Chapter Text
You are the hole in my head. You are the space in my bed. You are the silence in between what I thought and what I said. You are the night time fear. You are the morning when it’s clear. When it’s over you’re the start. You’re in my head, you’re in my heart.
Florence + The Machines
It was the missing hand that gave him the first clue. Well, not so much a clue as it being an oddity. After the incident with the sex gas alien, when Jack had let a dangerous possessed girl free from the hub and been more concerned about the hand rather than chasing her down before she could kill anyone else, Ianto had realised it must have been vitally important. Whether to Jack personally or as a Torchwood thing, he had no idea and he’d never asked. They’d never discussed it. While the others had set about tracking Carys through CCTV on the quay until Tosh had lost her in a rare black spot without coverage, Ianto had silently and quickly helped Jack find a new glass containment box for the hand and filled it with the goop keeping it preserved.
After that, neither of them had mentioned it again, but Ianto had taken on the task of regularly checking the limb, making sure the containment chamber was operating correctly and monitoring for signs of degradation in the flesh. He had no idea if Jack had realised he’d added it to his long list of regular duties, but as it went with a lot of things between them, they’d had a perfectly good system of don’t-ask-don’t-tell going on, which had kept things simple.
At least he thought it had. He’d been kidding himself, though. In a few short days, everything—personally and professionally—had gone to hell. Jack and Tosh stuck in 1941, the rift, Abaddon, Jack and his apparent immortality, and the kiss in front of the entire team, followed by a heart to heart with Jack who’d admitted he’d made mistakes when it came to the two of them. Jack had told Ianto that he needed him, unknowingly echoing the words he himself had told Owen in the heat of the moment when they’d been arguing over opening the rift. Owen had taunted him—in your sad wet dreams where you're Jack’s part-time shag maybe—as if it’d never occurred to Owen that someone like Jack would actually ever want to be with Ianto. He’d wanted to throw it in Owen’s face, that he’d been sleeping with Jack for months, it wasn’t just a fantasy. And while it might have been undefined and casual, one thing had become patently clear; Jack needed him in a way that was different with the others, so that was exactly what he’d told Owen, even if he’d never really realised it himself until that very moment.
Though he’d all but had an epiphany over it, hearing Jack say those words had sent him reeling. He might not have said it in return, but the truth was, he needed Jack just as much, if not more. The past few days had shown him that with all alacrity.
Now the hand was missing and Gwen seemed to think someone or something had taken Jack.
“I’ll check his office, see if there’s any clues up there,” he told the others, who were still shooting questions at Gwen. They barely spared him any attention, so he set the takeaway tray of coffees he’d been holding on a nearby desk and hurried up to Jack’s office. He checked to make sure none of them were watching then quickly accessed Jack’s computer, bringing up CCTV surrounding the hub for the past half an hour. It didn’t take him long to find the answer. A blue box materialised at the base of the water tower for no more than a few brief moments. The Doctor. A strange shudder went through him. He’d heard all kinds of stories of The Doctor while he’d worked at Torchwood One, both good and bad. More than a few times, he’d wondered if Jack had travelled with the man at some point; he hadn’t figured there was any other way Jack could have seen what he’d seen and done what he’d done, if one assumed most of Jack’s outlandish stories were true, which Ianto had started suspecting a while ago actually were.
But it wasn’t only that. The Doctor had been there that day. Canary Wharf. He’d found out later that The Doctor had been the one to stop the Daleks and Cybermen; too late to save the more than eight-hundred employees who had died horrible, violent deaths.
He dragged a hand over his face, as if he could wipe away the dark memories so easily and forced himself back to the present. Jack had never talked directly about The Doctor, never told them anything about the hand, but suddenly Jack’s words from earlier came back to him. I can’t promise that I won’t have to leave again, but I’ll always come back to you, Ianto Jones.
Had Jack known The Doctor was coming, but hadn’t wanted or been able to say anything about it for some reason? He’d thought at the time they were simply talking about the shocking and extremely disconcerting fact that Jack had a slight problem staying dead, not intergalactic time travel in a blue police box.
Making a snap decision, Ianto swiftly typed a command into the computer, corrupting and deleting the CCTV footage in a way not even Tosh would be able to recover. Jack had trusted him with so much already—he had access in passwords and protocols around the hub that none of the others had, including the secure archives and Jack’s safe. He knew about Flat Holm. He’d long ago taken over handling the multiple bank accounts including Jack’s personal finances. He might have only been general administration, or the teaboy as Owen constantly liked to point out, but he’d pretty much taken over running this place from the background months ago. Had Jack done it on purpose, because he knew one day he was going to leave and needed to know someone would be able to run things in his absence, so that the team and Torchwood Three wouldn’t simply fall apart? Maybe he was reading into Jack simply being too much Jack to do it all himself when he didn’t have to. But for now, he was going to keep yet another secret for Captain Jack Harkness and hope those words he’d spoken were true, that eventually he would come back, even if he now had all of time and space to explore—though after over a hundred years spent in Cardiff, Ianto couldn’t really blame him if he never returned.
He shut down the CCTV program and stood, casting a glance across Jack’s neat desk, still in the pristine condition he’d kept it in when he’d thought Jack had been killed by Abaddon.
“Anything, Ianto, sweetheart?” Gwen was leaning into the office doorway, looking at him expectantly.
He summoned a small smile that no doubt looked grim. “No, nothing.”
And it was back to lying to the team again, just like he had all those months with Lisa. He was suddenly glad he hadn’t drunk the coffee he’d bought as guilt burned like acid in his stomach.
“I’m just checking CCTV of the surrounding area,” Tosh called out, gaining Gwen’s attention.
“Good idea, Tosh,” Gwen turned to jog back down the stairs and cross to the work stations, while Ianto followed at a more sedate pace. He paused to watch them as Tosh discovered the missing footage, then Gwen and Owen quickly got into an argument about what to do next.
Taking a deep breath and knowing things were possibly going to get even harder once Jack’s disappearance really sank in, he stepped forward to unobtrusively manage the disagreement in a way that left Owen and Gwen feeling like they’d come to their own decisions, while Tosh hid a knowing smile.
Where Jack had gone, and for whatever reason he’d left so suddenly without a word, Ianto only hoped it was worth it.