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A Matter of Time

Summary:

A time travelling, action-adventure, romance-filled science fiction romp ensues when Ianto runs into Jack in the fifty-first century after an accident with a vortex manipulator. Laser blasters, alien dance clubs, mercenaries, a little too much public sex for Ianto's tastes, sneaky plans and circular logic can be found here. Set after Something Borrowed, but not particularly "AU" (at least, at time of writing) it slots into season 2.

Notes:

Oh boy. This is going to be a doozy. Time travel, time loops, future and past colliding, memory loss and more. I have a beginning, middle, and end, but I suspect I'll take several detours before I get there.

Chapter 1

Notes:

The cover art is by [info]madeira (and you should really check out her other stuff, at [info]polaroidburn) who indulged my inner ego by creating such a gorgeous piece of art just for me. (And yes, that is the Serenity on the cover.)

Chapter Text


All extraordinary days begin with waking up.

The eighth of June was no particular exception. Ianto had gone home late after prying himself off Jack, ostensibly because he wanted a change of clothes, but really because Jack’s bed was less than comfortable, and if he was only going to get three hours of sleep he’d like to be able to sleep soundly. They’d had three separate arguments about it, and Ianto was beginning to suspect that Jack was refusing to get a bigger bed for fear Ianto might spend the night in it more often.

But maybe that was just Ianto being paranoid.

So, all things considered, it was an ordinary morning. Ianto had been first in (after Jack, of course, but he didn’t count), handing out hot coffees as the rest of the team straggled in. Once everyone had settled in for the morning, Toshiko beckoned him over to her desk.

“I finished with these yesterday,” she said, pushing a cardboard box towards him on the table. “So they’re all set to be archived. They’re profiled on the mainframe under identification numbers – got a pen?”

Ianto pulled one out of his shirt pocket, and bent over her desk, grabbing a sticky note. “Go ahead.”

“397374 – that had four parts, A through D, and then 297375 through 297379,” she listed off, and then pointed to a tall, lamppost shape object next to her desk. “That’s 297376, it wouldn’t fit in the box. I can help you move it down, if you want.”

“No, shouldn’t be a bother,” Ianto said, smiling up at her and folding the note into his breast pocket. “Thank you Tosh.”

“No problem. I’m sorry I’m unloading them all at once, but it took me a while to figure out which ones worked together and which ones were unrelated. We found them all together.”

“In Bute Park, I remember. I had to figure out whether or not to retcon the three year old along with her parents.”

Tosh looked intrigued. “Did you?”

“In the end, no. I decided that if she ever does tell her parents about the time she started teleporting from place to place, they’re not going to take her seriously,” Ianto said, smiling. “Besides, I wasn’t sure what to do about dosage for someone so small. Not to mention possible side-effects on toddlers.”

“Good thing we’re predisposed to disbelieve our children,” Tosh said.

“Indeed,” he replied. “I’ll get these out of your way, then.”
 
Ianto hauled the box under one arm, picked up the alien lamppost with his free hand, and headed down to the archives.

~

He’d catalogued the set of four items that were 397374, now entered into the archives under “contact lenses and remote recording devices” and categorized as “eyewear, lenses, visual recording, audio recording, espionage, data transmission, communication”. Item 397375 was still a mystery, Tosh hadn’t made any headway trying to get it to give any information beyond “inert lump of metal”, and so Ianto filed it in the “unknown” section of the archives, under “manufactured, metallic” and the chemical compounds of which it was composed.

He’d just come back from putting the lamppost in section F – which had actually turned out to be an alien lamppost, much to his amusement – on a shelf (filed under “light supporting device: furniture, electrical, household, twenty-eighth century”, the last thanks to Jack) and had opened up Tosh’s file on item 397377.

Item 397377 wasn’t a whole piece, or at least, so Ianto assumed. It looked to be the innards, or a small part of some greater device, with wires coming out of it, melted at the ends into a clump on one side. Jack had looked at it and pronounced it junk, some technical device from the mid four thousands, judging by the circuitry. Tosh had been intrigued with some of its design, however, and had run some thorough tests on it, most of which had produced sheets of data unintelligible to anyone unfamiliar with the tests the ran on alien devices. None of the readings, however, had been familiar to her, so she’d concluded that Jack was right: space junk it was.

Ianto ran over the data again, out of habit. On rare occasions he recognized correlations with other items in the archives that Tosh missed. He scanned the data on neutrino emissions and paused, frowning. That was familiar. But from where?

Ianto tapped into the mainframe and entered some criteria for a search based on the data. If anyone had ever entered similar data into the archives, it should show up. Ianto limited the search to the last three and a half years – the neutrino detector had only showed up in 2005, so nothing before then should have any data of the kind Ianto wanted to see.

Five minutes later the mainframe spit out the answer. Ianto stared at the screen for a few moments, and then down at the device. And Jack hadn’t recognized it? Then again, Jack wasn’t particularly technical, he tended to recognize items based on design rather than structure. Or perhaps the readings were a coincidence, and the device in his hand was unrelated to Jack’s own. Nonetheless, Ianto wanted to be thorough, so after he finished cataloguing the rest of the items in the box, he printed out the two data sets, grabbed the device, and headed back up to the main hub.

~

“So, I’m pretty sure it just died of heart failure,” Owen was saying, gesturing at the alien on the table in the morgue. “At least, assuming its heart is what I think is its heart.”

“Then what was he doing on the corner of Wharton and St. Mary’s?” asked Jack.

“By his toxicology report,” said Owen, gesturing to the screen, “Having a pint, I would say. Or returning from having a few. His blood-alcohol levels are through the roof.”

“So, we have a drunk who had a heart attack downtown and died on the corner?”

“That would coincide with witness reports,” called Gwen, who was working at her station.

“Lovely,” said Jack, rolling his eyes. “Wrap it up, then, Owen. He was probably just a tourist. His species is pretty friendly, from what I can recall. I think we can close this one.”

Owen nodded and began closing up the body. Jack turned to head up the stairs and almost collided with Ianto.

“Ooof,” he said, surprised, grasping Ianto’s forearms to keep from barreling into him. “Are you being sneaky on me, Mr. Jones?”

“Not in the slightest, sir,” said Ianto. “I was simply waiting for an appropriate time to interrupt.”

Jack hummed thoughtfully, and looked him up and down. “I think I prefer you inappropriate, actually.”

“Oi,” said Owen. “I don’t want to hear it.”

Ianto rolled his eyes and held out the artifact. “I wanted to ask you about this.”

Jack looked at the item. “I’ve seen this already.”

“Yes, but, have you seen the data Tosh collected on it?”

Jack shook his head.

Ianto handed him the device’s data. Jack perused it for about half a second and then looked up at Ianto, a bit of a smirk on his face.

“How about you let me skip the guessing game and let me know what you’ve found out?”

Ianto hesitated. There was a small possibility Jack would not be pleased with what he was about to find out, but its not like what they had done was in any way indefensible. Nonetheless, he steeled himself as he handed over the other data.

“The readings Tosh got from it with the neutrino detector bear a striking resemblance to data we collected on another item a few months ago. Some of the other data correlates as well, particularly that picked up by the rift detector. I thought perhaps the items are related.”

Jack took the other sheets from him and looked at the heading.

“Item 397225,” he read, his eyes running down the page. “Catchy. Does it have a better name?”

“I assume so,” said Ianto, resisting the urge to bite his lip. “But I don’t know it. It’s your wristband.”

Jack’s head snapped up. “My wristband?” he asked, voice low.

“Yes sir.”

“May I inquire why,” Jack said, the touch of menace that was already in his voice making Ianto wince, “my wristband has an entry in the archive database?”

“You may.”

Jack raised an eyebrow, and gestured. “Anytime you’re ready.”

Ianto cleared his throat. “After Abbadon, sir, when you were dead for five days? We ran some scans on you, and we also ran some scans on your wristband.”

“And that was necessary, why?”

“The scans of you?”

Jack just looked at him.

“Erm, well, you were dead-”

“Something I don’t know?” Jack interrupted, frostily.

“You were dead,” Ianto continued, pointedly. “And Gwen mentioned something about you looking for a particular doctor. I thought you probably meant The Doctor, and that perhaps you had some way of contacting him.”

“Obviously, I didn’t.”

“We know that now, sir,” said Ianto, “But we didn’t then. Frankly, Jack, we were just grasping at straws. We took some readings but couldn’t figure it out, so we filed the information and put it back on you.”

“I thought it was a bad idea,” piped up Owen. “You were just going to come back, find it was missing, and throw a holy rage.”

“Alright,” said Jack, looking pensive and not entirely convinced.

“I can understand the motivation to look at my wristband,” he said, and then looked at Ianto sharply. “What I don’t understand is why you felt the need to include the information in the archives.”

“I…it’s my job. Research, file, look up research again.” Ianto shrugged. He hadn’t really thought about it at the time. It was just another artifact to be archived.

“What do you have this filed under? Jack Harkness’ personal belongings?” Ianto didn’t answer. Jack looked at the paper in his hands. “Let’s see… 108298.” He looked up. “What kind of a category is that? Not particularly informative. I would almost say it’s misleading. Not very good archiving habits.”

“I didn’t create the file,” Ianto said softly. “I just found it.”

“And didn’t tell me about it? And used it?” he demanded.

“I found it more than a year ago. By the time I… wasn’t hiding things from you anymore, it wasn’t on my mind. And then, well, you died, and were gone, and I forgot about it all over again.”

“Ianto, you never forget anything in the archives,” said Jack.

Ianto just stared at Jack. He looked furious – worse than that, he looked betrayed.

“And I suppose you’ve read everything they’ve got on me?”

“Maybe if you told me anything about you I wouldn’t have to,” Ianto snapped. “Did you even consider that?

They glared at each other. Ianto could see Owen creep out of the autopsy bay out of the corner of his eye. Jack reached out and took the device from Ianto, pocketing it.

“I want you,” Jack bit out eventually, “to get me a hard copy of everything filed under ‘108298’, and then delete or destroy everything else. Don’t “misplace” it, or file it under something obscure, because I will find it. Clear?”

“Clear, sir.”

Ianto spun on his heels and climbed the stairs out of the medical bay, fuming. He hadn't been lying when he told Jack he'd forgotten about the file. That's not to say he would have told Jack about it if he'd remembered it in the months since Jack's return, but Ianto would have liked to have been given the benefit of the doubt. More than that, he was angry at how afraid Jack seemed to have been of him knowing even the tiniest bit about him.

When he got down to the archives, Ianto opened up all the files archived under the 108298 category. The data on the wristband was several times larger than the rest of the data combined - just a few news clippings, reports of Jack Harknesses over the past one hundred years - some actually Jack and some not - and a couple of photographs, both clearly of Jack. Not ten pages of information. Ianto sent all of it, along with the all the data they had collected after Abbadon, to the archive printer.

Once it was printed and shoved, unorganized, into a manila folder, Ianto walked back over to the terminal, and moved to delete the data, irrevocably, from the electronic archives. He hesitated for barely a moment before sending the necessary commands. He trusted Jack, he really did, and if Jack didn't want anyone else to see that data, well, he was their leader and that was his prerogative.  Besides, Ianto had it all memorized anyway.

Grabbing the folder, Ianto headed up to look for Jack.

~

Ianto found him in his office, bent over his desk, and, apparently, soldering. He walked up to the desk and dropped the folder on it unceremoniously.

“Here. The extent of my knowledge of Jack Harkness before his time at Torchwood. Would you like to retcon me as well?”

Jack grunted, and didn't look up. “Don't be stupid.”

Ianto didn't reply, just stood there, waiting for him to finish. If they were going to have it out they were going to do it properly. He could wait until Jack finished doing - Ianto suddenly realized Jack was working with the artifact he'd taken from him. He'd removed his wristband and had somehow opened it up, so that its inner circuitry was exposed. He'd undone the tangle of wires coming out the artifact and had connected some of them to his wristband. Ianto's curiosity got the better of him.

"Do you know what that is, then?" he asked.

"Yep," said Jack, still focused on his work. "It's the same as my wristband, or at least a part of one. It's a few centuries more primitive, though, which is why I didn't recognize it. Never seen one this old."

"Does it work?"

"Now? No, it's missing a lot of pieces. But I'm seeing if I can jerry rig it with mine."

"So you can travel in time?"

Jack paused here and looked at Ianto, eyes glimmering in the low light of the office. He looked very calm, now, after his previous outburst, but somehow Ianto found calm Jack more frightening than angry Jack.

"You know what it does?" he asked.

"No," Ianto shrugged. "But you were a time agent, whatever that is, and that's what Captain John's seemed to do."

"Fair enough," said Jack, nodding. "That's what it's supposed to be, a vortex manipulator. But it's disabled, and I don't have the technology to activate it. I'm seeing if this will let me bypass the part of mine that's disabled, more or less."

"Any success?"

"Not yet."

"That's too bad," said Ianto, letting the sarcasm bleed through, much to his own dismay. Angry at Jack and he still didn't like the possibility of him going anywhere else.

Jack caught onto it. "Ianto, I meant it when I said I didn't want to be anywhere else. I'm not even sure why I'm trying to fix it; the person who broke it had good enough reasons. I don't have anywhere to go, even if I could get it to work."

Ianto was tempted to tell him to stop, then, at let it rest well enough alone. But - time travel.

"It could be useful," he said, instead.

"Oh?"

"Certainly. If your... vortex manipulator had been working when you'd ended up in 1941, you never would have gotten trapped."

"And Owen would have never opened the rift," Jack finished. "No more disaster, no more Bilis, no more Abbadon. But you wouldn't have gotten to shoot Owen, either."

"That would have been a shame, " deadpanned Ianto. Jack grinned at him, full on, and Ianto felt his gut clench. Jack must have seen something in his face, because he moved as if to reach out and touch Ianto, but stopped himself at the last moment.

"Look, can you help me?" asked Jack, pulling his hand back in. "I really need someone to steady this while I attach the last wire."

Ianto stepped up beside Jack, and moved his hands to hold where Jack directed.

"There are better tools down in the hub," he observed, trying to hold his arms so they didn't get in Jack's way.

"Mmm," hummed Jack in agreement. "I didn't want to do this too near the rift monitors, it might have fried them out."

Ianto opened his mouth to reply, and then, suddenly, it happened.

With a sensation that he would later describe as a combination between throwing up and suffocating, except over each individual cell and magnified by a hundred, Ianto's vision went black and the world around him disappeared. For a long, shocking moment, he couldn’t breathe, and then he was gasping again, the ground solid beneath his feet, and someone's arms holding him up.

His vision swam before him, spots of colour dancing across his eyes, sounds consolidating first as someone's voice came into focus.

 “Why hello there,” the voice said. “And you are?”

Ianto held onto consciousness for just long enough to realize that the voice and the arms gripping him belonged to Jack before his legs folded under him and the world went dark.