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Just when Ianto swore he could sit not a moment longer, the car rolled to a stop. No break-neck breaking. A surprise, when Jack acted as the driver.
Ianto glanced at him sidelong, trying to gauge Jack’s state. The whole drive had been quiet. Not that Ianto minded—Ianto preferred a quiet drive. It was Jack and Lisa who liked to sing along to the radio (Jack quite badly, with intentionally incorrect lyrics; Lisa quite prettily, with forgotten and dropped lines). But the silence just went to show just how everyone felt today.
“I’ll take the drive home,” Lisa said after a moment.
Ianto looked up through the rear-view mirror to her, where her eyes stared back at the both of them in the front.
“Do you want to?” Jack asked.
Will you be okay enough to? was what he truly said, in Jack-ese.
“If you don’t,” she said.
Please let me do something other than sit, was what she said, in Lisa.
Ianto said nothing at all. He didn’t drive much, anymore. Never quite got the hang of hand controls, so he limited himself to a day where he could stand on his own two feet and not want to collapse to the ground just to rid himself of the omnipresent ache of his spine. And even then, Lisa or Jack generally stopped him before he could even get himself behind the wheel.
Part of him thought to himself that learning to drive just for Torchwood was a waste; he only got, what, three years out of it? Yvonne hadn’t even taught him to do much of the fun stunts. Well. Other than “crash the car and get out at lightning speed so that the Sontaran doesn’t shoot you in the face” or “speed around that motorcycle but don’t hit it. No, Ianto, don’t hit it. Christ. You nearly killed that man.” But no rapid doughnut manoeuvres like in action films.
It was a moment before he realised Jack’s eyes were on him. He glanced over, frowning somewhat. Jack gazed steadily at him a moment longer, then shook his head and drew the keys out of the ignition.
Ianto sat put as Jack popped his door open and exited the car. He listened to Lisa do much the same as he stared at the now-vacant driver’s seat.
Yvonne also never taught him how to hotwire a car. He’d really wanted to learn that.
His own door opened, and he finally looked up. Lisa stood outside, holding two crutches down to him. With a slow, silent sigh, he turned his body with great care, stepping his legs outside of the car. Lisa passed the crutches down to him, one at a time, and he slid his arms into the cuffs. Bracing himself, he managed to get out of the car. Lisa shut the door behind him as he moved out from the street and onto the pavement.
Jack stood there already, stood in that same stolid stance he always had. His gaze swept out over the scene before them as Ianto and Lisa joined him. Ianto almost didn’t want to look at that same sight, wishing to just stare at Jack some more. Maybe he could take it all in vicariously through Jack. If he read those minute emotions, if he just felt what Jack felt, then maybe that would be enough for today.
Not so much. Lisa had already left them, walking on ahead to the memorial. Then Jack followed.
Ianto sighed and braced himself again.
The memorial wasn’t much—no big statues or sculptures or plinths or anything of the sort. Just one big slab of polished granite laid into the ground. A far cry from the sleek, shiny high-rise used to stand proud in the same spot.
Ianto made his way, in measured steps, towards the closest edge. His toes just crossed the barrier between grass and smoothed stone, pointing right under a name carved deep within the rock.
Amanda Zhao.
Ianto remembered her. Short bob. Constant smile. Loud—but infectious—laugh. Always wore green.
He remembered them all. Every single name on this slab, he could put a face to. Smiles and frowns and confusedly raised eyebrows and every other emotion that ever crossed them. All those names and faces, burned into his brain for the rest of his time.
No passers-by would ever know who any of these people were; the memorial had nothing to denote who these people were or what this place was. All it had were names, etched deep, proving that once upon a time, something horrid had happened here.
Ianto hated it. Hated the façade of care that had gone into the memorial. This was a sham, meant to keep those who were leftover appeased—those who had the capacity to be appeased, anyway. Those like Lisa and Ianto.
“Survivors,” he muttered to himself.
He didn’t feel like a survivor. He was alive; that was all. Survival… was something else.
Brushing a toe under Amanda’s name, he sighed once more and decided to move on. Letter “H.” Further up the list of names than he wanted to go. More faces to remember as he passed each name.
The face he remembered most, though, was Yvonne Hartman’s. Not a day went by when her face didn’t flash behind his eyelids at least once. Yvonne had always had this way of making herself unforgettable to him, and that wouldn’t ever change. Not even if she was dead.
Ianto stood over her name, tracing each letter in his mind.
Five years, to the day, since he had last seen her. She’d sent him down to the Archives that day.
“I want you to figure out more about that sphere,” she told him. “Singh is making no headway on it, and I’m getting rather tired of it just sitting around uselessly.”
“Shouldn’t the actual archivists—”
“Ianto, you know I trust you more than them,” she said. “Just go down there. I’m sure I’ll be more than capable of handling this shift without you.”
Ianto had doubted her then. He didn’t want to be justified in those doubts. But here they were. Well. Here he was. Here she wasn’t.
He didn’t stay there much longer. Other names stood out to him. Tommy. Gita. Rachel. Moira. Kieran. He didn’t visit each of them; how could he? Almost eight hundred names were on here. Almost eight hundred faces. Almost eight hundred people.
Yes, he could remember them all. But it hurt.
Picking his eyes up from the names below him, he turned to find Jack standing a ways behind him. His head was bowed, staring down at whatever name lay below him. Ianto had a guess. A fairly good guess, at that. But it wasn’t his place to say anything on it.
Lisa, on the other hand…
Only a few feet away from Jack, her stance practically mirrored his. Though where his hands clasped tightly behind his back, hers wrung in front of her, rubbing at the warped skin of her palms.
He remembered when they weren’t warped. He remembered when they were smooth, soft beneath his lips as he kissed the back of her hand the day he decided he would be with her forever. He remembered her short hair, how well she kept it maintained. How he learned to maintain it for her, when he discovered how much simpler it made her day.
He remembered how easily it had all changed.
“Ianto,” she cried out. “Ianto!”
She was only twenty feet away. If he lifted his head, he could see her in her conversion unit, dull metal glinting red with the fires and haze around them.
He couldn’t get to her. He was stuck. Something had fallen.
Everything hurt.
“Ianto!”
“Ianto?”
He blinked. She was standing in front of him, brows furrowed as she searched his face.
“You alright?” she asked.
He thought about lying. So, he did. “Fine.”
She knew his lies. But she nodded.
“You?” he returned.
“Fine,” she agreed.
Lisa was a liar, too.
Nobody was fine here.
Five years. That was how long it had been since Lisa had been here. To the day.
She thought, back on the drive out here, that maybe there would be something big. Or maybe not big, but at least… noteworthy. People out here. Someone maybe laying flowers. A small service of some kind. Something.
But there was nothing and nobody. Just the three of them, standing on this damn platform, staring down at names that few other people could remember.
She wondered how many of them were left. The rest—the survivors. How many still stood? At the beginning, the numbers had been around the forties, dwindling as people died off in the hospital or through… other means, driven to their end by haunted and gruesome memories. By the time everything had settled, there had been twenty-eight or twenty-seven of them. The last number she had heard was nineteen, three months ago. More succumbing to injuries and traumas, even after almost five years.
Lisa sighed.
She could have been one of those eliminated numbers. Should have been. She thought about that a lot. Her and Ianto. Both of them. Just numbers, removed from a dwindling tally. Names put down on a slab of granite, to be forgotten by almost all.
With another sigh, Lisa began searching for a name.
While Lisa and Ianto had been cowards on this day for the past five years—or otherwise incapacitated (Lisa swore everything hurt more today; she felt like she was on fire all over again)—Martha hadn’t been. She was a good person, who had come to visit her cousin’s memorial every year. Lisa wasn’t half as good as Martha. Adeola had been one of Lisa’s closest friends at work, and yet…
They’d joked that they lived the same life. Two Black women living in London, all dressed up prim and proper for some insane job, making heart-eyes at beanpole white boys. Adeola always said Ianto looked like a “discount Gareth.” Lisa had always reminded her that Ianto had worked here first. Adeola was a single child; Lisa was a single child.
Adeola had taken a promotion. Lisa had turned that promotion down.
Adeola had been converted first. She had converted Gareth second.
Lisa had been saved. Ianto had been saved.
This year, Martha couldn’t pull herself away from her work to come up to London. This year, Lisa had dragged herself out of bed to act like a proper human being, one with a soul and an ounce of kindness.
Someone should always come pay respects to Adeola. She more than deserved that.
The name was, as expected, somewhere near the bottom.
Adeola Oshodi.
Lisa crouched, fingers brushing over the engraved letters. Such a lovely name. Lisa had always loved it, and the person that bore it.
“Hey, you,” Lisa whispered.
It felt a little weird. People could talk at graves, sure. But this wasn’t a grave. Nothing here to tie this place to Adeola, other than the name set deep within rock, and the knowledge that somewhere, so many feet above, Adeola had lived and died.
But, even beyond the awkwardness, it felt cathartic. Lisa didn’t get to go to the funeral—she’d been recovering still. This was as close as she got.
“Miss you,” Lisa said. “A lot. I have… so much to tell you. Don’t think I have time for it all, though. Not that I ever did. Lunch breaks… so short. Food was good—sometimes, anyway—but… god, we never got a full conversation, did we? Though I guess that’s our own fault. Never did know how to stay on topic, did we?”
She shook her head to herself.
“Well. Case in point. There I go again. Anyway, to keep a long story short… I have a new… boyfriend? I suppose; it’s hard to label Jack. He defies everything. Bastard. Oh, but… don’t worry. Ianto’s still here, too. Three-way thing. Throuple? I don’t know. Labels. Jack hates them. I guess we don’t use them either, now.”
She glanced up for a second. Jack was standing over a spot, not budging an inch. He probably wouldn’t until they left. Ianto was meandering around the names.
“They’re good,” she said to Adeola’s name. “They’re… I love them. You would’ve wanted to slap Jack, though. Too smart-arse for you to handle, probably. But not for your cousin. Martha adores him. And he adores her. Oh. Right, yeah. I met Martha. She’s… well. I think you mentioned you were a dead ringer for your cousin, once, but I don’t think I believed you. I do now! God, right. Okay. Not sure how much Martha’s told you. But she’s seeing someone, too. Mickey Smith. He’s good. We all love Mickey. You would have, too. After you got over how cheesy he is. Oh. Also. We all work for Torchwood. Still. Well, not still… this is Torchwood Three. It’s… it’s not the same. It’s Torchwood, but nothing like Torchwood. You would have hated it there. I did, too, at first, but now… it’s… I suppose it’s mine. You know?”
Lisa took a deep breath, letting all her thoughts run rampant through her head. Sometimes, reconciling the old Torchwood, Torchwood London, against the new Torchwood Three… next to impossible. Torchwood London was bright, shiny, new. Progress into the future, Lisa always thought. Making humanity ready. Torchwood Three… well. Lisa couldn’t describe it without just describing the Hub. Dark, dank, drab. Keeping humans safe until they were ready. One was Doctor-obsessed, the other… still Doctor-obsessed, but on a singular level. Singular, friendlier level. Level that got nobody killed.
(Or when it did, a reversable level.)
Friends in both places. Ianto in both places.
Granted, in the first Torchwood, there had been more friends, and Ianto had been safer. Though, she could argue that in this new Torchwood, there was Jack. And the friends were more… well. Lisa knew the word to describe how close she felt with this new team of hers, but she hesitated to use it. Bad things could happen the moment such a connection mentioned.
“Anyway,” Lisa said, finally letting that breath out. “I miss you.”
She brushed her fingers over Adeola’s name once more, then stood. She didn’t know where to go next. Her colleagues in Acquisitions? Those she and Adeola hung around?
She didn’t want to. How selfish was that? She wouldn’t go pay decent respects to the others, because she feared how much it would hurt. And she’d only even come because Martha wouldn’t be there for Adeola. Because Ianto maybe wanted to go, after five years. Because Jack missed two very special—and very alive—people.
So goddamn selfish.
How dare she live? Some of these people had more right. She’d been converted. Greg Oswald, right next to Adeola? He’d been caught in a fire. He died three minutes into the drive to the hospital, if she remembered right. Body finally gave out.
Greg Oswald should have lived.
He had a right.
She should have stayed gone.
Her hands burned like nothing else, and she ground her teeth. Damn things. The metal had been so strangely applied that it had fried her nerves and had done so again once peeled away by inexperienced doctors. Not their fault, really. There was a reason they had stuck her in the burns unit instead of a “de-converted from partial Cyberman conversion” unit. Her body had been something nobody had ever seen before then.
She really shouldn’t be alive.
From the corner of her eye, she caught a movement. Ianto. He’d turned to her. She looked to him expectantly, but he made no other movement. Blank face, empty eyes. That could be pain, she realised after a moment. She had grown used to seeing pain on him.
She came to see him as soon as the nurses allowed her to leave her room. Barely inches of her skin stuck out from the white dressings that covered her near head to toe, and everything felt like it was burning. Constantly. No release from the pain.
They brought her to see him during his first session of physical therapy on his feet, after the surgery she had only heard vaguely about. Learning to walk: something she wanted to watch her children do. Not her boyfriend.
The therapists had only just had him standing when he spotted her. He smiled, because that was what one did when their loved one visits them after near-death experiences.
He smiled, and his eyes had shone dull with medications and pain.
She would never ever forget that smile. Nor would she forget the way he almost screamed when they made him take his first step.
“Ianto?” she called, moving towards him.
He didn’t respond. Not good.
“Ianto?” she tried again.
Blinking, he focused on her.
“You alright?” she asked him.
He paused for the briefest of seconds. “Fine. You?”
If he got to lie, so did she. “Fine.”
Fine.
God. None of them knew what “fine” was anymore. Certainly not Ianto. Absolutely not Lisa. And never Jack.
Jack had never liked this place. Of course, he was old enough to remember when this place didn’t even exist. That didn’t say much, though, when he was also old enough to remember a time before automobiles.
Torchwood One had originally made its home in some fortress of brick and iron. Ugly thing. Most buildings from that time had been, though. Jack didn’t know if it still stood. He wasn’t about to look. He cared very little about Torchwood of old and held no fond memories of previous directors and their regimes.
But he did remember when the Canary Wharf tower had gone up.
“A shining pillar, bringing in the new age,” said Tony Beckett, tapping his fingers over the blueprint. He looked right pleased with himself. Of course he did. Bastard lived happily under the director’s thumb. “Should be nice. Right, Harkness?”
Jack gritted his teeth together, forcing a smile. With any luck, Beckett and this new director would be gone within the year. And, hopefully, whoever came next would be much better. Would listen. Would stop prosecuting the Doctor.
“Anyway,” Beckett said. “Back to work, you. Can’t sit around all day staring at plans.” Though Beckett would himself likely be doing just that.
Jack swore that if he became leader, he wouldn’t be half as incompetent as Beckett.
Such an ugly thing, all those windows made. Not as bad as that brick building, but still an eyesore to look at. It made Jack yearn for the architecture of his time, which said something. He’d never cared much for the style on Boeshane. Only fond memories of home kept him from grimacing at the thought of those sandstone walls.
But this building…
Maybe it was the contempt he held for this branch of the organisation. Or maybe the building really was just that hideous. Either way, he was glad it was—
No.
No, he couldn’t be glad it was gone. That was wrong. Jack wasn’t a good person—in fact, some would consider him to be a monster—but he was definitely a person. When the building fell, so did seven hundred and ninety-six people. And Jack wasn’t so uncompassionate that he couldn’t regret those lost lives. Sure, he had never liked those who had worked for Torchwood London—very certain exceptions, mind—but he did not think they deserved this. Only the lowest of the low deserved this.
He looked up at the sky, squinting into the bright clouds.
Five years ago, there had been Daleks up there. And below. And all around.
God, he hated Daleks.
Hated Cybermen, now, too. Hated them for Lisa, hated them for Ianto.
Hated them for Rose.
Hated them first for her, actually. He’d shown up for the clean-up, as the new director of Torchwood (finally, he’d thought back then, there would be a Torchwood safe for the Doctor), read the list of survivors, and found two names that didn’t belong listed amongst so many others that did.
It felt like something had been ripped out of him that day. Not his heart—he’d had that taken out of him, once, and that had hurt far less. This was something fundamental that he’d lost.
Twice the Daleks had taken Rose from him. Once had he gotten her back.
(Later, far too long after the fact, he did get her back. But how was he to know he would, back when he’d seen that list? The list was those of the dead, of the missing. And missing Tylers wouldn’t have had their names down, would they? No. Nobody would report the Tylers as missing if they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Or so Jack had thought.)
Their names were near the end of the list, sat side-by-side.
Rose Tyler. Jackie Tyler.
He had thought about bringing them flowers. Roses. Cliché. And cheesy. He knew they would have appreciated the sentiment, anyway. But he figured there was no point. Jack had a rudimentary faith in spirits (incredibly rudimentary, and borne out of sheer hope for something better than the nothingness of death), so flowers for the dead would be one thing. An understandable thing. But they had just universe-hopped. No spirits to collect tokens of grief.
Jack amused himself for a moment with the thought of some sort of spiritual voice message. A “hello, this is Jackie Tyler; we’re no longer here. Thanks for the flowers. Don’t leave a message. Okay, bye!”
He huffed out a breath.
No. No voice messages here. Just two names amongst near eight hundred others. Two names that had nobody to mourn them, nor needed anyone.
Jack mourned them, anyway.
He realised after a moment that Mickey’s name might be here. Not his real name, obviously. Just the one he’d used while undercover. Sam? Sam Something-or-other. Maybe Samuel Something-or-other. Didn’t matter, anyway. Mickey was still alive and in this universe.
He’d never asked Mickey about what happened here. At some point… maybe he would. But he had heard from Lisa and Ianto about it, and he’d seen the aftermath not hours following the event, so he wasn’t without a clue. He just didn’t know how Rose… how the Doctor… just…
Maybe he didn’t want to know. This wasn’t about Rose anymore. He loved her, and he missed her, and this is what kept her from him, but…
This is what brought him Ianto and Lisa. This was about them, now.
Speaking of…
Their movements caught his eye. Ianto had been wandering around the entire time, going from name to name, while Lisa had stayed put in one spot, much like Jack had. But Lisa had finally moved from her spot—he knew just which spot, too—to stand beside Ianto.
This would be it, then. Ianto would have gotten so stuck in his burdensome memories, and Lisa would have drowned in her guilt. Jack had wondered how long it would take.
He stuck his hands in his coat and slowly joined the two of them, hearing the tail end of their brief conversation.
“You?”
“Fine.”
Such bad liars. They would make terrible con artists.
“Why are you up here?” Jack asked. “How did you get in?”
“Security codes,” said the woman. Her bright bandanna didn’t cover the fresh scars well, but it stood out against the drab colours of the Hub. “Anyway. I’m here for the job.”
“Job? There is no job.”
“Torchwood. You need staff,” she said.
Jack looked to Suzie, who still had her gun trained on the woman. Suzie glanced at him in return, confirming what he was thinking. He then glared at back at the woman. “Let me guess, Torchwood One? We don’t need staff. Especially not you.”
“You always need staff,” said someone else.
Slowly, a man using two forearm crutches to bear his weight came through the cog door, standing behind the woman. Jack allowed himself a moment—only a moment—to appreciate the attractiveness of the two.
“Especially us,” the man finished.
Jack and Suzie had looked at each other again and silently agreed: they absolutely would not be hiring those two.
Jack’s hands slid onto their backs the moment he was close enough to reach for them. Lisa flinched, subtle as it was. He brushed his hand towards her spine, where he knew less skin stung and seared. She folded into him, placing her chin on his shoulder. Ianto didn’t do anything of the sort—not that he could, should he even want to. He had his weight on his crutches; shifting it over to lean it on Jack would likely have unsavoury effects on his back.
He said nothing to either of them. There was nothing to say. He just held them, each in their own way.
Then Lisa sighed and peeled herself away. Her eyes lingered on Jack, then Ianto. They flickered back to Jack again, before she turned and made her way off of the memorial. Jack brushed his hand down Ianto’s back—gently, always gently with Ianto’s back—and made his way after her.
She was leaning on the car when he caught up to her.
“Let’s go,” she whispered. “There’s nothing I can say… nothing I can do…”
Jack kissed her head, right on the line between forehead and headscarf. She closed her eyes and leant into it.
The click of crutches and careful footsteps betrayed Ianto (not that Ianto seemed to ever have any hopes of sneaking up on people). Jack and Lisa drew apart.
“Ready?” Jack asked.
The answer was no, Jack already knew. As much as Lisa needed to leave, Ianto needed to stay. But Ianto nodded, anyway. He’d relinquish his own burden for Lisa’s.
Jack opened the car door for Ianto and offered his hand out. Ianto eyed him for a moment, then slipped an arm out of a crutch and took the hand. Jack helped him into the car without a word.
He stopped Lisa on her way to the driver’s seat, giving her a second kiss. She accepted it, but moved on the moment it was over. He understood.
Once Jack settled in the back, Lisa started the car and slowly began to drive. The memorial crept by at a snail’s pace. Once it had disappeared into the background, out of sight from even Jack’s view through the back windscreen, the car took off. Soon, the memorial was nothing more than a glint of clouded sunlight in the past.
Jack sat straight, facing the front, watching Lisa visibly relax into the driver’s seat, watching Ianto lean his head back into the headrest.
He leant forward.
“You always mentioned that pastry shop,” he said. “Should we see if it’s still there?”
And in the rear-view mirror, two sets of grateful eyes looked back at him.
Later that night, Lisa would sneak a last raspberry crown into bed, which would make Ianto complain and Jack steal more than his fair share of bites. But they would be okay. And he would hold both of them close, and he would whisper vows into their ears when they slept.