Chapter Text
Ianto Jones had long since learned to trust his gut. It wasn't a particularly scientific method of investigation but it had, despite all odds, kept him alive this long.
And right now, his gut was telling him that something was off.
He walked the corridors of the Royal Hope Hospital with purpose, blending seamlessly with the steady flow of patients, nurses, and doctors going about their business. He was dressed down for the day in dark jeans, a fitted t-shirt, and a light jacket to hide his gun holster. If anyone looked at him, they'd see just another visitor, maybe a worried boyfriend waiting for news or a relative come with well wishes. Nothing remarkable. That was the point.
Officially, this was reconnaissance. Unofficially? He had no bloody clue what he was looking for.
So far, everything looked normal. Patients waited in chairs, doctors bustled past in white coats, nurses checked charts. A perfectly ordinary London hospital on a perfectly ordinary day. But Ianto knew better than to trust appearances.
The reports had been vague, too vague for his liking. Strange weather patterns, inconsistent energy readings, atmospheric shifts that shouldn't have been happening. The kind of thing T1 would have handled once upon a time. But Torchwood London was gone. Burned, buried, wiped from existence in a storm of steel and screams.
He didn't think about it. He focused on the work instead.
A static shock zapped his fingers as he pressed the call button for the lift. Ianto frowned, shaking his hand out. Just a random jolt of static, surely. And yet…
Bad omen.
He clenched his jaw, irritated with himself. You don't believe in omens.
The lift arrived with a chime, and he stepped inside.
His cover was simple, a friend visiting a patient, poking around with casual curiosity. It was easy to blend in at Royal Hope, just another face in the sea of worried visitors and exhausted nurses.
The doors slid open on the fourth floor and no one paid him any mind as he stepped out, keeping his movements slow and casual. He walked with purpose, glancing at the signs as he passed, Patient Records, Radiology, Staff Lounge- and veered left, towards the cluster of offices just past reception.
A quick check over his shoulder. No eyes on him.
He slipped into the nearest office.
It was a cramped space, cluttered with leaning stacks of paperwork and the faint scent of subpar coffee lingered in the air. He shut the door with a careful click, moving toward the desk. A few open files lay scattered, pages half sliding out of their folders. He skimmed them. Normal. Normal. Boring.
His gaze drifted to the window as he registered movement from the corner of his eye.
For a second, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. He stepped closer, drawn in, one hand bracing automatically on the windowsill.
The rain.
It was… It was going up.
Ianto blinked hard, leaning closer until his forehead nearly touched the glass. Sheets of rain weren't falling, they were lifting. Streams of silver threading upward like someone had reversed the footage of a storm. Droplets slid past his own reflection, climbing toward the clouds in neat, impossible lines.
"Oh, shit," he muttered.
And then the world lurched beneath his feet.
A deep, violent shudder ran through the building, a gut-level jolt that knocked him sideways. His grip on the windowsill slipped, and he caught himself against the desk as the lights flickered overhead. His ears popped sharply, a sudden shift in pressure that made the room feel like it was imploding.
The floor lurched again, worse this time, and then just as suddenly, it stopped.
And then, stillness.
The tremors faded, leaving a hollow quiet in their wake. Ianto pushed himself upright, steadying his breath, and turned back toward the window.
He swore again, quieter this time.
No more London skyline. No more dreary grey clouds hanging low over the Thames. No more anything.
The Earth was gone.
The sky beyond the glass was black, vast and star-salted. And below, where the city should have been, stretched grey rock, craters, and a whole lot of endless nothing.
He was on the bloody moon.
Ianto let out a sharp, shaky breath and dragged a hand down his face, palm cold and clammy against his skin. He didn't get paid enough for this.
But there was no time to panic. He forced himself to move, to think in tidy, containable steps.
The oxygen was still holding. That was priority one. He checked the windows as he made his way down the corridor, pressing his palm flat against the glass. They weren't airtight, obviously, which meant something was keeping the atmosphere in.
Maybe a forcefield or some sort of shielding, whatever it was, it meant they weren't suffocating yet. Small mercies.
One problem at a time.
He turned a corner, spotting the entrance to the Patients' Lounge. Beyond the glass doors, he could see two figures stood out on the balcony, framed against the impossible sky.
Ianto hesitated, then quietly pushed through the doors, every muscle tight as wire as he waited for any sign that their air bubble was about to pop and suck him out into the vacuum of space. So far, he was safe.
The first thing he heard was the woman speaking, her voice carrying lightly across the open air.
"We've got air. How does that work?"
"Just be glad it does," the man beside her replied.
A hot, sharp sting flickered up Ianto's spine. That voice. He knew that voice.
But he'd barely had time to place it before the woman turned slightly, just enough for her face to catch the light.
Ianto's body went cold.
His heart stopped, actually stopped, suspended for a breathless beat as the world narrowed to her features.
Adi.
But, no. No. It wasn't. Not Adi. It couldn't be, but God-
She had her eyes. Her posture. The same elegant tilt of her head. The bones of her face arranged almost identically, like someone had recreated Adeola from memory and gotten her 90% right.
For a dizzy, lurching moment, Ianto felt as though he were looking at a ghost wearing borrowed skin. His fingers tightened automatically on the metal railing, grounding himself in its bite of cold.
He swallowed hard, forcing the thought down, shoving it deep. Not here. Not now.
The woman kept talking, unaware that she'd just torn open a seam inside him. "I've got a party tonight. It's my brother's twenty-first. My mother's going to be really, really…" She drifted off.
"You okay?" the man asked.
"Yeah."
"Sure?"
"Yeah."
"Want to go back in?"
"No way. I mean, we could die any minute, but all the same…" She stared out into the glittering void. "It's beautiful."
Ianto followed her gaze. His panic was cold and sharp at the edges, hollow in the middle, but even through it, awe gnawed at him. How many people dreamt of going to the moon? And here he was, by accident.
Their conversation continued, aliens, spaceships, the impossible sky, and then-
"I had a cousin. Adeola."
His gut twisted hard, as though someone had hooked fingers behind his ribs and pulled.
Of course. That explained the resemblance. Explained the ghost he thought he'd seen. Explained why it hurt.
Memories Ianto kept oh so carefully compartmentalised surged; Canary Wharf, Torchwood One, the top floor full of bright, brilliant people. A different job, a different battle, a different catastrophe.
Adi, laughing too loudly in the canteen. Her and Gareth and their not-so-subtle office romance. The betting pool on how long before Yvonne stopped turning a blind eye forced them into HR paperwork.
But Yvonne never got the chance.
None of them got a chance.
"She worked at Canary Wharf," the woman said softly. "She never came home."
"I'm sorry," the man murmured.
Ianto's hands clenched on the railing, knuckles aching. The shock of seeing Adi's cousin had begun to ebb, replaced once more by heat. Sharp, blistering pinpricks blooming under his skin.
Because he knew who the man was.
That voice. Of course he recognised it. He'd known the moment he heard it, even if the shock and the fear and the goddamn sky had scrambled him.
It was Him.
The Doctor.
Ianto's emotions twisted violently, crashing against each other in a way that made his stomach turn.
Hate. Resentment. Grief.
And, God help him, gratitude.
Because as much as he blamed the Doctor for Canary Wharf, for Lisa, for the hollowed-out spaces in his life where people used to be… the truth was undeniable.
The Doctor was the only person here who might be able to make sense of any of this, and Ianto would rather face the moon with a man he hated than face it alone.
The woman straightened her shoulders. "I promise you, Mr Smith, we will find a way out. If we can travel to the moon, then we can travel back. There's got to be a way."
The Doctor hesitated. "It's not Smith. That's not my real name."
"Who are you, then?"
Ianto moved before he could talk himself out of it, stepping forward further out onto the balcony. "He's the Doctor."
The woman turned, blinking at him in surprise. "Oh, hello. A patient of yours, is he?" She asked the Doctor. "What is it then, Doctor Smith?"
But the Doctor didn't answer her.
He was staring at Ianto.
Not just staring, searching him, peeling him apart with those ancient, assessing eyes. There was something tired in them, something bordering on guilt. And then it was gone, smoothed away behind a practised blankness.
"Have we met?" the Doctor asked.
Ianto tamped down on the surge of anger that wanted to claw its way up his throat. Now wasn't the time to shout or punch the man or… God, maybe shoot him a little bit.
Yvonne Hartman's voice cut through him like a snap of cold fingers:
We can't interfere with time, Ianto, ever. Time loops. Paradoxes. Broken timelines. One misplaced word and everything goes sideways.
He needed the Doctor alive.
He needed the timeline intact.
He needed to be smart.
Ianto held his gaze, lifting his chin just slightly. The cold steadied him. The anger warmed him. Balance.
"No, sir. But I'm familiar with your work."
He didn't know how old this Doctor was. Whether Canary Wharf had happened yet. Whether mentioning it would break something.
So instead, he picked a name that was safe and would get the Time Lord on side.
"I'll pass your regards along to Brigadier Lethbridge–Stewart, shall I?"
A flicker, another shift in the Doctor's expression that Ianto couldn't read. "Oh. You're UNIT." He sniffed, "they're recruiting young these days."
Ianto dipped his head politely, resisting the urge to glare. "Ianto Jones. And everyone is young compared to you, sir."
A breath of genuine amusement escaped the Doctor. "Oh, Jones, is it? Martha Jones, meet Ianto Jones. Small world."
Ianto turned to Martha. She had Adi's eyes, but not her smile. He held onto that distinction like a rope and offered a restrained, respectful nod.
"Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr Jones." Something protective tightened in his chest before he could stop it, "but perhaps we could focus on the situation at hand, Doctor?"
Martha frowned. "Oh, I'm not qualified just yet- hang on." She turned to the Doctor, incredulous. "People seriously just call you the Doctor?"
"Yeah, usually."
"Well, I'm not." She crossed her arms, "as far as I'm concerned, you've got to earn that title."
Whatever comeback the Doctor had brewing was cut off as Ianto glanced skyward. His stomach dropped.
"Well," he said drily, beating him to it, "I'd suggest you start earning it quickly."
Above them, three massive ships descended from the void, blocking out the stars.
The Doctor exhaled, shoulders tensing. "Oh, brilliant."
Martha's eyes widened. "Are those-?"
"Judoon," the Doctor confirmed grimly.
Ianto sighed, he really, really didn't get paid enough for this.