20

There was a disorienting shift, but Ianto was glad his head wasn't hurting as much and didn't much care. Also, he realized he was in his own bed, and that was a relief. Had he been dreaming? Well, weird dream, but working in Torchwood, that was probably to be expected. In fact, it was probably a lucky thing he hadn't had a complete sleep induced psychotic break.

Suddenly Jack grabbed him and straddled him, pinning his hands down to the bed. "You stupid son of a bitch," he exclaimed angrily. For a single second, he thought maybe Jack was role playing, but since when did he ever call him stupid, even as some sex game? Also, he looked genuinely pissed off. "Why didn't you tell me you almost committed suicide?"

He looked up at him, feeling even more disoriented than before. "Umm ... I think I did. I told you after I lost Lisa, I wanted to die."

"Wanting to die is different than putting a loaded gun to your head."

This was genuinely strange. "Uh ... I don't know what to say to this. Do you have any idea how I felt after she died?"

The angry look on his face faltered and fell away. "Yeah, I do. I was in your head." Jack rolled off of him, falling onto his back beside him. "Ah crap." After a brief pause, he admitted, "It's not that I don't understand, 'cause I do. I've been there, I've been in that much pain that I didn't think I could go on ... hell, I've actually committed suicide once or twice. It just didn't stick."

"So I've noticed."

"But that's the thing. I knew there was a probability that I'd come back. You wouldn't have."

He rubbed his eyes, and tried to remember when he almost killed himself. It wasn't that time he took a bunch of pills but didn't apparently take enough, so all he got out of it was the best sleep of his life? No, that probably wouldn't have made Jack this angry.

Then another thought struck him. "Wait a second. You were in my head? Like I was in yours?"

Now Jack looked at him, a faint expression of alarm scudding over his face before he quickly shunted it aside. "You were in my head? What did you see?"

"The TARDIS, is it? The Doctor's space ship."

He didn't quite manage to suppress his sigh of relief. "Oh. Beautiful, isn't it? Most remarkable piece of technology I've ever encountered."

"You did seem to love it." Ianto considered what he'd experienced, and wanted to say "You love him; you loved your life with him" but didn't, because it probably would have embarrassed him. After all, people fell in love with Jack and had unrequited love for him, never vice versa. But it was nice to know he was capable of it.

After a moment of uneasy silence, where he was imagined Jack was worrying about how much he'd figured out, Jack asked, "How much do you hate me?"

"I don't hate you. Well, at times."

"I'm serious."

"So am I." Jack was giving him a surprisingly harsh look, and he saw how serious he was. Well, he must have experienced an interesting time in his life. He sighed, and admitted, "I did hate you after Lisa died. I hated you even more than I would have, because I was attracted to you and felt like I was betraying Lisa that much more. But my hate of you couldn't compete with the hatred I had for myself. Does that make you feel better?"

"Not really." He let out a small sigh, somewhat impatient, but mostly frustrated. "Why did you stop hating me? Assuming you did."

"I did. Well, except when you leave the cap off the toothpaste, and you look through my things -"

"I don't look through your things." Ianto just stared at him until he rolled his eyes. "Okay, maybe once or twice. What gave me away?"

"You never put things back exactly as you found them. I bet you think you do, don't you?"

"Don't get high and mighty on me, Mister I-Alphabetize-My-Junk-Mail. We all can't be that fussy."

"I'm not fussy! I'm just organized. And I do not alphabetize my junk mail." He paused briefly. "Just my bills. It makes it easier to keep track of them."

Jack shook his head. "So sad."

He pulled the pillow out from beneath his head and hit Jack with it, and while he grabbed it and elbowed him in the chest as he ripped it away, Jack laughed. He then tossed the pillow away and rolled on top of him, straddling his his hips and looking down at him like he wasn't sure if he should punch him or kiss him. Ianto would have preferred the latter, but wouldn't have been too surprised by the former. He smirked down at him for a moment, then the look faded in increments. "You really hated me. What changed your mind?"

"The memory stone."

"The one we found in the thrift shop? Wow, what happened there?"

He'd accompanied Jack in an attempt to track down an alien artifact that had been leaving a trail of chaos and confusion in its wake (Tosh and Gwen were the other team – Owen was busy doing an autopsy on what turned out to be the burnt corpse of an alien insect). The problem was the rift energy it gave off was so negligible that you had to be within fifteen meters of it to find it, and everyone described it differently, as if it was shifting its shape (actually, as Jack explained later, it had a passive "psychic chameleon field" - it became whatever someone expected to see). They'd picked up a reading from a second hand store near the underground station, and while Jack distracted the clerk with his charm, Ianto walked around the shop with his energy reader trying to find it. He got a reading on a container full of odds and ends, a junk drawer full of everything from mismatched silverware to old radio tubes. He was sifting around it carefully, trying to find the object that was actually giving off the energy, when he accidentally made contact with it.

It was instantaneous. He felt the briefest tingle in his hand before he suddenly found himself back in time, in the small kitchen of his London flat, making toast, and chiding Lisa about being late for work. He was aware this was the last day before the Canary Wharf incident, but it was like his contemporary consciousness was shoved back into a strange limbo. He was screaming at himself to tell her not to go to work, to go ahead and take that impromptu trip with her to Calais, but he hadn't actually time traveled: it was all memory. He was simply reliving a day, and couldn't change a goddamn thing.

It was agony at first, it felt like a knife had been driven into his gut and was being slowly twisted, but he began to realize something as the day continued on. It was that part he admitted to Jack. "Reliving my time with Lisa, I realized that I never saved her, that she was dead the moment I pulled her out of the cyber-conversion unit. I think I always knew that, but I didn't want to believe it. I wanted to believe I could save her, I wanted to believe I could bring her back. I didn't want her to be dead, and because of that, because I was so selfish and stupid, innocent people died, and I did something so monstrously idiotic -"

"No," Jack said, putting a finger on his lips to silence him. Ianto sniffed and tried to blink the tears out of his eyes. "I think it's time to stop hating yourself. You can't live in the past – believe me, I know – you just have to keep moving forward. We fuck up, we all do, but at least you fucked up out of love. That says something about you."

"That I'm an idiot?"

"That you are a romantic, and despite your sarcasm, not a cynic. That's pretty marvelous." He paused briefly. "See, I knew it wasn't allergies."

Ianto came out of reliving the day when Jack grabbed his arm and broke the connection with the memory stone. It seemed like several hours had passed, but only a minute or two had in real time. He found that he had been crying, and when Jack asked him about it, he claimed a dust allergy and quickly turned back towards the junk drawer. He had a container for the object, so using a nearby scarf in lieu of a glove, he willed the object to look like a rock, a nice piece of granite, and it did, so he easily found it in the drawer and was able to put it in the box without further deja vu. Tosh scanned the hell out of it, but wasn't able to determine why it did what it did, or why it called up memories in people that were generally fraught with some high emotion. Jack said they were used as grave markers on certain planets, a way of allowing families to recall good times with the passed on loved ones. He figured, since it wasn't just making people recall good times, that it was damaged or faulty somehow. That made as much sense as anything. "It was the best I could do with two seconds notice."

"Gotta think faster on your feet."

He scowled up at him. "One second I'm in a coffee shop near Brixton on a sunny day, and then next second I'm in a thrift store in Cardiff on a rainy night. See how fast you think under those circumstances."

"Still, allergies?" He scoffed in a mocking manner. "Why not tell me you got some grit in your eye? Remembered a childhood pet who died when you were three?"

"Right, that's it." He grabbed Jack by the arms and rolled over, so he had him pinned down to the bed by his body. Jack snickered and put up token resistance, but not much.

He grinned up at him, a twinkle in his eyes. "Is this feisty Ianto back? Good. I like him."

"So who's mind are we in now?"

"Good question." Jack looked around, and said, "Well, this is your place, so I'm gonna guess your mind."

He smiled down at him. "Good." He kissed him, hard enough to bruise his own lips.

He had enough torture for one day – now it was time to have some fun.

***

Epilogue

The Elusian syna-neuronal nexus turned out to be too much for Strain. Where nanobots failed, the Elusian device succeeded. When Jack ordered it to go into sterilization mode, it sought out any foreign organism and destroyed it, and Strain couldn't escape. The bad news was this meant Ianto was unconscious for several more hours because of the sterilization protocol; the good news was, if he had ever been exposed to mad cow disease, it was no longer a worry.

Jack regained consciousness first, and returned to his office to find Gwen waiting there. She'd come back with an alien object she had just recovered (and couldn't figure out), but that wasn't completely what she there about.

Seeing the small black object in the case, he knew exactly what it was, and felt a nervous twinge in his stomach. (No, it couldn't be ...) But he told her, "I have no idea what this is. Unless ..." he snorted humorously.

"What?" she asked, eyes widening slightly. Good, she was buying this.

"It's an ad."

"What?" Now there was skepticism in her voice. Had to reel her in.

"Well, it's broken, but most of the major worlds have these hovering around, showing 3-D ads, usually in stores, but they have billboard sized ones that float around major cities. You think advertising is bad now, wait until the thirty fifth century; it's bloody inescapable. They narrowcast ads into your dreams."

"They do not."

"They do! Until the universal court declares them an invasion of privacy. But even then, the occasional hacker still did it, until – yeah, I'm giving away too much. Anyways, it's a busted ad float. Nothing worth worrying about." He put the cover back on the container and put it down behind his desk, like he intended to throw it in the vault later.

She still looked skeptical. "Why would it drop through the Rift?"

"Best guess? Somebody deliberately kicked it through. You don't even want to know how annoying some of these things are." He took a breath and gave her his most offhand, charming smile, pretending he wasn't dying to open the container and find out exactly what was waiting on the data pad for him. "Was there something else?"

For a moment, it seemed like Gwen wasn't going to let this go, but she did, and he was grateful. "Actually, yeah. The Koslovains."

"What about them?"

"Why did Strain set that up? In fact, how? Ianto was there. Did they think he wouldn't come? Why even bother, in fact? What was the point?"

With the data pad, he now knew what the Koslovains were actually about, but it wasn't something he could share with Gwen. So this is where his greatest superpower came into play: lying. No one could lie better than he could. "Honestly, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure the Koslovains were infested by Strain. My best guess would be it intended to infect you as well as everyone else in the diner, but never quite contained the Koslovains natural lethality."

"So it was just another trap?"

He nodded. Of course this was bullshit, as Strain could only infect mammalian lifeforms, and Koslovains were insectoids, but she didn't know Strain like he did. Only one other group he could think of knew the Koslovains that well, beyond the Slovai, and they were also big users of the data pad. They were also responsible for Strain. Of course this was all connected, but since Gwen didn't know what the connecting factor was, she'd never pull it all together.

The connecting factor was him. And he'd never admit it.

Reluctantly she seemed to accept his explanation, and when he told her to go ahead and leave early, she accepted the invitation eagerly. In Torchwood, the ability to leave early didn't happen often, and then it was usually cut short.

Jack poured himself a glass of water and started going through paperwork until Gwen left, the cog wheel door rolling shut behind her. Only then did Jack pick up the container and put it on his desk, stripping the lid off and picking up the data pad. He felt the smart polymer sample his DNA, clinging to his fingers like melted wax, and then it came on, lighting up a faint blue as a message began to scroll above it like a holographic text message. There was no sound, no visual representation of whoever sent it, but this was the safest way. The Rift energy could possibly corrupt more complex data, but this was as simple as it got.

It read: We know when you are. Did you think it would be that easy, Jack?

His heart sunk. The Time Agency knew when and where he was.

John had said there weren't any Time Agents left, but would this be the first lie John told? Hardly. Besides, when you were an agency that dealt with time travel, this could be coming from the fiftieth century, not necessarily the fifty first. This could be coming from any when. The data pad was regulation spec – all he could tell was it was made around the fiftieth century, but there never had been much upgrades in the design.

Whoever in the Time Agency was after him, they were trying to make it known that he hadn't been forgiven or forgotten. Strain was phase one, and the Koslovains were phase two. They wanted him punished, and if he couldn't die – he had to assume they knew that now – then they were content to kill people around him, kill his team, until he got the message.

Here was the problem – what was the message? What did they want from him? He hoped it was an apology, because they'd have to show up in person for that, and he'd be able to settle this once and for all.

Jack put the pad half way over the edge and brought the flat of his hand down hard on the overhanging pad, causing it to snap in half. As it was meant to, damaging it triggered a self-destruct mechanism that reduced it to a handful of dust. (In case one got lost in an earlier time period, it couldn't be retro-engineered; as soon as you cracked the case, it released a specifically engineered bacteria that ate the polymer of the pad and its components, excreted them into dust, and died. A perfectly self-contained method of disposal.)

He brushed the dust off his hands and walked to the window, overlooking the currently empty Hub. He wondered who it was, why they wanted him so bad, and how he could get them to go away without getting Ianto and Gwen tangled up in this mess.

And he shuddered to think what phase three might be.

The End