Chapter Text
"Don't leave me. Please…"
Ianto Jones lurched upright as light stabbed his retinas. He must have been screaming, too, because someone was at his side making shushing noises. But he had no desire to be calmed; his eyes fucking hurt. His whole body hurt—muscles clenching, intestines twisting, bone grating against bone—but that was nothing compared to his eyes. They burned like they were floating in acid, acid that was dripping down into his lungs and pooled around his skin, and...
"Wha?" The half-formed word scraped from his throat as his vision cleared. He was in some sort of cocoon. It was leathery and scaled, like a giant snake had swallowed everything except his head.
Swallowed.
Digested.
Absolute panic set in, and he began to thrash against the snake, wishing he could feel his fingers well enough to claw his way out, but even as the thought of fingers went through his mind, other fingers were coming down on the snakeskin: lavender fingers with nails like stained bone, gently rising up and down, up and down.
Patting.
He heard the shushing noise again and realised that it was coming from the owner of the lavender fingers. He rallied every bit of self control he had to hold still long enough to see who was trying to soothe him. Oversized head with rough, scaly skin. Small mouth set beneath limpid, muddy eyes. Only the inner eyelids blinked, and the being nodded slowly, head moving in time with the patting motion of its hands. The shushing sound continued, and though his ears could make no sense of it, he understood it all the same. It, no, she—for some inexplicable reason, he was sure the being was a she—showed him a gunmetal grey stick.
"This will help until the doctor gets here," she said, then waved the instrument over his head. The pain began to ebb.
If they were waiting on a doctor, then she must be a nurse, and this must be a hospital. That was the only thing that made any kind of sense. The room was shaped like a wedge instead of a square. Light was cast by fixtures mounted halfway up the roughly textured walls. The colour reminded him of sodium lights, the kind used in hospital parking lots, not inside the hospital proper.
"Where am I?" His first proper words were a cliché, but had to give himself points for honesty.
"'How am I?' is the more important question." He jumped again, whipping his head in the direction of this new voice. The room swam around him, and he tried to cover his mouth to hold back the sick, but his arms wouldn't move. He looked down, saw that snake thing again, and panic crushed his chest. His heart pounded, lungs burning until he saw purple spots in the purple room.
"Breathe!" the new voice commanded, closer now. "Breathe, Ianto Jones, and that's an order!"
Despite an overwhelming urge to carry on freaking the fuck out, Ianto obeyed, forcing several deep breaths through his nose. Longer, slower, until the nausea receded, and he felt confident enough to turn his head again. The second voice belonged to a human female wearing a sleek black bodysuit with hair to match.
"I know it's creepy, but you're in a bioengineered medical cocoon. I promise, nothing's eating you." Her laugh seemed familiar, but not enough that he could put a name to the face. "You don't remember me, do you?"
Ianto shook his head, then made the mistake of trying to swallow. His mouth was so dry that it was impossible, and his throat clenched, cutting off his air supply. Before he could even try to indicate the problem, the nurse was there, waving the stick again. For a second, it felt like his salivary glands had gone into overdrive, then his mouth began sponging up spit as fast as the glands could produce it. He swallowed again, this time with perfect success. On the heels of a sigh of relief, he said, "I'm guessing I should?"
"We were hoping the treatment might do more than restart your central nervous system. Guess your memory wipe wasn't as primitive as they thought."
The woman in black nodded at the nurse, who nodded back, reaching for another object from a nearby tray. This wasn't an innocent looking metal stick. This was a syringe as thick as his thumb, with a needle as long as his hand. Though he'd think himself insane for it later, he was already working up a cocky little statement about where she was going to stick it when he realised exactly where it was going. Something cold and metallic clamped down on his head, immobilizing it, and those bony fingernails hooked under his nostrils, stretching his nares wide. It happened so quickly that he'd only just started to struggle by the time she pressed the plunger. A terrifying amount of clear liquid disappeared into his head before she removed the needle, then... nothing. Confused, he looked between the two women, opened his mouth, took a breath, then went rigid as his brain began to boil. Memories trooped back to their rightful places, stomping through his neurons like a war film on fast forward.
Joseph Dunning, his first Torchwood field instructor, telling him that he would wake up thinking he'd fallen asleep at his desk.
Yvonne Hartman scolding him for having wandered into the room with the bronze Void Sphere looming at the back.
Rhys inviting him out for pint.
Captain Hart sauntering in.
A woman. Beatrice? No. Mairwyn.
A crablike mask that had shown him the future. Confusion, anger, then a moment of perfect clarity.
Adam. Fucking Adam. Jack refusing to believe the lies that thing had planted.
Remember...
Ianto clutched his skull, desperate to keep his brain from jumping out. "Retcon," he said through gritted teeth. "Oh, God, I chose to die!"
"No," the woman replied. Her hip settled against the side of the hard table that was supporting him. "You chose to save the world."
"I love you."
"Don't."
"Thames House."
"Very good."
Ianto dropped his hands, startled for a second that they were free. The cocoon had been peeled down to his waist, drooping on the table like an abused wet suit. Warily, he reached out, touching the skin. It was the same temperature as his body, neither warm nor cool. What he'd first reckoned as scales was actually a close-set network of thin tubes that merged into larger ones at the foot of the cocoon. Those tubes ran into ports in the wall, and a screen of sorts was a few inches above them, though the screen was black. It was entirely possible that the beings that ran this hospital had vision that operated on a different wavelength than humans, but he had a feeling that it was turned off. Some of the pain had been replaced with a sense of bone-deep exhaustion. Restoring his memories had clearly taken more than just the few seconds it'd felt like on his end.
He blinked, and the facts assembled themselves into some kind of order. "The 456's virus didn't kill me."
"It most certainly did," Mairwyn replied.
"I'm not dead."
"Not now, no."
"Are we playing 20 Questions?"
She laughed. For reasons he couldn't put a name to, he considered shrinking away, but he barely had the energy to hold himself upright, let alone cower. He reached up to touch his nose, or at least he tried. His arm made it halfway before flopping onto his lap, boneless. A lavender hand wrapped gently around his and lifted until he was able to finish the job.
Nose still present. Check.
At the other end of his arm, the nurse was gazing at him, inner eyelids nictating slowly. She murmured something, more words that didn't sound like words but which definitely meant he needed to rest. Then she nudged his arm against his chest, and he realised she wanted him to lay down. He followed without question, her other arm supporting his back as she guided him flat. Quickly and efficiently, she lifted his hips, removing the cocoon like it was nothing more complicated than a nappy.
Ianto closed his eyes, sighing with something like relief.
When he opened them again, more time had passed. He was in the same room, but the light was different, dimmer and cooler, and he'd been given a pillow of sorts. It was hard enough to be wood, but it was at least soft on the surface and propped his head up at a decent angle. No blanket though.
Mairwyn, now sitting on a stool next to his table, didn't seem to be fazed by the interruption in their conversation. "After Captain Jerk Headcase abandoned your body in the morgue, I saved you. You're back just in time for your funeral. It's Thursday morning at nine. We can probably still get seats."
Ianto tried to sit up, but after three failed attempts, no sign of a nurse, and no help from Mairwyn, he gave it up for a lost cause. "And at what time can I expect this to start making sense?"
"You're on a ship in geostationary orbit of the far side of your moon." She spread her arms like a game show presenter before adding, "I brought your body here to be cured. The virus you were exposed to is deadly in some sectors but has already been rendered harmless in others. A bit like influenza."
"And the part about me being dead?"
"You were dead as far as current Earth technology is concerned, but your brain hadn't started to autolyse. Well, at least not any of the critical bits. This species had technology that could revive you." She nodded toward the blank display.
"Why do that?" He didn't bother reminding her that the last time they'd seen each other, he'd left her lying in a pool of her own blood. That wasn't the sort of thing a person forgot.
"You died to save the world. It's time for the world to pay you back."
"And what's in it for you?"
Mairwyn was just starting to answer him when a nurse appeared. It was a new nurse, same lavender skin but with a different scale pattern and a smaller head. It nodded to Mairwyn, who took a few steps back while the nurse took Ianto's wrist between two sets of fingers. He almost smiled: centuries of advanced technology, but they still took a pulse by feel.
The nurse shook its head then said in deep, brilliantly clear English, "The heart is weak. It will need more treatment." Oddly enough, the diagnosis was unsettling when not spoken in that susurrant language.
"Oh, we can't have that, now can we, Ianto?" Mairwyn said, her voice sing-songy like she was talking to a child. She gestured at the nurse, who unfortunately, did not reach for the magic wand. Instead, the clamps came out again. Terror paralysed Ianto from head to toe; the only thing missing was metal body armour.
"If you check my pulse again," he said, struggling to sound calm, "you'll find my heart is beating rather more strongly now."
Mairwyn stalked back to his side, rattling the table as she knocked against it. "I have an investment in you, and I'm not taking any chances." The nurse leaned in, this syringe filled with something blue and murky. "And I can't get Torchwood One codes from you if you're dead."
* * * *
It seemed like every time Ianto blinked, an invisible God yanked time forward like a child's toy on a string. When next he opened his eyes, the alien hospital room was almost totally dark, and the lack of light amplified the sounds of the ship. A deep pulsing thrummed in his ears, like it had a heart, beating slow and steady.
Oh, no, wait. That was him.
"Guess they had a point."
The words creaked out of his throat, raw and dusty sounding. Moving as carefully as he could, he rolled off his side. As soon as his ear was no longer smashed against the pathetic excuse for a pillow, the thrumming stopped. The room was blanketed in silence, not even the sound of someone else breathing.
He squinted around the space, eyes a bit sluggish at focusing, but even if all he could make out was shapes, it was a pretty safe bet he was the only living thing in the room.
Slowly, Ianto pushed himself upright. He didn't get dizzy this time, but he almost wished he had. In the back of his throat, the muscles were straining like something was trying to crawl up from his stomach. Judging by the way his stomach felt, that was the rest of his digestive tract. Vomiting was probably exactly what his body needed. If the 456 were any representation of the virus they'd shared with him, it would be voluminous. His bladder had opinions on the subject of volume, as well.
At least the room was warm, because he'd still not been given clothing or a blanket. On the bright side, that meant he didn't have to negotiate his way out of anything to find the loo; the process of getting off the table was difficult enough on its own. Pins and needles in every muscle made more uncomfortable by the fact that the floor felt rough underfoot, like raw travertine.
He made two circuits of the oddly shaped room before coming to the conclusion that he was in trouble. The only door was locked—or, at least unable to be opened in any way he could understand. Didn't these aliens have to piss?
Returning to his table, Ianto examined anything in reach. What would their "call nurse" button look like? Nothing lavender, though, at least not in this light. Then again, the Earth buttons weren't flesh coloured; they were red.
"But mauve is the universal colour for emergencies," he reminded himself, then sagged in defeat. In this light, mauve and lavender were going to look more or less the same, which was to say, there wasn't anything of either colour nearby.
Because he wasn't dumb enough to start pressing buttons at random, he limped his way back to the door and knocked. It was a feeble attempt, owing either to his weakness or the door's construction, but it made enough noise that someone should have been able to hear it. Yet minutes passed, and no one responded. His legs were trembling from the exertion, and he considered sitting down so he could keep knocking, but he didn't want to take the chance that he'd not be able to get back up. He was pretty sure he'd piss himself in the process.
His forehead beaded with sweat while he looked around for something, anything, he could use to relieve himself. There was nothing. No basin for hand-washing. Not even a bottle, bin, or bowl. Finally, his eyes landed on the pillow. Despite clumsy fingers, the cover came off easily enough. He was just about to express his opinion of their idea of patient comfort when the door whooshed open, another bony purple nurse rushing in. Clearly, it knew what was going on, because it took the pillow cover from his hands and replaced it with what looked like an aubergine with a hole in the small end, gesturing towards Ianto's crotch. Desperate enough to try anything, he took it on faith that he wasn't about to violate a vegetable. He'd have plenty of time to feel weird about it later.
Later.
There would be a later. He'd died, but he wasn't dead. He had a future. Amazing what the brain chose to focus on when it got past the basic human necessities.
"Apologies," the nurse said. Another one with a deep voice that spoke English. Possibly even the same one from earlier, it was hard to say. It wasn't so much that they all looked alike, just that he'd never been given enough time to identify unique features before a giant needle was being shoved up his sinuses. For the time being, he was going to assume it was the same nurse, and that the deeper voice meant a male. It wasn't foolproof, but he needed to make sense out of something.
Letting out a huge sigh of relief as he finished, Ianto tried for a little shake, but found the vessel wasn't really designed for that. Figuring it was universally impolite to drip on the floor, he supposed he'd have to catch anything on the lip. So it was a bit unsettling, and he most certainly did not shriek, when, as he pulled out, the opening seemed to shrink around the tip and, well... They could corner the sex toy market if one of those things ever made it to Earth.
The nurse made a sound that may have been a chuckle, if it didn't sound quite so alien. "Sensor," he said, depositing it on an empty tray. "Please to down."
Ianto reared back, a hand raised in protest. "No more needles!"
The nurse shook his head. "No. No more. Examination only. You are much health. More health."
Slowly, Ianto settled against the hard pillow, a wary eye tuned to the nurse's every move. "Is English used off Earth, or do you have a translator?"
The nurse pointed to a device around his neck. Ianto hadn't noticed it before, too distracted by the body sporting it, but now he examined it while the alien began to palpate his chest. The device looked a bit like a titanium choker-style necklace. A small box to one side had a threadlike series of appendages that disappeared into the skin folds at the base of the skull. As the nurse made familiar grunts and hums, checking Ianto's glands and reflexes, a light on the box blinked on and off.
Other than the totally naked thing, this part of the experience wasn't any different from what he was used to with the NHS: awkward and impersonal. Which was why, as the nurse cupped one of his testicles, Ianto asked, "Should I cough?"
"Do you have problem with throat?" The nurse paused, wholly unconcerned by the location of his hand.
Ianto bit his lips, shaking his head once. "So, uh, how does your translator work?"
The nurse pointed to the light on the collar. "Circulation very good." He touched beside it, and the light went out. He spoke again, but this time it was that odd susurrant noise. Ianto reached out, pausing for permission, and the alien nodded. With the barest touch, the sibilance became English.
"Elimination function at expected level."
Ianto was sure the words were followed by a smile, but it was hard to tell with a face so unlike those he was accustomed to. Still, he smiled back.
Turning away, the nurse waved his hands under a fixture that glowed as he did so, probably some type of sanitiser, then tapped the wall next to the video display. It hummed to life, full of the usual incomprehensible glyphs common to all alien languages Ianto had seen.
"So, when can I leave?" Ianto asked as his chart was being updated.
Without looking back, he replied, "Time Agent will return one quarter lunar rotation. Rest now."
"Time Agent?"
"Female of Sol 3. Designation Mairwyn."
Ianto sat back up, draping his arms over his knees. "She's not a Time Agent."
The nurse froze at the touch screen. "Not?"
"No. That Vortex Manipulator is stolen."
"But order was proper." He pushed a seemingly random pattern of buttons, and something displayed on the screen. "Yes. Order proper."
A half dozen possibilities flickered through Ianto's mind, all of which lead to him being either a prisoner or an experiment. "What does the order say?"
"Treatment request. Shadow Proclamation forbid all interaction with being of Level 5 planet. Only order from Time Agency make legal."
He exhaled in relief. "Then I'm here illegally. I would like to leave on my own, not with Mairwyn."
The nurse stiffened as he turned away from the medical console to meet his patient's gaze. "Without legal order, patient violation of Shadow Proclamation, treatment must be made gone."
The translation may have been shitty, but the meaning was pretty damned clear. Ianto had exactly one option: go with the slightly psychotic thief who he'd shagged then stabbed. Well, he'd had worse days... "You know, maybe I'm confusing her with someone else. My memories are still jumbled."
"Is possible. Time needed to restore full body and brain function. Many cycle of Sol 3."
"Right. Many cycle." They shared an excessively enthusiastic nod. Apparently, lying to evade bureaucratic nonsense was another universal constant.
"Time Agent designation Mairwyn will return. Rest now."
"I'm on a spaceship orbiting my planet's moon, having just learned I was brought back from the dead. A nap was exactly what I had in mind," Ianto replied.
"This is good," the nurse said, bustling out of the room.
Sarcasm? Not a universal constant. "Could I get a—" But the door closed before he could say 'blanket.'
Sighing, he leaned forward, pulling his legs up to his chest more out of latent modesty than any dire need to conserve heat. He threaded his fingers into his hair and grimaced. It was disgustingly oily, and that was unsettling. He had no idea how long he'd been on the ship. What day was it? What had happened to Jack? Gwen? The children? Had the 456 won? Had his death accomplished anything?
First thing he was going to do when he got back to Earth was ditch Mairwyn and find a phone. Jack could tell him everything he needed to know. Jack would be able to—
"I love you."
"Don't."
"Huh." Pain sparked in his prefrontal cortex, and he froze until he was sure it had passed. A side effect of the needles, perhaps, or maybe something healing. He resigned himself to it happening again.
With a sigh, he returned to his previous train of thought. He didn't need a time-travelling dominatrix to tell him that his relationship with Jack was over. If it was ever a relationship at all. He'd truly believed that they had something, no matter how vaguely defined that something had been. But as he lay there dying, confessing his love with what he assumed was his last breath, all Jack could say was, "Don't."
"What does that mean?" Ianto asked the empty room. "Don't? Don't do the 'last words' thing? Don't finally say it out loud when you're dying? Don't love me because I'm not worth it, or worthy of it, or because I don't love you back? What?"
He groaned, dropping his forehead to his knees. "Would it have killed you to just say it anyhow?" Then he laughed bitterly. "Yes, fine, but you were going to get up again, and I wasn't!" The shout echoed in the room, the lack of soft furnishings making it embarrassingly loud. He inhaled deeply, then let it out, long and slow, until he'd calmed down. It was not a good time to be getting emotional.
But Jack's answer was a fair reason to be angry, wasn't it? Ianto had accepted Jack's unconventional view of relationships. It wasn't as if he himself was particularly in step with the times, either. And the thing with Gwen, well, that was uncomfortable, but it wasn't going to progress. For all his talk of a free love future, Jack wasn't a homewrecker. And Gwen was smarter than the hero worship; she knew she had something irreplaceable in Rhys. So Ianto'd ignored the flirtation because whatever Jack had been giving, he'd been the one actually getting it.
Or had he?
God, the doubt hurt. It hurt because he'd known better from the start. But he'd let kisses and dates and quiet moments in the Hub trick him into doing the one thing no Torchwood employee should ever do: hope for a future. The only thing Jack could commit to was Jack. Even Torchwood was just a passing fling when put into the context of that impossibly long life.
So it was time to face facts. He was dead, officially speaking. Not that death had stopped Owen, but this was different. Ianto Jones had a funeral coming up. As far as the world was concerned, he'd died. Except he wasn't actually dead, and that didn't match up with the future Mairwyn had shown him. Unless she'd tactically omitted that part, but what did she have to gain from lying to him about his death? She'd have improved the odds of him helping her if she'd shown him a future where she saved him from his own mistakes.
No, she had to have meddled with the time stream, which meant, in the quaint patois of temporal mechanics, he was fucked. He flopped back onto the uncomfortable pillow, scowling at the ceiling. Maybe a nap was a good idea after all. He needed his wits about him if he was ever going to get out of this.
***
The next time Ianto opened his eyes, the room was definitely of human design. When he stopped cursing another span of missing time, he realised he wasn't just back on Earth, but in a bed at the St. David's: hotel of choice for the rich, trendy, temporally-displaced, and impossibly alive. He rustled his arms and legs, pleased to confirm they weren't restrained, then he sat up carefully, expecting the aches and nausea to still be there. Instead, he felt hungover. 'Please-destroy-the-pictures' hungover, but nothing worse.
Whoever’d brought him to the hotel had been decent enough to hang up his suit. It looked like it had been cleaned and pressed, which was a generous touch. After two years of resolving Jack's post-mortem wardrobe issues, Ianto had all too good an idea what that job could have been like.
Someone had paid a lot of attention to detail. Usually, that would indicate that person cared. Which was why it was such a let-down to see Mairwyn in the adjoining room. She was stretched out, long and lean in her body-hugging jumpsuit, a panther on a white leather Knoll sofa.
"Good morning!" she said, waving her gun at him before tossing it onto the tufted ottoman. "Sleep well?"
He untucked his hands from the curiously furry duvet and scrubbed his eyes free of sleep. It felt exquisite. Right up there with the most pleasurable sensations of his adult life, maybe even better than his first successful wank. Sad that he had to ruin it by asking a question guaranteed to have a disappointing answer, "Has my flat been emptied?"
Mairwyn struck an exaggerated pout. "All work and no play makes Ianto Jones a dull boy! Oh, wait, you are dull. If you'd been half interesting, we'd have already got the Shroud, but no, you had to go being--"
"My flat?"
She directed her reply out the windows wrapping her half of the suite, in what he assumed was the general direction of his flat. His own draperies were pulled, sparing his eyes at the same time it denied him orienting landmarks. "It's still being combed over by the government. Now that the 456 have been dealt with, they're trying to decide if you should be a martyr or a scapegoat."
He sucked in a breath. "The children?"
"Safe." He exhaled as the knot in his stomach failed to take hold. "Everyone you care about is safe. Even him," she added with an exaggerated yawn.
Ianto nodded once, so absurdly grateful for the news that his eyes started welling up. He rubbed at his face again, covering his tracks. "So, other than the clothes I died in, I have nothing." For all his careful planning, that was one eventuality he ought to have considered.
Mairwyn slid off the sofa and disappeared. A moment later, she came into the bedroom, lobbing a credit card onto the duvet. "An investment in the success of our arrangement." The light from the sitting room silhouetted her as she posed between the French doors.
"Do you trust all your prisoners with your credit card, or am I special?"
"While it would be so much fun if you tried to use this to escape, I'm feeling a little impatient. I implanted a tracker." She pressed a button on her Vortex Manipulator, and pain flared in his neck like a bee sting. He smacked the spot instinctively then collected himself, focusing on the heat radiating from just beneath his left ear. Prodding the area with his index finger, he felt nothing but smooth skin. "If you try to cut it out yourself, you'll sever the jugular. I'd call it ironic if you managed to bleed out after being resurrected, but you'd probably figure out how to come back from the dead to correct my word choice."
"And if I say I'd rather die than help you?"
"I will keep going back in time until I find out what or who will change your mind."
It dawned on him then, so obvious he wondered how he’d not realised it when she'd first approached him. "You've tried to get the Shroud on your own, but you can't."
"Now look who’s the smartest weevil in the sewer!" She shrugged away from the doors and crawled onto the foot of the bed. "You know damned well that the only thing capable of porting into that section of the archives is a Dalek." She began walking the fingers of her left hand across the shaggy surface of the duvet. Ianto couldn't help but stare. Not at her hand, but at the fabric. It was just too odd, almost alien, and it made him think of the cocoon despite being obviously synthetic. While he appreciated modern décor, some of the choices eluded him. And, really, this wasn't the best time to be contemplating interior design. Mairwyn was still talking, unaware of his roaming thoughts, "Even if I could just beam myself in, I couldn't get into the box that’s holding it without..." She flicked her thumb and forefinger between his eyebrows. "…that..." Another flick. "...code."
Had she been this annoying before? Or had he been thinking with the wrong head? Probably a little of both. She was certainly being contradictory, booking him into one of the nicest suites available while holding him prisoner. Was that desperation or confidence? Ianto snatched her hand, jerking hard enough to unbalance her. "I’m still not finding your argument very convincing."
Mairwyn roared with laughter as she jerked herself free. With both arms, she drove him onto to the pillows, holding him there as she straddled his chest. "Just because I need you doesn't mean I won't kill you. Yes, I want the Shroud, but not enough to play games with one of Captain Jack's long line of dead fuckbuddies."
"Basic black," he replied, and she reared her head back, confused. "It's what the most fashionable burglars are wearing this season, isn’t it?"
She laughed again, calmer this time, and climbed off him with more elbow and knee than strictly necessary. He didn't give her the pleasure of a wince, just waited until she'd left the room before climbing out of the bed.
It wouldn’t be all that difficult to get to the Shroud from Torchwood One. He’d been assigned to study the device, after all. The problem was getting out of the building once he had it. But if Mairwyn could handle the time travel, Ianto could handle the extraction. Better yet, he'd have access to One's perfectly organised archives. It was almost poetic, really: the place had nearly killed him, now it would help him live. After all, Mairwyn had been annoying and persistent, but she'd only threatened to kill him; she hadn't actually made good. The people who had succeeded were none too pleased when their victims were so impolitic as to refuse to stay that way.
Like Jack.
Ianto stumbled, nearly tipping the potted orchid off the glass table in the corner. His stomach knotted up, and he did his best to breathe through it. It let up quickly enough, but another ache lingered, one Ianto knew wasn't going to go away for a very long time. There was nothing he could do about it, though. He had to keep moving forward, and the first thing on his agenda was a bath. His hair was still greasy, and his entire body reeked of old death and fresh sweat. Not a good combination.
Ten minutes later, as he emerged from the steamy bath, Mairwyn was waiting on the bed, leg bobbing impatiently. He met her eyes, but she said nothing, so he went on with his routine, doing his best to ignore the fact that she was watching him as he dried himself and dressed. No doubt it was some sort of mind game, and if she wanted to believe she was winning, he had no problem giving her the illusion.
At that moment, the only thing that was really bothering him was the loss of his suit jacket. He still had every piece of the ensemble, right down to the cuff-links, but not the jacket. And it had fit rather well for something off the rack. No doubt it was still in that abandoned warehouse in London. London... He turned to Mairwyn's reflection in the mirror he'd been using to dress.
"Why did you bring me back to Cardiff?"
"I thought you would appreciate something familiar," she said, not even pretending to be telling the truth. "But don't get too cosy. Decisions have been made based on your death. Critical paths are now set. If they realise you're still alive, it could jeopardise the planet's future."
He shrugged, twisting the second cuff-link into place. "All the more reason to keep me away from here."
She sighed impatiently. "It’s a calculated risk based on factors too complicated for your primitive ape brain to comprehend."
It was his turn to sigh. He gave his tie a final nudge into place then crossed his arms over his chest. "Why does my life make such a difference?"
"Captain Jack Harkness. He's a fact. A fixed point in time and space."
He couldn't avoid a shudder, so he tried to hide it by rifling the table for the rest of his things.
"You've heard that before?" she asked, and he nodded curtly, starting in on the desk drawers. "Your watch and wallet were given to your family with the rest of your effects."
Rhiannon. Could he at least see his sister?
No. Not because of timelines, but because she'd insist on giving back the money he'd willed her. She needed it more than he did.
What he really needed at the moment was shoes. He strode to the cupboard and grabbed his dress boots. The toe of the right one was scuffed; they hadn't been polished. So Mairwyn was attentive to details, but not to all of them. He unzipped the left boot and slipped his toes down the neck. "You were explaining the temporal significance of my continued existence?"
"Once your death no longer affects how the dear captain makes his decisions, your little paradox problem goes poof." She made a fizzling noise, and he looked up just in time to see her tracing a cloud in the air.
"I doubt I had much influence on his decisions before I died, let alone now." The bitter words came with surprising ease.
"Then you're one step closer. But until then—"
"Right. No contact." Ianto pasted on a fake smile. "Good thing I used to work for a secret organisation."