Chapter Text
“Jack?” Ianto asked, voice cracking as he spoke. “Who’s dead?”
Jack sighed deeply and closed his eyes. Ianto had always been so smart. Almost too clever for his own good, he used to tease. He’d always known everything. Well, almost everything. There was just one thing left that he didn’t know. One tiny detail Jack was dreading to reveal.
“Who does he mean?” Ianto gestured to the spot where his father had stood only moments ago before fading back out of existence, just like a ghost. The words he had spoken still hung heavy in the air.
‘I can’t believe that you're going to let him die. Again.’
The ground trembled beneath their feet as an ominous rattling sound came from above. Jack knew what this meant. The Rift was about to open. He was running out of time.
He took a deep breath and tried to find the courage to admit to Ianto what he had done. He hadn’t meant it to end up like this, but just like everything else in his long life, it was bound to go wrong. Jack brought destruction and pain wherever he went and now he was going to bring that destruction and pain upon the one person he’d promised to never hurt again.
“The person I knew I’d find if I came here to the last night of The House of the Dead,” Jack said, looking up to meet the cold blue eyes that stared at him with confusion and the slightest hint of fear, “Ianto Jones.”
Ianto licked his lips, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, and shook his head. He still held the battered cardboard shoebox that Jack had thrown at him only a few minutes ago. His other hand was placed low on his hip as he furrowed his brow in confusion. “Jack? What?”
“Ianto… six months ago…” He trailed off with another sigh, looking around the deserted pub that shook with each tremor coming from the ground. Jack knew Ianto deserved the truth, but it was almost too terrible to admit even to himself, let alone the man who stood before him. Ianto was the man who could love monsters, yet Jack doubted he’d still love him after he confessed to his latest crime. “You died in my arms.”
He couldn’t even make himself look at Ianto, let alone keep eye contact with the man he’d longed so desperately to see once more as he spoke. It was too much. Ianto looked almost exactly the same as he had the last time Jack had seen him, dressed in the grey pinstripe suit with the blue and silver tie he had worn on the day that they’d walked into Thames House. The only differences were that the skin on his right cheek was smooth, undamaged as it had been before the Hub’s explosion, and his skin was no longer grey and sunken. He was still pale, just as he always had been, but his cheeks and lips were flushed with the soft pink colour of life.
There was nothing to suggest that six months prior, Jack had pressed one last kiss to those cold lips and walked away, never to return. There was nothing to suggest that the apparition in front of him was not Ianto Jones.
“You’re a ghost,” he admitted.
“No.” Ianto’s reply was swift and blunt.
Jack rushed to explain. “I came looking for you. I couldn’t resist it.”
But Ianto just stared at him, seemingly frozen in place by Jack’s confession. He ran his free hand through his perfectly styled hair then shifted slightly from foot to foot. “I’m dead?” he asked.
“You were here waiting for me when I walked in.”
A ghost of a smile tugged at Jack’s lips. Ianto had always been waiting for him since the beginning, often with a perfect cup of coffee in his hand and a smile. And today, he’d been waiting for him here, at ‘The House of the Dead’, scolding him for being late. It hadn’t apparently mattered to the dead man that the séance had barely begun. “Ianto Jones, never late.”
“But I feel…” Ianto trailed off, bringing his hand up, lost in thought as he stared at it. Jack longed to reach out and grab it, uncaring that he would be as cold as the dead but found himself unable to move and barely able to breathe. Ianto ran his hand through his hair again and rubbed the back of his neck and jaw, no doubt feeling the light scratch of late evening stubble as his thumb lingered on his pulse point. He licked his lips and brought his fingers to hover uncertainly in front of his mouth, letting out an unsteady breath. “Real,” he concluded.
Not only did he feel real, but he looked real too. There was no fuzziness around the edges of his silhouette, no slightly translucent skin, no ghostly trail of goo. He blushed when he was embarrassed, and his eyes watered when he was upset. But the few times Jack had touched him – once when he first walked in and pulled the younger man into a hug as soon as he saw him, again when Ianto tried to clear the blood from his forehead, and once more when he gathered the shaken man into his arms after he’d seen the ghost of his father for the first time – Ianto had always been ice cold, not that he seemed to notice it.
“I’m not a ghost,” Ianto said with conviction. “I had porridge for breakfast.”
Jack looked away from him again, shaking his head softly as he squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his lips together in a thin line. Jack had made porridge for them both, indulging on the chance to spend a lazy Sunday morning together at Ianto’s flat for once, the morning before the 456 had announced their imminent arrival through the children.
He knew he had to keep the tears at bay. Once he started, he doubted he’d be able to stop.
“Didn’t I?” Ianto asked himself. “Jack? I can’t remember!”
His voice was so broken, pleading, and slightly hysterical. Once, this tone alone coming from Ianto would have broken Jack’s heart, but it had already shattered beyond repair when he’d died.
Jack had just wanted to see him one last time.
“I didn’t think you’d be so real-” he said, opening his eyes again but not quite looking at him. “I had hoped for less.”
“Thanks,” he scoffed.
“No, you- you don’t understand! I thought it would just look like you,” he said, gesturing at Ianto, whose eyes widened in horror.
“It!”
“I could have coped with that. I didn’t dream that it would actually be you,” he hastily explained.
Jack had come knowing that a powerful psychic, an elderly woman called Evadne Wintergreen, was conducting a séance here tonight at the most haunted pub in Wales, aptly known as ‘The House of the Dead’, in honour of its closing after six hundred years of service. He didn’t believe in ghosts, not in the traditional sense of them being lost souls still trapped on Earth. Jack knew better than that. But that didn’t mean that he believed that the frequent apparitions that appeared at the pub were a work of fiction either.
The old pub had been built on ley lines and inside an old stone circle, and along with its residual haunting of the same motions being performed time and time again within its walls, the barrier between the worlds had thinned. Shadows from the past were bound to appear. Normally, this didn’t cause any problems, so long as time didn’t bleed over as it had at the Ritz Dance Hall in Cardiff a couple of years ago.
But what very few people realised was that the pub had also been built over a crack in the Rift. He didn’t know how long it had been here – Torchwood had monitored the Rift for over a hundred years and learnt its influence was only about five or so miles, not the thirty-odd miles out here to Abergavenny.
And Jack had recently learnt of another being trapped within the Rift.
It was an entity known as Syriath, a creature from the Dark Times. She was from the oldest universe of them all, a place that existed before Time itself. And tonight, everything had aligned and Syriath was reaching out, using Mrs Wintergreen as a bridge between the worlds, bending time to create ghosts to lure people in so she could feed. If Syriath grew strong enough tonight, she would be able to open the Rift completely and destroy the Earth before moving on to everything else in this Universe. He had to stop that. He couldn’t allow her to escape.
He could have alerted UNIT, but he hadn’t. The chance to see Ianto one last time had lured him back.
“Syriath used my grief and she reached into Time. She recreated you, Ianto, and-”
Oh god. What had he done? This wasn’t Ianto. Ianto was dead. He was never coming back. Stood in front of him now was an echo of the man who loved him, made entirely of Jack’s overwhelming grief and sorrow. He was born of a thousand apologies that came too late and one last confession he’d denied when he’d finally had the chance to say it. He was every dark thought and every nightmare that had haunted him across the globe for the past six months. But he was also made of happiness and laughter and eye-rolls and smirks. He was the adventurous night and the quiet moment before the dawn. He was the stolen kisses, the secret smiles, and the thinly veiled innuendo. He was the safety and acceptance that Jack longed for and the stomach-churning guilt that could never be abated.
Every memory of Ianto rose to the surface of his mind. The man stood in front of him was not Ianto Jones, but he was so much more than just an echo, more than another memory, yet he was nevertheless so much less than his Ianto had been.
Ianto Jones lay six feet under the ground. He was not standing six feet away from him.
Jack shivered and turned away from the imposter, running a hand through his tousled hair, and groaned. “Oh, I can’t bear to look at you.”
“You can’t?!”
From the corner of his eye he saw, the echo step back.
“Jack?”
And there was that tone again. It encased the shards of his heart and dragged them down to the deep pit of his stomach. It may not have been Ianto, but it still was Ianto. It looked like him, sounded like him, and thought like him. And Jack was making Ianto hate him all over again.
He quickly turned back to him, automatically reaching out to pull him into his arms once more. “Sorry, Ianto, I-I’m sorry-”
But Ianto backed away. “Don’t touch me!” he cried, stumbling over a broken chair that lay on the floor. He sounded as if he were on the edge of tears. “Don’t.”
“Okay,” he whispered brokenly. He forced his hands inside the pockets of his greatcoat and reluctantly took a step backwards.
“S-so,” Ianto said, seemingly trying to compose himself as he straightened his tie. “How did I die?”
“It was all over so quickly…”
“Not an answer!” he hissed, pure venom in his voice.
Jack said nothing, instead staring at his boots.
“Was it your fault?” Ianto asked after a moment of silence. There was no trace of hatred in his voice anymore, just cold, calm disappointment. And Jack knew he deserved it.
Yet still, he couldn’t bring himself to answer truthfully, to admit the answer to Ianto’s question even to himself. How could he ever live with himself if he ever admitted that it had been him who’d led Ianto by the hand to his death?
It didn’t matter that Ianto already knew what he’d done, dragging him back to life. Jack couldn’t answer that question. So instead, he did what he always did when he was asked a question he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. He told a different truth. “You were one of the first victims of an alien plague.” A choked nervous laugh forced its way out of his throat as he looked up at him. “You were so brave. You died saving the world.”
“Well, you’d think I’d remember that,” Ianto said bitterly. He rolled his eyes as he spoke, and Jack looked back at his shoes. But his next words were interrupted by a broken sob. “But I… don’t.”
Jack wished that he could forget that moment too, the moment when Ianto had died in his arms. But he knew he never would, not even in a thousand years. He saw Ianto’s last moments every time he closed his eyes and heard his last breath on every soft gust of wind that whispered in his ear. He’d promised him that he wouldn’t forget him. He couldn’t forget him, not a single second of their time together, even those most painful parts. He’d held on to those memories of Ianto for millennia already during those long centuries he’d been buried under Cardiff. A thousand years would be easy in comparison. Ianto had never asked much of him, but Jack would hold him in his heart for the rest of eternity, even if he hadn’t shown it whilst he still could.