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“Ianto Jones.”
Ianto stared, dumbfounded. He had barely woken up ten minutes before. Lisa was still asleep, but she liked having coffee ready the moment she woke up, and Ianto lived to make her happy.
But there was a strange woman in his kitchen, leaning against the counter. It was odd enough that she was there, because his lock was one of the most difficult to pick on the market (Ianto had tested it himself and confirmed) and he had a sophisticated alarm system (which Torchwood London fitted to the houses of all its employees), but there was something beyond that, something of an uncanny valley. Perhaps it was the discrepancy between the long, woollen coat she was wearing and the wide-brimmed sun hat resting on her head; perhaps it was the even more noticeable discrepancy between the large peaks at the tops of her sleeves which gave the coat a notable old-fashioned look when compared to her tight-fitting black leather trousers; or, perhaps, it was the colour of her shirt, a shade of white that Ianto wanted to call colourful.
“Do you want to live forever, Ianto Jones?” the woman asked, conversational tone and all, as if she wasn’t a stranger in his house asking strange philosophical questions better suited to a late night conversation with close friends.
It was too early for this.
“One day, you will meet a man who can’t die,” she said. “His kisses bring life. Cherish them. Count them.”
Ianto turned around and walked back into the bedroom. When Lisa woke him up, complaining about the lack of coffee, he was perfectly happy to pass it off as a dream.
He had no idea what that woman had been on about until he woke up with Jack’s lips on his after Lisa had thrown him across the Hub.
He wanted to believe that he’d just been knocked out, but his lungs screamed in pain, greedily sucking in air as though there was none in them, and Ianto knew.
He had never hated Jack more.
So he went home, and in a desperate, last ditch attempt to get Jack’s taste out of his mouth, he took the pill.
He had wanted to take enough to kill himself, but he couldn’t. He had the fleeting thought that the kiss did more than bring him back from the dead but had actively stopped him from getting killed in other ways before shoving it away and calling himself a coward.
He really, really didn’t want to live forever.
After the whole fiasco with Mandy and The Saviour, he asked Jack to kiss him.
He didn’t know what he was hoping to get out of it. Maybe he thought that it would somehow revive his soul, not just his body. It didn’t.
Not even a week later, on the walk from the only available parking space back to his apartment after a particularly long night at the Hub, he crossed the street and was hit by a car.
He woke up on the pavement with the sky beginning to brighten above him.
At least it was a weekday, so there was no one around to know. Small mercies.
The next time Jack kissed him, he noted it in his diary. Then he noted the next time he died.
It wasn’t always mundane; in fact, it usually wasn’t. Weevil hunts were the most common cause, but he was invited to go out with the rest of the team on more dangerous missions more and more often. His relationship with Jack was purely professional outside of the flirting he did with everyone and the few shags they could get in between rift alerts. Their kisses were rough and fast, full of teeth and tongue, full of lust and empty of love. There was still a part of Ianto that hated him.
Then, something changed. Ianto wasn’t sure when the shift happened, but Jack started offering him softer kisses, longer kisses. Ianto found that he didn’t hate him anymore.
The pattern of his deaths changed.
Ianto had long since noticed that more traumatic deaths, ones that removed parts of his body (usually blood loss, but he got blown up once, and there was a memorable occasion where an alien artefact had stolen his bones that he wished wasn’t so memorable), took longer for him to wake up from. Now, with the variety in kisses, things changed even more.
Ianto made a spreadsheet.
When he had longer, more passionate kisses he came back faster. Same with simply more kisses closer to the time of death. Since the first time, with Lisa, Jack hadn’t actually been around to revive him, so Ianto couldn’t check and compare that. He wasn’t sure if every time he died reset the kiss count.
That is, until Jack disappeared.
When Jack revived after Abbadon and pulled Ianto into that firm, woefully short kiss, Ianto didn’t know it would be the last for a while. He would have cherished it more.
He didn’t stop going out with the team. It was almost morbid curiosity, for the first little while, but after three times he successfully revived, he knew he’d be safe for a while longer. He was suddenly extremely glad for the amount of kisses he’d shared with Jack; he didn’t want to die until Jack came back and he could punch that bastard in the face again.
He wondered if it was really so easy to die in Torchwood, or if the knowledge that he would come back had made him reckless. He wondered how many times Jack had died in the line of duty, and how many just because he wanted to.
As he went longer and longer without Jack’s healing kisses each revival became more and more painful.
Owen was the first of the team to find out. He was about to call the girls and declare Ianto dead when he suddenly revived right in front of him. Ianto was both extremely annoyed that it was his least favourite member of the team who knew, and extremely grateful, as a simple explanation of “Jack rubbed off on me” was enough to plant a mental picture in Owen’s mind that made him stop asking questions.
Ianto was down to two kisses when he stood in front of that blowfish, knowing that girl could die, his own life flashing before his eyes, when Jack made his miraculous return.
Ianto was mad, but more than that, he was scared. He was fully willing to forgive and forget and fall into bed with Jack again to recharge, but then John Hart came.
In that lift with a gun pointed at his face, Ianto almost wanted to make John shoot him. He could waste a kiss just for the satisfaction, the justification, the reaction Jack would have.
But there was no time. If the others really were dying, Ianto couldn’t waste any time on reviving, especially with how long it had been taking lately, with Jack’s kisses being further and further in the past.
Things did eventually return to normal, and Ianto was immensely happy to add another kiss to his spreadsheet. He had been too close to death, before. He wasn’t ready to die quite yet.
Ianto was incredibly lucky. The parting kiss Jack had bestowed upon him was passionate enough that he revived only a few seconds after being crushed by debris from the exploding Hub, and managed to get away before whoever blew up the Hub got there. He knew Jack would survive this. He had to.
Ianto’s diary had been lost in the blast, and with it went his spreadsheet. His memory wasn’t quite good enough to know how many kisses he had left as he was continuously shot down and run over and beat up. It gave him a slight edge, at least, when they weren’t sure if he was just getting lucky or if he could revive like Jack, but every death took longer and longer.
Even after they rescued Jack, there was no time for kisses while hiding from the rest of the world and with Jack constantly running off.
He entered Thames House with a confidence he didn’t feel, with a life he knew could be easily taken away.
As the virus began infecting him, he knew he had run out of kisses.
He confessed as a last resort. He knew Jack loved him, knew Jack knew Ianto loved him back. It was silently spoken in every one of their kisses, the life-force drawing Ianto back. He had hoped it would incentivise Jack to kiss him again. It didn’t.
Jack came back to life softly, as though the thing drawing him back had at least a shred of compassion, knowing he had suffered enough. His lungs didn’t feel like they were full of glass, but there was a terrible ache where his heart once was.
He rose, looked at Gwen beside him, and reached for her. She looked at him with wide, wet eyes, but her face was dry. Usually she cried so easily.
“Jack,” she said, urgent.
“It’s okay,” he replied, even though every part of him ached and moaned and cried No, it isn’t!
“Jack, look at him.”
He couldn’t. He didn’t want to. It was too painful.
“Jack, please!”
He looked.
Ianto’s face was soft, smoothed over, open in a way it never was, even in sleep. The ache inside him grew worse, but before he could look away Gwen spoke again.
“Look, he’s not pale!” She grabbed his hand and placed it on Ianto’s skin. Jack gasped.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, exactly, but considering alien viruses usually took longer to revive from and how much he didn’t actually want to come back, Ianto should have been pale and cold.
But he wasn’t.
He wasn’t alive, Human normal temperature, but he was certainly warmer than he should have been.
Jack moved closer, raising Ianto’s head to his lap as Ianto had done for him so many times before, cradling it as though it was the most precious thing in the world, which to him, it was.
He pressed his fingers against Ianto’s neck, checking for a pulse, and his chest convulsed as he held back a sob. But he wouldn’t give up yet. He couldn’t.
Ianto awoke with a gasp, drawing air into lungs that had too long been empty. He was warm, wrapped in arms he could recognise easily. A drop of water fell onto his face.
Ianto blinked, clearing his eyes from the fog of death, and looked up into Jack’s crying, smiling face.
“You’re alive,” Jack gasped through the tears.
“Kiss me again,” was all Ianto could say.
And Jack did, long and hard, putting everything he was into that kiss, all the love he never spoke aloud, all the passion he never tried to hide, all the longing, all the pain, and the sheer weight of relief almost crushed Ianto.
There was a golden glow behind his eyelids, and when they pulled apart for breath Ianto saw what it was.
Swirling around them like magic dust in the wind, like a slow hurricane, was Jack’s life force. Ianto could taste it every time they kissed, could feel it when they joined. This was the first time he could see it, and he knew he would never have to count kisses again.
When they walked out of the building, a woman in a large sun hat and coat gave him a wink from across the street.