body tries to pitch forward, a hand on Ianto's shoulder; with his other hand he pats Ianto on the back until he stops heaving.
"You're okay," Harkness says, and there's something to his movements—a shift of a hand towards a coat pocket, maybe—that Ianto catches and just knows, without anything to base it on, that Harkness is already working out how much Retconn to dose him with.
Well. That won't be necessary.
"'M okay," Ianto mutters in between ragged breaths, tongue thick in his mouth. "Didn' know weevils smelled this bad up close, 's all."
Harkness's hand stiffens on his back.
"I don't have any idea what you're ta—" Harkness starts, but Ianto heaves again, more vomit splattering on the ground, which is disgusting and undignified—and at some point he has to catch his breath and figure out how to stop so Harkness leaves—but the beam of Harkness's flashlight, which had previously shone on his head, shifts.
And the beam hits Ianto's vomit, and Ianto realizes Harkness stopped talking not because Ianto started puking again but because he saw the mass of half-digested gel capsules in Ianto's sick.
"Oh. Fuck," Harkness says. And then, "What did you take?" he asks, hand on Ianto's face again, and Ianto gasps and tries to squirm away but Harkness doesn't let him, shining his light at Ianto's eyes.
"What did you take?" Harkness asks again, and he sounds angry, for some reason, which Ianto's brain can't make sense of—it's so heavy, so tight, so full, so tired—
—he's been so tired for so long, he just wants to get some rest—
—and he blinks up at Harkness, and looks over at the tree where he was sitting when the weevils came—god, if he could just rest—
—and Harkness swears under his breath, and eases him down so he's lying on his side, staring at the weevils who aren't moving at all, and jogs off towards the shelter of the tree where Ianto was sitting and looking up at the stars, and where he left the bottle of Scotch and the empty bottle of Valium and the notes he wrote for his mam and Rhiannon.
He can't see the stars now, not without moving, and Ianto finds that he can't very much move. But that doesn't matter. He can feel his heart thumping in his chest, he thinks, and the buzzing in his head is very loud and very strange, but there's a breeze, still, that brushes his hair, and it smells like home, and it picks up for a moment and moves the merry-go-round, shifts it so the old metal squeaks, and somewhere in a house nearby the woman who laughed earlier laughs again.
It's still a nice night.
It's dark, and growing darker every minute, and that's all a night needs to do.
"God damn it!"
Ianto groans at the noise—because, fuck, but he was just on the verge of nodding off, and he'd really, really like to get some sleep—but instead of letting up, the voice gets louder, angrier, and suddenly there are hands on him, shaking him by the shoulder and smacking his face and urging him up, up, up so he's sitting and up to his feet, so he's wavering on jelly legs, vertical solely because of the arm that snakes in around his chest and takes most of his weight.
"Owen!" someone says, quite loudly, right next to his ear—and, oh, right, it's Captain Harkness—and what a loud asshole he's turned out to be, making Ianto walk when he could be sleeping on the nice, comfy ground right now—though he smells pretty nice. "Tell me what to do! Got a patient coming in for you, washed down a bottle of valium with alcohol—not sure, but he was up and tazing a weevil three minutes ago—yeah. Yeah, lots of vomiting. He's having trouble walking, looks disoriented. Yep. Got the standard SUV medkit, what should I—"
Harkness lets go of him, finally, and Ianto braces for a long fall but finds himself settled, albeit roughly, into the passenger's seat of a very brightly lit SUV. He blinks, finds his body slumping back into the seat, just about to slip into the sweet, still waters of sleep, only to jerk awake when a travel thermos of cold water is dashed in his face.
"Don't you dare," Jack Harkness says.
Then there's a needle prick on his shoulder, and hands shoving his legs in the SUV, and a paper bag set on his lap.
"Stay with me, kid," Jack Harkness says, slipping into the driver's seat and starting the engine. "Owen, heading your way, lights on."
Ianto blinks.
"Nope!" Harkness barks. He reaches over and smacks Ianto's thigh. The one the weevil's claws dug into.
The pain hits Ianto well enough, this time around. He yelps, and jumps, and vomits into the paper bag.
"Good job, kid," Harkness says, and slaps him on the shoulder. "We'll be there soon, okay? We're going to get you all fixed up."
Ianto's head hurts a little less, for some reason. It's still heavy like a big wool ball, but he manages to understand the words all right, once he stops heaving again.
It's silly, though. Whatever Harkness thinks. There's nothing that can fix him.
He's semi-conscious when they make it to the Hub. There's a man waiting for them in the garage with a wheelchair that he and Jack manhandle Ianto into.
The new man—Owen—is, first, a doctor, and second, angry, and, third, perhaps because of those first two put together, also loud.
Quite loud, actually.
He's volubly angry all the way from the parking garage through the secret tunnel and down to what Ianto later recognizes as a morgue.
"I couldn't take him to a hospital," Harkness is saying when they park the wheelchair by a tall metal table. "He got swiped by a weevil, and you know the odds of contamination from their claws without innoculation. Plus, he knew what a weevil was. Tazered one in the neck, after he downed his cocktail, and I'd like to know why."
"One of these days," Doctor Owen says, "this shit's going to backfire on you, Jack." He's mixing together a dark black drink in a glass, and Captain Harkness, unexpectedly, walks behind Ianto in the wheelchair and then just—
—he hugs him. From behind.
"Whazza-" Ianto starts—
—and the doctor fucking pinches his nose shut and puts the glass up to his lips.
"Just chug it, mate," the doctor says, loudly, over the sound of Ianto's spluttering.
It's vile. Not the taste—it doesn't have much of a taste, really—but the texture of it is disgusting, slimy water with grit in it, like he's trying to drink a glass of seawater with sand he scraped up from the beach. He gags on it, and the glass disappears and the fingers on his nose immediately let go.
Jack Harkness doesn't, though, let go; he stays behind Ianto, arms around his, holding him upright.
"Easy, mate," the doctor says. "Try to hold that in for a minute, yeah?"
Fuck's sake, Ianto thinks, what the shit type of bedside manner is this? And he coughs, and splutters, and catches his breath, and when he does the glass is right back up against his mouth.
"Bottom's up," the doctor announces, disgustingly cheerfully. "Come on, don't make this difficult."
Ianto nods, because he's pretty sure the only way he's going to get to nap sooner is if he cooperates. His head swims, but that's fine; the doctor lets him finish drinking the shit at his own pace, anyway, though he makes him finish all of it.
It's whatever Harkness injected him with, back in the SUV, he realizes. He gave him something to—to counteract the valium. Didn't he? Because Ianto still feels funny, still feels tired, still thinks he's going to knock off and sleep as soon as these two fuckers give him a moment of peace to do it in, but his head feels less—
—it feels less. And his heart, in his chest. It feels a little more normal again. There was something wrong with it earlier, but it feels better now. Or maybe that's just his lungs? Something felt funny in his chest, felt off, and he doesn't feel good now, not even close, but the parts of him that feel wrong feel wrong in a way that makes a little more sense.
Because, a far, quiet corner of his mind realizes, whatever Harkness gave him is saving his life.
"Oh," the doctor says, somewhere further away. "Shit. I remember him."
Before Ianto can wonder about that, though, the nausea is back, as insistent as it is sudden, and he takes a little breath to try and hold it in and vomits all over himself instead.
"It's okay," the doctor says, sliding a basin into his lap. "Get it all out, go on, love. It's okay."
It's not okay.
But Ianto's tired enough he can't explain why, even once the heaving stops. And when he does it gets loud again, a flurry of movement around him, another hypodermic and a needle in the back of his hand and other hands, touching, moving, helping him to stand and sit and lie back down.
And somewhere in the shuffle of it he finally manages to fall asleep.
Everything makes a lot more sense when he wakes up again.
He still doesn't feel well, exactly. He's groggy as hell, and his head aches and his stomach aches and—oh, bollocks, his entire body aches, and his eyeballs hurt in their sockets and he's not sure he could manage to solve a full page of his seven-year-old nephew's mathematics homework, but the world, at least, has a sense of logic to it.
He's on a bed, a regular bed but with metal railing attached on either side, stretched out on an uncomfortable twin mattress with his top half propped up by what must be half a dozen pillows. He's got what he recognizes from the feeling of it as an IV needle stuck in the back of his left hand, and there's a heart monitor beeping nearby. He's wearing a hospital gown—and, at a guess, his boxer-briefs, which is something of a relief—but he's got two blankets piled up on him. He's not actually in a hospital; it doesn't smell like a hospital, and when he cracks open his eyes—for the brief few seconds he looks before he squeezes them shut again because it's brighter than hell—he sees brick walls, no other beds, and, aside from the IV and monitor stand, a notable lack of medical equipment.
Oh, and Owen Harper's sitting in an office chair beside him, his feet propped up on the end of Ianto's bed, reading an Iain M. Banks novel.
It's funny; he was familiar with the staff of Torchwood Three from files when he worked at One, kept himself up-to-date every time there was a change because working for Yvonne Hartmann meant memorizing reams of minutia in your spare time so that, if she ever needed to know a random fact offhand, you'd know it. But the two times he'd met Owen Harper face to face, Ianto had been so out of it he hadn't recognized the man, even on Torchwood property.
Well, Ianto recognizes him now.
He recognizes him, opening his eyes, and then the light in the room stabs into them, and he shuts his eyes back up and moans.
There's movement at his side, noise, and a click. He crack his eyes open again and there's still light around him, but it's dimmer.
Dr. Harper's standing next to him, pushing some buttons on the heart monitor that's hooked up to the IV stand.
"How're you feeling?" he asks.
Ianto takes stock. Pain aside, the primary feeling blanketing him is plain exhaustion. His muscles are weighed down with a bone-deep weariness, like he just ran a marathon. His head, too, past the ache, feels heavy on his pillow; he's awake now, but he doesn't know how long that's going to last for. He can feel more sleep coming back up on him, even though he must have been out a while already, if they've moved him to a room with a bed in it. He blinks to forestall it.
"Tired." Thirsty, too, he realizes as he speaks. His mouth feels like he's dunked his tongue and palate in a barrel of that wax they put on pears and apples to keep them, and his voice cracks halfway through the word. He shrugs. "Achey."
Harper just gives a nod and takes a half step to a side table that's been pushed up against the wall, a little away from the bed. He picks up a drinking thermos from the table and slots a bendable straw through the opening on his way back.
"Yeah," he says. "That's what happens when you mix alcohol and enough benzodiazepines to kill a horse."
It's a pointed enough comment, but oddly there doesn't seem to be a lot of heat to it. Dr. Harper holds the cup of water up for Ianto, anyway, takes it away after a couple of short sips, warning of nausea, and then looks mildly smug when, after Ianto says he's still thirsty, he feels his stomach roll and decides he's had enough for now, actually.
That much effort is tiring, though, and Ianto feels the heavy pull on his eyelids start up again as Harper sets the thermos back on the table.
"Y'don't have to stay here," he says as he starts to go back under again, seeing the doctor roll the chair back over and pick up his book.
Harper huffs—a short, irritated thing—and gives Ianto a look before he sits down.
"Yeah," he says, "I do."
He sounds angry like a badger, all puffed-up hair and teeth; his hands are gentle, though, when they check the IV on Ianto's hand and smooth the tape on it back down.
Oh, Ianto thinks. Right. He must be on suicide watch.
It's an aggravating thing to remember, right before he falls back asleep, but but there's nothing to be done for it; and after a moment of thinking about fighting it, he slumps back into his pillows and lets it all go.
The next time he wakes up, it's Captain Harkness in the chair.
Ianto has no clue how much time has passed; he's fairly certain the room he's in is underground, from the lack of windows, and there's not a clock around as far as he can see.
Harkness looks much the same as he did last night, though he's lost the nice coat. He's in shirtsleeves and suspenders, with old-fashioned trousers and some light brown boots. The shirt's open at the collar, revealing an undershirt that Ianto can tell the quality of without touching, and his sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, revealing a set of forearms that Ianto can objectively classify as nice.
He's bereaved, not blind.
There's a stack of manila folders sitting on the floor next to Harkness's chair; paperwork that he's presumably finished working on, as he's currently intent on a small, cheap book of crossword puzzles—the Sunday Crossword Omnibus—held in one hand, solving a puzzle with a ballpoint pen.
Ianto watches him for a second. Harkness was known by reputation around One—around every special services agency in the UK, probably, practically a legend around the place. Most of it was rumor; even the official record was sketchy on basic details when Ianto looked, like how old he was, where he was from, and why his name had been showing up in Torchwood reports since the late 1800s.
Ianto has a few guesses, each one more unlikely than the last, but if nothing else, he knows Jack Harkness isn't just a normal human being.
He looks pretty normal now, though. Slumped in the chair a little, legs propped up on the bed like Doctor Harper's had been, eyebrows crinkling just a little as he scrawls down another word. He's handsome, obviously, with those deep blue eyes and the wide smile Ianto's seen in several pictures in the file at One.
The file that probably burned when the rest of the eighteenth floor went up. A human fuck-up, that was; Ianto never found out what happened there, but he knows seventeen people died on that floor before the cybermen converted them; most from smoke inhalation, though a couple probably burned alive. He heard some UNIT nurses talking about it just outside his room, after. When he woke up after they had to sedate him because he—
Ianto yanks his head away from that memory before it sticks. He shifts, fingers curling into the blanket. He grabs onto it and takes a long, deep breath.
"Hey," Harkness says, and it's not the big, toothy one but he does smile. He sets the puzzle book aside and straightens, booted feet smacking the floor with loud thumps. "How are you feeling?"
Ianto darts a glance up at the wall behind his bed, just in case there's a clock hung up behind his bed. There's not, though he can see a small, hastily installed pipe jutting out a bit from the corner of the ceiling, confirming that he's underground.
Which of course he is, because Captain Harkness brought him to the Hub to save him after he interrupted Ianto's suicide attempt.
Fuck.
"Feel okay," Ianto says, and it's not really a lie; he feels a lot better than he did when he woke up and Harper was here, and he feels absolute fuckloads better than he did when Harkness brought him in last night.
Or what he's assuming was last night.
"Can I have some water?" he asks next, when Harkness only nods.
"Of course." The water's on the side table again, though it's in a different thermos this time. It's cool though, with a few ice cubes clinking about in the mug when he drinks, and it's got some sort of flavoring in it, a too-sweet artificial strawberry taste. Ianto doesn't usually care for flavored water, but it's good now. He thinks he might be hungry soon, if he stays awake for a while, but he's not sure if his stomach will be up to it.
He wonders, vaguely, if there was any sort of lasting damage from the overdose, but he doesn't—he supposes it doesn't really matter. He can just try again whenever Harkness lets him go, presuming Harkness doesn't just shift him to a regular hospital once he makes sure Ianto's not a risk to Torchwood security. And presuming Harkness doesn't Retcon the last day or two away.
He can try again, and make sure he does it right this time.
Because he still wants—it's still the best—
"So," Captain Harkness says, sitting back down, the thermos in his hands. "Ianto Jones."
Right. He still has to get through this part first. Tell Harkness whatever he wants to hear, smooth things over, and—
And what?
"You know who I am," the Captain says. It's not a question, not really, but Ianto nods anyway.
"Everyone at One knew who you were, sir. You're something of a legend around Torchwood."
A menace, Yvonne called him one time after he poached Toshiko Sato from that prison before she could.
Probably saved Sato's life, but they none of them knew it then, of course.
Harkness's index finger raps against the thermos several times. He meets Ianto's eyes and gives him another smile, and he probably means it as kind or reassuring, but Ianto yanks his eyes away and looks down at the foot of the bed, where there's another blanket folded up by his feet.
God, Harkness must think he's pathetic.
He feels his cheeks flush and looks back over, though he keeps eyes fixed firmly on the captain's topmost collar button. He sees Harkness take a breath and readies himself for whatever's coming.
Retcon, or the hospital, or maybe he thinks Ianto's a risk and they're going to get through the whole, humiliating ordeal of a psychiatric hold with suicide watch here underneath the Hub with Dr. Harper as his physician.
He really couldn't even manage to off himself successfully. Christ. He even—
"Yvonne Hartmann thought highly of you."
And, okay, that is not what he was expecting at all.
"What?" he blurts, meeting Jack's eyes again in his confusion. "You—I mean, I—I mean, yes. I think she did. She recommended me for a salary bump a week before—the week before it all. You know." He waves his hand; he doesn't realize until he's doing it that it's the one with the IV still stuck in it, and the line snaps against the railing on the side of the bed.
Whatever. Harkness is looking at him with quirked lips and an expression of interest, which makes absolutely no sense.
"From what I understood, a good word from Yvonne isn't the sort of thing that would endear someone to you."
Harkness shrugs. "Depends on the word."
Whatever the hell that means.
Harkness leans in, anyway, and sets his hand on the railing. For a second Ianto thinks the man is going to hold his hand, but he doesn't.
"Listen, Ianto—can I call you Ianto?"
Ianto nods. What's it to him? Whenever Harkness lets him loose, he's not ever going to see the guy again.
"I looked you up, after I brought you in."
Ianto nods.
"Look, it's no secret I disagreed with the way Yvonne ran her agency." The Captain's eyes catch Ianto's and, this time, hold them fast. Bore into him. "And I wouldn't trust anyone from One as far as I could throw them. Never did. But do you know what Tosh found when she went poking last night?"
Ianto shrugs. He knows what his employee file at Torchwood looked like, sneaked peeks at it on a regular basis because—well, because he liked to know. But he can't think of anything in it that would change Captain Harkness's opinion about him as a loyal employee of Torchwood One; just the opposite, in fact. And he used to be so proud of his glowing performance reviews.
"Yvonne kept notes on the staff she worked closely with. Nothing formal, but she liked to keep track of people, see where they were and how they were doing with the work she gave them." Harkness leans in. He smiles again, a little, like he's keeping a secret. "Do you know what she wrote about you?"
Ianto shrugs, again. He could give a guess if pressed—workaholic, always in early, makes a really good cup of coffee—but he's not psychic, and Yvonne always liked to keep things close to her chest.
"She was worried about you. She was thinking of having you assessed by one of their psychologists."
Okay. That he does not expect.
"But—" It just—it doesn't make any sense. He doesn't— "I wasn't—I wasn't suicidal then! I was fine! I wasn't—"
Harkness does hold his hand then; grabs Ianto's where he's waving it in the air and gides it back down to rest on the blanket.
"I know," Harkness says. "I know, Ianto. It wasn't that. Yvonne wasn't worried you were unstable; she was concerned, Ianto Jones, because you had, in her own words, an active conscience."
Oh.
"There had been several assignments in a row where you'd voiced numerous ethical concerns, and several times she'd actually thought that you might blow a whistle on a project they were doing."
Right. Yes. That does make sense.
"Her notes indicated that this had been a concern since she recruited you, but that there had been several projects towards the end where you'd been especially vocal with your objections. And she worried that, with your relationship with someone popular in R&D, your views might start to spread to engineering staff. She was convinced of your dedication to Torchwood, and your loyalty to her, but she worried about the effect you'd have on the agency if you stayed with it, long-term."
If Torchwood One had survived, long-term.
He can just see, with his hand down with the captain's on it like this, the light scarring on his wrist that one of the seams on Lisa's cybersuit left when he pulled her off the machine.
"And how well," he asks Harkness, looking at it now. "Do you think that worked out?"
Because Yvonne might have had her concerns, but he went along with her every time, didn't he? He was just her aide, and—shit, the things she did, the lines she crossed; it was for the greater good, he told himself, and usually it all worked out. And even when it didn't, he bit his tongue and soldiered on. Their job was to protect the world from invasion, attack, and extinction; it wasn't always going to look pretty, and if you were going to do that sort of work, you needed to learn how to deal with the uglier parts of the job. It was what it was, and that was that.
"I know," Harkness says. He lets go of Ianto's hand, though he gives it a departing pat. "And I am sorry. What happened at Canary Wharf...shouldn't have happened. If Yvonne had stopped to think things through, they wouldn't have. But that doesn't make it your fault."
Ianto thinks of Lisa, still warm in his arms, and he thinks of how it burned when he put his hand on the metal on her skull to hold it still, and he thinks, right.
"If this is your opening to a speech about how I deserve to live, sir, you don't need to bother. I'm not going to off myself as soon as you let me out of here."
Something flashes across the captain's face—something old and tired and maybe just a little bit amused—but he just quirks up an eyebrow and huffs.
"This isn't a speech," he says, and the smile is back. "It's a job offer."
And that.
That doesn't—
"I don't understand," Ianto says.
Harkness shrugs. He slumps back in his chair again, looking eminently comfortable, as if he hasn't spent long enough in it, looking after Ianto, to get through that whole pile of paperwork that's still on the floor beside him.
"I've been where you are," Harkness says, as if that explains it all. Maybe it does, for him. "I didn't think I had anything left to live for. Torchwood changed that for me. Gave me a purpose, showed me I could make a difference. I think it could do that for you, if you let it."
He looks entirely serious, is the thing. Oh, he's got this smirk on, like some part of this reminds him of something amusing, but his eyes are nothing but earnest.
"So you're offering to hire me," Ianto says, fisting both his hands in the folds of the blanket laid out on him. "As a form of suicide prevention."
Harkness barks out a laugh. It does something to his face, laughing, something pleasant.
"Hardly." he folds his hands together and rests them on his lap. "I'm offering to hire you because I had Tosh look you up while you were unconscious. I saw your work record, during and after Torchwood. You've been lost since Canary Wharf, sure, but even lost you managed to talk yourself into a job you're not quite qualified for—where you were up against kids with years more schooling and all sorts of connections—and you did it without even interviewing. From what we can gather, you literally just talked your way into it at a cafe after you overheard the hiring managers complaining about the prospective employees. You've since managed to keep this job, even though you were out for half a week without warning, when you told your boss you got strep throat but you were, in fact, recovering from an accidental overdose."
Ianto's face feels hot. So, yes, that's not wrong, but it's not like—it's not like that. Not like Harkness is making it out to be.
"It's an easy job," he mumbles. He shrugs. "I thought it would be harder. I wanted something—"
He shrugs again. Then, catching sight of the IV in his hand, he blushes fresh. "I've been clean since then. I didn't want to—"
He didn't want to worry his mum. Didn't want her to have to walk in again and find him dead. That's why he'd picked somewhere far away from his apartment, to do it. Maybe a park hadn't been the best choice, but he knew the first one by in the morning would be the sanitation truck, so he wouldn't have traumatized any kids. Plus, he'd been a little drunk by the time he picked a spot.
He'd known that would hurt her, of course; Rhiannon, too. But they were just two people; two people out of billions in the world, and they'd get over it. They had each other, and they had friends, other family, and they'd manage to move on soon enough, not like him. Because Owen Harper had gotten him evacuated from Canary Wharf that day, but a part of Ianto—the part that mattered—hadn't ever left. And his body had come home to Cardiff, and had tried to find something—anything—to do, and when a high-pressure job hadn't worked he'd turned to drugs, and that had helped but it had hurt his family, so he'd stopped. And things had gotten worse again, and worse, and he just—he was just—
"I'm just so tired," he says, and he feels his eyes well up and shuts them.
"I know," Jack Harkness says. "I'm sorry. But we can help you, if you want."
Ianto isn't sure he does want that. Isn't sure he's ever going to be in a place where he feels want for anything, again.
But he says yes anyway.
Because there's just an outside chance the captain's right.
It's not the typical onboarding process, but Ianto at least has the benefit of knowing how two of his soon-to-be colleagues were recruited, and compared to bribery in a prison and a fistfight in a cemetery he doesn't think a failed suicide attempt sounds as awful as it could, otherwise.
It's still embarrassing as hell, especially having everyone of them know all about it, but he is at least in decent company.
They keep an eye on him in that bedroom below the Hub until he's feeling better. They let him go to the bathroom alone, at least, though Owen makes him keep the door cracked and stands outside it when he does.
Owen's got a thing about suicide, apparently.
Once Ianto's well enough, though, the next morning, Jack sits him down for a chat. Ianto's got two weeks to sort himself out. They'll be keeping an eye on him throughout, expecting him to check in with a phone call every day, and Owen will be doing a drugs test before he starts, with random testing throughout a probationary period, as Jack sees fit. Jack reserves the right, too, to check in on him whether Ianto likes it or not, if things get rough—and there's going to be a point where things get rough; that's a given, at Torchwood.
That's bad enough, but then Jack insists on Ianto's staying with someone for the next two days, at least.
"Your sister or your mother would be happy to have you," Jack says.
He means well, Ianto knows. And he's about to be Ianto's boss. But—
"This would only worry them," he bites out.
Jack's smile is sympathetic, but Ianto can tell that he's not going to budge on this.
"I know," he says. "I read your suicide notes. And having done so, I'd just point out that the reason people worry about you like that, Ianto, is because they care about you. And they'd want to be here for you when you need them."
Ianto grits his teeth, but in the end Gwen drops him off at Rhiannon and Johnny's.
She's nice; Ianto has no complaints about her driving, nor of the company she keeps him on the way. She's lively and friendly and warm-hearted and kind, and when Ianto isn't up for a lot of conversation yet, she fills the silence with chatter about her fiance, Rhys, and some of the strange cases they've had at Torchwood since she started several months earlier.
"The woman I replaced found a psychic knife and went on a killing spree around Cardiff," she says. "I'm the one who found her outside the station, duct taped to a chair with a note for the authorities. That's what led me to Torchwood."
Ianto's not sure exactly what instructions Jack gave her, but once Gwen parks outside the Davies' house, she insists on walking up to the house with him, and leads the way inside when Rhiannon opens the door.
It's evening, but, thankfully, not late enough she and Johnny are in bed. The kids are, but Rhi's folding laundry on the couch, and Johnny lopes downstairs and sweeps it up when he sees Gwen and Ianto by the door.
"Oh, I can't stay long," Gwen says. "My fiance's waiting supper for me. But I offered to drop Ianto off."
She smiles, kindly, but plants her feet by the door and looks as expectant as Rhi.
Whatever Jack told her, she's not moving until she hears that Ianto's not going to try to weasel out of this.
Ianto looks from her to his sister and fixes his eyes on the worn flooring by the door.
"I had a bad day," he says in Rhiannon's direction. "I called Dylan again."
Rhi gasps. He blushes, throat aching.
"It's okay," Johnny says, and Ianto hears him move and set his arm around Rhiannon's shoulders. "Relapsing is normal, Ianto, I know you—"
"I didn't relapse." He digs the fingernail of his thumb into the knuckle of his index finger behind his back. Takes a breath. The sooner he gets through this, the sooner it's done with. "Not exactly. I, uh. I bought a bottle of valium from him, and I took—I took it all. Together. On purpose."
It's not as bad as he thought; it's worse.
"Oh, Ianto," Rhi whispers, and her eyes are running over before she gets her arms all the way around him. "No."
It's worse; it's awful; he leans into the hug and returns it and feels Johnny's hand clamp down on his shoulder, like he's going to keep him in the world with his hold alone.
"It's okay," Rhiannon says into his ear.
And, "We'll get you sorted out," from Johnny at his side.
He doesn't even notice when Gwen Cooper ducks out of the house.
But that's fine.
Torchwood's going to be waiting for him when he’s ready, this time around.
Author:
jupiter2932Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: T
Word Count: 11,719
Characters: Ianto, Jack & Team Torchwood, Suzie, Rhiannon/Johnny
Notes: Warning for suicide-related scenes; also, a graphic depiction of bodily harm sustained by someone resulting in death.
Also I only just now realized how much I've made poor Ianto puke in fics recently. That was entirely unintentional.
Summary:
The first time Ianto meets someone from Torchwood Three, they help him. The second, he almost dies.
The third time around, he meets Jack Harkness.
The first time Ianto meets Torchwood Three is at Canary Wharf.
Lisa doesn't die right away. The conversion machine is only partway through the process when it shuts off, her mind still nearly entirely human; too human to survive, with that much metal grafted onto her body. She screams when Ianto takes her off of the machine; he stumbles, slipping on the floor that's slick with blood, red and frictionless from all the bodies. She slips into a seizure while he's trying to find his footing and takes him down to the floor with her, spasming, when he tries to heft her up.
She seizes for seven minutes, every second a terrifying cacophony. Ianto tries to help—tries to clear a space for her to seize in, move her onto her side, to the recovery position, tries to slide his jacket under her head—but they're in between conversion units, chunks of the building dropping down around them and splitting on the concrete floor, smoke from the fire that's heating the area unbearably; he burns his hands when he touches her, and when he tries again he jars the metal plates on her chest; it moves, shifting against her skin, into her skin, sinking deeper into her body so he feels some of her ribs scrape against it and shift and she screams, she screams and screams ; he tells her he's sorry, he's sorry, oh god he's sorry, please, please, and her arm snaps out and smacks the edge of one of the conversion units and hits it so hard, reinforced as she is with metal, that her arm snaps so violently the bone snaps in half; one jagged end of it tears through her skin and bumps into one of the loops of metal over her arm. The other end of bone rips through her brachial artery and kills her.
Ianto tries to save her; the first spurt of blood catches him unaware, splashing hot across his neck and chest when her broken arm snaps up and to the side in a muscle spasm. It only takes him seconds to jerk into action, though; he grabs at her arm, touches hot hot metal and burns his palms and holds on regardless; her whole body twists, snaps away, and he has to kneel and tuck her wrist between his knees so he can yank his tie off. He gets it around her upper arm, snaking it under the metal bands to fasten it in a tourniquet. Her seizing's slowing, so he's not worried about her breaking her neck if he holds her still, but there's tacky blood everywhere now, under his knees and shins and on his hands and on his face and all over Lisa, too; he pats his pockets down frantically for a pen to use for the tourniquet, finally yanks his suit jacket back out from under her head and finds one in his left front pocket, wedged between the lining of the pocket and the small box. It's the fancy fountain pen Lisa bought him for his birthday. The cap of the pen jams in the closely-set metal bands around Lisa's upper arms, and he fumbles with blood-slick fingers to take it off.
He sees flames some distance behind them, orange light flickering in the reflection off the metal helmet that's melted the skin at the edges of Lisa's face. Somewhere even farther away, on another floor, a sudden spate of gunfire erupts and falls just as quickly silent.
"It's okay," he tells Lisa, yanking her up closer by her arm and wincing in apology. "I've got you, sweetheart. ."
She moans, weakly, as he finally slides the pen in and twists the ends of his tie around, watching as the heavy sprays of blood sputter down and die.
"I'll get you out of here," he promises, and twenty seconds later she dies too.
There's flames behind him and debris in front, so he'd have a job getting out safely if he wanted to try; he doesn't, but it's what he talks about the next day. Fire and debris and gunshots, so I thought the best thing was to shelter in place and wait for rescue, is what he tells the UNIT staff member who comes to his hospital room with a clipboard and mispronounces his name.
He doesn't think about it now, though. He holds Lisa in his arms and asks her to wake up and she doesn't, so he sits there and holds her up to his chest and presses his face against the steel cap where her hair should be and begs and begs and begs, and eventually the sprinklers come on and put the fire out, and then at some point after that he feels a hand on his arm and turns to see a soot-streaked woman in jeans and boots and a fire retardant jacket shine a torch in his face.
"Sir? Are you—oh my God," she murmurs. She touches her hand to her ear—oh, she must be Torchwood, though Ianto's never seen her; perhaps she was stationed off-site, he thinks.
"Owen," she says, a little louder, raising her voice to be heard over her comm. "I need you. I've got a survivor. He's—yes."
She says a few other things, but Ianto tunes them out after male, young, shock, and hoists Lisa up a little, back onto his lap. His legs are numb, and his hands and arms and the skin around his collarbone are red and—red and white and puffy and not quite right, the skin, where Lisa's lain against him, where the metal on her body's touched, and it hurts, but he doesn't care. He sets his hand on her head, on the metal cap that settled on her scalp while she was still screaming, hiding it so he can't see it. She looks almost like she's sleeping like that, with his hand framing her face. When he moves it away the edge of his sleeve snags on a sharp bit of metal; it holds for a moment before it tears, and the metal cap on her head shifts; some of the skin at the edge of her forehead, burned and bruised and damaged, sort of stretches, and then, when he yanks his hand free with a rip, the skin tears a little too, in a bloodless, ragged gash maybe two or three inches long; gravity on the weight of the metal cap pulls it back, and the scalp, melted on, starts to go with it, and Ianto sees muscle and bone and Lisa's not supposed to look like this, she's not—
"I'm sorry," he cries, claps his hand down on the cap and pushes it down, shuts his eyes and bends over her and rocks her corpse in his lap. "I'm so sorry sweetheart, I'm sorry, sorry, please."
There's movement at his side again, both sides this time, and hands on his chest. Gloved hands, latex, doctor's hands holding a penlight and reaching into a standard Torchwood chest-strapped medkit, taking a bandage pack out and ripping it open.
"Okay, mate," the voice attached to the hands asks, and the hands reach up and cradle one side of his head and press the adhesive bandage patch up to the other. "What's her name?"
She's gone cold in his arms, even though it's hot all around them. He's hot. His skin—his skin is—
"Lisa," he says. She's not supposed to be cold. He looks around and—there; his suit jacket's just a foot away. She's always getting cold and borrowing his jacket, jokes about how she keeps him around for his Italian three-pieces. He sets it over her, covers up the metal on her chest and her mangled arm, and when he's done he sets his hand back on top of her head so the metal there doesn't move when he shifts.
"Tosh is going to take care of Lisa for a second, yeah?"
He's surprised to see the others there with him, still; he'd forgotten about them, just then, but the woman's smiling at him and the man, who's taking a syringe out of his bag and leaning in again. The woman tugs at his arm, and Ianto's arm moves, doesn't work when he tries to stop it.
"She needs m'jacket," he says, and then Lisa's not on his lap any more, which is wrong but also maybe good because his body doesn't want to sit up straight suddenly; doesn't want to sit up at all, wants to slump forward and rest. He thinks he should be allowed to rest now.
Hands catch him. Lower him to the floor and roll him softly onto his side.
"This is Dr. Harper," someone says. "I need a medical evac. Twenty-seventh floor, north wing."
Ianto can see the woman in the fire-retardant coat; Lisa's lying in front of her, and she's running a scanner over her body. His jacket's still on her, but it's shifted down a little so her shoulders are bare.
"She's cold," he tells the man, who's leaning over and scanning Ianto, for some reason. "She always borrows my jacket when she's cold. Y'should cover her up."
The scanner beeps. The man meets Ianto's eyes—he has kind eyes, the doctor does—and nods.
"Tosh, love," he says, and Ianto shuts his eyes and falls unconscious.
He wakes up alone in a hospital eleven hours later. His arms and chest and palms are bandaged up, and there are stitches on a cut on the side of his head and a nasal cannula feeding him a soft, cool stream of oxygen, and the jewelry box that was in the front left pocket of his suit jacket, with the engagement ring still inside, is sitting on the food tray folded out to the side of the bed.
The second time he meets a representative of Torchwood Three is in the living room of his flat in Cardiff, five months later.
He spots the woman following him on the drive to his flat first one morning, on his way to pick up a few changes of clothes to take back to Rhiannon's. He can't make out much of her besides her long, dark hair; she's hunched over the wheel of a 2003, blue Vauxhall Astra, which he sees two cars behind him on several streets through his drive. He thinks it's a coincidence at the time, decides to drive back the scenic route to check and thinks he loses her.
He makes it all the way to Rhi's, bag in hand, without catching sight of her again.
It's easier, being at Rhi's, than it would be sitting alone in his flat. Rhi knows what he needs for now; she makes sure he's busy, making him fold flyers with her and chop veg for her meal prep and going with him on a run to the store to find a replacement uniform for David since he ripped a pair of trousers on the playground the week before.
She doesn't trust him to go alone, which, considering Dylan, the nurse he knows from the clinic, texts him while they're out, is probably for the best.
She catches him reading the text and gently snags his cell phone, powers it off, and sticks it in her pocket.
He's pretty sure it's to distract him that she decides to do the rest of her weekly shopping early, as they're there. She must be running out of things to busy him with at the house.
Hell, maybe she'll finally let him organize her hall closet. He's been itching to every time he's opened it since she and Johnny moved into that house. If she'd just let him go at it with some plastic boxes and a label gun, he could sort it out in an hour. Four hours tops.
"Just get through today," she says, squeezing his arm when they queue up in the checkout line. "If you make it to Sunday, you can come with us for lunch with Mam. I'll get her to make Welsh cakes, even."
"Brilliant," Ianto snaps. He reaches into the trolley and grabs a cheap pair of flip-flops, a can of roach spray, and David's new trousers and dumps them on the conveyor belt. "My big sister's bribing me with sweetbread for good behavior. This is exactly where I envisioned myself in my twenties."
She gives him a look but doesn't rise to the bait. "Do you not want Welsh cakes, then?"
She leans over and picks up a value pack of low-fat Greek yogurt, the kind he knows she doesn't like, which he's kept his own fridge stocked with since he came back.
"Sorry." He takes a breath and holds it. She's going to a lot of trouble to help him, her and Johnny both, and he doesn't need to be an ass about it just because she makes an easy target.
She sighs and pushes the trolley up—then leans over when he follows and stretches up to plant a kiss on his temple.
"We won't take it personally," she says, setting the divider behind her groceries. "Me and Johnny, whatever you say this week. You're not the first person we know who's gone through this, you know."
Ianto does know. He heard all about Johnny's cousin Martin and Rhi's friend Dawn last week after his mam brought him home from the hospital to find Rhi, Johnny, and Rhi's friend Martha, who works as a counselor at the local youth center, camped out in his living room, waiting for him.
It makes him squirm inside when he thinks of it. It makes it worse that they're not wrong.
"Hot?" Rhi asks, wallet in hand. "You look flushed. Want to wait out—by the doors?"
He stops himself from snapping again and walks off with a nod. He does duck outside, but he stays within sight of the registers through the glass doors, leaning against a safety bollard and wishing desperately he hadn't given up smoking when he met Lisa.
Christ.
He is hot, starting to sweat more than he should be given the early spring chill. He grabs his collar and yanks at it, flapping it a little to try to cool off. He knows this is just a part of the process—went into this open-eyed, had no illusions that quitting would be a pleasant process; he just had not, at the time he started, assumed he'd ever want to quit.
If it hadn't been his mam who found him, honestly, after his little blip of an overdose the week before, he'd be hitting up Dylan for more stolen pills right now instead of voluntarily imposing on his sister's family to be watched like a delinquent for a week while he comes off the opiates.
It's hard not to feel like a total dick even through the anger. Rhi looks tired, even at this distance, her face drawn, dark circles under her eyes. It's unfair of him, he knows, showing up after four years away to just—to just be a mess in his family's life, the sort of mess he'd run to London to get away from. Dead girlfriend, PTSD, purposefully getting hooked on prescription drugs so he can make it through the day without breaking down. He'd only seen his family three, four times since he'd moved back, and ducked any hints of sympathy from them with pleas of being busy at his new job at the bank, spent his evenings curled up on the sofa trying to numb himself however he could. Didn't plan on making it to twenty-four, until he woke up in the hospital with his mam weeping over him and Rhi, as terrified as she was furious, giving him a dressing-down worse than anything he'd ever seen Yvonne Hartman dish out before she'd gathered him up and let him sob his heart out on her shoulder.
It's not been fair on her, or on his mother, or on Johnny or the kids—though at least the kids are happy enough, having been packed off to Gran and Grandpa Davies' for two nights while Ianto 'gets over the worst of it.'
It's not been too bad, yet; he decided to try to taper off a little, and took his last half dose late last night before Johnny picked him up. He's feeling a little achey, maybe, like he's overdone his morning run, and his palms are damp with sweat now, sweater feeling warm despite the cold breeze, but he knows tonight's probably going to be rough.
He's looking back at Rhiannon when he spots the woman out of the corner of his eye. She's standing in the parking lot pretending to be sorting out a problem with a trolley, but she's really watching him.
He's sure it's the same woman from his drive earlier; for one thing, her hair's the same: long, dark, a little curly in that style Rhiannon would know the name for; for another, there's a blue, 2003 Vauxhall Astro parked behind a moving truck in the third row from Rhiannon's car.
He knows her from somewhere; he's sure he does. Not London. He knows every single one of the people who survived Canary Wharf, and she's not one of them.
UNIT, maybe? Or maybe from one of the companies Torchwood had tech contracts with? He did so much work liaising for Yvonne his last year there, met so many people every day he couldn't possibly remember every one, but he knows he's seen her before. In a file, maybe, seen her picture, he thinks. Maybe.
He looks again, hoping to remember, but just then Rhiannon comes out of the store, calling his name.
When he looks back again, the woman is gone.
It's a miserable night.
The stomach cramps start up just before Johnny comes home from work, and they don't ease up a bit for the better part of a day. He spends the night curled up on the floor of the ground-floor toilet, shivering the whole night through even while he sweats right through his t-shirt and the shorts Johnny lends him when he vomits on his pajama pants.
Rhi ducks in and out, checking on him several times throughout the night and one time sitting next to him cross-legged, wiping his face off with a damp cloth and covering his body with a soft knit blanket.
"I'm sorry," he mumbles, resting his head on her thigh and clumsily patting her shin. "I didn't mean to come home just hurt you."
She runs her fingers through his hair; it's wet enough with sweat the locks just flop limply out of the way when her fingers move past them.
"It's not me who's hurting right now, is it?" she asks. Her fingers ghost across his forehead, rub soft, soothing circles into his scalp. "If you hadn't come home, sweetheart, Mam wouldn't have found you on Tuesday, and you wouldn't be alive to apologize right now. So don't think for a second that I'm sorry you're here, you twat."
He doesn't say, I wish I'd stayed in London, then, because he's not a total piece of shit, but just for a second he thinks it.
The don't have time to linger on sentiment for long anyway. Ianto throws up again a few minutes later, heaves sports drink into the toilet while Rhi rubs his back until the muscles in his stomach ache.
He doesn't emerge from the Davies' house for two days after that, on Saturday morning. Rhi doesn't want him to go, but he pleads his need for some more clothing, and Johnny backs him up with an, "I was thinking of running out before the kids get back. Thought we could get some frozen pizzas and rent them a movie, make a night of it. The more the merrier, hey?"
Rhi agrees easily to that; Ianto suspects it's less that she's happy about having Ianto out of sight and more she's too tired from looking after him to want to cook tonight, and Johnny likewise.
He hopes she takes a nap while they're out. Not likely she'll have a chance for it once the kids get back from their grands'.
Of course, it turns out Johnny actually meant it when he promised Rhi he'd keep an eye on Ianto just before they left, when they thought Ianto wasn't listening. The best Ianto can manage for a little privacy is getting him to wait in the car while Ianto takes five minutes to grab himself some clothes.
His own fault for giving in to sentiment and volunteering to be watched, he knows, but after two days cooped up in the house, it's starting to chafe. The irritation and moodiness from the withdrawal, he's sure, probably isn't helping.
He wonders, on his way up the stairs to his flat, how much Rhi told Johnny about what happened in London. He'd written her down, not his mam, as his emergency contact when he joined Torchwood, so it was her that got the call when he was initially reported as missing at Canary Wharf, before the people from Three found him. She'd been on her way to London when he called and told her not to come, that he'd been in an accident but he was fine. That he was going to be fine.
And it was Rhi that showed up in the hospital the day after, and to whom he spilled his guts over a beer—about Lisa, about the engagement ring, about what he'd been doing in the four years since he left Cardiff—once he was released.
He knew it was a mistake at the time, but it came tumbling out, encouraged by a combination of grief and alcohol and pain medication. He'd actually thought about Retconning her, after—for about half a second.
But he couldn't ever, he knows. Not to his sister, not unless she was in danger.
She knows how to keep her mouth shut when she needs to, anyway, which is what matters. Oh, Johnny knows, he's sure, but it won't go farther—at least, not the stuff that she could get in trouble for knowing.
The thing about his girlfriend tragically dying right before he was about to propose, that Ianto is certain is common knowledge among Rhiannon's friends.
He doesn't really care, much, any more.
But he's distracted enough thinking about it that when he opens his front door and walks in, Suzie Costello almost manages to stab him in the chest.
It's luck more than skill that saves him; she's almost as surprised as he is at the intrusion, and all the way across the living room when she hears him jiggle the key in the lock; she's mid-sprint when he steps in, his eyes down on the keys in his hands, and so it's luck—and maybe some exhaustion—that trips him backwards so instead of a knife in his lung he ends up with a long but shallow slash across his shoulder.
It's a jumble after that.
Ianto did some training when he was with One; he worked directly under Yvonne Hartman, and nine times out of ten she went out during business hours he was half a step behind her, comm in his ear and PDA in hand.
Plus, he grew up on a housing estate in 1990s Cardiff, a quiet, reserved boy who went Goth in his teens and mostly hung around with girls. Johnny Davies had taken one look at him, the first time Rhiannon brought him home, and taught him how to throw a punch.
So he's not completely lost when Suzie slips on his welcome mat, course correcting in a few seconds and swiveling, setting her left foot on the wooden floor and lunging at him again.
Ianto would be the first to admit that hand to hand isn't one of his strengths; even with his training, he's not a martial arts adept, and he hasn't kept it up since Canary Wharf.
Also, he's just spent the better part of the last three days shivering his way through withdrawal.
But it turns out that someone trying to stab you in the heart has amazing powers for revitalization; and it also turns out, as Ianto will later confirm, that Suzie Costello's main capabilities don't lie in hand to hand fighting, either.
Whatever it is, he manages to dodge her next lunge, and he jerks several steps back when she turns again and ducks and avoids a cut through his radial artery. She snarls, changes her grip on the knife, and lunges again—and, reaching out blindly with his hand, he grabs a pan off the dish drying rack, swings it, and smashes it into her head.
She drops like a rock.
Ianto drops the pan, leans over with his hands on his knees, and vomits.
As if they're in a bad, buddy cop comedy, it is at that exact moment that Johnny bursts through the door.
"It's okay," Ianto says once he catches his breath. "I'll sort this out."
The third and last time Ianto meets a representative from Torchwood Three face to face is at a quarter to eleven on a Saturday night two months after he sorts it out.
It's a beautiful night. Ianto's almost forgotten what it's like to be out on a spring night in Wales. He's barely seen the night sky since he moved back, outside of peering up at it through his windshield on his drive back home, on occasion.
But it's lovely. Even here in the city, in the heart of Cardiff. He can't see the stars much, past the city's light pollution, but the moon's hanging low and big in the sky tonight, and he can make out Orion's belt and the Big Dipper in the sky above. There's a soft breeze that stirs up now and then, brushing feather-light against Ianto's face, ruffling the hair he hasn't bothered putting product in for several days, now. It's not fresh, not here in Ely East, but the steel-and-gasoline smell that wafts over from the mechanic's down the street feels familiar, comfortable from weekends helping his dad, then Johnny, try to keep the family car running.
It's not the most comfortable place to be, sitting on tired scrub grass with his back against a tree, but it's quiet. This isn't a popular park for after-hours dallying of any kind—there's a larger, nicer park, with more secluded spots and a well-kept set of bathrooms—just a ten-minute's walk away; so this, a modest field with several clumps of trees and a few aging play sets, is empty this time of night. Just Ianto, sitting against a tree, raising his bottle of Scotch to his lips and taking a bracing sip.
He feels a little sick already, a hint that proper nausea is on the horizon, but he takes another drink and settles back, shuts his eyes and feels the wind pick up for a few seconds; it dies right after, the sound of it plummeting down back to nothing so there's just the noise of an old car rumbling down a street a block or two off, a woman in a house nearby, with a window opening, probably, breaking into a screech of laughter that just as quickly cuts off, a front door slamming shut. He remembers the soundscape of a Cardiff neighborhood like this, from hours spent lying in bed as a kid, trying to fall asleep to the noise of the world outside, his window cracked.
It's just such a nice night, Ianto thinks, and he lets the bottle sit loose in his grasp next to his hip on the ground beside him.
He should screw the cap back on, he knows, or if it sits out on the ground long enough it will attract insects, and that could make a mess.
In a minute, he thinks, and a small part of him says, leave it, it's not your problem to take care of messes any more.
He lets it sit for now, anyway, for another few minutes until the breeze picks up again and his arms, bare with his short-sleeved tee, feel cold. He swallows down a mouthful; his hand shakes a little on its way up, and when he sets the bottle back down it sloshes, and when he moves to wipe his hand off on his jeans, he knocks it over, and the rest of the Scotch glug-glug-glugs out of it, toasting the dirt.
Oh, well. He's probably had enough.
He takes a long, deep breath, relishes the feeling of it, and shifts, crossing his arms over his chest when a shiver runs through him.
For the first time in months, he can't feel the burning, corrosive hurt in his lungs—on his chest—that's dogged him since Canary Wharf. Since he got noticed by Yvonne. Since he started at Torchwood. Since he ran off from Cardiff at nineteen, looking for—
Hell, maybe never. Maybe this is the first time he knows what it feels like to be comfortable, to be okay.
It's a quiet, beautiful late spring night in a shitty, underfunded park less than a quarter mile from Ianto's childhood home, and, alone in this sea of consciousness, he thinks he finally knows what happiness feels like.
He's curling in a little, bringing his knees up because he didn't think things through and bring a jacket, when there's a very loud smash in the deep recesses of an alley nearby, and then a series of loud, scuffled clangs, and then a voice, with a distinctly American accent, yells, "Shit! Shit, shit, shit!" very loudly.
It's maybe twenty seconds before Captain Jack Harkness runs into the park, two weevils hot on his heels.
It's a night of firsts for Ianto, which in any situation that didn't involve someone in imminent danger he'd laugh at the irony of. First time seeing Jack Harkness and weevils in person, and here he's got a front-row seat to both.
Harkness is calling out to someone through his comm; he sounds considerably calmer about it than most in his position would, Ianto thinks, giving his location to someone called Gwen and ordering her to "Bring the van, ASAP!"
There's clearly been changes at Torchwood Three since Ianto last took a snoop; they've hired at least one new staff member—presumably to replace Ms. Costello, and, perhaps more impressively, they've bought a van.
Yvonne always did wonder how they managed without one.
It's probably not the best time to sit about reminiscing, though. Harkness is tearing through the park at a dead sprint—a gun in one hand and, incongruously, a spray bottle in the other—when he spots Ianto. He stutters, stops, and pivots, losing two precious seconds of his lead on the weevils to lead them away from Ianto, who he probably takes for a homeless guy kipping in the park for the night.
It's gallant of him. Brave. Lets the nearest weevil take him down with a flying leap thirty feet away.
Ianto almost doesn't get up. This is not his problem; none of this is any longer his responsibility. Not since Canary Wharf, not since Torchwood's government overseers left the survivors high and dry, sweeping it all under the rug; and especially not tonight.
He sits there, under the tree, for several long moments and watches Jack Harkness wrestle a weevil by the merry-go-round and Ianto almost, almost doesn't get up.
But then the other weevil moves in for the kill, and Ianto curses under his breath and heaves himself to his feet.
He's not exactly steady once he gets up. Walking in a straight line is a challenge, let alone trying to hurry, and with every step he take his head feels—feels tighter, somehow, like there's pressure building up inside that wants to burst, except the inside of it feels like it's been packed with cotton balls, like the things Lisa used to use to take off her nail polish. Fuzzy and itchy and full, tighter and tighter with every inch he moves. He can feel the Scotch sloshing around in his stomach, too, and the nausea that had threatened to show earlier is making itself known now, sick disorientation of the gut rippling out from his stomach and making him swallow heavy and desperate every two steps.
There's no finesse to it, not tonight. Harkness is stretched out on the ground, just barely holding off one weevil, which has got him pinned; the other's crept up next to them and is just about to strike when Ianto creeps—or, rather, staggers—behind it and, failing to see anything he can use as a better weapon nearby in the park, reaches into his back pocket, grabs the taser he's carried since he got home from the hospital and found UNIT had confiscated his personal firearms, sticks it to the weevil's neck, and clicks it on.
He's honestly kind of surprised when it works.
It doesn't take the weevil down right away; the creature has enough time to lash out and swipe with its claws. It catches Ianto across the thigh, though Ianto only notices when the claws catch on the side seam of his jeans and rips through.
The slashes don't hurt at all just then, which is nice.
Then the weevil takes a step towards him, staggers, and pitches towards the ground, twitching.
Ianto leans over and zaps it again, just in case.
It makes the weevil stop twitching, which is good; but when Ianto tries to straighten up again, he stumbles, sways like a dandelion in a strong wind, and sits down hard on the ground.
"Shit," he says, and his head swims so he has to hunch forward and rest his weight on his hands so he doesn't fall over prone. "Shit."
"Hey," Harkness says, and Ianto manages to look over and sees the other weevil also lying unconscious on the ground. Then there are hands on him, one on his shoulder and one on his chin, trying to move his head and make him look up, and that's a mistake. That's really not good.
"You okay?" Harkness asks.
And Ianto swallows, moans, and without further ceremony turns to the side as well as he can and vomits.
It's shit.
He didn't think it would feel this bad. The puking doesn't make him feel any better, like it usually does when he's drunk. There's a brief sense of relief, when the first round of heaving stops and he manages a breath, but it disappears directly. Ianto's head is aching; beyond aching. It's just tighter and tighter, the pressure ramping up so his eardrums feel like they're being crushed and his eyes feel like they're going to burst out of his head, the fuzzy, woolen-headed nothingness coming for him, starting to make him blink, darkness stretching out its hands to grab him round the neck and pull him in.
Harkness, to his credit, is a gent through it all. He keeps Iankto from tipping over when his body tries to pitch forward, a hand on Ianto's shoulder; with his other hand he pats Ianto on the back until he stops heaving.
"You're okay," Harkness says, and there's something to his movements—a shift of a hand towards a coat pocket, maybe—that Ianto catches and just knows, without anything to base it on, that Harkness is already working out how much Retconn to dose him with.
Well. That won't be necessary.
"'M okay," Ianto mutters in between ragged breaths, tongue thick in his mouth. "Didn' know weevils smelled this bad up close, 's all."
Harkness's hand stiffens on his back.
"I don't have any idea what you're ta—" Harkness starts, but Ianto heaves again, more vomit splattering on the ground, which is disgusting and undignified—and at some point he has to catch his breath and figure out how to stop so Harkness leaves—but the beam of Harkness's flashlight, which had previously shone on his head, shifts.
And the beam hits Ianto's vomit, and Ianto realizes Harkness stopped talking not because Ianto started puking again but because he saw the mass of half-digested gel capsules in Ianto's sick.
"Oh. Fuck," Harkness says. And then, "What did you take?" he asks, hand on Ianto's face again, and Ianto gasps and tries to squirm away but Harkness doesn't let him, shining his light at Ianto's eyes.
"What did you take?" Harkness asks again, and he sounds angry, for some reason, which Ianto's brain can't make sense of—it's so heavy, so tight, so full, so tired—
—he's been so tired for so long, he just wants to get some rest—
—and he blinks up at Harkness, and looks over at the tree where he was sitting when the weevils came—god, if he could just rest—
—and Harkness swears under his breath, and eases him down so he's lying on his side, staring at the weevils who aren't moving at all, and jogs off towards the shelter of the tree where Ianto was sitting and looking up at the stars, and where he left the bottle of Scotch and the empty bottle of Valium and the notes he wrote for his mam and Rhiannon.
He can't see the stars now, not without moving, and Ianto finds that he can't very much move. But that doesn't matter. He can feel his heart thumping in his chest, he thinks, and the buzzing in his head is very loud and very strange, but there's a breeze, still, that brushes his hair, and it smells like home, and it picks up for a moment and moves the merry-go-round, shifts it so the old metal squeaks, and somewhere in a house nearby the woman who laughed earlier laughs again.
It's still a nice night.
It's dark, and growing darker every minute, and that's all a night needs to do.
"God damn it!"
Ianto groans at the noise—because, fuck, but he was just on the verge of nodding off, and he'd really, really like to get some sleep—but instead of letting up, the voice gets louder, angrier, and suddenly there are hands on him, shaking him by the shoulder and smacking his face and urging him up, up, up so he's sitting and up to his feet, so he's wavering on jelly legs, vertical solely because of the arm that snakes in around his chest and takes most of his weight.
"Owen!" someone says, quite loudly, right next to his ear—and, oh, right, it's Captain Harkness—and what a loud asshole he's turned out to be, making Ianto walk when he could be sleeping on the nice, comfy ground right now—though he smells pretty nice. "Tell me what to do! Got a patient coming in for you, washed down a bottle of valium with alcohol—not sure, but he was up and tazing a weevil three minutes ago—yeah. Yeah, lots of vomiting. He's having trouble walking, looks disoriented. Yep. Got the standard SUV medkit, what should I—"
Harkness lets go of him, finally, and Ianto braces for a long fall but finds himself settled, albeit roughly, into the passenger's seat of a very brightly lit SUV. He blinks, finds his body slumping back into the seat, just about to slip into the sweet, still waters of sleep, only to jerk awake when a travel thermos of cold water is dashed in his face.
"Don't you dare," Jack Harkness says.
Then there's a needle prick on his shoulder, and hands shoving his legs in the SUV, and a paper bag set on his lap.
"Stay with me, kid," Jack Harkness says, slipping into the driver's seat and starting the engine. "Owen, heading your way, lights on."
Ianto blinks.
"Nope!" Harkness barks. He reaches over and smacks Ianto's thigh. The one the weevil's claws dug into.
The pain hits Ianto well enough, this time around. He yelps, and jumps, and vomits into the paper bag.
"Good job, kid," Harkness says, and slaps him on the shoulder. "We'll be there soon, okay? We're going to get you all fixed up."
Ianto's head hurts a little less, for some reason. It's still heavy like a big wool ball, but he manages to understand the words all right, once he stops heaving again.
It's silly, though. Whatever Harkness thinks. There's nothing that can fix him.
He's semi-conscious when they make it to the Hub. There's a man waiting for them in the garage with a wheelchair that he and Jack manhandle Ianto into.
The new man—Owen—is, first, a doctor, and second, angry, and, third, perhaps because of those first two put together, also loud.
Quite loud, actually.
He's volubly angry all the way from the parking garage through the secret tunnel and down to what Ianto later recognizes as a morgue.
"I couldn't take him to a hospital," Harkness is saying when they park the wheelchair by a tall metal table. "He got swiped by a weevil, and you know the odds of contamination from their claws without innoculation. Plus, he knew what a weevil was. Tazered one in the neck, after he downed his cocktail, and I'd like to know why."
"One of these days," Doctor Owen says, "this shit's going to backfire on you, Jack." He's mixing together a dark black drink in a glass, and Captain Harkness, unexpectedly, walks behind Ianto in the wheelchair and then just—
—he hugs him. From behind.
"Whazza-" Ianto starts—
—and the doctor fucking pinches his nose shut and puts the glass up to his lips.
"Just chug it, mate," the doctor says, loudly, over the sound of Ianto's spluttering.
It's vile. Not the taste—it doesn't have much of a taste, really—but the texture of it is disgusting, slimy water with grit in it, like he's trying to drink a glass of seawater with sand he scraped up from the beach. He gags on it, and the glass disappears and the fingers on his nose immediately let go.
Jack Harkness doesn't, though, let go; he stays behind Ianto, arms around his, holding him upright.
"Easy, mate," the doctor says. "Try to hold that in for a minute, yeah?"
Fuck's sake, Ianto thinks, what the shit type of bedside manner is this? And he coughs, and splutters, and catches his breath, and when he does the glass is right back up against his mouth.
"Bottom's up," the doctor announces, disgustingly cheerfully. "Come on, don't make this difficult."
Ianto nods, because he's pretty sure the only way he's going to get to nap sooner is if he cooperates. His head swims, but that's fine; the doctor lets him finish drinking the shit at his own pace, anyway, though he makes him finish all of it.
It's whatever Harkness injected him with, back in the SUV, he realizes. He gave him something to—to counteract the valium. Didn't he? Because Ianto still feels funny, still feels tired, still thinks he's going to knock off and sleep as soon as these two fuckers give him a moment of peace to do it in, but his head feels less—
—it feels less. And his heart, in his chest. It feels a little more normal again. There was something wrong with it earlier, but it feels better now. Or maybe that's just his lungs? Something felt funny in his chest, felt off, and he doesn't feel good now, not even close, but the parts of him that feel wrong feel wrong in a way that makes a little more sense.
Because, a far, quiet corner of his mind realizes, whatever Harkness gave him is saving his life.
"Oh," the doctor says, somewhere further away. "Shit. I remember him."
Before Ianto can wonder about that, though, the nausea is back, as insistent as it is sudden, and he takes a little breath to try and hold it in and vomits all over himself instead.
"It's okay," the doctor says, sliding a basin into his lap. "Get it all out, go on, love. It's okay."
It's not okay.
But Ianto's tired enough he can't explain why, even once the heaving stops. And when he does it gets loud again, a flurry of movement around him, another hypodermic and a needle in the back of his hand and other hands, touching, moving, helping him to stand and sit and lie back down.
And somewhere in the shuffle of it he finally manages to fall asleep.
Everything makes a lot more sense when he wakes up again.
He still doesn't feel well, exactly. He's groggy as hell, and his head aches and his stomach aches and—oh, bollocks, his entire body aches, and his eyeballs hurt in their sockets and he's not sure he could manage to solve a full page of his seven-year-old nephew's mathematics homework, but the world, at least, has a sense of logic to it.
He's on a bed, a regular bed but with metal railing attached on either side, stretched out on an uncomfortable twin mattress with his top half propped up by what must be half a dozen pillows. He's got what he recognizes from the feeling of it as an IV needle stuck in the back of his left hand, and there's a heart monitor beeping nearby. He's wearing a hospital gown—and, at a guess, his boxer-briefs, which is something of a relief—but he's got two blankets piled up on him. He's not actually in a hospital; it doesn't smell like a hospital, and when he cracks open his eyes—for the brief few seconds he looks before he squeezes them shut again because it's brighter than hell—he sees brick walls, no other beds, and, aside from the IV and monitor stand, a notable lack of medical equipment.
Oh, and Owen Harper's sitting in an office chair beside him, his feet propped up on the end of Ianto's bed, reading an Iain M. Banks novel.
It's funny; he was familiar with the staff of Torchwood Three from files when he worked at One, kept himself up-to-date every time there was a change because working for Yvonne Hartmann meant memorizing reams of minutia in your spare time so that, if she ever needed to know a random fact offhand, you'd know it. But the two times he'd met Owen Harper face to face, Ianto had been so out of it he hadn't recognized the man, even on Torchwood property.
Well, Ianto recognizes him now.
He recognizes him, opening his eyes, and then the light in the room stabs into them, and he shuts his eyes back up and moans.
There's movement at his side, noise, and a click. He crack his eyes open again and there's still light around him, but it's dimmer.
Dr. Harper's standing next to him, pushing some buttons on the heart monitor that's hooked up to the IV stand.
"How're you feeling?" he asks.
Ianto takes stock. Pain aside, the primary feeling blanketing him is plain exhaustion. His muscles are weighed down with a bone-deep weariness, like he just ran a marathon. His head, too, past the ache, feels heavy on his pillow; he's awake now, but he doesn't know how long that's going to last for. He can feel more sleep coming back up on him, even though he must have been out a while already, if they've moved him to a room with a bed in it. He blinks to forestall it.
"Tired." Thirsty, too, he realizes as he speaks. His mouth feels like he's dunked his tongue and palate in a barrel of that wax they put on pears and apples to keep them, and his voice cracks halfway through the word. He shrugs. "Achey."
Harper just gives a nod and takes a half step to a side table that's been pushed up against the wall, a little away from the bed. He picks up a drinking thermos from the table and slots a bendable straw through the opening on his way back.
"Yeah," he says. "That's what happens when you mix alcohol and enough benzodiazepines to kill a horse."
It's a pointed enough comment, but oddly there doesn't seem to be a lot of heat to it. Dr. Harper holds the cup of water up for Ianto, anyway, takes it away after a couple of short sips, warning of nausea, and then looks mildly smug when, after Ianto says he's still thirsty, he feels his stomach roll and decides he's had enough for now, actually.
That much effort is tiring, though, and Ianto feels the heavy pull on his eyelids start up again as Harper sets the thermos back on the table.
"Y'don't have to stay here," he says as he starts to go back under again, seeing the doctor roll the chair back over and pick up his book.
Harper huffs—a short, irritated thing—and gives Ianto a look before he sits down.
"Yeah," he says, "I do."
He sounds angry like a badger, all puffed-up hair and teeth; his hands are gentle, though, when they check the IV on Ianto's hand and smooth the tape on it back down.
Oh, Ianto thinks. Right. He must be on suicide watch.
It's an aggravating thing to remember, right before he falls back asleep, but but there's nothing to be done for it; and after a moment of thinking about fighting it, he slumps back into his pillows and lets it all go.
The next time he wakes up, it's Captain Harkness in the chair.
Ianto has no clue how much time has passed; he's fairly certain the room he's in is underground, from the lack of windows, and there's not a clock around as far as he can see.
Harkness looks much the same as he did last night, though he's lost the nice coat. He's in shirtsleeves and suspenders, with old-fashioned trousers and some light brown boots. The shirt's open at the collar, revealing an undershirt that Ianto can tell the quality of without touching, and his sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, revealing a set of forearms that Ianto can objectively classify as nice.
He's bereaved, not blind.
There's a stack of manila folders sitting on the floor next to Harkness's chair; paperwork that he's presumably finished working on, as he's currently intent on a small, cheap book of crossword puzzles—the Sunday Crossword Omnibus—held in one hand, solving a puzzle with a ballpoint pen.
Ianto watches him for a second. Harkness was known by reputation around One—around every special services agency in the UK, probably, practically a legend around the place. Most of it was rumor; even the official record was sketchy on basic details when Ianto looked, like how old he was, where he was from, and why his name had been showing up in Torchwood reports since the late 1800s.
Ianto has a few guesses, each one more unlikely than the last, but if nothing else, he knows Jack Harkness isn't just a normal human being.
He looks pretty normal now, though. Slumped in the chair a little, legs propped up on the bed like Doctor Harper's had been, eyebrows crinkling just a little as he scrawls down another word. He's handsome, obviously, with those deep blue eyes and the wide smile Ianto's seen in several pictures in the file at One.
The file that probably burned when the rest of the eighteenth floor went up. A human fuck-up, that was; Ianto never found out what happened there, but he knows seventeen people died on that floor before the cybermen converted them; most from smoke inhalation, though a couple probably burned alive. He heard some UNIT nurses talking about it just outside his room, after. When he woke up after they had to sedate him because he—
Ianto yanks his head away from that memory before it sticks. He shifts, fingers curling into the blanket. He grabs onto it and takes a long, deep breath.
"Hey," Harkness says, and it's not the big, toothy one but he does smile. He sets the puzzle book aside and straightens, booted feet smacking the floor with loud thumps. "How are you feeling?"
Ianto darts a glance up at the wall behind his bed, just in case there's a clock hung up behind his bed. There's not, though he can see a small, hastily installed pipe jutting out a bit from the corner of the ceiling, confirming that he's underground.
Which of course he is, because Captain Harkness brought him to the Hub to save him after he interrupted Ianto's suicide attempt.
Fuck.
"Feel okay," Ianto says, and it's not really a lie; he feels a lot better than he did when he woke up and Harper was here, and he feels absolute fuckloads better than he did when Harkness brought him in last night.
Or what he's assuming was last night.
"Can I have some water?" he asks next, when Harkness only nods.
"Of course." The water's on the side table again, though it's in a different thermos this time. It's cool though, with a few ice cubes clinking about in the mug when he drinks, and it's got some sort of flavoring in it, a too-sweet artificial strawberry taste. Ianto doesn't usually care for flavored water, but it's good now. He thinks he might be hungry soon, if he stays awake for a while, but he's not sure if his stomach will be up to it.
He wonders, vaguely, if there was any sort of lasting damage from the overdose, but he doesn't—he supposes it doesn't really matter. He can just try again whenever Harkness lets him go, presuming Harkness doesn't just shift him to a regular hospital once he makes sure Ianto's not a risk to Torchwood security. And presuming Harkness doesn't Retcon the last day or two away.
He can try again, and make sure he does it right this time.
Because he still wants—it's still the best—
"So," Captain Harkness says, sitting back down, the thermos in his hands. "Ianto Jones."
Right. He still has to get through this part first. Tell Harkness whatever he wants to hear, smooth things over, and—
And what?
"You know who I am," the Captain says. It's not a question, not really, but Ianto nods anyway.
"Everyone at One knew who you were, sir. You're something of a legend around Torchwood."
A menace, Yvonne called him one time after he poached Toshiko Sato from that prison before she could.
Probably saved Sato's life, but they none of them knew it then, of course.
Harkness's index finger raps against the thermos several times. He meets Ianto's eyes and gives him another smile, and he probably means it as kind or reassuring, but Ianto yanks his eyes away and looks down at the foot of the bed, where there's another blanket folded up by his feet.
God, Harkness must think he's pathetic.
He feels his cheeks flush and looks back over, though he keeps eyes fixed firmly on the captain's topmost collar button. He sees Harkness take a breath and readies himself for whatever's coming.
Retcon, or the hospital, or maybe he thinks Ianto's a risk and they're going to get through the whole, humiliating ordeal of a psychiatric hold with suicide watch here underneath the Hub with Dr. Harper as his physician.
He really couldn't even manage to off himself successfully. Christ. He even—
"Yvonne Hartmann thought highly of you."
And, okay, that is not what he was expecting at all.
"What?" he blurts, meeting Jack's eyes again in his confusion. "You—I mean, I—I mean, yes. I think she did. She recommended me for a salary bump a week before—the week before it all. You know." He waves his hand; he doesn't realize until he's doing it that it's the one with the IV still stuck in it, and the line snaps against the railing on the side of the bed.
Whatever. Harkness is looking at him with quirked lips and an expression of interest, which makes absolutely no sense.
"From what I understood, a good word from Yvonne isn't the sort of thing that would endear someone to you."
Harkness shrugs. "Depends on the word."
Whatever the hell that means.
Harkness leans in, anyway, and sets his hand on the railing. For a second Ianto thinks the man is going to hold his hand, but he doesn't.
"Listen, Ianto—can I call you Ianto?"
Ianto nods. What's it to him? Whenever Harkness lets him loose, he's not ever going to see the guy again.
"I looked you up, after I brought you in."
Ianto nods.
"Look, it's no secret I disagreed with the way Yvonne ran her agency." The Captain's eyes catch Ianto's and, this time, hold them fast. Bore into him. "And I wouldn't trust anyone from One as far as I could throw them. Never did. But do you know what Tosh found when she went poking last night?"
Ianto shrugs. He knows what his employee file at Torchwood looked like, sneaked peeks at it on a regular basis because—well, because he liked to know. But he can't think of anything in it that would change Captain Harkness's opinion about him as a loyal employee of Torchwood One; just the opposite, in fact. And he used to be so proud of his glowing performance reviews.
"Yvonne kept notes on the staff she worked closely with. Nothing formal, but she liked to keep track of people, see where they were and how they were doing with the work she gave them." Harkness leans in. He smiles again, a little, like he's keeping a secret. "Do you know what she wrote about you?"
Ianto shrugs, again. He could give a guess if pressed—workaholic, always in early, makes a really good cup of coffee—but he's not psychic, and Yvonne always liked to keep things close to her chest.
"She was worried about you. She was thinking of having you assessed by one of their psychologists."
Okay. That he does not expect.
"But—" It just—it doesn't make any sense. He doesn't— "I wasn't—I wasn't suicidal then! I was fine! I wasn't—"
Harkness does hold his hand then; grabs Ianto's where he's waving it in the air and gides it back down to rest on the blanket.
"I know," Harkness says. "I know, Ianto. It wasn't that. Yvonne wasn't worried you were unstable; she was concerned, Ianto Jones, because you had, in her own words, an active conscience."
Oh.
"There had been several assignments in a row where you'd voiced numerous ethical concerns, and several times she'd actually thought that you might blow a whistle on a project they were doing."
Right. Yes. That does make sense.
"Her notes indicated that this had been a concern since she recruited you, but that there had been several projects towards the end where you'd been especially vocal with your objections. And she worried that, with your relationship with someone popular in R&D, your views might start to spread to engineering staff. She was convinced of your dedication to Torchwood, and your loyalty to her, but she worried about the effect you'd have on the agency if you stayed with it, long-term."
If Torchwood One had survived, long-term.
He can just see, with his hand down with the captain's on it like this, the light scarring on his wrist that one of the seams on Lisa's cybersuit left when he pulled her off the machine.
"And how well," he asks Harkness, looking at it now. "Do you think that worked out?"
Because Yvonne might have had her concerns, but he went along with her every time, didn't he? He was just her aide, and—shit, the things she did, the lines she crossed; it was for the greater good, he told himself, and usually it all worked out. And even when it didn't, he bit his tongue and soldiered on. Their job was to protect the world from invasion, attack, and extinction; it wasn't always going to look pretty, and if you were going to do that sort of work, you needed to learn how to deal with the uglier parts of the job. It was what it was, and that was that.
"I know," Harkness says. He lets go of Ianto's hand, though he gives it a departing pat. "And I am sorry. What happened at Canary Wharf...shouldn't have happened. If Yvonne had stopped to think things through, they wouldn't have. But that doesn't make it your fault."
Ianto thinks of Lisa, still warm in his arms, and he thinks of how it burned when he put his hand on the metal on her skull to hold it still, and he thinks, right.
"If this is your opening to a speech about how I deserve to live, sir, you don't need to bother. I'm not going to off myself as soon as you let me out of here."
Something flashes across the captain's face—something old and tired and maybe just a little bit amused—but he just quirks up an eyebrow and huffs.
"This isn't a speech," he says, and the smile is back. "It's a job offer."
And that.
That doesn't—
"I don't understand," Ianto says.
Harkness shrugs. He slumps back in his chair again, looking eminently comfortable, as if he hasn't spent long enough in it, looking after Ianto, to get through that whole pile of paperwork that's still on the floor beside him.
"I've been where you are," Harkness says, as if that explains it all. Maybe it does, for him. "I didn't think I had anything left to live for. Torchwood changed that for me. Gave me a purpose, showed me I could make a difference. I think it could do that for you, if you let it."
He looks entirely serious, is the thing. Oh, he's got this smirk on, like some part of this reminds him of something amusing, but his eyes are nothing but earnest.
"So you're offering to hire me," Ianto says, fisting both his hands in the folds of the blanket laid out on him. "As a form of suicide prevention."
Harkness barks out a laugh. It does something to his face, laughing, something pleasant.
"Hardly." he folds his hands together and rests them on his lap. "I'm offering to hire you because I had Tosh look you up while you were unconscious. I saw your work record, during and after Torchwood. You've been lost since Canary Wharf, sure, but even lost you managed to talk yourself into a job you're not quite qualified for—where you were up against kids with years more schooling and all sorts of connections—and you did it without even interviewing. From what we can gather, you literally just talked your way into it at a cafe after you overheard the hiring managers complaining about the prospective employees. You've since managed to keep this job, even though you were out for half a week without warning, when you told your boss you got strep throat but you were, in fact, recovering from an accidental overdose."
Ianto's face feels hot. So, yes, that's not wrong, but it's not like—it's not like that. Not like Harkness is making it out to be.
"It's an easy job," he mumbles. He shrugs. "I thought it would be harder. I wanted something—"
He shrugs again. Then, catching sight of the IV in his hand, he blushes fresh. "I've been clean since then. I didn't want to—"
He didn't want to worry his mum. Didn't want her to have to walk in again and find him dead. That's why he'd picked somewhere far away from his apartment, to do it. Maybe a park hadn't been the best choice, but he knew the first one by in the morning would be the sanitation truck, so he wouldn't have traumatized any kids. Plus, he'd been a little drunk by the time he picked a spot.
He'd known that would hurt her, of course; Rhiannon, too. But they were just two people; two people out of billions in the world, and they'd get over it. They had each other, and they had friends, other family, and they'd manage to move on soon enough, not like him. Because Owen Harper had gotten him evacuated from Canary Wharf that day, but a part of Ianto—the part that mattered—hadn't ever left. And his body had come home to Cardiff, and had tried to find something—anything—to do, and when a high-pressure job hadn't worked he'd turned to drugs, and that had helped but it had hurt his family, so he'd stopped. And things had gotten worse again, and worse, and he just—he was just—
"I'm just so tired," he says, and he feels his eyes well up and shuts them.
"I know," Jack Harkness says. "I'm sorry. But we can help you, if you want."
Ianto isn't sure he does want that. Isn't sure he's ever going to be in a place where he feels want for anything, again.
But he says yes anyway.
Because there's just an outside chance the captain's right.
It's not the typical onboarding process, but Ianto at least has the benefit of knowing how two of his soon-to-be colleagues were recruited, and compared to bribery in a prison and a fistfight in a cemetery he doesn't think a failed suicide attempt sounds as awful as it could, otherwise.
It's still embarrassing as hell, especially having everyone of them know all about it, but he is at least in decent company.
They keep an eye on him in that bedroom below the Hub until he's feeling better. They let him go to the bathroom alone, at least, though Owen makes him keep the door cracked and stands outside it when he does.
Owen's got a thing about suicide, apparently.
Once Ianto's well enough, though, the next morning, Jack sits him down for a chat. Ianto's got two weeks to sort himself out. They'll be keeping an eye on him throughout, expecting him to check in with a phone call every day, and Owen will be doing a drugs test before he starts, with random testing throughout a probationary period, as Jack sees fit. Jack reserves the right, too, to check in on him whether Ianto likes it or not, if things get rough—and there's going to be a point where things get rough; that's a given, at Torchwood.
That's bad enough, but then Jack insists on Ianto's staying with someone for the next two days, at least.
"Your sister or your mother would be happy to have you," Jack says.
He means well, Ianto knows. And he's about to be Ianto's boss. But—
"This would only worry them," he bites out.
Jack's smile is sympathetic, but Ianto can tell that he's not going to budge on this.
"I know," he says. "I read your suicide notes. And having done so, I'd just point out that the reason people worry about you like that, Ianto, is because they care about you. And they'd want to be here for you when you need them."
Ianto grits his teeth, but in the end Gwen drops him off at Rhiannon and Johnny's.
She's nice; Ianto has no complaints about her driving, nor of the company she keeps him on the way. She's lively and friendly and warm-hearted and kind, and when Ianto isn't up for a lot of conversation yet, she fills the silence with chatter about her fiance, Rhys, and some of the strange cases they've had at Torchwood since she started several months earlier.
"The woman I replaced found a psychic knife and went on a killing spree around Cardiff," she says. "I'm the one who found her outside the station, duct taped to a chair with a note for the authorities. That's what led me to Torchwood."
Ianto's not sure exactly what instructions Jack gave her, but once Gwen parks outside the Davies' house, she insists on walking up to the house with him, and leads the way inside when Rhiannon opens the door.
It's evening, but, thankfully, not late enough she and Johnny are in bed. The kids are, but Rhi's folding laundry on the couch, and Johnny lopes downstairs and sweeps it up when he sees Gwen and Ianto by the door.
"Oh, I can't stay long," Gwen says. "My fiance's waiting supper for me. But I offered to drop Ianto off."
She smiles, kindly, but plants her feet by the door and looks as expectant as Rhi.
Whatever Jack told her, she's not moving until she hears that Ianto's not going to try to weasel out of this.
Ianto looks from her to his sister and fixes his eyes on the worn flooring by the door.
"I had a bad day," he says in Rhiannon's direction. "I called Dylan again."
Rhi gasps. He blushes, throat aching.
"It's okay," Johnny says, and Ianto hears him move and set his arm around Rhiannon's shoulders. "Relapsing is normal, Ianto, I know you—"
"I didn't relapse." He digs the fingernail of his thumb into the knuckle of his index finger behind his back. Takes a breath. The sooner he gets through this, the sooner it's done with. "Not exactly. I, uh. I bought a bottle of valium from him, and I took—I took it all. Together. On purpose."
It's not as bad as he thought; it's worse.
"Oh, Ianto," Rhi whispers, and her eyes are running over before she gets her arms all the way around him. "No."
It's worse; it's awful; he leans into the hug and returns it and feels Johnny's hand clamp down on his shoulder, like he's going to keep him in the world with his hold alone.
"It's okay," Rhiannon says into his ear.
And, "We'll get you sorted out," from Johnny at his side.
He doesn't even notice when Gwen Cooper ducks out of the house.
But that's fine.
Torchwood's going to be waiting for him when he’s ready, this time around.
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Date: 2024-03-09 09:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-11 02:50 am (UTC)